Losing a part of me

Category: Work

  • Day 327

    Yesterday was mostly a success. I had an extra protein in the evening – Not a full meal, but one chicken leg – because I was quite hungry after a good workout. I also had some dried apricots before the workout for carbohydrates. Neither of those is likely the reason my weight was slightly up this morning. That is most likely from the inability to move my bowels this morning. If I can get back on track these next few days, then I have confidence that my weight will begin to fall again.

    I am not worried about the bowels by the way. I have a good friend who spent a week suffering from constipation so bad that he tells me he was vomiting and needed to see a doctor. While I am usually regular enough to set a clock by, I have been known to miss a day… especially when I have had diarrhea for a day or two, followed by a really good BM. If I go two days without a successful poop, then I might consider speaking to my doctor… if I am in pain, which thus far I am not.

    I mentioned that I had a good workout yesterday. Yes, I finally got back into the gym. I did a little over two miles on the treadmill, and then some weight machines. While doing leg extensions, I started to feel that the issue with my knee might not be gout after all. As my doctor requested, I will get an x-ray done this week. It is entirely possible I have a touch of osteo-arthritis… not a pleasant option. With that said, it is still a manageable condition that if I have to, I can live with.

    While it was supposed to come Friday, I finally got the call this morning that my new (replacement) mattress is being delivered today between 1pm-4pm. Yes, it was always supposed to be delivered today, they just told me I would get the call about the timeframe three days prior, rather than the day of. Okay, that is not a problem. I was scheduled to be here all day until the call came. Now I can manage the rest of my day… I did not have plans to go anywhere today but decided in the end to change my haircut appointment from next week. After all, I am teaching on camera this week, and as my wife pointed out last night (again), the beard has gotten quite a bit out of hand!

    My personal trainer emailed me that she is back from vacation, and we are scheduled for our next two sessions. Tomorrow morning at 10am is the next one, which means that if I want to be ready, I have to be at the gym by 9:00am to do my stretches. I think she is great, but I also think she is completely unrealistic with the stretches that she wants me to do. I plan to tell her that tomorrow. I know, she wants me to be buff and toned and everything… I do not believe that in order for a fifty-year-old man to stretch for his exercises, he needs to balance his back leg on a bench and do maneuvers that he feels zero balance on and is afraid he is going to injure himself on. With all due respect, there has to be a better way. I know that what she is showing me is great, and probably better for people who plan to be hardcore… anything. I do not have to be hardcore; I just need to be limber enough to not injure myself when I work out. I will go into the gym early tomorrow, and I will stretch… but I will stretch as I would in advance of a Taekwondo class, which will not involve any apparatus or implements, just me.

    Today is a cool and cloudy day. The forecast is for a high of 0°, which is about average for this time of year. It is also calling for wind gusts up to 20 km/h, which means that there will be a sustained breeze. All this to say that it will be a comfortable day for walking my Princess Sophie, as well as for sitting on the balcony with a cigar this evening, should I choose to do so. We will see. In the meantime, I am going to try to do some studying today, as well as preparation for my class which begins tomorrow evening. I am currently waiting on someone else for something, which is never fun… I do not understand why the site is saying that they can reset my password automatically, but that option is just not working. Yes, I know it is a technical glitch, and that they are not open on the weekends… but what a pain!

    I guess I forgot to close this as other errands and tasks came up. My day has so far gone well – I went for my haircut (without any stops for cheats along the way), I had my lunch (the normal chicken with salad), and my mattress was delivered. I think I should go do some grocery shopping because I finished all of my vegetables today.

    I realized that tomorrow will be tight – after my morning workout with the trainer, I will come home and make a quick lunch. The World Cup match is at 2:00pm, which means I need to be done with lunch and on the road by 1:30pm. In the worst-case scenario – if the game goes to extra time and then to penalties – the game will be over by about 5:00pm… but if it does go that long, I will have to cut out around 4:30pm. I am teaching tomorrow evening, and I like to be logged on early for my class – especially the first day. Here’s hoping that my Argentina side wins handily in regular time!

    It is amazing how easily a day can get away from you. What I thought would be a simple day in a simple week has since changed completely. While I usually close my journal entry early in the day, it is now 4:15pm, and I just got off the phone with a training broker who wants to work with me. That phone call lasted over an hour, most of which was not discussing professional topics… although he was extremely complimentary about my speaking voice and cadence, which as a trainer is important. I also had to spend some time on the phone with tech support for the company that provides the labs for my class that starts tomorrow. I have not gone shopping, but plan to try to do that now. I am not going to the gym this evening – I have a session with my trainer at 10:00am tomorrow, and those two would be too close together. I will do my shopping, and then at some point I will take my Princess Sophie for a walk. I forgot to put it on this morning, so my fitness watch is reading 1,000 steps at 4:15pm. Not nice. Gotta make some of them up!

    Have a great day folks… whatever is left of it!

  • Day 299

    There are some days when you have no choice but to cheat on your weight loss program. Yesterday was such a day. I was picking Lyle and Dorothy up from the airport and driving them home. They were coming home from Italy, and I had joked with them to bring me a pizza. I could not believe it when they did! Rather than coming home from the drive and having a meal replacement, I had a slice of cheese pizza. It was a pretty big piece, but I did not think it would do too much damage.

    I was wrong of course. Over the past four days my weight has skyrocketed. Where I was hoping to stay below 305 lbs. a few days ago, I am now relieved to be just slightly below 310 lbs. and I am extremely upset about it… doubly so knowing that I am working all week and will not get to the gym at all. I will have to redouble my efforts to stay on track with my food intake. That is actually going to be easier this week than it was last week, as I will be teaching.

    The weeks when I teach during the day are the easiest ones to stay on track with. After my morning routine (which starts earlier because I set an alarm to wake up) I am at my desk by 8:00am (7:30am on Day 1 of the class). During our morning break, I will prepare my salad, and get the chicken ready to cook. About 30 minutes before the lunch break, I will walk into the kitchen (while still lecturing) and turn on the air fryer, so that by the time it is time to break for lunch, I can enjoy my meal in a relaxed fashion. While I might enjoy some mints or lozenges during the day, there is no other opportunity to eat.

    When the class is done, I will take Her Royal Floofness for her second walk of the day – that is, unless one of the neighbours asks to visit with her, at which point it might be the third or fourth walk. I will come back in after that and have another meal replacement. The rest of the evening is mine to relax. I suspect that I will need to go shopping this evening, as I think I am going to run out of lettuce with lunch. All I have to do when I go to the supermarket is remember that I am six pounds heavier than I was Friday morning. If I do that, my eyes will not be tempted by the myriad temptations available at the store. Oh, and I should check to see if I need milk.

    To continue the pattern of the last few nights, I did not sleep well. I fell asleep just fine, but once I wake up to pee, falling back into slumber eluded me for a long while. I have too many thoughts racing around in my head, and I cannot figure out how to put them aside. Try as I might, the second half of my nights have been much less restful than the first half. This has been going on for a few nights now, and I am paying the price for it during the day. I am tired… almost constantly. Fortunately, Leslie will be here in four and a half days. I always sleep better when she is next to me. For many reasons aside from sleep, I am literally counting down the hours! It is 110 hours as of right now, for those who might be curious. I cannot wait to have her back in my arms again.

    I should write a few words about the weather. Friday it was 21° and sunny. This morning for Princess Sophie’s walk I donned my ski jacket for the first time, as the temperature was hovering around 0°. I was even thankful that my leather gloves were in the pocket, else I would have had to keep my hands in the pockets the whole time. The calendar might say that winter arrives on December 21, but every Canadian will tell you that the accompanying weather comes much earlier than that. There were snow flurries yesterday, but only a couple. It would not do for the cold and the snow to come in one jarring moment, so I was grateful that at least the skies are clear today. Partly because I am teaching, but also partly because of the predicted (and actual) cold, I put on a t-shirt this morning… under a long sleeve button-down shirt. While I did not put on my winter boots, for the first time since April I wore my Blundstones for our walk. I know the insulated boots will be needed soon, but I will wait for real weather for that. The calendar be damned, winter has arrived in the Greater Toronto Hamilton Area.

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 222

    I did not lose any weight from yesterday, but I also did not gain any. Considering some of what I ate, I will be happy with that.

    Yes, I took an amazing walk in the morning, and got a lot of exercise. I burned calories as I pushed myself in the heat.

    We ate a delicious dim sum meal for lunch, which is truly a treat. I did something that I cannot remember ever doing with dim sum… I left some over. Leslie did not order too much, and when I saw it all when it arrived my first thought was ‘That’s it?’ but of course my eyes are still the same gluttonous eyes that helped me achieve the ridiculously obese form that I carried around so long. Could I have finished it all? Absolutely. Was I sated? Yes, I was. We put the rest away for today.

    Leslie has a great tactic she uses. When she believes I have stopped eating for nourishment, and am now eating out of habit, or because the food is there, she will ask me ‘Why are you eating that?’ If my answer is ‘Because I am still hungry,’ she lets it go. Otherwise, she asks ‘Do you need that dumpling, or onion, or whatever else?’ She reminds me that I am trying to break my unhealthy relationship with food. Yesterday she did not need to do that… with dim sum, one of my favourite meals, I suspect we were both pleasantly surprised.

    For dinner, we had a frozen meal of breaded cauliflower that was a Buffalo wings replacement. They were very tasty, but I suspect the breading is the reason my weight was not down this morning. However, it is a great starting point. I can take the idea of cauliflower wings and replicate it, either with no breading, else with much less breading, and add my signature (hic) sauce to them. That, good reader, will be a healthy and appetizing meal sometime in the future!

    Lunch today was the leftover Chinese foods… what little there was left from Saturday evening and from Sunday’s dim sum. It was tasty, but likely not very healthy. At least by enjoying them at lunch, I will be able to burn off the calories (and especially the carbohydrates and starches) by the time bedtime rolls around.

    After more than five weeks, my teaching contract will come to an end today. I had a really great time with these students, and this morning I received high praise from the school for which I am teaching, as well as from several of my students who are sorry to see me go. Alas, tomorrow they start learning subject matters that are outside of my expertise, and while I could fake it… I hate doing that. I wrote them all a very nice thank you note on our shared Slack channel… and tomorrow I start looking for my next contract. In the meantime, I will take the opportunity to enjoy my downtime, and will relax a little. One of the first things I did this morning was to disable my wake-up alarm!

    Last night I sat on the balcony reading. I am absolutely loving my new e-book reader that Leslie bought for me. I have always been able to read my e-books on my tablet, but when the sun is shining, the glare is insurmountable. The e-book reader solves that issue, and is a wonderful and thoughtful gift which will get a lot more use than just on airplanes!

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 195

    Princess Sophie is getting better, but slowly. Last night she asked to go outside again at 2:30am, and so I had another night of interrupted sleep. Nevertheless, I woke up mostly refreshed, and am happy the day is underway.

    For the sixth consecutive day I was pleased by the numbers on the bathroom scale, and I am once again in new-low territory. It feels good, and I hope I can continue to drop. Over the last week or so, I have hoped to lose at least fifteen pounds between now and my trip to Dallas, now twenty-two days away. If we account for the five pounds I have lost in that time, I see it as a reachable goal. That would have me around 315-pounds, which is twenty-six pounds down from the morning I left Dallas early in July. I am thrilled that is within reach.

    Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. There are consequences for a fat man who does a lot of exercise, including on the back, knees, and feet. Last night in bed I could definitely feel both of my knees, but a good dollop of Voltaren helped that. My heel was not too bad until I got up in the night to take Her Floofness out, but it is still okay. I dressed it again this morning and will need to go to the pharmacy to pick up more bandages. I will try to do that at lunch time.

    Lunch today will be fish, which is defrosted in the fridge, and salad. I know that I only have enough vegetables for one more salad, so I will also be going to the supermarket at some point today. That means that I will be running the temptation gauntlet of the bakery and prepared foods section, but I know I can do it. I will just make a point to go after I have eaten, rather than before. In fact, I might do that at lunch… they likely have the bandages that I need at the supermarket, so I will not have to make two stops.

    It feels good to be coming out of the funk that I was in. Leslie and I discussed yesterday (and not for the first time in these few weeks) that I am a bit of a social butterfly, and when I do not speak with friends, I tend to fall even further into depression. I do not think that has been the case with my break with Facebook, but it truly was nice to sit with Lyle and Dorothy on Sunday. I have other friends who want to see me, and a couple have reached out to see how I have been doing. I hope that I am better, but I have to be vigilant, because there are hidden triggers abound, and I do not want to run into one unexpectedly and fall backwards into despair.

    I am told that of my students who wrote the test yesterday, only one of them will be required to retake it. By any measure, that is a good pass rate. I tend to worry that sometimes my folksy teaching style focuses more on what students will need to know in their careers, and less on what they need to know for the exam. Every time I get news like this it makes me happy. Today we start on a new class, and it is one that I have taught several times before. I am looking forward to it because unlike the previous class, it is not a ‘For Beginners’ class… or at least, the technologies covered are much more advanced than the Foundations class I just finished with. When I teach a course for beginners, I am always worried that my previous disdain for Level-1 IT Professionals will come through. I have certainly evolved away from that opinion, but I never want what I used to think to show through. I also know that I have much more time for this class and will be able to take a more relaxed pace than with the previous one. It should be fun!

    It is a cooler day today than it has been, owing I suspect to the rain we enjoyed last night. The forecast has up to a 9% chance of precipitation today, but that is from 10am through 4pm, and that drops to no chance of rain by the time I will be ready to walk. The temperatures will top out at 26°C, which for my American friends is a very comfortable 79° Fahrenheit. As long as my feet and knees are not bothering me, I will endeavour to kick it up a bit and beat yesterday’s distance, if not the pace.

    Today is National Ice Cream Sandwich Day, but I will not be partaking in anything so frivolous. I am doing extremely well on my weight loss program, and now is not the time to falter. Have a great day folks!

  • Day 157

    I just failed my renewal assessment for one of my certifications. It is for a technology that I use, but I do not use most of the features. I will have to re-take the certification exam at some point in the future, but it is not something that I am particularly worried about.

    Last night was great. Leslie and I had dinner and drinks with a close friend of hers, and it is so good to get to know him. Leslie has met a few of my friends, but he is the first friend that I met.

    Let’s get this out of the way… my weight was up this morning. Yes, we ate and drank yesterday, and that might be a contributing factor; however, I suspect it is because I did not poop yesterday, and today I only had a small one. Tomorrow will be better! Well… I hope.

    Leslie and I went to an Asian shopping district today. She and I both share a love for Japanese (and other Asian) confectionaries, both of us having lived (briefly) in Japan. We picked up some great snacks, although we only had a very small bite of one. We also picked up Japanese doughnuts, and we had one after lunch. Oh my lord they are good! I am glad we did not buy more. I am really glad that Leslie reminds me when I seem about to fall off the diet cliff!

    I did not walk today, but we did sit in the pool for a couple of hours. This evening we are going for sushi, and I will not go overboard.

    Have a great day!

  • Day 134

    This should be easy math: Yesterday I did not (really) cheat, and therefore my weight this morning was down. While it is certainly the case today, it frustrates me that it does not always work this way. Yes, my measurement on the bathroom scale was a good one (not quite my lowest weigh-in, but close). I am not unhappy with my progress. I simply wish that every day that I do not cheat, my weight would be down. Such is not the case. Oh well.

    On April 9 I was thrilled to drop below 350 lbs. It is nearly two months on, and I have not dropped below 344 lbs. I am sick of that, and hope that last week’s revelation about peanuts will allow that to change… and no, this past weekend’s terrible cheating did not help one bit, but if I can stay the course for the next few days then hopefully I will drop below 340 lbs. I know that in two weeks I am flying to Dallas, and after that will be my birthday, and after that a quick jaunt to Long Island to celebrate a friend’s wedding. I know that I will likely be back to the 340s for most of those… I just want to get below them to prove to myself that doing things the right way will show results.

    It might seem strange to many that I speak in pounds, and yet my official weigh-ins are in kilograms. Of course, if you are following along on my blog then you will not see that… I do not post my weights there. Yes, I grew up in a household where we were taught pounds and ounces; the 2.5 years I spent in California did not hurt that. Fortunately, my physician’s office is Canadian, and they work in the metric system. While I cannot convert pounds to kilos as seamlessly as I can do miles to kilometres, I do understand both systems. I should eschew the antiquated and senseless imperial system in favour of the completely logical metric. Old habits do die hard though, so I still do both.

    Leslie finally received the right birthday gift yesterday, and I decided to pull the trigger and buy myself the same Ninja dual-zone air fryer that I bought for her. Before I did, I made sure that I was able to return the essentially no-name one that I had bought previously. I still had a few days left to return it, so all is good. I am glad that I saved the box for it… I will pack it up and drop it off at UPS on my way to the golf course later this morning. Amazon asks you to select the reason you are returning something. This, dear reader, is an IQ test. If you answer, “I do not want it anymore,” or something similar, the return shipping cost was $65. If you go back and change your answer to, “It did not perform the way I had hoped,” then the return shipping is free. What can you do, right? The new machine will cost a lot more than the old one… but I really did not like the old one.

    As I alluded to briefly in the last paragraph, I am golfing again today. I must be a sucker for punishment, right? Hopefully today’s round will be slightly better than my last one, which was abysmal. If I had any brains on the subject, I would sign up for golf lessons… or at least spend some time on the driving range before heading out on the course again. At least the weather forecast for the day is not nearly as extreme as it was Monday, with a predicted high temperature of 21°c. I will not be as hot as I was… although heat had never bothered me.

    I was paid for two separate and unrelated payments for work done yesterday, which was a bit of a relief. It is not that I am running out of money, it is simply that I do not like having to chase the companies that I contract to. There are still a couple of outstanding payments owed, but the oldest of those is less than 60 days old, and so I am not entirely concerned. That is also owed to me by a company that a) loves me and wants me to continue to work for them; and b) paid another invoice yesterday. Again, not worried. It is just nice to see money going into my bank account… especially knowing that my actual day job has been stagnant for the past two months. I exchanged emails with them about that yesterday, and there is progress on the horizon… I just wish it was quicker!

    Two weeks from today I am flying down to Dallas to see my baby, and I could not be more excited. Monday afternoon I took delivery of my new threads that I ordered in March. Unfortunately, they all still fit perfectly. Yes, that sounds weird… but I do wish that by now I would have lost enough weight that they would already be loose. No such luck. I am hoping that by the time we get married in November, I will fit into my older suits and shirts. Here’s hoping and praying!

    Have a great day folks… I’ve got a couple of errands to run before hitting the golf course, but that’s what I have planned for the day. Whatever you have going on, try to enjoy it!

  • Day 121

    I really have to start reining in my peanuts buying. I did not go terribly overboard yesterday, but I did buy more than I should have… unless I was going to spread them across a couple of days, which I did not.

    Other than the peanuts I stuck to the plan, and I am happy to be nearly one pound down from yesterday’s weight. My plan for today is to stay the course… make my chicken for lunch (with some steamed vegetables), and a tuna salad for dinner… which will be bracketed by the morning and evening meal replacement shakes.

    A friend might be coming over for a cigar during the day, but he has been historically unreliable, so I am not holding my breath. I also have to prepare for my Monday class, which is a Fundamentals (beginners) class, but that does not mean that I do not want to be prepared for it. I also want to look into the fiancé visa for the US. Leslie has been doing a lot of the work so far (as she is sponsoring me, she has to fill out most of the paperwork), but I still want to review it and see if there are any questions that I can think of that we should ask our legal counsel. We want to do things right, and I feel bad that right now she is doing all of the work. Yes, I know that is because she has to initiate it. I just wish there was something that I could do. As I used to live in Los Angeles, I am a member of multiple Facebook groups for Canadians living in the USA, and I reached out to the groups to see if anyone has any advice or guidance. While I have already received multiple congratulations from members, so far, the helpful advice has not been forthcoming. Grrr.

    Einstein described relativity thusly: “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.” I looked at the forecast for this afternoon and my initial reaction was: “Wow… 24°C… it’s going to be a real scorcher!” Then I realized that every day in Cuba was within a degree above or below 30°C… and that in Dallas today’s projected high is 34°C. It is true then… everything is relative. With the low temperatures around or below 10°C at night, and knowing I needed to wear a hoodie to take HRF for her walk this morning, 24°C seems pretty hot. It’s really mild… and either way, I have no complaints. Tomorrow will be the same (but with rainstorms in the forecast), and Sunday will be cooler (also rainy). Monday (a holiday in Canada) will be cloudy and 14°C. I guess I should not complain about the weather today.

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 100

    I was slightly better yesterday than I was today. After my initial fear that I had nothing in the house, I discovered a piece of salmon in the freezer. I also had tomatoes and onions, and while that is not much, my mother used to make a lovely salad with just those two ingredients and seasoning. She called it Maichel, which is really just the Yiddish word for food. When I sent a picture to Leslie, she was impressed by what I had scrounged up.

    After my class, I did go shopping. I now have lettuce and chicken and broccoli. Yes, I bought a handful of peanuts. Add to that, I also had an extra meal replacement bar. I was just a bit out of sorts last night. My weight stayed exactly where it was on the scale, and I know it would have been down, save for that late-night bar.

    My class went very well… I think. In truth, an instructor might have his (or her) feeling, but you do not know how well a course is received until the students submit their evaluations, which I expect they will do this afternoon after class. I do know there was active participation, and that everyone completed the exercises that I assigned. I was also very pleased with the timing of the course – I have taught some classes in which I can go through three or four modules in a single day, so creating four modules was a risk. I was also worried that the exercises might be either too simple or outright ignored. They actually seem to have been well received, and there was active participation in the review process. I suspect that at the end of the class the students (and thus the customer who hired me) will be satisfied. YAY! With luck, they will ask me to deliver it again in the future. While I am being paid my maximum daily rate as an instructor, when you factor in the time it took to create the course, it drops me down to under my minimum daily rate. Essentially, the first delivery (this week) paid to create the material; another delivery would make it profitable.

    On the other hand, while at the end of the class I was relieved and elated, I was also fried. I went shopping and then came home to make my salad. I tried to sit through my class in the evening, but I was just not in any frame of mind to focus on networking and subnetting and port security after the stress of the day. I sat on the balcony with a cigar and spoke with some friends I have not chatted with in a while.

    That, by the way, is my plans for this evening as well. I will either be smoking on my own balcony, or with friends. That will be determined at some point today. I just know that the culmination of this class will be something to celebrate, and good cigars will be smoked!

    Today is the one hundredth day of my diet. Truth be told, I have not achieved nearly the success I would have liked to have achieved by this point. Okay, that’s part of life… No, I did not get as far as I wanted to, but I got this far. The old expression, “Aim for the stars, and if you miss then you still hit the moon” comes to mind. No, I have not hit the moon… but I’m also no longer as big as it is. This journal is also less than eight hundred words from hitting the 100,000-word mark. As I have said before, I can be verbose. However, this time around, I am not just writing for myself. Each article that I post (and I have posted at least one article every day for the last one hundred days) is written into my journal in Microsoft Word, and is then transposed into my blog, www.losingapartof.me, which I hope might be an inspiration to someone. When I share my articles on Facebook, they get noticed. When I do not? Well, I still know that my biggest fan is reading what I write every day.

    I am truly looking forward to this weekend and having this class in my rear-view mirror. I only hope that I do not stress-eat at any point today before it is over.

    Have a great day folks!