Losing a part of me

Tag: Sleep

  • 2026 Day 9

    There have been many days that I have disagreed with my fitness watch over the quality of my sleep (based on the reported sleep score). This morning is the first time that I can remember that I disagree on the other side – that is, I thought I slept terribly, but my sleep score was high.

    • Sleep score: 90 (Excellent)
    • Duration: 7h18m (Excellent)
    • Stress: 13 avg (Excellent)
    • Deep: 1h34m (Excellent)
    • Light: 4h41m (Good)
    • REM: 1h4m (Fair)
    • Awake/Restlessness: –, 46 Restless Moments (Excellent)

    There were at least three and as many as five times that I remember waking up thinking that it was probably morning, only to look at the clock and see that it was 1:15am… 3:00am… 4:45am… and so on. Each time I felt like it took me a while to get back to sleep, and each time I remember thinking that there was no way that things would end well for a restful night. Was I dreaming each of those times? I wish I could ask Her Floofness… when I wake up in the night I almost always shift positions slightly, and because I know this disturbs her a bit, I try to reach over and pet her with a few strokes. Alas, she is much wiser than I am, living for the moment and not dwelling on the past. (Excepting for a couple of things that I have done for which she holds a grudge, including moving her from Southern California to the cold climes of Canada, and then later on giving away her couch).

    Depending on which measure we accept, I was anywhere from half a pound up to 2 lbs. down from yesterday. Had I cheated in any significant way, I would have picked a higher reading than I did; as the only ‘cheat’ was a pinch of shredded cheese when I was giving some to Her Floofness. The trade-off for that was that I only had three meal replacements (rather than the proscribed four). I was a bit peckish as I lay in bed at night, but it was not so severe that I needed to sate that hunger.

    On that topic, I am going to give my diet buddy credit for the recommendation about adding celery to my program (as needed). There have been a number of times throughout the past few days that I have felt the need for more, and rather than picking something else (which would be potentially detrimental to my progress), I munched on a couple of pieces of celery. I am at the point where I do not feel the slightest guilt for eating celery, and at the same time I do not feel that I need to gorge myself on it. I do not think I have had more than 2-3 stalks in any day, but if I had then what of it? Five entire stalks (which is double the maximum I have had) would be a whopping 30 calories… nothing to worry about, especially since it adds fibre and no negative nutrients to my intake.

    It is time for me to get to work, or else I would talk about my concerns about my sleep next week, and a few other things I have on my mind. They can wait until tomorrow, when I have no current obligations and will have time to write and relax. Right now I am about to start thirteen hours of teaching, so I’ll close.

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 1309

    I forced myself to stay awake as long as I could… which is to say until about 3:30pm. I then crawled into bed and slept for a couple of hours. As happens far too frequently, especially when I try to sleep during daylight hours, my eyes popped open a couple of hours later. I then did something that I do not usually do. Despite feeling like I was awake, and knowing that I was still exhausted, I stayed in bed. I probably got up to pee, but then I got right back into bed. I might have checked my email quickly, but I did not stay on my phone for any other purpose. I stayed in bed, and I eventually fell back asleep. While my fitness watch did not register it as such, I probably slept a full nine hours last night. It was blissful. I feel much more awake today than I have these last several days.

    These last couple of days I have eaten one of the new meal replacements for my mid-night breakfast. Aside from the fact that I would not have had time either day to prepare anything, it was a healthy and convenient ‘meal’ that I would not feel guilty about. I had the wafers both days – yesterday’s was mocha, today’s was chocolate – and they were both tasty and satisfying. By the time my lunch hour comes around (at 6:00am) I will make an omelette. As I mentioned, I have enough food in the house for a couple more days; by the weekend I should be able to get back onto the program… as long as I can do it with these meal replacements. It will be an adjustment, and I am not sure if I will succeed. I just looked and the product I usually use is still sold out. That is frustrating, and I am not sure how I will adjust… or if I will stick to a revised partial program for the time being.

    For the third night in a row, my weight dropped… significantly. I am now 5.8 lbs. lighter than I was just a few days ago. That is great, except that I am also still six pounds heavier than I was on my best day. I have a long way to go to even be back on track.

    This program is easier when the product is available but maybe the non-availability will force me to use some sort of self-control which might, in turn, become a habit.

    It is now 8:15am and I have less than three hours left to go before the end of my work day. I am hoping that a buddy is coming over for a cigar in the afternoon. I am also hoping that I can repeat yesterday… sleep from 5pm-1am. We’ll see.

    Have a great day folks.

  • Day 1279

    I was going to say that I spent the morning procrastinating, but in truth I have been diligently writing emails that needed to be written. I have also (at long last) made an appointment to get my eyes checked (I suspect it has been three years since I did) so that I can then get new eyeglasses, which I suspect has been a problem for me the past year or so.

    While my bowels are again stopped up (It has now been two days since a successful movement) I am not worried because it has also been thirteen days since I last ate solid food, and …

    Okay, that was fortuitous timing. I was right in the middle of writing about it that I felt the urge, and was quite successful in the endeavour. Here’s to the fibre I have been (since Friday) religiously been remembering to add to my meal replacements in the morning!

    I have often in the past talked about how my clothes fit was a good indicator of my progress. I have a masonic ring that I purchased in the autumn which over the last couple of months has been quite tight on my ring finger. There have been days when I wore it on my pinky, and others when I did not wear it at all. These last couple of days it has fit much nicer – it is a bit tight going over the knuckles, but is comfortable to wear. I look forward to it being even a bit looser in the next few months.

    Yesterday I reported that my weight had, for the first morning weigh-in since I started on the program, was slightly up. This morning it righted itself, with a 1.6 lb. drop from yesterday (and a 1.2 lb. drop from the previous day). I was not discouraged yesterday; I know that there will be days when this happens, and I do not have to be worried or disheartened on those days. When it happens I need to remember that what tiny progress I lost on Day Q will usually more than be recovered on Day Q+1. As I have written in these pages so many times, weight loss is about the downward trend and not about individual plots on the graph.

    My sleep score last night was up from the abysmal previous night, partly owing I would think to the fact that it recorded 8.25 hours of sleep. It reported that I did not get enough REM sleep. Still and all, a sleep score of 75 is much better than yesterday’s 56. I’ll take it! How well will I sleep tonight? That depends on how prepared I feel for my exam… which is tomorrow. Right now I do not feel like I am adequately prepared. I have less than twenty-four hours to get just a little bit more prepared… if that is even possible.

    The company that offers the certification for which I am testing tomorrow is called ISC2, and I have been certified with them in other programs since December. I was made an Authorized ISC2 Instructor in April, and yesterday was my first delivery of one of their courses. The class was for the very basic entry-level certification, and is meant to be a 2-day course. The training provider scheduled it as a 1-day class, and I only saw the discrepancy over the weekend. I was worried that I would not be able to inject the class with my usual panache, and in the afternoon felt like I was rushing through material at a pace that nobody (or at least not a beginner, which is who entry level classes are for) would be able to follow. Even with cutting the lunch hour to forty-five minutes and with the rushing my lecture went over time by three minutes. With trepidation in my mind I nonetheless apologized for rushing through and asked the students to fill out their evaluations. When I read them this morning I was elated to see that yes, they all wanted to class to be longer… but gave the instructor perfect scores. That is the only metric that I am judged on, and I was quite relived to see it.

    I have to get working on my studies… there have been too many necessary distractions today and while none of them were wasting time, they were also not studying for my exam. The rest of the day will be dedicated to that. I’m not sure if I will write tomorrow’s entry before or after my exam, but one way or another I’ll see you all on the morrow.

    Have a great day.

  • Day 1274

    Last night was not a good night. I do not know what happened, but shortly after I got into bed I realized my back was uncomfortable… and then in pain. Between 11:30pm and 2:30am I got up several times to

    1. Take a couple of Aspirin
    2. Rub Votaren on my back
    3. Remake the bed ensuring the bottom sheet was taut (Princess Sophie did not appreciate being interrupted by this)
    4. (only ever a last resort) grab a THC gummy

    In the meantime I tossed and turned and just fought to get comfortable, which was just not happening. The discomfort was not at all pleasant, but nor was knowing that the morning was coming too soon and that I could not handle another lousy night sleep. It was only out of desperation that I took one of the gummies that a friend had given me. I was worried that I would have trouble getting going in the morning (every time I have taken one of these I have spent the night in extreme thirst and woken up dizzy and with a bit of a headache) but that beat waking up without having gone to sleep, so I went for it.

    (I did wake up at 6:15am and decided that I would pee quickly then get right back into bed because despite the light of day shining in through the window I was definitely still… intoxicated.)

    Despite all that, my fitness watch still gave me a sleep score of 72, which honestly makes very little sense to me considering how little sleep I got. It is possible that before I realized I was in pain I did get some sleep, so who knows?

    It happened too late to affect my morning weigh-in, but I was happy to have an amazing bowel movement this morning. It was not painless, but it was well worth the strain. I only wish that it happened first thing in the morning… before coffee and meal replacement, and of course before my weigh-in.

    Today marked the one week milestone of my renewed program. In that week, with my daily pinch of cheese and yesterday’s peanuts, I have dropped an astonishing sixteen pounds. While I certainly have a long way to go, and while 16lbs is only a drop in the bucket compared to what I want to lose, it is still a huge accomplishment for seven days. It is encouraging, and gives me the strength to keep carrying on… despite all of the obstacles that life continues to throw my way.

    I mentioned yesterday that I weighed myself a second time after my second sleep, and that based one whether or not this morning’s weigh-in was higher or lower than that I would decide whether or not to keep it. In fact my weight this morning was slightly higher than yesterday afternoon, but I am still not going to delete that measure from yesterday. Hopefully by tomorrow I will drop below that number again, but either way I am still quite pleased with my progress.

    So let’s see… yesterday I went shopping to pick up coffee, and I also picked up a little cheat of some peanuts. I know, I should not be cheating, especially so early in the program. If after all that happened the last few days the worst thing I did was eating a handful of peanuts then I am going to chalk that up as a big huge win.

    While I did some studying yesterday, I confess it was not a lot. As I wrote in my journal, I got a whole lot of sleep yesterday during the day, and after the stress and anxiety of the previous day I did not need to push myself. I also knew that the new novel in my favourite series was downloaded onto my Kobo and ready to be dived into. I spent quite a few hours reading. I plan to continue reading it until the end, at which point I will resume my deep-dive studying for the exam.

    Before I sit out on the balcony to read, I need to make a trip out to my (not-so-local) cigar shop. While I have as many as a hundred cigars in my humidor, most of them are high-end special, rather than every day cigars. I do not want to sit outside smoking a $100 cigar… especially when I have so few of those left. I will prepare my meal replacement to enjoy before I head out because I do not want to find myself hungry and tempted to cheat along the way. I need to stay on track and so I need to minimize my exposure to any temptations, which are everywhere despite my best attempts.

    I am hoping that my body does not repeat last night’s debacle so that I can get some good rest. I plan to proactively strip my bed and do laundry – a freshly made bed is usually my best chance for good sleep, or at least of the physical factors within my control.

    Have a great day folks.

  • Day 1272

    As I prepared for bed last night I realized that my hunger was going to keep me awake… especially when paired with my anxiety over the exam I am writing this afternoon. I am still studying, but I am at peace with the fact that I am almost certainly going to fail. Anyways, back to the hunger. I had enjoyed my last meal replacement around 8:30pm, and two (three?) cigars since. I had ingested the Rideau Canal since 6:30pm. What was I to do? I bit the bullet and took another pinch of grated cheese. Yes, I have one small pinch every morning as I feed Her Floofness, but I make it a point to not take more after that. Nothing doing… desperate times call for desperate measures. I took another pinch of it before heading off to bed.

    I still did not fall asleep until 1:00am, but at least I slept pretty well… my sleep score was just barely down from the two previous nights to a 76 and according to my fitness watch, it was ‘Fair, shorter than ideal, with plenty of deep.’ I can live with that. I also only got up to pee once after finally falling asleep, and that was at 2:00am, which means that from 2am to 7:30am I slept five consecutive hours. I did stir at 6:15 or so feeling the urge to pee, but I decided I could wait. Ultimately this afforded me an entire extra 75 minutes of sleep that I likely would not have had if I had gotten up after 6:15.

    While I have been stressed and anxious since mid-March, that has mostly been for personal reasons. Today’s heightened anxiety is for professional reasons – I am nervous about my exam. While I do have more to say about my weight loss program, I really want to spend the next two hours getting the last minute studying and cramming in before heading out for the exam centre. Depending on how things go, you will either hear from me again later today… or tomorrow morning. If I do not post again today do not read anything into that – I might just be distracted.

  • Day 988

    Yesterday was one of those days.

    Wednesday afternoon my plan was to get some sleep and then wake up in time to connect to the Erev Rosh Hashana services that my synagogue broadcasts. A bunch of different things happened to keep me from my bed, and when I finally did lie down at 5:00pm, my phone rang… it was a Lodge brother in crisis, and I spent over an hour talking with him and helping him with his issue. I am glad I was able to be there for him, even at the cost of two hours of sleep. I then fell asleep for a couple of hours, but I did not mute my phone. When I get seven text messages in short succession it usually means that there is an urgent matter that needs to be dealt with. It turned out that it was just seven completely unrelated texts that came from different people, and it was a coincidence that they all came within a minute. The alert was enough to wake me up, and I could not get back to sleep. I decided that rather than lying there frustrated, I would get dressed, take Princess Sophie for a walk, and then I would call my wife so that we could light the candles and say our prayers before I joined the services online.

    Why did I go into all of that detail about Wednesday night? Essentially to say that I was so exhausted yesterday because between Wednesday at 12:15am when I woke up and Thursday evening at 5:30pm when I went to bed I got two hours of sleep. I got through my class just fine, but I am glad that in the afternoon I did not have a lot to do. I could not go to bed because my cleaning lady came… had I known what the previous two days would be like I would have canceled that in a heartbeat, but I was committed. I finally got to sleep at 5:30pm with the hopes that I would be able to sleep through until my alarm went off at 12:30am. In fact I did one better… I slept through the alarm and it was 1:05am by the time I got out of bed and got going. I am glad I did not sleep through my class!

    I am feeling much better today than I did yesterday. I was telling Leslie that with all of the difficulties in my life I am still a very blessed man, and I am grateful for so much. I am grateful this morning for having slept last night, and my class is going well. My weight, which has been up every day for nearly a week, finally dropped slightly this morning. Hopefully by the beginning of next week when I fly to Maine I will be down below 300 lbs. again. I will try!

    Have a great day folks!