Weight a Minute!

I was planning to write something controversial for my next post.  Everybody loves the drama, right?  How’s this for drama? I hit my goal!  Woohoo!  I started January fourth with the goal to lose 10% body weight which was 267 lbs.  Do the math…I was 239.7 yesterday morning.  I haven’t weighed this little since…well since I can remember.

When I was first diagnosed with diabetes by my grandmother’s cardiologist, he asked me, “Do you like meat?  Do you like bacon?  Well, now you can have all you want.”  I don’t think he realized my capacity for eating fatty, salty delicious bacon.  But I also really like bread, potatoes, rice, and pasta.  A simple sandwich on white, slathered with mayo.  A baked potato drowned in butter, cheese, and sour cream.  Not just rice…rice and chicken gravy.  And of course, the old staple in my household, spaghetti with meat sauce.  This post is making me HONgry. 

Consider the simple potato ship.  The perfect balance of salt and texture.  Flavorful…crunchy…greasy.  Add some sour cream and onion seasoning…nobody can eat just one!  How many billions does Frito-Lay make each year hawking these wonderful snacks?  And Pringles…the chicken nugget of potato chips.  Those long narrow cans might as well be a bear trap. 

I weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of 330 in the late 90’s.  I lost 30 lbs. on a low-fat diet in 2000.  I’d learned from a fitness instructor that fat had 9 calories/gram as opposed to carbs and protein which are both 4 calories/gram (alcohol is 7 calories/gram but, meh). Then sometime around 2015, I lost 30-40 again…this time it was mostly due to the diabetes meds I was on plus a moderate plain-old-fashioned eat-less diet.  I managed to maintain that weight more or less until last December when my endocrinologist diagnosed me with fatty liver disease which can lead to cirrhosis or worse.  That plus my A1C (or average blood sugar over 3 months) was climbing to record levels.  He prescribed a new drug, but I decided it was time to change my lifestyle rather than add drugs to the arsenal against my current lifestyle.

So, I started walking almost daily (and I’ve covered this in a previous post).  And I started a low-carb diet.  The first 6-7 pounds came off fairly easily.  I’ve always said the first ten were a cakewalk…that’s the soft fat. 

Some might call it a keto diet…I call it low-carb.  I’ve been testing my urine for levels of ketones and have only found “slight” levels since the freeze in February.  We’d evacuated the house because we had no power and stayed with friends, so I was not particular about my diet during that time (pizza and pasta was consumed).  Before the freeze, my pee tested with moderate levels of ketones…after, only slight levels.

What I’ve read, a keto diet refers to the level of ketones in your blood as an indication of how your body is producing energy from stores of fat instead of carbohydrates.  You deprive your body of carbs and it starts producing ketones to help break down fat cells as a source of energy.  That’s the gist anyway (I’m sure there’s lots more to it and many multi-syllabic scientific words which makes sense to very few).

Whatever…its working.  Ten percent body weight lost in four months and nine days.  Nothing left to do now but set a new goal and keep going (like Forrest Gump turning around at one ocean and running to the other…except Forrest never had a goal…he just felt like runnin’).  After all, it wouldn’t be a “lifestyle change” if I went back to my old ways. So I think another 20 sounds good. Let’s see what I look like at 220.

Update July 6th – This week I logged 235 pounds…32 pounds deleted! This is after a two-week road trip eating just about whatever I wanted and a mild case of food poisoning which made me eat very little for two or three days. My Endocrinologist was very excited and even suggested reducing my meds in the future.

-(Not so) Big Steve