Friday, December 30, 2011

Doing great...except for the part when I'm not

I'm feeling sorry for myself at the moment. I have a wicked head cold. Or allergies. Or both, I can't really tell. It comes and goes. At the moment it's here. I've been sneezing all day. I tried to exercise, but whenever I bend over to touch my toes or try to do a planky sort of thing, I start sneezing again. And then sometimes I cough.

I'll spare you the details on what all this is doing to my bladder!

I'm down to 295 lbs. Well, not today, but that's the new low. Remember, my experience on the bathroom scale is like a ping pong ball, but the new recent low is 295. I'm happy for that. Clothes are looser in interesting places, like my upper back, my axillary breast tissue (TMI?), my shins, even my feet. I used to wear 11WW, then went to an 11W, and now I wear 11C. Very cool! I can start wearing normal width shoes soon!

No weight gain during the holidays (yeah!) and no major parties coming up in the near future. The Paleolithic eating plan is working well for me. Since it's so cold (for dieting Californians, which is like all of us, 50-degrees F feels cold), I'm drinking a lot of my bone soups with lemon juice. I just made another one yesterday with the carcass of a free-range turkey. Mmmmm! It's nice with some chopped spinach or collard greens floating around in it, sort of like having miso soup. (I can't have that...soy. I miss it!)

Up until Christmas, I was going to Pilates for five classes a week plus a private session. I'm getting my joints, quads, hamstrings, glutes and lower back ready for my next big push, a 12-week figure weight-training challenge. The diet is going to get tightened up too. My goal is to push myself harder than ever for three months in order to drop as much weight as possible to get past as much of the type 2 diabetes and PCOS insulin resistance and weight loss issues as possible. I'm hoping that losing another 20+ lbs. will make it easier to lose the rest of the weight. I have a big goal, to get below 200 lbs by the end of 2012. At the end of Feb 2013 my COBRA health insurance will no longer be available to me and I have to go out to find my own. And I don't want to be turned down for anything because I'm too fat to cover.

(Divorce, the gift that keeps on giving!)

So anyways, other things are changing for the better...most notably, my legs are getting better looking. I have had issues with red necrosis between my mid shins and ankles, and issues with swollen ankles. I spent way too much time sitting for too long. The doctors never could do anything about the necrosis and I was afraid I was eventually going to lose my lower legs because of the diabetes. I kept being told to lose weight and exercise (duh!) and to wear compression stockings. Well, the stockings only seemed to make the problem worse. As did sitting for 20+ hours at a time on my overseas flights. I finally quit flying and sitting for hours and hours at a time (makes it hard to get work done though). I quit using the compression stockings. I started massaging my legs regularly, plus the weight loss and exercise, and I take two baby aspirin a day. I have also read that getting adequate micro-nutrients might have been an issue, so I'm taking more of that stuff too. And the necrosis is starting to go away! I've struggled with this issue for over 20 years. I weighed about 250 lbs when it first started happening. So maybe by the time I hit that number on the scale again, it'll all be gone. And I can wear dresses again without having to wear boots or opaque stockings with them (although a guy did give me his number when I was wearing the boots with a dress last month).

Okay, that's enough for now. I need to give my bladder a little bit of a break. I just ate and orange and it seems to have upset the balance of nature!