OK, so it’s been awhile since I’ve blogged. Alright already! Truth time. It’s actually been just over 18 months since I’ve blogged. My bad. Mea culpa and all that. Sheesh! Between a bad year with my left knee and then another bad several months with a messed up SI joint, I was sidelined by both my orthopedic doctor and my physical therapist, both of whom probably took exotic vacations on the sums of money I paid for their services over that time frame. I was under strict no exercise orders and honestly, I probably enjoyed that just a little too much. When I was cleared for exercise sometime back in the spring, I just somehow never got around to it. I was much too busy making trips back to visit my family and play with grandkids to get around to exercising, let alone the dreaded D word.
But here’s the thing. Trying to keep up with five active grandkids ranging in age from just a few months old to almost six years old, I came to the painful conclusion that I was too out of shape to keep up. Getting down on the floor to play was fine and dandy, but getting up without the assistance of a forklift was another story. And I got winded entirely too easily. I was put on notice during a particularly strenuous jaunt to Chuck E. Cheese with my rambunctious granddaughters. Trying to bob and weave through teeming hoards of miniature humans and not lose sight of MY miniature humans had me huffing and sweaty in no time. All I wanted to do when we got back home was sit on the couch and binge on The Big Bang Theory and REAL pizza (read Minsky’s) and not that crap they call pizza Chuck E. Cheese!
The final straw of course, was the dreaded yearly checkup where my doctor kindly informed me to my utter shame and horror that I had gained ten pounds since last year’s checkup. TEN POUNDS!!! #mortification! I don’t speak in hashtags often, folks, but this was just beyond mortification. Time to get with it. For realz. Sadly, during my time on the injured reserve list I had actually joined Weight Watchers for several months, alas, to no avail. I dutifully counted and recorded the Point Plus value of every morsel that passed my lips and pretty much stuck to the prescribed number of points, woefully small as I felt that number was. Guess what? I was always hungry and cranky and I lost almost no weight! Of course I knew deep down it was because on WW I was allowed to eat carbs and so I ate carbs. They swore up and down that as long as I stuck to my points values I would lose weight. Dirty, rotten, lying bastards. (Pardon my French if you are offended – but that’s how I felt for the results I got for my $18.95 a month.) I should have known better. My very insulin resistant self simply cannot lose weight if I eat any kind of bad carbs at all. Can. Not.
Armed with fresh resolve, I did what I knew I had to do. I also knew in my heart of hearts that it was going to be painful and that I was going to hate it, but I did it. The old double A. Atkins and Aerobics. I’ll admit I had some pharmaceutical help. My doctor took pity on me and prescribed an appetite suppressant so I wouldn’t be starving all the time whilst I shrank my food portions and gave up my beloved carbs. He also placed extra strong emphasis on the exercise portion of my plan. Perhaps paying for the prescription and the monthly co-pay to visit the doctor to be weighed and to monitor my blood pressure would be a bigger motivation than the $18.95 a month I shelled out for WW, because this is significantly more expensive. And for some strange reason, I really wanted to make my doctor happy. Go figure. Maybe it was the sad eyes he cast in my direction when he informed me of my weight gain, like he was already scripting my eulogy in his head.
The fateful doctor’s visit was this past July 31st. I began my Double A project on August 1st. Since it was the hot, humid and just generally miserable part of a Florida summer when I started my exercise program, I resorted to the exercise videos provided courtesy of Comcast On Demand in my nicely air conditioned living room, rather than my favorite form of exercise, which is walking outdoors. Heat stroke was NOT a part of the Double A Plan, thank you very much. My goal has been thirty minutes of cardio, four to five times a week and I have stuck with that fairly religiously. Go me! I have thrown in some long, slow beach walks on the weekends as well. But the best part is that by sticking with my Atkins plan with very insignificant to almost non-existent cheating, I have made some pretty stellar progress, if I do say so myself. Did I mention that on my birthday I didn't even eat one crumb of the birthday cake that was made for me? This is me patting myself on the back.
Seventy-one days into this journey I can proudly say that I have lost thirty-one pounds, one of my chins, many inches of back fat, upper arm fat and side boob and two pants sizes. And the dosage of my blood pressure medicine has been cut in half. This has been inspiration enough to soldier on. I will not blog every day, because frankly, what I eat and the silly aerobics videos I work out to aren’t all that exciting. But I will check in from time to time to give progress reports. There will be challenges, of course. The holidays are just around the corner. Thankfully, I never get trick-or-treaters here in my condo complex, so I will not be tempted to buy any Halloween candy that would just sit around and taunt me. At least Atkins just came out with their own version of M&Ms, so life is good.
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