Week 26: All on the Chin

Week 25 | Week 27
March 28 to April 3, 2020

Wow, talk about letting your guard down. This week was terrible. I managed to diet throughout the day. I adhered to my fasting routine. I spent a lot of time working outside and getting exercise. I was focused. Until about 8-9 pm. My willpower left me completely and I turned into a vicious snack monster. This was almost every night of the week. Nothing particular happened, but for some reason I was struck by some truly insatiable hunger.

On the first night, I went to bed and sweated a bit. That’s the blood sugar spiking. That was every night. Then I noticed my body was failing the war against seasonal allergies. My ears started hurting me quite terribly on the second night. By the end of the week I had aggravated the heel spur in my right foot. My right arm hurts more and I started having headaches. Going back on this diet, hell or high water, Saturday. I gained 8 lbs from this slip up.

So yeah, my unnamed, faceless opponent just spent an unreasonable amount of time exploiting my lack of defense. I just took a line of precise blows to the face and I ate every single one. I didn’t get knocked down and I feel resolved to come out of this, but it is going to be a difficult slog. Easter is coming up followed by my daughter’s birthday. Convenient excuses to eat, eat, eat. With the lock down still in effect, this gets more and more difficult. There are times where I feel like I don’t have anything left in the tank.

I will die before I give this up. Time to tighten up and get ready to counter this attack.

Week 26 Summary

Cheat Night?
So even though this week was fraught with mistakes and bad decisions, I still followed my routine of having a cheat night. Even though the amount of insane food I stuffed down my gullet made me sick as hell that night, I enjoyed every intentional bite. For every week I have had a cheat night, and more weeks than not I have had a loss. I had a couple of weeks where I did not lose following the plan, but I had other weeks where I gained because of things like Christmas or Thanksgiving. Ultimately, if I keep my meals in the plan, exercise, drink my water, and avoid really dense (but 0 point foods like stew) I will lose weight. So what does a cheat day (or HUMAN DAY) typically look like?

• I still follow the rules of intermittent fasting, but adjust from 16 hour fast to 12 hour fast. I start eating at noon, and it allows me to snack as late as I like (there is no way I am up enough to eat past midnight).
• I throw back three times more water than usual. This is for a couple of reasons. For one, it keeps my diabetes in some control and two, it alleviates the hunger. I eat less if I drink more water.
• I still drink my coffee that morning. Another diabetes tactic, along with just getting through to noon without eating. Coffee has changed my life for the better.
• My first item(s) of the day are typically chips and cookies. Those soft Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies? Fritos? Cheetos? Oreos? Nothing is off limits.
• I will follow this snackfest with a meal of pizza or burgers, or I may have fried chicken. At this point I eat until I am mentally satisfied and that often means I am physically not well. I follow this with a ton of water.
• I may snack on other things I craved throughout the week. Ice cream, certain candy, maybe a hot pocket or even some hot dogs wrapped in two slices of bread. The goal here is to check off all of the boxes. What are you craving? Go get it.
• Around 6:00 PM I start prepping for dinner. When lockdown isn’t in gear, we actually go out. Casino buffet, Chili’s or some restaurant. Those visits are always followed by some dessert and I do love my ice cream from Dairy Queen or Marble Slab. On lockdown, it’s a bit like lunch, but I know this Friday I am frying catfish, fries, hush puppies, onion rings. I am going to eat that all day.
• Late night snacking is usually what does me in. So much sugar and salt that I go to bed miserable. The goal here is like beating myself down so bad with shitty food that I don’t want it for the rest of the week. It works 85% of the time.
• The next morning I wake up and start all over, but I am almost always “hungover.” Slight headache, extreme grogginess, exhaustion, nausea, and some random discomforts. A few hours after being awake? Brand new man.

This is probably an irresponsible way to manage my weight, but right now it’s the only thing that has worked for as long as it has. 26 weeks in, I have never dieted this long, this successfully. I will keep on keeping on.

The Challenges of Exercising
I have all of these pains going on, but I forced myself to push through all these nagging issues. I began a project to create a raised garden, a request made by my wife who apparently decided it doesn’t matter anyway. Regardless, I started this project and after framing the retaining walls, I started moving dirt by buckets from a pile on my property. Shoveling is hard work, but so is trimming trees and hauling limbs to a pile to burn. This will be my exercise routine for the foreseeable future barring the weather.

Anyhow, I realized that it’s a total sweat job and one that tests my endurance a bit. I have something to look at in the end as well. I have a bit of brush I want to clean up and long time obstacles I have had to go around on my mower. My goal? limit the amount of turning on my mower, apparently. Also, toss some random weed whacking in there and a little bit of raking. Lots of work!

Snapographs

Sharing My Life Story: The Summer Vacation of Doom
Have you ever had a UTI? How about this, have you ever had a yeast infection? Did you even know men could have those? Yeah, I didn’t either, but woo doggy did I find out the hard way. How did this come to be?

Well, school ended and I was dieting by that time. It wasn’t a great diet, but it was effort. I was feeling okay, and I decided I would diet on our vacation to New Mexico. That plan fell apart the morning we left when I decided I wanted one of those Frozen mocha shake things from McDonald’s. I was slurping those things down, and I felt alright. That night? I noticed a stinging pain when I was pissing. The next day the stinging was increased notably, and was accompanied with a constant burning. When we got to New Mexico, the pain increased, and I was uncomfortable during the whole vacation, but I still had a great time.

Then we drove back and I did the same thing again and that night in like, Wellwaterhippitydo, Texas I was like Tom Hanks pissing on The Green Mile. I needed a John Coffee to suck the demons out of my body. I was damn near in tears. The stinging turned into “acid coated razors slicing through my flesh” when I took a leak, and the constant burning turned into like, fire and was extremely sensitive to the touch. I got home, and it took a week to get that knocked out. That sucked.

Why did it happen? Well, as a diabetic you are susceptible to a whole new world of dispositions no one would envy. One of them is that you ALWAYS have to pee and on a 16 hour road trip slamming back-to-back coffees, I apparently was also holding so much that I HAD LEAKS. All that stewing caused a yeast infection and a UTI. Anyhow…I recovered from that. This was also the very first time I met my current doctor for an appointment.

He tested me for the beetus and yeah, it was bad. He wanted to put me on insulin and whatnot, and I declined and he instead gave me a prescription to this medicine that was a prefilled syringe that had like 10 doses. Long story short, this was the beginning of my life as a diabetic in an official capacity. The tale has been told. Diabetes sucks. Don’t let your kids drink cokes and eat Little Debbie snack cakes while playing video games. They will be like me.

Man titties and diabetes.