*BOUNCE*

Just as I thought - my rubber floor has caused my weight loss to stall.  Why?

I've reallygot to get moving at this moment, so I can't analyze this fully now. The weight point circled in red is my actual scale weight from one day this week - 4 1/2 pounds heavier than today!  This is why I weigh myself every single day, so a single anomaly cannot drive me crazy. Without Tuesday (no idea why it's so different - it has to be water, but I don't see it in my food logs), my average weight for the week would be flat.

I know I've neglected exercise - I got a cold two weeks ago, it's mostly gone now, but it's snowed or rained every day and so even the dog walking has suffered.

I've done a look at what I'm eating. I log every bite through My Fitness Pal, and I learned a couple of weeks ago how to do an export of the data using an add-on.  It's kind of annoying to use so I brought things up to date manually just now.  The light area at the bottom are net carbs, which is what I'm trying to manage, while keeping an eye on the total I'm eating as well.

Based on Atkins procedures, at this point I should be widening my food choices and slowly increasing my net carbs. Until I see a true drop on the scale, I'm going to hold at about where I am right now - 25 grams of net carbs per day, with berries and nuts but no beans or grains or very starchy veggies.  Bacon and egg breakfast salad, steak and asparagus dinners, I'm lookin' at you!

The Crucial Tipping Point

I've been very good at sticking to eating well, or at least controlled. I started this determined round of weight loss on January 20, four and a half weeks ago.  I've been focusing on the details of Atkins, not just the general principles. I've been concentrating on eating vegetables at every meal, even breakfast. And it has had results. I've lost about six pounds, and I feel great.

But now I'm once again at the crucial point.  I've hit my "rubber floor", the weight at which I lose momentum, turn arounc and gain weight again. This has happened to me four times before, in the time I've been doing this blog. Here's my post on this from 2013, when I hit this point.

Here is what is going on that makes it difficult to keep going:

• The weight loss has slowed. The instant and heady success of the first few days and weeks are gone. This week I lost weight but less than before. (This is using my simple average of the week's daily readings.)
• The work of cooking is starting to seem to hard to sustain. I have other ways I'd rather spend my time.
• The food is starting to get a bit boring. When I make a big batch of something, I get bored before its done. 
• I want to eat with my girl more often, but she often she doesn't like what I like in the limited selection I have available.
• I crave certain treats which aren't allowed.

So here's what I'm doing to counter these problems, which are always the same:

• I'm upping the exercise. I'm working towards the first 5K of the season in March. I've kept up with two weight training sessions a week besides. 
• I'm really focused on getting sufficient vegetables at every meal. This is often harder than finding the protein.
• I'm really focused on portion control. Previous runs at Atkins used the food lists of "allowed" foods, without paying attention to how much of each is reasonable. Nuts, for example, no more than a quarter cup a day. Dairy, only a couple of ounces.
• I am ratcheting up the carbs a bit. Atkins recommends adding in a wider range of foods, and upping the carb level slightly, when you are close to goal, which I am. But I'm striving to keep it down. The other point they make is the wider range of foods cannot be at the expense of the main foundation vegetables that you have to eat every single day.
• I've got a set of "go to" quick and easy foods. A roast chicken from Whole Foods, for example, with easy vegetable sides. I found some Atkins and other low carb frozen meals when I stopped by a fancy new supermarket in a different neighborhood.
• I'm reading recipes and finding new things to cook. This also helps in trying to find things for my girl - adding sides she will like.
• I've got a couple of treats I allow myself, that are naturally low carb. (I tried a "low carb" Atkins brand chocolate-coated bar and couldn't stand the taste of malitol.) The two so far are blueberries (fresh or frozen) with creme fraiche or mascarpone, or crunchy almond butter with celery.  I think anything with actual chocolate in it is too dangerous right now.
• I've been giving myself some non-food rewards. I've bought some clothes, about which I may post later.
• I'm making very short term goals. Right now I want to sustain this through the next weekend. It's likely to be a social weekend, and I want to have fun!  But I'm setting parameters on what that can include.

So I've played with my data all morning while writing this post. Time to get out there and move!

How Different my Priorities Are

The coldest day of the year by far, queuing up outside the gym waiting for them to open!

Mixed Bag

Haven't been able to keep the energy level up, and now I'm running out of the food I made for myself. Plus, I will be cooking and eating in company a lot more often, which means compromises. But compromises are what life is made of.

But I did get out to the gym this morning, and then for a cold weather run with the dog. It was up to 40 according to the kitchen thermometer when we left. I was head-to-toe in specialty clothing, which helps to motivate me.

We're in training for the 5K season which will start in March.

Eating and Moving Through Stress

It was a very bad week this week, maybe the second worst of my life. But on this, my diet and exercise blog, that's not the story. The story here is I took care of myself.

As stress built over the past couple of weeks, I had started a new diet and was making progress. I also started a training plan for the 5K I intend to run in March. As things got tense, I hunkered down and cooked and cooked and walked / ran with my dog outside.

When all hell broke loose, there was no time. But there was a fridge full of good food to reheat quickly. A couple of days, I hardly passed through my own house to grab and eat the food, and besides had essentially no appetite. But every other day, I ate well and adequately without having to waste energy on it.

There were two days this week that are tied for the fewest number of steps I took during a day, since I've been tracking my steps with the current devices.  When I got a break Friday morning, I contemplated going out for a terrific breakfast. Instead, I suited up in my cool new running clothes, wired myself with all the tech, and the dog and I took my training run only a day late. This is what I wanted to do with my time. This was the best way to dissipate my stress. It was like meditating, it was so refreshing.

What an enormous change in my mindset - and for that matter, to my body itself.

Emergency! Emergency? (2014 Edition)

After only one trip to the emergency room in the last twenty years, 2014 was my year of emergencies for myself. I've had many trips during that time and recently to ERs with family and friends, but it's very different when it's you.

The killer tree and the telephone pole it brought with it.

First, in August, was the Attack of the Killer Tree, the 100-foot tall, 100-year-old oak that decided to come down on me. I ran, it missed me, but when I looked over my shoulder to see if I was clear, the dog kept going and over I went, backwards. (Good to know I can outrun a tree, too bad I was so clumsy.) I cracked the back of my head open on the curb and ended up in an ambulance. It turns out ambulances have protocols of where to take people, but some discretion on how they do it. Head injuries were supposed to go all the way across the county; I talked them into the hospital in my neighborhood, just a half mile away.

Good to arrive in an ER via ambulance. They look at you right away, no waiting for triage. On the other hand, once they figured out I wasn't going to die from it, I spent a total of FIVE hours there. Luckily, a helpful neighbor had taken my dog home for me, and scooped up my purse and got it to me before the ambulance left. My kindle lives in the purse. As it turns out, that was at least as useful as having my insurance card.  I read a complete VI Warshawsky novel. If you aren't familiar with VI, she is the original hardboiled female detective, by Sara Paretsky. It is not uncommon for VI, after having been beaten up or even shot, to get up and walk out of a hospital with doctors telling her not to. At once point, I considered doing likewise, but talked myself out of it.

Another helpful neighbor called my brother-in-law to tell him I was being taken off in an ambulance. I had texted him, something like "I'm off to get my head bandaged because I fell." But after the call, he came creeping into the ER, scared to death. This ER is fraught with pain for us. My sister died a few feet from where I was lying. He was reassured to talk to me, though the back of my head looked like I failed to outrun the zombies and they had some of my brains.  He assigned my nephew to await my call to come get me when I was released.

Four metal staples, a week's worth of bad headaches, two weeks of no running or jumping, an inability to sleep on my back for several weeks, and eight weeks before I could get my hair colored, was the only aftermath.

I had to go back to the ER to get the staples out, because it takes a special tool. (Of course, the family kindly offered to go to Office Depot and take care of it, but I decided to stick with the professionals.) I estimated 7 am was the deal - after 6 am shift change, but before most walk-ins would get there. BINGO!  One hour in -and-out, exactly.

The next adventure was much less exciting. I sliced a nice clean oval off my thumb the very first time I used a mandoline. (Thanks to my wood-working friend Jeff for the tip on the stainless steel mesh glove, which has enabled me to use the mandoline again, even though I twitch at the thought. Even more thanks to my girl for my new vegetti - like a pencil sharpener for vegetables. Still, I'll wear the glove when using it.) It's really hard to work your way into a first aid kit and sort through packages of bandages while blood is flowing freely from your thumb on your dominant hand.  Pretty much, my bathroom looked like a slasher movie by the time I was done. The next morning, I asked the nurse at work to help re-bandage it. She took one look, and ordered me off to the ER. (I have since decided this was unnecessary - this is actually what "urgent care" is for. I had thought of them as the flu clinic, but they do bandages.)  This time, I went to the downtown hospital at prime time. Still, they had two tracks, one for the easy things like my thumb. They talked to me and took my temperature, checked when last I'd been in West Africa, and had me back being looked at in about twenty minutes.  Two times, they unwrapped it and pulled off the bandage, which started it bleeding and hurt like billy blue blazes. Gave me a chance to practice my cowboy cursing, and to realize you have to ask for painkillers. Two hours later, and I had a high-tech bandage that could stay on for 10 days without pulling the scab off again.  I had to wear a waterproof finger cap over it during my sailing excursion, and I've got a nice scar now, but otherwise uneventful.

This last trip is the reason I actually started to write this.  Two weeks before Christmas, on a Tuesday, I woke up with chest pain. I got up and started doing my morning stuff. The pain got worse. It was like a pressure, and to the extent I could localize it, it seemed to be coming from between my shoulder blades.

I was terrified and skeptical, all at once.  I have a tragic family history of heart problems. My sister dropped dead at 46, waking up one morning with chest pain and declared dead two hours later. My older brother had a bypass operation while in his fifties. My grandfather died of a heart attack at age 52.

 I had felt something like this pain before, intermittently and for brief (< 5 minutes) periods.  I have had intense heart screening because of this family history, with no indication there is anything wrong. But I've read a fair amount about how women's heart trouble presents differently than men's. There was a recent article in the New York Times from a woman who wrote a book about her husband's heart attack and recovery, but who had a hard time believing she was having one herself a couple of years later.

I kept on getting ready for work. I drank some coffee. In the bathroom, I found myself with my eyes closed, leaning against the wall, feeling the pain and trying to push it away.  I remembered how good I felt in the gym last night, as I worked my upper body with very heavy weights. "That's it!" I thought "That's what is causing this!", and then I closed my eyes again from the pain. A deep breath, which hurt to do, I straightened up, and went to the computer. I googled "chest pain in women" and came to a website with short anecdotes from women who dismissed their chest pain.  "SECONDS COUNT!" was the theme between them. "I had a powerful pain between my shoulder blades and it hurt to take a deep breath" read the third narrative I read.  

That did the trick. I would have told anyone else to go to the hospital. I might have been dialing 911 for them. I knew I needed to go get this checked out. Still mostly convinced it was the gym, I thought of my family, and how my fragile girl shouldn't have to go through this again.  I might be embarrassed, but the embarrassment would be worth it.  I got dressed-I'm not sure exactly what I was thinking, but I put on work clothes, though especially comfortable ones, except for the ankle boots.  It was 44 degrees out, pouring rain, and 6:30 in the morning. I put on my foul weather jacket, grabbed my purse (the one with the kindle) and my car keys, rested my head against the door and tried to make the pain stop, and then headed towards the hospital.

Note to readers:  DON'T DO THIS!  Never drive yourself to the emergency room if you suspect you are experiencing something that could incapacitate you along the way. It is as bad as driving drunk. You may be endangering other people which you don't have the right to do. Always always call 911 for yourself or your spouse. The folks on the ambulance will start treating you when they arrive, saving some of those precious seconds that count.  This is true even if you live a quarter mile away from the regional cardiac care center's emergency room, with just two right turns  and one traffic light to get there, and you are already somewhat embarrassed about making a fuss about probably (but only probably) nothing.

I parked at the hospital visitor parking, and stood under the overhang just out of the rain and outside the door literally turning in circles,  "It's nothing", I thought. "I don't want to be here and I don't want this to be happening", I thought more honestly.  This place is fraught with tension for me.  My sister died right here. What is going to happen when I walk through that door?  One thing I know for certain, a chain of events is going to start that I won't be able to control.
I walked into the ER, and sat down at the intake window. "Why are you here?" asked the lady I recognized from my staple-pulling visit.  "Chest pains", I said, wishing I was anywhere else. She scooched her chair back, called "chest pain" to someone over the cube divider, scooched back, and asked for id and insurance cards.  I had them out, and requested she double check the address because of a mixup in the billing statements.  She asked who my primary care doctor was. "Well, my cardiologist is Dr. B" I said. "Dr. B!" She said with reverence.  She scotched back and said over the partition, "Dr. B's patient!"  A nurse came out and asked me to come back.  He took me into a little room and put those little electrodes all over my chest and did a quick EKG.  He said the doctor would look at it but but it looked fine to him. 

I don't know what I expected to happen but this was really low key. My mental images had been of the noise, confusion, and many many people surrounding my sister, overlaid with several seasons of ER on TV. This was almost bucolic, and certainly anti-climactic since I had worked myself into such a tizzy. I had on a hospital gown on top by now, but I walked behind my nurse to a work station, carrying all my stuff, thinking now I'll just get dressed and head on to work. 

Not so fast. I described my symptoms in more detail, first to the nurse and then to the doctor, how I'd been having intermittent pain for some days and then big pain this morning, continually adding that I'd worked out with heavy weight the night before and it certainly could be muscle pain. "But then why have you felt it before?"  I said I was fine and I wanted to leave to the doctor, and she said fiercely, "There is no place else you should be right now!"  I stayed.  I sent an email to work, "No Nan today" with no other explanation.

The rest is even more of an anticlimax.  I was there for some hours, during which time I was hooked to cardiac and blood pressure monitors, had two lines for blood draws/drug pushes put in my arms, given aspirin, nitroglycerin, a proton-pump inhibitor (for acid reflux, because the odds were growing it was not cardiac related), and an MRI. I resisted other stronger drugs that were recommended, and when the doctor talked about admitting me to stay overnight I really grew alarmed. At that point, my pain was less but not gone.  It's really hard to listen so closely to your own body and distinguish sensation from suggestion after a while. I took my own notes on my iPad about what was happening when, and what my symptoms were. I regretted the ankle boots, which I was still wearing, along with my comfortable work trousers. My own cardiologist, the important Dr. B, (who had done all those tests on me before) practices at that hospital, so the ER doctor talked to him on the phone. "Dr. B will be coming to see you himself" she told me with some awe. When he came, he looked through all the charts again and sort of apologetically told me he really needed to use his own stethoscope with his own ears to listen to my chest. The doctors agreed to let me go if I took the PPI and went for a follow up at his office for a stress test. 

So yeah, I'm fine.  I did an echocardiogram a week later, running on a treadmill at maximum effort then having an ultrasound of my heart while it was going fast from the exercise. The crew had to repeat the test because we didn't move fast enough. It turns out I'm in such good aerobic condition my heart rate dropped too fast for them to catch good video of it pumping hard.  When I reviewed the overall situation with the glorious Dr. B, he said every marker said I was very healthy, and he was impressed at how long and fast I was on the treadmill.  "Well, yeah, I ran some 5Ks this summer", I said, then very grandly, channeling our friend Chris, "it is my intention to go vigorously into old age". Quickly then, hearing the hubris echo in the room, sheepishly, "I'm going to be 60 this year. I have to think about these things."  "I'm right there with you" he said with a grin. He basically told me it appeared I won the genetic lottery, mitosis had favored me, and there was no reason to believe I had any cardiac problems, I should take the medicine for the acid reflux and follow up with my own doctor.

But I think I did the right thing. Here is something to think about during this red month of February -"just a little heart attack".

So that's my ER stories from  last year.  It's all over but the billing and insurance paperwork, which may last for some time to come.

Getting Things Under Control

I ate too much over the holidays - and didn't stop when the holidays were over. But homeostasis - my body's set point - resisted gaining the weight until mid-January. Finally, my indulgences caught up with me and I hit my highest weight in a couple of years.

Ding Ding Ding!  The alarm bells rang!

So back under control, which means following strict rules for a few weeks. I'm going to what has always worked for me so far - Atkins. I started a week ago last Tuesday (Jan. 21) - the day after my house guests departed. I had planned for this - happily postponing the work and the sometimes unpleasant beginning of the diet.  My guests left mid-day Monday, and since I was not at work I was able to lay in supplies and prepare for my back to work scramble.

As is my wont, I read some books. My two go-two books are the Beck Diet Solution which got me started back in 2010, and of course The New Atkins for a New You.  The Beck book is really a workbook of how to think about eating, and it has definitely helped me shape a new relationship with food. This Atkins isn't terribly different from the original Atkins, except it emphasizes vegetables more. But, like all these books, it has to start out with the science of how your body processes food and therefore why their way of eating is better. And, since it is part of the much-reviled Atkins approach, it has to justify why their approach to eating is not dangerous. The problem with re-reading these books is I've read them so much, they don't hold my attention. I think I know what they say and so I put them aside and just eat.  The problem right now is I need some rules on eating.

So for a change of pace, I got The New Atkins Made Easy.  This book pretty much covers exactly the same thing as far as eating rules as the more official book. It skips all the science, and in different words, tells you what to eat when. (And every rule is the same, just different style.) I needed different words to hold my interest, and the plain talk is great. The big point that is hammered into the first few chapters is:  VEGETABLES.  Not focussed on meat, butter, and eggs, as Atkins is rumored to be. Design every meal around greens. This book stresses the minimum amount of vegetables to eat each day, rather than talking about limiting carbs.  Yes, you have to limit carbs. No grains, no potatoes, no sugar, no beans, limited dairy at this stage. No fruit at this stage, which is the hardest right now. But eat your vegetables and you won't miss the carbs. Proteins are also subject ot portion control. Four or five ounces of meat per meal, max, (no pounds of ribeye), and average no more than an egg a day. No yogurt till later, but small amounts of sour cream are ok.  But eat your vegetables first!

So now here is a typical day:  Breakfast is eaten in the car while driving: no-carb chicken sausages wrapped in lettuce leaves to be finger food.  Usually each wrap is a single romaine leaf torn off the heart-of-romaine head.  There is my first cup of leafy greens. Lunch is a huge salad from the salad bar are work- spinach, lettuce, red onions, cucumber, mushrooms, (at least 3 cups) with my own salad dressing (so I know it has no sugar) and five ounces of meat from home. (I bring my own meat mostly because I care about farming practices used on animals).  An afternoon snack turns out to be crucial in giving me the energy to do dinner right. It's been a couple of celery stalks with hard salami, or just plain guacamole, or olives. (I'll add nuts next week, but want to keep the green vegetable side as well.)  Dinner on a week night is heating up something made in advance - roast chicken or grilled steak, with a couple of cups of cooked vegetables - broccilli or cauliflower or asparagus.  I've kept my evenings busy, so I can't reach for the sweets. This is my weakest time of day, and pretty much celery or a piece of cheese has worked for a bed time snack. It's also worked to not have a snack at all. I cook with olive oil and butter, and last weekend ate a bunch of bacon, but really, doesn't this look relatively healthy by almost anyone's standards?

I'm tracking my food in My Fitness Pal, and so I can say with confidence eleven days into this I've averaged 1300 calories a day, and hit the 20 "net" grams of carbs exactly on average. (Net carbs are total carbohydrate grams minus fiber grams, in my case that works out to 30 total carb grams and 10 fiber grams, so about a third of my carbs are fiber. More fiber would be good, but hard to find a food that isn't sawdust yet has more grams of fiber than other carbs.)  If you don't make your own food from scratch, it's very hard to make these targets. Bottled salad dressings, fruit condiments in salads, bread crumbs on cooked vegetables, all of these things add carbs. Meat and green vegetables, with oil and butter and vinegar is the only way to make sure there isn't corn starch in the gravy.

So I'm having terrific success in terms of what I see on the scale.

So the weight I saw on the scale two weeks ago, that went "ding ding ding" was six pounds more than today's weight!  Atkins says the first 4-6 pounds in the first two weeks are water, and then your body concolidates and starts losing fat.

We'll see. I've seen in the last five years that I can do this well for 2-4 weeks, and then I'm bored and want chocolate.  But it's also sustaining the effort to make food myself that derails me. For lunch, I can't stop at the food trucks for a sandwich (or even a curry since I don't know what's in the sauce). I've decided to buy step-saving foods, like cut up celery or romaine hearts. Eating off the salad bar at work is a huge convenience and almost totally eliminates any excuses there. One day I truly did not have time to go to the second floor and buy my greens, and so I just ate my meat for lunch, my celery and salami for snack, and ate more veggies at dinner. Another morning I was disrupted by teen schedules, but I was able to grab my meat and breakfast and stay on track when I got to work late.  But it is certainly a friggin' lot of planning and work.

Typically, there is a loss of energy a few days in, and a recovery a few days after this. I've had that "Atkins flu" very badly other times. To try to avoid it, I followed their advice and ate a teaspoon of salt (fleur de sel) for each of the first five days. I really didn't have the issues this time I've had other times. Today I started training for a 5K in March, so I can confirm the energy is back.

So I'm aiming to keep up this very restricted eating until President's day, then consider adding some carbs back. We'll see. I think I'm doing better at the planning and management this time around, and I pat myself on the back for not letting work or teens derail me in the first ten days.

Excelsior!