Long-Overdue Update

I have to take back what I wrote in the last post about never injuring myself with a Leslie Sansone video. About a week after I wrote that post I wound up first in the local emergency room, and when I *still* hadn't seen a doctor or even a nurse to take vital signs (who ignores a cardiac patient at 3am complaining of chest pains??) I wound up coming back home and at 9am phoning my doctor for an emergency appointment. As it turned out, those chest pains I had been having were a contused chest muscle and bruised ribs. The high blood pressure (200/100 again - YIKES!) I had early in the morning was just from worrying about it and was definitely NOT cardiac. Whew!

As I mentioned back in May, some of the exercises I was doing just weren't getting me into the target heart rate zone, so I started put more enthusiasm into my moves and for the videos that required hand weights, I increased from my 2 pound ones to the 5 pounders.

BIG MISTAKE!!

I have a history of easily pulled muscles and once dislocated my shoulder just by putting my arm on the back of the chair next to me. I dislocated it another time doing a Richard Simmons toning video. I've pulled muscles in my legs and arms many times just doing smooth and slow movements with very light hand weights of only a pound each. I should have known better than to use my son's 5 pound weights, but I was so frustrated at this lack of weight loss (Notice the ticker hasn't changed in months!) that I was willing to do anything to get it going again. I was already eating close to 1000 calories a day and I'm eating even less now and still I'm fluctuating the same 5 pounds up and down since April, and both doctors are as frustrated as I am.

When we lived in Florida back in 1999, one of the things I loved about being there were the TV commercials for local businesses. Here in urban NJ we get all the slick ads for NYC businesses and the occasional home-grown one for a local business, but those are few and far between. I never understood it when I would watch a B-movie where they mocked local tv commercials, since I had never seen any like those to compare them to. Well, the Greater Orlando area has loads of commercials for local businesses, all the same as those ones I saw in B-grade movies! The entire family fell in love with those from this one particular car deal, Family Auto Mart, featuring The Family Man and his Family Auto Mart (and personal) Family, including the Family Boy, his brother.

photo copyright Family Auto Mart 1999

The commercials can be found on YouTube and they have a great following there. This blog post from Tacky in Orlando tells it greater than I can. My son, to this day, still sings the jingle "Family Auto Mart, where the wheeling and dealing start. . ." and ". . . run a row of boo-coo mini-vans" is now part of our DNA. A friend of my dad's even bought a used car from them in the months just before we moved there and said yes, they're as crazy in person as they are in the commercials, but they do have excellent service and great deals.

Anyway, (now why the heck did I get off on this tangent? Oh, yeah! Now I remember!) one of my favorites was always when the Family Man and Family Boy would dress as hillbillies and since this song called "Fixin' to Learn Ya." Take a peek at it:



You would think after all these years with this back injury, and my childhood history of broken bones from my tomboy days of climbing the sides of buildings and falling off roller skates, that I would be more cautious when exercising. I guess I still hadn't learned yet.

So, after a gentle chastisement from my doc, we went on to speak of other things, like my echocardiogram results. The takotsubo is completely gone and my heart structure is back to normal. He was pleased with my eight pound weight loss. Huh? 8 pound loss? According to my scale at home - and I took my weight just before walking out the door, fully clothed and with shoes - I'm the exact same weight as I was my last visit to him in April. I asked if they had the scale adjusted since then, because the nurses told me when we were there with my husband's aunt and it showed that she had a 10 pound gain, even though the woman eats maybe one meal a week, that it was at least 6 to 8 pounds off. No, as far as he knew the scale hadn't been touched since my last visit. I have more blood work being drawn tomorrow for lipids, thyroid, and liver and I'll go see him again in early July for the results.

How will the results change my life? Well, if the triglycerides are sill up I may have to switch from a starch based food plan to a protein one, and add meat and dairy back into my daily diet. I could never go low-carb - I need those starches or my blood sugar plummets. I can't add too many fats in because my cholesterol counts weren't that great to begin with, although recent studies (past 20 years maybe?) are showing that the cholesterol levels in the body have more to do with genetics than what's ingested, for the liver makes most of the cholesterol. I like many of the vegan meals I make, but I like a cheeseburger even more, even if it's made from ground chicken. And a whole wheat pizza isn't far from my thoughts, either. I may switch over to a more South Beach type food plan, anyway, no matter what the labwork shows. Starving myself on 1000 calories of veggies and grains certainly isn't doing anything to help me lose weight, so I may as well go back to enjoying my food again. As long as I don't pig out with things like daily kielbasa or mystery meat hot dogs I should do just fine. I already had been living sugar-free and using whole grain flours for years before this heart thing and do plan on continuing with them for decades to come. So what if I'm still fat!