My daily exercise for the past 2 weeks has consisted of a 2-mile Leslie Sansone video, 5 minutes using the MagneTrainer for upper body work, then again for a minimum of 30 minutes in my target heart range as a recumbent exercise bike. It's been a great work out, getting my heart rate up there and making me sweat prolifically.

Then the leg pains started. First it was just above my ankle, and I blamed the shoes, the boots I wore outside to view the aftermath of "snowmageddon", or just too tight socks. But after switching shoes and making sure I never took a step without them, doing better stretches, even changing the type of socks I wore, the pain is now not only in the ankle but in the shin of my left leg. Damn! When this happened to me in the past my podiatrist told me to cut back on those higher impact aerobics. He already told me to not do so many walking exercises because of my deformed and arthritic feet but I liked the way they made me feel afterwards, and face it, those Leslie Sansone workouts are just so simple to do that a klutz like me can follow along with ease.

But now I have to back off a bit or the pain and damage will only get worse.

Today, instead of any of that fast or foot-pounding stuff, I pulled out my Francesco and Daisy Garripoli beginners qigong DVD, and aside from tired feet from all that standing in one place, I think I got a very good workout, full of gentle movements but some just enough to get my heart rate up a bit — nowhere near my target heart rate but at least elevated. It was nice, returning to this not-so-old favorite. I just bought it a few months ago, before my heart thing, and stopped using it afterwards when the cardiologist insisted on me doing only cardio workouts, with weight loss as the main goal, even though the cardiac rehab nurses not only approved of me doing qigong but suggested I do the cardio one day and do the qigong on alternate days, that doing cardio 7 days a week really isn't healthy or sustainable, especially with my history of various arthritic spots, neuritis, and degenerative disk disease in my spine.

In the old days, I would have just not exercised until my left felt better. My, how times have changed!

How?!?!

How am I going to lose more than half my current weight and not wind up in the hospital, nuthouse, or cemetery?

I'm following a very low fat, starch based food plan, keeping the sodium under 2000 mg a day and calories between 1200 - 1400.

I'm getting 5 to 6 hours of cardio exercise each week, much of it in my target heart rate zone. I mix it up between different videos, the treadmill and exercise bike. Many of the videos incorporate weight and toning work, too.

I'm using meditation and relaxation techniques, along with an ACE inhibitor, to keep my blood pressure down, and sometimes it goes a little too low, so low I'm about to pass out.

I try get eight hours of sleep a night, but some days life just interferes and I only get 6 or 7. I've been making up for it on weekends.

And my weight still keeps yo-yoing between the same 4 pound weight range that's still 140 pounds above my target weight, as set by the cardiologist in December. I haven't lost any weight in about a month.

Is it any wonder why the doc recommended weight loss surgery? Well, that plus the fact that as a surgeon he's knife happy, and probably gets a kick back from everyone he sends for a consult to one of the surgeons in our hospital's brand new bariatric surgery section, modeled after the cardio-vascular center the hospital built for him and brought in big bucks to the institution.

My food is very bland, meals are unenjoyable, and there's not much of them so I spend the majority of my days - and nights - hungry. My hypoglycemia is acting up, some mornings I wake up so dizzy I can barely walk and find my fasting blood sugars 20 or more points below the normal fasting levels. Between the low blood pressure, low blood sugars, and under active thyroid that my doctor refuses to treat more aggressively I'm barely functional!

My body is falling apart. Because of the degenerative arthritis in my back, many of the upper body movements cause pain in my shoulders, neck and upper back and the sciatica causes pains in my right hip and leg. My feet, malformed to begin with (Thanks, Mom and Nana!), are even worse, with the constant pounding on them from various exercises aggravating the arthritis, fasciitis, tendinitis, and now my podiatrist says some bones are shifting out of position, causing not just more pain but affecting my gait, which aggravates the back and hips even more. My already wide feet are now wider than any shoe on the market so no matter what I wear they don't fit right and cause even more pain.

I consider constantly changing food plans, going for a calorie counting plan like Richard Simmons' Foodmover, or even following the DASH diet, which is not only very low sodium but low calorie, too. Then I look at what foods I have available to me, not just in the local stores but what money I have in my weekly food budget to buy them, and sigh. I looked at chicken breasts yesterday that were loaded with bright yellow blobs of fat and whose packages had small puddles of "chicken juice" comprised of not just blood but I'm assuming the saline solution injected into most chicken breasts on the market today. Ground beef is constantly getting recalled for bacterial contamination, and besides, it's usually too high in fat content to be considered a healthy food, and the lower fat version is too expensive. I know, I could buy a cheaper grade and par boil it and pour off the fatty water, but then I'm left with meat that tastes blander than the packaging it's in.

I could also switch to a vegan plan that relies more on fresh vegetables - greens, mostly - and fruits and restricts starches, but I can't even find enough ingredients for one decent bowl of salad per week and certainly won't be able to find enough to make a pound of salad a day. Then there's another plan that limits you to around 1000 calories a day of mostly starches and fruit and later limited veggies. I don't think all that fruit would be good for my hypoglycemia. I may as well stick with the vegan food plan I'm already on and just pay really close attention to portion size and maybe lower the calories down to 1000 - 1200 a day again.

My hypothyroidism is as bad as it's ever been, with my PCP refusing to raise my med dosage for fear of "blowing out" my thyroid. He refuses to believe the fact that hypothyroid can lead to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, depression, muscle aches, rosacea (Another ailment of mine that keeps me indoors a lot) and of course, weight gain.

I have no energy for anything by the time I finish my daily exercise. I have no mental energy to read or do any of my former hobbies, and I fall asleep at the drop of a hat, making watching even a tv show impossible unless I record it and play it back in bits and pieces. Most days I don't even get dressed.

So I plod along, constantly hungry and in pain, constantly tired and frustrated. I dread each upcoming doctor's appointment because I know I'll get reprimanded for the lack of weight loss each time, whether I lose or not. I have no energy to leave the house most days, and the few times I do it's never for anything pleasant, but for mundane things like grocery shopping or going to the laundromat or to care for the elderly relative with Alzheimer's disease. Her mind is getting worse, her finances dwindling, and we know that sooner or later we'll be forced to move in with her to care for her. Sure, she can afford live-in homemakers right now, but refuses them. We're lucky she allowed us to hire one to come for a few hours on weekdays for the winter. But her money won't last forever, so to keep her safe we'll either have to place her in a nursing home or more in. Since every nursing home we interviewed told us the same thing the assisted living place did last September, that they can't force her to stay there if she doesn't want to, we know we'll never be able to place her. With our luck, as soon as she got settled in and we were lucky enough to sell her house, she'll decide to go home, so the house has to stay, at least for a year, yet we can't afford to care for both her house and pay for a nursing home (Over $3000 a month), so moving in with her is the lesser of the financial evils. This is a woman without a friend in the world, one whose entire family hates her (Including us) and hates to spend any time with, even before she started showing Alzheimer's symptoms, a woman whose own husband used to yell at her to stop being such a bitch to her sister and go to her room until after we left if she couldn't keep a civil tongue in her head. When he husband died there was no one left to reign her in and she berated her sister, my m-i-l, until the day she died. She only has one other nephew and one niece, both live out of state, and both want nothing to do with her. Because we live the closest, her care fell to us. My husband is trying to find a way to have someone else - ANYONE else - take over, maybe make her a ward of the state, but so far no luck. He refuses to accept legal guardianship because of all the paperwork involved, mostly the financial side of keeping every receipt to prove how every penny of her money gets spent. She can't even remember to eat, much less where she spends money each week, which is why we only leave a small amount of cash in her place and took away her checkbook after she once handed it over to a contractor who knocked on her door and offered to do work for her and told him to make out any check he needed. We had to threaten him with legal action to get him to leave her alone and stop coming around. See why she needs someone to be with her as much as possible? I dread the day we have to move in with her.

Heck, I dread many things in life right now. This isn't the life I thought I would be living when I was younger. This isn't even half as good a life I was living even five years ago, five MONTHS ago. Sometimes the alternative does look better, to twist the old saying around.

Since our last visit . . .

To see what happened to me since the last time I posted here, see my LiveJournal Blog, Suzy Bear's Wretched Mess.

I remember I stopped posting here when it became difficult to do so, but now the LJ software is giving this old computer fits so I may move over to here now. Blogger does seem to be working faster and offer more than LJ, that's for sure. Over the next week or so I'll work on fixing this place up a little better. I already removed the long lists of links off the side so it already looks a bit less cluttered.

I Drive My Husband Crazy, Too

I know nobody reads this blog - my counter service tells me so - but the few people who have managed to find this place over the years probably quickly run away as soon as they see the posts. They haven't changed much over the years - Dieting for weight loss versus size acceptance. The debate still rages today, but it's leaning more towards eating the healthier lower fat vegan foods and getting some fun exercise in than obsessing over the numbers on a scale.

We were recently "on vacation," in quotes because we're probably the first couple in NJ to have never gone away for any vacation in our 31 years of marriage, except for our 5 days in the Poconos for our honeymoon. Instead of going away we spend our money on such "luxuries" as a few extra goodies in the weekly grocery basket, or replacing broken or worn out/outdated items with more modern ones. This vacation we bought a few CD's (on sale) to replace those that was still had on vinyl (most from the 1960's) but were so worn and scratched we didn't dare play them any more for fear of ruining our 32 year old diamond needle on the turntable. We replaced the broken digital camera (only 2 years old) with a better Canon Powershot and broken Singer serger sewing machine (24 years old) with a newer Singer model. We bought 7th Heaven season one on DVD to replace the home-taped VHS version I had (the remaining seasons are in my Amazon shopping cart for future splurges). Now we can use those old tapes for the upcoming summer season of tv.

And we bought books, which brings me to the topic of this post. When the Amazon package arrived my husband had a good laugh at my expense. Included in the order was Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby's size-acceptance book Lessons from the Fat-O-Sphere along with Kip Esselstyn's Engine 2 Diet which pushes the same very low fat, high starch strict vegetarian food plan as his parents and Dr. McDougall. Yeah, at first thought they are extreme opposites, but if you look back on this blog you'll see that the times I felt my best, physically and mentally, were the times I was following the vegan food plan and avoiding all dairy. My husband unpacked the box and just shook his head when he saw the titles and said "We're in for another bumpy ride, aren't we?"

During vacation we ate a lot of crap - fatty meats, bakery goodies nearly every day, as well as almost every lunch from a fast food restaurant, then a chocolate cream pie with three inches of whipped cream on top for the finale on Mother's day. My son and husband really don't like chocolate pudding so the pie was all mine, and I devoured the entire thing in 2 days. Yesterday was my first non-goodies day in a week and a half, and I was in agony! I could barely sleep, my snoring and snorting, as well as hip pains, kept waking me up every hour or so. My head was ready to split open, and when I described the pain to my son he said it sounded like his typical migraine headache. It was the worst headache of my life and didn't go away, even with three doses of extra strength Tylenol. Usually one regular strength tablet taken only once gets rid of any headache I get, but this one was a killer, and the first time I ever had eye pain to go along with it. I never want to go through that kind of pain ever again!

So, with that in mind, yesterday was day 1 of no sweets or any other crap foods. I know the dairy in those things is causing the sinus problems, and I know yesterday's headache was probably a sugar hangover. I'm now going to make a strong effort to avoid all things dairy, have only a little bit of sugar (In iced tea or lemonaide), and continue to make dinners the whole family enjoys, which will save not only my sanity but a few bucks at the grocery store, too. Most meals will be low fat vegan, but not all. I already made one of the soups in the Engine 2 book and see a lot more recipes I'll be trying, just as I'll be making a lot more McDougall recipes, but not only very low fat vegan ones. In fact, yesterday Isa's newest book, Vegan Brunch, went on sale and I ordered it.




Plans for today include hitting the park with my new camera, and finally opening the box with the serger. All my fabric is washed and ready to go, and I've got a lot of sewing to catch up on. Once this headache is gone and I catch up on housework, the first thing to get made is a new Lazy Girls purse. I've had the patterns and fabric for over a year now and really should get started on them again. After that I have a few aprons to make up (Again, the fabric has been waiting about a year), and last week I bought more fabric for summer caftan shirts. I'm so glad I found her directions again after she moved them. I've been using them for almost 10 years now and just LOVE how those shirts feel and fit. I even wear them during the cold wintry days, layered with other shirts. They're best in the wildest fabric designs possible. For this year's batch I have a tropical print (Parrots!), ladybugs, multi-colored sprinkles (known as "jimmies" to some parts of the country), subdued beige butterflies, and my favorite (and the most expensive piece), Japanese fans. My apron and purse fabrics are wilder than these, so I really can't wait to get started. Hopefully now that I'm away from dairy again my arthritis and neck neuritis won't act up as much and allow me to work at the machines for more than a few minutes at a time without pain.

Expect photos. :)

And I Thought Only Magazines Did This

Our local newspaper had these two articles practically side by side:

Eating fatty foods may boost your memory, say scientists

15 fat-burning foods

You may have to enable Javascript or Java or lower security settings to see past page 1 of the article. In Firefox with AdBlock Plus I had to disable AdBlock on this page to go forward.

Of the 15 items in the article, three were hot peppers, 2 were caffeinated drinks, and 6 were meats. How are these things - especially the fatty meats - supposed to burn fat??

To quote John Cleese: "This is all much too silly!"

Great Winnie the Pooh Comic Strip

This is how I feel about dieting - I've been trying my whole life to "be like other (thin) people and have failed.

Here We Go Again

In the past month I've sampled 4 different weight loss plans. My weight had gone down a few pounds AND up a few plus one on each plan. I've eaten as low as 600 calories in one day and as high as 2000 calories, both my daily requirement for the plan I was on at the time. Yes, I gained weight on 600 calories a day. I'm ending March 2 pounds heavier than I started it.

I keep promising myself I'm going to put a stop to this insanity.

Again.

So this morning I unpacked my Overeaters Anonymous literature again and spent my laundromat reading time looking over old Lifelines. OA may not be perfect, but it's the best thing I can think of right now.