Month September 2018

Printing & Dieting

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Printing & Dieting Printing & Dieting

I don’t print very often but when I do, it’s usually for some last minute emergency thing. This is roughly what happens when such an event arises …

  1. Wireless printer connection lost.
  2. Reboot printer, laptop, modem & any other piece of electronics within a 100 yard radius.
  3. It comes alive!
  4. Print a draft copy of aforementioned critical document to see if everything is okay.
  5. Everything looks great, so now print a best quality page.
  6. That doesn’t work, so must change printer cartridge.
  7. Don’t have new cartridge, swear several times.
  8. Go to store & buy new high capacity color cartridge.
  9. Come back, stick it in, & print alignment page.
  10. It doesn’t look right & the scanner can’t scan it. Error!
  11. Twenty minutes later, discover that it was the black cartridge!
  12. No spare black cartridge either. Back to the store.
  13. Leave store, only to realize that all the good paper has been used up testing.
  14. Phew! At least I hadn’t gone back to the office again.
  15. Come back, spend another twenty minutes & a dozen more pages of paper to confirm that everything is working correctly.
  16. Admire first good print. And yes, it’s good!
  17. Go for coffee & cigarette to de-stress.
  18. Now have coffee ring on the corner of the good page! S@#$!!!

Despite how many times I’ve printed stuff over the years, this seems to happen all the time.

My experience with starting diets, & adhering to them, sometimes resembles this process. But it’s particularly difficult to stick with the dietary plan when you’ve got to deal with this printing challenge to kick the day off!!! 🙂 🙂 🙂

Dieting on the Road

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Dieting on the Road

Tandoori Platter

It’s not as challenging to eat “well” on the road as we dieters like to imagine. I’m not talking about going the chicken salad route (hold the chicken skin, the croutons, the dressing and the dried fruit & nut pieces) … you can do that if you want but that’s not how I diet!

Yes, you have to have some dialogue with the server. And yes, they’ll probably think you’re a bit of a pain. But better that than blow the diet. Again!

On the road last week, I was led towards an Indian restaurant this particular evening. And that was just fine by me. I pretty much love all food but if you forced me to pick just one national cuisine, I might have to go with Indian. As it happened, I was on a low-carb regimen that particular day. Oh boy!

I love rice, naan, samosa & pakora but those were not going to be allowed today. Yes, there were salad options. And yes, there were vegetarian dishes aplenty. But I was drawn to the Tandoori Platter. Right away, the word platter promises a gut-busting feast of goodies. And it was. Beef, chicken, lamb, shrimp and who knows what else. There were some token veggies in there too, just to assuage any little fear I might entertain of it being an unhealthy choice. One of the key reasons for this choice was that it didn’t come with a sauce, Tandoori dishes are dry spiced. And I refused to ask about their spice recipe … just in case there were any bad ingredients in there that would have forced me to order that chicken salad! I do love those sauces, by the way, but there’s always some bad stuff hiding in them. And today was to be as sugar & starch-free as any reasonable road warrior could make it.

The bottom line was that it was delicious. I was stuffed. And I was sufficiently fortified to resisted all the starchy temptations offered by my dining companions!

But did it work?

I don’t know!

I’ll have to wait for the official end-of-month weigh-in on October 1st to see how it all plays out. Though I might have been grateful that I didn’t have my scale with me during my travels!

 

Visualization for Weight Loss

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Visualization for Weight Loss

The Beach

Visualization has been a thing for years now. Athletes imagine themselves breaking world records. And then they do. Golfers see themselves making the perfect swing and  … Wow! … they get that magical hole in one. Okay, some golfers just visualize themselves hitting a fairway and that, for me, would be an achievement! But can that stuff be used for health & weight loss?

In an effort to motivate myself to walk more, I’d lie on the couch first thing in the morning (often catching up with news that mostly does nothing but stress & depress me!), and then I’d try to visualize myself walking. Our waterfront is a magical place to walk in the morning. A long expanse of sandy beach, with a cobbled walkway at the back for those who don’t want to feel the sand between their toes. Or for when it’s -10°C with a swirl of white fluffy flakes in the air! Catching a sunrise there, summer or winter, is an almost mystical experience. Not a difficult place to walk.

In any case, there I am, lying on the couch … visualizing! I visualize myself walking, and I’m a hundred pounds lighter, with a youthful spring in my step. My sore knee and aching back are miraculously relieved of pain. Perhaps I’ll have my earbuds in. And maybe I’ll even do a few salsa steps along the way. I’m wearing off-the-rack jeans, and not some baggy anti-style statement thing that I have to hunt down on the discount rail in the fat-boy store. And a tight fitting red t-shirt. Why red? Because it’s in the closet, the new tags still attached, a constant reminder of days past! And I’ll be wearing those matching cool red sneakers that I bought five or six years ago. But that I haven’t felt cool enough to wear yet. I’ll be meeting people’s gaze as I trip along, smiling bright and breezy good mornings to all. They can’t help it, they smile back and wish me the same.

Then I come to. And carry on watching the news. Next, I’ll probably grab a coffee and head to the deck for a smoke.

So why has visualization never worked very well for me? I think, perhaps, that I’m doing it incorrectly. Or maybe I’m so good at it that with the mission accomplished in my head, why bother doing it in the real world!

How we handle our dreams can be challenging stuff sometimes.

Rice is a Killer Carb!

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Rice is a Killer Carb!

Sunrise Zen Moment

But only in a good way! And now that I’ve now figured out how to eat it.

When I was a little kid, my Mom often told me that my eyes were bigger than my belly! She was right, I always went for the biggest piece. The biggest cup, bowl or plate. The largest slice of anything I thought was nice. Oh boy, if only I’d listened to my Mom!

I have the same problem today. When I filled that tiny pot with just a small serving of rice a few days back, little did I realize that, when cooked, the stuff would grow into three days worth of heavy-duty glycemic load. Though only very occasionally threatened by blood glucose numbers that might suggested I was heading towards prediabetes, I’ve always changed my eating pattern to, hopefully, avoid any consequence. Nowadays, I use a glucose meter to monitor the varying effects of the foods I eat while testing dietary patterns.

The Glycemic Index ranks foods, all with an equivalent glucose content, in order of their impact on blood sugar levels. The Glycemic Load goes one step further, ranking foods by more realistic serving size. The Index, for example, might suggest that we ought not eat carrots. While the Load, recognizing that there is far less sugar in a reasonable serving size, suggests we can.

Except in my case!

Because, sometimes, I have no concept of serving size.

Now, the Glucose Meter helps me see the impact of my eating. Today, my finger tips look like pincushions. After three days of monitoring things, while I was gorging on rice. I couldn’t help but prick my finger every time I sat down, just to see how things stood. It was fascinating.

My blood sugar never went into dangerous territory over the course of the past three days. But it did stay at a higher level than I would like. I don’t buy the theory that says older people should have more relaxed guidelines. I want my blood sugar at or below 5.4 mmol/L (97 mg/dL) most of the time. It’s been above that for most of the past three days, and today. After eating “well”, and with a lot of variety, since July 1st, I think my body is generally handling the glycemic load better. And remember, I had that bread too when I kicked off this carb-loading binge!

My weight over the course of these four days? Stable!

I think this means that I can safely include some rice, & even some bread, in my long term diet. With the odd binge, of course. If you’ve been following this story for any length of time, you know I’ve already “qualified” potatoes as a health food! But it’s really good news that I can now add these additional, almost forbidden, carbs to my regimen too. Not in these crazy quantities, and maybe not on a daily basis, but I can have them. Now that’s starting to feel a little bit like some kind of dietary freedom! 🙂

I think I need a Zen moment, by the water, to contemplate the sheer magnificence of it all!

Crazy Keto Contrarian Day

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Crazy Keto Contrarian DaySourdough Bread

You’re going to love this one. Wait ’til you hear what I did yesterday!

In my typical hardly-scientific way, I thought I’d try something way off the charts.

Despite eating a good low-carb regimen for the past three or four days, my mood wasn’t great when I woke up yesterday. However, it picked up as the morning progressed. A lot. And I decided to do something a little crazy!

Lunch: Two sandwiches that included 4 slices of heavily buttered sourdough bread, 4 slices of Jarlsberg cheese, topped with real sauerkraut and a squirt of Dijon mustard. Oh, I had the heel with a big splodge of butter too!

Dinner: A curried fried rice with red kidney beans. Lots of oil in the pan to brown the garlic and onion, before adding the rice and beans. Added a cup of cream at the end for a little more lubrication. I ate ‘til I was stuffed and even had leftovers that I had to stick in the fridge.

Dessert: Totally shameless cherry ice cream with 5 squares of Caramel Sea-Salt dark chocolate.

I know, know! What on earth was I thinking? I was thinking to challenge how much my body had changed over the course of the past two & a half months. Was my blood sugar control any better? Despite my reservations about the impact the bread might have on my mood, would it be okay to do the bread thing every now & again?

Today … I only went up 0.4 lbs!

That’s great on a number of counts, and here’s why …

  • It is a pre-bowel movement (sorry!) weight.
  • I woke up really early this morning, so I weighed in two hours sooner than is usual.
  • And I pigged out on tons of pretty bad carbs (from a low-carb or keto viewpoint) yesterday.

What can I say, bread isn’t depressing me today!

I was monitoring my blood sugar throughout the exercise too. From morning to lunch time yesterday, I was low-normal (fours & low fives) courtesy of the lower carb days leading into this. My peak after lunch hit 6.9 mmol/L (124 mg/dL). My post dinner and dessert peak was 7.8 mmol/L (140 mg/dL). My overnight (I woke up at 3:00am) and very early morning readings were 6.9 mmol/L (124 mg/dL) or lower. The overnight & early morning numbers were still green on the app log but they are higher than I prefer. And they are not numbers that I would want to see on a regular basis. But since this is only likely to happen very rarely, it’s a great result.

I’ve seen weight loss on potato days before. Now, I think I could achieve weight loss on rice, or even bread, days too. Might have to skip that 1600 calorie dessert though! I know day by day measurements are pretty meaningless in the great scheme of things. But it is nice to know that I can go a little wild every now & again. Without paying the psychological price that a big jump on the glucose meter, or on the bathroom scale, brings.

The bottom line is that my diet seems to have improved my ability to handle sugar & starch. I’m not “cured” in the sense that I can go back to eating the way I used to. Not without consequence. And certainly not every day. But it looks like I may have brought still more flexibility back into my diet & my life. And that’s a good thing.

Now what crazy things can I do today!?!