Go Big or Get Bigger…
January 7, 2009
Yesterday I mentioned on Twitter that I hadn’t had coffee, soda or red meat since 2008… yeah, it’s a little more impressive to use the year than to say “in 7 days” but I was feeling all impressed with myself. A little sass never hurt anyone.
But that brought up a lot of questions like “is that a New Year’s Resolution?” and “why those things?” and “how can you live without coffee??” (and bacon.)
It was part of my New Year’s Resolutions in a tangential sort of way. It’s that number 2 one: “Lose weight, get healthy, get fit.” A key element of all 3 of those is diet. What goes in your mouth is crucial to all of them. I didn’t set out thinking “no coffee, no soda, no red meat” – I set out thinking “okay, now how the heck do I get my pH balance back in control?”
I know, I know – ‘huh? Your pH balance GeekMommy? What the heck are you talking about??’
I don’t bring it up a lot but I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia in November of 2007. That was official confirmation of something that had been getting progressively worse for me over the course of about 12 years. At that time, the pain was so bad, I’d lie in bed trying to sleep cataloging the parts of me that didn’t hurt, because there were fewer of them most days. So my doctor started putting me on things to treat the Fibro and I’ve been mostly pain-free for about 4 months – since she added Lyrica to everything else.
Here’s the catch though – one of the side-effects for the drugs I’m on? Insomnia. As if I didn’t already have enough problems with that. One of the worst things for Fibro? Lack of sleep. See where the cycle starts getting vicious pretty quickly? So I start having to take Ambien just to sleep. Now we’ve added in yet another pill. Another side effect of sleep issues and the drugs? Weight gain. Seriously now… I’m trying to lose weight not add more. Did I mention that weight-gain is bad for my back, my arthritis, and you guessed it, my Fibro?
Okay, to top it all off – I start having serious problems with finding words. Not difficult words – every day normal words. Like ‘honey can you hand me that… um, round thingy with the drink in it, you know…’ I’d say ‘Coffee cup?’ my poor husband would reply. Short-term memory? I haz none. Alright then… I write it off to “fibro fog” that everyone talks about. Then Lyrica puts an additional 15 lbs on top of my already totally unhappy weight and shows no signs of stopping.
I go to look up the side-effects… I’m about to list the “more common” side-effects here (hold on to your hat)
Accidental injury; bloating or swelling of face, arms, hands, lower legs, or feet; blurry vision; burning, tingling, numbness or pain in the hands, arms, feet, or legs; change in walking and balance; clumsiness; confusion; delusions; dementia; difficulty having a bowel movement (stool); difficulty in speaking; double vision; dry mouth; fever; headache; hoarseness; increased appetite; lack of coordination; loss of memory; lower back or side pain; mood or mental changes; painful or difficult urination; problems with memory; rapid weight gain; seeing double; shakiness and unsteady walk; sensation of pins and needles; sleepiness or unusual drowsiness; stabbing pain; swelling; tingling of hands or feet; trembling, or other problems with muscle control or coordination; trembling or shaking of hands or feet; shakiness in legs, arms, hands, feet; unusual weight gain or loss.
Hold up there… did that just say clumsiness; confusion; delusions; dementia?? You don’t even want to see the list for “less common” – but yeah I have some of those too (okay, if you do want to see it, click here.)
So I started researching. Something I should’ve done before I started putting things in my body, but hey, when you’ve got chronic pain and your doctor says this will fix it and is safe? Sometimes you’re less cautious than you should be.
Well let’s just go with ‘better late than never.’ Sometimes that’s as good as it gets.
I’m not going to drag you through all of my research – it took me a couple of weeks and this is already getting longer than I planned. I’m just going to skip forward to the good part. The part where the people in the tin-foil hats start making sense.
Somewhere in the midst of all of my research the whole idea that I really ought to check my body’s pH-balance comes in to play. It seems that a lot of people with chronic pain ailments are ‘very acidic’ due to the ‘Standart American Diet’ (SAD) and that the body really should be closer to neutral or even slightly alkaline in nature to be healthy. Trust me on this – the science is solid, but it’s hard to find it behind the deluge of people trying to make money with “pH-balancing solutions” – from additives to diets to drops to ‘whole body wellness’ programs that you can access via eBook for just the low, low price of…
So I go to Amazon.com and buy these pH test strips. It’s $10 and what the heck, it reminds me of tests we did back in high school science lab. They’re supposedly good for urine & saliva and they do have the nifty little color-chart right there for you to compare too. Home science fun!!
They show up a couple of days later and I start doing the testing… according to directions and all. Testing for 2 days twice a day to get a ‘range’ so I can see where I really am. The little chart goes between 4.5 and 9.0 by halves and quarters. I learn that the 1.0 is a power of 10 – so while totally “neutral” water is a 7.0, 5.0 is not 10 times more acidic than 6.0, but rather 100! Scary.
Except for the part where the strips must be bogus. I mean, I’ve tested for 2 days in a row… and I’m down at 5.0 which is about the color it looks like the little test pads would turn if they were nothing except damp. Oh yay. So I drag out GeekDaddy as my control subject. We test at the same time. I mean, we have the same diet mostly, we live the same lifestyle… in theory, his should turn out the same way mine does, right? Especially if they’re just lame, or stale, or non-functional strips. We both stick the little strips on our tongues… wait 15 seconds – hold them up to the magic chart.
Mine still says 5.0 – or very acidic – his? 7.25 – normal, healthy, right in the zone. Crap. A few days later, my friend is visiting, so I have him do it with me. Mine? 5.0 again. His? 6.5 or right below the ‘optimal’ zone. Then again, he drinks a lot of coffee.
So then. What do you do? You change it. How do you change it? By getting rid of the foods that mess you up. Bye-bye coffee. Bye-bye red meat. Bye-bye Coca-cola my one ‘unbreakable’ habit!
Of course, everyone tells me “GeekMommy, you should make changes a little at a time, that way you will succeed.” Let’s revisit yesterday’s post for a minute, shall we? I don’t function like that. I’m a “do it, do it now, or spend the next several years talking about how you’re going to do it any day.”
Why do I say that? 7 and a half years ago, GeekDaddy and I quit smoking. I smoked for 20 years (from age 15 to age 35) and was at 2 1/2 packs a day when we quit. Cold Turkey. No ‘gradual ease down’ for me. No nicotine gum, patch, pill, treatment plan. I’d tried all those – if you throw in hypnotherapy and aversion therapy, you’ll get a complete view of what didn’t work. What worked? I stopped smoking.
Moreso, I just didn’t start again. Throughout many temptations (and there have been some big ones!) the trick has been just don’t ever do that again. No excuses, no plan for failure, no loopholes. Just. Don’t. Do. It.
Losing weight has been harder for me the past 10 years. Because while I could just never smoke another cigarette, I couldn’t not eat food. It’s kind of the equivalent of telling an alcoholic “you can’t get drunk, but you MUST drink 1 shot of alcohol 3 times a day to survive.” Yeah, that will happen.
But you know what is working so far? I just can’t eat those foods. I can eat – even sensible portions of ’semi-bad’ foods. Fish and chicken and pork are ‘moderately’ acidic in the body – but those red meats? The worst. So I’ve put certain things off limits. I’m living with The Acid-Alkaline Food Guide at my fingertips. Until I’m back “in the pH zone” everything in the far-right column (highly acidic) is right out. Anything on the acidic side at all is best avoided, except the protein thing for me once a day (I like it.)
So far? I’m one week in. I’m 6 lbs down from my weight before I started. (Yes, I know it’s mostly water-weight.) I’m feeling better than I did before. I’m working hard on getting enough sleep a night. I’ll be eliminating the drugs as I go. Did I mention that I just tested my pH balance as I was typing this? Yeah, it’s at a 6.0 today. Just like it was yesterday.
I’m going to get healthy. Losing weight will be a part of that, but not the only part of that. I don’t want to be here any more – the “cure” is just as bad if not worse than the “illness” it’s supposed to fix. And I’m doing it my way – the big way. The all-at-once way. The trick is? I’m not going to let myself off the hook this time. I can’t afford to.
Because that’s how I roll.
Wednesday Weight-Loss… Wait, What?
August 27, 2008
I’m starting to rethink this subject a bit. At the moment, I’m weighing in on Mondays for the Tweightloss Challenge and from everything I’ve heard, it’s better to not get obsessive about the scale.
Which is good – because between normal “monthly female water retention” and the stress of getting ready for Kindergarten and a dozen and one other little things – yeah, I was up a pound at this week’s weigh in.
Sigh.
Ah well. At least I know I’m eating healthier!! Next week, GeekDaddy and I intend to do the South Beach Induction phase. We’ve done it before and it’s always been a great way to jump-start weight loss (plus, it gets you away from processed foods!)
But we’re only planning on doing the induction part for 7 days. This is because I suck at doing that part any longer than that and inevitably end up not just falling off the induction plan, but diving head-first into indulgence-after-absence.
So we’ll do 7 days of Induction, followed by the sensible eating we’ve been doing. Smaller portions, healthier food. You know the drill.
I’ll keep this up for a bit I guess – but I reserve the right to turn it into “Wednesday Whatever” should it prove to be more of a nuisance than an inspiration! 
Weight Loss Wednesday – You Say Tacos, I say Mockos…
August 20, 2008
I didn’t get on the scale today – because I did on Monday as part of my participation in the Tweightloss Challenge. I’m on a team trying to lose weight with the help and support of our Twitterpals. So far, I’m down 5 lbs from where I started my journey and 3 from where I started the challenge. Or I was on Monday anyways… I’ve decided to try and keep myself to weighing only once a week, or I start getting obsessive about it and that way leads to stress and neurosis for me.
But I was trying to figure out what I could post that might help someone else thinking about all of this and then I remembered that GeekDaddy & I make a recipe that goes over big with our friends and they always wish we’d told them about it sooner… so I thought I’d share it.
Several years back, we tried one of those “highly restrictive professional diets” – there are a lot of them out there and you probably see them advertised on TV and in your local paper. This one actually happens to work – I lost over 25 lbs on it, and GeekDaddy lost 35 and hit his target weight – which is part of what proved our downfall. It was so much easier and faster for him that I got disillusioned when I was only 1/2 way to my goal and he was done and ready for “maintenance.” The other part of the failure equation was that the diet itself was so crazy restrictive that when I lost it and took “one weekend off to eat like a normal person” and he joined me, 3 months later we were both right back where we started.
One really good thing came out of it though and that was that the extreme lack of anything resembling a simple carbohydrate made us get creative. We came up with ‘Mockos’ (the name is a play on words of course, mock tacos -> mockos) because we were hard pressed to find meals that weren’t boring and bland… given that salt was verboten and most food was really generally unappetizing after a few weeks.
butter lettuce
What you need
~ 1 head of Butter Lettuce
~ 1 lb of lean ground beef or 99% fat-free ground turkey (the other kind is gross, thanks)
~ 1 can of either black beans or pinto beans
~ 1 bag of 2% shredded cheese
~ Taco seasonings (can either be a packet from the store or do like we do and put chili powder, garlic, onion powder and tabasco sauce in w/ the meat instead)
Brown the meat in a frying pan, season with taco seasoning, drain off any excess fat/grease. Zap the beans in the microwave. Set aside about 1/4 cup of 2% shredded cheese for each person. Use the individual butter lettuce leaves like you would a tortilla – so like a mini burrito or soft taco - you are going to put about 1/2 beans and 1/2 meat into a leaf, sprinkle on some cheese and roll it up and eat as you go. GeekDaddy adds salsa to his, I don’t. To each her own.
It serves about 2-3 people. You may find you have “stuff” left over. Just put it in the fridge and make it into a nice taco salad the next day.
Seriously – it’s tons healthier and really easy. Plus you can kind of play with the seasoning until you get it where you want it. We’ve done it with lean beef, ground turkey, ground buffalo, and even chicken. It’s fun and fast.
Yeah, not much of a recipe, but seriously. Yum.
Tell me if you try it what you think and how you make it your own!
Weight-Loss Wednesday? Thoughtful Thursday? Sick Reality.
August 14, 2008
I’m taking 2 minutes to write this before I go back to where I’ve spent the past 40-or-so hours… my bed.
Weight-Loss post didn’t happen – because I was busy losing calories the old-fashioned way: not being able to keep anything down other than crackers, ginger ale, and a bowl of chicken noodle soup.
Thoughtful Thursday? all I can think about is how miserable I feel, how quickly the e-mail is piling up in my inbox, how far behind I’m getting, and how I somehow managed to miss calling in to a panel on women in speaking that I really wanted to be in on.
But my stomach, intestines and muscles inform me that I am not going to manage anything other than clicking “Post” on this and collapsing back into bed. If I’m lucky, my darling GeekDaddy will bring me more soup. But he’s been taking care of both Buttercup & me while working full-time the past 2 days. He’s truly my knight in shining armor. My exhausted knight in shining armor.
Did I mention I’m a sucky patient? Whiny, self-absorbed, demanding and cranky? Yeah.
On that note. Tomorrow is another day. G’night.
