Monday, May 12, 2008

This week's weight

Michael: -4 lbs, 496.5, total loss since January: 47 lbs., (overall loss since 2006, 117)
Nina: -4.5 lbs, 280.2, total loss since January: 22 lbs.

A good week all around, although the weekly loss numbers are kind of magnified by the fact that we were both up slightly last week. I'm pretty happy with the way that we're eating now; Michael's blood sugar has been pretty stable except when we forget to eat for hours; the portion sizes are keeping down (the vegetable portions are going up!) and the addition of legumes in very moderate quantities has increased happiness without causing weight gain or blood sugar spikes. Hard to complain about any of that.

My big concern is that I still haven't been able to go back to playing racquetball; my hip (or thigh or whatever it is) is still really painful, off and on. We'll see the doctor at the end of the month, and see what he has to say about this and about Michael's knee. We've been pretty steady with the seated workout, and I found a bunch of additional information on seated workouts in general, so I'll be reporting back on how that's going soon.

The other interesting (I hope) thing is that Michael is having a blood test today... these will be the first cholesterol tests since we started low carb, and so it will be very interesting to see what happens.



2 comments:

Carol said...

Hi Nina,

Wow, you guys are doing GREAT!! Those are amazing losses since the first of the year. Congrats to both of you for hanging in there and trying all kinds of things till you finally got what works best for you! Is Michael feeling better since he is getting well below that 500 number? Are you feeling better, too? I know yours is less on the scales but women always lose slower than men...plus heavier people tend to lose faster, too. I think your losses are very good...at least an average of a pound a week, right? I know it sounds like not so much, but look at downward trend! So what if it's been up and down a few times...the trend is still down, down down!

I've skimmed several of your postings and wish I had more time to really sit down and go back to where I left off and read it all...there's some COOL stuff here! You are a deep thinker and have a very easy, breezy style of writing...I really like it.

I'm happy to hear that your Mom is doing better than you'd feared. Will she eat low carb? I've been reading lots of stuff about sugar (in all its forms and "incarnations") being bad stuff for cancer, too. I hope she's open to eating in a way that will not feed any cancer growth.

I saw that you and Michael had an anniversary. Happy Belated 2nd Anniversary!

I've been away (not commenting) for what feels like months! Much has been going on in our lives and it's been crazy with many ups and downs. I'm on here late tonight because I can't sleep. I spent most of today at the hospital with my daughter, who had an emergency procedure to insert a stent to do immediate dialysis. She's been in the hospital more than out for months now and the darn nephrologists have been waiting and waiting... I have no clue for what...something about the RIGHT time. I guess today was it!

She was feeling much better after 2 hours on dialysis and is looking forward to it hopefully giving her a better quality of life for as long as she has. They have a new dialysis center she will be going to with state-of-the-art equipment and perks like computers, as well as TVs, to pass the time when she goes for her thrice weekly, 3-1/2-hour-each sessions.

Hopefully, this will keep her out of the hospital and especially those emergency ambulance runs she's had so often in recent weeks.

I hope to catch up with all you've written and chat with you more often.

Best wishes,
Carol

Nina said...

Hi, Carol!

I'm so glad you wrote; I was really wondering how you and your daughter were. It at least sounds like things for her are going to get more comfortable.

Michael's feeling better in a way, I think, but the problem is that whatever he did to his leg a few months ago has meant that he's not all that mobile, so the weight loss has helped, but kind of not enough yet. He gets discouraged. I get all excited about his weight, and he says, I'll get excited when I hit 200 (or whatever the number of the day is). Sure... but you have to get excited by the things along the way, because that 200 number is still a really long way off. But I think that things are getting better.

I'm finally actually starting to notice that I've lost weight... which is really nice. The only good thing about how slow my loss has been is that pretty much anything seems terrific.

My mom... I'm trying to get her to eat low carb, but it's hard. She really doesn't eat a lot of the worst carbs... pretty easy on the sugar and white things... but she's not exactly eating low carb, either. The trouble is, I'm not there to feed her. My sister, who's a doctor of sorts, is pushing low sugar to some extent, but she doesn't seem to understand that "no sugar" is not the same thing as "sufficiently low carbs to keep blood glucose in a tight range." So I don't know what to do really.

Thank you for the compliment on the writing and the anniversary wishes! I can't believe it's been two years... it's one of those things where it seems either like an eternity or just yesterday.

I hope you're taking care of yourself with everything else that's going on. I don't really know, but I just have this feeling that you spend a lot more time taking care of everyone else than taking care of you.