Day 196 Very Heavy

I can feel myself getting fatter by the minute lately.  Ugh.  My worst nightmare is waking up middle aged with a pot belly that I can read off of when I’m standing up.  I was doing so good for so long and then these past few months it’s been pounding on, pound by pound.  When I first went on my meds back in ’05 I was prescribed Depakote and I gained about 45 lbs. in 6 months.  I was up to 215 lbs.!  Yuck.  I told my pdoc that I would rather be crazy than fat so take your meds and shove them up your ass.  Oh yes I did.  Well maybe not in those exact words, so he took them and just changed the names and gave me more.  But that didn’t make the weight go away.  No it didn’t.  I quit eating breakfast, upped my dosage of Adderall and drank a lot of coffee for a few months.  That helped but it really wasn’t healthy.  Do you think?  Anyway I read that missing breakfast was the worst way to lose weight so I started slowly getting back into the breakfast mode.  Mostly cereal and toast.  But it’s always toast slathered in butter and then given a nice glaze of PB to top it off.  But I did lose weight.  It took about a year and I got down to 185 lbs.  Not bad given that I’m a couple hairs shy of six feet.  I could live with that.  I threw away some pants that I had bought to support my gut with glee.

What was interesting about that was I also quit going out to lunch every day with the guys at work.  Now that helped considerably.  It kept my wallet a bit fatter but it slowed down the calorie count that I was ringing up.  I was 185 for about a year and a half and felt I was out of the danger zone.  I felt good about myself that I lost the extra baggage.  I really quit watching what I ate, I mean I am a guy and am not noted for my creative finesse in the kitchen.  I could never find anything to eat in there.  My sister or either one of my brothers, different stories.  They could find meals for days in my kitchen that I either overlooked or just didn’t have the imagination to put together into a meal.  Thank god for Trader Joe’s and Costco.  Hah!  But the weirdest thing happened.  I lost ten more pounds without trying to do it.  Now I’m at 175 and I’m looking lean.  Not concentration camp lean but pretty good looking lean.  I liked it so I imagined that I was taking care of that kind of body that requires attention to a diet.   I just didn’t eat 4 donuts when 2 would suffice let’s say.

Then I’d get a blood test and my cholesterol and triglycerides were always just a bit elevated.  In the high zone.  Where the top of the list is 200, I would come in at 207 or 209.  But they were always at that range, no big deal.  Well at least my primary doc didn’t seem to worry about those numbers.  I wasn’t fat, my blood pressure was good, my heart rate was always in the 90’s, even at resting pace but that didn’t seem to faze the doctor either.  Whatever, I just kept on eating the way I was accustomed too.  Which included eating out with friends, but not at LUNCH because that’s where the fat molecules lie.  I realized it was more luck than anything else.  But I was always a lean guy.  At least in my teens and twenties.  And my thirties and most of my forties too.  But there is a magical day sometime in the forties zone that things change inside of your body.  “Whoa!  That looks good! I’m hanging on to that one, and that one and all of those over there too!  Bring ‘em all over!  Whooo, looking good!”  Yeah, that’s when that voice starts getting listened too by your body.  Yuck.

Well what happened is not my fault.  I got tired of my primary doc and decided I needed a new one after a dozen years.  Well they give me a blood test and my cholesterol is now 230.  Holy cow!  You’d think I was a terrorist the attention I got from that test. “We’ll give you 3 months to lower that number or else!”

Or else they’ll put me on meds that’s what else.  And if there’s nothing I love more it’s taking more meds.  So there goes my donut breakfast every day.  I guess sugar is a bad thing.  I’m praying that the rumors about butter are not true because I just can’t stop painting my pieces of sour dough toast with the stuff.  It’s that good people.  And no I haven’t given up my lovable peanut butter either.  So now I eat only oatmeal (with toast ;)  ), OJ and a cup of coffee.  I eat nuts, fruit and yogurt for lunch.  Every once in a while I’ll drink a Monster or a Rock Star (I know I know, not good for me) and then I go home to dinner.  Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!  What’s for dinner?  I’m still a dunce in the kitchen.  I buy these bags of brown rice and quinoa from Costco that you zap in the microwave.  I pour a small can of stewed tomatoes on top of it and have that for dinner.  And now I’m up to 198 lbs!  What the hell is happening?  I got tested for cholesterol again and this time it was down to 208 but the nurse didn’t give me any credit for going down because I wasn’t below the magical 200!  Now that I’m focusing on the food that I eat, it’s starting to add up on the scales.  I hate it.  I don’t want to buy bigger pants because my ass is getting too big for my britches.  There I said that too.

My sister is the master of diets but I don’t want to talk to her about it.  “Oh we can do a fast for 3 days…” Uh no, I’m not drinking llama urine for 3 days straight, NO!  Or whatever it is about the 1,230 diets she knows about.  I just want to be able to eat a donut every once in a while, a Baby Ruth sometimes during the day, kettle corn when I’m feeling feisty and chocolate chip cookies dipped in ice cold milk sometimes at night.  Christ I get fat when I just think like that now.  Is it the oatmeal?  Or is the 2 tablespoons of Agave juice I put on top of it?  The walnuts I throw into it.  It must be the toast.  Maybe I can just put peanut butter on them and forget the beautiful, lovely, stunning, seductive, tantalizing butter for now.

I do drink a lot of water and I don’t drink soda at all.  Except for the aforementioned Monster’s.  But those are maybe 3 or 4 times a week.  Nothing regular you see.  It’s hard for me to think diet because I’m just so hooked on restaurants during weekends, bloodless battles in the kitchen with anything involving my stove.  Any ideas out there?  Besides fasting?  My shirts are starting to lose the battle of pretending they’re hiding a slender tummy.  I’d hate to start losing my clothes to this fight.  You know this a Cadillac problem that I’m whining about.  I could have cancer, wait, don’t you lose weight on that diet?