I'm sort of bulk posting so I can have material to see while I work on CSS, templates, and code (oh my! CSS, templates, and code!) for the site.
I have a portion of the infrastructure set up to develop and test this site in a non-public fashion, but since I haven't passed out the URL to anyone yet, I'm just working live ...
Went to a bar to see a band last night.
(People that know me are already floored. That's pretty much all they need to know. No, I didn't have anything other than Diet Coke. It might have been more fun if I did, but beer is high-carb any time and definitely out where I am in my diet. I didn't look to see if they even had any decent ales anyway.)
@dragonjaze works with the bass player, so when one of his bands had a date only a few miles from us, we went so she could say she had seen him play. I went because, you know, after three years being the built-in date for such things is part of the job.
The band was ... let's not be deliberately insulting, and start by saying it was mostly not my kind of music. They basically covered '80s rock with two guitars and drums. I look at them as being four guys having fun on weekends, at which they were successful. Picture middle-aged men jumping around while playing in front of 30 people, and a half-dozen middle-aged women dancing five feet in front of them, and you've got it. Musical artistry was not a requirement.
The were playing an upstairs room in a small village's corner pub. Acoustics were non-existent. The music was there to be loud and vaguely recognizable. They butchered some hits, but none that didn't have it coming.
I had fun watching people using this as their excuse to dance. Mostly women, sometimes with embarrassed but dutiful husbands. @dragonjaze remained seated but otherwise participated. We stayed for one set that started at 9:30 (a.k.a. bedtime) and left before 11:00, while the fun was forecast to continue until about 1:30. No thanks.
Related thought: at what age can straight men sit around a table with wine and retain the respect of their self-stereotype? I'll say 55 is old enough, 25 isn't, and I'm trying to box it in a little more than that. Um, research reasons.
So my doctor said that with everything saying my heart was perfectly healthy, the next thing to do was to lose weight. She wants me to target 180, which remains overweight by the book yet is almost inconceivable to me. I'll have to see how things look if I get close to that. The good news, for me, is that she turned out to be an enthusiastic supporter of Atkins. I got a little lucky in that respect, but also take minor credit for picking someone with a slightly interesting background rather than the first generic doctor that could see me.
I did Atkins successfully for about a month in 2002 or 2003 — can't remember which. I was in the Induction phase that whole time, because after two weeks I was more interested in continuing to lose weight at the speed I saw than in getting more variety in my diet. I was losing about a pound a day. Then I went in to the office on a Saturday morning when I expected to be done by noon. Work turned out to take longer than that, and by mid-afternoon I was starving for anything I could obtain. Naturally, nothing handy was low-carb, so I was off the diet. In his books, Dr. Atkins described exactly what to do in that situation.
It took 8-9 years for me to get back to it, but I'm here now. This time, I have a different promise to myself. I won't guarantee I won't be bad again. Instead, I guarantee I will log it in this space.
I started on 6/1. The previous night I got some measurements:
The morning of 6/1 my official starting weight was 250.4#. (I get weights after waking, before breakfast, wearing whatever I wore in bed. They're reasonably consistent.) My weigh-in on 5/26 with the doctor was at 256#. (Better scale, but wearing seasonal clothes.) For additional reference, since I don't have any pictures, my height is 68½" or 68¾".
So far I have resisted the urge to use the scale again, which is what you're supposed to do although I didn't last time. I'll get weights weekly and measurements monthly. She has me getting blood sugar measurements twice daily. Those might be too boring even for this blog.
I'm going to have some posts here that are just quick updates on measurements, etc. For that reason I will use the category feature of Zinnia, which isn't something I like to overuse. If you are following along for the occasional bit of daily wit, you may want to follow the feed for the "inanity" category only. Boring health updates will be under "health", which will be included in the overall feed. This post is in both.
I didn't get around to writing all this until 6/5, so I'm past the worst detox stage of Induction. Still working on breaking the habit of eating every 2-3 hours, but when I do, it's allowable stuff. More updates soon.