Yep, still hate being fat
Some of you longtimers (relatively speaking) might recall me writing a little rant about my current physical state of affairs. I was going to write something of more consequence today, but as far as the particular thing I wanted to write about, I wanted to give it more of my brain cells than I currently can. So I thought I would update you about the other instead.
My current living situation is unusual, to say the least. If I had to put a label on it I would say part-time live-in caretaker… sort of. I basically have three jobs to do, one in two parts and one only weekly or maybe twice a week (depending), and for that I get room and a little bit of board… okay, bacon. We have household bacon. I think I can still share the half-and-half too, except I’ve decided to just get my own so as not to cause the roomie overmuch expense.
The really unusual bit is my current diet. We have this arrangement where I go to the neighbor’s place and help him sort through some free meat he gets every week, and I get to pick from the still-human-quality stuff as long as it’s not spoken for (for instance, Roomie insists on first dibs for the lamb chops — she doesn’t do that for a lot of things, though — and Neighbor loves thick-cut pork chops). I consider that a more than fair deal. Especially when I can get things like cocktail shrimp (it is a decent size by Cajun standards, too) and smoked salmon. The rest of it goes to the dogs, and there are eight to feed between the two households.
Sooooo… I have flirted with the carnivore diet in the past, when I was doing an elimination diet to find out what the hell was going on with my weight loss and why it was stalling. This was back in 2012. But I couldn’t even get on keto and stay there, much less go back to carnivore again, even though it had worked really well to not only break my stall but actually make me feel better. It didn’t help that my daughter’s father had a few random tricks to sabotage me when I was already being weak-willed about it. And then when I lived with my dad, that was worse. I got this nice lecture from him one day that it’s not what you eat but how much when I had actual real-life experience to the contrary. Not that he would have listened.
But I don’t have those roadblocks anymore. My ex can no longer tell my daughter that they can’t eat at some restaurant because it serves food I’m trying to avoid and leaves me with basically no decent meal options. My father is not here controlling my food budget and getting angry at me for trying to manage a chronic disease properly and still, y’know, not half starve to death. I get to do what I want now.
Plus, it’s just plain cheaper. I still buy butter and half-and-half (cheaper than heavy cream and honestly, in the amounts I use daily, might as well be carb-free) and eggs and cheese (American slices — don’t judge, it’s less than three dollars a pound and yes, real cheese, I checked), but the bulk of my diet’s the free stuff and I actually eat pretty well. I hadn’t had chicken wings that weren’t Southern-fried in more than two and a half years; now, half an hour and some store-bought parmesan-garlic sauce (also less than three dollars a bottle and just trace carbs) and I’m sorted. Less than three dollars for a meal that would cost me at least thirty bucks now if I got it from a restaurant. Sheesh.
So how’s this doing me on the health end?
I’m still trying to sort out Medicaid, which for some reason is extra-complicated in this “good liberal” state that is always lecturing conservatives about how they treat the poor (don’t get me wrong, conservatives tend to be shitty to the poor unless it can make them look good at church, BUT) while it took me less than a month to get on it in Louisiana, so I don’t have labs right now. But I can say that my fasting sugars were in the 140s to 150s mg/dl in Louisiana more often than not. If I had had a busy day delivering the day prior, I might wake up with a 129. But since I got here, my sugars have dropped by about twenty to thirty points, depending on the day and which meter I’m using. (I accidentally ended up with two meters while I was in Louisiana. Long story.)
And turns out the roomie has a digital scale under the bathroom sink that is not one of those high-tech save-the-weight doodads, so you can just use it without messing up the other person’s data. Last I weighed, which I think was yesterday, it came back 239.5. I don’t know if you remember, but I was flirting with 260 in March. I think I actually got there, too. I am pretty sure the weight loss didn’t start here in California, but it is definitely still happening here: first time I weighed, maybe (at most) two weeks ago, I was at 242. At this rate I could be in Onederland by the end of the year. I doubt I will be — weight loss slows down after a while in ketosis, which I’m pretty sure I’m in — but you never know.
I’m also getting exercise, and I’m not sure how much that is helping. The data are mixed at best. My personal theory is that if you are already in ketosis then yes, exercising may accelerate fat-burning. If you’re still a primary sugar-burner though, well, good luck with that because you only have so many glycogen calories, you’ll be trashing your lean mass to get more, and you’ll be at risk for hypoglycemia too. But weight loss was not the reason I started walking. You will recall I sold my car to move here. I need to be able to at least get to Walmart so I can catch the city bus there to get around to more places. That meant I had to improve my physical conditioning, which had more or less bottomed out. Emphasis on “bottom.” Yep, I got one. You can probably see it from space.
(Do I make the rockin’ world go round? Eh, I dunno, possibly? Gravity works in mysterious ways.)
So far, the results are encouraging. It helped that I got new shoes, but my feet weren’t the only bits bothering me the first time I attempted a Walmart walk. I felt a lot less like an old lady when I got back from the second time I did it, a week later. But in between those two trips I’ve also been doing pretty much daily walks to the end of our road and back, which I found out the other day is half a mile out and half a mile back. It’s two miles and some change to Walmart, so I was doing some pretty good training there. I will just keep up that routine, and if I’m feeling really ambitious in a few more weeks I may try timing myself and improving my time. Why the fuck not.
One thing I have learned that has disappointed me is that once you cross the line into diabetes, it may not be as simple as keeping your carbs low, though you need to do that too. But you aren’t necessarily going to have perfect sugars ever again, and every point above 100 mg/dl is one more risk factor, even after meals. I am going to be patient for a while and see how things shake out, because I have heard it can take four months or longer on carnivore to really see healing happen. I will also see how I’m doing with my A1C, because my fasting sugar could just be dawn phenomenon and maybe my other sugars are fine for the rest of the day. But I want to impress upon those of you who are dealing with obesity and/or prediabetes that you really do not want to let this get away from you. If you aren’t diabetic yet, it will be easier to get your blood sugar normal now than to have to fight with it after you cross that line. So stop worrying about what anyone else is going to say if they see you eating “weird.” If they want to have to go through dialysis one day, leave them to it. You don’t have to.