Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Weight 117.2, calories 766. I am truly retired and it is kind of surreal to not have to adjust my personal schedule this week around working (which is good as we have a bunch of appointments and preparation for Florida). Lunch with my team was great and we lingered as long as we could until I had to leave to beat traffic. Many hugs and goodbyes in the office which got to be a bit much after a while. Boy am I glad we didn't do the conference room/cake retirement reception! Four people told me they are retiring in the next few months. All have been key people. It will be a very different place within the year!

Thank you SO much for the congratulations. I've told people that you are my therapy group, so I guess this is journaling for me, but with responses. I was never a good journal writer. I tried to get DH to do it a while ago thinking it might help him organize his thoughts and maybe his memory, but it is so difficult for him to write (or read) that it is just too much of a struggle for him. Sad, as he was a great writer and of course as an attorney who was an English major in college was one of his strongest skills.

Devon, I love that your students responded to your honesty with them. They clearly love and respect you (not easy to earn from kids these days).

Diane O: not passing in your keys and email! I had no choice - I had to give that stuff up to get my severance (which is a good thing). As you said, time for you to put that stuff aside too.

Shel and all, A hike together would be so terrific. I could do it especially if I could bring DH who would be thrilled. He used to be an avid mountain biker, but hasn't been able to do that alone. He did do it with the Appalachian club for a while until he had a disastrous hike where he lost several things including his car keys and I had to drive an hour each way on a work night to retrieve him and find his keys (which were lost in the car ultimately).

Cecily, those days when you want to eat everything are the challenge days. Luckily there are other days (at least for me so far), when I'm not so hungry and I try to offset the other ones. I get the most mad at myself when I've done great all day, including dinner and then I find myself grazing in the evening (an old and very bad habit that I haven't broken 100%). I try to plan an evening snack to keep that urge away but sometimes...

Oh, DS finally apologized for the blowup the other night. He has some repair work to do with his sister.

Everyone: Have a tremendous Tuesday!

Weight: 131.6
Macros: Cals - 1,688, Carbs - 194, Fats - 50. Protein - 104, Fiber - 32
Veggies/Fruits (goal 8): 8
Sleep (goal 8 hrs.): 6 hrs.
Exercise: Aquarobics

Liz, what a milestone yesterday was for you! Almost gives me chillbumps.

Yesterday's V/Fs came from black beans, corn, tomatoes, avocado, fresh pineapple, spinach, and blueberries. I had some very delish low-fat chicken tortilla soup from Aldi's yesterday. I topped it with melted cheddar and sliced avocado.

Well, stuff has changed. Hubby's local oncologist is sending us back to The Celebrity Oncologist at The Big Hospital in The Big City to do more biopsies (on the previous trip, the C.O. merely reviewed hubby's past medical records). We aren't thrilled about the additional trip required, but we're also impressed that our local oncologist is insisting on more definitive diagnostic information before hooking hubby up to a chemo IV. We appreciate that he wants to aim twice and fire once. Hubby and I are also getting more philosophical.

BTW, I'm going to do the "23 and Me" ancestry and health DNA testing; will pick up the kit today at Walgreens. The kit/tests/reports cost $199. DNA info doesn't scare me, and could be useful, as well as interesting. I'll save the reports in a Valuable Documents 3-ring binder I keep to share with doctors who may or may not even care about it. Oh well,

It's going to rain today - yea! We need the moisture. I'm looking forward to yoga class this morning.

Today, we're feeling resilient. :)

I am very pleased with 23& Me !! The health indicators were my primary interest, as my father was adopted. Having no family history for "half my tree" made me nervous. Turns out, thankfully, I have no predispositions to "bad hereditary stuff".

I have really enjoyed 23 and me! I got my Dad to do it too, since there are limits to what they can tell a woman (when they tell you your relatives, without a known male family member you don't know whether they are connected from your maternal or paternal side - because we don't have a Y chromosome).

Frnm the health side, I was able to see that I am genetically predisposed to blood clots which I thought was possible as my dad and my maternal grandmother both had them. My surgeon had me do Lovenox shots after surgery (awful) to prevent them.

Congratulations on your first full day retired today, Liz !! It is a full time job you can love !!

Appalachian Trail, here we come !!! Seriously, we're doing this !! The plans will evolve ( when, where, how, who) but we've all got the why.... Because WE CAN !! I've started an Appalachian Trail board on my Pinterest page. PM me with your preferred email address if you'd like me to send you an invite to the board. Any of us could then pin ideas as we collaborate and plan !!!

Got my work email shut down yesterday. Mailing back my keys this morning, before my walk on Keuka Lake beach, and ninety minute massage. (Liz... this is what you have to look forward to !!)

Diane O

Weight: 173

We got the car! Wasn't too much of a headache. But didn't get to fix dinner.

DSS has been a lot happier recently. I'm choosing to believe it's because he's gotten back into the gym. I sure hope so. I really want to prod DH to go with him. I think DH is scared to face that he's lost some ground being away from the gym. And obviously I'm a hypocrite too! But I really think it was good for all of us, all around.

Felt a couple big baby kicks last night. Very weird. Kinda creepy, honestly!

I'm still clinging to my scale, but considering putting it away. It occurred to me yesterday that I'm nearly 2/3 through what may be my only pregnancy! I spend so much time fretting over things. I don't want to let pregnancy be an excuse to let things get out of hand, and I know weight will never be a "nonissue" for me. But at what point can we say "I got this."? Maybe not this dot in time, but overall I'll figure it out. All of us have so many different struggles. And that may mean we put weightloss/maintenance efforts on the backburner for a period of time. That notion has scared me before. It made me think that would be a mark of an unsuccessful period. But more and more I'm thinking that's just part of the territory. So maybe I gain a little over the desired weight gain. Maybe it's avoidable, maybe it's not. But the main thing I have to get away from is letting that be determinative of everything in my future. If I gain too much weight, I just have to lose a little bit more. I'm glad I lost some weight this spring because now I know it CAN be done.

Weight 170, calories I'm embarrassed to say were 2278. 13,687 steps.

Good morning all! I had a run in with a box of chocolate covered English Toffees from Trader Joes yesterday. I should not have bought them. So high calorie and went down way too easily. I thought since I can control myself well around regular chocolate, I would be fine, but the toffee part proved to be stronger than my will to limit what I ate. I won't buy them again. My highest calorie day by far since surgery. Ugh. The scariest part was how familiar it felt to override my common sense and make the poor decision to just finish the box. It felt just like the start of a binge episode pre-surgery and made me realize I'm still very capable of that when the food doesn't take up space.

I'm going to try to not beat myself up, but focus on my average calories for the week - not cutting way back as any sort of punishment, but eating reasonably tge rest of the week to offset some of the toffee.

After all that I got a nail in my tire, except you can't patch a "run flat" tire, so that's $350 I didn't want to spend this time of year.

Cecily, IMHO days like you had yesterday are just part of learning how YOU are going to navigate maintenance. Stuff happens, and it always will. Your obligation to yourself long-term is to RECOVER from a day like that, but without flipping out and eating 300 calories the next day. Again IMHO, our goal in maintenance is to create, live and trust our healthy lifestyles, not succumb anymore to yo-yo dieting/binging/dieting behavior.

It's actually not a bad idea to re-experience how badly we ate pre-op. I've had days like that, too. And they always up being motivational and sobering reminders of what I really am dealing with. That's why I have found it to be a good thing to experience the REALITY of how slider/slurry food really doesn't challenge the sleeve. You'll soon figure out what your trigger foods are and aren't, and you'll find ways to limit their influence.

For me, the big change in maintenance has been that I no longer have days like one after the other. I analogize my maintenance meditations on those "WTF am I eating?!" days to my third day after VSG surgery -- when I understood fully that I'd actually had 85% of my stomach cut off and tossed in the trash. For several hours I meditated on the big differences between the theory of that decision and the reality of actually having DONE it.

This really is a safe space. No one here has been perfect in the past, and we won't be perfect in the future either.

To quote Maya Angelou again: "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better."

Beautifully put, Ann, thank you!!! I have lots to learn...

Don't we all ? This safe place gives us "the wisdom of the crowd"... OUR crowd !!