Monday, August 26, 2019

Good morning! Hope everyone had a nice weekend. We have rain coming today and tomorrow, but I like rain. Fall is definitely in the air and being a seasonal area, businesses are already switching to off-season hours.

I'm still on track with my eating and exercise. I took a 4.25 mile walk with my dad yesterday and I did okay on eating except for a pistachio slip up when dinner was late. But it could have been so much worse if I had given into all the other cravings I had yesterday. My weigh trend is down, but slowly so.

Tonight we are having 9 of us for dinner. I'm cooking. Should be fun. Today will be grocery store, cooking, maybe a trip to the shoe store to look at new hiking boots.

Question for everyone after the inflammation discussion yesterday. For those who have pain and inflammation and don't take anti-inflammatories, are there anti-inflammatory foods you eat? I hurt a lot these days! (Feet, joints, elbow tendonitis). I might have sneaked an Advil when I was just dealing with the sleeve/Advil ban, but the blood thinner/Nsaid ban is much more firm. And in the mornings, I feel like I'm 100 years old.

PS - Peps, your egg bites recipe sounds delish! Will have to try...

Weight: 142
Protein: 97
Carbs: 72
Veggies/Fruits: 8
Water: 40 ounces
Sleep: 6 hours
Exercise: Yoga@home, weeding, housework and laundry

I'm eating well these days. :)

Yesterday morning for the first time in forever I made an omelet with red and yellow peppers and scallions and a little cottage cheese. Lunch was a big veggie salad with chicken, and dinner was sautéed tilapia and shrimp with roasted Brussels sprouts. The evening treat was half a cup of nonfat Greek yogurt with half a cup of blueberries. It did not suck at all! :)

As noted earlier, I believe I will benefit from eating cleaner by cooking more of my food from scratch instead of relying overmuch on "healthy" frozen dinners and protein drinks as I've done for the last few years, particularly since my husband died 19 months ago. But it now appears that what worked well for me for a time is no longer working as well. I also think that eating many of the same foods day after day may be what has triggered old food cravings and more frequent binging of "forbidden" foods. So it's time (once again) to shake things up and get out of my current rut of maintenance fatigue.

BTW, my five-year surgiversary came and went on August 18. Since then I've reviewed my post-op records, especially my Monday morning weights, which I record in Excel. Shown below are my AVERAGE Monday morning weights for each of the past five years.

Year 1 (losing) - 168
Year 2 (6 mos. still losing; 6 mos. maintaining) - 137
Year 3 (maintaining) - 135* (this is my maintenance goal)
Year 4 (maintaining) - 133 (DH died)
Year 5 (maintaining) - 139

This past year was the first time I experienced significant maintenance fatigue. Year five also coincided with my second year of widowhood, which in some ways has been harder than the first year. I certainly know how to put on a good front for myself and others by "keeping busy," but the truth is that I'm floundering to fashion a life that excites me anything like life with my beloved husband did. I'm incredibly fortunate and grateful to have good health and funds to travel and to spend time with good friends who don't live nearby. However, I'm seriously in search of passions that will engage me intellectually and emotionally through my seventies. And while appreciating that my challenges aren't the toughest ones in the world, they are mine.

And in other news, I may get to mow today. :)

Today's musical theme is an old favorite by Sammy Davis, Jr.: I Gotta Be Me! :)

P.S. Cecily, re anti-inflammatory foods ... I know from personal experience with my own arthritis and knee pain that if I eat foods high in sugar and white carbs for several days my knees really start to hurt. Here's a common list of foods to eat and foods to avoid. Like you, I avoid NSAIDs unless I've really banged myself up and need a little help for a day or two. But I do take a daily Omega 3 fish oil capsule to fight inflammation, and it seems to help considerably. BTW, I assume everyone else knows that aspirin is an NSAID - something I learned only a couple of years ago. And we've all heard for years that every pound gained/lost makes a four-pound difference on knee stress.

My time away was 99.9% self-initiated, self-focused and self-indulgent. I did what I wanted to do where and how I wanted to do it. I was incredibly active and came the closest to intuitive eating I have ever been. Vancouver is an extremely health forward environment, which I totally soaked in. I came home 4.6 pounds lighter (the day after travel, so I may be dehydrated) and under my range.

That being said, this morning I went with DC to his monthly PTSD therapy appointment. The therapist wanted to process how ten days away from each other had gone. Between processing my ten days away, and this appointment, it is clear that I have gotten into quite the codependent rut. DC may not be willing to make some of the choices necessary to live a healthy life and I am an excellent enabler. Time to get back into some therapy for me. Have to process more, but that's the gist.

Respect! On both those fronts.

Like Ann, major respect that you are considering working on the co dependency issues. I know that with Ron I have to draw lines in my mental sand sometimes. Luckily, he usually is supportive of my need to do that.

I hear you so much Ocean re the co-dependency and PTSD. DH & DC sound very similar.......

Ceci - lots of hubbub about collagen peptides helping joint health. Here's a link: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/collagen-benefits

I've started adding collagen to my shakes several times per week to see if I notice any difference. I should probably do it daily, but so far I've only used it on work out days.

I spent a huge portion of yesterday dealing with food and food prep. I?m actually pretty pleased with myself for putting forth the effort. I have fruit and veggies for my lunches. I have egg bites cooked, veggies in the fridge, spinach for omelets and smoothies, yogurt, berries, sliced meats, oatmeal cooked and portioned for each day, etc? But, like I said, it?s A LOT of work!

I also bought a new Bento Box with more room for fruits and veggies. I looked at my lunch box last night and thought, ?Oh, this does not look like a VSG lunch portion! It looks too normal.? Upon thinking about the size of my lunch, I realized the portion size reflected my worry about being hungry after I ate lunch. I decided to go with it. I will eat my fill and see if I have any thing left. Either way, it doesn?t matter. The lunch is not calorie dense, but is high volume. Calories are 327.

I was terribly grateful to have a place to ?rant? yesterday. I wasn?t upset at all, but sure did feel the need to put my feelings about moderate eating in black and white. Very cathartic, I must say. It was just the thing, too, to get me more motivated to work harder on meal planning and prep. Tonight I?m going to grill boneless pork loin chops and make a nice salad with avocado and a few spears of asparagus I have left over from Saturday?s dinner. Makes me feel comfortable and secure knowing what I?m going to have for dinner. Is that weird? Maybe not. It?s an item scratched off the list!

Here?s the photo of the day for me. Trying a little photo journaling this week a la Shel.

Edit to add: I was not able to completely finish the lunch. It's been a while since I have eaten a lunch of this size. The carrots and cukes I think added more satiety than I anticipated and I realized soon enough that if I continued to eat I was going to be quite regretful (can you say foamies and regurge? LOL). So I stopped, but I have that uncomfortable pressure on my esophageal sphincter. So, now I know, that my imagined post meal hunger was exactly that - imagined.

Greetings Fabulous Ones

Weight AWOL today. Forgot. I am so honed in on getting a cup of coffee when I get up that nothing else matters.

I did get Chip to the beach yesterday. We went to a small lesser used one. When we got to the far end where it sort of dead ends to a bunch of rocks, I let him off lead for awhile. He was good - waded in and wandered around. He doesn't come when called well but I was able to lure him in. Nice because there were no other dogs on this beach. Its the beach where the boat launch is and has a nice harbor view.

Ann, five years after veg seems to be kind of a crucial time. Dr. Cirangle told me that his best patients had trouble after about 5 years. Me too. Seems like I was no longer able to pass up every single cracker or glass of wine. At 3 years I remember splitting a free glass of wine on an airplane with another passenger. Seriously? So I think our tummy capacity changes as well as our mindset. I was smug the first few years as I was rarely hungry and thought all this was easy. Not so. I am coming up on 10 years pretty soon and still consider myself a success but am not liking my thunder thighs.

Peps, good looking lunch. Looks like a great deal of fibre and water. Most excellent of you to organize meals for a week and have things on hand. Too many prepared foods around here lately plus mayonnaise.

Cecily glad your dad could walk with you. Hope he is feeling well. Cooking for 9 would send me into panic mode.

Kiln opens today and I should have a lot of stuff. Hopefully nothing on the "Shelf of Shame" where they put pieces that had too much glaze so they melted and stuck to the shelves and had to be broken off.

Warm and sunny here. Maybe tuna salad for dinner. Diane S