Tumbling Off The Couch

This is my journey from an out of shape, 360 pound fat guy, to a father and husband that is capable of keeping up with his family and will be with them for a long time. Watch me Do Life.

[tumblingoffthecouch]

I've had extremely good success in recent weeks as evidenced by recent posts of progress and victories. This week does not exactly follow that trend. My intent was to do 5 day fast during the week, as I have been for a few months now, then eat keto on the weekend. So far that's been a miserable failure and I've had to eat. Just have not been feeling well while fasting with extreme hunger that lingers, headaches, fatigue, & diarrhea. There's several factors that I believe are influencing this situation:

1) Sunday, for mother's day, we went to a Brazilian steakhouse and gorged ourselves on meat. So it was mostly keto but there was definitely too much protein and a small desert (creme brulee) at the end. However, I stayed in ketosis. 2) My wife is starting her monthly thing this week so the hormones are a flowin' 3) We are preparing for a confirmation party this weekend and are preparing lots of food this week. Luxurious smells of pork cooked in lard are filling my house. 4) I have a big deadline at work that I'm stressed about 5) Aside from prepping food for the confirmation party on Sunday, just preparing for it is stressful 6) I've been spending money like it's going out of style between buying another motorcycle, several vehicle repairs, and funding a confirmation party.

So, fasting just doesn't seem to be happening. Fortunately I don't seem to have carb cravings.  Pizza sounds equally appealing as steak with a buttered veggie. It's just whatever is going on with me isn't compatible with fasting and I have to adapt. My goal is to just stay keto and give fasting a try again next week. The tough thing is that I'm 10lbs up from last Friday. Short of the meat-fest at Fogo de Chow on Sunday I haven't eaten anything that I believe should be responsible for it. While I know that it doesn't matter, there's going to be a systematic shift from my fasted weight to my weight while eating, it takes work the maintain a mindset that isn't discouraged by that reality.

[tumblingoffthecouch]

So today is a bunch of little victories. Having ketones that high is really nice and motivating. This is the lowest BG I've recorded in over 3 years of saved data and to make it even better it's a morning measurement shortly after waking up and no meds. Third, my weekly weight was 289.8, I broke through a mini-goal of 290!! That’s 54lbs gone since the end of January.

So I was briefly down at 289 in September of 2012 while training for a half marathon. That's the only other time since 2001 I've been down here. Actually makes it hard to break my fast today, but it'll help keep me motivated at the family birthday party I'm going to tonight.

[tumblingoffthecouch]

Crossed a milestone that I haven’t seen in a while.

Weigh in this morning was 298.2!  I haven’t been down here since Feb of 2013! Still not in new territory but I’m below that magical 300 lb mark. Needed it, we had pizza at work today and this gave me motivation to stay in control while breaking my fast. Just ate the toppings. Tonight will be ribeye stake covered in butter, bacon wrapped asparagus & avocado slices covered in seasoned olive oil. Yummm...

[tumblingoffthecouch]

Wow I had a great checkup with my doc on friday.  Pretty much all my blood tests have dramatically improved.  Blood sugar is a little elevated but fasting insulin is less than half of what it was a year ago.

I expected my doc to freak out when I told him I haven’t been eating anything during the week. He was pretty supportive even though he can’t “condone” it.  Whatever I’m doing to give the kind of results that he’s seeing, he doesn’t want me to stop.

[tumblingoffthecouch]

Down another 4 lbs this morning, pretty happy with that! I’ve been fasting since dinner on Sunday and this week has been going exceptionally well in the fasting department. Earlier was kind of blah and headache-y but drank a ton of water last night and work up this morning feeling great. Seems that I always underestimate how much water I need or I’m not really drinking as much as I think I am.

Tomorrow I have my regular doc checkup. It’ll be interesting to see what he says. My blood sugar has been on the higher side, which is somewhat expected because I quit taking 2 of the meds due to complications. He won’t be happy about that. Nor will he be happy that I quit my blood pressure med.

Tomorrow night, I’ll eat dinner.  That’ll be 5 days of fasting.

[tumblingoffthecouch]

decisions and stuff

So this week I went up 6 pounds. I’m not surprised. Now that lent is over I have left my regular fasting and didn’t fast much this week at all. So my guess is that the 6 pounds is basically water weight. I’m trying to figure out what I need to do next. I’m going to switch to more of a intermittent fasting rather than these longer fasts. But I’m trying to decide if I want to do more of a stint of shorter, alternate day fasts or do I want to try for a really long one. It’s tough on the weekends to fast. However, next friday is a checkup appointment with the doc, he tracked me down, lol... So I’m likely to fast next week until then. 

One of the problems I’ve had lately is blurred vision. Like, I can’t read the speed limit signs, blurred vision. It comes on fast. At first I thought it was related to the fasting but it ended up not mattering what I ate or drank. I struggled with it for quite a while. So then I started looking at medications and turns out one of the most common side effects of amlodipine, for high blood pressure, is blurred vision. So I stopped taking it. Blurred vision was gone within 2 days and hasn’t come back. Also, I’ve struggled with painful edema in my legs for years. Even back when I was running sometimes my ankles would swell as wide as my foot and feel like a sausage ready to pop. I haven’t had any problems with edema since I quit taking the amlodipine. So far, my blood pressure has been normal without it. I guess I’ll have to see if it stays that way.

[tumblingoffthecouch]

What’s on my plate these days?  Well, literally nothing. Let me explain.

Back in June of 2015 I posted that I’m still around, working out and spending all my spare time cleaning up the mess of a tree that I cut down. Then I wasn’t around anymore, injury after injury kept happening as I’d try to keep active.

Things really weren’t working anyway. Dieting and running, the weight just kept coming back on - slowly. We’ve all heard that story before, it’s nothing surprising. Well, this year I decided to make a big change. Been reading a bunch of books from Dr. Jason Fung like this and this and what he’s saying makes perfect sense, it’s like he’s describing my life. So I’ve been giving his interittent fasting suggestion a try and at the end of January I started. You can see the incredible results on my weight page here. 

I decided for lent that I’m going to fast as much as possible. End of Jan and early Feb was a warm up to the extedended fasting. So the first couple of weeks were 3 to 5 day fasts. While fasting I consume only water, black coffee and tea. I dropped 20 lbs, which isn’t too surprising in any new endeavour. Lent itself has turned out to be pretty complicated, such is life. I had a work trip to California for a week, my birthday, our wedding anniversary and my youngest son’s birthday are all during this period. So the reality of how it’s worked out has been fasting during the week and eating “normal” on the weekends. I can be pretty satisfied with that. My blood sugar has been great, sleeping has been better, more focus and energy during the day. Even with mostly taking a break on my trip to california, I’ve managed to lose another 20 lbs this month and this is the lightest I’ve been since 2013. 40 pounds gone in 7 weeks with no exercise.

I’m starting to walk a bit now with some short stints of running for the time being. However, before doing anything serious, I want that weight down. Hopefully, all those injuries were just me being too heavy to do that kind of running before and with losing the weight I can get back into it.

[tumblingoffthecouch]

Still around

Hey Y’all, I’m still around.  I haven’t been logging workouts because every night cleaning up this tree mess is my workout!

This is a big tree.  So each night after dinner I work on cleaning up the mess and cutting up/moving the wood.  I finally have almost all the “big wood” cleaned up, then it will be the brush.

Then I get to fix the neighbor’s fence where I dropped the tree on it.

[tumblingoffthecouch]

Today's workout (and tomorrow's, and the next days...) Trees! Getting a chainsaw means no tree is safe around me. There are seven trees in my yard I want to cut down this spring. This is the biggest, and that's only about a third of it laying in my yard!

[tumblingoffthecouch]

Here's the cleats for the new pedals. I went with crank brothers for the pedals because their mechanism and cleats are very much like the time atac pedals on my mountain bike that I love. However, crank brothers also makes cleats that bolt onto 3-hole pattern road shoes. These cleats are much easier to walk in, hopefully they hold up well. If they work well, I'll transition all my bikes to crank brothers pedals and then it won't matter what shoe I wear.

[tumblingoffthecouch]

Get to ride the bike home from work tonight, hopefully meet the family and have a little picnic in the park after the ride.  It’s great for me, not sure how they feel about having a picnic with a sweaty and smelly guy.

Also did my push-up/ab/weight lifting routine today.  Totally toasted my shoulders and arms - it was a good workout.  Didn’t do anything with the legs because I want to save them for the ride after work.

Got new pedals on the bike.  I’ve had 1 ride around the block but seem to like them.  After the ride tonight, I’m sure I’ll know much better.

[tumblingoffthecouch]

Man I didn't want to work out today. Tired and lazy. Made myself go down and hit the treadmill anyway, wanted to run. The result after a 30 min run is this goofy, and relatively scary, smiley face. That run was a good pick me up that I really needed. 2.15 miles in 30 minutes.

[tumblingoffthecouch]

Rinse, repeat...

So today I basically did the exact same thing as yesterday.  Not exactly because there were more pushups, situps, crunches, leg lifts and a longer plank, etc...  But same routine followed by 20 min on stationary bike.

However, if you think you can’t get hurt on the stationary bike...  Foot strap broke on one of the hill climb intervals and foot came off the pedal causing me to crush the manly parts into the seat.  The gym was filled with some colorful words for a few minutes while I tried not to throw up.

Still a good workout. 

[tumblingoffthecouch]

I rode the stationary bike and didn’t crash!

Haha...  Today was pushups, abs, weights and 20 minutes on the stationary bike.  I’m procrastinating the treadmill till later in the week because I feel like I was hit by a mack truck from the bike crash on Friday.  

I did get new pedals for my bike yesterday. So hopefully I’ll get used to them quickly.  They definitely seem to have a more positive engagement, meaning that hopefully I won’t be coming unclipped anymore because I was not really clipped in to begin with.

[tumblingoffthecouch]

Almost got creamed today!

It's time to get different pedals for my bike. Crashed twice today because I came unclipped, or wasn't properly clipped in to begin with. Started thinking about it a couple of years ago when I came unclipped on a velodrome track. If I would have fallen then it would have been fun picking out all the splinters - it's a wooden track. This time I fell into traffic in an intersection and if the car hadn't been paying attention to me and swerved my head would have been under its wheel. The second time was pedaling hard on a steep hill climb. Despite the fact that I feel like I was hit by a mack truck it was great to ride today. First bicycle commute of the season. Also earlier today I did my pushup/ab/weightlifting routine. That also means I got a workout in every day this week. Well, weekdays anyway. Tomorrow I will be taking it easy. Cleaning the house.

[tumblingoffthecouch]

Exercise bikes are only a little less evil than elliptical machines

Why do the seats suck so bad on exercise bikes?  Why don’t they make the seat and geometry a little more like a real bike?

OK I’m done whining.  30 minutes of intervals on the exercise bike today. That’s 4 days of workouts in a row coming back into it!  Everything hurts, stairs are pure torture.  Must be doing something right ;)

[tumblingoffthecouch]

Good workout today - don’t feel like I broke anything.

Similar to Monday, well activity wise.  The workout didn’t feel like it sucked.  Did abs, pushups, weight lifting and 1.5 miles on the treadmill in 20 minutes.

Treadmill work is intervals and I’m staying slooowww for now, slowly break in the feet and knees.  OK, I’m always slow.  I mean extra slow.