mizducky's migrations: a weight management blog with attitude

Back in the saddle (yet) again

Hey, I'm back! Didja miss me?

I must say, the past couple of months have been some of the most exhausting, tumultuous, often-frustrating, but ultimately rewarding times I have ever known--and I've known some tumultuous times in my time, let me tell you. To recap, here's what I've been up to:

• For the first time in years, I acted in a play. I played multiple supporting roles in a production of Paul Rudnick's The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, including this one absolutely killer character, a disabled lesbian rabbi in a wheelchair who's the star of her own cable-access talk show, kind of a lesbian version of Dr. Laura. Community theatre, I have found from past experience, has this tendency to completely take over your life--and so that happened with this production. But that doesn't mean I didn't have the time of my life! Plus you would not believe the terrific upper-body workout I got from pushing myself around in that wheelchair!
• The same weekend as the play, I had a major speaking role in my church's annual Lesbian / Gay / Bisexual / Transgender Pride service. I was originally scheduled to be the major planner in charge of the service, but fortunately I was able to delegate that out. But I was still tapped to lead this one liturgy I wrote specifically for the service, and it turned into a really beautiful thing.
• Just last weekend, I rode herd on our church's contingent in San Diego's Pride Parade (yes, San Diego does their Pride celebration a month later than everyone else--I'm not totally sure why but I think it's to not conflict with the major Pride celebrations up in LA, Long Beach, and etc.) We'd chartered a trackless trolley from a local tourist-tour outfit, and then festooned it with banners and streamers and stuff, and then had a contingent of walkers and riders and parasol-twirlers. I am far from the first to observe that trying to organize a bunch of Unitarian Universalists is like herding cats--I luv all you folks, but damn were my nerves shot after that! But all's well that ends well, and everyone had a good time.
• Oh yeah--and somewhere about six weeks back, Mr. E, the elderly gentleman for whom I am live-in caretaker had another major health weirdness. Once again he recovered remarkably quickly, but for a couple of days in there we really thought we were gonna lose him ... and then for a week afterward we were concerned he'd need to go to skilled care. He's about 96% recovered at this point--dude has more lives than a cat. It's just me who's still reeling a little, even six weeks later.

In the midst of all this, my food admittedly got a bit random--hey, you try rehearsing for four hours straight, and then leaving rehearsal to find the only eateries still open are the 24-hour burrito joints. But even with all that, I managed to keep my weight on that same ol' plateau it's been hugging for months now. And with the physical workout from the rehearsals--not only the aforementioned wheelchair-jockeying but also an actual dance number!--I think I may actually have lost an inch or two in body measurements. In fact, I'm pretty damn sure I have--teeshirts that had previously fit snugly are now giving me some ease around the arms and bust. Yowza.

But, in some ways even more momentous than that, I found doing theatre to be a major epiphany for me. At least some of it had to do with how well my parts suited me--it felt like I completely knew how Rabbi Sharon was supposed to be from the moment I cold-read her part in auditions. But even without that, acting just felt so totally right, like something I had been meant to do all along but am only getting around to now. All those frustrated creative juices I used to pour into my preaching, and have only sporadically put to use more recently doing spoken-word, came surging up with a vengeance when I was raging on stage. I dunno what it all means, and I dunno if this was just a fluke and the next play won't be anywhere near this level of epiphany-hood, but I am determined that there will be a next play, and I will follow up to see if this is my calling for the next hunk of my life.

Confronting the omnivore's dilemma

You would think by now that I'd have read The Omnivore's Dilemma, given how much I have appreciated Michael Pollan's point of view in various articles and interviews. But finally, after several weeks of waiting to move up from #47 on the public library reserve waiting list, I succeeded in getting my hands on a copy--and boy am I ever finding it ... well, "enjoyable" is not quite the right word when you're talking about a book explaining exactly why and how our current industrial agriculture arrangements are wildly unsustainable from ecological and public health standpoints. Try "sadly enlightening," in the same vein that earned economics the sobriquet "the dismal science."

I'm only a third of the way through so far, but already I'm finding quotes that are just screaming out to me "post me in your blog!" So here's one now:

"... growing corn is the most efficient way to get energy--calories--from an acre of Iowa farmland. That corn-made calorie can find its way into our bodies in the form of an animal fat, a sugar, or a starch, such is the protean nature of the carbon in that big kernel. But as productive and protean as the corn plant is, finally it is a set of human choices that have made these molecules quite as cheap as they have become: a quarter century of farm policies designed to encourage the overproduction of this crop and hardly any other. Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest." (page 108)

So that quote should make it crystal-clear why this book is eminently on-topic for this blog: obesity, like any other public health concern, doesn't just happen in a vaccuum (whether biological, ecological, economic, or political). If a population is constantly bombarded by exhortations to consume some of the bazillions of food products processed in one way or another from that heavily government-subsidized mountain of cheap corn, sooner or later they're gonna get some of it on 'em, or in 'e,--and that'll inevitably show up on bathroom scales and glucose tolerance tests across the country.

P.S. Check out this previous post in this blog for a link to a video of Pollan moderating a vigorous panel discussion of the politics of obesity.

Splurging; recovering; mmm-yoso-ing; plateauing (weekly weigh-in)

Alert visitors to this site will hopefully have noticed--and followed--the link to the blog of my fellow food-blogger Kirk a.k.a. mmm-yoso. Kirk and his crew do an excellent job of covering all sorts of fascinating little mom 'n' pop hole-in-the-wall eateries, especially those specializing in ethnic cuisines, in the greater San Diego area and beyond. I've been a fan and frequent commenter on mmm-yoso for some time now, so it was probably only a matter of time that I became a contributing blogger over there. You can check out my maiden post on mmm-yoso here ... and there should be another one from me going live any day now.

You'll see that this next mmm-yoso post will feature a meal that, erm, doesn't conform all that well to my everyday food routine. It was, in fact, a planned splurge--although a rather bigger one than I think I had originally intended. Oopsie. But hey, these things happen, and it's actually quite simple to recover from them: all you do is just eat more lightly and deliberately for the next few days. That's it. No drama, no freakouts ... just takin' care o' bizness.

In the bad old diet-think days, such overly splurgy splurges would have been the source of much hand-wringing and self-recrimination, often leading in turn to a bad attitude and a what-the-hell might-as-well-really-blow-it-out binge. Nowadays, though, I have banned guilt and self-recrimination from my weight-management philosophy. It's amazing how easy it is to do a course-correction when you're not making yourself crazy over having wandered off course in the first place.

And as a matter of fact, when I did my weekly weigh-in today, I was back on (or still on) that same plateau I've been holding at for over a month now:

• Yesterday's weight: 192.0 lb
• Change since last weigh-in: 0 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 142.0 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -1.29

So there you go. Status quo maintained, senseless panic avoided. Much more pleasant--and productive--than the old way.

Weekly weigh-in: Thanksgiving survival

These numbers were taken yesterday (in other words, the day after Thanksgiving):

• Yesterday's weight: 198.0 lb
• Change since last week: 0 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 136.0 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -1.45 lb

As faithful readers know, my tendency is to greet plateaus not with dread but with satisfaction, because according to my regimen, as long as my weight isn't going back up I'm doing the right thing. And never was that feeling of satisfaction over a plateau more appropriate than this past Thanksgiving. For I wound up consuming not just one, but three--count 'em, three--separate Thanksgiving dinners, which makes that plateau not a ho-hum, but a hurrah!

So--how did I manage to make through all those Thanksgiving dinners without my weight going up? Three very simple words: moderation, moderation, moderation.

The traditional Thanksgiving dinner tends to be especially loaded with calorically-dense foods: the stuffings, potatoes, gravies, cream-enriched vegetables--and all those desserts! And lots of those foods have heavy sentimental value. I knew it would be unrealistically harsh to tell myself I was going to stick to the letter of my food plan, so I did indulge in most of those foods. However, what I did not indulge in is that other time-honored Thankgiving dining practice: that of gorging to the point of pain.

I took little bitty servings of the nutritionally-dense stuff, and rather larger helpings of the lower-impact foods like (un-sauced) vegetables, green salads, and of course the turkey itself. And I mightily resisted the urge to take seconds, except for the lower-impact foods. At the end of each meal, I was pleasantly full--but in no discomfort whatsoever. Which was especially nice after the third meal, as that was over at the house of some friends with a hot tub. I could just feature trying to deal with a hot tub if I had gorged like I used to in the Bad Old Days. Instead, it was a pleasurable end to a wonderful (if exhausting) holiday.

What also helped was, of all things, my foodie sensibilities. Somehow, all these years of exploring all sorts of foods seem to have left my palate a bit jaded. Don't get me wrong, I still love food and eating--but let's just say it takes a hell of a lot more to surprise and delight my palate than formerly. So, yeah, I sure enjoyed all of the food I tasted--but no dish mesmerized me in such a way that I felt compelled to keep tasting it (and tasting and tasting and tasting some more ... you all know how that one goes!). In fact, I'm now totally content to go without tasting pecan pie again until next year at the earliest--I used to love that stuff, but the one I sampled just tasted like tooth-achingly sweet goo faintly flavored with nuts and caramel. Not something I want to squander precious food allotments on again anytime soon.

So see: being a foodie does not have to be at odds with being a sensible eater--in fact, with the right mindset one's foodie-hood can be turned from a weight-management liability into an asset.

First major travel under the new dispensation

By the way, I'm about to confront another couple of milestones in my weight loss saga: first major trip out of town, and first airline travel.

Many of you reading this know all too well what a hell-on-earth of discomfort and humiliation an airline trip can be for a person of size. Remember the huge flap a few years ago when it became public knowledge that Southwest Airlines had a protocol for charging passengers who could not fit into their even-narrower-than-industry-standard coach seat a double fare for a second seat? And that said protocol involved informing the unlucky passenger that they were fat enough to require an extra seat right there in public in front of all the other passengers? Well, at my top weight I happened to be just borderline on their humiliate-the-fat-person double-seat protocol--I could just fit between the armrests of their preternaturally tiny seats, but had to request a seatbelt extender. So, fortunately, I never had the pleasure of the buy-a-second-seat humiliation, but I did experience the joy of having to ask the flight attendants--and sometime remind them multiple times--to please bring me the goddamned seatbelt extender already.

Not to mention enduring the baleful glare of whoever wound up sitting next to "the fat slob." Never mind that those super-narrow coach seats are also too narrow for strapping healthy young men, whose little butts might fit perfectly in the seats, but whose manly broad shoulders and gun-type biceps might still infringe on their neighbors' space in all directions. Naw, nobody whines and snivels about having to sit next to passengers with huge shoulders poking them, but you should hear some of the crap airline passengers spew about sitting next to people with big bellies or hips. And hardly anybody remembers this is all an artificial problem created by the airlines, intent on packing as many sardines into the tin can as they can get away with.

Oh, and don't even get me started on airplane lavatories. How the hell anyone bigger than a twelve-year-old uses those little coffins in anything resembling comfort, I do not know.

Well, for better or worse, I will now by virtue of my smaller bod be spared the majority of that insanity ... but that doesn't mean I'm out of the woods. For on my e-ticket are the fatal words: "food for purchase."

Yep. Airlines make you pay for your meals now. And they no longer seem to have any way to request special meals for various health reasons. Further, I haven't flown since they instituted all those new airport security restrictions on what you can bring on the plane. And I'm sorry, I've read the TSA website a bazillion times now, and can still find no definitive answers on what foods it is safe to take through security. And if you guess wrong, guess what? You're automatically in trouble with the law. I'm sorry, but that's fucked up.

Okay, yeah, I can buy food and drink inside the security perimeter. But just think of the quality--and price!--of the typical fast-food crap you find in airports. If I'm lucky, I might be able to score one of those awful salads that Mickey D's put on their menu so they can pretend they serve "healthy" food, with the boring mass of iceberg lettuce and the disgusting low-fat dressing. If I'm unlucky ... guess I'll be eating my very first fast-food burger since I went on my regimen, huh? Bleah. A food item I have not missed one whit, and now it's looking like my best chance at an even slightly palatable meal.

Anyway, enough of my whining about that. Once I do touch down in Charlotte NC, where I'll be visiting family, things should get a bit more pleasant ... and also a bit more challenging. This is a pleasure trip, after all, and so I have to figure out how I will navigate the food aspect, balancing legitimate enjoyment of the area's local cuisine against the desire to stay healthy and not go overboard. Considering Charlotte's local-cuisine claims to fame are apparently soul food and North Carolina-style barbeque, this might look a little dicey.

But I have decided two things: 1) this trip will not be an excuse to just randomly blow away the whole regimen with indiscriminate eating; and 2) neither will this trip be about puritanical self-denial. There is always a middle path, and I intend to find it.

Once I get off the damn plane anyway. Gah. I never liked flying. And I still don't. I may have made a lot of changes in the past fourteen months, but some things never change.

P.S. I will have Internet access while I'm traveling. I'm not sure how much time I'll have available to post, given that I'm supposed to be doing a lot of family stuff. So we'll see if I can make some progress reports while I'm out there. I'll be for sure posting a summary report when I return.

From my eGullet blog: how I'm working it these days

I decided I wanted to repost the following entry from my recently-completed eGullet foodblog because I feel it turned into an excellent snapshot of my current regimen. So, for those who did check out my eGullet foodblog, thank you! and sorry for the repeat. For the rest of you: enjoy!

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1. The most fundamental thing for me is having my mental game in order. Motivation motivation motivation. I can't just think of it as a "diet" for a short period of time, that I'll then stop when I've reached goal. I have to think of it as a way of life I can comfortably and happily maintain for the duration--i.e. theoretically, for the rest of my life. In my case, the final kick in the pants was watching my dad die a few years ago, of kidney failure resulting from type 2 diabetes, after a lifetime of eating outrageously despite all his doctors' warnings. It was a miserable and totally preventable death, and for a long-lived family like ours it was way too soon, and it made me look really really hard at ways I had also been ignoring doctors' warnings, and my own body's distress signals, for years. It took me a year after Dad's death to get myself totally committed to doing something about that, but once I made up my mind, I bid fond farewell to the old way of eating and have (mostly) never looked back.

2. Second most fundamental thing: do not underestimate the degree of difficulty of this life change you'll be making. I was essentially attempting to reprogram myself after a lifetime of dysfunctional learned behaviors around food, including some major angst about overweight and food behavior (almost literally) beaten into my head from way early in childhood. This is major, and so I have given it the attention and resources appropriate to the humongous effort it requires.

3. Another part of my mental game: you may have noticed me occasionally joking here and there about The Lizard Brain. It's no joke, really: many brain scientists observe that we humans have a triune brain, consisting of three evolutionary layers: the neocortex, seat of rational thought and consciousness, is evolutionarily the newest; the limbic system, a.k.a. the "Dog Brain", is older, and tends to be involved in processing such emotional bonding behaviors as love and loyalty; and the oldest layer, the so-called Lizard Brain, is the seat of basic survival instincts such as lust, hunger, and territorial aggression. I love the way this article explains this, especially this quote:

"Have you ever wondered why you reach for that pile of hot greasy fries while you tell yourself you are on a diet? The answer is that you have three brains, and the older brains were wired to put on weight long ago when food was scarce. Your old brains are not easily controlled by your fancy new brain hardware that reads diet books."

So--do NOT underestimate the Lizard Brain! 'Cause it'll gitcha when you're not paying attention! The best ways I've found to cope with it, is a combination of keeping close track of my food intake with all those lists and charts I mentioned previously, the better to prevent it convincing me to cheat; not letting myself get too hungry, tired, or emotionally upset--all conditions in which the rational brain is at a disadvantage and the Lizard Brain can rush in and say "ARRRRR! EATTTTT!!!"; and simply staying aware of my inner lizard, understanding its moods and its functions, so it can't sneak up on me.

4. Having said all that, there is indeed an important place for little tips and tricks, so that you'll be cheerful about eating this way for the rest of your life. My favorite tips:

a. "You can have it all--you just can't have it all right now." As far as I'm concerned, there are NO foods that are absolutely verboten, no foods that are "bad". There are, however, foods that are so nutritionally dense or high in calories that it's best to have them only for very occasional splurges. So--treat them like the splurges they are, and make choices wisely. Yes, I can still enjoy my beloved red-cooked pork belly--but to keep from blowing my daily food allotment out of the water, I only have it occasionally and in small servings. Yes, if I really wanted to, I could have a fast-food burger and fries--but I'd have to make proper room for it in my food plan, and I early on resolved that if I was going to have a splurge, I damn well wasn't going to blow it on a crappy fast-food burger! Somehow, knowing that I could choose those foods if I really wanted them, but that I was choosing not to because I wanted to spend my splurges on worthier things, has successfully mollified my inner lizard's lust for fast food crap. Like I said, the majority of this game for me is mental.

b. Party on the vegetables! Vegetables offer such huge variety in taste, texture, versatility ... it's a shame, really, how often even good restaurants, even in this day and age, still treat them as also-rans, or act as if the only way to make them interesting is to dump a lot of fat on them. (No, I'm not anti-fat--we need fat for health, after all--but even healthy fats are a big caloric hit and need to be used with care). I have really made an effort to improve my vegetable cookery and move beyond the "just add fat" solution. Roasting, broth braising, steaming, stir-frying; flavoring with high-flavor/low-calorie condiments such as soy sauces, mustards, hot sauces, vinegars, etc etc etc ... the possibilities are really endless.

c. For those of us who, like me, were meat/fat addicts, maximizing the meatiness of non-meat foodstuffs is a great boon to happy healthy eating. That's another reason why I like roasting vegetables and flavoring them with soy sauces, both of which add lots of umami; roasting also contracts and evaporates moisture from vegetables, making their texture a little more meatlike. And cooking with meat-based broths obviously is adding meaty flavor with low caloric impact. Plus some vegetables are just naturally more meatlike--mushrooms, for instance, are great meat-simulators both in texture and in naturally-occuring glutamates.

d. The Asian cuisines, in my opinion, are some of the friendliest to those who wish to lose weight. They tend to have some of the healthiest ratios of meat to carb to veg, plus they really have a way with those vegetables. eGulleteers who have lived in Vietnam for any length of time have commented that they lost weight almost effortlessly on a steady diet of pho and other such dishes; the first few months of my regimen, I ate pho for lunch almost every single day. Now obviously, if I ate big hunks of pork belly every day I wouldn't be faring so well! But I already covered that earlier, right?

e. Spread your day's food across several small meals rather than two or three big ones; don't go more than five hours between meals. The human metabolism works more efficiently if its continually processing modest amounts of fuel rather than cycling up and down as it wades through one big chunk of fuel followed by several hours of nuthin'. And the blood sugar level stays more even, too--nothing wakes the Lizard Brain up in full effect like a low blood sugar hunger attack.

f. Fluids, fluids, fluids. When you lose weight, that weight has to go somewhere, and that somewhere inevitably involves the kidneys and GI tract. Help your body do that processing efficiently by giving it plenty of fluids to help wash the weight loss byproducts away.

g. Eating right is only part of the equation. Exercise is the other part. Not only does it burn calories outright, but it also revs up the basal metabolism so that it processes more efficiently; more efficient processing means easier weight loss. I confess I still have a long way to go with the exercise part of my program, but as my physical condition has improved, physical movement has become a whole lot more enjoyable.

h. Wise use of selected diet-industry products. The vast majority of diet foods I find, frankly, disgusting. But there are a few I find benign to indispensible. The artificially-sweetened beverage powders, to make sure I get in my daily fluids. The non-stick cooking sprays--I saute with them, and then use small quanitities of high-quality fats for flavor. And we've already discussed the quest for lower-fat everyday cheese that actually taste good -- high quality high-fat cheeses are not banned, but they do fall in the "occasional splurge" category.

Weekly weigh-in: okay, that's a little more like it

These numbers are from Monday:

• Weight as of 2/12/07: 227.0 lb
• Change since last week: -1.0 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 107.0 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -1.95 lb

Yeah, it's nice to see the number going back down again, if for no other reason than to confirm that the little changes I made in my routine had some effect. And it's just a small turn--a variation in water retention could cause that. So I'll need to see if this trend continues to be sure I've broken this latest plateau. Still ... yeah. Nice.

But I figured out something else about this little stall. I took a tape measure to my waist yesterday. For the longest time my waist had been at 44 inches and just wouldn't budge. Yesterday, the tape measure said 42 inches. This as a result of the same period in which my weight plateaued and even rebounded! But the lost inches demonstrate that I sure as hell lost something recently. The mystery is why this was not being reflected by the numbers on the scale.

My theory is that I may have still been losing some body fat during that time, but I was also building up muscle tissue. This bulk-up was due to my heightened level of general activity--especially in the retail shop, where I'm frequently on my feet and walking from one end of the shop to another (gotta remember to wear my pedometer to work to confirm this impression.) Anyway, muscle tissue is denser than adipose tissue, so even though I aparently lost a large enough volume of fat tissue to decrease my waist by two inches, I also put on enough new muscle tissue to result in a net increase in weight.

In other words, this is a good thing. Lowering the body mass index happens whether you do it by losing fat or gaining muscle. It's just that the dieting industry has kept us obsessed solely with the losing-fat part of the equation.

In fact, traditional dieting pundits would have had me cutting more calories to break through the plateau I was on. Given that my body was busy trying to bulk up on muscle, starving it right at that moment would have been a really unfortunate move. It's one I've inadvertently done a lot of in my dieting history, with doctors' encouragement even. But I'm not going to do that kind of thing to myself anymore.

There may well eventually come a plateau that I can't un-stall without some more drastic changes. I'll deal with that when or if it happens. Right now, I am feeling confirmed in my decision to just tighten up a little and wait out the plateau, assuming my body's making a wise choice about its processes and not second-guessing that choice. It just feels like such a healthier way to roll with it.

A little emergency-room excitement (a.k.a. all's well that ends well)

As many of you are probably well aware, proper dosages of medications usually need to be scaled to one's body weight. A child needs to take much less of a medication than a full-grown adult; an elderly adult also often needs to take less than a younger adult due to decreased muscle/body mass. Likewise, a very fat person will need a higher dose than a skinny person, or else the med will be too diluted in that greater body mass to produce the required effect. Contrariwise, when you lose enough weight, you eventually need to get your prescriptions scaled down, or else you'll be taking way too much for your new body mass.

Now at this point I've lost around 97 pounds, which represents almost 1/3 of my original starting weight. I've been on a bunch of long-term prescriptions for some years now, including blood pressure meds (Maxzide and lisinopril), and figured I probably needed to get those scripts readjusted at some point, but somehow never quite got around to it. My excuse, and it's not such a flimsy one, is that it's a royal pain in the ass trying to get in to see my primary care physician--half the time when I call up, I get told she is booked up solid for the next couple of months, they aren't even taking appointments further out, and to call back in a month when they start taking appointments again. And then I'd call back in a month or so, and discover once again she was all booked up and they weren't taking any more appointments ...

Well, apparently all of this came to a head (so to speak!) last night.

We've been having unseasonably hot Santa Ana weather around here, so my home office has been a little sweat box. Still, I'd been soldiering on with my work, and had even snuck down to the exercise room when things cooled off after sunset for some stationary bike time. And I guess I wasn't drinking quite enough water, and then innocently compounded the mess by eating a bowl of low fat but extremely salty popcorn ... So in hindsight it was not so surprising that, around 10pm, I was sitting at my desk typing at the computer, and suddenly start to feel extremely woozy.

I was fading in and out, and had gotten as far as vaguely thinking "Gee, maybe I should go lie down..." when Mama Nature took matters into her own hands. I came to on the floor, next to my desk, with no memory of having fallen--just a head fulla fuzzy, and a lovely gash in the skin between my nose and upper lip. I still have no idea what the hell I caught my lip on--I'm thinking one of the corners of my desk, though there's no tell-tale blood spatters. In fact, thank goddess, the wound didn't bleed all that much at all. Didn't hurt anywhere near as badly as I would have expected either. But still--ow. And it was deep enough to definitely need stitches, and probably a tetanus shot too.

My roommate, bless his heart, was very oblidging about whisking me away to the emergency room of my HMO's hospital (which is fortunately less than 1/2 mile away). The ER folks of course got all concerned about why this lady fainted dead away out of the blue, as that could potentially be due to any number of things, some of them quite dire. But as they start running tests, they determined that my EKG and blood sugar and reflexes and such were totally textbook perfect, but that I was indeed severely dehydrated. And most entertaining of all was my blood pressure reading.

Time was when I'd regularly get systolic readings (the first number of a typical BP reading) up around 134, 140, and even higher. Meds would bring it down to 120-ish over 80-ish, which is considered normal. But last night, the ER folks were getting readings on me as low as 97/67. Yeowch! No wonder I fainted!

In fact, what I had experienced was a classic episode of syncope (the medical term for fainting) as is often seen with hypotension due to dehydration, such as can be brought on by the diruetic in Maxcide and by ACE inhibitors such as lisinopril, especially if there's also insufficient fluid intake. In other words, between the apparent excessive dose of BP meds due to decreased body mass, the hot weather, the not drinking enough fluids, and that damn salty popcorn, I guess I produced the perfect storm of syncopes.

So they dripped a couple bags worth of saline into my veins (it's amazing how much I perked up within a few minutes of them starting the IV), sutured up that lovely gash in my lip, and gave me a tetanus shot. They also got me an emergency appointment with another doctor in the same clinic as my primary care physician to adjust my meds--apparently even they couldn't get a toehold in my regular doc's appointment calendar, even for an urgent issue. They also instructed me in the meantime to not drive (yikes!--yep, definitely grateful this didn't happen while I was behind the wheel!).

While I'm waiting for my meds to be redone I'm also supposed to take my blood pressure daily with my home BP unit (which of course I had not done in weeks), and if it's well underl 120/80 again to just skip my hypertension meds for that day. I took it this morning and it was around 107/mumble, so no Maxzide or lisinopril for me today.

So how's that for a fun evening of excitement? (Insert glyph of sarcasm here.)

But seriously, I really am glad I had this incident in the relative safety of my own home as opposed to out in public--especially out in traffic! Obviously, I wish that somebody had warned me about the hazards of letting this meds-readjustment thing go unaddressed for so long--alas, the person overseeing my HMO's weight loss group, while a trained weight loss counselor, is not a physician. But still, I think there should be some sort of warning about this kind of thing somewhere.

Which is another reason why I'm blogging about it so extensively here. On a certain level, losing enough weight to mess with one's meds is the kind of problem you don't mind having--after all, it means you're actually getting somewhere with the weight loss. But when one's goal is healthy weight loss, it's still a problem one wants to avoid. I'm still annoyed at myself about the gash--even though the doc took great care stitching it up, I'll probably wind up with a little scar--but I'm glad that's the worst I got off with.

P.S. I'm now wondering why this problem didn't surface when I was in the hospital for the full hysterectomy this past August, or during any of the followup visits. After all, they took my blood pressure about a bazillion times throughout that. But I make a point of seeing what reading they get when they do my BP, and right now I'm not recalling any excessively low readings. I'm also wondering if the surgically-induced menopause from the removal of my ovaries might also have added to my little hypotension mess in some way. Who knows?!? It's a puzzlement to moi!

Weekly weigh-in -- plus: info about post-surgery weight gain

Interesting week. First, the numbers:

• Today's weigh-in: 241.0 lb
• Change since last weigh-in: -0.5 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 93.0 lb
• Average weeky weight loss: 2.51 lb

I'm pretty certain at this point that my slowed rate of weight loss is due to post-surgical recuperation. I got some support for this notion from this webpage. The fact that many womens' problem is gaining weight makes me feel pretty good that my weight is still going down at all, however slowly.

But it does also point out that I need to get a little more achtung about my favorite thing (insert glyph of sarcasm here), regular exercise. No more of this counting hauling laundry up and downstairs and grocery shopping, with sporadic unplanned bouts of walking, as adequate exercise. I'm a little more willing these days, thankfully. I very recently discovered that I can now walk several blocks without gasping for breath or feeling joints start to seize up. I have to go slow and step gently, because there is some joint discomfort, but the pleasure at walking just that little bit better is ample motivation to keep moving. I think I may have turned a corner here.

I want to make this exercise thing as attractive as possible, so I'll get kick-started into doing it. I do have the gym on premises, but nothing beats walking in pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods for making me enjoy exercise. I may indulge myself by driving to attractive walking neighborhoods. Yeah, there's something ironic about driving somewhere to walk. Welcome to Southern California.

Actually ... speaking of SoCal, I think I'll make my first walking jaunt at Ocean Beach, my favorite of the beach communities. Too bad I missed the farmer's market there today...

What I'm eating and/or drinking this evening: the minimalist smoothie

I'm feeling kind of tired and achey this evening, so I went for really simple foods needing little preparation. I thawed out an IQF boneless/skinless chicken thigh, threw it on the Foreman Grill, and had it between two slices of sprouted-grain bread. It was a pretty humongous chickie thigh, so that made a decent sandwich.

And right now I'm sipping on what may be the world's simplest smoothie. I had some cubed almost-too-ripe papaya in the fridge, so I chucked about two cups of that in the blender along with a cup of apple juice. No ice cubes, no yogurt (frozen or otherwise), no fancy-schmancy add-ins, and absolutely no additional sweeteners of any sort needed. The papaya and apple juice were plenty sweet on their own, the papaya provided ample body to the mix, and as the ingredients were chilled, so was the product.

I never understood why people felt the need to muck up a perfectly good smoothie with all that other stuff anyway. Especially the frozen yogurt--yeah, it's yummy, but if you're thinking it's "diet" food just because it's lowfat, think again folks--yogurt doesn't come that sweet on its own. And while I like an ice-filled smoothie on a super-hot day, in the cool of the evening it just makes my teeth hurt. And all the "power" add-ins--the powdered proteins, the greens, the potions, and on and on--well, okay, if you're looking for a full meal in a glass, I guess that's groovy. But c'mon--fruit is plenty nutritious on its own without all that gussying-up. I'm sucking down four full servings of fruit in my minimalist smoothie here, and that's nothing to sneeze at.

I've noticed that Jamba Juice, a chain that has built its business on elaborate smoothies chock-full of healthy add-ins of this sort, has recently added a whole new category to their menus: fruit-only smoothies. Obviously there must have been demand from a whole bunch of customers who, like me, feel that there are times when less is indeed more.