90 days in purgatory

Sep 05, 2012

I haven't reached my goal yet, but I feel like being fit and trim and active has to be the polar opposite of fat and miserable, so the 90-day supervised diet must be kind of like purgatory.

I worked with a nice nutritionist, who i will call the prosecutor. Each of my 5 visits (I had extras) went the same way. The prosecutor would say, "On the scale, OK, well you lost 6lbs, what did you eat?" I just stared at her with a blank look like "I don't know" I work from 7am until 10pm or later, I had 60oz of coffee and whatever the $5 footlong is.... or maybe I didn't even eat for a day, and then ate a large stromboli because I was getting hypoglycemic. My eating habits were atrocious, but that paled in comparison to my sleeping, or lack of sleeping, habits.

I fish offshore, own and drive a race car, am active in my daughter's school, coach her basketball team and, oh yeah, own two full-time businesses.... when the heck am I supposed to sleep?

So, the good thing is that I started tracking my eating, sleeping and excercise on a little custom spreadsheet that I made. It had 4 days on one side, 3 on the other and averages for the week. This way when I went in to see the nutritionist, at least I could tell her what I ate. She forced me to cut back to one cup a day of coffee - which worked out, because post-op I got wicked headaches from the caffiene deprivation- and kept my weight level. After 90 days I had lost about 11lbs. No major feat, but considering my only goal was to not gain so I could get qualified, it worked for me. 

I failed myself in that I didn't put much energy into studying what I was supposed to eat and why, what my diet would switch to post-op or just generally preparing myself for what I was about to undergo. I would handle it like everything else - bare minimums. Minimum time in surgery, minimum time in hospital, minimum amount of recovery and minimum amount of disruption in my life.... you know where this is going right? 

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