I suppose a little back-story is needed before I launch this sucker. I've battled with my weight ever since I stopped running for college. Back then, I was doing 8-10 miles a day and spending 3 days a week in the weight room on top of that. When I graduated high school, I was 6'0" and weight 145 lbs. By the end of my second year in college, I was running farther and faster than ever before and weighed 170 lbs. My diet has always sucked though.
Over the years since, I got married and had two children with extensive medical needs between the years 2005 and 2018, requiring my wife and I to stay up all hours of the night to either administer medications through a g-tube or orally every 2-4 hours (depending on the year). That's like having a newborn for 12-13 years straight. We had no support system, so we would rotate. My wife would do more rotations than me after she was forced to give up her job and I took on an extra one (sometimes two).
Things started leveling out with the kids' health a few years ago, but I had reached my highest weight at the time of 311 lbs. No sleep, a poor diet, and a shit-ton of stress will do that to you I guess. I saw a dietician at that point around 2019 and went on a no carb, ketogenic diet that consisted of 1200 calories a day, no sugar or carbs, and as much fat as I wanted. I hesitate to say it "worked" because it wasn't sustainable for me, though I did see promising results.
On the Keto diet, I dropped nearly 70 lbs (down to 242 lbs) in about 6 months, without exercise. Then the plateau period hit. I read all of the advice, listened to the dietician, and continued tracking my meals on My Fitness Pal for an additional 6 months without seeing any change in my weight. I gave up because I was constantly hungry, had given up the one vice that I've had since childhood (coffee with flavored creamer), and was miserably grumpy all the time. I also didn't have much energy... at least not enough to go for walks or get some kind of calorie-burning exercise in. Some say my diet was too strict, putting me into starvation-mode. My dietician disagreed and accused me of lying about my diet because "you can't consume 1200 calories a day and not lose weight!" I was offended, pissed off, and wanted to take it out on someone. Why not myself?
I figured if I started to eat what I wanted again, but got in the gym, it would all be okay. Signed up for an LA Fitness membership near my house and found a lifting buddy through work. We met 3 days a week and he gave me tips on lifting while I gave him tips on running (as I started back again myself). It only took 2 or 3 months to get back up to around 270 lbs. I felt great then! Of course, I didn't look great, but I felt much better. I had strength from weightlifting and stamina from all the cardio I had been doing. I was far from my goals, but I was on the right track.
December, 2019: I can recall this like it was yesterday. My daughter's band got to be in the San Diego Christmas Parade, and the whole family attended to watch. My son was feeling "sluggish" that day, and I remember this toddler that kept walking up to him with a snotty nose. The kid was grossing my son out, and he tried to avoid him, but there's only so much you can do while sitting in a chair with a kid trying to crawl all over you. We got home that evening and took my son's temperature as we were watching the news stories about this outbreak in China of a new virus called COVID-19. His temperature was 106.3 degrees. Working in healthcare, and never seeing a temp that high, let alone on someone who's walking and talking normally, we checked the thermometer on ourselves to see if it was malfunctioning. It wasn't.
We gave him some Tylenol and I took him to the urgent care where the triage nurse didn't believe me about his temperature... until it didn't register on her thermometer. She went into the back to get a different type of thermometer and confirmed the temperature I told her about. He was admitted with pneumonia. Within the next couple of months, we all passed around this cold that he had. It was late February or early March of 2020 before our whole family was well again. I was weak and out of the exercise routine. I was also again eating crap food because I didn't have the energy to prepare anything from scratch or make multiple trips to the grocery store every week. And of course, the gym closed.
Early January, 2021, I received my first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Outside of a sore arm and feeling a little run-down, it was like any other vaccine I had received. At the end of January, I received the second dose. Within days I began experiencing some strange things. I started to get these little pinpoint bruises on my feet, along with some swelling. I began forgetting things at work, and others around me began noticing I was behaving differently.
One day in early February, I woke up with those pinpoint bruises all over my body and I had huge blood blisters on either side of my cheeks inside my mouth. As I was getting dressed for work, my wife said, "You don't look right. I think you should go to urgent care." At first I was resistant. I'm not sure why, but I wasn't exactly thinking straight, so I agreed. Upon arrival, they did some lab work and found that my platelet count was 3 (thousand). They explained that the normal platelet count should be around 150 (thousand) and they called hematology. I was experiencing an episode of Immune Thrombocytopenia, and was admitted immediately.
They placed me on falls precautions and I listened as doctors debated on the best treatment. The attending physician decided to give me a platelet transfusion, which was administered until the head of Hematology saw me. After confirming I didn't have any STDs or any illnesses within the preceding few months, he ordered intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) and a heavy dose of steroids. He explained that the vaccine had caused my body to attack its own platelets because it caused it to see them as foreign. I was #36 in the country to experience this with the COVID vaccine.
Side note: No, I'm not an anti-vaxer. As a healthcare professional, I've had all of my other vaccines and consider this extremely rare. Unfortunately I can't get the booster, though I would prefer to have it (because of the science). It's for people like me who can't get it that I hope people do.
Since then, I have been working from home most days, quite sedentary. I struggle to walk to take the trash out. By the time I come back, I'm completely winded. I tried walking and steadily increasing my distance, but the farthest I got was about a mile and a half, and it took me several days to recover from that. There seems to be no scalable progression in my physical abilities. Even at my heaviest weight in 2019, I was able to get 2 miles in on my first workout, and go right back out there and do it again the next day as a starting point.
I've been pre-diabetic for a while, but I've seen several doctors about this exercise intolerance and did a cardiac stress test. My resting heart rate before my hospitalization was in the low 80's. It's now between 160 and 190 after sitting all day. My blood pressure at my heaviest in 2019 was about 139/90. After hospitalization, it was 180/110 (resting). I'm now on blood pressure medications to keep it to 150/100.
As you can imagine, with this new limitation in physical abilities, my depression didn't see any improvements. What's even more depressing is the doctors' attitude of "well, we haven't seen this before, so you just need to do what you can to promote your health" without any guidance whatsoever. I don't even know if it's safe for me to try to exercise. And I know it's faulty logic, but one of the very few things I truly enjoy is great-tasting food. I was at a point where everything else I loved felt like it was being slowly stripped away, and I decided to have a "what the fuck" approach to my diet.
Last week, I had a one on one meeting with my boss at work (virtually). It's a usual once a month meeting just to touch base. This time it was a bit different though. Work has been incredibly stressful lately. Between a massive cyber attack of our own systems and a national Kronos outage, normal operations haven't been "normal" in the last 6 months, and everyone's working double what they normally do. So instead of me filling the boss in regarding what my current projects are and where I might need help, I'm told that I am asking questions that I should know the answers to. My cognitive abilities are starting to resemble my pattern when I developed ITP right before hospitalization, and she thinks I should take some time off.
I have always taken pride in my work and my professional reputation, so this was quite a blow to my ego. The problem with what I'm experiencing is apparently everyone around me is noticing this, but nobody is saying anything. I don't realize I'm forgetting things or performing poorly somehow. They're just telling me this now. I imagine it's what having Alzheimer's Disease is like at first. In a moment, I went from barely keeping up with work (but still keeping up and in my mind, doing a great job still) to being told my work was suffering and inadequate. I'm still working through how I'm feeling about this, but it's not helping the depression.
So here I sit, writing this during a forced week off from work. I've taken a few days to think about how to make improvements. I've asked myself, "What things are within my control that will help how I'm feeling?" Of course, there's no real advice or direction for the cognitive ability improvement I need except for weight loss and exercise. This also happens to be the recommendation for resolving my blood sugar problems, my high blood pressure, my chronic back and joint pain, and to help reduce stress and improve depression.
I hate that I'm here right now. I hate everyone's words of wisdom that they offer without solicitation. Everyone's an expert, or so they say. Maybe (just maybe) intentions are good when people say things like "you're in charge of your own destiny", "...and how did you get into this place in your life?", and "...only you can put the work in". The reality is these phrases come off as privileged and they don't take into account life's circumstances beyond your control. Of course, I know that some choices I've made haven't exactly contributed to my health, but what does your stupid fucking statement accomplish except to rub my nose in that.
I'm showing up now and I'm in a place (at least in this moment) to make some changes for the better. I figure if one of my kids gets hospitalized for 6 months again, or if my own health takes a nose-dive, perhaps whatever work I can do now will prevent me from spiraling further down during the moments I can't do much to work on myself.
I hope anyone reading this didn't begin with the hope that it was going to be super-inspiring. I'm not sharing this with anyone, which gives me the freedom to show up, as I am, and be honest about what I'm feeling in the moment. Sometimes, all you can do is your best with the tools you have at your disposal. That's all I'm doing.
So what, specifically am I doing? Well, I started drinking 1 cup of black coffee a day (starting yesterday). Comparing that to three cups a day with a combined total of about a half a cup of flavored creamer with all that sugar in it, it's an improvement. I'm also going to be working on portion control. I'm not necessarily worrying about the type of food I eat yet, although I'm preparing myself to work on less carbs in the near future. For instance, last night I only ate 3 slices of pizza when I'd normally eat 4. One more change I'm making this week is I'm trying a 16:8 intermittent fasting schedule. I'm eating all of my calories between 10:00 a.m and 6:00 p.m.
I worked out my TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) to be 2,855 calories a day to maintain my current weight. So if I want to lose a pound a week, which is a very slow-paced healthy rate, I would need to consume 2,355 calories a day. The very first day I tried this was yesterday, and even with those three slices of pizza, I only ate 1,770 calories (tracking everything I eat with My Fitness Pal). At that rate, I'm in a deficit of over 1,000 calories a day, which should result in a loss of 2 lbs./week, the maximum recommended rate for healthy weight loss. I figure if I eat between 1,855 and 2,355 calories a day without exercise (at least for now), it's a great way to slowly step back into a weight loss plan.
Other things I'm moving toward are drinking more water, taking the dog out for very short walks, and continuing to track my foods while adding more protein and veggies, while removing carbs and sugars. What I'm looking for is "sustainable", not balls-out maximum results in minimum time like I'm extremely tempted to do.
I seriously doubt I'll be updating this daily or even weekly, but I also wanted to have a way to documents my progress, or at the very least, my feelings as I start it up again. For me, the biggest hurdles are motivation, mentality, and depression, which alone has shown the ability to completely wipe out all of my efforts. I guess I'll be back later with an update.
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