One Hundred Days with No Sugar

I was awakened by a text, and I went ahead and got up to go to the gym.  I was actually excited to do a real workout and see what I weighed afterward.   I realized on the way to the gym that today's weight-lifting was my lightest routine that I do, so I decided to do two songs on the elliptical to one song while weight-lifting, and I included my abs in the weight-lifting, too.  On the elliptical, I positioned my legs on "narrow" for the first song and "medium" for the seconde song.  I think I'm too short (and have too many knee issues) to do "wide."  This worked well, and I turned up the resistance each time I got back on.  All in all, I did the elliptical seven times, so, through fourteen songs, and I had six periods of abs and/or weight-lifting in between them.  At the end of each elliptical song, I paused my iPod and increased my speed for the rest of that minute.  I kept track of how many minutes I did the elliptical, and, when the last...

So, here is the most exciting thing I can think of right now.  Last night's new recipe included instructions to make a smooth cheese sauce as part of the casserole, and I am thinking it's close enough to Velveeta that I won't need to buy Velveeta anymore.  I don't know what is in Velveeta--okay, I DO, because I just looked it up, but it has seemed less than healthy to me as I've used it in one of the kids' favorite meals. The recipe for that came from their father, whose mother made up this comfort food out of four ingredients (one of them Velveeta) when she was a single mother.  I've continued to make it for the kids following our separation, but, as I've tried to eat healthy, keeping in mind that whole foods closest to nature are best, my heart has not been one hundred percent into buying and eating it.  So.  Velveeta is reportedly made of  milk, water, whey, milk protein concentrate, milkfat, whey protein concentrate, sodium phosphate, salt, ...

The birthday cake that I thought I had missed when I was out of town was served at work today.  It looked good, in the store-bought cheap way.  It was some kind of chocolate with a speckled frosting and an Oreo cookie on top.  Of course, I didn't have any.  Some of my team members asked me about it as I left the room after congratulating the birthday person, and I said I was on day sixty-eight.  I was wrong--it's day sixty-nine.  Some of them had forgotten and some of them had not been aware.  I'm pretty used to missing out on things like this now, but, later in the day, as I passed the last three pieces sitting in an empty cubicle, one of them yelled out to me, "Just eat one."   Just eat one.  Just give this up.  You aren't losing weight, anyway.  What are you doing this for? Well, I found out yesterday that my coworker is dying.  I had my mammogram today.  I'm sure if I had been eating all the sugary things that...

I felt worse last night, so I went to bed early and rested in the steam for about eleven hours.  I did not go to the gym. I did not think being in the pool would be good for me, nor exercising my lungs, either.  I wasn't sure if my relapse was due to having been up since 3:00 a.m. or having worked out a little bit, or both, but getting past this illness has to be my priority. I made sure I took a walk at work, and did eight sets of abs, and I felt myself get wheezy both times.  So, I did all the other things just like I am supposed to, but I feel fat, and discouraged.  I need to be having good, solid workouts daily.  I cannot believe that going ten weeks without any sugar has had so little impact on my body.  Seriously, what is up with that?

I made it to the gym just before four a.m.  There were only like four other people there, which was perfect for going back and forth between weights and the elliptical.  I knew I would be making this up as I went along, guided by the principle of alternating.  I haven't weight-lifted for so long that I started with that.  I did sets until the song I was listening to on my iPod ended, and then I went over to the elliptical.  I immediately started sweating.  It's been too long.  I ran on that until the song ended, and then, because I was in the middle of a minute, paused the iPod and intensely finished the last minute, to get my interval training in.  Then I went back and did a few more sets of weight-lifting, and so forth.  Each song this morning was just over three minutes long, so the fourth minute was intensely done, and then I started over after the next weight-lifting interval. Even though there were only four people there, that didn...

First thing this morning, I tried to make sure I got enough sleep.  I woke at six and could have gone to the gym, but, since I knew I should not do much there, anyway, and I had not really gotten to sleep before ten, I set my alarm and went back to bed.  Not sure I slept anymore, but it was a nice rest. I was out of the house by seven-twenty, and I did my full abs.  It felt good to move my body again.  The mirrors at the gym showed me clearly my full rotundity and the reason I need to keep going on this project.  I think that if I am going to alternate cardio exercise and weight-lifting, which that doctor on the video recommended, I am going to need to do it when the gym is pretty empty, i.e. the middle of the night.  So, this morning, I just walked on the treadmill.  I'll tell you what.  Walking 3.0 miles per hour feels like walking 3.5 mph used to feel.  I gradually turned up the speed and even did a three-minute jog at 4.0 mph, which u...

No major coughing fits last night.  I coughed, but not alarmingly so.  I am hoping it won't be very many more days before I can begin to exercise.  The scale did hint this morning that it might budge with some of the new things I am trying.  I have been adding back one abs set each night.  Which feels, each night, like just enough before I start wheezing. I did excellent eating yesterday, I think.  Not quite so excellent today, although I didn't, of course, have sugar, or anything like that.  I am trying to have my sugarless hot cocoa earlier in the evening and not eat anything but my eggs and tomato juice with my antibiotic until after eleven or twelve.  I did that today, but I was soooo hungry that I sneaked home from church to have some dried peach slices, and I probably had more of those of the course of the day than I should have.  I also made a cheese toast to tide me over until choir practice ended.  We then had a nice potato so...

I coughed really hard in the night again.  So hard that I found myself saying, "I can't do this anymore."  I wondered if a hospital would have a way to better control my coughing than my prescription cough medicine and steam.  I ran the shower for a while to get even better steam.   I was up a few times briefly in the night, but stayed in bed past eight o'clock, which is highly unusual for me.  I had really wanted to go to the gym to just weight-lift a little bit, but, after coughing again like that, I didn't dare. The most important thing I need to do right now is get over this illness. I had the day to myself.  My children were with their father, and my husband was at work.  My older son is, I guess, at work or with friends.  I went to Costco earlier in the week, and I decided I only needed to go to one store today.  I puttered around the house, doing laundry and some light housework but nothing major.  Changing and washing ...

I went to bed early last night and luxuriated in the long, steam-filled hours.  I do NOT want to cough like I did last night ever again.  The downside was that I slept through my son and daughter each asking for rides home from work.  My son found another way, and my daughter called me and woke me up.  Even though my husband had to get up at five for a twelve-hour shift, he was still up, so he went to get her. I hoped he would get a good night's sleep after that, but he couldn't.  Other than getting up in the middle of the night to help him with some cough medicine and a boring TV show to help him drift off, and then getting up with him again at five to cook him some eggs and make him something to take with him for lunch (because he couldn't have had more than two hours of sleep at that point), I stayed in bed for a twelve-hour span.  I woke in the morning and saw that I had another hour, but that hour actually felt like it was longer.  Highly unusua...

I went back to work today.  I worked all day.  In the afternoon, I had a coughing fit that felt like I was pulling muscles on my rib cage and in my back.  Fun times.  I had two calls from my ENT's physician's assistant.  First, he told me that I have two strains of bacteria growing in my sinuses.  The one, no problem.  The other responds only to the three antibiotic families I can't take.  So my choices were going to boil down to getting back on the one that's destroying my tendons or going into the hospital for an antibiotic by IV.  He said he'd call me back by tomorrow. When he called back, he said he had talked to an infectious disease specialist, who had said that the antibiotic I am on should work for both types of germs.  Yippee! My weight was very disappointing this morning.  I know I haven't had a good workout in over a week, but I'm also eating very little.  I only ate half of what I brought to work to eat today....

I was still sick today. I made some oatmeal for myself and my kids.  Had a little bit of the leftovers for lunch, tomato soup and a sandwich for dinner, and a handful of dried peaches.   I am planning to return to work tomorrow, but I don't know when I will be able to resume exercising.  I am still coughing hard, several times a day.  I am far from well. I'll make my cocoa and turn in early.  I am looking forward to seeing my coworkers tomorrow.  One of them has passed the test for citizenship.  I think I have missed at least one birthday cake.  I need to catch up on my work. Just to top off all the morbid thinking I've been doing this week, I got a letter from the hospital, informing me that I had my last mammogram a year ago today, and it's time for another one.  I guess I'd better make that call.  I think my sister who died of breast cancer was about my age when she came down with it.  I don't know that avoiding sugar ...

I told my supervisor last night that the doctor had said I should not work today.  This morning, I worked hard to talk to my "buddy" on the team to get him to make a few contacts to let people I had told I would be in today that I would not be in today. I got my daughter to summer school, hurriedly showered, and went to the nine-thirty appointment I hoped I had. I found out the nineteen dollars was for a flu test I had had on Valentine's Day, the day my new husband had been diagnosed with Influenza A.  We had all had shots, but my daughter, who had worked in a day care center at the time, had come down with it during a weekend at her dad's.  To make her life easier, and to protect the rest of us, including myself who is not supposed to ever cough hard, I had allowed her to just stay at his place until she recovered.  She was old enough to take care of herself for the most part, and he had showed enough concern to take her to the doctor in the first place. But h...

The children came home at 5:15 a.m. I heard them in the kitchen and got up to see them.   I was surprised they had not texted me to let them in but had come in a harder way.  I welcomed them and hurried them off to bed.  My daughter had summer school at 9:00.   One of them finally told me the truth about the missing hours.  My ex had taken them to San Francisco after leaving the convocation, and driven them across the Golden Gate Bridge.  It was not the first time in their lives they had been there.  It was an unnecessary and selfish trip on his part.  I am sure he knew that my allowing "a little more time" to attend the convocation and bring them back did not include a side trip, nor extend past dawn.  I told this child that they would not be going back to see him tonight--he'd already had more extra hours than those.  "He's not going to like that," was the response. I quickly texted my ex--while he was still up--that I ...

I took what I believed to be a second sleeping pill in the night, because, although I was very tired, I was having trouble sleeping.  In the morning, though, my thyroid pill looked very much like my sleeping pill, and I realized that I had taken my thyroid pill early.  It's a good thing I caught myself before I took the sleeping pill in the morning, or I would have been completely wiped out for the day--one of the most important days of my son's life. I don't know how long it was, but it seemed like hours that I lay in the nice hotel bed, fully covered and warm, but shivering violently with the chills of a fever.  Every now and then, I would force myself to stop. I'd turn over or change position in some way and will my limbs to be still.  But I could only hold that for a few seconds before the violent trembling would resume.   Our alarm was set for six, but I woke up a few minutes before that and started my morning routine.  The hotel breakfast als...

I didn't get enough sleep, partly from packing, and partly from my younger children texting me as they arrived at their hotel in California.  My ex-husband had politely requested to start his weekend time several hours earlier so that he would not have to drive with the children all night.  I granted that, as their safety is prime for me, but then I asked him what his plans were for the end of the trip.  I knew, and had expressed, that he could not get them back to me by seven p.m., but what was he planning to do?  I got silence for a while, and then, when pressed again, he said he would leave right after the ceremony and get them back around midnight.  That seemed like the best he could do, besides flying, which I wished he would do but couldn't make him do, so I was pretty satisfied.  I suggested that he could actually make that drive on Saturday, and that his extra time with the children on both ends would be equal to his usual Monday night visit, so may...

The only thing that got me through last night, when so much of my time and energy had to go to meeting the needs of people and things outside of my weight-loss goal, was the expectation that I could have a very good, long, slimming workout this morning. I checked the reminders I had made on my phone to check in for my flights.  I had made them while I was on my last trip to California, and I was amazed to see that they were one hour off.  Apparently, the computer in my phone counted ahead the hours instead of looking at date and time, and since I was in California then, would have reminded me too late, now, to check in.  I reset the times and kept the phone beside me throughout the night. In the middle of the night, when I realized that my ex-husband had not even told me what hotel he would be taking my children to (and this is clear in the law, it's not a favor to me), let alone discussed the sleeping arrangements (there are important reasons for this that I won't go...