Saturday, October 24, 2015

The Incredible Shrinking Farmer!

by Pa Rock
Disappearing Scribe

Last January, at the request of the doctor who manages my diabetes, I began to do a better job of monitoring my weight and blood sugar readings.  On January 14th  I set up a rough chart in an old notebook to record my morning weight, blood sugar, exercise (if any), and evening blood sugar.  Before long it shortened into just a daily list of morning weights and blood sugars.  The first readings on January 14th showed that I weighed 218.4 pounds and had a blood sugar of 184.

I have weighed over 200 hundred pounds for literally as long as I can remember.  At one point, in fact, I actually reached 250 for a brief time, but normally I tipped the scale at around 240.  Much, much, much too fat to live comfortably.  My jeans had a very tight and uncomfortable 44-inch waist.  I had no problem holding my pants up - Mother Nature did the job for me!

After open-heart surgery in March of 2103 I lost twenty-five pounds almost immediately.  Some of that had begun to slip back on when I began tracking my weight in earnest in January of this year.  One reason that the doctor, an endocrinologist, was so serious about monitoring weight and blood sugar was that he was placing me on a new diabetes medicine, one which had a side effect of weight loss with some people.

There have been some flukes along the way, but basically the medicine, Invokana, has lessened my interest in food - and I no longer get the occasional urge to stuff myself just for the hell of it.  A week or so after starting it, my weight had increased to 220 pounds, but that proved to be the high water mark.  From there on it has been a very slight, and very steady, decline.  Now my blood sugars are normally in the 120-150 range, and my weight has been hovering just north of 200 for a couple of weeks.  Yesterday morning I weighted in at a tantalizing 200.0 pounds, and this morning I finally succeeded in cracking that formidable psychological barrier with a weigh-in of 199.8!

That's right!  fat Pa Rock is under 200 pounds - and it's all downhill from here!

A few months ago I purchased a pair of jeans with a 42-inch waist.  Those proved to be too loose, and I wandered along the coast of Alaska constantly having to stop and pull them up.  It got so bad that Gail finally presented me with a pair of suspenders!  I now have a new pair of jeans with a 40-inch waist laid out for tomorrow's trip to Kansas City.  (Another surgery, this one to fix a pain in my neck.)

But I'm not complaining because life is getting better - an ounce or two at a time!

No comments: