The giant has, indeed, awakened, and he’s decided that he has been a giant for far too long. It’s time to shrink to some semblance of “normal.”
Never in my life could I have imagined that I would weigh more than 300 pounds. Inconceivable! But there I was after 63 years of life, embarrassed by the doctor’s scale when it said 330 pounds. That couldn’t be! And yet, one year older and the scale still read the same, all the way up to two weeks ago.
To tell the truth, my weight was only a symptom of deeper issues in my life. There have been too many years of emotional turmoil, too many years of eating to compensate for the desperate feelings inside. Truly, no one’s fault but my own, but I was unable to “fix” things.
I’ve long recognized the fact that no one is going to get me into a better place in my life. You can only do it yourself. Ten years ago I found a wonderful woman and we created a relationship that I thought would send the rest of my life in a positive direction. Alas, I didn’t foresee the difficulties to come, nor, most certainly, did I count on the rest of her life being so short.
It has been a year since she has passed. I miss and mourn her every day. The longing to have her alive and with me will never go away, but reality forces me to accept things as they are, and that means moving forward in life, rather than living in the regrets of the past (and there are plenty of those).
For some unknowable reason, I seem to have awakened from the stupor I was in. Though not a perfect life by any stretch of the imagination, I feel that it is an acceptable life, and not only that, but that I can improve on it. Rather than just lying back (or more accurately, just sitting on my ass) and stagnating in my own emotional swamp, I appear to have turned a corner.
Yes, I’ve said this before. It is difficult to truly believe that I am going to continue on the positive course I am on. I’m too skeptical of my self-motivational skills. In the back of my mind there is a little voice that keeps saying, “It’s ok, take a little walk on the ‘positive’ side of things. I know you’ll return to the dark side.” I fear that I may. I have always done so before. But there are reasons why I may not backslide as I have done in the past.
First, what have I done? Mostly, all I have done is quit eating sugar and drastically reduced eating grains and other carbohydrates, at least as much as possible. This isn’t really new to me. Many years ago I was on the Atkin’s diet, and I lost considerable weight and was feeling great. Life, however, took some unexpected twists and turns around that time. It was not enough to have lost weight, I wanted more. Eventually, one thing led to another and I obviously packed the weight back on, and then added even more.
Recently, my wife had been telling me about a book she was reading which pushed a ketogenic diet. I bought and started reading the book, too. It’s actually a further development of the Atkin’s style diet, utilizing less protein and more fat than in previous diets. I can’t tell you why (because I don’t know, not because it’s a secret), but the idea of changing my eating to the kind of diet I had used to successfully lose weight earlier in my life started to really resonate with me. What did I have to lose, except some weight? So, essentially two weeks ago (plus a couple of days) I decided to give it a go. The results, so far, have been really encouraging.
In these two weeks, there are two changes that have encouraged me enough to make me believe that this is the way to eat for the rest of my life, one of those things was unexpected, and, to me, pretty damn amazing.
And that amazing thing? I have bad knees. One has been replaced and the other is bone-on-bone and needs to be replaced. For years my natural knee has been getting worse and worse and it has made walking very painful. I had finally come to the point where I knew I had to have it replaced as soon as I could. Then I started this diet. Within a week or so, I suddenly realized that my knee wasn’t hurting so much. In fact, the pain was probably less than half of what it was before, and it is a pain that I can live with now. That’s not to say that the knee shouldn’t be replaced, but I really don’t want to go through that any sooner than I have to, because it was no fun when I had the other knee replaced.
So what happened? It was inflammation! Eating the sugar and carbohydrates was creating inflammation in my body, and in particular in my knee. Often when you make a change in your life there can be a placebo effect, depending on your expectations. But this caught me totally by surprise. I had no expectation or even a thought that my knee would feel better (except later, maybe, if I took some weight off of it). This has really opened my eyes. And there’s an additional benefit. If my knee is doing so much better because of reduced inflammation, I have to believe that the rest of my body is experiencing similar effects, whether I can “feel” them or not.
And the other thing, though not really amazing and actually expected, is the improvement in my mental state. It’s pretty easy to think that what you eat doesn’t affect your psychological state, but it does. I have been feeling more positive and am not experiencing the highs and lows (actually, lows and lowers) that I was before. No, I’m not dancing in the streets with joy, but I’m actually finding that waking up each day is a good thing, rather than something that I am just going to have to suffer through again.
These two things alone are enough to keep me going. Well, that and the fact that since I have started eating this way, I have lost about fourteen pounds. That’s not chicken feed. Yes, I know my weight loss cannot continue at that pace, though I really wish I could get below 300 pounds like yesterday, but it is going in the right direction. It was a scary thought that at 330 pounds, it was likely that I would be putting on even more weight the way I was going.
So, I recommend to you, cut out the sugar, cut way back (and I mean WAY back) on the carbohydrates, increase your fat intake, and moderate your protein intake. You may be surprised and pleased with the results. I know I was, and I can only imagine that even better things are to come. Assuming, of course, that I live that long. But my odds are better now than they were before.