Compact meals on the go.

Last night I made a batch of onigiri (Japanese for rice ball). This was the first time I have attempted to make them.

I got some season packets and a press at the Japanese market yesterday. I used brown rice, crab flavored seasoning, diced turkey ham stuffed into the middle and wrapped them up in nori (roasted seaweed). They are a wonderful compact meal you can take on the go. They are very popular in Japan and are even sold at convenience stores. It is like getting a taste of sushi without going out or having to hassle with the long process of making sushi, which I have done many times. They came in at under 150 calories a piece and are delicious!

We always grill on Monday

Since we generally work on the weekend because we work in the movie business, Monday is our Saturday and that is when we grill out. Since we are on the diet I wanted to keep it as slim as I could. First thing I did was hold off on anything most of the day so I could still have my calories for dinner (I couldn't do that if I had weight loss surgery) We made shrimp kabobs with fresh pineapple and turkey ham, mushrooms and cherry tomatoes with half a cob of corn on the side. Total for the day 719 calories. The kabobs with the sausages and the pack of sausages are for our roomie.
This one is hard to see because it was dark out, but it flares and sizzles beautifully. :D

This was from Friday but today's was very similar only I had an apple and a low sodium V8 instead of the cheese.

329lbs to 255lbs

This is a photo of my weight loss progression over the last 6 years, yeah that is slow. So slow in fact that nobody in my real life can tell anything has happened. I can tell though. I can't wait to put an even thinner pic in there. They say that to keep it off you need to lose it slowly. I am not sure they mean this slowly though. When I hit a plateau, baby I do it right.

After my recent hospital stay the doctor told me to eat a soft food diet. What this means is that I couldn't eat anything that took any effort to digest. I could not eat anything that might give my intestines any kind of workout and I was told no foods with seeds, peel, whole grains or fiber. Needless to say when I got home and started digging around my kitchen I had almost nothing I could eat. I have been eating whole grain and multigrain so long that I didn't have anything I could eat in the house. I had to head out to the grocery store and pick up something I cold eat. I got a breakfast cereal that had no fiber, white bread from the bakery and some stuff to make sandwiches with. When I got home and made a ham and cheese sandwich on a white deli roll with mayo, yellow mustard and ketchup. It was just like eating a sandwich I might have made when I was 14 in the 70's. The taste was familiar and yet strange. I prefer the foods I eat today. After a few days of this I was ready to scream. I got on the scale and discovered that I had gained back all the weight I lost while in the hospital (4lbs) plus another 2, I did scream, 257lbs. That was last Thursday. When that happened I had planned on starting my no surgery bariatric diet on Sunday but my sudden weight gain prompted me to go ahead and start it on Friday morning, which I did. I got on the scale and today I was at 252lbs. This makes me happy.

I did some research on what people eat and what their goals are after surgery. I found the USFC Medical Center website for post surgery patients. So for the first month I am striving for 500-700 calories per day. I am tracking my food and nutrition intake on My Plate which does a great job of tracking foods and their content and is free to use. It has a HUGE database of foods to select and is easy and I like using it. One difference between me and the people who have actually had the surgery is that their stomach is very small and they have to blend their foods and can't drink and eat at the same time. I don't have to follow those restrictions since I am not actually having the surgery and I can eat and drink at the same time and will have my whole stomach to use for digestion, so that is a plus! At first I was worried about that small calorie count per day but then I found this study from Web MD about the effects of a very low calorie diet and people who have been diagnosed with the disease in the last 2 years and how it for all practical purposes "cures" diabetes. It has been just over 2 years since I was diagnosed so this motivates me even more that this can be done. So the plan for now is to eat every 2 hours, small servings with all food groups being represented daily. Drinking plenty of liquids throughout the day. When I lost the weight for the Army I didn't know anything about nutrition and just starved myself eating only 300 to 400 calories per day for several months until I had lost the weight and then I went right back to eating normal and with in the first 6 months had gained back 30 pounds and that plagued me while I was in the Army because I couldn't lose it despite all the physical things you do in the Army. After I got out I put on another 50 pounds because I stopped doing any of the physical things that were keeping me where I was. I averaged another 10 pounds per year after that until I was past 300. This time around I am more educated about nutrition and have a guild line to follow. I feel very good about this. Today I'm eating: Activia light yogurt, 2 light sting cheese sticks, Pure Protein bar, 4 oz chicken meat, large mixed salad w/light dressing, sugar free jello cup, herbal tea, and low sodium broth. The nutritional content of that is, 626 cal, 1471 mg sodium, 18 gm fat, 72 gm protein, and 47 gm carbs.

Making the change.

I created this blog a couple of years ago and at the same time I made a facebook page for the same thing. I have to say that I never really used this blog and did most of my posting to the fb page. I decided today to convert this to my main blog on this subject and have stopped posting to the facebook page. That being said, I started a journey 2 years ago. At the time I was pretty fed up with my life, I was staring down the barrel at 50 and wanted to change. The things that I wanted to change the most were basically my weight, the fact that I have sleep apnea and type 2 diabetes and the course of my life. I had never gone back to college after the Army and when what would have been my retirement date came and went it really got to me. I have been pretty much just marking time since I got out. I wanted to change all of these things so I set about making a two year plan on changing my life. The biggest changes I have made so far are the way I handle money for the better and I have gone back to school and it is going great and I am very happy with it. The big change I didn't make was losing weight and getting rid of my diabetes and sleep apnea. I have lost weight in the last 2 or 3 years. At my highest several years ago I topped out at 329. It was just after the holidays in Jan of 2006. I got on the scale and freaked. I went on a diet and lost down below 300 and leveled out at about 285 where I continued to hover until 2009. After my first and second hernia surgeries in the same week I had a long slow recovery that lasted just about 9 months. During this time lost down to about 245 but after my recovery I gained back up to the mid 250's and that is where I have stayed ever since. I have made multiple attempts to go back on a diet but can't seem to manage to get past 248. I have seen that number several times since then but for what ever reason I can't get past it. I spent this past week in the hospital with a bowel obstruction. I spoke with the surgeon and he said that it was a combination of my hernias, which have come back and scar tissue left over from my older surgeries that caused it to occur. I am better now but while I was there he told me that basically my abdominal wall is shredded now and will have to be reconstructed surgically and that since I have all this weight still on my body that no surgeon will do it because it would just rip itself back out. After telling me that he suggested that I have bariatric surgery. Now I have always been against gastric bypasses and the like. I have always considered them the cheaters way out of having to have self discipline, especially since I willed myself into losing weight so I could join the Army and lost over 80 pounds to do it. Believe me when I say this, it plagues me that I can't seem to find that kind of self discipline again even though I have such great seemingly motivating factors as diabetes and sleep apnea but at any rate I told the Doctor how I felt and he told me that it would also "cure" my diabetes and that for most patients, they were off their medication in under 2 weeks. He also told me that many insurance companies today do cover the surgery because of all the other health related things it addresses besides losing weight. This got my attention and I told him that I would talk to the people from the hospital's program which I did. We asked them many questions about different procedures etc and over the next few days laying in that hospital bed I decided to go ahead and do it. After I got out of the hospital I went online to my insurance and discovered that they would not cover any kind of weight loss surgery. Needless to say this brought me back down and for a couple of days I tried to cope with the idea of being right back where I was, getting nowhere and then it struck me. I got online again and looked up the diet that people who have had the surgery follow. I had just spent the last week without food and then when I did eat it was liquids for 2 days and then I have been on soft foods since. This is what people who have had the surgery eat and I am doing that right now. So after much contemplation, I am going to attempt to be on a bariatric diet without the surgery. I think I can do this, here is to hoping I can.

School Update

So it has been over a year, but I have been attending Troy University Ecampus, that is to say, I have been going online. I decided to major in Social Science and as of last term made the chancellors list. It has been going pretty good actually. I consider it one of the best decisions I have made in the last 10 years! http://www.troy.edu/etroy/

Meal Plan

Will soon be returning to this schedule:

Breakfast:
Homemade Yogurt w/fruit
Crumpet with butter spray and fruit spread
Coffee w/splenda

Lunch:
Fruit w/cheese

Dinner:
Lean meat with fresh vegetable salsa or chutney.
Soup

High Protien, Low Fat, Reduced Carbs

Home Made Yogurt

1/2 gallon of milk
set the crock pot to low and cook for 2 1/2 hours
turn it off and let it cool for 3 hours
add a 1/2 cup plain store-bought yogurt and mix it well
wrap the crock pot with a blanket for 8 hours
I strain it in batches through coffee filters or paper towels to get the thick consistency. I also use a mixer to mix in splenda and a little vanilla.

College bound......again, well sorta.

I went and spoke to a college rep about returning to school to finish my degree. I've filled out the application and will be sending it in as soon as I get a spare $30. I have filled out my transcript request for my old school and will be faxing that off as soon as I find out the status of my application for school. I will be filling out my online paperwork for financial aid. I'm moving forward.

Today the diet goes back into full effect. Same style as when I was laid off over 5 years ago and it was very successful only I gave it up as soon as I got back at work.

Workouts at the gym start next, as soon as I figure out when and where to fit it in. But I will fit it in, even if it's just 2 days a week it's happening.

Taking it all back muther fuckers!

Two year plan aka Stuff I hate

Fake people
Being lied to
Being punished for extra effort
Children being promoted to managment
Fake friends
Two faced "friends" and coworkers
Having a job I love being managed by bare minimum people

Being fat
Having diabetes
Sleep apnea


Putting my life on hold and never getting it back off

I just signed a two year lease on my apartment. I got two years to make a change.

Here goes...