Monthly Archives: December 2023

Brief Christmas musing…

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In the post-plague era, it feels like some of the old traditions have fallen away. In fact, since 2019, I’ve only been home on Christmas Day two out of the last four years – either avoiding the illness of others or not wanting to spread my own across the state. 

I made it home for 2023, though. Still not feeling at the top of my game, but at least I can’t blame this one on the Great Plague. So we muddle through, enjoy some rare true down time, worrying that what the cats are up to in my absence, hoping that the dog doesn’t demolish my childhood home, and hitting most of the usual high points – even if doing it with less vim and vigor than I’d like.

It’s always good to be home, sleeping in my old room, and at least for a few hours not finding myself completely tied to day-to-day normal. That will start again soon with the drive back out of the mountains towards the shore. 

For the moment, though, I’ll soak it in – all the more aware of how fragile and fleeting can be these days.

To those of you reading along, I wish each and every one a very happy Christmas. I hope you got exactly what you wanted.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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In the best spirit of the Christmas season, I feel like I should throw out something that doesn’t annoy me this week first. That’s the fact that today marks the Winter solstice for 2023. We’ll now begin seeing incrementally more daylight each day. If that’s not cause for celebration, I don’t know what is.

However, it wouldn’t be Thursday if there weren’t at least a few items to call out as annoyances for the week. As my ultra-long Christmas weekend is now underway, though, I’ve shaved it down to two instead of the normal three and present them to you in no particular order.

1. Calculations. I usually do a reasonably good job at calculating how much leave I have to “use or lose” at the end of the calendar year. I base all of my other leave planning around needing 64 hours to cover the week of Christmas and the week of New Year. The fancy pants automated leave tracker, though, is telling me I’ve unexpectedly miscalculated by approximately 10 and one half hours. If it’s right, it means I could be leaving more than a day’s vacation on the table. If I’m right, it means my use or lose balance for next year will be 10+ hours short. I think I’m right… but not with enough conviction to take a risk of losing vacation time. So I guess my vacation is starting mid-afternoon Thursday instead of at close of business Friday. That part isn’t actually annoying, but having such a large variance in my normally precise end-of-year calculation is, at a minimum, perplexing.

2. One more thing. I’ll never understand the mad rush of some people at this time of year to get just one more thing done before turning out the lights for the year. As I’m plodding through the week, I couldn’t help but notice that there are at least seven separate actions sitting in our tracking database with deadlines between Christmas and New Years. Someone at echelons higher than reality actually looked at those things and thought, “Yup, we absolutely have to have an answer on these absolute nothings before the dawn of 2024.” That’s just the stuff that people have bothered putting in the “official” tracker. The week will be replete with unofficial asks as well. Look, if it’s something involving a hazard to life and property, sure, the holidays are just another few days of the year… but if it’s just standard requests for information, maybe stow it for a week or two until someone might actually give a shit. Otherwise you’ll get what you get… and I promise you it won’t be much.

Simple concept, challenging execution…

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On June 28th I had an epiphany. Maybe a lot of people do when they find themselves laying on a gurney in their local emergency department waiting for tests to reveal if they’ve had a heart attack. The tests, fortunately, didn’t reveal anything immediately catastrophic, but that didn’t do much to change the simple fact that I felt awful and it was categorically impossible to keep plodding along as usual with all the warning lights that were being flashed for me. 

So, I did what any reasonable person would do… I slashed salt, downloaded apps, poured over internet discussion boards, and scheduled appointments with any doctor I could think of that might help get to the root cause of why I was feeling so badly… and more importantly why my heart occasionally decided to make a big show of trying to thunder out of my chest. Months of tests, scans, consultations still haven’t definitively what was going on with me through the summer of 2023. They keep poking at it, though, so maybe we’ll find out at some point… though as my symptoms have diminished, I’m less optimistic that will happen unless they reemerge and can be captured on one of their fancy tests or scans. If I’m honest, the part of me that things better out of sight and out of mind is winning out over the part of me that wants conclusive answers.

One of the deals I made with myself laying in the ED back in June was that I would finally head the medical advice I’d been getting for as long as I could remember. I couldn’t control the test results or the lack of official diagnosis of what was happening, but I could, in theory, control my weight. It had to come off and it had to happen in a significant way. As someone who’s life is almost defined by being a dedicated creature of habit, it would be arguably one of the hardest goals I’ve ever set for myself… and one I was being drug too unwillingly by my own traitorous body. 

July 1st I weighed in at 330 pounds. Not knowing a damned thing about weigh loss, I set an arbitrary goal of making it down to 250 by the end of the year. Eighty pounds. Six months. I had no idea if it was doable, or even if my own brain would let me stick with something I hated with a passion for that long. 

I downloaded the LoseIt app, plugged in my vital statistics, and told it I wanted to lose 1.5 pounds a week. It spit out how many calories I should be eating each day… and that’s when I realized I had no idea how to effectively measure food. After that it’s been all weights and measures before anything gets on my plate. If you ever want to take the romance out of food, definitely weigh it all up first.

If June 28th was my epiphany, buying that damned kitchen scale was a light bulb moment. I’d been protesting for years that I wasn’t eating absurd amounts of food. That’s objectively true. What I was eating, however, was incredibly calorically dense. A proper 400 calorie “serving” of lasagna is preposterously small. Same with anything involving cheese, really. Once I accepted the scale, though, things started happening. Yes, I was ravenously hungry all day every day, but the weight came off at a rate closer to 2.5 pounds a week than my planned 1.5. Chalk that up to the limited additional exercise I was willing to program into the day’s limited hours. 

Two months along, I discovered I wasn’t ravenous anymore. I was hungry for sure, but felt decidedly less likely to chew my own hand off. That’s about the time the anxiety I mentioned in last week’s post started to make its presence known. After that it was pretty much a war between my own stubborn determination to lose weight and my brain screaming that something was wrong. We seem, for the moment at least, to have concluded that particular war. I’m particularly grateful to that particulate respite.

What have I learned? Well, for me, losing the first tranche of weight was simple – radically decrease the number of calories going in while moderately increasing the number of calories burned. Calories in, Calories out as the people in the forums are fond of saying. The catch is, although the theory is simple, not a single part of it is easy. Learning about calories, how to measure them, abandoning long cherished menu items, learning to cook new recipes in an entirely different style, and sometimes being hungry all day no matter how well planned your meals are is hard. It’s damned hard. Every step of it is a goddamned fist fight with yourself. 

This how I sum up my experience so far… it’s an incredibly simple concept, but wildly challenging in execution.

I don’t think this process have given me any special insight. I still don’t know dick about losing weight. I don’t know much about macros or the fancy concepts of nutrition. I’m just a guy over here using an app and a scale to try to keep everything the experts say you need in between the lower and upper limits. Some days that works better than others. 

Anyway, I hit my mark of losing 80 pounds two weeks early. I’m still losing – down to 248.6 as of this morning. All the charts say at my height, I should “ideally” weigh in at 185 pounds. Frankly that sounds unreasonable. The chance of me hitting a weight I haven’t seen since high school at the latest doesn’t feel like something that’s achievable. Now 220 or 225, something that puts me in the range of being merely overweight instead of obese, does seem that could be within reach.

I’m plugging in my next goal as hitting 225 before June.

We’ll see how it goes.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Plumbing. My well’s pressure tank has had a slow drip for 18 months now. It’s one of those projects that I knew needed to be taken care of, but there was always something more pressing. Every couple of weeks I’d go down and empty the coffee can that was sufficient to contain the waters. A couple of times recently I found my coffee can full to running over after just a week. Since it’s the kind of thing that feels like it would inevitably let go during Christmas and facilitate a real crisis, I finally called out my usual plumbing outfit to make the fix – the ones who are good and fast, but absolutely not cheap. The thing about home ownership that no one tells you is that it feels like 90% spending money on stuff that’s entirely essential, but in no way is a joy to purchase. Anyway, I’ve got a brand new obscenely expensive pressure tank and associated couplings installed now so I guess that’s my Christmas present to myself.

2. Slack time. It’s not that I hate having slack time. Not really. Slack time through the week is very welcome, mostly. On telework days, there’s always more than enough alternatives to keep my attention until the next Thing To Do shows up in my inbox. When it falls on an “in office” day, though, it does make the time stuck in fluorescent hell drag on indefinitely. I suppose slack is just an occupational hazard this time of year… and with only two office days between now and the end of the year, the annual hazard will fix itself before long. Until then, I suppose the trick remains to look busy enough to avoid falling victim to anyone walking around with end-of-the-calendar-year good ideas.

3. Slowly unwinding. I know I should be happy it seems to be working, but I’m absolutely tired of the pace at which the anxiety causing metformin is slowly working its way out of my system. Six full days from my last dose and I continue to feel slightly less prone to panic as each of those days slips past. That’s not to say that there aren’t still a few bad minutes and hours in the mix. Still, we seem to have crossed some kind of threshold where there’s more good than bad… and that hasn’t been true in a number of weeks. You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I’m just a bit put out that it wasn’t the instantaneous relief I really would have liked to receive.

A tale about health, both mental and physical…

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For years, I listened to every medical professional I met tell me that I’d feel much better if I lost weight. Over the last six months, as you know if you’ve been following along, I’ve finally been following their advice. I’ve been following the very broadly defined advice of “eat less, move more.” In my case, that equated to about 30 minutes of pretty mild exercise – walking or time on the stationary bike – and a pretty fanatical devotion to tracking calories. Since July, I’ve been consistently losing right around 1% of my body weight every week.

Even as I’ve closed in on my initial goal of losing 80 pounds, I can’t say I felt better. Sure, I was a bit more flexible and found that taking the stairs wasn’t hell on my knees, but I felt increasingly awful. In fact, the more I lost, the worse I felt – physically and mentally. 

For the last six weeks, I felt like someone who was definitely not me. My head was in a constant fog, I was struggling to regulate my emotions, and was spending most days in a constant basket of worry and anxiety about everything and nothing. Even my blood pressure, which has been wonderfully controlled for months started to creep up past the “elevated” level towards hypertension. My primary care doctor preliminarily identified the problem as anxiety stemming from my cardiac health scare in June and July. He gave be a very small prescription for Xanax in hopes that would get me over the hump for the worse of the anxiety. I took it, but didn’t notice any difference at all. 

Last week, after a very tough weekend, I finally made an appointment with a behavioral health professional – a therapist – convinced that there had to be something going wrong with my head. My big beautiful brain has always been what I consider the natural gift I got – it certainly wasn’t athletic ability or good looks. Something messing with my brain has always been my nightmare scenario. 

In any case, the therapist I consulted with gave a preliminary diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder and instructed me to get back with my general practitioner to discuss options for going on anti-depression medication. I wasn’t thrilled, but honestly by this point was pretty desperate to get some relief and get my thinking back under control. Fortunately, I was able to get an appointment the next morning to talk with my doctor. 

We met for almost 45 minutes Friday morning while I described all my symptoms and he asked some probing and uncomfortable questions. A few in office blood tests later, we had ruled out a lot of physical possibilities and we’re closing in on saying yes, my brain was sick… or at least we were until I mentioned how disappointed I was with my weight loss as it seemed the more weight I lost the worse I felt. 

That sentence seemed to hit the doc like someone throwing a light switch. After consulting my chart again and reviewing the bloodwork results, he noted that “You’re still taking metformin…” He went on to explain that in some case, dramatic weight loss can actually send diabetes into a form of “remission,” meaning that it was entirely possible that we were treating for a disease that was no longer trying to kill me on a cellular level. Even though my home testing had never caught any evidence of classically low blood sugar, he speculated that the medication was, in fact, causing my system to mimic the body’s natural response to low blood sugar – releasing stress hormones among other things. It’s possible, he seemed to think, that I was experiencing a form of pseudo-hypoglycemia rather than a true mental health problem. He instructed me to immediately stop taking the metformin and see if that resolved the issues over the next week or so.

Today is my 3rd full day of not taking meds for diabetes in a very long time. I’m keeping a pretty close eye on my numbers, but my head is definitely clearer and I’m feeling much more like myself. I don’t want to call it a comeback just yet, but I’d dearly like to believe the answer to two months of increasingly feeling off kilter is as simple as not taking four little white pills. 

That’s a long way of saying that I have a new appreciation for just how important it is to be your own most forceful health advocate. To our collective detriment there’s still a stigma attached to seeking mental health treatment. There shouldn’t be. The brain is just another organ capable of misfunctioning. Getting help for it is no more problematic than seeking out a cardiologist for heart troubles. Without taking to a therapist, it’s hard to say how long I’d have just stayed mired down in a bad place. If you don’t take anything else from this screed, take this as encouragement that if you need help or need to talk to someone, go do it.

Anyone who thinks less of you for it can fuck directly off.

Feel free to tell them I said it. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Decaf. I miss proper coffee. Even though I was reduced to drinking it black, I still miss the periodic jolt of hot caffeine. Decaf and the various herbal teas I’m using as a substitute just don’t get it done. It might be a tolerable sacrifice if giving it up were accomplishing anything towards reducing symptoms. So far, though, the only difference I notice is being more irritable and far more jumpy than usual, which feels like moving directly in the wrong direction.

2. Campaign season. With the Iowa caucuses coming up, we’re deep into campaign season for the 2024 presidential election. As much as I used to revel in it, I wish there was some kind of app that would just block any kind of political add or reporting so I could skip it. There’s not a single thing that any of those blowhards are saying that’s going to fundamentally change my political opinions or influence who I vote for… beyond possibly ensuring that they become someone for whom I’ll never cast a vote even in extrmis. It’s hard to point out any current politician who isn’t just talking for the love of hearing his or her own voice. I have increasingly little tolerance for any of their performances.

3. Snow. Yes, I know it’s December. As I’m sitting here snug in my home office with the curtains pulled aside to give a delightfully peaceful view of my backyard woods, I’m greeted with what is effectively the first snowfall here on the homestead. It’s not going to amount to anything. It makes an objectively pretty scene with the contrast of browns, greens, and birds flitting about the yard… nevertheless, it falls firmly into the category of “do not want.” Snow was once a harbinger of an extra day off, but the convenience of telework mostly made that concept obsolete… so now snow is just confirmation that winter is not just coming, but that it has arrived.  

Of McRib and self-denial…

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In my mind I’m sure that “diet” will always be among the most unpleasant 4-letter words in the English language. Over the last five months, though, I’ve learned a lot by tracking every bite and morsel that’s found its way into my mouth. Calories, macronutrients, I’ve plugged them all into my fancy little nanny app after giving everything a proper weigh and measure. It’s certainly changed how I view a “serving” size… some for the better, but most for the worse. 

The most important thing I’ve learned in tracking everything, however, is that over time I’m found ways to continue eating a fair number of foods I enjoy. Not all of them, of course – a Chipotle burrito and a big slice of my home-made lasagna remain well out of bounds – but I’ve been able to start re-introducing some old favorites. 

For instance, I found that if I scale back hard on breakfast and lighten up a bit on dinner, I can manage to cram in a McRib value meal for lunch.

I know that doesn’t exactly sound like an accomplishment for some people. Hell, the European Union probably doesn’t even consider it food… but I’ve loved the damned thing since I was working the grill at my local McDonald’s way back in the late 1900s. Its arrival each fall is something of a minor personal celebration here.

Yes, the sandwich and fries are a touch high in calories and saturated fat, but not prohibitively so if I tweak the rest of the day’s menu. In my mind at least it’s something well worth doing if only as a reminder that at some point I’ll again exist in world of food beyond variations on baked chicken and brown rice. Sadly, I’ve had to replace the Orange Drink with a Diet Coke. I haven’t yet come up with an acceptable way to offset the calories in a fully loaded soda yet… but it’s a compromise I’m willing to make if it means I get to enjoy the rest.

I wish I could say this process has been some kind of life changing, electrifying wonder experience. The reality is, though, even as I begin slowly adding back foods with flavor, it’s been mostly drudgery. Necessary and probably long overdue drudgery, but none the less, not an experience I’ll spend a lot of time remembering fondly. 

I’ve still got miles to go as the poet said, but I’ve suffered though much longer than I figured I’d stick with it. The real question now that I’ve passed well beyond the halfway mark is how much longer I’ll manage to stick with fairly rigid self-denial. It’s not an activity I’ve ever been particularly well suited for and one that still feels decidedly unnatural.