I’ve been away from the scale for a while. I’ve avoided it because I’ve cheated. I drank a bottle of wine with my dinner the other night and it sure didn’t help me out any. In the last seven days, I have continued to lose weight. It’s slower than I’d like, but it’s still on a downward trend. It’s my behaviors that have slowed it down. I’m finding it emotionally difficult to fight cravings. Salt is the biggest craving I have. On Paleo we eliminated adding any salt.
We also don’t eat canned goods or anything that has salt on the ingredient list. I’ve never used a lot of salt, at least not to my way of thinking. I remember my grandparents and aunts and uncles eating it, a lot of it. I didn’t like the amounts they used and I don’t think I use anywhere near the amounts they did. This past weekend my mother reminded of why salt became so important to her generation. Iodine. She asked me where we get our iodine from in our diet without salt.
The answer I gave about where we get our iodine, was only partially correct, I said “the vegetables we eat”. In truth, after some research, I find that most of my iodine must have been coming from dairy, which is the food group I miss most of all. Cheeses of all types, cheddar, swiss, mozzarella, Colby-Jack, Muenster, Havarti, Romano, Parmesan, goat cheese, and I love buttermilk, sour cream, cottage cheese, cream sauces and cheese sauces, cream cheese and of course smoked Gouda. I also love and miss bread of many types along with pasta. I can’t have corn or grains of any kind and that means no chips and dips, no enchiladas, quesadillas, tacos or burritos, no beans or rice. I can’t have pizza or make homemade pasta anymore or garlic bread. Mix that all together and you have the basis of many Italian and Mexican dishes that I love but can’t risk, anymore.
If I make my goal of reaching my prime weight of 155 pounds by January 3rd next year, then I’ll be confident I can eat those foods again, at least in a limited volume. When I was in my 20’s and early thirties. I ate what I wanted when I wanted until I quit smoking. Since I replaced nicotine with food, I’m now having to replace food with discipline. I really wish I’d learned that lesson when I quit smoking, but there isn’t really a way I could have learned that. It wasn’t discipline, it was emotional along with a physical withdrawal.
A few years after I’d gain the weight, my doctor put me on Paxil to treat my ADHD. At the time the AMA was following the Amercian Psychiatric Associations unfounded determination that ADHD was nothing more than an anxiety disorder that could be treated with Paxil, Welbutrin, and other anti-anxiety medications. The problem was, anxiety is a symptom of ADHD, not the cause. Anyone with ADHD could have told them that, but I digress. I took Paxil for almost a year and was up to 30mg per day when I had an incident that that left my wife afraid and me very worried about my psyche. I decided to quit Paxil immediately. They said it wasn’t habit forming, yet when I quit cold turkey, I went through the worst 6 weeks of my life. I was already easily a raving lunatic on Paxil, bursting into fits of rage without any reason. But, for six weeks I was in pain and couldn’t think straight. I wanted to kill myself many times during that period. I decided to quit just before Thanksgiving and that made the holidays anything but cheerful and bright. I learned was withdrawal is. It’s not pleasant. If Paxil isn’t addictive, I’d be terrified to go through DT’s with a drug that is. But that’s what I had done with nicotine, only I used food was my Methadone.
Hopefully, I’ll hang on and avoid falling into the trap of giving in or giving up on myself and hold out until I’m thin again. I have to keep reminding myself that I want to front a band again. I want to confidently wear swim trunks without a shirt. I want to feel better and I want to get fit enough to run a marathon. I look at what Eddie Izzard did, running 43 marathons in 51 days, and he did 27 of them in 27 consecutive days. That’s fit from fat and I want that. I can’t imagine much else that would create more self-discipline than that. Below are today’s (yesterday’s considering the time), weigh-in results.
CURRENT PROGRESS: 9.2 lbs. lost in 22 days.
Projected weight loss over 180 days = 75.27 lbs.
Starting weight on July 5, 2017, was 281.2:
Day Twenty two: July 27, 2017 – This morning’s Weigh-in was 272.0 lbs, that is a loss of 3.2 lbs since July 20.
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