Maude has a hard time getting motivated to exercise and count calories. Snow doesn’t help. The 2020 Twenty: Entry Three.
February 15, 2021
I seem to have developed amnesia on that time I lost forty pounds.
I certainly have not cultivated the motivation I had at that time. In the days before I started this series, I had done about ninety minutes of my 150-minute cardio goal (which is just the basic recommendation for an adult). I did not meet the goal. And I definitely did not in the couple weeks following. Last week I went on a decent, but still short, bike ride with my daughter, who I’m still teaching to shift a 21-speed while I teach myself. But I finally feel that I’ve made a good acquaintance with my new bike.
Also, she has a name. It’s Esme. Because I’m apparently fond of naming my wheeled vehicles by their color lately. My semi-retired bike, Azu, was the color you might guess: blue. The “glacier blue” Honda I bought during the Frozen craze I named Elsa, with the approval of my young daughters. And now Esme, teal and lime green. (Esme is typically short for Esmeralda, which translates to “emerald”.) But you know what? They all fit.
Currently, Esme, Azu, and Elsa are all sitting on my carport partially covered in snow. Because the very unusual situation in the South today is several inches of it. When I woke up this morning, it was nine degrees.
My latitude is 32 degrees, that’s the highest I’ve ever lived, and I haven’t traveled far north either. So nine degrees Fahrenheit is a little bit of a stranger to me, as in I’ve never been in nine-degree weather in my entire life. My father, who’s lived here all his life and has a couple decades on me, has never seen this either. As you might gather, several inches of snow is also a little bit foreign. We don’t see snow every year even, so when we do get maybe two inches it’s a huge deal for every kid (and plenty adults) in the neighborhood. Often it’s the first time they’ve ever seen it. This is just crazy.
This is the doing of Winter Storm Uri. The situation has been gearing up for a few days. As the storm approached, our mild winter weather got colder and colder, and freezing precipitation got more threatening. (Before Uri even got to us, there was this 100-car pile-up in Fort Worth, Texas.) So Esme and I haven’t been out. And apparently, Uri’s being followed. Winter Storm Viola comes in a couple days. We’ll see how it goes, but unless I decide to do jumping jacks in my living room, cardio is falling lower and lower on my priority list.
In the meantime, my amnesia.
How did that go again?
In MyFitnessPal, I can study a chart of my weight gains and losses for a few years back. I think I first began using the app in 2015, when I got my prediabetes diagnosis. At that time, I was instructed to lose ten to fifteen pounds, and I lost eleven. Of course, that slowly came back. So in 2019, when I suspected, then later confirmed I was diabetic, I was twenty pounds heavier than where I started in 2015.
I started making some moves months before my diagnosis, so I’d already lost about twelve pounds when I had my blood sugar checked and found out I had Type 2. By the end of that month, I’d lost about five more. A month or so later, I’d lost eight more, gained it back after Thanksgiving, and lost it again. After that, it began falling pretty steadily. In the three months between my first A1C check and my follow-up, I’d lost sixteen pounds.
A month after my follow-up A1C, which was normal level, I’d lost another seven pounds. I was exactly thirty-six pounds lighter than the same day a year earlier. A month later, I’d lost a few more. By the end of that month, a couple more. So at shutdown time, total weight loss was forty-two pounds, and I wanted to lose just four more. I was hoping when I got there, I could stop taking blood sugar meds, enjoy myself but watch my weight, and use these methods to bring it down again if it crawled out of the range my doctor gave me. But here I am.
It’s all there on the books for me to look back on. Any one of these days, it could all come back to me.
If you’d like to become one of my fitness “pals” in the meantime, and be there when it does, you can find me here.
What do you think? I would like to hear from you, but you won’t find the typical Comments section here. If you have given the issue some thought or have an experience to share, please enter it here, or send your response to Maude@mauvereport.com. I would love to hear how the rest of America is doing with this in 2021.