Maude reaches the August goal! But can she sustain it? The 2020 Twenty: Entry Fifteen.
August 31, 2021
The Good News First
I stepped on the scale and could hardly believe my eyes. As of August 30, the first goal of the final months has been met! I have lost seven or eight pounds, which means The Big Twenty is now reduced to the Big Eleven, and that I’m now fifteen pounds from my original 2020 goal. (And it’s Shark Week too, so it may even be lower.) In other good news . . .
My A1C
It turns out I made a huge mistake! Not a very consequential one, just kind of a gaping one.
I recently relocated and reread the breakdown of my April lab results, and I found out I got my A1C completely wrong. There were a lot of numbers, of course, and I think one just stuck in my head. Unfortunately it was the wrong one, even though the A1C was the main number I was focused on. So when my new primary care doctor read my April endocrinology results at my July visit, she had it right, of course. I had it wrong.
The good news about that is, that means my April result was only in prediabetic range, and not Type 2, where I thought it was for the last few months. It was quite a bit higher than the check before (which was now a whole year ago). It was on the cusp. So I still got my medication doubled. And that remains the same. Hopefully it’s helping. I don’t know yet though, because I still haven’t found out my July results! But it’s nice to know we’re trying to pull down prediabetes and not Type 2. It’s nice to still be able to say I haven’t returned to that threshold, even though the motivation hasn’t hurt.
However . . .
I can’t say the month’s weight loss is due to healthy habits. I have most likely surpassed the six-pound bump for two reasons.
The first one is, I started my new job. I am officially teaching elementary school, a first-year teacher in my forties. I have not yet found my rhythm on that, and by rhythm I mean my method for getting all my work done in fewer than fifty (or sixty) hours a week. In my first week, which is always the hardest no matter how long you’ve been doing it, I ran myself almost to oblivion, sleeping too little and eating less. I survived, but clearly that isn’t a model I can sustain. While I generally do better with diet discipline when I’m working, the discipline must hold that I do actually eat, especially considering my blood sugar situation.
The second reason is, I live in the South, and without a mask mandate in place in my district (a situation that has since been remedied), I managed to catch COVID somewhere in that first week of school. I came home the first day of Week Two with a cough, a sore throat, and a feeling of feverish foreboding. When I ran a fever from that evening into the next morning, I called in, kept the kids home, and went to find a test. After extensive searching, I was able to find a home antigen test and an appointment for a lab test the next day. Both came up positive, and a second home test over the weekend also came up positive, even though the symptoms had mostly gone away by then. I am currently waiting for the results of a second lab test; either that or time will release me back into the wild. But as it stands, this first-year teacher has mostly lost the second and third weeks of the school year. Not ideal.
Fortunately, I am vaccinated, so other than losing a week of my work and my life, COVID has mostly just meant “mild symptoms”. I ran fever for a good couple of days. I had a couple days that were like a bad cold or the flu. I isolated. I still seem to have a lingering sense of general ickiness at times. And for the time being, I have no sense of smell. None of that has been awesome, but most of my complaint and frustration at this point is with the major disruption of my life and the tough recovery I have ahead just from that. But also, my youngest child, ineligible for the vaccine, caught a two-day fever of her own, so I’m pretty sure she was infected. (We’ll also be waiting on her results.) Fortunately, she hasn’t shown any other symptoms but a little congestion. So it will probably end up as just major life disruption for all of us. Another piece of the COVID cost paid by a family who’s done everything in their power to avoid exactly this. As soon as I can get my child vaccinated, I will. But who knows if we’ll stay safe from more “breakthrough” in the future? I’ll be back to work regardless.
So, one week running ragged, and one week sick and languishing around the house. I can’t keep that up. But I hope I can take it from here, count the weight loss as a blessing, and get back into healthy diet, sleep, and exercise in the next few days. I’m wondering if I can shave off that eleven by the end of September.
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.