that cheerful Howdy! hasta stop

I forgot to get the good pic again, but remembered to grab one coming back thru on my way home this time. The other side says Partridge Family. Also noticed this time it's for sale. Don't know if you can read that, maybe next week I'll get a better pic.

And I felt bad for not doing the neighbor's squash blossoms justice last week, so here's a better shot.

I have done my planning, my shopping, and yesterday initiated my original paleo / South Beach / Rosedale health plan combo diet. The only thing I purchased with Rosedale was the book (used, spent under $2), didn't buy anything else or take any supplements, and the rest I just studied online and did on my own.

Back around 2009 I had become desperate and bent my mind around putting together my own health care team. By 2011 I was cleaning off years of medications and lost 50 pounds in 4 months, but it took a lot of research on how diabetes actually works, how 'nutrition' is skewed into the wrong foods by big companies, how to survive without medications by actually paying attention to what I put into my own mouth. It's work paying attention and keeping track, but it's very easy with all the mandatory food labeling we have nowadays.

This is my public trail through healing.

pill phobia at its finest - coming out of the stupor of medication addictions, poor medication management, over prescribing

my problem with healthy food - challenging the healthy grains concept

Holidays With Diabetes- Easier than you think - An easy way to understand what the holidays do to diabetics

Diabetes and Steroid Meds - Surviving steroid treatment for other chronic illnesses and allergic reactions while maintaining control with diabetes

I've come a very long way since I wrote those articles. I've slipped off my own path a bit, regained a little weight, backslid into pain complications and medication problems, and now I'm very tired of 2017 dragging on like this. Time to get my control back.

Because I keep after continual physical therapies throughout the year, I am still not only maintaining function around my home, but keeping up with far more activity than I ever dreamed I could do. I still can't get on my knees at all without destroying them and have almost continual pain somewhere in my body during everything I do, including reclining and sitting, but it's manageable. However, I've lost my grip on that manageable part a few times this year, and I want it back. Part of losing that grip is because I'm slipping on my nutrition planning, and it doesn't take much for the diabetic headaches and slower healing and stomach problems and nerve pain to pop back in my door with a cheerful Howdy!

It's too easy to grab quick and starchy bites on the run because I have high energy young people in my house now. I must menu plan for MYSELF and stick to it. I work around food allergies, so I heavily depend on dairy for proteins, but some dairy has lactose and lately my glucose spiking is worse on lactose because of my new blood pressure pill. So, I bought an extra dozen eggs this week and boiled them up. One boiled egg a day will replace my second cup of coffee with creamer (canned milk).

I also bought bacon. Bacon gets a really bad rap when it's actually much better for you than cookies and cake and pie and spaghetti, especially when you're diabetic. It's easy to cook up a package of bacon and then keep it on hand in the fridge. When others grab a cupcake, I can grab a piece or two of bacon, and later I can use the bacon drippings to cook up a big load of pan roasted brussels sprouts, which are even more awesome with aged balsamic and grated parm.

Guys, I lost 50 pounds in 4 months one year without even trying just doing THAT and stopping when I reached 1500 calories. I could nibble all day and still dropped 5 bowling balls off. It never really hits home how much we carry around until you pick up a bowling ball and go wow, that was IN ME.

Anyway, I reached a point in 2011 where I felt like a skinny fat person, which was really fun for new clothes (got down to an 18), and I would really like to go past that now. I've been in size 20 jeans for awhile and if I'm going to be having difficulty with pain and possible falling (the klutz is becoming strong again), I'd like to be easier for others to help getting back up, knowhutImean? So I bought butter and bacon and eggs and cheese and brussels sprouts and broccoli and lettuce (I love lettuce wraps around chicken tenders!) and stuff like that, and let's see how the rest of the year goes.

I've been hovering just above 200 pounds for months, I wanna break through that. Can I do it? I've never lost weight on gabapentin before, plus I'm back on low dose xanax and still on daily zyrtec. In 2011 I was NOT on meds bossing my weight/water retention around, because I had spent 3 years cleaning off most of my meds and got into physical therapy. We'll see what happens. I do know that I gained weight this year on baclofen and higher doses of gabapentin, so the baclofen is gone and the gabapentin is back on very minimal pain control.

I. Want. This.

click for more fall gifs

number crunching, er, flabbing

I was plowing through another old stack of stuff, grinding away on the shredder and getting ready to move a little piece of furniture when I ran into some old measurements from 2012 after I lost that 50 pounds in 2011. I have since gained back 20 of those pounds, and this is the impact of 20 pounds.

• Thigh- gained an inch around (ug)
• arm- gained an inch around (ok, so I'm an inch bigger all over)
• waist- gained 3 inches around (WHAT)
• stomach- gained 4 inches around (no... this can't be right)
• hips/butt- gained 4 1/2 inches around (facepalm)

That is 20 pounds of pure fight against sometimes twice yearly prednisone and this latest stupid gabapentin thing that screwed my diabetes to the moon and I'm still grappling that fasting glucose down to at least the high 90s 3 months later.

This has been my hardest year for diet and exercise since 2011, even though my blood work is super healthy, my diet is awesome, I'm finally sleeping the way doctors want me to, and I'm very controlled on nearly everything with as little medication as possible. Well, that's not entirely accurate. 2012 sucked quite a bit because I was still dragging to gym with so much challenge that I could barely handle nustep and basic lower core. But I was skinnier. Well, fat skinnier.

This is unacceptable.

April is always hard, so focus has to stay on controlling allergies. I've already cut out cheese, fish, and corn (I already ate very little corn anyway, because diabetic) because high histamine foods. I'm itching all over this morning for whatever unknown reason, and all I can do is keep taking antihistamines and avoid histamine triggers trying to stay off pred. Breathing is first priority, cardiac under stress is second, and everything I do is about avoiding developing congestive heart problems as I age through super spoonie challenges.

I've been around nursing homes and hospitals through other people's stuff enough to know that how much I weigh when I crash will be how difficult it is to care for me, help me move, keep my circulation healthy, avoid pneumonia complications, etc. I know I'm too young to even be thinking like this, but since I've already had my foot nearly in that door, I want to be more in control of how I finally do go in that door.

I lost the equivalent of a 50 pound bag of dog food, or 5 10-pound bowling balls. I've got 2 of those bowling balls back. I don't want them. Even if I'm in less pain and better health, this is still unacceptable. It's a quick slide back down a very slippery slope if I'm not careful.

As much as I loathe this part, I'm going to have to just start actual counting calories again. The first time around, it was simple. No special plans, no exercise, just stop eating after I hit 1500. That's all it took. 50 pounds melted off in 4 months with nothing more than that. I had incentive back then because my health was scary dismal and my food allergies became frightening, so now I'm looking for a new kind of incentive. I've got 3 other people in my house eating whatever they want, and one of them being 3 years old doesn't help. I'm not able to trick myself into believing I earn anything for achieving a goal like this (my biggest incentive has always been food, alas), and I don't have enough self awareness to really care what other people think of me in general, so it really is up to me to just own wanting this. So what do I cut out when I've already cut so much out that all I get for a treat is an ounce of chocolate chips...?

Looking at you, third cup of coffee with evap milk in you...

I'm feeling mean, so here's the most annoying Benny vid I've ever seen.



:edit: I found this.
The Ideal Weight and Body Fat Percentage for a 5' 4" Female

I'm going to shoot for that.

Jawn being strip searched just for using blogger

1 tbsp of my favorite chocolate chips has 70 calories. How many chips are in 1 tbsp??? And is that an ounce, or what?

Finally found an answer, from A Comprehensive Guide to Chocolate Conversions, Substitutions and Equivalents- "1 ounce semi-sweet chocolate (chips or square) = 3 tablespoons semi-sweet chocolate chips (or, 54 individual chips) - 1 ounce semi-sweet baking (chips or square) = 3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder + 3 tablespoons sugar + 1 tablespoon butter, margarine or shortening"

And that's my foil in this calorie counting thing. I added roughly 210 calories before I went to bed last night. I've decided after this bag of chips is empty, NO MOAR.

The biggest challenges I'm running into with Windows 10 is that it runs more like mobile, and I'm having to cave to dowloading apps for things I normally pull up in search or have saved to desktop shortcuts. Jawn regularly gets into fights with Chrome and Facebook because W10 keeps making it difficult to interface them with my built in programs already running. I have no idea if I'll wind up having to allow Kaspersky to be the boss about how these apps will open once I have them loaded. All I know is that I better be as protected from the world as I am myself, because I can barely move on my own laptop without stringent profiling and interrogation.

STEP OUT OF THE KEYBOARD! What? SHOW ME YOUR ID! It's me, this is my computer. THAT WASN'T THE CORRECT PASSWORD, TRY AGAIN! But I'm already logged in... YOU CAN'T PROCEED WITHOUT AN SMS CODE. Seriously? I was *just working* there.

And then some of the sites start fighting back, because if it's going to be this way, forget playing nice, and they just fold their arms and legs and sit around the table with their noses in the air not cooperating. My pictures folder is getting really tired of being held hostage in corporate takeovers.

I *think* I just downloaded the Facebook app for Windows 10. Suddenly it was all instantaneous and not laborious at all, but I never got a confirmation that happened. We'll see how it goes.

this meme strangely links to all this in google search
(just scroll down)

Ok, things going on and what in the world am I doing with any kind of Plan?

• I need 3 more dimes and 3 more pennies to make rolls. My monthly change haul is already nearly $40.
• I have a beautiful new orange 32 GB Cruzer Glide to load junk over to once I'm done with stuff. Nope, still haven't found all my other flash drives. Yep, actually been excavating.
• I'm really in an orange mood lately, I think it's because I'm ready for autumn. Did you see the size of those webs I posted to twitter? And they're just getting started. I live in Mirkwood.
• I am actually working on real work. I know you guys laugh.
• I've started a giant platform on MoCreatures. Lest any of ye protest that I'm on minecraft too much, my multiplayer was down for nearly 2 weeks, so nyahnyah. And 45 minutes working on a platform isn't being on minecraft all the time. Anyway, I had this idea for a cool scifi story years ago, and I'm actually building what it would look like (kinda). Anyway, the platform will be really big, like raising a town up on stilts. Underneath the platform is already very dangerous for really excellent bad guy spawns. I was killed by werewolves from hell yesterday, they set me on fire and everything, which is perfect because there is a nasty underground thing going on in my story. Up top I want to build with very expensive blocks, so I might need to extend town protection or something before I start on the buildings. It'll be like a swanky shopping plaza with a tram system, and since it's next to my evil lair, the tram will naturally run partially underneath the platform for a scary good time. This could possibly take months...

In other news, @bonenado has been checking out a cricket powered bugracer for Bunny (cricket not included, lol). No idea yet if we'll actually get it.

Massive software update came through on my phone, took forever, so I just shut down and went back to bed. Waking up a second time and no coffee is a bummer, threw my whole morning off, so even though I'm dressed and functional, I feel out of kilter and weird, like I didn't do it right.

Here is the hair regrowth I brought up a few days ago. See that little piece sticking out in the ponytail? It's not break off or from being cut. I regularly regrow patches like chickens do (many chicken breeds will partial molt year round like wild birds), which is actually a really good sign after all the crap I've been through. I'm back on more meds now, so I'll be watching this like a hawk. I've seen loads of forums of people complaining about hair loss after med changes. I still think it's related to diabetes and not getting enough protein, like the body has to prioritize what's more important for protein allocation when the diet is too carby in a dsyfunctional metabolism. All it takes is a med change to throw a fluid balance off and there you go, a cascade of systems readjusting, starting with liver and kidneys because they're the ones that filter the meds. The healthier you can keep your liver and kidneys, the more protein you'll have left for hair growth. Doctors don't have time to asplain this stuff, nutritionists aren't certified to actually say it like this, nurses are simply just run to half to death, and the 'official' diabetes groups are being funded by people who don't want you to know this (seriously- American Diabetes Association receives millions each year from junk food companies, candy manufacturers and pharmaceutical firms). When I was my sickest and most immobile, I was on handfuls of meds and my diet was atrocious. Pills don't save you from a junky diet. They only give you a sense of controlling the downhill slide by slowing it down a little bit.

"The ADA's advice to diabetics is that they can keep eating all the ice cream, sweets and soft drinks they want, as long as they control their blood sugar with pharmaceuticals," Adams said. "It's medically absurd. Diabetics need to eliminate liquid sugars and refined carbohydrates from their diets for life, and in doing so, many of them would find their diabetes disappearing."

I have never bought that guy's book, but I did my own research and figured it out myself, and then almost literally came back from the dead, as it were. You can read more about his approach here. Not being paid to link that.

I think the most important part of this is that patients are told they are 'borderline' when they are already very sick. My ketones were noted 3 years before my diagnosis. The borderline level is (likely, in my opinion) set by pharmaceutical companies, because the second you hit that 126 and cross into diagnosis, you get meds, and by then it's too late, the meds don't keep it from progressing. You just simply live in a controlled state the rest of your life as you slide downhill into old age. They compound it with advocating a very high amount of carbs as being part of a healthy diet in a body that can't properly process carbs, and that keeps you on meds so it won't kill you outright. Carbs are really big business. Think about it sometime.

Some of us are very lucky and don't tolerate meds. Some of us are forced to get healthy on our own if we want to live badly enough. My health was so bad that I couldn't walk through a store or even get in and out of a shower by myself. Diabetes was taking me down hard and fast, and there was only one way to save myself- stop consuming stuff my body can't digest properly. No more sweet tea, no more big breakfasts full of pancakes and waffles and french toast, no more giant servings of rice and potatoes and pasta in restaurants, no more cake and ice cream and pie on holidays. No. More. Cookies. Yes, it's very hard. If you have diabetes (borderline or full blown) or even insulin resistance, your body thinks it needs sweets because the sweet-o-meter is broken (starches count for sweets in the body, you'll crave bread, too), and every two hours that alarm goes off screaming we need carbs or we'll die, and you really can't help it, you've gotta do something or go crazy. The ONLY way to turn that off is to stop the cycle. Proteins and healthy fats, leafy and cruciferous veg, berries and nuts, foods low in starches and sugars. I lost 50 pounds in 4 months barely even trying, and then I felt so much better that I started exercising. I regained my abilities for self care at home and shopping for myself around town. It was wonderful getting those back.

Not everyone loses a leg or goes blind before diabetes kills them. My mom died from lots and lots of strokes, and on the outside you couldn't tell she was diabetic. She got skinny for awhile, seemed to have lots of energy, and didn't look unhealthy for a woman her age. At home we knew she suffered- her feet were going numb, it was getting harder and harder for her to walk to the mailbox because she'd be out of breath and fatigued, and she finally started losing her strength as muscles started wasting. You don't have to be fat to have diabetes.

Sorry this turned into a big long thing. I know it seems like I embellish a bit when I mention once in awhile fighting to live every day, but with all the stuff I've got stacked up on me, I'm fortunate to still be here, and I'll be very fortunate to make it as long as my mom did. I'm doing everything I can every single day to reach that goal.

I really need to let go of the chocolate chips...

And I really need to get off this post and get moving around.

something dumb to do

Please note- My automated personal luck of Hyrule pronouncement happened seconds before I died.

"May cause weird dreams." No, it's causing fantastic dreams, but the problem is waking up every other minute and that's how I know. I'm sure it's more a combo of pain level and another med withdrawal than anything, but I'm fond of side effects lists. I'd make them more fun to read.

Day 2 of skipping half of one of my BP med doses. So far so good.

Full blown fibro flare confirmed yesterday in physical therapy, and we're talking skull to tailbone and quite the number of referred pain issues. Not even going to bring up the charley horses, but yes, I'm all over the warmed up stretches. I've also already dropped a pound since I saw my doctor Tuesday, yay!

So I'm hungry, in pain, and in a really great mood for some reason this morning. I hope it lasts, because the last few days have been pretty glum and a couple of people nearly got phone calls, but I think I'm good now.

Let's see what youtube is suggesting today. Wo, ok, I just saved you guys from at least a dozen pretty off the wall mood swings in several fandoms and genres. Gonna settle for this one today. Easy on the feels, and my head is saying thank you.

challenge accepted

My doctor has challenged me to cut 500 calories from my daily total. This should be a cinch since I already can't eat 80% of what I'd love to be able to if I could, right? Guys, for me this means cutting those giant salads in half. I'm not kidding.

Anyway, very thrilled with the awesome hepatic panel coming back all super normal. Now the biggie is cutting down my blood pressure med, whaaaa?

I've been on blood pressure meds since my 20's because of a rhythm problem that was eventually corrected (years later, so like eventually eventually), and leading up to the procedure that fixed it saw me on the absolute fullest possible dose anyone can go with a beta blocker for a couple of years. I had started out on a calcium channel blocker, and as compliant as I tried to be, that stuff only made other things worse, so I found the beta blocker much more tolerable. I was supposed to be getting off it after the procedure, but my blood pressure shot up for some unknown reason and taunted me until we all assumed I'd just be on it the rest of my life.

Cut to years later, I'm old enough to actually be on a blood pressure med, my blood pressure started spiking wildly out of control, and I went up and down and in and out with this beta blocker. My doctor's been trying to get me off it since 2011 and my heart goes nuts on everything else. One of the most miserable months I've ever been through was switching off blood pressure meds every week until we were forced to go back to the beta blocker. And then suddenly in 2012 we figured out it was the birth control I'd been on all that time. Dumped the birth control, boom, blood pressure went down, I was able to cut the beta blocker dose in half again, and everything was wonderful. It was the lowest dose I'd been on since I started blood pressure meds.

And since then it has very slowly been bumped back up. My body's had enough of this beta blocker and fights it. It's done. I'm getting weird symptoms like super Raynaud's (suddenly freezing in the middle of summer isn't always thyroid, apparently) and now my doctor thinks me going so scatterbrained again (I'm at the Scott having to tie one scene in a show over to the next level of stupid) is the beta blocker. He added a different calcium channel blocker during the big allergy thing in April, I finally broke through the noncompliance and just stuck with it, and NOW I'm being instructed to slowly cut down the beta blocker.

I've been through some hefty med withdrawals through the years, but this one has truly been the hardest. It's an awful thing to be so sensitized to every little bitty thing your heart does that most people never feel, thanx to living with that arrhythmia for so long, and after March sucking for being the worst arm pain I've ever come through in physical therapy and April sucking for being the toughest allergy season I've ever come through on the inhaler and May sucking for the ongoing therapy that is bringing more main nerve trunk back online (referred pain is a bitch and a half, but it's better than losing function over nerve compression death), I get to spend June sucking now for what I hope does NOT become a noteworthy month. I've pretty much already been through the blood pressure and rhythm problems from hell over a series of years, so the only way this could be worse is if I have an actual heart attack or something, but I'm pretty sure it'll still play hell with my anxiety.

So I'm going to focus on cutting 500 calories from a healthy diet that is already so restricted by food allergies and diabetes that most of y'all would think you were in some kind of boot camp, and I'm going to suck it up because hopefully I'm this close to becoming Madonna, and all this crap I've gone through getting my life back after years of literal crippling pain will have been worth it.

I've asked in past posts on various blogs what a person would be willing to go through to get what they want, and the evil villain commitment it takes to focus and do what it takes no matter how hard it gets and how alone one feels doing it. It gets weird sometimes...


And this is what you get when you put Lady Gaga and Benedict Cumberbatch into the youtube search bar together. Oh, nothing, just psyching up for more physical therapy in a few hours.


Aaaaand we're going there. Subtextually speaking, this is all metaphorical for me. Pinky Robot needs to own the webs. My driven passion has been underground all spring conquering multiplayer, need to get it back out here in the open. You guys have no idea how much behind the scenes stuff I've been juggling, as it were. I mean, besides what I just told you. Time to run.

crazy long post and WINNING

I'm only minutes out of a dream where giant bugs from a space infestation took over our entire planet and they used their collective hive mind and ingenious nanorobotics to quickly take over our food supply from raw earth to finished product. It still all basically looked the same, but every single bite of food we were stuck eating was molecularly contorted and embued with giant bug something, and it was mutating all of us into a giant sticky mass of collective thought, literally. I remember picking through a few items in a cafeteria and spitting stuff out, I remember finding a few survivors scrounging for old outdated food in garbage heaps that hadn't yet been incinerated, and I remember an attack we coordinated on one of the giant blobs that was filling up a whole university and ingesting students and faculty into its collective. I remember it oozed around my foot and I could hear other people's thoughts for a brief second before I yanked my foot loose with a big sucky squelching noise, and I lost my shoe to its stickiness. I ran really hard across a lawn to another building and up some stairs, and that's about where I woke up.

This is Pinky's brain on a diet. Srsly, as I'd say on the twitters.

Those of you still new to me don't know I have been a devout Kathy Griffin fan for many, many years. I loved when she taunted Hollywood about weight loss and made fun of all their gimmicks while she suffered through simply cutting her calories down, saying she was snarky and mean because she was hungry all the time.


Ok, moving on. Two days to Halloween, and you know what? That awesome list I made yesterday, all the things I got done and had a GREAT DAY, and I *still* forgot to buy candy for trick-or-treaters. I KNOW! BRAIN FAIL!!!! Because that is the one thing I didn't actually have written on the list.

When I go back and read it was mutating all of us into a giant sticky mass of collective thought I can't help wondering if this infestation has already happened, because look at all of us tweeting pix of our food porn...

Back to now. Wait, go back to yesterday. I've done my best to avoid entanglement with a living, breathing psychiatrist for decades, but wound up being assessed by one last year about this time right smack dab in the middle of a manic euphoria episode. Since I'd been plastered for years on handfuls of meds for really ludicrous amounts of pain and suffering and had only recently gotten clean from stuff that Hollywood people wind up in posh detox hotels for, I was not aware that I have manic swings because who can tell through all that crap? Explains a few things about my childhood and my adult personality, though, so I'm good with it, and after a year of negotiating my way back out of MOAR MEDS, I was thilled yesterday that my psychiatrist was thrilled that not only had I not gained weight on last month's prednisone, but had lost 5 pounds since and am actually sleeping 8-10 hours a day regularly now, and THAT, ladies and gentlemen, convinced the man that I am disciplined enough to stay off head meds.



I blame society. Click this to see who I grabbed this glorious Johnny Depp cosplay from.


And this gave me the warm fuzzies.



This won twitter yesterday. Click for source.


This won facebook.

Gotta end this somewhere. Where's my celebration song?!! Hang on... here we go.