The Great Journey

I have more experience in hospitals than someone might imagine. Not as a patient, but as someone that used to scrape people up off the pavement and rush them to the ER in the back of an ambulance. For about three years, I spent more time in hospitals than I care to remember. During training for that gig, I tore my right ACL, the anterior cruciate ligament, basically the ligament that holds the knee together. For reasons lost to the mists of time, I never had it surgically repaired, and I've had a "bad knee" ever since. Aside from a faux heart attack in 1998, (I'll tell that story another time) I haven't been in the hospital since. On December 12, 2022, five days after I had the procedure to lance and drain an infected puncture hole on the bottom of my left food, I spiked a small temperature. Annie informed me that we were going back to Urgent Care to have it looked at. We got there around noon, and they told us that all their appointment slots were full and if we ...

 As I mentioned in an earlier post, my parents tended to use food as a weapon. Because of that, I learned at an early age that to get what I wanted I had to sneak it. Over time, this had several unfortunate results, results that lasted long into my adult life. I'm only skimming the surface here, but successfully sneaking food that I'm "not supposed to have" became a sick, twisted reward of sorts. Candy, fast food, pizza, peanut butter & jelly sandwiches (the first food I abused) became things I straight up lusted after. I managed to rewire my brain so that succeeding at getting those foods not only gave me the pleasure of the food, but a dopamine hit for getting away with it. Nothing succeeds like excess, right? Coupled with the body-shaming they used in an attempt to motivate me to lose weight it created what I call a Shame Circle. I'd eat my feelings because of the shame I felt for being fat, only to be more ashamed of eating the food that made me fat, and s...

  I didn't have the best childhood growing up. Many, many have had it worse, and I'm not trying to place blame...but a lot of my food issues can be directly traced to my parents, specifically my mother. My mother was obsessed with control. She had to control every situation, whether it be social, business, child-rearing, whatever it was she felt that it had to be her way or the highway. She wanted to both control what I ate and what I didn't.  Perhaps it wouldn't have been so bad if she were not such a horrible, terrible cook. Her idea of a healthy veg with dinner was either a salad consisting of iceberg lettuce, a little onion and some hothouse tomatoes, or taking a cauliflower and boiling it and putting it on a plate so it looked like our side dish was a human brain, or a can of asparagus boiled so much that it was a pile of green, nasty-tasting mush. She absolutely did not know how to season a meal.  The control issues would emerge when I would refuse to eat the nas...

 This will be one of several posts on this topic. Unlike a lot of a diabetics, I don't have a sweet tooth, not really. I do enjoy certain types of candy (most anything with peanut butter in it) and I love buttercream frosting on a cake, but aside from that most of the "bad" food that I eat comes from The Clown, The King, or The Adopted Girl. By those I mean, of course, McDonald's, Burger King & Wendy's. Every once in a while, when I was in the mood for a really shitty pizza, The Noid (aka, Domino's) would get involved. Annie and I have cookies and candy (non-peanut butter variety) in the cabinets for the granddaughters and I really just leave 'em alone. It's not a big deal for me at all.  But fast food... Oh, what a seductive siren song they have sung to me over the years! There's just something about tucking into a greasy fast food cheeseburger that has spoken to my soul for, well, decades.  That's only one part of the equation, though. Ta...

 I'll try and make entries more often.... sorry. I mean at this point, no one is reading yet, but still. With all other changes in my life, I need to commit to this.  January 23...been over a month since my last post. Let's see what's happened since then in bullet-list format, and I'll expand on some of them in this post and others in later posts: My average daily fasting sugar has dropped from the low 200s to around 110-120; I've not had any fast food since December 6; I've not had diet soda since December 7; I've not had a sandwich or any bread, really, since December 7. My weight is now 339lbs; My relationship with food has gone through a 170-degree change. Not quite a full flip, but close to it; I've gone from taking insulin 5x a day to 2x, and the reason for that will occupy it's own post; I've made a bunch of discoveries about myself and how I deal with food and exercise and how I feel about food an exercise, which are two vastly different ...