Lucas’s Blog

We’ve just returned from another gym session where the focus was on the upper body, so suffice it to say I have sore arms and shoulders!

At the moment I’m alternating between upper and lower body workouts, interspersed with cardio days. It’s interesting how your body tries to beat you at your own game, by ‘getting used to’ the workouts you do, and compensating for them, reducing their effectiveness. So you always have to try and trick your body by surprising it with different routines, or pushing yourself really hard. 10 minutes on the bike at gear 10, 85rpm used to be really difficult, now I find my natural pedalling speed is 85… so I’ll have to work on that.

The hardest part of this program so far was not really the 8 week course, because I had so many checks and balances that I couldn’t really go wrong without someone noticing.. it’s been the period after that. I’m only seeing my nutritionist monthly now, so it gets harder to stay on track. I’m still having trouble with my water intake, and eating after dinner. I mean, sipper bottles are great because they make drinking water easy, but I need at least 1.5-2 litres a day, and sometimes that means taking the lid off, and skulling! I’m also forcing myself to keep a daily food diary.

Some of the benefits of the work I’ve been doing are starting to show… these are:

- People commenting on how good I look… at first I thought it was just because they knew I was going to the gym and they were trying to be supportive, but even people who didn’t know I was doing a program have made comments

- I don’t drink nearly as much alcohol. I used to have a whisky or two at night after work, and I just dont feel like that any more. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped drinking, Daniel’s brother’s stag do last weekend was evidence of that But it’s not such a regular thing. In fact, I rarely drink anything other than water now. I used to think orange juice was healthy and good for you, but I tried Fresh Up again recently and the intensity of the sweetness made it barely drinkable.

- I can have a few chips now without hogging the whole bag. If Daniel has chips at night (wait till he sees the nutritionist…) I can have a few without simply wanting to finish the whole lot!

- Being able to tackle some of the steeper streets in Auckland without ending up a panting mess – I walked up Shortland St yesterday and was able to chat at the same time!

- Clothing sizes dropping. That abused notch in my belt is on a break now as I’ve moved up a few holes… my shorts are looser (putting me more at risk of them just falling off in public, not that I would care about that too much, but it might put off some lunchtime punters!)

My personal trainer wants me to make this blog public so I guess I’ll submit it to a few places in the hopes my development will motivate people. I’ll break free of the WordPress mold sometime soon and make a fully-fledged site, replete with lots of geeky tools and recording options

It’s been a hectic few days and I couldn’t make it to the gym yesterday morning so I went with Daniel after work. It was just a cardio trip… but instead of ranging from 52.-5.5 (speed) and 2.0 (grade) I turned the grade up to 2.5 and maxed my speed out to 6.0, which is pretty cool since when I started at the gym 5.5 was really difficult!

I’ve got an upper body workout today which I’ll have to do after work again… so much work, so little time!

Here’s a pretty helpful health-related site: http://www.patient.co.uk/

Hello again! I’m back from today’s session which was all about the lower body – lots of punishment meted out to my legs, essentially!

I’d been ranging from 5.2 – 5.5 on the treadmill, which might not seem much to you gym bunnies, but I’m not ready to run yet! Today I pushed myself a bit and held it at 5.6 for my 15 minute warmup. That might not seem a lot, but before I started this program just the idea of regular exercise seemed tiring! In the back of my mind I always thought I’d give it up, and that I’d eventually dread going. But I find I’m actually enjoying it, and the post-gym feeling makes the effort worthwhile.

The same goes for my diet plan. I discovered yesterday that FreshUp juice (I used to drink orange juice by the gallon) now tastes so terribly sweet I can barely drink it! If I drink anything other than water now it’s usually milk (out of the bottle of course, I mean, Mum lives in Taranaki). But blue top full cream is just too much, it has to be lite blue. The moral is that if you’re on a good diet plan (one that you’re comfortable with) you will get used to it if you give it a chance, and all of a sudden unhealthy foods will start to taste bad! That doesn’t mean I couldn’t be talked into a Steak and Cheese pie, but I know I’d feel (a) guilty and (b) queasy afterwards, and I swear I never thought that would ever happen.

My business partner Daniel has joined the gym now too, and we go at 8am when for whatever reason, the place is deserted! I would have thought that would be the busy time, but apparently it’s the dead spot between the early morning gym crazies and the housewives who come in after the husband’s left for work. So there’s a tiup for ya, if you don’t want to be exerting yourself too publicly.. find that morning dead spot! So now we’re done and dusted by 9am and ready for work. Plus, having someone else work out with you adds a bit of competition to the process

So, in terms of stats, my blood is good today, (6.7 this morning), and my weight down to 186.5kg I’ve broken the last plateau, it seems.

Speaking of blood, I thought you might be interested in the whole diabetes/blood sugar thing from my perspective. When I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes it was a bit of a shock, because despite my weight I’d always thought I was OK healthwise. Thinking back on it though, I remember having to get up 4 or 5 times a night to go to the toilet and being terribly thirsty all night, waking up with a mouth like the floor of a parrot’s cage. That sort of thing creeps up on you and you don’t notice how bad it’s getting. At the moment I probably get up once, and have a sip or two during the night, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it was.

I jumped on some web forums dedicated to diabetes and as a result,  bought a blood glucose test unit. Of course it didn’t come with any test strips, because those have to be prescribed – at the time I thought it was the fault of the supplier and sent off some emails asking where I could buy the strips from… I’d jumped the gun, because my diabetic nurse sorted it all out for me and sorts out a prescription whenever I go in for a checkup.

Basically the idea with blood sugar is that you don’t want it to spike and you don’t want it to stay high for long periods of time as it does all sorts of nasty things like damages your eyes, your circulation (they test your feet as part of the care program!) and so on. The good range for blood sugar is around 5-7 ish (it ranges before and after meals and so on). So you don’t want to eat high-sugar items or items that have a high Glycemic index (essentially how fast they dump sugar into your system). You can find all sorts of Glycemic indices on the web by the way. I use Splenda when I need sugar and that’s only in porridge in the morning – I used to drink a  lot of coffee but now I rarely do, I’d weaned myself off sugar in coffee.. now I drink Earl Grey Tea.

So, back to testing. Each time you test you put a little electrode strip into the unit. You have a little spring-loaded plastic tool that pricks your finger, you squeeze out 1 drop of blood and press it against the electrode which sucks it up. About 10 second slater you have your reading. Easy!

The only thing I find tedious about this whole health process is the paperwork – writing down what I eat, my blood sugar, my weight… as I mentioned in the last post I use some software for that, but it would be nice to have one system where I could enter all of my data. Since I’m a programmer by trade I think I’m going to have to whip up some sort of tool!

Anyway, back to work for me…

Here I am! In all my ever-decreasing glory… I’m going to grit my teeth and publish myself to the web as I do the weight loss thing. Why? Well, motivation for a start – I can’t sneak off and have a steak and cheese pie if I know my next graph upload will spill the beans! But also, it’s for you. You see, I’m a geek. I’m on the web all the time, as it’s my job. I have an AppleTV and download my television. I’m pretty smart, so I thought I knew a fair bit about diet, good eating, weight management and so on. Things that we all just “pick up” from our parents or the TV. And a lot of it isn’t true! I went from a health newbie (I lost 60kgs a couple of years ago on Atkins, thinking ‘this is it!’ then I put it all back on again!) to someone who’s a lot more informed now. Mostly thanks to the team at the Apollo Health Centre in Auckland. I’m feeling better, looking better and I’m a lot healthier. Sure, I’ve got a long way to go… I’m about 188kgs now and I’d really like to hit 110 in the next year or so… but it’s working! And I want to share what I’m learning with you.

So, let me figure out the best way to do all this. I’m a Mac addict, and I’m using Black Cat Systems’ HealthTracker to chart my weight (http://www.blackcatsystems.com/software/healthtracker.html). Actually, if you know of a simple graphing app like this that is less buggy and looks more Appley, could you let me know? I’m also using Diabetes Logbook X (http://www.nesfield.co.uk/diabeteslogbookx/) to monitor my blood sugar (I have an Optium Xceed Blood Glucose meter, for my morning stab – squeeze -wait blood tests).

Once I get the hang of it I’ll post my graphs and a handy tip each time. Here’s the first tip – eating less doesn’t necessarily make you lose weight! I used to skip breakfast and sometimes lunch and only have a big dinner, thinking that my total intake per day was less so I’ll lose weight. Well, my nutritionist has me eating 5 times a day! Lots of small meals that keep the metabolism racing and burning fat. And it’s good food too! I was always a meat and potatoes man, and I’m eating porridge, bananas, yoghurt, grilled steak… all yummy stuff : )

The weight loss process has been an emotional journey as well, and I found that talking about it, and the support from my friends is what prompted me to start a blog – I hope that you will follow me on my journey, and maybe try some of these tips for yourself!

OK, so here are my latest graphs.

Weight

Blood Sugar