shirts and pants

I don't know why I hadn't thought to do this before, but I finally tried on some old clothes last night—clothes that I've kept in my closet and not used for years. Unsurprisingly, everything fit quite well, with my size-48 pants in particular being rather loose on my now-thinner frame. So my wardrobe has, over the course of two months, expanded significantly. I can almost look good again in slacks and a tie. Might be nice to get down to a size 30-something eventually. 

All of this is vanity, of course. I'm not losing all this weight for my looks, although the improvement in looks is a welcome side effect. No, I'm losing all this weight because I now know that I was basically on a path to an early death—something I had long suspected but had never taken seriously. A stroke makes you take things seriously.

I'll be interested to hear from the docs, come September, how my diet-and-exercise regime has improved my numbers—not just fasting blood sugar and blood pressure, but also my triglyceride levels and my A1c (a three-month average of your blood sugar*). I don't know whether they'll be inclined to scan my heart, but I think my cardio has definitely improved a bunch since I left the hospital in late May.

As always, though, I have to remember this is merely the beginning of the struggle. Getting down to 90 kg, or even lower, will take time and continued effort. We'll see how good the T Diet is at getting me where I need to go. And we'll see whether my two cheat days per month will be enough to keep me sane as I skip meals three days of the week. 

There's a lot yet to discover.

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*I had long wondered how you could get a three-month average from a single sample of blood. Jason Fung explains in The Diabetes Code that your red blood cells have about a three-month life cycle, so at any given moment, you have young cells, middle-aged cells, and old cells circulating in your bloodstream, each reflecting a certain amount of blood sugar (HbA1c = glycated hemoglobin). A sample of your blood will contain cells from all of those stages of life, thereby allowing doctors to see a three-month average. Your fasting blood sugar and afternoon/evening finger-prick blood-sugar tests, by contrast, vary from hour to hour, so they're not a very reliable measure of how you're doing. I used to think I could fake my numbers by being a bad boy until a week before my doctor's appointment, then suddenly behaving myself dietarily during those final seven days. Sure, by the time of my appointment, my fasting blood sugar would be low (by "low" I mean 150-ish, not bad for a diabetic on meds, but which I now know to be scarily high if I hold myself to the standards of non-diabetics, for whom 70 and below is the norm, although this CDC chart puts the threshold at 99), but there's no fooling the A1c reading. You have to behave yourself for three months to keep that average down, and if you're behaving yourself for three months straight, you're arguably leading a bona fide healthy lifestyle already, not faking it. An A1c reading of under 5.7 is considered non-diabetic. If, by my appointment, I'm reading a 6 or so, that'd be a triumph, and it would mean that diabetic remission is right around the corner. I hope to be able to say, by this time next year, that diabetes is behind me, and I will finally have joined the ranks of the normal.