numbers after a day of recovery

blood sugar: 136 (I took a hit)
blood pressure: 117/76 (up, but the high end of "low")
weight: 114.5 kg (no change from last time)
pulse-ox: 98%
pulse: 65
estimated A1c since 4/15: 7.31 (down 0.02)

After my med-free day yesterday, I took my meds late last night and very soon after got the shits, lustily firing out two thankfully solid torpedoes in two separate sessions. It's always amazing, how much is left inside the intestines even after a whole day of not eating. You might have a kilo of food stuck in there. The fun continued this morning with the return of my good friend Rush O'Dye-Aria, which is how I squeezed out enough water weight for the scale to show me at about the same weight as when I last displayed my numbers.

We're back on the discipline now, though, so my blood sugar ought to calm itself down over the next few days,* continuing the downward trend of my A1c. I'm about to go have my morning smoothie, but I look forward to the day I run out of SlimFast: the smoothie's extra calories are keeping me from losing more weight, and I've been hovering in the 114-116-kg range for weeks now, possibly because I eat more at lunch, or maybe because I snack on almond butter or chocolatey peanut butter (low sugar, but there's still sugar) at night. The snacking isn't really affecting the blood sugar, but the calories from the nut butters are definitely affecting my weight.

The breakthrough will come when I finally start to apply myself to my strength training. With muscle comes increased metabolic rate. Right now, I'm working on very basic heavy-club moves—just an elementary swing back and forth. I have a 6-kilo and a 10-kilo club, and the 6-kilo club ought to feel like a feather when I handle it, but it's heavy. That shows how weak I am and how far I have to go. I'm eventually going to have to buy one of those larger, adjustable-weight clubs once I'm strong enough to go through all the maneuvers with them, but right now, I still need to master the technique. You'd think there'd be nothing to just swinging a baseball-bat-shaped hunk of metal back and forth, but it's not as obvious as it looks. There's proper rotation, proper balancing on the feet, proper orientation of the feet, proper tension in the arms, proper grip, etc., and that's just for the one elementary maneuver I'm currently practicing: the basic two-arm, side-to-side swing. So we can't even talk about inside/outside mills and shield casts yet, let alone the one-armed versions of these maneuvers. But I have faith that, with persistence, those moves will come. Practice makes perfect.

But right now, I want my smoothie.

ADDENDUM: here's trainer Mark Wildman on heavy-club swinging basics. I'll have a lot to say about Wildman soon. I've watched a ton of his videos.

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*In healthy, non-diabetic people, there's a quick recovery of the blood sugar after eating. Healthy people often have a BS baseline that's under 100, and after a meal, they return to that baseline in an hour or two. We diabetics, by contrast, are insulin-resistant, which means the insulin pumped into our bloodstream by the pancreas doesn't affect us as much, i.e., it's less effective. This is why docs prescribe all those blood-sugar drugs (like metformin) and even exogenous (i.e., from outside of the body) insulin. But as I pointed out earlier, the drugs and insulin don't really solve the problem so much as they hide it, and everyone looks at the lower BS numbers and smiles and pretends that things are better. It's got to be a matter of actually having better numbers through the consumption of fewer carbs than merely seeming to be getting better thanks to drugs. Hence the need for carnivore, keto, or even vegan diets (lifestyles, really) that avoid carby vegetables.

Esse non videri. Being, not seeming.