Weight Loss

For years and years - pretty much ever since I had kids - I have battle my weight, constantly gaining a little each year over the year before. Back in July of 2011 I tried a diet that worked wonders for my best friend from high school. It worked wonders for me too, for the first go-around. I'd bought 2 go-arounds and the second one didn't take off a single ounce. I lost 50 pounds with the first round, so I was happy with that. However, I couldn't keep the pounds off. I tried many strategies - eating less, not eating this or that, avoiding that or this if possible. Keeping an eye pealed for something I could get that might work. Living out here, I am handicapped by what I can eat. I can't run to the store for fresh veggies or salad fixings and I can't keep such things here for very long - I don't have a refrigerator, but even if I did, I still can't keep fresh things here. If it isn't frozen, canned or dry, I can't keep it around.

This last winter, the lymph nodes in my face flared up for some unknown reason and it got a little scary so I went to town to see a Dr. However, by the time I got there it was all done and over, so I turned the trip into a shopping trip. I wasn't about to shell out $200 to chat with a Dr. about what might have cause them and I had no other reason to visit one. Anyway, my son juices so he was juicing things for me. Tasted good, but it didn't have the desired affect on my weight - quite the contrary.

During my shopping, one thing I needed was vitamins so I was looking for the Centrum ones I'd always had (at least for the last few years). When someone else does your shopping for you, you kinda take what they send you and these seemed pretty good so what the heck. They were one-a-day's, but I took one in the afternoon too (if I remembered to take one with me) at work. During the winter I mostly didn't take them at all. They were (hopefully) my energy source to get me through the day. Taking one also helped me remember to drink enough water throughout the day - something I'm not so good at, but I'm getting better.

Long story short, my son scoffed at the manufactured vitamins I was after and had me get instead these all natural ones. The brand name is CODE. You should seriously check them out.

The OCD in me wouldn't let me just throw out the old ones, so I religiously took them twice a day like always starting shortly before going back to work. I'd reached 200 pounds again and I was looking forward to working off a few pounds at work. My sedentary life here during the winter does me no good. I know this, but my little 1/4 mile walk to the boats and back doesn't really accomplish anything but to get me out of the house for a little while.

I know I'm strong. I believe I am stronger than most women my size and age, but carrying around 50-60 extra pounds every waking and sleeping moment of my life kinda wears on me after a while. Never call a fat person weak; depending on how much weight they're carrying around, believe me, you wouldn't want to do the same be it extra weight or a rucksack.

Work starts out with me trying to figure out what goes where and where it all is, that and catching up on all the laundry fast enough so incoming staff can have clean bedding. I swear everyone just packed up and left at the end of last year - I don't know - maybe they did. After I got the laundry-room caught up I started getting the flowerbeds tilled. I have a garden claw for this, but it's still work and my back and feet would ache after not very long. Then, to interrupt my work, the girl hired to clean the lodge wasn't doing her job. Her definition of cleaning was to clean what you can see, which might be fine most of the time, but to start of it needs to be move everything and scrub everything - there's a whole winter's worth of dust and bugs and whatever to clean up before you can get away with taking shortcuts. Anyway, she got fired and they really needed help in there so that's what I did until they got a new girl in. It set me back about a week, so baby plants weren't getting planted and weeds were having a field day, not to mention getting into cabins.

Cleaning in the lodge meant crawling around and checking under things, and cleaning under things. Going over every piece of furniture and cleaning them from one end to the other. Wiping down walls (I didn't get to all of them). You get the picture. I was mostly done with what I could do around coming and going day fishermen when the new girl arrived and then I had a week to get the gardens all done and move on to the cabins. Millions of thanks to the guys for helping me with the rocks around most of the more up front gardens. After that in was into the cabins where I wiped down the walls, crawling around, on top of, and under the bunks in search of cobwebs and dust. I even found some left over flood silt here and there (after 4 years I was surprised and disappointed by that, I can tell you). It wasn't bad though - not where it really counted. After that it was making beds. That entailed up and down a ladder for each layer if it was an upper bunk and there were 2 in most of the cabins. Thank goodness I only had five cabins to worry about at the time.

On top of all of this exercise, our 4-wheeler decided it didn't want to go anymore. That left me hauling things back and forth with a 2-wheeled cart. I had to carry barrels down to the boats in order to take some to work to be filled (they didn't have barrels to be filled with gas; their gas was pumped directly into big tanks). I also had to haul down propane tanks (thank goodness we aren't using the big tanks) and to add insult to injury, we ran out of gas here so I was hauling five gallons at a time back up to the house as needed. I was starting to feel like a mule (and wishing I had one). Groceries were supposed to come last week and I was seriously dreading the ordeal of figuring out how I was going to get it all to the house. But now the 4-wheeler works again so I'm spared most of that worry. No idea what the issue was with the darn thing, but it works - no more cart.

Long story - longer than I intended - but the gist of it all was that through it all, I didn't lose more than maybe a pound or two. Never try to tell me that exercise and eating right will melt the pounds away. Don't try to tell me that muscle weighs more than fat and I must have been building muscle as I was losing the fat. That may be true - a little - but it certainly didn't make my feet hurt less.

Finally, about 5 weeks after I started work, I ran out of my old vitamins and start those new ones my son wanted me to get. Also during that time, I was getting a little desperate so I asked my best friend if she had any of that hcg stuff that worked so well. She did so I bought it. I guess it's hard to come by these days, having gone out of style or something. Maybe it worked too well and the FDA put the pressure on them. I also ordered some diet stuff from a neighbor out here. And some tea my daughter-in-law had given me a while back but I'd used up. The tea and some of the stuff from my neighbor is cleansing and the pills do whatever they do. I just got it, but I haven't opened any of it yet.

Back to those CODE vitamins: Ever since I started taking them (I went with the one pill twice a day at first), I started losing weight SLOWLY. That was fine with me. Slow is good as long as it goes. I also recently learned that I might be suffering from a vitamin D deficiency at least during the winter. I get scaly spots on my face during the winter and I ran across an article that indicated that might be a D deficiency. Well, guess what - If I take these vitamins as recommended, I get 100% of that too. Hmmm Something to see about anyway. So I decided to take the 2 pills in the morning and 2 in the evening (when I remembered - most of the time) and see how things develop.

Yes, the weight is coming off and I have energy. My feet still hurt if I'm on them all day, but that's getting better. I have my finger crossed. Wouldn't it be a hoot if my weight problem was some kind of enzyme or probiotic shortage? Just like with hcg, my hunger and cravings have decreased, my energy level has increased, and the pounds are coming off. I don't lead a toxic life. I don't eat manufactured foods more than maybe once a year, so cleansing isn't necessary. I SO wish this keeps working. Needless to say, I've asked my son to get me more of those vitamins. I mean, seriously, if they're actually a benefit, I'm all for it. Wish me luck.

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My hcg Diet

One day my girlfriend, Sandy, sent me an email telling me all about this wonderful stuff she found. She was so sick and so disheartened by it all – she figured she’d be dead in another ten years, if not sooner. But now, as if by a miracle, after hundreds of trips to different doctors, it was all going away, and along with it about a pound a day of fat. A POUND! That’s a whole box of butter just being chucked out every day!

I was totally thrilled for her; her updates were just amazing. Finally, something had been found that made the fat go away without us having to start training for the Olympics or something of the sort. I mean, have you watched Biggest Loser? Personally, I don’t like that show, though perhaps those people need that kind of abusive discipline. I don’t.

I have always considered myself a strong person for a woman. I mean, read my blog. I lift and carry. I walk. Okay, so I don’t do it every day, but still. During the summer I work at a fishing lodge and I probably end up walking well over a mile if not miles every day, and that’s not counting the mile I walk to and from the boat every day in order to go to work. During the winter it’s a different story. Since I’m not working at the lodge, I spend a lot of my time sitting in front of the computer. But I still go out and split wood nearly every day and sometimes twice a day.

I also consider myself healthy. I’ll take aspirin for some aches and pains now and then but I have no other medications to take, not counting the inhaler I use for my bronchitis – one little inhaler has been known to last me up to four years, so even my bronchitis isn’t much of a nuisance.

Of late though, I’ve been feeling really quite old. I love where I live but living in the wilderness of Alaska is not for the old and infirm. I’ve always known that the day would come when we would have to move to town. I mean, if you can’t do the chores necessary to get along, the only alternative is to hire someone to do them for you or move to where life is a little easier.

Well, after hearing of Sandy’s success, I simply had to give this hcg diet a try. I was over 200 pounds now and I’ve been toying with the idea of quitting my job – it was all I could do to make it through an entire day. My feet hurt. My back hurt. I was tired all the time.

At work, I keep the cabins clean, which involves making or changing beds every day and some of those beds are the upper bunks – kids always choose the upper bunk. And since I hate the idea of carting a mop and bucket around, cleaning the bathroom floors was a hands-and-knees job.

When I first started working here there were ten cabins, half of which had a bathroom. Also on my cleaning every day list was the bathhouse which was two bathrooms, each with two sinks and two showers, and the floors here too. There was also a third bathroom but that was just a toilet. Then there were also four outhouses to maintain. When I first started working here, I was able to make it through all of that by noon most days, and then my afternoons were filled with maintaining the flowers and berry beds as well as the assorted trees and bushes. Thank goodness I didn’t have to mow too.

Since I’ve worked here, one bathroom was added to a cabin. In the last couple years, two cabins were taken out of the guest cabin list – a relief for me though they were seldom used anymore.

Believe me, taking care of the bathhouse, eight cabins and the yard is a big job and I was feeling like I wasn’t doing it the way I should. My boss gives me a raise every year and every year I was going out of my way to take short cuts. I felt guilty about it too, hence my thoughts of quitting.

Regardless of my work or my life here, I have been looking for some way to lose all this extra lard I’ve accumulated over the last 30some years. I did the math; on the average I gained at least two pounds a year.

I always check out the diet section at the store when I go to town – they all say ‘exercise and eat right and take this wonderful pill, and watch the pounds melt away’. ha ha ha I even tried a couple. So much for that theory.

Last year I ordered the drops from Sandy, only they didn’t get here before I was grounded to home. I did finally get them in February only to discover that both bottles had broken in shipment – I was so bummed. So as soon as planes were flying again, I sent her another check. I was going to try this stuff. I was desperate (though likely not so desperate as Sandy was when she started).

She told me she felt great, that she had energy again, that all her ailments were simply melting away, but I just thought it was due to weight going away. I had no idea.

I learned that starches are supposed to convert to sugar, which is where your energy is supposed to come from, but too much and it converts to fat, supposedly to be broken down into sugar at need at a later time. However, in some people that fat never breaks down; it just keeps building up and you have to eat more to get the energy you need, only too much of it is converted to this fat rather than the energy – a vicious circle.

Hcg breaks that circle. It tells your body it can burn this fat now, all you need. The fat converts to the sugar, which gives you energy. And oh my God the energy! I’m not talking about something like a caffeine buzz either, just energy, the energy you need to do whatever you are doing. Come the end of the day, I’m tired. I’m 55 years old; I’m entitled to be tired after a long day, and I love taking naps in the afternoon when I get the chance.

No longer do I look at the clock and think, ‘I’ve worked 2 hours, let me take an aspirin so I can make it to lunch so I can sit down for a while.’ And then in the afternoon I say, ‘I’ve done this flowerbed, do I have to do the next one or can it wait until tomorrow? Maybe I’ll go find some bushes to trim or some rocks to pick up, then maybe I’ll go home early.’ Nope – the other day I did all the flower and herb beds in one day. I had blisters on my hand from it, but job done and I was proud of my accomplishment. I’m back to working like I used to – getting the bathhouse, all the cabins and outhouses done lickety-split and polishing the gardens like they haven’t been for a while. Yeah, I keep them weed free and always have but there’s a difference now.

I’m carting around 30 less pounds of lard and that’s part of it, but my feet don’t hurt any more and my back doesn’t hurt any more. I’m not watching the clock any more. Though this summer I’m not eating lunch with the crew. I’ll pass through and grab an apple or banana or whatever’s available within my diet and that’s it, I’m off again.

When I first started working I was proud of the fact that few of the younger people could keep up with me, and since I was always all over the place, finding me was usually rather hard. I’m that way again and it’s wonderful.

My son asked me when we were moving to town. Like I said before, I knew the day would come. I told him, now that I feel 10 years younger, it’ll be a while. I like living here and I want to stay here as long as I can. Sure, we’ll spend some time in town each winter (maybe), but frankly I’d much rather stay out here.

With this session, I almost reached 170 pounds. My next session starts in September. I won’t be working then, so maybe the pounds won’t come off as easily – we’ll see; there’s still the walk to the boat dock I can take every day and that’ll help. Maybe I’ll put in a snowshoe trail around the parameter of the property – now that’s an idea – we’ve a 20 acre plot, rectangular in shape – anyone care to do the math for me? How far is that?

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