Oh my diet!
I am being approached by many co-workers saying, “You really lost a lot of weight.” I shrug the comments not because I don’t care but because my weight loss is necessary. And it is not 100 percent intentional. My diet is centered around diabetes and if the strict regimen of diabetic type 2 diet is followed, anyone can lose weight. The question is - is this diet applicable to those who are not battling diabetes? Maybe or maybe not. If you are the type who enjoys sampling restaurants and different foods with no holds barred, this diet will make you miserable. If you are like me who look at diet as a form of nutrition and not a source of pleasure, welcome to my world.
Let me share with you how I lost 23 pounds in 6 months. I went through stages I could attribute only to myself. It is what I call a path from ‘most to least resistance’. Yup, it is such a pain to wake up one day and look at the mirror and vow ‘I am gonna lose weight from now on and will keep it that way.’ It is not easy. The only thing that fortified my resolve is the power of ‘consequence’.
If I reason with myself that “I will die anyway so why do I need to deprive myself of the joy of eating and doing nothing?” Consequence: I will probably suffer years of complications before I die. “Who cares if I was fat?” Consequence: I won’t be able to climb Mount Everest and run Boston marathon(which are in my bucket list). “Why do I need to drink my meds?” Consequence: I will probably suffer the disease those medicines are for such as…. You get the picture. This is my approach to my patients as well. Sometimes it works, sometimes I just piss them. If a patient doesn’t want to move, he has the right to but it is my responsibility as a caregiver to explain why he or she needs to move. This will free me of the guilt of negligence. I don’t want to see a day when a patient suffered a blood clot or pneumonia or embolism because ‘nobody cared to explain to him the consequence of immobility’. Inflicting fear and alarm is dangerous though. I have patients throwing me out of their rooms for adding more reasons to their anxiety. That rarely happens but I am very careful.
We all have different approaches to life and I am not suggesting I have the best lifestyle to emulate. If you are the type who spends his Friday night with his computer, blogging about nutrition while the rest of the world is having fun somewhere, you need to seriously re-consider if that is something you want to copy. I am a busy with multiple nerdy interests, so do the math and I am ‘that one’.
Today, in compliance with “eat like a king in the morning, commoner at lunch and pauper at dinner”, here is what I ate: I woke up with a wonderful 97 glucose meter reading and felt hungry. I ate 1 pancake, scrambled eggs, 2 small sausage links, 1 pear for breakfast. Then 6 pieces of chicken wings and a serving of mixed veggies for lunch. Tonight (with my blood sugar5 at 120), I cooked a soup sauteed mixture of kale, bok choy and mussels, ate it with ¼ cup of bulgar and I thought that was good for me. I could not skip dinner even if it was late due to having worked the whole day doing some physical work. That was enough for my work out.
So the meal I have consumed tonight is sauteed mussels, clams, kale and bok choy. This is very quick:
Saute onion and garlic in olive oil
Pour a decent amount of water for soup
Pour a can of clams and a bag of mussels
Add 1 jalapeno sliced pepper
Add salt to taste.
That’s it.
