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How I did it

In my last post, I talked about how I lost 70 pounds in just 5 months. It was pretty simple in concept. I went on the theory that type 2 diabetics (which I was becoming) are insulin resistant. This means that a low fat diet is not a good idea, because carbs are difficult for insulin resistant people to process in a healthy way, and tax a system that is already in disorder.

The problem:

The signs that diabetes was coming were there: over 40 years old, 50 inch waist, BMI of 42, high LDL (bad) cholesterol, low HDL (good) cholesterol, elevated triglycerides, high blood pressure, and the sudden appearance (within the past year) of skin tags around the neck and shoulders. (Skin tags are sometimes a sign of insulin resistance.) This was confirmed by an A1C of 6.6. A reading of 6.6 is a little high, and is technically on the low end of being diabetic.
If I wanted to not be a diabetic, I needed to lose weight and keep it off, and then I must learn to control my diet in a healthy and maintainable way. I decided that I needed to lose at least 100 pounds.

The solution, phase one:

I immediately gave up all starches and sugars, and the only carbs I am eating are vegetable fiber. So, I eat vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, cucumber (and pickles), olives, string beans, and other low carb vegetables. I stay away from nuts, peas, carrots, corn, potatoes, rice, wheat and grains of all kinds, all oils except olive oil, and no fruit.
I limit my eating of tomatoes, onions, and dairy products. I can eat meats, except I stay away from organ meats in order to avoid gout.
I can eat one dessert each day that uses alcohol sugars, and one Adkins bar in place of lunch. You also have to learn to only eat when you are hungry, not when you have an appetite. There is a difference.
I eat less than 30 carbs a day, most days less than 20.When counting carbs, do not count dietary fiber or alcohol sugars like splenda, because they do not affect insulin resistance and do not cause spikes in blood sugar. No alcoholic beverages.

A typical day for me goes like this:

6 a.m. Breakfast: Two sausage patties, two scrambled eggs with a tablespoon of salsa or chopped onion for flavor, and a large cup of coffee with two Splenda. Total carb count: 4
noon: An Adkins bar to hold off hunger pains. 3 carbs. Sometimes, I will instead have a salad of spinach, arugula, a small slice of onion, olives, cucumber slice, low carb ranch dressing. 4 carbs.
6 p.m. Dinner NY strip with steamed broccoli and cheese. Total carbs: 4
9 p.m. Snack: Jello no sugar added pudding cup. (They are sweetened with alcohol sugar. Banana fudge is my favorite.) 4 carbs
I drink 2-3 liters of water per day. Other than that one cup of coffee in the morning, that is all I drink.
Total carbs for the day: 15.

The results:
They kind of speak for themselves. I have lost 70 pounds since September, my waist is now 10 inches smaller, and my A1C is now normal. My BMI is now 34.

My ultimate goal is to weigh about 180 pounds, which I hope to see this summer.

In defending myself:
 I am trying to avoid the fate of this guy, so: I am not a dietician. I am in school to be a licensed practitioner, but I am as of yet simply a paramedic. Although based in scientific fact, this site contains my opinions, and should not be taken as being medical advice. Nothing on this site is intended to be medical advice, and does not imply a provider-patient relationship. I am not your doctor. Do your own due diligence, and consult a professional if you have any health or diet related questions. This site is intended to chronicle my own success, and is not intended to assist you in diagnosing, treating, or managing any disorder or disease. The reader assumes all risk if attempting anything mentioned on this page.
Sucks that I have to put all of that, but that is our world now.

By Divemedic, ago

Weight and health

I had my annual physical exam done back in September. When the blood work came back, it showed an A1C of 6.6. Anyone with an A1C of more than 6.5 is a diabetic, and the doctor said that they would have to confirm it with a second test before officially diagnosing me with that disease. She said that the early diagnosis of diabetes can sometimes be reversed if the patient were to lose 10-15% of their body weight.

That test result changed my life. I weighed a little over 300 pounds that day, 5 months ago. I changed my eating habits, and now I weigh 235 pounds, and I am still losing. I have lost 22% of my body weight, and I continue to lose about three pounds a week.

Last week, I got the results of my second A1C test back: it was a 5.8. I am hoping to be under 200 pounds by May. A 100 pound weight loss in 8 months. Incredible.

By Divemedic, ago

Gut punch

So I retired from my jobs as a paramedic in November so that I could move several states away for the next two years, so I could return to school for my graduate degree. I packed up some of my favorite handguns and moved 1,200 miles. I now own a house in Florida, and rent an apartment a few miles from the school. I am a dual resident of two states, and maintain a house in both of them. I guess I am technically a snowbird.

One of the problems that this caused relates to the way that I packed my handguns. I guns into four padded Pelican cases. There were four 1911s, a pair of Sig 229s in Stainless, and a Beretta Tomcat in one case, and a Sig Mosquito and 3 Glocks in a second, an AR-15 in the third, and a Springfield M1A in the fourth. The problem is that the Pelican case is air tight, and I packed them in hot, humid Florida, and transported those cases to the cool, dry north.

Three weeks later, after finally getting settled in, I opened the locked cases, and it felt like I had been punched in the gut. The humid air trapped in the Pelican cases had condensed, and began corroding some of the guns. In the end, only two were damaged: The AR has some surface rust on the barrel which cleaned off with some work. The sad part was one of the 229s (the .357Sig) was rusted so badly that the takedown lever, mag release, and slide stop were all rusted in place. Apparently, the 229 Stainless doesn’t use as much stainless as I thought.

I took it to the gunsmith, and the guy behind the counter told me that my gun couldn’t possibly be stainless steel, because you can’t blue stainless. I tried to explain Nitron finishes to him, but he looked at me like I was stupid and told me that there is no way to blue stainless. I then asked him why it says “stainless” right on the slide, and then told him to hand me my gun back, because he is obviously not the guy I want working on my guns. It turns out he is only a helper, and the real gunsmith actually knows what he is doing. The total repair estimate on the Sig is about $400. Rebarreling the AR will be expensive, too.

Expensive lesson.

By Divemedic, ago

The gun question

As you know if you have been reading this blog, I am in school to earn my Masters Degree and become a Physician Assistant. We were recently in a class on how to conduct an exam, and were talking about the questions that we are required to ask a patient. One of the questions that they said we are required to ask is whether or not they own a gun, and whether or not that gun is kept in a secure location. Then we should use this as an opportunity to talk to them about the dangers of having a firearm in the home. I spoke up and said that I did not feel like that was a valid medical question, and the answer that I got was that this was about safety.

I then pointed out that we shouldn’t stop there. After all, if this is about safety, why not ask them if they are gay, and of so, lecture them on the dangers of homosexual activity? Of course, the reaction I got was how inappropriate that was. I pointed out that more people die each year from AIDS than are murdered by firearms.

I then asked if I would be penalized in any way for refusing to participate in a politically charged topic like this. They relented, and I will not be penalized in any way for refusing to ask that question.

By Divemedic, ago

“It just works”

“It just works” is the slogan of Apple’s products. The Apple fanboys will go on and on about how the idevices are virus and crash free. Now, I can tell you that I own a windows desktop, an iPad, and an iPhone. Until I bought my iPad last February and my iPhone in December, I had never before owned an Apple product, nor had I used one (with the exception of a former significant other’s machine). I had almost exclusively been a windows person. In fact, I had owned a windows machine (or three) since the days of Windows 3.0, when I bought an Intel 286 machine. We go way back.

So after a year of testing, how true is the claim? Not very. I use my iPad for note taking, and it occasionally needs a reboot. Some software compatibility issues require some tweaking, and there ARE viruses out there that affect Apple equipment. However, I have not had a virus on any machine that I have owned (including my Windows and Apple devices) in over ten years, mostly through some common sense web practices, despite not having any virus protection software running. (Spyware is a different story: but I eventually got a handle on that as well.)

With all of that said, the iPhone 4S is not my first smart phone, but it has been the best one I have had, and I have often wondered during the 2 months that I have had it how I ever got along without it. The iPad is great for taking notes during lectures (I use it to write directly on the Professor’s Powerpoint slides. There is an app that allows you to highlight, write notes, and mark up the slides on your iPad, using only your finger, but that is a post for another day.

So yes, Apple products are good, but bot the evolutionary leap forward that so many claim it is. They and Windows devices, IMO, are on par with each other.

By Divemedic, ago

Defenseive gun use

One of the lies that is told by anti gun forces in this country is how guns are not used for lawful defense that often, and that your risk of being killed by that gun is higher than your chances of using that firearm in self defense. The flaw with this statement is that firearms are used in self defense millions of times each year without a shot being fired, uses which of course don’t make it into any sort of statistics.

Here is one such case.
A man is in custody after Greene County deputies believe he and a companion broke in and ransacked a home…  A brother of the homeowner, who lives nearby, interrupted the burglary in progress and held the man at gunpoint until deputies arrived. 

By Divemedic, ago

Free College

At first glance, Ohio’s Antioch College offer of free tuition for a four year degree sounds like quite a deal. After all, a four year degree from this 160 year old college is worth over $100,000. The problem is that it is a complete waste of four years of your time.
The reason that it is a waste of valuable years of your life is that the school teaches liberal arts. Liberal arts majors have unemployment rates that are higher than the national average. According to the CEO of the Harlem Education Activities Fund, graduates in more practical fields find that their skills are outdated within 5 to 10 years. Of course, that means that you have probably been working in your field for those five or ten years, and are current in your knowledge through your work experience.
 Not so with a liberal arts degree. It is outdated from the start. Of course, many will tell you that a degree is better than none, but higher education is supposed to be about creating self-sufficiency through job training so a person won’t end up jobless, homeless, dependent upon relatives, or victimized for being in poverty. There is an industry to support here, though. The colleges of this country are peddling snake oil.
The public library’s and bookstore’s purpose is to increase one’s knowledge, ethics, and intellect. If four years or more of a university education is spent on only increasing intellect and morality with no job training, the time that you have spent there has been wasted.
A liberal arts degree is a degree that you earn that has no purpose, other than to allow you to list a college diploma on your resume. This is operating on the assumption that any college degree is beneficial, no matter what the degree was for.
I have a liberal arts degree that I earned by accident while pursuing other academic endeavors. I don’t even list it on my resume, nor is that degree hanging on my wall beside the other two. If any four year degree looks good to an employer, why not get a degree that has the added benefit of giving you a job skill in a field where you will actually get a job?
A four year degree at a state college in Florida (where I went to college) only cost me about about $11,000. For that kind of money, you are better off living at home and going to your local college to earn a degree in a field that is actually hiring.

By Divemedic, ago

Greedy harpies.

So I was at school today, and I overheard a conversation between two female grad students, and they were bragging to each other that they were having their school paid for by their ex-husbands, as a part of a “maintenance order.” One then bragged to the other, “I told him to take the TV and the shotgun, because he had cheated on me. I told him if he didn’t take the gun, I was going to kill him. I got to keep the house, the dog, and the money, and he still has to work two jobs to pay for my school.” All of the other women in the area were in agreement.

I brought this up to my friends, and not one of the women  saw the double standard. If a man ever threatened a woman like that, he would have a domestic violence order on him, and probably be in jail the next day for domestic violence. He certainly wouldn’t be a winner in the lottery.

I’m sorry ladies, but cheating in a marriage does not entitle anyone, man or woman, to free money for the rest of their lives. To claim so reduces women to the class of prostitutes with a payment plan. If women ever expect to be equal in the eyes of the law, they have to be willing to be treated equally in ALL areas of the law.

That is why I cannot believe that there is a popular country music song where the woman talks about all of the violent things she did to her man and his truck because he cheated on her. If this were a song where a man talk about destroying a woman’s property, the outrage would be immediate.

By Divemedic, ago

Geek humor

My grad school class is filled with people who have a wide range of degrees: Pre-med, Chemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology, and Psychology degrees are common. So I got a laugh when one of the students, complaining that a professor was rather long winded and boring, said: “I could feel my telomeres getting shorter.” Geek humor.

By Divemedic, ago

Interesting conversation

I had a conversation in a bar last night that I found to be interesting. I was sitting in a local beer joint having some wings and IPA with another grad student when the subject of guns came up. He told me that although he is from Illinois, he routinely carries a handgun for protection. That is interesting, I say, because Illinois remains the only state in the USA that does not allow this, and you need a permit to even own a gun, and permits to carry guns are non-existent. He told me that the only way he would get caught is if he had to use that gun to defend his life, and in that case, he would worry about the ramifications then.

Now understand that this particular grad school is not for slackers or troublemakers. The school won’t even look at your application if your undergrad GPA is less than 3.3 and your criminal history is a blank slate. Not only that, without giving any of this guy’s details away, he is a very upstanding guy, and his resume would certainly not place him in the category of ‘troublemaker.”

Gun control has failed as a philosophy. Some folks just haven’t accepted that, yet.

By Divemedic, ago