Life Update - October 15 2015

Things have gotten rather out of hand.  I feel very unhealthy and with good reason.  Back in July I said that I need to be doing better.  And while my last A1C (from the end of July) was 7.5%, much improved from the 8.1%, I have failed to do any other tests (basal, insulin to carb ratios, etc).  I've also failed on the being more active point, too.  Well, not entirely...I did buy a new pair of runners and so have started walking more, particularly to work (now that work is currently stable for the moment).  I went swimming a few weekends in the summer with a friend, which was great fun.  But then that stopped, too.

Rather than just kind of carrying on as I have been, I decided to make some changes in my life.  I looked it up today, and my BMI has tipped into the obese range for my height (30.1).  I currently weigh about 210 lbs (I didn't weigh myself first thing in the morning because I forgot. I'll have to do that maybe tomorrow to get a more accurate weight).  I tried looking up my body fat percentage, which is something I've never done before; it came up as 27% based off of a calculator I found online.  That sounded way lower than I was expecting so I tried another calculator and got 39.1%.  And then I remembered the scale I bought awhile ago gives body fat percentage and other measurements.  It took me a bit to figure out how it worked, but I got a reading: fat percentage: 46.2%, hydration: 36.9%, muscle: 26.5%, bone: 10.7%, calories: 2355 kcal.  I don't know that I really need all of those statistics (or how accurate they are), but I figure I'll use them to keep track of how things are going.  Oh yeah, and I measured my waist (37 inches) and hips (44 inches).

So that's what I'm currently at.  I've read that for my height (5'10) a healthy weight is under 175lbs.  I honestly don't think I've ever gotten that low (or if I have, that was it - I've never gotten beyond that and have never been able to maintain it).  So I'm thinking that rather than shooting for the 160lbs I attempted back in 2007 (wow has it really been that long since I started this blog???) I'm going to shoot for (and try to maintain) 170lbs. That would mean losing about 40lbs.

So what is my concrete action plan to do this?  For the immediate future I want to focus on exercising.  To that effect, I bought myself a Fitbit Zip today.  I want to take a look at the exercise/walking I'm currently doing before I'll start really trying to tweak everything (ie do more).  My mom asked me if I wanted to do an exercise video with her every Sunday, which will be great: I've been wanting to add yoga and Pilates back into my life but have had a hard time maintaining any consistency (ie I've done two 20 minute videos in about the last 10 months).  Going to my mom's place will help keep me motivated to do it.  Plus her living room has way more space than mine does for yoga and Pilates.

In the next few weeks, I'm also planning on starting up swimming again.  It looks like I completely failed to record my swimming adventures from last fall here, but for a few months I was going once or twice a week.  Over the last many years I apparently forgot how much I absolutely love swimming; being in the pool was great.  Unfortunately just before Christmas I fell off that bandwagon and never got back on (with the aforementioned bit of swimming during the summer).  I'm hoping to go twice a week, at least for a month (once I get a month-long membership at the local pool): one afternoon with my dad a week, and one night after work.

And of course all of this will have to be accomplished while balancing my Type 1 diabetes.  That never goes away, and tends to actually get in my way most when I'm trying to exercise.  Take today, when I wanted to walk with my mom; we made it twenty minutes before I went low and we had to call it quits.  While I have strategies that work well enough for most of my activities (at least most of the time), I have yet to develop something for swimming.  So that's going to be a major goal for the next month - get through swimming without going low and without going super high afterwards!

I've decided to label this post and any other related to it as "Life Goal" because the whole point of this is to be healthy and feel good for life.  And I'm not going to arbitrarily assign it a date (like I did when I first started this blog).  I will lose these 40lbs in however much time it takes me. I'm going to try to do weekly updates with weight and body fat percentage for the next little while mainly so I can keep track of things (that's my new "progress" label); once I hit my goal I'll probably do them less often, but will try to do them here and there to see how well I'm doing maintaining things.  Wish me luck!