Stages

An era has come to end; the era of me being on Atkins.  The reason I went on such a drastic diet was because my blood sugar had gotten too high and I had become borderline diabetic.  My doctor had put me on metformin towards the end of last year, and being that my family history is quite full of diabetes this scared me.  A lot.

As I've blogged before, due to Atkins I had lost in the neighborhood of 60 pounds since the end of last year.  I went to the doctor yesterday and he did one of those finger prick glucose tests.  He said if the sugar was at or around 6 I could get off the metformin.  As it turned out the sugar was down to 5.5 (the doc was VERY happy about this) and off the metformin I went.  So that crisis has been at least temporarily averted.

The thing that always scared me about Atkins was the fatty intake that was not only allowed but encouraged.  That can't be good in the long-term, so now that I had met my first goal it was time to plan out  the next step.  So I found a gym about 4 minutes away and signed up.  Yesterday after my doctor appointment I met with a nutritionist to plan out a diet alternative that would help reduce body fat and also build lean body mass.  I'm not entirely sure that I like this diet though.  Way back when (late 90s) I was actually a bodybuilder and recall to some extent what my diet was, and it was a lot more food (specifically carbs) than what I'm going to be taking in now.  The thing is that diet worked quite well, my body fat was just over 10% and I was pretty big.

But I'm going to try this out, I already started today.  Of course over the last week I had one last hurrah, partaking a bit in stuff I had omitted completely since last December.  Rum & coke, a trip to the Chinese buffet, a sausage pizza...yeah probably not the best thing to do, but I had to get it out of my system.  Yesterday I finished it off with a chocolate milkshake and some BBQ chicken nachos from Famous Dave's.  Kind of a farewell tour of sorts.  So far on the diet today it just doesn't seem like enough food, and of course thats to be expected since its a reduction diet.  But we'll see how it goes.  I still have 2 meals due today (had 4 already).  I plan on starting the lifting phase this Monday.  I have my workout broken down already by day, it will just be a matter of familiarizing myself with what's where at this place.  I am hoping to go in tomorrow and Sunday morning and hit the treadmill for at least half an hour each day just to wet the feet in this place a little.  The nice thing is its open 24 hours so I can go any time.  Its also only $25/month which helps a lot too.

So come Monday the plan is to get up at 5am, take my thyroid medicine, wait the necessary hour before eating, taking breakfast, then hitting the gym by about 6:30.  I'm a little nervous about going to a new place, especially considering the physical wreck I am anymore lol.  But I'm excited too, this is something I used to enjoy doing back in the day.

Also worth mentioning, I had my body fat measured yesterday.  I joked with the guy, asking him if he'd ever had anyone come back with a reading in the triple digits before.  As it turns out (and I already knew this), if I had no body fat on me at all I would still weight 245lbs.  So yes, I truly am big-boned.  :)