Ow. And Some Other Stuff.

So, yeah: ow.  Since I finished the punching drills in the TKD class the other night, my arms (and back and chest) are sore today.  And I’ve been lifting weights and doing pushups for a few weeks now, and they’re STILL sore.  That’s ok, though.  I kind of like being a little sore, and even when I first started doing TKD and my arms were a lot stronger, I was still sore the morning after.  🙂

Oh!  And here’s something funny.  I’ve heard about sending shredded credit card applications back to the company in those pre-paid envelopes they send, but I like THIS even BETTER.  (Via Sue.)  *evil grin*

Anyway. 

I’ve been eating WAY less sugar and carbs lately.  Well, fewer REFINED carbs, anyway.  As I write, I have a sandwich on whole-grain bread sitting in my lunchbox for later, so I’m not cutting out carbs entirely.  And first?  I would like to say that THANK GOD it’s getting easier.  I think it helped that I wasn’t Cutting Them Out, because that always makes me insane.  I was eating a piece of chocolate in the afternoon (though I think I’m ok without it now – not to say that I don’t have the option – I just don’t think I need it to prevent crazy-brain).  And I’m going out to Happy Hour with some friends this evening, so that’s challenging, especially since I’ve been avoiding alcohol as well.  So clearly I haven’t cut them out altogether.  But I’ve been eating a lot fewer.  But the first few days were rough – not so much the physical cravings as the battle with Crazy Brain: trying to make my brain think and function NORMALLY, even though I was, in some ways, restricting what I ate.

And why, you ask, was I restricting what I ate?  Me, an avid fan of NOT restricting foods and food groups, not even “bad” ones because it makes me crazy in the head?

Well. 

Sometimes I know things about my body.  That sounds silly, doesn’t it?  We ALL know things about our bodies.  But I think maybe I trust my body more than some people?  I don’t know.  But there have been times in my life where something went wrong and I KNEW what it was.  Without looking up symptoms, without going to the doctor – I just knew.  And when I DID go to the doctor, they eventually confirmed it.  That’s happened to me a few times.  It happened when I ruptured the disc in my back.  I KNEW what it was: not that it was ruptured, but I went in saying, “there’s something wrong with my SPINE.  NOT the muscles around it.  It’s the SPINE.”  After 3 (!) years of getting bounced from General Practitioner to General Practitioner, all of them saying, “it’s probably nothing, it’s probably a muscle spasm, do some physical therapy, you’re probably just not flexible [dude, I was a DANCER.  I was FLEXIBLE, ok?],” I finally had a meltdown in the waiting room after my 4th session of my 3rd round (!) of physical therapy.  I cried and screamed and said I’d DONE the exercises, and I COULDN’T SIT OR WALK OR STAND AND SO HELP ME IF THEY DIDN’T GET ME IN TO SEE A SPECIALIST NOW  SOMEONE WAS GOING TO GET HURT.  And lo and behold, they sent me to a specialist.  And the specialist asked me where it hurt and how I could move and couldn’t move, and looked concerned and sent me to an MRI stat, and when I got back to his office he was livid (not at me; at the people who didn’t believe me).  “You have a ruptured disc!  And it’s old!  There is scar tissue and everything!  AND IT’S STILL LEAKING FLUID!!!  IT’S STILL RUPTURED!!!  WHY DIDN’T THEY SEND YOU TO ME BEFORE????”  Yeah.  I’d been walking around with a ruptured disc for 3 YEARS.  That is a long-ass time to be in chronic pain, people.  (I don’t know how people with chronic pain diseases do it.  I’d off myself.  No, seriously.  I’m not being flippant.)

Anyway.  That same thing happened with my knee, which was misdiagnosed for (a different set of) 3 years.  I kept saying, “something TORE,” and they’d say, “well, it looks fine now, and you can almost walk on it.  You’ll be fine.”  Um, yeah.  Something was TORN, it turned out, imagine that.  😛

I say all of that to lead up to something that will make people want to send me to a doctor, and I should say up front I’M NOT GOING.  I have a holistic doctor, and I’ll talk (have talked a little already) to her about it, but all the tests you want to recommend?  Don’t.  No, really.  Because I already KNOW what’s wrong.  And yeah, it sounds irrational for me to say that, but well – sometimes my life is a little irrational.

Anyway.  I’m pretty sure that sometime last week I managed to go from insulin-resistant to diabetic, pretty much overnight.  I woke up in the morning, hungover with sugar and alcohol from a binge, and stumbled around getting dressed.  After an hour or two though, I realized that something was WRONG.  My heart was beating fast, I couldn’t stand up without thinking I was going to pass out, I was hot and my skin was hotter . . . this was not a “normal” hangover.  So I started thinking about what I’d eaten and drank the night before, because I KNEW I hadn’t had enough alcohol to produce that effect.  And as I thought about it, I realized that IT WAS ALL SUGAR.  Straight up sugar, in various forms.  Oh, shit.  And then I realized that all those symptoms I was having?  Were indications of dangerously high blood sugar.  Um, yeah.  Not just HIGH blood sugar.  DANGEROUSLY high blood sugar.  Oh shit, again.  (Fortunately it wore off just before noon, which was my cut-off after which  I was going to the ER, which I really, REALLY didn’t want to do, but was scared enough to do if I needed to.)

So.  Game over.  That’s it!  Everybody out of the pool!  We’re done!  Done with the self-sabotage (which, hoo-boy, is obviously working WAY too well) and the bingeing!  Do not pass Go, do not collect 200 dollars.  We’re done.

The funny thing is that I’ve been hypoglycemic for a long time, so I never really worried about my blood sugar being too HIGH.  How can you be both hypOglycemic and hypERglycemic?  Crap.  That SUCKS.  

But!  It’s highly motivating!  Between the fright and the vanity (because YES, I’d like to drop some weight, and I know I’m a hypocrite because I DO believe in Health at Every Size, but that’s not the same as Health at ANY Size, which is a whole ‘nother post, so I’ll shut up now), I’m SUPER-motivated, lemme tell ya!  LOL  And I figure that IF I really have tipped into diabetes, then I’m standing on the edge of that diagnosis and will just have to tip myself out of it again. 

All that said, I’m not going to use the term diabetic.  Like I said, if I’ve tipped into it, I’m just barely into it and will get myself out of it, stat.  But I don’t want to OWN the word, from a psychological and/or Law of Attraction standpoint.  So I’m not diabetic.  I’m taking care of my blood sugar (which would be true for hypoglycemia too) and losing weight to fit into my cute clothes.  Period.  (I just have some extra motivation now.)

(Note to potential future insurance folks who might have stumbled across this: I have NO official diagnosis.  I’m probably wrong.  I probably just had a REALLY bad hangover, and now I’ve pretty much quit drinking.  That is all.)