Why I'm doing this! Or, no more malt liquor blood for me!

All my life I've been fat.  On the Gabriel Iglesias fat scale, I've been everywhere from big to DAAAMN!, but most of my life I've alternated between "husky" and "fluffy".  I come from a family of 'fluffies'.  My dad had diabetes for the last 10 years of his life, and in 2010 he had a heart attack, after which they performed a quintuple bypass.  I didn't even know you could have a quintuple bypass.  He survived the surgery, and resolved to finally get healthy, and six months later he was diagnosed with lung cancer and was dead on April 16, 2011.  I guess life is a biatch like that sometimes.

At any rate, I spent the next year figuring out how to live with the grief, and realizing that if I didn't make the changes I'd been wanting to make for years (but not doing anything about it) I would follow in my dad's footsteps and be dead before my time.  This will not work.  My #1 job in life is to embarrass my children, and there's too much work left to do.

(Warning - I'm going to talk about prayer.  If you are atheist or agnostic - skip this paragraph.)  So if I can get serious for a moment (I will endeavor not to do that very often), I getting desperate to do something different with my diet and health... but I had NO energy.  I felt most of the time like I was wading through concrete, and I would sleep all night and wake up tired.  In January of 2012 I prayed that God would intervene in a supernatural way to get me out of this lethargy and to help give me the willingness or the will power or the whatever to change my life.

(Not for use to control diabetes.)

That summer, my mom visited us for three months, and after a summer of drinking heavily my a1c shot up to 9.3... basically somewhere between Guinness stout and Colt 45 malt liquor.  My doctor wanted to put me on medication.  I'd been diabetic since 2008, but mostly I had not taken anything and my blood sugar wasn't terrible, but wasn't great.  Well, the summer of booze pushed it up too far for even me to ignore.

Meanwhile, my wife (Mrs. Boss) had been struggling for years to lower her cholesterol levels.  Nothing was working, and the next step for her was to go on statins (cholesterol medication).  She was very unhappy with the prospect.  So this summer she had changed doctors, and her new doctor suggestion she go low carb.  She said that new research is showing a correlation to weight and cholesterol levels, especially in patients (like my wife) for whom diet changes were not working.  She said that by going low carb she could take off some weight which would improve her blood work.

A good friend of ours had recently lost a ton of weight, and she had been seeing Dr. Julie Brogren at the Revitalize Clinic in Woodinville, WA.  She said that Dr. Julie had a program that might work for us.  Mrs. Boss went to see her, and came home with a some major lifestyle changes in tow.  I was decidedly NONPLUSSED.  I liked my booze, I liked my chips, and I LOOOVED my potatoes.  Fortunately, I love Mrs. Boss more, so I decided to humor her by going along with new way of eating.

So here's how it works.  It's similar to a lot of popular 'diets' or 'eating systems' out there.   Atkins, Paleo, stuff like that... basically, most carbs are bad.  In this diet, I can pretty much eat all the meat I want, all the cheese I want, all the eggs and bacon I want... so far so good... skim milk is bad, half and half not terrible (more fat = less lactose by volume).  There are three classes of carbs (which I'll list at a later date).  Class 1 are unlimited... so these are things like cauliflower, broccoli, spinach, etc.  Class 2 are limited carbs... like carrots, milk, nuts, etc.  These are carbs you have to count.  Class 3 are carbs you cannot have.  This is basically anything containing sugar, starchy vegetables, rice, grains & bread, etc.  You're allowed 30 carbs a day from Class 2.  And that's pretty much it.

So... we started this in September, 2012.  As of November 2012, I'd lost 40 lbs, and my a1c was down to 6.2.  You read that right... in two months of eating this way I dropped my a1c down by over three whole points.  I'm dangerously close to getting below 300 lbs for the first time since 2005, and my wife's losses have been even more dramatic.  She's lost over 50 lbs, and she's flirting with Onederland (as she calls it).  She was a size 24 in the summer, she's a size 14 now.  So it works.  Best of all... it really isn't that hard.  I don't really miss potatoes or chips anymore.  I actually like cauliflower.  And most of all I like losing weight.