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Another Weight Loss Attempt

It is time again for another doomed-to-fail weight loss attempt. Why Do I Do This To Myself?

It’s Glaringly Obvious!

Every time I look in a mirror, try to walk up a flight of stairs, or attempt to pick something up off of the ground, it is obvious why I need to lose weight.  I’m a big, fat, slug of a man.  The pain sucks. My back can’t handle the stress the weight causes.  I’ve consistently gained 10lbs a year since getting injured.  I don’t expect I could make it to my 50’s if don’t reverse course.

If I want to see my kids grow up or get married than I have to make weight loss a priority.  If I would like to be able to remain mobile much longer than I must shed some pounds.  I’d really love to be able to stop using my cane.  If I continue to balloon then eventually my ankles, knees, or back will just give out and I’ll be in really bad shape.  It should be glaringly obvious that if I want any quality of life that changes need to happen.

But I Also Have No Idea!

While it IS glaringly obvious that I need to lose weight, I simultaneously have no idea why I do this to myself.  I have tried and failed so many time that I have no confidence that I can succeed.  Does another attempt make any sense if I have anticipate failure?  Yes, the results seem desirable and worth the effort; No, they don’t seem achievable.

But hey, would I really be “me” if I didn’t occasionally try insanely stupid things that seem doomed to failure from the beginning?  Maybe it’s time for a “Here, hold my beer Sprite” type of moment.

Weight Loss Efforts

I will not be doing anything drastic.  I will be trying to combine a small change in what I eat (my “diet”) with a small increase in exercise.

What I eat (diet)

I think the biggest effect could come from just a slight amount of self-control, namely, not eating or snacking after scriptures/bedtime for the kids.  This usually happens around 9pm at our house, but I routinely consume a significant number of calories after this time.   Eliminating this “after hours” eating could/should have the biggest impact on my weight loss.

I don’t usually have much of a breakfast, due mostly to morning back pain keeping me in bed until after normal breakfast hours.  I know breakfast is “the most important meal of the day,” but this probably won’t change.  My morning consumption however has already been changed from cereal or bacon/eggs into a fruit/veggie juice.

Julie and I bought a Champion Juicer that we love.  We’ve had one for years (replaced after each fire).  Julie has been making fresh juices for us most mornings as breakfast.  The juicer tears apart the cells releasing the nutrients rich contents and eliminating the pulp/cell membrane.

A typical juice for two would include:

3 apples

1/10 of a pineapple

1/2 cup of mixed berries (blueberries, strawberry, raspberry, etc)

2 carrots

1/2 cucumber

1/2 stalk of celery

1 serving of some type of squash (zucchini, crook necked, etc)

small handful of spinach or kale (kale is bitter, use sparingly)

There are numerous books, websites, blogs, etc. that give you other recipes that are great.   This one is kind of Julie’s go-to recipe.  Just run it all through the juicer, stir, and enjoy.  You can get a full days nutrients from just one glass of fresh juice.  And it is easier than trying to eat that quantity of produce.

Exercise

This one has always been tough.  The chronic pain makes everything hard.  Combined with seeing how much ability I’ve lost, it becomes is very depressing.   How do I overcome that?

I had always played a variety of sports that would have me running and jumping.  But my weight and back problems don’t let me do either of those.  AT ALL!   Thankfully it is summer now, which provides an easy way to neutralize my massive weight: swimming.

Being in water relieves the stress that the weight puts on my body.  It doesn’t hurt my leg joints nor my back.  The plus side of having this much blubber is it’s buoyancy!  The local Pleasant Grove pool is only open in summer, and so I am looking forward to taking advantage of our family pass.

The downside to swimming though is that in order to breath one must keep ones head out of the water.  I’ve found that the arch in my back that this requires creates a more-than-acceptable level of pain.  So in years past I haven’t swam either.

I’m ashamed to say it took me 9 years to solve the problem of breathing with my face underwater.

My magical breathe-under-water device.  A snorkel and mask!

I don’t know why this “new technology” eluded me for so long, but I’m happy to say that I can now swim, pain free.   Shoulder surgeries has left them weak which could be a problem with swimming too.  Happily, I’ve found that also using fins give me plenty of propulsion to keep me at the surface without engaging my arms (the blubber helps too!).

So I can avoid back pain, rest my arms/shoulders when tired, and can get some exercise!  I am thrilled and excited about this.

Optimism

I’m leery that something will go wrong.   In the last few years something always seems to for me.  But I am more cautiously optimistic.  Not necessarily that I’ll lose weight, but that I can at least increase my activity level without a corresponding increase in pain.

If I can exercise, and if I can control what I eat, perhaps the weight loss will come.  If weight loss can occur, perhaps the pain will decrease (or disappear?).  And if I can be healthy and if the pain goes away, perhaps the depression/anxiety/PTSD will get better too.   That is far too many if‘s for me to be hopeful, but maybe feeling doomed to failure isn’t realistic either.

So wish me luck.  Words of encouragement are always welcome.  Prayers are appreciated.  Feel free to ask me how it is going.  I need the accountability.

And please, stop running away and screaming when I take my shirt off at the pool.  That could make a person feel bad you know 🙂

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Bad Days

You’ve had bad days, right?

Yeah, Me Too!

I have them often, either because of the Mental Health issues or the never-ending chronic pain problems.  I won’t dare say that I have more bad days than most, but I have plenty of them.   So if you find yourself wondering why I haven’t posted anything in a few days, it is because I’ve strung a few less than stellar days together.

So please just keep us in your prayers. We’ll keep you abreast of what we’re doing just as soon as possible.

Thanks for everybody’s love and support.

Enjoy the picture of Andrew playing at the park a few weeks ago!

 

Andrew Jensen - Bad days don't affect him!Andrew was not having a bad day while he played on the monkey bars!

 

 

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Angels Among Us

I believe in angels, both the seen and unseen.  The immortal ones, and the average, everyday, human kind of angel.

I was at a church event this week (New Beginnings) with my daughter, Caitlin.  It was kind of a recognition ceremony that doubled to encourage the girls to live by the values they profess.

When talking of doing “good works” one of the presenters there shared the story of the High School valedictorian who gave a speech where he told the story of how he had cleaned out his locker and was planning on committing suicide that weekend… only someone noticed him as he was on his way home and they spent the weekend (and high school years) together.   (Here’s a link to the story of Kyle).

Well it got me to remembering the Angel that saved my life, Ryan Neilsen, while I was at Fort Huachuca.   I had a hard time at Fort Huachuca do to the unfortunate presence of just a couple of soldiers there who found particular delight in my misery, but it was the presence there of Nielsen that helped me survive the place.

I had filed several informal charges* against one particular guy who was the main problem.   Despite this though the cadre provided no relief and he didn’t restrain himself at all, in fact he was encouraged by the lack of action by the NCO’s.  So things got worse for me.  Thankfully there was  a friend in the unit who was a strength at a time I was weak.

After one particularly bad week of harassment and abuse I had decided to just give up.   I was done.  I couldn’t handle the stress of the current situation and had started to believe it would never get better.  I had broken down and was sobbing and slightly hysterical.   I stumbled over to the Chaplain’s office to try to reach out for help from him, but it was locked and he was gone.

I probably spent 10 minutes just sitting outside the locked doors sobbing and thinking of ways to make the pain/suffering stop.  After a while I was able to stop shaking enough to pull my phone from my pocket and called Nielsen**.   I don’t know that he could understand a thing I said and I tried to talk to him.   He knew I was in bad shape though and asked where I was.   Thankfully he was nearby, close enough that in just a few moments I saw him sprinting his way toward me.

It was a sight I’m sure I’ll never forget, seeing him running toward me to save me from the darkness I was enveloped in.   He talked to me, calmed me, and helped me find additional care.   He was an angel of comfort doing the Lord’s work.  Because of that day, and others like it, Ryan quite literally saved my life.   My family was the reason I chose to kept living, but Nielsen was the one who help me make that choice.

That man has my undying gratitude and will forever, eternally, have my respect and love.  I don’t know if he even remember this incident, but I hope that he knows that if he ever needs me, I will likewise come running to his aid.

In a world full of ugliness, terrorists, hatred, and pain, it is easy to believe that those things are the only things to find in the world.  But you can find some way to be an angel.  Find some way to encourage those around you.  Try to SEE those around you who are hurting, are afraid, are alone, or are ready to give up.  It might only take a moment of kindness to save a life.   It only took a moment to save Kyle’s, and it only took a moment to save mine.

 

* I did end up filing formal charges.

** I could have called Julie, but she seemed too far away.  Plus I wanted to shield her from the pain I was feeling.

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“Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge…” You know the rest!

“Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles…”

Many of you will recognize that as the epic description that “Grandpa” gives before reading “The Princess Bride” to his sick Grandson.  As one of the most quotable movies of all time, it is a fine film that many have thoroughly enjoyed for several decades now.

“As you wish”

Unfortunately, and far less enjoyably, that description also applies to what I experience almost every night when I close my eyes.  My particular experience with PTSD has less to do with my waking hours than it does with my non-waking ones.   There are some manifestations that take place when I’m up and about, but the worst ones are the ones that play out across my synapses while I sleep. I might talk about the causes of my PTSD at a later time, but I’m not up for that right now.  Suffice it to say that I have it.

It is a fact of human biology that we MUST sleep.  And those moments are pure torture for me.  As soon as I close my eyes I’m almost always whisked away and placed in some form of danger.   I’m being held captive somewhere, I’m being tortured, I’m watching people operate on me while I’m ‘awake’, I’m in a house surrounded by people trying to get in to kill me, etc.   Those dreams are pretty bad.  I toss and turn while asleep (also not good with my back), wake in sweaty panics, and just find no rest.

But those aren’t the worst ones.  Part of my PTSD comes from an individual who made some very descriptive threats against my family.  The nightmares where those are played out, or where my brain expands on them, are the worst.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen my wife raped, or a child killed, or been frantically searching for someone who has been taken,  have tried to escape some potential tormentor who is giving chase, or in some other horrendous way watched the mutilation, violation, torture, or deaths of a family member at the hands of some villain (who I occasionally know) that I was unable to stop.  Those nights are the absolute worst, and they come far too often.

I wish there were some better treatment for this.  Since getting here in SLC sometime in November I’ve been regularly seeing someone at the VA.  Supposedly over time things might calm down or stop.  It’s been 8 years since I left the Army though, so I’m not holding my breath.   Other vets have told me that they find some of the more intense therapies very useful, but they usually entail going over the very raw experiences and reliving/retelling them, and I just don’t feel like I’m up to doing that.  Perhaps with time.

For now the best the VA has to offer is medication.   At first they gave me something to relieve my complaint that I couldn’t sleep (I guess I failed to leave out that the nightmares were the reason for that) and so I received a medication that was very good at helping me stay asleep.  But it made it impossible to wake from the nightmares, so that medication was a serious no-go all by itself.

So they added another one to help with the nightmares… except that they don’t have one that affects the actual nightmares.  They give me a blood-pressure medication so that I “will still have the nightmares, but your blood pressure won’t go up so you won’t care about the nightmare.”  So I still have the experiences every night, but the drug tries to take the terror out of it.  How well would your psyche handle that?

My psyche isn’t exactly in pristine condition.  Julie dragged me from the house to a choir/band concert at Caitlin’s middle school (same one Julie attended) a few weeks ago.  We sat in the very back (so I wasn’t surrounded by people) and I went through my regular (though probably not normal) habit of marking exit doors, high traffic areas, persons of note, etc.   I tried to act nonchalant with Julie and asked her if there was an exit at the end of one corridor and then questioning, “I must be turned around, how would I get from that door back to the car?”  I knew where I was, but wanted her to play out the escape path in her mind.  I’m sure she knew I was just being psychotic again.  :/

But if that wasn’t psychotic enough, as I was scanning the crowd and finding exits I suddenly found myself mentally crawling between seats involved in a gunfight with a group of masked attackers.  While everyone else was shuffling in and finding a seat, I was busy returning fire as I tried to push civilians toward some cover, apply pressure to an abdominal wound I took, make my way toward where I thought Caitlin might be on stage, and try to kill some mythical masked SOB with an AK-47.

Of course in real life I was sitting stiffly and starting to hyperventilate about the fact that I was in fact unarmed because I was in a school.  Julie could tell and just helped me breathe.  She takes good care of me like that.   My brain follows that track so frequently while I’m asleep that it easily falls into that pattern when I’m awake sometimes too.

So while the need for sleep is a biological fact of humanity, it is a psychological terror for me that bleeds into my life at inopportune times.   It might sound like a simple phrase, but when I add to our family prayer, “please help us all sleep well” you can understand how selfish a request that is.   I plead for it every night.

I wish upon the rest of you sweet dreams as well.