Eureka!

Gadzooks! By Jove! Zounds!

A breakthrough!

After waiting however many forevers I've been sitting here for a call from that seminar place, they finally gave me a call today. There's a seminar going on tomorrow, it seems, from 6-8pm not but 15 minutes from my house. Sweet!

For recap's sake, this seminar is the one thing I need to do (I think?) before I can speak with the surgeon Dr. Burritosmell recommended and schedule a time for the surgery. Needless to say, I'm very, very excited to finally get this show on the road. :] I'll be sure to update as soon as I get out to fully document the experience and everything I learn at the seminar.

On a sidier, angrier note, my shakes haven't arrived yet. According to Amazon, they were supposed to arrive anywhere from 2/23 to 2/29 and they haven't.

Dear Dr. Burritosmell,

While you've the age and appearance necessary to easily be confused for one of my family members, I fear that our time together is quickly coming to an end. Your antiquated tools and stubborn ways are keeping me from getting what I feel is proper medical attention. You may have some questions, so please allow me to elaborate.

I told you I had concerns about the accuracy of my blood pressure tests. I told you that in the past I was told I have high blood pressure; in face, it was so high once that the nurse asked me if I was feeling woozy or if I needed water. You told me today I have normal high blood pressure, when the sleep study technician, not even a fully licensed doctor, told me it was 159/108. You finally gave me medication after copious nagging, but you told me it was weak stuff I could easily get without a prescription.

I also told you I had concerns about the accuracy of your old, rickety kitchen scale. I'm sure those old scales, with the bar that spins around the scale the more the scale is depressed, work just fine for those within a certain weight range, but for us bigger people we need more heavy duty, modern tools. When my doctor before you tells me the digital scale reads 479 lbs then not two weeks later yours reads 446 lbs, I hope you can understand my concern. When the digital scale at the sleep study center says I'm 483 lbs and you tell me two weeks later that I'm 429 lbs and hey congratulations on losing 17 pounds I can't help but be skeptical. My diet hasn't changed, I haven't been exercising, and I was on the juices for all of 4 days.

This last topic's a bit more abstract than the first two but still pretty important. You're... like, an old Filipino curmudgeon. You're never particularly happy about anything, you're not very personable and you've a way with words that's particularly grating. Like when you say "What's wrong with you", "Why are you here" or "Well, if you keep using different scales of course you're going to get different results", I can't help but feel a little put off. When I'm in the middle of the most important medical emergency in my life and you say "Okay, I'll schedule to see you again in three months" it kinda seems like you're not as interested in this as I am.

Anyway, I'd say something like "it's not you, it's me", but I've always been taught that lying is bad. I wish you the best of luck with your business in the future. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go check to see if switching doctors affects my weight-loss-surgery procedure at all.

The cold, hard facts.

One thing the sleep technician disclosed to me was how to determine if someone warranted a sleep apnea machine or not. Sleep apnea is a very big problem that is often overlooked, but it can lead to strokes, heart attacks, dementia and even death. Reggie White died of it! Anyways, he said if someone scores a 15 on some test, meaning someone woke up about 15 times in an hour due to an inability to breathe, they needed a CPAP machine.

Curious, I asked him how the numbers get. He said he just did a sleep study on an elderly man who scored a 70, meaning he woke up roughly 70 times in an hour, not even getting a whole minute of rest. He said that in that state the body never reaches the deeper levels of sleep, never dreams, and never gets any true rest. Freaky, right?

In the morning, he comes in to wake me up (I'm already awake) and he tells me I scored a 105. That's five points away from the maximum, which is 110. Shaken but not quite stirred, I took it on the chin and asked him how the night went; watch anything good on Netflix? I asked, remembering we'd joked about how he passed the time. He said he was busy all night monitoring me so he couldn't really watch anything.

:C

I'm starkly reminded of the nurse who took my blood pressure and asked if I was woozy, or if I needed to sit down.

Speaking of, he took my blood pressure and weight. I knew Dr. Burritosmell's old-school scale was off, but I still have to admit; I'm disappointed with what I saw. I jotted it down, but I knew I'd memorize it anyway.

That's my blood pressure (159/108), my weight (483 :C), and my sleep apnea test results (105).

These shakes, this surgery, the CPAP machine... they can't come soon enough. I'm in a really bad way.

Sleep Studies and How They Suck

To be fair it wasn't all that bad. The technician guy was nice; some guy named Ryan who abashedly claims he's told he's one of the best sleep techs in the bay. Tech Support turned medical support, we talked about nothing while he hooked up wires all over me. I always knew there'd be some wires, but this was just plain high school anime hentai ridiculous. I ended up with two belts, one around the gut and another around the chest, a wire taped to each calf, one on each shoulderblade, about 6 on my head and five or so on my face.

Lol, I look like a brown egg.

Anyway, I sleep about as well as you think one can with all those wires hooked up to them. I'm prone to toss and turn a bit and I asked the technician what would happen if some of the wires got disconnected. He said he'd wake me up and he'd reattach them. If he did try to wake me up, it certainly didn't work. There's nothing quite like awakening to the feel of someone taping something to your head, with some foreign voice talking to you mid-sentence.

I woke up multiple times throughout the night; my bed right now is two mattresses on top of one another (lolghetto) so the clinic's bed was the Aggro-crag in comparison. The room was pitch black, save for the dozens of tiny eyes of the infrared camera, fitting together like spider eyes in the darkness. Grrrrreeeaaattt. It didn't help that Ryan, who I'd built a rapport with, said "Oh, did I tell you about the guy who died in here?" right as he turned off the lights and closed the door.

Anyways, I woke up, he came in, unplugged me from the matrix and I did some paperwork. He had some... pretty alarming results for me, but I'll save that for the next post.

Well, that was fun.

After about five days of drinking this nonsense and losing about 4 pounds in the process, I'm donezo with this juicing fast. I sat with my buddy Morgan who did the shakes with me the first time around and weighed the options available to me. He's a really smart dude so I give his opinion a lot of gravity, and he pointed out that, pros and cons aside, the juice fast is meant to be a detox to make one healthier, whereas my focus is losing weight. When I got to a more reasonable weight, that's when I can start focusing about balancing greens and vitamins, but until then my priority should be getting the numbers down while keeping myself energized and healthy on the ride down.

The fact that the juices were gross, the cleanup was shitty, the preparation was overwhelming, the juicing took a long time and the fast deprived me of certain nutrients is merely an afterthought, though I'm glad he validated my thoughts.

So, with that said, I'm officially quitting the juice fast. It was fun and interesting, and definitely made me feel energized, but ultimately it's more trouble than it's worth. Worry not, though! I've already ordered shakes and will be jumping onto them as soon as they arrive. I look forward to that tons. Until then, I'll be on 1-2 juices a day and a light meal midday, since I know dinner's mostly wasted nutrients.

Last time I was on the shakes for about 8 months I lost 100 lbs, so I've high hopes this time around.

Also, the weight loss surgery is still underway, just a little... delayed. =/ I'll be calling them back this week to see if I can get any kind of updates about that.

Crisis averted

Yesterday, we decided to watch a movie after work. Chronicle's been all over the commercials and the premise was pretty interesting, so we decided to go watch it. The showing wasn't until 9:35, so we knew we'd get home around midnight and figured we could just juice then. What we weren't counting on, however, was me getting nauseous. I'm prone to motion sickness and this movie was pretty much shaky cam from beginning to end; I ended up feeling really gross and discombobulated, so when I got home all I wanted to do was sleep. I figured i could just juice everything in the morning when I woke up.

Thing is, my alarm didn't go off and I woke up AT 10am; pretty much when I'm due at work. So, I rushed through getting ready and just figured I'd do shakes for the day; I've still some leftover boxes in my trunk for emergencies like this one. Luckily, Jody was nice enough to get up earlier and juice not only his stuff but mine as well, setting me up for the whole day. What a champ, right? So, I was able to make it to work CRAZY LATE but with my juices in-hand.

It was super-cool of my roomie to be a bro like that and make my juices for me, but the whole while I couldn't help but think of what a hassle this diet has become. Locking away 2 hours each day for prep/cleaning/juicing is becoming a bit of a burden, moreso than I was originally prepared for. 14 hours a week dedicated to the diet, just tied down to the kitchen... man, it's draining and dragging. I'm trying to figure out how I can do a little bit of both instead; maybe a juice a day and shakes for the rest of the time.

Anyways, I'm still going to stick to this at least for the full 15 days. This week, though, to hell with recipes; I'm just going to get a bunch of produce I actually LIKE and see how that ends up working. Maybe exchange kale with lettuce and add some melons and pineapples. Yum.

Moar Joose!

Another night of successful juicing. As much of a hassle as the juicing process is, it can be fun, too. Tonight, the site we use to plan our drinks was down so we got to make some mystery drinks based on whatever we had and what we thought would taste good. They were mostly successes with one glaring, hateful mistake.

Fuck a grapefruit in the Lifebone.

Other than that, though, we made a solid four drinks for tomorrow and managed to prepare all of our drinks for tomorrow ahead of time. We were able to squeeze a fourth day out of our current selection (with some minor runs to the store for some filler veggies), which is something I must admit I can't do on the shakes.

Anyways, cheers, and here's to sticking to this nonsense. ^__^

Apples for Oranges

This is harder than I thought it would be. I went into this hoping that all of the juices would taste good but expecting some of them to taste bad. What I didn't want or expect, however, was that they -all- would taste bad. Even the good ones, if I'm being honest, taste pretty bad. I guess I'm just not one for smoothies. This diet's been a fight the whole way through.

The thing is, it wouldn't be all that bad if it was at least convenient. But the process of washing, cutting, organizing and preparing all of the fruit, of operating and cleaning the machine between each type of juice, of dealing with the pulp and cleaning up the kitchen afterwards... it's an ordeal! This is -with- the chores split evenly between two people, too.

To that extent, I've been thinking more and more of my old shake diet. This juice fast isn't my first go at an all-liquid diet; I used to eat these powdered protein shakes, doctor approved, that provided me with all of the nutrients and energy I needed. Drinking nothing but shakes, I went from 420 pounds all the way down to 320. The fact that it was so simple (add water, stir, drink) made it much easier to stick to; I didn't have to think about food, I didn't have to dedicate so much time to thinking about the diet. I just did my light exercises, chugged my shakes and lost pound by pound.

After all, that's what it's about, right? Losing weight, getting healthy? It doesn't really matter which way I get there, so long as I'm whole and sane when I do. This juice diet is quickly becoming far more trouble than I was ready for, though the fire required to fuel a complete meal-replacement still lingers. On top of this a friend of mine who joined me in my initial shake weightloss diet is jumping back on it as well, and is looking for someone to join him.

Pros?

• Comparable price to the veggie diet, if not cheaper
• Less hassle and maintenance, virtually no prep time
• Tastes great
• I've got a friend who'll go whole-hog into the fast with me for months
• Complete nutrients; not lacking in protein, fats and carbs, like the juice
• Less calories than the juice - Fasting on calories helps aid and accelerate the weight loss
• No wandering around weird hippie markets XD

Cons?

• I just went in 50% for this juicer; that was a pretty decent investment
• There are only 3 flavors of shakes, so they can get monotonous
• I can only get them online; if I run out and didn't preorder, I'm screwed

So far, the Ayes have it. I'll stick with the juices for now, though, and try and get my money's worth out of it. I'm still trying to figure out a way to incorporate both, just so I can get some fresh stuff (non-teflon-packed) in my system, but there's no real reason to.

Ultimately, the goal is to eat healthy, and neither an all juice diet nor an all shake one is a reasonable, realistic way to live life. But, it'll help me get to the point, weightwise, where I can start considering what a real diet should be like.

Awesome. ^__^

So, I was looking at my previous blog posts, and look at how much I weighed in August.

So, apparently I lost 33 lbs.. or something? XD That, or Dr. Burritosmell needs to get a new scale.

Day Two

Another day, another juice. In my haste to get in to work on time I forgot to weigh myself, so instead I'll give my doctor's office a call and see if they can pull up my numbers for me. With luck, they'll go down by the 28th, when I go in next.

What a nice lady my doctor's receptionist is. ^_^

Last recorded weight: 446 Lbs

Blood Pressure: 150/100

Yikes, right?

Anyways, I'm chugging my Minty Fresh Berry.

• 2 cups Blueberries
• 2 Kiwi Fruit
• 16 Strawberries
• 2 cups Mint leaves, packed into the measuring cup

Aaaaand it's pretty delicious.: ]

So, I'm exhausted so allow me to sum.

Some of the juices sucked. Some of them were awesome. I didn't even need all of them. We made tomorrow's juices in 2/3 the time that it took yesterday. My nails are long. I was tired all day but that's probably because I only got 5.5 hours of sleep. Tomorrow, I'll try and post some hard numbers for yall; my last recorded weight, blood pressure and calorie count. Let the progress tracking begin!

AAAAAAND WE'RE OFF!

So, day one of the JoinTheReboot all-juice fast has begun!

The morning began with a hearty jug full of Purple Power Juice.

Ingredients

• 6 cups Concord Grapes
• 1 Golden Delicious Apple
• 2 2 x 2” pieces Ginger
• 1/2 cup Blackberries

It was pretty good! A little tart; made me do the Martin twist-and-wince a bit, but it otherwise went down smooth. Overall, a GREAT way to start the day and the diet alike. :]

Next up was the Mean Green...

Ingredients

• 1 Green Apple
• 2 cups Spinach (~3 handfulls)
• 2 cups Kale leaves (~6-8 leaves)
• 1/2 Cucumber
• 4 Celery Stalks
• 1/2 Lemon

I... yeah, no, no more. Gonna cut the lemon from the recipe, I think. It was the hardest thing I've ever had to drink, I think... and I've another one very like it coming up in about 40 minutes. Gat dammit.

Oh well, in the end it's about nutrients and health. I just gotta get used to the idea of drinking whole lemons, I suppose.

:S

This is it. :]

VIDEOS!

AND NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT OF THE EVENING!

THE VIDEOS!


Video the first!
Wherein Jody and I embark on the Journey of Juice, making our first juice and going through the process.

The Inaugural Taste
Here, Jody tastes the very first juice we make, The Purple Power Juice. It is -so damned good-.

The very first Mean Green
Since the last juice was all easy stuff, we figured we'd show what the first "real" juice looks like in the making.

MEAN GREEN!
The first REAL test; how does Mean Green taste?

And I'm spent.
After about 2 hours of juicing we're done; 10 juices made, five each, meaning we're all set for the next day. Behold the glorious final product. :]

McGoodbye

Standing at the brink of this crazy new diet, I can't help but feel a little scared. I always get like this on the eve of something new, and though giving up all solid food in lieu of liquids isn't new to me, this level of intensity and commitment is. I won't lie; some of those juices we made tonight tasted great, yeah, but one or two of them were outright gross. Finding good, cheap recipes for juice that I can stand drinking, day in and day out, is as daunting as it is important.

Sitting here, waiting for these videos to upload, I should be feeling excited. Thrilled, even. I'm about to start a new chapter of my life that will help bring me to a level of health I've only ever dreamed of, and it's everything I've ever wanted. But all I feel is nervous, nauseous and scared. I should be eager but all I really want to do is go eat something terrible as a final farewell to this horrible side of my life.

I'm sure, to some extent, that this is what drug addicts feel like the night before they go to rehab.

I wonder if the local McDonald's is open 24 hours...

Let there be JUICE!

I fucking reek of produce. I am covered in the viscera of so many dead plants. I ran my fingers back through my hair and came away with bits of kale and beets.

So, after last night's bit of disappointment, my roomie Jody was able to get another blender. Same brand, same model, only this time it's brand new and from Macy's instead of "Factory Reconditioned" from Amazon. They said they'd give us a refund in the form of a gift card; whatever, I'm just glad to be on the move with this new diet.

We put together all of the necessary ingredients for our first day worth of juices (after a quick run to Safeway for some celery) and went to work. I'd describe it in great detail but I've a number of videos uploading that'll do that work for me. Suffice it to say, it was painful and awkward at first but eventually smoothed out as we found our rhythm.

In this way, juicing is like anal sex.

With Jody preparing the recipes and me behind the wheel of the juicer (that thing's a beast), we did a pretty good job. It took a while, though, and we ended up leaving a mess. I'm convinced that, if nothing else, this diet will lead to us having a cleaner, better organized kitchen. I'm looking forward to day five, when we are divine gods of the juice who waste not a single inch of celery and can measure within an atom what a cup of kale is, simply by hand alone.

I shouldn't be this exhausted, but I am. XD More on this and other things when the videos upload!

JOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSE

Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead.

At a friend's suggestion, my roomie and I watched this documentary on Netflix. It follows two men, both in differing states of unhealthiness, who are prime examples of the movie's namesake. They embark on this drastic all-juice diet cleanse program wherein they ingest pretty much nothing but juiced vegetables and fruits, all while keeping a moderate regimen of a diet. Nothing special, right? Just another healthy documentary trying to sell some new diet-food making appliance to the guilty masses?

Of course it is. XD

The thing is, though, this movie has a guy in it that is painfully familiar. Phil Staples is well into his 400s, weightwise. He is drudging through life, miserable and sad. He cannot play with his kids because he tires too easily. He breathes heavily from walking short distances. He has trouble doing far-too common, everyday tasks because of his size. He is alone, he is slow, he is dull and he is miserable because of the life he is trapped in.

So, he starts in on this diet, all juice all the time, and the change is nothing short of miraculous. I'm not just talking about getting skinnier; I lost weight on the shake diet, any fast will make you lose weight. But he has energy, he has pep. He was sluggish and monotone, suddenly he's speaking with vim and vigor, he's popping off lines and smiling. He has a positive effect on those around him and whoohoo, Phil's suddenly the man.

Well, I wanna be the man, too.

I see this guy on this diet and I think to myself, hell, I'm just waiting for this doctor to call me, and I did the shakes before, sure, but that was eating food out of boxes and teflon packs. This diet is 100% real stuff that comes out of the earth, focusing on foods I've normally stayed far away from. I'm all for it.

So, I go to their website and do some research. For some reason, the diet the guy in the movie was on isn't readily available; there are plenty of diets including both juices and eating, but no all-juice diets longer than three days (and no diets past 15 days, period). It kinda weirds me out; did they have to change the diet in the movie because someone tried it and got hurt, or there was some adverse effect they didn't really talk about?

I dig and I dig and I find out that basically, just like in the movie, they don't want to make the diet readily available in 2-month fast form to anyone who hasn't first consulted their doctor. Good call.  (I'm seeing mine on the 28th, btw, so I'll be asking him about it then)

Anyways, I find a few juice recipes and throw together a 3-day regimen. Taking the ingredients for a bunch of different recipes, I compile them into a list... and it looks pretty daunting.

And that's just for three days.

But whatever, it's time to do this, right? So, my roomie and I go half in for a juicer like in the movie ($80 each, ouch), then we trek on down to the San Mateo Whole Foods market to find some of this crazy plantlife all the healthy folk seem to be so crazy about.

It is a -nightmare-. Nearly everything there has the golden label of organic on it, written ever-so-coolly on blackboard in white chalk, and gathering everything on the list is straight chaos. When we finally do get everything (or nearly everything; we had to go to Trader Joe's for Kale, compensate blueberries for cranberries and we just plain forgot to get ginger), we take it to the counter... and pretty much drop a whole hundo each.

We could've done better research on where to get produce and chosen cheaper recipes, but we were in a rush and completely new to the process. Next time, we're going in smart and we're going in cheap; there's no reason why this diet shouldn't be cheaper than eating out 2-3 times a day.

So, here we are; Superbowl's over, we've eaten the last of our farewell meals and we've got everything lined up by the juicer. The phone's focused and I'm about to take video of the first juice... when...

Click.

Click.

Click.

The juicer doesn't work.

So, now we've got about $200 of PLANTS in our fridge and no juicer to turn it all into easy-to-consume liquid yumminess. Bit of a bummer, right?

Ah well. Tomorrow's a new day, and we're going to send this dumb juicer back and pick up a new one at Macy's. Now that we're all caught up to present, hopefully my blog posts will come in smaller chunks, eh?

Look forward to my first juice video/picture, coming soon!

Poor old Michael Finnigan...

...get it?

Here we are again. I've so much news and progress that I won't waste too much time with the fluff; if you're here, it's because you know me and you're concerned, and chances are I think you're great. More importantly, you know full well why I write this blog and why I'm trying to lose weight. Let's get straight to the good stuff, yes?

I've decided to go for Bariatric Surgery. It wasn't an easy decision to make, but when I weighed the benefits versus the alternatives, I decided to go in whole-hog. I'm sure my recklessness comes as no surprise. My cousin and my aunt have both had the surgery and have had amazing results; my cousin Sarah, once nearly as big as I was, is like a supermodel now. Now, I know what you're thinking; the surgery is by no means a magical fix that will make me skinny, nor is it 100% safe. Trust me when I say that I've thought this all through, weighed the pros versus the cons and I've finally decided that this was best for me.

Exciting, right?

Since my last doctor left his clinic (which I later learned is shadier than I'd thought), I found a new doctor. Long story short, he's an old Filipino man whose office is in a beat down grocery store shopping stripmall, right next to a Mexican restaurant, but I stuck with him because I can relate, he seems concerned and he's got that family vibe to him.


Some people go to mom and pop bookstores instead of Barnes and Nobles, or to local coffee shops instead of Starbucks. I'll see Dr. Burritosmell and drink my Frappucinos™, thank you very much.

So I talk to Dr. Miranda and tell him I wanna go for the surgery. He says cool, he's had a couple of people do it before, but there's one problem; my insurance. Working through an HMO is a long and lengthy process full of tests and whatnot because you have to prove to your insurance company that they should pay for it. Normally, that'd be fine, but I've got a wedding to get ready for... and frankly, these health-related issues I've been having have been getting worse. I can't wait the year+ it could take. Dr. Burritosmell (Miranda) says that if I really want him to send me straight to the folk who cna help me, I have to switch to a PPO. A PPO lets you do what you want and see who you want, but there's a catch.

You have to pay a portion of whatever procedures you have done.

=/

Whatever. says I. Let's do it.

Here we are, a few weeks after telling my Doctor I switched insurances on the New Year. I've already got a referral for a surgeon (!) and I'm going in for a sleep study on the 15th.



I called the surgeon, and they said I have to go through a seminar regarding the surgery first, which would be fine if they currently had one scheduled. As it stands, I'm waiting for them to call me back.

As for the sleep schedule, though, I'm -stoked- about that. I haven't slept for longer than 5 consecutive hours since... my teens? Even then, my sleep has been angry and broken with raucous snoring; jokingly, my friends say I sound like a drowning raptor when I sleep. Not jokingly, they say I sound like I'm dying. I can't describe well enough the intense shame and embarrassment of sleeping around my friends, knowing I submit them to this every night.

So, this sleep study thing is the bees knees. I'm excited.

While I've been waiting for the surgeon's office to call me back, I've been sitting here, knowing I need to do something more immediate about my weight; no more waiting, no more postponing, I need to do something NOW.

So, juice.

More on juice and what two hundred dollars worth of plants looks like in my next post. Thanks for making it this far, if you did!