Life is a series of challenges, but some are more welcome than others. Today I bicycled into the office, showered and changed into street clothes. I brought in a pair of jeans, a polo shirt and the usual accoutrements. After showering, and dressing I made a stark observation:
My jeans are almost too big to wear.
Woo hoo, what a good problem to have. I don’t yet need to shop for more clothes, because I have sets of clothes that will follow me down to below 190#’s, but it is a good feeling.
Since I have had a bout with coronary artery disease (a mild understatement), I get to daily take a fun regimen of medications. Prior to my “event” I had battled high blood pressure (ironically, my cholesterol was OK), and was on an ace inhibitor to keep it in the “sane” range.
Post event, my cardiologist has been much more aggressive. I am still on the ace inhibitor (which really was almost side effect free), and we added anti clotting drugs, as well as both a statin to lower cholesterol (they like to keep it really low, about 80), and a beta blocker.
Beta blockers are the devil. It does help lower my blood pressure, but it also lowers both my rest pulse rate, and my metabolism. The heart rate reduction is particularly pernicious, as it makes it difficult to get into a good aerobic zone for exercising. I can work my ass off, and never get above a pule rate of 130BPM.
The bad of this is that while I am certainly burning the calories of the exercise, my heart rate monitor sees me as not exerting as much as I am, and thus it tries to adjust my statistics accordingly.
Alas, there is no hope for change. Every year when I go for my stress test, I have to stop taking the beta blocker for 2 days prior. And my blood pressure goes through the roof. Like 150/99.
Last week was a challenge. With the holiday (grilled some yummy steaks), and our anniversary (tried another local Mexican place that is now our favorite), and two days of training a new sales engineer put a crimp on the diet. But all told, I came out of the week down a pound, and once the over abundance of salt worked its way out, my blood pressure recovered nicely.
This weekend, I got into the spandex, on the bike, and put almost 54 miles on. It is getting challenging, as even leaving at 7:00AM, it is already 85F, and rising to mid 90’s before I get back at 9:00AM. Next week, I will need to pull the Camelback out of its hidey-hole, and load it up. The water bottles are no longer enough to keep me hydrated.
I am down to 215#, 25#’s to go to get to my target of 190.
(This afternoon, it is almost 112F. It is safe to say that the ice broke on the Salt River.)