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Thursday, May 19, 2016

Eric and the Plant-Based Diet Part II

I really didn’t like being on Lipitor.  I don’t know if it was in my head because of all the horrible reports about it that I had read online, or if it actually made me feel awful, but, either way, I wanted off of it.  I went back to my doctor in June of 2014 and begged her to let me stop taking it.  I told her that there was no way anymore cholesterol was going to enter my body because I was done with 98% of animals and their by-products.  She said something about my body producing its’ own cholesterol, which I am sure is true, but I was doubtful that it would be an issue.  However, I am not a doctor because I didn’t go to medical school because I am lazy and because people are gross (ok, I’m done stating obvious things).  She finally agreed to compromise with me, and let me take the medication every other day.  I don’t know why I let my doctors have so much power over me, but it’s probably because they are actually doctors, and they have the advantage of having been trained to make me doubt myself and Google—also, probably in medical stuff too.  So, again, I don’t know if it was all in my head or if was real, but I felt better.  I was on the lowest possible dose of Lipitor, and I was now only taking it every other day.
I spent most of the rest of 2014 working, watching tv, playing video games, listening to podcasts, dealing with our new surprise, adorable, yet medically improbable child, and trying to discover every type of junk food on the planet that was, as Peta calls it, accidentally vegan.  There is a ridiculously large amount accidentally and intentionally vegan junk food out there.   Now, it’s not very healthy and sort of defeats the purpose of why I started this diet in the first place, but you can be a vegan, and never eat a singe vegetable for the rest of your life.  There’s also a ton of meat and cheese “substitutes” that certain desperate people will tell you are very close to the real thing.  I disagree with those people, for the most part.  I haven’t really had anything by itself that made me think it was meat, but when it’s mixed in with other things it can be hard for my brain to distinguish the difference.  As far as the “cheese” goes though, I haven’t found anything close, and, besides ice cream, that’s the thing I miss the most.
When I started this diet I really believed that the lack of unhealthy choices would force me to lose weight.  The more research I did, and the more online communities I joined, the more I learned that there is going to have to be more self control on my part than I originally had hoped.  Some people, myself included, might have thought that just abstaining from all animal products completely would be all of the self control that one could muster.  I can’t tell you how many stories I have read where the person went vegan, and lost all the pounds without even trying.  I guess my life doesn’t work that way.  So, that year and all of the next my weight hovered around 380 lbs with about a 5-10 lb fluctuation here and there.  I’m pretty disappointed in myself being the only overweight “vegan” that I know—I only know one other vegan, my wife, and she didn’t convert until September of 2015.
My doctor sent me a letter in September of 2014 informing me that she was leaving her practice to go work on a new specialty or something.  I have tried really hard not to take that personally.  This was actually pretty good news for me because I really hated driving an hour and a half away to sit in a waiting room for another hour waiting to see a special doctor that I had only chosen because I thought that she could magically cure the headaches I was having 5 years ago (she didn’t, but she did try, I still like her).  There was no way I would ever work up the courage to leave her, but I certainly did complain a lot to everyone else.  I got a new doctor in early 2015 and she is a super cool lady.  It took me a few months, and some blood work, but she let me quit taking Lipitor at the end of 2015.  She is awesome and my new goal is working on her letting me get off of the blood pressure meds, but that’s going to take some doing.
After we lost our jobs in December of 2015 I gained 17.8 lbs, like an idiot.  It sucks because when they announced to the plant in August that they were going to shut it down I made a mental note to myself that I needed to cut out all of the bad foods, count every calorie, start exercising, and write again.  I did exactly zero of those things in that 5 month period.  I don’t know why I’m so self destructive.  I am now currently doing 2 1/2 of those things regularly.  So, that’s something, right?
In March I made several changes to my diet.  I cut out all processed food that had either, oil or sugar in the top 5 ingredients (that’s the 1/2 in 2 1/2), I started counting every single calorie that I consume (which is way more work than it should be, but it’s a real eye opener too)(that’s 1 of 2 1/2), and I stopped eating any food 3 hours before I go to bed (I’ve read that this does absolutely nothing for weight loss, but I feel better in the morning when I go to sleep hungry.  That’s probably just in my head, right?).  Also, and this isn’t diet related, but I have obviously, finally started writing again (that’s 2 of 2 1/2).  As of this morning I weight 367.6 lbs which means that I have lost 30.2 in the last 2 1/2 months.  That sounds better than it is because the first few pounds were much easier to lose, and now I am at approximately .1 lb lost a day on average.  So, here I am, on a plant-based diet, counting all the calories, and losing weight at a glacially slow pace, but at least I’m writing, something, and I don’t have to take Lipitor anymore.
Eric Anderson
P.S.  To be continued again…

Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Eric and the Plant-Based Diet Part I

In early September of 2013 I went to my doctor for a routine blood pressure check up.  She told me that I had borderline high cholesterol, and if I didn’t cut back on the meat she would have to put me on medication.  I said “sure doc, no problem”, and I left.  Then I spent the next 3 months eating nothing but ground beef, sausage and piles and piles of cheese (there was probably other stuff in there too, but that’s not relevant to this story).  Sure, I hated the idea of being on any more medication, specifically that medication (I had read a few things about it that I didn’t like), but meat is delicious.  She had scheduled me to get more blood work in mid November so I just crossed my fingers and hoped my gluttonous behavior didn’t come back to bite my ass.  Two days later I got a call from the nurse.  “She wrote you a prescription for Lipitor and I already called it in to the pharmacy” she told me.  “But…” I said “…I don’t want to be on Lipitor”.  She told me that she was sorry and I decided I was going to become a vegan, maybe, probably, after Christmas (what’s the rush?  I’m already on medication).
A year or so earlier my boss had watched a documentary called Forks Over Knives about plant-based diets (sneaky vegan phrasing).  He decided to compromise and he just became a vegetarian, mostly, for a good deal of time.  At work we all gave him a lot of crap for his refusal to eat that oh so delicious animal flesh, but it didn’t phase him because he was concerned about his cholesterol.  His son and daughter-in-law were already full on vegan, but more for ethical reasons than health concerns, although, I’m sure that’s an added benefit.  I thought the idea of not eating meat was absolutely ludicrous.  God gave us the animals, right?  Man was not meant to eat carrots, right?  That’s what I was always taught anyway.
I made it through Christmas and told my wife that I was going Vegan on New Year’s Day.  I didn’t really know much about veganism other than the abstaining from animals and their by-products part, but I was determined to do whatever it would take to get off of this awful medication.  I don’t really know how she felt about it when I told her.  She seemed mostly ok with the idea, but she was also used to all of the crazy new diets that I had tried over the years.  I imagine that she thought that this was probably another fad that I would give up on after 3 months or maybe sooner.  We had a week to prepare.  We already had the essentials for survival.  My bread was vegan so I could live off of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but I also found a vegan protein powder, and we bought almond “milk”, quinoa, and a couple vegetables.  On New Year’s morning we got up and watched Forks Over Knives first thing (I had never seen it before) to give ourselves the motivation that we would need to see this thing through.  After that my wife told me that she would be a vegetarian, but veganism was a step too far, and she certainly wasn’t going to push it on the kids.  I was mostly okay with that because this is about me and my cholesterol, but I knew it would be harder with that stuff in the house.
I went back to my doctor in the second week of January and declared that I no longer needed to take cholesterol medication because I was no longer eating anything with cholesterol.  She told me that my cholesterol levels were better, but that was probably because of the medication and not because of my insane diet choices (she was concerned that veganism was going to make me a diabetic).  She decided that I should stay on the medication a while longer.  She was also concerned that I had gained weight although that wasn’t the case at all, this time.  You see, there was a problem with the scale in the examination room that I normally used.  The scale always said that I weighed quite a bit less than I knew that I actually weighed, but I didn’t want to argue and over the last couple of years it had become way too awkward for me to say anything.  It just happened that on this day they decided to put me in an examination room where the scale actually worked for my enormous size.  I explained all of this to her, which was rather embarrassing for me, but I had to defend myself.  She was skeptical to say the least.
On January 1, 2014, when I started my plant-based diet, I was the heaviest that I have ever been in my life.  I don’t know exactly how heavy I was because there were no scales in my house that could actually tell me, but I know I was pretty heavy.  I couldn’t weigh myself until I got to the large shipping scale at work on the 6th.  I was 425 lbs by that point.  Based on how quickly I was losing weight during that first 3 months of my new diet I figure that I was at least 435 lbs.  I got down to about 380 lbs, and then I just stopped losing weight.  I don’t know if it’s because I discovered that Fritos, Oreos, and many items at Taco Bell are Vegan or if I just… hmmm, no, that’s probably it.
Eric Anderson
P.S. to be continued…

Friday, May 13, 2016

Eric and the Velleity

“I need to make a change in my life, in my way of thinking, I need to either pursue this thing full on, whether it be good or bad, or just give it up and be happy with my lot in life.” - Eric Anderson February 22, 2012 at 9:19 AM (4 years 2 months 19 days 21 hours 41 minutes 0 seconds ago)
When I posted that, 133,224,060 seconds ago, I didn’t realize that there was a third option.  I had no idea that I would give up writing completely and also be miserable and unfulfilled creatively the entire time.  2,220,401 minutes ago, I thought that I was motivating myself to dedicate more time to this thing that I have almost always wanted to do with my life.  When I posted the last thing that I would write on the internet for 37,006.6 hours, other than a few insignificant tweets or facebook updates, I thought it was a new beginning and not an ending.  As those 1,541.9 days, 220.6 weeks, 50.6 months, and 4.2 years went by, I did not go a single one without thinking about starting to write again, but I guess that was a wish not strong enough to lead myself to action (Velleity).
Whenever I think about why I quit writing I can’t really narrow it down to a specific reason.  I was depressed, angry, terrified, and I just didn’t feel great about things in general.  I was unhappy and stressed out at work, I was fighting with pretty much anyone that pissed me off, and I was too lazy to get up and make myself do it.  I thought my writing was too whiney and sad to share with the world, which it was.  I just re-read, re-edited, and took notes on all 37 of my old posts, and there was a lot of crying in there.  I have known all along that I need to be doing this though, because it is my therapy, and my brain isn’t going to get better unless I start working out my issues (on the internet, for the world to read).
In early 2012 I started working every day of the week.  This continued for the entire year and took up 95% of the Sundays in it.  I decided to use that as an excuse to stop going to church.  I didn’t want to go anyway so that worked out, but I could have gotten off of work early enough to make it.  The day after Christmas of 2011 I wrote something about a person I had been fighting with since September on my health blog (I was trying to track weight loss and other health issues, probably stress, but it was super boring mostly).  Even though everything I wrote was 100% factual, in my opinion, it hurt some feelings and turned into a thing.  We argued about it for over a week, other people got involved, it was dumb, and it just upset me so much that I didn’t want to go back to church.  There were several people involved that I just didn’t want to see there.  I kept writing for a couple of months after that though.
I spent an inexcusable portion of 2012 illogically concerned that the world might end before the year was over.  If destruction wasn't reigned down by the Mayan demon death dragon (or whatever was supposed to happen) then it was surely coming from the crazies that believed in that nonsense.  I knew it was irrational at the time, and I know it even better now, 3 1/2 years later.  I probably shouldn’t admit that even a small part of me was terrified.  As soon as 2012 was over, and the planet not destroyed, so were the 72 plus hour work weeks, and all that sweet sweet overtime pay (We only thought we were broke before that time).
Then, 2013 started with a layoff at the plant and a major cut back on hours for those of us that were “fortunate” enough to stay.  The next three years were filled with rumors of layoffs, hour cut backs, slight hour increases, more hour cut backs, actual layoffs and finally a notice of plant closure last August (2015).  It was both a relief to finally know our fate and terrifying to not really know it at all (I am still unemployed along with my wife, who also worked at the plant).  We finally closed it down in December and the 4 1/2 months leading up to that day were some of the hardest of my life.  During all of that time I still didn’t go back to church.  It was much easier to just continue not going after I didn’t go for a year already, and I was (am) still angry.
In that past four years things haven’t really been bad for me.  We have been very fortunate.  I mean, sure, every time someone tells me what’s on the news I get depressed, angry or terrified all over again, but there have been plenty of good things that happened too.  I started a plant based diet (98% vegan, but I’ll get into that later), we had a surprise 99% impossible child (she’s the 1%, but not in the way that normally means), we bought a house that we love, I lost a job that I didn’t even really like (now, I am still unemployed, but maybe it was still a good thing and I should be looking at it as an opportunity), I still have a beautiful wife, and, now, three adorable children.
Since I quit officially writing, my brain has been sneakily getting me to write other places that might not have been entirely appropriate.  I wrote extra long meeting notes and speeches to my employees that I never actually gave.  I wrote long angry letters to companies that pissed me off, city officials that pissed me off, and to my HR rep about coworkers that pissed me off.  Apparently, when I am angry or fired up about something my grasp of the english language multiplies tenfold.  Also, it is apparent that I have anger issues that I need to work out.
So, now, 2016 is here.  Four years is a good length of time for me.  I got married to my wife after not seeing her for four years, and that has turned out pretty great.  I started going to church again almost 3 weeks ago (I’m not any less bitter or angry, but I need to try to let that stuff go).  I decided that I was going to start writing months ago, and I have spent that time doing everything I can to avoid actually doing it.  I both love and hate writing.  It gives me a headache, but it makes me feel better after it’s done.  My brother texted me back in January or February that he wanted to start blogging in addition to his short stories.  I half jokingly suggested that we should start a website together.  He seemed excited about the idea, and then it was too late for me to change my mind.  So, here I am, with a new website, and a journal full of private thoughts that I, for whatever reason, feel I should share with the world.  I have to whine here to, hopefully, avoid whining so much in my real life interactions.  I would say that it isn’t for you, and you don’t have to read it, but I will be checking the site metrics at least 42 times a day to see if you are.  That’s not really your problem though, is it?
Eric Anderson
P.S.  All the time math was done by this guy.  Thank you math cats.