Weight: 184.8
Yes, I’m still here. And, as you can see, my weight plateau seems to have ended. For the past several days I’ve been dropping slightly but steadily. But I’ve been meaning to write for quite a while because I have new products and resources, and I’m excited about them.
First, as of Friday, I’ve officially started actually planned exercise. It’s all due to my purchase of a rebounder. This is a mini trampoline, and I made sure I got one with a bar. As a kid I had one of these and in the 70’s and 80’s as far as I know, there wasn’t such a thing as a bar to grab onto. Now though, I don’t think I’d get on this thing without it. This provides low impact exercise so it’s easy on my joints, but it gets my heartrate up and I can feel it making a difference in my leg muscles in particular. And, it’s obviously helping with the weight loss as well.
In other news, not too long ago I was having some spikes in my blood sugar, and I couldn’t figure out what was causing it to happen. I was still eating the same things, and as far as I knew, I wasn’t doing anything I shouldn’t be doing. Then I discovered that, yes, I actually was doing something wrong. I recently discovered Monster 0 Ultra, which, according to that link, is zero calories and zero sugar. So, in my mind, it was safe to drink. Bruce found this Healthline article that states:
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2. Energy drinks
Energy drinks can be high in both caffeine and carbohydrates. Research has shown that energy drinks not only spike your blood sugar, but they may also cause insulin resistance. This can increase your risk for type 2 diabetes.
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So, although I really found this stuff tasted great, I gave away my remaining supply last night. Since I stopped drinking it a little over a week ago, my numbers have gone back down to where they had been before I discovered Monster.
And, speaking of numbers, my next bit of news is about my A1C. For those who don’t know, the A1C measures the blood glucose over a longer period of time. In my case, the time between tests is usually three months. The number that indicates a person is diabetic is 6.5, and in a person without diabetes, the A1C is around 5.6 or below. A number between 5.7 and 6.4 indicates prediabetes. So, my last test was back in August. At that time, my number was 10.3. This was actually down quite a bit, and in the past I’ve been at 12 or 13. Last Monday I went in for bloodwork again and received my test results for the A1C on Friday. In three months, my number went from 10.3 down to 7.3. Lisa said that ideally, it would be good if my number was 7.0 or a little bit lower. So, yet another milestone for me, and something to be really excited about.
I’ll be adding another resource link to my links menu at the top of the page. But, of course, I have to write about it here too. I have thousands of recipes. Some are on my computer in Word or text files, some are in the body of email messages, and some are in links, partly organized, but not really. So when I want to make something, I have to remember where it’s stored, or locate a bookmark in the browser, or one of the many other ways I’ve saved links. It’s a total pain! A few weeks ago, I went on a search for a recipe program that would help me organize all my recipes and make them searchable. What I found is even better.
In an article I found, they were talking about the top five recipe organizers. They had free trials, so I went through many of them, only to discover that they weren’t friendly with my screen-reader. Then I came across Plan to Eat. It had two positive things going for it right from the start. A, it’s a web-based system, and B. they offered a full 30-day trial without requiring a credit card up front for trying it. So I started putting it through it’s paces.
With a very small amount of configuring, I was able to set up an applet that sits in my favorites bar of Edge. If I come across a recipe on a web site that I want to save, I just have to go to my favorites bar and select this applet. It opens a window at the bottom of the page, and imports the recipe into Plan to Eat. I can edit and make changes before saving, and then once I save, I just close the clipper and I’m back on my original page. Recipes are categorized, and I can adjust serving size when I’m ready to make something.
I can also import recipes. So I can take all these thousands of documents and copy and paste info into the correct edit fields, and it will import the recipe for me, just like the clipped recipes from the web. I can also choose whether I want to make these recipes public or private.
I’m not done though. In addition to saving all my recipes, I can create meal plans. When I’m viewing a recipe, there’s a plan button. So I choose that, and a calendar pops up. I choose what meal I want to use the recipe for, breakfast, lunch, dinner, or snack, and then choose the date when I want to have that meal. If it’s large enough, I can even say that I want to have leftovers on another day and it will put that on the planner.
But, it gets even better! Once I’ve created my meal plan, I can go to the shop tab, and it’s automatically created my grocery list for me. I can go through and remove items that I already have, and then there’s a staples list that I can add items to that aren’t part of the recipes. This way, when I’m at the store, I’ve got the list of only the items I actually need. I can print the list, share it with someone else, or, (and this is my favorite way), bring it to the store with the iOS or Android app. When you do this, you can shop in real time, and check off items from the list as you go through the aisles. The list is categorized by section, and you can further customize by store. And, best of all? This entire site and app is about 99.9 percent accessible with JAWS. And the part that isn’t totally accessible is easy enough to figure out, so I’m able to do this myself. When I open the page, my “recipe book” comes up. All of my recipes are shown, and I can search by word, recipes including that word or not including that word, so on and so forth, so I can quickly narrow down my search results and come up with what I want to cook. And these days, since I’m doing my grocery shopping in store with someone I know, I just turn speech off on my phone, and let them use my list to direct where we go. It really does simplify shopping. And, because we do have to be so much more organized with meals now, this helps me to be a bit more organized. I believe I paid about $37 or $39 to gain full access to this site, and that’s for a year. For me, this is extremely reasonable, and has made such a difference to me.
Well, I think this is finally the end of all I wanted to say today. I’ve been wanting to update for some time now, and just haven’t had the energy for it. I did a sleep study overnight on Friday, and will have the results on Tuesday, so I’m hoping this may help to explain why I just never seem to have enough energy.