Metabolic Status

Here is the crux of IF is how it affects your metabolism.  There are several statuses described by Simple.  You move from state to state based solely on how long you have  been fasting.

“The metabolic status refers to the state of your metabolism, which is the process by which your body converts the food you eat into energy. It can be influenced by various factors such as age, gender, activity level, and overall health.

To get a comprehensive understanding of your metabolic health, it’s best to consult with a medical doctor or a registered dietitian who can evaluate your individual circumstances and provide personalized guidance.”

This is the warning the AI assistant provides but the app goes ahead and attempts to tell which state you are in based on your fasting time, like I said above.

Another annoying thing is that you can only review these states when you are currently fasting. That means I will finish this post after dinner. Stay tuned.

0-2 hours your blood sugar is slowly rising

2-5 hours your blood sugar is going down

5-12 hours your blood sugar is normal

12-15 hours you’re in fat burning stage one

15-24 hours you’re in fat burning stage two

24-36 hours your body is in autophagy

I only fast for 16 hours. autophagy will never happen for me and should be avoided with my health conditions.

I have Metabolic Syndrome:

“A cluster of conditions that increases the risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes.
Metabolic syndrome includes high blood pressure, high blood sugar, too much body fat around the waist and irregular cholesterol levels. The risk of metabolic syndrome increases with age.”

In other words I am a morbidly obese diabetic with high cholesterol and high blood pressure.  Not good!

Another recommendation is to do some moderate exercise while in stage one and two.  So l have been swimming around 9 am before eating and during Kelly And Mark, which is a show I hate since Ryan Seacrest left. So I am killing two birds with one swim.

Coincidentally, these ducks joined me this morning.

IF

Just completed two weeks on IF (intermittent fasting) using Simple.  Let me tell you it is not simple. But I am determined.

There is a morning check-in with the coach. Her name is AVO. She tries to analyze my previous day and offer advice on nutrition and exercise. She is often wrong.

This morning I argued with her because she told me I didn’t make my hydration goal, but I did. Arguing with her is pointless:

AVO: Now, regarding hydration, you.ve almost hit your goal. You logged 3.2461462 OZ, just slightly under your goal of 3.3814023 OZ.

What made it challenging to reach your hydration goal yesterday?

Me: I made it this app is messed up I think these check-ins are inaccurate and not much help.

AVO: I’m sorry to hear that, Jeff. We aim to make these check-ins as helpful and accurate as possible.

Let’s focus on how we can make your experience better. As was discussed, you’ve done great with your fasting, meals, and activity. As for hydration, you were just a smidge away from your goal.

Would you be open to trying to drink just one more glass of water today to help meet your hydration goal? This small step can ensure you stay properly hydrated, which is essential for overall health and well-being.

Me: As I said I did drink enough. Not sure where your numbers come from but not what I recorded.

At this point I dropped my phone and cracked my screen protector. Luckily I had another one to replace it.

AVO: I apologize for any confusion, Jeff. It’s great to hear you are keeping up with your hydration. Your feed back it important and helps us improve.

Was my guidance helpful for you today?

OMG!!!

Here is my log page from Sunday:

Other than that the program is great…..LOL. Actually, when you log a meal it does a nice job of looking at it and recommending changes for the future. Cut back on junk food for example. Eat baked potatoes instead of French fries. Avoid beverages with added sugar. Things that I know, but I am getting caught with my hand in the proverbial cookie jar or sometimes even the real one.

The advice is piling up on me. No sweets, no sodas, no junk food, no pizza, no dessert, no chips! I know, I know, I know….but you can eat whatever you want during the eating window…just not that stuff….LOL.

P.S. It just told me it was time to log my weight. I have logged it every morning. Another glitch in the program. And it pops up telling my sugar is low. How does it/she know?

A simple plan

My attempt to lose weight on my own has failed. As a result I decided to try a new plan. It’s called Simple and is the number 2 diet plan out there behind Noom.

As you recall I had some success with Noom.  But once I finished all the course materials it got boring to rehash them again.  Like Noom, Simple has an app for your phone.  The key difference is this plan is based on intermittent fasting. Basically, you have an eating window, mine is eight hours.  So this morning while writing this I am at the end of my 16 hour fast waiting to eat at 9:30 am. (It is only 8:30 now so this is but me some time.)

I started the program a week ago.  So far I have lost 6.3 lbs.  Mind you I have gained and lost this amount over and over again. We are old friends.  This week will be the proof in the pudding if I can continue to lose weight.

A couple things that I like about the plan and hate are that when you record what you eat you just type it in as a note and the program uses AI to analyze it and come back with results and suggestions for improving. The other thing is the users group is not in the app. It is actually a group on Facebook.  This puts the support in my face as I am on Facebook a lot.

So where is the hate? AI is not always accurate. At first I tried arguing with it. All that does is illicit an apology for the confusion.  So I have learned to not question the answers, but rather rephrase the questions to get different responses.

Wish me luck! My trip to Hawaii is three weeks away.

The fallout

What happened after I drove home? To say things were different, or that this was life changing, would not be too far from the truth.  I think the biggest thing was it was freeing.  But I was a mess and had a lot of cleaning up to do first.

First, the phone bill came in and I couldn’t pay it. The phone was turned off. Luckily, I had a company cell phone (yes they were finally invented). My boss was understanding and allowed me a few personal calls without charging me.

Next, the credit card bills came due.  I couldn’t afford these either. Also, the truck payment came due.  This triggered me because Roger had the truck.

I called his mother. I told her about the breakup.  I explained my financial situation. I said if Roger wanted to keep the truck, she or he would need to pay it off. Otherwise, I was going to allow it to be repossessed. She was very apologetic and said she would pay off the loan, though it wasn’t even worth the balance we owed.

One less thing for me to worry about. I kept making minimum late payments to everything else.  Eventually, I filed bankruptcy.

Did I ever hear from him again? Yes, about a month after he called me and said how unhappy he was and he wanted me back.  I told him no.  Then I made an agreement with him that if in six months he could change, and show proof we could talk about it.

The list of things he needed to do was impossible.

In six months we had that conversation. He hadn’t changed. I said goodbye to him one last time. (He couldn’t reach me after that because I change jobs and phones.)

Fran and Roger have both passed away.  May they rest in peace. It’s laughter I will remember.

The deception

Here we are at the last installment of Jeff gets duped. I have been reliving this in my dreams and thoughts during the day.  There is more to this story  than I can possibly write.  Twelve years is a long time.  Lots of abuse. Most of it mental.

You may wonder if I fought back.  Of course I did, with every fiber of my being.  There were two physical attacks that should have ended everything for most logical people.  But this was more emotional than logical.

The first one was late at night. We had been up watching horror films, Friday the  13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, those sort of themes .  I had already gone to bed, only to be awakened by him standing over me with a butcher knife in hand. I told him it was not funny. And then fear set in because he didn’t end the gag.  We struggled and I got the knife away from him.  No one was murder that night, but I had a new fear instilled in me. I was genuinely afraid of him.

The second one that comes to mind was in the car. He was a bad driver so I usually drive. After all you can’t primp in the rearview mirror and keep your eyes on the road.  We had gone through a drive thru and we’re head to Fran’s house.  Something about his food wasn’t right and he wanted me to go back and get them to fix it. I refused. He got angry and smashed his hamburger into the side of my face. I pulled the care over in a rage of my own and told him to get out. We were only a few blocks from Fran’s.  I left him there…I should have never come back for him.

Now we move to the main event.  I got a great job with a bank in San Francisco.  After several jobs, he landed on one that seemed to fit. He was doing well. It was a discount store. I even helped out on weekends with him.

It was all going well. They offered him his own location in the East Bay. I was happy. I thought I had fixed him.  Little did I know what was coming.

He was unfixable.

Before you start wondering why I stayed with this man, you need to know there were good times. There were times of great joy.  But that is not what this is about. This is about the dark shadow that eventually broke me.

When I made the decision to end it, I got in the car and went to Target. Shopping has always been a calming event for me. This time I just sat in my car in the parking lot and cried for what seemed like a very long time.  I am not sure if these were tears of relief or failure. My emotions were all over the place, but this time I was not going to let him win. This was it, we were through.

He panicked about getting his own store and ultimately turned it down. Not only that he quit his job all together.  He was home alone again while I worked to keep us a float.

After a week he still hadn’t started a new job. He told me he was going down to LA for a body building competition (to watch) and that he was staying with some guy he met at the gym.  I didn’t push for details. This time I was going to give him some slack and see what happened.

After the trip to LA he was different. He was doing something that didn’t involve me. I was relieved. But I knew better.

He was on the phone with this guy all the time. I was worried about the phone bill. But again I let him continue down this path. What’s that saying, give um enough rope and they will eventually hang themselves.

There was a second trip to LA. When he returned he was excited about moving again. He wanted me to transfer to LA.  The bank was going through a merger and the job I had was eventually going to be in LA.

I told him no. I wanted to stay in the Bay area.

The pressure for me to move continued for a few days.  Then I caught on the phone in the middle of the night. Instant trigger for me. Who was he talking to? He said it was the guy in LA. I bumped the lamp and discovered two hundred dollar bills he had hidden. Where did these come from?

That was it. I confronted him about Mr LA. (Turns out he actually lived in Colton, close enough, but the significance of this is that was where he was headed all those years ago when I offered to let him move in with me.)

He denied any relationship with the guy other than friends.  But why would he pay for his airfares and give him money, he wasn’t getting something in return? Two hundred dollars was a lot of money in the 90’s. Heck it’s a lot now!

In away I let all of this happen by turning a blind eye. I needed something tangible. While I really didn’t care about him cheating on me, I felt betrayed. It was more than sex. He had violated the importance of our relationship.  He found a new source for his illicit behavior.  It was a real person. I was less important as a result.  That was what I needed to make him leave.

I was terribly nice about it. He needed me to help him move so we waited for the next three days weekend.  We loaded the car and truck with the things he owned or I allowed him to take to his new apartment. It was a six hour drive. I think I cried all the way there, but not in front of him.  We unloaded everything, he kept the truck and I drove home.

Weight gain

Here we go. This topic is ongoing. But this is about when it all started.  I was going back to school at night to get my master’s.  The days were long.

We lived in Long Beach at the time.  We moved there because Roger had lived there before and thought we should try it out.  It wasn’t really any farther from my job than where we were living, just a different direction.  And who wouldn’t want to live at the beach?

We moved quickly into a place that just wasn’t right.  I didn’t feel safe. So we moved again into a duplex that was in a better neighborhood.  We moved one more time to a place on Ocean Ave. The Queen Mary and the Spruce Goose were right out the window as was the beach across the highway.

From here I drove to Anaheim for my job, and to Santa Ana for my night classes.  I left the house at 6 and wasn’t home till after 10 on school nights.

I think eating this late is what started my weight gain.

Anyway after about a year, we moved back to Pomona. We needed to be closer to friends and family, plus scary things happened in our building.  One weekend when we were away a swat team raided the place. There was a drug dealer in the building. His girlfriend was a hooker and would sit on the front stoop crying at all hours

One night we caught someone climbing through the living room window.  That was it. We moved out.

I finished my degree. I was 31 years old.  At this point I wasn’t fat but I was putting on some unwanted pounds.

Amazingly, we had no phone issues in Long Beach.  I thought the problem was solved.  But back in Pomona idle hand caused mischief.  Not only was there a phone issue but he used my credit cards.  I had to get a P.O. Box in Anaheim so he couldn’t get the numbers from my statements.  Again, I am managing a situation that should not be my problem.

I can’t explain why I let this go on.  He made me feel like no one else would ever want me. He said he gave up his place to move in with me. (I know, not quite the truth!) He was so apologetic and didn’t want me to give up on him. Mixed messages.  Hell, I was working two jobs and going to school. I didn’t need this aggravation at home.

The weight kept coming on. In some ways it was self preservation.  I thought if I was bigger I could fend off the violence. Again, I am solving a problem that should not have existed in the first place.

Move forward several years. I got a job in San Francisco. We moved one last time as a couple. The final straw will be my next topic. The betrayal.

Vanity

Here we are at the root of all evil. Not actually but sort of the truth.  Roger was very vain.  He spent a lot of time primping before leaving the house. His hair had to be just so. His clothes needed to show off his muscles. He even applied some makeup like blue eyeliner. If everything wasn’t to his liking, sometimes we would just stay home.

He was always getting his hair cut, or dyed, or having extensions put in or taken out.  It was not cheap.  Sometimes he would dye his own hair, but the cutting was left to the salon.

Mostly he wore short hair. The cut had to be fresh. Often he would get it done weekly. More expense.

He didn’t want to be Japanese. To hide this he got blue contacts. He got a nose job (sold his car to pay for this one). He used artificial tanning products. Special ones that body builders use.  He wanted to pass for Hawaiian. At one point he was even using a Hawaiian first name at the gym.

He pretended to be young too. He worked out with some teenagers.  He was 27 wanting to be 17 and acting like a five year old when he didn’t get what he wanted.  One of the teens challenged him on the leg press. While he had a massive upper body he didn’t work on his legs much. This challenge popped his achilles tendon and put him in the hospital.

Time to move on from this topic to me and my weight gain.

The phone

I was torn between this topic and the one on vanity. This one has the most pull on my guts. Why didn’t I see this as a sign? I should have ended it then and there after less than a year. I could have saved myself so much pain. But that is not what happened. Here we go with the phone.

Remember back in the beginning I found out his phone was off. I thought it was because he was moving…..that was probably not the case. Also remember this is before cell phones. If you didn’t have a home phone you had to use a pay phone at the corner market or gas station.

So now we are back to the day I discovered he was not working. He threw things at me. China to be precise, came sailing across the kitchen and slammed into the wall oven. Not only did the China break but the enamel on the oven chipped. This was some serious shit. I ducked.

After the fight, he is home alone every day with not much to do. Or he would go over to Fran’s house. He was supposed to be looking for a new job too. This is were is all gets kind of blurred together. Remember I said I would regret laughing at him in bed. This is also were Fran comes in to muddy the waters. I am frustrated just trying to write this now.

Apparently, he told Fran about my comments in the bedroom. They cooked up this plan to buy me presents. Not just any presents. They bought a collection of things from the adult store. This was supposed to spice things up as it were, but I was not having it. It was my birthday as I remember it. One of the gifts was a chess set with “boobs” and “penises” as the pieces. Nothing I would ever want! They thought it was funny. There were also things like lotions, and oils, and something called a “licky dicky”, basically a candy wrapper for your member. Okay, so maybe my criticism was misplaced but these gifts were way out of line. After Fran went home we had another fight. He pushed me down on all fours and forced himself onto me. Again, not a good experience. I wasn’t giggling this time for sure .

I am trying to tell this without being too graphic. So this non-sense day pasted and several others. Then I discovered the phone issue. He had racked up a huge phone bill. The calls were to a 976 number. Remember psychic hotlines, those numbers were 976 and charged by the minute. But he was calling a sex line. I got a hold of the phone company and was able to get those numbers blocked as well as excused from my bill. But this was mid-month, there were more charges no the next bill. It was ridiculous. He had hidden the bill from me so I didn’t see it soon enough.

A side note, I woke up one night before all of this and found him on the couch with the phone in his hand. He was supposedly talking to Fran. She back his story up. She also knew why he lost his phone in his apartment. She was lying for him. I could not trust this woman.

So how did we get past this? I really don’t know. He made me feel guilty about it. Why I ever felt guilty I will never know. Some twisted logic that I bought into and he knew what to say. But this was not the last of our phone issues. It happened again a few years later this a different service, 888 numbers. I got those blocked. Then he started calling long distance talking to who knows who. I got the long distance shut off. Then the damn phone companies split up and you could dial a code to activate a long distance carrier. I was on defense. I took the phones out of the wall and locked them in the trunk of my car. I bought a device that was supposed to block those carriers. He somehow bypassed that too. He bought a phone at a goodwill store. It was a challenge that I should not have ever taken on.

He got a job and it stopped.

I know this all sounds strange. Looking back at it now it sounds strange to me too. The next chapter will be about his vanity. This will explain his inability to hold a job. Something, I also tried to fix. It will also touch on my issues with weight gain, but that is separate topic. Finally, I will explain the final betrayal. As if all of this were not enough.

Solar

Taking a break from the Roger story. It has been affecting my dreams and my mood when I am awake.

Yesterday, they finally turned on our solar power. Very exciting. We are leasing the system. It will pay for itself eventually. ROI is projected at five years.  But it really depends on how much energy we save and sell back to the grid.  Even so, the lease gives us a fixed monthly cost. No more 600 dollar summer bills because of air conditioning. The lease is about 280 a month.  If we did bill averaging it is costing us more but we are more environmentally friendly now.

Here in California all new builds must include at least 10% alternative power (solar).  It should help resale too. The lease is assumable or can be paid off at the time of sale.

We have a battery too, which takes over at night and during rolling blackouts.  It is not a Tesla. Politically, we could not do that although it was an option.

Also we met with a travel agent. Paris and a rhine river cruise may be in our future.  We are shooting for next Spring.

I will go back to my story tomorrow.

This is the new electric panel that connects to the roof and feeds the house and the grid. Next to it is the battery on the right. Actually there’s two batteries in that housing.

Roof panels being installed.

There is an app that shows what is going on with the system and has charts (analysis) showing usage and savings. It will need to be running a while long to get any meaningful data. Exciting! 😄

Friends

I haven’t revealed all the topics yet. Friends is next because it helps build up to the remaining topics, the phone, vanity, weight gain and the final deception or maybe salvation depending on how you view it.

As I mentioned, my friends dropped out of the picture. His friends took over our social life outside of family. His best friend is Fran.

Fran is his friend because she feeds his ego.  She tried to flatter me too but I saw it for what it was, a tool to get things she wanted. Okay, so maybe I fell for it at first.  I was still a young man of 26 when we met.

Why is it that women who hang around gay men always have big boobs, or at the very least are overtly sexual.  She wore low cut blouses and was constantly adjusting her self in case you didn’t already notice her. 

So beyond that she had a family. Three children and a husband. The oldest son was 19 and the other boy and girl were 10 and 11. These two were with her current husband.

Here is another strange thing. She would constantly tell us how big her son was, meaning his genitals.  I often wondered if there was something incestual about those comments.

I also wonder if Roger had first hand knowledge of this fact. But number one son got a girlfriend and moved out of state the first year we were together. I always thought of that as his great escape.  I envied him on some level.

Aside from this family there was Karen. She was a young woman. She was a nurse. I liked her. We bowled in a bowling league together.  She even asked me to take her to her high school reunion.  She had one major flaw, at least to me. She was a racist and used the n word all the time. She also had a weight problem. But she was nice to me and I trusted her. She was genuine.

Maybe a quick description of myself is needed here.  I weighed 150 lbs. I had medium length brown wavy hair and brown eyes. I wore size 30 501 jeans and stood 5′ 10″ in height, six feet with boots on.  I was not muscular, but rather thin and scrawny. Looking back I was rather cute, but at the time I didn’t think so.  I looked like a Twink.

So where am I going with this? Our social life centered around these two women and our families. Once in a blue moon we saw his twin brother.

The phone is next. This is one of the secrets Fran kept from me. It is also what should have ended everything.