Health Journal: October 3rd 2018
DISCLAIMER: I am not a health professional. This is NOT medical advice. Ask a doctor if you want that.
Yes, that does involve losing weight. But, it isn't actually the primary motivator. The truth is, I don't know what my healthy weight is. But, I can read the signs. And I was at an unhealthy weight before. And for me, the indicator was heart burn.
For a while I had chalked it up to, "I'm getting older, this is just a part of it". But, during my travels, I rarely eat a lot of food. I hate airplane bathrooms. And generally lowering my intake of foods and liquids easily breaks me of the need to go.
What caused the introspection however was my lunch choice on my flight out. I went to a sit down restaurant at the airport. The only thing on the menu appealing to me was a poutine with bacon and jalapenos. It was a recipe for heartburn, and I had no tums or anything else on me. I also had an early dinner with an oversized bagel. But, I ended up throwing half away and scraping off the bulk of the cream cheese.
No heartburn that night.
On a normal day, those meals would have RUINED my night. I mean COMPLETELY. What was different I concluded was that A) I had been rational with the over sized bagel and not eaten all of it, and B) those were the only things I ate that day. So, even if they were decent sized meals, capable of inducing life ending heartburn, it was still a decent chunk less food than usual. Also, none of it was eaten particularly late.
So, the next day, a reasonable lunch, sandwiches ordered in. And a 6 inch spicy Italian sandwich at subway. I ended up eating the chips from the meal late in the evening and had like 15 minutes of heartburn which was very identifiably Doritos flavored. So, success. I ate Doritos at like 10pm and had heart burn when I laid down for a total of like 15 minutes at 11:30.
Next day, BBQ brisket sandwich for lunch and Spicy Thai stir fry for dinner. I though for sure I was doomed. But, again, I was fine. I didn't eat the whole plate of stir fry, but it was later than my usual dinner and I was quite full at the end.
When I got home, I concluded that the primary cause of my heartburn was overeating. If I eat late, sure, I can get some mild short term issues. But, they are also easily resolvable with tums. I've easily taken 6 or fewer tums since I got back. And half of those were preventative. In other words, I took them as prescribed. So, I can't really be sure if they were even needed. Another 2 or 3 were taken when symptoms were experienced and killed them entirely.
I've since undergone some even crazier tests. One night while my parents were down I had a healthy soup for lunch but gorged myself on breaded medium wings and spicy chicken and fries for dinner. I walked home from the restaurant. I should have been unable to sleep. Period. Prior to this experience it would have been impossible for me to go to sleep that night. No volume of tums would have saved me. My total food intake for the day was not only spicier than usual. But, also much higher in volume.
So, the final conclusion was that I was, prior to this, over eating by a substantial amount, every single day. It doesn't surprise me that adjusting my eating in a given day impacts my heartburn. That is easy arithmetic. WHAT I ate in day always had some impact on my heartburn. Even at it's worst. If I ate a little less, stopped eating earlier or replaced some of the unhealthier things with fruit and vegetables I could offset anything in a given day.
The mind blowing test was that dinner at the restaurant. This supported a theory I had which I couldn't test in a single day. And that is that, consistent better eating practices could even prevent heartburn on the occasional binge day. In other words eating better for say, a week or two, could enable me to eat whatever the heck I wanted on the odd day here and there.
So, while weight loss isn't really my objective. It is certainly an indicator. I lost probably close to 10 pounds in about 2 weeks. Though, I think a lot of that is water weight and clearing out a backlog in my guts. I think very little of that is actually genuine fat loss.
But, in accordance with that, I'm basically starting to keep track of my weight. Obviously, if I get back up to where I was when heartburn was a constant problem I should expect constant heartburn. If I can stay around where I am now, or even go lower, in theory heartburn should be an increasingly lower risk problem.
I have, however, adopted a strange technique for weighing myself. Some people recommend once a week. Others recommend daily at the same time. I'm actually weighing myself multiple times daily. It is one thing to read that and even understand that weight fluctuates quite a lot in a day based on whether or not you've eaten, taken a dump or a piss or what you did the previous day. It is another thing entirely to watch it happen multiple times a day.
Humans are actually quite bad at a lot of things. Accurately remembering when the last time you took a shit. How much you peed out vs. how much you drank. How heavy your meal was. And the list goes on. And all of this leads to daily, or even weekly measurements being quite flawed. My weight can fluctuate 3-5lbs within a day. While 1-3lbs fluctuations seem most common. Even those are substantial. Once you settle into a rhythm, that difference can account as much as weeks worth of fat loss. So, looking at the ends of what I've seen. I could have lost 1lb of fat mass, but still weigh 4lbs more than since I lost that weight at any random weigh-in.
But, if I weighed myself at multiple points in the day, on multiple days. I'm much more likely to see at least one reading which more closely shows me that loss.
Even better than that though. By weighing myself multiple times in the day, I can also get a much better picture of how my daily activities affect my health and weight.
I don't like fixating on weight. But, I feel like, if I'm going to consider my weight into my goals that I need to do it right. So, I bought a digital scale which also reads BMI, fat mass, water mass, muscle mass, etc... and syncs it to my phone automatically so I get decent visualizations. Within a day it totally changed my perception of the numbers on the scale. I'm no longer bothered by one or even a few measurements trending upwards. I need to eat and drink. And those things will, necessarily, bring my weight up at least temporarily. And knowing how much impact they are having can also drive decisions on whether or not I need to make adjustments, either with exercise or perhaps adjusting habits for future days.
When I just weight myself once a day or once a week, I can only really use those as vague estimates. And then, the differences feel a lot more real when in reality they are less meaningful because it is even harder to remember or know how representative they are.
I'm not running to the scale every 20 minutes or anything crazy like that either. There is a bathroom downstairs where I have the scale. I weight myself in the morning and after using that specific bathroom, if and only if I remember to do so. I don't sweat forgetting to. Nor do I go out of my way to use that bathroom specifically to weigh myself. This gives 2-4 measurements a day. It means I generally get both a morning and afternoon measurement at the least. But, I'd say the average is 3 a day. And this gives me a much better image of the overall trend.
Anyway, that was long. But, I had been wanting to write something since I started breaking the cycle of heartburn, and since buying the scale. But, I had wanted to wait until I started feeling the like results, both from the heartburn and what I was getting from the scale were a bit better understood for me.
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