Back on Track

This was a better week from the viewpoint of weight loss — nearly three times as better, in fact.  Even better, my blood pressure seems to be improving as well:  This week, the BP was 112 over 80, enough of a drop that my doctor considered taking me off the rampiril.  (He didn’t, though.  The recent fluctuation has been enough to warrant further treatment.)  I can’t complain about 33 pounds over five weeks.  That’s a lot better than I would ever do on my own.

I attribute the improvement to the opening of school and the end of the holidays.  I wasn’t a holiday binger at all — I stayed “in the box” — but the loss of a regular schedule really played havoc with my program, I think.  While school’s in session, life is more bland but more steady, and that helps.  I did have one more adventure with chicken chips, but that was for the dinner party for Annie before she went back to Chicago, and I figure that’s a special enough occasion.

My latest favorite discovery is the combination of an HMR entree (specifically, the chicken parmesan pasta) with the chicken soup.  I’ll admit to being a little dubious when the counselor said to just dump an entree into a soup and see what happens.  But this one is actually quite good.  It’s exactly what’s called for on a cold winter’s evening.  It’s also a relatively clean background on which to experiment with spices, an art I do not have any grasp of at all yet.

There was a mini-crisis looming in my program, in that next week my group would technically “end core”, meaning finish the original 13 week program.  After that, one transitions to either “ongoing” or “maintenance”.   While 33 pounds is fantastic, I’m still nowhere near my goal weight, so maintenance was out.  But the ongoing session meets Thursdays 7-8:30, and I’m on duty that night and can’t leave campus.  It’s pretty hard to engineer a duty crew swap this late in the year and I wasn’t sure how I’d be able to work it out.

But in fact it turns out not to be an issue, at least not yet.  I started quite late in the core group, and missed about half of the sessions.  So my counselor agreed I should probably just restart the core, which (in addition to the two weeks inter-session we’ve set up) means I don’t have to think about it for 15 weeks, or roughly until late April.  Yay.