I'm back! I'm in my 60s now, and nearly as heavy as when I began my journey back in 2006. In the 15 years since my departure from this site, I've done Keto and Whole30, both with such success that I had a tummy tuck in 2013. Unfortunately, it only worked as long as I cooked for hours every week. Eventually, the commute and the angst of my job halted it, and with it, my shape. By 2017, I was nearly at my top weight, at 230.8. I started walking in desperation, and it helped. Over the next two months, I dropped 15 pounds and felt terrific. I hadn't changed my diet yet, but I was encouraged by the progress. But then my family life blew up, settling down only last year. In the interim, my weight ballooned. I went from 160 pounds in May to 230 pounds in August. This year, I vowed to get healthy again, and I started walking. I was walking the dogs up to an hour a day and feeling good. And then I got a kidney stone. Whatever terrible things you've heard about kidney stones are true. It was more painful than labor, it went on for days without relief and I was so crazed with pain and the shaking that came from it that I rode in the ambulance wearing only a sheet and a blanket. I'm not into Greek medicine: I just couldn't bear anything touching me. A trip to the ER turned into a 1.1 cm kidney stone too large to pass. I got stented, watered, and, in a twist of horror, a case of high blood pressure. I hate medical offices. I am so rarely sick that I can count on my fingers the number of times it has happened: one flu in high school, 2 cases of strep throat in my 40s, another flu in my 50s, COVID in 2020 and now this. I spent 4 days laying in a hospital bed, except for every 15 minutes when I was up to go to the bathroom. In addition to blood pressure medication, I got a water pill. Goody. I've been home for about 2 weeks now. I was so weak coming home that I only managed to walk 4 minutes outside before I came back home and collapsed. There's nothing like looking at your route and thinking, "gee, maybe I'll make it to the end of my driveway today--score!". I'm up to 40 minutes now. It's hard, and I can feel the stent pressing on my back when I go too far, but I do feel better. I still have the stink of the hospital and all the loss of control that comes with being a bed in a hospital wing. It's hard and I don't like it, but I'm doing it. I managed to convince myself that it doesn't matter how I feel about it; it only matters that I do it. The hospital is no place for control freaks or for people like me, who enjoy talking to others. Doctors to talk to, they talk at. Nurses are better, but essentially the same. Tired of getting interrupted and talking to myself, I stopped interacting with my care team altogether. Medical professionals sound like they're making conversation, but they're not. They're just filling in their instructions with words that sound like conversation. Phrases such as "how are you doing today?" and "have you been burping and passing gas?" need only one or two words. Anything else and they just blank out on you until you stop talking, and then they resume their lecture. "Your blood pressure is dangerously high." No comment. "It'll have to come down before we can let you go home." I want to protest and tell them that I've never had high blood pressure except in a White Coat setting, but remember, they aren't listening. And getting angry over their attitude just sent my blood pressure higher, so I stopped. In addition to the walking, I turn to my old favorite stand-by, the diet. I needed to lose weight and I needed to get my blood pressure under control. I happened upon a nutrition book by a doctor titled "How Not to Die". The author lists the 15 deadliest human diseases and discusses how they come about and how to correct and even reverse the illness. I read the chapters on Hypertension, Kidney Disease and Heart Disease (my family has a long history of instant death by heart attack or stroke). In looking through these preventable diseases, I decided to go whole foods, organic wherever possible, and largely plant-based. I removed all the excess sodium from my diet, most meats, fishes and sugar and replaced it with leafy greens. Leafy greens, a food I hadn't had in quite some time. It meant cooking again, but I looked at it as Cook or Die, so here we are in the kitchen again. Big changes. Big opportunities. Big stress. The salt removal was awful. I didn't realize how salty my diet had become. Paleo and Whole30, with their meat- and fat-heavy diets, lured me into a salt mine where I rolled around in white-crystal ecstacy until I made a kidney stone. Determined not to repeat this horror of the hospital, I found a few recipes. At first, it was miserable. Everything tasted like water or cardboard and, while I wasn't really hungry, I didn't enjoy anything I made. I decided that if I had to eat bland in order to live, I would do it. But then, as the book claimed, my taste buds began to change. By the second week, I was shoveling salad like it was my Destiny. We ran out of food one night, and I found a frozen tilapia filet to bake. It was so salty and nasty that I threw it out after 2 bites. Then I had stomch cramps all evening. I'm willing to believe that the stomach issue was brain-induced but, all the same, I hated it. Now, in the 3rd week, I'm actually buying dried garbanzo beans and red lentils just to have in the house. What? The only thing I've ever kept in my house that I didn't consume in one sitting is we*d. But here I am, preparing for next week already. Last weekend, I went to the grocery store for the first time in several years. The delivery service from the store has sent questionable produce in the last several weeks, and they invariably forget at least one thing, so I sucked up my hatred of grocery stores and went in. It was beautiful. I had a list of produce that I needed--a long list. I wandered up and down the aisles, looking for the organics, checking each piece for color (the brigher/darker the better for nutrition), and setting them in my basket. When I was done, I had only dried lentils, coconut milk and tofu that wasn't from the produce aisle. And my grocery bill was about $100 less that it was in my Meat Era. So far, so good. Then I made a vegetable soup that I'm drooling over. I bought 3 different types of lettuce (no iceberg!) for the salad and I made a tumeric-based tofu scramble for breakfast. I am famous for eating the same foods over and over again, but the nutrition book encouraged readers to eat a variety of food: greens, fruits, vegetables and grains. I'm celiac, so no grains for me, but I was in for the rest of it. I took my time, choosing fruits I hadn't eaten in the first 2 weeks, and I substituted lentils for chicken in a recipe. When I unpacked at home, a lot of the food was on my counter, smiling at me. The rest was lighting up my refrigerator like a rainbow. I haven't lost any weight since I came home from the hospital. I went from 2,200 calories of junk per day to 1,600 calories of clean organics, but no pounds are gone. It's irritating, and in my current state of irritation, sometimes it brings me to tears. I did test for low thyroid function but come on! Even at my age, weight loss is possible. I'm walking 30 minutes every day and I'm drinking 3 quarts of water. I stopped drinking all but water years ago, but I've never ingested an Atmospheric River like I do now. Pretty soon, I'll have to carry toilet paper in my purse, because I have to go so often. I actually schedule my errands and activites around my bathroom breaks. Woo hoo! But no pounds off. And so I go into Week 4, prepared with new recipes, including a pineapple-coconut carrot salad I'm making for my Mah Jongg group. My garden, finally, is producing in my 4th year, and so I have basil, cilantro, rosemary, chives and oregano to put with my tomatoes, banana peppers, potatoes and butternut squash. I can hardly wait for winter to come so I can make root vegetable soup. Imagine; I'm thinking of vegetable soup with longing. The good news is, I don't miss meat. I'm astonished at this, and I really don't believe it, but I just don't like it any more. I hope to keep it that way. I have a follow-up appointment with my GP in 3 months to check my sugars (pre-diabetic, sigh), thyroid, blood pressure and weight. I really want to get out of the healthcare system, so I'm putting all my effort into living clean. My hope is that my clean living will eventually catch up to my body and the weight will come off naturally. Wish me luck, and send me your vegan recipes. A the B(ig, but not forgotten)