Week 4 – My Birthday

Week 4 by Dr. Mark

Sometime during the first week I realized my birthday would fall right right in the middle of this diet. Not just any birthday, my 30th. I figured, that’s great, I’ll get 1 cheat day since its my 30th after all. For some reason I thought I should ask Eric first, just to make sure it was OK. Well that wasn’t too smart, he said “absolutely NOT, it’ll ruin everything!” Afterwards, I realized it was a pretty dumb thing to consider anyway. If you can remember back to one of my earlier posts, cheat days for birthdays, parties, etc. are part of how I got to this point, and haven’t been able to fix it. So it was decided I would not cheat on my birthday.

So how do we celebrate without having my favorite foods and cake? Well, I had a great birthday even though I didn’t get that pizza or traditional cake and ice cream. My birthday happened to fall on a Tuesday, which is my day off, so we were able to workout in the morning at Crossfit Bridgemill. Amanda then took my son Micah and me to go ice-skating. It was great to get back on the ice, and it felt good doing something active.

That evening we went out to eat dinner. Since being on the diet, we have only done this 3 times. Going out to eat is something, that since being on this diet, I haven’t really had a desire to do (which is actually a pretty good side effect for the wallet at least). I think this is because, there are so many delicious menu items that I know I can’t have and there will probably only be a few things I can even consider, and I would still need to have them alter the dish for me. Its not really a situation I want to put myself in.  The first restaurant we tried on the diet was Chipotle. There it was easy because they have a taco salad (which I’ve mentioned before is one of our favorite meals to make at home), it was delicious. Ruby Tuesday’s was our second restaurant stop. There it was a little more difficult to find a dish, but having the salad bar to swap for one of the sides was nice. For my birthday we went to Sixes Tavern with my brother (Dr. E) and his family. It was definitely more difficult to find a dish there that would fit the diet without having it modified. Thankfully Eric and Laura are experienced and comfortable with asking for an altered dish. It was a good learning experience for me. The waitress was very willing to work with us to make sure we didn’t get any sugar in our food. The food there was great even without the sugary sauces, mashed potatoes, and breads.

It felt good to have a birthday without stuffing my face with unhealthy food and feeling sick from over eating. I was perfectly satisfied with my meals and still felt great afterwards.

After 4 weeks of the 60-day turnaround I’m down to 215 lbs (that’s a loss of 15 – 18 lbs. – never had a definite start weight).  The weight loss has slowed down since the first week, but it is still going down. Some days it can be frustrating to see the scale stay the same, or sometimes bump back up. However I’m seeing a change in the mirror everyday, and my clothes are starting to fit again. I have to constantly remind myself I’m doing this to pursue health, loosing weight is just a byproduct, not the goal.

-Dr. Mark