#SoCS - 19/8/23

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “the first 3 words of the first full sentence.” Okay, follow me here. This is what I want you to do: 1. Grab the closest book to you when you sit down to write your post. 2. Open it to a random page. 3. Locate the first complete sentence on that page. 4. Use the first three words of that sentence to start your post, then take it from there–write whatever comes to mind. That’s it! Have fun!

Here goes:

Having said nothing on my blog for over 5 weeks this is my 4th post in as many days.  I had a bit of a shock back in May when I was diagnosed as being in the pre-diabetic range following a blood test so I've been focussing on improving my health.

Thankfully in my area there is a pre-diabetic course you can attend that goes through all the details of what being diabetic entails and also how to switch your diet and increase activity levels etc.  It started as sessions once a fortnight, we've now moved to monthly sessions and overall it takes about 9 months from start to finish.

It was the kick up the backside I needed to start eating more healthily.  I was guilty of eating way too many biscuits, croissants, brioche buns, pies, chocolate and red meat and no where near enough fruit and vegetables.  I'd also become a bit of a couch potato and my expectation was for not doing less than 5000 steps a day.  Oh and we were still eating the same portion size as we've always done and of course my weight had been gradually creeping up and up.

The first things to go were all the pastries and chocolate.  Thankfully I mostly do online shops for groceries so it was easy to cut those out.  We're quite good in cooking most of our meals from scratch - not relying on too many processed things but we were definitely eating too much.

I'm also not great at drinking water so I've been trying to do more of that although of course that means more trips to the loo including during the night so my sleep patterns haven't improved.

I've surprised myself at how I'm managing to stick to this.  I thought I would crave things like the biscuits and chocolate but I haven't and I think because we're generally just reducing the amount we eat it hasn't felt too much like a diet.  We also invested in an air fryer so we've been getting to grips with that although I still need to more planning ahead to make sure we have all the right ingredients for dinners.  We're opting for more fish and chicken and definitely cut back on the red meat.

Some weeks have been better than others - last week for example my son and his family were here so we had to be more flexible with meals to suit their boys who are 5 and almost 3.  But my weight is coming down gradually and a recent blood test put my sugar levels back in the normal range.  I'm not going to be complacent though.  These changes are for the long term but an occasional treat won't be fretted over.

The step count is definitely better too.  My aim now is to do at least 7500 a day and most days I get there.  Again I don't beat myself up if it doesn't happen.  Being retired means it's very tempting sometimes to just sit and bury my head in a book or switch on the TV but we are fortunate to live within walking distance of a forest and lake so there are nice places to walk but I'm also happy just walking in our local neighbourhood with music playing in my ears.  A play list of walking songs keeps me at a steady pace. 

However, I suddenly found myself with no enthusiasm for blogging - or even checking on other people's blogs!  It felt quite strange.  I definitely felt out of sorts but can't really explain why.  We did have an ongoing saga with HMRC (Tax office) that was quite stressful and that is still ongoing although it has become almost farcical.  Anyway hopefully I'm back in the swing of things again.

The host site for #SoCS is here. Thanks to Linda for providing the prompt each week.

I will admit to cheating a little bit for the opening 3 words - I did grab the book nearest to me (Please, Mister Postman a memoir by Alan Johnson) but I took the 3 words from the first new paragraph on the random page as they seemed to work well with recent events.