Fighting My Addiction

I was talking with Rish on the phone the other day, and he was telling me about The West Wing. He's been on the show, but he'd never watched it before. Recently, however, he has begun watching the show. He told me about John Spencer's character, Leo McGarry, and a particularly moving episode where they delved into what the life of an alcoholic is like.

The character mostly refuses to ever drink, because he's not like other people. He can't just have one drink. If he gives in, even a little, then he will certainly go overboard. He was kind of shocked by it all, and after he expressed that to me, I told him, "Now you know why I've got to do things like Keto and Intermittent Fasting. I'm the same guy, but with food."

Now, I don't want anyone to think I'm making light of addiction. I understand how powerful and destructive that alcoholism or drug addiction can be. People can be normal people one day, and criminals doing the most awful things the next day because they gave in to their addiction to alcohol or drugs. They're terrible things, and the bane of the modern world.

But I am going to raise my hand and say, "Hi, my name is Big Anklevich, and I'm an addict." What I am is a food addict. Or better yet, a sugar addict. Actually, more precisely, I'm a carb addict. I'm like that guy on West Wing that can't just have a taste. I'm like Barney from The Simpsons, who got off the sauce, turned his life around, became an astronaut, and when he had a tiny glass of champagne in celebration, went off the rails and lost it all.

That's me. For example, at work people often bring in treats--donuts, cookies, pizza, cake--and every time that they did, I was that piece of shit that kept sneaking back covertly to grab more and more of it. I hoped that no one saw that I was frequenting the treat table way more than anyone else. And of course my actions meant that several people didn't get any treats at all. What an ass.

It was 20016 that I found out that my habit had led me to diabetes. Now something had to change. I couldn't just keep going like I always had. In late 2017, I discovered the Ketogenic way of eating, and realized that I could turn my life around.

Over the next six months or so, I gradually got myself onto the diet, until I was firing on all cylinders. I was sticking to it perfectly, I was losing lots of weight, and things were going swimmingly. All my blood tests told me that I was super healthy. I hadn't felt so good or so good about myself in years.

Then the combination of two events completely derailed all that progress. One, I went to the doctor, got an A1C test done, and it said that I was at 5.2. A diabetic is someone who score 6.5 or higher on the A1C. A prediabetic is someone who scores between 5.7 and 6.4 on the A1C. So, my efforts had moved me out the even the range of prediabetes. So, in my mind I started thinking, "Wow! I'm not a diabetic anymore."

In one sense, that was true, but in another sense, it was completely false. It took me a long time to turn my body from a healthy one into a diabetic one. It would surely take a similarly long time to repair that damage and get back to normal. But I wasn't thinking like that. Instead, I was thinking, "Wahoo, I'm cured!"

The second thing that happened at that time is that we went out to California for our summer vacation. I'd been so good with what I ate over the last while that I thought I could lay off the Ketogenic thing while I was there. Let myself have a vacation and eat whatever I pleased. We were in San Francisco, I should have myself some sourdough and some Ghirardelli.

Those two factors combined sent me off the rails again. When I got back from vacation, I couldn't get back onto keto and stay on. I kept telling myself that I wasn't diabetic anymore anyway, so it shouldn't hurt if I have an indulgence or two sometimes. Of course, that's not where it stopped. An indulgence or two would have been fine, but they multiplied to three or four or ten or seventy-eight.

All that weight that I lost from being good on keto began to creep back on...wait, creep isn't the right word. It came rushing back. It didn't take long for me to return to my old corpulent self. All my problems began returning. Worse yet, because of keto, I had been able to ween myself off of all the medications I was taking before. But now I was eating as if I was a normal Joe, and I didn't have the protections that those medications offered (along with their numerous side-effects). So, these indulgences hit me even harder than they would have before.

Here and there, I would get control of myself for a little while, but inevitably I would lose it again. I noticed a black speck appear in my vision, and realized that I had damaged my eyes with my recklessness. This was particularly sobering. What else was it doing to me that I wasn't able to see evidence of? How soon was my fatal heart attack coming?

I'd been thinking about trying to get back to it, and using YouTube as a means of ensuring that I keep at it. I'd long thought of doing a YouTube channel documenting my success at Keto. But I hadn't decided to do it until I'd already lost 40lbs. At that point, isn't it a little late to start documenting things? Now, I guess, I could make the lemons into lemonade, because all my progress had been reversed. So I could document it all from the very beginning.

So, here's my first video of my new YouTube channel called Big Anklevich on Health. A documentation of me finally getting my health under control, and turning my trajectory toward an early grave in a different direction.

I did that one a few weeks ago. Last week, I did my first update. Here it is:

As you might have guessed, I was pretty pleased with my results of week one. There's no way my weight loss could keep that pace, but when I did my second update, it was still going pretty well:

So, that's where I'm at so far. I'm being pretty drastic, I suppose, but I feel it's necessary to get myself completely under control. I'm going to visit family on vacation about a month from now, and I need to be ready to turn down all those temptations, and keep myself heading in the right direction. You don't get to One-derland if you give in to all the offers you receive after all.

It's only been two weeks, but I'm feeling good, and it seems to be getting easier every day. Sometime soon, I'll go see the doctor, and I'll be able to share with you what my A1C is and what my other blood tests reveal.