Tikkabik

I kinda surprised myself earlier today by stepping on the nice digital scale that Bonnie bought me for Christmas, which I frankly have barely glanced at since then. When I stepped on it the day after Christmas I weighed in at 285 lbs -- which is, for better or worse (well, for worse, actually), the weight I've more or less resigned myself to for the past few years.

Just checked myself this morning when I was getting myself ready for the day and I measured in at 268. This isn't a doctor's scale, so I can't vouch for its accuracy, but it seems pretty consistent (weighed myself a few times on it throughout the morning and the value didn't change), so I'm pretty sure it's fairly on-the-mark. And I expect the bulk of that loss is water weight. I'm not exercising, to be honest, and I'm not eating radically differently.

For the past few weeks I've been concentrating harder than I have in years to better hydrate myself -- drinking upwards of two or three liters or so a day, sometimes more, sometimes less.

Part of it is simply an awareness that I was really, really dehydrated, all the time. After I started getting my blood sugar better under control last fall, my unslakable thirst disappeared, and with it, so abated my desire to have cold fluids on hand at all time. So I went from drinking maybe two quarts of fresh-brewed iced tea, plus a few glasses of diet soda, plus maybe a glass of water or so, to almost nothing. The payoff is great -- you can't know what it's like unless it's happened to you how desperate that diabetic craving for liquid is. Imagine being a sieve, where the water goes through you but doesn't stay with you at all.

That lack of conscious desire to drink beverages has, in fact, dulled my sense that I *should* be drinking fluids at all. I went from constant fluid uptake to almost none at all: Most of the time, I'd go through lunch and dinner without having anything to drink. My skin started flaking, I'd get rashes, bad acne patches, dry scalp irritation, headaches. As painfully obvious as it is in retrospect, it didn't dawn on me for weeks and weeks that my problem may be that I wasn't keeping the water levels up high enough.

So starting a few weeks ago I picked up the pace and started drinking more. Water, specifically. I've largely lost my taste for diet soda all together, especially since I've developed a paranoid suspicion that the artificial sweeteners in that crap may be dulling my mind. (I can thank AlphaX for that, after he posted to one of my blog entries from last August telling me that NutriSweet made his mom forgetful.) I haven't convinced Bonnie to write that stuff off, but one step at a time: When we first met, she was drinking whole milk and sugared soda.

Anyway, we'll see where it goes. But at least now I know why I had to close my belt another notch last week.