Food. Weight. Weight loss. Exercise.

I love food.

All food.

I love to try new foods and go to new restaurants and learn about other cultures and try their foods. I love French food and Moroccan food and Afghan food. I love Indian food and Seafood and Tex-Mex. I love food.

I have always loved healthy foods. As a child I would opt for the salad bar over pizza. I love most all fruits and vegetables and especially love the rare occasion when I get to try a new one. I love to cut them and cook them and find different pairings.

Food and the experience of taste is one of the most amazing gifts from God and maybe one of my favorite blessings.

We eat to live, but there are times when I have lived to eat.

I love sugar. I absolutely love sugar. There are times when I am obsessed with sugar. Any form: candy, cake, ice cream, hard candy, chewy candy, sugar, honey, etc. And one is never enough. One turns to two turns to five turns to ten.

As a younger person, I worked out all the time. I was extremely active with sports and running and playing with friends and swimming and with whatever activity the day held. Being active and having built up toned muscles led to having a high metabolism. Eating was a pleasure with no bounds. I ate healthy foods, butI also ate a great deal of non-healthy foods.

Time changes things: life, habits, schedules, metabolism, muscle mass, choices, bodies, eating, health.

Sometimes, life changes some things while other things do not.

So, with time, my schedule slowed down, my eating maintained, my habits became more sedentary, my metabolism slowed down, my muscle mass dwindled, and I slowly began gaining weight.

I realized I was changing, but truthfully, I wasn’t concerned or worried or interested. This had never happened to me before and I was in a bit of a state of denial. Despite having a Bachelor’s degree in Exercise Science and a Master’s degree in Nutrition, I did not really know what to do or how to change.

With time, I realized that I fed my dogs cleaner, healthier food than what I was consuming.

I saw myself in pictures and did not understand what I saw. In my mind’s eye, I was still healthy and fit and trim and the pictures I saw did not represent the me I believed me to be.

Working as I do, I have free access to a significant amount of food at all times. It is not healthy foods: unlimited soft drinks, chocolate, chips, crackers, cookies, etc. It would be nothing for me to go through a 13 hour shift having consumed an excess of free foods and think nothing about it. We even joked at work that I was a trash can and would eat anything.

A coworker mentioned this to me one day. Something in the way she said it sounded different this time. I heard her different. Why would I ever be okay with someone equating my body with a trash can, least of all me? God created me as His beautiful workmanship, a temple, and I was allowing my body to become a trash can.

Concurrently, I found myself neck deep in an ICU filled with dying COVID patients. Nothing we did helped them. No meds we administered made a difference. Week after week, month after month, we watched them die.

The ones who had diabetes, hypertension, and obesity were the ones who did the worst. These were preventable chronic diseases that these patients had simply from making poor choices. 

The same poor choices I was making.

I could not help anyone with COVID; only God can do that. But I can help myself. I can make better choices. I can change my behavior and prevent these chronic diseases from taking root in my body. I can honor God with the temple He made me to be and stop treating my body like a trash can.

Around this same time, a friend posted a book that talked about the psychology and neuroscience of eating. Susan P. Thompson, a PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences, wrote, Bright Line Eating. From the moment I began reading, I realized that her writings aligned with many of my core beliefs around eating and food. From an anatomy and pathology standpoint, her writing made sense to me. Almost immediately, I bought into and believed in the psychology behind what she wrote. I knew that this was the key for me beginning my journey out of treating my body like a trash can and into the temple I was called to be.

From the start, I have been adamant about not calling this a diet. When you go on a diet, then you go off a diet. I do not diet. I eat. What I wanted was a new way of eating, thinking, behaving. I wanted to change my habits, my mind set, my lifestyle. While I was hopeful to experience some weight loss, that was not my ultimate goal. My goal was to be healthy, to be happy, and to be free from eating in the manner in which I had been eating with no respect for myself.

So, on June 22, I committed to change my life and eat in a more God honoring, self-honoring way.

I committed to more vegetables, more fruits, eating three meals per day, no sugar, no flour, and no snacking.

There were moments in which this was difficult, but within a very short period of time it became automatic.

I ate my portions and I was satisfied, not painfully gluttonously over full. I found that I wasn’t hungry between meals, but calm and more relaxed. I found that my mind wasn’t obsessed with food and that I was mentally free to think on other things. I contentedly looked forward to the next meal without worry. 

Foods began to taste better than they ever have.

I was not exercising and the weight literally just fell off. I simply stuck to the meal plan. Weighed my foods, planned my meals, and was more filled than I have ever been in all my life.

In just under three months, I lost just under 30 lbs. I feel so good and I am so proud of myself.

I believe in exercise. I believe in moving. I believe in taking care of one’s self in all the ways that one should.

But you cannot do everything at once. It takes work and effort to change habits. It takes willpower. 

To change everything at once is to expect too much of oneself. If I had been trying to incorporate more exercise while also trying to change my eating, I strongly believe I would have failed at both. I am not strong enough to have the willpower to do it all. 

As I said, I believe in exercise. Now that I have lost most of the weight and this new way of eating and treating myself is becoming a lifestyle change, I can begin thinking about incorporating exercise. 

I am not quite ready yet, but I am almost there. I believe in taking one step at a time.

And I am so very glad that I did.

Sabbath

I am off today. I slept in. I am resting.  I am cuddling with my pups.

I have been at the hospital, in the ICU, the last 5 days.

I have been in the room with, talked to, interacted with, and done procedures on patients who are positive for COVID-19.

They are sick, they are not doing well.

We are finding that patients tend to do worse in their second week of illness.

We did not know that. There is so much we do not know.

The increased anxiety has seemed to level out the last few days as we are all settling in to our new normal. People are less panicked and more reasonable. But things are still manageable now, I do not know how it will be when it is not.

We are continuing to try and plan and prepare and learn. We are learning more every day just from simple experience and trial and error.

I am thinking on things differently now. For so long we compared COVID-19 to influenza that I came to assume some things that were not true. I assumed that you get COVID like you get the flu. It comes, you deal with it, it is gone. But I am not sure that is true. We do not know what kind of lasting effects it could have, what kinds of chronic illness it could result in or could be. I dismissed that if I got it I would not die from it, but we do not know that, I do not know that.

I have never been concerned or scared to do my job. But I am becoming more and more aware of how dangerous and deadly this is. I will continue to do my job but not without concern.

People must continue to stay home. People can be contagious for up to 5 days before showing symptoms.

I fear it will be many months before this is over. I believe we need to quarantine for a long time to keep safe and to keep this at bay. I believe we are still only in the beginning stages of this virus in our area.

I have plenty of food and toilet paper and electricity and entertainment.

I have a phenomenal dog walker who caters to my pups and is so incredibly supportive of me.

I have good friends and family who are checking in and offering prayers and encouraging texts and messages and sending love.

I have dear ones who have sewn masks and left them on my door step.

Part of me wants to be at work today. Part of me knows I need time off to rest and recharge. Part of me is confused by the reality of what is happening.

All of me is thankful for a steadfast God above.

HIV, HEP C, PPE, COVID-19

In the fall of last year I suffered a needle stick. I knew as soon as I felt the needle that I was in trouble.

It was early in the morning and I responded to a code blue, a cardiac arrest, as I do on a regular basis. The patient needed an emergent line; this means I needed to access a large vein in his groin. Usually, we place central lines in a sterile fashion wearing a gown, gloves, a mask, and a bouffant and the patient is draped with a sterile cover. But in emergencies, I only don gloves. Sterility is not important when the patient is actively dying.

I knew this patient. They were on my service. I knew they were HIV positive. And when the needle pierced my glove and my finger I knew I would be starting six months of frequent lab draws and prophylactic medications. Fortunately workers comp covered it all, the two meds I needed were each more than $2000 per month.

Time has passed. I am HIV negative. I have completed the meds.

Last week I found myself in a code. A patient was having a cardiac arrest. They needed emergent access. I found the vein I needed. But in the process I sprayed myself with the patient’s blood. I was literally covered in it. I knew the patient. They were on my service. They were positive for hepatitis C.

Fortunately this patient has an undetectable viral load and I do not need to worry. This is good because there is no prophylaxis for Hep C.

PPE is so important. PPE, Personal Protective Equipment. I have never had a time in which this resource has not been available to me. As evidenced above, there have been times in which I have chosen not to don this equipment. And times in which that choice has put me in danger. Most of the time I wear the gown and the mask and the gloves and put on all the things and do all the things.

I have thought a lot about HIV lately. Wondering what it was like for those health care providers in those early days. Caring for patients who had a virus that no one understood, that was killing people, that had no cure. I’ve wondered what the hospitals wards were like, what the anxiety and stress level was. I wondered who the nurses and healthcare providers who volunteered in those days to take those patients were. I’ve wondered what motivated them, what scared them, and how other people treated them.

Years and times and science has passed so that I can now walk into an HIV positive patients room during a code, only wearing gloves, suffer a needle stick, and take meds for six months to find that I am not infected by this devastating virus, to move on, to exist as though nothing happened.

Years and time and science has progressed so that I can now walk into a Hep C positive patients room during a code, only wearing gloves, find myself covered in their blood, and find that because they have an undetectable viral load I need not worry. I can wash myself and move on as if nothing ever happened.

And now we have COVID-19.

I have seen my world change the last few weeks in ways that I have never seen before. Health care workers are full of anxiety and confusion about how to best care for the patients with this virus. We are taking volunteers at the beginning of each shift and they are donning the PPE that we currently have available, making the best decisions that they know how to make, but not knowing if they are the best choices are not. We are watching people die from a virus that we do not understand and that has no proven treatment and no real cure. And more and more people are coming.

More and more health care providers are themselves contracting the virus. We all wonder who will be next. If we will get it.

In time we will run out of PPE, rooms, beds, ventilators, medications. I fear in a shorter time than we know.

I do not know what the days will look like then. I do not know that reality.

HIV.

Hepatitis.

COVID-19.

These are all viruses. Antibiotics do not work on viruses. Time will teach us what does.

I love my job. I have always loved my job. I still love my job.