Well, well, well…I think I may have figured out the mystery of my coughing fits that just won’t quit. I think it is/was a combination of factors. I have no doubt about when and why it started – it was the dust from the construction at work. That’s why it didn’t bother me when I was at home, at first. And that’s why the steroids and antibiotics knocked it out for a week after only three days of treatment. I say knocked it out, but it didn’t completely disappear. But I was coughing only about 10% as much as I had been.

But then it came roaring back with a vengeance, which didn’t make sense if the steroids and antibiotics had done their job. It started getting worse, much worse, so I spent $300 on a natural supplement called Natural Cellular Defense. After three days of that, nothing had changed. But the next day, my cough got quite a bit better. I was probably only coughing 75% as much as I had been. But this past week, I had a horrible night at home, and it’s been pretty persistent since then.

Then, yesterday, I drove to the office and worked four hours, trying to make up some of the 30-40 hours I lost by going home early when I was coughing my head off at work. Got home, and I was starving. I saw where Papa John’s had a large pepperoni for only $10, so I had one delivered. And, yes, I managed to eat it all, which is a bunch of food. I had no business eating the whole thing in one sitting. Well, shortly after finishing it, I had my worst coughing attack yet. This one was really bad. I’ve been trying to be alert to what I’m doing before my coughing fits start, and it wasn’t hard to miss this sign.

But how can eating too much make you cough? I’d never heard of that. So I went to Google and typed in “can indigestion make you cough”. And, lo and behold, it turns out that GERD, or acid reflux, can do that. Now, I’ve had acid reflux in the past, where partially digested food backs up into the esophagus and causes a burning sensation. And I wasn’t experiencing that, so at first I thought it couldn’t be acid reflux. But the articles went on to say that in some cases of acid reflux, a dry, violent cough is the only noticeable symptom; there is no burning sensation.

Well, I’ll be darned. So I popped a couple of Dollar General’s Zantac knockoffs, and I immediately felt better. And what is a main cause of acid reflux? Being extremely overweight. So, at least in the past few weeks, it hasn’t been my lungs making me sick, it’s been my huge gut. Although I rarely eat as much as I did yesterday, I have been eating a lot of fairly spicy food at home lately, and probably eating bigger portions than the average person. So I’m going to cut back on portion sizes, and start eating milder foods, and see how my cough does.

If I can get rid of this cough by eating less, that’s about the most powerful incentive I will have ever had to lose weight. Heck, at this point, you could just about talk me into a ten day fast if it would cure this cough. Now, I’m no doctor, and I could be mis-diagnosing myself, but everything about the acid reflux hypothesis seems to add up. I’m going to watch what I eat for the next week, what kinds of food and how much, and see if that doesn’t greatly reduce my coughing flareups. And hopefully get back to walking, which I haven’t been doing because I’ve been too busy coughing all night.

That’s it for weight loss blog today.

Had a good day at work, everything was fine, but shortly after I got home the coughing spasms kicked back in, out of the blue, and they won’t stop. No walking tonight, and no blogging, unless you count this. I’m gonna go to bed, because I usually don’t cough when I’m lying down.

What a life…

Not much to report, actually, folks. (And there’s nobody reading this, anyway, so it all kind of works out!) I woke up with cramps last night in my calf. Twice. I can’t believe it’s from walking 8 minutes a night, but my calves aren’t feeling too hot, so I’m taking a break from the walk tonight. Plus, I have a huge writing assignment, so I’m working on some things here at home to help me be more productive. Like cleaning house, clearing off my work desk, etc. Nothing major, but I want to be ready to come home from work tomorrow and jump right in to writing. I’ve got a line on another writing job for an internet marketer. He wants 7 mini e-books on the topic of pigeon racing, of all things. I’m probably going to accept it. This past month was a disaster, financially. Spent $700 on my 15 year old truck. Have to write a check this week to the City of Lumberton for $175 for a speeding ticket. Spent about $400 trying to get rid of my cough. So I could certainly use the $350 he’s offering for these e-books. And who knows, it might lead to more work down the road. Plus, I’m still working on ghostwriting a full fledged book. So I’m going to be very busy for the next few months, extremely busy for the next few weeks, and I won’t have much time to spend on cleaning house, etc. So I’m gonna try to knock it all out tonight so I’ll have all my ducks in a row tomorrow night. And I’m giving my calves a break. Pretty soon, I’m going to start weighing myself every day, taking my blood pressure and pulse every morning, and posting the numbers on here. And I’ll probably start putting up a picture once a week or so to track my progress, or lack thereof. And I’m probably going to start linking to some YouTube videos on weight loss, as they tell me Google likes that kind of thing. I’m still nowhere to be found when you do a search for weight loss blog. But that’s not the main thing. The main things are getting serious about losing weight, and blogging darned near every day. And today makes 5 days in a row that I’ve blogged. Stay tuned.

Woo-hoo! Of course, that’s better than most days, when my weight loss blog has zero page views. Actually, the average is probably a page view and a half a day. About every third day, for some reason, I’ll get three or four visitors. Back on July 29 I actually had 16 unique visitors. I have no idea why; it was certainly not thanks to Google, who doesn’t even seem to know this blog exists on most days. That’s alright; I’m pretty much an introvert anyway, and not really all that interesting. In many ways, I’m the most boring person I know. Not that I find myself boring; it’s just that the ways I like to spend my time most people find boring. Like reading. Or going to bookstores. And reading. Taking long walks and listening to paranormal radio talk shows on my mp3 player. And reading. You get the picture. I have no interest in bars, night clubs, night life, etc. But I could probably use more of a social life. My weight is a big thing holding me back there, as I’m very self conscious of how huge I’ve gotten. (Of course, that doesn’t stop me from going to Schlotzky’s for some reason…) Which reminds me of an old friend, and one of her friends. My friend was a little overweight, and her friend was quite a bit overweight. Not so fat that people would stop and stare, but she was pretty big. My friend loved to go to garage sales and antique shops on the weekends, or go shopping, but her friend refused to go with her because she was so embarrassed about how fat she was. But if my friend offered to treat her to Golden Corral, she was always up for that. Not sure how I got off on that rabbit trail, but I guess what I was driving at is that I’ve always had something of a loner instinct in me, and so I shouldn’t really care if nobody is reading my weight loss blog.

But for some reason, I do. I guess it’s because I don’t want to feel like this is complete waste of time, an exercise in futility. I was kind of hoping that other people would read my story and either follow along to wish me well, or find inspiration to start their own attempt to lose weight and reclaim their health. Of course, I’ve actually blogged very little; I go 5-6 weeks sometimes without updating my blog. And I don’t think Google likes that. Maybe I’ll start showing up in the search engines if I keep blogging faithfully every day. I need to do it for my own discipline, anyway, just to keep me focused on my goals and stay on the straight and narrow. It would be nice if I had a bunch of readers, but the fact that I don’t is no reason to stop blogging. And as long as I’m blogging nearly every day, my health, fitness, and weight loss goals will be at the top of my mind. Speaking of which, I forgot to mention it, because it took place during my six week coughing spell, but July 27th marked one year since I’m touched a cigarette. So I got that goin’ for me!

And I just walked in from my nightly eight minute walk. And this is the 4th day in a row I’ve walked, and the 4th day in a row that I’ve blogged.

The weight loss blog adventure continues!

Well, I think this is a record for me – this is the 3rd day in a row I’ve blogged. I really, really want to update my weight loss blog every day, and I always intend to, but then I get laid up by a wicked cough for six weeks and there’s nothing to report. But here I am, after blogging both yesterday and the day before, sitting at my desk at home, typing away on the keyboard, to let all three of my average daily visitors to my weight loss blog know what’s up. So, ya gotta admit, ya really have to hand it to me, and give me an A for effort this week!

So how goes my weight loss adventure? Well, right now I view myself in a “maintain” mode. I am cutting back on Pepsi, Coke and Moutain Dew at work, but other than that, there’s not a whole lot to report. I am, however, sitting here sweating like a pig after my eight minute walk. (Again, 3rd day in a row! Yowsa!) I’m sticking with eight minutes for now, because I learned a very painful lesson a couple months ago, when I pushed my distance too hard and too fast, and got a whole bunch of lower back pain for the effort. The plan is to keep it at eight minutes until I feel I’m up to adding more distance, and then I’ll bump it up to about 10 or 12 minutes, depending on how I’m feeling. I’ll keep it there for a week or two, and then bump it up to about 15, and do that for a couple weeks. You get the picture…eventually I want to get back to walking 60 to 90 minutes a day. I love those long walks, I used to take them all the time in Tennessee, and when I do it regularly the weight starts dropping off. But, if I want to get back to taking my long fitness walks, I’m going to have to force myself to take short walks for a month or two so I’ll be in shape to handle the long ones.

I also want to say that today has been, remarkably, almost cough free. It may be the zeolites I’m taking in the form of Natural Cellular Defense which I mentioned in my previous post. As you may recall (all three of you!), I wasn’t too impressed with my results after being on NCD for several days. Especially after shelling out $300 for two cases and next day shipping. But something seems to have changed today, and if it wasn’t the NCD, I don’t know what else it could have been. So I’m going to keep taking it. So, like I said, I’m in “maintain” mode right now. Can’t walk much, drinking a little less pop, so my weight is staying right around 340. One thing I hope to do, besides keep reducing the amount of pop I drink and adding distance to my walks, is to start drinking much more water every day. I don’t drink nearly enough, and it really is the elixir of life.

Anyway, that’s it for today. Check in tomorrow for the next installment of my weight loss blog!

Uh, kinda sorta, but not really. In keeping with my newly adopted policy of moderation when it comes to adding distance/time to my walks, I’ll be walking for eight minutes. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. I might burn off 50 calories or so, if I’m lucky. However, if this policy of moderation keeps me pain free, and allows me to build back up to 60-90 minutes day and stay with it, then, yeah, today’s eight minute stroll will have been a “weight loss” walk. And it will mark a turning point in my weight loss blog, as my problem has been sticking with things.

Right now, I’m just trying to hang on until October, when it won’t be 97 degrees every day. The locals tell me that September won’t be that much cooler than August. And I’m trying to increase my water intake, and decrease my consumption of pop and tea. Yes, “pop”. I know people in Texas refer to any carbonated soft drink as “Coke”, but I grew up calling it pop, and it will always be pop to me. The “Coke” thing just doesn’t cut it. You’ll be at someone’s house, and they’ll ask if you want a Coke, and you say sure. A few minutes later they return with a Diet Cherry Vanilla 7-Up. And then you have to drink that nasty stuff because you “requested” it.

I was hoping that I would cut way back on iced tea after leaving Tennessee, because you can’t buy Milo’s brand here. Milo’s is something else…it has some sort of secret ingredient that makes it unlike any other iced tea (some say it’s cinnamon), and it’s addictive. But after I moved here I discovered HEB brand Sweet Tea Texas Style. I was afraid it was going to be the traditional sweet tea, so full of sugar that you practically gag. But it’s not; it’s closer to what most Northerners think of as iced tea, and has lemon in it, too. And I’m hooked on the stuff. I might even like it better than Milo’s.

But I have got to cut way back on it. And the pop. At work, we get free pop. All we want. The company keeps the fridge full of all kinds of different soft drinks, including the Mexican Pepsi and Coke in real glass bottles. And I drink 2 or 3 a day. (It used to be 4-5 a day). But I need to cut way, way back on both the tea and the pop. If I cut out both entirely, I would probably drop 100 pounds in a year without doing anything else. So why don’t I? Well, I guess I like the taste of them more than I like the thought of being 100 pounds lighter. Which is pretty pathetic. But there’s more to it than that. I know that I don’t do very well on diets or programs where I have to cut out one or more things entirely. Or maybe that’s just rephrasing what I just said as an attempt to justify myself. At any rate, I’m going to try to cut way back, and add more water to my diet. We’ll see how it goes.

That’s a good question. I know I’ve said (at least) two or three times that I’m going to start posting on a daily or almost daily basis. I said it again in one of my most recent posts. But here we are, and it’s been two and a half weeks since my last post. And there was a month between that one and the one before it. Some weight loss blog, huh?

So what happened? For one thing, I developed a terrible cough. It sometimes seems to be non-stop, and is very unpleasant. No phlegm or anything else ever comes up, so it’s sort of like the dry heaves, and I often feel as if I’m about to cough up my esophagus. A friend told me to be careful, as it’s possible to “dislodge” your esophagus by coughing too hard. The cough didn’t start out as that big of a deal. We were remodeling at work; they tore the wall down next to me to access the new addition they built on. There was a lot of dust for several weeks, and that’s when I started coughing. I guess I should’ve started wearing a dust mask as soon as the cough started, but I didn’t cough at home, only at work, so I didn’t think it was a big deal. But gradually things got worse; I spent more and more of my work day coughing, and eventually I started coughing at home, too.

After about a month a half, and when it got really bad, I went to my “doctor” (he’s actually a Nurse Practitioner). He said the dust had irritated my lungs, then they got inflamed, then they became infected. So I had an upper respiratory infection. He said if I were younger, and hadn’t spent 26 years smoking, my lungs would have handled things a lot better. He gave me a steroid and an antibiotic. Which worked wonders! After about three days, no more cough. Kept taking the pills, even though I hate taking that kind of stuff, just to make sure it didn’t come back. But a week or so after my drugs ran out, the cough came right back. Terrific. So I spent $300 on a natural health supplement a friend swears by, called Natural Cellular Defense, containing something called zeolites. Been on it since about Tuesday, and frankly don’t see much difference. I’m not writing off the $300 as down the drain just yet, but things don’t look too promising.

Here’s the weird part about this cough. Make that weird parts. When I’m laying down I don’t cough at all. Never wake up at night coughing, or anything like that. If I wear a dust mask, my cough goes almost completely away. And if I eat something very spicy, such as very hot chicken wings, hot and sour soup, spicy chili, (basically anything that makes your nose run and eyes water), the cough goes away for several hours.

Anyway, all that to say that I haven’t been doing too much walking lately. Also, on that front, I bit off way more than could chew. I went from walking 6 minutes a day to 90 minutes a day in about a week and a half. That was way too fast, and I paid the price about a week later, and had to quit walking altogether. So now I’m going to try a very gradual approach. I’ll start slow, and only add a tiny amount of time from day to day. So I walked seven minutes this morning. Tomorrow, I’ll shoot for eight minutes, and no more. We’ll see how it goes.

Thanks for reading.

Ever since I’ve moved to Beaumont, I’ve fought a lack of energy. Some days at work it was an all day battle not to doze off. With my weight, I probably have sleep apnea, but I put off going in for a sleep test until I could save more money because we have such a high deductible on our insurance. Well, this past week, I got a ghostwriting job that will pay pretty well, so I called my doc to see about a sleep study. I assumed I could get in an out, and have my sleep mask in a few days. But no, he wanted to draw some blood and run some lab tests first, in order to rule out other causes of my constant fatigue, such as thyroid problems. Took the blood test Friday; still haven’t been notified of any results. But Monday I was about as beat as I’ve ever been on the way to work, so I stopped and got some nicotine gum. I used to smoke (July 27 will be a year without cigarettes), but on long drives I sometimes use nicotine gum to stay awake. Well, these past two days have been two of my most productive at work, and I can’t help but think the nicotine gum has a lot to do with it. I hate chewing it (it’s harder to quit than cigarettes), but if it keeps me alert and energetic like this, I may have no choice. I’ll have to re-evaluate things after the sleep study happens, if ever.

I could only manage 45 minutes of walking tonight, due to back pain. Actually, I could have gone longer, but I’m thinking that maybe I went too fast too soon. Two weeks ago, when I decided it was time to get serious about fitness walking, I hadn’t really walked in like 4 or 5 months, and I weighed about 340 pounds. Under those circumstances, going from zero minutes a day of fitness walking to 90 minutes a day in two weeks might have been too much. So I’m going to keep it at 45 minutes a day or so and see how it goes.

Which is kind of a bummer. Because I really enjoy long walks. The last third of a 90 minute walk is the best; its’ when you really hit your stride.

But I don’t want to overdo it, so I’m going to restrain myself for a few more weeks while I build up some stamina and strength in my back.