Don't kid yourself. Losing weight can be an expensive proposition. I know.
It's cost me many thousands of dollars in the two and one-half years since I started taking Byetta. And then when I started to eat low-carb last December, the costs went up.
The
Byetta alone cost me a couple of thousand dollars in insurance co-pays.
And having to eat quality food means my grocery bills are much higher
than junk food. Besides that I had to throw out a lot of lesser quality
food as my standards increased.
But even
that is hardly the worst of it. I had to throw out all my shirts,
jackets, sweaters, trousers, and underwear. And not just once. As I
downsized from XXXL Tall to M Tall in shirts and 56" to 32" in
trousers, I had to buy new wardrobes -- several times.
Only
my big head and feet stayed the same size, 8 /14 and 12 respectively.
So fortunately I didn't need any new hats, shoes, or socks.
But
even my fingers downsized. Before Catherine died I wore a wedding ring.
It wasn't directly expensive for the jeweler to take care of that size
problem. But the indirect cost was steep, since Catherine went with me
and spotted a nice string of pearls on sale and asked me to buy them
for her. Of course, I did.
Why would anyone spend so much money just to get thin?
As you may have guessed, I had more than one reason.
Mostly, I wanted to control my diabetes. Seems to be working, since my A1C has gone from 6.8 when I started to 4.9 today.
Other numbers are equally good, like my cholesterol, triglycerides, and blood pressure.
More
subjectively but something that I am aware of every day is that I feel
so much better and have so much more energy. I feel 20 years younger
than my biological age. That's important, because my new girlfriend is
20 years younger than I am (although she acts 20 years younger than her biological age).
Even more: My sleep apnea is gone. My chronic back pain is gone. The pain of osteoarthritis in my left knee is gone. I rarely have headaches any more. The allergies that I could barely control with powerful antihistamines every spring has also disappeared. Even my formerly fatty liver is no longer fat. I could
write a book about each of these sentences, but you get the idea.
When
I worked for the federal government years ago, we always calculated the
cost-benefit ratios of our projects. Weight loss is one that anyone
would fund.
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