I often half-joke about how life gets in the way of your best intentions, whether it’s sabotaging your diet or making it challenging to fast or exercise.
In a recent blog, I also joked about how weight loss is like banking. When you are flush, you make deposits in your savings account (store fat), and when times are tough, you withdraw from your savings (burn fat and lose weight). I used the analogy of tough times, maybe when you’re unemployed.
Last week, the universe decided it would be funny to test me by making me the target of a recent widescale “restructuring” effort at work. I was told last Monday that I’m being considered for redundancy. As I’m a director, this usually involves a “consulting” process, but they made me a conditional “enhanced offer” of a payout if I just left immediately, rather than making them go through the motions. So yes, unemployment beckons.
I’m not counting myself out yet – there is a job available in an adjacent team which would seem like an ideal use of my skills and expertise, but I’m still waiting to hear back about that. And I’m not sitting around moping about it either. I also mentioned that I was due to go to a conference in Barcelona last week – I had joked about that being my “final boss” battle before a diabetic check-up I had scheduled for last Friday. That conference was an industry event that included most of my company’s competitors, and so I took the opportunity to put feelers out for potential job opportunities.
I also managed to stick very closely to my eating plan, as well as fitting in a treadmill run at the hotel’s gym.
The result was I only put on 2.7lbs (1.22kg) while away. Consider that on my last business trip to Paris just two weeks prior, I put on 6.1lbs (2.76kg). So this trip was far less damaging, despite my being extremely stressed due to my redundancy news. I’ll take that as a major win to be honest! As we’ve talked about before, this kind of short-term weight gain is not body fat, it’s just water and glucose and very much temporary. Regardless – consider that final boss’s butt well and truly kicked!
The universe wasn’t quite finished throwing me under the bus. On Thursday last week, I got a message from my GP surgery telling me that my diabetic check-up had to be postponed until 5th May, which was also not ideal. I had been building up to this for many weeks now, as this was my 3-month check-in, and I was really excited to see how far I’d gone in putting my type 2 diabetes into remission.
Again, rather than simply mope about that, I sent away for a home blood test kit, which arrived over the weekend. I’ll be taking my blood today and sending it back so I should get my results by the end of this week. I’ve used “Monitor My Health” blood tests before as they partner with the NHS and use their laboratories for the testing, thereby ensuring accurate results.
I’m back to fasting today, and will be swimming later. I fully intend to stick to my routine as far as possible, despite the shadow of potential unemployment looming over me. Life does sometimes get in the way, and sometimes it can feel harsh. You can’t control everything that happens in life. But controlling the things that you can control is a great way to feel less a victim of the vicissitudes of life, and more like the author of your own story.
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