A Healthy Budget

So, we weighed in at the UgL last night.  I decided that since the other scales weren't agreeing, I'll track my progress with the scale at the gym.  According to that scale, I'm 309.6. Still not a pretty number, but it's a starting place.  My body fat percentage is 46.something. I don't remember what.  Fernando told us that once our accounts are set up, we'll be able to see all of our stats that are recorded and that we'll be doing check ins every six to eight weeks. I think that's all good for me, because it gives me a time frame to look forward to rather than looking for infinitesimal changes every week. Also, if my weight is not changing much but my body fat is changing, or my measurements, I'll be able to see that there is some kind of progress.

I was thinking about the budget thing a lot yesterday, how you have to do your current budget and see how bad you are doing before you can build to make progress. This was my first health budget. It's hard to do because it's painful to look at where you really are, but you will never know if you're making progress if you don't truly know where you started. This got me to thinking about payday loans. Dan and I used to be stuck in a payday loan loop until someone who loved us helped us get out of them, under the conditions that we would never do that again. It was kind of hard to not get a payday loan when things were tight at first. If you've never done that, thank God! If you have done this, you understand how hard it is to change your way of thinking and to get the thought of getting a payday loan out of your head. It occurred to me that Dan and I are living a payday loan lifestyle. We have been looking for short term fixes for long term problems. We are hungry, tired and in a hurry, so we grab a burger off the dollar menu. This does not help our finances, our health, or any other aspect in our lives. It's just a payday loan for our health. In the long run, it's hurting us far more than it's helping us. It's taking money we could be spending on real food, adding unhealthy crap and weight to our bodies and the long term costs of the health problems on the horizon are going to outweigh the cheap up front cost to our finances and our time. As with the payday loans, the interest is killing us.

Just like with the finances, we have to take baby steps to make real changes. I know this is not going to happen all at once. We are going to do well and then bobble and have to get back on track. But we've come miles with our finances and we can do the same with our health. We just have to remember that a stumble is natural, expected and ok. Dan has been working on finding us better meals with lower carbs, and I am now eating breakfast each day so I can take my metformin. Two years ago, my A1C was at 5.9. Last summer it was at 6.0. They said a point a year is ok. I'm thinking a point a year leads me to 6.5 and diabetic by the time I'm 45 and that is NOT ok with me.

We're measured up and know where we stand. We are making small changes that we can live with and maintain. We may be rumblin', bumblin' and stumblin', but we're going to make real change.