burner of poptarts; breaker of things

Original OKRs post I’m tracking against.

Weight loss
- I’m now down 35lbs over the past 2 months. This is still largely due to a strict diet and a healthy amount of exercise.
Exercise
- Walking highlights
  - I have been overtraining and my feet and lower legs are not recovering properly between workouts.
  - I’ve lowered my workouts to 2 miles per day and will slowly build up higher over time.
- I’m adding some light resistance training to supplement some of the walking miles I’m losing.
Nutrition
- I’m still experiencing success with low carb and whole foods
- I’ve shifted into a daily intermittent fasting mode. I’m currently cycling on a 16:8 IF schedule. (I eat all of my daily calories within an 8 hour window)
- As long as I eat plenty of protein and fat, I’ve found it easy to stick with finishing dinner by 7pm, skipping breakfast, and having lunch by 1pm or so the next day.

Nothing new to add to podcasts or books from my last check-in.
I’ve resubscribed to youtube and found a lot of really great material there also though! I’ll follow up with some posts detailing some of the notes I’m taking.

Wearing the Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) helped me identify what to eat and how to curb the spikes after eating foods heavier in sugars or carbs.
I’ve also taken the opportunity to learn how hyper (high) and hypo (low) blood sugar feels. It’s mind blowing how much food (or the lack of it) impacts the body.

Circuit Training
- I’ve been to the gym!
- The treadmill and I are friends, but I haven’t quite made it over to the weight machines yet.
20 miles per week walking/running
- I hurt my foot, so I didn’t quite hit my goal this past week.
- I did put in 18.6 miles. So close, but not a great finish for the week.
cook 5 healthy meals
- Last week I did cook some chicken breast pretty well.
- We have been grocery shopping, and I’ve got a few things I’m looking forward to trying.
blog post per week
- I did it!
discipline of morning/evening routine
- Early mornings are still a challenge.
- Getting to sleep at a decent hour is getting better.
- We have new challenges now that we’re back “home” and have access to all our friends and family. It’s too easy to stay up late catching up with everyone.
8 hours of sleep
- I’m starting to see some consistency here.
meds/supplements
- I did it!
- I’m adding some Calium, more Vitamin D, and Turmeric daily for my foot recovery.

Travel days
- This past weekend we wrapped up the last 6.5 hours of our 6-month long road trip.
- We encountered a lot of traffic while not on the back roads.
- Getting setup in New Braunfels felt very relaxing, if only because we aren’t planning any RV trips through the end of the year at least.
Foot woes
- I overtrained and injured my left foot.
- After staying off it for a few days I feel more or less normal, but I’m going to take it easy.
- I’ve scheduled a visit with a podiatrist to review my form, shoes, and the structure of my foot.
Visiting with the Hepatologist
- This week is my “big game” week.
- I’ve put in a significant amount of effort to drop weight through diet and exercise. I’m excited to learn how my progress tracks with my effort.
- My aim is for the blood labs (7/3 -> 8/15) to show a U-turn and present a clear path to recovery.

This past week was difficult with back to back travel weekends, so I did not capture priorities for this past week. Boo!

I can at least share some accomplishments.

P1: Blood glucose in range
- I leveraged diet choices and exercise to keep my blood glucose average at 70mm/dL for the 2 weeks I wore the CGM.
P1: maintain healthy diet through the stress of travel days
- This was a challenge, but we have managed to keep it low carb and whole foods.
P2: improve blog dev to make it easier to post
- Most of my development is on a remote server, but this makes regularly posting content more challenging.
- I installed everything to make blog posts locally on my laptop.
- Everything is working and this post was written locally! So more content to come!

…and some things I’ve started but not yet finished:

P1: newsletter and RSS for blog
- I did discover that the blog RSS feed is https://blog.ruebenramirez.com/index.xml, but I still need to update the site to make this easy to find.
- I haven’t yet identified the right newsletter integration, but I’m sure I’ll get to the bottom of everything this week.
P1: Resistance training schedule
- I know that I want to keep things light and aerobic to align with the low carb diet I’m on.
- Beyond the dietary considerations, I’ve still got a lot to learn about what is and what is not in range.

Rueben Ramirez