LOVE THOSE PLUS POUNDS

I've stated this before as a "Patti theory" but this time I proved it. Extra pounds are for an old person like money in the bank.

First off let me get out of the way that I am feeling better now than I have felt in a month. My heart is beating steady and true. YES!!! Thank you so much for all your caring, good thoughts and prayers.

Ok, now about those extra pounds. I think all of us would like to be at our ideal weight and some of you have maintained that with little sweat. Kudos to you. The rest of us have let age pack extra pounds around our middles as we left the work force and slowed down. Thanks to elastic waistbands and a less demanding vanity, we are mostly content with our pounds in the bank.

Some of us, myself included, have gotten a bit greedy hoarding away future energy and were edging towards becoming among the 1% of excess weight. Being in the 1% of money is much more appealing. I had a good 30 plus extra pounds to carry around and remember, I am quite short. There is always too much of a good thing.

At the start of my problems with the AFIB, I became very careful of my diet and ate only the good stuff  for my heart and hit the treadmill. Amazingly, I dropped 7 of those ugly pounds quite easily. Then the diagnosis of the tachy-brady (my naturel pacemaker just wore out) and the need for an artificial pacemaker arrived.

In the hospital, they give you powerful antibiotic drips to combat infection. Since they had to go in a second time to fiddle around, I got double the dose.  Once I was sent home and visited my primary doctor to check my blood clotting, that doctor was concerned with my upper back pain plus that I had a fever and cough so back in  the hospital I went and on more antibiotic drips.

They sent me home from that hospital with another round of oral antibiotics. Well that probably killed off the very last of my "good" bacteria or at best left a puny breeding pair to handle the digestive load requiring billions. You could have tied a rope to my foot and floated me in the Macy's day parade I was so full of gas.

OK a slight exaggeration but in truth I could have kept a backyard BBQ grill going strong all day. Such fun and quite painful which is why I haven't been around to visit you all. Prone, groaning beached whale was about all I could muster.

 The discovery of  kefir via a friend, thanks so much Arliss, has been a huge help. I caution here that kefir is an acquired taste.  That tart elixir plus a ton of yogurt and exercise, I am finally MUCH better and almost suitable for polite society. Not perfect yet but doable.

The pound part of this post is that I have lost 14 pounds through all of this. Not a lot in the big picture but had I been nice and slim to start with, that weight loss would have left me a bag of weak bones and raggedy flesh, unable to fight illness.

But by having those extra pounds in the bank I was able to keep energy supplied to my healing body.  I still have a surplus and while my skin doesn't fit particularly well right now, I don't look too ghastly. While I have abut 10 more to lose, I am hoping to keep a more manageable stash of plus poundage just in case but hope those won't be needed.

So don't despair my friends if your waistband feels snug. You are just storing energy for the future and if you ever need it--it will carry you quite well through any rough spots. Just don't be like me and hoard too much. Moderation is always the key.

A slightly bionic Patti has returned.