It’s been 24 hours without caffeine. I started thinking that perhaps a daily 6-pack of diet coke wasn’t helping my erratic heartbeats and I should probably cut that out until I figure out what all is going on in my body. I also cut out my morning cup of coffee, but that’s no big deal really because it just gave me heartburn.

Luckily for me Coke makes a caffeine-free version of Diet Coke, because I don’t think I can live on unflavored water for the rest of my life. I’ve learned that there are VERY FEW beverages out there that don’t come packed with caffeine. For example, I was going to pick a pack of Diet Sunkist until I googled it and found out that it is the ONLY orange soda that has caffeine. Really??? That’s nuts!

Anyway, I went about my walk as usual, it’s a gorgeous day and there’s no way I’m not getting out there to enjoy it and get some un-bottled, natural Vitamin D. They say that Vitamin D is good for your heart and Lord knows I need some help right about now.

It was at about the 1/2 mile mark that my chest started really hurting. I even got a touch of vertigo and had to sit down. It was scary. I wasn’t even walking that fast and my heart was felt like it wanted to jump out of my chest. I could feel it pumping in my neck. I could even feel the irregular beats while taking my pulse on my wrist. Something is just not right.

These irregularities are becoming more and more noticeable each time I exert any type of energy, and then my heartbeat goes crazy and beats all types of irregular.

After I got back and calmed down, I went ahead and posted a request on Facebook for anyone to recommend a cardiologist – if you read my last post you know I was less than impressed with the treadmill Dr., so far there’s been a couple of recommendations but after calling on each, neither accept self referrals. Hopefully some more people will respond and I can find somewhere else to go.

UPDATE: My friend Angie, a nurse at a cardiology clinic, recommended two different doctors and both accept self-referalls. THANK YOU, JESUS!!! I’m scheduled for early next week.

 

SO, today I decided to join Weight Watchers OnlinePlus program. They were offering a free sign-up and had a promotion of “get paid to get healthy” where they will pay me $50 if I lose 10 pounds in 3 months, so I figured I had nothing to lose but more weight.

Greg’s first response was “What, so now you’re done with MyFitnessPal?” NOOOOO, actually just the opposite. I’m going to continue tracking my food intake with BOTH apps.

My reasoning is, so many of the low-calorie, healthy, recipes that I come across are calculated using the SmartPoints or PointsPlus system and it got me wondering… how is that different than the calorie amount that I’m allowed on MFP? So, I purchased a one-month membership and am now building all my recipes in both apps.

So far, I am finding that they are pretty much the same. In MFP, I’m allowed 1360 calories per day and on WW, I get 38 PP+ and on the first day I used up exactly all of both – all 1360 calories on MFP and all 38 PP+ on WW – with the exact same recipes and amounts consumed. Pretty cool.

The main difference I notice is that on MFP, EVERYTHING gets counted and on WW – fruits are NOT subtracted from your points. FRUITS ARE FREE! This is a big deal to me beacause I eat a TON of fruit. But, having it be “free” might also might be a bad thing, because I do eat so much of it. But, since I’m still tracking in MFP, I know that I’ll never go over because that app will always keep me accountable by counting every single thing.

In one of the weight loss blogs that I follow, “I Lost Big and So Can You”, Kristine’s boyfriend, “The Steele Project” has created a game on Diet Bet. I had never heard about this before, but it’s pretty cool. In the games that I’m signed up for, you bet a certain amount that you will lose 4% of your total body weight in 4 weeks.

There are other types of games, longer one’s and just about every amount imaginable. I went with a modest $30 bet. While I’m sure that I can make the bet, I’m also pretty tight with just putting my money somewhere that I’m not familiar.

The games that I joined are called “Self Love and Sweat” and “Spring into a healthier you!”.

I signed up a couple days before the games started and after paying my money, I had to take two pictures of myself weighing for the initial weight check-in.

For each game you are given a “challenge word” that you must write down on a piece of paper and have in view in both pictures – here is the first pic and below is the second pic which is a close-up of the scale itself with my weight and the challenge word in clear view.

My first word was “Lychee”. What a weird word. How funny though because that is my daughter’s favorite gummy candy sold at World Market that I give her every Christmas.

My second word was “Nettles” (which after Googling I found out is a herbaceous perennial flowering plant), but since I signed up for the second game within a day of the first game, I was given the option to use the first weight and pictures which was very handy. There is a companion app that you can download for both Android and iPhone and each game has their own chat room where you can get to know the other players and motivate each other and post status updates and workouts. You can also submit unofficial weigh-in’s which can help you stay accountable.

I’m super excited and ready to add another layer to this weight loss journey and road to healthier living!

You know that saying, when you can’t run with your legs, run with your heart? Yeah, well, if it’s skipping beats you might want to get that checked out.

And that’s how I spend my Monday, seeing a cardiologist, walking up a 10% incline to see how my heart would respond.

Apparently, these chest pains that I’ve been having, and the overall discomfort, is due to extra heartbeats, also known as early heartbeats.

Sometimes when I’m riding the bike at the Y, I’ll notice that my heartrate drops to 40 beats per minute. Then I’ll check my fitbit and it will either say the same thing, or just have the two dashes like it can’t read my pulse.

According to the cardiologist, this is because mechanical devices don’t know how to interpret these extra beats so they get all wonky and just display whatever they think is happening at the time.

I wasn’t really that impressed with the Dr., tbh, he didn’t really seem to act like this was any big deal and just told me to stay under 145 beats during exercise.

The problem with that is that my regular, just walking around the house, heartbeat is 105-110 so to get up to 145 doesn’t take much. My resting, laying in the bed watching TV heartbeat is 85. So I’m really thinking there’s more going on here.

I’ve decided to just chill out on the heavy cardio for a bit and keep walking and see what happens. But if it’s not better in a week or so, well then I’ll probably be posting again about going to a different doctor. Better safe then dead. ✌️