Another celebration

144.6 today! Woo-hoo!!! I lost those two pounds!

This was one of those mornings where I stepped on the scale and was afraid to look--while I had hit 144.6 on Friday, I didn't weigh myself over the weekend and yesterday morning I was 145.8, so I had no idea what my weight would be this morning. While it's not unusual for me to drop a pound between Monday and Tuesday (even when I eat well and exercise over the weekend I find that my weight spikes on Monday mornings--I drink a lot less water over the weekend, though, so I suspect I'm retaining fluids that I then flush out when I get to work and start downing water all day) I didn't know if my Friday low weight was an anomoly and the Monday weight was more realistic, or if the Friday weight was for real and the Monday weight was a spike. I've been telling myself for the past 24 hours that anything in the 145 range would be acceptable--the whole point of a "stretch" goal is to work so hard to reach it that even if you miss you're still in good shape.

OTOH, my blood pressure is still through the roof. I had it checked at the wellness center on campus yesterday and it was 144/99!! That's higher than it was at the doctor's office (although there she made me lie down and relax before taking the reading; at the Wellness Center I walked two buildings away, sat down, and had the reading taken immediately) (OTOH, my heart rate was a very nice 68 bpm even after the short walk, so at least that's good). I've reduced my caffeine to one cup of coffee a day, I've been tracking my sodium intake and it's nearly always well below the 1500 mg a day that is considered the maximum for someone with high blood pressure or anyone middle aged.

Today I'm focusing on adding more potassium to my diet, which is supposed to help with blood pressure. Kind of funny with potassium--everything I read says that you can easily get this from your diet and it's best for you if you do, but I'm looking at the list of sources of potassium and it seems to me that to get the RDA of potassium in your diet, you'd pretty much have to spend all day eating. For example, today I had cantaloupe and cottage cheese for breakfast (468 mg), I'll have almonds for a morning snack (1 ounce is 206 mg, but I don't think I eat a full ounce, so say around 100 mg.); I have a salad for lunch that is designed entirely around potassium (spinach, roasted sweet potatoes, and white beans = 1,114 mg); I have an apple and a clementine to eat during the day (about 250 mg), and dinner usually involves some kind of green vegetable (generally 150 mg, unless it's asparagus - yum - that has 288 mg) and milk (366 mg). That gets me to 2,448 for the day. The RDA is 3,500 mg, and while I might get some more in whatever else we have for dinner (even if we had tilapia (unlikely since we had that last night) and baked potatoes that would add 990 mg, still a tiny bit under the RDA) that would mean that I had been eating all day entirely for the potassium and would STILL be low for the day. And if I were eating without thinking just about the potassium, I'd almost certainly be well below the RDA (sweet potatoes and white potatoes and beet greens and clams are just not part of my usual diet, although other things high on the list--low fat yogurt, tomatoes, beans, and spinach--are). If I were to guess, I'd say that my normal diet probably falls short on potassium by at least 1500 mg.

Before you suggest it, bananas make me gag. They are also not high up on the potassium list--at 422 mg per banana, they are just above spinach (419 per half cup, cooked) and I'd much rather eat spinach. Oh, and potassium supplements? Only 99 mg per caplet, and you aren't supposed to take more than one a day. What's the point of taking one at all, I wonder?