Erev Rosh Hashanah. L'Shana Tovah to all.

Tonight begins the important Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah, the New Year.  Tomorrow and Friday, Mark and I will head out to our Orlando synagogue, SOJC, over near WDW, for two days of very long services.  They typically begin at 9 a.m. and go to about 1:30 p.m.  During the services, we will all thank God for his many blessings to us and the world and fervently pray for peace and prosperity for both us and the world. We tell ourselves and God that He is our King and we re-establish that relationship with Him.  This is essentially what we pray at every Shabbat service, but during the holidays there are more of these kind of prayers and the added element of asking for these blessings to last for us especially through another year. We pledge to forgive ourselves our sins and forgive others, although there are more of those prayers on Yom Kippur next week. We blow the Shofar to signify a new beginning, a wake up call in a way.

I wish everyone I know, both family and friends, Jews and non-Jews alike, that we all have a beautiful, happy, and prosperous New Year, that we all think about our lives and our relationship with God in order to make our little part of the world a better place. To all, I say L'Shana Tovah, a Happy New Year, to everyone.  May it be a sweet New Year for all!  I especially pray this for all of those in the USA and the Caribbean islands who have been affected by the many hurricanes this season and the people of Mexico who have been devastated by two recent earthquakes.

My little choir will sing five times on each day, so we had our final rehearsal tonight.  Our Cantor took a photo of them last night to put up on Facebook.  This morning I downloaded the photo to my laptop because I thought I could put it up here.  Hm...couldn't figure that out, so I just took a photo on my phone of the photo from my laptop and put it into Picasa the usual way just so I could put it up in this blog.

It's also Weigh-in Wednesday, and I am 273.9 this morning, which is a gain of 2 1/2 pounds for the week.  That is so sad.  My average calories for the week were about 1650 per day.  It's not a number that should bring on a a good weight loss, but it doesn't seem like enough to cause such a big weigh gain either.  I would like to think that I could maintain my weight with that number.

It was a tough week because we ate out four times and had a big party at Cindy's house last Wednesday night when I definitely over did it.  Yesterday I was up a bit more than today, so I lost a little water weight yesterday because my calories were only 1295, the lowest of any day in the week.

Also my grand experiment yesterday of keeping the carbs super low in order to get a normal fasting blood sugar reading did not work at all.  I had only 84 carbs for the day yesterday.  That's the first time I've been under 100, or maybe even under 120.  My sugar this morning was 111, not what I was hoping for.  Mark has suggested that it might be because I did not eat a bedtime snack or any carbs after dinner.  He has found that if he does not have some carbs, maybe 20-25 or so, around 11 pm., his sugars are high in the morning due to Dawning Syndrome, or his liver releasing sugar after a long fast.  Tonight I will eat my Arctic Zero, 28 carbs and 147 calories, at 10 p.m.  I'll report tomorrow morning how that may have affected my morning reading.

It may not even be healthy to go lower than 84 carbs in a day, even though I know it can be done, and many people following at Atkins diet for weight loss regularly do it. I recently read that the brain requires 130 carbs a day just to function efficiently.  I won't be trying to go super low carb for awhile because the High Holidays will be bringing additional carbs at dinner.

Mark has done a great job of picking low carb, soft main dishes for us.  I got that temporary crown yesterday, which is less secure than the old permanent filling, so I have to be careful not to break it for the next five weeks.  But each meal of Rosh Hashanah will involve some challah, apples, and honey.  Even if I eat only a little bit of those things, it's still carbs.  We are definitely NOT having our traditional Rosh Hashanah dinners tonight and tomorrow night.  I don't know if Mark is sad about that or not, although I think I am a little bit.  Everybody has special holiday foods that they enjoy and look forward to eating.  This year, none of those are happening.

Our typical Rosh Hashanah dinner would be the following:
Wine
Apple slices dipped in honey
Raisin Challah, preferably in a round loaf
Chopped Liver
Matzo Ball soup
Gefilte Fish
Main Entree consisting of chicken, potato kugel, and a vegetable
Honey Cake for dessert

Well, THAT'S not happening this year.  I am not calculating the calories in carbs in all of that, but I am sure the carbs are in the hundreds and the calories in the thousands, just for DINNER!

Instead tonight's menu is more like any other dinner we would have in a week:
Wine for Mark only (I'm still off alcohol for the vocal nodes)
Apples and honey, a carefully measured, small amount of only 1 T of honey and 1/8 of a small apple
A small amount of regular challah, just one ounce that I'll carefully weigh out
Shakshuka (eggs poached in spaghetti sauce, very soft to eat)
Cooked spinach

What a difference!  Tonight's meal will not feel at all like Rosh Hashanah except for the apples and honey.  The good news is that this dinner will have only 55.6 carbs and 526 calories.  Quite a difference!

If I don't eat anything I have not programmed today, my calories will be 1221 and the carbs will be 110.  Eating the Arctic Zero tonight will be a good experiment for Mark's theory of morning sugar levels.

My only concern now is that no matter what I do, these sugars will not change because I do NOT have diabetes. There are several other things that can cause excessive thirst and elevated sugar levels.  I have an appointment with my new family physician next Wednesday, and I hope she will agree to run some tests to rule those other things out before settling on a diagnosis of pre-diabetes.

My numbers are not high enough for diabetes, but neither are they normal.  These numbers will not cause any long term damage to any organs in my body, and at 67 years old, I will probably die before those numbers could EVER have an impact on them.  What pre-diabetes really means is that if I do not change my eating habits significantly, then actual diabetes is the logical conclusion.  Even if I ran numbers of 140-200 every day, all day, at my age any damage to the internal organs like kidneys or eyes might not take effect before I am gone.

The whole thing always comes back to weight.  As a person who has been overweight and/or obese her whole life, I would totally expect to be a Type II diabetic at this age, and only serious weight loss will reverse those numbers.  That is what I think is really the issue, so I just have to do three basic things: exercise more, keep the carbs low, keep the fats low.  Holidays, restaurants, dinner parties, vacations, and especially cruises all conspire against me!  THAT is my real challenge, controlling those situations as well as I control my eating at home.

Meanwhile, once more, L'Shana Tovah, may you all have a blessed, peaceful, happy, and sweet New Year!