Sweet Tooth

Wow. So the adventures in vegan cookies were a bad idea. All that sugar precipitated a major dental emergency.

I cracked my right lower back molar on a lemon poppyseed Clif bar at the finish festival for Reach the Beach a few years ago. I had some work done on it, but my managed care dental program put me through the run-around for ages. It was finally too far gone for a root canal to make sense, so it had to come out. I was waiting for a good time, but I don't think there's ever really a good time for dental extractions. Waiting for the holiday season made it a lot more complicated.

I started having pain from the tooth on Christmas weekend. I took some NSAIDs and ignored it, I was out of town and then working. Sunday, December 30, the pain meds stopped working. By the time the dentist could see me on Wednesday, I had an abscess and my jaw was all swollen. It made my throat hurt, even to swallow water. They put me on antibiotics and sent me to a specialist the next day to get it pulled.

Putting off dental work is crazy, it only makes a bad situation worse.

Overall, I would not recommend this as a diet technique, but now that I'm recovered I have to say it was a remarkably effective way to take off those extra pounds I put on over the holidays. I dropped 16 pounds in about a week, taking me to a new low of 61 pounds dropped. There was some metabolic backlash, but I seem to have stabilized and kept off about 6 of that.

However, I've really slacked on the exercise front, it's time to get back in the saddle. We moved the bike into its own room, so I can't hear the TV, which makes the indoor bike boring. Tooth pain is intensified by exercise, so I didn't bike for well over a week. I've often noticed that after a break in exercise, it's harder to get motivated to do it. I had a little affair with Krispy Kremes and pizza on Thursday, which pushed me back up to my dreaded "high" weight of "only" 50 pounds under my starting weight. I'm not beating myself up too much (unless I don't get right back to losing now that I've hit that point!) but I know it's time to get back to burning off the fat!