Still maintaining my weight loss

It's been some time since my last post; the good news is that I'm still pretty much near my multi-year low; in fact, there has been exasperating vacillation. When I had eye surgery in early May, I weighed 20 pounds over this morning's weigh-in. In part, I'm back to doing the protein bar thing since  my return to work, but that 20 pounds was mostly, if not all, temporary water gain, not a rebound weight gain. I had to do another weigh-in as my doctor seemed to balk at extending my 3 prescriptions without more blood tests. They had replaced the traditional physician scale (you know, where you manual raise or drop notches and then adjust the amount between notches until the scale balances) with an oversize digital type that seems to take 40 seconds to warm up. This one resulted in a weight about 3 lbs more than my weight-in this morning.

I shattered my last home Taylor scale (mostly glass) and being cheap, replaced it with an old-fashioned scale which is hard to read. So I recently bought a Taylor digital scale replacement. The only issue with the Taylor scale is that it is highly sensitive to placement. I normally weigh in in the hallway, but it seemed to indicate I dropped 15 pounds out of sync with the manual scale. So I put it on my kitchen floor (more level) and got an expected weight. It always annoyed me in the past because if I merely bumped into the scale in the hallway, it would throw off the scale validity--did I really lose 5 pounds or is the scale out of balance?

Still, I'm worried I'm not drinking enough during these hot summer months (in which case weight loss is somewhat misleading and may indicate poor health). In part, I've had an issue with my apartment refrigerator, and my landlord has not replaced it. My freezer is somewhat functional, but I haven't had a cold drink for months, nor salads, etc. I'm close to buying a compact refrigerator.

I have since the surgery relied more on shelf-stable (e.g., Hormel Compleats (e.g., turkey or chicken breast, meatloaf, etc.) entrees), canned meat/fish, canned soup/chili, etc. I think I've kept carbs in check, although no doubt I should be worried about sodium, processed meat, etc.

I may soon reinstate my Nutrisystem subscription, if I'm going to resort to eating shelf-stable food. Nutrisystem's food items are generally healthier alternatives.

I did get involved on a food topic, introduced on a tweet from Congressman Massie. Familiar readers to my foundation political blog know I'm a libertarian. Massie was responding to a Democrat senator's reflection on a recent ICE bust of meat packing plants, suggesting legislation which provides liberalization of USDA inspection rules which make it hard for smaller farms and ranches to compete. (I'm in favor of this deregulation.) My first brother-in-law's father owns a ranch where he owns a few head of cattle. I remember visiting them early in their marriage, and my sister served a cut from "Blue Eyes".

So I remember maybe 10-15 years back my brother-in-law was looking at selling grass-fed beef and the family had set up a website, with my sister providing cooking tips for grass-fed meats, when all of a sudden things changed. He repackaged a business reselling premium steaks from presumably conventionally finished cattle. To this day my brother-in-law and sister don't talk about what happened (I think they basically shut down their new business years later, basically breaking even but no profits), but they were implying itt's almost impossible for smaller operations to comply with USDA operations. Of course, Walmart sells grass-fed roasts at just over $6/lb, and ShopRite also sells Australian ground beef for about $4/lb. Butcher Box still wants me to reinstate my monthly subscription, but it made more sense when I didn't have any options in Arizona.