More = less?, A new can of worms, Skinny and Weak

Yesterday at lunch I played pickleball with Kerri, the woman that I previously knew from the gym who started playing with us a few weeks ago.  She is improving rapidly.  Although I won all of our singles matches I had to work hard to do so.  She is incredibly quick and gets to all sorts of balls I would never get close to.  At the end we teamed up to play doubles against some decent players and won that game as well which was cool.  She is a pretty hardcore beach volleyball player and has been nudging me to step back on the court to at least see how things go.  I might.

Her all around athleticism is pretty astounding.  I am hoping that if I trend up doing more total body activities like pickleball and possibly volleyball it will become less and less impactful to my body.  That is the hope at least, with no basis in science whatsoever.

So today I had a follow up appointment at the med clinic.  It’s intent was to see how I have been since the abnormal EKG in March that sent me into the circuit of cardiologist testing which basically revealed nothing significant.  Prior to this appointment they did a standard blood panel to get basic numbers on sugars, cholesterol, and a number of other things.  All those numbers were very good.  I told her the cardiologist said I was good to go.

She then asked about my hernia since I went to see her first about it.  I told her I had a surgery scheduled, got covid and then canceled it.  I told her since it has not changed and is not really bothering me I am going to just let it go until that changes.  She didn’t seem to think that was a problem.  I then asked her if it was possible to have a testosterone level test run.  I told her I have had  some issues that made me wonder what my level was which was last tested 4-5 years ago when I had my 18 months of mystery fatigue.  I also mentioned how I had lost a pretty significant amount of weight in the past year.

Last year at this time I was upper 180’s, last night I stepped on the scale before taking my shower and was 174lbs.  Keep in mind that was a night weight which is normally the heaviest you will be during the day.  She said she didn’t think the weight loss could be attributed to low T but I said my thought process was loss of muscle.  She asked if anything else happened during this time.  I mentioned the end of a long term relationship where I was well fed.  She wasn’t sure if she could get a testosterone test covered under insurance, I said I didn’t care I just wanted to know the number.

So the weight loss concerned her somewhat.  She asked if I had any history of cancer in my family I told her outside of skin cancer not really.  She said to be safe she wanted to run some cancer marker blood tests, awesome.  I mean I guess in the outside chance that there IS something going on it would be good to know early so I agreed to it.  They did the draw on the spot, pulling 5 vials of blood which I managed to get through without showing how uncomfortable it makes me.  In a perfect world all the cancer screenings will be clear, my T level will still be in normal range and I can move ahead with life.

It’s interesting that the last time I weighed this little was also when I was single after splitting from Ali in 2012.  However during that time the low weight was sort of intentional as it made calisthenics, which I was heavily into at the time, easier.  I was in the best overall shape of my life around then. Now my weight is in the same range but the strength is not there.  At the gym today doing bench press, a weight I could push 5-6 times a year ago, went up once, and it wasn’t easy.  Now part of that could be from having blood pulled a few hours earlier but still, there is a clear trend going on. It could be a side effect of the stress I have been under for various reasons the last year.  It could just be as simple as I don’t consume the same amount of calories as when Cindy cooked for me.  I am hoping for simple explanations and solutions.