Kedging

October 2019, in the Chesapeake Bay

“Kedging” is the term used by my friend Kim’s friend Chris (Crowley, author of the “Younger Next Year” series of books) for a way to motivate yourself to get out there and do things. Big things. Scary things. Boats - especially old sailing boats - use kedging as a technique to move themselves out of a dangerous place - shallows where the ship is aground, for example. An anchor is tossed (or, preferably brought in a smaller boat) out in the direction you need to move the ship, and then everyone pulls on the anchor rope to move that way. Repeat as often as necessary. Crowley writes it is “climbing out of the ordinary, setting a desperate goal and working like crazy to get there. To save yourself.”

I figured this out years ago. Back in the 1980s I took a number of Sierra Club backpacking trips out west, and for each of them I trained. Especially after the first time. It was clear to me, the better shape I was in, the more fun I would have. Or, alternatively, the less miserable I’d be. I have continued to use this technique, from signing up to run a 10K to backpacking in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge. My next “kedge” adventure is coming up - in just sixteen days!

I’m going sailing! On the world’s most beautiful ship, the Pride of Baltimore II! Offshore! From Baltimore to Bermuda!

I’ve sailed on her before, but never offshore. So I have some idea of what to expect. But it will be physically challenging - even if I don’t get seasick. The only absolute requirement is to be able to climb up and down the ladder from the deck to the main cabin. But the better shape I’m in, the more I’ll be able to do, and the more fun I’ll have. Or, the less miserable I’ll be. 

I signed up for the trip less than six weeks before departure - the day it became available. So not a huge time to prepare for it. But not nothing, either. Knowing my propensity to go all in on something, often followed by burnout, I instead set myself a couple of reasonable goals. I had already been exercising more than during the winter, walking more, and working out with my trainer via video once a week. I upped the sessions with the trainer to twice a week. As she is heavily pregnant, this made her very happy, thinking of building reserves for the time off she will have when the baby is born.

I looked at how much I had been walking, and I decided to aim for a twenty percent increase in my steps. That is a fairly dramatic increase from the baseline, but my baseline steps this year have been very low. So the absolute number of steps is not that many. Of course, the first day after I signed up, all jazzed and excited, I walked my feet off and doubled my baseline steps. But a couple of days later, it rained on and off all day, and I barely left the house, with only a tiny number of steps. So, twenty percent more steps is actually a very reasonable goal, but one that I have to keep in mind. With long evenings and nice weather, I’ve been out there pretty late, up and down the steep hills that make up my immediate neighborhood. Still, I’ve also had some very low energy days, and it will take work to meet the goal, measured as the average for the month of May.

So two things I’m afraid of: seasickness and migraines. I have never been actually sick from motion, but I have felt nauseous. So, I have my wrist bands, and ginger candy, and over-the-counter medicine, and the super duper anti-nausea stuff I got last year when I had vertigo. The medicines make me sleepy, so I hope I don’t need them. If I get a migraine, I’ll take my medicine for that and just hunker down as much as I need to. 

The cruise is a one-way trip to Bermuda. I’ve got an Air BnB for a couple of nights when we get there, and then a flight home. I like traveling alone, but it takes what I think of as “gumption”. I imagine I have a “gumption reservoir” and doing things like finding a restaurant and dining there alone uses up gumption out of my reservoir. I figure I’ve got about two days worth. There is also a good chance other guest crew members will be lingering in Bermuda, so perhaps we’ll do things together and the total gumption need will be less. But I’ll certainly be ready to come home!

Impulse Buying

I spend lots of time on the internet, and that allows the internet to track me and target ads. It's a little pathetic, like a neglected puppy, I show the slightest interest, and a product / product type is all over me. Sometimes, it's amusing. Sometimes, it actually works on me. I am very suggestible, I have money, I have time, I have endless optimism about whether I'll use something, and I'm always seeking the new and novel. In fact, I subscribe to some emails (including Wirecutter from the NYTimes) so I'm getting "push" into my mailbox. If I didn't want to buy anything, I wouldn't do this.

For budgeting purposes, I have a list of possible big purchases (defined as over $100) and things have to be on the list for a while before I act. I have to do at least some research, and be sure I want it. But there is an amazing array of things one can get for less than a hundred dollars, and I have been known to just push the button and buy. I try not to - I will go so far as to put things into my shopping cart on a site, and then close the browser thinking I'll come back tomorrow with a clearer mind. Sometimes that even works and I don't buy the thing. But more often than I like to admit, I do.

Clothing is an obvious category. For me, its not so much party or dress up clothes, or any kind of bling. Things that catch my eye are specialty clothing for adventures I hope to have some day. So recent purchases include a merino wool tshirt from Woolx ("the only tshirt you will ever need") and, in contrast, a quick-dry cooling long-sleeved tshirt from Arctic Cool ("like wearing an air conditioner"). They are nice. I already own a bizillion tshirts. Now I have a bazillion plus two.

Anything to do with travel catches my eye. Gadgets, of course, luggage, purses. I have disposed of enormous numbers of suitcases and bags and backpacks, and yet I'm constantly browsing, looking for something new. The ideal is small, has a million tiny but capacious pockets, holds everything, weighs nothing, and transports itself. Such a thing, The Luggage, exists in Discworld (by Terry Pratchett). But I keep searching in this world. Each trip planned is likely to generate some wistful looking, if not an actual purchase. Right now, I have storage space set aside for all the bags and backpacks and suitcases I own, but any more purchases will drive another round of purges. I also have bags to put in bags, of course, more than a few. Which leads, when traveling, to endless hours of unzipping things to see what is each one. I just went through all that have, got rid of the most tatty, and washed all that remain. Ready to go someplace!

Lately, I've been tempted by food things. A young blogger, Athena Scalzi, has written of several things she has tried and I've jumped in behind her. I got Honey Pops (a Maryland company, Waxing Kara, makes them) and found them a lovely treat - not one I want all the time, but something to savor. I got a "box" of treats from Japan. It was so fun: the whole family sat around after dinner and sampled the twenty things in the box. Weird and sometimes wonderful, great entertainment.  This strikes me as really expensive for what you get, but this is not food to shovel in mindlessly, but to taste and explore. The whole package - literally packaging and all - makes for a lovely experience.

Back to My Roots

 I decided it was time to go back to where I started on this blog - how am I doing on weight and fitness?

I've not been happy with either, lately, and I decided it was time to get into gear. As is my wont, I like to study the situation before taking action. Or if not before doing anything, at least as a motivating device while I'm doing it. We know it takes some sustained attention and effort to actually move the needle on either fitness or weight. It feels like the older I get, the more it takes.

I really got motivated when I looked at the graph of my steps. My daily steps have been going down. As with all numbers, it's important to look at them in context. After trying a couple of different ways of looking at it, I decided the time period of 2018 to the present makes sense. I retired partway through 2019, and shortly afterwards my mother died. So 2018 was a full year of office work, 2019 was full of disruptions, and last year was, well, it was 2020 and we all know what that means (amirite)! I think it's useful to anchor this look in the working world, and look at how things have changed as I figure out this retirement thing.

This is the picture that grabbed my attention. I seem to have been in decline more or less steadily since a rally last summer. This, of everything I track, is the most controllable thing. I can fix this. I need to fix this!

Total calories burned is a similar outlook to steps. I show both, because if I'm doing a lot of work that doesn't involve steps - like gardening - it shows up in the calories.

This calorie graph also shows that last summer's rally for steps didn't translate into total calories - so I guess I was walking more than I was working. Huh. Need to think about that.

Of course, I care a lot about my weight. It is something of a fitness indicator, just on its own. But I also care about how I look, and weight is bound up into that.

The two red dots show my retirement date and the day my mother died, respectively

Covering the same timeframe as the other graphs, this is not a great picture. But it could be worse. It's not all just going up. I made a little progress last year, and then lost some of it, and I've been holding my own this year. Can I actually reverse it?

For the ultimate in context, and to reassure myself that weight loss is, in fact, possible, despite current common wisdom to the contrary, I show you my weight since the beginning of time (that would be 1988, the first time I went to Weight Watchers).

I find this picture very reassuring. It tells me that my weight loss efforts have not be in vain. I was at my peak weight in the few years around my fortieth birthday, and all the years since then have benefited from being fitter and slimmer. Around age 55 is the second big loss (also the start of this blog). It shows that even now, as I feel fat and feeble, I weigh less than I did when I made the second effort.

This picture also clues me in on how unrealistic my "target weight" (represented by the blue line) has been. I hit that weight briefly twice, showing it was physically possible. But the orange horizontal line is where I settled for a while. I wasn't satisfied with being there - especially at the upper end of the range through which I was oscillating. Somewhere between those two lines would be ideal, I think. I would feel and look the way I want to feel and look.

I've also got my broader range of measures, the Report Card, cooking. I'll post when I'm ready for that.

Costco Pitfalls

 I love Costco! But, since I live alone, sometimes it just doesn't make sense for me to shop there. But I love to go there! And, they have certain things that I can't get elsewhere. 

So yesterday I took a trip there - my first in-person visit this year. I left with a $200 cash register tape. But there were pitfalls.

I'm trying very hard to reduce food waste. And, I'm trying to manage portion control in a way that will allow me to lose weight. Only a very disciplined trip, with a list, would succeed at those dual ambitions. I was maybe moderately successful? Because after all the "Costco treasure hunt" is part of their deliberate marketing strategy, to keep pulling us back in. They don't always have the same stuff, and they make sure they have rotating displays of things you wouldn't expect to find there, but when you do, it's such a good deal you have to buy it even if it wasn't something you ever thought you wanted.

So food was the main point. There are three things I specifically go to Costco for: 

• Big bags of Mayorga coffee beans
• Aidell's Chicken Apple Sausage, a staple in my house since 1995
• Yakisoba frozen noodles and veggies, a three minute tasty vegan dinner

 I did get those things, I did. So the trip was successful. And yes, even though I already had a two month supply, I bought toilet paper. I passed up the 5-pound bag of clementines (I rarely finish a normal 3-pound bag), and the 5-pound bag of fresh brussels sprouts. But then I grabbed a 10-pound bag of Vidalia onions, driven by the "only available for a short time" message. But Vidalias are not good keepers, so I need to eat an awful lot of onions fast. (Good on the grill, can peel, slice, wrap in aluminum foil with olive oil. One serves two people at most.) I passed up the 12-packs of muffins, the 4-dozen cookies, the very good but big-enough-to-use-as-a-step-stool banana bread. In rebound from my magnificent self-control, I then grabbed a big box of apple strudel.

I have a thing for pastries with apples. Our local grocery, Giant, makes fabulous apple turnovers. I buy them, but a box of eight full size turnovers doesn't last 36 hours in my house. Light and airy, they aren't that substantial, but they are never-the-less filled with fat and sugar. So clearly I wasn't thinking clearly when this box of ten large strudel pastries went into the cart. 

Last night I had half of one, in lieu of a starch at dinner, and was satisfied. Heavier pastry than Giant turnovers, but very tasty. Now, I'm going to save the other half of last night's for today, but the other nine are getting sliced in half each, wrapped individually and tossed in the freezer. If they don't do well in the freezer, that's too bad, I'm just not eating them all at once and I won't just toss them in the garbage without trying to ration myself first.

Sadly, all the Costco bags of frozen plain veggies were simply too big to fit into my freezer, especially with all the other stuff I knew I'd have to freeze. I prefer fresh vegetables, of course, especially seasonal, but the only way I can consistently eat fresh is to go to the store more often than I want. Mostly they don't keep long, and if I'm only cooking from scratch two or three times a week, I can't buy more than two or three types of vegetables to be cooked. So I want to experiment with frozen, though of course just before summer might not be the best time to execute that plan. As a fully vaxxed person, I could go to the store more often, but it leads to a lot more impulse buying (see: apple strudel, above) and raises the overall food cost. 

OK, musing on a dull topic, I succeeded in making myself hungry. Time to go to the kitchen and scratch that itch.