Steady as She Goes

It has been a good week. No flu. No migraine. I cooked enough that I carried my meal to work every day. I am mindful as I eat, and conscious of the tastes, slower, and enjoying it as I go. The weight loss I see is real, though less than the initial woosh.

Total Calorie Burn.
Big one-time drop was switch in technology.

My real focus is on upping my activity, though. If I can manage the food the way I did this week - not the main focus of my week, but good and easy due to planning, then I have more time and energy to work on the activity. I spent some time going back and looking at my activity statistics.  I've definitely got scope in improve my activity levels.

Steps from fitbit

I've tracked my calorie burn since I first started wearing a device.  The big drop shows that different devices calculate it differently.  I think the more recent data is probably more "true". The absolute scale is actually not that important - it's the trend. So the calorie count shows that the past few months I've definitely upped my game from last year.

Zooming in on steps in the past couple of years, you can see there is a lot of variability in how much I walk.  In June of 2015 and 2016 I took vacations with a lot of walking. But generally, 2016 had fewer steps than 2015. This last January, I took a work trip that required being on my feet a lot. I've got another walking vacation coming up, so I'm strongly motivated to get these step counts up!

Speaking of that, it's warm and sunny and the dog is restless.  Catch you later.

Cooking

Cooking at home is the key to controlling what I eat (and also to keeping it reasonably priced).  But I have years and years of a habit of not cooking on week nights.  Am I too old a dog to learn this new trick?

Two days a week I go to the gym, which totally shoots the evening.  I should definitely get a pass those nights.  But other nights - I get home between 6 and 7, depending on work and traffic.  I'm generally in bed before 10 (and sorry if I'm not - a post on sleep and how I crave it will be coming). There is still time in that evening window to cook.  And yet, I rarely do.

What do I eat if I don't cook?  Leftovers, mostly.  I try to have a surplus from when I do cook so I have them. Gym nights, I don't want to eat much if at all before going. Afterwards, I either grab leftovers (as I did last night) or else stop at Whole Foods hot food table.  Often, on gym nights, I end up not eating much at all - sometimes, it's just pistachios. On work nights without the gym, its almost always leftovers. There are also a very few frozen dinners I like and often have on hand.  I don't go out, unless its with one of the kids to a place like Chipotle.

Tuesday, I actually cooked.  I have an internal debate about what constitutes truly cooking. Heating up something from the freezer or fridge that was already cooked does not count.  But tonight, I had all the ingredients at home because I'd intended to cook Sunday night, and instead went out to a restaurant with the family.  So tuesday night I made italian sausages, spaghetti squash, and a fresh tomato sauce from raw ingredients, and by almost anyone's definition that was cooking.  I thought about it on the way home, and one thing I did differently tonight from most nights is that I went right to the kitchen.  I did not first flop down on the couch with the ipad to check up on facebook.  Instead, the dog went out back, I changed my clothes, and then grabbed all the ingredients out of the fridge and got right to work.  I had also walked through the steps in my mind while driving, so I didn't in the moment have to decide if (for example) the sausages were going under the broiler or on the stovetop. Decision-making is not my forte after a long work day, and that kind of indecision can drive me to the couch with the ipad while all my energy and good intentions leak away.  I also had a clean kitchen to work in.  Definitely a messy kitchen is often a barrier.

I know that for most women of my age cooking dinner is not that remarkable.  I did go through a stint where I made dinner for the family every night, but it wasn't for twenty plus years like most of us, only about five years.  Now I'm back on my own, and pistachios in lieu of dinner is actually just fine some nights.  No-one to please but myself.  But I'd like to get the inspiration and energy to cook more often than just on weekends.

So I guess the main points of my cooking success are:  clean kitchen, all ingredients already on hand, a clear plan of how it's going to go, and don't flop down on the couch first. Another key point is home before seven.  I'll see if this is repeatable more often.

Stress Reducers

We all have stress.  By any objective standard, I've had a fair amount of personal stress in the last ten years.  Right now, there is a great deal of stress coming from the wider world, accompanied by a strong sense of helplessness.

Cortisol is known as the "stress hormone". Chronic elevated levels of cortisol cause inflammation, affect insulin, and drive hunger. Through these means, stress leads to belly fat.  Stress disrupts your sleep, which also leads to belly fat. Stress makes us fat!

Stress isn't going to go away, not any time soon.  Sometimes, the stress cannot be reduced, only absorbed.  These are my go-to ways to avoid sinking into carbohydrate bliss when bathed in an internal cortisol bath:

1. Take Action

Whatever the source of stress, it is compounded by feelings of helplessness (especially true for me, who wants badly to feel competent and in control).  So figure out, "what is the one thing I can actually do to impact the source of the stress?" Figure it out, and do it.  This is the fundamental approach to resilience - shit happens, and how you respond is your business.  Find an employment lawyer for job stress, call your elected representatives for civic stress, find a nanny or a therapist for stress from your kids, read on the internet to get smart about the reasons the stress exists and so find other things you can do.  I've done all these things.  It may not fix the problem, at least not at once, but I think of it as starting to chip away at it. Control the things you can, which is what you do.  And as you fall asleep, think "at least I did something".

2. Run or Walk

Not just any kind of exercise, but moving through the world helps me a lot.  Running gets the heart rate up higher than anything I do and creates a cascade of good effects through the body.  I listen to music when I'm running, but running is so hard I cannot run and ruminate at the same time. Afterwards, the stress hormones are presumably lower (says the science) and good hormones and good tiredness fill your body.

Walking takes longer, but can also absorb me.  Walking has probably saved my life several times over.  It's sometimes the one thing I can do to take action  (as in #1 above), when my problem is me. I can walk to exhaustion, thinking, just being present, or lost in a good book through headphones.  The main thing is to get outside and get tired.  Not just tired, exhausted.

3. Write

I'm not a "writer", in that I'm not a professional, nor is it how I describe myself, nor is it part of my interior definition of who I am and what I do.  And yet, I find at times, that writing is my way out of a stressful dilemma.  When I'm ruminating, turning things over and over in my mind, writing can help. This is private writing, not blogging like this, though sometimes blog posts have been drafted or thought of in private writing first. I have been a journal-keeper in the past, starting in high school, but I am far from regular now. However, I have shelf of blank books in my bedroom, most of them filled with my scrawlings, some of them yet blank and awaiting my thoughts.  I believe that morning pages - the practice of daily writing at least three pages first thing each day - combined with the walking to save my life back when I lived in Chicago.

These days my writing is generally at a keyboard.  I can type faster than I hand-write.  When I'm using writing as a stress absorber, often the words come tumbling out and have to be captured as quickly as I can think them.  Some times, that isn't the case, and I want the sensation of my hand gliding over the page, using a lovely pen on quality paper.  Not often, these days, though.  In fact, sometimes when I want the handwriting feeling, I use longhand - but on my ipad.  (That is how I move through my work day, handwriting free-form notes with different colors and pen widths, then being able to refer back to them weeks and months later, because they are filed neatly in my pretty Notability app.)

These days, my version of morning pages will be done on 750words.  This minimalist site is inspired by morning pages, but captures your words in a private session. It's slightly social, in that it posts who has written.  Of course one of the things I like is it counts words for your, and even does some elementary sentiment analysis on your words.  You make badges for consistency (number of days in a row) which everyone can see. Every month is a "write daily for the entire month" challenge with its own badges and encouragement. Having un-interrupted streaks is not so very important to me (though I've done the one-month challenge successfully a few times).  But when I use the site, the length is about right for me.  

Writing gets me out of repetitive cycles of ruminating thoughts, able to build on one thing written down, and move forward, instead of simply repeating over and over again.

4.  Meditate

I took a class called "Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction".  MBSR is an 8-week class structure developed at Boston University by Jon Kabat-Zinn specifically to help patients coping with chronic, severe, or fatal illness.  I am neither religious nor spiritual, but this is very practical and doesn't go far into the woo-woo stuff that puts me off.  Later, my friend Kim introduced me to 10% Happier, by Dan Harris, who makes a skeptic's journey through the land of meditation.  Harris has developed a meditation app, which I now use regularly.  

An app for meditation, you say? Huh?  This particular app features brief (2-8 minute) video lectures or discussions on aspects of meditation, followed by guided meditations.  I find it helpful, and of course I love that it logs my minutes of meditation and gives me a record of how much I'm actually doing it.

I got into the meditation game persuaded by science that meditation "works". I believe it has helped me reduce self-imposed stress, by cutting my ruminations, and also helps me better handle the stress I can't reduce but have to live with. For me, that is working. 

5. Escape

Allow a book or movie to transport you out of yourself and your own problems.  Look at someone else's for a change.  However (and this is key) do NOT allow yourself to eat during this transportation. Eating doesn't have to be totally mindful all the time, but there is huge danger combining stress, food, and the silver screen.

6. Run Away

I do this from time to time.  Get in my car and go away. Sometimes for days. I have a couple of places that are my special places of power.  I gain strength by being outdoors and alone.  I don't want to talk to anyone, I disconnect, I go away.

I did this on election day.  I took the day off and took the dog for a long hike / rock scramble.  We were gone for six hours. I went home and dropped off the happy but tired old dog and walked to downtown to eat alone in a restaurant wearing earbuds for isolation, and then walked home - about a 3 mile round trip.  I was still jangly anxious, unable to sit down, and the dog was game for more travels around the neighborhood.  I went to sleep very early, woke up just after midnight, and only then broke my self-imposed isolation to check the phone. (Sadly, of course, the stress has only mounted since then.)

These are the things that keep me going in the face of stress.  I fight the impulse to succumb, to lie under the covers and ruminate, by some combination of the above things.  I imagine I can feel the cortisol coursing through my veins and I use these things to absorb it and move forward.

Restaurants

Restaurants are hard, especially in the early days of a diet, when food choices are most restricted but habits are not well formed.  I always want to opt to being social, but my somewhat unconventional understanding of what is "healthy" makes it hard sometimes.  For our family, it is incredibly hard to pick a  place, since one of us is vegan, and so the only foods we overlap on are salads!

Almost all Thai food is cooked with sugar. A lot of Chinese food is as well.  What doesn't have sugar has corn starch, often. Coatings on meet and vegetables are starch based. So at a Chinese place, I'll opt for simple - beef with broccoli, or else moo shi without a pancake or sweet hoisin sauce.  I simply try to avoid Thai places.

Waffle Houses and IHop - did you know they put pancake batter in their omelettes?

Sauces most places are extremely suspicious.

The family went to Red Lobster Sunday night, which all things considered was the least-bad choice in terms of what I wanted to eat.  I got grilled shrimp, steamed broccoli, and a side salad.  The problem was it just wasn't terribly tasty.  So the reason I was there was not primarily the food, but the company.  It's just important to shape your mind around that.

Because I'm tracking every bite right now, another problem with restaurants is simply understanding what the food is and how to count it. My crowd-sourced app has a lot of the chain restaurant menus already included, but you have to study the entry to decide if it's correct.

Much easier to eat at home.

Back to the Gym

My illness last week was a period of enormous inactivity.  I'm not sure I've had that prolonged a fever for a few years.  It really took a lot out of me. My energy levels, never very high, are still even lower than normal.  But I know at my age, it's very much "use it or lose it".  So Sunday morning I dragged myself back into the gym.

I actually had had hopes of a more active Saturday. I felt pretty good in the morning, and it was supposed to be really warm.  I took the dog to the park (just over a mile) first thing, in what turned out to be the last few moments of sun.  It clouded up, and stayed that way the rest of the day.  It turned into a pooky day for me, no energy, no big projects, just hanging out and dissipating myself on trivial things.  I would hate to see the count of how many times I checked facebook. No naps, but not a lot of accomplishments to point to.

So Sunday, not as warm, and with the cloudiness ripened into rain, I took myself off to the gym for a short session.  Weights and TRX, arms and legs and back.  I was very quickly out of breath, and yet it felt so good to move.  Lots of stretching was worked into the mix.  Range of motion is also something that would be quickly lost if not specifically used often.

Oddly, my knees, a perennial source of pain, were not sore at all.  I think that may be a function of their finally having a chance to really rest up and recover.  My arthritic knees are always slightly irritated from use.  Ice and NSAIDs keep it manageable, but they probably never recover completely, since I use them all the time.  Except when I have a whole week of being sick.  How about that for finding a silver lining!

Recovery will take a while.  I'm just really glad I like going to the gym, so I'm willing to put in the work to get back to strong.

Weight Checkin

In spite of the flu, I was successful at sticking to Atkins induction eating, and so had the typical Atkins dramatic drop in weight.  On this graph, a keen-eyed viewer would notice the individual weight points just before the drop, higher than anything else in over two years. This is what caused the alarm bells to go off.

This impressive one-week plunge in weight is typical when narrowing the diet from including sweets and starches to only vegetables and protein on Atkins. It's water. But, of course, the high reading on the scale also included water, so both the gain and the loss have the same components.

My pants feel slightly better, but I haven't worked out in over a week and I had all-time lows on fitbit steps while I dozed through my fever. The way my clothes fit should be further improved just by getting moving again.

Clearly what actually counts as weight loss success is seeing a trend that lasts longer than a week. But let's admit seeing the plunge is motivating!

Where I felt my best, in terms of how strong I was, how I looked, and what I was eating, was the first half of last year.  I wasn't blogging then.  I wasn't tracking my food. My weight had gone up from achieving my goal - but I always figured that goal wasn't sustainable, so I wasn't sad about that. It seemed I had some stability, at a new and better set point.  But, eventually, whatever precarious balance I had went kerflooey.  So now I need to figure out how to get back to that range, and how to keep it there in a sustainable way.

Dog Walking

Walking is nearly a religion for me.  It has saved my life, I'm sure.  One of the best things to motivate me to get out there and walk is my dog.

I've had a dog most of my life and find it hard to conceive of ever living dogless.  Bad days or good, the dogs always want to go see (and more importantly, smell) the world.  It makes me happy to make my dog happy.  What an incredible beneficial evolutionary adaptation for both species!  Our happiness and well-being are mutually reinforcing - and for very low investment, because all we need is each other.

My dog heads out the front door and turns right on the street, the direction of the park.  This is the dog's perennial optimism, even though we never go that way at night.  The park is way more interesting to him than the neighborhood (though clearly there is no such thing as a boring walk).  He turns right, and if I follow, his ears swing up and his tail reaches a higher angle.  He sets off on a ground-covering trot, ears bouncing with every stride and the tail swinging gently back and forth in time to his stride.  I look at those ears and tail, and it makes me smile, because I've made him happy.

I want to move more, and having a happy-to-go-anywhere dog is very helpful!