Energy

Where does it come from? Where does it go?

It seems like I'm feeling more energy these past few weeks than in roughly forever. Why? What is the secret password that uncorked the bottle?

Does energy come from taking pills? Does it come from eating right? It takes energy to take pills, and even more to eat right. So which comes first? Enough energy comes from no-where as a gift, just enough to allow me to set things on a course that will start to generate energy?

Things I am doing that are helping grow the energy reserves:

• Taking vitamins (B12 and D3)
• Taking anti-inflammatory (celebrex)
• Eating right (low carb, my own cooking)
• Doing back exercises
• Going to the gym
• Meditating
• Brain training
• Sleeping lots
• Doing useful things at work
• Sailing
• Riding the Vespa
• Gardening and garden planning
• Spending more time with family

But I know I can't rise from the couch out of my funk and start doing these things all at once. So what has set off what is now seeming like a virtuous spiral?  Which of these is a cause and which a result?

Could it be the miraculous Curable app has miraculously fixed me after all? Despite my skepticism and only intermittent practice?

I'm enjoying the ride for now.

(And, of course, things don't just go one way. I had my first migraine in months this weekend, even when the pain was low it was like operating on half power. But I woke up this morning without it, and felt great!)

Snacks

I'm still trying to figure out how to stop eating cheap chocolate candy in the office every day during my afternoon slump, predictably between 3-5 pm. I am low on energy, and actually hungry in many instances. A handful of nuts doesn't do it for me, doesn't cut the cravings. So I went to check out snacks.

Whole Foods to the rescue. I went nuts in the chips aisle (see what I did there?). I got chips, and I got dips, and I got crunchy things, and I got savory things, and I got sort-of sweet things.

I'm working my way through these. The plantain chips are really good, though I'm no fan of bananas. They are very very salty, and it appears part of what I am craving at that time is salt. The crispy broad beans are also very salty and filling.

The lentil chips are highly processed food that tastes like lightly salted cardboard. I'm disappointed - I like a lot of Saffron Road products. I'm too cheap to throw them away, and they make adequate shovels for bringing tabbouleh to my mouth, so that's what's up with that.

Cashews are the carbiest of nuts, and it seems I'm also craving some starch in the late afternoon, so that is one nut I am consistently reaching for. Of course I get the roasted with salt.

I've found a series of Moroccan lentil dips sold at Whole Foods, that are fabulous with pita chips. I brought them to a potlock this past weekend. I bet they would be easy to make - sort of like the legendary Mediterranean lentil-and-feta dip my friend Liz often serves to the delight of her guests - but vegan.

These chips with dips are getting me through the afternoons, and I am finding it's good during this busy summer to have a different chip and dip combo for dinner. It's freeing, since it's usually just me, to do a quick, cold snack than to take the time to fix something and sit down and eat.  I suspect when cold weather rolls in, I'll want an actual meal again, but for now it's nice to feel like I'm eating light and not taking too much time.

Salvation Over the Internet

I'm a fan of self-help books from way back, perhaps a subject deserving of its own future post. But with the advent of the internet, now I'm a fan of self-help over the internet, a somewhat more interactive, but still private and self-motivated approach.

I recently did some housekeeping on my phone, and I realized I've got several paid subscription services I'm using, some more intermittently than others. Yes there are blogs and podcasts, but I'm talking about services, where content comes with coaching, often in the form of a moderated forum for subscribers supplemented with email personal coaching. 

I've never done therapy, only one attempt at Weight Watchers (before the internet existed), and I prefer to meditate alone. These internet services suit my introverted home focused personality.  What follows is a partial list of those services I'm using, with notes on how I found them and what I think about them.

I forget how I stumbled onto the Summer Tomato blog, but I'm a big fan of  Darya Rose's Foodist approach to eating. Being a good San Francisco-based internet entrepreneur, she has a few services available, and I've used two of them.  The first was a free, weeklong course in mindful eating, the Mindful Meal Challenge. She runs a new one every Monday. Sign up, and get an email every day with a link to a video with that day's instruction. You get admitted to a private Facebook group, where others in the challenge, and Darya, provide support and answers to questions. Really helped me get started with focus and slowing down my eating. I think it made a permanent difference in how I approach a meal. She also has cooking lessons, Foodist Kitchen. It cost $99 to get 30 days of daily emails and links, and access to another private Facebook group. Because I agree with Darya that one of the keys to eating healthfully is cooking at home from scratch, I signed up for that as well. Of course I know how to cook, but I wanted the discipline and approach of structuring cooking for a month. She is big on building habits, and paying for the course helped focus me on doing the daily work she recommended. I found I could actually make dinner on a week night - but I still don't, mostly.  I think what has stuck with me most from the course is a new (to me) approach to chopping vegetables that is much faster than what I did before-basic knife skills- by decreasing the time it becomes more approachable.

So those are courses, one and done, but with continuing access to the materials and the support groups. I have an ongoing paid subscription to a meditation app, 10% Happier, that definitely makes me happy. I came to this from the book of the same name by Dan Harris. The app has full length courses and guided meditations of various lengths and topics, and is constantly updating the material. I often go to the app for meditating, looking for guidance, rather than just doing a simple timed quiet meditation on my own. Of course, I like that the app records my meditation minutes so I have access to looking at my history. Dan Harris also has a blog, and another book, and I'm a fan of it all. I turned to their guided meditations on living with pain when my back went out, and it was so very very helpful in sorting out the actual physical pain from all the mental anguish I was having.

One of the courses in 10% Happier is on Mindful Eating, taught by Judson Brewer. I did that course, which ends with noting Brewer has his very own, longer, more expensive, app called Eat Right Now. It consists of an app and an online community, which is staffed by Brewer's grad students. The app has a number of tools to access to help manage cravings and hunger, and for 28 days daily unlocks a lesson for the day. I've signed up, and am continuing it. I've been through all the content twice. It is built on the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) approach to meditation, all about noticing what you are doing, and understanding habits. These are common themes with all that I've covered here. It is also using many concepts and approaches Brewer has successfully used in treating drug and alcohol addiction. I found the insights and approaches useful and enjoy the on-line community. I think this program is probably closest to a magic bullet in modifying how I actually think about and approach food. But being mindful requires energy, and my focus has been distracted by other, non-weight, health problems.

I bought the app Migraine Buddy to track my migraines and to try to get a handle on triggers. It is just geared to tracking that, though it also has a community, the community is not so active.

When my back was out, my blog reader turned up a post from Kim's friend Chris, the Younger Next Year guy. He has a new book coming out soon, the Younger Next Year Back Book. His post said he had teamed up with a guy who also had a web service to fix backs. Of course I checked it out.  Back Forever is a 10-week program that has daily, eventually weekly, exercise programs with a write up and really meticulously detailed videos. This gym rat, who has been having personal training for 10 years now, combined with several series of physical therapy, learned a lot in the details of how to do the fundamental core exercises. I didn't go back to my gym for nearly 3 weeks after my back went sproing, but I did do these exercises, and they are what got me up and moving. Like our friend Chris, he's all about this is forever, not just till you are back on your feet. I was totally faithful to the plan for the first three weeks, pushed on to do all ten weeks, over a longer time period, and I've just turned off my subscription but I'm still doing the exercises. I probably will use his recommended technique for standing up from lying on the floor for the rest of my life. I'll also buy the book when it is available, because, hey, I love self-help books!  So I would highly recommend the not-cheap-for-an-app service - more than $20/month - for addressing back issues.

So I have migraines and back troubles and knee problems (not to mention the month of a sinus infection I may have finally gotten over) and Facebook pushes an ad on me about fixing chronic pain. I clicked through, read the blurb about the miracle cure, and signed up for Curable. It says, "Curable is a guided program that helps you understand why you have pain, why it persists, and what you can do about it." Bingo! Pushes all my buttons!  It's all about the mind-body connections, and how understanding and noting what is going on is the key to having less pain. I'm still not totally on board with this - it doesn't say "it's all in your head" but it does say that original physical causes for pain can be amplified and turned into recurrent pathways, so the pain the brain experiences is real, but maybe can be cured or reduced by non-physical means.  There are several pieces to it - basic pain education, with links to publications, meditation exercises from two schools - noting (my MBSR approach) and relaxation - and, finally and most difficult, self analysis by doing guided writing exercises. It's hard. And I'm still a little skeptical. But I'm slowly approaching it, and it's been a while since I've done completely honest private journalling. (And remember, never done therapy.) I still have my subscription, but I access it less than once a day. So definitely not a 30-day miracle cure for me.

I'm sure if I scrolled through my phone I'd find still more apps I thought would fix me. But if there is a theme to the ones I mention here, it's that they all require actual real life work to keep up with them in order to acheive results. Like my bookcase full of self-help books, each one of these has some gem that I'll keep with me going forward.

Just the Facts

My weight has gone up steadily for some period of time. Since I started blogging in 2010, here's the picture:

Clearly, things are not what they were, once I had lost a bunch of weight and more or less stabilized at a certain weight. Part of the insight is I never was truly stabilized - I was managing things with gradual ups followed by sudden, planned, drops in weight by sticking to a specific set of rules for eating.

This pattern is fairly consistent forever. Look at the really long view:

So right now, my challenge is whether I want to strive for the pattern: bring my weight back to where I want it by restricted, planned eating, followed by relaxing the rules, then bringing the rules back before it goes too far.  What I have been experimenting with instead is trying to eat mindfully and healthfully all the time, but without any rigid rules.  Evidence so far indicates this is not a good strategy for keeping my weight in bounds. I'm still not willing to give up the attempt yet.

I continue to try on different strategies for how to act, versus falling into rules about good and bad food. I do still try to make choices about food based on broad general guidelines, summed up by Michael Pollan ("eat food, mostly plants, not too much"), but without demonizing any specific foods or whole categories of food. I try to eat mindfully, slowing down and thinking and feeling how the food feels to me. I try to prepare my food myself. On another note, I'm also upping my activity levels.  I'm a long way from finding a set of actions or attitudes that stabilizes my weight at a place I'd like it to be.

I really struggled in this post to avoid any value-laden language, about eating or my weight. No words about where my weight "should" be, nor about what is eating "right". So hard. I refer to where I "want" my weight, acknowledging it's a number or target I've picked myself. It is derived from how I looked and how I felt when I was there, not from any external table or chart. Food choices I try to make based on how they make me feel, short and long term, informed by extensive reading on how our bodies handle different foodstuffs, but not by some categorizing everything as "healthy" or "bad".  

Ready

For the first time in a few weeks I feel ready for the week. I have leftover and ready to go breakfasts (cabbage frittata) and food for lunches and dinners.

My lunch was SO much food, but modelled after the lovely salads available at salad-specialty restaurants (flourishing locally but sadly none within a block of my office). I bought lettuce, onions and spinach from the salad bar in the cafeteria, added my dressing from the office fridge, and then my leftovers: half a hamburger and grilled vegetables, along with cheese, cheese crisps, and olives from home.  Totally over the top, but very good. I ate about two-thirds at lunch, and put it aside. It became my 4:30 snack, and with a handful of cashews while driving home I wasn't hungry before the gym.

After the gym I contemplated no food, as it was late, but decided to go for it. More leftovers.

I had a sausage and a half cup of mixed beans done yesterday in the Instant Pot. (I would like to eat more beans, seems healthy and carby without being sugar or white flour.) Very satisfying. Nothing in me was craving any bedtime chocolate. I don't expect that to last, but certainly wasn't going to force chocolate on myself!

I seem to have cycles, though my monthly menses are long over. Yesterday was an up day, not driven by extra good sleep or especially good food the day before. But appetite was reasonable, and I felt strong and happy at the gym. I walked a lot, even getting a quick mile in at lunch in the fabulous (not hot yet) weather. Last night was a terrible night for sleep, but with a good day yesterday with food (roughly 35 hours now since my last sugar) we'll see how the energy plays out today. Food today is planned to be identical to yesterday, with the added bonus of being already packaged up yesterday.

Another Race Done

Today was the Takoma Park 5K. This neighborhood run is the second race I ever entered, in 2012, and the one I have done most consistently. My time was much slower than before. I refuse to admit that I am now in an inevitable decline due to age. Instead, I see this as yet another confirmation that on race day, it's too late to substitute determination for training. I frankly under trained.

The other way to look at this is way better than the race I did in February. That was the slowest I've ever been. It was snowing, it was on steep hills, and it was freakin' February and I was not trained at all.

This made me go back and look at previous race results. I had compiled many of my results before, so it wasn't a lot of work to go back and bring the list up to date - especially since I didn't run in ANY races in 2017!

What did take some time was making a nice graph of my pace over time. My best year was 2015, where I took training seriously. Here is the history:

Lower on this chart is better- fewer minutes per mile

BTW, for my few but avid readers - I've put some effort into the garden blog, and am likely to do some posts there, as I work to fill the void from the tree and get some renovations done.

Fabulous Visit to Washington DC

Just a couple of tourists

Yes, I live here. But I took some days off from phenomenally busy work and a friend came in from out of town, and we played tourist together. I was clear to my friend: I'm not showing you the town, we're going to go do things together, and with a heavy emphasis on things I haven't done before. The weather cooperated and it was terrific in nearly every way.

We hiked in a park along Chesapeake Bay (after swinging by my boat) and had tasty crabcakes at a little place that sells both seafood and cooked food to-go, sitting at a picnic table outside along the highway. We went to the gym to work out together with my trainer, marvelling at how we've changed since college days when such a thought would have been absurd.

World class scenery

We weren't the only ones here

The cherry blossoms were still going, so very early one morning we got down there so S. (an avid photographer, as am I sometimes) could take advantage of interesting morning light. It was past peak, but still darn nice. Every bit as breathtaking as they say.

We walked to the brand-new shiny waterfront development, The Wharf. While some places opened in November of last year, some are still under development and many places just opened in the last few weeks. We sat outside and ate seafood salads with cocktails for lunch.

Fireproof Woman

Made partly from muffin tins

We visited the Renwick Gallery, a bite-sized little piece of the Smithsonian across the street from the Whitehouse. They were showing The Art of Burning Man, fun and wierd. We had cocktails at a rooftop bar looking down into the Rose Garden.  We walked the length of H Street, stopping at my brother-in-law's pharmacy, and rode the street car back. We went to Union Market, the hip food-stall place that replaced the old actual farmers' market. (There we had brunch pizzas with quail eggs.)  We visited the Portrait Gallery and saw the Obamas' new official pictures. (Hers really doesn't look like here, though it is still a magnificent rendering.) We had an afternoon brunch at a downtown place where we skewed the demographic significantly upward just by walking in.

Me and the Supremes

We saw the new and amazing African American History, Art and Culture museum. We were there about four hours, which sort of exceeded my ability to focus, but we barely scratched the surface and I'll be back. 

All told, it was a [insert new superlative here] experience.  In five days, I set new step count records for this year three times. We visited three museums. We ate and/or drank out ten times, and seven of the restaurants were new to me. I took a bunch of pictures (mostly of cherry blossoms) and S. took eleventy-bazillion. We had the family over for one meal, cooking mostly from new-to-us recipes.

Sadly, my body was not as strong or resiliant as I was hoping. My knee was the worst part, and a limiting factor on our activities, but I also got a blister on my foot and my back was aching by the end of the day. The day S. left I was having a migraine, which I'm learning can be triggered by activity.

View from inside the African American Museum

I refuse to accept that reducing my activity is inevitable.  NOT YET.  Instead, I'm trying to double up on the activity, walk more, do more things, and keep up with those back exercises, many of which were also prescribed when I did PT for an injured knee. I don't know if it's time to get a second opinion on my knee, if it could get better (and if I could run) with a replacement. I do know, for any elective knee surgury, this is absolutely the wrong time of year for it, so no hurry on this. Just something to keep in mind.

I've been back to long long hours at work, so keeping the step count up is hard, but extended daylight hours is helping. I like this time of year, when optimism is in the air!