Champion napper and award-winning sloth, at your service

This past week I’ve had some setbacks, and since I haven’t blogged yet this week, that must mean it’s time to write down my setbacks and try to think my way through them…

Remember how I was so chipper in recent posts? Well, pregnancy fatigue has hit me like a brick wall, and I am struggling to stay awake until 9pm most nights. I don’t mind going to sleep early (bring it on!), but it means my after-work workout mojo is M.I.A. Plus, in a blow to convenience and my serious tv addiction, the awesome bicycle trainer I borrowed to help me exercise indoors has been recalled to its original owner. I had one good week where I did 20 minutes every night after work, watching tv shows as I pedaled, with the wireless headphones on so I could hear those American Idol auditions over the bike’s noise, really enjoying myself. Sure, it made our small living room even more crowded, and the vibrations were such that I would get uncomfortably numb in, ahem, certain delicate areas, but it was exercise! With! Television! Fare thee well, idyll!

Even the mild Pacific Northwest climate is conspiring against me, with many mornings of freezing fog and freezing temperatures. I thought with a mild winter we’d be mostly into Spring weather by now. Apparently that was a little too optimistic. With the cold as hell mornings and my recent sleep addiction, it just doesn’t seem feasible to get up before work to walk as I was doing in the fall. That will have to wait until Spring, um, springs.

One option is to invest in my own bicycle trainer, but with even the cheap ones going for $80 on Amazon (and not much cheaper on eBay) they are just expensive enough to make me pause. Is that money better spent on credit card bills? Should I get over my cheap instincts and just make the investment? Ignore the vibrations (or is it the bicycle seat?) that limited me to 20 minutes and count some exercise as better than none?

The problem is that I know the correct answer to these questions, and I’m grumpy because it doesn’t really accommodate my rigorous schedule of couch lounging.

But hey, if I’m unhappy with making the right decision, I’m pretty sure my doctor will have some real tough love for me at my first prenatal appointment. Can you picture her reply when I report that rather than take prevantative steps (literally! ha ha) against gestational diabetes and high blood pressure, I’ve chosen to indulge my need to watch culturally engaging entertainment like Daddy’s Girls and Jon & Kate Plus Eight from the vibration-free sanctuary of my couch.  And that it’s easier to imagine making an extra credit card payment (which, let’s face it, probably wouldn’t happen) rather than spend it on a device that can reduce my risk for scary complications.

Okay, I think this blog post has done its duty. I now feel pretty guilty (but mostly silly) for avoiding an $80 solution to a lifelong problem. A bicycle trainer won’t bring about world peace, but it will make me a fitter, happier, healthier mama, that’s for sure.

I like when I can turn around decisions from being about shame (stop impersonating a human sloth!) to being about practicality and self-care. Now I just have to follow through on this one: I will check in on how it goes.

Big news and big changes

Well, it’s finally happened. I’m pregnant! It’s very exciting even though I’m trying to be only cautiously optimistic. It is still early (week 5 or 6) and who knows what will happen — I’m going to stay cautious until I get into the second trimester. Normally I wouldn’t announce it here, except of course there are some big changes in my life that I want to record.

First, I have started eating according to the pregnancy Daily Dozen recommended in the occasionally annoying and paranoid but super helpful What To Expect When You’re Expecting book. Since I am already overweight, I am ignoring the first of these dozen, which is to eat 300-350 extra calories per day. This simply doesn’t apply as strictly if you’re overweight, and my highest goal is to lose some weight as I progress, as I eat healthier and exercise and my body sheds what it doesn’t need. But don’t worry, I am still eating a lot! And I am eating super healthy foods. And (get this), so far I’m losing weight. Crazy, right? I’m sure it won’t be this easy the whole time, but at least I’m getting a healthy jump on things.

My sister gave me the What To Expect Pregnancy Journal & Organizer to go with my book, and though at first I thought it would be overkill, it’s turning out to be really helpful. There is a food tracker where you tick off which foods you’ve eaten. The Daily Dozen is not necessarily intuitive, as many foods count in multiple categories, so I actually sat down and made myself a little spreadsheet showing all the foods and serving sizes. It’s now on my fridge, for easy reference while I’m cooking or packing lunches, and I keep the journal on the counter so I can tick things off as I go. (I’m happy to send the spreadsheet to anyone if you want it, I just can’t figure out a way to upload it and make it legible.) The categories I’m supposed to eat daily are: protein (3), calcium foods (4), vitamin C foods (3), green leafy/yellows (3-4), other fruits & veggies (1-2), whole grains & legumes (6+), iron rich foods (some daily), fat (4), salt, fluids (8+), and of course the prenatal vitamin.

Since I’m still not eating sugar (and not missing it, dudes!), this is what a typical day’s food looks like for me:

Breakfast:

2-3 eggbeaters in an omelette with spinach, tomatoes and cheese, with one piece of rye toast with margarine. Some apple left over from making my lunch, and a mug of milk.

Lunch:

This is my wonderful Laptop Lunchbox filled with quinoa, carrots, yogurt dip, tomatoes, almonds and some cheese.

Snacks: Typically some fruit, lately clementines or apples, or a cheese stick.

Dinner: Some kind of light protein with whole grains and green leafy vegetables. As I recently announced to my husband, “We’re going to need to get used to have Kale and Spinach in the house at all times.”

*

The journal is also configured to track exercise, but it’s in a separate section from the food, which I find counterintuitive. The exercise section does have a nice table so you can say what you did and how you felt afterward, but I don’t think I’m interested in that. So I’ve been penciling in an Exercise line beneath each week’s tracking table so I can write in the minutes. It works for me! But tracking exercise is only fun because I have finally solved my hate-to-go-out-in-the-cold exercise aversion! My wonderful brother has loaned me this contraption that turns my bike into a stationary bicycle! This thing is pretty cool. It pushes resistance on the back wheel to give you something to push against, and it’s a compact enough set-up that we are leaving it in the living room. Yesterday I hopped on for the first time and biked for 20 minutes. I forgot that it takes me a while to get used to how the bicycle seat feels, so I’ll have to build stamina for longer workouts. My goal is to get 30 minutes each day, and as it gets warmer outside this spring I can also take walks in the evenings.

So that’s where I’m at. Oh! One more picture for you. I recently checked out my Physics Diet stats to get a historical feel for where I am as I start pregnancy, and here it is:

Weight since May 2008

While I’m not at a historic low, I sure am close! I took a long hiatus from tracking on PhysicsDiet, but I’m committed to checking in about once a week to keep track of how my pregnancy progresses. Mostly I’m just happy to see here that in less than a year I’ve managed to lose around 10 pounds, even if many of them have been gained-then-lost-again along the way.

In this episode of the Body Tinkerer…

207.4lbs

Look at that! I’m nearly down to my lowest weight, last reached about two months ago! I continued taking walks about every other day last week, which feels pretty good. Food choices are also going well.

However, it seems like I can’t shake this lower back pain for the life of me. (And believe me, I’ve tried to literally shake and shimmy and twist it away, and that just seems to make it worse.) It sidelined me from a walk last week, and again this morning, since it was so bad last night it hurt every time sat down in a chair or tried to get back up again.

Among other remedies, so far I’ve done the following: periodic stretching throughout the day, no more heels, no more period in case that was making it worse, more chiropractic adjustments (my neck sure does feel good now!), taking a week off Yoga, ibuprofen, heat packs, and ice packs. It won’t go away. It sticks around like a bad cold.

I’m beginning to think that I am unconsciously doing some horrible back-throwing-out thing without even knowing it. So I’ve started trying to catch myself in the act of doing bad posture things doing the day and correcting them when I can. Arching my back while I sit typing away at work? I try to hold my stomach muscles tighter to take up the slack. Locking my knees while I stand, hyper-extending my lower back? Keep knees soft and tilt the pelvis ever so slightly forward like a good Yoga student. Lean forward toward the computer screen? Square my shoulders and sit up straight as a church pew. But it’s so hard to keep it all up! I am going nuts with how this back pain is making life difficult.

It really feels like my body is a collection of bad mechanics. I know that weight loss will help a lot with this, because it will simply remove a lot of the strain from various joints and structures. But trying to get there gradually is hard when the squeaky wheel is my lower back, which so happens to also be the universal joint on which almost all body mechanics seem to depend. I don’t know if all my occasional tinkering (stomach in, pelvis tucked, shoulders back!) is working. If only my job could suddenly morph from deskbound writer to bedbound laze-about, I’d be set!

I suppose for now I’m going to keep my head up (stomach in, pelvis tucked, shoulders back!), my choices healthy, and my walks mindful. I’ll be a good little semi-vegetarian aspiring Yogi, with a touch of the reluctant mechanic thrown in for good measure, and hope for the best. I’d love some advice, if anyone has dealt with anything similar!

Waking up early (shhh, secretly I like it!)

Do you ever notice how calming it can be to carry out your plans? Well, calm is how I felt last week (as I wrote) when I first decided to go to bed super early, set the alarm for 5:30am, and then wake up and go for a walk. I’m working on reminding myself about all the good things about taking early morning walks, because I am so apt to get carried away with fussy lazy selfish anxious reasons to skip it. But I did feel calmed last week, like I was soothing my inner fussy self. That was a nice feeling.
But the most important part is that I didn’t let myself get stopped by last Tuesday’s success! I got up and did it again the next day. Two walks in a row, on two ridiculously rainy and dark and miserable mornings, made bright and beautiful because I got to bop along listening to music and start my day refreshed and alive. Very nice.

My walks were interrupted on Thursday and Friday by some pretty awful lower back pain, though. Ouch. One chiropractic adjustment and one rest day later, I got up on a marvelously sunny Saturday morning and went walking again! Bad mood 0, Jesse 2.

It is lovely to be freed from the Magic Sloth Hour (9-10 pm) of lame tv and aimless web surfing. In the pre-dawn hours, the house is quiet and the neighborhood is sleepy, and I get to spend some time with my own thoughts and feelings. What it really feels like is a healthy dose of mindfulness. Mindfulness helps me stop eating when I am full, choose nourishing food over empty food, and feel my emotions instead of lashing out or using a pint of ice cream to “cope.” I like to think that my morning walk can serve as a waking-up meditation, getting to know the day and my mood and my body all at once. Even if I’m listening to melodramatic dancey Bollywood music (playlist du jour) and squinting at the rain, the physical work is good for my body and my mind, where all I have to focus on is putting one foot in front of the other.

I think I’m slowly coming to a realization about how change works for me. I can get excited about living healthy and make lists of good food, buy accessories and make plans, go to websites and track statistics, weigh every morning and generate a lot of noise about what I’m doing – create a trail of goals, numbers, ideas, and tools. This is great in the short term! I get excited about a shiny new thing, and hopefully, as a byproduct of shiny-newness, I make a few healthy choices along the way. This is great but it doesn’t always help me be more mindful about what I want. If I want change to work once the excitement dies down, I have to be willing to feed the contemplative side of me through mindfulness: not just planning and shopping and cooking the good food but eating it slowly, in a quiet kitchen with someone I love. Maybe this was the missing ingredient for me earlier this year when I started trying to make healthy choices and lose weight. Over the long term, the mindfulness has to be there to steady all the noise and actions that happen on the surface. So mindfulness is what I’m working on this week, though it has to be a mindfulness that connects to physical movement – like Yoga class and morning walks. Maybe I’ll come back next week and write something totally different, but this week my healthy choices are working because they’re connected to mindful acts of self love and self care.

If you’re reading out there, how does mindfulness fit into your life? What helps you to be mindful during the day?

Feelings are hard, numbers are easy

To weigh, or not to weigh? This is my dilemma, friends. Okay, maybe dilemma is too strong. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, though. My dear friend L, who has lost something like 75lbs over five or six years with Weight Watchers, recommended to me that I think about moving to weekly weigh-ins. But, but, but, I thought, I love weighing every day! I know every diet/fitness blogger on earth has gone through this decision, but for the record, here are my personal pros and cons:

Pros:

• Daily reaffirmation of accountability
• Physics Diet turns the fluctuation noise into trends I can follow
• My awesome Tanita scale!
• Numbers are easy, feelings are hard

Cons:

• Relying on the scale for affirmation
• Substituting numbers for feelings

Is the scale a safety blanket for me? Am I afraid to rely on my own intuition because I’m scared I’ll repeat the past, where somehow I “couldn’t tell” that I was gaining weight until my clothes mysteriously stopped fitting? (Um, was that even a successful lie in my own mind?)

Intuition can be great — I feel like I’m relying on it now, since I’m not tracking my food and only exercising 3 times per week at most, and yet I’ve been dropping about 1-2lbs per week for the last month! But intuition is fickle, it can steer me toward the cheesecake and fresh donut stall at the farmer’s market when I was fully intending to buy tomatoes and lettuce.

Meanwhile, whither exercise?

Okay, notice that I tried to sneak by with that reference to my three days of exercise per week. Accountability time! To be honest, although I’m definitely getting my weekly Yoga and Hula dance classes in, exercise during the rest of the week is totally haphazard. I’ll go for a walk if it’s shoved in my face, but the rest of the time it’s like I’m ignoring a good friend! I’ve got missed calls from my beautiful red bike and my walking shoes, and I’m afraid to call them back. This is not good.

Here’s the thing: I seem to be dropping what I think of as “fake” weight right now. It’s real weight loss, and I’ve eaten a million salads to prove it, but these are pounds that were only sustained by a year (okay, years) of eating very poorly. Too much ice cream, too many pasta dinners to please my husband, too many decadent brunches even when I wasn’t hungry for them, too many hamburgers at restaurants and grilled cheese sandwiches at home. Too much of everything! My body has been full like a bathtub with the overfill drain stopped up, and now I’m dropping to a more reasonable level.

So while I’m perfectly happy to be losing weight (10 lbs since June 15), am I really in the right place to be relying on diet and not cultivating life-affirming, happy-making exercise habits? I’m still listed as obese in my medical chart (though Physics Diet dropped my risk from Very High to High today). I’m not sure what is holding me back on the exercise front. Hotter weather and the threat of a sunburn? Should I just stick with what’s working until it stops?

I have a sneaky feeling that I should be paying attention to my emotions here. Hmmm. Do I really feel satisfied solely by a slowly decreasing number on the scale? Maybe for now, but I need to evaluate whether I’m feeling emotionally balanced with my exercise. How am I respecting myself? I have to love my ability to slather on sunscreen (yes, even at 6pm) and find my iPod for a walk after work. If I just love my ability to do Yoga and Hula, what happens when those classes end? I need to have other habits that can fill in, otherwise this lovely stroll downhill to weight loss will get much more difficult.

Here is my commitment: one day this week, I will go for an evening walk. I’ll remind myself why I like walking so much. I’ll think about how I can fit more walking into my week, even when it is sunny and there is a lazy garden chair and a laptop waiting for me, and a million entertaining shows on the DVR. Each of these things can wait, because this week I’m just going to go for a walk. All I have to do is let my intention help steer my thoughts and make it actually happen.

So, this must be that “happiness” everyone is talking about…

I just have to record how awesome this week has been so far! There have been quite a few emotional ups and downs, but the most beautiful part is that I have exercised every single day. I know for some people that’s sooooo not groundbreaking, but I am so proud of myself for taking action. Until this week, the idea of being active every day was kind of an abstraction — I was hitting three times a week if I was lucky (and let’s not forget that two of those three days are gimmes because I have a scheduled activity at lunchtime).

For two or three months in a row, I was doing 15 minutes of weights/abs work in the morning, but I didn’t count that as true exercise, because my heart rate wasn’t elevated for very long at all. Also, that was using the 8 Minutes in the Morning routine, which I’d grown tired of. This week, things have managed to fall into place nicely. I know it’s only Thursday, but here’s what I’ve done so far:

• Monday: 10 mins abs/cardio circuit in the morning, 25 mins intense salsa dancing in the evening
• Tuesday: Bike ride in the evening
• Wednesday: 10 mins abs and weights in the morning, hour Yoga at lunch
• Thursday: 10 mins abs/cardio circuit in the morning, 45 mins Hula at lunch

I’m proud of me for being consistent, even if Tuesday I was sleepy as hell and would have rather crawled onto the couch in front of the tv. No! I got on that bike! I went out and smiled at some trees!

These smaller increments of activity are good for me (especially because short and frequent is better than nothing at all), and lately I’ve been finding that smaller meals are working for me as well. I had a bad, old pattern on Yoga Wednesdays that wasn’t working for me: I would eat a regular breakfast around 8am (eggs + toast, almond butter toast, or yogurt + granola), panic about blood sugar and eat a 250cal Clif Bar right before 11:30 Yoga, and then eat a regular lunch around 1pm and dinner around 7pm. Essentially, I was adding extra calories for energy in the middle of my day without making space elsewhere in my diet. As much as I know that snacks are good for me, maybe my weight gain over the last couple weeks hasn’t been entirely due to travel and kitchen-laziness as much as it was those two boxes of Clif bars that have mysteriously disappeared! Hmmm. (By the way, I don’t have a low blood sugar problem, but I hate not planning for a late lunch and then getting the low blood sugar shakes!)

So the new habit that I tried this week (born partially from breakfast laziness and partially from lazily thinking it might be a Good Idea) goes like this: 170 cal snack bar when I leave the house at 8am, yogurt + granola around 11am, salad at 1pm, raisin nut mix or crackers to snack on in the afternoon, regular dinner. Voila! Awesomeness! Plus cheapness, since a robust salad is a whopping $4 in the cafe.

I know that as much as I love routine, I am easily bored, so if I want to keep this up I will have to find new and exciting snacks! Eye-catching fruit! Let us not forget sushi! This week has largely been successful because I shopped for yogurts in a fancy market, adding excitement to a boring snack; plus, my husband just happened to leave a box of 170 cal snack bars out on the counter. My initial no-time-for-breakfast instinct to grab one was a nice kickstart to this whole thing.

But I just can’t believe how good it feels to finally have a good balance of daily exercise and good food. Is it crazy that I feel I’ve been working at this for months now, and this is the first time it’s really happened? It has been far too easy to pretend that luxurious breakfasts and not-quite-clean lunches and all-out-decadent dinners would not add up to that uncomfortable, overstuffed, did-these-jeans-shrink-in-the-wash? feeling. Maybe it hasn’t been like that every day, but I have had so many excuses, so many good reasons why I needed to watch tv instead of go on a walk. And I’d like to point out that this week of steady healthy choices has been possible despite all the emotional challenges going on elsewhere in my life. In small moments, this week has been momentously challenging, but when I look back all I feel is happy and balanced. That is a really good feeling and I hope I have the good sense to come back and read this when I am in a funk sometime.

(PS — Sadly, now it is going to take an impressive effort of planning to keep eating healthily and get exercise this weekend, because we are babysitting my 15-month old nephew from Friday morning through Sunday evening! While running after a toddler is its own exercise regime, I think I will at least ask my husband to take over for an hour here and there so I can go out for a nice walk on the country roads. And I will commit now to not allowing toddler food dictate my meal choices! Wish me luck.)

My active weekend

We had an unusually gorgeous weekend here in Portland, Oregon — blue skies and sunshine for two glorious days in a row! For some time now I’ve been asking my husband to go on a bike ride with me, and we finally went on Saturday. We went riding on the portion of the Springwater Corridor that goes from the Sellwood Bridge to just beyond the Ross Island Bridge along the Willamette River.

We drove to the Sellwood Bridge (bottom of the map) and then went north on the path for 3.8 miles and turned around and went back, so nearly 8 miles total. It was so exciting! Riding my bike out in the real world, just like a real person! (My neighborhood bike rides include traffic and occasional pedestrians, but they don’t feel like The Real World.) The path is mostly level and goes through a beautiful wildlife preserve. It was good practice for me to be around other bikers and walkers and dogs and such, to learn how to maneuver and pass and look behind me without falling off my bike.

I did feel a bit guilty about driving there, because it is only 3.2 miles from our house, according to Google Maps (that’s $1 in gas roundtrip, at $4.19/gal and 26 mpg). But the first part of that route goes down a scary steep hill, and then through some trafficky bits of Milwaukie and Sellwood. I don’t know if I’m ready to handle that hill (not to mention return back up it) or the cars! It can’t be that bad, though, because my husband rode his bike to work today for the first time, along the same path we would have taken if we hadn’t driven on Saturday. And he did it on a fixed gear bike! Surely I can handle it on my 21-speed cruiser. I have to keep reminding myself if I use my brakes properly, hills will be just fine. It’s only if I panic that hills become a problem — sometimes I envision grabbing the front brake by accident and flipping over the handlebars (my brother earned some face gravel doing this when he was young), or slowing down so much that I wobble and fall over. I know, I know, I need to confront this fear! It’s really irrational. (Though I want to say, have you seeeeeen that hill? Ohmigawd it is so steep the sheer g-forces of descent will shatter my bike into tiny bits!)

Aside from the awesome bike ride on Saturday, I spent a lot of time this weekend in the garden. I needed to transfer all my tomato seedlings into one-gallon pots (Hey Amy! Great minds think alike!), which was nice mild exercise for a Sunday. Now my plants are all happily assembled in their sun room on new shelves, and my garden is looking beautiful. Here are my shelves of newly transplanted tomatoes:

As a very, very nice coda to my weekend, this morning after my ten-minute cardio + abs circuit, I weighed in with a three pound loss. Some of this is dehydration, from a brief bout of stomach trouble last night, but some of it is hopefully a real loss and normalization, getting me closer to my weight from before the Chicago Work Travel Food Freakout. So I was very happy this morning! I have really felt the difference of carrying around those three tiny extra pounds during the last week — if i want to be fit, I need to do a lot more exercise (I’m averaging 3-4 times per week right now), and right now my heart and muscles are just not up to the task. Aside from everything good I’ve got going on, I haven’t maintained consistent exercise, which makes it harder to work on self-acceptance. I don’t want to accept myself as a lazy person! I want to love myself so fiercely that I will go on a walk even if I’m too scared to show myself to the world. So it feels good to have this small gain as proof that change is possible, and I hope it will help me as I pursue my fitness and nutrition goals this week.

Our heroine performs a heroic feat of derring do!

I was very brave today and went to work out at the gym on campus. I had to fight my way through a maze (of hallways) and brave the stares of the gorgon disinterested gazes of fellow gymfolk! Okay okay, it was totally fine and if I keep my heart rate right in the “cardio” zone (it’s super easy for me to go really fast and get into overdrive burnout mode, oops), then I don’t sweat too horribly and can cool down in time to get back to my desk and not feel like a sweaty freak. Success! Now I can exercise even when it’s rainy!

In other news, this past weekend I took care of myself by getting a pedicure on Saturday and then a spa massage and facial on Sunday! Oh my, it was incredibly relaxing and I came out simply glowing. Aside from the beautifying fun, my masseuse was able to help me with some shoulder pain I’ve been having recently, too. She helped loosen up my right shoulder, and then at my regular chiropractor appointment today I received a more detailed diagnosis: it seems I have some tendonitis and inflammation in my shoulder, and one of the major rotator cuff muscles is weakened and unable to hold my shoulder in the right position. I was so glad to finally figure out what is going on — and now I have some specific exercises to help regain strength and proper alignment. Since I never had any particular shoulder injury, this pain and weakness is simply the result of a lifetime of bad posture and some recent gait changes from my ankle injuries. Bad posture kills, guys! No joke. This pain is pretty bad and I am going to have to do some serious work to undo all my slouching.

From now on, I’m supposed to avoid overhead presses, or really any overhead stuff. I’ll be focusing still on core strength (to support better posture from the inside out) and a few rotator cuff strengthening moves. I also have to ice my shoulder at lunch and in the evenings, and take ibuprofen for a little while to help with the acute pain. But I’m clear to do pushups, planks, and downward dog in Yoga class!

The funny thing is that as soon as I came home, I realized why my shoulder could be aggravated even worse — every time I open the front door of our house, I slam my shoulder into it gently to get past an unevenness in the frame. Ha! So I need to find a new way to get in the front door now, too.

This past weekend, Memorial Day weekend, I didn’t get in any exercise at all. I have many reasons why not, but I won’t bother — it’s over, I had fun, the end! Excuses are useless, action is what counts! This is partly why I was so excited to finally get over my suspicion of the campus gym. I can’t depend on my evening moods and the variable Spring weather to get me moving, I’ll just be whiny and tired forever. Now I can keep a bag at work and go whenever I need to! I know that this is not a great revelation, but at least half of fitness is convenience, and now I have even less of an excuse!