Nyom

I have not been eating well.

Correction: this week I have made a belated stab at eating well.  It’s proving... taxing...

I have started monitoring exercise, fluid intake, sleep, and fruit/ veg intake again.  Among other things, having an objective measurement is super-useful.

And it turns out that I’m about hitting exercise and sleep targets, scraping by on fluids, and frankly failing at fruit and veg.  And, frankly, even those dismal fluid and fruit/ veg intake figures are only because I’m trying harder so that I can have something to put in the log.  Less Heisenberg, more Hawthorne.

Balls.  I remember that, last time, I was doing really well - easily getting 7/8 fruit and veg a day, and usually drinking about 2½ litres of water (apart from Saturdays - I rarely do well on Saturdays as they tend to be my sofa day - lots of sleep, not so much on the food, drink, or social activity).

Over the last couple of months I appear to have systematically broken all my good habits, possibly in a fit of pique over my neck being sore and it being more difficult for me to exercise.  (At some point soon I need to address this thanatopic, adolescent tendency; it’s really starting to get in my way.)  I cut down on exercise, social time, water intake, fresh/ any fruit and veg, and I did it with a grim sense of achievement. It was weird. I only see how weird it was now, writing about it and looking back.

I’ve started baking again (creative endeavour, sense of achievement, nom), which means more biscuits. I have to take them out of the house and ply them at colleagues, friends, randoms on the street (this is not actually an exaggeration - I gave home-made flapjack to a homeless guy because I didn’t have any cash on me, and I don’t smoke).

I feel like I’m coming at this health thing again from not even a standing so much as a lying-down start.  This is going to be tougher than I’d anticipated...

Any hints and tips would be gratefully received on how to make this stick.  In the meantime, I’m going to keep on with the spreadsheet and keep reminding myself how much better I feel well-hydrated and with a less-challenged digestive tract.

(I wish I understood the weight thing - this entire time I’ve continue to remain in the lower half of the ideal BMI range, and - according to the possibly incredibly faulty fat analysis machine - I have a really (like scarily) low fat composition...)

Om nom nom

I spent a couple of hours baking last night - a lot of fun (and quite profitable from a “sweetening IT folk” perspective. ;)) The flapjack and the shortbread biscuits were made in celebration of one of my projects (finally) going right, and they seem to have gone down well.

As mentioned previously, I am an idiot for sweetmeats in biscuit/ flapjack/ pastry form. I am trying to stick to a low-refined-sugar approach to food at the moment, saving it for weekends/ dancing/ celebrations. My joints have been thanking me, which is polite of them... Today has been difficult, though, as I make a mean flapjack. It’s not your dry-as-arse, crumbly pre-packaged flapjack - it’s gooey and sticky and filled with fruit and seeds; you know straight away that it’s all about the sugar and fat - it glistens.

So I’m not going to tell you how to make it on this blog because, well - doesn’t really fit with the title, does it...? I’ve been giving the damned stuff away as fast as I can today, otherwise it’s going to sit next to my desk. Beckoning.

I’m currently trying something that helps me sleep better at night and doesn’t challenge my digestion quite so much: big meal for lunch, salady stuff for dinner. I don’t always manage the salad (sometimes it comes with pizza... or in pizza form... what...?), but my seven-a-day is still going pretty well.

Today I'm going to tell you how to make one of the healthiest things I cook. Variously known as “Fay's Ratatouille”, “That Tomato Sauce Thing” and - most enduringly - “Red Gunk”, my partner swears that Weight Watchers is missing a trick with this one. So here it is:

Dice one medium onion, put in a saucepan with a handful of shredded mushrooms and half a big courgette (or one small one), chopped into quarter-slices, reasonably finely.

Cover (just) with water, add a little salt (unless you don’t want to) and boil on a high heat until everything is soft and a good part of the water is evaporated (10-15 mins max, generally). (Yes I know: denatured vitamins. It’s a sauce, add some raw veggies later...)

Add a tin of chopped tomatoes, stir and heat further, adding herbs and spices to taste (I recommend: garlic (loads), English mustard, black pepper, paprika, ginger, Italian Herbs (basil and oregano especially) (loads).

Move to a lower heat and add at least half a standard tube of tomato purée, stir, and simmer. It’s pretty much ready to eat now, but the longer it simmers gently, the nicer it’ll be.

Works hot on pasta, rice, or potatoes; works cold in sandwiches and on salad. It loves cheese. You can use it to bulk out bolognese and soup, and one of my favourites is to add it to bacon and freshly-wilted spinach in fresh garlic and butter and serve over pasta, but that’s just my taste.

You can also do variations to the basic recipe (I like adding finely-diced carrots, slices of leek, tiny broccoli florets, and celery at the last minute (so it stays crunchy) to the mix, along with an extra half-tin of tomatoes and more tomato purée - this variation is known as “Vegetable Splat”).

High in fibre (and taste – see herbs and spices above), low in fat and sugar, it’s vegan, and good for most allergies except tomatoes/ citric acid.

Bon appétit!

Food, Glorious Food

(Dammit, now I have that song stuck in my head.)

The Spreadsheet Plan is working out well. Disappointingly, it told me that I have to work harder on fruit and veg (thank goodness dried fruit counts - I'd struggle to make it up to 7 most days) and that - as suspected - I'd routinely been drinking not enough water.

It also highlighted that, curiously, I am much better at eating and hydrating well during the work week.  I'm guessing this is either to do with the reduced structure during the weekend, or because it's easier to eat vegetables when someone else is cooking them for me.  Possibly both...  Hmm.  The hydration issue, though, is still a little confusing.  But I'll come up with a plan for combating that and then we'll see...! :D

As part of this Back on the Wagon programme, I've been trying to identify my weaknesses and eliminate them.  I have come to the conclusion that there's one thing in my life in particular which can topple all sorts of good intentions and excellent plans in a single bound.

To put it bluntly: I'm a cretin for biscuits*.  They are my Kryptonite.  I don't really eat many sweets; I'm "meh" about savoury fatty food (I definitely know when to stop, and do). I'm virtually teetotal, and am generally pretty straight-edge. I can only put my utter inability to resist biscuits* down to:

1. That thing about foods which combine both sugar and fat (which pretty much never happens in nature, so we have few inborn mechanisms for recognising satiation from processed foods which combine them like this, apparently) being so addictive.
    
2. Me being encouraged to snack on (a strictly limited number of) biscuits* every day at about 4:30pm as a child (i.e. after school but before dinner... possibly because my mother wanted us not to be hungry as she preferred us to all eat together - i.e. so that she only had to cook one meal).
    
3. My allergies meaning that many other sweet treats of choice are not an option (anything containing chocolate, nuts or eggs, which means no cakes, among other things), so biscuits* are pretty much as good as it gets when it comes to convenient processed snackery.

*biscuits, in this context, means a range encompassing cookies and flapjacks. In fact, flapjacks are particularly dangerous as it's easy to fool yourself into thinking that they're "healthy" because they contain oats, and often fruit. They're also ludicrously fatty and sugary.

So what have I been doing about this?

To start off, in my own, fumbling, amateur way, I've been following my "good" instincts (i.e. listening to my body, rather than following "damaging" cravings).  I'm pretty sure that I know fine well when I'm doing things wrong through indolence/ a desire to passively hurt myself (yay depression and a fragile body - why self-harm when you can self-neglect?!), so I'm having to come up with ways around these thanatopic tendencies.

One thing I'd worked out was that if I allow myself to become too hungry (to the point where even waiting to cook/ the actual act of doing cooking seems like a massive drain on perceived low resources) I will snack like a mofo.  If I structure my eating a little better, I can resist snacking.

Well... resist snacking crap, anyway.  I'm allowing myself dried fruit mid-morning and mid-afternoon at work, eating a carby lunch, and trying for a light meal in the evening which is strong on vegetables and protein, but low on carbs.

My lifestyle is problematic, and some of it can't really be switched up without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  I perform, using my voice.  There appears to need to be quite a gap of time between eating satisfying (fatty, carby, proteiny) foods and singing/ speaking well.  As most performances tend to be in the evening, around the time you'd be wanting to eat sensibly, juggling all these things can be an arse. Also: the satisfying food that's available when the show has finished and you're on your way home tends to the unhealthy (to say the least). And see above - by the time I'm in a position to eat I'm pretty hungry and tired, and also starting an adrenalin come-down, so prone to seeking something that feels like an energy (or mood) -boost.

So what are biscuits substituting for?  They're not exactly something that our bodies have adapted to draw nutritional substance from.  They're eaten because they're nice, a treat.  They're eaten because a sugar-rush can be a compelling high; because they remind us of childhood (with the extra benefit of no-one telling us we can't eat too many now we're grown-up); because we associate sugary foods with the end of the meal when we're relaxed and happy after a good time with family/ friends; because biscuitry is a reliable standby of feeling good and filling us, unlike people or job or creativity; because we're tired and have overridden the command to sleep, so need something else to fill the energy void; because we're not great at working out what it is we're missing and we know we like biscuits; because they're convenient and they keep for ages in desk drawers and vending machines and bags and cupboards and pockets; because it's just an ickle biccie...

So I need to get better at working out what "I want a biscuit" means in each context and then acting on that, rather than ignoring or repressing that urge.  Sleep, water, attention, stimulation, sex, affirmation, nostalgia, low blood sugar... these needs can all be dealt with in other ways.

In other words: I need to make new habits, tread new patterns into my brain (like "walk rather than wait" or "bus rather than taxi" or "bike rather than bus" or sleep rather than social media") as I replace "biscuit" with better sources of satisfaction.

No short order. But I've done it before - let's see if I can do it this time so it sticks better.

The Secret of the Pyramids

We have a shorthand in my household when people are emotionally up against it: "Maslow?"  It's even become a verb: "What should I do?" "Well, to start off, Maslow it."

What are we talking about?  I used to teach this as part of my A Level Psychology course, and I figure (despite its limitations), that it's a good tool:

Here's the thing - it's really hard to do that brain stuff that you need to do when you're hungry, tired, thirsty, or scared of basic stuff.  So if you're suffering from low brainwidth, deal with a couple of the lower rungs of Maslow first.

In a brain-flap? Drink some water.  Right now.  Get some water in you. Okay, now you've dealt with that, how do you feel about carbohydrates?  That's good news - here's a cookie^*.  Right, now we've dealt with that, what do you need to do next?  Is this an emergency, or can it wait until you've had a nap?  Okay, well, have another cookie^* and let's work out the rest of this.

In other words, you need all the resources you can actually get hold of (instead of punishing yourself for feeling bad, coz that works excellently well as both a long- and short-term strategy...) in order to deal with brain stuff.

I am crabbit at the moment, partly because my sleep is off and I've been in an amount of pain (though better today due to yesterday's interventions), partly because Everything Happens At Once seems to be one of those things.  I'm feeling overwhelmed, in short, and I'm going to write a poem about it full of emotive symbolism and all but, in the meantime, I'm going to deal with what's in front of me so that I can deal with things a few steps away.  And this may also mean telling Everything Else to back off a couple of steps, thanks.

I will eat lunch shortly, and go to the gym tonight. I will then eat well and early and I will sleep, by all the gods, because the world's a more dangerous place when I haven't.

And now, just to cheer you up, a picture of a crabbit (alternate definition):

__________________________

^* substitute dried fruit/ banana/ boiled egg/ whatever works for you at this point.

Bad Poet, No Biscuit

My dietary shifts are generally going well - I’m eating a lot more vegetables, especially raw ones; I’ve been ensuring that I drink at least two litres of fluids a day every day; and am being more punctilious than ever in making sure that my grains are whole (where available).

I’ve also largely cut out refined sugars, choosing to eat dried fruit in their place, or just go without.

And yet biscuits. Mmmh. They are a major weakness in this otherwise annoyingly virtuous pattern. Somehow, last night, I persuaded myself that an “emergency” necessitated biscuit- and crisp-eating. That said emergency could have been obviated with some planning and organisation on my part was by-the-by. At least they were hobnobs, I suppose...

Last night’s literal running-around saw not only a little victory or two (“snack food before the show? Why yes, I’ll have a wrap and a smoothie, thanks...”) but several little disappointments. I have not been listing them (getting taxis, not losing weight, days when I say “screw salad, I’m having bacon!") as I generally just get dispirited when that happens - historically ingrained memes leading me to say: “Yes, you’re right - I’m worthless, let me prove that to everyone, especially me...” I discovered, all too late in life, that saying “well done, you cycled into work once this week!” works better than “lazy git, you caught the bus four times this week - shaaaaame...” That’s not to say that stick doesn’t work for some extremely short-term goals, but I’m clearly more of a carrot person.

If that’s even a thing.

It was a healthy evening for lots of other reasons, though - the only cab taken was at the end of the night, when buses had vanished; I had lots of social contact (including hugs, random jabbering, and positive strokes from people who are good at sharing that kind of thing); I got to holler admiration at one of my spoken word idols; and then there was the dancing.

Wednesday was supposed to be a rest day, so no physio, gym, or mat exercises. Instead I ran, walked fast, stood around for ages, and then bounced up and down periodically, flailing as much as space would allow while shaking my head. Hmm...

I brought the stick with me. I still have to do that for prolonged standing, and even its shooting-stick charms couldn’t obviate my knees hurting like bastards today.

I have a feeling my physiotherapist would not approve... Especially considering that I went to the gym today as well.

Maybe I need to revisit that whole “rest” concept.