Back in the Saddle

Blimey. It’s been over a year since I last updated this. So what’s happened in the World of Fay Health & Fitness since then?

1. Injured myself at home on the actual day of that event. Foolishly. Luckily, it’s a neck injury I’d had before, so this time I didn’t piss around, got hold of a physiotherapist (my old one having semi-retired), and got into a bunch of new, neck-related exercises.
    
2. After recovering from foolishness, continued to do lots of cycling, but just back on a daily, get-everywhere-I-don’t-need-to-transport-gig-gear/people kind of way.
    
3. Got back into mat exercises - press-ups, crunches, planks - plus the fun addition of chin-ups, courtesy of a bar you can slot above the doorframe (and a stack of books to stand on, because I’m not that tall (despite being tall for a poet), and our house is old, so the ceilings - and therefore doorframes - are high).
    
4. Went to the Edinburgh Fringe in August to take part in the usual shenanigans, which, from a health perspective, involved:
   
   Positives: a bunch of weight-lifting (hauling my crap up six flights of stairs virtually single-handedly as my flatmate had a hernia); walking 2-3 miles/ day up and down a very steep hill (luckily, I lived at the bottom of the hill), sometimes more if I had to go home and change between shows; continuing with the daily physio exercises and the twice-a-week, more hench mat exercises.
   
   Negatives: bad/ little sleep; the usual dehydration and when-the-fuck-do-I-eat issues leading to a little weight loss; abundant and often unnecessary stress (necessary stress I can deal with).
    
5. On the final couple of days had a troubling cough and sore throat, which I powered through on sheer adrenalin and stubbornness, which transmuted into a cold as soon as I started the long drive home through the night.
    
6. Cold turned into a chest infection and laryngitis, and then… and then I couldn’t speak, sing, or anything vocal, couldn’t bend over to pick things up, couldn’t lie down flat, couldn’t eat much, was constantly coughing and had chest pains and stomach pains, and then the bit where my throat kept closing off, stopping my breathing, all of which made sleep difficult.
    
7. I lost a LOT of weight. And no-one seemed to know what was wrong. Everything hurt, everything made me cough, and the only thing I’d ever relied on my whole life - my voice - was gone. And no-one seemed to know beyond a shrug whether it would ever come back.
   
   I pushed on through work, though had a lot of sickness leave, including after a trip to A&E (waking up in the middle of the night entirely unable to breathe and retching mucus) when I was signed off for a couple more weeks after I’d only just got back to work.
   
   As you can imagine, my mental health took a steep and long fucking dive. And even the physio exercises were out for a long time because of the aforementioned not being able to lie down flat, so my joints started to suffer in a major way. I slept (hell: I lived) on the sofa for about three months for fear of waking everyone constantly with the coughing and the terrifying choking noise that happened every time I dropped into proper sleep, even when propped up perpendicularly. It was bad enough that I wasn’t sleeping…
   
   It was horrible. And then there was the (thankfully apparently a clerical error?!) cancer scare.
    
8. Slowly my voice returned to something that was at least audible (though it’s currently fucked again - yay) as I learned what I can eat and not eat (I’m even more limited now than I was before), and which drugs and supplements help and which are, at best, useless.
    
9. They still don’t know what’s wrong, but the latest notion is to put me on a very low dose of something that, at much higher doses (like: fifteen times higher), is used as an anti-depressant.
    
10. I’ve recently got back on the bike. I am still horribly unfit. But I was haemorrhaging money trying to get around town and this is worth it long-term.
     
11. I’m even more recently back on the mat exercises, after I managed to injure myself doing ill-advised free weight-lifting (yes, again) a couple of months ago, and put a crimp in the cycling and some of the physio for a while.
     
12. I’m not living my best life right now, and I think the definition of that is going to have to change, but hey - who needed creative career plans anyway…?
     

I thought I’d go back to the blog because I actually wanted to ask some dietary advice, but I’ll leave that until the next entry, because it’s a bit much to cram into a catch-up post as well…

Thanks for reading (and, to some of you, waiting so patiently).

Progress and Technology

Hello!

Well, it's been a while, but I thought I'd give you an update.  Preferably one nothing to do with slightly scary mental health stuff.

So today I'll be talking about:

1. Training for the Sport Relief 2016 Challenge (sponsor me here)
2. Technology
3. General Health stuff

1. Training for the Sport Relief 2016 Challenge

This has been less fun that it could be - partly because I got ill between Christmas and New Year, and could (fairly) directly attribute that to going out on a training ride late in the day, getting cold with an exercise-induced lowered immune system, and then, instead of going straight home, went to the shop for food (a move that seemed logical at the time) where clearly some infectious bastard breathed on me. Garh

So what with having funtimes with breathing, then injuring myself (minor standard neck/ shoulder stuff), then the winds being insanely strong, I somehow let training drift into a puddle of excuses. I was still cycling pretty much everywhere (work, social engagements in Cambridge, choir rehearsals, anything where I didn't need to tote much gear) else, but no particularly challenging distance.

And then I checked my magical spreadsheet, which showed me that I only had a few weeks to go, and that I'd spent nigh-on two months not training. Eeeep! Instead of a steady increase of ≤½ mile every session, I was going to have to jump up more emphatically each time, especially if I stepped back to a shorter distance to kick back off again (because, despite being foolish, I do learn - slowly - from my past mistakes with exercise).

Mon 28-Dec-15: 16.4 miles, 1:39:32 hours (64% of end goal)



Wed 24-Feb-16: 10.1 miles, 0:57:14 hours (39% of end goal)



Sun 28-Feb-16: 12.6 miles, 1:11:38 hours (49% of end goal)



Sun 6-Mar-16: 15.5 miles, 1:29:16 hours (60% of end goal)



Wed 9-Mar-16: 17.7 miles, 1:41:25 hours (69% of end goal)



I am still aching after this last one (cold, damp, mizzly, long; an exercise in self-discipline/ persuasive self-talk), and currently wondering two things:

a) How much of a percentage of the end goal should I aim for?

b) Should I do a training cycle on the Wednesday before the Sunday 20th ride, or am I better off having a rest (apart from work cycling) that week?

2. Technology

After agonising over gadgets, I found the one that was the best fit: a FitBit Charge HR. Of all the things that I wanted an activity tracker to do/ be, it only doesn't do one of them: GPS tracking. On the other hand, it (along with its concomitant app) does everything else, and things I didn't even know I wanted it to do (and some other things - like calorie counting - that I'm resolutely ignoring).  It's good at working out when I've been cycling for short stretches, but the longer ones confuse it, so I have to manually record them, which isn't exactly taxing.

It's proving useful for helping me keep track of (and manage by increasing) my water intake, gamifying my fitness efforts, and it looks slinky on my wrist (it functions as an actual watch as well).

It's also proving useful during anxiety - it turns out that the thumping heart sensations are often misleading: my heart-rate will rise slightly, but not anything like as much as it feels. This is proving remarkably helpful in swift calming and fending off potential full-blown attacks.

And I've bought a fancy water bottle that's easy to carry around work (I saw someone else with one and desired it greatly), means I don't use up lots of plastic cups (yay environment), and measures much more precisely how much I've drunk during the day at work/ during cycle rides.

3. General Health stuff

I am generally well. However, my hip joints (especially my right one) are not. I have been mostly ignoring this and trying to find comfortable positions, but the "it's reliably achey by 10pm" rule has shifted to "it's reliably achey all the damned time and difficult to bear by 10pm".  And now the right one keeps going out of alignment when I get up from a chair and start walking. Unfun. So I need to go and see someone about this.  Sadly, my former physiotherapist has now retired, so I will need to begin the Quest for a Local Physiotherapist Who Actually Understands HMS/ EDS all over again, though armed with more knowledge than last time I started.

My lower left-hand back aches reliably after about 6-7 miles of continuous cycling; less if hills are involved.  I've been advised that I need to get my posture on the bike checked and the bike's setup amended by experts.  As in all things requiring experts, this is not cheap.  If it prevents some further physiotherapy sessions, mind, it'll be worth it.

I forgot to renew my gut medication prescription last week.  This will NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN.  I have come to rely on not being in constant abdominal agony - turns out I'm on PPIs for life. A small price to pay unless, of course, the NHS is dismantled. O_o

I'm beginning to see why people with my condition (especially those with more severe versions) get into a cycle of morphine use.  I'm still avoiding even paracetamol unless my neck's particularly bad and I want to sleep (and nothing I've got touches migraines, so there's no point there either), so we'll see how long I can keep this straight-edge attitude to pain management up...


Thanks for reading so far! :D More updates to come, more frequently and smaller, especially in the run-up to the Sunday 20th challenge. Did I mention that you can sponsor me...?! :D

Sometimes it's difficult. That’s okay

#TimeToTalk 

Last weekend I had a panic attack. It wasn’t a particularly bad one, putting aside the fact that they’re all, you know, horrible. I mean, no concept with either of those words in it is nice.  Even writing this out has made me super-aware of my heartbeat, the way it fists on my breastbone; my breath, the way those accelerating swells bind me into my clothing. And how, okay, that’s a good thing, but it doesn’t stop. It just doesn’t stop. And the heat’s rising, that very particular sensation at my temples and if I lift my fingers I’ll see them trembling and my skin is tingling and...

Breathe out. Slowly.

Butitsallhappeningitsallmybodyrevoltingallthoughtschiming

Breathe in. Slowly.

CaughtinsomethingthatIcantescapebecauseitsmeandwhywontitstop

It stopped before. You mastered this. You have enjoyed your body’s good reactions to challenge. You will inhabit it happily again.

Nonononononono!

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Before all that, it turns out, is something like a migraine aura. I caught a whiff of it, running late for a gig in what turned out to be an impossible-to-breach venue once everyone else had gone inside.

“I’ll power through it, distracted by the entertainment and my pride in my friends’ achievements...”

Wandering alone around deserted-looking buildings in the dark, in a quiet and imposing part of town is no-one’s favourite. Certainly not mine. Well, sometimes. But not that night. And knowing I was on the verge of panic was a mixed blessing, let me tell you. So I made my way back to my bike in the freezing cold and called everyone I trusted who I thought might be available. Luckily for me, someone finally answered, and I was able to talk to someone who wasn’t going to judge me, tell me what to do, or ask me a ton of unhelpful questions. They said:

“I can do whatever you need - either let you talk or tell you what works for me or blather to distract you.”

Right there, teetering one-footed on the edge of desperation, I chose for me to talk, then them to distract me. Once it was clear to me that I was only rehearsing the panic that had led me there rather than actually purging it, I asked to swap roles. Then I sat down, caressing the icy, fake cobbles of the ground around the bike stands. I imagined the heat of sun-warmed rock beneath my trembling fingers, and I listened to my friend talk, uncondemning and measured, and then they moved onto a topic close to both of our hearts that was also not a burden to me and I felt myself uncoiling, there on pitiless concrete, softening into the circle of a hug from 50 miles away.

Thank you. You know who you are.

I spent the next two days poisoned with adrenalin and its fallout. I treated myself very carefully. I was as assertive as I could be about my needs. I supported people making and performing art. I was lovely. I was tired. I was present. I was fed and watered and wonderful and happy and so, so tired.

So I’ve learned some things from this:

1. You can feel the panic aura as it approaches.  This is useful; very useful to know.

2. These things work:

a) Recognising and putting boundaries on it before it gets going properly.

b) Phoning someone you trust, if you can’t get physically to someone you trust.

c) Sitting down and touching the ground, no matter where you are.

d) Talking yourself down using a kind of loving dissociation.

e) Eating hot chicken soup once the main freak-out is passed.

f) Talking about it so that you can remember all the people saying “that sucks, poor you” rather than “get away from me, freak!”

g) Remembering.

3. My friends are even more awesome than I already thought they were.

4. I can ask for help.

5. If I go for a week of short/ crap sleeps I lose my shit.

I hope this has been useful for any of you. It’s been scary and useful for me – both the writing and the sharing.

Be well, lovely folk.

Changing Relationships

So, I’ve blogged before about pain. About what “stop comes before ow” really means and how you can be guided by, but also ignore pain if needs be.

As I get more into the old exercise regime, the more pain I’m experiencing.  Some of it is “good” pain - e.g. the stiffening and burning of artfully-shredded muscle fibres that are on their first steps to growing back thicker.  Some of it is “bad” pain - e.g. the twanging of a shoulder joint that’s experienced injury due to superfluous effort in a less-advisable position.

Now, I’m prone - like probably every enthusiastic bendy - to overdoing things, breaking myself, and having to take a break from exercise as a result.  This has been well-documented in me, even as recently as last year’s big fitness push, and I find myself there again, having gone too hard on the old press-ups last week and now having unilateral neck pain, and pins-and-needles in my left arm due to a twanged shoulder. (Yes, it’s The Particularly Borked Shoulder.)

But something occurred to me last week, as I was going up the stairs and thinking: “yep, this is an injury, not just a post-exercise burn” - it’s not a disaster.

Let’s say that again: It’s Not A Disaster.

In the past, the pattern has been: start exercise regime, forget sensible approach after a couple of goes (at most) and overdo things so that an established weak point is compromised, curse a lot, rest for ages, start again only after I’m really fed-up of being unfit.

And I’ve managed to manage that somewhat - I’ve been building more slowly (last week notwithstanding), being more alert to potential injury, stopping sooner, and giving myself space to recover before getting back into things without leaving it so long that I’m actually more prone to injury if I try coming back in at the same level.

But in the past it’s been all: oh! ow! and then beating myself up for a muppet. Catastrophising the pain and popping myself in the victim box all over again. The pain is punishment! The pain is validation! The pain is a full-stop!

Waaaiit... rewind - the pain is validation?  Hmm, sounds like some kind of brain weasel talk to me. And it’s a problem that, the more I think about it, the further it goes back for me.

There’s an awkward balance to be struck when your body is limited in a particular way.  You have to own it in order to manage it.  But sometimes that very self-definition can take you deeper into NOT managing it.  Speaking for my own situation, it’s useful for me to say: “Because of underlying weakness and historical issues, I stand a much greater chance of injury if I lift things above shoulder height, so I’ll avoid doing that.” It’s less useful to say: “I’m limited, so I can’t lift things, so I won’t.”  It’s useful to acknowledge where pain stops being a good guide and is just distressing/ distracting/ a sleep-killer.  It’s less useful to shy away from all pain and hold myself in a kind of twitching huddle in a corner, hemmed in by painkillers and fear, outraged because I’m not pain-free.

Because I’m never going to be pain-free.  I don’t know about anyone else, but I know I’m always experiencing pain somewhere at any given time. There are some Usual Suspects, but sometimes they all kick off, and sometimes it’s a new place, and  most times it’s only one or two of them.

But if I define myself purely by my pain, and use that as an excuse not to do things: I Am A Limited Person, Here Is My Badge Of Pain, that’s, well, frankly a bit rubbish.  Pain as validation as a lesser being is a weird circular argument that does no-one any good. I wouldn’t expect anyone else to be able to get away with that, so why me?

And pain is clearly not a full-stop. That was the conclusion on the stairs - if I see the muscle burn of good exercise as a landmark on the way to becoming more awesome, I need to start treating the Usual Suspect Injury Pains as landmarks as well, somehow. Whether as a learning point of how far not to push things, or some kind of psychological step on the route to better self-acceptance, or better ability to ignore unfixable pain, there must be some use in it, and seeing it as a full-stop disaster where I swoon in a bower and wait for some bugger to come rescue me is helping no-one.

Not entirely sure where I’m going with this yet, but this feels like a positive realisation, and a potentially very useful mental tool.

Trumpet

Bear with me, gentle readers; I appear to be having some kind of personal revelation. It goes something like:

• I am good at a variety of different things.

• In some cases: very.

• This is not a bad thing.

• If I do well at something using these skills, it is not "cheating".

• I deserve to do well at stuff, especially if I continue to try to bring people with me.

• I need to stop hobbling and muzzling myself.

• It's not too late to work to realise my potential, and I'm not too old.

• I really am not too old.

• Life is beautiful and terrifying, and I can be part of that beauty and terror.

• Cool.

That's it, basically.

Some advice about brain weasels

Or: what to do when you’ve started the day with negative emotions...

More of my friends are adopting the “brain weasel” nomenclature than I would have, perhaps, anticipated. This makes for quite efficient conversations:

“My brain weasels are loud today...”
“Tell ’em to sod off, the little buggers.”

“Sorry: I have brain weasels today.”
“No worries - let me know if you’d like to meet up later...”

Today someone was able to use the term to let me know that they were having a difficult morning. Then they asked: did I have any advice?  Turns out that... yes. I rattled off a pretty decent list. Revised version below, because I thought it might be useful to others:

Help! I’m in work and the brain weasels are snapping. What can I do?

Thing is, you can’t exactly go back to bed, can you? So here are some work-compatible things to do:

1. Maslow it - drink more water (go and do that right now), eat well, ensure you feel safe/ physically comfortable in your environment.


2. Adrenalin seems to mute them. Maybe go for a brisk trundle at lunchtime. If something more strenuous is an option, maybe consider that...


3. Listen to (powerful, strong, happy, or positively defiant) music. Plug it in, baby!


4. Pick a thing (it can be absolutely tiny) and do it well today. That often shuts them up. If it works, do another one. Rinse, repeat. One step. Then the next. The day is over. You won.


5. Treat them like a belligerent fundamentalist/ troll* - when you answer their snide little accusations, they’ll switch tack. You can choose to ignore them or refute every argument. Both approaches take energy, but ignoring/ refuting also demonstrates control, which giving in and admitting they’re right (they’re not) does not (it also saps energy, but builds no strength).
   
   Think of this like physical health:


1. If you exercise, it’s hard work at first and hurts, but less work long-term, because you have a fitter body to carry you around in.


2. If you either go into to denial or decide that you’re determined to beat an illness, you’re WAY more likely to than if you just meekly give in. Hardiness for the win.

A favourite refutation I came up with recently was when I was trying desperately to find something, brain foggy and starting to hyperventilate, and the weasels said: “Hah! You’ve lost it! You’re rubbish! You don’t know where it is!” and I found myself saying: “Yeah? If you’re so much bloody** better than me, you can tell me where it is then! No? Then shut the hell** up! From now on, you’d better prove you’re actually better than me any time you try this nonsense, or you forfeit all right to bloody** criticise me!”

I won’t deny it - that did feel good...! :)


6. In my experience/ opinion, comfort blankets DO NOT WORK. They will just give the metaphysical rodents more ammunition. So do something challenging you know you do well; don’t resort to sugar/ caffeine/ alcohol/ Facebook/ mobile phone games, etc.


7. Find someone pleasant to talk to who has the time and energy for you. Don’t feel you have to talk about your problems, but do talk about stuff you like as well as stuff you don’t like.


8. Make a plan for the evening that involves healthy behaviour (exercise, good food, early night, helpful social time, etc. - even if all that happens is you go to bed early out of all of those, making a plan and executing it will feel excellent and tell those pernicious, furry idiots off good and proper)

And that’s it, really. Obviously you may not be able to do more than one or two of these in a work day (though 1, 2, 4, and 8 are pretty feasible!), but it’s a start... :D I’m thinking of printing a simple version of this out and putting it somewhere prominent for when I feel like I’m having/ about to have a bad day myself... Any further suggestions?


______________________________
*fundamentalists come in all forms - pick your poison, it’s not all religious

**The language was a lot worse than that - swearing is very energising, if you’re me...

Today is the first day...

... of the rest of the working year.

(I appreciate that some of you may have worked between 24th December and today - sorry about that! I, however, have not. Benefits of working for an academic-related organisation, I guess...)

So! :) How’s it been going for you lot? Me, I’ve been powering through the day on rampant optimism and a renewed determination to prove to myself that I am a worthwhile human being (I have had too little broken sleep - more about this in another post, I suspect). In fact, that’s the core of my “resolution” for this year - basically: feel better about myself.

Obviously there are various different elements to this (i.e. pretty much every aspect of my life! :)), but for each one I do actually know what I need to do, I’ve just not always been doing it. So, in order to inspire myself, I reckon I just need to keep that clear “feel better about myself” goal in front of me every time I find myself wussing out and cutting corners. Because when I work at doing things right, I feel better about myself.
 
Ludicrously simple; diabolically difficult.
 
I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. I generally start on projects/ changes/ movements that look like them in December, when it’s dark, and miserable, and cold, partly to prove to myself that you don’t need a set date to kick off Doing Stuff Right, just a good mindset. Sometimes I start them in April, or February. Or on a Thursday or something. Because I know that if I keep waiting for some kind of perfect kick-off signal, I’ll keep on finding excuses.
 
I have a narrow line to walk here - let me introduce you to the brain weasels (I’m not going to dignify them with title case): they represent the snarly, snide, tricksy little bits of me that are always looking for reasons to put me down. They say tiny, mean things - their sharp, narrow teeth and sinuous forms are slippery and insistent. They are composed of fear and are like handy little pocket abusers - you may even have left the originals behind, but they’ve sowed tiny, portable, conveniently-sized memes to take with you everywhere. (I’m sure you know the kind of thing they like to say: you’re not good enough, you’re a failure, you’re a disappointment.) They snigger every time you trip or drop things or run late. And I do those things a lot... They represent the opposite of “you are a worthwhile human being”.

They’re wretched little bastards and they need to be stopped. Or, okay, well, transmuted somehow.
 
The ways to beat brain weasels need to be as multitudinous and flexible and cunning and (nearly as) small as they are. Because the more you give in to their assertions about your worth, the more you’ll give up putting effort into doing stuff right, and the more fodder there’ll be for their grindy little teeth. I’ve seen this negative spiral demonstrated very clearly in my physical health, and it’s all too evident in my mental health, if you know where to look.  I want to get a series of positive spirals going - feel better, do better, feel better, do better, feel better, do better, feel better, do better...
 
What’s the narrow line? Well, years of playing host to the weasels has left me with some difficult-to-repurpose mental constructs in which the furry little gits flourish. And one of them is where I find it really, really difficult to take compliments. Because I may know fine well that the weasel runs are ridiculous, and that they make me miserable, but I’m used to them, see? They’re home. They’re where I’m comfortably miserable.  So the more loudly people are nice to me, the less I can take it. I get so overwhelmed with this enthusiastic evidence that at least part of me looks dramatically different to the Worthless Map of Fay (© Weasel Enterprises) that I throw up as many big walls as I can to stave off the information overload. Go too far and I cry and shake and run away. Literally. It’s messy.

Slowly I’ve been working on my anti-weasel techniques. I’m being scientific about it, which means being better at spotting both negative and positive patterns, instead of taking either states for granted or treating them as neutral. I have learned that the following things are particularly good at helping silence/ squish weasels:

1. Walking. Anywhere, at any time. But it needs to be fast/ vigorously. At my own pace, anyway. 
    
2. Dancing. Stomp on their little heads! Drown them with music! Okay, maybe just stun them into submission and muffle their annoying squeaks to the occasional half-hearted “you’re too old to be doing this!” (Yeah, I’m manifestly not, so shut up! :D) 
    
3. Hosting performances. You’d think that the nerve-wrackingness of this and the massive potential for tripping up (Get the names wrong! Stutter! Offend someone accidentally!) along with opportunities for jealousy would be fodder for the invisible shit-stirrers, but somehow: no. I enjoy the performances too much to be jealous, and frankly, when you’re running an event, you have no time for weasels. 
    
4. Spending time with particular friends. You know the type - diverting yet supportive as appropriate. Also: the wider I allow my network to be, the better my chances of spending time with people whose personal styles will fit the mode I need to be in. And the less chance of the weasel who says “you’re just a burden to your friends!”  
    
5. Properly singing something I know well. There’s a pattern emerging. 
    
6. Spreadsheeting. Doing something both systematically and creatively. It’s something I have developed good... wait... excellent, expert skills in, and it’s something I can sit quietly and nerd out over.

The answer appears to be: do things irrefutably well with good people. Keep pushing at (sometimes tiny) increments of What Could Be Even Better so that the evidence for being worthwhile mounts manageably. Get the adrenalin flowing. Allow meaningful connections with other humans. Demonstrably build up the ability to be more awesome.

It’s not about comfort blankets (because the more moping/ eating crappy food/ taking a taxi rather than cycling/ playing dumb computer games I do, the worse I feel) but about strapping in tightly before heading off towards the horizon, laughing uproariously and whooping at the steep bends.

So I will be giving myself tiny compliments. Every day. Not ignoring the bad stuff (because weasels loooove it when you’ve got stuff you’re procrastinating over - oh my yes!), but aiming for the kind of objective approach I’d use with someone who isn’t me. And also coming up with ways to improve things.  In other words, I’ll be running a Lessons Learned on my life. Every day, if I can, no matter how vestigially, sometimes.

And, in the meantime: getting fitter, having more fun, and being more awesome, a bunch of which I’ll be posting on here. :)

Unwelcome Guests (in the body)

This has not been a great week, physical (and therefore mental) health-wise.

Basically, despite being Little Miss Healthy, my joints decided that the thing they really, really wanted to do was suddenly stiffen and hurt. All of them. A lot.

Now, sometimes this happens, e.g. hurting like the Devil after dancing for the first time in years, and more often than not I can point at a cause and work away from/ ignore it accordingly:

1. Dancing like a maniac/ standing for ages - the concomitant muscles/ joints hurt as you'd expect.
   
   Solution: Rest, plenty of water, stretching beforehand, bracing properly throughout standing period to prevent if possible.



2. A long period without daily physio exercises - knees in particular suffer from this one
   
   Solution: Ease back into physio (i.e. lower reps until muscles restabilised).



3. Being dehydrated - general achiness (apparently, according to my browser's spellcheck, this isn't a real word - tough) and "tiredness" of joints.
   
   Solution: The Universal one. Sorry. Well, obviously, I drink more water, and wait for recovery (a day or two).



4. Eating too much sugar - as above dehydration.
   
   Solution: again, pretty obviously cutting the sugar down, working out why I'm eating badly (tired? bored? sad? leaving meals too late, so needing a quick fix, etc.?), drinking more water and eating more protein (don't ask me: it seems to work!)

Of course, sometimes I just get the 'flu or something, which again is known and can be accounted for.

Last Thursday I started hurting. And it didn't get better and in fact progressed. It was bits that normally don't hurt this extensively (wrist, knuckles, ankles, hips, jaw) as well as the usual suspects (neck/ shoulder, knees) and some old friends (lower back, upper back). And I've now been through a whole slew of emotions, including the classics of denial, anger, bargaining and depression (with a hearty dose of fear to boot), currently wobbling in and out of acceptance.

Wise people (with much worse versions of this condition than mine) have told me to not stress, and that it's just a flare-up, just a phase; I'll be back to normal in no time. I'm more optimistic in the mornings, when I'm reasonably mobile, but right now, with my hands seizing as I type, my optimism could do with some work.

Other people have told me I should eat this magic leaf, or cut out potatoes, peppers, and tomatoes. Others are counselling NSAIDs. I am honestly struggling to stay focused on anything other than putting one foot in front of the other, and I suspect that I am a massive grump monster in the evenings.

Being me is hard work right now, and with two weeks to go before I drive myself and a big pile of equipment to Edinburgh to start the gruelling marathon of the Fringe, I'm starting to get a little troubled...

Mens sana in corpore sano

(Whut? Latin - from a poem by Juvenal - means “healthy mind in a healthy body”...)

While I’ve been more than willing to subject you all (“all” is such a big word for an average of 35 readers per post, back in this blog’s heyday) to various intimate considerations of my physical health, and while the term comes up as a tag in eight posts (nine including this one), I’ve been more reticent about my mental health.

It seems that, in some ways, I’ve suffered in the past from a dichotomous position on mental health care, similar to my approach to dieting: i.e. it’s a great thing for other people to invest time and effort in, but a mark of shame (specifically: failure) in my own self. {sigh}

Exploring why this might be seems to take us perilously quickly into stereotypical realms of family history. So let’s not. Let’s move onto the position I find myself in now, where I’ve come to view psychotherapy as being pretty much identical to physiotherapy: part of you is misaligned in a way that makes you uncomfortable and takes up energy that you could be spending on much more productive activities; discussing things with an expert in the field and following some of their advice to realign things, trusting your own judgement as well as theirs, seems pretty sensible.

Just as with physiotherapy, finding a good psychotherapist whose approach suits you (and, maybe more specifically, has the ability to take the you that you are now and help you on the way to transforming to the you you want/ need to be) is pretty key. And finding ways to keep going with their advice and guidance between sessions will give you a lot more benefit (and save you a bunch more money) than putting all your dependence on them to “fix” you. Ideally, they will help you develop the tools you need to get to the place you want to be in.

We still, as a society, seem to have a prevalent view that physical and mental health are separate things (denoted by separate names!). I’m pretty sure that this is, long-term, an unhelpful notion. It would be great if we could get onto speaking in terms of “health” and leave it at that, moving onto the specifics (knee pain, asthma, eczema, depression, dissomnia, vertigo, migraine, agoraphobia, broken arm, etc.) if necessary.

The thing is, it’s all part of a system. Your mental health affects your physical health, and your physical health affects your mental health. Whether or not you subscribe to an idea of an incorporeal mind and a physical brain, the mind’s direction would still prompt the brain to make changes in the body based on electrical and chemical shifts. It’s an actual, physical thing that your mind does to your body. The same impulses that mean you can direct your hand to pick up a drink and tip, swallow, set down again, etc., can also make more insidious changes.

We still have Stone Age bodies connecting with rapidly-adapting brains, technology, environments, and social structures. The responses that were designed to get us out of life-threatening, physical danger quickly are being applied to much less urgent, but much longer-term stressors. Stress chemicals hang around in our bodies much longer than they were ever designed to do, to the detriment of our immune systems, hearts, lungs, blood pressure, digestion, adrenal glands, skin, hair, eyesight... pretty much you name it, actually...  In other words, our life-saving response to stress is now killing us (those of us who live in a mechanised society/ have non-physical jobs).

So it’s important to look after your mental health, because it’s you, isn’t it? And if you’re all over looking after your physical health, you need to be looking after your mental health, because it’s all the same thing. In order to get started on (and maintain!) a decent physical health regime, your motivation and discipline need to be right - and this includes not overdoing it and harming yourself with it too.

Look, I’m not one of those people who’s going to tell you that you can cure your own cancer by thinking right, and that colds are happening because you’re mentally lazy, but I am someone who’s read the research that indicates that recovery from any illness or injury is massively affected by mental attitude (for interest: you’re better off either being in strenuous denial or full-on determination to beat it than apathetic acceptance that there’s nothing you can do), and that, since cancer can be fought off by the immune system (we’re apparently all exposed to it multiple times during our lifetime - we only notice when we haven’t fought it off), and stress affects the immune system, good mental health can only help when it comes to preventing/ fighting off cancer.

And, let’s face it, your physical health affects your mental health - long-term pain is a git for wearing you down; illness makes you feel groggy and unlike your usual self; revelling in the fitness and strength of your body can help your sense of mental resilience, etc.

This is all a round-about way of saying that, for the last couple of months, I’ve been seeing a psychotherapist, and will continue to do so until I’m in a position where I feel like I’ve realigned what I’m capable of realigning for the moment. Unlike in previous goes over the years (the first one was great, but the second one was far too insecure, and the third one was an old-school Freudian overly-concerned about whether I was breastfed...), the current therapist appears to be a good fit for my world views, and visiting her appears to have given me the stable base from which I can ask difficult questions of myself in the meantime, and answer them too. There’s something curiously empowering about the thought that, as regularly/ frequently as I need it, there’s a safe space where I can go to express being as angry/ unhappy/ jubilant/ proud/ messed-up as I am without fearing social punishment, and from there move onto working out ways of realigning what’s causing me to be less than I could be, because misaligned stuff needs to be brought into the light before you can start tinkering with it.

Go metaphors.

See, this blog is about my quest to become closer to what I can be. (Remember Maslow and self-actualisation?) And that includes emotional and other mental function. I was born with certain physical issues that make fitness harder (hypermobility, asthma, etc.), and given others by the misguided actions of others (food allergies, generally crappy immune system), and wrought some of them myself (the gimpy RTA-shoulder, for example) and these are things that can be managed, overcome, worked around, etc., with some extra support and persistence, and with imagination and the right research and information. The same goes for my mental/ emotional issues - presumably some of it I was born with, some I achieved, and others I had thrust upon me. If they were different, or more profound, likely I’d need medication, like I do for other long-term conditions that no amount of exercise will change (asthma, for example), but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

My emotional resilience is already improved, and my assertiveness has increased. It’s like watching the way that persisting in physical exercise has seen my stamina, strength, and confidence improve, and for approximately the same reasons. Also in common: the mental/ emotional challenges outside of my comfort zone hurt like blazes the first time or two (see: dancing, cycling, weight machines), but that pain fades into strength if I keep going, especially if I give myself space either side of the early/ quantum-change challenges (and recognise which pain is useful and which potentially damaging... and then stop the latter).

This brand of psychotherapy isn’t forever, but it’s right for where I want to get to now, and that’s the best I can ask for! :) I'm going to continue to feel proud of the work I've done already, and the achievements yet to come - both physically and mentally.

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.

Returns

So, I went back to to the gym last night.  After a gap of {checks} nearly 6 weeks. Hmm. The chronology (for those of you interested in the anatomy of excuses) goes something like this:

14th March - final gym session before week of rest before The Walk
23rd March - The Walk
24th March - Beginning of further week off gym to recover
31st March* - "My legs still hurt, a few more days off won't hurt"
2nd & 3rd April - Stomach bug, off work
4th April - "Still feel wobbly"
7th April* - "I think I'm getting a cold"
14th April* - "I keep getting nosebleeds"
16th April - "I feel really mentally/ emotionally feeble, AND I miss the gym... hmmm"
17th-21st April - Away on holiday
22nd April - "I'm just recovering from lack of sleep on holiday"
22nd April - "Actually, sod it, I'm going to the gym tomorrow"

(* dates approximate)

So I did.  No more excuses, no more bollocksing about, waiting for the stars to align for exercise.  I've spent weeks not even walking very far in the mornings or evenings, wasting money on taxis to get me into work.  While there are depressing, stressful, annoying things happening in my life, and I can't fix them with stationary bikes, I can:

1. damn well tire myself out in a good way so that I get the sleep necessary to help problem-solve in my poor brain;

2. feel a sense of achievement in clocking goals and doing a difficult thing well;

3. get back that sense of purpose and personal puissance that comes with feeling physically fit;

4. treat myself well - that's actually treat myself well, by giving myself the gift of fitness, rather than "treat" myself, which amounts to doing a series of passive things that are actually quite harmful (sitting around in unhealthy poses, eating crappy food, staying up late to watch films/ read books that will still be there tomorrow, getting cabs instead of the bus, mithering, "having a rest from physio", etc.).

5. be kind ("you had a few rubbish weeks, let's move on"), and not punish myself ("stupid cow! give me a gazillion press-ups so that you injure yourself, can't sleep right, and feel even more wretched! you deserve grief for feeling bad!")

6. get myself a new goal to aim for.


Yesterday morning I just grabbed my gym bag, ignoring the fact that the kit was not clean (yes, I got myself clean socks, I'm not a total barbarian!), and set off after work (after realising that I'd been killing time with extra bits of work that could wait, presumably trying unconsciously to make it "too late" to go) to the gym, walking fast, trying not to overthink things.

Luckily, my brain still seems to retain the well-worn groove that came from doing that very thing twice a week or so for eight weeks, so as soon as I'd flipped the "walking to the gym from work with my gym bag in my hand" switch, I was fine.  In fact, I'm worried that I did too much on the stationary bike because I was working to the old pattern from 6 weeks ago.

(I've just worked it out explicitly - I've now spent nearly as much time Not Doing Exercise and Being Inactive Again as I did the opposite. Darn it!)


I did 20 minutes or so of sliding resistance on the recumbent bike, then about 6 minutes on the rowing machine.  I figured that my neck/ shoulder problem was up to it.  I'll monitor over the next couple of days for pins-and-needles, etc.

Yes, I stretched out afterwards.  And yes, I'm a bit sore today.  And yes, my heart-rate was more elevated than it would have been back in March, but less than it was in January. So, you know, I haven't lost loads of fitness... :)

Reach for the Stars

I think it's fair to say that the sponsorship effort is going pretty well for The Walk.  As you know, I beat my original target and raised it.  And then I beat that and raised it again.

And now I'm close to beating that.  Blimey. People are lovely.

Raising attention for this has meant stepping outside yet another comfort zone, one that came up in conversation last night as my mate and I stumbled home for 2½ hours from a gig in a London location so outer that it didn't even have a London postcode. She was being quite... insistent... on helping me with my (large, but not as large as usual, and on wheels, okay?) case.  She was lovely and patient and helpful and non-patronising, but letting her carry my case was a bit of a mental struggle for me.

To say that asking for help doesn't come easily to me is a bit of an understatement.  My first phrase, apparently, as a child was: "I do it myself".  (My mother used to say that my first word was "No".  Hard to say how accurate that is...)  So it's been a fairly overwhelming characteristic of mine since, basically, early cognition.  My ingrained dedication to self-reliance is not about to change with ease/ at all/ ever/ overnight, is what I'm trying to say.

I'm getting better at it.  For example, I'll accept help with much more alacrity these days.  Not quite the same as actively seeking assistance (and I've always been someone happy to go seek information, being more than willing to accept that there's always someone who knows more than you do about, e.g. where the condensed milk lives in this shop, how to open the car bonnet of the car I'm driving, ou est la gare, etc.) but, you know, a start.  A big part of the last three years has been accepting what I physically just can't do and persuading myself that I'm worth getting it done well and not hurting myself in the process.  At some level, Being Able To Do Stuff is enmeshed with my feeling of self-worth.  And yet, as with my complicated perception of the desirability of dieting, I don't judge others by what they can't do...

This is echoed in my sometimes desultory attitude to publicising my own events/ merchandise, etc.  The best way to persuade myself to request assistance is to remind myself who else suffers if I don't.  So having a goal where others will benefit if I do well is über-motivational, and this has got me pushing mention of my sponsorship drive around the shop. And now that everyone and their monkey know that I'm doing it, I can't bottle out. And if I'm definitely going to walk six miles in a go, I'll need to get the tools to be able to do it without breaking myself and returning to the place where I need to ask for help.

Ta-da! Fay-logic circumlocuted! I win out over the apathy!waaah, and Sport Relief get a bag of cash to help people in need.  Oh, and the people who give me the money get to feel good about themselves too... :)

Thanks! :D

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.

Syncopation

I only remember when it was because my brother had been given a copy of the book of Labyrinth, and I'd been given something... forgettable, and - to my mind - infinitely inferior and unfairly girly.  I suspect it was Boxing Day.  We were bundled into the car with little explanation and yet - surprisingly - my mother was driving.  My father's tolerance for other people driving, especially a car with him in it, has never been what a body might describe as capacious.  This prompted questions that were shut down abruptly, so I sulked back into Anne of Green Gables, or Little Women, or whatever it was I'd been gifted.

I have to assume that this made it late December 1986 or 87.  I was definitely adolescent, and inclined to question my parents on pretty much everything anyway.  I don't have a clear memory of when it became apparent that we were heading to hospital; it kind of jump-cuts to my dad in the hospital bed, bare-chested, strapped to a bunch of machines that went beep.

As an aspirant doctor, I was intrigued.  As a person with an annoying book and a low boredom threshold, I was doubly so.  I appear to have refused to get worried about my dad.  I left that to afterwards.  It's been a pattern I've maintained and established for most of my life - deal with the thing in front of you, then freak out when it's safe to do so.  So I asked many questions and watched everyone's expressions, and learned about ideal electrocardiograph patterns and cardiac dysrhythmia, and how to make the best of the terrifying frustration of abruptly-drawn hospital curtains, and medical staff body language. Also that there's no way to persuade my brother out of a book he's got until he's actually read it.  I have a similar disposition, as it goes, so I can't blame him...

Happily, my father was discharged a day later (I think), and came home (where he still is) with some stern advice from fellow-doctors (I imagine that's particularly difficult to take!) about diet and exercise.

Research indicates that "Type A" personalities (competitive, time-driven, impatient, pro-active workaholics possessed of covert free-floating hostility) are more prone to cardiac incidents (I suspect that part of this is being prone to pushing through physical symptoms as signs of weakness...) than the more chilled dudes occupying the Type B category.  All of this is over-simplistic, but does appear to have a reasonable amount of basis in the results.  The key thing here, though, with regard to my unnecessary 12-hour-shift-working, impatient, explosively-tempered father is that Type A personalities are way less likely to re-infarct than their less competitive brethren. i.e. if someone sends two people home from a cardiac incident: one Type A and one Type B, with the same advice (exercise more, cut down on fatty foods, eat more oat bran (this was the 80s)), the Type B presumably says "eh, I start all that tomorrow; I'll just chill for now." The Type A, driven little bugger, is likely to go "I will be the best at not getting another heart attack!" and duly goes on to lose the weight, do the exercise, and eat oat bran like a boss.  Behold, that - oddly enough - works and Type As, surviving the first one, are less likely to die prematurely of a heart attack than Type Bs in a similar position.

Why this combined Fay Family History/ classic psychology text summary?

My dad was only a couple of years older than I am now at the time. This factoid impacts on the resolution made later in this post. We share many phenotypical expressions of our genes (more than you might imagine, at first glance) and a fair number of personality traits, including - probably most significantly - stubbornness...

None of the chronic conditions I've lived with all my life - to the best of my knowledge - are degenerative.  Manage them well and asthma, allergies, etc. will just bimble along without scaring you too much.  Oh except when they won't:

Apparently, I can only really look forward to the chronic discomfort of Hypermobility Syndrome (HMS) getting worse as I age, especially after the menopause.  This... was a bit of a shock, and made an already-annoying Thursday just that bit more fun.  And it only properly struck me some time later, so today's exercise was accompanied by a crushing sense of "what the hell is the point if it's all just going to get worse anyway?!"  Yay motivation!

But I plodded on through the physio moves (not well, but I did) and onto the mat exercises.  I carefully did the leg raises and didn't push them into Bad Pain.  I moved onto the press-ups and thought "You know what? Sod it.  I'm not that high on the HMS scale as it is and I'm going to be the best at being a muscle-bound person compensating for HMS that there is." Like many other things, being entirely pain-free and comfortable is something that will belong in memory and I will celebrate the relatively good days when they come and treat myself kindly (but not over-indulgently) on the bad days. Because a life lived in fear of pain - of anything, come to it - is pretty spectacularly rubbish.  (Obviously I didn't articulate this all in the middle of press-ups, but the "sod it" bit definitely came across...)

I've lived that life before, because that was the only model I was given and - you know what? - it sucked. I am occasionally extremely bitter about the waste of my life due to that inherited pigswill, but - looking back - you can see that I was always trying to break out of it (despite this, historically, leading to a good kicking by those holding the fear-reins), and to many people's eyes I'm sure that it's long looked like I did.

The post I had originally been going to write this morning about the "oh, hey, your condition will only worsen" news was far more maudlin.  Instead, I had a 4-hour "nap" (answering my body's actual need rather than "pushing through" needlessly), and then did my pre-planned exercise and ate well.  I feel ferociously better and am writing this so as to have a touchstone for that "well, if this is the best it's going to get, I'm darned well going to extend this for as long as possible" resolution.

Fit that on a motivational poster...

Extra

So, most of you probably know that I'm working up towards walking 6 miles in aid of Sport Relief on 23rd March.  What you might not be aware of is that we recently smashed the original £300 donation goal.  I'd frankly wondered if it was too ambitious at the time.  Now I'm seeing what happens when you set your goals high and keep pushing towards them...

Obviously, what I've done now is set a new target of £500.  And if we hit that in the next three weeks (we're less than £100 away from it now), I'll raise it to £750. And so on. (Well, sensibly enough so that I'm not setting myself up for failure...)

Yesterday's wall was (probably) as a result of a lot of emotionally-wearing stuff happening in quick succession to a body and brain that are already being deliberately challenged, pushed, changed, and demanded-of. Pretty sure I can't spreadsheet that, but I can keep track of, e.g., quality as well as quantity of sleep.

Confessions #1

I am a MASSIVE nerd. I think we suspected this already, but come on: who else do you know would decide to chart their menstrual cycle in a spreadsheet and then apply an algorithm to give predictions of the better days to exercise over the course of the weeks in order to draw a graph of this.

An uncle-flipping* GRAPH.

I'm monitoring a lot of things on this project; even I feel that this might be getting a little weird. I was monitoring protein intake, but gave that up really quickly because, well, it was a bit dull, to tell the truth, and the answer to my previous conundrum (am I eating too much protein because I can't eat pulses, nuts, eggs, and fish?) appeared to be: "probably not" (there seems to be little but rough consensus on absolute figures and a huge range of what "right" is, and the potential side effects of too much - anywhere from "nothing" to "meh" to "heart disease" to "OMG crumbling bones!"), apart from beef days, which I already knew.

However, the revelation that my waist-to-hip ratio leaves more to be desired than you might think (though this depends on: time of day measured, muscle tension, and which ratio scales of "you're doomed!" you believe) has me thinking that, despite earlier protestations, maybe I should be measuring calorie intake.

I really don't want to.

1. DULL.
2. Admitting that (again, depending which Doom Scale you believe) I'm closer to "overweight" than I'm comfortable with believing.
3. Painful and difficult.
4. Calorie-counting is what people on a diet do, and I'm not on a diet.

Am I?

And if I was, so what?  Hmm...

My mother was always on some diet or other and miserable about it.  She constantly felt uncomfortable about her weight and some days it seemed she felt like her very skin didn't fit right - she didn't even like her hair (until after it started to grow back after the chemo and we begged her to leave it alone and let it curl naturally).  I only have a few photos of her.  Among other things, my memories are of a slightly overweight, slightly-shorter-than-me woman with a wicked sense of humour, a beautiful voice, and a lot of regrets.  Presumably, at some level, I associate calorie-counting dieting with a fundamental lack of liking for yourself.  Oddly enough, at other levels, I also associate it with a fundamental respect for and desire for a healthy amount of agency for yourself.  I guess it depends on who's doing the dieting, how, and why.  Maybe it's fine for everyone but me. (Seriously?!)

I wonder, of course, if me striving to overcome the screwed-up joints (a clear legacy from a man with a double-jointed digit or two and a woman whose joints constantly pained her, sometimes to a crippling degree), to gain muscle definition, and compensate for my low-movement lifestyle is a symptom of a degree of dissatisfaction with who I am.  I don't think so.  It doesn't feel so much like trying to change myself into something else as uncovering a self I've neglected for a while, whipping the dust-sheet off a still-serviceable piece of old furniture**.

Or I'm protesting too much.

Anyway, for the moment I'm not going to count calories, if for no other reason than that my heart just sinks at the notion, and right now - trying to take something positive from the fact that I'm bleeding too heavily to exercise (like the discovery that I've already got to the point where I miss actually exercising when I can't, and distraction in the form of the creation of a menstrual exercise algorithm, for goodness' sake!) - I can do with all the motivation I can get.  I am, however, going to cut down even further on refined sugar***, and see where that gets me... :)

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* Not swearing is pretty hard, but I'm going to give it a go for this blog, in case certain folk**** are actually reading this.  Hello!

** I'm not that posh - it was just a mental image

*** Oddly, that does sound rather like a diet... {facepalm}

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**** Putative delicate readers who, for some reason, I'm happy to allow to read talk of my menses... curious...

No Man’s Land

Some of will not want to read this. Some of you may well be relieved to see someone else saying this out loud...

Like, I suspect, a fairly large number of people out there putting together and maintaining an exercise regime, I am an adult person with an active pair of ovaries and a uterus and - along with work and other time commitments, current state of health, sleep deprivation and Stuff, I need to factor this state of affairs into my exercise planning.

For example, about a week or so before menstruating, my already floppy joints become even floppier, and more prone to damage. I need to take this into account when, e.g. doing press-ups or weights - I’m liable to injure myself. I’m also going to have to put extra effort into lifting, which may affect my perception of my strength and progress. With the mood-shifts that can come - while these can be combated by exercise, the bad ones can make actually going and doing exercise a harder ask.

I tend to change weight/ shape around this time, with water retention adding to my woes.  Which means that checking to see if I’d lost weight/ the burden of spare Fay on my belly last week was pretty much doomed!  In addition, the urge to stuff carbohydrates (especially sweet, short-chain ones) in my maw is rarely higher than at this time of my cycle. My blood pressure is often higher than normal, and migraines pounce, rounding out already foul and pathetic moods with their very own nauseating magic.

All this can pretty much be accounted for and worked around:

• Don’t give in to your inner grump and overdo the weights.
• Do nudge yourself firmly to a sensible timetable of exercise, no matter how much doleful poetry (seriously, it was dreadful) you compose on your phone on the way to the gym.
• Do stop eating when you’re actually full.  Keep leaning to the high-fibre, lower-refined-sugar snacks.
• Drink even more water.
• Don’t berate yourself - you’re more likely to give up on yourself and sulk in front of the TV with your own personal barrel of fudge.
  Mmmh. Fudge.

I’m annoyed today, but trying to see the bright side of it.  I was due to do the Long Walk Back Home Goal today but luckily I’d already decided to do that on Saturday and do the gym tonight, as usual.

Then last night happened. Pain so intense it was like being continually punched.  It was liked being a teenager again. (Whenever I say this, it’s pretty much short for: A Bad Thing™, by the way.)  It was also, inconveniently, at 4:30am. And yes, I already had a hot water bottle. And yes, I used pretty much every pain management technique I’ve got. And yes, I got up, walked around, drank some water, tried to distract myself, then gave up and took some paracetamol. I found getting up an almighty arseache this morning, and reluctantly decided that, all things considered, I’d be doing myself more harm than good doing Proper Exercise today. Nine hours later, while sad I won’t be doing it, I haven’t changed my mind.

For those of you who may be thinking: wuss - you may well be right. And here’s a thing: I don’t care*. A massive part of this whole project is about trusting my body and the signals I receive from it, learning again how to interpret them properly.  I did quite a lot of exercise yesterday morning, having already started this new phase of the cycle, so I’m not backing away from exercise without trying it.  I’m just not going to stagger to the gym, bleeding heavily and sleep deprived. A mistake in judgement doing too little on one day of the month will do, I reckon, less damage than doing too much.

Remember: I’ve been here before, I’ve exercise-munted and crippled myself more than once.  (*I’m sufficiently self-aware to realise that this is me arguing against one of my own inner daemons; this is, after all, part of what writing this journal is for.  This one is convinced I’ll never be good enough at anything, and tells me that telling me this at every opportunity is for my own good. It’s a dick.)  I’m pretty sure I should pay attention when an organ a similar size to my heart starts shredding itself.  Back in the bad old days of the Massive Tumour™, I would move as little as humanly possible for the first three days of my menstrual cycle. Even now I’m occasionally nervous about hurting myself at such a time.

If I’m still not fit to do it tomorrow, this may become the first session I’ve cancelled since committing to the timetable.  I’m choosing to see this as a learning point rather than failure, as I’ve been at this for less than a month, and I reckon it’s going to take a few of them to establish patterns (as well as achieve some of those pesky goals!).

I am, after all, a scientist at heart as well as a poet...