mizducky's migrations: a weight management blog with attitude

Back in the saddle (yet) again

Hey, I'm back! Didja miss me?

I must say, the past couple of months have been some of the most exhausting, tumultuous, often-frustrating, but ultimately rewarding times I have ever known--and I've known some tumultuous times in my time, let me tell you. To recap, here's what I've been up to:

• For the first time in years, I acted in a play. I played multiple supporting roles in a production of Paul Rudnick's The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, including this one absolutely killer character, a disabled lesbian rabbi in a wheelchair who's the star of her own cable-access talk show, kind of a lesbian version of Dr. Laura. Community theatre, I have found from past experience, has this tendency to completely take over your life--and so that happened with this production. But that doesn't mean I didn't have the time of my life! Plus you would not believe the terrific upper-body workout I got from pushing myself around in that wheelchair!
• The same weekend as the play, I had a major speaking role in my church's annual Lesbian / Gay / Bisexual / Transgender Pride service. I was originally scheduled to be the major planner in charge of the service, but fortunately I was able to delegate that out. But I was still tapped to lead this one liturgy I wrote specifically for the service, and it turned into a really beautiful thing.
• Just last weekend, I rode herd on our church's contingent in San Diego's Pride Parade (yes, San Diego does their Pride celebration a month later than everyone else--I'm not totally sure why but I think it's to not conflict with the major Pride celebrations up in LA, Long Beach, and etc.) We'd chartered a trackless trolley from a local tourist-tour outfit, and then festooned it with banners and streamers and stuff, and then had a contingent of walkers and riders and parasol-twirlers. I am far from the first to observe that trying to organize a bunch of Unitarian Universalists is like herding cats--I luv all you folks, but damn were my nerves shot after that! But all's well that ends well, and everyone had a good time.
• Oh yeah--and somewhere about six weeks back, Mr. E, the elderly gentleman for whom I am live-in caretaker had another major health weirdness. Once again he recovered remarkably quickly, but for a couple of days in there we really thought we were gonna lose him ... and then for a week afterward we were concerned he'd need to go to skilled care. He's about 96% recovered at this point--dude has more lives than a cat. It's just me who's still reeling a little, even six weeks later.

In the midst of all this, my food admittedly got a bit random--hey, you try rehearsing for four hours straight, and then leaving rehearsal to find the only eateries still open are the 24-hour burrito joints. But even with all that, I managed to keep my weight on that same ol' plateau it's been hugging for months now. And with the physical workout from the rehearsals--not only the aforementioned wheelchair-jockeying but also an actual dance number!--I think I may actually have lost an inch or two in body measurements. In fact, I'm pretty damn sure I have--teeshirts that had previously fit snugly are now giving me some ease around the arms and bust. Yowza.

But, in some ways even more momentous than that, I found doing theatre to be a major epiphany for me. At least some of it had to do with how well my parts suited me--it felt like I completely knew how Rabbi Sharon was supposed to be from the moment I cold-read her part in auditions. But even without that, acting just felt so totally right, like something I had been meant to do all along but am only getting around to now. All those frustrated creative juices I used to pour into my preaching, and have only sporadically put to use more recently doing spoken-word, came surging up with a vengeance when I was raging on stage. I dunno what it all means, and I dunno if this was just a fluke and the next play won't be anywhere near this level of epiphany-hood, but I am determined that there will be a next play, and I will follow up to see if this is my calling for the next hunk of my life.

My new exercise routine: community theatre!

I'm sitting here typing with my left leg elevated and an ice pack on my knee, all thanks to my latest exercise routine--and I'm pleased as punch about it!

You see, I saw an audition notice go by from the community theatre group associated with the big hippy-groovy Unitarian Universalist church I hang out at, and found myself sorely tempted. I hadn't done theatre since back in my college and immediately post-college days, and I really missed it. Of course, some of why theatre fell off my personal radar scope had to do with my weight--not only that, for better or worse, many theatre groups have a certain "look" in mind for various roles, and fat is usually not part of that look; but also, as my weight continued to rise and interfere with my mobility, I simply was no longer physically up to it.

Plus then I got older, and more involved in other, more "serious" things, and kind of put frivolous things like theatre away in mothballs.

But now, I sat there looking at this audition notice and going "well, why the heck not?" For one thing, this particular group--especially because of its UU social-action headset--has a strong track record of casting actors of "non-traditional" appearance. Plus the play in question--Paul Rudnick's "The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told"--totally appealed to me with its brash humor (it's a humorous take on the Bible and religion from a gay liberation perspective). Plus now, even though I am still a fat broad, I'm not nearly so "broad" -- or immobilized -- as I had been. I could do this! All I needed was to make it through the auditions. No small thing, that--but you can't win if you don't play ...

So I went down and auditioned, and lo and behold I got a really juicy supporting role! (Actually, three roles--the play is structured so that the non-pricipal actors all play multiple roles.) Hurrah! So now all I have to do is actually survive the rehearsals...

The reason I'm icing my knee today is because last night we worked with the choreographer for the first time. Man, you wouldn't think that a mere ninety minutes of intermittent movement could take so much effort, but by the time I got home last night I was definitely a hurtin' unit. Fortunately, none of the moves are all that difficult (though remembering them all and doing them up to tempo is going to take some work), and a couple of hot baths plus that icepack seem to be handling the hurtin' bit.

It's my hope that, as rehearsals continue, my body will rise to the occasion and get used to this heightened level of activity, so that I won't be the walking wounded the day after a rehearsal (or the day after a show, for that matter). And now I'm feeling an additional motivation for regular exercise--getting my body sufficiently conditioned that it'll be ready for each rehearsal and less prone to injury. I may also invest in a simple knee brace from the local big-box pharmacy store or some such.

But anyway--this is my new creative project, and it's not only helping with my bod, it's also an opportunity made possible by all the work I've already done on my bod so far. So I've totally psyched to be doing this, and if there's even the slightest chance that any of you folks out there will be in San Diego the weekend of July 11th/12th, I hope you'll consider coming to the show and watching me be a whacko on stage for a paying audience. More details on the when/where/etc. as I get 'em.

Random notes on post-cane leg strengthening

At this point I've pretty much totally abandoned my cane, except for extremely long walks or times when my legs are feeling ouchy. Which they do rather more frequently than I had expected, as re-training my leg muscles not to depend on a cane is proving to be ... interesting.

It's not just that my left leg, the one with the bum knee that I had been favoring, needs to strengthen up the muscles surronding that knee. All my leg muscles had gotten used to leaning on that cane, and are now having to readjust to having my center of gravity back in its normal alignment. Among other things, this means that walks require a lot more physical exertion than I'd been used to--all those muscles working in directions they had gotten out of the habit of experiencing.

I had already experienced the phenomenon of my balance shifting as I took off weight--every time I went dancing, I spent the first several minutes feeling like a spaz because my center of gravity wasn't where I was expecting it to be, causing me to almost lose my balance whenever I attempted to bust a move. Usually by the end of the evening I had compensated--only to go through the whole process again the next night out, when my weight distribution had changed once again. This is like that, only more so. Suddenly I'm calling on muscle control from my toes on up to keep me walking in a staight line without torquing a knee or twisting an ankle.

I also think some of my struggle is due to the fact that I need to replace my walking shoes. I have good quality New Balance shoes, but at this point they're two years old, and while they're still reasonably whole the heels have worn down just enough that I don't think they're holding my feet in the proper alignment any more, making my muscles work even harder. Dang--those things are expensive. But I've learned from hard experience that good walking shoes are one of those things it does not pay to cheap out on--you really get what you pay for, and bad shoes can really screw up delicate knees.

Oh yeah--forgot about the cane!

I was hobnobbing with folks during coffee hour after services at my hippy-groovy Unitarian Universalist church this morning when one of my fellow church members flags me down and asks: "Hey, so you're totally doing without your cane now? How is that happening?"

Heh. I almost forgot that people who know me are still catching up with the fact that I'm not using a cane much anymore. I still keep it in the car, because sometimes at the end of a day of shopping or whatever, the muscles around my left knee get fatigued and need a little support. And sometimes I use it the day after I've overdone things and the knee is letting me know it feels a bit unstable.

But otherwise I'm pretty much free of it. And the more I walk around without it, the more my endurance increases, as well as the strength of those key muscles around the knee that keep the joint aligned and supported.

The little meniscus tear is still in there, and still occasionally starts clicking and attempting to lock the knee. But it's doing it less and less. I can't help thinking that the way I was walking with the cane, which inevitably throws one's body out of alignment, was exacerbating the meniscus tear. Now that I'm using the cane less and less, my body and thus my knee are in more normal alignment, so it's plausible that this is putting less stress on that little wedge of cartilege in there so that it doesn't get all irritated and inflamed as often.

It's too easy for me to take this change for granted, but it really is a big huge deal--and it's a direct consequence of having taken off all that weight that was slowly but surely pulverizing that knee to bits. So--hurray for me! And hurray for friends who spontaneously notice such things! Hey, I'm not proud, I'll happily take all the ego-strokes I can get.

Weekly weigh-in: oops. Plus, losing the cane

Oops--life got hectic, and so did the scale:

• Today's weight: 193.5 lb
• Change since 2 weeks ago: +1.5 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 140.5 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -1.36 lb

Last week I got immersed in a major cooking project, a dinner for eight that I had originally auctioned off as part of a fundraiser for my church. (You can read all about it over here). It was a hell of a lot of fun, and as you can see many of the dishes were surprisingly healthy ... except for the high sodium content from all that fish sauce and soy sauce and other lovely salty condiments. The dinner was this past Saturday ... I enjoyed leftovers for the following three days ... and now my bod is bloat city. Not so bad in my feet and ankles as it used to be, but enough that I can feel it. And I definitely feel it in my hands too, in how my rings barely go onto my fingers instead of threatening to slide off like they usually do. And of course it's showing up on the scale.

Alas, there's nothing to be done except to drink lots of fluids to flush the excess sodium out of my system, and wait for the retained water to follow. I am trying to hasten the liquids release by various natural means. For instance, I just ate some canned beets and their juice as a snack--not only are beets one of the few vegetables that I think taste okay canned, but beets are a natural diuretic. (Plus they make your pee such a gorgeous shade of pink!)

Meanwhile, I have experienced an unexpected and accidental leap forward in my physical exercise progress: somewhere during all the shopping and running around in the past week, I managed to leave my walking cane somewhere. I have no idea where--I just got home and realized the cane was not in the car with me. Now the fact that my knee was so well that it did not remind me that I needed my cane is certainly something worth noting, but it gets better--while I've been sporadically using my backup cane, I've mainly been going without altogether, and while my left knee felt shaky and unstable at first, the muscles around it have strengthened up to match the new load with surprising quickness, and now I seem to only have trouble with stepping down on the left leg while descending stairs.

Mind you, I haven't tested myself walking long distances yet--and I think that, at least for the first experiments, I'd feel safer taking a cane as backup. But already this is a great leap forward. I'd long realized that the cane was causing as many problems as it was solving--allowing the muscles of my left leg to get lazy, throwing my whole body subtly off-balance and thereby spreading stress and pain to other joints in my body. And when you carry a cane, it's all too easy to find yourself leaning all your weight on it even at moments you don't really need all that much support. So I'm really excited at finally reaching the point where I can start doing without the cane again, so that I can quit twisting my bod into a pretzel and take the next step towards healing.

Weekly weigh-in: Back under 200! Plus: walking

First, the numbers:

• Today's weight: 199.0 lb
• Change since last week: -1.50 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 135.0 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -1.52

I dunno that crossing the 200-pound line again is worthy in itself of massive flags-and-fireworks celebration. After all, this is "again," and is also partly an artifact of switching scales (as I think I've already mentioned ad nauseum). But what I do find worthy of celebration is that, after lots of slow, plateau-ridden weight progress the past several weeks, I've had back-to-back 1.5 pound losses, preceded by a one-pound loss. In this process of inches and ounces, 4 pounds in three weeks is definitely something to note.

And just as I expected, it started happening when I started getting off my butt even a little tiny bit. I've finally started taking the occasional walk in my neighborhood--we're not even talking massive regular walks, I mean just every few days walking the four blocks to the corner grocery store and back--and look what an impact even that modest amount of effort seems to have produced.

And also as I expected, walking--or more specifically, walking in an interesting walker-friendly environment--is turning into a perfect exercise to me. As I think I've also droned on about in this blog before, lots of conventional exercise just bores me to tears. Stationary bicycle? Treadmills? Snore! Silly-ass exercise videos with insipid music played on cheezy synthesizers? Positively deadly to a music geek like me. And frankly, exercise classes would be kind of deadly to my wallet at this point in time.

But the neighborhood I moved into this past June is eminently walker-friendly -- not only are there a plethora of nice level sidewalks, but the neighborhood itself is charming and interesting. So a short-attention-span geek like me can derive endless entertainment from checking out what everybody has done with their garden or cottage, which antique shops are selling which gewgaws, what wacky crap is being sold by the 99 cent store, and on and on and on. And now that the temperature has finally dropped around here, it's actually comfortable to walk.

In fact, it's actually been raining off and on the past couple of days--and you thought that song was right about it never raining in southern California, huh? But I'm now so taken with my first few forays into walking, I'm strongly contemplating suiting up in raingear and going for a walk anyway. How's that for breathing a little new life into the exercise part of my program?

I'm doing the AIDS Walk--September 30th

Or at least I'll be doing as much of it as I can. AIDS Walk San Diego is another one of those fundraiser walk-a-thons -- funds from this one go directly to organizations providing essential support services to persons living with HIV/AIDS. As I've had my share of friends over the years who have died from or who are living with this disease, it's a cause near and dear to my heart. It's a 5K walk, and I'm not sure I'll make it much beyond the one-kilometer checkpoint, but hey, it's the thought that counts! Needless to say, I'd love to collect donations on behalf of my efforts for this cause -- so if the spirit moves you, click on this link and you'll be taken to my personal page on the San Diego AIDS Walk site. (And no, you don't have to be a San Diego resident to donate!)

Crunchy knee part deux: tempting fate

So one of my favorite local bands, Rockola, had a gig on Wednesday night, and of course I could not resist going to hear them and dance my ass off.

As I think I've noted previously in this blog, one of the greatest joys of my weight loss adventure is regaining sufficient mobility and endurance to return to some fraction of the dance-floor monster I used to be in my teens and twenties. However, while the mobility and endurance have improved, there's some damage to my joints that have not, so I have to be careful or my dance-floor abandon can come at a painful price. And here I was, just a day after a particularly nasty run-in with the damage to my left knee.

Thus it was with a little trepidation that I headed on over to the club and hit the dance floor. But with a little care--making sure I wore my good supportive dance shoes, choosing to dance on the carpeted area next to the dance floor, rather than on the wood dance floor itself which always grabs my rubber soles putting hazardous torque on the knee joints--I was able to party on down for a goodly part of the evening with no apparent negative repercussions. Even today, two days after, I seem to have escaped reinjuring the knee.

Heh, now that I've typed this, just watch--I may have invoked the Fate Goddess to bitch-slap me for hubris! But ... well ... so far, so good ... I'll keep y'all posted if my knee does decide to go south again, but right now the cartilage crunchies seem to be in remission. And I had fun, and got in a huge slug of exercise too. So--yay!

Weekly weigh-in -- plus: crunchy knee! OW!

First, the numbers:

• Today's weight: 215.0 lb
• Change since last week: -1.5 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 119.0 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -1.89

In the past week I've been once again trying to re-dedicate myself to the exercise part of my program. Mainly I've been concentrating on getting some walking in wherever and whenever I can, which has mostly been going excellently.

However, the importance of wearing the right footwear for even this casual effort was underlined today, when I chose to wear my cute little black leather clogs instead of my properly padded New Balance walking shoes. The clogs are supposed to be ergonomic too, but apparently not enough so, because after an afternoon browsing in a local 99 cent store and other errands, I came home just in time to have my left knee go out on me in a particularly painful fashion.

Usually when that knee bugs out, it's the meniscus tear--whatever little torn flap of cartilage is going on in there gets folded the wrong way, catching in the joint so that I can't fully straighten it. But this time the knee did its rarer and more painful bug-out mode, in which the knee cap somehow slides a little bit in the wrong direction, and suddenly there's vicious shooting pain between it and whatever bit of bone/tendon/stuff it's rubbing against.

Fortunately I was able to crawl into a nice hot bath, and eventually persuaded the kneecap to get back in its correct place and quit banging up against whatever. But before I got the kneecap to behave itself ... ow, did that ever hurt.

So ... yep, I should know better. And every time one of these little incidents happen, it's powerful negative reinforcement against the next time I'm tempted to wear the cute shoes instead of the super-comfy ones. Apparently, though, I'm a slow learner on this lesson, because I keep on coming back for yet another round of negative reinforcement. Oh well. I'm sure that, when I get tired of torturing myself that way, I'll stop making that mistake.

Weekly weigh-in -- wow, that's a lotta water!

Okay, first weigh-in since my fainting drama of last week:

• Today's weight: 242.5 lb
• Change since last weigh-in: +6.0 lb (!)
• Cumulative weight loss: 91.5 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -2.18 lb

Assuming all of those six pounds represents water weight I put back on since going off my blood pressure meds, all I can say is: holy crap! No wonder I keeled over from dehydration!

Needless to say, I don't feel bad about putting back those six pounds--those are obviously six pounds worth of fluids my body desperately needed for proper functioning. I hate to think what other kinds of damage I could have possibly done to myself if I kept on being so severely dehydrated.

I continue to feel a tiny bit of edema-bloating happening in my feet and ankles at the very end of the day--like right now, for instance, at 10pm. Something I will continue to keep my eye on. On the other hand, ever since I went off my blood pressure meds, I have been feeling noticeably more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. At first I thought the meds might have been having some kind of psychoactive effect on me that was now removed ... and then it dawned on me: duh! I was probably faintly woozy from dehydration for weeks, without knowing it. Just add water and swoosh! Brain perks right back up.

Meanwhile, life--and the weight management effort--continue onward. I got the stitches removed from my upper lip this past Monday. On Tuesday I felt sufficiently rehydrated to try my first bout of relatively hard (for me) exercise since the fainting incident: 30 fairly strenuous minutes on the exercise bike. I felt perfectly fine afterwards, from a staying-conscious-and-not-passing-out standpoint. However, today, the ol' left knee is feeling angrified at me. Sigh. And so it goes--once again, gotta nurse the knee back to relative happiness, and remember for next time to take it easy with the bike.

Geez, it's always something with me, innit? Oh well ... onward and outward ...