mizducky's migrations: a weight management blog with attitude

Weekly weigh-in -- two steps forward...

The numbers:

• Today's weight: 238.0 lb
• Change since last week: +0.5 lb
• Cumulative weight change: -96.0 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -2.40 lb

Once again, I swear I was doing the same as the previous week when I had the 3.5 lb drop, including more exercise. As a matter of fact, you'll recall that I managed to overdo the stationary bike last week so that I screwed up my knee; I then went and compounded the problem by going to not one but two Halloween parties last Saturday night and dancing my butt off. And then, determined little exerciser that I'm trying to become, I went and used the stationary bike on Monday, even though I was feeling really achey.

And therein lies what I think is the cause of this week's uptick. Because all this overdoing turned me into a hurting unit on Sunday, I took a couple of Vicodin (I have a script for when I have joint pain that breaks through my usual daily dose of prescription NSAIDs). And as anyone who has messed with prescription opioid painkillers knows, they can be very constipating. I'll spare you the graphic details, but let's just say I was noticeably, erm, stopped up the beginning of this week, and it's taken until today to get things even sort of moving properly again.

In fact ... well, I have broken a solemn vow to myself and have been jumping on the borrowed bathroom scale rather too often, but it's turned out to be a good thing because I have seen for myself just how much my weight fluctuates on a daily basis, without any overeating involved. Something as minor as eating a bunch of salty pickles one evening can cause my weight to jump two or three pounds the next day, presumably due to water retention. And now there's this little Vicodin aftereffect, which at one point had kicked my weight up a good three or four pounds (heh ... for those readers who thought I might be "full of it" ... well, I guess I was!).

Now, I'm certainly not going to stop either eating pickles or properly treating post-exercise pain just because they cause my weight to temporarily fluctuate in this way--especially since, regardless of such fluctuations, my general weight trend remains downward at a reasonable pace. But it is nice to figure out what's probably causing these fluctuations, so that I know not to worry about them so much.

Still, it would be nice to at least not over-exercise to the point where I need the Vicodin. That stuff's addictive qualities actually scare me a little, plus the constipation thing really is no fun. So I try to avoid taking it unless I really feel like hell, and then only take the minimum dose. The point, though, is that I'll be making such decisions based on legitimate health considerations--not on whether it'll cause my weight to go up temporarily. That's just silly--specifically, a very silly example of "Magic Number on Scale" Madness.

Anyway, I'll be laying off the exercise bike for the next few days to give my joints a chance to simmer down some more ... and then I'll give it another go, at a slightly gentler pace. Pity that I seem to have missed my shot at outdoor swimming for the year; water exercise would definitely be much easier on my joints. But by the time I had finally worked up my nerve to climb into a bathing suit, I found myself nursing an abdominal incision, and by the time said incision healed up enough to be safe to immerse in a swimming pool, the Santa Anas shut off and the temperature dropped. Oh well ... I suppose I could always look into a Y membership or something. And there's always next year.

The duck vs. the machine, round 2

The good news: I've exercised three times this week--twice on the stationary bike, once in a chair aerobics class at the monthly follow-up meeting of my HMO weight management program.

The not so good news: even that modest amount of exercise seems to have pushed me into the realm of "overdoing it." I'm feeling very fatigued today, and my left knee, the more screwed-up one, is doing that unnerving clicking-sensation thing that indicates its little meniscus tear is getting irritated. And I definitely don't want it to get any more irritated--that inevitably leads to seriously nasty pain that forces me off my feet for a good couple of weeks or more until the meniscus simmers down again.

The still-encouraging news: even that modest amount of exercise seems to have been enough to boost my metabolism and get my weight loss out of its stall.

Preliminary conclusion: I'm gonna give my trick knee a break from the stationary bike over the weekend and/or until it quits doing its annoying little click/lock behavior. If it's still doing it come Monday, I'll switch to the treadmill instead--still aerobic, but no major knee-bending involved.

The interim bummer: Damn! I was wanting to go dance my ass off at a Halloween party or two this Saturday! Oh well ... maybe I'll try a dance or two and see how it goes. After all, it's not like I was planning on any pogoing or slam-dancing (heh).

Postscript: no emoticon graphics on Typepad ... I don't know if I'm disappointed or relieved. :-)

Weekly weigh-in -- that did the trick

Went in for my weekly weigh-in a little early as this week is going to be busy. The numbers:

• Today's weight: 237.5 lb
• Change since last weigh-in: -3.5 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 96.5 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -2.47 lb

It looks like the increase in my exercise activity has succeeded in breaking this latest little plateau I had been stuck on. Since I last posted, I have stationary-biked and treadmilled a second day (Friday), gotten in some strenuous (for me) walking (Saturday), and had a day that, while including no formal exercise, kept me going from dawn till dusk (Sunday). So I'm glad to see all of that did have some effect.

It seems my bod, like most people's, does need a few bouts of intense non-dawdling exercise to kick up its metabolism into a higher gear. Nice to know that it does have a measurable effect on me, at least for the time being.

I expect that sometime further on down the road, as my weight continues to decrease, I will again reach a point where the my levels of exercise/calorie expenditure and food intake/calorie intake are once again in equilibrium, and I'll have to ratchet the activity level up another peg or two to drop more weight. Assuming I'll need to. It may well happen, at one of these equilibrium points, that I'll declare myself content with that level of weight and health and proceed from there. After all, as I keep on reminding myself, this is not about a particular magic number on the scale; it's about functional measures of health such as ease of movement and general wellbeing.

The duck vs. the machine

Went down to the exercise room in my apartment complex for the first time since my hysterectomy surgery. Yay me! Did okay on the stationary bicycle--stuck it out pretty well through one of its 15-minute pre-programmed routines, albeit on the lowest resistance setting. Then I tried the treadmill for the first time ... and in ten minutes flat, even on the lowest setting, it had kicked my butt. Ah well. Gotta start somewhere.

Random stuff that's been turning me on recently

Too hot to think of grand all-encompassing rant topics, so here instead are a few bits and pieces that have been making me smile:

• Blueberries: I was shopping in my local Food-4-Less yesterday, and spotted blueberries at $2.49 for a full-pound plastic clamshell box. Usually it's something like $2.49 for a tiny half-pint container, so of course I had to buy the cheapo berries. I quickly remembered how much I adore these little balls of beauty--some were tart, and some were meltingly sweet, and all of them were totally yummy (note the use of the past tense there--between last night and this morning, I've basically inhaled them all already). Blueberries are also low in calories and packed with anti-oxidants, but the main thing is that they taste so goooooood.
• Fixing my pressure cooker: my housemate innocently ran my pressure cooker, lid and all, through the dishwasher. My concerns about this were proved when I next went to use it, and the damn thing wouldn't hold its pressure at all. Now I had carefully saved the instruction manual, but of course I saved it in some really safe place that I can no longer remember. A bit of traipsing around the web, though, finally revealed that one of the safety interlock thingies in the lid of my Manttra pressure cooker is designed to give out under overly high temperatures--like when the pressure in the cooker goes too high ... or when subjected to the super-hot water in a dishwasher. But all's well that ends well--the replacement part cost maybe four bucks with shipping, and Manttra got the part to me in three days. There was a certain amount of expletives involved in taking the lid's pressure-interlock mechanism apart, fiddling with all the fiddly bits, and putting it back together again. But I tested the cooker out, and voila! it works again! Housemate is now on alert not to put the cooker lid in the dishwasher, and I feel absurdly pleased with myself for my little bit of detective and fixit work.
• More personal dance therapy: I went to hear one of my friend's bands play this past Thursday night, and once again enjoyed another spate of free-form dancersize. This time I managed not to damage myself so much that I was hobbling around like an old lady the next day. But I did note that I really need to get myself some better dancing shoes. All my current footwear has really fierce non-slip soles, mainly because with my crappy joints I became really paranoid about slipping and falling and banging myself up even more. However, non-slip soles are definitely *not* what you want when trying to boogie on a good hardwood dance floor. In fact, a shoe that grips the floor is the worst thing in the world for putting unpleasant amounts of torque on one's knee joint while attempting to shake one's booty. So I am now forced--forced, mind you!--to go buy more shoes. I'm so heartbroken about this (insert glyph of maniacal laughter here).
• Speaking of being forced to buy more stuff for myself ... I've now not only lost enough weight that I really desperately needed to buy some new smaller clothes, but now some of this new smaller clothing is starting to fall off me too. I am trying my best to shop the sales and discount joints as much as possible, but I also want to honor my newer, smaller bod by not clothing it in crap. So I'm treating myself to a few nice (but still bargain) things. All I can say is, my church's rummage sale organizers are really gonna love me come October!

Here's a new concept: the exercise splurge

Over the past several years of grappling with the arthritis, gout, and resulting chronic fatigue, I often discovered myself struggling to maintain a precarious balance between just enough exertion vs. overdoing it.

This is a juggling act all too well known to anybody coping with a chronic but variable health condition. Some days there's just no getting around the fact that you feel like warmed-over crap, and between feeling physically icky and feeling depressed over the ickiness, all you want to do is just crawl back into bed and hope it all goes away. But then come the days when you wake up feeling mysteriously, miraculously good--and you're so overjoyed that you want to rush out and do all the things you used to do and feared you would never be able to do again. To the point that, the day after, you're back in physical agony, and even more depressed than before.

So then you try to rest up and recuperate the best you can, and the next time you have a really good day you cautiously go out and do just one or two things you hadn't been able to do in a long time. And either that's still too much, and you're back in the agony bed again, or it goes okay, so you try a few more things, and then a few more beyond that ... and then you rediscover the agony. Wash rinse repeat, over and over and over and over again.

Well, now I'm finding the cycle a little more complicated, but a whole lot more encouraging. My physical condition is definitely improving as I eat more healthily, remove more weight, and take more pressure off my long-suffering joints. So the temptation is huge to get overly enthused about this real improvement, and totally overshoot into overdoing-it land. And because my condition keeps changing, it's much harder to figure out where that fine line between doing and overdoing has strayed to at any given moment. Mind you, this all falls into the class of Problems You Like To Have -- as in, I much prefer being confused over an ever-improving capacity for exercise, to being confused (and demoralized) over an ever-worsening capacity. But it's still a challenge, and still requires a certain amount of cautious attention.

Well, this past Friday night I decided to throw caution to the wind, and the day after I definitely paid for it. But this time, for a change, I've decided that overdoing was actually a good thing rather than a bad thing. You see, I went to hear a friend's band perform Saturday night, and I actually got up to dance. And not just for one song either, but for a good five or six numbers.

Now this is significant because, for me, dancing to rock music is a whole lot more than just mere exercise, or a mere social activity. I am a member of one of those generations for whom rock music is a deeply meaningful thing, and dancing at rock shows akin to a full-body psycho-spiritual experience. Time was when I could stay on the dance floor seemingly for hours, dancing myself into a trance, to the point of having a something akin to a shamanic experience on the dancefloor. Dancing was also my personal liberation from others' narrowminded opinion of my physical appearance--it taught me to love and respect my body just as it was, at a time when my bod sure wasn't earning me a helluva lotta love or respect from my peers or my family. In other words, to paraphrase Lou Reed, from my teens onward my life was almost literally saved by rock'n'roll.

So when my physical condition first got bad enough that I could no longer dance with such abandon, or even dance at all, it was a real blow to me, a loss I grieved so deeply I was at a loss for how to make peace with it.

But now I feel my ability to dance slowly but surely coming back, and it's filling me with such excitement and hope that sometimes I can barely contain myself. So on Friday night, when my friend's band took the stage and began to rock out, a little voice in my head spoke up and said: "Fuck this caution shit--we gonna shake a little tail feather tonight! Damn the torpedos, full speed ahead!"

And the next morning--or rather, the next noontime--I came to and realized that, yep, that twang I felt in my left hip during my last dance of the previous evening had indeed morphed into a major owie. Oh yeah, and I had even succeeded in giving myself a wee bit of a hangover. But you know what? I wasn't depressed over any of this, even though I spent most of that day creeping around the apartment like a little old lady. Because--damn it, I'd had a wonderful time that night, and any discomfort I was feeling the day after was totally worth putting up with for the sake of having such a wonderful time.

Plus, because my general condition has been improving, I was actually 90% recovered after another 24 hours. Pre-health regimen, such overexertion might have put me out of action for the better part of a week.

And thus was born in my mind a new concept to add to my health regimen: that of the Pre-Planned Exercise Splurge. Like the Pre-Planned Dining Splurge, the Exercise Splurge is not to be indulged in too frequently, as the negative consequences will shortly start to outweigh its more positive features. But when judiciously scheduled, and accompanied by adjustments in the regular routine to compensate for their impact, both types of splurges provide a much-needed safety valve. There's only so long, after all, that one can maintain a tightly-controlled regimen before one has to do something with all those urges to be, well, unregimented, and it's much better to channel those urges into a short, well-planned "vacation" than to have them bust out in an unanticipated and potentially hazardous binge.

So--I'm very pleased with my first test-piloting of this new concept, not to mention my short recovery time, and I'm already looking forward to my next opportunity to shake it on the dance floor and commune with the Rock 'n' Roll Gods. This, after all, is part of what I'm really going through all this rigamaroll for--not to be perfect at negotiating the rigamarole, but to reclaim my physical liberation.

Exercise: these new-fangled bicycle thingies

So I've only been living in this new apartment complex since--what? mid-February? And I had yet to darken the door of the on-site exercise room, even though that was one of the features that made this place so attractive to me. Well, I finally got over whatever it was that was holding me back, and went down there. And I had a pretty decent workout--plus a little entertainment value too.

You see, this nice little room has a small but impressive collection of high-tech computerized exercise equipment, all of which will probably seem like old hat to health club regulars, but since I haven't darkened the door of any of those joints either in a very long time, it's all pretty new to me. There's a treadmill, a Stairmaster, an eliptical trainer, and two fancy-shmancy bicycles. I was glad to see the bikes were more of the recumbent style that I had used in physical therapy last summer. But those bikes in the PT department were simple mechanical models, without the whole dashboard control panel that these high-tech puppies sported.

It took me a good ten to fifteen minutes just to figure out that damn control panel. One could set a variety of resistance programs, supposedly optimized for fat-burning or maximum aerobic effect, and simulating courses of varying degrees of hilly-ness. One can also enter one's age, weight, target heart rate, and any number of other healthful bits of data, which the bike's silicon brain would then use to customize your exercise routine.

One could also get the thing to beep and flash at you like an enraged electric eel, which I managed to make it do several different times. All I could think of was the old "blinkenlights" warning posters that used to turn up in every computer room back in the old days when computers were room-sized collections of boxes covered with the flashy things. Nope, this bicycle definitely did not take kindly to my "gefingerpoken und mittengrabben" ... but then it was also marvelously inscrutable as to how to avoid riling it so.

Finally, however, I succeeded in entering some data that the poor confused thing could fathom, and we were off and pedaling. While one pedals, the control panel nicely displays a bar-chart representation of the course you're following, with the bars indicating relative amount of effort for each segment. This was all very nice, but I think they're missing a step here--if they got that little screen to run Ms. Pacman or something, I bet we'd lick the national lack-of-fitness problem in six months flat.

This exercise room also sports some more old-fashioned equipment: a set of free weights (left lying all over by some previous user) with an inclined bench, plus a variant of the old Universal Gym type pulleys-and-levers gizmo (a little dog-eared from long use). Oh yeah, and there's a pool table, plus a wall-mounted TV for your biking-and-videoing pleasure. And nice big picture windows looking out at the swimming pool (which I do intend to make use of also, once I finish getting over my fear of appearing in public in a bathing suit, however well-camoflaged by teeshirts and etc.)

My actual time spent doing uninterrupted pedaling (as opposed to stopping and starting to re-adjust seat positioning and fight with that damn control panel some more) was maybe only twenty minutes or so. But now that I've (mostly) cracked the code on that control panel, I hope to be making my subsequent rides more frequent--and more rewarding. The important thing was getting in that room in the first place. Knowing myself, now that I've gotten over that hurdle the rest will be a good bit easier.

Sneaking up on exercise: the farmer's market gambit

As frequent readers of this blog may recall, I have been working through numerous issues regarding exercise, such as chronic pain, past negative experiences, and more. But at this point one of my biggest blockers is just plain ol' motivation.

Especially on days when I wake up and find my body having one of its cranky days, when everything just feels all stiff and achey for no good reason except perhaps the weather or the phase of the moon or some other damn thing, the last thing I want to be doing is exercising. In fact, when such days come on strong it's hard to feel enthusiastic about any activity except turning over and going back to sleep--or at most creeping to the bath for a long, hopefully restorative soak.

I have come to accept--at least on an intellectual level--that exercising through such morning stiffness really does help. But tell that to my bod, my achey breaky bod (okay, you can all stop groaning now, you knew I was going to do that sooner or later). And the Marine bootcamp method of just dragging my own ass along kicking and screaming into exercising only does nasty things to my attitude. So, strong believer in positive reinforcement that I am, I have set my mind to thinking of some creative workarounds.

I arose yesterday to find my bod in an especially cranky state, and spent half the day just sitting with that, thinking "y'know, this really would feel better if I got up and moved about," but not finding the motivation to pull the trigger. And then it hit me: it was Wednesday afternoon, and one of the more entertaining farmer's markets in town happens on Wednesday afternoons--how about taking a walk over there? And suddenly, even though my body was no less cranky, I felt an energy and eagerness to get out and move which trumped all the crankiness. See? You really do catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

So I climbed in the car and drove out to the Ocean Beach Farmer's Market. OB, San Diego's hippie/beach-bum neighborhood, has long been one of my favorite places to hang out, and its main retail/hangout district along Newport Ave is made for walking, just four blocks long and crammed with fascinating shops selling everything from antiques to 1960s-style headshop fare. And on Wednesdays one central block, plus adjacent parking lots, is lined with booths selling produce, handicrafts, and other assorted stuff. Thanks to my handy-dandy disabled placard and early arrival I was able to snag a parking spot just half a block from the market site. I donned my trusty sunhat and shades, got on my feet, and set out.

Now I totally adore open-air markets--flea markets, farmer's markets, antique and art fairs, you name it. I don't even necessarily buy much of anything--I just like to poke about, and browse, and enjoy all the sights and sounds and characters. Sometimes I even get ideas for handicrafts and cooking projects of my own from checking out the vendors' wares. But especially now that I'm on this health regimen, farmers markets with their lovely locally-grown produce have a whole new appeal for me. Yesterday the produce vendors were especially rich in big beautiful strawberries, tomatoes, cucumbers, and avocados. There was one vendor who also had a tempting array of squash blossoms and baby squashes. I was loathe to weigh myself down with lots of purchases, both for my body's sake and that of my recently-filled fridge. But I did make an exception for some tiny but juicy blood oranges at a terrific price.

Mind you, I was not charging around the market at aerobic-level speeds. But I was slowly but surely getting around, which was a definite improvement upon sitting on my ass like I had been doing that morning. By the time my joints let me know it really was time to quit, I had made the equivalent of two complete circuits around the market; my little cheapo pedometer said I had covered just a hair under half a mile. Half a mile is pretty damn major in my exercise book at this point.

Now obviously, excursions like this are a whole lot easier to work into one's life when, like me, one is a telecommuting freelancer who has the flexibility to rearrange one's work hours as one sees fit. And not everybody has a handy farmer's market to slink off to. But I still think my general strategy of reframing of exercise into an attractive outing instead of an uninspiring chore has a lot to recommend it, for anyone else whose first reaction to the urge to exercise is to lay down and wait until the urge passes.

Weekly weigh in--the dreaded plateau!

Well, it had to happen sometime. I went to weigh in for my weekly weight-management group, and my weight was 300 pounds. Which was a moral victory last week, but ... not the number I was hoping to see this week. Alas, it appears I have hit that bane of all people intent on losing weight, the plateau.

A plateau is what happens when the body's metabolism notices that there's been a net deficit of calories over the past several weeks, and shifts into low gear to resist further weight loss so that the body's fat reserve lasts as long as possible. Now this is a brilliant mechanism for the body to have evolved in order to survive famines and such. However, when there is no famine but simply an attempt on your part to deliberately get rid of a major overage in the fat reserves, this brilliant mechanism turns into a royal pain in the butt.

Needless to say, this phenomenon has had a history of being vastly misunderstood by anyone who has never had to do any dieting themselves--including many doctors and nutritionists. But the phenomenon is annoyingly real, and knowing this can save one a great deal of angst and aggravation.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that I've plateaued, given that my weight loss last week was a bit lower than I had been seeing up to that point. And then there were all those food cravings dogging me in recent days. I now suspect that these were both signs that my metabolism was beginning to do the shift, both digging in its heels to stop the downward momentum, and upping the demand for high-calorie foods so that the organism (me) would get busy and find some food already.

Never fear, though. As understanding of this plateua business has grown, so has the list of strategies for breaking a plateau. Interestingly, cutting food intake is not necessarily one of them. Yeah, it is prudent to do an audit of one's eating to see if there have been a few too many liberties taken, or if one has unconsciously been getting a little wacky with the portion control. But if one's food had been totally compliant, cutting the food level even further can be counterproductive--because then your metabolism will think the famine's getting even worse out there and will try to slow down even more.

No, what you've got to do is get the metabolism kicked into high gear again, and this is where exercise can be the great equalizer. Especially weight training exercise. I mean, cardiovascular exercise is fine too, but there is now documented proof that increased muscle work and muscle mass raises the metabolic rate, because muscles suck up a lot of nutrients when they're working. Soooo... it looks like it might be time for me to pick up a pair of those cute little handweights and pump a little iron. (In addition to some aerobic work, especially now that my knee seems to be recovered).

Changing up one's food is also a recommended plateau-busting strategy. I was just saying, in my previous post, that I had gotten into a bit of a food rut and needed to perk things up with new stuff. So I'm going to go with that idea. I also now realize I've been getting a little lackadaisical with the many-small-meals strategy -- i.e. the business about eating several small meals a day boosts one's metabolism and results in more weight loss than eating the same quantity of food in just two or three larger meals. So I'll give that a whack too.

There are other strategies as well, but I think I'll just try those for now, and see if it helps. Meanwhile, I have fixed myself a dinner that is a veritable umami extravaganza, full of glutamate-rich mushrooms seasoned with soy sauce. And I'm remembering that, regardless of what the number on the scale sez, I'm already ahead of the game because I haven't strayed from healthy eating one iota.

Exercise Trumps Diet for Weight Loss

Link: Exercise Trumps Diet for Weight Loss.

"These findings were surprising to us as scientists," Cameron says. "We always assumed food intake was the main control of body weight and that dieting was the best way to control this. From these results, you are forced to think how active you are is more important than how much you eat."

"I don't think most people who try to diet will be surprised," Cameron says. "The body immediately tries to compensate for calories you are not taking in by dropping your metabolic rate and lowering your activity level. There was no way to get around the fact that activity matters a great deal. Altogether, our feeling is that activity is very, very important in controlling body weight."

Sigh. No, I'm not surprised. But while I'm glad they're finally doing studies to prove this stuff to themselves to their satisfaction, I can't help being rather peeved that the white-coat types are still surprised. Especially since I spent years trying to lose weight their way, and being shut down whenever I'd have the temerity to point out that it was not freakin' working.