6 posts tagged “diet”
and it's not my fault, i promise. this year is turning out to be a year of firsts - in february i experienced my first faint, and now i get to experience my first concussion - woo! um. so how did i gain this premiere concussion, you ask? well, i was so engrossed in my book (o'reilly's rather helpful adding ajax, since you're so very interested) that i kind of didn't notice we were at earl's court station until the doors were about to close, so i bolted for the door, hesitated a second to make sure the doors weren't about to close *on* me; they weren't, so i hopped out onto the platform where i was promptly cannoned into by a fellow commuter who seemed to come out of nowhere at immense speed (but apparently, i was told later, was bolting from the train that had just come in on the other side of the platform). his (presumably very heavy and hard, judging by the bruise it left above my knee) bag whacked into my left leg, unbalancing me and sending me spinning off down the platform. i realised i was going to topple over and there was basically nothing much i could do about it; then i realised i was about to topple over towards the train, which is never going to be a healthy thing to do, but i managed to spin myself a bit more before heading for the pavement. i don't *think* i actually hit my head on anything, but there is a small blank space between the point where the other guy ran into me and realising i was about to fall over, so it's possible i did hit something, but anyway. (in defence of the guy who ran into me, i do dimly recall hearing an "oh sorry!" as i went spinning off, but as the doors were on the verge of closing, he wouldn't have been able to get out by the time i went down, even if he wanted to). fellow travellers flocked to my side and then vanished again just as quickly when i said i was ok and it was obvious i could stand. i was, however, feeling terribly confused and disorientated and more than a litlte queasy. but i got over to the other platform and managed to get on the ealing broadway train alright, meandered vaguely down the hill and home safely where i spent the evening on the couch not really doing anything other than ordering three (yes, three) cookbooks on amazon.
fast forward to thursday morning and i arise, limping, with an enormous bruise above my left knee and the poor wrenched muscles in my left leg and arm all protesting against any sort of movement. i managed to get breakfast and lunch all ready and staggered into work. needless to say i was not quite as effective as i would usually be, so come early lunchtime, i took myself and my confusion off to the nhs walk-in centre down the road from the office (noting, with a little concern, on crossing the road that i couldn't really tell which cars were moving towards me and which were stationary) where the nurse told me that i seemed to be concussed and i should go home. so home i have been ever since. improving now, thank heavens, but still a little confused in the head and unbalanced when moving around.
i know i haven't really been writing much lately. the first six weeks of the new nutritionist-imposed regime turned out to be very hard work indeed, and the last few weeks (covering Easter and my cakeless birthday) even more so. so i was disinclined to talk about it much cos it just made things worse. i am now in phase two, though, and doing pretty well (although, after a pretty much blemish-free record over the first six weeks, i have now blotted my copybook with a few small easter eggs during this concussion incident). phase two is much the same as phase one, except that i am now allowed some protein at lunchtimes which makes a *huge* difference in dealing with my dodgy blood-sugar levels. i am being encouraged to try to cook more pulses though, which i'm trying very hard with (hence one of the books i ordered - cooking without which apparently has some good recipes for pulses in it) but nothing changes the fact that a dinner without meat just doesn't make me feel fed. full, yes; fed, no. i am such a carnivore. so far i haven't really seen any change at all in my energy levels, which is disappointing and i suspect may mean that wheat isn't the answer - so yay! toast! but then raises the question again of what *is* causing it? however, i have scored big-time with the weight-loss, which was a goal of the whole enterprise but actually a less important one because i figured if i could deal with the energy levels then i wouldn't always be snacking to keep awake which would be bound to help with the porkines. but i have made real progress - from 79.1kg when i started about 7 weeks ago, i am now down to 74.1, just 0.1kg off my second weight goal. i have gone from a well-filled size 18 down to a 16-needing-a-belt and can now do up (and in some cases actually wear in public) all of my size 14 trousers from a couple of years ago. all of which i find quite amazing, and certainly very encouraging. especially in the light of my attempt at the csiro diet which it seems is just not right for someone of my metabolic and blood sugar peculiarities and under which i struggled to lose even 2 kilos over about 3 months (and then promptly stacked on 4 kilos or so as soon as i started work). so i'm very pleased with this progress.
some interesting things we've discovered:
- soy disagrees with me. it makes me feel slightly queasy and makes my skin break out
- i really really really need protein at lunchtime and preferably at breakfast too
- it is possible to have too much salmon
- watercress is horrific, but baby spinach rocks
oh god, it's true. i've been in denial for years - oh i liked my salt - a little vegemite here, a bit of extra soy sauce there, a packet of salt and vinegar crisps a little more often than strictly necessary (yes, they are necessary) - but it seems it has all snowballed into A Problem. i am therefore declaring myself an addict, and at the decree of my nutritionist (who i should say right now before i start fully on the deprivation diet to be described below, is lovely and charming and a good listener and has a sense of humour and all those sorts of things you want someone who is telling you you can't eat the things you love to be) i am having to Cut It Out.
i guess i should have suspected something when i found myself reacting to the smaller quantity of salt in uk butter by buttering my bread and then sprinkling salt upon the butter, but alas no. and now i have to reduce and reduce and reduce to basically nothing at all. the first morning of the new regime, i used half the amount of salt i usually would in my porridge and nearly cried. fortunately the organic oat milk i bought to try seems pretty good and after skim milk i don't really feel like i'm missing out on the milk score.
so, the deprivation diet. the following have been decreed as the plan for the next six weeks:
- no wheat
- no dairy
- need to switch from sugar to a natural low-gi sweetener and no more than 1 tsp of said sweetener (agave syrup) per day
- *sob*
- no red meat - poultry three times a week; otherwise fish, tofu etc.
- increase bitter green vegetables - watercress, spinach and rocket have been mentioned in dispatches, all of which i dislike fairly intensely - watercress to the extent that after trying it again, it has now been banned from the house. thank god baby spinach leaves are acceptable
anyway, finding little strategies to get by. My mornings are perked up with heart-shaped lemon juice ice cubes (I have to have lemon juice in hot water with my breakfast - apparently it's very cleansing for the liver):
why'd he have to go and write such thoroughly addictive books? i sailed through northern lights then absolutely had to go and get the subtle knife on thursday so i didn't have to stop, and now i've just about finished that so i have to go back to the library today to get the amber spyglass. grr. i'll be through that too in a few days, i guess, but that's the end of the trilogy so there won't be any more. damn. and then i can't let myself start another book until i head to paris next wednesday. but i have a good book lined up for that - the last book of philip reeve's 'hungry cities chronicles', a darkling plain. hopefully that will last me a full week. it's quite thick...
i guess i should report on the other book i've been working my way through which is julia cameron's walking in this world. i found the first couple of chapters very overwritten and quite fluffy (although still with a couple of useful points, but her editor really should have slashed and burned, especially with the extended metaphors) but the third and fourth chapters are much more controlled, and i'm finding it useful. yes, she reiterates quite a bit from the artist's way, but in a way that's also kind of what i needed - a reminder in a different form, and there are new points made too, so overall i think it's doing me good.
the diet is getting me down a bit - having a hell of a time trying to shift any of the weight (not helped by offputting exercise weather - wet, grey and damn chilly out there) and while on wednesday i was back down to 76.9 (where i was the first sunday before i started to go up again) by yesterday i hadn't shifted so much as a 100th of a kilo. nicht so gut. but i'm persevering, and today i realised that all the times i've ever managed significant weight loss have been when i've been travelling - so basically i need to be walking 5-8 hours every day and eating bugger-all. this isn't exactly a practical long-term plan, though, so i'm going to try to go out on a reasonably long walk each week, and i have hatched a plan for djeli and i to walk across luxembourg one weekend (although a luxembourger friend says this only takes half a day, so perhaps we need to walk across, have lunch, go back, and then the next day traverse it top to bottom and back again!). today i am going to brave the weather and walk from knightsbridge to victoria which will get me to the library for my pullman fix.
*sigh* well it seems that my slow metabolism is doing for me yet again in the diet stakes. i started off well enough - went from 78kg to 76.9 the first week of the new diet, but now i'm back up again to 77.3. on the plus side (hah. no pun intended), i'm less than the 77.8 i was on wednesday (largely, i suspect, because i haven't always been eating complete meals, for one reason or another).
this is actually a fairly standard result for me - because my metabolism isn't normal, if i eat the same amount of food as a normal person i put on weight, so under normal conditions, diets start out well for a week, or even a month if it's extreme (e.g. when i had to cut out all fat from my diet when i had gallstones and dropped a dress size in a month but lost pretty much nothing after that), but sooner or later it all stops working and the pounds start to pile on again. so a little disappointed, but djelibeybi at least is making amazing progress - he's lost 3.5kg in two weeks which is great.
i think the solution for me is to shrink the portion sizes, while keeping the proportions of carbohydrates, protein and so on intact. i don't think i need to worry about veg because i should eat more veg anyway (not hugely fond of the stuff) and have been having trouble getting through all the salad i'm supposed to eat on this, so forcing myself to eat a little more veg-stuff than is comfortable should be a good thing.
interesting discovery of the week: wednesday night's cajun fish fillets revealed that i react pretty seriously to cumin. which, combined with coriander disagreeing with me, has just wiped out every indian dish in the plan, and explains why i've never been able to handle eating indian food. nice to have a name for the culprit!
it might take a while to work out the exact quantities i should be eating, but at least i'm seeing an improvement in my digestive problems, a huge reduction in sugar crashes (thanks to matching up carbohydrates with proteins, i haven't had a single crash in two weeks - previously i was having to deal with this on average two or three times a day) and generally feeling healthier, if not thinner. so now i just need to maintain the proportions while eating less food. wish me luck!
as of yesterday, djeli and i have embarked upon our new-improved-us programme. we've started in on the csiro total wellbeing diet (for those of you who don't know, the csiro is australia's national scientific research organisation) and so far, so extremely funky - beef provencal casserole for dinner last night, roast capsicum and tomato soup today (quite easy to make, although roasting the capsicum and then trying to get it out of its skin was a bit of a pain) with a toasted ham sandwich, and a chicken stirfry tonight, just to give you a small sample of the food we're eating. all homemade and so far everything delicious. even the soup. even though i don't actually much care for either capsicums or tomatoes. odd. i'm modifying my diet from the csiro's plan slightly because of health issues (mentioned in the previous post. i won't go into them again here) which, according to my new book, seems to mostly consist of following the csiro diet, but making sure i get little protein-filled snacks throughout the day, and to avoid eating carbohydrates without following them with a protein - so i had bacon and an egg this morning with my wholewheat toast, and mid-morning a banana followed by a handful of nuts, and will correspondingly reduce the amount of chicken i eat tonight to balance things out. so far i'm feeling pretty good. generally not hungry and haven't had a sugar crash at all in the three days since i started matching up proteins with my carbs, which for me is amazing, considering i've been used to having at least 3 crashes a day. digestively things have improved too, but we shall wait and see.
and just to ensure i am completely accountable with this stuff, i have started off weighing 78kg (i should be 55 or so for my height). my first goal (heh. i accidentally typed 'goat' there first) is to see if i can balance out my digestive issues and kill the sugar crashes. then to get myself back to 74kg which is where i was when i got to australia 2 months ago. then 70kg, then 65kg, then 60kg. if i can get myself down to less than 60kg (which is what i weighed when i left school) i will have a party and undo all the good i have done. or maybe just serve everyone bowls of bran :-)
heh. and just as i get home, vox posts a new sydney cityscape banner :-) so i'm just going to use it for a few days, i think. will replace the now-very-out-of-date easter eggs anyway.
yes, i'm home. as of 5am today, i am safely back in london at last. it feels a bit weird to have cupboards and my own kitchen and stereo and stuff about and to actually not have to go anywhere, and very little i really have to do. very very weird. but hopefully by tomorrow i'll be a little acclimatised.
i'm going to try not to rabbit on too much today, but so much stuff has accumulated in my brain over the last seven weeks or so, and feeling so jetlagged that it may be a hard ask. i humbly beg your forgiveness in advance.
to start with, i feel like the universe is giving me hints. big fat hints. big fat obvious wet-fish-slap-in-the-face hints. when i first quit my job, i had a nibble of a choral commission, which still may come through, but i haven't heard anything yet. while i was in sydney, a good friend of mine asked me to write something for the amateur choir she conducts. i wrote to the old girls' union at my school about their newsletter while in sydney, and got an email back including a suggestion that i might want to consider writing for an anniversary concert they're having next year (choir and/or orchestra). and now, coming home to find a file of spnm newnotes magazines, with their attendant flyers and composition opportunities, i discover that there's a juicy-sounding composition competition coming up, for - yup, that's right - SATB choir. so i think i'm meant to write choral music at the moment. which is fine and dandy by me. i've been feeling vocally inclined for a while now, between the satie song arrangement and the set of little walt whitman songs i've been working on, so might as well go the whole hog and work with SATB. so yay! direction!
which realisation has had me a little hyped up (well, as much as the jetlag will allow) to get back to sorting out my creativity stuff. i've done julia cameron's the artist's way a couple of times now, and it's been fabulous, but i'm still feeling a bit of a need for direction but it's too soon to read the same thing again, so while ordering another book from amazon this afternoon (more on that in the next paragraph, but it's medically related so feel free to skip that one), i made up the gap to get myself free shipping by ordering cameron's walking in this world as well. i've heard mixed things about this - some people saying it's great and a little more advanced than TAW, but others saying that she goes over a lot of the same ground. i think i'm not too concerned about the latter because she has a lot of useful ideas and approaches in TAW, and it's sometimes beneficial to run through ideas in different ways anyway, so i'll see how that goes. hopefully my new books will turn up at the end of the week.
the other book i ordered was because while i was in sydney, my doctor was finally able to diagnose the digestive problems i've been having which has set me off on an investigation of my assorted health issues in a quest to finally sort myself out and make life a little more enjoyable. at first she thought i might have some kind of bug we could kill, and i was most disappointed when she got my tests back and gave me a clean bill of health - no bugs to be found anywhere - grrr! but on the other hand, she was able to put a name to my problem - irritable bowel syndrome - and a bunch of reading has actually given me hope that i can really do something about this. seems it's not uncommon following gall-bladder removals as one's innards have no way of regulating the amount of bile floating about. so i have a couple of strategies for that, and we invested in both books of the csiro total wellbeing diet, which not only has had rave reviews from all sorts of people but came recommended by our doctor as a healthy and sustainable way to lose weight, lower cholesterol, etc. etc. (and the recipes look and sound - and by all reports are - delicious) and the second book i ordered today is about controlling the symptoms of polycystic ovary syndrome (another fun little health issue i have which mostly raises its head in the form of insulin resistance and a tendency to put on weight as soon as i look at anything that has a calorie) by diet. so i've got my reading cut out for me in the weeks ahead! i need to read all this stuff, digest (hah!) it and then come up with a plan based around the csiro diet which will keep the PCOS and IBS under control, allow me to lose a little weight, and keep my meals at least approximately in line with djeli's so that we're not having to cook six (or possibly nine - seems that small meals and lots of them may be the way to go for me) completely different meals every day.
</medical bit>
but it's marvellous to be home. i have no energy whatsoever at the moment, so just messing with some photos, ticking things off, deleting them or adding them to my to-do lists on rememberthemilk.com (which i am absolutely loving, i must say - it came in so very handy in our frantic last few days in sydney), catching up on a little tv and eating chocolate to try to avoid re-napping (i caught four hours earlier today during which djeli went up to the bank, came home, called the AA, changed the battery in the car, then drove to oxford and back to make sure it was ok - really need to not sleep again until it's properly night). tomorrow i think will be the time to clean off and reinstall the old vaio laptop in preparation for hooking up the 100-odd Gb of mp3s i ripped while in sydney. i'm fairly sure that if we counted individual discs, at least, i'd have ripped over 500 of the things. if i never look a ripping programme in the face again, it'll be too soon!
