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October, 2017
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Vital Vitamins
Vitamins and pills (source: Pixabay)
One of the things I’m trying to do right now is to get control of my health. I want to get to a place where I can feel comfortable in my own skin. I’ll never be back to “svelte” but I want to get back to some facsimile of healthy. One factor that touches all aspects of health is diet. That brings us to the question of vitamins.
I have a kind of love-hate relationship with vitamins. On the one hand, I understand that the nutrients we consume are vital to overall health. On the other, it is super easy to get caught up in the numbers game where vitamins are concerned. Did I get enough of this vitamin today? Do I need to bump that one up, just a little bit? If I eat, say, spanakopita to bump up my iron, do I then move my fat intake too far in the other direction?
There are plenty of people out there, too, who want to “help” you to manage that process. There are services, apps, “communities” you can join. Some people find them helpful. My use of quotes here probably shows that I am not among them. I think most people who have any kind of obsessive disorder in their psyche will find those tools to be more harmful than helpful.
(I’m more grateful than I can express to the doctor who pointed that out to me. She freed me from searching for yet another service that wouldn’t work, and showed me why it wasn’t helping.)
Anyway, vitamin supplements sound like a great idea, don’t they? I took vitamins from the time I was a little kid. They were just a basic part of preventative medicine. Too bad studies don’t support the idea of multivitamins preventing much.
The best way for us to get the vitamins, minerals, and nutrients we need is from food. Our bodies just don’t absorb supplements taken in pill form as well as they do vitamins taken from the foods we eat. The issue comes when our diets become somewhat deficient.
That’s not necessarily a criticism. People whose diets lack one particular nutrient, or even several, aren’t lazy or stubborn. Some of them may be chowing down on fast food a lot of the time, but it’s not for you or me to judge them for it. When I was working two jobs and still barely scraping by, fast food was something I could eat while going from one job to the next. You do what you can with what you have.
And there are other people who wind up having trouble getting the nutrients they need for other reasons. All kinds of people have to cut some things out of their diets, for a variety of reasons. One of my closest friends developed a meat allergy as an adult – yes, it’s related to that tick disease – and now finds herself deficient in several nutrients. She has to supplement. I developed a dairy allergy at some point along the way. Yeah, I should be supplementing.
I just don’t like meat. Does this mean I should choke it down and call it a virtue? No. I can supplement.
Many Western people believe chugging back vitamin supplements will somehow cure all of our ills and prevent a host of diseases as we age. That isn’t proven by science. Eating a balanced diet and living a healthy lifestyle can mitigate some risks. Taking supplements can help fill in gaps, but it can’t substitute for eating moderately, in balance.
I do take a B-complex supplement, when I remember to do so. I’m not sure it helps with anything, but it makes me feel like it does. There have been studies that cite its efficacy with ADD and anxiety, although that’s still kind of inconclusive. I’m willing to try it, since my diet could be better and I feel like my symptoms are better when I take it.
I’m about to start taking an omega-3 supplement too. Vegan sources exist for this important nutrient, and honestly, I feel better when I’m consuming them.
Hopefully, making changes to my diet will help me get the vitamins I need to get back to health.
Traveling Fit
I’ve been
Big scary plane
traveling while trying to get in shape, and I’m not convinced this was the best plan. On the one hand, it’s good to keep the body active and moving while traveling, right? On the other hand, starting up a fitness regimen the same week that I go to a work conference is probably not going to work out well for me.
Today was the last day of the conference. In fact, I’m sitting around, killing time and waiting to catch a flight that’s already been delayed once. It’s as good a time as any to check in and report on my progress.
I’m pleased to report that I did make it to the gym. I’m less pleased to report that I made it to the gym exactly once. I felt weird going down to the gym in my workout gear. Also, people gave me some very odd looks as I got onto the workout bike with my Texas-sized self.
This is a large part of the reason I stopped going to the gym at home, actually. People didn’t want to use workout equipment near a fat person, and they let me know it. I don’t know if they thought I was contagious or what, but I guess that’s a post for another day.
Anyway, I still packed gym clothes for the trip, and I used them, so I’ll count that as a win. I also made a concerted effort to eat better while I was traveling. Those results were more mixed.
I didn’t have a car, or a kitchen. Control over my dining options was limited. The hotel did have a pub, and that pub did have a salad I enjoyed. I ate that salad, sometimes accompanied by a beer cheese soup, for at least one meal per day. Sometimes I ate it for two meals per day. And I didn’t feel particularly hungry, either, which is good.
At home, though, I eat a mostly vegetarian diet. Here, that would have eliminated almost all of my protein options. I also don’t cope with dairy well, but ate the beer cheese soup every day to get some protein.
At home, I drink my coffee blacker than a Goth girl’s wardrobe. Here, the only coffee option was Starbucks. They do offer plain coffee, but I’m pretty sure they filter their coffee through used gym socks. A person pretty much has to get a Froofy Coffee Drink ™, which means I wound up consuming a lot more sugar than I’m used to. Fortunately, they offer almond milk as an alternative to dairy in most of their Froofy Coffee Drinks ™.
Sleep was a little bit of an issue here, although I think I got more sleep here than I do at home. I needed more sleep here than I do at home. Being around so many people, and being part of the attraction instead of being a guest, was difficult for someone with my level of anxiety. That took a lot out of me. Still, I was able to make sure I got more than six hours of sleep every night.
Of course, the whole sleep schedule didn’t take into account traveling here, or traveling home. I didn’t sleep the night before I got here, and I’m not likely to sleep on the way home. I think Monday’s going to be pretty useless, but we’ll see.
Either way, I love traveling. I’m looking forward to my next trip, when my fitness routine will be more established. I’m going to try very hard not to judge myself too harshly no matter what my results are from this week, and I’ll look forward to being better able to focus next week.
Let’s Talk About Sleep
Can we talk for a minute about sleep?
Kitten sleeping
So, sleep is something we all need. There are some folks who may need less sleep, but the human body needs sleep to survive. Personally, I suffer from chronic insomnia. I’m in treatment for it, and that treatment helps. Make no mistake, though – I need every bit of that treatment, from CBT to medication, to make sure I get what I need.
Why is that important?
The name of this blog is Former Fit. That’s because I was formerly fit, and now I’m not. (I just had a terrible moment where I tried to put on a brand new dress and failed. That’s a post for a different day.)
Every time I’ve gained weight, every single time, I gained during a time when I wasn’t able to get the sleep I needed. That’s not a coincidence.
There are other factors at play. I have a thyroid condition. There are some genetic issues involved. I have some injuries that stop me from exercising in ways I enjoy. But the severe weight gain has all come at times when sleep stayed as far out of my reach as a Yeti.
I’m working on that. Like I mentioned, I’ve been in treatment for my chronic insomnia. I’ve also been making an effort to get to bed at a reasonable hour. My smartphone has a “go to bed” function, which chases me to bed seven hours before I hav
e to get up.
Here’s the problem, and I’m sure you have the same problem. We all have a lot of life to get in the way of our goals, right? We have homes to maintain. And we have jobs. If we work from home, the line between work and home becomes blurred more often than we’d like. I work from home more often than not, and it’s hard to turn it off and go do things around the house.
When home is your workspace, it’s hard not to feel like you should be working when you’re at home, right?
And when you’ve got a big deadline breathing down your neck, it’s all too easy to say, “Okay, just this once, I’ll push it out and stay up a little bit later.”
I find I have to do that all the time. And I can pull it out when I have to. After all, isn’t honoring my commitments more important than sticking to a sleep regimen?
The thing is, sleep is kind of a foundation for health, for all of our health. Without it, we don’t heal. So I’m making more of an effort to get the sleep I need. And I hope you will too!
On The Bike
I’m not a big fan of the exercise bike.
I’ve had one for years. I’ve spent hours on it, and I’ve let it sit in the corner collecting dust for months at a time. I used to like riding a bike around my hometown, or in my old town where I had a relatively safe bike path. Riding indoors, and staying in one place, just feels like a sad metaphor for suburban life.
Bikes, without dust
I could probably ride around here, but to say it’s a little risky would be like calling a giant pool of gas a little flammable. I’m not quite ready to lie down in the cold cold ground yet, so my options are limited. As we lurch toward winter, they get even more limited, and so the bike becomes a necessity.
It smirks smugly at me from the corner of my workspace right now, just over my left shoulder.
The good thing about my exercise bike is that I can set limits. I can set the machine to run for half an hour, and after half an hour it will stop doing its thing.
The bike has been in dust collection mode for a while. This is probably not the best time for me to dust it off. I’m heading off to a conference later this week, which is going to wreak havoc on my schedule (and my resolutions.)
The thing is, something always comes up during the week. I’ve usually got three to four different projects going on at the same time. At least one of them is usually dangerously close to deadline. There is always something more important, something that needs more attention.
Let’s ignore the scare tactics around cardiovascular effects for a minute. There are other factors that play into cardiovascular disease, like your genes, and plenty of very active people wind up with heart attacks and strokes.
I have ADD. According to every piece of research I’ve managed to find, exercise is crucial to managing attention deficit disorder. It helps to even out the hormones and neurochemicals that keep us from focusing.
Because of the endorphins released by exercise, a workout can also help to alleviate depression and anxiety. These are both issues that I deal with. These are both issues that affect my work.
And finally, exercise at the right time of day can help people with chronic insomnia alleviate their symptoms. Insomnia is an issue I’ve lived with for most of my adult life. Disrupted or absent sleep has been present every time my weight has shot up.
Sure there’s always some pressing issue that’s screaming for my attention. Sure, it feels almost selfish or self-absorbed to block out half an hour to do something that focuses entirely on me, and not on work or family or something profitable.
Can I really afford to skip that bike ride?