Act two

For some years now, I've been aware of a growing fear of getting older. I realise that it's quite an embarrassingly ordinary fear, but I think I understand why it's there. I've felt for most of my life as if I had been interrupted, that the "natural" course of my life was derailed when I was fifteen and suddenly found myself alone in the world, a ward of the state. I was, simply, unable to recover anything resembling a normal life and ended up spending the next 17 years drifting rather aimlessly, occupied, mainly, with just trying to figure out how to survive, how to live in a world that had suddenly become unutterably hostile, cold and dangerous, and what I was supposed to do next.

The feeling of being unsafe, of having no one to turn to and having to struggle just to survive, perhaps greatly exacerbated by living in one of the most notoriously difficult places in the world, has become habitual after many years of constant use. After I left home, I simply never felt safe, and though it is objectively not true, that feeling of nameless dread has stayed with me, and contributed mightily to my ongoing struggle with clinical depression and anxiety.

I also think that the presumption of being perpetually in danger, apart from believing I was essentially alone, was also a product of my time. I grew up in a time when we were told every day by the nearly hysterical leftists who ruled the culture in that part of the world, that any given 15-minute period could be our last. I have written about this before several times, but I think it is greatly underestimated how much psychological damage it did to the children of that period to be raised with this terrifying, nihilistic outlook. We were being told this by all the adults in our lives, by teachers, movies, television news reports and in many cases by our parents and their whole social milleu. In other words, by every authority figure we knew. But because we were children, we had no perspective.

We simply took it as the truth that the world was liable to come to an end at any moment, a prospect precisely calculated to undercut any feeling of security our parents might have otherwise been able to give us. To this day, I still have terrifying nightmares about natural catastrophes, nuclear wars and unspecified world-shattering cataclysms. (It's funny that my favourite genre of films is disaster movies). I think this fear is going to remain with me for the rest of my life, in one form or another. If you grow up fearful, which we all did, you will remain fearful, but neurotically, without a real cause.

Before leaving home, I had been quite sheltered, and though we were more or less at the bottom of the economic classes, I was never worried about it, or even noticed it much. I was always too busy in my own little world of books and beach exploration. But, although she was brilliant, and she did manage to keep us above water one way or another, my mother also never really learned how to thrive in the world. She had managed to survive, but it always felt as if she was barely hanging on, always on the edge of some kind of irrecoverable disaster, which I'm certain is how she felt about it. She also left home very young, at 18, and also really never managed to pick herself up again. Certainly financial stability and security was something that she was totally incapable of creating, so it was a skill she couldn't pass on to me.

I know now, however, with the front, rational, thinky part of my brain, that most of my fears are ungrounded. However close it feels, the time in my life of floundering helplessly around, of being terrified at the appearance of every electricity bill, of having to look for a new "shared accom" in the newspaper every eight months, is long gone for me. The objective fact is that I've managed somehow to learn how to run my life perfectly adequately. I've held the same job (or variations on the same job) for 13 years and have no fear of losing it. And if the outfit folded tomorrow, which it certainly isn't going to do, I get offers quite regularly which I've turned down because I like my life the way it is.

I have a nice flat, and nice things in it, nice friends, nice hobbies and even a few nice hats. I've even managed to keep the same cat alive for five years. Indeed, I've managed to keep myself alive, despite having had a cancer diagnosis in a weird and often frightening foreign country. Looked at objectively, I'm doing fine, and have learned to handle crises and difficulties pretty well, and a great deal better than my mother ever did. I'm never going to be rich, but mostly because it seems like too much effort for too little return. Trying to get "rich" seems a little pointless when you already have most of what you want in life.

But whatever my level of acquired material competence, it will never offset the deep and undisturbed layer of anxiety my life was founded on and most of which is unconscious. And that tangled mass of fear is inextricably caught up with the thought that my life went the wrong way 31 years ago and can now never be recovered. The things that were supposed to happen, the things I think of, rightly or not, as "normal" will never happen. I will never be able to turn it around and get things back to the way they were supposed to be. The result of my parents rejecting me, and leaving me to raise myself, has been that I will forever believe I have done it wrong and irreparably damaged myself. And that whatever I accomplish now in any field, it will still necessarily be the wrong things. I doubt I will ever be able to shake the feeling that I am living a kind of consolation prize life.

And of course, this feeling is cemented stronger and stronger with every year that passes. There was still, somewhere lurking in the shadowy regions of my half-conscious mind, the idea that I could still, somehow, turn things around, fix the mistakes, and make things go the way they were supposed to. The fear of getting older is less about wrinkles and white hair (which I think will look pretty good, actually) and more about those doors closing forever behind me, shutting off the way back home, and I will be lost out here alone in the awful wasteland of the world forever. I told someone recently that the one thing I've wanted that I can't ever have is simply to go home.

Everyone has their own struggle, and this is mine. Of course, the thing to ask is what are you doing to fight these unreal things? A person consciously dedicated to The Real cannot allow such a destructive Fantasy to undermine that dedication. I think that sorting out what is Real and what is Fantasy, is the basis of the psychotherapeutic technique called Cognitive Therapy. You have learned a set of habitual beliefs, thoughts that come so automatically that you can't distinguish them from reality, but which tell you things about yourself and your life that are simply untrue. To force these thoughts into your conscious mind, to bring them into the light of scrutiny, is the work of the therapy. When you semi-consciously think, "Everything's a disaster" you have to bring that thought into the open and challenge it consciously, don't let the whispers and insinuations continue to dominate the discussion. Respond clearly, "OK, exactly how is it a disaster?"

Coincidentally, it is also the basis for spiritual growth, according to all the great spiritual writers. Being crippled and paralysed by unnamed existential terrors is exactly the state of mind in which sin comes to look like a sensible option, a solution to problems. So a great deal of the work of the spiritual life is learning to be totally dedicated to what is objectively Real, and rejecting Fantasy. It makes sense, of course, that spiritual wellbeing and psychological health would come about the same way, and be achievable solely through a total, radical dedication to Truth at any cost.

All this is why I like this website. It is clear proof that the things I think, the frightening semi-conscious beliefs about how life goes, are just untrue. It is simply untrue that the "natural course" of things is to have your life stagnate and deteriorate after 45, whatever the anti-culture tells us. It's not even true that there is a logical, natural progression to life, that one figures out what to do by one's mid-20s and then gets on with doing it in an orderly way from then on. Life is simply never that tidy. Things happen, often out of any logical sequence. And here's a little secret that I'm just beginning to understand; life gets easier and less frightening as you get older. You get happier, you get less self-critical, you get more relaxed and less critical of others. You just plain get happier.

The cancer thing shook me badly, and the treatment, particularly the surgery, hit me like an asteroid right in the middle of those fears. It seemed as if it was the slamming of every door to happiness, the closing off of my future and any chance of happiness. The day I went in, I experienced an agonising moment of panic in the hospital when I very nearly packed up and went home, declaring that I didn't want the life I would be left with after the surgery. I didn't want to be the person it would force me to be. These were thoughts that might seem irrational from the outside, but had been stamped into my mind from an early age. It was, in truth, a confrontation between two totally opposed and irreconcilable worldviews, the one I had been raised with, and the one I had consciously adopted. One that said that some kinds of life aren't worth living and that we can decide which, and the other that says life is always its own end. And now I understand that these two systems of thought are at war, and always will be. (Well, I've always known that I was in a constant internal struggle, at war, but now I can pinpoint exactly what the war is about.)

It's notable that it wasn't thoughts of my own life or possible future that held me to the course. It wasn't even thoughts of God and His preferences; such things are too remote for me. It was the thought of my friends and what they needed from me, what I owed them. I can't put this down to any virtue of my own. It was not a religious decision that made me go forward, nor courage. Just the knowledge, that I could not deny, that there are people in the world who love me. Vicky was with me that day, and I found I couldn't abandon her.

I have a lot of sympathy for the people who have been frightened into supporting the euthanasia movement, something that is very popular among the aging Boomer generation, particularly in Britain. I understand that they have learned that life is supposed to go in a particular way, and that if it does not, that life itself is un-acceptable, literally, and that they have never had any other way of thinking proposed to them. In fact, the "pro-life" way of thought is so different from the way the world thinks that unless one is raised in it from early childhood, it will be constantly at war in each of us. We aren't used to thinking correctly about The Real, and making decisions based on our dedication to it. But that dedication is the only way out of the wasteland.



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Nungazing

Though for some time now even the tiniest flicker of desire to be a nun has entirely vanished, and it no longer gives me The Sigh (some of you ladies will know whereof I speak) I still like to nungaze on occasion. (I would like to say for the record that I invented the term nungazing, which I have noted has gone around the Cathosphere for a while now thanks to Kat's having adopted it from my old nun-posts...without ever the least nod of attribution I might add.)

I don't really understand what happened to my nun desires. I remember them quite clearly, and know that I first decided I wanted to be a nun, contemplative if you please, by the time I was eight. I pursued it semi-seriously in my 20s and more seriously in my 30s and then one day, it just stopped. Like someone shut off an invisible switch.

They took a blow, along with nearly every aspect of my religious inclinations, when John Muggeridge died. I spent about three months not caring about anything after that. More or less just lying face down on the floor not eating and focusing on breathing as shallowly as possible. I got up later and started living again (since there didn't seem to be any alternative) but since then - and I realised with a start the other day that it has been seven years! - I have struggled to find any joy or enthusiasm or even interest in religion. Having had a good deal of time to think about things recently, it's clear that the succession of events, a lot of which I've not written about publicly, has really knocked the stuffing out of my "faith life". (Good grief! how I loathe frivolous God-talk!)

Oddly enough, living in Italy has significantly reduced my day to day involvement with the Faith. One would think that proximity to the Pope and all those incorrupt saints lying around in their baroque Snow White coffins would be sort of inspirational. But things have happened, let's just say.

Cancer treatment left me largely housebound and these days the trip into the City is hugely troublesome. A day in town must be paid for with two days in bed, and the rest of the week exhausted and draggy. I had a burst of energetic going-into-the-City in the spring when drawing classes started again in April and a kind donor gave me a huge whack of money to pay for nearly full time lessons for the spring session. But it was clearly way more than I was ready for because by the end of May I was so exhausted I could hardly move or think straight. I guess there's only so much I can force my poor old battered body to do.

Yesterday was a holy day of O. in Italy, as well as a national holiday and the start of Ferragosto, and it was impressive how many of the Italians observed the obligation. But my immobility combined with the insufferable, suffocating hot weather made going into town out of the question, as it has for several months, and the only thing going in S. Mar. of course, is the NO. There's a little chapel around the corner where they have Sunday and Festa Masses that only rarely employ bongos. Yesterday, and I assume througout the summer, they take the Mass outdoors instead of making us sit in the tiny chapel, putting plastic lawn chairs out on the bocce green next door. It wasn't unpleasant, (except for the rasping, off-key, caterwauling female "cantor" whose enthusiasm for singing directly into the microphone did nothing to encourage more than a little thin warbling from the congregation).

But I'll be perfectly honest: it was the first time I've been to Mass in several weeks and it did exactly nothing for me, except to make me more cranky and out of sorts. For the last year, I have been more or less dispensed from the Sunday Mass obligation and it has done nothing to encourage or bolster my flagging enthusiasm. I dutifully played the part at Gardone, but peer pressure is a poor substitute for genuine devotion, and it's only too easy to look pious.

But I've not given up. I don't really know why a thing that has been so integral, so much at the core of my identity, has suddenly fled but recently I've learned to roll with the punches and be patient. Things develop and often take time. Healing takes time, no matter how imperiously one commands one's brain and body to obey. It seems that I am the only person (apart from Christopher) over whom my bossy mind-powers have no effect.

I think I'm thinking about it more because someone I know has decided to go all the way and join the Carmelites, and it has opened the door to some rather dusty old mental and emotional closets. I think I have an idea what is going to happen to her inside. The World and its doings are going to become increasingly distant and irrelevant. I've experienced this just on the few short visits to monasteries. I recall that it was a bit of a job getting the old brain back into the business of caring about politics and All That after coming out. The world inside a monastery is a different sort of place. I suspect that it is more like the way God sees the world.

I find myself equal parts annoyed with K's decision and more lonely at the thought of it. (Yes, yes, I realise that I am supposed to be happy for her, but it's like using phrases like "faith life" and signing emails with "in Christ"...fine if you can fake it, I suppose.) It is acting like a dredge at the bottom of a very old river and bringing things up that I would rather allow to continue to rust away.

Now and then I test the old nun-obsession by doing a little nungazing of my own and it's always the same. Nothing. It's just not there, that old thrill.

John and I used now and then to spend an evening in his sitting room or in the little library downstairs. I would read aloud to him for a bit and we would sometimes say the Rosary together. I don't ever remember being happier than these little moments. But now when I think about them, all it does is hurt. And it's the same with most of the happy things in my past. My worst dreams are always the ones where I revisit my grandparents' house Up Island, that blissful little pocket of glowing childhood happiness and security. Those are the worst nightmares I experience, and the agony of waking up from them and finding myself back in the here and now is even worse than finding myself back there again. I always know when I'm feeling domestically insecure: I dream that I'm back there and wake up crying.

One thing I've learned is that we don't really ever "get over" pain and loss. We just learn to live with it. Or maybe it's just me.

Maybe that's a hint as to why my brain can't stand to think about God n' Religion any more: it seems like happiness that I can't ever have, like finding the Door to Narnia, and having it be locked. It's probably why nungazing now only makes me faintly sad. I think I have convinced myself at least that having had cancer, and having been cut apart to stop it, hasn't meant the end of meaningful life. But things are certainly vastly different now than they were before diagnosis, and before coming here, and before leaving Canada and the Oratorian Empire. In some ways better: I'm less fearful, less intimidatable, but also less able to be happy. My capacity for joy seems to have diminished. And I miss Cheshire.

We'll have to see what happens next, I suppose; I'm placing a lot of hope in art and in Seeing More of Italy in the coming months of chemo-free goodness. My hair has started growing at something approaching its previous rate (still weirdly curly though) so maybe my capacities will start expanding a bit soon.

Anyway, all this ramble was precipitated by a photo and a news story about the SSPX Dominican nuns of Wanganui, New Zealand. The rumour is that the Vatican Cong. of Religious has approved someone transferring from a NO convent into theirs. If true, this would be quite a good sign. And it reminded me of the hour or so I spent looking all over their website and daydreaming about them. For a short time, it was fun to imagine that I could retire there and teach drawing and painting in their little school. I could wear tweed skirts and twin sets and invite the girls to tea and teach them to make Victoria Sponge cake and drive the nuns to their doctor's appointments and things. It was a peaceful hour and felt sort of almost like the old twinge.

I suppose I've been sharing too much again. Sorry.



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How sugar makes you fat

The mechanisms may be a little obscure yet, but there are some researchers who have figured out quite a lot of the process. The evidence is saying more and more that it is the habit of eating sugar, and the consequent constantly high levels of insulin, that is making everyone fat. The "no grains" thing comes in when you learn that foods made with grains get converted very efficiently into sugar in your blood, which you don't use and that then gets stored as fat.


This series is rather poorly paced, but it does give the basics. The guy is Dr. Robert Lustig whose work is a bit "controversial," but no more than the whole idea that you should entirely cut out processed sugar and pre-processed foods in general. I'm not a scientist, but I have stopped eating sugar (mostly) and I can tell you it has made a huge difference in my recovery and general health.

I think the most horrible part is the fatty liver disease part. Not only does sugar it make you fat, it turns your liver into fois gras.

I've been using the basic nutrition template found on the "Primal" diet websites, like Mark Sisson's (He's also on the sidebar). These seem complex, and there are lots of debates in the "primal community" over this or that food, and I've been doing some research. But the basic thing is really easy: cut out sugar and grains. That's it. Don't eat sweet stuff, and don't eat things made from flour. So I eat a whole lot of fruit (because it's Italy and it's wonderful), veg, meat, chicken, fish and dairy. The debates rage all over the net about which combinations of things to eat, which specific foods within these categories are better or worse, about cutting out dairy and eating too much fruit. But the rock bottom basic thing is still: no sugar, no grains. If you do that, you're doing it.

No matter what I did, I have never really lost very much weight. Fortunately, I've never had a very bad diet and have mostly avoided pre-processed foods most of my life. So I've never been really fat and probably never will be. Therefore, I've never really needed to loose a whole lot of weight. Before the diagnosis just over a year ago, I had already started cutting back on sugar and grain-oriented food and had gone down a bit. But I was in my forties, and I was slowly, year after year, creeping up and getting more and more rounded. I wasn't obese, but I was certainly larger than was comfortable and a lot larger than I liked.

Cancer sort of interrupted everything, but I've taken advantage of the weight loss and decided to keep going in a serious way with improving my diet. And everything I've read, everything, has told me that sugar more than anything else is the biggest factor in poor overall health and weight gain.

In March, I purged my kitchen, getting rid not only of sweet things like jam and Nutella, but all processed foods. Which meant all packaged soups, boxes of juice, condiments with HFCS or sugar in the label, anything at all that came with an ingredients list that included sugar, and honestly, that was nearly all of it. I have kept a little German mustard and a bottle of ketchup which I use to flavour some sauces and soups and my precious tub of Thai green curry paste. Yesterday I finally gave in and tossed my equally precious jar of hoisin sauce (sigh).

The one thing I'm really flopping on is honey, but I think I can live with that. In addition, I got rid of anything made with flour or grains. All bread, pasta, cereal, cookies, crackers or biscuits. Any baked goods. (And corn is not a vegetable. It's a grain. Corn is the seeds of a grass plant. Don't eat it or anything made from it.) I guzzle yogurt so much I've started making it myself. And any "diet" that involves me eating as much whipped cream and strawberries as I want is the diet for me!

Not having the stuff in the house has made all the difference in the world. It's no problem giving it a pass at the grocery store and I do most of my grazing when I'm at home working, and only having fresh food in the house to graze on has meant that there just isn't anything here to be "tempted" by. Now my pattern is to eat fruit and home-made Greek yogurt in the morning with tea, a lunch of meat and salad or veg, and "dinner" is usually a little salad or home made soup. My sleep is still pretty wacky and I'm often up in the wee hours of the mornings, and then the snacking kicks in, but if there's only fruit, cheese, olives, yogurt and left-over chicken, it's hard for that to be a big problem.

Likely because the surgery has made a lot of very large metabolic changes, I'm not (yet) really losing weight the way other people do when they eat like this. But I have no problem with this. I went down about 6 kilos (13 pounds) since this time last year. At Gardone I probably went up a bit (haven't checked), because the meals were all set for us, even though they were very good about substituting when asked, and I decided to have a gelato-oriented holiday. But again, not really bothered by this. I'm back to my normal eating now, and I know that I won't gain significantly. I've got a pretty good handle on how my body will react to things, and have more or less figured out how to manage it, when to say no and when it's OK to go easy. When I found out that people who have had (H-word) gain an average of 25 to 40 pounds in the first year (!!!), I remember that it's been seven months now and I'm actually losing weight a little bit, so I figure I'm winning.

Now, truthfully, I've had a pretty bad slump since the end of June. Just exhausted, and can hardly move or stay awake. But I think I simply overdid it. I had consciously given myself until April 9th to recover, and wasn't going to spend one more minute waiting. Art classes started then and I was going and that was that. I was feeling so much better, so I did the thing I always do and jumped up and ran off into full time life, going into the City five or six days a week, running about doing things, taking classes and working and even going to Pilates classes twice a week. I was able to keep it up for about six weeks, and then just fell flat on my face and stayed there.

Since then, I've just been very very tired and struggling with what were undoubtedly sleep-related problems with depression. The other day, I went into the City for Mass and then after the lunch went over to the Forum to do some drawing (someone's paying me!!) and stood there like an idiot in the blazing hot sun. Unsurprisingly, this totally did me in and I've spent the rest of the week paying for it.


But these systemic things, like chronic fatigue and insomnia, are just going to have to work themselves out over time. The good news is that I can work, almost as much as I did before, and I can go to the beach, see my friends and look after my house and Winnie, so it doesn't seem to matter too much that I sleep a lot more than before.

This morning, I made my little trip round to see the doctor and he says I'm doing remarkably well. I'm still about 2 months ahead of the normal, expected recovery time, and he agreed that cutting out sugar has probably had a lot to do with that. The Italian doctor is always very sanguine. Mostly he tells me not to worry, that I'm doing fine. Relax, have a holiday, go swimming more often... It's very Italian.

He's suggested that I try getting super-B-Complex vitamin shots to help speed up recovery of the nerve damage. As soon as I can find someone to help with calling the undoubtedly Italian-only phone number, I'll get that sorted. I've got to go have those endocrine system blood tests, which I put off because of Gardone, and after that we'll be able to tell for sure what my blood sugar and insulin, leptin and other hormone levels are, and whether I'm insulin-resistant, or what.

But it's been a fascinating experiment. Of course, it's impossible to tell how I would have responded if I had just carried on eating as I did before - you can't really do a proper experiment without a control - but I think the experience of other people is a good place to compare and if so, I'm way ahead. Way.

Stop eating sugar. Really. Everything will work a whole lot better.



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Exercise

OK, I'm obviously turning into one of those obnoxious Modern People. I started Pilates today *, with a class at a nice place in Rome that doesn't charge the earth, is friendly, clean, modern and seems to be populated entirely with other women and gay men. I did two classes today, in fact, which may not have been the brightest move. Nonetheless, I was so enthused that having done so surprisingly well at the Machines class, (it's weird, bear with me) I thought I'd just dive in and try the mat exercises ... at which I did somewhat less well. (It was pretty comical, actually, I kept falling off the foam tube thing. But everyone else seemed to manage it, so I figure better balance will come in time.)

And truthfully, though I spent the morning doing more exercise than I've done in at least ten years, I don't hurt, haven't had the expected collapse or nap attack and actually feel better. A little achey in the leg where I stretched some of the tendons and muscles that were damaged by surgery, but nothing terrible. And I was able to come home and do my work, which is a huge bonus. A big problem has been that I've got to do two things a day, class and work, and have sufficient energy really only for one, and class comes earlier in the day, which means my work has been suffering, and I've been fighting exhaustion. What I most hope to start with is that energy will increase, and the permanent state of exhaustion will begin to recede.

And most of all, I really, REALLY enjoyed it. Way more than I was expecting. It has been about 20 years since I've done any serious exercise programme, since the end of my fencing period. When I was fencing regularly, about three times a week, I was also doing strength training and fencing-specific exercises to hone my form, speed and precision. I was 24 and I was bullet-proof, baby.

I've never forgotten that wonderful feeling of being completely inside my skin, totally in control of every movement. It was like being a superhero, and I really missed it. I dabbled a little in Vancouver with various martial arts, taking a Wushu class here and an Aikido class there, a Crane Karate class over there, but nothing stuck, and I let the whole thing lapse in the last ten years. I've missed it, and today, though I was obviously the slowest one in the class, I felt it again. I could be bullet-proof again. It's thrilling.

The health kick is probably a very good reaction to the Stuff that's been going on, and probably the best thing I could be doing right now, for a lot of reasons. But the cancer treatment, and its potentially devastating aftermath has, frankly, scared the crap out of me. Just the fact that I even had cancer still scares the crap out of me. And the medical facts are still a horror. Statistics are a bitch. After [H-word] I can expect a lot of very unpleasant things to happen, up to and including the generally shortened life-expectancy. Osteoporosis, recurrence, huge and hideous weight gain, sudden and irreversible increase in all physical aspects of aging, all the horrors of menopause, times ten, because it is surgically-induced and premature, sudden onset and dramatically increased.
 
Since The Surgery, I've been resting and reading, and waiting for the time to start working and coming back to life, testing to see how much I could do, precisely how much energy each of my activities takes, how much I could handle, and how much pain and exhaustion each of them would cost. I've actually been keeping a diary of sorts, to try to get a concrete idea of how much life I can live. And reading a lot to see what I could do to expand the life and minimise the cost.

I knew I had to do something about my poor beleaguered body. It's been a bit knocked about lately, and the news about what happens to you after all the stuff I've had really wasn't making me happy. The average poundage put on by women who have had [H-word] is 25 to FORTY!! Gahhh!! As if my self image hasn't taken enough of a hammering lately. Now I'm going to turn into a giant wobbly blob of hideous goo. With brittle bones.

Bloody hell! Bugger that. I've been reading about this stuff, and the basic rules still apply no matter what sort of hideous mutilating and castration you've been put through. It's the physics of the body: base metabolic rate + exercise = the number of calories you can take in per day without getting gooey and horrible. Increase either or both, and drop the caloric intake, and you win. It's just that [H-word] drops your metabolic rate, and the "average" woman is pretty sedentary. So, the first thing to do was to get the hell of that sofa. Which started pretty well on April 9th, the day I started going back to Andrea's art classes. This meant, between walking to and from the train, and to and from the station in Rome, about an hour of walking a day, five days a week, which seems to have been a good thing to start with.

I've been doing minute calculations for a few weeks, tracking the stuff I habitually eat, knocking some off the list and cutting back on other things (who knew a handful of hazelnuts would have the nutritional equivalent of a whole meal?), and as I've mentioned previously, totally cutting out processed white sugar, and nearly all grains. (Though I totally caved the other night at the Avengers, with a giant bucket of popcorn and a packet or so of peanut M&Ms and some gummy worms - but how often do I go to the movies?)

A bunch of other things, like not getting enough sleep, also slow down your metabolism, so I've started being really strict about bed time - no later than ten - and  almost all of these are more or less common sense. And yes, I've put on 3 kilos since my immediate post-surgery low of 74 kilos in March. At that size, I looked pretty good, though the surgery had made me kind of weirdly shaped, and I'm not interested in getting to be a skinny little thing. (Went there once, and it was... bad.) It just can't be that hard to maintain it.

And everything I've read about Pilates is that if you are relying on it alone to lose weight,  it won't necessarily outstrip the calories you eat. But it significantly alters your body's appearance, shifting things around, building muscle mass, and strengthening and lengthening your muscles.  It redistributes your muscles and fat, making you look better, even if you don't actually get smaller. And today, I certainly did feel my heart rate increasing, so it's got to be good for something at least.

The other [H-word] thing is osteoporosis, and I've been reading about that too, and fluctuating wildly between hysterical bouts of horrified, mindless panic and despair, (Oh, Hi Depression, nice to see you again...) and determination that IT FRACKING WELL WON'T HAPPEN TO ME. Apparently, exercise is, again, part of the solution. In the case of osteo, it's weight-bearing resistance and high-impact, basically weight training and jumping, dropping on your feet. I was surprised to see, however, that all the studies - I don't read stupid "support" websites, I read peer review journal articles - say that even a teeny bit of high-impact exercise per day will really do a lot towards staving it off. I was surprised at how little it takes. That and the HRT I'm on which is supposed to be very good for preventing bone loss.

Overall, I think it is just impossible for eating more green vegetables, fruit and high-protein food, ditching sugar and grains, combined with a bunch of exercise, to go wrong.

I just hope I don't bore you all to death talking about it incessantly.



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* For which I wore trousers in public. First time since 1998!