Awesome 350 calorie lunch for your low cal Friday:

A friend has recommended this 5-2 thing. I think the hopes of me actually getting thinner are extremely... errr, thin. Most of the process of weight loss/gain has to do with hormones, and after All That, and particularly (h-word) my endocrine system is completely buggered up, even with the HRT drugs. But even without thinking about weight-loss, lowering caloric intake is a good idea, or so all the latest research shows.

Even if we're not eating badly, even if we're buying fresh from Whole Foods or the local farmers, eating too much is still pretty bad for us. That and sitting around. (My sedentary habits are really making me worry.) The idea that everyone needs 2000 cal/day is outdated, and is even possibly dangerous.

So, lately when I'm at home, I'm more or less just eating fish, poultry, fresh fruit and veg, nuts, cheese and yogurt, with lots of tea. Mostly one main meal a day and a little grazing for the rest. On Wed's and Fri's I drop down a bunch of calories. Doesn't seem to be hurting at all...

Prep time about 20 mins:

1 swordfish steak
1 cup oyster mushrooms
1 clove garlic
20g butter
pinch of salt

1 cup broccoletti, chopped
tsp chicken stock powder

Wash the broccoletti, pull off any yucky bits, chop off the tough ends of the stems, then chop into little bits, about an inch long. Into the pan with a cup or so water, tsp chicken stock powder. Cover with a tight fitting lid and let it simmer/steam over a lowish heat. (I did this the other day, but failed to wash the greens first, and got lovely crunchy grit in my teeth. So do the washing.)

Melt the butter in another pan and break up the mushrooms into bite size bits, toss on the warm butter and saute with the minced garlic over a low heat. When the mushrooms are starting to release their juice, throw in the fish, sprinkle with a wee bit of salt and cover the pan. Let it all cook for 10 mins.

Remove the mushrooms from the pan (don't over cook) and flip the fish and let it brown a bit for a minute or two. When the fish is done, take some of the chicken/broccoletti stock from the other pan and deglaze the fish and mushroom stuff.

Load it all onto a plate.

Eat.

~

People from the developed world really just eat too damn much food and sit too much and judging from the ever-increasing girth of most of the people you see around you, the 2000/day notion really does seem overly simplistic. Each person is different. With my buggered up system, even with the HRT, I've been getting along just dandy on about 1500/day, and I haven't lost any weight at all.

And I never buy bread or pasta or anything with sugar in it. I eat a little bread about once a week when I join the gang for our post-Mass lunch in the City, but that's only because the waiter brings it to you without you asking.

Having been largely off sugar for a few years now, I think we have seen that sensitivity rises. Judging from the awful reaction I had this week, I can't imagine what the heck was going on with me before I gave it up entirely. I cringe now to think how much sugar I consumed!

"But I get so hungry!" Cut out the carbs. The feeling of hunger is not your stomach being empty or your body craving nutrition. It's a hormonal signal your organs produce based on other hormonal signals. If you're eating too many complex carbs or sugar, it's getting turned into glucose in your blood and your liver and pancreas are working too hard and getting overloaded. Your body produces the "You're hungry!" signal in response to chemical changes in your bloodstream. If you eat too much of the stuff that triggers the system, you're going to get the signal when your body doesn't need food for fuel. So you're eating sugar or carbs that get turned rapidly into glucose, which triggers the hungry-hormone, which makes you eat more, and what you're probably eating more of is the same carbs and sugar stuff that started it, ad infinitum... oh wait, no. Ad obesitum, and diabetes, heart disease and cancer (yes, cancer).

All of which is the nutshell version of why the 1st worlders are fat. We eat nothing but processed food, all of which has sugar added. All. Sugar = hormone imbalance = obesity. And I'll say it again: there's sugar in damn near every single thing we eat that's processed or packaged. That means everything except for fresh food. Don't. Eat. Sugar.

And watch out for boredom eating. This is a big one for me. I work on the computer, so sitting and looking at the screen for long hours prompts me to want to stand up and walk around pretty often to clear my brain. Where do my feet have to go in the flat? Usually to the kitchen. I eat to take my mind off work and my eyes off the screen.

Working on it. Those nice nuns gave me a copy of the Farnborough Monastic Diurnal, so I'm thinking maybe I have somewhere else for my brain to go when it can't stand the screen any more. We'll see how it goes.



~

So, that's that...

Latest via email from the dottoressa:

Dear Hilary White,

the result of the biopsy that we did at Gemelli hospital was ok.
I will send it to you as soon as I can.

~

Free drugs!

Haha, no. Just advice. Sorry.

This is a note I just sent round to all my colleagues that I thought would be of benefit to the general public.

But first, I would like to tell the general reading public that the MRI scan showed no sign of cancer. C-free.

I still have to take it to the other doc and she will sit me down and tell me what's wrong with my nodes, but I'm going to bet that lack of exercise and too much sitting is a big part of it. Your lymph system doesn't have a heart to pump the stuff around, but uses your muscle movements. Well, the inguinal lymph nodes, the ones in your hippal region, respond well to lots of walking and moving, so it stands to reason that a lot of sitting and not moving is going to make them clog up. Especially after having a bunch of them removed from that area followed by a lot of down-sitting. So. There. That's good.

Here's the advice I got from the doc today who fixed my back.

Remember my sore back at the meeting in August? Well, it has been a chronic thing, happening with greater severity more times a year in the last few years and I've been getting treated for it with acupuncture. Today I hobbled back to the doc and he gave me a little lecture (in the nicest possible way) saying that it's the result of the way I work and it will only get worse if I don't fix that.

He asked, Do you work at a laptop on a desk or table? Yep. How long do you spend at the computer every day? About 6-10 hours. How long have you been doing it? About ten years. He said, yep, you're right on schedule. He told me that the laptop is the one invention that is destroying health more than any other thing except smoking.

He said that if I didn't change the way I work, I would eventually get to the point where the injury is permanent, and had to be treated with drugs and I'd be in pain all the time.

He told me what to do, and I thought I'd pass on the advice before LifeSite staff all turn in to hunchbacks. Cranky hunchbacks.

Ideally, standing to work is better than sitting. But if sitting, it should be either in one of those insanely expensive ergonomic chairs or on a stool that has no back rest which will force you to sit up with your spine straight.

Next, set up a work station where your computer screen is up at your eye level:

Sit facing forward with your bum on the edge of the seat and your back straight, feet flat on the floor. Lift your computer up on a box or a shelf so you are looking at your screen straight ahead without tilting your neck down. Even lift it up a little higher so your chin is tilting slightly upwards. This will force your whole posture to stop curling forward. Get a plug-in USB keyboard and mouse and work with them lower down so your elbows aren't bent more than 90 degrees. Ideally, get something to lift the back edge of the keyboard so it's not flat, like a book stand.

Also, he said to set a timer for 20 minutes and work in intervals and when the timer goes off, to get up and exercise. Touch your toes, then stand with your feet shoulder width apart and twist slowly to the right then back to the front then to the left, twice, then a lateral stretch with your right arm in a curve over your head then the other way. Do all these slowly, and only to the point where it starts to hurt a wee bit. No further. Stretching the hamstrings is also important, as is getting better muscle tone in your front, so curls and crunches and leg lifts. He said to do all this just a few repetitions at a time, several times a day.

Right now, I'm sitting at the table in a dining chair, and spending several hours a day curled up with my back and pelvis tilted to form a C shape and my legs curled up under me. He told me that this posture is going to wreck my back and if I kept it up, it would get to the point where it is impossible to fix and would be facing an uncomfortable old age of chronic pain.

The internet is mezmerising, literally. It's like a form of hypnosis, and I've been reading a lot of the studies of the various physical and other damage people do who use it a lot. I think all LSN employees qualify as people who use the internet "a lot". Everything I've read says that if you have to use the internet a great deal for work, a way to do it without ruining your brain is to do it in short intervals.

Setting a timer for 20 or 30 minutes and walking away from it for five, apparently does much to help the problem that everyone has of attention span and compulsive surfing. You know, I'm sure, what I mean; that thing where you get to the point where you can't read a whole article without flicking back and forth between tabs and YT videos and email. Far from slowing you down, it is being shown to improve productivity and concentration.

So, there you go. A bit of medical advice for free.


Here's the thing I subscribe to on YT with some of the back-strengthening exercises that Francesco the Friendly Pilates Guy recommended.



~

Many thanks

I would like to just send a quick update, and a note of thanks. I got a great response to my donation drive, and now have more than enough to cover all the immediate upcoming expenses plus have some in reserve should anything further unfold. Meantime, we still haven't moved any further forward.

Between wasting most of the week waiting to get the computer back, catching up on work time lost, and waiting for the $$s to clear from PayPal into the bank, (remembering of course that because of bank machine withdrawal limits, one can't take out the whole required amount in one day, but have to do it in batches over a few days...) there's been no way so far to make the trek into the City and across town to get the MRI results.

If the odyssey of the Apple Store was anything to go by, it's going to be a bit of a palaver (which is British Understatement for a "damned nightmare"). Meanwhile, the stress and worry seems to be catching up with me and my back, has remembered that I am Officially Old and has reacted by totally seizing up as of yesterday morning. I can hardly walk across the flat and have been hobbling around using an umbrella as a walking stick. Pathetic, I know, but amusing enough in its own way.

Fortunately, my doctor is also an accupuncturist and knows how to fix me, AND I now have enough dough to pay him for it. So, win! I'm also almost ready, after a week of taking some medication that I couldn't be bothered to identify, to go re-take the cellular test, which is scheduled for Friday. So, one way or another, all will be clarified by the end of the week.

Today I also found some drugs in the bottom of the pharmaceutical shoe box left over from the last time I buggered up my back in August and it worked well enough in clinical trials to get me to the supermercato and back today (with help from a friend) so I'm gonna give it a go tomorrow. I hate having to go into the City at the best of times, (gypsies, traffic, noise, morlocks, other people,) but it has to be done.

Life is just damn complicated and bloody inconvenient at times. I wish there were somewhere we could register formal complaints about it.

For some reason that I can't really figure out, however, I've stopped worrying about recurrence for the moment. Maybe all the other stuff, none of which really rose above the level of irritation and huge inconvenience, was sent by God to take my mind off things and give me stuff that I could actually deal with fairly competently.

Or maybe I've come to some kind of peace with things and just figure we'll burn that bridge when we get to it.

Who knows?

I've learned in the last few years that there is never any point in this country in hurrying. It doesn't accomplish anything except a peculiarly Anglo type of sputtering aggravation. Things happen here at their own pace. Fussing over it is like trying to shoo the tide back.



~

I won't say 'here we go again'...

Well, well, well... it's amazing the power a single email can have over one. The results from my latest every-three-months cellular test are ....

drumroll please...

inconclusive.

I got what I thought was the usual 'everything's fine, see you in three months' email this morning, but it said instead could I please come back next week. I have to admit that my calm is starting to be a little strained.

And the MRI scan results continue to sit patiently in the doctor's office for me to cobble the cash together to retrieve them.

I continue to receive smiling assurances from every doctor I talk to that it's "probably nothing serious" and each time it's sounding less and less convincing. I remember only too well how many times I was told two years ago that I would only need a little, bitty surgery and no chemo...

I can usually happily afford one or two doctor's appointments per month, but am now wildly exceeding my quota. And I could use a little help.

As you can see I've put the Paypal button back on the sidebar. I would be very grateful for any assistance. At the moment, I'm using the private system because...well, it works and is fast and efficient. And I've got to wait until January to renew my public insurance.

I'm not panicking yet. So don't any of you all neither.


* - *

UPDATE:


Aaaaand, of course, what would put the cap on the worst day of the year so far?

My computer deciding that perhaps today IS a good day to die, and doing the kamikaze off the wall at the train station to. the. ground.

Blammo!

I will now go home and pull the covers over my head instead of waiting for the piano to fall out of that cargo plane onto it.



~

My nodes hurt

I've got hurty, lumpy nodes.

Going to the doctor this afternoon to get an appointment made for an MRI. I told the nice lady doctor, "My nodes hurt". She ultrasounded them and said they're "inflamed" and that it's "probably not malignant" which really did nothing to reassure. Then she said that if it gets worse to email her.

Well, it got worse, it turns out you've got nodes in all sorts of interesting places, all of which hurt when they get "inflamed". It hurts to walk and swallow and all sorts of things.

Anyway she said, "Get an MRI". Which sounds to me like a Bad Thing. She said again on the phone later that she still didn't think it was THE Bad Thing, but I still needed an MRI.

We'll see. But I think I'm going to buy a packet of post-it notes to stick on all my stuff with my friends' names on them, just in case.

Anyway, going to see the other nice doctor today who said he can fix me up with an MRI in a private clinic.

We'll see.

I'm also broke, need a hair cut and have realised that I am living beyond my means, in practical terms. I'm simply paying too much rent and that's that. I can cover my monthly expenses, but never have a penny left every month, and I never "go shopping" or spend money frivolously, (except for the weekly Sunday lunch).

All of that last part is neither here nor there, except that it's making me cranky and out of sorts.

On the up-side, the nice Telecom Italia guy came round this morning and jiggled the cords on the modem, and announced that there's nothing wrong with either it or my computer. It's the cable, we figured out by process of illumination. So that's a relief. A cheap, easy fix.



~

Mystery solved

I hate to say it, but I took one look at this and thought, "Actually, I'd probably give it a shot".

I may have discovered the reason I can't seem to lose any weight.

That and the sitting-around-on-my-butt-all-the-time thing.

(Actually, mostly the second thing.)

I've more or less got through my horrible jet-lag sleep timetable screw-up problem, and my back seems finally to have recovered. So I've got no excuses left not to be at the gym every day.

Except... every day?! Srsly?

~ * ~

OK, I've got an embarrassing secret to admit: I like Chagall.

I know, I know, he's not with the realist programme, and I am betraying a modernist streak that most people would not really credit to me, but well, there you are. I look at his paintings and I see something Real. Frequently, it's something that I don't find in a lot of the new classical and contemporary realists doing the work now.



The floating wiggly people, the angels and purple chickens and dancing goats, the winged cows playing fiddles, the magic rabbis in snowy Russian villages... it all speaks to me about my inner symbolist dream world. Can't help it.


~

There is something wrong with my brain

Or, I could be a girl, I don't know which.

But whenever I watch this video, I usually cry when the elephant busts out of jail, goes home and finds his friends again.

I was first introduced to Coldplay by best-friend Vicky, my go-to girl for all things pop-culture, in the following conversation several years ago:

"That was nice, what band was it?"

"Coldplay".

"Ah, well, they're really good."

"Yes, they are. Quite good."

"Are they a local group?"

"No, I think they're British."

"Doing well? Are they popular?"

"They're the new U2."

"Oh, good for them."

Vicky taught me everything I know about being cool.

~ * ~

Apparently a few other people also like it. It's been viewed a simply amazing 222,411,796 times! Holy Cats! I guess they are doing well.

~ * ~

First day in nearly three weeks I can walk normally. The day after I arrived in Tranna, my back totally seized up and I spent the entire time walking like a penguin and yelping in agony if anyone touched me.

This is one problem I can't put down to old age. I did my back in the first time in the fifth grade playing floor hockey. (Yes, yes, go ahead with your Canadian jokes, I'll wait.) I was covering goal, and I thought the ball was going one way and it went the other. The top half of me went the first way and the bottom half followed the ball, and the rest of me landed face down on the floor screaming.

Months of physio made it better, but it's been touchy ever since. And unpredictable. I once got six weeks of agony for reaching down to the kitchen floor to pick up a plastic bag.

I got accupuncture in Tranna before facing the 9 hour overnight plane ride home, and it helped (that, and the codeine). But it's still been another few days to become fully functional.

The accupuncture guy said it was the abrupt transition from roasting hot Roman weather, to the ice-box air conditioning of the plane, then all the AC in Tranna: one minute in the cold and the next out in the heat again. He said that Chinese people come over to Canada from nice warm China and get all sorts of AC related injuries. Back and neck mostly. He said it'd start getting better as soon as I got back into the warm.

I've looked up exercises to do to strengthen my back, and the Francesco the Friendly Pilates Guy said to do them every day, but...well, it's me, so...

Anyway, If anyone has any suggestions I'm interested. (Anything but yoga. Don't hold with that New Age guff.)

Even when I'm not crippled, my lower back is always slightly sore, always stiff. It's always difficult to get moving. Loosens up once I'm on the go, but it's always a problem. Nothing worth wasting money at the doctor's for, but maybe there's something someone knows.



~

Coffee experiment

So, day two of the coffee/gym/metabolism experiment was a bit of a disappointment. I'm figuring out, I think, how to use this legal stimulant but I can see it's going to be tricky to balance everything.

Tired out from the Huge Gym Day on Fri, I didn't get nearly as crazy again yesterday and was pretty draggy most of the day. And that was with double the dose: I downed four... yes four ... double espressos through the course of the morning while puttering about the house, and it wasn't nearly the same. Got a bunch of housework done and later was still perked up enough to get on the bike and go pay the bills, but didn't make it over to the gym until 2:30 and discovered that, being Italian, the nice Gym Lady doesn't open in the afternoons on Saturdays. I wasn't disappointed, in fact, and was just as glad to go home again. Not a lot of energy left over by Saturday evening. Artificial stimulants, at least the legal kind, have limits, I guess.

I'm guessing that the explosion on Friday, and the 5.78 km power walk, increased weights etc, just made me more tired than usual and it's taking an extra day to recuperate. I'll go back tomorrow morning and see how I get on.

Also, have to remember to eat. The biggest factor in the equation in getting draggy was probably food. I forgot that one of the things caffeine does to you is suppress appetite. In fact, it gave me a kind of gloopy tummy; not sick exactly, just not interested in food. When I got back home on Friday, I just went to work as usual and felt fine. Just had cucumber salad and little gorgonzola on pomodorini for dinner.

On Friday morning I'd had protein, vitamin and iron-rich leftover Fegato alla Veneziana for breakfast, with a couple of peaches, and then poured in the coffee on top. Saturday morning, I was feeling gloopy, so just went with a little fruit, then forgot to eat anything at all for the rest of the day. By the time I'd got to the gym at 2:30 I was starting to get light headed when I stood up too quickly. So it shouldn't be surprising that I was feeling most of the day like I was wading through mud.

Sleeping was definitely interrupted. I was truly pooped by Friday night, but unsurprisingly had trouble sleeping. Last night, I had a work thing to finish which took till nearly one thirty, then couldn't sleep at all until nearly three.

Taking a control day today. Nothing but iced tea and fruit and yogurt after church, and am about to make some lunch and then might take a snooze. I'll try a little short dose of coffee again around five to perk up enough to go to the beach-o for a swim. That's about when Wicked Old Yellowface has eased off enough to make it safe to go out. Nothing like an evening snorkel to make you feel alive.

My friend who works in a fancy-schmancy Tea Shoppe in Vancouver tells me that the caffeine in tea and the caffeine in coffee are actually two different chemicals. Too much tea caffeine has always just made me jiggly and clumsy. Coffee caffeine makes me think I can RULE THE WORLD. So it'll be interesting to see what comes of this new thing.



~

Purple weights

Not me.

OK, so that's another 30 minutes of treadmill and 30 minutes of bike-machine, plus a bunch of weight lifting today. I got home, a little wobbly, and had a huge attack of "LIE DOWN AND GO TO SLEEP RIGHT THE HECK NOW!!" But it seems to be passing. I wonder if it's some kind of blood sugar thing. Or maybe the four cups of tea has just perked me up unnaturally.

So today, there I was, sitting in front of the same mirror as this guy sitting on another weight-lifting seat-chair thingy, and we were both doing the same things with our arms at the same time, and it was hilarious because there I was struggling with these little girly purple - yes, purple, - weightlets and I was all scrinchy-faced and huffy, and the guy was lifting 15 k in each hand. In real weight, that's like thirty freaking pounds! In each hand! He was, I hasten to add, also making the scrinchy-faces and huffy noises, but seemed to have a deal more justification.

Every time I go to the gym, the same thing happens, I get there and I'm all, Oooo, I'm at the gym! and I'm going to be the best looking old person in town! See, I figure it's a big accomplishment to have left the house while wearing clothes that aren't my pjs, and be going to an actual, real gym! And then I get on the treadmill and I'm doing the fast-walking and thinking, look how fast I'm walking! Gonna be Angelina any day now!

And then I notice that the treadmill and bike-machine setting is on 2 (and it goes to 25) and the "weights" are like the kind of weights you'd imagine Paris Hilton picking because they match her purple chihuahua, and I look down and that podgy jiggly gooey thing is still right the heck there in front of me...

Oddly, I actually really like it. They're very nice to you, and it's weirdly fun to concentrate on doing this purely physical thing that you know is good for you and is actually pretty hard to do. And, given what my brain has to pay attention to during working hours - the end of the world and whatnot - having to concentrate on the simplest thing, the immediate here and now ("Thirty more?! Seriously? You saw the scrinchy-faces for the first 15 right?") and beat each challenge each time, feels really great.\

And the place is quite the nicest one I've been to.

First, it's not in Rome, which means I can get there without having to get on a train for an hour and struggle with Rome (for those who've never been, getting around Rome is always a struggle; remember all those dreams you've had where you're desperately running towards or away from something and your legs won't move and it's like you're running through molasses, and you're completely surrounded by chaos and there are inexplicably thousands of shrieking lunatics all around you and you've got no pants on? Rome's like that...) which means I'll actually go to it. I signed up last year for a gym club/Pilates studio in Rome and it was pretty great, but was such a fight to get there I just gave up.

This place is brand new and in Santa Mar., which means I will actually turn up. And it's staffed basically by one person, the owner/ trainer and the Pilates guy who's just there for class time. She and Francesco the Friendly Pilates Guy do this thing of kind of diagnosing you to see what stuff you need to do, how fast and hard you have to do it, kind of where you are to start with, and they coach you through individually. Even in the Pilates class everyone does slightly different stuff at slightly different rates and with different intensity, according to what they need. So you don't have the feeling of being way wimpier than everyone else. You just toodle along at your own rate with a personalised programme.

And, being Italians, everyone there is very nice and friendly. And they're all quite curious about what a Canadese is doing there. I've given my "I've had cancer treatments and am recovering" spiel so many times in Italian now that I'm getting quite good at it. That and counting to twenty.

Anyway, at least I've been getting a Rosary in every day now. The treadmill is kind of boring, so it's good for the boringest prayer in the Catholic world. And you can offer up all the frustration and embarrassment and the non-Angelinaness of yourself at the end. It's just GOT to be worth something in Purgatory, right?



~

The mummy lives!

Well, here's the report on the experiment so far: that's more or less a month of Pilates and gym workouts, three or four times a week for an hour+ per time, and I'm happy to report that I'm feeling a lot better. I'm starting to get less stiff in general and more stretchy; my back doesn't hurt any more when I wake up. Today I wasn't tired at the end of the Pilates session and it's nearly eleven now and I'm not stiff or achey or tired. Stuff that wore me out and was really difficult or close to impossible is now too easy. So much so that I think I'm going to have to step it up a bit.

I was on the treadmill yesterday for 35 minutes, just walking but really fast, and on the recumbent "bike" for 20 minutes (9.5 km) plus did a bunch of weights and crunches and whatnot. It wore me out plenty, I won't lie, and when I got home, I was out like a light for 2 hours. But naptime ended naturally and was only two hours, not my usual disastrous four. And I was able to think clearly enough after to get some work done. And today I was fine. Perky, even after Pilates. Back for PE class tomorrow, so we'll see if it's any better.

One thing that's really obvious is a general improvement in strength and cardio endurance. I've been riding my bike around town a lot, at least 20 minutes a day most days, and simply, there are hills that I sail up now that I had to get off and push before. Biking is just plain easier and more fun, less work. I've been amazed that I can handle 35 minutes on the treadmill at 5.8 - 5.4 km/h without any trouble.

Something I noticed right away was that all this jumping around, while fun and good for me, just makes me sleeeeepy. Like I've been drugged. And it was coming in these weird attacks all of a sudden; I'd be home from the gym and putting groceries away or getting the tea on, and all of a sudden I'd have to just about crawl off to the nearest horizontal surface, as if someone had hit me with a dart. It was like that for the first couple of weeks after starting just the Pilates three times a week, and then got better. Then I started the extra PE class that is a lot harder and it started again. So I expect I'll adjust again, and maybe will see this effect each time I jump things up a notch. We'll see. And meantime, there ain't nothin wrong with naps.

Is it possible to come back to life, and get to a point where you're generally healthier and stronger than you were before All That? I don't know yet, but it's starting to look pretty hopeful. I haven't stepped on the scale again, and won't for a bit yet. I'm with you all, I don't think it matters very much. I'm quite interested in boosting metabolism, though, which takes a considerable amount of work.

I'm also getting pretty concerned about bone density which is something really affected a lot by both chemo and (h-word), so I'm looking now for a few videos of high impact aerobics. As far as I can tell, there isn't much that can be done for postmenopausal women, but what there is seems to be just a hell of a lot of exercise. Which is fine by me. The other thing is the drug I'm on, and will be on for years and years... basically for the rest of my life. Its main function is to help stave off osteo, but the exercise and green veg rule can't do any harm, I figure. I haven't been tested yet for bone density, but we've got to wait now until the end of the summer (medical things in Italy don't really happen much in summer). Which will give me enough time to see if the high impact thing can work.

I've also, finally, totally cut out sugar and grains. I was cheating regularly, with an ice cream here or there, a bit of bread with dinner in a restaurant and I was having a lot of honey. I've found a place that sells stevia and the only thing I use it for is my yogurt/cream/fruit/egg milkshake in the mornings. No more honey at all, and the big jar I bought over a month ago is still in the cupboard. I'm still guzzling fruit like it's going out of style, but I think it's OK as long as the exercise level stays the same or increases.

And every day, as I'm carrying my bike and a bunch of grocery bags up the stairs to my flat, I remember that two years ago, at the end of third chemo, I couldn't make it at all, and had to be carried myself. I couldn't walk around my apartment and had to have a chair in the bathroom to sit on while I brushed my teeth.

So, win.

"Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live:

And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the Lord.

_

CIPN

Chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy.

It's what I have. It started shortly after I came home from First Chemo and got so bad that I was unable to walk and had to be taken to emerge in Civitavecchia one day because I couldn't stop crying from the pain. It gives me a feeling in my fingers and feet like you get when you whack your funny bone. If I touched anything hard, like turning a key in a lock, opening a yogurt tub (those razor-sharp plastic tub edges!) doing up buttons or typing, would send firey little shocks of pain, like electricity, up my fingers. It made my coordination poor and I would often drop things and trip on things and I found I would make a lot more typos, and my typing speed slowed way down. I fell down some marble stairs once because I couldn't feel my feet. Sometimes the sudden unheralded lances of pain would just shoot up my legs and arms and I would fall. As it got worse, it felt like my hands and fingers were swelling up and burning, like the fingertips were going to explode. My skin got ultra-sensitive, so much that I couldn't stand to have the shower on me on full, and had to keep it down to a trickle.

It's nerve damage as the chemo drugs eat the cell structures that allow the nerves to grow. About 30% of chemo patients get it, and no one really knows why it happens and there is very little that can be done to treat it. With most people, it gets better by itself, but very, very slowly. And with some people, again for no reason anyone understands, it just never clears up completely.

I was on huge gobs of opioid painkillers for over a year. I slowly weaned myself off the Contramal through the winter, and the neuropathy hasn't been much of a problem, though my right foot still felt funny. It was going away, I thought.

Until a couple of weeks ago. It started coming back with the shooting pains and tingly feet and aching arms and fingertips. The other day, I realised that touching hard things was getting difficult and I found it hard to hold the pencil I was drawing with. I've started turning the shower down again. Today, though, my feet and fingers are on fire and I'm sitting here typing this very slowly with the flats of my fingers instead of the tips, to try to make it hurt less.

The only thing I can think of is that it's the exercise. I went to the gym this morning to start the extra work-outs and everything was fine. I had no problem doing 1/2 an hour on the treadmill and held up pretty well to the other stuff. I was there an hour. I was pretty tired after, and it was quite hot out, so I got in the shower, and it was awful. I had to turn the shower way down. The rest of the day, my fingers and toes have been burning and now the pressure is building up in my fingertips.

What the hell?! It's been two bloody years since chemo!



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Fatty

Well, that's annoying: stepped on the scales last night and found that I'd gone up 1.4 kilos since starting exercise classes. This is especially vexing since I was starting to think that I was looking slightly better. Francesco the Helpful Pilates Guy said it's because I've started putting on more muscle mass but haven't started burning fat yet. He and the gym owner/trainer have decided to take me on as a project, starting tomorrow morning. I'm an experiment, to see if an old lady whose had her metabolism more or less surgically removed can be brought back to life. I spose it couldn't hurt. Or at least won't do me any harm.

I've collected an array of fun exercise videos and it's a funny thing that I can actually get motivated to do it just by watching a couple of them. It just looks like fun, and I can hear my brain saying, "Hey, let's try that, I bet it will feel good." And oddly, it does. My secret is to put the exercise video on one window and my 80s club and synthpop mix playlists on another window, turn the sound off on the exercise video and just remember how much fun it was to dance in clubs in my 20s.

What the hell. No one's watching except the cat. And she's very open-minded.



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Exercise Questions

OK, all you health nut types among the Picnickers, some questions about exercise:

1) a colleague of mine, who also spends a lot of time working hunched over his computer, sitting on his duff, suggested doing little short bursts of exercise interspersed throughout the working day, so we don't turn into blobs of goo. Blobs of goo with stiff, inflexible muscles and permanently shortened spines. Any idea if there is merit in the suggestion? A break to do ten crunches and ten push ups? If you don't really break a sweat, is it still doing anything for you?

2) If you've been pretty sedentary for a while and start exercising, of course, even the little bits you're going to start out with are going to make you at least a bit stiff and sore at the start. What is a sign that you're doing too much or over straining muscles?

3) and how long should you wait before doing it again? Should you wait until all the stiffness has gone, or only a bit? Like, do a full workup the next day and just ignore all the pain, or wait a day or what? Can you do your little bits and bursts while you're on your down day or do you have to just be a blob for a day.

I've noticed that I'm doing a lot better pretty fast with the teeny weeny exercise regimen. I was dismayed but totally unsurprised when I finally stood on the scale and discovered that I'd gone up 10 kilos since about the same time last year, shortly after the surgery. I knew full well that I had only myself to blame, so didn't do any of the dumbass stuff like railing at God/the universe. While I was lying about on the sofa all winter, not going to Rome to the studio, being kind of miserable and not really seeing anyone, and drinking quite a lot of prosecco, (...ahem... like every day...) it really wasn't too hard to figure out what the outcome was going to be.

The chemo and surgery really did take quite a lot out of me, and I lost a bunch of weight just by being unhealthy and not eating. The two years (!!) it took me to recover were spent nearly entirely on my back, in the wheelchair and later unable to do anything very physical for a long time. Then by last autumn when I should have been starting to get active again, the sedentary habit had sunk into my brain, and the days got short, I had no classes to go to and an internet connection at home and ... well... that's the story. All that weight that I lost during recovery, right the heck back on, plus a little two or three pound bonus. Sigh.

So, when Andrea got back to Italy and I had an excuse to leave the house every day with classes going again, I started by first walking a lot, then riding my bike around Rome, for about 1/2 an hour to 45 mins a day. It felt so good, I kept doing it and shortly felt better enough to sign up for Pilates classes a few weeks ago, here in S. Mar where there's a nice shiny new gym. I explained to the very kindly instructor that I was trying to get back in shape after all that stuff, and he's been very helpful.

After All That, and many years of being more or less inactive, I'm all out of alignment, all cramped up and inflexible, all flabby and un-toned and the guy really seems to know how to tailor the programme to suit what you need. We do our muscle exercises, and our long stretches, then he comes along and kind of diagnoses you. He picks up your feet and squeezes you and stretches you and picks you up by your ankles and sort of shakes you back into shape. This is three times a week and I'm already starting to feel the good effects. Along with doing the exercises at home and doing my little situps and crunches and stretches and pushups and some stuff with the resistance band, I'm better. Yay! Still fat, but less flabby and way less stiff.

I was also getting slackadaisical about the diet, letting sugars and carbs creep back in, at least when I went out to eat with friends. But the biggest change is that I'm not indulging in 1) any sugar at. all. (stopped taking honey in anything) and not buying wine to have at home. With Gardone coming up, we'll have to see how that will pan out when I'm surrounded by all my cool Traddie Gardone friends and we're all whooping it up and talking Traddie shop into the wee hours every night for two weeks. Gardone was where it all started going south last year, so we'll see.

But on the whole, I feel a lot better just for doing these wee bits of exercise. I can feel years and years of stiffness and flabbyness starting to seep away, very slowly. And slow is better, I think. I've read many times that sudden shifts of weight or body tone really only result in your body kind of backlashing against the shock. Which probably played a part in the weight gain after surgery. Slow and steady wins the race, and teaches your body the new normal.

So, can't recommend Pilates strongly enough. It was, after all, designed to help athletes and dancers recover from injuries, so if your "injury" is just being out of shape, it's going to do you wonders.



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See? I told you...

Doc's appt. today:

She said that there didn't seem to be anything wrong just from the looks of things, and the ultrasound showed nothing abnormal. Now I have to wait for the test results (a couple of days) and have to go have my annual CT scan, but on the whole she said the pain would probably be a mild infection in the surgeried area. She says this is very common and has given me a prescription and said to take it easy for a few days, more sleep, which is always nice, and to get the CT scan as soon as possible, with some blood tests.

The CT scan and cellular test will show definitively, but she said there are no visible signs of cancer.

Went down to St. Peter's after the appointment, (thinking I might go in for a bit, but being a Wednesday the line was incredible) and sat in the Piazza for a while at the foot of one of the columns, watching the kids playing, chasing the pigeons, and the Philippina nuns having lunch after the weekly audience, the crowds of tourists following along behind the tour guide ladies holding up their little umbrellas. They've still got the banners up from the canonisations on Sunday.

Rather peaceful, in a busy sort of way.



Here's a cool old-timey song for you to chill to.



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Want one more?

Another reason not to eat sugar and to drop the carb intake:

Turns out Alzheimer's is a form of diabetes.

Researchers are calling it Type 3 Diabetes.



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Everything you think about nutrition is wrong

Sorry.


Here it all is with helpful graphics. (Just ignore the advert part.)



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It's not just for normal people

...even the slightly creepy and weird should be healthy too.

I apologise for boring you all with this health kick. I seem to be turning into one of those annoying proselytising health nuts. I'm sure I'll get back to normal eventually.

In the mean time, while I have no idea who this Jorge Cruise guy is or why he has such a rage about processed foods, or health in general, or why he seems slightly creepy and weird, or why the people he interviews often seem slightly creepy and weird, but there's some useful information about the badness of sugar here.



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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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What is sugar doing to your blood?

It's horrifying...



Who on earth would eat Pop-tarts for breakfast?

Or for anything else?



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