What is Health?

Spring has sprung, and I'm not really getting outside much more than I did in the depths of winter.  However, I'm working ~10 hours of overtime a week and giving my house more cleaning than it has in a long time.

My coaches on my journey with minimal shoes are real athletes.  But do I even ever want to be an athlete?  Sure it would be great to show off to doubters my Boston marathon entry, but I'm really not interested in spending hours and hours of my life to exercise just to exercise or to get shiny medals.  My neighborhood is a dump, I take no pleasure in walking through it, and my life is already too busy to manage to schedule trips to the park.

We are getting financially closer to being able to move to the country.  I'm hoping that will help my exercise levels.  Gardening season is getting underway sooner, which will definitely eat up a good share of my free daylight hours.

I am pretty happy with my new normal for activity.  I've given up on the local endurance race due to lack of true interest.  (I may still go photograph runners for them.)  I'm still slow, but my activity is rarely limited by my ability, I live with much less pain.  But am I healthy yet?  No, not really.  I feel 90% better, but there are still nagging occasional pains, I may still throw out a shoulder next harvest.  What should be my next move towards health?

Yelling Stop: Prof. Dan Lieberman Raising Money for Youth Fitnes...

Yelling Stop: Prof. Dan Lieberman Raising Money for Youth Fitnes...: Prof. Lieberman is raising money for a program that encourages kids to run a mile at school. Consider contributing.

http://www.active.com/donate/youthfitness2011/danlieb

Fourth Belt Hole

This guy weighs the same as me.  Does he need to loose weight?

I don't pay much attention to the scale, it's a horrible measure of fitness. However, I do pay attention to my belt, and before making some changes, it was getting a bit too snug.  In addition to loosing the shoes and being a little more active, I've also dropped a lot of the grains from my diet.  Refined grain products are generally very low in micro-nutrients and provide nothing but calories.  They also provide most of their calories in the form of carbohydrates.  Being hypoglycemic, when I eat too many carbohydrates , my insulin quickly spikes and stores all that excess carbohydrate as fat and brings my blood sugar low, making me hungry again in a couple hours, despite my liver having plenty of glycogen on board.  My new diet has replaced the missing carbohydrates with more fat.  The body can convert fat into keytone bodies, which function like  carbohydrates in most body tissues, but do not cause insulin spikes.  I still eat my fruit, veggies, and dairy products, so I have just enough carbohydrates to keep running those parts of the brain that need them.

Eat More Bacon, Loose Weight

This on the other hand is a big no-no

I'm not religious about my diet.  (I had 4 biscuits when we went out to dinner the other night, and I still eat my breakfast wrapped in a tortilla every morning.)  Sometimes though, not being fanatical about your diet is necessary to stick with it long term.  I can cheat now and then and still overall keep on trending my menu planning in the right direction.  But now that my liver is not constantly overloaded with glycogen, I can tolerate the occasional carbohydrate load better than I used to.

The major benefit of this diet is that I'm not hungry all the time.  It is really easy to control portions and excessive snacking when you're just not hungry.  My blood sugar is stable, I'm meeting all my micro-nutrient needs, I'm eating tasty food when I do eat.  I used to bring snacks to work, and I'd eat them about every two hours, and be hungry enough to be watching the clock ready to pounce on that snack/meal as soon as I could allow myself.  Now I eat about every 6 hours, and I occasionally skip a meal if it doesn't fit in my schedule.

And this morning, I hit the fourth hole on my belt.  I expect to waver between three and four for awhile, but that is a lot of progress from when I wavered between hole one and not wearing the belt...

Still Slowly Improving

Last week I walked more regularly than I have since High School:


02/02/12 0.5 miles
02/01/12 0.25 miles
01/31/12 0.5 miles
01/30/12 0.5 miles
01/29/12 0.37 miles
01/29/12 1 miles

And I was just slightly sore and tired.

I don't have something worthy of going into my DailyMile log every day, but I'm making a lot of little changes, like standing up in meetings, or while working in the lab, doing squats while I have a minute of downtime waiting for something, getting more housework done.  These little changes are nearly impossible to measure, so it's hard to say how much I've improved of late, but it's moving in the right direction.  As the weather warms this spring, and we start to get evening sun back, I need to make a regular habit of walking the puppy after work and really see more measurable improvement.

I've given up on Mind the Ducks this spring.  I've not done enough work this winter, not really increased my maximum mileage at all, although I've improved my ability to recover after a walk and repeat again the next day.