Day 8

First weekly weigh-in...

Up 1lb since last week :(

(It is traditional at this point to say something about increased muscle mass or water weight but I don't really think those are the reasons.)

I've been doing well at the snack-avoiding, have had nothing sugary other than the odd bit of fruit, and I've moved somewhat more than the week before, I think. I've done a fair amount of brisk walking with the buggy, enough to get hot. I have been very hungry in the evenings, though...

Two possibilities: the snack-avoiding doesn't amount to as many calories as I thought, and it isn't making enough difference; or it amounts to more than I thought and the body is protesting and going into starvation mode. Which seems unlikely. I guess I'm going to have to count calories for a bit and see what my daily intake actually is. Maybe I'll start on Wednesday; tomorrow is my birthday and I believe there will be cake (in moderate quantities, OK?)

I'd have to say that in the past, I've tried calorie-counting and the numbers have sat stubbornly in the same place unless I was doing a lot of exercise as well. Still, onwards and upwards (or downwards, I hope).

The Up and Running fora are now open for chat, but the actual running doesn't start properly until next week (the first week is all about motivation and mindsets). I may take myself out for a little trot at some point regardless. I haven't managed to get a sports watch yet, though, so perhaps it's just as well we're not starting the timed stuff yet.

Mixed kind of day

At about 6pm today, I was all set to write a nice upbeat post about the constructive day I'd had - I got quite a lot done and went for a snowy walk. Apparently Britain has had more snow today than it has for eighteen years!

Then, just as I was waiting for J to come home from work, some boys came past our house and decided to pelt our windows with snowballs. Big teenagers. Hard.

We live in an area of Edinburgh which used to have a bad reputation, and is undergoing regeneration. I've honestly never had any regrets about moving here, or much to complain of regarding neighbourly behaviour. We live between a young doctor and a retired couple. The place seems perfectly civilised.

This didn't. When I heard the boys throwing snowballs at the elderly couple's house next door, I went to the window to see what was happening, which was obviously a mistake. I'm sure it wasn't personal, and I'm sure it was just high spirits really, but they were shouting and swearing and I was genuinely frightened that the windows were going to break. I don't think they could tell how much noise it made for the person inside.

I ended up calling my mum and the local police, in that order (but by then the boys had moved off). The policeman on the phone said that they were getting a lot of similar complaints - and it was happening all over Edinburgh - and they had just sent a police car to patrol the streets, but they wouldn't send anyone out to our house unless we had property damage. Which was fine. Nothing to see here. The boys didn't come back.

J came home just after that, and we had our tea and watched University Challenge and I felt a bit better, but he's now worried that our windows will be broken when we aren't here. He's rationalised that we are under pretty much constant surveillance from the old people's home across the road, so disaster is unlikely to occur, but he's unnerved.

So maybe you'll get a cheery upbeat blog tomorrow. I like snow, and I like people, but I'm feeling a little bit jaded about both just at the moment.

We have a working camera

And we like it a lot. We've just spent the past hour taking pictures of our little housemates.

Whether they are overjoyed to be co-opted as photographic models is a bit uncertain, but we're quite pleased with the results, given that we haven't yet memorised all of the manual, and were taking these photos after dark, in rather dim conditions.

We're particularly impressed with the macro setting, which is excellent for showing the details of fur and whiskers.

Guinea pigs are somewhat ludicrous animals. It's hard to imagine how they could have evolved, given that their main purpose seems to be to squeak loudly and bumble around. But we love our three very much.

We spent most of the daylight hours today in town, buying clothes - cords for me, jeans for both of us and - finally! - new tracksuit trousers to replace my aged and ragged ones. It took a while to find any which were warm, decent and black, but BhS finally provided some for only £12, which seems pretty cheap.

I'm not so thrilled about the jeans, since they serve to prove that irritating quotation about it being difficult to have both a finely honed mind and a finely honed body. Postgraduate study is bad for both one's physical fitness and the fit of one's jeans. (These ones are the same size as my old ones according to the label, but in a more forgiving cut.)

I've always found buying jeans frustrating, but it's even more annoying when I know that if I'd kept up my maintenance efforts successfully, I wouldn't need to be doing this. But there's no point in dwelling on it. I don't have much time at the moment, and weight loss is not top priority, and there's no way it can be. When I finish this degree, I will get back to it. In the meantime, well, I need to wear something.

The piggies don't worry about their weight. If you're a guinea pig, you're supposed to be rounded.

50 minutes to midnight

It's been an up-and-down kind of day. J went to work, without too much OCD checking, but was very tired and down when he came home, and later in the evening had a slight strop over doing his homework for his new therapist. He's only seen her twice, and she does give him a lot to do outwith the sessions. There's a table analysing his negative thoughts, and a sort of diary of what he's done each day (including the time spent doing OCD checking), and an exercise where you try not to think of a pink rabbit. And some more stuff, but I can't remember the details.

In a way this is good, because we, rather than the taxpayer, are paying for the sessions, and we want the therapist to get the information she needs quickly, so they can make the best use of the sessions. On the other hand, I can see why he quails at the thought of filling in a table with percentages every time he has a negative thought - wouldn't you? Then again, I WANT him to fill in the stupid tables. We do not have an unlimited budget for this, and it is imperative that he engages with the process right from the start. Which means, as far as I can see, providing the information on his moods that is asked for.

So I stropped back, and he did the tables, but I am feeling not very noble, and also that you're not supposed to have to tell 28-year-olds to do their homework.

The guinea pigs are sweet and squeaky. And fluffy. Brownie came and sat on J in a successful attempt to get him feeling phlegmatic enough to tackle the tables.

I am still trying to catch up on work for my course after having been ill, which isn't putting me in the best of moods. The world suddenly seems to be full of wondrous activities which I could be doing if only I could get the course over with.

Sorry if I sound gloomy. I'm not, really; but I'm trying to give an honest run-down on the day with these daily posts. The general stropping is over. J has gone to bed, and I shall follow him shortly, and tomorrow will be another day.

Colds are not good for the soul

I have a cold. Everyone else in Edinburgh either has it, has just had it, or (I'd guess) is incubating it.

Mine is mostly sitting in my sinuses, throbbing quietly.

There will be no triumphant tales of exercise exploits this week, because I am just too tired. Normally I'm a night owl, but I've been in bed well before 10pm twice this week, and am about to go there now.

*whoosh*sniff*whoosh*

Night-night.

Further ups. Further downs.

Well, this has been a very full week, one way and another. Lots of academic work, job applications, and J had a bit of a crisis on Thursday (he'd held it off until I'd handed my work in...) There was talk of his going into hospital, and it was all rather frightening for a while.

I know that going into hospital might not necessarily be a terrible thing, if it actually did some good, but given that J generally only wants me when he's feeling down, the idea of him being somewhere else daunts me. Not that it would be a bad thing if he had more people to support him, but... it's not that there is nobody else offering support; it's just that I'm always his first choice.

However, it doesn't now look as though he will go into hospital (he's not a danger to himself, so if he did go, it would be voluntary). His therapy is being changed a bit, and the doctors are considering whether to try medication again.

I'm kind of hoping they decide not to, because this would be something like the fifteenth different antidepressant J's been on, and none of them has had any visible positive effect. (Negative effects have been present and correct.) However, J seems to think it might be a good idea, and it's his decision.

Things improved a good deal on Friday, and the weekend's been not too bad; we went for a long bike ride, played with the kittens, and saw a good deal of my family. And he seems OK today, if a little panicky. I now have another job application to do and a five-minute presentation to write on the importance of local-authority archives...

On the other hand, it's been a good week for weightloss.

On Monday (possibly because it was also the first of the month) I decided to sign up for a SparkPeople account and do some food tracking. I've tried to do the tracking before while keeping this blog, but although I have written things down, I never get around to looking up the nutritional info. I do tend to lose while I'm doing it, however. This week, my intention was just to document what I was eating, rather than try to change it particularly.

Once, in a time long ago before I had a blog, I used to have a FitDay account and track EVERYTHING. Rigorously. This came directly after a period of more or less no exercise and fairly poor eating habits, otherwise known as the beginning of my first postgraduate degree. At that point I was living on my own, and that made it fairly easy to weigh everything I ate and so forth. The snag was that I didn't have any scales, so couldn't tell either what my start weight was or whether I was losing any, and that also made estimating my recommended level of food intake a bit hit-and-miss. I still have no idea whether I actually lost any weight during this period or not. Photographic evidence suggests I might have lost a bit.

When I moved back home, I stopped tracking everything because I was no longer cooking for myself, so I didn't really know what I was eating and it became too much of a faff. FitDay was/is somewhat cumbersome to use, and entering all the foods took quite a lot of time.

I got the impression that SparkPeople was better; it's actually not that different in that respect, although I'm being less obsessive this time around (I'm prepared to choose an equivalent if the food I want isn't already entered, and I'm not weighing every carrot). I've been at it for a week, and so far have not missed any days, although Sunday - salad buffet lunch at Mum and Dad's - was probably a bit approximate.

Things I like about it: it gives you an upper and lower calorie limit, not just a target to hit; it allows you to save "food groupings" (such as cereal and milk: handy if, like me, you eat the same things repeatedly). This feature also comes in handy for saving recipes you make from scratch.

What I don't like is the same problem that I had with FitDay: it's very US-centric. Often I've had to be a bit creative to find what I was looking for in the food database. For example, "peppers" didn't bring up anything, and nor did "capsicums" (my next guess). But "bell peppers" does. And there's a lot - a LOT - of pre-prepared US items, but not many UK ones, although there are some.

I suspect this is what you get with a database into which users can enter their own items: someone's found it worthwhile to put in Flora Light (a margarine) and Hellman's Light Mayonnaise, but not UK-style baked beans, for instance. (It matters a bit. US tinned beans have a lot more sugar in them.)

What surprises me most, so far, is that for the first couple of days of tracking, I actually fell UNDER the recommended calorie level, and well under the recommended intake of fat, although my protein levels (which I'd expected to be low) are about what they should be. I suppose that being vegetarian, I know I need to make sure to get protein, but maybe don't pay such attention to the proportion of carbs to fat. Although I'd said I was just going to record this week, and not change what I was eating, I seem to have self-corrected a bit: I notice that by the end of the week, I was more in the middle of the recommended levels, and that the proportion of carbs had gone down a bit. (This despite eating ice cream twice.)

But I've lost two pounds this week without apparently trying. I am not making any promises to myself that I'll track for X number of weeks, but if I can just keep doing it one day at a time...

Humph

So, after that very good start, my weight did nothing in any direction this week, and nor did my bodyfat percentage points. Humph. Well, OK, maintaining is better than gaining.

I am very good at maintaining, actually. My metabolism seems to be the kind that doesn't really care much what I do, because I neither gain nor lose weight very easily. Which probably means that I get away with nutritional negligence when I shouldn't.

Actually, last week was OK, food-wise, although Sunday included some chocolate which I rather regretted afterwards. But, I don't know... I don't think I was being as mindful as I need to be. No major dietary crimes, but I'd lost concentration a bit.

I've been trying not to eat bread, on two grounds: firstly, I don't seem to digest it very well (I get indigestion if I eat toast for breakfast). Secondly, in the absence of any actual snack foods in our house, I have a tendency to grab a slice out of the fridge mid-evening. Not that this is a nutritional crime, but I don't NEED it.

And I didn't entirely avoid doing that. I also made some muffins, but I don't regret that (and I didn't eat them all myself!).

The main thing about last week was that I didn't go running at all, although I have been lifting weights like a good little person. I went out on my bike a couple of times, and for walks, and I springcleaned the entire house (which feels like exercise, although I seriously doubt that it has any benefits). But evidently this wasn't enough. This would fit in with my previous experience: it doesn't matter how healthily I eat - if I want to lose, I need to do lots of proper sweaty cardio. As in running.

I need to work on scheduling that, though. It's too hot to run on the local cycle path during the day, but if I go near sunset, J has conniptions, because it's not very well-lit. (He came with me once, but he got nervous and was bitten by midges.) I wouldn't run there myself after dark had properly fallen. But it's so much better than running on the streets, which I really don't like. I can never get into a rhythm in between dodging pedestrians, wheelie bins, and having to stop to cross the road. And most of the streets round here are pretty steep. And I suspect J still won't like me running in the dark. Sigh.

However! New week, clean slate! I shall go and skip in the back garden, and then I shall do some work for my paleography assignment. And later perhaps I shall go for a run. Wish me luck.

Four reasons why...

I haven't posted very much in the last week or so:

These two little chaps have come to stay with us for a couple of months. Their names are Snowy and Snuggles, and we’re babysitting them while their owners are abroad. We’ve been talking about getting pets for ages, and of the animals I have lived with before, guinea-pigs seemed the most suitable option: they don’t make me sneeze, they don’t seem to mind living in a hutch too much, and they don’t need taking for walks. Also they’re cuddly.

Although he’s very fond of animals J has never had a pet of any kind, so this seemed a good way to find whether we really have the time to care for guinea-pigs, and whether he’s allergic to them. So far, the pigs have been a joy. They’re young and lively and chirp away to us entertainingly when we pick them up, as well as mowing the lawn for us (well, when it’s not been pouring with rain). And just to add to the excitement, my brother suddenly phoned me up last Saturday and made mewing noises down the phone. This almost counts as normal behaviour for my siblings, so I wasn’t too surprised. Then he announced that his cat campaign, which he’s been carrying out ever since I moved out, had suddenly succeeded when he least expected it: my parents were adopting two nine-week-old black kittens.

Here they are, trying to ooze out of the box in which my parents were taking them home. They are very cute indeed, but also extremely lively. The boy is called Sirius (because he’s black, obviously) and the girl is Cassiopeia, Cassie for short. Or Puss. Or Trouble. They’ve only been home a week and it’s already clear who rules the house.

I have not been exercising terribly strenuously, though, mostly because I have a cough – the kind which makes it hard to draw a deep breath. Although I’m hardly ever ill, I’ve had various little health problems over the last few months, mostly infections. Not major, just annoying: I’d like not to go to the doctor in July, if possible. The last thing was an infected insect-bite on my arm the week before last, for which I had to take strongish antibiotics (and was threatened with an IV if they didn’t work – scary biscuits!) That cleared up fine, but I have reason to suspect the pills killed off all my friendly bacteria as well as the unfriendly ones. I’m alternately eating live yoghurt and vitamin-C-containing foods and hoping to feel better soon...

Good news, bad news

Good: J went to work for some of last week, and seems to be feeling better.

Bad: But that’s still only four days he’s been feeling better. Fingers crossed.

Good: We are going away for a short break for a few days later this week.

Bad: I feel fat. The holiday will involve wearing a swimsuit.

Good: I have decided to buy a bathroom scale, so that if I am actually getting fatter, I can find out and take decisive action (though not before I go on holiday).

Bad: I have not actually bought one, or taken any action other than looking at pictures online and saying to J, “Look! The ones with body fat monitors aren’t that expensive.” J (if he has a fault, it’s a certain unwillingness to spend money) makes non-committal noises.

Good: I’ve nearly made up my mind that I’m going to do this 10K.

Bad: But I haven’t actually been running AT ALL this week. Or any other activity which involves moving faster than a walk.

Good: I ate fewer biscuits and less cake this week than I did the week before.

Bad: You don’t want to know about the week before.

And so it goes on.

If you have seen my motivation, could you tell me where I left it?

I can make excuses for myself. I have been busy, and work has been rather full-on lately, and there’s been stress about J. It’s too easy. None of those things is really to blame. I’m not unhappy; I just seem to have fallen back into a mindset I thought I’d left behind a long time ago. It goes “Nothing I do will make that much difference and I can’t be bothered right now.”

However. My plan is that the holiday’s going to get me back on track. This is not going to be a sitting-down-reading holiday. There will be some of that (I’ve got five new books! Five) but there’s also going to be tennis, badminton, swimming at least once a day, and – I hope – country dancing. I know it’s supposed to take 28 days to make a habit, but how about four to reset the system and remind me that I actually like exercise?

Circles and good intentions

I promised myself that when I got paid from my new(ish) job, I'd buy myself some weights. Of all the things I can't do since the gym became impractical, I miss weights the most. I've tried to keep myself flexible by doing the motions unweighted (especially the squats, since it took so long to get any depth) but it's not the same.

My brother bought some lovely shiny dumbbells with removable plates a few months ago, which seemed just the sort of thing.

So on Saturday I duly went up town to try to get some. Could I find any? No. I think I was looking in the wrong shops. Still, I got some exercise jogging along Princes Street in an attempt to go to as many shops as possible in the time I had.

I still seem to be able to run without wanting to die, which is lucky, since I haven't been running properly since early December. Stephanie, a friend from livejournal, offered to go running with me last Saturday, but we got our wires crossed and it fell through. Next Saturday. Maybe. If she's free.

The trouble is, my spare time for doing anything at the moment is extremely limited. I know this sounds pathetic coming from a twentysomething with no children, but it is. Here's my daily timetable:

7.00 Alarm rings.
7.10ish. Get up - unwillingly, because I am not a morning person - dress. Eat oats with muesli topping, bring J cup of tea.
7.35 Leave house. Catch unpredictable bus as soon as it comes. Read on bus.
9.00 Arrive at work. Work like mad thing to be impressive so they'll write me a nice reference when my contract runs out.
5 to 5.30 Leave work. Catch unpredictable bus again. Read on it.
Anything between 6.15 and 7.15 Arrive home. Cook tea with J, eat it.
8ish Start work for course.
12ish Go to bed.

This is slightly exaggerated - I don't have work to do every single evening - but not much. I don't feel I'm exactly starved of me-time, given that I get two hours every day in which to read, but I've yet to work out a way of exercising while on the bus. And I feel slightly tired a lot of the time because I'm not getting quite enough sleep...

There is my lunch-hour. I could go running then a couple of times a week, but the temptation not to is strong, because my workmates are pretty nice and it's more tempting to stay in and talk to them, given that the schedule above doesn't leave much time for a social life. And there are the weekends. During which I really want to garden. (We're trying to grow our own vegetables this year. Or rather, I am trying to grow them. J looks on with mild interest.)

I do like the job. But the next one I apply for won't be quite so far away. How do other people do it? I can't be the only non-morning-person who works nine to five, commutes and also studies...

Any ideas?