Boardwalk Sooke

I hurt my knee a little this morning so then I decided to go for a walk. That makes sense right?! Well it was a plan I had to get outside and walk today. My knee was ok but it made me unsure and worried of where I was stepping. 

You park on Horne Road, walk down a steep incline, then down three flights of stairs… going down these stairs I realize I will have to go back up…

The boardwalk is very nice, on the water. It goes around to a ramp walkway going up to MacGregor Park, or along a trail in the woods that loops back to the stairs. This time I walked the boardwalk — 

And then the trail back to the stairs. 

It is not a very safe trail. It is not relaxing to walk because the trail is narrow and tilted and lots of roots of the trees popping out of the ground. A sign on the road warned of a bear in area, so I turned off my music after a bit on the trail part. Will I hear the bear before it starts to lunge to eat me and I will be able to get away?? Hmmm….

This walk took me 27 minutes. Uphill on stairs and the road back to parking lot, got me sweating.  I did not love this walk. But I did it! 

Rithet’s Bog

This is a beautiful beautiful beautiful place to walk! (Did I mention it is beautiful?) I did a couple of loops of this park a week ago and spent an hour walking. I loved it. Lots of it is covered overhead by trees, and some is open. Benches throughout. This time I did two different loops of trails. Next time I want to do the one called Rolston trail to Emily Carr Park.

Here are a couple of pictures of Rithet’s that I took:

Yes and I love ❤️ ducks! I loved this walk. 

355

Been a long time since I blogged. Fought a couple of colds and bladder infections recently and now feeling better. But it kept me from work-outs… also not really much to report as far progress… a health blog is actually rather dull when I don’t do extra research in the health and nutrition field and post things like that. Maybe I will try that later, who knows.
Good news: my weight is now down to 355.8 lbs! It was encouraging to see the scale drop in numbers at last!

Left side : Jan 2017 

Right side : Apr 2017
Another strange and good change that I have noticed: I can wrap up the vacuum cord! No that is not as huge as being able to fit into much smaller jeans, or run up some stairs, but this is rather significant to me. I shall elaborate.

Here is an example of an upright vacuum and the cord in the back.

I use such a vacuum at home, at work and at the Hall. Any time in years past when I would try to lean over and wrap up the cord properly, I would only get a couple of loops done before my back felt like it would collapse and my legs would literally begin to shake! I resorted to pulling the vacuum close to a chair, sitting down, and then wrapping up the cord. 

One day at work and being in a hurry I just wrapped up the cord standing up. All of the sudden it was wrapped up. Whoa did that just happen?? I actually stood and looked at the darn thing to see if I had really done it. Yup. 

Progress! I attribute it to my legs and stomach muscles being a little stronger. It is strange and not a usual measure of strength, but the fact that I was genuinely surprised that I did this feat should tell you how far I have needed to go! 

Fifty-two

After about 52 days of my new plan for getting healthier and building my origins story, I finally got to the point where I WANTED to work out! 52 days!! Up till then it was always an effort, always forcing myself, talking myself out of it and then talking myself into exercising. 
Then one Monday I woke up and thought “I gotta get outside and go for a long walk.” It even looked like it might rain. I got out there anyway, carrying a small bottle of water, and my iPod with the angelic voices of One Direction filling my ears. 

At 48minutes I was really sweating and then got a burst of energy…or maybe that was because I was on my way back to home by then! That session of walking/exercise was 1hr.

Anyway 52 days is what it took to get to a turning point. That’s kind of a long time. So if you are starting off on a new health regime or something like that, hang in there! 

A dislocation led me here…

One of the reasons that I started to really want to lose weight again and get healthier was because I ended up in physiotherapy for a dislocated shoulder. 

That in itself is a long story but short version: October 2016 I fell in the shower and dislocated my left shoulder and it popped back in on its own. I must say that the pain I went through for the following two weeks was horrific and the two months after that was down to the level of mind-numbing excruciating.

I didn’t go to physio right away, much to the ire of my doctor. When I went to him two months after the accident, and asked for pain killers, he asked me “Are you in physio?” 

“No, I’m in too much pain to be in physio.”

“No you are in pain because you are NOT in physio.”

He wrote the prescription for some painkillers and also gave me a bit more of a lecture about physio. “You MUST just do it! Just spend the money on yourself and do it because you will never get better if you don’t.”

The painkillers cost me $30 and might as well have been jellybeans for all the help they gave me. They didn’t touch the pain at all. 

After the dr appointment, I sat in the car outside the office and cried. I was frustrated and so overtired (for two months sleep was only happening in 1-2 hour increments and then my shoulder would wake me up.) I phoned physio that afternoon and made an appointment. I paid $68 for the 30 minute appointment and a length of resistance band and printouts of my exercises. I thought “wow $68 for some latex and paper. I’m in the wrong business.”

I did the exercises they gave me everyday. At the second appointment a week later, the physiotherapist measured my range of motion and I had improved it by 50% in just one week! 

Soon I was sleeping better and longer. More strength was being restored to my left arm. And I noticed that after I left my physio appointment, I always felt amazing!!! The appointment would go like this: we would talk a little, then she would get me to show how far I could move my arm, then I would lay on the table and she would pull and stretch my arm as far as it would go until I had to tell her to stop because I thought I might die. And then I would spend a few minutes with the guy in the gym to make sure I was doing the exercises right and he would add more to the list each week. That’s all! And I would leave after that and feel super amazing!

(As you can see by this picture, a shoulder injury can be especially bad because there is a lot going on in there! It is a joint that can move in more ways than any other of your body’s joints.)

Also, my shoulder was improving more and more. So it made me think more about my body. Here in just one week, my shoulder had improved 50%. God made this body to heal and get better and that was proof that my body could still heal! I was given an amazing machine to use in life and I had trashed it , ignored it, let it get too heavy and flabby and fed it all sorts of junk. What was I doing?? Is this how I thank my God for this gift He gave me?

Well to be forgiving to myself, it is a complicated mess that has brought me to the weight that I am. Many years of trauma and then bad habits and not caring. So it is not all my fault that I am here but I can change the direction I am going. So that is what I started doing. When I fail: like missing a workout or having a muffin, or staying up too late, I don’t give up — I just start again the next day to do better. 

It is working and it is slow, but it is working.

If your doctor says you need physio, believe him and do it right away! I am a believer in it now and will never doubt again. And in some ways it is a trial that brought something really good to me, because my going to physio got me to focus on my shoulder and subsequently my capacity for healing and I decided to heal more than just my shoulder. 

Jammed

Today was the first workout I have done since getting sick in February, so I think it has been three weeks. I have been feeling better sooner than that but I was out of routine.

I grabbed a Turbo Jam dvd today from the shelf — Punch and Kick Jam. Yah well it kicked my butt! I won’t say it was a total failure because I did last for about 30 minutes and worked up a heck of a sweat, but I couldn’t finish the workout. I had to skip to the cool-down and stretching at the end. 

I would say that Turbo Jam is beyond me just yet…at least that particular work out is. I will go back to Biggest Loser DVDs for the time being and hopefully can work up my stamina to do the Turbo Jam dvds later. Have you tried Turbo Jam? It is fun but bordering on high impact aerobics, you can do everything at a lower intensity but I couldn’t even keep up with it doing it that way today hahaha! Lesson learned.

Next lesson I learned: I feel great! I put off the workout until about 4pm today. Most of the morning spent in bed. So tired and very sore today too so I wasn’t looking forward to it. Then I thought, well maybe the workout will help the pain and guess what it did! The opposite to what you would think — my side and hip and lower back was hurting so much and now after the workout it feels better. Maybe the blood flow helped lol.

Anyway, Turbo Jam is now to be another goal to aspire to. I have to work up to it and still can’t even keep up with the Biggest Loser workouts. You should try these honestly. (If my friends are reading this, ask me to borrow them!)

Why You Shouldn’t Watch The Biggest Loser

This list of points are so good, I just had to repost them:

This quote is from fooducate.com

1. The Biggest Loser shames its participants as if they are lazy. A study published in the journal Obesity concluded that watching just one episode leads viewers to dramatically increase their own hateful biases towards obese people.

2. The Biggest Loser idolizes fast and unhealthy weight loss. Some participants lost as much as 20 pounds a week. A healthy pace is 1-2 pounds a week at most. This lets the body and digestive system gradually adapt to the new weight.

3. The Biggest Losers gain most, if not all, their weight back. Around 80-90% of the show’s participants have gotten back to their starting weight. The ones that stayed slim are working as trainers so are heavily involved in the field.

4. The Biggest Loser destroys its contestants’ metabolism. The regimen of many hours of exercise paired with limited caloric intake led to a metabolism slowdown of 500 more calories per day compared to a gradual weight loss regimen. This metabolism change means that a person is allowed to eat 500 calories less per day compared to someone who lost weight over a longer period of time.

5. The Biggest Loser causes irreparable damage to its contestants’ health – whether the skeletal system (knees, ankles), thyroid, or emotional health.

6. Some of the show’s sponsors are companies promoting fake foods such as Kraft fat-free cheese, energy Drinks.

Thoughts on The Biggest Loser

Did you watch the Biggest Loser when it was on tv? Maybe if you are skinny and fit, it wouldn’t appeal to you. I loved it! I found it motivational. Of course it was never motivational enough to make me get into a proper and sustained exercise routine haha! 

The Biggest Loser contestants were all tremendously overweight and what they accomplished each week in terms of exercise goals and weight loss was amazing! And they were sometimes come to these great epiphanies and cry and I would sit watching and I would cry too. And at the end when the last person won, oh man I would cry. It was so emotional. I think it was partly because I was battling my own weight and emotional issues and so could really relate.

I have work out videos made by the same people who were the trainers on the show and the people in the videos are people from different seasons of the show. Always it is during the season, so they have lost a lot of weight but are only part way through the journey. That means I’m working out to a video with all these fat people on it, and they are doing the routines way better than I can — totally kicking my butt! Wow! I will catch up eventually!

Recently I was reading past blog posts on Nerd Fitness website. Two were about The Biggest Loser. It has been ten years or more since the last season I believe , but anyway what has been seen since the show is that most of the contestants have gained their weight all back!

From one season, doctors and researchers brought in the former contestants and out 14 of them, 13 had gained back the weight and some! Wow so sad! The really awful thing that has happened is that now their metabolisms burn less calories than they should at a normal resting rate for their current size. 

There is a lot of sciencey stuff to prove all this and I haven’t had time to research and read enough about it yet to explain it here. 

Check out 

nerd fitness.com 

in the archives of the blog posts and look for The Biggest Loser in there if you want more info right away. 

What I gather from what I have read already is that the rapid weight loss that the show achieved was too hard on the people’s bodies and really wrecked their metabolisms. Doctors on the show at the time had said that if the contestants wanted to maintain their weight loss after they left, they would have to work out about 9 HOURS a week!!! That is ridiculous! Who can do that and live a normal life at the same time? Also, on the show, there were personal trainers working with them all the time and monitoring. But because it was technically a GAME SHOW, it was all about winning the money at the end, so there was not enough true help to make them have permanent changes in lifestyle and attitudes about food and health.

I do remember that when I was watching the show, I noticed that they focused everything on the exercise and really never talked about food at all. And some of the “tests” that were set up were just cruel. For example, the contestant would be allowed to go into a whole room decked out with desserts. If they ate some desserts, they could gain certain advantages for their team. But then it would give them calories that they would have to work off later. Or they could decide to not eat any of the desserts and just focus on themselves losing the weight.

Well, put an addict in a room with their free heroine and what is that supposed to actually achieve? I kind of think that is mean. But it was a show and a game so that is that. But now look what has happened to some of them?? Example one man went onto the Biggest Loser at 444lbs. He got down to 289lbs. Now after the show some years, he is back up to 450lbs, and what is worse is that his metabolism did not reset to his weight gain. He burns 458 FEWER calories a day than a man his size should.

I think this is horrible that this happened to these people. I’m shocked that no doctor or trainer could see the problem in the future while the show was making these amazing claims! 

This doesn’t mean that it will happen to me or you with our weight loss. Because the people on the Biggest Loser show, did their weight loss in a very short amount of time and with little or no focus on nutrition. 

But for me, after reading these articles about the post show weight gain etc, when I work out to the videos, I don’t feel quite the same as I did before. The trainers on the videos — I always think now “Did you know this was going to happen to them and you said nothing?” Hmmm. It still is a good work out video, but makes me wonder how the show could keep going?! Maybe they have changed some of the way the show is done now. I don’t think I could watch it anymore knowing what I know. 

Sick week

Had a wicked cold since last Sunday. Started with sore throat, progressed quickly to head cold and chest cold. It’s almost done now. 

Soon I should be able to get back to my work-outs. I haven’t exercised while I have been sick. At first I thought I might, but then my cold quickly turned to a chest cold, and that decided it. 

Experts say that if your sickness symptoms are in your neck and above, you can still work out. If your symptoms are below the neck, you should not. Those systems are all needing a lot more energy to heal, so exercise will just push your body too far. Same with if you have a fever — don’t exercise.

I weighed myself on Saturday morning and my weight has stayed the same this week. I didn’t do too much comfort food during my cold and I drank tons of fluids so that must have helped the weight stay the same as well as getting well!

Gorge walk

Tuesday January 31 went for a walk around Gorge waterway. It was quite cold out and clear skies, lots of wind brrr! I was not to be deterred. Clothes layered up and some music from my iPod and I was set. Walked for 78 minutes. At first my lower back was hurting a great deal, but after about 35 minutes it settled down. This was also around the same time I started sweating, after 35 minutes so I felt warm enough for the wind not to bother me. Felt really good about this walk. Legs felt like jelly when I got back to the car. 
Wednesday Feb. 1 Did a five minute warm up and then 30 minutes of the Nerd Fitness Beginners Bodyweight workout. 

Thursday and Friday busy days this week and only had janitor work and my physio appointment for exercise. Will try for the weekend for actual work-outs.