Project updates
- Life maintenance – One of my greatest fears is that the activity of managing my life will consume so much time that it crowds out my substantive activities–the projects I actually care about–and my life will become a container that contains nothing. In the past couple of weeks this fear has been distressingly close to being realized, and it has layered a film of sadness over my days, which tells me the people who say you’ll be happier if you make (physically) healthy choices are lying.
- Diet – 16 more days of my gluten-free experiment, and to distract myself from that countdown, this week I’m starting a 10-day dairy-free experiment (which required another long grocery store visit), both of which are to see if they affect my ulcerative colitis, so if my symptoms clear up while I’m off both dairy and gluten and come back when I start on dairy again, then I’ll take it as a clue that dairy is a problem. Meanwhile I’m attempting the rather complicated TLC diet till at least around September 25 to see if I can budge my lipids and maybe lose a final few pounds before I try to gain the right kind of weight, though the lipids might be helped by going off Humira, which I expect to do once these diet experiments are over, since it’s not really helping me anyway. I might feel happier about all this time spent in life maintenance if I felt I was making progress, but the scale says I’ve actually gained a pound in the past week (and another in the past day) rather than losing one, and even though I know weight fluctuates from day to day, it’s still a little depressing and certainly not encouraging when for once in my life I’ve been doing this stuff right. But even if I gain weight the whole time I’m on this diet, I know I can go back to low-carb and probably lose it again.
- Exercise – I’ve been walking every morning, which I admit is kind of nice, and I’ve been using the time to sort of have devotions. Last week to give myself more options, especially on rainy days, and to maybe start weight training again, I rejoined the gym I went to several years ago. I haven’t used it yet because I’m trying to stabilize my morning schedule before I complicate it with a longer workout, and I haven’t really settled on the workout I want to do or how I want to track it. Plus I’m not sure it makes sense to try to build muscle while cutting calories, so I have stuff to learn and plan.
- Daily routine – One thing has been a success, my idea of moving activities to the morning to do them consistently, so maybe I’ll move everything there and wake up at 2:30 every morning. Not really, I hope, since morning is the time I do things to forget about them, since that’s what happens; and so if I moved everything, I’d do the activities I care about, but they’d slip out of my mind and my life would end up feeling pointless, though maybe I’ll try it anyway just to see what it’s like. And in spite of my sadness and worry about fitting everything in, I know there are some things I can do to tighten up my time management, such as assembling a whole week’s worth of lunches at once, so I’ll be trying some of those ideas. I’m sure getting enough sleep would help a lot, such as by letting me feel alert enough on the weekends to not waste them on mindless web surfing, general sluggishness, and catch-up sleep.
- Math relearning – I got a miniscule amount done on my programming. Maybe I can do more this week.
- Fringe theories – One thing I have been able to do is sample a bunch of skeptical podcasts, since I can listen while I do other things. For example, here’s an interesting interview with a skeptic who went on a conspiracy cruise. I’ll probably add these podcasts to my Fringe Theory page at some point, if I can find where my spare minutes are buried.
Life updates
- Work – My employer worked out the issue that was keeping my coworker and I from speaking at the conference, but today (Monday) I found out they’d found another speaker in the meantime. It’s a relief, though, because right now my life is crammed full of too much to think about.
- Apartment – A few weeks ago I realized my apartment managers hadn’t asked me if I was renewing my lease at the end of July, and last week in a small panic I realized I still hadn’t heard from them, so I called them on Wednesday and Thursday trying to get in touch with the lease renewal person, who was out of the office both days. Finally Friday morning she called me back, and we got it sorted out. So that added some unwelcome drama to my week, but at least it’s over now and I didn’t have to do anything extreme like finding a new home in two days, though I did locate an available apartment nearby that I think would’ve worked well.
- Socializing – Not everything good is being crowded out of my life. I hung out with Jeremy Wednesday night and Tim Sunday night. Sometimes it’s nice to abandon responsibility to spend a few hours with a friend.
Glad you got the apartment thing sorted!
Speaking of sorting, are you going to read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child?
I probably will, maybe after the final version comes out. It’d be easier if there was some kind of audio version.
I wonder if your UC symptoms simply don’t have much to do with your diet. Perhaps after all this experimentation, you’ll conclude that eating whatever isn’t going to change the symptoms, so you can just eat what you like (within reasonable general nutrition limits).
Anyway, about gaining muscle and losing fat simultaneously, Scooby’s Workshop has a helpful calorie calculator that gives recommendations for different scenarios, including gaining muscle while losing fat (item 6 in the calculator). The website has lots of good information about exercise. The visual presentation is decidedly low-budget, but Scooby has a genuine desire to help others be informed and stay physically active.
http://scoobysworkshop.com/calorie-calculator/
About the apartment—I thought you wanted to move sometime soon…
On the UC symptoms, that’s what I’m expecting and hoping, to go back to eating whatever I want. IBD specialists say diet isn’t the cure (http://www.ccfa.org/resources/diet-and-nutrition.html). Anecdotes from diet enthusiasts say it can lead to remission. I wanted to try out some of the recommendations just in case and to fend off people’s dietary advice in the future. The torture is almost over!
Thanks for the Scooby’s link. I like the sample meal.
I do want to move someday, but this year I wasn’t very excited about it, especially with all this other stuff going on.
While building muscle might not reduce your weight per sé (as some mass will be build into muscle tissue), it makes sense to do both muscle training and cardio training. Weight is just a number, and in the end the goal is not to achieve a magical number, but to feel/look healthy/human.
Also booo socialising boooo. What if you catch the human disease, where you turn into a human? What would become of you? (Also, did you ever realise how similar “decease” and “disease” seem to me? I just almost wrote the “human death” just now. That would have been… “bad”.)
Yeah, once I build muscle, my weight will go back up. My thought was to get rid of the extra flab first so it doesn’t accidentally stick around if I have to eat more calories.
And sometimes socializing can feel like death, so you would’ve been right either way.