A few things have gradually fallen by the wayside since my period of depression last year around this time. And so, time to reestablish some default settings in my life, hence the title of this post. In terms of daily habits, it’s been going on three days thus far, in the areas of: physical activity; food; writing; keeping in touch with friends & loved ones; work; finances — amongst others.
Now, here’s the kind of item that blogs are made of…
…at least sometimes. A nice way to come back to posting here now & then.
This comes by way of the Alaska Newsreader blog at the Anchorage Daily News, but it originally appeared in the Unalaska Advertiser‘s police blotter:
6/19/07. Tue. 0828. Suspicious Person/Activity – Court officer reported that the court building had been bombarded with a baked potato. An officer responded and noted potato and cheese on both the building and windows. No investigative leads were discovered.
(Unalaska is a fishing town in the Aleutian Islands.)
It was as I’d hoped yesterday: the grey was dissolving. Though it took a night’s sleep to really turn the trick. Not quite enough sleep — I’m still pretty tired — but at least I feel more than dead inside now.
Dissolving is very much how it felt, how it often feels when the grey begins to leave. Maybe the pit too, I’m not sure. In either case, though, there’s strong physical sensation that goes with the feeling of unease & depression, especially in the gut/womb area. So when it goes it’s like a mass of some sort being broken up & dissolving away. But I wasn’t certain, having been up later than I’d hoped last night, that it would really go all the way, just because of not enough sleep. Then I woke this morning, hitting the snooze on my Palm (which has acted as my alarm clock for several months now), feeling the weight of Vai, my cat, against me, & I thought, It’s gone. But I didn’t know for sure until I’d been up for awhile, because often I don’t know. Often when it’s still there, I don’t know until I’ve been vertical for some time, & the grey slides back into place. It didn’t today, thankfully.
It’s also like a fever breaking. And with that analogy in mind, I’m taking care not to push myself now anymore than I did yesterday. Fever broken doesn’t mean the ordeal’s over. Still need bed rest. Still, in my case, feel fatigue & the potential to return to grey, if I am unwise.
Not that grey is a bad color, by the way. This is a particular kind of grey… dusty & bleak.
Tonight: vegging out a bit with the TV. The boy, when he returned from his summer/early fall job in King Salmon, turned me into a Battlestar Galactica fan, & now I’ve seen all of Seasons 1 & 2 on DVD, I’m entering the middle of the first half of Season 3 by having upgraded my cable service a couple of evenings ago. Too bad I missed several Season 3 episodes already, but I’ll just have to snatch them in reruns I guess. In the meantime, I’ve caught up on the story by reading episode synopses. But I’m afraid Rozz might come back to a TV addict. Ewwwww.
Depression, despair, blah blah blah: whatever one might call it, it’s been a factor of my life for a lotta years — all of my adult life, & some before, at least as far back as the summer after my junior year in high school. Perhaps, given limbo (see below), as far back as sixth grade.
My extensive experience leads to a language about it. Thus, I can classify it into three major modes:
I’d say I’ve been in limbo for several weeks. Had a brief but very unpleasant bout with the pit early last week, then was okay… & now, for the past three days, the grey.
The grey is like a great grey landscape of bleakness, just dust & stones. Emotionally dead: I can’t rouse me, nor can anyone else, to laughter or fun, certainly not joy; but nor can I be roused to great negative passions like hatred, anger. Annoyance, maybe. It’s hard to talk in any but the business sense, by which I mean I can conduct the necessary communications to accomplish my job, or buy something at the store, but it’s not good for banter, it’s not good for discussion of politics or my feelings, it’s not good for intimacy. Better off to leave me alone. Better for me to be left alone. No, correct that: it’s can be very good to have company, but company needs to be quiet & nondemanding. I need not to be made to talk.
It’s not like the pit, when I desperately need to talk & friends to listen & touch, hold, let me know it will be okay.
So how do I get out of the grey? Pretty much as I get out of the pit, other than what I need of friends is different. So, I get lots & lots of sleep. I make sure I’m still eating well. I don’t have high expectations of myself. I vedge out. I pull back from overcommitments as well as commitments to stuff that prevents me from doing the good stuff (like writing) that feeds my spirit. And when my energy picks up, I do that good stuff that feeds my spirit.
In some ways it’s just as well this is happening: as with last week’s pit, this week’s grey is forcing me to reevaluate a few things, & to make changes that will hopefully kick not just the grey in the butt, but also the limbo that has surrounded me for the past few weeks.
I feel like the grey is kinda dissolving right now. The fact that I can write this is evidence of it. Aa couple more good night’s sleep will probably kick it, enough that I can have more energy to take care of the changes that need to happen.
So… that’s where I’m at…. & that’s where I’m going….
Rozz departs late tonight, or rather tomorrow extreeeeeeeeemely early, on a redeye flight to Seattle to go to acupuncture school. It won’t be until December that she gets a break to come home for Christmas. In fact, a three-year program, with only three 3-week breaks per year. So we’ll be doing a lot of the long distance relationship thing.
I think we’ll be fine.
But all the same, I’ve got the butterflies right now.
Maybe you’ve heard that oft-cited statistic that, of all people who go on a weight loss program, 95% regain all that weight. In other words, only 5% succeed at both losing excess weight & keeping it off.
Well, curious about that statistic, the Amazing Shrinking Mom did some investigation, & things look not quite so bleak after all. Looks like that famous 95% stat originated with a particular study of a small sample of dieter in the 1950s, & that it’s been cited unquestioningly ever since. But other, later studies are more optimistic.
For details, see the Amazing Shrinking Mom’s post, “About That Ninety-Five Percent Failure Rate”.
Craig Ballantyne’s Turbulence Training blog today had part 1 of an interval training primer, entitled “The Best Cardio Intervals For Fat Loss – part 1”. (Full information on Ballantyne’s program is at his main Turbulence Training website.)
This is good info for beginners like me, too. Ballantyne writes:
If you are a beginner and you can walk at 3.3mph for 20 minutes, then your intervals will start at a walk at 3.6mph for 30 seconds to a minute. That is interval training.
That’s a pretty good match for the experiment in interval training I conducted last week. I’ve been doing it this week, too.
Part 2 of the primer is promised for next week. Ballantyne says he’ll also…
… expose the most ineffective machine in the gym.
Hint – It is also the most common machine these days, yet I’ve yet to see a single person change their body by using this machine for their cardio and intervals.
My guess: the elliptical.
Update, 17 Aug 2006: Gee, I coulda sworn he said “next week,” not “tomorrow.” Yet part 2 of his primer is on his blog today: “Best Cardio Intervals for Fat Loss – Part 2”.
I seemed to have been right about my guess on the elliptical as being (in Ballantyne’s opinion) the least effective machine for training, but he doesn’t go into much detail about it. Merely his ranking (his opinion) of the best methods to use for interval training:
- Sprinting outdoors (and hills might be the absolute best)
- Strongman movements (Farmer’s walks, tire flips, car pushing)
- Bodyweight interval circuits
- Treadmill running
- Stationary cycle (upright preferred)
- Stairclimber
- Rower
- Swimming (only works for competent swimmers)
- Elliptical & Crosstrainer machines
I received my Precision Nutrition (PN) materials last Friday, & have read through a lot of it. In fact, I read through enough of it that it influenced my grocery shopping on Saturday, mostly be leading me to buy more fruit than I had been previously.
Because of how I’ve already been eating thanks to the influence of my previous reading & research, especially as influenced by Diana Schwarzbein, I’ve found that there’s not really that much modification that I need to do in order to bring myself in alignment with PN’s 10 Habits. I think anyone who is familiar with PN can read my current eating plan as described in my previous post, & see how close I already am to what PN recommends.
Note that Schwarzbein is a practicing endocrinologist. Her Schwarzbein Principle books are very much geared toward metabolic healing, with lots of emphasis on the problems of Type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance, & related problems (Syndrome X, aka metabolic syndrome). As an insulin resistant person, I find it a very good sign that John Berardi’s 10 Habits in PN are so similar to what Schwarzbein had already influenced me to do. I continue to be impressed by John Berardi’s attention to insulin resistance/insulin sensitivity, even as he is careful to claim no particular expertise on Type 2 diabetes or its precursors.
(For those who aren’t familiar with the 10 Habits, seven of them are discussed in an article on Berardi’s site, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Nutritional Programs”. Apparently the habits were expanded to 10 later on; an abbreviated form of the 10 Habits can be found in another article, “ Built Like A Neanderthal, Part 2 – Evolution, Diet, and Body Type”, about three-quarters of the way down.)
The biggest modifications I need to adhere to the 10 Habits:
All these changes will be contingent on a couple of things:
I haven’t yet begun on strictly following the PN 10 Habits because of time constraints in meal planning/prep time as we get the last things done with our move. But, I am beginning to eat less starchy carbs & more fruit.
Re: getting with the changes to exercise: I anticipate getting on board that later this week too. Got to print out the first Turbulence Training workout manual for myself. I plan to get a gym membership this Friday with my next paycheck.
A couple of weeks ago while loading out the junk — er, I mean the stuff — in Jesse’s old room, I discovered a belt we’d bought him at some time in the remote past that he has never worn. I know he’s never worn it because when I found it, it still had attached the little plastic hanger thingy that they use to hang belts for display in the clothing store.
I absconded with it. And have been wearing it since.
This is a belt that in late December would not have fit me. But a few things have changed since then, including my waistline. Since late December, I had already had to make two new holes in my old belt because the holes that existed weren’t tight enough. Now I’m using the third hold in the belt that was formerly Jesse’s.
Today I finally got around to measuring my loss by comparing the belt holes & measuring the distance between them.
Since late December, I’ve lost 2-1/2 inches around my waist.
Just received my Precision Nutrition package. Will be reading/viewing/listening over the weekend & working out what I need to do.
