Recovery

Since badly injuring my back and developing Sciatica from my inflamed muscles pushing on the nerve I have had to learn a few valuable lessons.

1). Listen listen listen to your body!

This is a hard one for me because I tend to be of the mindset of "Pain is good when you're working out. More pain = harder work" etc... But there are different kinds of pain. Not only have I been learning the difference between them, but I've also learned that some pains will lead you to incapacity instead of great capacity.

2). When there is the bad kind of pain, patience is the first thing you need.

The whole Rest Ice Compress Elevate (RICE) thing is good too. Add some heat, some stretching, some PT approved exercises for "core strength" and a loving boyfriend who will massage at a moment's notice and you've got a recipe for recovery. These are all active things though. Things that you do. Patience is something you must have in order to recover. This is probably the hardest part of recovery for me.

3). You don't need to workout as hard as you did in the past.

In fact, if you try, you'll just stay injured. Instead of doing what I used to do, I've had to cut back a lot of specific exercises, switch some exercises. Here are a few examples:

I now lift 3 days/week. I have cut out most exercises on "Back Day" and "Leg Day". I can still do the following:

Back:

Face-pulls (works muscles of upper back/shoulders)
Lat Pulldowns (works upper back and lats)
Back Extensions on a machine (Lower back but way easier on the muscles than Hypers)

...yeah thats about all I do for back now other than my PT exercises.

I combine this workout with my "Legs" workout sometimes.

Legs:

Hip Abductors (I am severely lacking mobility in my hips which may have been a cause for getting injured in the first place)
Leg Curls (machine)
Leg Extensions (sitting machine...the standing one puts more torque on the back)

Today I actually squatted for the first time though...after several months of doing very little leg-wise. I did the bar and the bar plus 25s. So little compared to what I'm used to...but remember...patience.

I've used this recovery (and am still using it) to learn the lessons above. I'm trying to really focus on the movement and the muscles, even at light weights while also getting back into running more. Hopefully, once I fully recover I will be able to do more, but I think the important thing is that, even if I never get back to deadlifting or squatting as high as I used to, I'm still happy that I can workout as much as I do and humbled by the lessons I'm learning.

MFP

I have counted calories since I was about 14 years old. It's been both a good and a bad thing, and although I haven't done it every day since I was 14, I would say I did it a large portion of those days. Going back through old boxes I always find a food journal with calorie counts in it.

I'm at the point where I can read through these journal now and feel a bit sad at how little I used to eat and how miserable I was doing it. Regardless of how it was, I knew I had to do it. It started out as education -- a way to understand how much I was actually eating when I was overweight. This is one of the first things that nutritionists (like my sister!) tell their patients to do to lose weight: start keeping track of everything you eat.

In the beginning, it was good. I realized I ate a lot more than I needed and started cutting back. I was 14. Dieting was something everyone did, right? Well, like the typical type-A perfectionist I was, I didn't half-ass the calorie counting. I made sure I did it "perfectly".

Some examples of the obsessive perfection were weighing/measuring all food, looking up nutritional info on multiple sites and averaging them to get the most accurate outcome, and making sure not to eat anything I didn't know nutritional information for.

Eventually, as the eating disorder started taking over, counting became more and more important and obsessive. However, sometimes I believe that not counting would have been worse. When I didn't count, I drastically overestimated how much I was eating so that I wouldn't gain weight. At least with calorie counting I could eat as much as I would allow myself without low-balling it. Now, I'm not suggesting this is a good thing, but for a brief time when I tried not counting calories, it was much worse.

As I've recovered, one might think that I would have stopped counting as much. The truth is, I haven't -- I'm just less obsessive about it. I still need a certain amount of control and knowledge of what I'm eating. So I still "count" which is defined much more loosely now then it used to be. I weigh and measure foods as well, but I can eat out at a restaurant without worrying now.

The reason I wanted to talk about calorie counting today is that I believe it's actually helpful for me. Now its not just calories that I like looking at, but how much protein I get, how many carbs and how much fat. I can spot trends now based on calories and macros. I can correlate it to cravings, mood swings, energy levels and so on. I like the knowledge. I think knowledge is usually good as long as its not misused.

My calorie/macro counter/food journal of choice has now switched to an online one: MyFitnessPal. I no longer fill up journal after journal of paper -- but an online one instead. It has cool apps to make charts of things like protein or net calories over periods of time which I also like (cause I'm a nerd!).

It has a feature that tells you how many days you've logged onto it in a row. Today marks my 500th day, which was why I wanted to write about this. It's a lot of days, but something I do so naturally, and hopefully healthily now, that I think of it as an accomplishment.