Traveling....

....is hard. It's hard for several reasons. It's hard on my body, physically. I don't travel well. It's hard on my stomach. And finally, it's hard on my mind. But it's been getting better.

Let me explain a little bit more.

1). Traveling is hard on my body.

My body is stable within pretty narrow conditions. Changing climate, altitude, pressure, temperature, food type or daily activity typically causes any combination of the following: nausea, headaches, sinus pressure, exhaustion, allergies, grouchiness (this counts, right?) aka. mood swings, and decreased appetite.

I am Figure 2.

Often times, when I would return home from college for a break I would get sick almost immediately at home, or if it were a weekend visit, upon my return to school. Even though it was a mere 4-5 hours between college and home, it was still a bit too much for my immune system.

Car trips seem especially hard, although long flights are also difficult. Emmy, my pup, feels the same way. While our other two dogs tend to fall asleep on long car trips, Emmy gets wary/anxious and will stay awake. Although I don't always stay awake, I share her wariness and anxiety.

Freya, unlike me, is particularly happy in cars.

Food on long car trips:

Because of my inability to stabilize my body during long trips, I tend to try not to eat too much before or during the trip. My stomach doesn't do well anyways in the car (unless I'm sleeping), so I try not to make it worse when I'm driving.

Sometimes I will bring crackers or a Quest bar if it's a particularly long trip, but often times Ryan and I will just wait to eat until we arrive at our destination.


2). Traveling is hard on my stomach

I stated this in the last section where by "traveling" I meant the act of traveling (the actual driving/flying etc), but traveling in the generic sense of "staying somewhere else" is also very hard on my stomach. As you know by now, I'm a creature of habit. I like eating similar food, although I have a good repertoire, but traveling often puts a wrench in that.

When you go to someone's house as a guest, you are socially expected to eat whatever they prepare. There is the assumption that they, being the gracious host/hostess, have prepared a meal for you, in a polite gesture back to them, you eat what they serve. This is typical of most cultures -- not just ours.

I have the good fortune of visiting family that makes sure that they have at least some things prepared that I will eat. Because I don't eat any red meat or fish this often means they make some sort of chicken.

Some of the delicious, yet different, food I had this weekend.

Regardless, however, of their consideration, often the food is very different from the food I normally eat. As you may suspect, this tends to leave me feeling quite sick, even though what I consume at the time is delicious.

This is nobody's fault of course, except maybe mine for not trying tons of different food. I like what I like and stick to foods that don't affect my body in negative ways -- but when offered food that I know someone has gone out of their way to prepare for me, it's quite hard to explain that even though it may be in the same food group as food I tend to eat, it will still leave me feeling sick, simply because of how differently it is prepared.

3). Traveling is hard on my mind.

This has to do with the ED side of my mind more than anything else. I don't know how many calories I'm eating. I do know that it's a lot more and that I'm not exercising enough. I don't have the safety of my routine. So my head likes to worry. How many days can I do this before I start gaining weight? How much is polite to eat but not so much that I have to spend the next week making up for it?

These questions are a lot easier now than they used to be. I used to never want to travel for fear I couldn't know exactly what was in my food and how many calories I consumed. It's getting better...slowly. But that doesn't mean its not still a battle. It may always be one. But at least I feel like I'm winning now :-).

Summer foods make me happy.

Ahh. It's been a while since I posted. I will slowly try to catch up on some of the stuff that's been going on. Let's just start with the main things:

1). My back is "healing" (I think/hope) nicely. 

Basically I have been staying away from A LOT of exercises. I mentioned in a previous post that I basically stopped Back Day. I mostly work my shoulders & lats on back day instead. I have stopped a lot of leg day. However in the past two weeks I have started incorporating squats back into my routine. Today I hit 135x4 which was hard and humbling. Working my way back up.

I have been doing one Chest & Arm workout, one Arm Only workout, and then one combined Shoulders/Lats/Legs Workout a week. So 3 lift/total workouts a week instead of 4. I walk the dogs 1-2 miles every non-workout day instead and sometimes try to run if I'm not going to lift.

All in all, it has been helping a lot. The other thing that helps is that I've been traveling for the past two weekend (not including this one). Even though the car makes my back pretty sore, the lack of workouts or long time at the shelter has probably factored into the recovery some.

2). Eating hasn't been as healthy.

I attribute this to several reasons. Amoung them is that every day I have to fight that feeling of "Well I'm not working out a lot so I don't need as much protein. May as well have ice cream instead." I have eaten a lot of ice cream in the past month or two.

Traveling makes it a lot harder to control portion sizes (except by eye) and makes food choices less available. It's not that I absolutely couldn't eat the same way, but its a lot easier to eat what everyone else is eating and just try to eat a bit less. This is what I've been trying to do. But it still makes for several meals that aren't quite as healthy.

We've also recently added a third baby (puppy) to our pack. She's grown into a very loved family member, but the past month and a half have taken a lot of work getting all of us there. I haven't been at work as long because I've had to come home earlier for her. This cuts down on workout time some and definitely takes away some energy.

The above excuses are all things I'm working on now. I'm trying to eat more healthily regardless of how much working out or traveling I do. But it's tough for sure. I think it has just gotten the best of me recently.

3). But my love of summer foods will help fix number 2!

Summer is actually one of my favourite seasons in which to eat. A few of my favourite things recently are:

a). Strawberries. I pretty much have these in the fridge every week. They make the perfect snack to eat when I get home and I want to last another hour until dinnertime. They are so perfect now, and not to mention almost always on sale!

Delicious!!!

b). Salads. I love them. They are pretty and filling and delicious! Back when I had more serious issues with counting calories, I would use salads as a way to fill up without having a lot of calories. Basically I wouldn't use a lot of cheese, no dressing at all, ever(!), and definitely no nuts or seeds or anything that would add more calories. Basically I just had lettuce, peppers, cucumbers and chicken. Nowadays I'm loving lite honey mustard. Tonight's salad had Romaine hearts, a variety of cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberries (they're perfect in salads too!), crumbled feta, grilled chicken and lite honey mustard dressing. And it was delicious. I usually make enough to get 2-3 salads out as well :-)

Dinner tonight & Lunch tomorrow :-)

c). Grilled chicken & grilled veggies. I love food on the grill! Ryan is such a good griller. Although it's been raining the past couple weeks, we usually grill out at least one a week. I typically have marinated chicken or turkey burgers. He usually goes for the red meat and has burgers or steak or kabobs of some sort. I love grilled zucchini and squash as well.

Healthy shopping cart!

What do you love about summer foods?

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.

Food struggles during an injury

Being out of commission kinda sucks, to put it bluntly and not at all eloquently. Not only am I frustrated because of the pain (which is getting better, but still oscillating between nagging/sore and medium/bad), but on top of that, I can't work out or rough-house with the puppies, or clean or do any of those things that help make graduate school more manageable mentally.

On top of this, I of course have concerns about weight gain. I have been quite active for the past year, almost year and a half. I really rely on being able to run and lift and then eat to support my activity. Part of what has helped me so much while dealing with the eating disorder is to begin to see food as fuel for my body. The better/more I eat (within limits) the better I perform both mentally and physically. Seeing the lifting numbers go up, running numbers go down seems to make up for the weight on the scale staying roughly the same. It's taken a while to get to that point, but I'm glad I got to it.

Fast forward to now. I haven't worked out "for real" in about two weeks, nor will I probably for at least another. When I get to the point that walking feels ok, I may start incorporating light jogging in, but it's going to be slow.

So, given that I'm not working out, what am I doing about food? I knew I would have this issue if I were to ever get very injured. It naturally begs a few questions:

Q-1). How do I start seeing food as fuel in general for normal body functioning and not just for training?

Q-2). If I cut back because I'm not training, how much do I cut back?

Q-3). How scared should I be that cutting back may send me back into a downwards loop of trying to see how low I can go -- at least for the time being?

Q-4). How do I deal with any possible weight gain I see on the scale?


So, I don't have concrete answers to any of this of course but here are my tentative answers the way I see them now:

A-1). I try to realize that recovery requires more work than just existing, that repair of damaged nerves and muscles needs rest -- but also fuel, and that the faster I heal the faster I get back to training.

A-2). I've honestly been trying to listen more to my body and just go with less than what I have been while training, but more than 1200. I usually hit 1300-1500 now...although some days this has been a struggle. I've also cut out more "junk" as in no ice cream on weekends after hard workouts and fewer less healthy snacks.

A-3). I think this depends on how long I have to do this for. However, trying to see it positively, this is good practice for any other future injuries or times when I need to take some time off.

A-4). Trying to do this now. It's harder than I thought **

** I have been taking Prednisone for inflammation. This is a steriod with one possible side effect of water retention. Now, while the "tiny" increase on the scale is most likely from that, I still get paranoid.

Long roads...

Long roads to recovery -- those seem to be the only type. I don't think I've ever had the experience of a "short recovery".  My shin splits in high-school turned to stress fractures because I refused to stop running on them. Those took a while to heal, thank you stubbornness. My shoulder dislocation also took a while to heal, and this new nerve pain/injury...it's going just as slowly.

For the past 7 days I have rested, iced, stretched, took meds, heated, repeated. And by repeat, I mean the whole or part of this processes every day 3-8 times a day. While the constant rest has probably helped the muscles relax a bit, it's still in a decent amount of pain sometimes and my mind is going crazy.


Despite how enticing laying in bed can be after a hard workout or a long day, laying in bed for 3-4 straight days is mind-numbingly boring...even with my physics textbooks and code to distract me.

Thankfully I will be seeing a physical therapist and my doctor again tomorrow morning! I have no doubt I will need to keep repeating everything I have been doing, but at least I will have more data to present and possibly new information to gather (like when I can actually start working out again and what to do to prevent this in the future!)

Injury Sadness :-(

It has been a while since I posted on here. I get very excited about writing about working out and fitness...but that requires actually being to work out. I have been cutting back recently due to the injury on my back from lifting (most likely).

History:

1). When I felt the initial pain in my lower back the first thing I cut out was deadlifts -- even though I loved them so much, they were putting such a strain on the lower back muscles.

2). The next thing I cut out was half of back day -- more the lower back half which included deadlifts, hypers, etc.

Ok, admittedly not just back pain keeping me from deadlifting this...

...but I still kept feeling pretty badly...

3). So, the next thing I cut out was most of leg day. Squats put a lot of pressure on my back, as did the leg press and glute bridges.

By this time the pain was in the lower lower back, also in the butt/glutes...and it seemed to be getting worse.

4). So I basically cut down to three lifting days a week (Arm day on Sat, Chest/Arm day Tues and Cardio/Upper back/shoulders either Sunday or Thursday). Needless to say at this point I was sad. I was disenchanted. I couldn't do some of my favourite lifts and even after lifting with other muscle groups my back/butt was still quite sore the next day.

The "bad day":

I've continues with this cut back routine for almost a month: until last Saturday.

Last Saturday was bad. I worked out (Arms and Cardio) in the A.M. and then went to volunteer at the shelter. I had the good fortune of being able to work with one of the timid dogs whom I like very much -- but she was a medium sized dog and I had to pick her up, carry her, put her down, repeat multiple times. I felt my back getting worse throughout the time, but figured it was just sore from lifting weight (squirmy weight sometimes!) from off the ground. A couple dogs I had also pulled quite a lot, which is usual, but seemed to bother my back more than it had every other weekend.  After this, we also did a bunch of housecleaning and walked our own dogs. By that night I could barely move. In fact, I had to get Ryan to help pick me up out of bed because everything was so sore.

I stayed in bed most of Sunday and Monday with little reprieve. Tuesday, the pain was so bad that I went to the doctor. I had a PT appointment schedule for the following week (in 3 days actually!), but I could barely walk, so I took the first appt. available.

So what is it?

The verdict: Sciatic nerve pain due to severe swelling of the sciatic nerve. In fact, it's so swollen its easy to feel and almost even see.

The prescription: The doctor gave me steroids (ha!) and pain meds to reduce the swelling. I have been taking those for several days combined with heat & ice, stretching, wonderful massages courtesy of Ryan, and puppy kisses, courtesy of the doctor doggies.

Doctor Q.

Guess at a cause: In researching this type of pain, I found at least 3 or 4 common causes, including herniated disks, slipped disks etc. I finally came across one that seemed the most plausible: Piriformus Syndrome. This is basically a tightening of the muscles in the butt/glute/hip joint. When these muscles get pulled too tightly (like possibly from overlifting, or lifting with poor form, or both of these combined with lack of stretching!) the muscles become inflamed. The problem is the poor little sciatic nerve runs in between these muscles and so, when the muscles swell, they pinch the nerve. This sounded like a likely cause.

When I was mostly a runner, I had very limber, loose, flexible muscles. When I started lifting 4x/week, not running a lot and not stretching, I felt all my muscles, especially those in my hip/back get a lot tighter. I would put money on this being the cause.

Ice, heat, rest, meds, stretch

The plan: Rest, ice, heat, stretch, take it easy...until I feel good enough for light activity. I will, of course, start with walking and running at an easy pace. I will also probably do arm and chest lifting workouts. Eventually, if I recover fully I will ease my way back into a harder routine.