GETTIN' HEALTHY with Ives Iverson

[Ivy]

Sorry about the goofy title. It was the first thing that came to mind. I may change it. (I would be glad to change anyone else's thread title too, if they get tired of theirs.)

Here are the goals I set in UDog's intro thread:

I'm in. My goals are a little amorphous, though. I'm a little burnt out on diets so I've sworn them off. My main goals are to improve my life and health. Weight needs to come down in the long term but I'm not focusing on that primarily right now.

General dietary goals: eat intuitively to avoid binging.
General exercise goals: break up my weekdaily sitting (I have a sedentary job but I work from home so I have some freedom to move as I might not in an office environment).
Other goals: Adequate sleep, relaxation, sex, human connection.

Dietary details: focus on fruit/vegetable/lean protein intake, enjoy all else in moderation. Main goal is no binges.
Exercise details: on weekdays, get up and move around once per hour for a few minutes, walk dog at least once, all to add up to a daily goal of 10K steps. Once or twice a weekday run through the 7 minute bodyweight workout app. Do something fun/active each weekend with the family.
Other details: focus on nighttime routine and sleep hygiene to increase daytime wakefulness. Limit one nap of reasonable length at midday. Cut down on bathing in screenlight in the evenings. Read an actual paper book before sleep. Sex at least twice a week. Continue to focus daily on really connecting in my most valued relationships.

So the first week or so of my journey has gone pretty well. I bought myself a Withings Pulse fitness monitor and I'm wearing it 24/7 (except in the shower because it's not waterproof). It tracks my activity and sleep patterns- not sure how it does the sleep thing, but it seems to be accurate as far as I can tell. I guess I wouldn't know if it were inaccurate, since I'm asleep when it's tracking, but it caught my one wake-up last night. Interesting stuff.

I find that the tracker makes me want to do better. I'm a little bit of a pleaser and a teacher's pet. I like to do well and be acknowledged for same. So, I like doing the things that make the tracker happy. Good job! You took X steps today! Good job! You got 8 hours of sleep today! And I don't want it to tell me I need to do better. So far, so good with the tracker. A++++ would buy again.

My food goals are going well, but then, they were pretty vague. I'm getting good levels of fruits/veggies/protein. And I haven't binged since I began keeping track. I have eaten cookies a couple of times but only a few, not the whole bag. I'm tracking on myfitnesspal but only to see where I'm at. Right now the goal is to fix my head. I don't think any weight loss will stick until I do.

Exercise goals, as I mentioned, are going well. I'm getting off my ass every hour and doing the 7 minute app once every weekday. For anyone interested, it's the NY Times 7 minute bodyweight workout: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/the-scientific-7-minute-workout/ On weekends I'm aiming for one fun activity with the fam. Last weekend we went to Old Salem and walked around. It'll do. I haven't hit 10K steps yet since I got the tracker- I guess I did not fully realize how many steps that is. I'm hitting 5K most days with a dog walk in the afternoon, sometimes two. So I'm revising that goal to 5K for now, and working up to 10K maybe by the end of the challenge.

Other goals- Sleep is going well. I take a short-ish nap on my lunch hour and that's it (I was previously taking two naps most days, one of them pretty long). And I'm retiring to the boudoir earlier than usual and reading until tired, instead of my usual furious internetting until the moment I feel sleepy enough to pass out. It seems to be making a difference. I went to bed at motherfucking 9:30 last night. UNHEARD OF for me. But I feel good today. Other stuff: lovin' on my family, mostly a check. I was really cranky yesterday which is why I put myself in time out early bedtime. Otherwise I think I'm doing okay with that. Sexin' it up twice a week, check. That's my husband's favorite of my goals.

 

[Evo]

Exercise goals, as I mentioned, are going well. I'm getting off my ass every hour and doing the 7 minute app once every weekday. For anyone interested, it's the NY Times 7 minute bodyweight workout: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/the-scientific-7-minute-workout/

ooo

I like the sound of this.

I might try in on for size. I like quick!

 

[Ivy]

Eat The Food: check. I probably ate a little too much of the potato salad I had for breakfast, but I had slept through normal breakfast time and it was almost lunchtime, and I was ravenous. So I think it's okay. I'll probably only eat one more big meal today anyway (plus a couple snax so I'm not doing anything crazy restrictive that will feed my ED) so I am trying to just be chill about it.

Take The Steps: check! I took a 5K step walk just now and it felt awesome! It was raining a little bit but not too bad.

Sleep the Sleep: check and a half, and it wasn't great. I went to sleep around 11 and got up around 10. So, way too much sleep. I had a headache for the first part of the day but I tried to hydrate and oxygenate (I think that's why I get headaches if I sleep too long) with water & a long walk and now I feel much better.

Love the peeps: check. My kids are at their grandparents' so Noah and I are having a date weekend. We're looking for a museum we've never been to to go to after I have a shower in a few minutes but I think it might be too late in the day for that. Maybe tomorrow. We took the pup with us on our long rain walk and he was so cute. His tail was making figure-8s the whole time. We'll have dinner with my parents tomorrow to get the kids back which will be nice- I've missed my mom since getting my fill of her at Christmas. She's going through some heavy shit right now (pancreatic cancer) and when she's under stress she gets a little bit weird. I have tons of compassion for her but I also get a little bit irritated at times with her irrationality and weird ways of coping. They're weird to me, but they give her comfort, so I understand she needs them. So if I get a breather I can go back to her and have the loving attitude I want to have.

Thinking about getting one of these Withings activity thingies for my little sister, who is struggling right now with her own weight and body image and activity levels. She's trying to get a job as a substitute teacher and I think she'll be tired, but I think if she also sees how much more active she is it will be gratifying. I don't want to light up any disordered thinking though, because I know from experience that when people try to coerce me into losing weight it feels really shitty and makes me want to eat a doughnut. I just want to be encouraging and loving, not coercive or pushy. So, holding off on that for now.

 

[Udog]

Great batch of goals. You truly are focusing on the keys of overall health, here. I may steal some of them a bit later.

 

[Ivy]

Thanks, [MENTION=4722]Udog[/MENTION]! My health keeps declining and my most recent experience (discovering I have afib) was kind of a wake-up call. I'm pushing 40 and I need to stop eating and sleeping like I'm in college- it's not contributing to my long-term health. Probably never did even when I WAS in college, but when you're young you have a bit of a buffer for that kind of thing. Or you feel like you do, anyway.

Update tiem!

Eat the Food: Still pretty good, no binges. I'm not sure I'm really ready for detailed calorie tracking though- it's going okay, but I can feel myself starting to "save" calories for late in the day and I've started to crave sweets a little. I might need to go back to no tracking, just intuiting. I thought I was descriptively tracking (as opposed to prescriptively tracking, like "on a diet" tracking where the goal is to keep calories down) but it's changing my behavior and right now I'm not sure if that's conducive to my overall healing at this point. I'm going to give it a few more days and see what happens and if this trend continues I'll put tracking on hold.

Take the Steps: I almost beat my brother on the Withings Leaderboard last week and I didn't even have it a full week. I told him I was shocked to find how hard it is to take 10K steps and he said small improvements are better for me right now than trying to jump in at a level I can't sustain. I can work up to it. 10K steps is five miles a day, that's a big change from no miles a day. He tends to get about 5K too, so we're on a level now and we've agreed to ramp up our steps together.

Sleep the Sleep: going okay. I haven't gotten quite 8 hours most nights, but I'm approaching it. I wish I could sleep another hour in the morning, but school starts when it starts. I'm trying to get to bed earlier but I can't seem to get there much before 11. Anyway, dialing it back, slowly but surely.

Love the Peeps: Saw my mom on Sunday at dinner to pick up the kids and it was super nice. Also saw my dad and grandmother. It was a good visit with all of them. And my little bro was there, AND he requested to sit by me! It's so nice to have him back. He had a girlfriend who was pretty toxic and didn't "allow" him to see us for about a year. They FINALLY broke up late last year and he's been very apologetic about letting her do that to us. The kids are home and I missed them, which is a good thing to happen to the parent-child relationship once in a while. And going to bed at the same time as my husband is reaping all sorts of associated benefits- increased levels of spooning, for example. That's super nice.

 

[Ivy]

I keep forgetting to update in here, too. Damn, I'm bad at that. At least the actual challenge is going well for me. I'm claiming it as a moderate success so far. And moderation is good. I'm learning to be happy with moderate successes because SUPER WOW OUTSTANDING!!! successes just aren't realistically sustainable long-term. That's why they're SUPER WOW OUTSTANDING!!!

I'm just copypasting from the main challenge thread this time. I hope to put more frequent informal notes about progress in here going forward.

So last week was okay. It was super cold here (at least for here- I know it was way colder further North). That made me want to hibernate, which was good and bad I guess.

Dietary stuff- still going well. No binges. This is remarkable for me, to be tracking my diet and not descend into heavy restriction followed by binge, repeat ad fattum. I set my calorie count on MFP to my TDEE and have been eating at a very modest deficit of a few hundred calories under TDEE. It seems to be enough not to trigger disordered thinking. So far, so good. 7/7.

Movin' around- a mixed bag this week. I did manage to get all my steps in every day, but I only did the 7-minute app twice last week. I'm going to split the difference and call that 5/7.

Sleepin' 'n' stuff- very good. I slept over 8 hours every day last week and kept my stress levels low during the day. I'm actually starting to want to go to bed in the 9:00 or 10:00 hour. 11 feels late to me now (and it is, because I get up at 7 so I'd have to fall asleep instantly to get 8 hours- and I don't). This is huge progress for me and might help explain why I haven't been wanting to binge. I don't feel extremely well-rested still so I'm hoping my neurologist will want to follow up with a CPAP sleep study to see if it improves my quality of sleep. The report from my initial sleep study said that I had "mild obstructive sleep apnea" and that at one point for about a minute or two in the night my blood oxygen level was down to 83%. I'm sure that doesn't help. Anyway, 7/7.

Love and marriage- great. My daughter had a cello concert on Saturday that we were all very excited about. It was the first event she had to audition to get into and she did great. Very proud of her. We celebrated afterwards. My son isn't into anything like that yet (he's just 8) but I loved on him this week too by paying attention to what he's interested in and watching his Youtube videos with him and giving him feedback about those. And I washed his fox hat so he can continue wearing it to school without grossing anyone out, which is important to him. A good week to be married, too. We had a night on our own and we made the best of it with dinner out, a movie in, and snuggling. I feel weird giving any more details about the sex part of things since that was one of my goals so I'm going to leave that out of my check-ins out of respect for the life partner. But anyway. I'm calling this week a 6/7 because I didn't connect as much as I'd like with my parents or siblings.

 

[Ivy]

Cross-posted with the main thread.

Update! Last week sucked.

Eating the Food- mostly okay, but I did overdo it one day on some stuff that I used to use for planned binges. Not quite to the degree I once would have but enough that I felt like it was a bit of a relapse. The victory I managed to pull out of the ashes is that I tracked it anyway, and then didn't go off the rails for days or give up entirely because I had messed up once. I got back on track and I think I'm okay now. 6/7.

Taking the Steps- horrible this week. It snowed and was really super cold otherwise. I only made it to 5K steps on 3 out of 7 days, and then just barely. And on the days I didn't, I was a massive slug. Didn't do the 7-minute bodyweight app even once. Gotta pick myself up. 2/7.

Sleeping the Sleep- mediocre. On the days I didn't walk enough, I napped more than usual. On those days I found myself slipping into later bedtimes, though I still managed to get 7+ hours most nights, but not every night. 5/7.

Loving the Peeps- at least that went well. Going to bed at the same time as my husband most nights has been nice- it's a time we can check in after the day's events and talk about what happened. He gets his "physical touch" love language needs met and I get my "words of affirmation" love language needs met. Also, the kids were home two days from school and we had a good time together on those days. On the night when it started snowing we took a long snow walk together. My son and I kept walking after the girl and the dad and the dog got too cold and went inside. We were probably out for a couple hours all told. He drew foxes in the snow all over the neighborhood and we wore out the batteries in the headlamp. And the girl made us hot chocolate for when we came back inside. (That's one reason I don't want to be too dogmatic about "good" foods vs. "bad" foods- foods are more than their nutritional profiles, and things like hot chocolate after a walk in the snow are more about closeness with family and warmth and comfort than nutrition. I don't want to give that up.)

Again didn't see any extended family this week including my mom whom I miss a lot right now. But I did text continuously with my brother and we agreed that all three of our kids who are old enough (my 14yo and his 12 and 16yos) will go to the same music camp this summer that my daughter has gone to for the past two summers. They all play stringed instruments and don't get to see each other as much as they'd like, so a week together on a college campus playing music will be fun for them. So let's call this week 6/7.

EDIT: Reading this over again, it doesn't seem like it sucked as much as I thought it did. Maybe just the normal fluctuations and up-and-down of life. Need to walk more though, that's for sure.