Reactivation in the sense of getting off my duff & getting active again.
Reactivation in the sense of writing this blog again.
It’s been nearly a year & a half since I’ve done either with any consistency — not since mid- to late October 2006 when I posted the last blog I wrote about my participation in the second iteration of my workplace’s Start Walking program. I’d done pretty well with the first iteration of the program overall, & thought I was geared up for the second go-’round too (I’m pretty sure I did it all the way through the Bioneers weekend recounted in that last Start Walking blog, at least) — but then a number of circumstances conspired within my mind to bring me to a . . . well, not a screeching halt, exactly. Just a slump into the grey, one of the several forms that my old demon depression takes with me. And even after it kinda sorta dissolved, I found myself still in some kind of energy-less limbo, another of depression’s manifestations in my life.
And so I kinda sat around on my couch a lot, feeling the dark of an Anchorage winter close all around me, along with all the looming huge crapload of boxes from the move we had just made, that for awhile there I was the only person present to deal with. Or not deal with. And even after my mood picked up a bit, I didn’t pick my body up & do much exercising of it. Plus, I found these really tasty pistachios seasoned with rosemary & garlic sold at the Natural Pantry (the store I do most of my grocery shopping at), & ate way too many of ’em, ate too much of the tasty raw cheddar cheese there too, & occasionally had a pizza or one of the refined-carb-heavy snacks someone brought in to work, & managed thereby to gain back all the 18 lbs. I’d lost over the course of my 2006 activities.
But there’s good news too.
I didn’t gain back more than that 18 lbs. Gaining back more than you lost is pretty typical with a lot of “diets,” but that didn’t happen with me. That’s because of the second piece of good news:
I didn’t go back to my old, pre-2006 style of eating. Sure, a few more pistachios or pieces of cheese than I should have had (both healthy foods, but too much of a good thing, y’know?); sure, the occasional pizza with it’s refined carb crust & greasy pepperoni — but overall I lived by what I’d learned about how to eat. I didn’t return to the vending machines (haven’t eaten anything out of one in over two years now), I didn’t go back to boxed cereals & other heavily refined carbs as a daily part of my diet. I continued to eat lots & lots of veggies, low glycemic index carbs, lean meats, coldwater fish, nuts & seeds, etc., just as I’d learned.
I didn’t lose my knowledge of what works. I know how to lose fat (not just weight, but fat, especially the nasty adipose tissue that lingers around the waistline): I just have to do the work.
And now that I’m doing the work again, well — piece of . . . . Hmmm. Not piece of cake, for cake is so very high-refined-carbohydraty. Nor, really, is the work quite “piece of cakey” anyway: rowing 5,000 meters on an indoor rower takes a bit of sweat, you see.
Oh yeah, & I made some good gains in the interim, too. For example, last October, with my Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, I bought myself an erg — a Concept 2 Model D indoor rower — something I’d had my greedy-for-fitness eyes on since the year before. I even got myself going on it quickly enough that I was able to meet the first of the online rowing challenges that Concept 2 sponsors every year, to row 31,000 meters over the week leading up to Hallowe’en, & got myself this cool Skeleton Crew challenge certificate. (I still need to order my t-shirt.)
And I started making some really good kick-ass soups, full of legume & vegetable goodness, like the lentil soup I posted about in January. Nowadays I typically make a big enough pot on Sunday evenings to cover maybe half my meals from Sunday night through Wednesday lunch — & all low-GI & healthy.
But came time to be a bit more organized about it all. Fat loss, exercise, nutrition, diabetes prevention — & yeah, given I’ve had a couple of bad bouts in the past year with old demon depression, that too. Health — which if I haven’t mentioned before, is what terveys means. (In Finnish.)
So a couple of weeks ago I broke out my iPod & started dancing in the morning again, as I did of yore. And I broke out my old Excel spreadsheet (now done in OpenOffice Calc) that I used to use for keeping track of my Start Walking stuff, updated it to 2008, & started keeping track again of my walking, rowing, dancing, strength training, & come spring probably biking too. Started participating in another workplace health program that, come March 31, will also include Start Walking round 4 (I missed round 3 altogether). And dusted off my Turbulence Training program materials that I had barely started tapping a year & a half ago, to pursue it in earnest this time.
And started, as of this post, to write this blog with some regularity again. Which also helps me toward my health goals.
