Tag Archives: habit

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Hungry

Each time I’ve gotten pneumonia, I drop ten pounds in a week. The weight stays off, each time for longer. Then I gain it back and go past my “normal” weight. It takes work to get that extra weight off.

I have been trying to lose that extra weight since the start of the year. At first I just tried to increase my vegetable intake. The green, yellow and orange vegetables have the lowest calories and carbohydrates. The grains and rice and potatoes and bread are all more dense and have more calories and carbohydrates. I tried to go easier on them.

I did not make much progress. The climbing gym has been building muscle and clothes fitting better, but the scale did not move much.

I started having conversations with my stomach. I would eat. My stomach would demand more. “HUNGRY! WANT MORE!” This is not real hunger, as the people in occupied territories are having. This is my stomach or hindbrain fussing. It was easiest to control at lunch. I would fill half my container with spinach or mixed greens and then add more vegetables or tuna salad or egg salad or humus and vegetables. I would take a piece of fruit. Once that was done, we were done. “HUNGRY!” my stomach would complain. “That’s ok,” I would tell myself, “It’s ok to be a little bit hungry. We’ve had enough food. Stop fussing.”

My stomach fussed a lot at first. Now it is more of a query: “Hungry?” “No,” I reply, “we’ve had enough.” It seems to quiet down much more quickly. I think I am losing weight but I have no scale here and haven’t remembered to weigh myself in the last 3 weeks at work. Never mind. I have more muscle, at any rate, which is denser than flab. Muscle burns 9 kcal/gram and fat burns 4 kcal/gram. I climbed yesterday at the gym and might again this afternoon. It did take weeks or a couple months for my stomach to quiet down. Changing habits is not easy.

The tuna salad and spinach and green chili dish was my breakfast this am. I don’t think my stomach complained at all after it. It was distracted by packing and clearing out the refrigerator and cleaning. Sol Duc knows I am packing but is pretty sure she is going with me. I have been putting her toys in the carrier and she’s gone in and out to suss out the situation.

I hope all the people who are suffering from hunger get fed, today and tomorrow and the next day.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: hungry.

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Age-defying

I get lots of quasi and fringe medical emails. I subscribe to some so that I know what they are “pushing”. The current trend is online “classes” where you sign up and then they have hours of talk and interviews and stuff. The talks can be three hours or more for a week. I am offered a bargain daily to sign up to be able to access the talks over and over. Hmmm, not today, thanks. I have very low tolerance for videos and television.

Currently I’m getting notes from an “age-defying” one.

I am skeptical about “age-defying” as they are describing it. However, there is a study that I think is very convincing about how to stay healthy as you get older. It was done in England. They looked at five habits: excess alcohol (averaging more than two drinks a day), inactivity (couch potato), addictive drugs, obesity and tobacco.

They had people who had none of the five, people who had all of them and people who had one or two or more. The conclusion was that for each one added, the average lifespan dropped by about four years. That is, the people who did all five tended to die 20 years sooner on average than the ones with none of the bad habits.

Recently in the US, the news said “Gosh, it turns out that any alcohol is bad for us.” I thought, how silly, when various studies made that clear over a decade ago. There was a very nice study from Finland, with 79,000 people where they looked at alcohol and atrial fibrillation. Atrial fibrillation increases the risk of strokes. They concluded that lifetime dose of alcohol was directly related to atrial fibrillation. That is, the more you drink, the sooner your heart gets really grumpy and starts fibrillating. Alcohol is toxic to the heart, the liver, the brain. Tobacco is toxic to the lungs, the heart, the brain and everything else. The addictive drugs: well, you get the picture.

So the anti-aging prescription is pretty simple to recommend. It just is not always simple to do. That is why we still have doctors. For chronic bad habits I am part mom/cheerleader/bearleader/nag/kind helper. Here is the prescription. Feel free to send me money instead of buying that seven day set of twenty one hours of lectures:

  1. Minimal or no alcohol.
  2. No addictive drugs (that includes marijuana and THC and we have almost no studies indicating that CBD is not addictive.Remember that THC and CBD and the other 300+ cannabinoids produced by the marijuana plant were not studied because it is illegal at the federal level.)
  3. No tobacco.
  4. Exercise every day: a walk is fine.
  5. Maintain your weight, which means as you get older you either have to exercise more or eat less or both. Muscle mass decreases with age.

The last anti-aging piece is some luck. Born into a war zone? Caught in a disaster, flood, fire, tsunami? Born into a family with trauma and addiction and few resources? Huge stress in your life? Discrimination or abuse? If you have had none of these, help someone else, because you have the luck. Pass it on.

The header photograph is all family members: two are my aunts and one is a cousin of my father’s and they all play church organ! Music sustains that side of the family. I took that in 2017 in Baltimore, Maryland. We had the uncles along too!

This is my grandmother on my mother’s side. I took this in the early 1980s at Lake Matinenda.

I will try to dig up the links to the two studies.