http://www.helpdiet.co.za/blog/letter-of-gratitude-to-prof-tim-noakes/
MEDICAL CONDITIONS
Medical conditions, lifestyle diseases, health challenges
That’s it! Enough already!
Hear ye! Hear ye! Public Announcement!
It really is enough now. Exactly what is ‘it’ and what is enough already? Weight. Hypertension. Blood Glucose (and the edible kind). Fatigue. Insomnia. Indifference. Oh grief, I could go on and on.. and on …
It’s what my dietician called ‘the slippery slop’. Perhaps I should pen that as ‘The Slippery Slope’. Because it really, really is a Slippery Slope people. Actually, no, scratch that completely. It’s the Slippery Gorge. And do please check out the synonym verbs for Gorge hereunder!
The infamous and notorious (there is a difference) Odyssey takes to the road again tomorrow morning. Let’s be clear on this, tomorrow 19 August 2013 at 07h00 my Odyssey takes to the highway again. I am mortified to admit here on this horribly public forum that I tested FBG and BP this morning and both are notably elevated. Elevated from my usual readings that is – which were last done on 23rd June. That is the mortifying part – the interval between these routine checks. Won’t be permitted to happen again. I am not mortified about the readings themselves, they are simply proof of severe self neglect. My excuses for this severe self neglect will become clear as I continue to bore you all in the days and weeks to come 🙂
Gorge (per the ubiquitous Google)
|
Noun
|
||||
|
Verb
|
||||
|
Synonyms
|
Baby steps nutrition.1
One of the things ‘they’ say is that Green Tea packs a power punch nutritionally. My daughter-in-law (Taiwanese born) has always stated that the green tea we get here in RSA is not the ‘real thing’.
She and I agree, though, that LIPTON CLEAR GREEN – MINT is rather ‘lekker’! I confess to adding a sachet of Huletts Equisweet sucralose. (the green one). I also let the bag draw in the tea cup for quite a while and drink lukewarm-ish.
According to Diane Kress RD CDE, 2 cups of green tea per day is non-negotiable 
2013 New beginnings?
Happy New Year to each and every one of you!
Goals? They are but dreams unless written down. Just IMHO. 🙂
Let the Odyssey resume… let’s do this peeps!
(A test post from my Android phone)
ODYSSEY: All psyched up & nowhere to go!
Yeah well no fine. There I was – on Saturday morning all fired up, fasted and keen to get my latest lot of bloods done.
Tootled along in the new Yaris (now named Ruby btw!) to the lab we now use.. only to find they do not open on Saturdays…. Sh*t… not impressed. I was on my way to pick up my granddaughter to take her to a birthday party so could not shoot through to Milnerton where the Pathcare lab does open on Saturdays. I was planning to go on Friday am but decided on Saturday as Fridays would cut into my working day….. hhhmmm. Will have to go to Pathcare lab tomorrow am.
The regular blood tests have now become even more important in my life as I made some quite momentous decisions recently.
Quite momentous in that I have been battling to curb a backslide in my weight loss progress since all the ‘snot en trane’ of the last half year or so. I need all the help and motivation I can get but I have nonetheless resigned from Weigh-Less. I will miss the lovely pamphlets they produce and I will miss some of the people I met while there in 2009/2010. I will be glad to have R125 a month more to spend on good, quality food. But for the rest – well quite frankly I truly believe that I can teach most of them a thing or two. Some GL’s are tremendous and others just do not have ‘it’ I am afraid.
I have come to the realisation that I went about my weight loss in completely the wrong way. How can a 25kg weight loss not be a raging success story? You may well ask! I did the right things for me (I thought) – low GI eating plan mainly of my own creation; using nutrition software to keep track of intake; some increase in physical activity >>>>> and therein lies the crunch!
I have realised that far more than what that damn scale says, it is in fact body fat % that has to be monitored and brought down to within the normal range. At a 25kg weight loss, I looked pretty darn good if I say so myself and I still get compliments about my June 2010 birthday photo used on most websites I frequent. BUT BUT BUT I was a skinny(ish!) fat person!
If body fat % is right, then the weight will be right too… I think… any comments greatly appreciated here!
Lack of robust physical exercise during my weight loss journey resulted in far too much of that 25kg loss being lean muscle. I can feel that and see that in myself. To rectify the matter will not be a simple undertaking but I plan to give it a go. The low GI eating is resuming (for me the only way to go) and the nutrition software has been ‘re-booted’! The CRUNCH is going to be the physical exercise – aerobic; stretching; light weights; core; – dear heaven this is not going to be easy at all!!
Anyone know when I can buy reasonably priced skinfold calipers? I am serious! Can order from the USA for +- $20 BUT the freight costs are very high. www.chponline.com.
While we are mentioning websites here, check out the new diabetes website www.mydiablog.com. Had a long chat with the founder this evening – a German named Wolf. What a great guy.
Blue Tuesday coming up – had a great weekend out & about in the sunshine so not looking forward to my desk again early tomorrow morning.
Have a great week everyone.
ODYSSEY CONTINUED : SMART goals
My post this morning has to do with goals. And what’s more, this post is cribbed directly off a newsletter I subscribe to. Tom Venuto’s BURN THE FAT Fat Burning Tips E-zine : www.burnthefat.com.
‘They’ say – and I have always believed implicitly in this – that a goal is but a dream until it is written down. This post fits in nicely with my post of yesterday about New Year’s resolutions.
Whether we call them resolutions or goals, we surely all aspire to something in this fresh New Year? It’s like a nice clean sheet; a new blank page in your new 2011 Journal – you do try to keep a journal do you not?! 
You do at least try to keep a food log do you not?!
I think I have mentioned before that some years ago I created an Excel workbook which enabled Weigh-Less members to record daily food intake and the various formulas would add up and track their daily progress. If any one part of the daily formula was exceeded, the figures would start showing in RED!!! If anyone is interested, I could try and dig it up again from the bowels of my computer! Back in about 2007, I sent out literally hundreds of copies of this spread-sheet. Each page also has space for remarks where you can record what a shit day you are having!
But, as usual, I digress ….. let me just get on with it and list what Venuto calls SMART as well as SMART-ER goals:
1. Specific. Set goals with clarity. Get clear. Get precise. Be specific. Your mind does not respond well to generalities.
2. Measurable. Set goals that can be quantified in measurable units. Kg weight; body fat % (more about that soon); body measurements; clothing sizes.
3. Accountable. Set goals that you can be held accountable to. Accountable to yourself with weekly progress charts; a daily nutrition diary/food log; and possibly a training journal. Double that accountability by submitting your results to a third party who can hold you accountable!
4. Realistic. Set goals that are attainable and maintainable. ,5kg a week FAT loss a week is attainable. 1Kg per week would be awesome and not quite so easy imho! I will talk about FAT loss in future posts. I am NO expert but have been reading up about it.
5. Time bound. Set goals with deadlines. With no time limit, there is no urgency for completion. Set weekly goals for nutrition and workouts (!); weekly weight and body composition; then look ahead and check quarterly progress. Set long term goals.
Now for the ER part.
6. Emotional. Goals give direction but strong emotions are the propulsion system that drives you in the desired direction. Connect your goals to your values. What’s most important to you about reaching your goals? What will reaching your goals do for you? What will your life be like then? How will reaching your goals make you FEEL?
7. Review often. Stay laser-focused by writing and reading your goals every day. Repetition is one of the keys to re-programming your mental computer for success.
Of course, I have to add my own little rider to this – also adapted from Tom Venuto’s words –
Work HARD at achieving your goals and EXPECT success!!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
We are goofing off today with our family on one of our ‘most-est’ favourite jaunts – a trip down to Simonstown – replete with cat box in the boot. Love that historic place. Now (sorta!) settled in our new home, I am ready to rescue a kitten from TEARS – though I greatly fear it may turn out to be two kitties from TEARS as all three of our grandchildren want to be part of the process. At R450 each, they are not cheap rescues either! But of course we understand and accept that it is more about donating to an incredible organisation rather than the cost of a kitten per se.
Have a great day everyone!
Odyssey : Interrupted…..
“ I try to take one day at a time,
but sometimes several days attack me at once “
I used the above quotation in June in the series of posts on quotes that resonate with me.
Well at the moment I have to say that several months have attacked me all at once recently. Since June I have been bombarded with truly huge challenges on all fronts; business-wise, health-wise, personal-wise, feel free to imagine any ‘–wise’ you can think of and it has challenged me! And (never begin a sentence with ‘and’ Eileen!) the concerted attack continues unabated.
The result is enormous stress or I should say events that are causing very stressful loss of focus on all mission-critical fronts and will continue to do so until the end of the year.
The catalyst for all of this can probably be laid at the door of our impending re-location to a lovely leafy little suburb called La Rochelle. It will be our second suburban move since moving to Cape Town in 2005. We currently occupy two apartments in a nice old building and we are in the process of packing up both; together with a garage which is crammed full of ‘stuff’ both business and personal.
Our home apartment is not so bad – the cupboards are pretty neatly sorted. A dear kind person has offered to just pitch up on moving day and load all our garments ‘as is’ on their hangers into her car and transport them to our new home. Cool! We are profoundly grateful to her.
My books are mostly packed and ready to roll. My chests full of craft & hobby paraphernalia must still be attended to but I am leaning towards just transporting the drawers ‘as is’ as well.
Our business apartment is not so simple and we are presently surrounded by literally dozens of boxes packed and labelled, packed and not labelled, not packed and ……….. ya getta da picture I am sure.The result of darn nearly five years of not sending archive paper back to our clients. Of course, the clients have been quite happy to leave their stuff with us – saves their space!! The garage has many more such boxes waiting to be shipped and we only have 3 weeks to go to D-Day.
I better get to end of this post and go do something useful ! 🙂
We are determined to move with as little junk as possible and the physical strain of all this angst is getting to us a bit. We are not getting any younger so it’s a case of pacing ourselves and forging ahead in an orderly fashion. List-maker that I am, there is not much that will miss my attention even as thinly spread as we are at this time.
The loss of focus on the health and wellness aspect of the Odyssey is hugely upsetting indeed but as Dr Anna says “ Do not beat yourself up about it” . I will just renew /redirect focus as soon and as often as I can. In between the (organised?!) chaos, I am still trying to keep up with all my health newsletters, still checking out the “Metabolism Miracle” option, getting to gym occasionally and hiking on mountains and in forests every so often…… What more can I do with everything else going on?!
Talk again soon I hope…… keep well and be in touch please if you can….
Weight Loss : Spring has sprung .. or so they say…
All rightee! Listen up you lot! After an absence of over a month from my soapbox, I am back in full voice! You poor people!
Have endured damn nearly 3 months of pure hell business-wise. No, rather make that work-wise; business is good. The pace has slowed down very slightly from barely concealed hysteria to the usual controlled chaos!
I also had what I am resolutely calling My Pitstop for the last two months. A slight weight gain over the period which I have firmly decided I will not beat myself over the head about. Various reasons for this and I am fully aware of all of them! Here are a few:
No food journal. Too busy to take time to record what I was eating. It was so easy to just mindlessly eat whatever was put in front of me with my left hand while my right hand was wielding the mouse at literally all hours of the day or night!
No meal planning. No proper shopping trips to make sure we had the right food in the right quantities in the house! Increased incidence of takeaways when we were too exhausted to bother with cooking which was a lot of the time.
Not enough pure water. Too many mugs of coffee (also mindlessly consumed while wielding the mouse!) and not nearly enough portions of fruit and vegetables to make up for the drought. The 500ml Aquelle bottles are now back on my desk – I try to swallow 4 bottles through the day. I particularly like the Aquelle bottle shape and they go to gym with me too.
No regular exercise. I kept up the mandatory 2 days a month at Virgin Active but did little else there. We went walking several weekends – up the mountain, walked on the beach and over the rocks from Llandudno to Sandy Bay, climbed up above Simonstown to Admiral’s waterfall… All spectacular stuff and we have amazing photos to show for it but it was not nearly enough. We plan another walk this Sunday – out Hout Bay/Llandudno way again. Looking forward to that and do hope that the weather co-operates.
I also joined a unique ladies gym called Adrenalynne. The owner is an amazing person called Lynne who is not young enough to be my daughter which is a plus for me!! She is a previous Mrs Fitness SA title-holder and the fabulous framed photos and qualification certificates in her well equipped home gym have to be seen to be believed! I go (try to get to!) to a twice-weekly class of ladies who call themselves the Golden Girls. Enough said! The first couple of times I went, I thought the gentle dance/stretch routines were a little tame for me. I very soon changed my mind however and have left several classes quite puffed and feeling lekker ‘loose’ all over from all the stretching we do.
Zero self care. Hurtling from one day to the next; battling one computer issue after another. Dealing with multiple and extraordinary client issues all coming at me at once. All culminated in severe stress, fatigue, serious night leg/foot cramps from all the sitting for hours on end and weight creeping stealthily up each day on the scale – that is when I did weigh myself in the mornings! Most days, I was already at my PC by 4:30am and often stayed right there until midnight.
As I prepare for my resumed onward and downward Odyssey, I am looking at a number of things:
Body Fat Percentage – as opposed to plain old body weight which can be deceptive.
The Metabolism Miracle – a New York Times bestseller by Diane Kress, RD, CDE. I have never been one for fad diets and I could not care less about NY Times bestseller lists but this book resonates with me and it is anything but a fad diet.
Nutribase software – yeah, yeah, OK. I know. Just do it Eileen! Don’t mess around with theory. Or get too technical/analytical.
Well, I see it this way for me, myself and I! I achieved a 25kg weight loss and have almost brought the real Eileen back to life by making a big deal of plotting on graphs, keeping food logs; weight logs; BP logs; Glucose logs; examining food labels minutely, etc. etc. It works for me and millions of others as well if we go by the sheer volume of health-based software available on the http://www. So I let you’all know how it goes!
So do let me know how things have been for you over the worst of the Winter? Or the best of Summer for those of you in the Northern hemisphere?
Talk again soon, have a great day, Eileen
Reading : one of my favourite pastimes
I am a voracious reader. Have been since a very young age. Always will be. Come rain or shine, workday or holiday, I cannot live a day without reading something.
Am I talking Tolstoy? No, I have no conspicuous literary pretensions. I am a reader of washing machine manuals, cereal boxes, crime thrillers, craft & nutrition books by the dozen, cookbooks, biographies, business tomes, ‘pop psychology’, income tax and VAT manuals, – you name it, I read it. For my business and for my pleasure.
I love nothing better than curling up under a duvet with a good book and preferably a large slab of chocolate. Well, OK, the slab of chocolate has not happened for a very long time unfortunately. So I make do with 3 Provitas and hummus! Not quite the same but I am a hummus binger!
So, amidst all the very serious crashing computer issues I am dealing with at this time, I was thrilled with the arrival yesterday of 4 books I had ordered and eagerly awaited.
New editions of the SA GI & GL Guide and SA Edition of The Complete Kilojoule Carbohydrate and Fat Counter.
SA Cookbook for Diabetes & Insulin Resistance Book 2.
More Jewellery in a Jiffy.
No rocket science as you can see!
Interestingly, I see that the new edition of The Complete Kilojoule Carbohydrate and Fat counter now has nutrition software available as a companion resource. This is something new and I will be checking it out and will let you know what it’s all about.
Have a great day.
Weight loss – are you battling too?
Man alive, what a struggle I am having this winter with achieving a steady weight loss result every week. Although I do weigh in at Weigh-Less most Thursday mornings, my actual loss chart runs from Sunday am to Sunday am and that chart shows my struggles far too graphically!!
I had a ‘mini-breakthrough’ on the 2nd and since then have been fluctuating a bit down-a bit up-a bit down- you get the idea….
Causes of this? Ah, that part is easy. Not enough water; lax portion control especially with the winter ‘comfort’ foods; erratic mealtimes; eating at my office desk (toast with peanut butter in left hand and right hand still wielding the mouse!!); ‘illegal foods’; occasional piggy binges; not nearly enough physical activity; not enough ‘time out’ for extreme self care; the list goes on and on…
The whole odyssey is about the ‘extreme self care’ that Cheryl Richardson writes about so well. Although I am posting about weight loss today – which is the crucial self care bottom-line for most of us on the journey to best wellness- the other aspects must receive attention too. Serious attention.
OK, so the causes of poor weight loss, no weight loss and, yes, weight gain are no mystery to any of us.
One reason we must consider is this: What eating plan are we actually following? Low fat? Low carb? Atkins? Weigh-Less/Weight Watchers? Crash diet? 4-day ‘Heart Diets’? ‘3 days on/3 days’ off? Growth hormone injections? Considering bariatric surgery?
We HAVE to have a plan. A map. A route. A guide. A GPS. Call it what you will. That much I have learnt from over 4 decades of (often bitter) experience. I have spoken about this before but it does bear repeating!
In a nutshell then:
Where are you now? (Get your health status checked out. Know ALL your ‘numbers’.)
Where are you headed? (Goal weight. Healthy ‘numbers’.Physical fitness.)
How will you get there? (Lifestyle Plan. Write it all down. Get your support team together – appropriate health professionals; your family and/or friends; a mentor you know well and trust? Stop dreaming it. Just action it. Now!)
While facing often overwhelming odds as I do, one thing I know for sure (Oh God, I sound like Oprah) is that I have come this far and there is no turning back! And if the journey to my destination takes longer than I would like, so. be. it. I am still learning all along the road.
(This post – in fact all my posts – with apologies to my English master Mr Graves who thought he had taught me perfect English grammar! )
Eileen's Odyssey 