Re-locating ….the news is out…..

Sooo… here we go……. on the road again…..

I remember that my paternal grandparents were always moving. Or so it seemed to teenager Eileen. Usually moving around and staying with my parents and their siblings. I also remember watching in fascinated horror as my diabetic granny injected herself with a steel torture instrument loaded with insulin several times a day.. but I digress as usual. That is a story for another day.

We live a profoundly privileged life and we have recently been given the choice of either staying where we are in a (too) spacious home with a garden or moving to a considerably smaller home in a gated security complex. With the years going by, we’re not getting any younger so it made perfect sense to accept the opportunity to move back across town. We will be returning to Milnerton and will have the pleasure of living closer to our sons and their families. The fact that these children are keen on the idea gives us great pleasure; we can’t be too terrible as parents and in-laws! Right? Right? LOL!

There comes a time for all of us when we need to scale down and de-clutter.  However, talking about it and subscribing wholeheartedly to the principle are two totally different things! It’s bloody hard to toss items one has had for years. And don’t give me the hoary old “If you haven’t used/worn it in a year, out it must go”. It’s not as cut and dried as that. I won’t be cutting down to “4 mugs, 4 plates & 4 spoons” as cheeky middle son suggested! Yes, grateful that I don’t have to go that far. 🙂

My business will continue as normal with a slightly changed focus. More news on that soon.

Anyway, this is the first advice to many that I interact with on social media. More to come as the weeks go by. Stay tuned and thanks for reading.

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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

I am really upset … 3 Poor self care and diabetes complications

Those of you following this blog will know the story about my friend T who works for a friend/client of mine. At Christmas time he scraped his foot while swimming and by March his foot had been amputated.  He is still getting around on crutches while he awaits a prosthetic foot.

I was upset once again yesterday when I was told that T was admitted to hospital last Thursday with deep vein thrombosis in the remaining ‘good’ leg. He remains hospitalised at this time and I will contact his son later this morning to get the latest update. The grave danger and possible consequences in this situation do not have to be spelled out.

What really, really gets to me is that this whole unfolding crisis could quite probably have been avoided completely. It need never have happened.

T really needs to supplement his pension income, his employer wants to accommodate this but also has to deal with T’s lengthy  absences from work. It has placed my client in a  difficult situation which will have to resolved one way or another.

When we blithely ignore the warning signs that our lifestyle is causing our bodies to deteriorate, we are literally toying with our  lives. There are thousands of medical conditions that can befall us over which we have no control whatsoever. Surely it makes sense to take charge of what we can control and influence? But we just don’t do it.

I am relentlessly driven by a number of things to continue on my odyssey back to optimal (optimum?!) wellness. I cannot just let it go. I cannot just let things slide – much as I am so often tempted to do. I deviate from the path – badly sometimes – and yet I cannot throw in the towel.

• I value my financial independence and the lifestyle that this affords me.
• I dread the day my children have to step up to the plate and provide for me financially.
• I fear being dependant on others to care for me physically. I cared for my dying mom-in-law for over a year before she died and it was a harrowing experience for both of us. Well do I remember the two of us crying bitterly in each other’s arms as I changed her filthy disposable nappy yet again. The anguish she suffered from the pain and loss of dignity is something that still lives with me  26 years later.
• I am angry at myself for the stupidity I exhibited over many years in not looking after my health and lifestyle.  I still exhibit this same stupidity ; work and stressful deadlines still predominate in my life.

One small consolation is that sanity has now prevailed long enough for me to appoint a temporary office assistant. After only 3 mornings with us, the ‘advent of Nicky’ is changing my office landscape and I will talk more about this in a later post.

Eileen’s Odyssey : quotable quotes

Quotations that I come across often give me pause for thought, provide motivation to keep me headed in a chosen direction or focussed on desired outcomes. I like this one. 

Until I get through this deadline week, keep well, keep strong and see you soon!

 

"You don’t get to choose how you’re going to die, or when.

You can only decide how you’re going to live. Now."

                                                                         Joan Baez

Our precious time .. my way of thinking..1

Where are we now?
Where are we going?
No matter what our personal circumstances are, we all face the challenge (I don’t like the word problem) of deciding what to do with our time. Yes, it is a decision no matter how we might think to the contrary! We ALL think we are forced to do something when, in fact, we have a choice in these matters.

Think on this: We are where we are today as the result of every decision we have ever made in the past.

Hate your job? You decided to work there! Depending on the degree of your dissatisfaction, you will have to decide to stay and make the best of it or look for another job. Either of those decisions will be followed by further decisions!

Hate your relationship? You decided to enter into it! Once again, depending on how bad things are, you will ultimately have to make one of two decisions! Stay or go and you know what will follow-on from there – more decisions!

Catch my drift? You can go on and on – try it and you will see that consequences (where you are now) are the result of decisions you have made. SO hard to accept that sometimes. We always want to say it’s not our fault about this, that we had no control over that.

So, we do decide how to use our precious time.

I am trying to make the best use of my time and to do that I have had to make some quite tough decisions.

I have decided to streamline my business, separate it from my private life (not easy when you work from home.)
I have decided to reverse my slide down the slippery slope to ill-health and incapacity.
I have decided toi make more time for my hobbies and interests. For my home and my family and friends.
I have decided to make a better job of working together with my spouse in our home-based business! That dear readers may be the most difficult decision of all! 24/7/365 is VERY difficult and the words ‘ chalk’ and ‘ cheese’ do come to mind! Nothing much wrong with chalk and nothing much wrong with cheese either but the two commodities do not really go well together do they?!

So, in making your own decisions about how to best make use of your precious time to reach your own goals, the following two quotations may help you get clarity:
“One of the very worst uses of time is to do something very well that need not be done at all.”
Brian Tracy
” Before you begin scrambling up the ladder of success, make sure that it is leaning against the right building.”
Stephen Covey

Have a great day everyone!