“ 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….
Motivation
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! )
Weight loss : a mini-breakthrough
Well, it was a damn long time coming. What a battle! As of this morning, I have edged past the 25kg mark for the first time – 25.2kg down to be exact. As I said, a mini breakthrough but a breakthrough it is.
My weight loss has fluctuated between 24 –24.8kg for the last 2 months. I know the reasons for this very well. Lax portion control, little exercise, insufficient water and occasional mini-binges all contributed to the patchy downward progress.
June was a month of bi-annual medical checks I have which form part of the diabetic care protocol. At the beginning of the year and at mid-year, I have various tests done to check my health status. Doctor, pathologists, ophthalmologist, podiatrist and dietician all had the dubious pleasure of my company last month. I will talk about it in a later post.
Diabetes really is a dread disease in that uncontrolled – or even just poorly controlled glucose levels wreak havoc with virtually every body system. Unseen and undetected until too late. That’s fact and not just me becoming neurotic or a hypochondriac! While I am very aware of my health diagnoses/challenges and am doing (action!) all I reasonably can to reverse the situation, I have no time to sit around contemplating my ‘health navel’!
Between health, business and personal challenges, I seldom have time to scratch myself! I do not schedule enough ‘me time’. I call it down time or time out. I am looking at that quite seriously and would recommend it for everybody.
As part of my mid-year checks, I consulted a dietician about the prolonged weight plateau. Yeah. Another one. Another dietician I mean. Did I learn anything new? No. Didn’t expect to. What I did get was a slightly revised eating plan which cuts kJ to 5200 per day. (About 1222 calories). Rather strict plan for sure. Cuts carbs and leaves protein/fats much the same. Am I following the recommendations to the letter? Not quite but I have had a shift in weight and that’s the bottom line isn’t it?!
The other perennial recommendation is to increase exercise. Any regular physical activity is crucial for overall health improvement – any physical activity at all.
So get that fat dog out on a leash and get out into the neighbourhood so that he can pick up his pee-mail!
Odyssey to wellness : a good software resource
Good morning everyone 🙂
Just a quickie post this morning about Benutriwise software. Priya Jaipal, the developer of this excellent resource, has just published her latest Health-e-news newsletter.
While the newsletter does happen to contain a rather disjointed review of the product written by yours truly, that is not the reason for this post.
Priya is offering a “ World Cup Special” of a huge discount on the price of this excellent tool. The price is only R200,00 and I do urge those of you that may have been hesitating about buying this software to download and buy it on-line.
Marketed as a calorie counting instrument, I do not only use the calorie count function. I am working on ways to track GI (Glycemic Index), GL (Glycemic Load) as well as Weigh-Less portions on the system.
Have a great day.
Snippets to smile at … and to think on
How did the cow jump over the moon?
No-one told her she couldn’t!
Taken from Riva Greenberg’s Diabetes Stories website.
I am one of those bolshie types. I don’t like being told what to do. I’m pretty sure there aren’t many people who do – like being told what to do that is!
Maybe there is more of my Dad in me than I think. Dad was a chain smoker. I mean a CHAIN SMOKER. He would light one cigarette with the still glowing stub of his last ciggie. Not filter tips either. As a child I used to see the red glow of his cigarette in the dark whenever I ventured out into the passage on my way to the loo in the dark hours of the night.
The real (and phantom) pain he suffered all his life from an amputated right arm during World War 2 was often given as the reason for his chain smoking.
One day, on one of the regular family Sundays my parents used to host on the farm, an aunt told my father that he was addicted to cigarettes and that he was incapable of giving up the habit. For that reason, he should accompany her to a Smokenders meeting during the coming week.
Typically, my bolshie Pater snorted derisively that he could give up at any moment he wished. My equally bolshie aunt retorted that he could not possibly give up decades of chain smoking ‘just like that’.
With that, Dad – by now really riled up – took his smoke out of his mouth & stubbed it out furiously in the ashtray that lived by his chair. “ That’s the last cigarette I will ever smoke!”, he declared angrily. The whole family laughed which did not amuse my old man at all!
And – do you know what – it was! The last cigarette he ever smoked. He suffered; gee how he suffered but would never really admit it. He made my Mom give up too. (Although she started up again behind his back and for many years she thought he didn’t know it!) Til the day he died years later he never put another cigarette in his mouth. Sadly though, the damage had been done.
I’ve never been a follower. I tend to lead from the front; rise to the top; stick my neck out. Dish out orders my kids would say no doubt!
But, you know, sometimes – just sometimes – I could be leading in the right direction! Sure hope so anyway! No-one has told me I will not reach my goals. On the contrary, I have received support all the way.
I surely do need the motivation and encouragement as I battle some unexpected obstacles……. Maybe you have some too …….. take heart, we are in this together!
Quotations : Dolly Parton
“ Find out who you are and do it on purpose. “
Dolly Parton
Ah, the incomparable Dolly! A feisty, loveable actress and queen of the country music genre. She seems to be full of down to earth humour and homespun advice. Very privately married and has never had children. Maybe she’d had enough – she was borne ‘dirt poor’ into a family of twelve children!
How many of us know exactly who we are?
Quotations : Nikki Giovanni
“ I really don’t think life is about the I-could-have-beens.
Life is only about the I-tried-to-do.
I don’t mind the failure but I can’t imagine that I’d forgive myself if I didn’t try. “
Nikki Giovanni – Grammy nominated American poet, author and activist
Born 2 days before me on 7th June 1943 in Knoxville, Tennessee. Her words resonate with me as I progress along the odyssey!
If my post-dated posts upload correctly, this post will be published on the morning of my birthday; 9th June. Many Happy Returns of the Day to me!! 🙂
Wellness journey : spoil yourself a little!
Hello everyone 🙂
On what can be a very long journey to optimum wellness and ideal weight, we sometimes need a treat. Something out of the ordinary to look forward to and experience. To get our minds off our eternal preoccupation with eating plans and exercise schedules.
I had such an experience today. A wonderful pre-birthday gift from a guardian angel who has come into my life.
At a recent networking breakfast for women business owners, I met an enterprising young woman who is passionate about aromatherapy, reflexology massage and – of all things – she is passionate about foot care. This was, of course, of interest to me as a diabetic needing to take special care of my feet.
For the first time in my life, I was treated to a full body aromatherapy massage. From head to toes, I was pampered with lavender-based oils and hot stones warming my tired muscles – all in the comfort of my own home. Wonderful!
Treating ourselves to something we really enjoy can make all the difference to our frame of mind. It need not be anything that costs a fortune. Not at all. A little downtime for your favourite hobby? A good sleep? A new lipstick? Coffee with a friend?
I took a dear friend with me to a card-making session on Saturday morning. We had a great morning, totally relaxed, ‘sticking bits of paper to cardboard’, as one of my very cheeky sons put it!
On your own journey to wellness, try to find time to treat yourself. It makes the world of difference!
Eileen's Odyssey 