*grumble*

Yesterday started off well but ended up pretty painful. I'm calling it a 5 - all joints involved, not crippling but definitely uncomfortable. I'm going to ride it out a couple more days at this dosage before I make any changes. I'm not entirely sure what to blame it on yet, but that's the point of the spreadsheet.

TMI Warning

One more thing that became apparent - my digestion was definitely disturbed this morning. Too early to tell if it's related to the swelling or not, but worth a note. I'll be eating restaurant food again tonight, but from a much more reliable place.

The run went fine, although my legs are definitely tired. I'll be glad of the two days without running. It is clearly going to take a while to get me back into condition.

Slapstick

Last night's post got derailed by a late-evening incident with an angry soda bottle and all of my sheets. Anyway.

I am distinctly more stiff this morning than I have been the past two days. Not quite stiff enough to lose range of motion, but it's hard to get those last joints to flex that last half-centimeter. Calling it a 3, although there's no pain to speak of.

Three possible reasons:

- Weather. I always like to blame the weather, and it's been raining all night and we're due thunderstorms today.
- Food. I ordered a (gluten-free) pizza for dinner last night, and also had root beer and ice cream. These shouldn't be triggers necessarily, but that's why I'm tracking.
- Meds. Yesterday was my first day stepping down to 20mgs. I'm going to stay there today and see what happens.

Anything else, including the Will of the Gods, could be the culprit, but those seem most likely.

I did my squats and pushups yesterday - 3x10 of each. No real trouble, although I expect my quads to be complaining by nightfall. Planning to run this morning, stiffness or no.

Day One

My first day of LOG EVERYTHING is going well. I'm going to keep some notes here, and also verbalize some of my plans for the next month/quarter. (I am planning no further than end of March right now, because, realistically, I can't see that far into the future.)

Exercise: Today was a running day - the second day of Week 2 in the Couch to 5k. I'm more out-of-shape than I like to admit, but it didn't give me any trouble.

I had lunch at Guero's, which was lovely. Mexican food is nice because it doesn't automatically contain tons of flour and bread - corn tortillas make me happy. I do wonder a little about cross-contamination and non-obvious gluten, though, so I'm going to try to note when I eat out so that I can reference it if need be.

Among other things, I'm going to keep extended notes on the data in my spreadsheet here. I'm not going to post the actual sheet, although once I have a month or so of data I may post some selected charts if there are any interesting patterns.

- Pain in the morning: I'm calling it a 2. I had some noticeable stiffness but no loss of range of motion and no pain. (I'm going to try to define these until I get used to the scale, so it stays internally consistent.)
- I split the Pain column into AM and PM because how I feel first thing on waking and how I feel by the end of the day aren't necessarily connected.
- I'm going to log caffeine intake there because DailyBurn doesn't do it automatically.

Some notes on the January plan:

- I'm going to log all my food but I'm not going to change my eating patterns right now. (Not consciously, anyway.) I want to get a reasonable baseline before I try something like hardcore paleo or whatever. Of course, the act of logging will probably change my habits somewhat, because I'm much less likely to snack mindlessly when I know I have to log it after, but I won't be deliberately restricting calories or anything.

- Likewise, I'm not going to start a weightlifting program right now, either. I will be going to karate hopefully three days a week and running three days a week, and that's all I want to load up with. I am going to get a Crossfit Total at the beginning and end of the month in order to get a strength measurement, but I won't be training for it.

What I will do, instead, is do some very light, very basic bodyweight exercises a couple days a week when I'm not doing other things. Pushups, air squats, and bench dips - just a set or two a couple days a week, and only when I'm not feeling tired out from karate. Since the dojo is closed this week, I'll do some on my non-running days and hopefully be ready for the CFT on Sunday, and then just use them as filler throughout the month.

- At the end of the month, I'll take a look at the data and refine from there. I also have a doctor's appointment the first week in February, so I'll be talking to her about medication - I would love to be off prednisone completely by then, but we'll have to see.

Tracking in the New Year

After a very spotty year, health- and fitness-wise, I'm trying something new for the next few months. I'm going to attempt to obsessively track everything that affects my joint health and try to use that to make intelligent choices about food, exercise, and medication - because there isn't really a better strategy available that I can find. I'm going to use this blog to take notes on my pain and stiffness, mood, the weather, and anything particularly unusual that doesn't fit in a spreadsheet. I'm also going to log my workouts here, because those also aren't always reducible to numbers.

(I'm going to start tomorrow, rather than wait for the first, because more data is better, right?)

I'm afraid it's not going to be very interesting, but this is the handiest place for me to stick this stuff. I don't intend to share my spreadsheets with the world - it'll be rather too much information - but if you have a particular reason to want to see them, drop me a line and we can chat privately.

Neighborly Games!

Sorry for not updating more often - I've been very busy, and I'm happy to point you at the fruit of my labors. I've created a Facebook and web game review site called Neighborly Games. I'd love to hear what you think, either here or over there.

Amazon v. Macmillan

(I tried to post this to Metafilter, but alas, it was a double. Seems a shame to let all the links go to waste, though.)

In a late-Friday surprise move, Amazon removed all "Buy Now" links to books published by Macmillan, the parent company of Tor, St. Martin's Press and many others. Macmillan released a statement making clear that this is a hardball negotiation tactic on Amazon's part. Amazon's official statement frames the disagreement a little differently.

The heart of the issue is a difference of opinion about Amazon's place in the supply chain. In addition to various parodies of Amazon's statement (provided not by the CEO or PR department, but the unspecifically-named "Amazon Kindle Team" and buried on their forums), the incident occasioned some thoughtful analysis.

While Amazon has supposedly relented, authors are still waiting for their books to become available.

This is not the first weekend surprise by Amazon (previously.)

Patterns

This morning I finished the fourth week of the Couch-to-5k plan. I've been running Thursday, Sunday, and Tuesday since the first of the year - haven't missed a run. This is better than I've done in a while for non-karate-related workouts.

I've also been hitting the gym, going to karate at least 3 days a week, and eating quite a bit closer to right than normal. Plus the house is cleaner than it's been in ages. How am I pulling this off? I finally took a step back and looked at some of my patterns.

I live alone, and so must amuse myself. Sometimes I play video games; mostly I read. And since I was a little kid, I would read while I ate. This translated into eating while I read, and I could (and too frequently did) curl up with a book and any amount of food and plow through both without noticing. If all that was in the house was healthy food, I'd eat that, but I was still eating out of habit rather than hunger. And if I was hungry, I'd grab a book and end up killing an hour or two as well as having a meal.

My decision, then, was to try to focus on purposeful, rather than habitual, actions. I moved my book-in-progress from the bedside table to the breakfast bar, and now I prepare a meal, set it out, and only read until it's done. I was super-strict about this for the first couple of weeks, and I'm only easing back a hair now to make sure I don't backslide.

This has done two things: first, it's made portion control much simpler and less painful. I figure out what I want to eat, I eat it, I'm done. I'm not on any sort of super-strict diet or anything - I'm just cooking my own food and tracking it so that I know the new pattern is working. Second, I am not losing entire evenings (or days!) in a book unless I consciously decide to - and the thing is, I usually don't. I have time to do the dishes and sweep the floors and work on the novel, and I don't have to pry myself away from the book to do it. If I decide I want to read, I usually take a nice long bath and read in there. It's lovely and relaxing and there's no temptation to snack.

I grump all the time about the 50 pounds I put on just before I moved into the condo. But the thing is, yeah, I made some bad choices there, but that's not why I haven't been able to lose the weight. That is the result of years of patterns that I've set for myself while living alone, and it's finally time to toss them out and make some new ones.

Writing Elsewhere

I have a short essay up at our dojo page - check it out!

Happy New Year!

I've been exceedingly lax in posting since my October blast. Hopefully that will get a little bit better over the next month. I'm trying some new things with my routine and I expect them to have at least some effect.