Occupy Austin

I just spent 40 minutes or so at the Occupy Austin General Assembly (the official "occupation" begins tomorrow but they've been holding meetings for a week or two now.) I took notes!

There were probably thirty people there when I got there, and probably closer to 70 when I left. They were at Austin City Hall, which was built with an outdoor assembly area - stadium seating and all. They did have a mic so I didn't get to witness the human microphone thing.

The organizer-types introduced themselves, explained that running a GA was voluntary, rotating position, and then asked for a female to co-moderate because all the moderators were male. Someone volunteered. That was neat.

They started off with "report-backs" where people who had been getting shit organized took the mike, and this was was I was particularly interested in, because I haven't been able to figure out what these folks actually wanted to do. It was actually a lot more like a festival planning meeting than any sort of protest - it was all about process, logistics, and events, not rhetoric. Some things that stood out:

- They are planning to hold classes, discussions, and workshops throughout the occupation. They're getting volunteers from the community to run them - for example, tomorrow evening there will be a class on nonviolent communication.

- They've gotten people to volunteer heath care, water, childcare (that sounds like it will be hairy) and legal services. They've got a help line set up in case people get arrested, and six lawyers so far. (They were careful to emphasize that they do not expect nor intend for anyone to get arrested.)

- The people there were, demographically, sort of what you'd expect in Austin - young, bearded white men, older first-gen hippie ladies, a smattering of minorities. There is a Diversity Committee working on reaching out to more people, and a need for some Spanish-language press materials, which are good signs I guess.

- The first external action seems to be organizing a mass account closure at major banks. They're collecting information on local banks and credit unions and will be encouraging people to make the switch.

The biggest irony was that because they had a small spotlight on the speaker, the speaker couldn't see any of the elaborate hand signals from the audience, so I saw no particular evidence of a consensus process. But then, I left when they got to the point where they were accepting proposals for agenda items, so they may have resolved that - the organizers were vocally disturbed by that as it got darker.

So yeah, apparently all of those old hippies at the anti-war protests were wrong. This is what democracy looks like - it's tedious, nitpicky, self-conscious, and ultimately builds something a lot more complicated (if maybe not more politically effective) than easy-to-remember chants.

Kickathon!

It's that time again! Sun Dragon is holding its annual fundraiser to pay for our scholarship fund and all of the free self-defense workshops we hold. I'm not yet planning anything quite as ambitious as my month of karate-related posts from a couple of years ago, but here are some selections if you want to get more of an idea what we're up to:

Verbal Self-Defense, or, a tiny woman knocks me down by yelling at me.

The realities of running a strip-mall dojo as a non-profit: some days you teach kata, some days you teach drywall installation

Saying no: more self-defense class stories.

I would love it if you'd donate - here's the link! And I'll probably have a few more stories to tell over the next month or so.

So Close!

I know I haven't been keeping up with this blog very well this summer, but since I've recorded previous Crossfit Totals here it seemed the best place.  I've been using the Wendler 5-3-1 strength training program since February, and I thought I'd try a Total and see where I ended up.

Deadlift: 205

This is not quite a personal record - I've hit 215 before, and attempted it today, but didn't get it all the way up.  (That I was able to break it off the ground was heartening, though!) But it's pretty respectable, since it's thirty pounds more than I could pull at the beginning of the year, and twenty more than immediately before starting the program.

Squat: 195

Respectable, since my best recorded number is 205, and I strongly suspect that was at a wildly inadequate depth. Also forty pounds up since the beginning of the year.  I suspect I can get a lot more mileage out of this movement in the next couple months.

Press: 95

AAAARGH. I got 100 pounds up to my FOREHEAD and couldn't get it all the way up.  I am going to add some tricep assist work to try to get this in better shape. Not that 95 isn't fifteen pounds up from the beginning of the year (and that's a significant jump for a movement involving relatively small muscles, unlike the other two) but dammit I wanted to hit triple digits.

Overall, some very satisfying progress. I'm going to continue this program through the end of the year at least, since I haven't topped out on anything yet. I'll do another Total at the new year and see where I am.

Round 2

After a lovely and totally successful birthday week-to-ten-days, I am feeling the need to tighten things up a bit again. I haven't been super bad, but I have had some cheese, and some tortilla chips, and some potato chips, and rather a lot of booze. Its also about time to do another caffeine detox. So back on the wagon I go, and we'll see where that puts me. I am going to do the Whole30 again, with pretty much the same terms as last time. I will endeavor to report in a bit more often this month.

Losing

Recently, I had the opportunity to spend time with a bunch of folks that I very rarely get to see. They were all at least marginally aware of my adventures in Paleo, and if they weren’t, my mom made sure they heard about it.

Of course, what everyone really wanted to hear about was not the RA remission but the weight loss. I’m totally a fan of that side effect, so I talked about my 25 pounds, and about finally discovering what being full felt like, and my mother invariably chimed in there with “It’s totally true! You should see it. She’s never eaten portions like these before!”

(A note, lest you get the wrong impression: My family is not neurotic about food. Rather the opposite - we LOVE food. We think about it, talk about it, and celebrate around it. None of us were more than average-American overweight before my little metabolic meltdown. Mom’s reaction was more surprise than approval. There was food left! Even after Dad finished! That never happens.)

And then, every time, something odd would happen. The people I was talking to would start to tell me why they couldn’t possibly do it. I’ve seen this almost every single time I’ve had this conversation. It’s not odd that people resist change. It’s not odd that people don’t want to give up beer and bread. But it’s odd that people think that this is a logical conversational gambit. I’m not a salesman. I’m not earning points for conversions. And in every case, I wasn’t the one to bring it up. (Although, to be fair, sometimes my mom was.)

So on the plane I started wondering about this. Why is “Oh I can’t do that, here’s why:” the response to “Hey I feel really good and have lost a bunch of weight with these guidelines.” And here’s my theory:

We get so many messages about eating being bad that we start to believe we can’t possibly be good

Think about it. Junk food is bad. Processed food is bad. GMO food is bad. Monoculture food is bad. Meat is bad. Carbs are bad. Fat is bad. Eggs are bad. Alcohol is bad. (And then we get to “bacon is bad” and the entire culture yells “Fuck it!” and orders more bacon.)

It’s this impossible weight to carry every time you put a bite of food in your mouth. Everything is wrong, bad, unhealthy, possibly immoral. Everyone who pays the least attention to these sorts of things (i.e. most American women) knows she’s doing the wrong thing every single time she eats. It’s almost impossible to avoid concluding that you’re just a bad person who does bad things and that’s the way it is.

And so when someone says, in effect, “Hey look, I’ve been a good person and you can see my reward!” (and yes, my jawline is totally a reward,) it would seem both unrealistic and arrogant to say “Oh wow, I’ll go be a good person too!” So they mutter and stammer and come up with excuses, because that huge weight of negativity makes it impossible to actually weigh a new diet on the merits.

I’ve spent years - most of my life, really - being interested in nutrition, educating myself, comparing claims and, recently, testing them. I don’t think about food in terms of “good” and “bad” - I just wonder what effect it will have on my body. But this is very much not a mainstream position, and I lost sight of that. So if I sound arrogant or sanctimonious about this stuff, I apologize. But I really do worry that moralizing about nutrition is making it emotionally impossible for people to try new things and find stuff that works for them.

Three Month Report

The biggest success of this whole adventure, I think, is that I've gone through three months with a couple of deviations here and there but I've never actually "fallen off the wagon" as such. I've discovered that I can have a little bit of milk or cheese here and there, but not a bunch. (Which is a shame, because I always want a bunch.) Corn chips won't kill me but they make me retain water like a son of a bitch and feel vaguely lethargic, and potato chips are fine but I am inevitably starving an hour later. But in general, as long as I actually make it to the grocery store regularly I'm pretty much ok eating home-cooked, high-quality meat and veggies all the time.

I've lost around 25 pounds since Feb 1, which is great. But now the interesting part begins - I'm at the low end of what's been "normal" since I put on all this weight in a hurry five years ago, and I've never been able to stay below it for more than about a week. Will I continue to lose weight now? That's the big question. I certainly hope so.

My joints are doing well. I'm still weather-sensitive, but my day-to-day stiffness and discomfort is basically gone. I've been lifting weights with no issues, and I'm back on a pretty regular karate schedule. (It was pretty striking to see what a difference that 25 pounds made, even though the better part of it was water. Pushups are much easier now!)

Other than my ongoing caffeine addiction, I feel pretty good about my current lifestyle and I'm eager to see where it goes from here on out.

Updates

So the last two weeks my diet has devolved into bacon-and-Red Bull. Which doesn't work quite as well. I'll post more soon - I mostly wanted to note this for posterity.

One Month of Paleo Eating

So I followed (more or less) the Whole 30 plan throughout February. Here are some stats and observations about the month as a whole.

Weight: 14 lbs lost. Now, I wasn't actually trying to lose weight, and was actively ignoring some of the more obvious suggestions (going deliberately low-carb is the standard one.) Most of this is water loss - I look and feel much less puffy, and my pants are distinctly looser, but this all came off in the first two weeks or so and I've been holding steady since.

Sleep: I sleep pretty well in general, and since I'm not on a fixed schedule it hasn't been much of an issue. I have pretty naturally moved back to a normal sleep-at-night, wake-in-the-morning schedule, though, which I hadn't been since November.

Blood Pressure: from 120/80 to 107/69. This is just a curiosity, since I happened to be scheduled to go to the doctor this morning. I don't have blood pressure problems as such - 120/80 is unusually high for me, actually - but it was interesting for sure.

Meds: I went off the prednisone after about 10 days, and have had no symptoms of acid reflux all month so I am not continuing the Nexium now that the initial prescription is done.

RA Symptoms: gone. No noticeable morning stiffness most days, no swelling, little to no pain. I'm running/hiking regularly, attending karate 2-4 hours a week, and starting a weightlifting program this month since my hands now feel up to it.

Overall: I'm pretty much sold. I feel terrific, have lots of energy, and suffered no ill effects. My carb cravings are nonexistent, and I haven't been seriously tempted to cheat all month. I don't even miss cheese all that much.

So! Onward and upward. In March I'm going to add in a nice, sensible linear-progression weightlifting program and probably start to keep a closer eye on my carbs. I have plenty of weight to lose, and it would be nice to keep it coming off, although I'd expect to see about half of what I lost this month. I don't have any desire to try to add anything back in as of yet.

I know a lot of folks were interested in this whole thing - if you have questions or want to chat about it, I'm more than happy to do so. I've done a ton of reading/podcast listening on these topics this month, and I like talking about my current obsessions.

Sleep

I've been vaguely worried about the fact that I've been waking up in "the middle of the night." This morning it occurred to me to actually check the time - 4:50am, after having gone to bed at 10:00. I'm experimenting, now - I actually got up instead of trying to fall back asleep. We're going to find out if maybe I don't actually need 10+ hours a night.

A Week of Paleo

A friend asked my for an idea of what I was actually eating, and while I'm not tracking everything in detail, I was able to put together a list of stuff pretty easily. I figure I may want it for posterity, so here we go - my first week of Paleo meals, with commentary:

Breakfast: Usually eggs, scrambled with onions, mushrooms, or something green and served with salsa and/or avocado. (I get my eggs from a friend with a whole flock of backyard chickens, and they're fantastic.) Otherwise leftovers.

Lunch: Either cold roast beef or sliced turkey from CM, or leftovers.

Snack: Kale chips! Or some nuts and/or a piece of fruit. I actually haven't been snacking much - I find I'm not really hungry between reasonable meal times. Sometimes lunch turns into a series of disconnected snacks, but that's just because I can lounge on the couch and nibble on and off for three hours if I want to.

Dinners:
- Masaman curry with chicken:
I'm not 100% in love with this particular recipe, and the potatoes aren't strictly kosher. I like the dish as a whole, and I need to find a better and also more compliant version.)

- London Broil:
This was good, although I'd probably sub mushrooms and black olives for the green olives and sun-dried tomatoes. It was a little sharp-tasting for me.

- Chicken Adobo:
Again, not strictly kosher, although I use wheat-free tamari instead of regular soy sauce. It wasn't perfect - tamari has a stronger flavor, and I need to mess with the proportions to find a good balance - but it was tasty. I used drumsticks because I prefer dark meat and they were great.

- A generic crockpot beef stew with bison stew meat and sweet potatoes and a bunch of random spices.

- Chicken soup - no recipe, just broth, the HEB Caldo frozen vegetable blend minus the random chunks of corn-on-the-cob, and chopped-up chicken breast. This was perfect mid-week when I was freezing. (The veggie mix does have potatoes, which were kinda terrible - they were just mealy and not tasty.)

Upcoming: a shepherd's pie variant, Cocoa-toasted cauliflower, and something with bison liver.

All in all, I certainly can't complain. There was plenty of food, and all of it was tasty, and none of it was particularly fiddly to cook. Onward!

Lifting, take 2

I'm pretty sure I miscounted the weight on my overhead press last time. There was no earthly way it was getting above my nose this morning.

Otherwise, though, pretty good - added ten pounds to my deadlift and made a valiant attempt at adding ten to my squat - a nice, from-the-hole fail. If I'm going to fail at least I want to do it with good form.

One Month

I haven't been blogging much - I have found hand-writing notes more congenial - but I've got a fair bit to report on.

January

First of all, my joints have been in pretty good shape. I had a pair of spikes, both tied to sudden weather changes, and another, less-severe spike right around my last prednisone step-down. Otherwise, they've been good - not perfect, but good.

On the drug front, I'm now on an every-other-day schedule with the prednisone, and in another week or so (when the current winter storm passes over) I may try to drop it entirely. On the other hand, my doctor put me on Nexium for my recurrent acid reflux, which is apparently a common side-effect of prednisone. I'll take that for about a month and hopefully I'll be all done by March.

I haven't been to practice quite as much as I wanted - I was shooting for three days a week and hit two. But I'm reasonably satisfied with that, and I'll step it up as I continue to build stamina. Right now my feet and ankles are getting tired quicker than I'd like, and I'm trying not to push them harder than they'll take. I've also been running regularly, and until this week haven't missed a run. (Again, winter storm = unhappy joints.)

My eating habits are manifestly abysmal. Classic feast-or-famine behavior - I'll eat 1000 calories for three days running, then eat three times that. My weight stayed totally steady all month, which is excellent, but certainly not ideal. I'm not actually overeating, and I'm getting a reasonable amount of exercise, which suggests something else is going on. This brings me to this month's plan.

February

It's time to bite the bullet and go whole hog. It was the paleo folk that brought the possibility of a gluten intolerance to my attention, and that has helped a ton - now I'm going to follow the rest of their recommendations for thirty days and see what happens. It's obvious that I don't tolerate dairy well, as much as I like it, and if there's one grain sensitivity, there may well be more, so a full-bore elimination diet is not a bad idea.

Now, this isn't a weigh-and-measure diet, and I have no intention of adding that in. Like last month, I'm going to eat the way I'm naturally inclined to, with only the restrictions on type of food. I won't be avoiding the scale as recommended, though - I want to make sure I have that data. (I'm not setting weight-loss goals or anything, though - that's not at all the point.)

I'm going to continue running and going to practice, and I'm going to try to add in some body weight exercise as I feel well enough. No lifting yet - maybe next month! I also intend to do a fair bit of mobility work with the help of that excellent blog. I've got a 5k in a couple weeks, and hopefully that will go well - I have some work to do to feel confident about the full run, but I have time to do it.

That's it for now!

17 Hours Later

I feel mostly caught up on sleep. I actually feel pretty good, now, so I guess it worked out in the long run. I'm pretty beat up from the unexpectedly tough practice yesterday on top of a pretty decent run, though. Today is going to be nice and quiet, and I'm going to eat a bunch to make up for the meals I slept through yesterday.

3:45. Seriously, People?

3:45am, I am awakened by the inexplicable sound of water running through the pipes. (My bed is right on the outside wall next to the laundry area and building hot-water heater, so this isn't an unusual sound at less god-forsaken hours.) Then the washing machine starts up. "Seriously?" I think. "No, really, seriously?"

So I had a bunch of caffeine today.

Week One

So we're seven days in to the new year. I have two pages of notes on how everything is going, but the short version is: fine. It's been a pretty steady week, pain-wise - a little higher than I'd like but not problematic. I've done all the physical activities I planned to, and they didn't seem to affect my overall pain level at all, which is fantastic. I was on a steady dose of prednisone all week, and at this point I feel ready to drop down again tomorrow.

One of the hardest parts is ratcheting my plans for the future down - I keep wanting to add all kinds of exercise and do drastic things to my diet, etc. Hopefully with concentration I can rein that in and stick to stuff that I can actually go through with.

I Keep Forgetting

I just want to remark that I always forget how much better actual food tastes. I made bay scallops with garlic butter in about five minutes instead of my all-too-common post-practice Taco Bell run, and I ate them in about five seconds. So tasty! And so healthy!

Grocery Shopping

Among other things, I'm trying to live on a fairly tight budget right now, so I took more than my usual care grocery shopping. I pulled a couple of recipes I wanted to try, stopped off at my local mini Asian market to get some of the more obscure items, and went to the regular HEB for the rest. Lots of vegetables, a huge package of chicken thighs (I have roasted a couple whole chickens lately but the thighs are my favorite, and damn they're cheap) and some ground beef. I really wanted to take advantage of the eighteen-pound bag of locally-grown oranges for $5, but I just can't imagine eating all of them before they go bad, so I settled for the four-pound bag for $2. What a crazy markup!

The first thing I did when I got home is make Masaman curry with the chicken thighs - it's supposed to be better the second day, so I cooked it up and then portioned it and stuck it in the fridge. Initial tastings are promising.

I'm definitely slightly stiffer than I have been. It's pretty rainy, and I expect I'm still adjusting to the lower dose, so I'm not really worried yet. This is where having a spreadsheet is really handy - I can see that last time I dropped my dose, it took about five days for the pain and stiffness to level out, and the third day was the worst. So I'm not trying to change anything else right now, because my body is behaving as expected.

Today will be my first day back at karate since the holiday break. I'm looking forward to it, although my quads are still complaining from Sunday. My quads are unduly whiny.

Recovery

I'm predictably sore today, but in the good way. My joints are actually feeling pretty good - maybe a little irritated, but no big deal. I think my plan is to go to karate tomorrow and Thursday this week - going today seems like it might be a bit much, with the soreness and the run this morning.

I had a really funny moment on the scale this morning - the first reading was 10 pounds down from yesterday. I'm still not sure what happened, exactly, but, nice as that would have been, I'll have to settle for a pound and a half.

Pumping Iron

Wow, I have missed lifting. My Crossfit Total trip to the gym was a complete success - I was able to lift a pretty respectable percentage of previous maxes, and while I'm sure I'll be sore tomorrow, I didn't have any pain while actually lifting. I'm going to keep an eye on my hands in particular, though. I really don't have any way to spare them stress when lifting heavy, and while it's not impact, I am not certain how they'll handle it.

Despite yesterday's pronouncement, I dropped another 5mg of prednisone today. Looking at my spreadsheet seemed to justify it. Off-the-cuff extrapolation - Tuesday will suck. Let's see what happens!

Happy New Year!

I'm starting the new year feeling pretty good. I didn't overdo last night, so I got my run in at a reasonable hour and with some success. My joints seem to be tolerating the running pretty well, even if my calf muscles still resent it. The real test will be next week when I try to run and go to class a couple of times.

I did have a touch of heartburn last night. This has been cropping up lately, and it's somewhat worrying. Unfortunately, it could be caused by either of my medications, alcohol, caffeine, or a variety of foods, or any combination thereof. It's been pretty sporadic, so I just want to note it when it comes up.

Today will be a very light day, food-wise. I ate plenty of good, rich food last night, and I'm not remotely hungry yet. I think it'll probably be a soup-and-leftovers day.

I'm going to hold on at this dose for another two days at least, and see what Monday's practice does. My fingers are crossed. I'd like to be off the prednisone by the end of the month, but I need to be really better.