Concussion Update (by sarah)

Just a quick update - I have improved drastically, went to the Drs yesterday and he is pleased with with the fact I can plan knit and colour in even though I can't follow patterns or do my own drawing. Writing still hurts, reading still hurts and gives me virtigo.

I am bored but hey I'm felting like a fiend, I made wings - they glow. I am not up to using the image uploader yet - I'm barely using the camera and the quality of pictures taking is shocking.

This will all just take time but it should be a full recovery - I have fine motor skills back and no longer slur - speech is still slower than normal but as I was a fast talker this is only evident to people who know me. I also take a while to answer some things or think of the word - it's weird but I do normally get there. Sadly this also means I solve problems several hours after they needed solving - I am not used to not being able to see ways to solve/get around/sort things out.

I am very behind on work, I dread to think about how many emails I have. I am taking it easy and waiting for my brain to sort itself for another 4-6 weeks depending on headaches, I am going to the clinic about the polyp/lumps in my sinuses in August, I am getting sorted. I am enjoying colouring in but it takes forever, writing this is taking for ever and is harder than I could have thought.

I am still very tired and need to get away from noise as I start to have trouble processing information and sensory import. I've not been able to watch TV or films or fair ground rides or highly patterned clothing. I sleep and get dizzy but this is now a lot less than it was.

Feeling thick would be a good discription and the reading writing stuff is the way I remember it from infant school - I used to get vertigo then - that was the dyslexia - is it that now? Has the concussion made that worse? I am distracted but can now keep hold of my phone - I've completely lost my keys though but then not really allowed out on my own anyway :/

I think I've fucked up part of my career again at least temporarily and I am hacked off about that.

There is still a bump, a phyiscal ouchy lump that sits there in my hair and the whole area hurts if I laugh but hey I've started to laugh, I take a while to get jokes but I was often slow at that and then laugh and laugh once I got it but this is more so than that.

The girls have mostly been brilliant and poor Al... well he's been the hero once more. I dry brushed my hair for the first time today as lump was still bleeding/weeping before - I am a frizz ball but it's stinging so I don't wont to put serum or anything on the hair and I learnt at the weekend that putting my hair up can pull on the lump area - not nice.

I am getting there - thanks for the well wishes an d patience and help.

Exercise and the Failure to Diet (by sarah)

So today I take Jean swimming, today I go swimming for the first time without needing aid to get into the pool for a decade. Today I am fretting that without my glasses on I will not be able to keep track of my 9 yr old or that due to not having been swimming much I will have forgotten how to and I could only just barely swim as it was.

Today I stand here with two swimming costumes, my new one black and multicoloured and my old one - black and white. One is really too big for me and one is really a little too snug and just fit last week and I've had a pigging out birthday weekend so my stomach is not wanting to be compressed.

I am fretting that one will slip off and the other will leave back dugs - or folds of skin, I am fretting that before Alaric has always been there and now I wont be the obvious wife and mother but just me and I do not look young and beautiful. At the same time I worry because I put the swim suit on and I feel naked and exposed and I'll be in public. I have some pit stubble and some leg hair and I don't want to use my energy in dealing with them as that may result in no swimming. I am only an ok size if I hold my stomach in and it hurts today.

I have the scar on my knee from the 10 yr old biking me and scars from caving mucking up my shin and the varicous vein sticking out and ugly on my thigh, cellulite bobbling and I'll admit I don't look that different to me as a teen and I felt all of this then as I panicked over day glow bikini or my turquoise swim suit.

And I just want to hide but Jean... Jean is growing up and wants to swim, I can take her now - for the first time since being a mum I myself by myself can take her. She is already self concous and worried about her body and I don't know if confiding in her or hiding it from her is best.

Bingo bango bong - it's time talk about my diet and expectations. People think the diet is about weight loss but it's not I've also felt fat, it doesn't matter what size I am I look in the mirror and see the same sized person. For a little back ground on that - this has been the case when I was size 8 to being in the last trimester of pregnancy at a whopping 16 stone. One of the swim suits is an 18 and the others a 10 - to look at they don't seem that different.

My diet has been driven by medical stuff and the want to feel better - of course I want to look better but I resigned myself to being not normal aesthetics a long time ago. This is part of the panic before I go out.

My hair is big, it is frizz, it is curl, my skin is blotchy and changes colour and I have scars and now stretch marks. I have an enormous bottom - always have had, it sticks out and is wide. It's just the way I am.

I like weird clothing but I know from having tried that I still stick out even in normal clothing so I might as well wear what I want.

Recently the diet has kind of failed, I have reverted to the 1600 cals a day and I no longer have a nurse to talk to about this. However, I am now a quantified self and have been monitoring things - not weight Alaric deals with that as I don't really want to know. But I do know that my weight has plateud, which is amazing as I keep eating 200 cals more than my maintain intake. The maintain is what you can eat without putting weight on but you wont loose weight on it either.

And the strange thing is that everyone is now commenting on the weight loss but I am no longer loosing it - what is happening however is that I am going down dress sizes. I am physically becoming smaller or more compact as I exercise.

For me it is strange how the focus is on the weight loss, I assume this is because it is the most easily quantifiable thing?

On the other hand my pedometer game is going really well and today I won a pink lemur, the more exercise I do the more in game energy I have to make plants grown and to build buildings with. I still have huge areas to unlock on my maps and it is my main motivator - except now the headaches are under control and the pelvis is behaving and the bleeding has stopped I am enjoying the exercise - but I wasn't before not why that was all going on - I was just doing it when I could for fear of being unfit/fat except there was no way I could do enough.

I mention this as there are people out there who keep trying to use me as a gauge for themselves - you can't. I couldn't even use myself as a gauge six months ago. Each person has to find out what works themselves and sadly my journey has been made a lot more doable by money. Yes you can exercise cheaply - ie running but without proper shoes you risk shin splints, without the pedometers motivations to actually do a run can be low.

Gyms cost money and adults on the kids climbing frames at the park can end up in the police being called. Swimming costs money, dance, climbing, yoga cost money. Youtube vids are free but can take alot of sorting and again motivation.

I like my allotment and it is exercise but... it cost money and it's not even a council one as I've now been on the waiting list for one of them for 3 yrs! They do not have enough allotments >:( Everyone should have access to an allotment >:(

This post initially was supposed to be about the emphasises being on health and not actual weight loss and how size and weight are a loose corralation and not absolute. But it was high jacked by my nerves about swimming and self identity and stuff.

I have everything packed and ready and I know Jean is uber excited - I've gone with the larger swim suit with the idea that a boob popping out maybe is preferable to being uncomftable and not being able to swim. Only time will tell if I can remember how to actually swim and for that matter get out of the pool by myself at the end of the session.

Experiments in Food: Soylent and Joylent (by alaric)

I was interested to hear about Soylent - the meal replacement, not Soylent Green - when it came onto the scene. I lead a busy life, which includes cooking for two kids and a wife (one of the children has an intolerance to cow milk, and my wife has an intolerance to gluten as well as milder issues with cow milk and soya). I often find myself in the situation of being quite hungry myself, at the start of needing to cook a complicated meal from fresh ingredients. Also, I don't like eating breakfast until an hour after getting up, so I tend to eat in the office on weekdays; due to a shortage of filling breakfast options that will last long enough for me to finish them off on two days a week, I often end up skipping breakfast at weekends or just grazing on raw root veg from the fridge, then feeling woozy come lunch time (about when I need to start organising lunch for the family). So the idea of a powder I can store for a long period and then turn into a balanced meal replacement with near-zero effort, and cheaply at that, certainly has some appeal.

Sadly, Soylent decided they can't ship to the UK (and muttered something about refunding my contribution to their crowdfunding effort on that basis, but not until November 2015 - and I funded them in July 2013!), so I gave up on the idea of giving it a go.

But thankfully, they have published their recipe online, which has prompted a Dutch company to set up shop making it and shipping it from the EU! They're called Joylent, and as the name suggests, are taking a rather light-hearted approach to producing basically the same stuff. So I gleefully ordered some, and have started experimenting with it.

I don't plan on living on the stuff, although some have - I just want an easy, filling, meal replacement for when circumstances require it.

So far, I've had two "meals" of it, and the results have already been somewhat interesting.

The first one was a weekend breakfast replacement. I started with the vanilla flavour; it was tasty and 600ml of the stuff went down easily, leaving me feeling satiated. I found I felt full, and with plenty of energy, but I was craving crispy and strong-tasting food; I think my mind didn't quite believe that a soupy liquid with a gentle vanilla flavour could have actually fed me. Although I was craving salty fries and pickles, I didn't actually want to eat anything; I just wanted those flavours, and would probably have been happy to just nibble a tiny amount or something.

Come 1:30pm, four and a half hours later, I felt a sudden pang of hunger, but it passed quickly. I still didn't feel light-heated and ill as I often do when I can't easily eat. In this particular case, I was on a long drive, so we didn't get to stop for lunch until 3pm. I was feeling... "peckish" by then; I fancied the idea of eating, but wasn't suffering from hunger, which was unusual for such a late lunch. I ate a paneer tikka wrap and the leftovers of Sarah's nachos, so plenty of exciting textures and strong tastes, which was exactly what I wanted! I didn't have to eat very much to feel full and satiated, and had a light (and nutritionally meagre) dinner of chips and ketchup that evening (due to lack of alternatives, being a vegetarian in a place that focussed on the eating of sausages), and went to bed not feeling malnourished at all.

The next morning, I had a whole grapefruit for breakfast, but was feeling pretty hungry come lunchtime at 1pm. Sadly, the place we ate was focussed on the eating of roasted animals, so all I had for lunch was a small plate of roasted potatoes and steamed vegetables, which was tasty but not very nutritionally diverse (I'd eaten little protein since lunch the day before). So before setting off on the drive home, somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, I had a second vanilla Joylent. It was pleasing that I'd been able to chuck my nice Joylent mixing bottle and the open pack in my bag for the trip; I bought a bottle of water in a shop to mix it up, but if I'd brought my own bottle of water I'd have been ready to throw together a "meal" wherever and whenever I wanted.

I was once again satiated, although a little less so; I think I put less powder in (judging a third of a pack of powder is tricky, although I think I'll soon be able to work out how big a third of a pack looks in the mixing bottle and get it right in future), as it came out a lot more watery this time, despite not being full quite to the 600ml mark. Once again, I was quickly craving crunchy strong tastes, so at about 8pm, I ate some salt and vinegar crisps at a motorway service station. This quickly led to me feeling I'd eaten too much salt; I felt a bit dehydrated and had a nasty salty taste lingering in my mouth. I suspect the morale of that story is that I've become accustomed to eating too much salt; I need to train my mind to realise that I don't need to have tasted savoury salty flavours to have eaten a meal!

As I lie in bed typing this at 11:15pm, I'm feeling a bit hungry, but not uncomfortably so (I didn't have dinner or anything else to eat).

The Joylent flavours are banana, chocolate, strawberry and vanilla; I think it would probably be a good idea for me to train myself out of craving salty tastes in a meal, but it's quite interesting that I've not found anything else I've eaten lately as filling as the Joylent, nor able to keep me "going" as long. I could see myself living happily on the stuff, but I would really miss food tastes and textures. However, it's made me more aware of how nutritionally limited a lot of foods are. I like the thought of using something like this as "fuel" and then having small quantities of spicy crunchy foods for the taste!

Also, it would be interesting to try and make a curry flavoured Joylent. Either get some without any flavourings added, or start with a mild-tasting one and blend in a nice mix of spices. I may have to perform some experiments in that area!

Time to get fit (by alaric)

Sarah's been putting a lot of work into losing weight lately, but apart from the fitness stuff I do in Krav Maga classes most weeks, I've not really paid much attention to my own health. However, my work have a fancy new medical insurance benefit thing, which has two features of relevance: One is that they pay for us to be poked and prodded and weighed and so on to establish our basic health parameters, and the other is that they encourage us to do exercise and eat well through a complex system of points-based incentives.

This has a two-pronged effect: It's told me that my body mass index (23.4) is in the healthy range (18.5-25), but a bit close to the top end; and my blood pressure (124/75) should be under (120/80). Thankfully, both of these can be improved by doing more cardiovascular exercise; and with the complex system of points-based incentives, this is GAMIFIED. Combined that with discounts on interesting fitness tracker gadgets, and feeling that nagging awkward feeling of watching Sarah work really hard on her weight loss while I slumped on the sofa with my laptop, and it started to become inevitable that I was going to start doing more exercise.

So, I got a discounted Polar RC3 GPS. This is a watch with a GPS and some smarts in it, which communicates via radio with a heart rate monitor worn on a strap. By logging heart rate data it can measure my exertion in an activity, and if that activity involves moving around (running or cycling, for instance) it can combine that with speed and gradient information from the GPS to work out what effort I was expending. This data is uploaded via a USB cable to a Web service that Polar run (alas, I have to depend on them keeping the thing up and bothering to securely store all my data, although there does seem to be an option to download it in a documented file format; but if the site goes down, I'll be having to reverse-engineer their USB protocol to continue to get data from my watch).

The fun is in the analysis, however. Their software has a model of human metabolism that works out how much strain I'm putting on my system, how many calories I've used, how many calories of fat I've burnt, and an efficiency factor they call "running index". It'll gather data across exercise sessions and work out trends and all sorts of fun stuff, including a "training load" graph that tracks an exponentially decaying cumulative average of the strain I undergo; horizontal bands on the chart indicate cumulative load levels where I should be taking things easy for a few days.

It also has an ability to suggest training schedules, which can be uploaded into the watch, and will then guide me - giving me a target heart rate to aim for for a given time period, then moving up to a higher pace, than down again, for instance.

So I've set myself the target of doing at least one - and ideally three or four - runs a week, where I spend at least half an hour above seventy percent of my estimated maximum heart rate. Here's one I did earlier. You can even see what I did on a little map, including my cool-down period at the end!

The data from this thing feeds into the health insurance provider, too, which then drives their points-based incentive system. This has an unexpected benefit; although I'm quite enamored of earning points on principle, some of the benefits are things that Sarah and the kids enjoy (free cinema tickets once a week, Starbucks or iTunes credit, etc). That makes an incentive for them to send me out on runs; given how busy our life is, that's surprisingly useful!

Other than meeting my weight and blood pressure goals, and generally increasing the number of armed assailants I can disable at Krav before I start to get sweaty, I'd quite like to do a marathon or something one day.

Exercise and a Diet That’s Wise (by sarah)

Those who've been following will know that I am loosing weight - what is kind of weird is that I am still loosing weight even though I am now back up to the 1400 cals that I was eating before with binges of 1600. Of course it is not that weird, having lost a bit of weight, discovering in the process that I can't eat any wheat or barley etc... and having medication for headaches and what not and then the bleeding finally stopping. My pelvis finally settled down and most of the joint pain went so I can do stuff.

I've been running! Yes I know! Six months ago I was having to use the damn walking stick to walk into town and now I have little races with Jeany. I wish I could have done it before but I couldn't, I know because I was trying. Desperately. It took the combination of medication for under laying problems, getting equipment out of my own money that meant I could exercise without putting undue strain on the pelvis and could exercise at home so I could rest when needed, a 1000 cal diet for about 3 months during which time I was dizzy with white spots in vision, neaseatingly hungry and Mr McGrumpy Pants, and last but not least discovering that there was something else other than cow and soya that I was allergic/intollerant/having an immune response to.

To be honest I don't think I would have managed it without Al or the nurse or the money to eat properly and buy special equipment or if I'd had a full time job. In fact one of the things that became apparent to me was that everytime I have tried to go back to college I have become really ill again. It could just be the added strain but I don't think so because it was also taking me 2 weeks to recover from parties and the common factor was bread.

At home we didn't tend to eat it, but at parties there were sarnis and college there was packed lunches or bought sandwitches. I've done a couple of parties now without eating any wheat and it has not taken me two weeks to recover!

So this is all great, but you know I'm not actually that excited by the weight loss itself - what I am excited about is getting fit and doing stuff. So I am currently aiming to go to the climbing wall for a me climb once a month - and yes that is lame but it takes a while for my muscles to stop aching and being all fatigued enough to do a proper climbing session. It has been amazing to be able to climb again - I suck at it and it is frustrating because I remember being better but I think I'm doing well.

I have a Dr Who Walk/Run-athon which I am working my way towards and of course the exercise bike 🙂

Last night I did a 7 min work out with Alaric though I skipped a couple of the exercises though one of those was because I was still planking and this time I had to stop not because of my c-section scar or my stomach muscles but due to my shoulder! I did not even attempt the side planks but Al did.

(Shoulder is an old stunt biking accident - the same one where it turned out I'd broken my pelvis not that I knew it at the time).

Then we have the chin up bar - now I got this bar about 2 years ago and Al installed it and I was really trying with it. First off I couldn't even reach it with my hands, then I reached it and held on but couldn't lift my feet. Alaric on the other hand could bring his knees up to his chest but not do a pull up - we both wanted to do climbing again and it seemed like a good thing to train our upper body strength.

Eventually I managed to lift my feet off the ground - just a fraction. I was so excited though it really was nothing and it wasn't with my arms it was just trying to lift the legs using leg muscles and handing by my arms.

I am now 2 years later at the same point Alaric was in the beginning - I can pull my knees up to my chest and for the last 3 days I have been able to lift myself slightly with my arms. Yesterday I sung on the bar which was ACE, I lost my grip but did not crash to the ground but landed on my feet and my pelvis did not hurt! Stuff like this has been so painful for so long that mainly the last few months has been about testing limits. Amazingly I've only ended up with ouchy hip twice - though I am having a... erm... wee wee problem. I'm kind of just padding up and ignoring it and then showering as soon as I've had a run etc... TMI I am sure but I also know this is a problem a lot of women have and it needs to be talked about!

Alaric can now do 3 pull ups 🙂

I've caught up to him with the planking - now I need to do the same with the pull ups!

Also one day I would still like to do a full marathon - I had resigned myself that this was one life goal I could never reach but now very much I am starting to think it is back on.

Kind of should get some running shoes...