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.

London (by sarah)

My London, my city
Is falling through the cracks
Slipping down between glass
And chrome
Squeezed into non existence
Becoming darker
Messier
With pretention
And no protection
It's soul is dying
As all the things I knew
Crumble under callipers
And blue prints
Raised for respectability
Losing the unique
And the grotesque that was more
Becoming safe
With edges of dire
My City, My London
Soon will be no more

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.

R.I.P. Terry Pratchett (by sarah)

I wanted to blog about Sir Terry Pratchett the fantasy author last week but could not. I found out via his social media feeds and it struck to the marrow in away that I wasn't expecting nor prepared for. My facebook status read "Oh no frown emoticon Damn you upload tech you are coming to slow - we've lost another..." with a link to the authors page. With Leonard Nimoy's death as well I was hurting.

I'd known Terry's demise was coming, I've know since we went to his talk at the Cheltenham Lit Festival in 2007. There are sadly no photos due to the camera getting busted during the house flooding and there is no signed book either because I'd spent all my money on getting the tickets to the event and paying for parking and fuel.

It was an amazing experience and formative experience for me, but he announced he was having little strokes/bleeds and we knew what that meant. Watching over the years as he appeared at other things saying he could no longer read, or do many things was heart breaking. But he kept writing, he kept being inspirational and though opinions amongst my friends varies about the quality of those stories I've liked a lot of them.

I felt slightly awful as one of my first thoughts was... "I hope he finished the book for the autumn." It is also weird that a man I met/saw in the flesh once, just once in my life could upset me so with his death - I always used to think that people who morned for celebrates were stupid - I was wrong.

His books have been a big thing in my life. It all started with my GCSE Chemistry teacher who wrote in my leaving book to try his books out, she thought they would be perfect for me and she was right. I did not however go straight out and grab one, that had to wait until I was struggling with my A'levels, by this point I was doing a creative writing course at lunch times at the college and I was kind of getting sick of the accusations of plagerism especially on stuff I worked on jointly with my dad. Plus revision was coming up and I needed some distraction.

I used to go to Hornchurch library to procrastinate, I could be found "doing my homework" on the table by the geology etc... books not many of the wall of books around me would be anything to do with my homework. I rationed myself on the fiction books though as otherwise I would stay up all night, I had just written a story about falling off of a dragons back and puncturing reality and again been told it sounded like Pratchett. I went over to the sci-fi and fantasy stand (they did not have a book case - horror just about managed and was nearly all Stephen King), they had just put out some new books, one of which had a cartoony cover... I flicked it open having noted the name on the cover. It was Watchmen, it was about a dragon and sure enough it was like listening to me and my dad making up stories together.

I did not put it down, I finished it in three days - I am still a slow reader and was in the middle of A'levels - four A'levels when the normal was three plus lots and lots of extra stuff like the Geology Society, Creative Writing courses, Guiding and Thriftwood Campsite not to mention jobs and unsuitable boyfriends.

I hoovered up the libraries grand total of 3 discworld novels, Dad found me another two in a second hand shop in Brentwood. They however turned out not to be discworld but The Dark Side of the Sun and Carpet People. Throughout my A'levels I lent heavily on Terry to pace me through essays and all nighters, being slightly problematic in that there were rarely chapter breaks so I would have to remember to stop at ten page marks. Dad ended up reading them - he ended up a huge huge fan! I had to make him keep writing, assuring him that he is different enough (one day I will get his work out there!).

I learnt a lot during my A'levels and alot of the really important stuff like how to be myself and people can be dicks, came from his books. Of course they were not the only fiction I was reading but they were the only ones that I was saving up to buy models from - not that I ever managed that one 🙁

During the last leg of my A'levels I had a triple exam day, I had a clash! Not of two exams but of three and one of them was a long everything exam for Classical Civilizations - apparently it is not normally taken with with sciences. I wasn't allowed to talk to anyone and I was pushing the boundary of having to stay over night somewhere in isolation. I had to be escorted by teachers - I am in truth a shy person and found this highly worrying and embarrassing, I wasn't even able to go and buy food so had packed dinners. I also had Small Gods - I am not a last minute crammer, the dyslexia rules that out as an exam passing strategy, mainly I need to relax and not have panic attacks between exams. I read the whole book between the exams and felt like a complete zombie with brain over load - the book kept me sane, the book pointed out certain things that I was beginning to suspect myself already. I think bits of it may have accidently sneaked into my Clas Civ exam essay.

The summer between college (I was at a sixth form college and not at school for my A'levels) I worked at Thriftwood Campsite as an outdoors pursuits instructor, by the end of the summer I was the Duty Warden due to illness sweeping through our ranks. On of the boys (the guy who should have been in charge) lent me his huge, huge stack of discworld novels and a minidisc player. So when I suddenly found myself in charge (there was the actual Warden and Sub-Warden but they lived off site though not a thousand miles away and the next summer I was a Duty Warden from the start), the discworld helped me unwind.

The books were a mirror and not as distorted as people seem to think. I got to go to uni - I was sick, I was ill, Harry Potter and Vimes got me through. I had to repeat my first year of uni and when I had to go to the meeting for them to decide what was best, I had role models that didn't exist in normal lit. I had the witches which fitted me and my friends and my family, the Watchmen and the softest spot I reserve for Rincewind. Not to mention Imperial College is a rambling misfit of buildings with cellars that are linked and tunnels to various other bits like the museums etc. There was also the Queens Tower - I was blatently in a discworld novel.

I remember the thrill of The Fifth Elephant posters going up in the tunnel that goes to South Kensigton Station. And when I returned for my second and rather more successful bash at university I had scanned the book covers and printed them out A4 to be posters for my wall, this was how I then found the sci-fi, horror and fantasy library as they pretty much came and claimed me once told about my wall.

I was never competely well after that though and when stuck in bed, when unable to run and jump I turn to three book groups - Discworld Novels, Harry Potter and Philip Pullman. These got me through weeks of oxygen monitoring and bed rest during Jean's pregnancy, they got me through nights of breast feeds. They have been read so many times I am on second and even third copies of some of them.

For someone who couldn't read until I was 12 - books are increadibly important to me and none more so than Terry Pratchett's books. The stories curl around themselves so that I do not have stories in my head anymore but worlds, I feel such a sense of loss that the mind that produced these works is gone. They started as satire but became something more.

Poor Jeany has only just started reading his work and I have censored a little bit - she is 9. She went as Tiffany Aching for world book day - one of his characters. I gave her the book about the 9 yr old witch because she is struggling as we all do with growing up and being different and I knew that though I was never like Tiffany - Jean is. This was someone who could be a fictional role model for her but realistic, that make mistakes, some really awful ones and how you get through that. Jean loved the book. There was a horror on her face when I told her he had just died, "but I'll run out of his books now" - it was a genuine sorrow.

She made Nac Mac Feegles, and had a frying pan. She also declared that she NEEDED book 2 in the Bromiliad series (Books of Gnomes).

Part of the great ache is that though the world is missing him, no one had the right to ask him to stay, he was suffering and loosing him self a fragment at a time. The tweets on his twitter feed are loving and sad and that deep humour that is something more than comedy or tragedy.

And of course there is something else, Terry Pratchett always read to me like my dad's stories - the ones I grew up with and going to see him speak made this more apparent. It was like watching my Dad's ulter ego, the one who got on with writing the stories down. So it's also a stark reminder for me that my Dad is not immortal and worse, I've always bought him the latest Pratchett book when he's been ill etc... mortality what a fragile thing you are.

Which leads me on to the last bit. To conquer my own sadness I drew some pictures and I posted one of these to social media, it is not brilliant, it is just a sketch and it's not very big and it was done for me. But people have been asking to buy it. It is not for sale, I'm afraid, as my Dad has asked for it. However, when I said this, some of you have been asking for prints - there will be prints, it might take a while as I need to clean the image up and I'll also do some of my other pictures, there will also be a page with high res versions on for download. But I can not/will not take money for these, instead if you request one or download one then maybe think about giving money to a research or care charity. There is already a Just Giving page for Terry Pratchett supporting the charity NICE which is the one his daughter has asked people to give to.

And for anyone who knows me in the non-internet world, I am still doing a tribute party, I just need to find a free weekend which is being tricky! (the cake pic is from my dad's 65th birthday).

And for anyone wanting to see good tribute art I suggest you check out the Multiverse board I've started on Pinterest.

Last few bits - that's I've just remembered I wanted to mention:

The xkcd comic made me cry.

I felt a huge sense of relief when I first read about L-space and all libraries being connected through out time and space, this occured just after I'd started to discover all the book/libraries/museum burnings in our history.

When I was in labour with Jean everything was going wrong, dangerously so and I couldn't speak and was basically dying. I was very lucky but at the time death was no longer scary - taking my baby with me however was. Within me I knew death and it was a combination of the Aztec woman, mother, warrior, birth and death and Death from the discworld. A sort of cross between Terry Pratchett's Death and Neil Gaiman's I suppose.

It sounds hippy and I'm not saying it's not but I clung to life by thinking of the glow of universal power in deaths eye sockets, by remembering I was as much part of existence as everything else. I know doubt would have found some other imagery but it is always locked in my mind. And because I am me this appears in a poem and the poem has been on the radio and stuff, I always wondered if anybody would spot the connection.

This picture is one I started painting after I read my first discworld novel - I stopped when someone pointed out the elephants were supposed to be the other way around. I am now considering finishing it anyway.

And finally - my thoughts go out to Terry's family and friends because what I am feeling is but a shadow of their pain and remembrance. RIP sir.