Well, my first attempt with transparent commitment, public goals, everything arrayed to push me led initially to weight loss of about 30 pounds, and then regained about 15 of it. Strike one.
My second attempt, my “reboot” this year, was wiped out by depression and I ended up not only regaining all of the other 15 pounds I had first lost, but I also added another 5 on top of it. Pushing me to my largest weight ever, 345 pounds. Strike two.
Sigh.
So I’m working on a reboot plan, I know why it’s not working, and what I need to do, but apparently the online transparency plan isn’t working for me as a way of keeping my nose to the grindstone. I have a couple of new things to try, but I guess I’ll try those out on my own and post updates more sporadically. Stay tuned!
When last we saw our intrepid hero (i.e. me), he was facing a cliff-hanger of epic proportions (literally). He had plateaued, become relatively inert, started to despair, and wallowed in frustration. I needed a break. So I took one.
My “goal” for my break was to take my mental energy off my weight and health, and while I wasn’t planning to abandon all my new practices, I didn’t want to be tracking everything every day, only to see no progress. I stopped in early February, and planned to go to the end of March. That was this past Sunday.
So what did I do over the previous seven weeks?
On the positive side, I didn’t go completely crazy. I didn’t throw away my plans to eat breakfast more regularly, although I didn’t try to fight that hard to make it at home either. For snacks, I gave myself a break from preparing them by taking a financial hit, and so I bought my veggies at work more often than pre-chopping them at home. Lunches weren’t bad, but not great. A bit too much pizza thrown in as a treat rather than sticking to other healthier choices, but again, I didn’t go nuts either. I did better on drinking water through-out the day. And dinners stayed relatively the same. We tried out the Hello Fresh delivery service, and while the food was interesting, it also included more prep time than normal, and more prep time than say SupperWorks. We’ll stick with it a bit more, building up some extra recipes perhaps (the yakitori was great, also a couple of others), and then likely try some more SupperWorks. Finally, on the positive side, if I rely on measurement as my progress, my overall weight stayed relatively the same. Up and down a pound or two, but nothing much different than when I was plateaued. The real benefit is that I didn’t expend a lot of mental energy on it in the last seven weeks. That’s at least an indicator that some of the habits are part of my “new normal”.
On the negative side, I had a health scare in there for my heart, which turned out to be (likely) more reflux-related as my body gets used to my new meds. Speaking of which, I started taking a baby aspirin a day for my heart stuff, although my GP removed that from the regime now that my heart issues are “resolved” (i.e. no signs of a problem). I went up to five meds (2 BP, 1 diabetes, 1 reflux, 1 aspirin) and then down to three (dropped 1 BP and 1 aspirin), and then back up to four (added a cholesterol med). Long-term, maybe I can get rid of them all, but for now, we work with what we have.
Continuing on the negative side, I’ve been eating ice cream a little too regularly in the last seven weeks. Not excessively, but since it’s my Kryptonite, I was using Ross’ philosophy from Friends (“I was on a break!”) to allow myself to do it…DQ, Frosties, Laura Secord. It’s a slippery slope.
I’ve also been a giant house slug with the snow challenges. I’ve been hibernating way too much. Sigh.
CTRL-ALT-DELETE
But Monday marked my overall reboot, and the beginning of round 2 / attempt 2 to start the next 25 pound goal. It’s 10 weeks to my birthday, which is probably too short a time to get all 25 pounds lost, but I have smaller goals in there to get things done (like getting my basement done so I can work out in it — or as my new advisor, the Kinesiologist, suggests, I should picture the goal of getting the physical set-up in the right layout as the first exercise / workout). We had a great first appointment, and I suspect we’ll have 2-3 more before I’m fully on track for the future.
After restarting Monday, I can feel the challenge for the week…yesterday was my first day back at work with full menu control. Today I sacrificed a bit at lunch to have pizza with a friend, but I’ll adjust for it in my other items for the day. And I’m planning to BBQ on Saturday night. How wrong can the week go when it ends with BBQ?
If you’ve read my blog in recent weeks, you’ll have noticed a trend. Lack of movement. Increasing despair. Frustration. Wallowing.
I am struggling to keep with my program, and to get ANY momentum at all, ranging even from eating healthier with my snacking and breakfast times all the way through to actual being ready for exercise. I’ve been trying various things to “re-energize” my approach but most of it is frankly just not working.
So today marks my last post on this topic until Spring hits. I’m just focusing too much on negative sides of what I’m not accomplishing that it is starting to affect my overall mood and emotions. I’m taking a break. No, I’m not stopping, no, I’m not giving up. But I had to let go of the constant tension and I did that today.
I desperately wanted a quick comfort boost and my normal outlets — a creamy hot chocolate or an actual frozen hot chocolate from Timothy’s — were not getting the job done. So I gave in to what my body was telling me.
I had ice cream at Laura Secord.
If you have read the previous blogs, you know how I feel about it. Tantamount to falling off the wagon for AA members and taking a drink. Attempt #1 is complete and I’ve failed to achieve my goal. I did make some progress, there’s positive in them there hills, but a failure nevertheless.
I’ll try to minimize the backsliding over the next two months. I may even make some more progress in there. But for now, I’m done blogging about it until at least April 15th. I need some quick wins on other fronts to get my confidence back up.
Not the posts I thought I would be writing about now, but it is what it is, I guess. Sigh.
While I should be doing a full update for measurements and everything, I’m really not feeling it at the moment. And so I didn’t do an update on Wednesday. But someone asked after a previous post if I was going to post about what I was using for resources — websites, apps, etc. — and I wrote this up last weekend, so if anything might jive for others, I might as well share.
Apps
I tried out a bunch of apps, and very few resonated with me. I tried weight trackers, nutrition ones, stuff about exercise, and a raft of others. In the end, I’m only happy with four of them, and right now, I’m almost down to using only two for two specific elements.
The first area is almost unrelated — I like to jumpstart my brain with some puzzles in the morning. Not “physical health”, more “cognitive health”, I guess. I subscribe to an app called PUZZLE PAGE, and each day it gives me 7 new puzzles or so. Basic crosswords (more kris-kros puzzles than traditional crossword), sudoko, etc., plus some other ones for pattern recognitions, quote falls, etc. It has an option to sync across devices through cloud saving, but I find it too hard to play comfortable on a phone screen. I also have Quote Slide which I have been playing for years, as well as Picture Cross, Puzzledom, Ludo King, Rikudo, and, for a long time, Family Zoo. But mostly I only use those for variety now. Puzzle Page is my mental app of the day. I’ve tried Lumosity, a few others, but this one suits my interests better. All of them are available on iOS, I think, although I was doing them on Android.
In terms of nutrition, I bopped between two apps. The gold standard for most people is the app MYFITNESSPAL by Under Armour and I upgraded to Premium for the first month trial. You enter what you eat and drink, and it tells you the nutritional count for the day.
Samsung has a similar app called S-Health. And since I was a pure Android user when I started the journey, I tried it out. Unfortunately, it only works on the Samsung phones, NOT my Samsung tablet, and I do tend to use the tablet more than my phone.
Both of the apps come with extensive lookup databases, and with the similarities between the two, I think they must have pulled from the same database at some point. You can also add in fitness times, exercise types, etc., and it will give you your calorie count for the day. There are also blogs that are linked or links to exercise programs. Both aim to be ALL-IN-ONE. But for me, the main point was education…I needed to get a better understanding of the food choices I was making, while keeping it relatively simple. I kept track for a couple of weeks and it really helped. I did not renew for MyFitnessPal at the end of the month, wasn’t needing it as much by then, and I always had S-Health for backup (at least at the time, I’ve now switched to iOS for my phone).
My dietician has me on a simplified diet and as long as I remain within that, I don’t need to access the nutritional info of every piece of food going by. For me, most of the challenge was more about certain food choices (too many carbs, not enough veggies and fruit) and when I was eating (skipping breakfast, messed up schedules). I changed that, and my weight adjusted. From time to time, I look something up, but I’m not in it daily. I might decide to go back into it at some point to get me “restarted” / refocused, but it isn’t my “go to” app. And because of that, I don’t need the premium subscription. Both “basic” versions work just fine.
The fourth app runs on my Android tablet and it is a pretty basic weight tracker. You can do it in the other apps, but I wanted something just simple and easy to use. You put in your starting date and weight, your goal weight and ending date, and it will chart your plan to get there on a linear scale. The other apps do that too, but they also will add in a bunch of caloric info that I didn’t want cluttering up the interface. By contrast though, the weight tracker I use (MONITOR YOUR WEIGHT) is not particularly health-friendly — if you put in that you want to lose 10 pounds a week for 10 weeks, it will dutifully chart it out for you. 100 pounds in a week? Here’s your chart. Neither of those would be healthy plans, but that is not what the app is for — it’s just charting your info for you, it doesn’t check to see if you’re an idiot or simply unrealistic. The other apps do — both will limit your weight loss to under 2 pounds per week…they simply won’t chart anything else. And usually won’t let you set a date and goal in any other way.
The app I use ignores all that, it’s really just a graphing program, and will let you enter your weight each day or at whatever frequency you choose to enter, and plot it against the goal. It shows you the raw data (plot points), a green line to show your “goal” (i.e. straight line from starting point to your goal), and an orange line to project your likely weight loss path at your current rate of progress (extrapolating from your entries). If you want to export the data to Excel, you can (simple CSV format). Pretty simple with few bells and whistles.
I looked at some of the exercise apps, and I may want something at some point for tracking, but most of my stuff is so individualized, the big “generic” apps don’t really fit my program very well. I find myself tracking things more in Excel than anything else. I have a bunch of exercise videos and I’ll blog about those in the future once I get the basement set up properly.
Websites / Email Feeds / Blogs
I also initially signed up for some good websites. The info was good in the first few weeks particularly, keeping my mind focused on my learning, but over time, some of the articles started to seem more like click-bait headlines / pop articles than useful advice.
Everyday Health has a number of email feeds to choose from and one is called Diet and Nutrition. Some recent articles include:
9 steps to lower your BMI (basically about accuracy, scales, and having a plan);
7 foods that spike blood sugar (white rice, white bread, sodas and other sweet drinks, red meat, fast food, packaged foods, whole milk…duh!)
9 Foods to avoid if you have Type 2 diabetes
7 Easy Breakfast Ideas for Type 2 diabetes
Some diet tips, some recipe suggestions, etc. But pretty basic. After a week or two, they seem rather juvenile even. And after a month, it’s the rare article that contains something useful.
Another feed is called Living with Diabetes and contains similar articles:
Diabetes Breakfast Mistakes
Is Intermittent Fasting Safe for People With Diabetes?
What is Hyperglycemia? How to Prevent, Detect, and Treat High Blood Sugar
9 Healthy Fruits for People With Type 2 Diabetes
Some are still pretty basic, but I find it is at least a slightly higher ratio of useful information in there.
A third feed that I chose was Men’s Health with articles like 7 Best Foods for Men Over 50. The rest of the topics are pretty varied, and while there are some useful things hidden in there, there are a LOT of articles that I’m not interested in (vacation spam, problems with urinary infections, how to control a Herpes outbreak, etc.). Heck, even Readers Digest Read-up has some interesting articles in it (The Most Popular Weight-Loss Products on Amazon!).
But the better ones are pure health-related like Healthline: Diabetes. The content might not be much better than the Everyday Health, but the ratio of soft articles seems lower (Is It Safe to Donate Blood If You Live with Diabetes?; Can 6 Weeks of CrossFit Help Ease Diabetes Symptoms?).
I don’t know if there are any startling “nuggets” in there, but it’s what I have been using. Doing this article helped me to realize that the ratio of useful info to pablum on some of them was so low that I unsubscribed. If I find anything else out there that works, I’ll share.
One extra thing
As an aside, I also have a Fitbit HR. I have had it for some time, and I love the premise of it. But four things are holding me back from fully embracing it, each individually minor. First, my knees are giving me problems. So I’m not capable of 10K steps right now. That shouldn’t stop me, I can still do whatever I can do, right, and track it.
Second, I find it very uncomfortable to wear, partly related to all watches. When I type, I like to keep my desk a bit higher, and let my wrists rest on the desk. It works for me, no carpal tunnel problems, etc., but if I rest on the desk, the watchband starts to dig into my wrist. And then I take it off to type, which I do at my desk all day long, forget to put it back on, which means it doesn’t record all the other steps I take when I’m not wearing it.
Third, the charger for it is not a simple mini-USB, it has it’s own VERY short cord (about six inches) and a weird shaped dongle. I usually only charge connected to my computer at home (I’d charge it at work but we’re not allowed to plug USB devices in, even to charge). I carry the cord, but then I forget to charge, as opposed to other devices that naturally line up when I finish for the day. It charges with a slightly different setup, and that extra “step” means it ends up running out of power before I remember to keep it up to date.
Fourth, there is a problem with this model of Fitbit that is endemic to the series. There is no separate “pairing” option on it to turn on Bluetooth and you need to use BT to synch to your mobile device. When I synch, even if I did a synch yesterday, it takes FOREVER to synch properly. Sometimes it doesn’t connect and it takes awhile to do that; other times it just seems to pause half-way through; other times it just takes forever to transfer every single bit of data. I wouldn’t particularly care except that if the power has run down, synching is the ONLY way to set the time. A couple of weeks ago, it took THIRTY MINUTES. Searching the internet have turned up tons of anecdotal tips and tricks, including starting a synch, wait a minute, and then completely reboot the phone and do it again. By rebooting, it guarantees that the BT link is severed on both ends (the sending Fitbit and the receiving phone) whereas simply disconnecting the BT setting leaves the Fitbit somehow lock-blocked. Some people just use the health apps on their phones and use that to track by estimate how many steps they take, but evaluations of these techniques show wide variations with reality.
Like I said, I love the premise of it all…nutrition and weight apps, e-feeds to keep me focused in a larger community, and an e-device to gather health data. And some people have gone that route whole-hog with great happiness. While I like tech, I only use it when it works well and helps. I haven’t found that sweet spot.
The only real tech solution that is working GREAT for me is a digital diary of sorts. In other words, this blog!
Last week’s post was brought to you by Debbie Downer. I confess that I’m really “not feeling it”, the weight loss journey. I’m holding steady a few pounds above what I was earlier, which is a miracle considering how much I’m screwing up my diet regularly. I’m kind of giving myself a pass for the month of January, with a view to going hard again in February. But as part of my coping mechanisms, I’m trying to latch on to brightness wherever I can find it in the journey. And I didn’t really talk about a spark I felt back in December.
I had a good day. Actually, I had a great day. That doesn`t sound like much, does it? Sure, I mean, great days are good, but so what? Because it had been so long since I had a day like that, I think that I’d forgotten they exist. It was like my “new normal” over the last ten years defined good days within a narrower and narrower set of parameters.
For context, the “great day” was a normal everyday day, nothing special. I woke up, had a shower, ate some breakfast, did some basic things, and went to take something out to the garage. As I stepped out of the house, and into the garage, I suddenly became acutely aware of my body. It was like my brain was trying to tell me something, and suddenly I decided to listen. My brain was saying, “Yo’ dude, have you noticed how you’re feeling right NOW?”.
I was energized. I had been listening to music, I was bopping along, I felt pumped. I felt, well, healthy. And most of the day, I kept thinking, “What is THIS? And how do I get this feeling EVERY day?”.
It felt new.
As I thought about it, I harkened back to an earlier post about various indicators — on-scale and off-scale ones. Lots of people had ideas of what else to suggest, and most of them fell into psycho/socio measures that tend to be very subjective. One friend in particular noted that she has indicators that lead themselves, in the most simplistic version, to whether you`re having good days or bad, what pain thresholds look like, etc. But they didn’t seem to “fit” with my journey, or my experiences in the past. I set them aside in favour of some future work (i.e., this post) about well-being. I wasn’t sure I would find anything that fit well with me, personally, but I wanted to check it out further.
I confess that I had looked at well-being indicators once before, and was underwhelmed. Perhaps it’s my analytical side, perhaps it’s the performance measurement work I’ve done in my career, or perhaps it’s the approach I take to goal-setting in general, but I found that most of the indicators were either population level (i.e. not suited to the individual), too subjective (how do you feel today? are you satisfied with your life?), or too specific to unique populations (i.e., for chronic pain sufferers, what is your pain level today? Can you walk 10m? 20m?). Most of them didn’t seem to apply to me.
For example, I wasn’t in physical discomfort, pain, etc. I had no injury, I was just fat. Mental health is always an open question for me, sometimes jokingly and sometimes literally, but I wasn’t in any distress. In fact, that was one of the weird elements up until I hit 300 pounds — sometimes it was hard to see the direct impact on me. I coped pretty well.
Which when I write it out — “coping” — it seems obvious that there is impact. Likely measureable impact. Yet the dampening down of my energies and general feelings of health have been so long and gradual that I have equated much of it with simply growing older. No “good days” vs. “bad days”, just “what was”. Minor ripples and variations within a narrower range. Never too high, never too low. The “new normal” became simply my “normal”.
But like I said, then I had a good day. And I experienced again what that can feel like. My energy was up, I felt physically fitter within my current body frame, and my mood was positive. Oh, sure, it was gone the next day. Yet a couple of weeks later, I had a half day where I felt the same initial energy and mood bump, without the physical health sensation, and I thought, “Hmm, maybe I *should* be tracking this.”
More research on well-being
So I went back to some of my old bookmarks, did some additional searching and found some basic stuff online, even some more pop psych articles. Most were crap. Even ones where there was any rigour to them, they often were only for population level indicators rather than for individuals. Or just ones that didn’t apply to me. Until I found the Personal Wellbeing Index for Adults (PWI-A) from the “International Wellbeing Group” run out of (I think) Australia. As I read the file linked above, I found myself nodding YES! in a few places.
For example, they noted that one of the challenges with Quality of Life measurements is that you have to first define QoL — and if you change the definition, the measurements are either relevant or not. There’s no consensus on the definition, and thus little consensus on measurement, with one estimate being over 1200 indices around the world all with different elements. Yes, been there, seen that.
It then noted that even where there was a bit of consensus, it often was extremely narrowly focused, such as on a specific age demographic, medical condition or disability. In other words, if you defined the group as those with a muscular disease with motor control impairment, a bunch of your indicators are going to be about how they experience their day from that lens (or at least in part from that lens). Like the chronic pain example I used above.
In part, this was the same reaction I had to my friend’s initial advice — absence of pain wasn’t really relevant to me. I didn’t see how I could simply call it “absence of fattiness” instead.
What I wasn’t expecting in the article was that they faced head on the issue of objective and subjective measures of personal well-being. And the rigour with which they approached the question of “which domains to measure?”. They wanted no overlap between categories to prevent the possibility of something being influenced by the other indicators OR merely being a contributor, not a stand-alone area.
In fact, it was one of the areas that led them away from single-item/dimension constructs…if you defined QoL from a single lens/theme, and then decided it was made up of elements A, B and C, those elements are both contributory and definitional — you can only understand A within the control of the QoL definition, as opposed to understanding A as a standalone area on its own.
For me, it was some of the limitations I saw with some of the 1200+ constructs…circular definitions and inconsistent rigour in the elements, meaning that if one piece fell, the whole construct failed. I generally prefer models that can be seen as complementary and potentially capable of compensation rather than hardcore integration.
The scale chose seven domains that includes opportunities for both objective and subjective outcomes:
Standard of living
Personal health
Achieving in life
Personal relationships
Personal safety
Community-connectedness
Future security
It also includes a general question about overall satisfaction with one’s life, but that isn’t included in the scale (not a unique domain). The ninth question is one on which the group couldn’t achieve consensus — whether or not to include a spiritual or religion domain.
Each of the questions is measured on a 10-point scale where 0 is not satisfied at all and 10 is tickled pink (okay, actually it is completely satisfied). So I did the test (Taking a Personal Wellbeing Index (PWI) test) and it was interesting, but it didn’t really get me to the point of having some good indicators. I am going to ignore the Standard of Living, Current Achievements, Personal Relationships, Safety, Community, Future Security, Spirituality / Religion, and Overall Life questions, but I am going to incorporate one of them in two forms:
How satisfied am I with my health?
How satisfied am I with my current options and approach?
Embracing my inner researcher
Okay, I liked that first one, and it was encouraging enough that I went a little research-crazy. Which means, for the first time ever, I have a blog post with an Appendix! I’m sharing my notes and links at the bottom to what I found.
So having read all those links, I find myself at a bit of a cross-roads. I know which parts are directly relevant to my weight journey (marked in yellow in the appendix):
Global:
current life satisfaction, overall sense of WB
Physical:
breathing, dexterity, discomfort, elimination, energy levels, fatigue, fitness, general health, illness, mobility, nutritional balance, pain, physical activity, sleep, stress, usual activities, self-reported health status
ability or time to do interests/hobbies, recreation, sex, work/life balance, outdoor environment
Social WB
family, friendships, home life, lonely dissatisfaction, parenting, partner relations, social supports, volunteering, arts & culture
But the cross-roads is related to the fact that I really hate doing the same work twice. And if I like these WB indicators enough to incorporate for my health journey, perhaps I should consider them more broadly. Like a Personal Well Being Index that I review likely annually that also takes into account all those other factors that don’t really apply to my physical health journey, more the broader holistic “me 2.0”. It’s the same challenge that the first article had — ensuring that the domains are discrete, and I see a bunch of the ones above as being “part” of a larger discrete category, it’s just those other parts aren’t as relevant.
I don’t know who I’m fooling, my decision is already made. I need to make a quick and dirty PolyWogg Well-being Index that goes beyond the basics. Maybe I can tie it to my favorite Blue / Red / Yellow / Green model.
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/6/7/e010641: Strong theoretical analysis (including distinguishing between “priority” areas in various disciplines), and 99 self-report measures based on frequency, intensity, and strength of agreement with various statements. The research separated out “affective” component (emotions) and “cognitive” component (evaluation). Strong links identified in the literature between “positive health” and “well-being”. Of the 99 indicators, the ones most likely to be of interest to my health journey are physical WB (breathing, dexterity, discomfort, elimination, energy levels, fatigue, fitness, general health, illness, mobility, nutritional balance, pain, physical activity, sleep, stress, and usual activities), global WB (current life satisfaction, overall sense of WB), mental WB (acceptance, mood, emotional reactions, inner balance, intellectual wellness/mental alertness, motivation, optimism, relaxation, self-esteem, self-care, and self-control), activities / functioning (ability to do interests/hobbies, recreation, and sex), and social WB (family, friendships, home life, lonely dissatisfaction, parenting, partner relations, social supports).
https://b.3cdn.net/nefoundation/7a378df45fafe612cc_a3m6i6g49.pdf: Well-being = how people feel (emotions) and how they function (sense of competence or connectedness), including feeling optimistic / useful / relaxed / dealing with problems well / thinking clearly / feeling close to people / make up my mind about things; feeling satisfied with life today / happy yesterday / anxious yesterday / doing worthwhile things;
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/health-happiness/research-new/positive-health/measurement-of-well-being/: Differences between objective WB(population) and subjective WB (individual), as well as WB vs. resilience. Questions if some WB indicators are more determinant of health behaviours, chronic disease or mortality, with links for multidimensional, positive affect, purpose / meaning in life, life satisfaction, mastery, happiness, optimism, etc.
www.geog.uvic.ca/wellness/wellness2011/Chapter2.pdf: Physical wellness, psychological/emotional wellness, social wellness, intellectual wellness, spiritual wellness, occupational wellness, environmental wellness, economic wellness, cultural wellness, climate wellness, governance / social justice wellness are all covered in brief. In addition, the social determinants of health (macro issues that are foundational for micro considerations).
https://www.governanceinstitute.edu.au/magma/media/upload/ckeditor/files/Wellbeing%20Indicators%20across%20the%20life%20cycle_FINAL.pdf: Economic factors (including number of working hours), home factors, health factors (including life expectancy, self-reported health status, disability, smoking, mental health + overall life satisfaction, time devoted to leisure or personal care or sports), education and skills factors (including cognitive skills), social and community factors (including standard ones plus volunteering, outdoor environment, and arts & culture), empowerment factors, and safety factors. Good list of indicators useful for “older adults”, including caring duties, access to transportation, connectivity (access to internet), home tenure, rent assistance, assistance with core activities, use of aged-care services, home and community care, number of hours of care, community-packaged care, prevalence of dementia, and underemployment.
http://theconversation.com/how-do-we-measure-well-being-70967: Disconnecting happiness (positive and negative fluctuations in emotion) and satisfaction (cognitive evaluation, perspective), focus instead on capability model (since physical condition/neglect can become “normal” and valuation neglect reduces person to single number rather than multidimensional i.e., the UNDP HDR effect) and the need to also understand well-being in context of opportunities/capabilities;
