OK, so lately I've been doing that very odd thing that people did before they had gyms and personal trainers: I've been exercising by doing something constructive.
I have to rake, then mow, then weed-eat, the property. That's a lot of work for me. Granted, I live in a tract home, but it's still a lot of work. I have to stop and rest on the porch bench for awhile between each part. But I'm getting better at it.
I worked (and paid my housekeeper to work) on the garage for months now and I can actually walk all the way through it to "get to" things like the lawn mower, tools, etc. -- what a concept! This is great and makes doing things a lot easier. Used to be that after DP moved in I had no idea where to find anything (and when I found it, it would invariably have been left out to rust), and the effort of even getting a couple tools to DO something was just off-putting. Now I'm starting to get my life and property organized again -- I spent over a year since he left doing almost nothing besides working, coding (though not much of that anymore), and working on cleaning out the house, yards, and garage.
I have regular watering, weeding, and just finished all the amending and planting, for my backyard garden. It's a standing garden which is great, but that also means you're doing stuff leaning over with a hand trowel, not a tiller and a shovel, and trust me, two-year weeds as thick as my wrist and three feet deep are still hard work. It was abandoned for two years and I'm just restoring it this spring. Still much work to do on the overall area but at least the beds are planted.
I spent half the day today shoveling half my potting mix -- this is a dumptruck load in my driveway of a 'soilless mix' that is spaghum peat moss, pine fines, perlite, and something else I forget -- into containers (20 - 70 qt containers) to add to the garden collection. It started raining huge drops, but the minute I finished my mad rush to cover it all--2 minutes, if that--the rain ceased.
Got distracted with work, kid, shopping etc. I'm considering trying to mow the lawn before the storm arrives since it's already too long again and I won't be able to mow for a couple days after it rains. Trying to start the lawnmower nearly injures me so it's more a matter of my courage than my energy at this point. In my attempt at procrastination, I'm blogging instead.
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I haven't been weight lifting for a long time. I'd like to re-start that. I had a long list of issues that interfered--by which I mean, interfered with my personal priorities, because obviously, had I wanted to do it more than I didn't, I would have.
I've been walking off and on, with the kid. My city has a walking park with a 1-mile track. It's surprising how fast cardio facility increases if you just move regularly. I remember realizing this decades ago with bicycling, that it would only take several days in a row of doing it to move from so wiped out I had to stop ten times and gasp for my life, to doing vastly more, faster, with no rests, and being ok with it.
At right is a pic of the kid (11-Apr-08) at the walking park with me. She's wearing my severely oversized (for her) sweatshirt.
The cardio-facility fades fast though. If I don't move much for a couple days, it seems like I lose a whole lot and have to spend a couple days recovering facility I had previously.
Eating crappy food takes me down fast, since it not only adds oxygen problems (gluten foods give me asthma which worsens sleep apnea so I'm O2 deprived), and some asthma, but all the water-bloating that goes with eating a lot of carbs too, which affects how limber I am, how stressed my heart is from bending over, etc. My "fitness level" can change radically in two days for better or worse just depending on whether I'm eating steak and eggs vs. pasta and tacos.
I have cooking goals this week, like roasting a whole chicken and using the carcass for a soup; whipping egg whites stiff for a variety of experimental, vaguely breadish recipes; making more cocoa coconut oil/cream bites; and I got a few different "Black Angus" burgers and steaks at Super Walmart frozen section I want us to try. Tonight we must do stir fry and use our broccoli and colored bells before they go bad, with chicken and some gluten-free soy sauce.
My eating goals are mostly to refocus. All in all, my eating has sucked off and on for the last -- well actually, for about the last 17 months to be honest -- but fortunately that means it is "ok" about half the time, I haven't gained any weight back. I still weigh 375 on LC (390 if I fall off--I hold about 15lbs of water weight for carbs if I'm not LC) which is sort of miraculous given how much crappy eating and lack of exercise I've had a lot of the time.
My exercise goals for the moment are still centered on the reality around me:
- Get all the soilless mix into all my containers, which means shoveling and wheelbarrowing.
- Get all the containers with drainage holes in them (not on the bottom but on the side near the bottom) which means a lotta time with the drill. (Yes. Smart people do that part FIRST. That is simply not how the timeline worked out.)
- Get all the weeds that 'recovered' in the garden totally out of there.
- Get the front lawn mowed and edged again. It's a weekly job in Spring. This will be two weeks if I wait till next Saturday but it will be forest by then so I can't wait that long.
- Get the back yard raked and the bazillion twigs (from arm-thick and 10' long to zillions of finger-size twigs, from the old ice storm) outta there so I can finally mow and weed-eat back there, before the grass is taller than me.
There is a big long list of OTHER stuff I ALSO need to do -- but not this week.
I've been reading about lectin/protein intolerances and I really want to make a bigger effort to get totally off gluten. Although I'm not giving up cheese at this point, I'd like to reduce the amount of dairy I intake as the protein, caseine, I react with craving to which tells me I have some allergenic reaction to it. (It doesn't escape me, the irony that I spent my whole life eating two primary foods that I am probably literally intolerant to. It's no surprise I'm huge but it's rather amazing I'm not dead already.)
I also need to get back to my note-taking on the Gary Taubes book 'Good Calories, Bad Calories' as well since even looking at the book as I walk past tends to inspire me back to eating meat/eggs/veggies. Boy that book was convincing. If I were on the jury, some people would already be hung! The man may be the first person who can make even my tendency for "overkill" look pitiful and weak. It's only for really good readers who don't mind really dense material, but it's awesome for those.
And... I want to do another beginning of weight lifting. I slightly injured myself the last time, plus my back room kept getting one of the 8 cats into it (two know how to open the doorknob!) and using it as a litterbox, so even when cleaned up you just couldn't be in it due to the smell, which killed my enthusiasm frankly. The cats are going 100% outside as soon as this storm cycle is over so the horrendous flea situation we had last summer will not be repeated. Too many cats act like a wild pride--I am still waiting for DP to come get his so I only have my 4. (As usual, even long after I get rid of him again, still in some way he is managing to muck up some portion of my life! Oh well. I do love the cats, of course.) Anyway so within a week max I should have my "weight lifting room" restored.
The TV/VCR/DVD is there now. I got rid of the whole media tower, center, TV, and all our VCR tapes (many hundreds) not long ago on freecycle. We have DVDs only now, in a couple fat zipper books, and what visual stuff we have is in the back room, as it hasn't been used for much else.
A coworker sent me a Christian "walking" exercise DVD, something to do indoors if it's raining or something. That was nice of her. Also low-fat cookbooks. Apparently she either did not understand lowcarb that I mentioned repeatedly, or she is hoping to convert me, heh. It still surprises me that people think lowcarb is nothing but bacon and butter; several lowcarbers I know all but live on chicken and fish and broccoli and asparagus and things like that.
... that would not be me.
Anyway, I'm going to start posting on this blog hopefully weekly and talking about what exercise I have done, planning, and any subject matter that relates to exercise or my experience in that area. I think I've waxed on enough now...
... I have to go mow the lawn.
PJ
Posts
5 comments:
Hi PJ,
If you're interested in soil fertility and what it can do for your health I suggest you read chapter 8 of "Food for Nought" by Ross Hume Hall, PhD. Like GC,BC by Taubes FfN is dense reading.
Here are some observations:
Benjamin Franklin - You are what you eat.
Ross Hume Hall - You cannot be more than what you eat.
Michael Pollan - You are what you eat eats.
Jeff Volek - You are what your body does with what you eat.
Another great book (and dense read as you put it) is Biochemical Individuality by Roger J. Williams, PhD. BI and FfN are unique in the health and nutrition literature in that they furnish in depth discussion regarding issues that most other books gloss over.
I like to garden. In fact, I call what I do extreme gardening because of the amount of nutrients I concentrate in my soil. In addition, I am experimenting with plant powder fertilizers (PPF). So far I've only used spinach leaves and pansy plants as fertilizer. I've boiled spinach leaves and used the water to fertilize plants. I've dried pansy plants, powdered them in a blender, boiled the powder, and used the water to fertilize. Both techniques work equally well.
Have to go.
David Brown
Nutrition Education Project
Thanks David, I'll get and read both of those books, they sound interesting. I'm pretty interested in stuff that relates to gardening, and I've blogged eons ago (on another blog) about my fascination with genetic individuality, so both are right up my alley.
Is there some reason for your choice of what you're boiling into your garden water? Why not use a little of everything? Are you using things from your own garden? Do you compost? How often do you water with supplements? Is there any way to measure actual effect? Er, sorry for so many questions, I'm just curious.
Hi PJ,
Had to cut my first comment short because my son arrived to take me to work.
I suspect almost any leaves would work. Boiling releases chemicals locked up in cells making them available to plants. I use pansies because they are convenient to dry, powder, and store. I thought of using spinach but they don't dry as fast, aren't as easy to handle, and take up far more space during the drying process. My pansies grow far larger than normal in my heavily composted soil, about 18 inches tall and wide.
I try to make at least 12 cubic yards of finished compost a year. The materials that go into the compost are mainly maple leaves and grass clippings. The remainder is kitchen scraps, crop residue, and shredded branches from pruning fruit trees. I make bins about 3 feet in diameter out of 1 by 2 rabbit mesh. It takes about three weeks in warm weather to run a batch of compost during which time I turn it once.
I haven't run any side by side tests with powdered plant fertilizer (PPF) to gage exactly what effect it produces. Mostly what I've done is use it on plant starts and my wife's African violet. About six weeks ago there was only one blossom stem struggling to bloom. Today, the whole top of the plant is solid blossoms. I plan to test PPF on potted strawberries after I get my garden planted and some other projects taken care of. I don't yet know strong a concentration to use or how often to apply it to optimize yield. It may take several years of experimentation to make those determinations.
Thanks for your questions. Do you know about stone mulching?
Dave
Stone mulching? Never heard of it! Is it somehow related to 'rock dust' and... dang what's his name, I think he did something with a forest in Austria or something like that. I've gotten rid of my library (attempting to declutter house and soul) and only remember general concepts most the time, so...!
Stone mulching is a simple concept. Lay 4 or 5 inches of leaves on the ground between rows of plants or around the trunks of trees and cover with stones. I use stones one to three inches thick that I gather when I go hunting or huckleberry picking. There's a book by J.I. Rodale entitled "Stone Mulching in the Garden" that you can probably obtain through interlibrary loan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.I._Rodale
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