Shapeshifting Inclinations

It’s been two weeks since my last post.  It has been hard.  I felt like I was on such a roll before my biking accident.  I was working out multiple days a week and actively losing weight.  Then even after the accident I was looking forward to getting back on the bike and then the calf muscle was torn.  It feels much better.  I still limp a bit in the mornings and it does hurts still but not even close to what it was a few weeks ago.  I can walk somewhat normally but still am not using stairs normally.  I am hoping to try next week with the stairs but I am so afraid of re-injuring it.  I’d love to get on the bike again but still have this lingering fear of re-tearing the muscle.

I’ve stuck to my pretty much vegan diet.  However I have not lost any further weight, I’m not gaining aside from my normal 5 lb flucuation, but I’m not losing.  So I’m just kind of stuck.  I don’t want to push myself too soon and end up injured again but I don’t like not being able to do ride my bike or even work out.  Even my right wrist is still sore and not completely healed.  The knee where the stitches were looks bad but has not given me pain lately and I’m able to fully bend it.  I am still favoring it a bit though at times.

I’ve had thoughts at times of going back to eating meat.  I haven’t really craved it per say, but the thoughts have crossed my mind.  Mainly because eating was easier when I wasn’t consciously thinking about what I was eating.  I ate a lot of fast food and fast prep meals and losing that convenience is what I miss most, not really the meat itself.  It’s hard to plan out what you are going to cook and buy the stuff ahead of time and even when you have a plan there are times I get home from work drained and just want something fast.  It’s the lazy habits I’ve developed over the years that are hard to break.  I haven’t given into anything yet but it definitely does make it more tempting when the scale is not rewarding you weekly as it was in the beginning.

Ultimately I hope I reach a balance in life.  I’m not there yet and the journey is hard.  I remember just a few weeks ago I was praying for the pain to end and the pain has almost gone away and now I’m wishing to return back to “normal’.  So it is an endless cycle, each time you get to the point you wanted to you end up wanting something more.  I guess it is just human nature but it sure makes feeling happy and satisfied in life hard.  For me it is hard having to go through this journey and still look down and see my fat on my stomach.  I’ll be hitting 13 weeks this weekend since that January date I decided to start this.  I originally wanted to lose a pound a week and I’ve lost more then that, a lot more.  I just need to remind myself of that, where I’ve been and where I’m going to.  I can get there if I keep pushing and don’t give up.  This is just a minor road block, I have to be patient enough to wait it out.

It is 3:30 in the morning and I am up.  Hunter wanted out at first and my leg felt really bad as I limped to the back door.  The muscle was really tight and things just hurt.  My wrist is still quite sore and my left knee still has a tightness to it that is not quite normal yet.  I’ve been off of work for two days and just spoke with my boss yesterday about taking the rest of the week off.  My body just needs a lot of rest.

I hate feeling this way.  I know that my calf muscle likely snapped due to it having to bear all of my 230 plus pounds the last few weeks. Although I am happy about the weight I am losing it is nights like these that make me mad at myself for getting so heavy.  I’ve lost 23 pounds but I am still obese.  That is a sobering thought.

Still I shouldn’t dwell on it.  It is going to take many weeks for me to fully recover.  I am actually afraid of stairs.  It’s weird too because I am not afraid of hardly anything.  The thought of trying to walk down even the steps on the front porch scares me.  I am afraid of re-injuring my right calf and afraid of tearing my left calf.  The pain was so intense when it happened I am now really afraid of it happening again.

I don’t feel that way about my bike just the stairs.  I hope it is something I can overcome quickly.  I was able to put more weight on the leg without pain like I felt yesterday so it is definitely healing.  I am not sure when my gait will be normal again

Today is one of those days that I wish I would have just stayed in bed.  I didn’t though.  Got up and had breakfast.  Knee was feeling pretty good.  Started walking around the house and was able to bear full weight on it without pain.  Movement was still a bit stiff, but it felt good.  I went up and down the back steps for a bit bearing full weight on it.  Then I decided to head to the front porch which has 3 much steeper steps.  Up & down I went probably 4 or 5 times.  Then it happened.  Walking down the stairs I put weight on my good leg, the right one, and heard an audible pop and instantly had severe pain.

I had an icepack laid out on the chair in the living room because I was planning to ice my knee after the stair exercises but instead I grabbed it and put my calf on it.  It hurt worse then the fall off the bike.  I tried to walk it off as I always try to do but the pain was unbearable.  I hobbled into my bedroom and lay there with the leg propped up.  I started crying from the pain and just the overall frustration with life.  I really could not believe this was happening to me.  I mean what are the odds that I would injure my good leg simply by walking up and down stairs, and pull the muscle so bad it likely was torn?  How the heck will I manage to get around when my good leg is now terribly painful and my newly healed left leg is still stiff?

I just lay in bed in pain for awhile.  I finally hobbled up and got some ibuprofen and put the ice back back in the freezer.  Walking was extremely difficult.  My left leg was now forced to hold all the weight of my body and my right leg could bear no pressure at all.  When I made it back to the bed I started googling the injury and reading about athletes who hear the “pop” and stories of being on crutches and casts and being laid up for weeks at a time.  It all seems so daunting.  I’ve already missed several days of work this year and I can’t imagine missing much more but I am going to have to.  I can’t even walk right now.

I can only hope that this will improve with rest in a day or two.  I am lucky it was not my Achilles tendon as that usually requires surgery.  This appears to be a calf strain, possibly a tear.  There is no swelling but there is some slight bruising so I am hoping it is just a minor strain.  It did not feel minor though that is for sure.  I was in really bad pain for several hours. The pain has subsided some but I still can’t bear weight on it.

Here I am 20 lbs down and stuck unable to do anything but lie around the house and browse the internet or watch movies.  I can barely walk much less cycle and this has really got me down.  Not only that but it is the fact that almost every week something bad is happening to me and there just seems to be no end to it.  It awakens in me something that I try to keep buried most days and that is my loneliness.

Days like this it really sucks to be single and alone.  I hate feeling sorry for myself like this but it really does suck  I see people around me friends and family who have folks in their lives that support them and are there to help them when they are ill or hurt.  Me, I just have me.  Sure my best friends would show up in a heartbeat and help me out if I asked but it is just not the same as having someone that is there all the time because they want to be there.  Most days I am ok with being single at 37 with no husband or children but days like this it just hurts.  It hurts because I don’t think we were made to suffer alone.  Suffering is inevitable but in my soul I don’t feel right suffering alone.   In Genesis God says it is not good for man to be alone and it is nights like this that I understand why.  Yet I know that I will make it through this.  I have to hobble from one room to the next and the going is slow but it won’t last forever.

When I hurt my knee I didn’t really pray about it because I just assumed it was my own fault for going to fast and getting to confident too soon.  The pain was bad but it was bearable.  Today I prayed for healing because the pain was really bad. It is strange that when things get really bad it forces me to pray and when things are good or not too bad I just try to handle it myself.  Today I just felt tired an unable to deal with this myself.  It has been a hard journey these last few months.  Literally a few weeks ago at 2 in the morning I was walking my sick dog around my yard allowing him to say goodbye because I though I was going to have to put him to sleep.  Driving your only dog alone in the middle of the night thinking that you have to be the one to tell the vet to end his life sucks just as much as popping a muscle in your one good leg.  Never really being able to talk to anyone about those feelings and emotions is even worse.

Perhaps the worst part is that I never imagined my life would be like this.  I spent my whole childhood alone in my own world with very few friends.  Most of elementary school I played alone because kids made fun of me so I just learned to ignore it and deal with it myself.  When I played sports in junior high and high school I finally made some good friends that I would hang out with and have fun with but most of those relationships ended when school ended.  In college I commuted and met very few people on campus to connect with.  Somehow when I was young I thought that one day I’d grow up and live happily ever after like all the people in the books I read did.  I think that is why I don’t read fiction anymore because it is very disappointing when those fictional worlds stay fiction and none of the dreams you once had ever become a reality.

Ok that is enough of my pity party.  I needed to get it out and off my chest.  Now it is time for a bit of reality.  I could be living on the streets somewhere.  I could be dying of  a terminal disease.  I could be unemployed.  I could be disabled.  There are million worse things that could have happened to me that haven’t.  Perhaps the worst of all would be to be hopeless.  Luckily when I was young God took hold of my heart and gave me hope.  Sure on days like these it’s hard to remember that hope but it is there.  The point is things could be a lot worse then they are.  I am a 37 year old single woman that makes more money in a day then most women in the world make in a year.  I have more riches in my life then most.  I have access to clean water, medicine and I have a roof over my head.  I can share my thoughts openly on the internet because I am educated and well off enough to afford internet service and computers.  So enough of feeling sorry for myself.

With some ice and some rest and probably a lot more ibuprofen this leg will heal.  I am not going to gain a bunch of weight not being active because I am not eating the unhealthy diet I used to eat.  I might not lose weight as fast but heck I’ve dropped 20 pounds in about 10 weeks which is double what my original goal was.  I hope that I use this experience and all the feelings both good and bad to someday help someone else get through a rough patch.  I need to really rethink my life and become less self centered and more in tune with others needs aside from myself.  Even my darn loneliness has a purpose.  All these experiences that make up my life make me who I am.  I thank God for making me someone that can be honest about by feelings and honest about my struggles.

The choices I make effect my world and this I deeply care about.  It is not enough anymore to just empathize.  It is time to start taking actions.  At one point in my life when I was a young Christian I thought God had called me to preach the gospel to the world.  Twenty years later as I look back I realize now that I had too much left to learn for me to be a teacher.

I haven’t always made the right choices but thankfully I still have time here to make better choices.  One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned outside of church is that God is concerned about a lot more then just right belief systems.

I’m not sure where all of this is leading but I am sure I must keep walking.  I do need to rejoin the community though that is for sure.  Despite all my misgivings about ritualistic religion the only way to be an agent of change is to participate in the community you want to help change.  So the time has come to return.

What a week this has been.  As I write this my left leg is propped up beside me with 3 stitches right on the knee cap.  Thursday night I had headed out to work out and was feeling really good, I mean really good.  I had not ridden at all that week due to dealing with Hunter and his having eaten 1/2 a bag of chocolate chips so I was really happy to be back on the bike riding again.  I was pushing myself hard doing 15mph on average.  I had done my first set of loops in the park.  I had taken the hills like a champ and had a ton of energy.  I was thinking about riding even further that night since I was making such good time.  Then it happened.  I flipped over the front of my handle bars and landed on my head.  My body bounced back, my chin hit the cement and both knees collided with the cement as well.  My right hand served as a break for my body.

I rolled over in a lot of pain.  One cyclist came over to see if I was ok and I was just in a lot of pain.  I’m not sure if I hit something or I just applied the brakes too fast on the hill I was starting to enter, it wasn’t clear.  What was clear is that my left knee had a big gash, my wrist was killing me, my nose was bleeding and my chin hurt.  I though perhaps I had split my chin but luckily there was no blood just pain.  My head was fine thanks to my helmet.  My knee was not so great.  After laying on the grass for a good 10 minutes absorbing all the pain and what just happened.  I decided to get up and walk around.  I was a bit shakey but I was ok.  Seeing what my knee looked like I decided it would not be wise to pedal the 6-7 miles home with it split open so luckily my Dad was home with his truck so I met him on Wardlow road and he gave me a ride home.

At home when I took a look at my knee in the light I could see the inside of it.  It was a deep wound and I knew at that point it probably wasn’t wise to take care of it on my own.  It was also starting to hurt pretty bad as well.  So I headed off to the emergency room and 5 hours later I would emerge with stitches in the knee and a strained right wrist.  The stitches are right on the knee cap so I have a knee immobilizer to keep me from bending it and popping out the stitches.  The first two nights were quite painful, last night things had improved a bit.  The leg gets stiff pretty often and it hurts to move around but I’ve been dealing with it.  I am so lucky I did not break anything, things could always be worse.  I can’t quite understand why all these things are happening to me lately but perhaps it is just in the cards.  Today as I type this I am ok and my dog is ok so in this moment I can be thankful for this.

Today when I stepped on the scale which has practically been stuck at 244 lbs for the past two weeks I was so happy to see 240lb.  I immediately went in and took off the knee brace and weighed myself without it and I was at 238!  I am out of the 240′s and up to 20lbs of weight loss.  It felt so good to have such a great victory in a week that has been so rough.  Not being able to ride for the next 3 weeks is going to be a challenge, but I am confident that my diet is solid now and even without the exercise I should be able to maintain and possible drop a pound or two in the next few weeks.

It really sucks to be hurt but a part of me is glad that I am dealing with a sports injury instead of a health issue.  With my weight I could easily be facing diabetes, stroke or heart attack.  So to be laid up because I feel off a bike due to riding really fast in order to burn calories, I’ll take it.  I’ll be back on the bike too as soon as my wound is healed because I want to continue to be healthy.  I might have some more cycling accidents in the future but I’ll take those over a heart attack, stroke or diabetes any day!

Last week was a bit disappointing and exciting at the same time.  My weight is staying right at 243.  I was hoping it would drop and I’d be closer to the 230′s but no such luck.  It still goes and and down daily between 3-5 lbs but so far has not dropped like I was hoping.  I’ve been eating all plant based food and sticking to this diet pretty darn well.  Supposedly when you eat less calories then your body needs you drop weight.  I haven’t found that to be exactly true.  I am eating around 1400 calories a day but still not see the weight drop weekly.

Two weeks ago I dropped like 6 lbs, last week nothing.  Same thing happened in January as well.  There were some weeks where the weight came off and some weeks where it didn’t.  I’m not as consistent with my exercise as I’d like to be but I don’t think that is causing it as prior to this I was not exercising at all.  I think I just have to be patient with this process and not get hung up on the pounds.  I feel better then I ever have and have a lot more energy so that is all positive.

Saturday I accomplished one of my cycling goals which was to ride down to Seal Beach via the river trail.  I finally did it!  I almost stopped at the halfway point.  I got a bit dizzy and was feeling really tired and was really close to turning back.  However, I got off the bike walked around a bit caught my breath then got back on and kept going.  It was a great feeling when I reached the beach.  To think that a little over a month ago I could barely pedal through the park and now I’m booked 24 miles in under two hours is just incredible.  My next long term goal is to ride in the Long Beach Marathon.  Short term I’d like to do beach trips every weekend.

The real challenge for me at the moment is trying to be consistent with my riding.  During the week it is rough.  I was going to ride yesterday and Hunter was really sick so I didn’t.  Tonight I just did not have the time.  I’m hoping the rest of this week I can be a bit more consistent.  Ultimately I’d like to ride 5- 6 nights a week with a long ride on the weekend.  It will take some time to get there but if I keep working on it I’ll get there eventually.

As the days go on I continue to learn more and more.  I am now more convinced then ever of the importance of eating raw organic food.  I’ve been learning about flouride, food additives, and politics.  The more I learn the more I am convinced that I much like most of our culture have actually been poisoning my body in the past 35 years.  From genetically modified seeds and crops to chemical additives in foods.  All the things I used to eat every day with ingredients I could not pronounce.

I don’t blame the fact that I ballooned to 258 pounds on food, I blame it on my own ignorance.  I chose to be ignorant and not care about what I ate.  Now that I do care I am working to educate myself.  I am not sure exactly where all this will lead, but I do know something has to be done.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on diets and at times I find myself very confused.  There is so much conflicting research it is hard to dig through it all.  I plan to continue to dig and really try to uncover the answer to what a healthy diet is.  I know that this weekend I recovered from a cold faster then I can ever remember doing.  I am just confused mostly about proteins, supplements and how to make sure you are getting what you need.  It’s funny too because just a few months ago I never really cared.  I ate what I felt like and paid no attention to calories or nutrients.

What amazes me the most is the claim that plant based diets cure and reverse chronic illnesses.  The science behind it makes sense.  I am committed to continuing to not only adhere to a plant based diet but to also chronicle my experiences with it both good and bad.  There is so much information out there for me to dig through.  I hope to share what I learn here along the way if only to possibly help someone else interested in the same thing as I, becoming healthy.

I’ve been dealing with a cold since Friday, I think it is due to lack of sleep this week and all the germs in the office.  The strange thing is I have only sinus congestion which is not like me.  Nothing in the chest at all.  Normally when I am sick I always have both.  It might be because I am not eating dairy.  Hunter is doing better.  He has mostly solid stools but this morning he did have some loose stuff again so I worry.  I switched him over to a holistic dog food which I am hoping will help but since we don’t know the cause I can only guess it may be food related.  I read up on the dog food I have been feeding him, it is made by Diamond and is called Nutra Nuggets.  There were not a lot of good reviews on it just due to some of the ingredients.  Erick and Mal switched Moose over to this food I am feeding Hunter now and Moose’s seizures lessened so I am going to try this too.

At this point it is all I can do is try.  I know he is getting older and won’t be around for long but I’m happy last weekend wasn’t the end for him.  It’s hard having only a dog as your companion.  This is the down side of being single, sure you have a lot of freedom but the damn loneliness is killer.  Most people come home and talk with family about their day, me I come home and deal with it myself as you can’t really tell your dog how the day went, LOL.

Friday I tried a soy latte and really liked it.  I think I will start getting these now when I have coffee cravings.  I continue to do a lot of research and reading on diets.  It’s so hard to know what to believe as there is so much conflicting research and opinions.  I really like this plant based diet I’ve created for myself.  I think  for me the key will be being flexible.  If I eat 90% of my foods from veggies, fruits & whole grains and then maybe do 10% from a lil dairy or meat I’ll be ok.  In other words I’m not going to say I’ll never eat dairy or meat I am just going to purposely not eat it often.  I never really liked milk in the first place so it was not hard at all to stop using it.  Cheese I ate a lot of especially cheddar cheese it was my favorite, that is the hardest thing to give up.  I think though by not eating it in the last few weeks my sinuses have improved so it was definitely causing something to go awry.  I think on occasion I will still eat a little bit of it but I will never go back to eating as much as I was.

I’m down to 243 still which is a big drop from last week and I’m not sure exactly what caused it.  I’ll take it though.  I’ve been eating plenty and not really feeling hungry so I’m ok with my body dropping weight.  I have not worked out at all this week just due to Hunter, once this cold passes I will be back on the bike.  I’m hoping to ride 3-4 times a week at least.  I need to drop another 20lbs or so before I head off on my road bike so as not to damage the frame, sad but true, LOL.  One of these days I’ll make a post with some of the stuff I’ve been eating.  I’ve really discovered some delicious foods and I look forward to me coming up with new creations.