Category Archives: health & fitness

A narrative of my journeys with diet, exercise, and various healthcare professionals

health & fitness, randomness Leave a comment

Morning Brain Dump

Sitting at the kitchen table with a coffee beside me and a cat draped around my shoulders.

Just got back from having blood drawn in preparation for an endocrinologist appointment later this week. It didn’t take long at all — half an hour, including drive time — but I’m now feeling much more awake than I usually do at this time of day. I suspect it’s the combination of having to drive myself there, being outside (albeit briefly) in the brisk darkness of early morning, and having to interact with other people in person.

As soon as I hit Publish on this quick check-in, it’ll be back to the usual routine of working from home.

krav maga, parenthood Leave a comment

Unpublished, Jan 2023: We’re Officially Black Belts!

This post has been languishing in my Drafts folder for nearly a year now.

There was clearly more that I wanted to say at the time, but didn’t quite manage to get into words. There’s even more to say now that a year has passed… but that’s a post for another day.

The date embroidered on Connor’s black belt is December 3, 2022; mine says December 17.

It may have taken longer than expected, but we finally have the tangible proof that we’ve earned the rank of black belt.

The interesting and perhaps unique perk of our dojo is that we now get to cross-train. Connor and I now attend a weekly all-ages Black Belts Only class, which introduces the kids with black belts in American Freestyle Karate to Krav Maga concepts, and the Krav Maga adults get to learn forms and katas.

weight loss Leave a comment

You Reap What You Sow

I just sat down to write a blog post, opened up WordPress, and found this stub of a post that I started back at the end of May:

“If you want different kinds of results, you need to plant different kinds of seeds.”

This is relevant in so many ways, both literally and figuratively.

I’ll just run with this one.

If I were writing this with paper and pencil instead of typing on my laptop, my eraser would have torn a hole in the paper by now.

I guess I’ll just start with the main fact I’m dancing around: I’ve gained 40 pounds in the past four years.

Selfie in a formal portrait style.
August 2019
Me sitting at a park bench. My face looks puffy.
June 2023

On one hand, the reasons why I gained the weight don’t really matter at this point. What matters is getting back down to a healthy weight. On the other hand, if I don’t pinpoint what happened, then how do I fix it?

Let me give some background, and peel this onion a bit.

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ADHD Leave a comment

Progress Not Perfection

My laptop has been open to a nearly-blank WordPress screen for a good five minutes now, prompting me silently to “Add title.” Meanwhile, I’ve been staring out the window, elementary-school-style, letting my mind wander. Embracing the random associations without the judgmental undercurrent.

My therapist mentioned in our session last week that ADHD brains tend to be “nonlinear” when it comes to organization, and will have several processes or thoughts happening at once. I was reminded of a video* she’d shown me several months ago, where someone had narrated their inner monologue as they were puttering around their kitchen, complete with overlapping reminders and random thoughts and a constant earworm, and I had felt totally seen.

I feel fortunate that my therapist has a background in ADHD, with both her clients and her family. She picks up what I’m putting down and rearranges it from a different perspective. I suppose that’s what therapists do in general, but having someone who understands how my brain is processing — sometimes better than I do — is huge.

I think that’s one reason why I don’t blog or journal as much as I once did: I no longer feel the urgency to get stuff out of my head and into words to essentially psychoanalyze myself. (Or use CBT, or ACT, or whatever.) Instead, my tendency to write and document and plan gets channeled into my weekly planner spreads, where I do my damnedest to script the critical moves in advance.

My mental health is very much a work in progress… but at least I’m progressing.

* I intentionally didn’t to try to find the ADHD Simulator video until I was sure I was done writing, because I knew if I went down that rabbit-hole, this would never get this posted, and would go into my Drafts folder with all the other blog entries I’ve started and never finished. I found this video first, which is by the same woman but wasn’t the exact video I was thinking of. It’s worth including a link, though, because it captures the frustration I feel when I’m trying to backtrack through all the prerequisites of a single task.