I got adjustment number seven last Thursday. By the time I go in for number eight in December, I will have passed the one-year mark with having braces.
Category Archives: health & fitness
A narrative of my journeys with diet, exercise, and various healthcare professionals
Spondylo Update: I Still Have It (But It Doesn’t Have Me)
Way back in April, I thought that spin class would be a good way to “open up” my lower back to alleviate some of the nerve pain.
Boy, was I wrong.
That was about the worst thing I’ve ever done to myself. I hosed my back and had to make a mid-month chiropractor visit (which I rarely need to do) for pain management. According to Dr. Smith, I managed to rotate one of my vertebrae.
Yikes.
This month, I got to make another mid-month chiro visit. See, I’m used to the constant low-level ache in my lower back — not really even rating on the scale of one-to-ten, but more of an awareness, a distraction — and I’m used to the slight numbness in my hip and left leg that my offset L5 causes by pressing on a nerve. What I’m not used to is the sharp, localized pain I had a couple weeks ago.
Turns out that my bulging disc at L4 was to blame this time — probably from lugging around a clingy 30-pound Mama’s boy who demands, “Carry you?” Dr. Smith prescribed some yoga poses: cobra and upward dog, to be done while watching TV in the evenings. The backward flexing helps relieve the pain of the bulging disc, but it had the potential to make my spondylo at L5 act up. She actually told me that if the cobra pose made things worse, I should stop and accept her apologies. Luckily, cobra did the trick.
It’s funny that I have two very different back problems that have two very different ways of relieving pain (backbends vs. forward bends and hamstring stretches), and relieving one could exacerbate the other.
I make a point to attend my Thursday yoga class every week, and I’ve been trying to add a core strength class into my schedule whenever I can. There’s one that the fitness center at my work has been offering lately called Core Fusion, which mixes Pilates and upper body strength and some yoga. I absolutely love it — it’s always a huge, packed class with all ranges of fitness levels. (It’s a testament to how uncomfortable I still am with my body image that I find myself scanning any fitness class for anyone who is less fit than I am.) The stronger I can get my core, the more likely it is that everything will stay in alignment and not cause me any grief.
I don’t have any dreams of returning to running. Considering that this condition has surfaced relatively early in my life, I don’t plan to do anything that could make my life miserable down the road. Cycling — maybe someday. Lifting — if I’m careful and don’t do anything stupid. Yoga — I’d like to keep with it and improve my form, actually. Improve my balance, strengthen my core, and maybe finally own crocodile pose someday.
Weight Loss Check-In
Last month, I decided that I would start posting monthly weight-loss updates — weekly ones seem to be a little too frequent to avoid saying the same thing every time, but a periodic check-in is in order, to keep me honest.
I actually skipped my weigh-in this morning. I did it for the reason that most people skip a weigh-in: I knew the number wouldn’t be what I wanted to see. I haven’t been tracking as diligently as I should, and I’ve been hovering around the same weight as a result.
However, I did have some relevant Non-Scale Victories (NSV’s) in September:
- My grandmother, who hadn’t seen me in person in ten years, was amazed at how “thin” I was at my son’s 2nd birthday party.
- I looked at myself in photos of the birthday party, and was perfectly OK with how I looked.
Apart from those moments, I’ve been noticing that I wear my Spanx less and less, and my once-too-tight work pants more and more. I should really take my measurements and see what’s going where.
I also find that I really don’t care anymore if everything is exactly in the right place with no lumps or bumps. Not to say that I’m dressing sloppy. It’s just that there have been articles of clothing that “fit” just fine, but if I sat a certain way, they clung a little too close and failed to disguise my unique shape (that is, my spare tire). I find that I really don’t care anymore. Anyone who would be judgmental of what I wear and how I wear it…. I dress how I feel comfortable and classy, and if I think I look good, then the hell with anyone else.
I suppose I should be thankful that half-assed tracking hasn’t gotten me in deeper than just an extended plateau. Even though I didn’t track today (and I probably went over on the very first day of my tracking week), I intend to start tracking tomorrow and see how long of a tracking streak I can keep up.
I used to be the silently judgmental Weight Watcher who looked down her nose at people who were supposedly “on-program” but didn’t track. Now that’s me. Kind of. I know that if I don’t track, I’m not technically on-program.
Work the program, and the program will work.
You get out of it what you put into it.
Operation Braceface: Day 295
My sixth adjustment was last week. Of course, I took photos that evening, although I knew I might not document the actual adjustment for a few days yet.
The focus this time around is on getting my lowers in place — closing the gaps, aligning the tops of the teeth — because they need to be in their final position before Dr. N. can determine the final position of the upper arch.
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Dueling Diets: Weight Watchers 360 v. Lose It!
First, the good news: I lost one whole pound at this week’s Weight Watchers weigh-in!
Ironically enough, though, I wasn’t truly on-program this past week. I was tracking on the free Lose It! app, online and on my phone.
I’ve done similar stunts before, although usually I’ll double-track on both WW and Lose It, like I’m doing this week. (I thought I’d plug all of last week’s data into my WW eTools, but it proved way too tedious to do after the fact.)
So, why do this other thing, when I’m already paying for Weight Watchers, and I know it works?
I first started using Lose It last year, I think it was, when my Mom needed a (free) diet plan to follow, and I couldn’t keep e-mailing her the PointsPlus Values (PPVs) all of her foods. It was different when I could give her my Points slider from the old Points program — now they’ve made the PointsPlus calculations more complex, so members need to buy an electronic doohickey to calculate PPVs (or use eTools online). Long story short, Mom needed a free option, and Lose It had a social aspect, and one of my friends was already using Lose It, so I double-tracked on this different weight loss program to support my Mom.
Turns out that I really like the user interface of Lose It! And UI is everything when it comes to usage, and usage in this case equates to consistent tracking of food and exercise.
Things I like about the Lose It UI:
- I like being able to scan the barcode of a prepackaged food within the actual tracking app. WW requires members to use a separate scanner app that then imports to the Tracker app, and the scanned foods database seems to be more sparse than the database powering Lose It.
- I like the little icons that represent my food. Yeah, I’m a dork. I know it’s fluff. But it’s part of the experience, and I like it.
- I like being able to see my macronutrients (protein, fat, and carbohydrates). WW isn’t set up like that — the calculation for PPVs specifically makes it easier for members to avoid tracking a bunch of numbers. I like being able to see, for example, that I only got 19.5g of fiber today — should probably ramp that up just a little. That’s just me — if left to my own devices, I would eat macaroni and cheese for most meals of the week. Keeping tabs on my macronutrient percentages helps me not pig out on the pasta, and make better choices for dinner when I see that my carbs are out of control.
I originally had my Lose It program target me to lose half a pound per week. I kept under my calories quite handily on that program. No problem! Hence how I lost a full pound last week, I think — I was doing better than I had to, staying below my target calories, feeling good about my adherence to the program.
Today was my WW weigh-in day, so I decided to start double-tracking today. After lunch, eTools said I only had two PPVs left for the day (wha…? stupid side of macaroni), while Lose It said I still had half my calories yet to go! Hello, disparity! So, I went into Lose It and told it that I wanted to lose two pounds per week. Bingo — then they both matched.
For the most part.
It’s still a challenge to track exactly the same thing in both trackers when I’m eating “real” food — or non-prepackaged food, anyway. For example, that side of macaroni and cheese I had with my lunch today:
| Carbs | Fiber | Protein | Fat | |
| Lose It! | 49 | 2 | 9 | 2 |
| WW 360 | 40 | 1 | 20 | 17 |
All right, so why am I tracking in two separate programs again?
Mainly because I wish that the WW interface looked and acted like the Lose It interface. Plus, I like the fact that I can specifically tell Lose It, “Listen. I want to lose a half a pound a week,” and it tells me how much to eat to mathematically hit that target. I can adjust my PPV target in eTools, but it’s kind of a shot in the dark. Plus, I hate to do that without my Leader’s guidance, because it feels like cheating.
“Oh, I can’t seem to find the willpower to stay within my PPV range — let’s raise it to something I can stick to.” What?
So, I think my goal for double-tracking this week is going to be to get myself back on-plan for Weight Watchers. I know myself. I know that if I allow myself to get too far off track, I’ll just throw up my hands and stop tracking. How about I figure out how many PPVs equates to Let’s Aim For Half A Pound A Week Instead Of Two, then successfully stick to that for a while?
It’s not quitting. It’s not cheating. It’s making the plan work for me.