World Tai Chi Day

Today is World Tai Chi and Qigong Day

I'd like to offer my thanks to Dr. Robert Bates, Lee and Karen Holden, Garri and Daisy Garripoli, Thich Nhat Hanh, and, believe it or not, David Carradine, who sparked my interest in the gentle martial arts many, many decades ago.

Dr. Bates's New Tai Chi Video

So far all I see is this short on You Tube, but if he puts it all on DVD I'll probably get it. Be sure to go to YouTube to watch this and read his description of the video. I'm one of the people who wrote him about having 2 left feet and found even the simplest tai chi movements too complicated. To me, this is as complicated as advanced math - I just see/hear it and my brain goes into spasms.

I'll attempt to do these moves, but I've been trying to master just the foot movements of tai chi for decades now and still trip over myself making the turn from one side to another. I'll stick with Dr. Bates's Fun With Qigong videos for now.

Why Dieting Makes You Fat - a.k.a. Setpoint Theory

The article in this link on the Big Fat Blog is one lady's opinion, one that I, and thousands of others like me, subscribe to. Dieting Makes You Fat! Period!

Ow!

I finally updated those tickers, bottom left. Don't look - the weight one is not pretty at all, showing a gain since January 1, 2011. I blame the pain.

Last post I mentioned I was having a lot of pain again. Since Feb 9th I've had back pain - again - stretching from under the shoulder blade and now towards the front. I also have pain in the shoulder joint on the same side. For decades I've had mystery pains and blamed them on CFS/Fibro but my doc is one of these who doesn't believe those are legitimate diseases. I had seen the doctor in the past for these exact pains and he blamed them on my degenerative disc disease - pinched nerves in the spine causing referred pain - but now that we know the Vitamin D levels were microscopic if existent at all, these muscle pains could have been exacerbated or even caused by that, too. What ever is causing it, it hurts and has greatly affected my range of motion and quality of life. I can't sleep, I can't sit, I can't move without pain in the right side. It may ease up for a day or 2 then I would move too fast or reach too far and it flares up all over again, spasms bringing me to my knees at times, bringing me to tears others.

Increased pain means decreased exercise. Pounding my feet to Leslie Sansone hurts my back, rapid movements of Richard Simmons hurts my back. Forget the treadmill - there's no way I could open and close it without bring me great pain - if I could even lift the darn thing. So I've been doing a lot of qigong. Every day I'm doing my Fun with Qigong 5-Flows routine, either with or without the DVD, and then I discovered Lee Holden and his Qigong for Upper Back and Neck Pain routine.

I paused the video after each movement shown in this clip and did it 6 times on each side and by the time I was done my back didn't feel as bad as it did, so I went and ordered the DVD. I did the routine again this morning before my Fun With Qigong routine and again, it eased a lot of the pain I woke up with. I'm hoping this will really get the healing going in one direction now instead of 2 steps forward and one painful one back. I'll find out next week for sure when the video arrives and I can do it along with him instead of the half-assed way I'm doing it now.

D'oh, Indeed!

The scale keeps moving in the wrong direction.

Yes, some non-McDougall foods have crept back into my diet, as well as some higher-fat "approved" foods, like peanut butter and tofu. But I blame a lot of the 5 pound weight re-gain on the lack of exercise due to PAIN.

I posted back in August about the doctor visit where he changed my thyroid med. My last visit a few weeks ago he increased it again because of all the hypo symptoms I continue to have, and besides the over-whelming fatigue, the muscle pains affect me the most. While there he also gave me the yearly flu vaccination and an osteopathic treatment that's supposed to help prevent side effects, because when I had the shot last year I wound up with a 103º fever and the panic from that raised my blood pressure to dangerously high levels again.

Well, the cure was worse than the disease once again. No reaction to the shot but the next morning I couldn't move my head, I had so much neck and shoulder pain! Twice daily Aleeve, many hours with a heating pad with moist heat, and gentle movements like qigong instead of the aerobic type of exercises and three weeks later I still have right shoulder pains. This is on top of my usual aches and pains from the spinal arthritis, neuritis, sciatica and various arthritic joints. I did manage a few gentle and slower Leslie Sansone workouts, but many days I had to stop after 5 minutes, the sciatica pain was too bad.

Today was the first time I was able to do a complete 50 minute very low impact Richard Simmons workout, my all-time favorite on, Silver Foxes. And now, an hour later, my arms and legs are still rubbery and shaky! It's going to take a while to get back to the level I was at last month.

Food-wise, I'm still debating which is the best food plan to follow. The no-added fat vegan diet didn't do that much for my cholesterol levels - the red yeast rice is what brought the numbers down - but the cardiac cath I had last year showed beautifully clear arteries so I know it's doing some good, even after Summer 1999's foray into unrestricted eating, thanks to the Overcoming Overeating philosophy (White Castle sliders and onion rings, donuts, cookies and cakes almost daily, real Italian sausages and turkey hot dogs - all my favorite foods).

I'm drooling just thinking about those foods!

But I know I can never eat them ever again, not if I want to get healthier physically. Mentally, that's another story, for I live to eat, and knowing I will never be allowed to eat another hot dog or piece of cake for the rest of my life is so depressing that life may not be worth living. I didn't even have cake for my birthday a few weeks ago, but that's nothing new. Most of my life I didn't have birthday cakes because I was forever on a calorie restricted diet, usually only 1000, even as a child in elementary school. I only started having birthday cakes when my son was young and he insisted mommy have a cake, because everybody gets a cake for their birthday. Yeah, right.

sigh

I keep watching videos from Dr. McDougall and his associates to get me back in the right frame of mind, to get back to enjoying (or at least tolerating) healthy no added fat starch based veg eating again, but it's not working. Even Jeff Novick's video where he's actually cooking only piqued my interest for a few minutes, until I remembered how those meals actually tasted.

Not bad, just not exciting. I'm the type of person who will seek out more foods to eat if what I did eat for a meal was unpleasant, unfulfilling, unexciting or bland. Dr. McDougall doesn't like exciting foods. He feels we would eat as a recreational activity, overeat, if food was exciting. He says we should strive for monotony in our food plans, to treat food as a medical necessity, taken in the smallest dose possible to sustain life. He even says to fill up on bland things like salad and brothy soups before getting to the cooked vegetables and starch portions of our meals so we fill up on the very low calorie, high water things so we don't eat as much of the filling foods. Yeah, I do that and I'm starving within an hour of the meal because the watery salad veggies and broth are already digested and out of my stomach and now it's empty again. Know what he says to do in this situation? Eat another salad and bowl of brothy soup.

sigh

I'm hungry. And tired. And achy. Brothy soup is not going to give me what I need.

My daily exercise for the past 2 weeks has consisted of a 2-mile Leslie Sansone video, 5 minutes using the MagneTrainer for upper body work, then again for a minimum of 30 minutes in my target heart range as a recumbent exercise bike. It's been a great work out, getting my heart rate up there and making me sweat prolifically.

Then the leg pains started. First it was just above my ankle, and I blamed the shoes, the boots I wore outside to view the aftermath of "snowmageddon", or just too tight socks. But after switching shoes and making sure I never took a step without them, doing better stretches, even changing the type of socks I wore, the pain is now not only in the ankle but in the shin of my left leg. Damn! When this happened to me in the past my podiatrist told me to cut back on those higher impact aerobics. He already told me to not do so many walking exercises because of my deformed and arthritic feet but I liked the way they made me feel afterwards, and face it, those Leslie Sansone workouts are just so simple to do that a klutz like me can follow along with ease.

But now I have to back off a bit or the pain and damage will only get worse.

Today, instead of any of that fast or foot-pounding stuff, I pulled out my Francesco and Daisy Garripoli beginners qigong DVD, and aside from tired feet from all that standing in one place, I think I got a very good workout, full of gentle movements but some just enough to get my heart rate up a bit — nowhere near my target heart rate but at least elevated. It was nice, returning to this not-so-old favorite. I just bought it a few months ago, before my heart thing, and stopped using it afterwards when the cardiologist insisted on me doing only cardio workouts, with weight loss as the main goal, even though the cardiac rehab nurses not only approved of me doing qigong but suggested I do the cardio one day and do the qigong on alternate days, that doing cardio 7 days a week really isn't healthy or sustainable, especially with my history of various arthritic spots, neuritis, and degenerative disk disease in my spine.

In the old days, I would have just not exercised until my left felt better. My, how times have changed!