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When I went to Structure House my goal was to get healthy. It is hard to admit what that means because it shows you just how weak I got but here are some sample smaller goals:

To be able to stand at the stove long enough to cook a stir-fry.

To be able to buy groceries pushing a cart instead of riding one.

To be able to open my own screw top bottles.

To be able to do two household tasks on the same day.

To be able to cut my own toenails without having to take breaks.

See–just basic everyday activities of daily living.

I had come to depend too much on Dave to do things and it scared me to realize that if I lost him I would have to move into an assisted living facility.

So off I went to Structure House to gain strength and ability. Losing weight would be part of the process.

So I made a commitment to stay until I got that strength or until the weather got bad enough to threaten to freeze my pipes.

So which one of those two things caused me to leave Sunday?

None of the above.

Yes, it got cold. But not cold enough to freeze my pipes.

Just cold enough to freeze me. I needed to run my furnace. A lot. Evenings. Nighttimes. Mornings.

My furnace runs on diesel and I had plenty of that so no problem, right?

Wrong. My furnace FAN runs on electricity.

And I wasn’t plugged in.

And we were having too many rainy/overcast/mostly cloudy days for my solar panels to keep up with the demands of that fan.

A couple days I went driving so my alternator could help charge my house batteries. But the second time I did that my batteries still only got up to 84% full. And that was not going to be enough to carry me over to the next time I would have time to drive without cutting classes.

So, I left.

I am on my way to Texas.

To sell my RV.

I simply cannot do this anymore.

I will go back to Structure House to continue my struggle to get healthy.

But this time I will rent one of their apartments.

Where I don’t have to worry about having enough electricity.

Or whether or not I can pull the dump valve when my tanks fill up.

It’s time I focus on what’s most important.

TTYL,

Linda

Food is fuel. If your vehicle needs diesel and you put in gasoline it will not run well. We need to feed our bodies the foods that have the nutrients we need. Which means getting healthy is not just a case of calories in–calories out.

But calories do still count. There is a formula for determining how many calories your body needs just to keep you alive. This is called your resting metabolic rate. If you eat fewer than those calories your body will begin to eat itself to keep you alive. If it is eating stored fat that’s OK. If it is eating muscle that is not so good. To make it even more of a challenge if you do not eat enough calories your body returns to it’s hunter/gatherer survival skills, assumes there is a famine happening, and reduces your resting metabolic rate. That means you can eat fewer calories to stay alive. It also means you NEED to eat less which can make it harder to get all your nutrients in without overeating. So you want to eat neither too much nor too little food.

When it comes to exercise function is the most important. If you cannot walk to the gym don’t waste your time on the exercise classes there–go for a walk! A little bit the first day, then a little further and a little further until your body can take you the places you want to go. Then you can make the gym your destination.

Learn to listen to your body to determine when it is physically hungry. We in the USA eat for things other than nutrition. Food is not entertainment. Food is not a drug to cope with our emotions. Food is not something to eat just because you can’t think of anything else to do. We need to find new ways of entertaining ourselves and others. We need to learn to feel and process those emotions that scare us. We need to plan our days so we are doing things that help us get into the flow so we don’t even notice time is passing.

Structure House is teaching me all that and much more including ways to meet those challenges. Who knew you could have fun learning to do karate while sitting in a chair?

TTYL,

Linda

 

Counting calories eaten.

Counting pounds lost.

Counting steps taken and minutes working out.

And it is, slowly but surely, paying off.

I’m eating between 1000 and 1100 calories a day and having trouble keeping them up that high. The food here is tasty but so low-cal that I have trouble eating enough food. My stomach doesn’t want to hold those quantities. So I have been given permission to eat as many almonds and walnuts as I need to get up to that 1000 calorie minimum. Isn’t that an interesting phenomenon?

I’ve lost ten pounds. Which doesn’t sound like much to me. So I keep reminding myself that it would add up to about 150 pounds if I kept it up for a year. Fortunately, I don’t need to lose quite that much. 🙂

I am using a FitBit to track my steps but I’m not even half way to the recommend 10,000 steps a day. So I remind myself that when I got here just walking from my van into the building left me huffing and puffing and looking for the nearest chair. I can walk a lot further than that now with no huffing and I even received a compliment from another participant on the increase in my stride.

And I am keeping a list of my non-scale successes. Such as now being comfortable in a size smaller jeans than I was wearing when I arrived. And walking down the stairs instead of taking the elevator. And now being able to do two exercises classes on the same day when I couldn’t even do one when I arrived. And being able to walk my Travel Scoot to my van in the back forty at Target when its battery died just as I was leaving the store.

And I am astounded at how social I have been here. I eat every meal with people to whom I talk instead of burying my nose in a book. And I chat with people between classes. And, of course, I give tours of my van to people who have trouble believing I can live comfortably in the parking lot.

Well, maybe not so comfortable this weekend. It is cold and rainy. But that seems a small price to pay for all the benefits I am receiving from being here. I made the right choice when I decided to come here. And I’m staying on until I feel ready to leave. So many more insights to discover and pounds to lose and strengths to gain, you know.

TTYL,

Linda

 

Is it possible to get jet lag when crossing only one time zone?

Because that’s what I appeared to have last week. I was so brain fogged I could barely function.

I have decided it’s because of my sleep schedule.

In Minnesota I had been going to bed about 3 am and getting up about noon.

Now I am in North Carolina and asking my brain to get up and function about 7 am.

It has no problem getting up at 7 am but it expects me to make a quick trip to the bathroom then go back to bed. So it says, “What do you mean ‘that’s it’? You don’t really expect me to function at this hour, do you?”

Slowly but surely it is accepting that, yes, I do expect it to function then.

So, I only went to one exercise class all week. And I’m not sure how much I learned in the lectures. I may have to repeat some classes.

But, I feel happy and I have lost almost 5 pounds so some things are going right in spite of my recalcitrant brain.

It can only get better from here, right? Right?

TTYL,

Linda

On October 7, 1964, several families gathered in one room in preparation for becoming members of the same church. At the end of that gathering the oldest son of one family offered a ride to the Sunday evening youth group to the daughter of a different family.

Thus it began.

Two years, two months, and twenty-two days later that young couple held their wedding reception in that same room.

And we are still a couple after all these years.

And are glad to be so.

TTYL,

Linda