NOOMin' It

I signed up for Noom for a year to try to give myself space to figure out how to make better food choices with all the weird food limitations I have due to my body being in a constant state of hyperalertness and reactivity.  (At least I know now why I'm so reactive - see illicit cats post here.)  Some thoughts during my second real-ish week doing the thing.

What I eat and what the scale says seem to be mostly unrelated.  Or at least not directly and obviously and immediately related.  I mean, I'm sure they are in some way, but, for instance, if I eat the number of calories on the lower end of the range they specify, there is no immediate corresponding change in my weight the next day.  If I eat over the number of calories in range they specify, sometimes I weigh less the next day.  They ask you how you are feeling with each weigh in, and I just default choose the thoughtful emoji because it's a mystery.

Sometimes I stay at the same weight for days at a time whether I am making good choices or not.  It's a thing.

Overall, the trend is down slowly and staggeringly.  Again, only on week 2, so small sample size.  But hopeful.  I know that changing how you think about and organize and eat food to healthier patterns is a long game, so hopefully the small wins will continue to add up (or subtract : ) and the end result will be something much healthier and maintainable with all my new, mindful, better for me habits.

They tell you that progress will not be linear and the scale is not the only place for celebrating wins.  There are other changes to look for in fit of clothing and body composition.  I am . . . always living with some (or all) brain fog, so, I don't notice these things, if they are happening.  Again, hopefully will become more obvious over time as my body adjusts.

Interestingly, I think the most clear signs that DON'T rely on me to notice them come through my buddy the Oura ring.  

CAVEAT: Right now I don't know if this is correlation or causation.  Time will tell.

I DID just launch a big, very stressful thing at work, and it wasn't a disaster due to extensive work and preparation.  But I've finished up big projects before while using the Oura ring without this kind of dramatic result set.  And work overall is still in a bad place, and I'm still feeling borderline burned out, and my manager is still quietly and kindly incompetent and hindering me from getting the promotion I earned several times over, so it's not like suddenly work stress is gone.  So time might tell if any of these things are real changes and not just blips from the project launch. 

Despite that, my Oura ring has been shocked and surprised at how much less time I spend in the stressed zone and how much more time I spend in the restored zone.  Y'all, this is statistically significant.  Sometimes I will randomly get this message once a week or month.  I don't know that I've ever gotten it for days in a row.  Like, all of them this week.  Including days I worked.  Including days I DROVE.  It's anomalous.  I love it and hope it continues and is tied to better nutrition and patterns I'm setting up through Noom.

My HRV average has been inching up.  You have no idea how bad it generally  is, and it is (not mysteriously now that I know about the cats) way worse when I live here at home than when I live in Canada or California.  HRV is about how much time you spend with your sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) active vs your parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest).  When you're stressed and, you know, your brain is a little broken by chronic illness and doesn't really know how to engage the parasympathetic nervous system (something that is supposed to happen smoothly and automatically), your HRV is lower.  It's a sign your body is under stress.  You know, like maybe because along with the chronic pain and disturbed sleep and such, your immune system is constantly fighting off an allergic reaction to cats.  And the world.  And eggs and sesame and pineapple (among other odd things).  HRV is kind of new as a vital sign, so there's not a "normal range," but in healthy people it starts high and generally declines with age.  Older adults (60+) average 25-45 ms.  I . . . don't think I have ever averaged anything that high.  I'm not sure I've ever gotten up to 45 at all, let alone averaged it.  I DREAM of being in older adult territory for my average.  But in the last week, that average has been a little higher.  More than once.  

My lowest resting heart rate at night has been dropping more consistently and has been happening earlier on average.  Since my health started to fall apart, my sleep has always been . . . nonstandard.  One of the reasons I stuck with Oura is that a lot of the score is based on doing the right behaviors.  Do you go to bed at a roughly consistent time?  Do you get up at a roughly consistent time?  Wearables always have a hard time figuring out if I'm actually asleep.  They generally think I'm in light sleep when I am totally conscious, awake, and doing things, so those scores are less useful.  But the one that shows when your lowest heartrate is and what your heartrate is doing overnight are fascinating.  They're supposed to show a sort of hammock shape where once you go to bed, it goes down until about halfway through your sleep and then come back up.  I have honestly never had that pattern.  My dysautonomia includes a feature where my heart just kind of doesn't know what it's supposed to do with itself.  Sometimes when I sit or lie down, it spikes.  (Spoiler alert: It is not supposed to do that.)  So at night it wanders all over the place and spikes when it shouldn't.  Very rarely, it hits its lowest point around 2-4 AM.  It's been doing that more in the last week than maybe ever.  And once it hits that low, the HRV goes way up corresponding with the second half of sleep when the body is supposed to be doing its best repair and reset work.

This does not mean I feel rested or that getting up is any easier.  Or that I have more energy during the day or less pain.  Alas.  But here's hoping these small changes are reflective of some good being done as I set up these new patterns, and the benefits will gain momentum and become more obvious.

Especially because the State Fair was in this sample set, and I probably ate every single thing I am reactive to (along with way larger quantities of food than I generally do), and the trends are consistent trends.

Dum spiro, spero.*  Dum NOOM, spero?  : D

*Thanks, Jo Walton's Among Others : D

Ditching the Slacker Voice, an odyssey

In the immortal words of Relient K, "I so hate consequences."

Once upon a time, I adopted a more, shall we say, relaxed speaking voice. You see, I was a graduate school student in a choir full of undergraduates, and I was working a retail job, and my height and confidence, coupled with a somewhat precise speaking voice, large vocabulary, and decent diction seemed, shall we say, threatening at most and not very friendly at least to people I had to interact with every day.

My sister puts it this way, "You make people feel stupid sometimes."

I decided that since a lifetime of slouching hadn't really helped my height be less intimidating, maybe I should try to change my speaking voice, so I did. I adopted a lazy sort of tone, reduced my vocabulary outside the graduate program, and tried to sound more relaxed. Now I'm paying for it.

My voice has been getting more gravelly, and it takes an inordinate amount of time to warm it up for speaking or singing, and I thought it was because of being allergic to the Midwest. I went to see an ENT, and he prescribed some additional thankfully cheap things for the allergies. During the exam, he asked me five times, "Do you strain when you talk?"

Five times I answered, "No?"

After the fifth time, he said, "You strain when you talk. Want to go see a voice therapist?"

"Sure, " I said. It took a while, but I finally saw one. It turns out that I strain when I talk (shocker). After some discussion, it turned out that the main culprit is my slacker voice.

Sigh. You try to be less threatening to others and only hurt yourself. What a strange life lesson.

Because I'm a singer, the therapist told me I might be able to straighten out some of the damage on my own, especially since I knew what was causing it and since I don't need it for those reasons anymore (working a professional job and thus not able to participate in that choir anymore).

I can go back to sounding like an intelligent, professional person again. Hooray! So now, my goal is to ditch the slacker voice before it does any irreparable damage to my vocal cords and my singing voice. Welcome back, diction.

The thing is, after 8 years of the slacker voice, my vocal cords don't really know what the correct way to work feels like, so my throat is tired and still hoarse most of the time.  I don't really know if I'm actually making progress.  Also, I don't always think before I talk (a problem since birth, I think), so I'm not sure how long it will take to reprogram my speech patterns. (I pray not as long as it took to make them a habit.) Wish me luck!

Maybe I'll get an essay out of this someday . . .

Hurry Down Sunshine

Finished reading Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg.  This stark and powerful book covers the time just before Greenberg's then-teenaged daughter had a mental breakdown through the time she resurfaced.  He immerses you into that summer in New York, his family interactions, his awkwardness and helpless agony.

I decided to read this book because I'm trying to hash through some family-related stuff in my writing, and I wanted to see a writer dealing with the sudden mental illness of a family member.  I read some reviews, and they all seemed to indicate that if I was going to read one memoir about mental illness and family, this was a good choice.

Best technique moment:  Greenberg's sitting in this diner, and the TV is showing the current presidential campaign clips, and the way he describes what he's feeling and thinking about the presidential candidates says so impossibly much about him in his specific situation that I am in awe.  What an incredible way to show.

Another impressive technique: no table of contents (in the hardcover edition).  You don't know how many chapters there are or how long they are.  You just have to read until you hit the end of a section or run out of time.  When will this end, you wonder as blow after blow happens on page after page after page.  Genius.