dog – Live Well with Lisa Proctor

Ill again … 😔

I had such high hopes for this year. As I said a couple of posts ago, 2023 was a bit of a write off but I thought I was going into 2024 mostly recovered and ready to claw my health back. Well, “the best laid plans” and all that.

Last Tuesday I finished my lunch and promptly vomited it all back up 🤢 I didn’t really feel much worse than usual, and it was just one episode, so I called my husband and asked him to pick MiniMe up from school just in case, but assumed I’d eaten something that hadn’t agreed with me. I didn’t eat much for the rest of the day. I couldn’t face the delicious curry I’d made for dinner the night before as I still felt queasy, but I managed a bit of tea and toast and didn’t think much more of it. Until I started trying to remember if this had happened before and realised it had, in my early 20s, when I was going through a particularly bad spell of recurrent kidney infections . I only have one kidney, and it a duplex, which makes me more prone to infection. The difficulty is that I also don’t usually get any symptoms other than back pain, and these days I have back pain all the time! Luckily, because of my history, I always have a week’s worth of antibiotics at home and I’d just bought some new urine test strips so I did a quick check. My leukocytes and nitrites, both signs of infection, were positive, so I started the antibiotics that night.

Luckily, within a day or two I felt much better and I’ve been resting lots and drinking lots of water. I look the last capsule a few days ago and have been trying to get a few chores done each day without over doing it. I donated a prize to an event that happened last Friday (I make gift frames and ggreetings cards),

so I have made a start on making that and am sorting out some of the clutter in the house in the hope of being able to clear enough space to put a mat down in the living room and actually start doing some exercise! Wish me luck!

Happy New Year! How are we all doing? Good Christmas? etc….

Right, now that’s out of the way, let’s get down to business. I have never wanted to write a “diet” blog. I want to talk about nutrition and general health issues but I will never preach about weight loss. Whilst I do believe carrying a large amount of “extra” weight can have health implications, if you’re happy as you are, then you crack on. We’re all adults here and are responsible for ourselves and I don’t offer unsolicited advice or make comments about the size of peoples bodies. I’m obviously happy to help anyone who wants to lose weight but I won’t suggest that you should.

However…I am NOT happy with my body and weight at the moment. Since I hit my target weight (another phrase I avoid nowadays!) the week before the first lockdown I have steadily regained all the weight I lost and more, and with a history of heart attack, stroke and Type II diabetes in my family, I think it’s in my best interests to lose a few stone (lbs if you’re in the US, kgs if you’re anywhere else ) and, more importantly, some inches off my waist, so I may talk about MY attempts at weight loss.

2023 was a total write-off for me, healthwise, which has led to me being heavier than ever. I started the year with a ruptured IT band, which is probably the post painful thing I have ever endured ( and I gave birth to a child with 91st percentile head circumference – episiotomy, forceps, stitches- the lot!) I could hardly walk for several months (after the injury, not the birth!) so, obviously, there was very little exercise on the cards.

By May I was pretty much back to normal which, for me, is still quite a lot of pain. I did try to at least do a bit more walking though, and things were going well until mid July, when I got Covid for the first time.

It completely wiped me out for the first couple of weeks. I could barely lift my head up a lot of the time and just about managed to get to the bathroom (about 10ft away). By the end of the summer holidays I was almost back to normal but was still getting tired very, very easily. This meant I had to carry on driving my daughter to school etc as walking would have written off the rest of the day. I was gradually building my strength up though, when I got Covid again in December. Luckily, I wasn’t anywhere near as ill as the first time, but it was still a week and a half stuck at home, followed by the Christmas holidays, when everything goes to pot anyway.

Throw into the mix my dog getting injured and needing months of hydrotherapy, which meant fewer/no walks for us both, no agility class and some missed school visits (we volunteer through the Pets as Therapy Read 2 Dogs scheme),

my daughter picking up more bugs than she ever has before – including Covid again, her also having her first proper allergic reaction since she was 18 months old and three deaths in the family and 2023 was a bit trying to say the least!

So, hopefully, 2024 is going to be different! Obviously, all of 2023’s mishaps were out of my control but my plan for this year is to improve my health. I am going to put my nutrition coaching skills into practice on myself and I’ve signed up to a specialist app for EDS/HSD sufferers to try and improve my strength. I won’t be focussing on losing weight but I am hoping that at least a bit of weight loss happens as a result of the improvements I make to my diet and my increased activity levels. I’m also going to actually post on here a bit more often! My dusty fitness tracker is charging and will be ready to go in the morning. Just hope I am too! 😁