It’s alright for some….

Health blog, occasional post.

Village life,injuries & obesity, the posh gym and basic exercise at 65+.

Well this isn’t good ; couple of weeks back and I was making my fail video about the mainsail of my boat not fitting because, like a total noob, I measured one side of the four sided ‘hole’ incorrectly and thus ended up with sail that’s far too long in the luff to fit the mast. Another couple of days after that I was downloading and reviewing the video footage to see what I could use and how to stitch together a video about the job. I had a horrible shock when I watched the video segments because several of them have me in the shot and I thought that I looked bloody awful – basically a big belly and a lower belly fat fold hanging over the front of my shorts.

Right there and then I decided that I had to do something about it and as it happens within another day I had the sail folded, packed and sent back to the sailmaker in Norfolk. That day I dropped the mast back down again, pushed boat and trailer back under the shelter and pulled the cover back over it. Simply put, iv’e put the boat away for the time it will take for the sailmaker to add my job to their already busy schedule and in fact iv’e decided to take a break from the project while I sort myself out a bit.

It’s not such a bad idea either, it’s both hot and dry here and the air has been loaded with pollen ; i’m glad that this isn’t year one of the build because I would be struggling right now with epoxy resin which is hugely heat sensitive.

Now, because the relevant footage is video and not stills it’s already gone in the editing bin and I did the video edit in a different way avoiding the clips of myself in full fat b’stard mode. In terms of the launch, sea trials and start of the around England project i’m now 2 months behind and I suspect now that nothing much will happen before the end of the summer. and I hope, a break in this weather.

What I have to work on right now and am working on is a way of firstly getting rid of a whole load of this weight, working on an exercise regime again and with that re-establishing a proper discipline of eating that doesn’t have me snacking on coffee and biscuits in between jobs on the boat.

Last week, that’s week one of this, I ‘mostly fasted’ which is to say that I had coffee regularly but most days I ate either nothing or just a couple of slices of toast. I also started a walking exercise routine again with 6 out of the 7 days given over to reasonably long hikes over the local ‘lumpy’ scenery. This week I am combining an early morning walk while it’s still cool with sets of bodyweight exercises when I get home – so far that’s just sets of press-ups and this week’s target is to crank out a hundred during a day. Also…I made myself a step-up/plyo box because one thing I found out this week is that controlled step-ups could well be one of the critical exercises for maintaining strength, stability and balance which will help to prevent falls in a few years time.

So, that’s the story and the problem.

I for one have no truck with the BS of ‘body positive‘ – all that means is actual obesity and eventual metabolic ill health while at the same time trying to convince themselves that being obese isn’t just normal but that it should be celebrated and must be accepted….to not do so is the height of intolerance.

There is a claim, among the body positive ie obese culture that there is nothing wrong with obesity and that what I would regard as obesity is just some choice of body shape and that it’s perfectly healthy to be that way. Maybe it is the case that some obese people are metabolically healthy but usually what we get to see, or not mostly, is any proof or evidence – we never get to see what the obese persons HbA1C is for example, never get to see their Liver profile results or an MRI scan of their visceral fat.

I’ll be honest – I didn’t take a baseline weight and nor did I waddle down to my GP surgery and ask to have a set of bloods taken ; all I did was see myself on video, went and took an honest look at myself in the mirror and took a quick hip to waist ratio measurement. That will do for me because I know the basic science of the problems of central abdominal obesity and that one of the simplest metrics to work with is waist circumference and it’s relationship to hip circumference.

My problem, at 65 is what to do about it, and here i’m going to take a sideways step and tell you a bit of an odd story about health, fitness, an injury and resentment.

Functional fitness, rather than aesthetics fitness say, has often been important in my life because iv’e been a long distance hiker, climber and big boat racing sailor. If you think that long distance ‘walking’ and mere yachting don’t require much in the way of fitness then try a day out doing intense match racing on an IOR Maxi yacht or humping a multi-day pack up from the floor of Yosemite valley.

Thus one winter I was starting to prepare for a long wilderness hike by carrying increasing load over greater distance using the Dartmoor river valleys as my training ground. One cold morning I was a couple of hundred yards into my hike when I felt a sudden snap-like pain in my calf and I fell over ; my first thought was that i’d been struck by the bite of a venomous snake – I had the problems of Yosemite hiking on my mind. It wasn’t a snake bite, we only have one venomous snake in the UK and they’re neither active or aggressive in December, rather it was a simple and spontaneous gastrocnemius muscle tear in one calf that would put me off work for the next 12 weeks while it mended.

The first piece of stunning luck that I had was that my own practice GP was on holiday and in his place was a locum GP whose previous job had been chief medical officer for the Royal Marines at CTC Lympstone and he knew everything about gastroc tears and their treatment. This was just before Christmas mind and the one thing that I urgently needed was access to a swimming pool to start my rehab, as it happened I got taken around to the local community gym and pool where they were in the process of emptying their pool for a major clean. Instead I hobbled into the ‘posh’ gym and health club 5 minutes down the road – they were not only happy to take me (and my money) but were staying open all over the holiday and they even had a method for hoisting me out of the pool should I need it.

To tell a long story in short what started that day wasn’t merely the rehab for my gastroc tear but a whole new relationship with health and fitness : I went from pool work while the tear started to heal, then balance work to stabilize my ankle again and then to free weight training to build up muscle mass.

The extremely weird and confrontational side was what happened over at the hospital in the so called occupational health department.

So, I got pulled in by the occ-health department despite having sent in the ‘sickie’ (certificate) from my locum GP that specified 12 weeks at least until I would be fit for work again and this was around week 6 of that. What, or who I was met by was a highly confrontational occ-health nurse who wanted to know why I wasn’t back to work at week 6, and what she had was the same print-out sheet that I had been given – funny though that she only read from the front which sugested a minimum recovery time of 6 weeks for a grade 1 tear and completely ignored the other side which stated 12 (on average) for a more serious injury. At our ‘heated’ consultation I simply leaned across the table and flipped her ‘fact’ sheet over…..all that did was to make her even more flustered.

When she demanded to know what I was doing about my rehab I pulled out my notebook and pretty well gave a week by week account of my progress including pool sessions every day and at that time gym sessions 5 or 6 days a week. When she crossly wanted to know exactly which gym I was using (it wasn’t the hospital’s own physio gym) I just told her that it was the ‘posh’ (expensive) one over the road……to which her scathing response was ‘well it’s alright for some’ – for those unfamiliar with colloquial passive/aggressive English what that means is resentment and in this case that of resenting the fact that I was spending a fair amount of my own money on my rehabilitation.

Me…..I’d simply had enough and pointing to her nicotine stained fingertips asked her in return how much she spent on cigarettes…….I basically then gave up in sheer contempt and walked out !

You might think that it’s strange to find bitterness and resentment in a supposedly professional nurse but in my long experience of nursing it’s a common problem ; our man Dr Peterson describes the problem as being one of the negative features of agreeableness which is a common trait among women in healthcare. Resentment is a weird phenomenon though as it seems more based in envy and jealousy rather than anything positive and I think is what the late Terry Pratchett was talking about when he used the term crab bucket……it was pure crab bucket that the nurse resented that I had what she thought was money to burn on a posh gym and seemed to miss the sheer irony of her spending far more – enough to get nicotine staining – on cigarettes.

Resentment or crab bucket seems to be a feature of village life too, perhaps because I see less people the ones I do see I see in greater detail.

Resentment or just plain envy is a strange phenomenon because it never seems that the person demonstrating resentment wants whatever they are being resentful about but just seem to hate the fact that someone else has got something or is doing something that they don’t have or don’t do and it also seems to be a relative thing. Another way of seeing the same thing is how crime occurs, not because of poverty but when one group or individual is perceived as being better off than the average person in that area thus…..owns nicer car in otherwise poor area….car gets stolen or keyed.

Local examples……man building sailing boat in back yard, village response – it’s alright for some. Man modifying end of drive to enable towing same boat out into road – response…..you can guesss I think and the resentment is because he has off road parking while the nearby social housing estate does not.

This week and the two preceding ones iv’e been busting a gut to get back into exercise and because there’s very little in the way of exercise facilities here it’s all happening at a very basic level : a hill walk 3 times a day, 100 press-ups on the kitchen floor and now step-ups onto a home made plyo box……next week i’ll add squats with my old barbell and some plates. I was seriously considering this week whether I needed to invest the hard cash to go to a gym to help me solve my over-weight problem. My answer so far is not to because at this early stage I can achieve just as much by stomping around the local lanes – it’s all hills here, and doing what I can at home, which is turning out to be quite a bit.

Going down the rabbit hole of resentment.

So I was out walking a few days ago, doing my second circuit of the day, which is usually my long circuit that takes in a path through the local woods past the ‘Gunnis’ in the village of the same name and back down through the village itself. Towards the end of my walk I came up behind the young couple (30’s young) that live in the village and are well known for never having worked and always doing their ‘shopping’ by taking from the local food banks and community fridge….it’s all a very one way process with them…..basically it’s all take. One local rumor is that they feed themselves from their food bank takings and save their benefits for nice things like meals out and holidays…..anyway on this particular day I came up behind them and briefly overheard their conversation.

What they were talking about and getting quite heated and angry about was the food bank and specifically that they hadn’t been able to procure their usual favorite brands even when they’d been round each of the stores that had food bank boxes. The end point of their rant to each other was that someone…..they….had to do something about it, the they in this case being presumably a different they/them hey….get my pronouns today !…. that I often used to hear being complained about largely outside the hospital at visiting time.

And yes, by the way – I do get the irony here.

The they/them problem – neat I think to be able to use that one in this piece with zero reference to to anyone’s squidgy bits preferences.

In my last job I would often be outside the main entrance of the hospital at the same time as many of the evening visitors and, once again, I overheard many relatives and visitors moans and grumbles about they and them ; the staff that is – or at least Doctors and Nurses. The moans took on a kind of predictable sameness in my mind perhaps because it’s what I have been hearing for the best part of 35 years. What it always seems to be, through a relative or visitors eyes is that they aren’t doing enough to sort out the problems of their relative as patient – that’s us of course not doing enough for them – not doing enough to sort out their cancer, their heart disease, their diabetes and so on.

And yes, it’s the same passive/aggressive moan that I hear in the village which is why I rarely engage most of them in conversation because I really don’t want to hear about Mable’s piles or John’s lumbago.

I seem to be having another intense phase of studying health and disease once again and something I notice about the internet is the plethora of conflicting views : some say that diet is all and exercise of no consequence while others go the opposite way and tell us that diet has little impact on health. Some say that you can’t out-train a bad diet while others point to the garbage they consume while packing on pounds of muscle – there’s almost no such thing as a consistent view and what it seems more like is the confirmation bias of presenters and influencers just pushing their own opinions.

One view that I came across is that people fail and become both obese and sick because they are at least mentally lazy or that some other factor such as covid has sapped their will to thrive : the opposite view is that many people generally desire good health and might even be mired (as I am) in a sea of conflicting information.

My view, it might be thought of as the ‘English’ view is that in this part of the country health and disease are passive problems – someone else’s problem perhaps and they should be doing more to solve it…….what I hear very little of, nothing locally, is any sense of involvement or responsibility for ones own health problems. Given that everyone here has access to the internet I find that very odd.