Stalled ? – break the stall.

Weight loss stalled

Stroke/fasting experiment.

Like many middle aged people I struggle with maintaining an acceptable weight and body composition. Also, as with the experience of many others I would say, somewhat tongue in cheek, that I only gained lots of weight when I started ‘dieting’ unlike say the experience of managing my weight with hard exercise,which was great but only for as long as I was able to maintain a routine of hard exercise. When I was doing it, I would say ‘seriously’ my training regime took about 3-4 hours out of the day 3 or 4 times a week although I have to add that I could eat just about anything I liked the look of – the problem being that everything I liked tended to be caloricly dense and often high in sugar.

Most of my regular visitors will know that I had a bit of a shock when I weighed myself (and looked at myself in the bathroom mirror) in the new year. Like many others I made a new years resolution to lose a load of weight although unlike many I came up with a workable plan that took account of one knee replacement and a long history of back problems. When I last posted about progress I was some 86 exercise sessions completed (out of a hundred planned)……except then I really made a mess of the plan by having a stroke !

So, the last few weeks haven’t been great !………aside from the huge reduction in exercise alongside feeling tired all of the time and notably ‘fuzzy’ in the mornings one of the big problems, in my mind. is that my slow and steady weight loss bottomed out and then stalled : I kind of predicted what was likely to happen next – a fast weight gain – and that really annoyed me (not the way I put it BTW).

At the same time my plan of gradually transferring my exercise regime from walking to triking wasn’t working out, in fact I was enjoying the trike rides less and less – mainly down to having only one tried and tested route to ride – only then that got closed as well. As I write nearly a month later my usual village escape route is still blocked and closed, most days, when I take a short walk that way there’s no evidence of work happening either so I tried to find another route out of that side of the valley only that leads to a blind emerge onto a steep section of a main road where I also have the problem of getting out into the center/right at slow speed to make a junction. Each attempt to ride that route, even with positive hand signals, has resulted in some degree of altercation, plain road rage or insane close passes from the worst drivers.

The big turnaround (maybe).

Amidst the grim desperation of everything seemingly going wrong I figured out that I couldn’t make things much worse by trying to do things a bit differently thus iv’e made a few changes and tried some things that iv’e done before and some completely new ones……

New trike set up and new riding routes.

The trike wasn’t really working for me at the beginning, first, it’s gearing didn’t go low enough to get me up the hills here but neither was it high enough for fast road riding – I would get to the point where I needed to free-wheel really too quickly. Iv’e made 2 changes so far, first was in fitting the Bafang ‘E’ drive – that helps me a lot on the steeper hills around here……then secondly I had the pedal/motor chainring changed to one 10 teeth larger. The second change makes for a much better cycling experience because I can now pedal the level sections and easy downhills in high gear and really quite fast.

The real limiting problem seemed to be that I only had one viable route to ride on and even it had the end problem of a fast main road to contend with. I always used to ride with the intention of getting out into east Cornwall and that really meant just one way out and one way back…..gets tedious after a while. What I did last week was to go deliberately downhill first (very fast downhill) and then cross the old bridge into west Devon ; iv’e only tried that once before and got severely caught out by what we call ‘the cut’ which I thought would be the quieter (in terms of traffic) but much steeper. To put it mildly but bluntly the more aggressive local wide boys treat it as a race track plus it’s narrow – there is a permanent floral display at the top commemorating a bad accident between drivers !.

So, for the first time last week I rode the longer,slower and less steep main road route out which twists and turns it’s way out of the river valley to the east. There, it starts to get really difficult as the road becomes a fast one with tight curves and poor visibility ; there is however a roandabout at which it is possible to turn north into the badlands of west Devon or south towards the Bere peninsular. Going either way has already given me much better riding as the roads are wider, smoother and the land less ‘folded’ so I can pedal in high gears for longer, which seems to me to be much better exercise than winding slowly up a steep lane mostly on the E drive.

Bonus points with the trike have been earned by being able to ride to one or other of my favorite cafes ; I almost can’t tell you how much the positive riding with a cafe as the ‘windward mark’ lifts my mood.

As I write iv’e been home from hospital a month and as I said in another post my best description of that time is, not great – not terrible, in fact if asked to rate the experience on a scale of nought to ten I just say…..3.6 (that’d my attempt at a joke BTW).

I was extremely tired when I got home – possibly due to the 26 hour wait in A&E followed by 2 days being shunted around the hospital so when I got home it was a relief to actually sleep, in fact I slept heavily just about every night for the first few weeks but still woke up physically tired and mentally fuzzy. Early on I noticed I was waking up every day with what felt like DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) as though I had done a hard weights session the day before ; eventually I had to make an executive decision about my prescribed medicines and chose to halve the dose of the Statin that I had been given. Luckily, when I had a face to face with my kind but rather mumsy GP she agreed with my decision,saying that some amount of Statin was better than nothing but not when the higher dose affected me so badly.

Iv’e tried to normalize my life again – been out walking even if I walk as though iv’e been drinking, have started blogging/writing again if only to completely delete many of the posts that i’d started : iv’e even worked on the Pathfinder despite having very little desire or patience for the jobs – still, i’m one job further ahead from when I came home. At this end of the month I started driving again, I was a bit rocky and hesitant at first but positive enough to head out on a road trip in a few weeks time.

So…..this month has been a bit of a shitshow all round and one thing I didn’t feel up to doing was any reading and research about stroke recovery – I figured that what has happened is more or less permanent and what I have to do is get used to being me again except with the newer and slightly less capable version. As I said in yet another post I did wonder if the stroke also represents the end of my outdoors life ; of course it doesn’t have to although at times it has felt like it.

In the back of my mind I kept coming across this idea that i’d read at least something about stroke (or brain damage) and dietary effects – I think the actual papers that I read might have been more about kids with epilepsy and how they respond to a ketogenic diet and I think that somewhere else I came across some work about fasting and brain recovery. As many of my readers will know I experimented with fasting for weight control but gave it up on finding that fasting is almost always associated with muscle loss – not something I can afford right now and something that I can’t as easily train my way out of. The idea took hold though because one of my own experiences of being fasted (or just in ketosis) is the mental clarity that came with it – the one thing I would say that iv’e totally lacked this month.

Long story told short but I weighed up the pro’s and con’s of trying a short fast again – or at least a modified fast (some added protein) – my thinking,such as it was, that my priorities were the hints of what it might do for brain health first and maybe get my weight loss moving again. In the literature there are several unsupported comments about fasting and functional stroke recovery although it’s not an area where there is much experience and the only research seems to have been with experiments in mice. So anyway….I fasted, had a considerable water ‘dump’ and woke up with a refreshingly clear head and when I did my weekly weigh-in I was down by 1.4 Kg : I assume that the loss was mainly down to water loss but given that my usual slow weight loss was stalled and that otherwise I was keeping my eye on the ball with my actual diet and what exercise I was capable of I thought i’ll take it’ and might even risk a second try.

Now, at the end of what I have to admit has been a very bad month i’m actually feeling quite positive – iv’e had several good rides on the trike, seem to have broken the stall in my weight loss and I am feeling surprisingly positive about the Pathfinder project now that I have made the decision to finish it to expedition standard and TBH i’m not that worried about having no great desire to sail it at the moment.