another check-in

lol -- Y'all are going to get tired of hearing from me, today.

I've been catching up on miscellaneous posts as well as checking places where i've left comments and not been back, during this my day of recovery before i allow an airplane to stress me (i hate flying these days)....

One thing i've noticed the last few days is how dopey my thinking has felt.  Unless i'm much mistaken, i've been speaking more disjointedly and have been more easily distracted, too.  Having had nothing but coffee with cream and stevia (and supplements) for the last 18 or 19 hours, i feel as though my brain is coming back.  For me, this is the sine qua non of existence.

The "ghrelin effect" has kicked in, too:  that keen and alert feeling which encourages me to go out to hunt-and-gather....  ;-)

Ok, i'll shut up.

silence

There's no one in the house right now, except me and the dog.  No television is on, and the radio in the kitchen is inaudible from here.

Since we live in the city, it's NEVER completely quiet; depending on the time of day there's the very frequent sound of vehicles driving up and down our street.  Often we hear helicopters overhead because there's a major hospital not far away, and police 'copters are not unusual, either.  Dogs bark from time to time.  During the day, this old neighborhood can echo with sounds of hammers and saws, because someone around is ALWAYS rehabbing.  There's the occasional siren, and sometimes the voices of people walking along the sidewalk.  Then, in warmer seasons when the windows are open, we can hear fireworks in the stadium when the Cards have scored a home run.  The sound of gunfire is not out of the question, late at night.

Do you ever sit in a room and just listen to the silence?  I feel like i'm one of the few people to do this regularly!  Often when i'm around others, they return to their homes from work or outings or whatever, and the first thing they do is turn on the television.  They cook and eat with voices constantly in the background; they get ready to leave the house with the news on or music playing; some sort of media player is plugged into their heads as they pad along on their treadmills; they turn on their automobiles, and the radio immediately begins to blat.  Some don't think they can go to sleep without a television's blue light flickering in their bedrooms....

The constant unremitting natter drives me CRAZY.  I have a sneaking suspicion that it strongly contributes to the stress most people suffer from, and they don't even realize it.  UNCEASING auditory input....  The human animal didn't evolve this way -- until the twentieth century it was almost impossible to have this kind of noise pollution (unless one lived in extremely crowded surroundings, with people coming and going at every hour of the day -- not terribly common, i should think).

Try a little experiment, and live a day without piping extraneous AUDIO into your atmosphere.  If the world around you gives you little to hear, try listening to your own thoughts -- hear what they have to say, and pay attention to their message.  You might learn something important.

one week in, impressive progress

I woke early this morning, eager to enter my first week's results in the PPC's progress tracking tool.  ...Earlier than i should, in fact -- i sat up WAY too late last night, writing (which is also going well, but i won't go into it here).

I couldn't be more pleased with my progress.  I'm not eating a significant difference in number of calories, but a few staples of my ordinary diet have been pulled from under me by the strictness of this first phase of the Personal Paleo Code.  Generous amounts of heavy cream and butter, and phases of home-made yogurt use were customary with me.  Wine with meals, and the occasional not-sugary cocktail also fit into my idea of what the civilized bohemian should be drinking.  I even decided it would be wise to cut the nightshades.  Cheese, cream cheese, rice, stevia in my coffee, a couple of sucralose-sweetened sodas per week -- all banished.  About four and a half pounds of "ugly fat"* have also been banished.  In only one week.

Did i mention, i'm hypothyroid?  It's BLOODY hard for me to lose weight, though when i first started Atkins i had this same sort of success.  Trouble is, once you dump the worst dietary offenders (white flour, sugar, fruit juices) ... where do you go from there?  Eliminating seed oils, when i first discovered paleo, and balancing omegas 3 and 6 only take you so far.  Tweaking vitamin/mineral intakes, ditto.  Add to that, the fact that i'm now considered to be "of a certain age," and no matter what anyone tells you about it being natural to get dumpy now, it's still not a good thing to do, for many reasons.

One gets in a pattern of eating "permissible" low-carb/paleo foods.  Until and unless you steel yourself into a month of puritanical eating, you'll never know exactly which food is doing what to you.  I can tell you, IT'S WORTH IT.  It's a social pain-in-the-ass, and i'm lucky that my husband's business-trip was of long enough duration for me to be able to concentrate most of my attention on what i'm doing.  ...Wait, maybe THAT had something to do with the stress-snacking urge i suffered the other day.  Did the electrical outage distract me from my iron-backbone concentration?  If so, it goes to show what conditioned behavior patterns do to you -- one major distraction, and it's back down the slippery slide....

Well, i have another 3+ weeks before i can even THINK of adding in some of my deletions.  (Toward the end of that time, i have a major social event coming up; gotta consider it a challenge -- even a DARE -- and ramp up my "stubbornness response" to see it through.)  The heady progress i've made this week won't last, i'm not fostering delusions about that.  But the remaining signs of "physical degeneration" i've experienced, like my once-injured knee's tendency to arthritis pain, SHOULD also improve ... and i've yet to add in the REGULAR tabata sprints on the stationary bicycle.

"Ain't no stoppin' us now!"

*  Reference to a very old joke:  "wanna get rid of that ugly fat?  divorce him!"  Or "her", i guess.  :-)