In the parallel universe where the Corona virus never transferred to humans, I'm bouncing around right now, packing the last bits and pieces into my backpack, and probably preparing food and coffee for the journey to the NESAT conference. I guess there's quite a bit of chaos in the study as well, more than usual, as I've only come back from the fair in Karlsruhe on Monday, and the list of post-fair homework (apart from "carry things back inside to empty out the car") is still untouched.

Instead, I'm sitting here at the home office desk, with the Most Patient of All Husbands sitting at his home office desk on the other side of the room. The tickets for the journey have all been cancelled or the dates moved to next year (when there will be a NESAT), and we'll be staying home, doing the social distancing thing.

It still feels weird.

There are a lot of things that have changed here in Germany, due to all the restrictions. For me, personally, it feels like things have already settled down a lot into a "new normal", not all of it brilliant, but mostly it's fairly comfortable. Our favourite market stall for Saturday grocery shopping is back after taking a break for a few weeks due to the situation, shops have re-opened, and we've established virtual meetings with some of our friends, so we do get some social contact. It's not the same as meeting like in pre-Corona times, but it does help to see friendly faces via videochat.

Germany is probably not a bad place to be in at the moment, even though there's rising stupidity here as well - people protesting against the restrictions, falling in with conspiracy theory groups, and generally not taking the virus too seriously anymore (because it wasn't so bad after all...) I just hope that stupidity of any kind, including the "race to be the most liberal in taking back the restrictions" that some politicians now seem to engage in, won't destroy the fragile success we had in slowing the virus spread. The smart thing, as far as I can see it, is still to stay at home as much as possible, keep a good distance to other human beings, and try to not get sick.

So that's what I'm trying to do - plus seeing the good things that come from the changed situation. We don't have to worry about our catsitter situation, for instance (as we're not going anywhere at the moment...). We're having boardgaming sessions with international participation. There's more digital events now, allowing me to easily and quickly connect with other colleagues from around the world, straight from my own living room. There's more people buying things locally (which is always a good thing). Some bad things in our society now come to light, and there's a possibility that some of them might be remedied. Of course this can't balance out all the deaths, and all the negative impact that the virus spread is having on everything everywhere - but we might as well try to make the best out of it!

Before the summer is all over, and the holiday pics get buried in the digital stack that is ever growing, here is how our paddling trip went.

We started out on the Elbe river close to the Czech border, in Schmilka, and got to enjoy the spectacular scenery there:

[caption id="attachment_4821" align="alignnone" width="640"] From Königstein to Pillnitz - Bastei near Rathen


We had very, very sunny weather, and it was really dry the weeks and months before, so just like last year on our Saale trip, water levels were very low. Which means that we had the river mostly to ourselves, no commercial vessels at all - as the water in the river was too low for them.

That made for very relaxed paddling wherever we wanted on the river, which was nice for us. The sunny weather also meant applying sunscreen generously, trying to get an early start for the longer days, and wearing sunglasses and hats as protection. So this is me, "hard" at work paddling:

[caption id="attachment_4822" align="alignnone" width="640"] Just taking out the paddle after steering...


We worked our way down the river, enjoying every bit of it. On some days, we really worked our way down - there was a headwind quite often. One time we stopped paddling for a short break and stayed completely in place... on a river that was technically flowing. (Not as fast as it would have been with higher levels, but still.) The wind was strong enough to sort of anchor us in place that day...

[caption id="attachment_4820" align="alignnone" width="640"] Wine grows here. As do beautiful buildings.


There was a lot of beautiful buildings as well - usually in scenic places on the higher places, right on the shoulder of the river valley. Wine grows in this area, and we often saw vinyards and wineries.

We made a lot of sightseeing stops along the way, of course - many interesting places with a lot of history are strung along the Elbe. One of them is Meissen (where we did not visit the porcelain manufacture, though, even though I come from a porcelain town - too far out from the river, and too many other things to see). While we had these very low water levels, we also saw marks from past high levels during floods. 2013 was a bad flood year, but in Meissen, we also found this mark from 1501, which was at about the same height:

[caption id="attachment_4819" align="alignnone" width="640"] High water mark at a building in Meißen - dating to 1501, when one of the bad floods of the Elbe occurred.


Another place where we stopped was Torgau, which was also well worth visiting, for the spectacular staircase in the castle alone - called "Großer Wendelstein":

[caption id="attachment_4818" align="alignnone" width="640"] Wendelstein in Torgau


One of the fairy tale film productions that the former GDR was famous for was filmed here: Sleeping Beauty. The actress is in one scene shown walking down these stairs...

As promised yesterday, here are a few more weighty (hah!) or so thoughts, and a bit of background.

As I child, I was normal-weight, and fairly active. All during school, I stayed at normal weight, with fluctuations between summer and winter; but I started getting heavier and heavier with the reduced activity and different eating habits that came with moving away from home and studying.

Over the years that followed, my weight went up, and up, and up - and due to a lot of diet myths that I had bought into, taking them as facts, I never believed that I could do anything against this.

I lost a good bit of weight when I went on a three week trip during my PhD study time, looking at textiles in Scandinavia and Finland; I also lost some weight when I had to deal with food intolerances and was trying to find out what I could eat, and what did not sit well. However, after these stints, I inevitably returned to my old eating habits, and the consequence was, of course, that I gained back the weight I had lost.

The turning point came in January 2016, when a friend pointed me to the book "Fettlogik überwinden" (which, by the way, has come out in English recently; it is called "Conquering Fat Logic" and published by Scribe). You can read more about this in the post from January 2016, if it interests you. It took me from January to June to get down from a BMI of almost 39 to the upper edge of normal, BMI 25, and another few months to lose the remaining few kilos and reach my goal weight - that happened in September.

So... you already know that I still have to keep an eye on what I eat, and how much. This can be irksome, and I'd prefer to live in a rainbow-coloured wonderland where I can just have all the chocolate that I want and eat whatever and not pay attention and still be slim, and strong, and healthy. Who wouldn't? However, I've come to the conclusion that this will never happen for me, and it is probably not going to happen with most people. (I have a friend who has to watch what he eats closely, because otherwise he'll eat too little, which is no better than eating too much.)

For a good while, I was sort of annoyed about this need to pay attention, but fairly recently, I realised that this is kind of a nutty thing to be. I have to pay attention to spend my time wisely, too, after all - every single day. There's only so many hours in a day, and if I get sidetracked too much and dawdle on random internet sites, I am going to get into trouble with the rest of my plans. I've never seen this as an annoying unfair thing, though. Budgeting my time wisely, or my money wisely, or my calories wisely - they are very similar to each other, and while I may have dreams about having inexhaustible amounts of time and money, I have never seen not having them as unfair, much in contrast to not having inexhaustible eating capabilities. Weird, right?

Realising that weirdness has helped me to mostly come to terms with that - I might still grumble quietly about not having enough calorie budget, but more in a way of how I grumble about not having enough money to spend on fancy things that I don't really need.

Another thing that I recently realised is that, in one way of looking at it, I am actually... a diet failure.

You probably have read, and heard, about this "95% of diets fail, because people gain back weight afterwards", right? Well. Technically, I am also falling in that category... because I am, today, about 2 kg above the weight from the end of my diet. Which makes me someone who re-gained weight after finishing... if you do a survey that only asks about gain, and not about how much. (There were a few occasions during the last three years when I had re-gained a little bit more, by the way, but I was able to cut back for a while again, returning to tracking calories, and got it under control once more.)

If you ask me, though, I'll tell you that I would consider gaining back a little bit of what I have lost is not making me a failure at all. And even if I would have re-gained some more - how many people manage to stop smoking on their very first try? How often do you fall off a bicycle when you are learning how to ride? How many knitters never have to rip back a bit, or a lot, because things did not turn out to be the correct gauge, or the correct fit after all?

Is that a reason to just give up before you even start? Of course not. Learning something is rarely easy all the way through - but it's always worth the effort, and finding out how to eat the right amount for what you are, and do, and want to be, is a kind of learning, too. It gets easier over time. It is easier if you have support. There will be days when it seems like nothing budges, but there will also be days when things suddenly feel in the flow. Whatever you do - don't give up on your goals. Go for it. If you fail - try again. Sometimes it just takes a lot of small steps, but every little step in the right direction brings you closer - and at least you won't have to wonder about what could have happened if you hadn't given up.

Here you go. Ramble over - now this blog will go back to its more usual topics!

It's a personal one, and it's a health-related one, and I am very happy about this, so you are going to get a long and rambling post. Or two.

Exactly three years ago today, I stepped on the scales in the morning, and for the first time in I don't know how long, I was in the "normal weight" range. And now it's three years later... and I feel like writing a bit more about all this. Which means you're getting a post about weight and health stuff today and on Monday - in hopes that it might be interesting to you, or maybe even helpful.

First things first, though: Pictures.

This is me, a little less than three years ago, in September - that is shortly after reaching goal weight:

And this is me, last week. I tried to get a similar body position, and, of course, I mostly failed. So there's a blurry pic that is sort of similar:

and a not so blurry pic that is even less similar:

As you can see, there's not much obvious change. I am about 2 kg above the goal weight that I had set, which doesn't make me tremendously happy, but I'm also not motivated enough at the moment to do a serious calorie reduction stint (which, for me, means I have to measure and weigh the things I eat to closely track calories, because I'm still not good at estimating stuff to eat under maintenance).

The not so obvious things are these: Both being overweight and then obese and finally seriously obese for years, and doing the hardcore weight-reduction diet for nine months have left their traces, physical as well as mental. I have stretch marks on some spots of my body (I actually got a few stretch marks from growths spurts when I was a teenager, my connective tissue is not top of the pops, it seems). I still have some excess tissue and skin in the places where I carried most of the fat, though my impression is that this is still improving, albeit very, very slowly. I don't mind it too much; I look decent when dressed and decent enough when not, and with 40 years I am not going to have the body of a 20-year-old, even without the overweight years. My food intolerances have gone away with the excess weight, the asthma and hay fever has improved a lot, and my general fitness is much better as well (though I still don't have enough raw strength for many of the bouldering things, and I will complain about that muchly).

The mental things are a little harder to pin down, and they will also fluctuate more. First thing to mention: If the excess weight comes from eating as a coping mechanism, there's a definite need for a different coping strategy to keep the weight off. I had a mild case of using food as a reward, or as consolation when things did not go well, but it wasn't too hard to put a stop to this for me. Food was not connected to a lot, or to very bad, underlying different issues for me, which made - and makes - things a lot easier. Losing weight will not miraculously cure all problems. It will cure the stress of the excess weight on the body, it will alleviate hormonal issues coming from the extra fat (which is a hormonally active tissue), it will lessen joint and respiratory problems and generally improve health and fitness. It may alleviate depression or depressive moods, but it will not cure problems of self-esteem that come from different, deeper places, or any other mental issues. These might come up harder, in fact, if eating more was the coping strategy that used to hold them at bay.

So these days I try not to slide back into having food as a reward for something, or as a consolation. Most of the time, I manage. Sometimes that emergency chocolate does come in, though. I'm usually not very happy about that, but well, that's life, and I try to do better the next time something like this comes around.

One of the things I struggle with a lot more is irrational fears of suddenly balloning up again to my highest weight. When thinking about it with a level head, it's really absurd - you just physically cannot add on several dozens of kilograms in the space of a few days, even if you eat all the time. But tell that to the little part of my brain that insists on being stupid! I tend to retain water when I get stressed, when I don't have enough sleep, when I travel, when I have an illness or tweaked a muscle, when I have done more or different sports than usual, for hormonal reasons, and when I have changes in diet. So... basically for anything not in the very relaxed and normal plan. This means that my weight can shoot up a few kilos if several of these things come together - and even though I do know it's just water weight, at times I will get into some kind of irrational panic that I'm going to re-gain all the weight I lost now, no matter what I do or how much or little I eat. (This is not helping, as it adds more stress. It also takes a long while for some of these water retentions to ebb off, sometimes several weeks, which adds to the stress from these irrational things... which doesn't help. You get the picture.)

Sometimes I can handle the weight fluctuations pretty well, and sometimes I get really panicky, which totally sucks. Same with estimating how much I eat - sometimes I do well, and everything feels under control and relaxed and stable; at some stages, though, I feel perpetually hungry and could eat five elephants in a day, which is not a good thing. Occasionally, something in the other direction happens, and I eat too little for a while, which has its own not-so-nice repercussions. So I am trying to keep things in balance and not overeat even if I have the desire to just stuff my face all freaking day long, and not eat nothing or next to nothing even if I am not feeling really hungry. It works, mostly. Sometimes I just fail. Then there's nothing to do but pick myself up, take a deep breath, and move on, aiming to do better next time.

Losing the weight was simple in the sense of "just eat less, and maybe move a bit more". Sometimes that felt easy, and sometimes it felt like the hardest thing in the world. There were days when I was super motivated, and days when the only thing keeping me at it was sheer stubbornness, and the knowledge that there would be an end to this at one point, and the more I veered off track the longer it would take.

Maintaining the lower weight is just as simple in the sense of "track your weight, keep an eye on how much you eat, and make sure you don't eat too much or too little for extended periods of time". It's not always easy either, and there is no end to maintenance mode, so replacing a lack of motivation by stubbornness can be even harder now. In both cases, however, sticking to it has proven to be totally worth the time and effort I put into it.

I'm a day late to blog about this, but I only realised yesterday afternoon: June 3 is World Bicycle Day.

Bicycles are my personal favourite means of transport. I've been cycling to school as a teen (even though my parents could have take me in the car), and I continued to cycle when I moved to study in Bamberg. That's not only because of my green soul - cycling in Bamberg is much smarter than taking the car anyways, as there's no parking spaces and those that are there are usually either full or really expensive, so this was also a very practical solution to the mobility problem. (My car was parked either a quarter hour bus ride away or a quarter hour walk away, as these were the closest free parking opportunities where one could find a space without too big a hassle.)

When I hooked up with the most patient husband of them all, we found that he was a cyclist as well, so our transport preferences combined beautifully. Only our riding speeds did not - I was much, much slower. Which is not a big deal within a city, but does cause potential problems when you are going on cycling holidays. So we looked for a tandem with enough luggage capacity for cycling trips including camping gear, and we did stumble across the Pino, a half-recumbent tandem made in a small bike manufacture in Germany. (If you're interested in the bike, there's the Pinoforum, where you can find more information. It even includes a small English part.)

So when we have to go somewhere in our day-to-day life, the default means of transportation is the bike. If that's not possible, due to some reason - too far away, too much to transport - we check for public transport possibilities. In some cases, these will combine very well with taking the bike along; there's a special ticket in our area that allows two adults to take two bikes along (in our case, only one is necessary, though). If that won't work, it's the car. Which means we travel a lot by bike, and it's usually just as quick to take bike or public transport and bike as it would be to take the car, or even quicker. For instance, when we go bouldering, it's about 10.5 km one way. With the car, due to how we have to drive, it takes us about 25 minutes. With the bicycle, it takes us... 30 minutes, and we arrive with already warmed up legs - and don't have to look for a parking space for another 5 minutes.

Even in combination with public transport, the bike rules, in the speed department as well as in the cost department. As my car is the company car, I have to do the proper maths for all its costs... and my cost for driving one kilometer is about .34 €. Often, using public transport is cheaper or, at the most, coming to the same cost.

Plus there's the health benefits of using a bicycle... some (more or less) fresh air, and some joint-friendly movement. It's important to have a bike that fits so you can ride easily and comfortably, though, so it might be worth to look for a good bike shop, and take a bike-nerdy friend along to help. I'd also recommend keeping your tyres nicely filled, that makes for a much smoother ride, you have to pedal much harder on flat tyres.

Every kilometre not done with a car, but with a bike instead, counts. We only have one planet, and using a bike helps to make it last a little longer. So - take the bike if you can, not only on World Bicycle Day!

I have discovered, ages ago, that I work better with rules that are hard and firm and sort of blankety than with, hm, softer variations or guidelines. That is one of the reasons I blog every weekday (holidays and so on excepted) - it's much easier for me to remember it's a workday, and I'm supposed to blog, than to remember doing it every week or every  Wednesday or so. (Downside of it is that I have to blog every day, including periods where I have no ideas, not a lot of time, or both, which results in some short and boring posts and the occasional gratuitous cat or garden pic, as you well know.)

Anyway - those general rules do work for me better than squishy ones. So I do yoga in the morning, before I eat something. No yoga, no food. (I have the cat pic equivalent here, too: when there is little time, rolling out the mat and doing a few forward folds and a down dog or two totally counts. Don't you think I torment myself too much.) I do not buy garments made from or containing non-organic cotton. I do not have many of these rules, by the way.

But now I've made a new rule. Which I'm not fully sure about yet, as it can't be as blankety as the others, so I'm still in the fine-tuning phase. The rule is: No coffee without a pull-up or chin-up.

If that sounds weird, here's the reasoning behind it. Part one: I love coffee, and as there's such things as good de-caf coffee, getting too much caffeine is no reason to stop drinking it anymore. However, I love my coffee with milk, and if I go overboard on this... it is not good. I can stomach milk very well, but having five or six or so cups of coffee in a day will, sneakily, add up to quite a few extra calories. I actually managed to put on a little extra weight again, mostly due to milk-in-coffee consumption, which irked me no end and resulted in a short return to calorie reduction earlier this year. (I did not get above normal weight, though - I've been safely below that line since two years and a week ago. Hooray!) So. I want to keep on having coffee, and the option of getting my hydration partly, or mostly, through coffee if I feel like it, but it should also be kept in check somehow. A day of only coffee should be the exception, not the rule. This sort of begs to attach something to having a brew that makes it worth thinking twice, right?

Enter part two - I need more muscle. Or better intramuscular coordination. No matter what it might be (both, probably), there are regularly moves in bouldering where I just lack the sheer physical strength... and this sucks. It sucks even more because I'm rather small and often can't reach things, so it happens again and again that I'd be able to do a move if I could just pull myself up better with the arms. I've been complaining about this for long enough now, and yes, I do have a pullup bar installed (right here in my study door)... so I could, theoretically, do some training every day.

[caption id="attachment_3904" align="alignnone" width="640"] The bar. Looks harmless, right?


Sadly, I can be a very lazy person, and progress is sloooow in this, and not very visible. So, as a result, I am lacking a good incentive, and haven't been doing much.

Which will change now. Because coffee! I can have as much coffee as I want, provided I do a pull-up or chin-up before each cup. They do not need to be complete, but it's either a full one or to exhaustion. Which means that I do think some more before I go and fix myself a cup, and that I'm especially wary on Wednesdays as we go bouldering in the evening, and I don't want to be all worn out before we start. I'm not sure yet on how to handle weekends and coffee away from home... but for now, when I'm here, the new rule is active. And in a few weeks, I'll see where this brings me!

Remember, back in January, when I wrote about my weight issues in a long, rambling post? When I started losing weight back then, I set a goal weight number as the finishing line.

It took a good while to reach that number. I was planning to be finished in summer, and though I broke through the border to normal weight according to BMI charts in mid July, the last few kilos to the goal weight I'd set took much, much longer than expected, due to a number of things (among them two weeks of vacation, where I did not eat at a deficit). Basically, I've been more or less finished, as in "weight and body fat percentage are in a healthy area now", for... a good two months? So I've started to gradually eat more again, to prepare for maintenance mode and figure out how much I actually need now to stay where I am... still very slowly going down, waiting for the magical number to appear.

This morning, I have seen that number. I am now officially done with the weight loss, and entering maintenance mode, so to say. This little fact has not made it to my brain just yet - I've been juuust slightly above the goal number for four weeks now (water retention is nasty!), and it still has to sink in that it is now there.

And now, I guess, it is time for the obligatory before-and-after-pics. So on the left, you see how I looked last winter, before I got going. On the right, you see how I look now, and what I did on Tuesday evening - a friend has infected us with the Boulder Virus a while ago, and we're now going up the walls about once a week. (Yes, I know, they are not proper before-and-after pics, where you have the same posture and the same clothes and stuff. But I guess you will get the gist.)


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
So. I did it. It was really simple: count all calories (including every little bit of food and every drink), eat less than you burn, get enough protein, do a bit of sports to keep as much of the muscle mass as possible, and that's it.  Simple doesn't mean easy, though, and it was hard sometimes - but it was worth every little bit of effort! Life is much, much better now that I have lost the excess weight. Also... I have a wardrobe full of new clothes (the old ones didn't fit anymore, apart from a few very old ones that were always tight before).  I have a new hobby (climbing or bouldering are just not as much fun with too much weight to hoist up)... and I even made a new friend in connection with the book that helped me so much - Fettlogik überwinden.

And I'm very, very happy about all this!