Good to go (also, cool x-rays!)

Well, that was reassuring.  Worse than predicted by the physio, when I went for my 8 week check at the hospital, yes they took an x-ray; but not only did they not do much assessment of mobility/range of movement, they did none at all!  The consultant asked "how's is it?" and then moved on to "you need to leave the plate in for another 6-12 months before considering taking it out if you want it out".  And that was it!

I'm allowed to do absolutely anything and there's no need to go back again.

So here are the x-ray progress pics...

10 days after the crash, with no intervention:-

 
Immediately post-operative (click to enlarge and note the headphone in the front-facing [top] one and the springs and wires in the angled [bottom] one, probably from a surgical implement to hold stuff in place; also note the two screws not going through the plate, which hold chunks of bone together):-

And here we are, 8 weeks post surgery.  Healing up nicely:-

So there we are.  Off to physio this afternoon to get cracking with putting some muscle back in place again.

Day one of the experiment

Not much to report other than when I look at my kcals taken in for the day, I'm 1120kcals under the amount theoretically required to maintain my current weight -if- you follow the kcals in vs kcals out model.  I have had a short run and a spin session today, but I'd usually get hungry after those and want to eat more anyway.

I'm not hungry at all.  Dinner was... experimental and based on an unprepared fridge; as in, I haven't done a grocery shop to match the experiment properly yet, so I did the best with what I had.  I'm not craving bread or potatoes (yet?) nor sugary things (I rarely do anyway), though we rarely eat pasta and rice (and when we do they're brown) so there's no loss there.  It is only the first day though.

To my previously educated brain, there's lots about that which looks awful; only 10g fibre, less than 5 portions of fruit and vegetables, but the protein amount looks great especially for the low overall kcals.  BUT.  I need to throw those ideas away for this experiment.  If you read Taubes' book "Why We Get Fat and what to do about it", you'll have a  fair idea of why those ideas have to go bye bye.

I was accidentally right all along?

Thanks to Dr Tamsin SportieDoc, I am currently half way through reading a very interesting book indeed.  Since I decided to try to lose weight back in 2006, I've been very interested in food, nutrition and the sciency bits behind it.  And it seems like we've (Western society) been swinging to and from the more useful answers over the years: "fatty food is bad!" -> "carbs are bad!" -> "eating fat makes you fat" -> "refined sugars are more evil than crack!" -> "low fat diets!" -> "low carb diets!" -> "nuts are too fatty and make you fat!" -> "eat a handful of nuts a day!"...

When I decided to change my lifestyle and eat differently to firstly lose weight and then keep it off, I reduced my energy intake in the understanding that if "energy in > energy out", you put on weight and the converse of "energy in < energy out" and you lose weight.  And, in the process of doing that I accidentally did something right.  I ended up quite dramatically reducing the amount of carbohydrate I was eating (almost no bread, no pasta pretty much ever, not much potato/rice/starchy veg) and lost a load of weight.  Yes, I also reduced the amount of cheese, butter, oil I ate and had almost no nuts or seeds ever, but I also almost completely cut out alcohol and sugar too.  I also ended up eating quite a lot of nuts and seeds at the tail end of last year, in an attempt to get some more variety and hard-to-get minerals into my diet, which co-incides with another drop in weight and body fat levels.

This is not an image from the book,
but illustrates one of the main points
that insulin inhibits lipolysis (part of
how fat changes from stored
to usable fuel in the body)

I can't explain the theory in the same way as Taubes and nor could I in a few lines of blog post even if I were good at reducing things to simple facts.  The thing is that there's a lot of scene setting and examples that he gives in the book that get you thinking and questioning before he explains what (he and a number of people) believe to be going on inside the mammalian body with what goes in and the effects on body composition and overall body-weight.

I can recommend that you get hold of a copy either in print or digital form and read it.

Having listened to MrTOTKat talking about some of the endurance sports podcasts he listens to, where they've covered topics like ultra-runners running on very little fuel which is mostly not carb-heavy and teaching the body to use fat as a fuel for endurance sports, I was finally given that push by Taubes' book (though I'm only half way through so far) and I'll be testing out some of the theory over the next few weeks, in a very unscientific way, to see if by tweaking and refining my existing pretty reasonable diet I can better control my body fat and then maybe even reduce reliance on carbohydrate as a fuel in the longer term.  Let's see!  If the theories hold up, I should be able to do it with no genuine hunger at all (though I may well have cravings, but that's tough boobies and I can deal with that just fine).  If the experiment yields a positive result, I may well have to go and re-write a bunch of my pages on weight loss and maintenance.  I sincerely hope that is the case!

Competition winner!

Aaaand the winner of the competition to win a £25 voucher to spend at Sport Pursuit is.... verity!  Her response; "My favourite bit of sportswear is my shock absorber sports bra which holds me in and stops wobbling whilst I do running and cycling. Wouldn't be able to do sport without it. For many years not having a decent sports bra was the reason that I didn't run!" reminded me how much female specific portwear has come on and enabled more women to take part, especially thanks to decent sports bras.  I often forget how "lucky" I am not to be that "gifted" in the boob department and how easy it is for me when it's pretty tough for the more generously endowed lady.  So, verity, if you'd let me have your email address I'll send you the voucher code - enjoy!

Thanks to everyone for entering and hope you save money on your sports gear by shopping at Sport Pursuit in the future.  I just saved a bunch (even compared with other online stores) on some better fitting base layers for running and cycling and looking forward to them arriving in a couple of weeks time.

Mirror mirror... who is the chubbiest?

Since Ironman UK this year, I've put on just under 4kg.  Now, given at the time of the race I was about 2-4kg heavier than what might (still don't know for sure) be a good "racing weight" for me at the time, that puts me now more than a stone over a good racing weight.  That's a lot.  And quite depressing.  In the off-season, it's recommended not to gain more than 4% if your total ideal racing bodyweight; 4kg is almost 7% for me.

OK, so I'm not a professional athlete and paying the mortgage doesn't depend on my athletic performance (or looks), but I revert to being a normal human being when I see photos of female pro athletes and feel utterly fat and inferior.

See here the lovely Lesley Paterson - two time XTerra World Champion and all sorts of other triathlon successes as a pro athlete.  My god she's buff!  Look at those thighs, biceps, calves and abs!  Now I know I have some pretty mean muscles myself (albeit a tiny bit depleted in the arms due to lack of being allowed to do stuff), but they're fairly well hidden under a layer of reasonably thick fat.

6-8kg fat is a lot of fat.  Really a lot.  Fat isn't particularly dense, so volume-wise that's quite big.  And that means I have problems with clothes that are in any way structural (e.g. bras, belts, things with waist-bands) in that the structural bits dig in to the fat bits and make it look awful (sausages!).  Plus, dammit, since I got fit, I got vain!  I liked looking almost good in clothes - sports or otherwise - I was hovering around the 20% body fat mark!  And 6-8kg of fat is, well, 6-8kg of extra weight to be schlepping around and slowing me down when running, for example.  (Hello Thames Turbo half marathon in less than a month's time.)

(is it me, or does Ms 30% look a lot better than Ms 25%?)

The answer is simple, yes?  I've done it before; losing weight.  But... it was different then.  I wasn't exercising at all and I was miserable and needed something to control in my life.  And as energy intake and expenditure is all a bit inexact on a normal day-to-day basis, the more exercise you do, the bigger the errors get.  I could compensate by assuming minimal calorie expenditure with exercise, but that could cause other problems like changes in how my body processes food and under what circumstances.  It's all so much more complicated now!  Add in the fact that for the last 10 weeks I've been unable to do a lot of the exercise I'd been doing that magically lost me 4kg leading in to the start of the season this year, and I'm still not doing any of that level of exercise and won't be for a while even when I am allowed to start rehabilitating the muscles in my arms.

And then there's the festive seasons... my birthday, Halloween, Bonfire Night, pre-Christmas, Christmas, post-Christmas, New Year... all great excuses to pork-out/drink lots but also great excuses to dress up in nice clothes that I don't look so hot in right now.  Wah!

So, do I call truce on myself and accept that I don't -need- to lose body fat at the moment as I'm neither unhealthily overweight (and inactive), nor does my livelihood depend on it, and the mental benefits of being less than strict might be good for me?  Or do I start to put some effort in, stick to calorie deficit, lock things down and drop those pounds?  (WLR reckons 3rd Feb to hit the top of my race weight window if I stick to 500kcals deficit per day and a 500g weight loss per week)  Given that I will want to focus a lot more and the mental effort required to do that 100% almost daily only lasts for so long (6-7 months in my experience) do I want to fritter that mental energy away now when I've got races up until the middle of November next year?

What to do?