truelove | Entries tagged with personal: health

My bad hip has been freaking out because of the swimming. It's getting better, but it's going to be a long slog until the muscles are strong enough that I don't have trouble with that hip again when exercising.

To deal with this, I have been walking with the cane again regularly.

Yeah, guess how that's been going.

"Oh my god, what happened to you?" say the newer co-workers who haven't seen me walk with a cane before.

"Awww, you're walking with the cane again, what did you do?" say the co-workers who have seen me walk with it before.

"I just need it sometimes," say I, unable to shake the training that it is rude to call people out on their rude as fuck shit. I haven't been unable to make snark my default response and yet I also refuse to explain my disability to people whose business it goddamn well isn't, and that's left me with "I just need it sometimes."

I love how my body is up for comment, that my choice in assistive devices is deemed cause by so many for eyebrows and gestures and "What's with the cane?" -- and in fucking accusatory tones, no less. As if I have done something offensive to society by daring to be young and disabled.

I didn't stop walking with the cane regularly because I stopped being disabled. I just had a good stretch where I didn't need it much. But I'm disabled; usually, the cane lets me deal with it better than without.

But sometimes I think the most useful thing the cane could do for me is hit people's shins when they pry into business that isn't theirs.

The absolute fucking hell of it is: swimming is going to probably help a lot. It'll help my overall fitness. And once the muscles get stronger, I'll probably need the cane less often than I had even when I was stable and mostly not using it.

But even then, I won't stop being disabled.

If only people would stop demanding that I explain myself to them for daring to exist while visibly disabled in their vicinity.

Today i swam ~120 meters. It's an improvement? But yeah. I look forward to being able to swim actual distances and not want to diiiiiiiiiiie.

It continues to be fucking weird that I swim best when I relax the most and am not trying to swim hard for distance or whatever. I mean, I get it, I do, but it's. Counter to most of my prior athletic experience. Relaxation is not a good thing in gymnastics. :3

I've been taking swim lessons. I learned to swim when I was very, very young and was a passable swimmer when I was eight or so but as an adult I've found I have shitty endurance and I've known my form was terrible. So, you know, the solution is: find a coach, have them teach me better form!

My endurance is still shitty but things are getting better. One of the things that she hasn't mentioned explicitly but has implicitly a few times, and the thing that has helped the most so far aside from fixing my arms so they're not hideously inefficient, has been relaxing.

It's hard to relax in the water! You're in water! You could drown! You need to keep swimming! You need to do fifteen things at once! But yeah, actually, it makes the rhythm and movements like eleventy million times easier if you're overall relaxed and let yourself move around a bit in the water.

But probably I wouldn't have gotten so far as figuring that out, without someone coaching me. Like, none of this is shit that I couldn't figure out for myself, but -- then again, it is. It's all stuff I know in pieces, not stuff I know how it looks when it's put together.

Once I can swim a couple laps at a time and not want to curl up and diiiiiiie, I'm going to be looking at diving lessons. I was a gymnast once, and I loved the acrobatics. My joints are arthritic and cranky, these days, you know. Diving seems like lots of fun and like it might not completely destroy my joints.

so guess who went down with a migraine last night around about, oh, 8pm?

i woke up this morning still with the migraine, rather baffled as to the source of the thing as normally they're triggered and also i haven't had one in months and months and the last one was a contact migraine from a friend rather than my own.

eventually i realised that, oh hey, right side of my jaw's been pissed at me for the past day and a half at least and started poking at my jaw and went holy shit that's a mess. and then i called SWIHA and scheduled an appointment before work and the nice man worked on my face and neck and shoulders and he poked my feet for the reflexology effects but mostly it was my face and neck and shoulders.

my face and neck and shoulders were very sore and achy and misery-inducing afterwards (no, he didn't do a lot of deep pressure, just a lot of working points and energy work and getting the muscles to relax a bit) but on the bright side the migraine had ratcheted down about, oh, 85%! i could be functional indoors without sunglasses and a headscarf!

oh my god though my neck and shoulders and face are a mess what the hell even. my face has never been like this, i do not even know what i did -- i don't clench my jaw so wtf what even. dinner was interesting. though despite the soreness? chewing was still less painful than my meals yesterday were.

i am contemplating drowning myself in a hot tub at my next opportunity, just so i can get my face and neck too. #dreamwidth suggested a snorkel? that could work.

i have scheduled an appt next week at SWIHA as well and i guess i will sort my damn health insurance out and see if i can schedule something with my chiro and... try to take better care of myself. eesh. /o\

You know what pisses me off about the Obesity Epidemic? It's not just the fact that it's based on pure bullshit, the fact that the BMI is 16 kinds of laughable and a joke of a statistical hack ¹. It's not the fact that we hear endlessly about it from the media, and What You Can Do To Protect Your Children.

It's the fact that they call it an epidemic. The implication is, it's communicable. In pretty much every other medical context, epidemic is a term used to describe the spread of a contagious disease.

The fat's catching, folks! Run for the hills! RUN, RUN, RUN, LEST YE TOO BECOME FAT!

Even if there were a genuine health concern here -- I don't concede there is but what the hell, let's pretend there is for a moment -- this is not a particularly helpful way of viewing something that isn't a communicable disease. Framing a healthy diet and exercise in the context of precautions you can take to keep from catching Teh Fatz makes them directly comparable to washing your hands regularly and not making out with the public water fountain. And that comes off as completely fucking ridiculous. I mean, really?

And, of course, implying that obesity is, by extension of being a disease and an epidemic, contagious reinforces loathing of fat people: they're unclean, you see. Unhealthy, unclean, unsanitary. They're destroying their own health and yours too. Just by being there!

I know I'm not the only one who finds the whole farce completely fucking ludicrous. I just wish there was anyone in the middle of the circus raising a voice to point out what a farce it is. Not just the BMI, but all of it, including the hysteria. (When is hysteria ever remotely useful? Honestly.)

But that would be endorsing obesity, of course. And that would be like infecting everyone with H1N1.

¹Ironically, yes, that article talks about obesity being a kiiiiiiiller. It does, however, nicely deconstruct how full of shit the BMI is and what a stupid basis it is for advice regarding management of anything.

mood: aggravated

Reading through some fat-positive and body acceptance related blogs right now. Stumbled over into that part of the blogosphere via a link to this lady's blog and found myself particularly enamoured of this post addressing the bullshit statistics of obesity, along with helpful photographic illustrations.

Having a lot of thoughts, not least of which is: jesus christ the unhealthy messages are embedded so fucking deeply in our culture. I actually really like how my body looks lately, and I keep going "...but I could stand to lose some weight, really," and then stopping and listening to myself and wanting to shoot myself.

When I was a teenager I was very thin; thin enough people commented on it. I had trouble staying warm, it hurt to sit on hard seats. (Well, it still does, but for different reasons.) Even when I was 16, and quit gymnastics I was still quite slender. I thought weighing yourself was bullshit, too, because I weighed 140 and people still thought I was on the thin side and chronically under-guessed my weight at least 20, if not 30 pounds.

Then puberty finished hitting me upside the head, ages 16-18, and I had a hell of a rack which in all honesty is probably where most of the 10 lbs I gained after quitting gymnastics went. I was still pretty damn slender, though. When I moved when I was 18, I gained weight again. Stress, I am sure, and probably my body filling out that last little bit.

I remember when I was thinner and stepping on the scale was a pure curiousity and I didn't give a shit whatsoever what I ate. And -- mostly I've kept that. Except how I haven't. Now I think about diets and have to actively reject that kind of thinking. Now I think about how much bullshit the BMI is in a very personal, and not abstract way.

And, you know, I think so much of it has to do with clothing and fashion. I managed not to give a shit much one way or the other when I could find clothing that fit me. But these days? Clothing and clothes-shopping tells me, you are too fat, too busty, too curvy, too hour-glassed. Too too. Stay home and hide yourself, there's nothing for you here.

And it's just about impossible not to start internalising that shit.

I've been struggling with myself to not worry about my weight, about dieting, about being slender and perfect, for my cosplay for Club Vivid at

vividcon this year. I'm cosplaying T'Pol and, and -- god knows, I know, that everyone there isn't going to give a shit that I'm probably at least fifty pounds heavier than Blalock. Except maybe me. And I'm working on that.

Right now my project is: eat healthy, nutritious foods (you know, all the ones that I actually do love), and eat at the right times. And eat enough protein. Because my energy levels are a hell of a lot more important than some fucking meaningless number.

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truelove's ramblings

Entries tagged with personal: health

disability isn't something you stop experiencing even if your symptoms remit for a little while

further adventures in swimming

swimming

hello migraine my old... 'friend'

shit, I caught Teh Fatz! what'll I do now? I'll be horribly disfigured for LIFE!

breaking this journal in, finally

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September 2015