A while ago, we got surprised by an offer to participate in an excursion organised by the BUND (which is a nature protection organisation) - to go see some very special, protected forests such as the Hohe Schrecke (page all German) and the Hainichenforst, and some wild cats in Hütscheroda (English/German page, and pics).
We decided to go - and we had an amazingly wonderful weekend, with lots of really uplifting information. There was a bunch of success stories about smaller and larger things that are good for the region around the protected areas, and of course the protected areas themselves. There was also a bonus fruit juice tasting from a local fruit juicery, bonus info on how to prune cherry trees (which was very timely, and very helpful, for the sour cherry bush tree in our garden), and lots of wonderful forests and meadows and birds and bugs.
Here's some forest for you:
There were also beautiful meadows in the open land between fields and the forested areas, and I was utterly delighted to see several of these butterflies - it has been years since I last saw any of them:
Their German name is, literally, "chess board butterfly".
If you've been following this blog for a while, you know that we have the privilege to be door-openers and can-openers for a little (though really not so little) cat. Things that you might not know about said little cat:
She came to live with us in 2012, when we fetched her out of an animal shelter. She'd been found, as her previous owners had set her out in the midst of winter, so her history is unknown. The shelter gave her a name (Madonna), sterilised her, had her chipped and her ears tattooed (these are standard shelter procedures in Germany, to help identify an animal if it gets lost), and gave her a general health checkup. She never felt at home living with other cats, and from what we gleaned from her behaviour, she was probably all on her own, and she definitely had no possibility to go outside in her former home.
After she'd been with us a bit, we realised she had weird coughing fits. A bit like coughing up a hairball, but never with any hair coming out... so we did a bit of research, and then we went to the vet, and we were told that yes, she has feline asthma. So we did some more research, and we found out that there's several ways to treat the asthma: Depot cortisone injections, cortisone pills, or inhaling cortisone with a special inhaler. The two first methods are systemic treatment, and daily doses of cortisone are, unfortunately, not without side effects. Inhaling, in contrast, puts the drug only there where it's needed: into the lungs.
So we got an inhaler, and cortisone spray, and started the rather long and tedious process of getting the cat used to inhaling. (She got pills during that time. That was even less fun than the inhaling training.) It took about three months, and it is daily ritual since, morning and evening. Usually, it's a very quick procedure - she gets a "bribe" treat, lies down, inhales, gets some more treats, we wipe her nose, even more treats (they are small ones), and then she's getting her food, or we open the door so she can go out and do Important Cat Things.
This process has fascinated quite a few people in our acquaintance, so in case you are curious now as well, here's a video of me doing the inhalation stuff with Madonna. The colours are a bit flat, but everything should be visible enough...
One of the things that come with me whenever I am travelling, apart from the World's Best Thermos Mug, is a set of cutlery. We actually bought that for our camping travels, when obviously you need cutlery, and I tried to get the most lightweight version possible. While my husband went for a three-piece set made from titanium (because that's really nicely lightweight), I found a wooden set with four pieces (it includes a small spoon, and for some things, I just love using a small spoon). It was even lighter than the titanium one... but unfortunately, neither a wooden knife nor a wooden fork are really useful for many food items.
So after being annoyed with them for a while, tearing open breadrolls (or borrowing a real knife) and breaking apart instead of forking up things with the fork, I caved and bought a second set, this time in titanium as well, to replace the knife and fork. I kept the spoons, though. They are wonderful. When I'm travelling, the cutlery comes with me - in my travel bag or in my handbag, depending on whether the latter comes along or not. When I'm not travelling, though, it is stored with the rest of our camping gear. Consequently, sometimes it happens that I am somewhere and my handbag does not contain the cutlery... and I would need it.
I've now stumbled across a cutlery set from metal that is full-size, but will pack down as the individual pieces are screw-together, which sounds just like the thing to put into my handbag to live there, forever. It's called "Outlery", and it is currently running on Kickstarter for another two days. If that sounds interesting to you, too, here's the link!
It's been a while since you got a proper garden pictures post, so here you are:
The lavendar is coming into full bloom - and it's being appreciated by the bees. As is the thyme that has taken over our lawn:
This is a somehow weird picture, but I like how the background came out.
We also have a space (you could call it a flowerbed, if you are feeling generous) where wild flowers such as the one above are growing in abundance. I'm extra happy about this one, which I'm seeing here the first time this year:
And finally, woad has managed to gain a foothold here - it's doing its "second year thing" now, flowering and making seeds:
Back in 2016, I decided to finally give in and get myself a smartphone. One of the reasons for this decision was that I wanted to offer customers on fairs the possibility to pay via card - and to do this with relatively small financial and logistical overhead, you need a smartphone.
So I did some looking, and some research, and I tried to find a phone with replaceable battery (as this can be one of the first things to give out, and being able to replace the battery means you can use the phone so much longer), relatively small so it would fit well in pockets, with decent battery life and not too highly priced. I finally ended up with a Samsung S5 mini - and I was quite happy with it.
Until... well. Until at some point, it did not get proper reception anymore. Even in places where it should have gotten very good reception - nothing. Some head-scratching and some internet research later, I had found that the phone has two antennae built inside, one for the "slow" stuff and one for the "fast" stuff (3G), and the fast antenna had died a quiet death. This was annoying, but no big deal - I changed the settings to never use the fast connection, and there it was, functioning nicely again. Yes, the internet was slower now - but I never stream things anyways, and all the bits that I needed to download occasionally are quite small. (The Most Patient Husband found me a prepaid phone tariff that was very, very small and thus very, very affordable, and just the right fit for what I would need. It has 150 MB of free data each month, which is plenty for checking mails, writing a few messages, and even sending a few pictures when away from home; for everything larger, I use wifi connections. So I'm very much used to not sending or downloading huge things over mobile data - and whether getting the mail takes 3 or 6 seconds, well, that's no big deal.) It, however, meant more use out of the phone, and not needing a new one. Good for the environment.
My newfound serenity with the slow mobile data did not last very long, though, because apparently something else was giving up, and the phone became unreliable. It would refuse to connect, refuse to get messages or send them, and since that was one of the main uses for the phone when I'm doing stuff such as organising the Forum, I was getting antsy. I had expected the phone to last much longer than just a bit more than two years, which was making me quite unhappy - even though the thing itself still seemed like the perfect fit for my needs. My desire to spend another 180 or so Euros for a new phone of this make, for maybe another 2 years was, however, ... very small. So I got myself a refurbished replacement phone... the same model, used and with slight traces of said use, with a new battery, for about a third of the new price. Also I had hoped to just very easily transfer my old phone's contents to the new one. Same thing, should be easy, right?
The new phone arrived, and I found out that it was a branded one, with T-Mobile special software (sorry, apps...) on it. Well, no big deal. I managed to transfer my stuff (not as easy as I had hoped), and everything worked well for a bit. Then an Android update arrived, and afterwards, the phone would crash, or lag for ages until it reacted. Which is annoying for a phone that you want to use, but really and seriously not good for a phone used for, say, payment by card on a busy fair... One of the worst lags was about 14 minutes until I managed to access the home screen. So I was not happy anymore - but also did not want to buy yet another phone.
I finally decided that I could try to root the phone, in hopes to make things better - and reading the help pages and descriptions in an android forum, I found that there's a way to overwrite the phone OS with a newer or different version (an un-branded one, for instance), which would not lose any data, not change the OS, and not void the warranty (not that I have one, but good to know). It's called "flashing", there's a tool that Samsung offers called Odin (hah!), you download the proper firmware, follow the instructions and hope that it works.
That's what I did... and it looks like that was successful. So in case you have similar troubles because your phone had some hiccup when the last firmware update arrived... you might want to trust in Odin making everything better, too.
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.
Kardinalsnelke
