Category: health

giving meditation another try

I blogged back in January that I was going to give meditation a try this year. I got off to a slow start with that, then pretty much gave up on it back in April or thereabouts. Well, I’m going to try again.

I still have two books on meditation waiting to be read: 10% Happier and Search Inside Yourself. (The Great American Read group that I’m in on Goodreads has really sidetracked all my other reading.)

I was using the Meditation Studio app (mentioned in my January post) to try to learn meditation, and I guess I’m going to pick back up on that. I had finished their starter series, and am now partway through the meditation essentials series. My short-term goal is to do one meditation from that series every weeknight this week. We’ll see how that goes.

I’ve noticed that Meditation Studio was recently acquired by the company that makes the Muse headband, which worries me a little. Muse seems like a bit of a gimmick, while Meditation Studio seems like more of a serious no-nonsense app. So we’ll see if they keep the app as-is, or mess it up.

I still haven’t signed up for a paid subscription to the app. As a legacy customer, I can subscribe for $24/year. (The regular rate right now is $50/year.) Some of the more popular meditation apps, like Headspace, cost around $100/year. (You’d think an app that just helps you sit quietly for a few minutes wouldn’t need to be so expensive…) I should probably hold off on paying for anything until I see if I can stick with it for more than a few days.

Five years of losing it

I just realized today that I’ve recently hit the five-year mark since I decided to start losing weight. Here’s a blog post from five years ago today where I discuss my initial progress. (I didn’t mention my starting weight in that post, but it was 230 pounds.)

I’m still tracking all of my meals with Lose It, and I still subscribe to their premium version. I’m including a graph of my weight over the last five years here. So far this year, I’ve basically maintained my weight at 135 (+/- 2 pounds). I’m pretty comfortable at this weight, so that’s fine. (Though I’d kind of like to get down to 130, just so that I can say I lost an even 100 pounds. But that’s probably not a good idea.)

The green line on the graph is from the last time I set an actual goal weight in Lose It: 160 pounds. Once I hit that weight, I stopped actively trying to lose weight, and just kind of let things go until I bottomed out at a stable weight, which, for me, is apparently 135. I’m sticking with a goal of about 2100 calories per day, and I’m usually right around there (+/- 200).

I’ve also done well on the exercise front, at least in terms of step count. I almost always hit at least 7500 steps a day and often go over 10,000. I never really did adopt any other exercise habits though. I never joined a gym or anything like that.

I don’t really have any profound weight loss insights to share here. If you’re looking to lose weight, different things are going to work for different people. For me, I think this is the stuff that was key:

  • Tracking all of my calories. Anything less than that makes it too easy to trick yourself into thinking you’re doing well, when it fact you’re still eating way too much.
  • Packing my own lunch every day and not going out for lunch anymore. (I still go out occasionally, but maybe just once or twice a month.) It’s not hard to do, if you can figure out a few things you like to eat that stay within your calorie budget and aren’t hard to prepare and toss in a bag every day.
  • Drinking mostly water. I’ve just about stopped drinking juice, beer, soda, and sweetened iced tea. (I still drink a lot of coffee, but there aren’t many calories in that, if you don’t load it up with milk and sugar.)
  • In addition to the Lose It book I mentioned in the original post, this book on Volumetrics was pretty useful too.

Trying Meditation

I worked from home yesterday, because of the snowstorm, and I called in sick today, because it was so cold this morning that I started losing feeling in my fingers and toes while I was trying to clear out the snow around my car. (I am legitimately getting over a cold. I’d probably be fine by now if not for all this weather…)

This leaves me with a whole day to just mess around, which has led me to try to knock a couple of “rainy day” projects off my list. One of those is something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time: trying meditation. I’ve been bookmarking (and occasionally reading) articles about meditation for some time now. I even downloaded a meditation app to my phone a year or two ago, but never got around to using it.

Well, long story short, I convinced myself to start using that meditation app today. The app is called Meditation Studio. When I first downloaded it, it was a paid app, but I got it for free via the old Starbucks app of the week thing (Which I guess is dead now. Oh well.) Anyway, I guess it used to be a paid app with (mostly) free content, but (as with many apps) they’re switching to a subscription model. But they’re allowing legacy customers to keep using it for free with all the currently available content, so that’s cool. The subscription price is a bit steep — $10/month (or $60/year). There’s a “holiday discount” going right now, which makes it a little more reasonable, but still not great. I did the first meditation in their starter series today, and my goal is going to keep going through that, one session per day for ten days, and see how that works out.

As I said, I’ve been thinking about meditation for a while now. It came back to the front of my mind recently, due to a few things. First, just thinking about New Year’s resolutions; I didn’t really make any this year, but it got me thinking about stuff I’ve been putting off. Second, I saw a few references to Dan Harris’ new book over the last couple of weeks. When he published the first 10% Happier book in 2014, I was kind of interested, but not enough to buy or read the book. The new one is called Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, and is a follow-up to the first one. Third, the Note To Self podcast re-posted their episode with Chade-Meng Tan recently. After listening to that episode last year, I added his book Joy On Demand to my Amazon wishlist, but never got around to buying it.

I’m still somewhat skeptical about this whole meditation thing. My skepticism probably comes from looking at stuff like this astral projection video on YouTube that just makes me think of Doctor Strange. And it’s possible that it’s all just a plot to get us corporate drones to work harder, as this article (pretty much) asserts. On the other hand, here’s an article from HBR that makes a good case for meditation. And I should probably read this NY Times meditation guide that I bookmarked a long time ago; it seems pretty reasonable and practical.

I’ve also been giving the Breathe app on my Apple Watch another try. I disabled it pretty quickly after it first came out, because the reminders were a distraction, and I wasn’t convinced that it was at all useful. But now I’ve re-enabled the reminders and I’m giving it another chance. (Of course, the reminders seem to have stopped working now, so that’s something else to troubleshoot, which is only going to make me more stressed…)

 

The Secrets of Sleep

I often bookmark articles on sleep, like this recent one from the New Yorker, which is a review of a book called The Mystery of Sleep. (Sometimes I actually read the articles, but mostly I just bookmark them…) I’ve been having some trouble sleeping again recently, though I’m not sure there’s much I can do about it, without making some pretty major life changes. (For instance, last night, there was somebody outside playing music at 3am. Not much I can do about that.)

I’m still using the Sleep Cycle app on my iPhone to track my sleep and act as an alarm clock. They added the ability to track snoring a while back, and that confirms that I do, in fact, snore. (And also that listening to recordings of yourself snoring is kind of horrifying.)

I’ve thought about buying a new mattress (though my current one is only a few years old). I was looking around at internet mattress companies, but after reading about all the shenanigans involved in that industry, I’m a little less interested in that. (Though maybe my takeaway from that should be that they’re all just selling slabs of foam, and they’re all pretty much the same, so I should just pick one and buy it and not worry too much about which one.)

Here’s another article, this one from NPR, with Terry Gross interviewing a scientist who wrote a book called Why We Sleep. In this case, I can skip the article and listen to the audio, so maybe I’ll do that. (Not that I’m likely to learn anything I haven’t already heard, but you never know.)

trying a vertical mouse

I’ve been using a trackball, left-handed, at work for the last few weeks. I’ve found that it helped with my shoulder problems a bit, and it wasn’t that hard to use. But I never got really good at precise positioning with it. So now I’m trying a vertical mouse (right-handed). I’m using this cheap one from Anker. A friend recommended an Evoluent VerticalMouse, but that’s $90, compared to less than $20 for the Anker, so I decided to give the cheap one a try first. It’s working OK so far, though I’ve noticed that double-clicking is more trouble than with a regular mouse, since clicking the button tends to move the mouse a little, and if it moves between clicks, it doesn’t register as a double-click. So I’m getting used to that.

I may try to switch back and forth between the trackball and the mouse occasionally, just to keep myself from relying on one hand or the other for too long. And I think I might try a trackpad at some point too.

Kensington Orbit trackball

I’ve been having trouble with my right shoulder recently. (Well, OK, by “recently,” I mean for the last twenty years or so. But it’s been getting worse lately.) I’m doing some exercises now, at the suggestion of my doctor, that might help. But I’ve also decided that maybe I’ve got a mouse problem. I currently use an ergonomic mouse, from Contour Design, and it works really well. It’s much more comfortable than any other mouse I’ve used. But I’ve been thinking that maybe I should give my right arm a rest, and try using a trackball with my left hand for a while, and see how that works.

So I bought a Kensington Orbit trackball and started using it today. I’m not having as much trouble with it as I thought I would. I’m not nearly as accurate with it as I am with my Contour mouse (and my right hand), but it’s workable. And I suppose I’ll get better at it if I keep using it. I might switch back to right-handed use at some point too. Maybe I’ll see if I can switch between left and right once a week or once a month, and see if that helps or if it just confuses things.

The Kensington Orbit is a pretty simple trackball, and cost me less than $30. It’s got just the ball, two buttons, and a scroll ring. The scroll ring works well; I think I’d be lost trying to use a pointing device of any kind that didn’t have some sort of scroll function. I miss having a third button though. I’m used to using three-button mice, and I do use the middle button (though mostly just in Firefox). I used Kensington’s software to map it so that when I press both buttons at the same time, that registers as a middle-button press. But pressing both buttons at the same time is a little awkward. Maybe if I decide that I like the trackball, but can’t live without having more than two buttons, I’ll trade it in for a fancier trackball.

 

Too Many Steps

I generally feel pretty good about myself if I manage to get in 7500 steps in a day. (I’m at about 6300 today, and that’s about average for a weekday.) I know that 10,000 is often cited as a good goal, but I rarely get that many.

Now, I’m reading that maybe 15,000 is the goal we should be shooting for. Yikes. For now, I’m going to pretend I never read this article and continue being happy when I manage to get past 7500, and ecstatic when I pass 10,000.

(In related news, I’m still wearing my Apple Watch every day and filling up the circles in my Activity app on most days. I almost always hit the “stand” goal. I usually hit the 30 minute exercise goal. And my move goal is currently set at 370 cal, which I hit maybe 5 times a week.)

How Social Isolation Is Killing Us

This is an interesting article, though the title may be a bit overblown.

I need to do more to maintain my relationships, both for my own sake and for the sake of those around me. That second part is easy to forget; it’s easy to get wrapped up in your own bubble and forget that other people around you need help and support.

A great paradox of our hyper-connected digital age is that we seem to be drifting apart. Increasingly, however, research confirms our deepest intuition: Human connection lies at the heart of human well-being. It’s up to all of us — doctors, patients, neighborhoods and communities — to maintain bonds where they’re fading, and create ones where they haven’t existed.

Source: How Social Isolation Is Killing Us

Healthcare in America right now

Here’s an interesting article on Obamacare, which unfortunately turns out to be largely a waste of time to read, due to a couple of key sentences near the end:

There’s one significant problem with all these ideas, of course: They’d need to pass the Republican Congress and be signed into law by Mr. Trump.

Source: Politics Aside, We Know How to Fix Obamacare

So, it’s a good thought exercise, but it isn’t going to happen.

And here’s another article that doesn’t leave me feeling good about the current state of the healthcare system in America:

To put it in very, very blunt terms: This is the health equivalent of a carjacking.

Source: Surprise! Insurance Paid the E.R. but Not the Doctor – The New York Times

I already knew about this one, of course. I’ve read about it before, and was actually a bit worried about it, when I went in for hernia surgery last year.

another migraine

I haven’t had a serious migraine since August, so I was starting to think that maybe the problem had somehow resolved itself. No such luck. I got a doozy today, with an aura and everything. Since my last post on the subject, I’ve been trying to learn about migraines, and I’ve been keeping an eye on certain things, so I could maybe figure out my triggers.

Today’s migraine is making me toss out a few of my ideas. All my previous migraines have happened on weekdays, on sunny days, where I’d done a fair bit of walking. Today is Sunday, it was raining for most of the day, and I engaged in very little physical activity today. So it doesn’t really fit the pattern.

I took an Imitrex right after the aura hit. This was my first time trying it. I’m really not sure if it helped at all. The aura went away after about 20 minutes, which is, I think, fairly typical. And the post-aura headache was probably a bit milder that my previous ones, but that may just be because I was at home, and could just lay down for an hour.

The really annoying thing about this migraine is that it happened as I was reading through the first several issues of the recent Detective Comics relaunch. Specifically, I was just getting ready to read Detective 939. So I had to stop for a couple of hours until my eyes and brain started working well enough to read comics again. (I have now finished that story, and I enjoyed it a lot!)