Foot Notes

my golden arches

One of the first memories I have as a child was sitting on the edge of my sandbox on a sunny summer’s day and extending my legs and bare feet into the middle of the box and pushing up piles of cool damp sand with my toes. That was the best. They were good toes!

As I grew I pretty much forgot about my toes. And took my feet for granted. Except for the times I managed to injure them.

There was the time I was riding my stingray on the dirt path across from my house and I decided to put my sandaled foot down to break before the road. The sole of the sandal scooped up a piece of broken glass that was lying in the dirt and crammed it into my foot and lanced the bottom of my big toe. That hurt. I still have a scar.

Then there was the time I decided to wear China Doll shoes out on a date with a nice reliable guy with a decidedly unreliable car. It was the middle of a snowstorm, the car stalled, and I ended up walking about a mile home in a northern Wisconsin blizzard. When I finally made it back to my apartment, my feet felt like flippers on the bottom of my legs, numb and clumsy. During the next few days as they thawed the pain throbbed and it was excruciating. A week later the skin peeled off in thick layers, but finally they healed and I could walk again without any problem and barely a memory of the whole horrible frost bitten ordeal.


Then there came more fashion affliction.
It was the mid-seventies and platform shoes were really “in”. And of course I had to have a few pairs. One pair of platform sandals that I owned had the soles carved out of wood and leather straps to hold the wooden soles onto your feet. I wore them a lot. They are quite challenging to walk around on after a few brandy and cokes. So the ankles were twisting and the back was swaying all through the seventies.

[Just a short note about the particular anatomy of my feet. They are very wide and have very high arches. My arches are so high that it is hard for me to keep clogs on.]

By the eighties the fashion industry had come up with even more ways of torturing my feet and I happily hopped into each and every pair of their medival torture contraptions. Retro shoes were the flavor of the day and I was right there trying to cram my triple Es into Double As. And I did it. And I walked on them all night. Night-after-night. And just so you know, they weren’t flat soled either, they were high-eee heels, so they pushed my foot down and into that narrow opening for hours. I liken it to some forms of Asian foot binding. I still have no feeling in the two toes on the right side of my right foot.

After that, I decided if I had to wear shoes, then comfort would be my main goal. Since they don’t really make wide shoes with high arches to sell at the local shoe store I have never achieved true foot comfort wearing shoes. The ones I get to buy are always a compromise between those that fit lengthwise and pinch the ball of my foot and the top of my arch, and those that don’t pinch but are a size too long and I trip over them.

My feet have been there for me through the years, regardless of how I’ve abused them. They’ve gotten me from here to there almost painlessly for just about 50 years. I have always loved my high arches. They were one of the only parts of my large-boned and mannish body that actually made me feel somewhat feminine. I felt they were golden.

But now my poor feet are carrying around twice the weight they were meant to bare. I really should be walking on all fours. Extra weight, time, and high arches have taken their toll on my plantar anatomy. Things are shifting, and it hurts… a lot.

I have this heel pain that burns constantly. It dulls my enthusiasm about moving. I guess it is called Achilles Tendonitis. And there are exercises I can do to stop the pain. But I think it is going to be slow. It is another one of those “Catch 22” situations that life keeps throwing at you --- My foot has a problem and I am overweight. If I lose weight my foot won’t hurt any more, but in order to lose weight I have to exercise and in order to exercise I most certainly need to use my foot. ---



some foot notes:
stretching in the morning, at night, before and after exercise, keep things like feet and ankles from injury.
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/achilles-tendinitis/DS00737/DSECTION=3

Bata Shoe Museum: http://www.batashoemuseum.ca/collectindex.html

A place to buy wide shoes: http://www.shoebuy.com/womens-comfort-shoes/p3.htm

On a scale of 0 to 250

When one embarks on a mission like this, one thing looms large in the background. Unmentioned, yet unrelenting.

It's always there, repulsive, but somehow attractive, especially to the perennial optimists like myself.

It is a way of gauging progress, or, in my case, the lack of it. It is both encouraging and bewildering. It seems so neutral a thing. Just a tool. So passive. Almost comical if you think about it. You step on it and it spins up to a number, isn't that delightful! Boing, boing, boing! All kinds of fun! My son loves to jump on and off of it watching the numbers spin all the way up to 37 pounds, WEEEEEE! --- which is about as high as he can count right now.

But really, it's not the way it looks, almost like a caricature of a friendly little creature -- Poké Mon-esque, really -- certainly not something all that intimidating. But somehow, as the years pass, it gets creepier, and creepier, until just even partially shifting you weight over to it becomes a frightening exercise in psychological control. Those aren't just numbers anymore. They are a symbol of success or failure. They are cold, calculating, judgmental, and unforgiving. Personally, I try to keep mine covered with a towel while I'm visiting the room where it stays.

With most things higher numbers are better. Like test scores, pay checks, IQ levels, scrabble tallies, IRA percents, and ratings. Here it's more like golfing. The lower the number the better. And since I've never been very good at golfing, the scores I receive on my little device resting on the bathroom floor are consistent with that. Higher and higher each year, until soon, my little 1940s model will not have enough numbers on it. It seems that in the 40s it was rare that a person reached my weight and still lived very long -- I guess that wasn't considered to be a sustainable market.

As with golfing, let's just say these days I'm better off staying in the clubhouse. All the talk about the biochemistry of human metabolism and how food and exercise cooperate to bring our bodies to some form of stasis makes my head spin. There's potassium, selenium, phosphorus, zinc, iron, and all kinds of trace minerals... chromium, etc. We definitely are what we eat. But reading the info about the human body and its function, I am reminded of a class I took in astronomy some years back. It seems, that humans are made of the same stuff as stars. And it also seems, that the ratios of these elements are similar. Iron, Hydrogen, Oxygen... So no matter what amount of force our mass exerts as it interacts with this universe, I think the song "Woodstock" from a long time ago by Joni Mitchell sums the whole thing up rather well -- we are stardust, we are golden.

So with that, the next time we are required to step upon that instrument to measure our "stone" we can find solace in the idea that whatever it has to say to us about our progress or regress, maybe we'll remember that the heaviest part of our bodies can sometimes be our mind.

The Universal Solvent

40 to 60 percent of our body weight is water. Isn't that remarkable.

Water is also the most universal solvent known. It has the ability to dissolve both bases and acids. Apparently it also has the ability to dissolve fat. Water makes your metabolism burn calories 3% faster.

LS said she has had success this week and she says it's because of her increased water intake.

There are many reasons given for drinking water to facilitate health and weight loss. Proper hydration makes our bodies run more efficiently overall. It's good to remember that if we feel hungry, it might just be a sign that we are a little dehydrated and all we need is a nice cool glass of water to feel better.

So how many glasses a day? How big are the glasses?... one source says: 1 ounce for every 2 lbs of body weight in order to gain the metabolic bennies. Meaning, somebody who is 150 lbs should drink 75 ounces of water a day. That's 9.3 eight ounce glasses per day. (I worry about this formula for kidney function reasons, so someone correct this if it is too extreme.)

If I'm stressed out or achy, I sometimes get into a nice hot bath. It relaxes me and has a meditative effect. I highly recommend this. But you must remember, to maximize the hot bath experience, you must burn at least one candle and maybe even play some nice music. Try to avoid placing the radio in the tub with you. This kind of weight loss is not recommended -- it's a quality of life thing -- diminishing returns, you understand.

Swimming is another wonderful activity. It stretches you out and takes stress off of your poor old joints. It has an ebullient effect on your spirit and can be a transcendent experience (as long as you know how to swim, if you can't swim, it may have a very different effect, that kind of transcendence we can do without!) And don't worry about the swimming suit thing. It's only temporary -- from the locker room to the edge of the pool, 12 seconds at most -- then it's an invigorating plunge into some nice chlorine saturated water. But once you are acclimated and buoyant and start to push yourself along, it's almost like you're a kid again -- weightless. The hot tub aprés bain isn't bad either.

Portion Proportion

The bigger the portion, the bigger your proportions.

I was thinking about the problem of portions as it relates to the problem of our proportions.
And I thought if I see myself reflected in the portion that appears on the plate (for the five or ten seconds it remains there) I may be able to stave off the urge to load the plate up with too much food. The smaller the portion, the less I'll be adding to my overall proportions.

Where does that come from? Don't we know by now we aren't going to starve to death? Sometimes, I'll just eat the whole potfull just because it is there. I don't know where that compulsion comes from. It's such a primal urge I don't even have a verbal indication for it, it's more sensual -- the smell, the taste, the texture, the color, and the sound -- yeesh, the sound of all it gurgling around in my stomach after I've eaten every last morsal!

It helps to serve everyone and myself, and then put the leftovers right in the fridge, because if they are left out even durning dinner I am in big trouble.

My dinner plates are getting smaller, but I'm not sure the portions are, if you have spiral pasta and it is cooked just right, you can stack those babies up pretty high.

Then there is the handful of food problem. Walk by the table at work and there is a bag of almonds there. Almonds, not so bad, protein, vitamins, minerals, good fats, good carbs. But if you walk by that bag twice and take a handful, how many almonds is that? Ten? I don't know. All I know is that sooner or later, the bag is empty.

Weighty Issues

Many are reporting an increase in their weight since joining the Madness. Do not fear. All is not lost. It has only been three weeks. Rome wasn't built in a day and this is much harder than building Rome!

Since we are mostly all women over 40 with the exception of TB and JZ we have many of the same weight issues. But I think the focus should be on healthier lifestyle. Changing how much we are eating, changing the rate of our exercise or the frequency.

JZ rode his bike to work up until the latest cold snap. This is a great thing for the environment and overall health and fitness.

TB is a great baker and knows how to substitute sugar and other not-so-good things in a recipe so that the outcome is healthy and lower in fat and sugar calories and contains more natural food products.

I feel like I am making strides just parking my car down by the stadium and walking from there. Remember, we are all at differnet levels of fitness and we will all have strides that we need to measure individually.

There will be things we can do collectively. Such as increase our duration of walking, watch our "bad" carbo intake. Cut down on how much television we watch or how long we sit at the computer and blog!

I hope everyone contributes their failures and successes and ideas to this blog. This is a journey, sometimes more like a fight. And the fight unfortunately is never ending. It takes energy, focus, positive self-talk, encouragement from outside, cloaking devices to keep out the button-pushing comments from our mothers or similar people, and a lot of determination and self-control.

Our bodies are miraculous organisms that will respond to these life style changes.
Lower your expectations! There is nothing more self-defeating than raising an expectation to an unattainable level and then not meeting it. Then you tend to think; "Why am I bothering!" and then the fridge opens and that leftover spaghetti falls out and into your mouth and the ice cream just leaps in after it, leaving you feeling bloated and lethargic watching the latest on Fox News about Anna Nicole Smith.