Tag nutrition

The close-out of my medical fitness program

Angel Ackerman 1 Comment

Monday is my last session as part of the Thrive medical fitness program at St. Luke’s. Working with the trainers in the program has reminded me of some hard truths– and the part that’s hard is the reality of your own habits and thinking patterns.

The numbers show some nice progress. I lost four pounds of fat and gained one pound of muscle. (And had I eaten better imagine what those numbers could have been.) My blood pressure according to their records has stayed the same, but based on my home readings has gone down and requires less medication. The strength-based tests– well, I kicked butt.

I certainly feel better, and stronger, though I still have work to do on my cardiofitness. That won’t really improve until I commit to more cardiovascular exercise, even if it is just walks around the neighborhood. I would love to return to riding my bike again, but there’s a fear factor there. It’s an activity I don’t want to do alone, which is also true of walking.

But here are the lessons:

  • When my body hurts and locks up, strength-training stretches all those muscles and gets rid of the pain.
  • I can only lose about a pound a week if I eat well and exercise at least three times a week. Diet alone won’t do it. And my food choices don’t have to be perfect but they have to be solid.
  • Salt is my nemesis. Too little and I experience orthostatic hypotension and lightheadedness, too much and I end up with as much as five pounds water weight.
  • I must be choosy about my fast food. Domino’s or Little Caesars pizza will put me in a coma, and I will sleep so well, but the impact will show on my heart rate, blood pressure and weight. Wing Stop has no benefits, only the effects of the salt. I now keep various processed chicken products in the freezer because while they are not a wholesome choice, I can make my own sauces to replicate Wing Stop and save the truly detrimental health effects. Taco Bell in small doses can be tolerated, and I usually get a cheap box deal and make the items all vegetarian. It adds some extra fiber and vegetable matter to the mix.
  • And out of all the fast food chains– I can navigate the menu at Chick-Fil-A and not notice any real impact. Their fruit cup and kale crunch salad, especially when paired with grilled nuggets, are solid choices. They also have a chicken (or vegetarian) cool wrap, which, while it is calorie dense, is easy and quick to eat– with a good portion of lettuce and cabbage. (Yes, they also have amazing salads, but those big salads are realistically three portions. That’s a lot of salad and chicken. A lot.)

Do I have the discipline to not only continue but improve upon this progress? I don’t know. Honestly. IF I made a commitment to meal planning and cooking, I could. But with money and time always an issue, I don’t know. With stress leading me to seek comfort in my favorite foods– did you know they have Sour Patch Kid Jelly Beans? Eva says they flipped Sour Patch Kids inside out… With fatigue influencing my choices– caffeine and sugary carbohydrates, anyone?

Will I get up in the morning, drink a glass of water, and commit to some sort of exercise in my home gym?

Damned if I know.

Stay tuned.

Gunk and other updates

Angel Ackerman 1 Comment

It is Saturday, December 28, around 8:30 a.m. when I start this. Do not expect much eloquence from me, as the gunk Eva passed on to me from her recent illness is still interfering with my ability to think and sleep. It has instead given me a lovely cough, which now after more than a week is getting “wet” and “productive.”

I FINALLY finished my medical intake at the St. Luke’s Medical Fitness program. Because of my paused membership, I’m not sure when my end date in the Thrive program is but let’s assume mid-February for now. This whole journey started in early November when I visited my neurologist-physiatrist to talk to her about my recent mobility issues and any concerns she had about me returning to an exercise program.

The older I get, the more I worry that my cerebral palsy will cause me to hurt myself because I tend not to notice when my body is doing the wrong things.

Eva has worked really hard on remodeling the garage and including a space for a home gym, so I need to pay some attention to myself in that regard. But I’m out of shape, and falling more than usual, so I’m scared.

My neurologist referred me to the medical fitness program, and I had my first medical intake appointment on November 11. My blood pressure spiked during that appointment, so they sent me home without doing the baseline exercise portion of the intake. I returned two days later, and they almost sent me to the ER because my blood pressure was still bad.

Here are the previous entries recalling all of that, when it was happening.

Two trips to the primary care doctor, two trips to the cardiologist, and two or three falls (depending how you count, one was a trip, but I still believe it happened because of balance issues which makes it a fall) later, my blood pressure seems under control again.

And of course, yesterday, when I turned up at the gym in the basement of the hospital, it was 130/90.

Since I’ve been fighting the gunk, I almost canceled the appointment, but I filled a water bottle with my electrolyte flavor, grabbed a scarf, forgot a mask, and hopped in the car. My fear was that if I canceled the appointment, the intake would have to wait until after my colonoscopy and I was worried that one thing would lead to another and I’d never get this done.

When I arrived, I forgot my water bottle in the car, still couldn’t find a mask, and realized I had no idea where my membership/gym tag was. In the back of my mind, I knew I had packed a gym bag at my last attempt and that the tag was in the gym bag. But where was the gym bag? And what bag did I use?

Lots of hand sanitizer and frequent hand washing and I refused to shake the young man’s hand. I also told him if I continued to cough and he had to send me home, I understood. But I reiterated that I had had many trials to get to this point and I would rather be sent home than continue the cycle of not trying.

Onto the fancy scale I went (168) and I know that body fat percentage was in the forties, wish I could remember what it was when I was super lean a decade ago. Turns out that information may only exist in paper journals in my attic.

39-year-old Angel … with something to prove before hitting 40

The Angel in the pictures is 45 pounds lighter than me, and I think those 45 pounds, age and stress have had a ridiculous impact on my blood pressure and my mobility. (And for the record– the sweatpants worn by Angel in the pictures were my favorite sweatpants ever.)

I have learned that my body reacts strongly to salt and sugar, and that I “do better” when I cook, and that I have no self-control with processed snack foods like potato chips and doritos.

The trainer I met with yesterday talked about maximum heart rate and how hearts slow down as we age. The highest my heart rate reached in 2024, according to my AppleWatch, was 186. 207 was the highest since I got the watch. The online calculators I have seen suggest that my maximum heart rate for my age is between 170 and 179.

The trainer, and maybe his name was Ryan but maybe I invented that, would like to see me four times a week. I still have the mental mindset to make this work, but my physical stamina and fortitude have worn me out to the point where I can talk myself out of my own efforts.

I found this post from when I started my journey with Apex Training in 2021.

Maybe, someday, I will get my discipline under control and be one of those old ladies who powerlift. Screw the whole red hat/purple dress thing.

Meanwhile, Monday is my first colonoscopy. It was supposed to be the Monday after Thanksgiving but the doctor had a death in the family. Tomorrow I start my official bowel prep, and it scares me, because I get shaky without food, and low blood pressure without salt, and I already have a mobility disability. Then they will knock me out on Monday, and I tend to have a heavy reaction to medications and anesthesia. So none of this makes me comfortable. The actual colonoscopy, that doesn’t scare me. But everything else does.

So tomorrow, unless I experience miraculous healing today, I will be expelling mucus from my lungs and all the poop from my bum.