another daddy update 07/06/2012

Last night, he was a little out of it. When the nurses asked him if he knew where he was, he couldn’t answer. Something’s not completely right, they found some value in his blood that’s not supposed to be there, but physically he’s not really showing signs that something is wrong. To be sure, they are taking him for a CT scan this afternoon. If that shows something, they will be able to quickly treat whatever it is they find. I’m just hoping that the new connection in the intestines isn’t leaking. That would mean they have to open him up and cleanse his whole tummy.

Keep hoping for the best, and a fast recovery :S

dad progress 06/06/2012

So my dad had his surgery on Monday. They removed about 70 cm of his large intestine. He didn’t need the ICU, nor was he kept for longer in the recovery room, so he was back in his own hospital room at around 4pm. He was sort of awake and muttered that he wanted a bacon sandwich. Instead, we offered him a glass of water :). Needless to say, when we talked to him about the sandwich, he didn’t remember it at all, so it was just the drugs and the grogginess making him say stuff.

Yesterday he had sort of a good day. Had some pudding and a dry cracker, after which it didn’t take long before his bowels showed that they were still working.

Thanks to an epidural feed of painmedication, he was pretty much not feeling anything. At 2am this morning (why this time???), they switched off the painmedication, with as a result that dad woke up at 4am in so much pain, he couldn’t endure it. Now my dad.. he’s a tough cookie, he won’t easily admit when he’s in such pain that it’s unbearable. When I spoke to him this morning, he was speaking in such a tiny voice, and he was obviously very uncomfortable. Fortunately, around 10am, the doctor came by, and agreed to turn the epidural feed back on. So he’s a bit more comfy now.

The next few days are a bit critical. If there’s a leak in the new spot where his intestines come together, it will start giving problems anytime between now and the weekend. This is not something the doctors can prevent, the only thing they can do is monitor closely, and act as soon as there appears to be some problem.

Lots of people have been praying for us, thank you for that, and please keep doing so, and keep your  candles burning. I’m convinced it all helps!

 

x Taloeloe

Preparing for a little Ctrl+alt+del 16/05/2012

I’m at work at the moment, preparing some last things so I can hand over my work to a few different co-workers. After today, I’ll have 12 days of freedom and relaxing. Yay!

I’ll try and post here during my leave, but seen as every post so far was written while I was at work (yes, bad bad naughty me!), no guarantees.

 

 

The ABC of me 14/05/2012

Totally stole the ABC from an online buddy, here’s my version 🙂

A – AVAILABLE: Yes, but no ^^
B – Birthday: September 21, some time in the 70s
C – CRUSHING ON: I wish I had a crush
D – DRINK YOU LAST HAD: Milk
F – Favorite Song: The Story by Sara Ramirez (yea, Callie in Grey’s Anatomy)
E – EASIEST PERSON [PEOPLE] TO TALK TO: my best friend
G – GUMMY BEARS OR GUMMY WORMS: Gummy bears
H – HOMETOWN: not saying
I – IN LOVE WITH: the sun, which is out for the first time in weeks, today
J – JUGGLE: Nope
K – KISS the same sex: only on the cheek
L – LONGEST CAR RIDE: Driving the car myself: from Holland to the French Alps
M – MILKSHAKE FLAVOR: BANANAAAAAA
N – NUMBER OF SIBLINGS: one sister
O – ONE WISH: right now, i just wish my dad will be ok real soon
P – PERSON YOU CALLED LAST: my brother in law
R – REASON TO SMILE: that sunshine today
S – SONG YOU LAST SANG: We Are Young (along to the radio in the car omw to work)
T – TIME YOU WOKE UP: 8.30am (yes, right when I was supposed to start work!)
U – UNDERWEAR COLOR: Black
V – VEGETABLE(S): I wish they came in chocolate flavor! Seriously tho, I love brussel sprouts and spinach
W – WORST HABIT: smoking
X – X-RAYS YOU’VE HAD: my knee (several times) and my foot when I was 16 and broke it.
Y – YOYOS ARE: veeeeery retro
Z – ZODIAC SIGN: Virgo

My non diet 11/05/2012

Over this past year, so many people have ‘kindly suggested’, ‘silently hinted’, ‘bluntly blurted out’ or genuinely out of good intentions told me that I should join weightwatchers, or get some sort of ‘shake’diet or see a dietician. When I first joined the gym, sure enough it took a good 5 minutes before the first person suggested it.

To each and every one of them, and I will continue to do so in the future, I’ve smiled and told them I know it’s because they mean well, but I will not do any of these things.

Food and eating have been too much of an obsession in my life as it is. Sure, I could just scrap out everything I find enjoyable to eat (unfortunately I have an unhealthy preference for fatty, sugary and salty things), but what happens then once I reach my goal weight? Right, I slowly start cheating, and then before I know it, half of the hard work will be undone.

I was very resistant at first to the idea of working out purely for weightloss. I still am, actually. But after a few weeks of working out, I did come to realize that it’s utterly daft to sweat like a mofo for an hour and a half, walk around with sore muscles and stiff joints, only to go home and stuff your face with everything that’s unhealthy.

This whole gym thing, it’s a good thing. It’s an investment in myself and in feeling good about me. I never in my life had the disillusion desire to be a nice size 40. I just want to be as healthy as I can be, and still be able to enjoy life. It’s taken me 25 years to gain all this weight and trust me, I’ve tried the extreme diet thing and it’s not for me, not a long term solution at least. It’s time for my life to stop evolving around food. This is one of the reasons I wouldn’t resort to weightloss surgery, I hear and read too many stories where people are constantly reminded of eating too much or eating too little or for them to need 25 minutes to eat their measly slice of toast for breakfast. I’m in no rush. I just want to keep noticing that I’m physically benefitting from my workouts, while still being able to eat a sandwich when I really want to, or pasta, or cookies, or chocolate or something fatty and totally not good for you.

The theory really is simple. Use up more energy than you take in. This doesn’t have to balance out every day, I take it on by the week. It’s hard to measure how many calories you burn. The standard values you read everywhere (even on the gym equipment) is mostly based on a person of ‘normal’ size. I know that my body needs more energy as it works harder. But as it also has a lot to shed, I also need to burn more. And then, when I do work out, I burn more than the machine says, because it does have to work harder. Yea complicated huh?

Either way, I didn’t want to make becoming healthier feel like punishment. Diets are exactly that to me. I’m doing something good for myself, sometimes I deserve to cut myself some slack. And sometimes a girl really just needs to be able to pig out without a reason too!

I’ve always hated being at a party and feeling miserable from seeing others tuck in to all the nice snacks, with me sipping on some water because of the damn diet. I’ve always hated to go to a family barbecue and get my own bowl of salad and not use the epic garlic sauce on the nice juicy meat that just got grilled. Screw that. So now I make choices. I usually do not eat bread for breakfast / lunch anymore (in Holland it’s very common to have 2 bread meals per day). Instead of lots of pork meat, I eat a lot more chicken and fish now. I don’t particularly love veggies, but can stand them when processed into a nice stirfry with lots of herbs and some asian style marinade thingy. Instead of having candies or chocolate at my desk, I keep some breadsticks or something similar at the office to nibble on if ever I get a real craving. All in all I am a lot more aware of the things I eat but I will not deny myself something when there’s a real occasion. I don’t have a consultant or dietician to ‘answer’ to. I found I was just telling them lies anyways, saying I really didn’t cheat and that I didn’t know how it was possible that I didn’t lose weight. At the end of the day, I am the only person I answer to. If I decide I can live with the consequence of eating that piece of cake at work, I bloody well will eat it.

So, as said in my previous post, by not dieting I have managed to shed quite a bit of weight. This works, for me. No pressure from people that only are concerned because I pay them to be. No disappointments for myself or the people around me when I do have a week where I only seem to be taking in stuff that’s not good for me.

I know that diets work for other people. It’s good for them. I’m always happy for someone when they’ve accomplished their goal. But thank goodness, I’m not ‘other people’. I’m me, and as with many other things in life, I guess I insist on doing this in the only way that suits me. Yes, I get to be that selfish, it’s my life and my fat to lose, after all!

Dad’s challenge to me

It was May 28th last year when I was talking to my parents about how I really wanted to start moving a bit again after a few years of hardly any exercise and WAAAYYYY too much food intake. I was fully aware that, with my excess weight, it would be very smart to get some guidance, but the gym membershipfee was a little too steep for my budget. Then suddenly, my dad looks at me and says: If you join a gym now, and have the discipline to go there twice a week for a year long, I will repay you the membership fee.

I guess you already figured that I accepted the challenge, else why would I write about it? Well, I did. On Monday 29th of May I had a meeting at this club called HealthCity. It’s fancy, their machines are well maintained, they have a sauna / steamcabin / sunbed you can use for free. 2 squash courts, 5 tenniscourts, and of course, grouplessons are included, as are coffee/tea and other refreshments. Most importantly, when I walked in there, there weren’t 20 sets of eyes belonging to bodybuilder muscle guys staring me straight back out, I actually felt at ease. They told me they could help me get started back up, but of course I had to be willing to put in the time and effort to actually show up. I decided if I didn’t sign up right then and there, I would probably end up not joining, and then continue to waste my life away on my couch, playing computer games.

My first time ‘working out’, was a bit of an embarrassment. It was that introduction thingy, where they show you how to set up your bike or treadmill. After 10 minutes on the bike, and another 15 on the treadmill (both at extremely low speed/resistance), the instructor told me I could try out some other machines if I wanted. So, remembering how much I used to enjoy it like 10 years ago, I headed for the crosstrainer. I lasted 3 whole minutes on that. The last 2 of them were just me being too short of breath to bother getting off. I ended up going upstairs to the dressing room, and spent 10 minutes in the shower crying my eyes out. I felt so useless, and so horribly out of shape and I didn’t think it would ever change. That same evening I told myself: Ok, welcome to rock bottom. Do not enjoy it for long, you are gonna get off this asap and never coming back here.

For the first months, I decided that each workout would just be focusing on building up a little bit of stamina, so cardio fitness only (besides, my lard didn’t fit in half of the muscle training things anyways).20 minutes on the bike , 20 minutes on the treadmill (walk at the fastest pace i could handle), and for the first week, I had to do 5 minutes on the crosstrainer, and every week I would add a minute to that.

This really paid off. After about 6 weeks I was totally hooked on the crosstrainer, even lasting 30 minutes, but still at very low resistance, and never really going over 100 rpm. But it offered me more fun, and I was able to last so much longer before getting bored like i do on the bike/treadmill.

After about 3 months, my instructor sat down with me to make a new plan. We decided to still focus mainly on the bike/treadmill/crosstrainer, as I was making lots of progress still, and not too confident about putting extra strain on my back and other joints (yea i know, opinions vary on this, but this worked for me). I started letting the machines dictate me what to do by using preset interval programs. Those were nice, it gave variation, I didn’t have to think, just follow. The first time the treadmill told me to walk at an 8% incline, I was like: ISTHISTHINGBROKEN??THISISNUTS!!11!!1!, but little by little I started to be able to keep up and started to enjoy it too.

And then October came. And brought my first official crisis. One Saturday morning, October 8th to be precise, I arrived at the gym, in good spirits actually, but once I tried to workout, it was like my body went on strike. I just couldn’t get myself motivated to do anything. Now instead of forcing myself to still do a full workout, I decided to cut myself some slack that day. I just took my waterbottle and towel, and went to the lounge for a nice cup of tea and chats to random people. Then I went and had a nice 8 minute sunbed powersession, a long hot shower and went home again. I still laugh at this but it was the only right thing to do, for me. That evening I made a new plan:

From that day, until the end of the year, I was going to put in 2500 minutes of pure cardio fitness. It boiled down to 3 sessions of 70 minutes each per week. That’s steep, for me. But it actually got me right back on track, and I managed to complete my goal on December 29th.

But then.. what next? I was a little done with doing 4 things. Somewhere down the line, my instructor had also told me the powerplate might be good for some muscletoning, so my routine, in all these months, still hadn’t come much further than treadmill, crosstrainer, bike if I really was up for it, and lots of powerplating.

Then one day, after a rough day at work, I jokingly told one of the staffmembers that I would love to try boxing. She said: well, why don’t you come to my Kickfun class, I think you might like it.

And like, I do! It’s torture every time. I suck at squats, and obviously my tummy gets in the way when i need to do a lot of kicking. But I feel SOOOO much progress. I think I’ve been doing this for 3 months now, or so, and a few weeks after my first Kickfun lesson I started doing Bodybalance once a week as well, and my body is really really responding well to both.

I’m down 4 (yes, FOUR) dress sizes for pants, and 3 for shirts/sweaters. If you don’t know me, and see me now, you’ll still think I’m overweight, even obese, but I am probably down about 30-35 kilos in weight. I’m wearing clothes in a size I last wore about 8 years ago. (about the weight and weightloss thing: that’s a whole different story which I’ll get into next post)

The year is almost up. My dad will surely lose the bet, I am not gonna let it slip in the last week. Even better: I’m not ending my membership. So long as my finances allow me to, I will keep going there and making progress. Just need to keep setting myself new little goals.. and need to think about a new one as we speak. I’ll get on that once my vacation starts, this coming Wednesday.

For now, have a wonderful weekend, peeps!

Love, TaLoeLoe

 

Switching to english 10/05/2012

It might sounds odd, but these days, I think I speak English more often than I speak Dutch, which is my mother tongue. It’s as easy for me to express myself in either language, it’s just that, when written in English, more people might be able to understand what the hell I’m on about 😛

So.. what’s new? Having a crazy week at work, I’ve been so productive, it scares me. But the explanation is simple: after next Wednesday, I’ll be off for nearly 2 weeks. Time for a little mental ctrl-alt-del.

The past weeks have not been easy, we found out my dad has colon cancer, and even though they think he will be fine with just a surgery, it’s been scary shit, waiting to find out whether or not his cancer had spread to his liver, or lungs, or… Fortunately, that wasn’t the case, the only thing they cannot check until the day of the surgery are the lymph nodes in his belly. They will be checked (or removed?) during the surgery. The tumor is in the right hand side of the colon, which is good. They can fairly easily remove it, and reattach the small intestine at a higher point. It’s just that it’s still a tricky surgery, and we’ve seen a few too many people get leaks in where the 2 parts are reattached to be fully at ease. And anyways..it’s cancer, you know. It’s scary, it shouldn’t be there, and we’re not ready to lose our dad to the stupid thing.

Good thing: dad isn’t planning on going anywhere either 🙂

 

Alright.. I’m still at work and got some stuff to do. Catch ya later!

TaLoeLoe

 

 

 

blablabloggen 08/05/2012

Zo af en toe moet me wat van ‘t hart. En vaak wil ik daar niemand op dat moment mee lastig vallen. Een blog is er, heeft geen andere plannen of een vriend, kat, kind om tijd mee door te brengen, en kan eigenlijk ook niet zeggen als het vindt dat je maar uit je nek zit te kletsen. Echt wat voor mij dus!

Maar eens zien, of ik hier mijn ‘ei’ dan in kwijt kan 🙂

 

x Taloeloe

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