the morbs xi: the first five
longsuffering paid subscribers: I'm not dead! — 5% of my starting weight is officially gone.
Just before the sun came back, I had started to accept the idea that I was just not a very happy, energetic, or social person anymore. Maybe I had been, at one time — but it seemed clear to me that I didn’t really like other people that much, after all. That was, I felt, just how I would feel for ever — spending time with other people because it was the right thing to do, and I because of course I loved them — I wasn’t a monster, after all. I knew they needed me and my obligations to them mattered to me, and I needed them the way any social primate does. I had moments, with them, when the pain had a kind of lightness to it. It’s not like the lonely was any less bad, after all — it’s just that it wasn’t embarrassing, and not quite as draining. This was the way it would be, it seemed. I’d basically accepted it.
Then the sun came out.
The sun hit my face, the warm air hit my lungs, and I was blasted full of social desire and physical energy. I walked all over Toronto — twelve thousand, sixteen thousand, twenty-five thousand steps. Here were the longer days, and my urges to fit things into them. I had friends, I remembered — multitudinous, fascinating friends with interesting lives and capacities. I wanted to run to them.
For the first time since I got sick with COVID in January of 2022, I felt like I was getting back my capacity for complex long-term planning — far and away the weirdest casualty of my omicron infection. My very active mind’s eye had a big black circle punched right in its centre by my vaccination-tempered illness, and my cognitive capacity took a sharp nose dive. I worried I would never get it back.
But I am getting it back. This new world feels like it’s waking up, and with it my new set of expectations. I feel like I know what I want. I’m starting to see how to get it.
I also feel lighter.
I am lighter! I’m lighter in a real way. I have been complaining a lot, of late. But here’s what’s been going right:
I’ve realized there is a kind of long-term consistency that I can manage with a menstrual cycle that controls my life, which is still consistency, even if it doesn’t look like the “same thing every day” that I think consistency is. To me, this looks like:
Absolutely slamming back high-iron meat for the first few days of my cycle, but otherwise keeping my calories very low to take advantage of the fact that I’m in pain and it kills my appetite.
Fasting basically as much as I’d like after I stop craving red meat so much (usually on day 3-5 of my cycle) up to the day before I’m set to ovulate.
Not worrying so much about a calorie deficit while I’m ovulating and eating anywhere between my regular deficit and maintenance of high-nutrient-content foods.
In my luteal phase, understanding that the weight gain I’m experiencing is water weight, of which I gain as many as eight pounds, and that it is temporary and will go away! Absolutely not giving into the demons in my head that tell me I’m a horrible monster. Eating on the higher side of a deficit, but still in at least an overall deficit for the week. Avoiding anything that will spike my blood sugar like it is Satan himself attempting to storm the holy walls of my body. Making sure I get a minimum of 40 minutes of yoga every day. Also just generally slowing down in this time. This time, simply, sucks more. My focus, simply, is worse. It is my dark and twisty time. That’s fine. A little dark and twisty never hurt nobody.
Supplementing. I am somebody who, I suppose, needs to supplement. I guess I have poor vitamin uptake. I believe this is true because when I do not take supplements, I am ravenous, like something bad is happening. When I do take supplements, I am fine and a kind of hungry I understand as reasonable. I am starting to treat the people who are like “supplementing is bad and you should get all your nutrients from food” with the same kind of suspicion with which I treat women who are very judgemental of other women who do anything to change their appearance — sure, there is an exploitative industry that exists adjacent to this thing, in order to convince people they are broken when they are not, and then profit off of their insecurity. I also believe there are also people with superior genetics who are smug about it, and wish to remain smug.
I used to tell myself I had to take a pint glass full of pills, and then I would simply not take them, because the task, before completing it, felt monumental and impossible. Reading that annoyingly correct book Atomic Habits put some shit into perspective: if you want to do something hard every day, first do the easiest version of it. My much more slimmed out regimen is currently:
1. Horrifically Expensive Greens Powder that I now Do Not Believe I Can Live Without Because I Started Feeling Better Taking It and if it is a Placebo I Do Not Care.
2. 3000 IU vitamin D3 (liquid, dropped right into the greens powder.)
3. Lion’s mane mushroom powder (crushed up and added to Greens Powder when I get a new bag delivered.)
4. 1200 mg calcium from milk or calcium citrate (I’m going to write a whole article on calcium, calcium dominates my life)
5. A fish oil capsule, or two, I don’t know — I actually bought these for my dog, and I’m not sure what the correct adult human amount is? They are small and I think they’re supposed to be concentrated, or something. I usually take one but sometimes I get saucy and take two.
6. a 500 mg magnesium supplement (usually right before I go to bed).
This seems to be a workable combination for me right now.In case this is something you care about: calcium and omega-3 is what my psychiatrist recommended for my premenstrual dysphoria,1 magnesium and vitamin D both seem to curb my food cravings, Lion’s mane is something I just really hope is doing something help with that hole-punched-out mind’s eye thing I mentioned earlier (I have a powder right now because it was on sale at my local health food store while my supplies were low, but my friend makes an amazing tincture which is my usual go-to, and is also easier to add to the greens powder) and fish oil is like… it’s good for you, right? It’s like… mediterranean, and shit? Make brain go brrr?
The second my supplement regimen becomes too complicated I just abandon it. I hate that you’re not really supposed to combine a lot of stuff, which means I have to stop whatever I’m doing a dozen times a day to swallow more pills, and sometimes I feel like getting everything I’m supposed to the “right” way is a part-time job. The setup mentioned above is uncomplicated enough that I actually do it: I take the slimy green drink with drops of vitamin D as soon as I get up. Then, if I have milk in the fridge and it’s hot out, I have a big iced coffee with lactose-free milk — and there’s 600 mg calcium taken care of. If I have no milk, I just pop two calcium citrate pills. Then at lunch time I’ll take omega-3 and two more calcium pills, and I keep the magnesium by my bed and take them at the same time I take my regular medication. There’s a chance this may make my medication not work optimally, or whatever — but since I haven’t lost my mind yet, I’m going to assume it’s fine.
I’ve been doing a ROLFing series I’d like to write about. I think it’s doing something. I also have to take care of my own truly awful postural patterns, which are deeper psychological hurdles — but the bodywork is helping.
Slowly changing and integrating habits — yoga is the one I’m most focused on, currently.
The fact that I have now lost over 5% of my initial starting weight. Now, you have to imagine me posing, staring at you. Just kind of waiting for praise.
STATS
(I have no idea how many weeks I am at! I want to get this published, so I’m just going to post the data and then clean up my timeline for a future article. Sorry, guys. Didn’t you come here for chaos? Are you not entertained??)
BMI: 35.7
Body fat: 44.5%
Subcutaneous fat: 38.5%
Visceral fat score: 17
BMR: 1685
Metabolic Age: 37
Changes (since Paranoia’s End)
BMI: - 0.9
Body fat: - 1.5%
Subcutaneous fat: - 1.3 %
Visceral fat score: - 1
BMR: + 3
Changes (since start of project)
BMI: - 1.8
Body fat: - 2.6 %
Subcutaneous fat: - 2.1
Visceral fat score: - 2
BMR: + 5
Weight Change: - 7.12 of my total starting weight
This feels like such a victory — I’m nearly halfway to my first major goal, which is to get my visceral fat score out of the “excessive” category. “Excessive” visceral fat is any visceral fat score of 15 or higher. Seeing my score having come down by two whole points feels like I’m really doing something — it doesn’t just feel like a fluke, like it did before. Like a minor change I could lose in an instant. I’ve accomplished my first short-term goal, which was to lose 5% of my starting weight. I’m even a chunk of the way to my second short-term goal, which is to lose 10%.
Upcoming articles include a free post, going up tomorrow, about the process of making pemmican for my trip to Vancover. The regular Morbs post will be adjusted to a bit later in the week — I’m playing catch up on a bunch of work right now, but it will be up as soon as I can get it there.
He definitely recommended 2000 mg calcium and 1000 mg omega-3 — but the longer I think about it the more I think he may have gotten these backwards. I can hear the chorus of doctor haters being cranky about this, but I will defend him, because he is an incredibly chill dude who is very nice to me and always gets my refills in promptly and thinks it’s important to have me control my treatment plan and my own dosing levels, and trusts me with a great deal of very controlled medication, and we all make mistakes. 2000 mg is an insanely high amount of calcium, and trying to take that much (especially of the other kind of calcium, the more normal kind which is in most calcium supplements), made me the scary kind of constipated. It was like a Japanese horror movie. Enough to make someone start reading psychoanalytic literature. Most of the scholarly articles I’ve found recommend 500-800 mg of calcium to treat premenstrual dysphoria, with moderately better effects at 1200-1600 mg. I’ve been aiming for 1200 mg and I do think it’s doing something, my mood has not been as black as it was during my luteal phase when I first started trying to lose weight.