H Is For Health - An Update

The Blogging From A To Z Challenge doesn't work on Sundays so I thought I'd sneak an extra H post in given that yesterday's letter was H. If you're visiting from the A2Z Challenge, my H post is here.

So this is H For Health - An Update...

Last year ended poorly from a health & fitness perspective. I already knew and accepted that between going on holiday in late September and hopefully flying to the UK for Christmas in late December I would be battling to keep the weight off, after all, what are holidays for if not a bit of indulgence...

Things were compounded by a couple of accidents in which I fell off my unicycles (though not at the same time). 

Firstly I fell off my 36er and smacked up my knees. This was pretty bad and after hobbling my way to the local nurse's clinic and getting her to clean and dress them, I then spent a couple of weeks feeling sorry for myself.

I then managed to break out of that depression and get back on my unicycles, this time I was on my new (to me) 26er riding my first Muni (Mountain Unicycling) in a long time. Anyway, I managed to fall off and break my arm. The ride on the lower slopes of Table Mountain up to that point had been brilliant.

So I got a bit more depressed and fed up, and so by the time 2022 was under way and we were back home (yes we made it to Blighty for Christmas, no thanks to Covid) I had gone back up to 95kgs, which was really frustrating but totally of my own doing.

The New Year didn't get off to a great start as my chest problem (we're still not entirely sure what it actually is!) went in to overdrive. Basically, when I eat certain protein rich foods (a nice juicy steak anyone?!) it feels like a part of the food gets trapped in my esophagus. Normally this will shift with a sip or two of water, but occasionally it takes longer. This particular time it took 12 hours and so I finally went to see my GP about it. 

She believed it was a by-product of acid reflux - which I've lived with most of my life - and gave me a pretty heavy duty drug to take for two months, and during this time I had no issues and no reflux. However, after two months I stopped taking it and all was fine for a few days until I had a fizzy drink and the reflux came back. The long and the short of it is that we isolated sugar as being the major problem and since reducing my intake to almost zero and only having an occasional sugar-free fizzy drink all has been fine again. So for now I'm off the medication and living freely and enjoying one of those juicy steaks every now and then.

The year didn't get much better as there was an outbreak of Typhoid locally, and I managed to pick it up. We think it was from a locally made sandwich I bought which was the only thing the rest of the family didn't eat. Anyway, that was a very unpleasant 10 days, and then shortly after that we all got Covid apart from Eli who somehow dodged it.

In the midst of all this I was trying to stay fit with my boxing, unicycle riding and attempting to lose a bit of weight as I continued with the intermittent fasting which I've been doing for about a year now. The intermittent fasting is brilliant, it fits with my lifestyle and frankly I find it quite easy. I'm following the 16:8 format and when I do eat in the eight hours, I try to watch my calorific intake, though truth be told I'm quite lackadaisical about it.

Anyway, I'm now back down to 88kgs, so in the midst of all of this I've managed to shake off seven kilograms of unwanted me, and I'm feeling pretty good for it. 

Now if I can just stop picking up whatever the fashionable bug of the day seems to be...