What's a Grrrl to do?
December 27, 2006 at 13:17 I’ve always been health-conscious though not a granola. I grew up with a Dad who was into organic gardening before organic gardening was cool. He was also a vitamin and supplement freak, always latching on to research recommending megadoses of vitamins. What he chose to ignore however, was the basic medical advice given everyone: watch your weight, eat right, and exercise.
He was thin most of his life but his weight ballooned in his 50s and 60s. He loved to garden but didn’t exercise. He took lots of supplements but never saw a doctor for a physical. He had a stroke when he was 65 and never fully recovered. In mind and body, he was a shadow of his former self. I didn’t want this to happen to me.
As a teen, I developed an interest in health and fitness and took up long distance running, competing in track and field as well as running road races. I did a lot of reading on nutrition, watched my weight and diet, and worked out regularly.
By the time I was 30, my scoliosis made running painful for both my back and my knees, so I began walking for exercise instead and taking step aerobics classes. I put some weight on after the births of my two children, but lost most of it. I continued to walk regularly when my kids were small and eventually returned to taking fitness classes, though my left knee was giving me more and more trouble. Eventually I dropped out of the aerobics classes and never found another class I liked as well.
In my early 40s, I kept walking and took up yoga, practicing regularly for a year or two before moving to Belgium. As I struggled to adjust to a new country and way of life, I let myself gain 15 pounds and quit practicing yoga. Bad move. While I’ve done a lot of walking, my body has slowly gone to mush. In that classic midlife move, my waist has disappeared and I’ve lost a lot of muscle tone.
Meanwhile, in the last few years, for reasons no doctor has been able to explain, I’ve developed a heart arrhythmia that requires I take medication to slow my heart rate down. This makes it challenging to exercise with any intensity, especially during those time frames when my heart has a tendency to fall out of rhythm easily. Then a flight or two of stairs can knock it out of whack and flatten me for a few hours—another obstacle to exercise.
Happily, in the last six weeks or so, my heart’s been behaving itself, and I’ve been trying to get beyond walking and start an exercise program to build strength and burn more calories. A few weeks ago, I bought a stepper, thinking it would be a good low-impact way for me to get some aerobic exercise and enable me to exercise regardless of the weather. I also bought a balance board to stand on while I do some work with small dumb bells, a relatively painless way to engage those “core” muscles.
I started very s-l-o-w, using the stepper every other day for 20 minutes and the balance board about twice a week for 10 minutes. Within 10 days, I noticed a weird sensation in my right leg, a sense of it being flushed. During my regular chiropractor appointment, he noticed my lower back and glutes were tight and my hips off balance.
“What’s going on here? You’ve got some new problem areas. Have you been doing squats or something?”
“Actually I bought a stepper,” I said proudly. My chiropractor works with elite athletes, and I figured he’d be impressed by my newly upgraded fitness program.
“A stepper?” he asks incredulously. “That explains why these muscles and joints are so tight.”
I tell him about the “heat flashes” my leg has been having. They don’t exactly hurt, they’re just uncomfortable. Sometimes my leg kind of aches.
He looks at me and says, “That flush is the first stage of sciatica. Your nerves are getting increasingly irritated. No stepping for you.”
My 10 days of exercise have now resulted in three weeks of therapy with my chiropractor. My leg and hip still aren’t back to normal, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to get back on the stepper.
I feel more than a little frustrated, caught in a Catch 22 where I need to exercise to keep my back and midsection from slumping and causing more problems, but my heart and my scoliosis make it really difficult to exercise without injury. It takes far more exercise now to get the results a moderate amount of exercise used to deliver, and yet I’m not physically capable of doing what I need to do.
One step forward, two steps back. That’s the aging process in a nutshell—enough to make a grown Grrrl cry.
Copyright 2006 Veronica McCabe Deschambault. www.v-grrrl.com.
December 27, 2006
Reader Comments (12)
Yes, I totally hear you on the things "going slowly to mush." The frightening thing is that, even if you maintain a healthy weight, the lack of muscle tone is gonna getcha one way or another: even if you exercise, things just don't stay in the right places anymore! :-(
The bright side:
Although we are slowly waving good-bye to our once able bodies, we can at least boast about how much wiser we are.
Can't we?
Right?
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Wishing you, your family and your readers a Healthy, Peaceful and Creative 2007!