Melissa Louise

Packed up the car and hit the road. We are having a gas and dinner stop in Spanish Fork. Hoping to make Moab tonight and camp before heading to Mesa Verde in the morning. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

One thing that really helps me when I am not hungry but considering eating the thing anyway is to remember that if they aren't calories I actually need, it's waste whether it's in the garbage or in my mouth. If I am not in need of the calories, then I am in fact wasting food by eating it. This helps me throw things away when I need to because I'm just choosing between the actual trash and the trash that I turn my stomach into when I eat what I don't need.

Hey Jerem, sorry it took so long for any responses! Hi! How is this first week going?

Yikes, a donut shop job?! I'd weigh at least 100 pounds more than I do! Great goals! How is the body weight workout going? About the van, your time and energy are valuable. Sometimes it's ok to walk away from/get rid of something.

Hi Kim! I'm right there with you on the 14/16 fence. It will be wonderful to be solidly back in the 14s! What kind of healthy snacks are sounding appealing to you right now? Love your painting side quest. Baking is about the only creative thing I do.

Your push to move forward when you don't want to and it isn't fun is really inspiring. Well done! I am with you on the scale. I do much better when I only weigh myself every few weeks maximum. That way, there's always at least some progress to be excited about.

Oof, long drives are rough. Maybe some stretching tonight?

Ok. So, general advice about knees and yoga first. First, I am not a yoga teacher or any kind of fitness professional, and I am in no way qualified to give medical advice. I am just a person who has dodgy knees and likes to do yoga. Be careful! Sharp pain is a total no-no. Your yoga practice should be about doing something for yourself, not TO yourself. There is a difference between breathing into a stretch/through a difficult stretch and pushing past the warnings of bad pain. Do you feel like you have a handle on feeling that difference when you practice? One of the best ways to protect your knees during yoga is to make sure you are really activating the big muscles in your legs to stabilize the knees. Try standing in mountain pose with your legs fairly relaxed (if possible). That gives you a good idea of what things feel like when your legs muscles are not very activated, and are not protecting your knees. Then, lift your toes up and you should suddenly feel your lower leg muscles firing. If you can lift the whole front of your feet off the ground (use a wall or chair for balance as needed), you should feel your upper leg muscles firing, and the sides of your knees stabilizing. You want to remember what it feels like when your leg muscles are engaged, because that's what you want to strive for while practicing other poses, especially standing poses. You can use that toes/feet up trick in almost any standing pose to test whether your leg muscles are activated. Now try doing warrior I or II. You want to sort of pretend there's a ball or invisible line between your thighs, and activate your pelvic and leg muscles to draw them toward each other. Again, this helps stabilize your knees in these types of poses. It sounds like you might be having more trouble with kneeling poses, though. Is that right? That's what I had the most trouble with after knee surgery, and honestly, I still have a hard time putting direct weight on that kneecap. Some of the things I do include: practice on top of a thick rug, and/or double up on yoga mats. I also got a better yoga mat that is thicker. put a towel under your knee (like for cat/cow), or roll up the end of your mat and put it under your knee. For cat/cow, if a towel under your knee isn't enough, you can do it from a seated position, arching and flexing the back. modify so the knee doesn't have to go down. So instead of a low lunge with the knee on the ground, I do a high lunge and keep that knee up. The knee up versions of some things are harder on other muscles, but work better for my knee. For child's pose, I did a forward fold from a cross legged position instead for about a year because I couldn't do child's pose, and even now I still do a wide child's pose with my legs farther apart than most people. For anything where they say "come to hands and knees," I look to see if it's something I can do either from a plank or from the ground instead of putting pressure on my knee in a hands and knees pose. For any poses that are done from kneeling, I do them from seated. I can't kneel for more than a minute or two. Now about sideways knee pressure and twisting. There are some poses you want to be very careful about where you are pushing on your body. Specifically, tree pose and triangle pose for me. In tree pose, your foot needs to be way down by your ankle or way up by your crotch. It's important that your foot stay away from your knee so you don't put sideways pressure on the knee. With triangle pose, unless you're lucky enough to be able to get your hand on the ground, I recommend using a block instead of putting your hand on your shin/leg, again to avoid pushing against your knee. For twisting, I try to remain mindful about pose transitions and turn my body instead of twisting my knee, especially while weight bearing. I hope that helps! There are lots of great videos on youtube about protecting the knees in yoga. If you want to ask about modifying any specific poses that are giving you trouble, I'll be glad to try and help. I think the NF yoga might use different names for poses than what I am used to.

I don't think that workout schedule is ideal for ANYONE. Only you can decide where your priorities are, but it seems like it's possible that trying to simultaneously stick to a strict heavy lifting schedule, do a cut/recomp, AND push yourself training for a 10k might mean that at least one of those goals will suffer from limited bandwidth. You may be a person who benefits from multitasking and feels challenged in a good way by frequently seeing your goals just a bit above what you're doing. Is that the case?

Yes! Ishiguro! I hesitate to play favorites, but he might be my favorite literary fiction author. I loved The Remains of the Day and Never Let me Go so much. I'm working on An Artist of the Floating World right now, but I'll have to pick up The Buried Giant after that. re: generational memory, I enjoyed the Eduardo Galeano Memory of Fire trilogy. Hope you have the most fun on your trip this weekend!

Hahaha! No worries, you don't have to love camping like I do. I recently learned that one of the friends I hike with often hates hiking. My mind was kind of blown, but it turns out that she does it because she loves the time we spend together, and we always take her really interesting new places. To each their own.

Love that mug! What are these pigeon variations being discussed? I'm looking for ways to improve my terrible hip mobility, but the only hip opener I know is a regular pigeon pose.

I meditate for many of the same reasons Leimanu said. Mostly I am trying to give myself a peaceful mental space where I can work on my issues. Without intervention like meditation, my mental space is fairly apocalyptic. I think it's working! In the past, I've sometimes been able to recognize those moments, like Leimanu said, when I find my emotions and reactions running the show instead of making conscious decisions, but I generally haven't been able to change the loop other than to recognize that it's happening. Yesterday, I was getting frustrated because I had a lot to do, and was trying to plan out the most efficient geography of my errands, but it was difficult because my end time was very uncertain. My husband is usually unable to predict what time he will be done at work and need a ride, and then sometimes he isn't able to respond to texts or calls in the afternoon. So I was feeling frustrated, like "Well, I can go to Costco, but do I have time to stop at the grocery store or will he want to be picked up?" And then I had a moment where I realized that my emotional state is more important than planning out the most efficient possible errands, and took deep breaths in the parking lot until I was making conscious decisions about how I was feeling instead of letting my impatience and frustration run the show. Now to keep that mindfulness through today as I pack for a big trip and hit the road.

Uuugh I am with you on the team that can't go back to sleep after being woken up. Yay for billable work! Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

That sounds like success. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Re: you and Shaarawy and the existential crisis of doom, I'll just leave this here: My husband is the king of wanting to map out every single possible if then scenario and be assured of what might happen given every possible detail before committing to a decision for fear of missing out on a better possible opportunity. I will say to you both what I say to him when that goes beyond the point of reason/utility: not making a decision or taking a leap forecloses on just as many options as making a decision does, they're just harder to see. So yes, absolutely, do the research, thinking, planning, and analysis you need to do, and then leap! Your happiness is valuable, and worth taking risks to achieve. And remember, we are rangers! If you leap and lose everything, you have a bunch of people here who will come live off the land with you. There will be no underpass living for you. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Hahahaha! This will be the longest camping based trip I have ever taken. To some of my friends who aren't outdoorsy, I am SUPER HARDCORE. Compared to some of the folks I hang out with who routinely do epic 300+ mile backpacking trips, I don't even register on the scale. It's all relative. WWACH, I love that gif so much. I'll do something extra Swanson-esque on my trip in honor of it.

Day four! You are going so strong. Congrats on the job front. It's a wonderful thing to have a great interview and a probable offer, even if you're not sure how you feel about the job. I love that your staple foods are jar salads and quiche. Right now, mine are yogurt, slow cooked pork butt, and rice (not all eaten together). I have some ambitious cooking plans for later today though. Where is that time turner when I need it? Your username always makes me think of that scene from the movie Alien when Ripley is singing the Madonna song.

Oh, vegetables. I don't think I've eaten one since I went off my elimination diet. I've got some cauliflower in the fridge to cook up today, though. Come to think of it, I've got a ridiculous amount of carrots and squash in there too. Guess I know what I'm doing later. Yay rest day! Enjoy it.

Good luck at swimming class tomorrow! I can't wait to hear how it goes. Hey Jodie, you're here in Utah, too? Hi! I'm in Salt Lake. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I'll write a proper reply about knee yoga stuff when I'm not cross eyed from sleep deprivation, but just chiming in to enthusiastically second Cadence's recommend of an Iyengar yoga class. If you get a good teacher, they are amazing. I love the precision of that approach. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Yes, board games! My husband played Boggle with me over the weekend to cheer me up. . I am a big fan of Ticket to Ride, which version(s) do you like best? What are Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert like? So the epic trip has a very ambitious itinerary. We bought tickets to see Mark Knopfler at Red Rocks in Colorado. The concert is on a Wednesday night, so we took Thursday and Friday off too, and then my husband managed to get the entire week off, so it has morphed into a ten day roundup of awesome. If all goes according to plan, we will hit Mesa Verde National Park, Great Sand Dunes National Park, the Mark Knopfler concert, Rocky Mountain National Park, and then Colorado National Monument/Black Ridge Canyons wilderness area. We will be car camping for the first half of the trip, and then hopefully doing short backpacks during the second half. We are eyeing Glacier Gorge to Black Lake in RMNP, and Rattlesnake Canyon in Black Ridge wilderness as overnight backpacking trips. We haven't been to any of those places before, so it's all very exciting. I'm planning to be a dork and try to do crow pose in each of the parks we visit. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Don't go to the dark side! I assure you our cookies are superior. I dedicate this photo montage of cookies of the rebellion to Shaarawy, long may the force be with you. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Are those biscuits I smell burning? As my good friend would say, insurance smells like sadness and stale cheetos. I have outsourced the resolution of one of the insurance fights to my husband to preserve my remaning sanity while I resolve the other one. Is this how teamwork works?

I was reading another recruit's thread and got to thinking about anxiety. I said in my first post in my thread that my superpowers include anxiety, and while I mean that lightheartedly, I've been realizing lately that I also mean it semi-seriously. What follows is my little meditation on the upsides of anxiety. For most of my life, I've had negative feelings about my issues with anxiety, hypervigilance, and control. I mean, yes, being so hyperaware that sleep is only sort of a nodding acquaintance, and being so jumpy that unexpected thunder causes me to start so violently I throw my drink in the air is difficult (had to change clothes after that one yesterday). And let's not even talk about the trust and control issues. I have said many times in my life that if I could change one thing about myself, it would be the anxiety/hypervigilance/control issues that interfere with so much normal functionality in my life. And while improving my response to certain situations and rewiring my brain away from the nonuseful products of those issues is still something I am working toward (mostly through yoga and meditation), I now find myself striving to embrace that part of me. Goodness knows that trying it push it away hasn't done me a bit of good. I joked a little while ago to a friend that anxiety was my superpower, repeated it in my challenge intro here, and now I realize that it's true. Here is a comic showing anxiety as a superpower. What if anxiety actually IS a superpower? In an effort to reframe my negative feelings about my anxiety issues, here is a list of things that are amazing about it: Immunity to poison! Anti-anxiety medications have no effect on me. No one could ever slip me a valium and get away with anything while I am impaired.Increased night-time vigilance! Come the zombie apocalypse, I'd be the perfect sentry to sleep by the fire and wake at any little noise to ensure the safety of camp. Zombie raccoons will not be taking over on my watch.Party planner for the apocalypse! I am a great person to have around in terrible times, because that's mostly where I live. It's home. I know this place, I already foresaw the worst possible outcomes and planned for them. Surgery didn't go the way it was supposed to? I HAVE A PLAN FOR THAT. And I am almost always surprised and delighted when something turns out well.Magically suspicious! I see right through masks meant to conceal potentially dangerous intent or emotions. The possibly dangerous person having a talk with Jesus about which underwear to buy at Target? The terrifying survivalist who flipped his rig and is laying down in the dirt and approaches us with a knife behind his back when we stop to see if we can help? (true story). I will steer us right clear of those situations.Carrying concealed empathy! If you are anywhere around me, I care how you feel. All of the time. It's impossible for me to be indifferent to anyone's feelings. With enough effort, I can put myself into anyone's shoes and use that ability to remove anger and annoyance with the things other people do. I can also use this power to help people feel less alone, or just to lend an ear. Lovecraftian weirdness threshold! My own world is so strange and confusing that my tolerance for other strangeness is high.+3 goggles of recognition! I have built in facial recognition software. It's because people are never faceless to me, and I interact on an individual level with most people I come into contact with. I will always know which person at a restaurant is our server, and if I see the lady who works at the pharmacy twelve years from now in some other place, I will know her face. I took this for granted for years because I thought everyone could do it. Sole survivor! While I sometimes enjoy other people, I can take care of myself. I would never let anyone treat me poorly because I felt I needed them. Conversely, you can know that time I spend with you voluntarily is never because I need something from you. I know on a fundamental level that other people are a luxury, not a necessity.It is what it is! I am very practical about accepting things and people how they come. I don't need my loved ones to be perfect, I just need them to be themselves. I have little innate sense that life should be "fair," which saves me a lot of time. Instead of spending time questioning WHHHHHY I just get on with adapting. I don't waste time and precious resources trying to fix other people, because I know the hard way that you can't, but I also know the difference between tough love and being an unfeeling jerk. I won't waste my time trying to fix what isn't mine to fix, but I will also never give up on someone I love or stop loving them while they work on fixing themselves.See? Read that, and tell me anxiety isn't a kind of superpower. Now, all of those things come with downsides big and small, but that's not what the list is for. Whatcha got, people? What are some of the upsides of anxiety, or other unexpected superpowers you have? How can we turn our negative feelings about our perceived flaws into strengths without undermining our efforts to become our best selves?