[Teros]

Sounds awesome.  I don't really know how to 'run slow' with pacing.  I just run and/or feel like I'm going to pass out or walk.

[jonfirestar]

On 6/22/2022 at 7:56 PM, Teros said:

Sounds awesome.  I don't really know how to 'run slow' with pacing.  I just run and/or feel like I'm going to pass out or walk.

Yeah that's a thing. I can say it's a lot easier when you are able to hold a faster pace. Relearning how to ultra shuffle is a bit of a pain. I really hope that I can pick up pace relatively quickly after this but time will tell. It's better to run more miles slower than fewer faster. 

[jonfirestar]

Update:

 

I've honestly been in a bit of a funk this week, I've been feeling a little drawn out. I think I've finally come to the conclusion that I'm probably not eating nearly enough. I'm getting hungry again and i've currently got a genuine appetite but my entire relationship with food has been altered over the last few years to the point that it's pretty easy for me to simply not eat. So I'm essentially intermittent fasting right now but without anything near a big enough break in order to actually fuel my activities. I really don't know how I want to approach this. Counting calories doesn't appeal and how can I eat intuitively when my intuition is not to eat? I ate a candy bar after my run today because I had sugar cravings and it was available. I know this was not a bad thing to have done but even with it when I juggle up total calories in my head I'm coming in well under 2000 calories and that really isn't enough. My weight also took a bit of a sharp slump where it's been edging downwards slowly for a while. 

 

Did a run on Tuesday and today. Tuesday's run was decent if not as good as Sunday but today's run was pretty awful. I'm taking it on myself to eat before I run. Or put another way I'm going to eat breakfast. Fasted cardio is one of those things that seem good on paper but isn't particularly effective. 

[Tanktimus the Encourager]

The intuitive eating book says if you struggle with getting enough food you don't try to eat intuitively till you work through whatever makes it hard to eat enough. I know that probably doesn't help much bit at least you don't have to beat yourself up for not being able to eat intuitively. 

[juliebarkley]

 Glad to see you back! We are always here when you need support.

 

On 6/13/2022 at 3:36 PM, jonfirestar said:

I've really not been talking much to anyone and the longer I'm out of action the harder it is to reach out again.

Just remember that though it is harder to reach out as the days pass, the people who miss you are happier to hear from you will each passing day as well. Because you are missed.

 

On 6/20/2022 at 4:25 PM, jonfirestar said:

To be very honest this is going much better than I expected it to. Mainly because I weigh a heck of a lot more right now than when I last ran and the effects of that are really showing, just not as much as I expected it to. 

 

I had planned to run Wednesday, Friday and Sunday and hit each and every one. Not only am I running I'm finding myself looking forward to doing it, which I really didn't expect for a little while.

Hooray. Run, @jonfirestar, run!

 

 

I have trouble getting enough to eat too. It can really sap your energy on a bad day. I try to make sure I have some easy high-calorie options available. Right now I have several kinds of cheese and an assortment of crackers, peanut butter chocolate, and homemade beef jerky. The latter two are sitting in plain sight, which means they get eaten more often.

[jonfirestar]

8 hours ago, Tanktimus the Encourager said:

The intuitive eating book says if you struggle with getting enough food you don't try to eat intuitively till you work through whatever makes it hard to eat enough. I know that probably doesn't help much bit at least you don't have to beat yourself up for not being able to eat intuitively. 

I'm not beating myself up about it I'm just thinking aloud about how I should approach things. I don't really have the answers right now. That's why I'm simply starting by eating breakfast  

 

 

4 hours ago, juliebarkley said:

 Glad to see you back! We are always here when you need support.

 

Always great to hear from you, Julie. 

 

4 hours ago, juliebarkley said:

Just remember that though it is harder to reach out as the days pass, the people who miss you are happier to hear from you will each passing day as well. Because you are missed.

Thank you so much. That means a great deal to me. 

 

4 hours ago, juliebarkley said:

I have trouble getting enough to eat too. It can really sap your energy on a bad day. I try to make sure I have some easy high-calorie options available. Right now I have several kinds of cheese and an assortment of crackers, peanut butter chocolate, and homemade beef jerky. The latter two are sitting in plain sight, which means they get eaten more often.

Yeah I've got to come up with something like that. I recently overhauled my entire diet trying to clean things up a bit. The net result is now I'm not eating nearly enough. It's hard, at least for me, to strike a balance.  It's a work in progress. I guess. 

[Salinger]

Hope you are having a nice day Jon ❤️ xx

[jonfirestar]

11 hours ago, Salinger said:

Hope you are having a nice day Jon ❤️ xx

Thanks. It was nice enough

 

Update.

 

Still feeling in a bit of a funk but good things are nonetheless happening. I took things pretty easy today and even managed to eat myself some breakfast. 

[SkyGirl]

JOOOOON JON JON JON HELLLOOOOOOO I'M SO GLAD YOU'RE HEEEEERE

[jonfirestar]

7 hours ago, SkyGirl said:

JOOOOON JON JON JON HELLLOOOOOOO I'M SO GLAD YOU'RE HEEEEERE

Hey Sky!

It's great to see you too! How have you been? 

One of these days I'm going to go and catch up on everyone's challenges but I've been insanely busy since I posted my challenge  

[jonfirestar]

Update

 

Oh if I had hair I'd be pulling it out with the stress of today  While I won't attempt to explain what I do for a living more than saying I'm an IT guy who builds bits of internet infrastructure. Currently I'm in the middle of the biggest release of my career! I expected things to break, but sometimes things break in new and unexpected ways. And today right as I was about to report in to my team 'I'm done start testing' everything fell over. After spending the whole day digging through the things I'd done and then hours of reading network traffic trying to figure out why it wasn't working I found the problem was something that I didn't do at all. Actually it was a pre-existing issue that had gone unnoticed for quite some time.  It was also something I'd never seen before.  

 

Ahh anyway that's a brief glimpse of where my headspace has been for the last week or so. I think and hope I can finally put this to rest tomorrow. 

 

Still the running has been happening on track. Things are improving albeit not quite as linear a fashion as I was kind of expecting. Still overall things are going well and I'm slowly getting faster and faster. My fastest and best feeling run happened over a week ago and that's a little annoying but I'm just happy to be getting out there. 

 

I'm still struggling to fuel myself correctly. That was a struggle I had today and I think some of my issues could easily be solved just by getting on top of this. I really need to have a breakfast that I can just grab out of the fridge. There is very little chance of me having it if I have to make it first. That's the simple, brutal truth. I went 18 hours without eating anything and then did a run, still without eating so it's little wonder I felt like I'd bonked hard. 

Since I started this challenge a couple of weeks ago my weight has dropped over 7 pounds. I want to lose that weight but it shouldn't be dropping quite so fast. 

[Maigs]

Don't know if this would be helpful for your breakfasts, but mine everyday for years now is PB&J oatmeal. Scoop of oatmeal two scoops of water and throw it in the microwave for 3 minutes while I get dressed. Then add a big spoonful of peanut butter and a smaller spoonful of jelly and stir. Wham bam done. I can't be bothered to doing anything more in the morning (not even using PB2 instead of peanut butter since it involves a splash of milk and extra stirring...) But I can consistently do this. Depending on the amount of peanut butter it's about 400+ calories with a decent chunk of fat and protein so it holds me over until lunch just fine

[Cheetah]

18 hours ago, jonfirestar said:

running has been happening on track

 

Keep up the good work!

[jonfirestar]

22 hours ago, Maigs said:

Don't know if this would be helpful for your breakfasts, but mine everyday for years now is PB&J oatmeal. Scoop of oatmeal two scoops of water and throw it in the microwave for 3 minutes while I get dressed. Then add a big spoonful of peanut butter and a smaller spoonful of jelly and stir. Wham bam done. I can't be bothered to doing anything more in the morning (not even using PB2 instead of peanut butter since it involves a splash of milk and extra stirring...) But I can consistently do this. Depending on the amount of peanut butter it's about 400+ calories with a decent chunk of fat and protein so it holds me over until lunch just fine

Thanks, any and all suggestions are welcome. Always. Interestingly a few years ago, before I first got sick, that's really close to what I was eating and had been eating for breakfast for several years. It was even lazier though. Overnight oats, with milk and yogurt, and PB. Honey rather than Jelly since I'm not a fan. Just thrown into a jar (no stiring) and by morning it'll combine together enough that it barely takes any stirring at all. I feel your distaste of extra stirring! 

 

There's a bit of a mental block. Probably because it all started with me simply not being able to eat the breakfast I'd been eating for years. I mean I'd put it in my mouth and then want to spit it out. Funny how your body can communicate you know. My body was actually telling me 'you've got a massive infection in your gut. Don't feed it.' I'm supposed to only eat clear soup in those situations lol. 

 

Ahh sorry  this is why I have such a hard time coming back here, you know. I've literally had only one thing to talk about for more than two years. 

 

4 hours ago, Cheetah said:

Keep up the good work!

 

Thanks. Slow going but it's going. 

[jonfirestar]

Update. 

 

Oh another weird day, we had another death. This one is less personal to me but one of my wife's family members and she's really torn up. They are in Floridia and right now it doesn't look like we're going to be able to get out there. 

 

I'm feeling a lot better today. I did eat breakfast, and lunch and dinner lol. I've been thinking about food a lot, which is actually encouraging. The dinner I made today was exceptionally good. I don't really find it so much fun anymore but I'm still a decent cook. Today I amazed myself. I think a lot of the credit does go to Hez for doing the shopping. Anyway long story short I don't feel this way about food much anymore. I generally don't care what I eat on any given day. I'm still doing the cooking because I've always done the cooking, but any effort I put in is entirely for a want to give my wife something good and healthy rather than any interest in the craft itself. I'm taking this as a good sign and with gratitude.

 

No run planned for today it's due tomorrow. I did take a walk. It's three miles and something I'm doing on days I'm not running and don't have anything else to do. It's three miles because that's how far I can walk on my lunch break on a leisurely walk. Since I still work from home (it's because I'm ill so often, surprise) getting out every day is vital for my mental health. So I make that happen.

 

I was struggling to even walk for a while but now thankfully I no longer have that issue. 

 

I really don't want to just complain about being sick. I'm beyond tired of it. It's why I have a hard time with talking to anyone. I really miss Mr_Wills today. He was always someone I could just chat shop with. You know give me something other than, being sick to talk about and I would have been talking to him about the stuff I found this week because it's weird computer stuff and he would have been interested. 

 

I should probably stop right here. 

[Chris-Tien Jinn]

On 6/28/2022 at 3:04 PM, jonfirestar said:

it's weird computer stuff

 

Sounds interesting ...... 

[Salinger]

Hey Jon so sorry you are missing Willy  sending you love always.

 

💙

 

what did you make to eat last night ? Looking for more recipes !

 

hope you are well rested and sleeping (not awake like me at 4am!!) xx

[jonfirestar]

6 hours ago, Chris-Tien Jinn said:

Sounds interesting ...... 

Well, the problem itself turned out to be extremely simple and perfectly obvious once I figured it out but it's not something I'd ever encountered before. It was just an arp table overflow on the dhcp server, but the symptoms were driving me crazy. I had appropriated a server to test on  and that one was working just fine but the one my colleague was trying to work on just wouldn't work. Then I went around clearing up some weird traffic (which I suspect was caused by some strange interaction between lacp and ipmi that was causing a lot of L2 traffic to be sent to the vlan that I was looking at that shouldn't have been there at all) and it started working. Only to then run into the same problems about 30 minutes later.  It was only once I realised that the dhcp server was seeing packet loss to itself that I got on the right track. It makes sense, there are many thousands of bits of tin that use it. I'd filtered out arp on my tcpdump, that probably didn't help. 

Problem took many hours to find. The solution, replace a number with a bigger number in a proc file. 

 

4 hours ago, Salinger said:

Hey Jon so sorry you are missing Willy  sending you love always.

 

💙

 

what did you make to eat last night ? Looking for more recipes !

 

hope you are well rested and sleeping (not awake like me at 4am!!) xx

Thanks Lizz, I got pretty emotional while I was writing that. I do miss him a lot. 

 

Please dont' look to me for recipes! I'm so apathetic towards food right now that everything I'm making is extremely simple. So it was just burgers, but the meal was just amazing. 

 

Alas no, my sleep over this week has been atrocious. Although I slept better last night. 

[shaar]

Hi Jon!  Wanted to check in and see how you were getting along.

 

I'm sorry about the poor sleep lately, it's been happening to us too and it just throws so much off in so many ways.

 

I'm glad you are getting yourself outside for walks, your mental health is worth it and you deserve all the good things that you can funnel your way!

 

Hang in there friend, you're doing great! ❤️ 

[jonfirestar]

5 hours ago, shaar said:

Hi Jon!  Wanted to check in and see how you were getting along.

Thanks Shaar! I'm doing well, overall, ups and downs, you know, but overall things are good and getting better. 

 

5 hours ago, shaar said:

I'm sorry about the poor sleep lately, it's been happening to us too and it just throws so much off in so many ways.

Doesn't it just! I think it's just a reaction to the stress I'm under but it's good stress, if that makes sense. 

[jonfirestar]

Update:

 

Well as I've already mentioned I've been having trouble sleeping. I'm having issues going down. I'm not sure why it's not run away thoughts or anything. Just a general restlessness when I try and sleep at night. And I've been waking up really early. That's the time of year lol. It was less of an issue when I'd plan to be up that early but I'm just getting up with the sunrise, Which at the moment in my part of the world is at around 4:45am  No, blackout blinds don't make a difference. My body just knows... 

 

So yesterday I was really just exhausted. I did go for my run and it didn't go at all well. That's okay though, the challenge is all about consistency and not about how those workouts go. In fact it's my firm belief that no matter how good or how bad any single workout goes, it makes almost no difference. Consistency is key. My run was a little shorter and a lot slower. 

 

One thing I didn't have trouble with is food. I was just hungry and ate so much more than I normally would. I'm also good with that and okay with it. I feel like I needed a refeed but it's also not the kind of habit I want to get into. I'm really looking for a healthy balance. 

 

I ate less today but still more than I have been. Three meals. This is good. Feeling hungry like this is honestly not something I've had for years. 

 

 

[Salinger]

Hey morning Jon, I have been waking early too, around 4/5am. Kind of annoying, i can never fall back to sleep. 

 

Hoping your day goes smoothly xx

[jonfirestar]

14 minutes ago, Salinger said:

Hey morning Jon, I have been waking early too, around 4/5am. Kind of annoying, i can never fall back to sleep. 

 

Hoping your day goes smoothly xx

Bit annoying isn't it? And me too. I pop awake. 

[Teros]

On 6/23/2022 at 6:31 PM, jonfirestar said:

how can I eat intuitively when my intuition is not to eat?

100% THIS.

 

I know that intuitive eating works for a lot of people, but when I've given that advice.... like, I don't *trust* my intuition.  My intuition is to have ice cream for breakfast, or eat a whole box of gluten free cookies.  My next intuition is to not eat anything until 3pm and then realize suddenly that I've ravenous.  I NEED structure to get my body regulated.  I hate counting calories too, but what I found was measureing/weighing things when I batch-cook and then eating whatever when I'm ready seems to work.  So I'll cook a bunch of steak and beans or chicken thighs, etc; weigh it out into 8oz serving containers and then I know that I'll eat 2 of those bowls per day + vegetables + 1 fruit + 1 yogurt and I'm solid.  It takes the intuition out of the equation since in my brain it's more like, 'Gotta eat twice, gotta have these 3 items'. and the portioning/calories is already done.

 

 

[Marauder]

Sorry for the restless evenings. I suffer from the brain that won’t stop but when I’ve felt restless before when trying to get to sleep, the only thing that worked for me was getting up and doing something for a bit and trying again.  I got worse and more frustrated if I laid there and kept trying. Even if it’s just a bit of stretching or reading.