I’m going to go through each of the last four weeks and do a more quick summary than usual. I just want to get them over with at this point.
For Week 7, I began the week with a huge amount of work for preparation for both my conference I was holding, the person I was hosting, and the people who would be over for two parties. The person whom we had hired to clean the house simply didn’t show, which added a large amount of stress and required both the boyfriend and I to spend many hours cleaning that we hadn’t planned to do. While I had initially planned to exercise every day, the realities of the above and then running a three-day conference just threw all of that out the window. I was also better about food than I have been in the past in these sorts of circumstances, managing to stick to roughly within ~100 calories of my target each day; the untracked excess is because of some chips I was eating at the party, or some Andes mints I had during breaks. We then flew out on Saturday, which eliminated yet another day of exercise. That said, the amount of exercise badges is due to the Watch awarding them on Sunday, doing a week of Monday–Sunday rather than the US standard of Sunday–Saturday, and it’s non-adjustable. So, those badges are for August 01–07, not 07–13.
With Week 8, I was at the bf’s mother’s house in Michigan for Sunday–Wednesday. I slept. A lot. And I couldn’t track food as well since we ate out a fair bit. And I have no idea where her scale is. However, I did manage to get up and go walking the Tuesday and Wednesday evenings we were there, doing her loop and all the cul-de-sacs off of it which add up to just under a 40-minute, ~3.7km walk, which I extended slightly by doing her cul-de-sac twice. Then, we drove the ~5.5 hrs to my parents’ house in Ohio on Thursday, where I tested out my dad’s new eBike. Rode it again Friday and controlled my food intake better. And then Saturday he was killed. And I did nothing.
A friend of mine who also lost her dad fairly suddenly suggested that, at least for awhile, all that can be expected of you is to just continue to exist. Just waking up and getting out of bed can be enough for that day. I slept absolutely horribly the first night, staying up until I was so exhausted that I hoped sleep would come easily, but it didn’t. I was so exhausted emotionally and physically on the second day that I slept a long time, nearly half a day. The only exercise was getting myself and my mom out of the house, where she rolled in her wheelchair up the ~⅛ mile cul-de-sac and I walked with her. And then back. And then a neighbor who was mowing our yard (“anything I can do to help, please ask”) stopped and told us that they had talked with the police chief and were (a) starting the process of putting in a 3-way Stop at that intersection, and (b) also having the street named after my dad both in honor of him and because of all the walking up and down it he did every day. I stayed in the rest of the week.
I was with it enough towards the end of the week (and my mosquito bites had faded enough) to use my dad’s treadmill in the basement for a full 40 minutes on Thursday night. And five minutes on Friday to just fill my Watch Exercise ring. I was still sleeping a lot, and just staying in bed longer. Food from the Meal Train had continued and so I tried to keep things in moderation, but I definitely over-ate. The only reason the calories aren’t worse is that I was low on protein and figured it was better to be low on protein than to eat another few hundred calories a day. I also got back to weighing myself, but I again did not measure my body so don’t have a bf% measurement.
I will note that I finally brought myself to clean, reset, and wear my dad’s Fitbit Charge 5. It was very weird at first, where I was getting about 1.5x the steps on the FitBit as the Watch. I trusted the latter more than the former given that FitBit claimed I got about 600 steps while I slept. After trying multiple things, what ended up working was that I put the Fitbit on my non-dominant wrist and told the app it was on the dominant one. It still over-estimates steps by at least 10–20%, but it’s a lot better than >50%. But, I’m not using the Fitbit as my main tracker, it’s more for a second opinion. And to share with my brother and his wife.
… and, that kinda summarizes the last month.
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