2019: the Year of Self-Improvement

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge of life since I started writing this blog, a little more than nine years ago, under the not-terribly-futureproof moniker, Travels with a Nine-Year-Old.

The nine-year-old is now 18, and within months of graduating high school. Next stop? A year out (some of it in China), then university, almost certainly in the UK for PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics). I am surprised to find that I’m closing in on 45, and that we’ve been in Bali for more than five years.

Both midlife – and, let’s face it, I’m unlikely to live past 90 – and spawn taking flight are pretty liminal life stages. Neither are bad things. I look forward to seeing Zach safely launched, although I’m well aware that, at least for folk of privilege, adolescence now officially extends to around age 24, so this is just another stage in the parenting journey. And I don’t feel or look as old as I might have thought I would, had I ever thought about what 45 looked like.

My brother, however, was relatively recently diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, which is one of those things that turns lives upside down. It’s his story to tell – he writes about his life with autism and, now, with both autism and cancer at Aspi.Blog – but it has very much carved a dividing line through the lives of others, too, shearing the last few months neatly into “before cancer”, when one lived a care-free existence replete with personal and professional activity, and “after cancer”, when one, well, didn’t.

A friend, who lost his best friend to cancer in his 30s, said that since then he and his wife have chunked their lives into 3-year goals, so that at any given point they’re working towards the next objective. I don’t think I can be quite that structured in finding positives from someone else’s cancer journey, but I have formulated a broad-brush five-year vision, and I’m looking to set myself goals that nurture that bigger picture every month. (Why vague? Partly because the geography is going to relate to Zach’s life choices.)

So, yes, this is, in essence, a New Year’s resolution post. In February. And, yes, you have my permission to stop reading.

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Have they gone now? Whew.

One set of goals is financial. I’m not going to share specifics here, but the global economic boom isn’t going to last forever (far from it), and I’m not nature’s most provident person (VERY far from it), so I’m working on a series of targets, 3-month, 6-month, and 12-month, chunked monthly.

Another goal is to be more present for Zach. Cancer brought me to the UK for a slice of last year and juggling work, travel, family and cancer wards didn’t seem to leave a lot of space for anything else (and, yes, I tried to do more – friends, culture, socialising – and, in the end, I spent the first week of January flat on my back exhausted). So in addition to being physically present, I’m working on being actively present: cooking, putting phones in jail over meals, making the time to chat not only over dinner but when he comes in from school, actively doing stuff together (when his own friendships and relationship permit), and generally being mindful. I’m also being tidier. (That’s less a goal per se than a means of feeling both maternal and in control.)

Beyond those two overarching goals, the first goal I’m chasing is weight loss. I read that New Year’s resolutions are best pursued one at a time, which made sense to me, so, while I’ve got a stack of stuff I want to work on, I’m starting with weight loss. When I weighed myself towards the start of January, I was over 80kg (that’s more than 12.5 stone, or 176lb), which is… a lot.

My target weight is 65kg (which is still a bit over 10 stone, or 140lb), largely because it’s comfortably within a healthy BMI, and it’s a plausible-sounding number, and from over 80kg to 65kg sounds like a good round number whether you’re thinking in kilos or stone. But I’m not hung up on the number. I never really weighed myself until I got fat. So if I get there and don’t like the way I look, I’ll drop a bit more. If I’m happy with my body before I get there, I’ll stop.

The goal is two-fold. The primary one is to be happy in my own skin again – it’s really no fun having your stomach get in the way when you bend over to reach for things or cringing each time you look in the mirror while you shower, and, yes, thin privilege is real and I want mine back. The secondary one is health: fitness, longevity, etc.

I’ve never been particularly fussed about my body, but that’s because it’s always done roughly what I wanted it to do, and from here on in, that gets a lot harder.

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For what it’s worth, there’s no great mystery to the weight gain. I finally managed to give up smoking in October 2016; I’ve had several rounds of medication for minor issues with weight-gain as an associated side-effect; I drink too much; and, despite being in my mid-40s, I persist in eating like I’m 22. Plus I did a bunch of travel. Jet lag is not conducive to a healthy diet and whenever I go to the UK, especially in winter, I stuff my fat face with childhood-era carbs, from salt and vinegar crisps to family-size bags of sweets to Yorkshire puds, that you just can’t get out here.

I am beginning to suspect there’s no great secret to weight loss, either: you simply need to consume fewer calories than you use and (and this is the hard part), stick with it. You also need to accept that, once your 40s hit, you can no longer eat what you feel like eating when you feel like eating: your relationship to food needs to fundamentally change. Time will tell if I’m there yet.

Anywise, I’m using an app called Noom, which counts your calories, measures your exercise calories, and gives you a calorie budget: you get extra food calories if you exercise, but not all the calories you use. (It also wants me to do 10,000 steps a day, but, while there’s a yoga studio approximately every 500 metres around here, pavements are in distinctly short supply.)

In January, I cut out booze (for Dry January, a British institution), stuck to 1200 calories a day (or thereabouts… I didn’t weigh my food because, well, who DOES that?!), started weighing myself daily, and started exercising (not all on the same day). I lost a solid 4kg, and can see the impact on my beer-gut, my bum and – oh joy of joys! – my double chin already. Along the way, I’ve rediscovered the joy of yoga and am feeling fitter, stronger, bendier and more relaxed.

For February, the plan is that I will have two more relaxed days every week, when I can drink alcohol and consume 800 calories more than the app says I can (fun tip: swim for a couple of hours and it gives you LOADS of calories). I’m also upping my exercise, adding two brutal hot Pilates sessions a week to my more leisurely melange of yoga, swimming (breaststroke), treadmill (walking) and weight training (desultory). It’s early days, but I seem to be still losing weight, albeit more slowly, and am feeling a lot less martyred than I was in Dry January.

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In other 2019 news… I’m hoping to tend this blog a little more than I have done over the last couple of years. I’m not sure what that’s going to look like, as yet, and you’d be unwise to hold your breath awaiting updates, but I hope – particularly for those vanishing few who’ve been along for the ride over the last near-decade(!) – it will be fun both to read and to write.