What Matters Most

It’s a little girl’s fault.  She was in the park with a sparkling green hula hoop spinning round and round and it looked, well a bit ridiculous and lots of fun.  I had heard that hooping was a good form of exercise.  My latest stats search has it at 400-600 calories burned an hour, but that assumes you can keep it going for that long, which is a difficult assumption to make fact. 

Still, when a free intro to hooping class was offered I thought I’d try it out, not for the fitness aspect, as I’m still on hiatus, but for the fun aspect.  I signed up to satisfy that pure desire of “I want to do that.”  So I did that.  Or I tried to do that at least.

The hoops are bigger and heavier than the plastic ones for kids, although they can come in any color and sparkle if that’s what you want.  And yes, I wanted.  The weighted hoops are actually easier to keep up than the plastic ones for children.  Of course, talent and endurance is needed as well. But unlike lifting weights where your ability is slowly increased with time, hooping just hits you, and suddenly you’ve got it.  Like dancing, you do the moves over and over again until your body feels the rhythm and suddenly you’re flowing instead of jerking.  With hooping, the rhythm in your body keeps the hoop where you want it.  Of course, once you have hooping in one direction on your waist down you can move on to the other direction, then turning and walking, sidestepping, waist hooping, thigh hooping and off the body hooping. Like dancing, there is no end to moves you can make, no end to letting the rhythm take hold of you. 

While the exercise level is great, judging by how sore my muscles were the next day - I think it can be a full body workout once you get some different moves down - it’s the connection with your body that may be the best benefit. You can’t think your way through hooping; it'll come crashing down.  Instead, you have to let instinct take over so you can dip your hip suddenly and speed up the pace to not drop the hoop.  You can’t analyze, you have to feel your way through.  As a writer I spend a lot of my time in my head, and when I’m in pain I am always searching for ways to ignore my body, ways to take my mind off of it by being absorbed by something else.  But to really heal, you need to be in your body in order to listen to it.  It’s the connection with your body that will let you know how you are really doing and clue you in to what is wrong.

The one caveat I have, is that the hoops are heavy and until you get the moves down a lot of bruising can occur; it falls on your feet, it smacks against your calves or in my case, I wasn’t keeping the hoop even and I bruised my hip where the bone sticks out a bit.  A sore hip, though, helps to keep me from favoring that side and keeps the hoop in balance. After a day or two, the bruising started to fade and as I develop more skill the bruising occurs less. 

After the intro class, I signed up for more.  During the second class, while I was trying to turn in the opposite direction from which the hoop was spinning, I felt a slight ache that let me know that the muscle was breaking down in order to build itself stronger the way muscles do.  Hooping may bruise and ache at first but it’s part of the process of getting better - which can be said for life, really, and especially for getting healthier.

The main thing is that while hooping is a good fitness routine and a great way to reconnect with your body, the most important thing is, it’s fun.  And as any kid will tell you, that’s what matters most.

 

 

Suggested Reading: The Empowered Patient

I know I am supposed to give up the constant remedies, regimes and research, and focus on just ‘being’ for a while. This means, amongst other things, only fun reading allowed – mainly fiction and superficial non-fiction – basically fashion or anything written by a celebrity or, of course, those special occasions when it’s both. Anything medical is obviously strictly forbidden.
Sometimes, though, instinct kicks in and your gut tells you this is something that you need to know about. Such was the case with a @lissarankin tweet touting the Owning Pink Book Store. I barely took a glance before Elizabeth Cohen’s The Empowered Patient found its way into my shopping cart.
As it says on the back, Cohen’s book will give you “crucial advice on receiving the best possible health care.” I started with a highlighter, but soon realized that I didn’t need it.  I will never need a refresher as the contents are forever fixed in my mind. I’ll admit the heartbreaking stories of medical errors were tough to read, but the lessons they taught will never leave me.
There were hints, checklists and websites throughout, but organized in such a manner that I never felt confused or overwhelmed. Which is impressive, because when it comes to medical talk, unless you’re in the field, who doesn’t feel overwhelmed? Besides, I have it on good authority that even if you’re in the field, fear or doubt can render you just as lost as a novice. Cohen acknowledges this and gives you the resources to overcome whatever hesitation you may have.
The book felt very much like a cheat sheet on how to handle everything that goes with being ill – understanding your disease, finding your best way back to health, and handling all the bills that go with that process. It took me eight years of constant appointments, prescriptions, referrals and little progress to learn how to dump a bad doctor and to make the most of my five minutes of face time. For anyone who doesn’t feel like learning those lessons over nearly a decade, they can just read Chapter 2.
I even followed the web research advice and put symptoms in from before I went gluten-free. An article appeared, published in 2003, which talked about Celiac Disease and my symptoms. Up until a year and a half ago, I had never heard of the disease. Had I known the tricks Cohen gives, I could have been alerted to it several years earlier. With the guidance of the book, I would have also been able to find a doctor who would have been open to testing me, instead of just handing me more pills to treat the symptoms and not the cause.
I will admit, my first reaction was that had this sleek blue and white book been published eight years ago, I could have spared myself constant frustration with doctors, not to mention been able to diagnose myself years earlier. But the what-ifs quickly disappeared and now I can just celebrate the fact that I feel more prepared for whatever may come. So when I am recharged and ready to try the regimes and research again, I now know exactly what to do to get a positive outcome.
I guess sometimes, as every Celiac person should know, you just have to listen to your gut.

Greater Good

Ever since I was diagnosed with Celiac Disease, I'll go through phases where I'm hungry all the time. Today was one of those weird days.  My packed lunch didn't make it past one o'clock. So I had to dig into my stash - a drawer of gluten free goodies that I take from whenever someone brings in donuts, cake or cookies - basically every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I pulled out a container of Trader Joe's mini-peanut butter cups, opened it and remembered that I had just been in the copy room using the germ-filled machine along with a dozen other people - two getting over bronchitis, the rest with nasty colds. So I left the bag on MY desk and went to wash my hands.
On the way back I briefly noticed my co-worker, I'll call him Bob, had a half-eaten sandwich on his desk along with an open bag of pretzels. I didn't really care about this fact until I went to my desk and saw Bob with his hand in my container of candy.
Now I should mention that whenever I go into Bob's office he always offers me what he's eating. Normally, he pulls his hand out of the bag, licks his fingers, and asks if I want one. I always say no. He then follows up with what seems to be his favorite question "Can you eat this?"  I used to answer honestly, but since he asks it about the same food over and over, I just tell him I don't know and continue on with the reason I went into his office in the first place. I should also mention that people at my workplace tend to go trick or treating in the middle of the day. They go from desk to desk looking for whatever they are craving. Sue has chocolate, Kate has cookies gets whispered down the lane. So the fact that Bob was digging through my candy, while gross and rude, was not entirely unexpected.
"I just needed something sweet." He explained, as if that was reason enough for the smear of chocolate on the letter A of my keyboard.
"Well, you can have the whole thing now." I told him.
"Why?"
And that's where I was stuck. I've tried many times to explain to Bob why I can't take from the dip bowl after he's scooped out some with his bread stick, why I can't use the office toaster and why I clean out the office microwave before putting my food in. But he never gets it. Contamination is a word he can't understand having to do with food.
So, in what I thought was a moment of genius, I tried another way. "Bob, if I just touched rat poison and then put my hand in that candy, without washing my hands first, would you want to eat the candy?" What felt like five minutes later, he responded. "No?"
"No." I affirmed. "And gluten, which is in the bread of the sandwich you were just holding, will do the same thing to my stomach as rat poison would do to yours."
"Right. So you can't eat this now?"
"Nope."
Bob started to walk away and I handed him the candy.  He looked at it dubiously, but took it.
I should have been annoyed, and bummed, that I didn't have my candy.   But I didn't.   Instead, I felt victorious, having finally gotten through to Bob!  I was still hungry but I didn't mind. If it meant I would never have to explain to Bob again why one little pretzel stick could, in fact, hurt me I was okay with it.  It was all for the greater good.
I was still on my aren't-I- so-clever high when an hour later I went into Bob's office to drop some paperwork off. That's when I noticed the nearly full container of candy in his trash can. I asked Bob, somewhat bitterly, if he didn't like the candy.
He responded, "I'm not going to eat it if it's covered in poison!"
I know I shouldn't have given up, I should have tried again to get him to understand. But I didn't.  Instead all I said was, "Good call."
In truth, I was most likely helping him out. If I did tell him the candy wasn't covered in poison, I'm willing to bet he would have eaten it straight out of the trash.  Giving up this time, was for the greater good.