Maintenance

This article is posted out of order.  It should be read before 'breaking barriers', which is written a week later.

                On Thursday I keep my appointment at the DIF office, with the physical therapist.   A staff member did an intake interview, after which I was sent down the hall to talk with the doctor.  I met her in the open room.  A slender middle-aged woman with short hair attractively dressed in slacks approached me, and said I should come on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 3:30.  After a month they would re-evaluate me.

                This building is in a different part of town.  Thinking of the old railroad avenue as a boundary, this is on the other side.  The only thing that has taken me to that side of the town is the ‘Walmart’ store, locally called the Aurrera Bodega.  In order to find this location I had to take the long way around, along the main road in from Durango, the familiar path towards Aurrera and then make a left at the American hamburger restaurant.  I took the more direct way home, noticing landmarks along the way so I could take the more direct route next Monday.

                Aurrera is on the main thoroughfare into town from Durango and the highway.  I would be walking there now, where in the past I have always driven.  In the end, it is a short walk.  Not intimidating at all.  The veterinarian is also on that main road, closer to town, and so I stopped there to get some more flea medicine for Dog.  I have visited or passed by this shop at least five times before, always finding the older gentleman there, never his son the Doctor.  Today I was in luck.  The doctor was in.  I asked him about spaying Dog; we set an appointment for Sunday.

                The nurse CeCe is also in this same block, at her pharmacy ‘Angel’.  I stopped and sat for a long chat with her.  In previous blog posts I have mentioned her in context of the celebration of Our Lady of Guadalupe feast day.

                The following day is Friday; I rolled out the yoga mat and for the first time in a long time, moved along with the Beth Shaw tape ‘Yoga for Fitness’ that I used to use regularly, in I can’t remember how many years ago.  I felt great after that.  Again I packed a shake and headed out to the country, to see if Juan had plowed the garden.  I brought along the seeds I had been collecting, hoping to get something into the ground.

                I went to the bus station which is on the old railroad way.  This road, now called Constitution Avenue is on land still belonging to the federal government.  The avenue is wide.  Running down the center, no doubt where the railroad tracks used to be, is an elevated and paved sidewalk.   Lined with palm trees, it is well-used for exercise by the locals.  I found a bus in the station waiting for passengers; I was given permission to bring Dog on board, with the suggestion that we sit in the back.  That ‘porter’ was there to see me get on board.  I asked him for the price, ten pesos.  Such a deal!

                This porter is a character.  He is slender, probably about 5'10". He has a smooth browned face with a thick mustache and large warm eyes.  He tends to hover; this has confused me in the past as to his intentions.  When I had arrived from the airport by bus, he wanted to help me off with the luggage, but I had only the one light bag.  I used the station toilet before walking home; when I came out he was still near my luggage, hovering.  I asked him if he was still waiting for his tip, and he said no and walked away. 

         He is stoop shouldered, barely swinging his arms as he walks.  He wears a knitted shirt with a bus company logo at the breast.  He seems long-waisted, because he wears the belt to his jeans buckled very low, below the navel.  His walk is a lunge forward with long strides, a serious stride.  He is quick to laugh, an honest laugh from a humble heart; clearly he enjoys himself.

                On the day I went to the station to find a taxi to take me out to my country house, he called a taxi for me.  He waited with me.  When the taxi arrived the driver wanted to get off the main road to turn the car around.  The porter stood in his way, hands on the car hood, wordlessly indicating for him to stop so I could get in.  The driver verbally abused him, calling him an idiot and chasing him away.   After I got in, the driver pointed out that he felt it was dangerous to stop on the main road, and for that reason wanted to turn into the side road.  He said that fool should not be interfering, that he didn’t understand anything 

                This porter is a quiet and humble soul, who seems only to want to be of assistance.  His soulful eyes speak more than his lips.  He has a very pleasant face; I could detect no sign of idiocy.  Yet the taxi driver put the other man in perspective.  I have a glimpse as to how he is considered by the locals.

                On this day Dog and I are able to board the bus to El Pozole.  Another passenger is also getting off, which allows me time to work my way to the front of the bus.  The aisle is narrow; Dog’s paws keep knocking into people’s arms and things, as I carry her.

                We find the garden area roughly plowed.  Juan furrowed his own field, in alternate rows only.  Mine was simply turned over, with lots of clumps.  I went to the water pump house to get out the tools I would need.  This is the first time I am trying the keys I had copied in town.  I had left the originals in Michael’s house for when Jhampa came next.  My keys did not work; moreover, there is an extra lock added, for which I was not given the key.  I went to Michael’s house to retrieve the originals, but they were gone. 

                Well, I made the trip out here, what can I do with my time.  I decide to mark out the wall enclosure.  There are some bricks stacked up, so I use them.  They are not enough, so I use some of the construction boards that are lying around.  At last I have the perimeter marked out.  I am thinking that this is something that I can do with my own hands.  I can align the wall with string, and start laying bricks.  I watched my dad do it a lot.  Juan would be mixing cement to use inside the house, to finish the bedroom wall.  We would talk in a few days later about him resuming work on the house.  I could use that mixed cement.

                We walked back to the bus stop on the main road between Canatlan and Nuevo Ideal, highway 23.  Dog was dragging, her tongue hanging out.  Each time a speeding car went by, she would run into the weeds in fear.  Mercifully the trees gave a bit of shade as we waited at the pull-out.  There is road work just a little further down the road away from Canatlan, so that the traffic flowed in spurts.   I watched for a bus, and before long I saw one.  We ran to the farther end of the pull out; the bus used the full length of it, making us run further.  The big fat driver looked totally bored, maybe a bit put out.  I asked if I should pay him or pay in Canatlan.  Looking ahead at the road, he silently put his meaty palm out; I greased it with ten pesos.  This time Dog and I grabbed a front row seat, next to a cowboy.  We were the first ones off at Canatlan.  On the overhead screen a Will Smith film was showing, dubbed in Spanish.  I did not recognize the film, which is curious.  I thought I knew all his work. 

                I always wonder about the idea of showing a film on a bus ride.  This is common in China, as well.  In China there are always subtitles, because of the many dialects but one writing system.  It is impossible to hear the movie, however (or see the tiny subtitles).  Why play them?  Isn’t there a way to distribute hearing devices to the seats so that passengers can follow the film?  Being the film buff that I am, if there is a movie showing I want to see AND hear it.  This is one of those little gnawing annoyances that crop up. Subsequently on other newer buses I find a good speaker above each seat; it is easier to hear the film audio.  Still there are not other screens down the length of the bus.

               

                On the walk back from the bus station I looked again for the store I had seen a few days earlier, with crocheted items in the window.  I hoped this time it would be open.   I am looking for help with the vest I am crocheting.  I do not understand the instructions.  The gray-haired lady behind the counter told me that she is not the one doing the crocheting.  It is another lady who lives in a distant village.  She does not come to town often.  I left my phone number, and asked that the next time she comes to town I could meet with her.

                Once home in the apartment, Dog went for her bed and promptly fell asleep.  She did not budge again.  As it got dark, around 8 p.m., I took her outside for one last pee before bedtime.  She wasted no time.  She sniffed about a little, peed, and went right back to the door.  She looked at me to follow, to carry her up the two flights of stairs.  This is a first.  She just wanted to go back to sleep, after this arduous day in the country.

                The stairs are daunting for her.  She has short legs.  She cannot get a grip on the tile floor.  She pushes up with the hind legs, but the front paws get no purchase to pull.  Going down is much worse for her.  She gathers momentum and nearly crashes into the wall at each landing.  I am doomed to carrying her up and down.  Before my weight loss this was truly onerous; I was out of breath long before the top landing.  Now it is manageable, except when I return from shopping with my arms full.

                The gym was not open this morning at 6 a.m.  I guess on Saturdays it opens more like 9 a.m.    I met Juan in the church plaza at 9 a.m., as we had arranged.  Not being able to communicate with each other by phone is a real problem; I want to take this problem to the smart lady at the Telcel shop where I went the other day.  Dog is clearly happy to see Juan again.  Juan never says much, and doesn’t seem to interact much with Dog.  But she is mad about him, always happy to see him.  He seems puzzled at her reaction.  “Does she still remember me?” he asks.

                The gal looks at our two phones briefly, and figures out the problem.  Juan has been hitting keys that block a caller, without realizing it.  She instructs him how to avoid this, after unblocking my number.  Juan has told me that other of his people have had the same problem.  She is very clear in her instructions, so hopefully Juan has learned and will be able to have better use of his phone.

                After meeting with Juan, I went back to the gym.  I had already done a brief upper-body workout with the tube bands, but I did not complete a full hour of workout.  At the gym I did some lower body reps, but I did not stay long.  We were walking back home through the park, when a motorcycle turned a corner and headed down the street.  Dog took off after it like a shot!  She must have thought it was Juan.  And perhaps it was, but the bike had too great a head start.  I have never seen her do that before, just leave me like that.  She was two blocks away!  She came back soon enough.  As we are walking home again we pass a shop, and the friendly shop keeper stops to chat.  She admires the dog, as does everyone we come across.  She asked her name, and I felt foolish saying ‘Dog’.  It is time to give her a proper name.  In admiring the dog the lady used the word for pretty, ‘chula’.  Jeff calls his small indoor dog Precious.  I decided that Chula was a good enough name for my dog. 

                From henceforth Dog will be known as Chula.

                Down the block from the gym we sometimes see a dog in a yard.  This dog could be a medium sized poodle.  The white curly pelt is gray and matted like a Rastafarian.  And this is why Chula makes such an impression.  She is clean, and groomed.  If there are other such dogs in town, they are not seen on the street, and especially not without a leash.  I’m pretty sure that once I saw a Shi Tzu in town.  Of course, Chula does not need a leash because she is glued to my side; she never lets me out of her sight.  Which is why her tearing off after that motorbike was such a surprise.

                I am maintaining the diet, in a way.  Too many days my intake is under 700 calories.  When it goes down to under 600 calories, I have bad gas all day.  I work hard at eating more, and healthy things.  Still I often feel light-headed.  Even so, it is time for my weekly weigh-in and I have not lost any more weight.  The scale fluctuates between 144 and 145.  Have I reached a plateau?

                I splurged a little the other night, just to break the monotony.  I had a beer in the fridge leftover from December.  It is a robust 182 calories!  I picked out a rerun from my computer, popped some popcorn in the air popper with only salt for adornment, and had a night at the movies. 

                I miss bread.  I cannot bring myself to buy the Bimbo bread in the stores here, knowing how it is made with additives and preservatives, and bleached flour.  I have been searching the internet for a source of bran so that I can make bran muffins again, without luck.  There is a store in town that specializes in natural raw foods; I will try there.  In the meantime, bread.  How can I make bread that is nutritious?

                Somewhere I found a product with the generic name of ‘NaturPlus’, and ‘soluble and insoluble fiber’.  It contains flax seed, ground leaves of moringa and artichoke, and chia seeds.  Wheat bran and oat bran are listed high on the ingredients.  It is also flavored with stevia.  It also has pineapple powder.  I thought, what if I mix this into a bread batter.  And so I did.  I also have some Malt O Meal around, which is made with wheat and barley, and so I added a tablespoon or so of that.  I shaped the dough into small flat rolls and baked them in my toaster oven.  I tried one this morning with Jiffy peanut butter powder (which has the fat removed, and is only 70 calories per serving).  That mixture is putrid, although that peanut butter product is delicious with regular bread.  Later I toasted one and had it with an egg.  That was much more palatable.

                It may be time for me to add some street food into my diet.  I thought the street vendor tacos were made of pork, but Jeff swears they are made of beef.  I will try a few, and see how that feels.

                Sunday morning I weigh myself again; this time the scale reads 143.5.  I accept that as a half-pound weight loss.  Because Chula is recuperating from surgery, we pretty much stay in all day.  I do not even do exercise bands.  Lazy day.

                Monday morning I read an article in the Washington Post about protein and exercise.  A survey of research done comes up with an interesting conclusion.  For every kilogram of body weight one should consume 1.6 grams of protein, to build muscle mass through weight training.  This means I should be consuming over 100 grams of protein a day. 

                I open cupboards and pull out protein powder, tuna fish, quinoa and the other products I’ve been consuming.  The article says that one cup of chicken has 44 grams of protein. 

                My protein shake has only 13 grams, the Jiffy peanut butter powder has 8 grams.  Tuna has 22.5 grams.  Quinoa has merely 3.9 grams.  Bacon, of course, has none.

                I look at the PB powder and at a jar of PB.  Of course the protein content is the same, but there is one huge difference.  The powder has no sodium but 136 grams of potassium.  The jar has no potassium but it does contain sodium.  We know that in nature sodium and potassium are usually together with something like a 1:1.5 ratio.  In processed foods, however, potassium is often missing or in lower amounts than sodium.  Potassium is so important to muscles, yet it is difficult to find adequate supplies.   I will try to add this PB powder to my chocolate protein shakes from now on.

                I have been carrying around with me from Florida an electric blender.  Today I finally tried to use it.  I wanted to make a fancy shake of the chocolate soy powder, half a banana, PB powder and a little yogurt.  I plugged in the base of the blender and turned it on.  Nothing.  I wound up mashing the banana by hand and shaking the mixture up for a long time in my usual way, in the bottle.

                I am tempted to take it apart and see if I can fix it.  Aurrera carries blenders, but of course I want the very best.  I have a project for myself this week; checking out the watts and speeds of the ones at Aurrera verses what I can find online at Amazon.

                On this grocery trip I pass up the bananas in favor of papaya.  This is one of my all-time favorite fruits, ever since discovering it in Acapulco in 1968.  I brought home half a papaya about seven inches long.  Before taking a slice of it, I dutifully looked it up on myfitnesspal.com. I found a broad difference in the fruits listed by source.  A Hawaiian papaya is 156 calories, high in carbs and no protein.  But other kinds of papaya listed seemed a bit healthier.  Another listing shows one large papaya with 120 calories and 1.9 grams of protein.  For this reason I always search for an analysis that uses ounces as the base, not subjective ‘large’ or grams.  I am currently using a weight-watcher’s scale that only measures ounces.  I have ordered a digital scale from Amazon, which gives both ounces and grams, but it will not arrive for another week.

                I remember from my Acapulco days, one of the waiters saying that his people believed that if one had only rice and papaya to eat, one would be well-nourished.  That is all a body needs, he said.  The papaya he ate is a different kind than the one sold here, and perhaps that kind is indeed higher in protein.  In the south of Mexico the papaya tree yields long fruit, ten to twelve inches long, and the color inside varies from pale orange to a deep sweet red orange.  In Durango City my friends have a papaya tree in their courtyard.  I shall have to try to grow one in my garden here, of the sort grown down south.

                In conclusion, I will go to the butchers and buy either beef or chicken, and start cooking meat.  In this small town the meat is not sold packaged and labeled in the meat section of the grocery store.  There are at least three butchers in town, one is half a block from my apartment, where I can see the meat before it is cut.  Hopefully I can buy beef with low fat content.

                Rotisserie chicken is a popular item in this small town.  I have come across four shops that have long skewers rotating over heat, stacked with chickens.  According to this web site, 3 ozs of rotisserie chicken is only 112 calories, low fat and 23 grams of protein.

                Generally agreeing with the article I read, myfitnesspal lists 46 grams of chicken protein to have also 230 calories, for 172 grams of meat.  The article says 4 ounces, which would be more like 112 grams.  But is ‘a cup’ 4 ounces?  I search news feeds on my phone to try to find that article again, but it is gone.  Trying to sort all this out could drive one mad.  In the end, diet cannot be an exact science.  It is enough that now I am aware that I am probably not consuming enough protein.  I will remedy that, and hopefully stop the light-headedness.  I focus on total intake of both calorie and protein, without obsessing.

                 

breaking barriers

Wow!  Another milestone.  Forgive me for crowing; this is the result of a lot of effort. 

For the first time in I-don’t-know-how-many years, I have broken the magic number of 14# pounds.  I weighed in this morning at 139.5 pounds.

Tomorrow it might be back to 140, but never mind.  As long as I continue my regime, I know the number will continue to go down.

When I grow physically tired and mentally weary, I indulge in a treat.  Perhaps an evening of air-popped corn and a light beer with a movie, or a yummy chocolate covered yogurt pop.  I have begun to once again indulge in Oxxo coffee [this is a chain like 7 Eleven].  They have these machines set up to dispense different flavors of Andatti coffee.  I have tried the ones found at gas stations in the States, but the latter are putrid with thickeners and too much sugar.  Here in Mexico I enjoy a cinnamon cappuccino for the sugar hit it gives me.  I have read somewhere on the internet that these have 80 calories a cup; I have a double cup, twice a week or when the need arises for a pick-me-up.

On Sunday, two days ago, I took a trip to Durango to pick up the kitchen sink I ordered, and to try to find some more decent protein powder.  I indulged myself in buying a few bottles of wine, one of each color.  This will be another of these rare indulgences/rewards.

I have been too lazy to go to the butcher to buy chicken or beef, so I have been relying on canned tuna fish in my salad for animal protein.  Rarely, I will buy half a barbecued chicken at one of the many rotisserie shops here, but its cost is an extravagance.

I am still not satisfied that I have a waist, so I will continue on.  Perhaps when I reach 135 I can stop?  Better yet, because I know that once I level off and return to strict maintenance I am likely to gain a pound or two, my goal should be 130.

I am lax about the gym.  I do go three times a week, but I push to stretch the time out to 30 minutes.  My shoulder is still hurting, so I am limited to the upper body work I can do.

I am working on a garden at my country house, but never more than 2 hours at a stretch.  Today I tried to go out there on the bus, planning to walk the five miles back after gardening.  This time the bus driver did not allow me to board with the dog.  I tried hitchiking for a while, but none of my neighbors passed, so I gave up.  I will try to arrange getting a ride in with Juan tomorrow morning.

I am going for physical therapy, but I do not think the results will be positive.  I continue to search for someone who knows how to apply magnets, or else acupuncture.

Again, please forgive me for making a big deal out of this.  I still have a lot of hard work in front of me, so it is not like I can celebrate completion of this project, yet.  I am just saying, Man! Does this feel good.