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That's Dr Tank Green to you, Marjorie.

On (no longer?) being an asthmatic

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I’ve had asthma since I was a kid. I don’t know if I was born with it or if it developed after a serious case of pneumonia that saw me hospitalised when I was around 8 or 9, and which left me with scarred lungs and a pathetic peak flow score. Unfortunately, since the NHS has lost all my medical records, I cannot ever know for sure when the asthma first started (as in, was it caused by the pneumonia or did it predate it?), but I know I have had it most of my life.

By about my early twenties, although I retained a pathetic peak flow score, I had mainly grown out of the asthma except for when I was ill. Then it kicked in with a vengeance and it seemed like every respiratory bug (aside from covid) went straight for my lungs as a weak point. I have had pleurisy about six times and pneumonia about four. I dreaded flu season and have always tried to be proactive about keeping my immune system healthy because of this.

In my early thirties, as I have said before, I developed what I called ‘winter asthma’ whereby, between late September to March of every year, I would get a constant and serious flare up of the asthma, as well as chronic sinusitis and other hay-fever-like symptoms. At some point, a nurse in an allergy clinic told me to supplement with vitamin D which helped somewhat. I later added in turmeric and black pepper supplements actually for my arthritis, but it turned out to have a big effect on the asthma symptoms instead. I would say that the vitamin D plus turmeric supplementation 90% solved the problem.

However, these were control mechanisms: if I didn’t take them for a couple of days during the winter months, the asthma and other allergy-like symptoms would come right back. Moreover, they did not make a difference to the fact that, whatever the time of the year, if I caught a respiratory virus, the asthma would severely flare up.

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On low carb diets

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Graph of my rapid weight lossI have written previously about my dietary changes in response to a borderline insulin resistance test result, so I thought I would post an update on where I am on this journey.

As you can see from that graph, my weight kept dropping until I hit 52.5kg, at which point I got scared. That put me in the underweight category in terms of my BMI; more importantly, my sleep became affected and I was definitely losing muscle mass in my quads.

The theory of low carb diets (by which I mean eradicating cereals, grains, sugars, and starches from your diet), is that by replacing them with nutritionally dense foods we will eat less. The reason being that we get more bang for our buck with every egg, steak, and chicken drumstick we eat. Our bodies need less food because everything we put in it has a lot of what it needs, nutritionally speaking. So we don’t get hungry as often as we’ve eaten nutrient dense foods.

This is all true in my experience. However, what did not seem to happen for me was an adequate hunger mechanism. By which I mean, my body seemed to be so satiated in terms of nutrient intake that it was not registering a calorie deficit.

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On gym culture

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Recently I switched gyms and it was a terrible mistake. I was really happy at my little budget gym, but the HQ payments team kept fucking up my payments which resulted in me being locked out three months in a row. Once was a mistake, twice was irritating, three times told me that they had no interest in fixing the issue, so I threw my toys out of the pram and moved to a different gym.

The new gym was equidistant from my house, bigger, had more equipment, and was £4 pcm cheaper than my old gym; but still, within a week I knew I’d made a terrible mistake and wrote to my old gym manager to ask him to deal with the payments team on my behalf. Thankfully he did and I am back at my old gym and happy as larry again and getting clowned for being a dick.

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On diet

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Two things happened today. Firstly I saw a picture of the once supremely handsome (now vegan) Robert Downey Jr looking old, grey, and dusty as fuck; secondly, I realised that I can hang off callisthenic bars using one arm, including my bad arm/shoulder. This was previously completely impossible due to my shoulder injury. Both of these observations are related to diet.

I turned vegetarian at the age of 13 or so for ethical reasons. I made the connection between the (delicious) lamb chops on my dinner plate, and the cute, fluffy lambs I would bottle feed in the spring time at my dad’s mate’s farm. I just couldn’t eat them anymore. I stayed vegetarian until I was in my mid-30s, after which I started eating some fish and meat as my health was clearly suffering as a result of spiralling food  intolerances and allergies and the beginnings of IBS. (Side note, in my early 40s, my IBS was so bad that my GP feared I had a gynaecological cancer. Thankfully scans showed nothing odious there, so she realised it must be IBS.)

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On rotator cuff injuries

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Rotator cuff anatomy diagramWhen I was about 25, I was hit by a car when riding my bike which resulted in a dislocated right shoulder. Because I was 25, I popped that shit back in myself. I’m not mad at that part; dislocated shoulders hurt like fuckeries and popping it back in (mostly) stopped the pain. What I am mad about, is that I never sought treatment to help my shoulder recover.

Never sought treatment, that is, until about ten years later when I started to suffer almost constant pain in my shoulder, anterior and posterior, which subsequently spread into my neck. Not only was I suffering almost constant pain, but I started to suffer a progressive weakening in that shoulder that eventually resulted in an inability to do pushups and means that I have been chasing “more than one pull up” for a decade. When particularly bad, I wasn’t able to pour a kettle or juice a lemon with that arm, which is ludicrous.

From my mid-thirties, for about another decade and up until the pandemic when my income took a serious nosedive, I sought treatment, usually monthly, from a variety of different practitioners. I have seen a wide range of masseuses (shout out to Jambaal Jeng who shines above the rest), osteopaths, acupuncturists, many, many physiotherapists (shout out to Ibby Abucar who also shines), an orthopaedic surgeon, and a neurosurgeon. Oh and spas. I live for spas and heat treatment now.

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