I've not been climbing in ages, I miss it. I've never had the nerves to try lead climbing yet though, and I've been doing it on and off (in the last couple of years, mostly off) for about three years, so I'm envious of your bravery after a few months!
I feel like a complete slob now... My recent excuse has been that if walking from Little Clarendon St to Keble Road is enough to make me wheeze, then I probably shouldn't be doing "exercise" unless I want to see the inside of a big white taxi. Happily, that's (mostly) not true now, but I've now got completely out of my routine, and have to get over the fear thing to get going again.
That's a particularly healthy week, bear in mind. On any given week I'll slack off on some or all of those exercise commitments (or be unable to find anyone to go hillwalking with - I don't like the idea of going on my own from a safety point of view). Last week, all the coins came up heads :-)
My recent excuse has been that if walking from Little Clarendon St to Keble Road is enough to make me wheeze, then I probably shouldn't be doing "exercise" unless I want to see the inside of a big white taxi.
I don't know how your asthma affects things, but I would have thought that that's exactly backwards. If a walk that short makes you wheeze, then you need to do more exercise, not less - but start small. Walk, don't run. Try the low rungs of the Hacker's Diet programme. Go for a walk round the park in your lunch break. Play table-tennis. I dunno, find something you enjoy :-)
Well, yes and no. What you say would be generally true, but the reason that I was wheezing wasn't unfitness. It was acute airway hypersensitivity (exercise/cold air/illness making my airways close up). Exercise won't help this, and may even make it worse. I think you're meant to aim for whatever you can do without needing rescue treatment. If that's walking a short distance, you are Sick and need better treatment, not more exercise. In fact, there is little to no evidence that I've found that implies that exercise helps asthma at all beyond the general benefits of losing weight. Of course, it does help in other ways, but it's quite depressing to know that in all likelihood, I could be as fit as an athlete and still get floored by a minor viral infection.
The Hacker's Diet is made of awesome - it's the diet that I've been (approximately) following since about July, with the result that I've lost nearly two stone. It's actually more of a metadiet, because it's based on the idea that it doesn't much matter what you eat provided the calorific content is low enough. The actual meal planning and decisions are left up to you, giving you the freedom to design a diet that fits the way you eat and which you have a chance of sticking to. The book provides the tools you'll need to do this, to fine-tune your plan once it's underway and you start to gather data, and provides some advice on retaining motivation and sticking to the diet. It's very grown-up: if you want that piece of chocolate cake, then have it, but you'll have to pay for it either by slower rate of weight loss or by making up the calories elsewhere.
The book (free, online, linked above) is very good and well worth reading, but I've also written a summary which you might find useful
( ... )
Thanks! I really like the approach Walker gives in his intro: taking losing weight as an engineering problem! There was a period when I was in high school when I lost some weight pretty successfully but I then promptly put the weight back on again, slowly, and I've not managed since. People keep telling me of the joys of exercise, and the only exercise I've managed to stick to in the recent past is my current 35-minute walk to work (getting harder to stick to in the utterly miserable weather these days).
(It's entirely possible I'd start losing weight without even trying by the simple expedient of giving up Dr Pepper, but I'm not sure I want to -- and I quite like the "grown-up" way of treating it as a credit in the calorie column and accounting for it in other ways!)
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My recent excuse has been that if walking from Little Clarendon St to Keble Road is enough to make me wheeze, then I probably shouldn't be doing "exercise" unless I want to see the inside of a big white taxi. Happily, that's (mostly) not true now, but I've now got completely out of my routine, and have to get over the fear thing to get going again.
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I don't know how your asthma affects things, but I would have thought that that's exactly backwards. If a walk that short makes you wheeze, then you need to do more exercise, not less - but start small. Walk, don't run. Try the low rungs of the Hacker's Diet programme. Go for a walk round the park in your lunch break. Play table-tennis. I dunno, find something you enjoy :-)
Reply
What you say would be generally true, but the reason that I was wheezing wasn't unfitness. It was acute airway hypersensitivity (exercise/cold air/illness making my airways close up). Exercise won't help this, and may even make it worse. I think you're meant to aim for whatever you can do without needing rescue treatment. If that's walking a short distance, you are Sick and need better treatment, not more exercise. In fact, there is little to no evidence that I've found that implies that exercise helps asthma at all beyond the general benefits of losing weight.
Of course, it does help in other ways, but it's quite depressing to know that in all likelihood, I could be as fit as an athlete and still get floored by a minor viral infection.
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The book (free, online, linked above) is very good and well worth reading, but I've also written a summary which you might find useful ( ... )
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(It's entirely possible I'd start losing weight without even trying by the simple expedient of giving up Dr Pepper, but I'm not sure I want to -- and I quite like the "grown-up" way of treating it as a credit in the calorie column and accounting for it in other ways!)
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