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Weight loss ft: a big bitch

I'm not dead. I've just been up to my ass in other things.

So I'm going to start losing weight. Not because I feel compelled to be hotter or whatever, but because I have, unfortunately, crossed the extremely lax line I set for myself years ago.

The line was

If I ever start walking like I'm morbidly obese, I'll lose weight.

I know, I know. It's super lax. And, my weight hasn't actually exploded or anything, either. It's just that I absolutely decimated my knee doing yoga on a hardwood floor, and now I have a limp. A limp that isn't going to heal if I continue to tip the scale at three bills.

So, here we are.

I’m going to start jogging daily, and thanks to some weird perk my life allots me, I’m going to have an under-desk elliptical. Good, considering I work 9 hours a day sitting down.

I'm not expecting my life to get markedly better, but if I can get my knee to heal and fit into the pants in my closet* I'll count it as a win.

I suppose I need a starting goal, eh? Well, I wrapped a tape measurer around my midsection and found that my tape measurer doesn't go around my midsection by about 3-4" or so. Well, that's my first goal. Make it so it does.

My overall goal is to drop 120lbs, which would put me at the 175 mark (or thereabouts). But for now, my goal is to lose 4 inches off my waist.

I'm also going to be documenting the whole thing on instagram, but I'm going to keep it private for a year or so, and then throw open the hatch and we'll all scrutinize my progress together. Funsies. 

*Not that it matters, but I should state that I do technically fit into the jeans in my closet, they're just tighter than I'm willing to put up with. I also didn't outgrow these pants, they arrived to my apartment last year and never fit. So, I'll expand my wardrobe by 4 pairs of pants if I lose like, 4 inches off my waist. That's almost like a reward.

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Four miles, sunburn, and a minor back sprain

Yesterday my girlfriend and I went for a four mile walk to obtain some boba, as we do every weekend. And, like every weekend, I overexert myself and wind up feeling sore for the next two days.

The walk, fortunately, isn't too bad. It's mostly flat, with maybe 67 feet of variance the entire time. It's down a very pretty street of old mansions that have been converted into student houses.

It was 86 degrees yesterday, and naturally, we left during the hottest part, but I don't mind. My job requires me to be stuck inside for eight hours a day, so on the weekend we try to get out and do things.

I got a new type of drink the shop offered, a drink called the “purple cow.” A grape milk tea with tapioca. It was sweeter than I was expecting, and walking the two mile return trip resulted in a stomach ache, but it was worth it.

In addition to dyspraxia and those comorbids, I also have a condition called EDS -- Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Fortunately, I only have hEDS -- the hypermobile kind. This means that my joints, skin, and blood vessels are overly stretchy.  

EDS isn’t linked to dyspraxia, by the way. I just happen to have both.

I bruise easily and I partially dislocate stuff quite a bit. As you can imagine, my clumsiness doesn't help. Thankfully I didn't trip on the walk, which has been known to happen.

Still, my lower back hurts today. It's hardly the worst I've ever had. But the dull ache is still something that is omnipresent. By Wednesday, it'll be a whisper of pain, and by next Saturday, I will make my way down town to sprain my back all over again.

But the boba is good, and fortunately, the weather should be cooler.

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Thə vəry bəginning

When I was a kid, my elementary school teachers never knew what to do with me. I was lucky enough to go to a tiny, rural school where the teacher-to-student ratio was about 1:15 at the most, and, to their credit, all but two of my teachers were spectacular.

As a side note: my school was exceptionally atypical. My classroom housed two grades, not one. First and second were combined, third and fourth were combined, and fifth and sixth were combined.

Math and English were the only classes we were taught separately, and everything else was the same. Art? The same. Science? The same. Social studies? The same. Religion -- yes, it was a catholic school -- the same.

This meant every other year, I had a rotating cast of familiar faces cycle in as the kids I spent a year with cycled out.

It also meant that I got two years with each teacher, which was a blessing, most of the time. It meant that these teachers, for better or worse, knew what to expect. But, of course, that didn't really mean they knew what to do when difficulties arose.

In Kindergarten, we all began learning how to write the alphabet. I had already known how to write the alphabet by the time I went to Kindergarten, thanks to a large, attentive family and a knack for picking up certain things.

But I knew how to write the uppercase alphabet. I was going to need to learn to write the lowercase one, too.

I already knew how to read somewhat by the time I was in Kindergarten. I loved books, so it didn't take me long to pick up reading. So, because I already knew how to read the lowercase alphabet, it wouldn't take me long to write it, right?

That was not the case.

My ability to learn to write was sporadic and unpredictable. I was more advanced than other kids in some places, such as being able to read the example sentences, but significantly behind them in other places, such as being able to copy down a letter correctly on my first try.

The letter "e" was a real hangup for me. No matter what I did, the letter always came out upside down. For a while, I tried to pass it off as just a unique "me" way of doing things.

My teachers were not amused.

Finally, I learned that if I flipped my paper upside down, I could write the "e", and then when flipped right-ways-up, it would be correct.

Again, my teachers were not amused.

Mrs. Wagner began taping my papers to my desk, which made me feel belittled and frustrated. I looked at my best friend's paper. The teacher did not tape it to her desk -- why should I be any different?

I didn't get the hang of writing the letter "e" properly until halfway through first grade, and I still occasionally make this mistake.

It wasn't the only writing problem I had, either. For example, I had a hard time distinguishing between the letter T and the letter D, regardless of their case.

Say we had a sample sentence like "The farmer makes butter from the cow's milk."

Even if I were allowed to look at the sentence while writing, odds are, it would wind up reading:

"Thə farmər makəs buddər from thə cow's milk."

Coupled with my delightfully Žižekian speech impediment, it didn't take long for some of my teachers, and the school nurse, to assume I was "retarded."

My mom hand-waved the diagnosis.

"No, she's just the regular kind of dumb."

Still, I was forced to undergo "academic assessment."

As it turns out, my mom was right. When the results came back from the exhaustive examination, it turned out that I was "pretty bright for a six year old, though that speech impediment is awful."

I wasn't diagnosed with any learning disabilities but was assessed as having some difficulties understanding certain letters.

"It's pretty common," the lady said. "Some kids just take a little while longer to pick up certain tasks. Just monitor her for any other problems."

So the verdict was in, I wasn't intellectually disabled, I was just a little behind.

Unfortunately, the gap would get worse before it got better.

B³

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Welcome to the Bad Brain Blog (a brief intro)

Ahoy there, ahoy.

Welcome to the Bad Brain Blog. It's my blog. It's new. I dunno how much I'll keep up with it, but I’ll try.

So what is this? More than anything, it's a space to talk about what it's like living with dyspraxia. About weight loss with dyspraxia, about working with dyspraxia, existing with it.

What's dyspraxia? Well, I like to call it "bad brain," but it's also known as Developmental coordination disorder. It used to be known as clumsy child disorder.

It's a neurological disorder that impacts your ability to plan and process motor tasks.

For example, I can't dribble a basketball. I'm well into my 30s at this point, and despite numerous attempts to be able to do it, I can't.

Surprisingly, I've managed to live a fulfilling life so far, what with my inability to dribble a basketball, but I seem to be doing okay.

If it stopped there, I suppose there wouldn't be much reason for this blog, though.

Dyspraxia affects your brain in other ways, too. A common comorbidity* for dyspraxia is dyslexia. And dyscalculia. According to a study done in 2013, dyspraxics have more than a 50% chance of having either dyslexia or dyscalculia. I have both.

But I digress. Now you know what my Bad Brain is and what this blog will be about.

The Bad Brain Blog is also just kind of a place for me to mark down things I think of or want to remember. Recipes. YouTube Videos. Dog gifs. Y'know. Stuff. It's more of a diary than anything, but I am putting it out in the open. If you find it useful, cool. If you don't, eh, I don't really care.

So, that's what this is.

Please note, this is not an advocacy blog, it's not really supposed to act as anything informational. It won't provide particularly helpful resources, except maybe to recipes that I like.

xoxo Bad Brain Bitch (B³)

*a simultaneously occurring medical condition present alongside others in a patient

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