Dehydration
"Those who cannot learn from History are condemned to repeat it", wrote George Santayana. Remembering the past is only half the key, however. Understanding it is crucial.
I went fishing for grayling years ago, in a little river called the Shreen which runs between Gillingham and Mere. The fly fisherman were a little annoyed by the grayling, which they felt were competing too successfully with the trout for food. I took my telescopic rod and a selection of spinners, put on rubber boots, heavy cord trousers, and a thick black jacket for protection against brambles and thorn-bushes, and started off upstream. I passed by the shallow stretches, since I could see the trout in them, and there was no sign of a different shape, longer, scaled, and with a dorsal fin three times the length of other fish. I came to a stretch where the river was so narrow you could jump across it, and although it was four feet deep, it was so clear you could see the insect life living on the weeds at the bottom. I flicked a spinner into some of the darker pools and got one trout, which I put back again, I wasn't interested in them that day. I crawled through heavy tangled growth for several hundred yards to try each pool where the branches allowed a rod to be poked over the water, with no better result than another trout.
Finally, I came to a more open section, where the tangle of grasses and wild parsley along the bank was chest high, and found a deep pool just below a large solitary tree, where in in the bottom of the water I could see four fish, totally unlike trout, holding position against the slow current. I towed a spinner over the opposite side of the pool. They didn't move. I tried it again, this time just over their heads. They still ignored it. After a few minutes I had to admit that they were not going to chase some bright glittering toy for the fun of it, as a trout would. I looked around me for something in the nearby bushes, a spider or a bug or some larvae with which to try and tempt them. There was nothing. I had to tramp nearly a quarter of a mile to the first field where there had been cattle recently, and rake through some large cowpats with a stick to get half a dozen leathery cow-fly grubs. I put one of those on a small hook, and drifted it down through the clear water, no float or shot, and was rewarded by the largest fish taking it. I had caught my grayling. I wrapped in some dock leaves and walked back to the car, only a couple of miles away, sweating profusely inside my thorn-proof jacket as I baked in the afternoon sun.
I ate the fish soon after I got back to my sister's house, where I was living for a few months while I completed a contract at Southampton. Soon after finishing the meal, I began to experience blinding headaches, and found my limbs heavy and painful if I stayed immobile for too long. They immediately suspected the fish, and were going to call the doctor, but I felt that to be premature. I lay down for a while, but felt worse, and when I got up and moved around I felt, maybe not better, but not quite so bad. I drank some coffee and almost immediately felt the pains subside. I decided that I had gone for too long without coffee that day and was experiencing a mild form of cold-turkey.
In fact, I was simply dehydrated, and had made the mistake of eating food before I began putting the missing fluid back in. But in my superstitious mind I believed it was because I had killed a fish that day but hadn't thanked the river for it, and ever since then I have apologised to the rivers or to the seas whenever I have killed one of their creatures.
Last week I began to experience aches and pains during the day. I have been on a diet for quite a while now. Nothing clever or complicated, simply restricting what I eat to about 1000 calories below my estimated daily requirement. Two pounds of fat equals 7000 calories, simple division by 7 gives the daily reduction necessary. My little petal is still in a huff because I am doing things my way and not letting her feed me a calculated nutritional diet based on her course she has recently completed. But I managed to lose a stone and a half last year on my own, and was convinced I could lose two pounds a week by eating carefully and being physically active. The aches, however, worried me, because I did accept that my little petal could be right, and I might be depriving myself not only of enough intake, but also of vital vitamins and minerals.
I dangled my question 'aches and pains while on a diet' into the sea of google, and got several pages that suggested eating too little could result in you not only not losing weight, but actually storing it up as the body went into a 'prepare for famine' mode. One site even offered a suggestion that 800 calories less than the estimated daily intake could be a mistake, and that 500 was a safer and more sensible figure. Eat more, to lose weight. Can you not see how appealing that might be to someone who loves food like I do? It could almost be the subject line in a spam message. 'Eat our specially-formulated bars and lose weight while you sleep, no exercise needed'. I did actually wander into the kitchen and look longingly at the loaf of spelt bread I had bought in Frome market. I even touched it and stroked the bread knife against it. But then, I noticed that the aching feeling in my arms and lower back which had been worrying me didn't seem so bad after getting up and walking through to the kitchen. I had a cup of liquorice tea instead, and walked around outside when the rain stopped briefly. That's when I remembered the episode of the grayling's revenge.
Reliving that day triggered a far more recent memory from last year when I was struggling to lose weight despite cycling for an hour, four evenings a week, and limiting what I ate to half of what I would have eaten. I broke the plateau mode then by going on a low carbohydrate diet for a while, but also by drinking a lot more water throughout the day. One of the sites that had popped up in response to my google enquiry 'eating less but still not losing weight' suggested that you need to drink a lot more water when trying to burn up stored fat, because the liver and kidneys need it in order to function properly. I looked back through the google hits for my recent question, and found that, several hits on from the 'eat more to lose weight' pages, were one or two pages suggesting that you need a lot of water in order to help the body turn fat into fuel. Oh, cynical me, who could have made sure the 'eat more' pages came up first in the search, I wonder?
Losing weight is really quite a simple concept; turn your stored fat into energy. The tricky part is making that process happen regularly enough. I have a suspicion that the body sometimes forgets to do something, or learns new habits such as storing fat instead of using it. For the past few weeks I have been fretting, because although I got my weight down from 13 stone 5 pounds to 13 stone exactly in the first three weeks of April, I then stayed resolutely at that figure, despite cycling regularly, sawing lots of old wood to burn on the boiler, and generally doing much more than simply sitting at a computer all day long. Now, I realise, I had forgotten the important lesson I learned last year, drink lots of water.
Today, a week after that lesson in the importance of regularly reviewing the past, I have reached the figure of 12 stone 11 pounds. It is a stable weight, because I have seen it for three successive days now, and I know that once more I have broken the plateau. It is not a new low for me, because I recorded this very weight at the end of September last year, after my trip to Kent to cycle around the remains of the old coalfields looking for the ghost of the East Kent Railway. But then, the autumn came, I stopped cycling in the evenings because of road-safety fears, and instead spent my evening time in front of a laptop trying to recreate the East Kent Railway in the Microsoft Train Simulator program. Despite my walking in the dark episodes (What goes up...: Back in the darkness again), my weight crept back up again, and by Christmas I had once more reached 13 stone 7 pounds.
Still, I have learned my lesson, yet again, and will go forwards knowing that water is the key to life. Nice, pure, sparkling water. Or not, as in the case of the hard, bitter-smelling, appliance-scaling stuff that comes from our tap and is really only fit for flushing down the toilet. I won't even water the house-plants with it now, the Avocado plant and Maidenhair fern in the kitchen both developed brown leaves after being fed tap-water for a few weeks. It's good business for the water companies, and just as good a business for the companies who sell filtration products. The whole civilised world seems to me to be nothing but a large market for corporate ambition. How long before we're all buying air-filters to reduce pollens and particulates inside our homes?
Whatever happened to quality of life? (Nothing actually, it's still there, as I found out last weekend, you just can't get it delivered to the door after buying it on ebay. You have to go get it.)
I went fishing for grayling years ago, in a little river called the Shreen which runs between Gillingham and Mere. The fly fisherman were a little annoyed by the grayling, which they felt were competing too successfully with the trout for food. I took my telescopic rod and a selection of spinners, put on rubber boots, heavy cord trousers, and a thick black jacket for protection against brambles and thorn-bushes, and started off upstream. I passed by the shallow stretches, since I could see the trout in them, and there was no sign of a different shape, longer, scaled, and with a dorsal fin three times the length of other fish. I came to a stretch where the river was so narrow you could jump across it, and although it was four feet deep, it was so clear you could see the insect life living on the weeds at the bottom. I flicked a spinner into some of the darker pools and got one trout, which I put back again, I wasn't interested in them that day. I crawled through heavy tangled growth for several hundred yards to try each pool where the branches allowed a rod to be poked over the water, with no better result than another trout.
Finally, I came to a more open section, where the tangle of grasses and wild parsley along the bank was chest high, and found a deep pool just below a large solitary tree, where in in the bottom of the water I could see four fish, totally unlike trout, holding position against the slow current. I towed a spinner over the opposite side of the pool. They didn't move. I tried it again, this time just over their heads. They still ignored it. After a few minutes I had to admit that they were not going to chase some bright glittering toy for the fun of it, as a trout would. I looked around me for something in the nearby bushes, a spider or a bug or some larvae with which to try and tempt them. There was nothing. I had to tramp nearly a quarter of a mile to the first field where there had been cattle recently, and rake through some large cowpats with a stick to get half a dozen leathery cow-fly grubs. I put one of those on a small hook, and drifted it down through the clear water, no float or shot, and was rewarded by the largest fish taking it. I had caught my grayling. I wrapped in some dock leaves and walked back to the car, only a couple of miles away, sweating profusely inside my thorn-proof jacket as I baked in the afternoon sun.
I ate the fish soon after I got back to my sister's house, where I was living for a few months while I completed a contract at Southampton. Soon after finishing the meal, I began to experience blinding headaches, and found my limbs heavy and painful if I stayed immobile for too long. They immediately suspected the fish, and were going to call the doctor, but I felt that to be premature. I lay down for a while, but felt worse, and when I got up and moved around I felt, maybe not better, but not quite so bad. I drank some coffee and almost immediately felt the pains subside. I decided that I had gone for too long without coffee that day and was experiencing a mild form of cold-turkey.
In fact, I was simply dehydrated, and had made the mistake of eating food before I began putting the missing fluid back in. But in my superstitious mind I believed it was because I had killed a fish that day but hadn't thanked the river for it, and ever since then I have apologised to the rivers or to the seas whenever I have killed one of their creatures.
Last week I began to experience aches and pains during the day. I have been on a diet for quite a while now. Nothing clever or complicated, simply restricting what I eat to about 1000 calories below my estimated daily requirement. Two pounds of fat equals 7000 calories, simple division by 7 gives the daily reduction necessary. My little petal is still in a huff because I am doing things my way and not letting her feed me a calculated nutritional diet based on her course she has recently completed. But I managed to lose a stone and a half last year on my own, and was convinced I could lose two pounds a week by eating carefully and being physically active. The aches, however, worried me, because I did accept that my little petal could be right, and I might be depriving myself not only of enough intake, but also of vital vitamins and minerals.
I dangled my question 'aches and pains while on a diet' into the sea of google, and got several pages that suggested eating too little could result in you not only not losing weight, but actually storing it up as the body went into a 'prepare for famine' mode. One site even offered a suggestion that 800 calories less than the estimated daily intake could be a mistake, and that 500 was a safer and more sensible figure. Eat more, to lose weight. Can you not see how appealing that might be to someone who loves food like I do? It could almost be the subject line in a spam message. 'Eat our specially-formulated bars and lose weight while you sleep, no exercise needed'. I did actually wander into the kitchen and look longingly at the loaf of spelt bread I had bought in Frome market. I even touched it and stroked the bread knife against it. But then, I noticed that the aching feeling in my arms and lower back which had been worrying me didn't seem so bad after getting up and walking through to the kitchen. I had a cup of liquorice tea instead, and walked around outside when the rain stopped briefly. That's when I remembered the episode of the grayling's revenge.
Reliving that day triggered a far more recent memory from last year when I was struggling to lose weight despite cycling for an hour, four evenings a week, and limiting what I ate to half of what I would have eaten. I broke the plateau mode then by going on a low carbohydrate diet for a while, but also by drinking a lot more water throughout the day. One of the sites that had popped up in response to my google enquiry 'eating less but still not losing weight' suggested that you need to drink a lot more water when trying to burn up stored fat, because the liver and kidneys need it in order to function properly. I looked back through the google hits for my recent question, and found that, several hits on from the 'eat more to lose weight' pages, were one or two pages suggesting that you need a lot of water in order to help the body turn fat into fuel. Oh, cynical me, who could have made sure the 'eat more' pages came up first in the search, I wonder?
Losing weight is really quite a simple concept; turn your stored fat into energy. The tricky part is making that process happen regularly enough. I have a suspicion that the body sometimes forgets to do something, or learns new habits such as storing fat instead of using it. For the past few weeks I have been fretting, because although I got my weight down from 13 stone 5 pounds to 13 stone exactly in the first three weeks of April, I then stayed resolutely at that figure, despite cycling regularly, sawing lots of old wood to burn on the boiler, and generally doing much more than simply sitting at a computer all day long. Now, I realise, I had forgotten the important lesson I learned last year, drink lots of water.
Today, a week after that lesson in the importance of regularly reviewing the past, I have reached the figure of 12 stone 11 pounds. It is a stable weight, because I have seen it for three successive days now, and I know that once more I have broken the plateau. It is not a new low for me, because I recorded this very weight at the end of September last year, after my trip to Kent to cycle around the remains of the old coalfields looking for the ghost of the East Kent Railway. But then, the autumn came, I stopped cycling in the evenings because of road-safety fears, and instead spent my evening time in front of a laptop trying to recreate the East Kent Railway in the Microsoft Train Simulator program. Despite my walking in the dark episodes (What goes up...: Back in the darkness again), my weight crept back up again, and by Christmas I had once more reached 13 stone 7 pounds.
Still, I have learned my lesson, yet again, and will go forwards knowing that water is the key to life. Nice, pure, sparkling water. Or not, as in the case of the hard, bitter-smelling, appliance-scaling stuff that comes from our tap and is really only fit for flushing down the toilet. I won't even water the house-plants with it now, the Avocado plant and Maidenhair fern in the kitchen both developed brown leaves after being fed tap-water for a few weeks. It's good business for the water companies, and just as good a business for the companies who sell filtration products. The whole civilised world seems to me to be nothing but a large market for corporate ambition. How long before we're all buying air-filters to reduce pollens and particulates inside our homes?
Whatever happened to quality of life? (Nothing actually, it's still there, as I found out last weekend, you just can't get it delivered to the door after buying it on ebay. You have to go get it.)
Labels: drink water to help lose weight, Fishing for grayling, learning from the past
posted by Sopwith-Camel | 11:47 am
2 Comments:
recently discovered this selfsame concept. it's one that diabetics become intimately familiar with real rapidly.
i read your fishing post with great interest. I used to fly fish, tie flies, catch and release...until i discovered that i liked the accoutrements and the hiking and skylarking better than i did the actual standing and fishing part. i can still tie a mean coachman, though!
FN, another concept with a link to diabetes is the insulin loop: eat carbohydrates, the body produces insulin as a signal to store up fat. Insulin production stimulates the appetite. Eat some more carbs to satisfy that stimulated appetite, and guess what happens?
Fishing. I'm going to do some more, because I felt that among other benefits, it was good to let my eyes work at a range of distances greater than that of a monitor or a windscreen. A few years ago I'd have been spitting feathers because I hadn't caught anything, but that day it didn't seem to matter. I did try tying some flies once, but I don't have that sort of patience. I prefer spinners.
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