Dry Ingredients:
- A fit and healthy dad who’s had mini-stroke
- A dog who ate a bar of 90% chocolate and nearly died
- A daughter who left for uni for the first time in the middle of a pandemic
- A job so busy you have to turn away work
Wet Ingredients:
- Insomnia and night sweats
- A yoga related back injury that prevents all training
- A wrist injury that prevents crochet
- Constant carb/sugar cravings
Decoration:
- Glacé tears
- Shavings of pandemic related stress
Cream together the daughter leaving with the back injury and beat until light and fluffy.
Stir in the paternal mini-stroke and chocolate obsessed, vomiting, diarrhoea fountain of a dog.
Fold in the remaining ingredients being careful not to over-mix.
If the mixture seems a bit dry add the amount of wee that has recently started leaking every time you cough, sneeze or laugh.
Place the mixture in a greased and floured 9 inch cake tin and bake for 20 minutes at the temperature of your perpetual hot flushes.
When the cake has cooled decorate with the glacé tears of a woman on the verge of a breakdown and sprinkle with pandemic stress shavings.
Allow to mature for 4 weeks while you wait for the men in white coats to come and take you away in a van that you suspect will be surprisingly comfortable.
Sometimes life just gets in the way…
It is fair to say that the last few weeks have been horrendous. I think that I could have coped with all the shit that has happened if I had been able to train.
There is no doubt that exercise improves my mental state and without it I have been lost.
I have had to navigate the slip road to the highway of cake without the ABS (anti-lock braking system not a six pack) of training, and I haven’t always been able to stop myself.
The psychological need for “treats” at a time of stress can be all consuming (no pun intended). Over the last few weeks I have eaten more rubbish than I have done in months.
Now, “rubbish” is relative. I’ve had a couple of tiny gluten free toasted sandwiches, a couple of homemade scones with clotted cream and a couple of fairy cakes (small English ones not massive modern cupcakes). At the same time I haven’t been drinking enough water or managing to sleep.
The impact of these ‘treats’ has been that I have had an upset tummy, raging dermatitis and a crop of zits the like of which I haven’t had since 1986.
Quite how I’ve managed to keep my weight at 9st 13/10st I don’t know, but I have. My assumption has been that my weight has stayed where it is because I’ve been losing muscle (see my previous post about fat v muscle). I asked Luke about this and he said that it was unlikely that I’ve lost much muscle in a short space of time.
All the way through this experiment I have told myself to look for the ‘little wins’. Whilst out for a walk this morning I thought about this subject and came to the conclusion that there really haven’t been any recently; but I was wrong.
Despite all the stress I haven’t lost my way completely; I haven’t started going to McDonald’s for every meal and I haven’t hit the bottle. Although I have been tempted.
There are just two occasions when I really miss having a glass of wine: on a Friday night whilst I’m cooking dinner and when I’m sitting in my parent’s kitchen chatting to my Mum and Dad.
My Dad taught me to love good wines, ports and whiskeys and some of my most cherished memories are the times that we have sat together talking nonsense and sharing a bottle of something nice.
When you stand back and look at everything that the universe has thrown at me over the last few weeks, the huge stresses and the low points, there are only two things that are important: that my daughter is safe and my Dad is ok.