Requiem, Delayed
Dieting Toward Eternity...
Kelly Ellington advanced toward the patient seating area. I had seen her before at the gym but never met her.
It was Monday, the fifth week of therapy and Jody, my clinician, had taught me a routine of exercise on machines I had never taken time to learn properly. It was Mondays and Thursdays, 6:45 to 8:00 mornings with a group of a half dozen patients at the hospital.
I was the only pulmonary case: each of the others had had heart attacks or cardiac surgery.
Jody had reminded me that in the fifth week, I would have a one-on-one session with the nutritionist half an hour after completing my morning workout. That staff nutritionist, Kelly, was the one I found myself sitting across from at her office desk on Monday.
Kelly was competent, professional and full of the empathy necessary among health care staff to establish rapport. It is more effective if the patient absorbs and embraces the sometimes technical features of nutrition.
Of course, I had been peripherally introduced in the educational process of being trained as a biologist-biochemist. Nutrition was a backwater for those focused on human genome changes causing birth defects and cancer. It took a crisis to shift attitude.
On her desk, a small stand containing business cards were embossed with Kelly Ellington, RDN, CSOWM. I could only guess what the acronyms represented, but surely the N stood for Nutritionist.
The calorie business was never appealing: my approach to fitness was to eat (and drink) as much as I desired and when the mirror suggested the need, to run. If weight persisted, my monosyllabic response was Run More.
In retrospect, it worked but not well. Motivation is often linked to deep emotional engagement, loss, setback, major accomplishment or a sudden epiphany that life is shorter than we can possibly imagine.
It took decades and a serious disease to impress me with the fact that, perhaps (Just Run) was an oversimplification.
The school experience on a wrestling team helped establish discipline but after a successful senior year on a conference championship team, I swore never to suck weight again.
Early on however, I did gorge on John Irving novels in which the main character was a school and college wrestler by design and temperament, and this informed his philosophy. Not just another writer but a commercially successful novelist. This was comforting to learn wrestlers might have more between their ears than sheer muscle.
Fitness was like education: get along as best you can without working at it. It was only in times of dire necessity, I would study even then, struggling to overcome inherent laziness. This time around, the details of achieving and maintaining nutrition and fitness were non-negotiable.
***
Fourteen months earlier, I learned the prognosis for my advanced disease, was fourteen and a half months. In other words, timed to coincide with a birthday at the end of May.
My oncologist hinted I might do better.
There is a whole psychology to learning of a serious disease than can’t be cured, only delayed.
This news, in my case, met with a new attitude, acknowledgement of Fate.
While each life is unique, one cannot escape genetics. There are likewise events that are impossible to predict or plan for. None of us knows the number of our days and this is fortunate: to live in blissful ignorance may be better than depression about knowing the time left.
***
Nutrition is not solely about counting calories but about understanding the psychological obstacles to health goals.
In my case with my goals, Kelly offered me a maintenance budget of 2240 calories and a weight loss budget of 1740 calories.
An internet chiropractor and nutrition guru identified seven foods: 1) sauerkraut; 2) arugula; 3) wild caught salmon; 4) cod liver oil; 5) grass-fed red meat; 6) Brazil nuts; and 7) extra-virgin olive oil.
To these he added three more: 8) fermented cheese; 9) dark chocolate and 10) L. reuteri yogurt.
To master this, an Excel spreadsheet would be useful although it was a major research project to accumulate the information and establish for each, the inherent number of grams and calories segregated into protein, carbohydrate and fat.
There was THAT to do, paraphrasing a typical Louis L’Amour hero.
It remained to cross-reference calories (quantitative nutrition) with the ten foods (qualitative nutrition), and to integrate these into a post-therapy exercise regimen and more healthy sleep schedule.
Somehow, the nutritional/lifestyle and attitude upgrades factored into a writing and farming schedule, but those details were slow to develop...