I’ve taken a few days off – mostly because I’ve got deadlines – but partly because I needed to stand back for a bit to get some perspective.

I’m one of the few people I know who like installation art and one of my favourite installations is a collection of supposed fragments from a bombed out museum.  In order to look at it, you have to get very close to see what the fragments are,

then you have to stand way back to get a sense of the enormity of the piece.

If you stand back even further and watch people looking at the installation, you see a sort of slow dance of people walking up to the wall then backing away, then up and back again and again.

And I think that’s what this blog has become: you can see me peering carefully at my behaviour and my motives for a while and then watch me take a few steps back to try to get to grips with the whole picture.

I’m in that last week of my 3 months in this country and have so many deadlines and appointments that my first plan of action is to crawl back under the covers.

My second plan of action is to walk carefully through the next few days, acknowledging that I’m stressed about meeting up with the liver specialist and stressed about getting my business finances in order and stressed about chasing up late payments (WHY do the larger institutions treat the little guys so badly?).

I also confess to feeling stressed about not being where I wanted to be with the weight loss – but really, there’s nothing I can do about that so I’m going to relax  for the moment, stand back and take a good look at the big picture, ideally without the company of unrefined carbohydrates.

I will also go for a run or two or three despite the weather and despite my sincere desire to stay in my pjs and watch endless episodes of the Gilmore Girls.

I get frequent emails from RealAge – you know, health news for people with no attention span, which suits me just fine most days.  Usually I read and delete but yesterday I got fed up with the words “a new study” or “recent research” that they throw out there all the time.

One of yesterday’s tidbits interested/annoyed me enough to go looking for the original research.

According to the abstract, the researchers’ hypotheses were:

that dieting, or the restriction of caloric intake, is ineffective because it increases chronic psychological stress and cortisol production—two factors that are known to cause weight gain; and to examine the respective roles of the two main behaviors that comprise dieting—monitoring one’s caloric intake and restricting one’s caloric intake—on psychological and biological stress indicators.

Basically they wanted to prove that dieting fails because both reducing calories and tracking calories increase stress levels.

121 women were split into four groups:

• monitoring & restricting – ate 1200 calories/day and tracked their caloric intake
• monitoring only – tracked their calories but ate normally
• restricting only – were given 1200 calories per day in prepared food so not tracking was needed
• control – ate normally and did not track calories

The results?

Restricting calories increased the total output of cortisol, and monitoring calories increased perceived stress.

The RealAge advice based on this one study?

So while it’s good to think about what you’re putting in your mouth, don’t obsess about it. Watch portion sizes, choose healthy foods, be aware of how many times you visit the snack cupboard, but don’t make things too difficult.

I do get the point about stress and obsessing and fully accept that starvation is bad, but I think the overall advice is pretty poor. And I’m especially pissed off that they make it sound like “eating more” and “winging it” are going to help you reduce belly fat!  BELLY FAT: every woman’s enemy.  I can’t believe that an editor didn’t stand back from both the headline and the advice and think, “Oh no – that could do more harm than good to overweight people who are completely out of touch with how much food they really need.  And using the belly fat thing is probably a little too emotive.”  You’d think. You really would.

Pamela Peeke has come up with a much more reasoned response. And yes, I think it’s reasoned because I’ve had similar thoughts myself.

I hadn’t realised quite how angry that one little email made me.  Maybe we should do some research into the effect of poorly thought out health advice on cortisol levels then we could follow it up with a really helpful headline and a “tip of the week”.

Flatten your belly with this reading habit.

If you want to lose belly fat, don’t read snippets of health advice on the internet.

I’m grumpy.

Broadband has stopped working at home.  I think it’s because I told the telephone woman that I don’t need my name on that line because we don’t use it any more.  Well, we don’t use the phone but it’s our broadband line.  Oops.  The fact that it’s my own fault makes me grumpier.

So I’m sitting in McDonald’s – whose door I haven’t darkened since around the turn of the century.  I hate McD’s.  Even more than I hate Starbucks.  My hatred for Starbucks is all about principles – I don’t always hate their products.  But McD’s?  Oh I hate everything……except their new free wifi apparently.  I like that.  So I bought a cup of coffee that rivals the badness of airplane coffee (and that’s saying something) and am sitting here listening to bad music and generally being grumpy.

This morning, to no one except God, I actually said out loud, “I’m overwhelmed.”

So I guess I am because, even though I talk to myself quite a lot, I don’t often make statements like that out loud.

So where’s the positive thinking? (Oh Lord, it’s Michael Jackson now….) Positive positive.

I think, once I’m done here, I’m going to tackle the following issues – in no order at all.  If fact, I will probably do them all at once, a little here and a little there.

Home environment.  I’ve got half way through the big clear-out which means it’s worse than when I started. I am going to file everything.  Ask me.

Laundry. Clean bedding makes everything a little better.

Food.  I got irritated with the staff who left me waiting forever (5 mins is FOREVER at McD’s) so I didn’t order the plain toasted bagel with jam on the side. So now I’m very hungry and that makes me even grumpier.  Lunch will probably be soup.  I have lots of fruit to eat up in the afternoon and a friend is coming for dinner which is all prepared (thanks to  M&S) and ready to go – crab stuffed trout.  All I have to do is boil a few new potatoes and fine green beans.

Exercise.  I hurt.  I’m going to limit my exercise to running up and down stairs. Oh.  I don’t think I mentioned that I ran out my front door on Wednesday thinking that I’d make it to the end of the block.  Instead, I made it 1.2 miles before I had to walk.  I was thrilled after 2 months with no aerobic exercise at all.  None.  Yesterday I managed a 4k row and a good sweat on the TreadClimber.  It is a huge relief to know that I’m not as out of shape as I thought I’d be.

Once the house is clean and lovely and smelling fresh and generally happy, I’m going to sit down and write a couple of letters.  Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that we have no broadband.

Many years ago when I was feeling equally overwhelmed I had a picture of myself with a huge pile of rocks.  I was tugging and tugging trying to move the big boulders on the bottom of the pile – instead of removing the little light ones from the top.  I’ve never forgotten that.  Every rock I take away lessens the overall burden. The boulders are beyond my control so I might as well leave them alone.