Month: October 2024

Healthy goals

~ Maggie ~ 5 Comments

I got a very kind and concerned comment on my last post telling me to be gentle on myself and to take small steps. That was exactly what I was thinking about after posting that.
Okay, to be honest… at first I was thinking that I really want to be skinny and fit and healthy and limber and able to do it all without feeling tired. Tomorrow.
Or at least before we go back to The Netherlands for the holidays.
But that’s less than seven weeks from now. Even I (always the optimist) know that’s just not realistic.
At all.
So, I forced myself to be realistic and thought up some baby steps, starting with my health goals (because I think those are most important right now).
The next seven weeks I want to:

  • ignore the scale. I weighed myself last week and I have to lose a lot of weight. But I want this to be about feeling better, not about the numbers.
  • stick to the kind of eating that I know works for me. I know that’s a vague statement, but it would take a lot of words to explain it all. Maybe I’ll write a blogpost about it some day.
  • build up enough strength and energy to be able to keep up with household and garden chores, preferably without feeling exhausted afterwards.
  • do neck and shoulder exercises and be aware of my posture. I think that will help a lot to get rid of my back- and headaches.
  • get fit enough to be able to follow along with this video. No, I can’t – I’m a mess.

Let’s see if I can do that. I’ll keep you posted.
Will I? I hope so. That’s one of my other goals.

Oh, and sorry for the totally non-related picture. I didn’t feel up to taking one of myself and I also didn’t want to use a stock photo either.

An update

~ Maggie ~ 8 Comments

Oh wow, I didn’t realize it had been so long since I last wrote something here. So much has happened since then.

After that last post temperatures rose even more and we got to a point where we couldn’t take it anymore. My husbands heart was acting up and I was just… well, sick constantly. So we booked a flight and went to our little cabin in The Netherlands, and we planned to stay at least five weeks, probably longer.

(edited to add: I was sure I complained about the heat in my last two posts, but I just realized I didn’t. I guess that’s one of the reasons I didn’t blog that much – not wanting to complain constantly. But it’s been hotter than usual and very humid since March.)

I was going to blog from there. I had great plans to rest, loose weight, get healthy, work on my mental health, deal with the garden, get back to writing more, etc.

But I never got to it. Within two weeks after we arrived, my father died. It was not completely unexpected. He had another case of pneumonia in May and never fully recovered, but he seemed to get a little bit better every single day. Until he got something else (we’re not sure what it was – I think his body just gave up). It started Thursday night and he died three days later, on Sunday.

Some of you may remember my mom died during the lockdown, so I wasn’t able to say goodbye or be at her funeral. This time I sat next to my father when he left us and I was fully involved in all the things that followed. There were times I wished I was stuck on Curacao again (let’s not get into details about that), but mostly I’m grateful that we weren’t.

At the funeral one of my cousins asked: “Was it a coincidence that you were here, or did you feel it coming?”

Well, even though the decision was made because we weren’t able to function in the heat, I had been advocating to leave for a while and I have to admit I was extremely and uncharacteristically mad at my husband for not being able to leave (he had work to do in the area). So yeah, I probably did feel it coming. I remember myself yelling that we had to be in The Netherlands in September without having a logical reason for that statement. My dad died September 1st…

Anyway. we stayed a few weeks longer to spend time with our family and returned to the island last Sunday.

It’s still a bit warmer than it’s supposed to be, but it’s getting cooler, so I have high hopes that I’ll be able to get my life back together. You know, loose weight, get healthy, work on my mental health, deal with the garden, get back to writing more, etc.

I’m kind of thinking to use this blog to plan, document and hold myself accountable for all those things, but we’ll see how that goes. I usually choose to only write about the good things and that works great too. We’ll see. For now, I just wanted to post something as a way to reconnect myself to the blog…