Friday night. My parents took our 3.5 year-old and with one kid in tow we headed to what turned out to be an excellent Indian restaurant. We got the non-vegetarian meal not realizing there would be no vegetables whatsoever and just meat. It tasted great, but I felt a little gunky afterwards.
Later that night I was doing toe pulls and popping my big toe’s joint. It’s like I released some toxins from that joint because that started the Gout, for sure.
But Saturday was a great day of physical exercise and outdoor air. A huge load of mulch arrived and I gleefully loaded up the wheelbarrow and delivered mound upon mound of mulch to my wife who spread it out on our various beds.
The kids came over and I showed off by jumping over the huge pile of mulch, sprinting after the older ones, climbing trees, and at one point even jumping over the stroller. I almost got into the splits, I practiced dynamic stretching, and I got plenty of sunshine. Shit, I even studied for my supply chain test.
But all was not well with my toe and by nightfall I could tell difficult days would be ahead.
This isn’t the I can’t walk variety of gout. It’s the “it’s gonna be hard to put on that shoe” kind of gout. It surprises me because I had been eating really well and it seems like just that one big meal tipped the scale. And that very well might be the case—but once your body’s line of defense has been broken, succumbing again is easy.
Now, that retrospection begins. Something we never seem to get right at work, I tend to retrospect, perhaps too much, in my personal life. In any case, I’m not going to be too hard on myself here because I’m mostly on the right track but still eating too much meat.
Much of this is a product of growing up in the Midwest of the United States, a meat and potatoes kind of place. Cold weather is also a kind of meat inducer. In any case, it’s a habit that needs to again be looked at because I don’t get gout when I limit myself to meat once every other day. And, to be blunt, gout sucks.
Finally, this weekend Alan Calvert’s Super Strength arrived. He is big on the pull over exercise for rib cage expansion. As I sit here and type on my laptop I realize despite my best efforts, I spend the majority of my days indoors at a computer with presumably poor posture for a great percentage of this time (shoulders rolled forward, for sure). That’s a far cry from the fresh air and sunshine needed for good health. Many things to work on here but what I’m thinking about now is rib cage expansion. Certainly my chest is sunken in due to the years of abuse—desks after desks after desks (public education followed by a desk job).
So, pull overs it is, done Calvert style. Incidentally, Super Strength contains the best explanation of the pull over I’ve ever read. I’m excited to give them a try.