I loved those free mornings when I could wake up to the luxury of a blank mind—that state between sleep and wakefulness, when everything is just fine. They’re now gone. They went from four days a week—Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday—to nothing.
The first encroachment is aqua-aerobics. The alarm wakes me up before 7 a.m. to be ready when our teacher comes at 7:30 to pick me up for our 8 a.m. start in Annabel’s pool in Urdaneta Village. But I’m glad to wake up perforce for that, and I do wake up no matter how late I slept the night before.
After a quick bath from pool exercises, there’s breakfast and, over it, stimulating chats with my well-informed and very much involved-with-life fellow aqua-belles. I feel good starting my day that way.
No secrets
Now my Fitbit watch, a gift I gave myself on my birthday in February, has taken away my free mornings completely. As with Santa, there are no secrets from it: It sees you when you’re sleeping, it knows when you’re awake, it knows if you’ve been bad or good…Unbelievable but true. I retired my 20-year-old Omega for it; it not only tells time, it tells your daily health history. It also works in partnership with my iPhone.
Once you’re awake, it lights up its usually opaque face to show the time and my pulse count. To find out the length and quality of my sleep, I reach for my iPhone. At my age, seven hours of sleep is suggested.
The iPhone chart does not show when I went to bed—I know that—but it does show when exactly I conked out. It shows how much sleep, and what quality of sleep, I got through the night; it tracks restlessness or wakefulness, light sleep, deep sleep and dream state (recognized by “rapid eye movement”, or “RFM”).
I’m more than willing to cooperate. I’m totally convinced a good sleep will improve my quality of life—mental and physical.
Usual goal
At 10 a.m., whether I did aqua-exercise or not, my Fitbit starts prodding me, “Are you ready to move?” Every hour until 8 p.m. it repeats the order to take 250 steps, which get done in three minutes. The usual goal is 10,000 steps, but I’ve lowered mine to 6,000, and even that I barely manage. Sitting, they say, is the new smoking.
After dinner, I begin to unwind and get ready for bed. Bedtime I’ve moved earlier. After the 9 o’clock news, no more TV for me.
All day, my Fitbit counts my steps, recognizes when I’m climbing up, but not down. I input my water and food intakes, and it warns me how much water I need yet to drink and gives me my calorie count. It flashes a signal that I’m burning fat and warns me to go easy when I have exerted enough cardiac effort. I can’t remember anyone caring this much for me.
It’s easy to develop trust in Fitbit, since it raises no controversial health points, unlike Dr. Google, who can’t seem to make up its mind whether wine, coffee and bacon are good or bad.
I made the mistake of opening an e-mail recommending a way of getting rid of belly fat fast, and more e-mails started to swamp me, and not just about belly fat but also about hyperacidity, diabetes and other problems.
Deadly little knowledge
Dr. Google empowered me with deadly little knowledge to self-medicate. Soy was good, so I went for it in a big way and got high uric acid. I ate broccoli and okra like they were going out of style, and my uric acid further soared. Told cinnamon was an antidote to sugar, I was emboldened to eat cakes and pies and ensaimada so long as they were generously cinnamon-powdered; my sugar shot to 115.
Adopting from some Keto diet, I ate bacon, eggs and meat and buttered my toasts with relish, and my cholesterol overshot by 28.
It took my husband, who never gets sick, to come home with a huge headache to make me panic and decide to get our long overdue blood tests. Instead of taking any medication, he drowned himself in glass after glass of water and got better.
Still, we went for our prescribed blood works. All my excesses were revealed. My Fitbit came just in time to put me on to a new lifestyle.
For now, there’s no escaping 10 mg Crestor after dinner for three months. I’m 0.22 away from diabetes; I have to lose 10 lbs before I can begin to fight my way back to good health—and my Fitbit pal will see I make it.
Guess who wasn’t even given any medication?