234: Life Update Volume 6

Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 234 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at www.seven-health.com/234.

Just a note before we get started: I’m taking on new clients again. This is a much smaller intake compared to the start of the year, and I now only have four spots available. I specialise in helping clients overcome eating disorders and disordered eating, chronic dieting, body dissatisfaction and negative body image, overexercise and exercise compulsion, and dealing with irregular menstrual cycles or menstrual cycles that have ceased altogether. If these are areas that you struggle with and you’d like to make a thing of the past, then please get in contact. You can head over to www.seven-health.com/help, and there you can read about how I work with clients and apply for a free initial chat. The address, again, is www.seven-health.com/help, and I’ll include that in the show notes as well.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I am a nutritionist that specialises in recovery from disordered eating and eating disorders and really helping anyone who has a messy relationship with food and with body and with exercise.

This week on the show, I’m back with a solo episode, and it’s actually a life update episode. This is my sixth time of doing one of these. The last one was back in December 2020, so eight months-ish. As I always mention at the start of one of these episodes, I try to keep the regular episodes fairly stripped back and just deal with the topic at hand or the guest at hand, and I have started to include sometimes recommendations for things to read or watch or listen to, but I put these at the end so it’s very easy to just shut the podcast off if you don’t want to listen to them.

But on the personal front or on the life front, I don’t mention much in the intro to shows. Not everyone wants to spend the start of every episode hearing about what I’ve been up to and what’s going on in my life, so it’s these episodes where I like to include this stuff because many people seem to be interested and enjoy hearing about my life and what I’m up to. For anyone who doesn’t care about any of this stuff, they can simply skip this episode.

00:02:35

How it’s been coming out of lockdown

To start off with, the pandemic. It’s been going on a while. The last time I talked about this, as I said, was back in December time, and we had a pretty tough winter. We started lockdowns again in the November time. There was a month in the November time; then there was a couple of weeks where things were not quite as locked down, and then basically from December onwards through till about late March time, we were in a lockdown and really couldn’t do very much at all. Shops were closed, bars / restaurants were closed. Yeah, there wasn’t much going on.

From the end of March, things started to slowly open up, and this then continued through in April and May and June. Everything was meant to be then fully opened by the end of June, but this was then pushed back until – I think it was the 19th of July. So yeah, it felt like a really long winter. And I mean, winter’s tough enough as it is anyway because it’s dark and rainy and miserable, but without the ability to see people, without the ability to go to the pub or to do activities, it really did feel like a long time.

Very much in stark contrast to the first lockdown, because that was in March of 2020 and then we had the most amazing spring and summer weather. And where I live in the countryside, we have a nice garden and there were places to be able to go, and you were happy to be spending time outside, and it was all new and novel. The weather made it a much easier phase to get through – and it wasn’t completely easy; there were lots of things that made it a challenge. But yeah, it felt much easier than trying to deal with this in the middle of wintertime.

Since lockdown has eased, there’s lots of stuff that I’ve been enjoying. It’s nice to be able to go out and do meals again, and we’ve done that a bit more. I mean, it’s not always the most fun with a three-and-a-half-year-old child, but it’s still nice to have that as an option. We’ve had friends stay over. I’ve been seeing friends quite a bit, being able to play golf again, being able to go to the pool or go rock climbing with Ramsay.

I’m definitely a card-carrying introvert and know that I need my own time and my own space to recharge, but I got so much of that over the last 18 months that there is definitely more of the extrovert side of me that wants to be hanging out more with people and wants to be out more. So it’s nice to be finally starting to do some more of that stuff.

I got my first vaccination back at the start of June and had no real issues apart from a sore arm for two or three days, and then will get my second shot in a couple of weeks, I think on the 9th of August. I’m looking forward to then being able to travel again. It feels like a really long time since we’ve been able to do any travel that hasn’t been domestic travel. We’ve done some holidays in the UK, which I’ll talk about, but yeah, it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to go overseas.

During the pandemic, I’ve had a number of friends who moved out of London and have left the UK. One friend is now living in Lisbon, and I’ve got a handful of friends who are now living in Ibiza permanently. So the plan is to hopefully go out and see both of those groups of friends before the year is out. That’s quite exciting and will be nice to get that kind of normalcy back, because it feels like that was something I used to really enjoy as part of my life, being able to travel, and that’s really been curtailed over the last 18 months. So to get that back would be great. But it does feel like everything is still very much up in the air, and I’m not sure what things will be like in the next couple of months and what travel restrictions will be like in the next couple of months. But yeah, I’m just hoping that it will be fine and I’ll be able to start to see people again.

00:07:14

Why we considered moving

We spent a lot of the start of this year thinking about moving and thinking about where we would like to be and still being in the UK, but looking at different options of places to go. There were two main reasons for this. One was, could we find somewhere that we could reduce our mortgage and have a little bit less outgoings? And then two, could we be closer to the sea and the beach?

Last year, I think the only trip that we took was to Dorset, and it was lovely. I really discovered how amazing some of the beaches are in the UK and discovered that we couldn’t afford to move to Dorset and actually reduce our mortgage, but we were then trying to look for places that were similar to that in terms of giving us the option of being closer to the beach. As someone who grew up and spent the first 21 years of my life living in Sydney, I absolutely adore being at the beach and being able to go for a swim. And yes, the weather in the UK is different to the weather in Sydney and it’s a different beach experience, but getting to spend time in the water, I just absolutely love, and Ali absolutely loves and Ramsay loves. So yeah, it was seeing if we could find something that would then be able to tick those boxes.

We did a trip to North Devon to see what that was like. It had some beautiful beaches but felt more like somewhere I would like to go for a holiday, but not actually live. There just didn’t seem to be enough going on in the place in comparison to what we have here and what we like about being where we are.

And then we decided to do a trip to South Devon to see what that was like, and that definitely had more of a vibe and felt similar to where we are here in terms of things going on and different options there. But I think everyone in the UK, or a large part of the UK, have decided they wanted to move to South Devon, so I think something like in the last year, house prices have gone up 20-25% in that region, and it meant that (a) it was then going to no longer be a reduction in the mortgage if we moved there and (b) the places we could actually move to were not very close to the coast. It would still be basically an hour’s drive to get to the beaches that we wanted to go to.

Through all of that, realised that actually, we want to stay where we are. It’s actually been a really nice experience where I’m now seeing where we live through fresh eyes. It’s now made me appreciate a lot more of the things that we already have on our doorstep and how much of a great place it is that we live, both in terms of the house that we have, but also the more general area.

It’s then made us start to think about the things that we were wanting to move for in terms of the beach or swimming or for a sense of community, and those things, could we start to do that more here? And we have. We’ve found some beaches that are nearby, probably about an hour’s drive to get to. So not on our doorstep, but close enough. And then found a couple of places you can do what’s called wild swimming here. There’s a big reservoir, and then there’s another place that I think used to be used for some kind of mining or whatever and now has been filled in and filled with water. They’re two absolutely spectacular, beautiful places to go swimming. So we’ve started to do that and really appreciate where we live. So that’s been a nice experience.

One of the other reasons for wanting to move – and it wasn’t a huge part of our reason for wanting to move, but it was a nice-to-have as part of a new place – would be having a bath. The house that we have, there is just one bathroom, and it is downstairs and it’s quite small. It has a shower in it, but it’s not big enough to have a bath in it. Ali absolutely loves having a bath. I don’t mind them; I will enjoy them on occasions, but for her, it’s something that she absolutely adores. Being someone who suffers with rheumatoid arthritis, there are times where she has pain, and significant pain. To be able to then soak in a bath is lovely as part of that.

So what we have ended up doing is putting a bath outside next to our house, in the garden, just round the side of our house. We have a really lovely garden, which is definitely not down to me or Ali or any of us. We inherited it as part of the house when we moved here. The former owner worked for the National Trust as a gardener and had created beautiful gardens. We have been lucky enough to be able to maintain that through the help of a gardener who knows what they’re doing. So we’ve put a bath in our garden, and it’s plumbed in properly so that you have hot water coming out of it. So we can now have a lovely garden bath.

I know the week that we got it put in, basically every time I would come down from the office and go back to the house, either Ali or Ramsay was sitting in the bath. So it has been a very good investment, and it wasn’t a lot of money. We got a cast-iron bath off Facebook Marketplace, got a plumber to plumb it in. It’s beautiful, and it’s really nice to be able to have a bath in nature and just be looking at all the flowers and the plants and everything around us. So that’s been nice.

00:13:40

I shaved my head

I shaved my head, which is something that has been coming for quite a while. I think I probably first noticed that my hair was thinning to some degree a decade ago. It’s been one of those things I’ve been thinking about, “Maybe I’m going to have to shave my head at some point.” I think maybe five years ago, I was seeing a hairdresser and he said, “I give you about six months before you’re going to have to shave it.” It’s held in there a lot longer than that, and it’s actually fine. I could’ve definitely left it another year or another two years. I didn’t really need to do it. But it was one of those things where I could see where this was heading, and at some point I was going to get into the position where I was wanting to shave my head. So I just got there a little sooner and started with a two, then a one, then a zero.

I did it about three months ago, and it’s actually been a really good experience in terms of just seeing how long it takes to acclimatize and adjust to changes. When I first did it, I probably spent the next couple of weeks really looking at myself in the mirror quite a lot – and not from a body checking / judgment place. I was pretty neutral about it. I was looking in the mirror and I wasn’t telling myself “I’m gorgeous” or anything along those lines, but I wasn’t telling myself “You’ve made a mistake.” It was more a very neutral, “This is just what you look like.” I was doing it as a way of just getting my mind to catch up with “This is how I now look.”

There would be times where I’d catch myself in the mirror and it would shock me a little bit, and now that’s happening much, much less. It’s been, as I said, about three months, and I’m finally starting to feel like this feels a little bit more normal. So it’s been a useful tool for me to see I’ve done something that has changed how I look, and I was completely neutral about the change, and yet it has still taken me three months to get used to it, and probably will take longer than that to really be used to “this is how I now look.”

For someone who is in recovery, they have a very different experience in terms of (a) the change that is occurring; most of the time they’re not wanting that to happen in terms of “I’m not wanting to be gaining weight, I’m not wanting my body to change this way” and (b) when I did it, I went instantly to the place of “This is the final destination. I shaved my head and that’s how it’s going to look forever”, whereas for someone who is going through recovery, the weight is changing. It’s going up and it’s changing, and it’s a gradual process. There is the “I don’t know where this is going to end” feeling. I didn’t have that. On Day 1, I knew where this was going to end because this is now how it looks.

So yeah, it’s been something that I’ve talked about with clients when they’re struggling in terms of their body, to be saying, that’s completely normal to be struggling at this point, because it looks different. And it takes time for your mind to adjust to it looking different. So yeah, it’s been quite a helpful exercise.

It’s also very easy for me in terms of I now shave my head every week or every week and a half, and I don’t have to think about my hair outside of that – which is great, because I was pretty terrible previously with getting haircuts and would always leave it months and months after the point at which I should’ve got it cut to actually get it cut. So now it is very, very easy.

00:17:52

Our house renovations

This is something else I probably should’ve mentioned when I was talking about the decision to not move: we recently got the house, the downstairs, renovated. I think it was on one of the Life Update podcasts I mentioned – and this happened back in December of 2019 – our house was flooded. It was thankfully pretty minimal. The water came in, but it was only in for a couple of waters, and then the rain stopped and it subsided. But we had reported it to the insurance and we needed to get things fixed. It was very liveable. After we got rid of the water, if you came into the house you would have no idea that we were flooded.

But as I said, we reported to the insurance and they needed to come and fix it, but we were about to get the place fixed and then Covid happened and we went into lockdowns, and it took a very long time for us to then actually get the work done. But it’s really been nice. Since they redid it, they put down new floors, they painted the place. We have wood cladding on some of the walls and they redid all of that, and they did a much better job than was in there already. I think the previous owners had done a lot of the work themselves, and they were not that great with a lot of the things they’d done. So to get professional people who are trained to then come in and fix everything was great. The house feels really fresh and new.

It was also another reason why we were deciding we didn’t necessarily want to move, because it just felt like in some senses we had already moved. We were having this new experience of being in the house.

00:19:51

Ramsay update

And then Ramsay. Ramsay, my son, is three and a bit. He’ll be four in September, so three and three-quarters or nearly four. He is no longer a little baby; he is a great little human being. Definitely – and I’ve commented about this before on the podcast; I think I commented when I had Barbara Allen on the podcast about high sensitivity: he’s definitely highly sensitive and more of an introvert. And I don’t think that was helped by the pandemic and not seeing people and him just being with Ali and I for long stretches of time.

But even now, when he is going out and being reintroduced to the world and going to nursery and all of those things, he definitely struggles more than the average kid, and he much prefers being around adults rather than children. Ali was talking to him at some point about his birthday and having a birthday party, and he was listing all the people that he wanted to have come and they were all adults. She said, “What about the kids?” He was like, “No, I don’t really want kids, and if any of the adults have kids, they can leave them at home.” So yeah, he much prefers the company of adults than children at this stage.

He’s started to do nursery, which he does. It was one day a week; it’s going to be two days a week from September time. We found a really lovely nursery that is a forest nursery. It’s in a place called Ide Hill, which is about half an hour from here. It’s just a really stunning place under the trees, in the forest the whole time, and that’s all points of the year. So every day he goes, he’s in his wellies and has wet weather gear if it’s going to be raining. It’s a beautiful setting and it’s perfect for him in terms of being able to be outside and for him to be able to climb and explore and move his body.

But yeah, he’s someone who really struggles with it and struggles with the letting go and not being with either Ali or myself. When he’s there, especially in the beginning, you can see he’s really spending a lot more time on his own and just watching other kids or being on his own playing much more than playing with the other kids. And definitely a lot of anticipation anxiety with going and much more anxious the day before and talking about going to nursery and not really wanting to be going. He’s fine after a while, once he’s there, but it is a challenge to get him to let go and to actually spend time there.

And I do think it will get better with practice, but I’m really glad that we found somewhere that is letting us take our time with it, because I don’t think he’s just the average kid who is able to get on with things. I think it is going to take a little bit of time.

He has learnt to ride a bike, which is great. He had a balance bike, which is one of those bikes that doesn’t have pedals and you just use your feet as the pedals and push along, which is a really great invention. It’s such a great idea because it means that you learn how to balance on a bike well before you bring in the pedals, which I think is great. He had that from, I don’t know, 18 months, two years old. Then he got a pedal bike without training wheels, and it took him a while to build up the strength to be able to pedal, but he can now do that and he has real confidence with it and just loves riding the bike.

So it’s been really great to see and is something that we can then talk about in terms of when he’s struggling with going to kindy. We can say, “Originally you didn’t know how to ride a bike, and with practice you were able to do that.” Comments like that seem to resonate quite well, and he’s able to take it on board.

He is really into math and numbers. It’s pretty incredible. The other day, his kindy said that they haven’t had a kid who can understand numbers like he does. I mean, this has been going on for quite a while, but yeah, his comprehension and being able to understand the concept of numbers is pretty amazing. I can play a game with him where I’ll say, “I’m thinking of a number and you just need to guess it”, and we’ll do higher or lower. So he’ll guess and I’ll say higher or lower, and I can pick 572 and he’s able to do that. He’ll go up and higher and lower and be able to figure that out, which I think is pretty cool.

I was then able to explain to him negative numbers and start to bring that in so he could then guess -67 was the number I was thinking of. I printed out a sheet of numbers, like 1 to 100, and I could say, “Can you find 67?” and he was able to point his finger to it and find that, which was also pretty incredible because I don’t know if he’d seen those numbers before. It was always like, “I don’t even know how you know that that is number 67.”

Same with he’s pretty good with subtraction and addition. If I say, “What’s 63 plus 7?”, he’s able to go, “Oh, 70.” And while we were on holidays recently, he was starting to get into fractions, talking about quarters and understanding with quarters there’s four quarters in a whole, so if you say “I’ve got six quarters,” he would be able to say “That’s one whole and two quarters, or one whole and one half.”

The same with time. He has an ability to understand time and what time means and that there’s 24 hours in a day and that there’s 60 minutes in an hour, and his ability to estimate time is great. If you say, “We’ve got to do this in 20 minutes,” he will roughly know when 20 minutes has been up, which again, I don’t know how he’s able to do that. Yeah, there’s a lot that, when I reflect, I can remember being in the first grade or the second grade and I was not able to think about numbers in the way that he can. So I think that is something that is very, very strong for him naturally.

He’s still enjoying going rock climbing, which I talked about in the last podcast. Not as much as before. I think at the moment, he really wants to go swimming. He missed out on that so much during the pandemic, and he just absolutely adores the water. Any time we’re at a beach or near a stream or whatever, regardless of the temperature, he’ll want to go in. There was a time when we went to North Devon when we were doing some exploring and it was 10 degrees in the water, and he just stripped off and wanted to go in. He was running in and out and in and out. So yeah, he loves pools, loves swimming, loves the water.

We’ve been wanting to do more of that, although it feels like every person is wanting to go swimming and everything’s booked out at the moment. But yeah, that’s definitely one of the things that he’s passionate about.

With his eating, he is a good eater. He definitely prefers snacks more than main meals, and I would say eats a ton of fruit, more than anything else. He’s now big enough to go and open the cupboard or open the fridge and start taking stuff out himself, so he starts doing that more often. There’ll be times in the morning where we’ll wake up and he’ll say, “I’ll do breakfast this morning” and then he’ll go downstairs and want to make something for breakfast. I’ll normally come down and he’ll have served up a bowl of muesli that has marshmallows all through it or some interesting concoction. But yeah, he loves the ability to feel grown-up and take things out of the cupboard and do that kind of thing.

He’s really got into singing and dancing. He watches TV, and then on my phone he’ll find the theme tunes to the shows he watches on TV, and plays it on Spotify and knows all the words and sings along. He has ruined my Spotify in terms of I listen to – they have a Discover Weekly playlist, and each week they would give me three hours of music to listen to and it would be based on the kinds of stuff that I listen to. For a while, his listening didn’t have an impact on my Discover Weekly, and then this week when I went in, it was basically all theme tunes to kids’ TV shows. So I need to find some way of remedying that so that I actually get recommended music I want to listen to instead of kids’ music.

00:30:01

Seven Health update

On Seven Health stuff, this has been the busiest year on record that I’ve ever had. Part of that is due to some of the changes I’ve made. Previously, I had two full days of clients a week, and then on the other days I would do all of the other stuff that I do for running the business in terms of the podcast, blog posts, client emails, admin, all of those things. I would do that on the other three days.

Now, I’ve increased to three full client days, and it often ends up being more like three and a half full client days. Because of that, I have more time to take on clients, hence it being the busiest year I’ve ever had. Working with more clients means that the podcast has taken more of a backseat. In some ways it’s been nice to have a bit of a break, and this year I’ve definitely put out the least amount of episodes that I’ve done, and there’s been weeks where rebroadcasts have gone out, or there’s been weeks where nothing’s gone out, and that really hadn’t happened before, at least in terms of the nothing going out.

I am keen to do more interviews and do more episodes again, but I’m also thinking about how this could look longer term, and do things need to change. This’ll be – I think basically now six years ago was when I first started the podcast, and six years is a long time. There are moments of it feeling a bit like a hamster wheel of creating content. I love the conversations and I love recording the podcasts; it’s just all of the other stuff and all the time that goes into it that is more difficult. So yeah, there’s thoughts about how I could do things differently, or do I want to do things differently. I’ll figure that out over the next couple of months.

I’d mentioned about Ali had, in the last episode, been helping out with Seven Health. That is still the case, but in a much lower capacity. I think towards the end of last year, due to lockdowns, she started looking after Rams a lot more, and she’s just been doing a lot less since then because that’s still going on. So it is more of me doing everything, and that at times can be a challenge.

I’ve come off social media personally and also with Seven Health. In the end of 2019 through to the midpoint of 2020 I was trying to build up social media and had a number of people and companies help out at different points. And then I decided to use it more as a distribution channel. I wasn’t going to create anything separate for Instagram, for example, but rather, if I did a blog post or if I did podcasts, I would still put it out through that. Then it got to the point where I was like, “I want to come off all this altogether.” It’s not how I want to spend my time, and I think for social media to really work as a business tool, you have to be pretty dedicated to it and you have to put the time into it, and that’s just not how I wanted to do things.

So yeah, I’ve stopped putting any content out through any of the social media channels and now I’m just focusing on the podcast and the blog posts.

The only other thing in terms of Seven Health stuff was I had someone help out at the end of last year in terms of SEO and have a look in terms of the SEO for the site and compare it to other people in the same niche and what articles and content is ranking well. This has been really helpful and has been useful as a bit of a guide for this year in terms of the content that I’ve been creating and the focus I’ve put in with that stuff.

I think the last couple of articles that I put out have strayed from this a bit and have just been things that I wanted to write about, but mostly it’s been using the SEO as a guide of useful content to put out and it has been really helpful to have that as a thing that can help me decide what to cover.

00:35:10

Ali update

Ali is doing well. I think there’s been points on the podcast before, or at least with these Life Update podcasts, that I’ve spent more time talking about her, because after Ramsay was born she had a really rough time of it for about a year and was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. That’s been quite a journey.

But she is in a really good place. It’s just so lovely to see, and is really in the best place that she’s been now since that diagnosis and since Ramsay was born and has much more range of movement and ability to do things. She’s horse riding multiple times a week, is able to muck out stables and do things that previously she just wouldn’t have been able to do because of pain in hands and wrists and other things. So it’s great that she’s able to be doing all of these things again.

It really does feel now that for her, it’s trying to work out, what’s going to be next? So that once Ramsay’s getting a little older and is then going to school, what is going to be her next thing in terms of her career? She is still going to be helping out with Seven Health, but I know she wants to be doing something more than that and something that she’s passionate about and can get her teeth into. So I think that’s going to be part of, for her, the next six months or the next year: really figuring that piece out.

00:36:53

Closing thoughts

So that’s kind of it in terms of what I wanted to cover as part of this. It does feel like there’s light at the end of the tunnel. I know when I recorded the last one of these in December, things were looking a little bleak again, and we didn’t really know what was going to go on and where things were heading. But it now feels like life is getting back to normal in some ways. And it’s definitely not there, and I think there’s lots that is still going to go on as part of this pandemic, but the fact that Ramsay’s getting older and is more of a little person, Ali’s health is better, and we’re able to do more, it really does feel more positive than it has in quite a while, which is really lovely.

So that is it for the show. I hope that you found my ramblings about my life entertaining in some way, or it was nice to hear what I’m up to and what’s going on. It does always feel a little weird / narcissistic to sit and talk about this stuff for however long I’ve gone on for, but I always know the feedback from these things are good, so I keep doing them because people want to hear about this stuff.

As I said at the top of this, I’m taking on clients again, and there’s four spots left. If you are struggling with an eating disorder or disordered eating or exercise compulsion or you’ve lost your period or any of the topics that I cover as part of this podcast, then please get in contact. You can go to www.seven-health.com/help, where you can find out more details.

Until next time, take care and stay safe, and I will catch you again soon.

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