Episode 201: A quick personal update where Chris shares what's been happening in his life lately. From how he's dealing with COVID to postponing his wedding to having to move out when his house flooded, 2020 has been an eventful year.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 201 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode at the show notes, which is seven-health.com/201.
Seven Health is currently taking on new clients. We specialize in helping clients overcome disordered eating, body dissatisfaction and negative body image, regaining periods and balancing hormones, and recovering from years of dieting by learning to listen to your body. If you’re ready to put an end to these struggles and heal your relationship with food and body, then please get in contact. You can head over to seven-health.com/help, and there you can read about how we work with clients and apply for a free initial chat. The address, again, is seven-health.com/help, and we’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. This week on the show I am back with another life update episode. I haven’t done one of these since May 2019, so over a year, and I know in the last one I said I wanted to do them more regularly and put them out more regularly, so I have clearly failed on that mission.
But there has been a lot going on in the world and in my life, so there’s a lot for me to cover here, and there’s been reasons why they haven’t come out. I think I say this every time I do the life update – I try to keep the regular episodes really stripped back and just deal with the topic or the guest at hand, and not everyone wants to spend the start of every episode hearing about what I’ve been up to or what’s going on in my life, so this episode gives me a chance to do all that. For those who are interested, they can listen, and for anyone who doesn’t care about this, they can simply skip over this episode.
Now, before I go any further, I should do this week’s book winner. Elsa M. is the winner for this week. Elsa, thank you for your review. We will be sending you a book of your choosing from our Resources page.
Reviews help to increase the visibility and help the podcast get into more people’s ears and for more people to find us, so reviews are really important as part of that. If you want to win yourself a book, what you need to do is leave a review, take a picture of that review, and send it over to info@seven-health.com, and then you’ll be permanently entered into the draw for the book giveaway.
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I guess the first thing that needs addressing is just what’s been going on around here in terms of dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. It has really been a weird couple of months. It’s been a weird year, 2020.
I’d been in Australia for most of January. We flew out in December time and had a week in Thailand and then were in Australia for most of January. My sister was getting married at the end of January, so we went out for the wedding. We were hearing a little bit about this as things were going on, especially considering Australia’s proximity to Asia and China, so there was a little bit of talk about this new virus and these deaths starting, but it wasn’t something I gave a huge amount of thought to just because there have been so many other things in the past that have seemed to whittle out a little bit, and at that stage it seemed very much limited to just being in China and actually just being in Wuhan.
We came back, and as we came back, things were ramping up a little bit. It was interesting going through the airports and noticing there were a lot more people wearing masks, a lot more non-Asian people wearing masks, Westerners wearing masks, which is a lot less seen, especially going through airports in Bangkok.
We got back here and then really, over the next month, so February, just watched it starting to swell, and then obviously the rest is history. Then we went into lockdown, and we’re slowly starting to ease out of that now.
The year has proceeded very differently to how I expected, which is stating the complete obvious. No one expected this to happen. But one of the good things with what has happened, or one of the things that has made this slightly easier for us, is that Ali had quit her job at the end of last year. (Ali is my other half.) She quit her job at the end of last year, and then when we got back I think she went back to work for two weeks and then finished up in the early part or midpoint of February.
It has made life way easier around here that there’s only been one of us trying to work as opposed to two of us trying to work. I know that for so many people with this pandemic, if they are lucky enough to have a job where they can work from home or work remotely, that hasn’t always been so straightforward because if you’ve got kids to contend with and look after, it’s not very easy. So the fact that we were able to have that be a little easier because Ali wasn’t working has definitely been a bonus.
I guess in terms of me and work, in the beginning it was really difficult to concentrate. It was like watching a car crash in slow motion, and I couldn’t stop checking the news. It was a really weird time, and I didn’t feel that I was being particularly productive. With clients, my work was fine, but in terms of putting together a podcast or writing an article or doing all of the other things that go into running the business, that was much more challenging.
That definitely got better as time’s gone on and definitely got better as I stopped reading the news or really limiting how I would consume the news, because I don’t think that was helping. Also just starting to shift and get used to what was now going to be the norm. What started to happen is I was doing shorter workdays. We regularly have a nanny that comes and helps out. They were coming three days a week while Ali was going to work, and then it was going to be two days a week, but obviously with the pandemic, that then stopped all of that, so it was just Ali and I who were here looking after Ramsay.
Our days got changed; I would typically look after Rams in the morning time and in the late afternoon/evening time, and then he would go to bed, and I would then just work during the daytime outside of that. That was a bit of a shift and meant that I was working less hours than usual, but actually really enjoying it. It had been a moment, and there’s been many moments, of reflecting on how I want my life to look, because I have been enjoying much more of the family time and Ali and Ramsay and I getting to spend more time than we have in a really long time. So how can I continue doing that even as this starts to end and there is a change in terms of lockdown and what we’re able to do?
That’s definitely made me rethink about life. I definitely reflected on how grateful and lucky we are to live in the countryside, because in lots of ways it didn’t change how we were living our life. We have a garden, we have bridleways that come off the back of our property to go for walks, and we were able to do that because we have a dog and Ali has a horse. So under the rules, we were able to go and see the horse and take that out. We were still getting a lot of outside time, we were still getting a lot of movement.
We, in a lot of ways, didn’t have our day-to-day life affected that much, and a big part of that is down to living in the countryside. For a long time I’ve enjoyed moving out here and being out here, but I really did reflect on that and how lucky we are to have the place that we have and be in the area that we are in.
00:09:25
Another part of this as well is I have finally started a meditation practice, and that has been a really long time coming. It’s something that gets recommended a lot with clients, and I’m very much able to talk about it in the theory and “this is what the research shows” or “this is what I’ve noticed with other clients.”
I understood meditation in terms of what it was trying to teach you to do and understanding that thoughts were just thoughts and they appear in consciousness and all of the things that it’s trying to help you to recognize and to learn. But it’s been a very different experience to feel that within my body and to get into a regular practice with this and then really notice how that has helped me and how it is when I’m not doing it.
I’ve been doing it now – I think I’m up to Day 33 or Day 34, somewhere around there. I skipped a couple of days where it didn’t happen, but it has really been beneficial. I find that I’m less stressed, I have less overwhelm than I usually do. I’m generally I think a fairly non-stressful person, but yet there are lots of things that can get on top of me or make me feel overwhelmed, and I think I’m much better at handling that now because of the meditation practice. So that’s been one of the things that I would say is good to come out of this pandemic, that it’s allowed me to do that.
00:11:15
The other things that I’ve noticed, one of them – and I kind of touched on it before in terms of how much our life hasn’t changed as part of this, and just realizing that I’m probably not seeing friends any less than I was before. Outside of going and playing golf with friends, I don’t actually catch up with people as much as I would probably like to. I think this has really hit that home for me in that we’re in a situation where we’re not allowed to see people, and yet that hasn’t really changed how much I see people because I wasn’t really seeing people before.
It’s often that thing where when something is really taken away from you, you realize how much you miss it, and there has definitely been a lot more of that feeling now, like I just want to go and give someone a hug or I want to go and meet up with this person for a meal or just hang out with this person.
So I think the other thing to come out of this is that I want to be in more regular contact with people, and more regular contact with people in real life. There’s been so many Zoom calls over the last handful of months, and they are nice; they’re better than nothing. But they are, for me at least, no substitute for the real thing. That’s definitely one of the things I’m going to be focusing on as restrictions are eased and we’re able to start to see people again, to prioritize that more than I have over the last handful of years.
00:12:50
The other thing that’s been useful that’s been great to come out of this is The Writing Club. I know I did a podcast a handful of weeks ago about this new thing that we were releasing around here. If you want to find out more, you can go and have a listen to that.
We are now in the third week of doing this, and I’m really enjoying how it’s going. It is in some ways a little experiment to see how writing assignments and then talking about them in a group setting would work, but so far I’ve been really enjoying it and thinking it works well, so I’m hoping that this becomes a regular thing that is run, where I run it three times a year or four times a year. The participants seem to be enjoying it and getting a lot of out of it, and for me, I’m enjoying the dynamic of it. So that is something that’s also good to come out of this.
00:13:55
One of the things that wasn’t so good was our wedding and that actually not happening. In the last life update, I mentioned that we were getting married on the 1st of May this year, and we were doing that in France. Rather unsurprisingly, that didn’t happen, which was disappointing, obviously. But given everything that was going on, it was totally out of our hands.
We did make the call probably earlier than when it was totally out of our hands, but we could see where things were heading. It felt a little bit like a big decision when we made the call, and then within a week and a half, the whole of France was in complete lockdown, and then another week later the UK was. So even if we wanted to proceed, it wasn’t going to happen.
But I guess that made it a little bit easier to deal with because it was just so out of our hands, and also, given everyone who was dying and everything that was going on in the world, it really didn’t feel like the right time to have a wedding. We have rescheduled that for next year, the 23rd of April at the same venue – which was also lucky that we were able to squeeze in there, because they were fully booked for a couple of years. They were able to find a date early in the season for us, which was really nice.
We are hoping that by then, the world will be in a somewhat normal place, or whatever the new normal is, but at least we’re back in a place where people can do international travel and gather for a wedding. That’s our fingers-crossed hope.
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Outside of COVID, another significant thing to happen in recent memory is that our house was flooded. It feels less recent now because it’s been really warm recently, and we haven’t had any rain for a really long time and desperately need some, but back in December – it was the 20th of December – we had such a wet end to last year, and really such a wet winter in general.
There was a week leading up to this happening where it really rained nonstop, and we woke up on the morning of the 20th and we got up, and Ali tried to flush the toilet, and the water just didn’t go anywhere. She was like, “This is a little bit weird.” Then we turned on the lights outside because it was still dark and looked outside, and there was just a moat around the house. It was probably about 10 centimeters deep. It was still below the height of the bottom of the door, but it wasn’t really far off. Our whole driveway was flooded, and a lot of our gardens were flooded.
We have a stream that flows through the back of our garden, and normally the water levels are about a meter and a half below the garden and we have a bridge that you walk over to get from where the cars are parked on the driveway to near the house, and there’s an area of stones that we have a table and a mini area there that then goes into the house. The stream had just completely burst its banks and was filling up the garden and the driveway and then the area surrounding the house.
Over the next 10-15 minutes, we just kept watching the water levels and noticing that it was continuing to rise and the rain was still coming down pretty heavily. We checked the phones; it wasn’t predicted to stop for many hours. So we moved everything that we could upstairs – all Christmas presents, all of Ramsay’s toys, any furniture that wasn’t too big, we moved upstairs. Then we left the house and got in the car to try and drive to find some sandbags to stack in front of the doors.
Driving around the area, the flooding was really immense. There were so many roads that were undriveable because they were completely submerged. You’d see cars abandoned who had obviously tried to drive through the water and had got stuck. The journey that should’ve taken us 15-20 minutes to get to the trade store to get some bags with sand in it ended up taking an hour and a half because we had to keep going round different roads because so many of them were closed.
We finally got back and put the sandbags at the front of the front door and at the back door, and sadly that didn’t do much at all. The water just came up through the floor and through the vents in the walls. Luckily, it was only a small amount of water, and within a couple of hours it had started to subside. That night we stayed at a friend’s house, but the next day we were able to come back and start to clean up.
It seemed that there was very little damage from what we could tell, apart from the floorboards were warped in a couple of the rooms downstairs, and that was noticeable trying to do a puzzle with Ramsay. Whereas before it used to be a nice flat floor, doing it now is very different.
But we’ve subsequently had the insurance company come out, and there is a lot more damage than is noticeable. So even though at the moment the house has been very livable in there, it needs to have work done on it. So we are needing to move out of our house, and that would’ve already happened if it wasn’t for COVID. It was meant to happen in March time. The insurance company was just about to start to look for builders, and then everything happened and was locked down, so it had been put on hold.
We are now most probably going to move out in the autumn time. We’re just wanting to make sure that as the restrictions are eased, there isn’t another uptick and the lockdown happens again because we don’t want to be out of the house any longer than we need to.
So that is something that was rather upsetting before Christmas and having to deal with, and now trying to figure out ways that we can prevent this from happening again, because we do have a stream in the backyard and there’s no getting around that. So how do we deal with this? Given the climate and how extreme things are continuing to get, it feels like we need to come up with a more permanent solution than just hoping it doesn’t happen again.
00:20:55
The next area is Ramsay. He is two and a half now. He’s like a real little person. I can’t remember what I said about him a year ago, when he was a year and a half old, but he’s now talking in complete sentences, and you’re able to have a decent conversation with him, or as decent a conversation as you can have with a two-and-a-half-year-old.
He knows the alphabet and he knows numbers, so he’s constantly looking at the clock and trying to tell us the time on the digital clock. He’s constantly wanting to look at the phone to know what the temperature is and what the real feel temperature is and what it’s going to drop down to, and telling us what those numbers are.
He has some planets that we put on the ceiling of his bedroom, so he knows the order of the planets, which is something I had to look up to be able to put them in order because I had no idea what they were. Now I do know the order of the planets, but until having him, I did not.
In terms of his eating, as I’ve commented on other life update podcasts and in other podcasts chatting with guests, we very much follow the division of responsibility style of eating with him. It’s our responsibility to put food on the table and decide when we want him to eat or have an eating opportunity, and then it’s up to him for him to decide what of that food he wants to eat, if any of it. We’re not forcing him and saying “No, you have to have your vegetables” or “No, you have to have more of this” or “You’re not allowed to leave the table because you haven’t eaten that.” There’s none of that. If he sits at the table and says “I’m not hungry,” then he doesn’t have to eat a thing.
It’s been really interesting over the last couple of months because he’s definitely going through much more of a beige phase with his eating and eating a lot less variety with each of his meals. It’s not uncommon at the moment for him to have one of the things that we put in front of him, so all he’ll have for a meal is just some rice. He won’t touch anything else that’s on his plate or in his bowls. Or he’ll just have chicken and that is all that he eats as a meal.
Then there’ll be other meals, and often breakfast, where there’s more variety coming in, but at the moment he’s definitely going through more of a beige phase. But it’s also interesting because that’s starting to naturally change now on his own. We continue to put down vegetables in front of him, and his plate is very much the same as what we’re eating, just a smaller portion of it. For quite a while, most of his vegetables, apart from potatoes or sweet potatoes or whatever, just got left. Now he’s starting to go back to eating them or eating some of them, so that’s a really interesting thing to notice. We don’t have to put pressure on, and he’ll start to eat those things again.
He’s also started to eat less at meals. As a younger child, it was always amazing for some of his meals just how much he could put away in one sitting, and that tends to happen less now. But he’ll eat a meal and then an hour and a half, two hours later, he’ll be hungry again, and then he’ll eat again. It’s more difficult to get him to eat a big meal – not “get him” to eat, but it’s less likely that he chooses to eat a bigger meal and more often that he chooses to eat a smaller meal and then is hungry again more regularly.
For breakfast, what will often happen is he finishes up his breakfast and we’ll just leave his breakfast on the table, and then an hour and a half later or so, he comes back and he’ll finish whatever was still left there. We’re discovering that that’s the way he’s tending to eat at the moment, and we’re okay with that.
He’s able to play more on his own and get lost in his own little world and play with teddies and trucks and cars. I can be sitting in the room chatting with Ali, and then he’s in the other room and you can hear him chatting away to himself and playing, so that’s been a change.
We’ve started playing hide and seek a little bit, and this has been a really good example on modeling and how kids will do what you do. We would play hide and seek and he’s just not great at hiding because he really doesn’t understand the concept of it. He probably doesn’t want to be in a situation where he can’t see us and he’s really far away or anything along those lines. So he’s very much hiding in plain sight, and we would then pretend as though we can’t see him and go and look in lots of different places before we finally look in the obvious place that he is.
Then when he was having his chance to look, he then started doing the same thing. Even though he may be able to see us, he would start looking at all of these other places just to fill in the time because that’s what he thought the game was about. So that’s been quite an interesting lesson in how much kids just model what you do as opposed to doing what you intend for them to do or hope that they would do. They just follow your lead.
He is completely out of nappies. This feels like a really long time ago that that change – I think it was probably just before his second birthday he stopped wearing nappies. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to go to the toilet without him being in the room, and the same with Ali. He would always be in the bathroom if you were in there; he was always interested and asking and watching and all of that. He just got to a phase where he wanted to do it himself, so the transition out of nappies was actually pretty quick.
I think we had a week where we had him in the nude for the bottom half for the week, and within about a week he learnt what it felt like and then was able to just tell us, “I need to go to the toilet.” There was a lot of false starts in terms of false positives, so a lot of telling us he needed to go to the toilet when he didn’t need to go to the toilet, but I would much prefer that than the other way around.
In a very short amount of time, he got it, and then maybe a couple months later he stopped wearing them at night and would just wake up and tell us that he needed the toilet if he needed the toilet. Most of the time he would make it through the night. There hasn’t actually been that many nights where there’s been any accidents or anything along those lines, and he’s managed to figure this out – which is great. I’m enjoying not having to change a nappy.
He’s got a balance bike, so the bikes without pedals. He’s really gotten into that and just pushing along. It means that we’ve gone out a lot more for longer walks and more exploring time.
I think on the last podcast, I was talking about the fact that Roxy, our dog, was looking a little disappointed because a lot of our walks would be much, much shorter because Ramsay would be wanting to walk and wanting to be stopping and wanting to be playing with stones. So even though we may be out for 40 minutes or 50 minutes or an hour, we weren’t covering a huge amount of ground. Whereas now, he’s able to walk and run a lot more than before, but especially on his bike. He really loves it and is able to come out for quite a long distance.
What I will typically do is take his sling with me, and at any point if he gets tired, I can then put him back in the sling. That was always the trouble when you would go a long distance, or a long distance for him, and then at the halfway point when you were the furthest from the house, it would be the point where he would suddenly be tired and didn’t want to ride anymore, and it would be a very long journey getting back home, trying to carry him and a bike without a sling.
So it’s nice. Especially because it’s been warmer over here, being able to do a bit more exploring around the area with him on his bike, and he’s been enjoying being out in nature with that.
I’ve noticed also him starting to want me more than before. Ali had always been his number one, and I imagine this is pretty much the case for most kids. The mom is the number one. If he was upset, he’d always want her or he’d always want her to be putting him to bed. She would be the one that he’d be asking for, and that has now started to shift. Ali was mentioning that there’ll be times when I’m not there and he’ll get upset and he’ll say, “I want Daddy,” which had not really happened before. I don’t like the idea of him getting upset, but it is nice that there’s been that shift and we’ve been able to spend more time together and have more of a bond. That’s been lovely.
He’s definitely happier now that our nanny has been able to return. She returned a week or two ago, so he’s been enjoying spending time with her again.
What else has been going on? We’ve continued on – I think I mentioned this last time – with no screens. He watches videos of himself or of our cousins if they send them over or that kind of thing on our phone, but not that often. But outside of that, that’s the only screen that he uses. He doesn’t have an iPad or watch the TV or anything. We’ve been able to continue that on, which has been sometimes more challenging when you’re a little bit tired and you would like a break, but overall we’re happy it’s still going that way and that he’s able to do a lot of the playing that I think, if there was a screen available, maybe he wouldn’t have been so interested in.
What else do I want to say? In terms of Ramsay, I think that’s it.
00:32:00
From a business perspective, one of the things we’ve been focusing on more is social media. We set up a Seven Health Instagram account back in I think September or October time, and since then been putting out content maybe four or five days a week. It’s slowly been growing. It’s taken a while to start to figure out how to get things right and to get the right people to help with this, but we’re now at around 3,500 followers, and that’s steadily increasing.
So (a) if you haven’t started following, then please do. I think we’re putting out some good content that’s helpful. And (b), if you have started following, please interact. We’d love to be doing more in social media, so if there’s any way that we could be doing better there, or if you have any suggestions, we’re definitely up for hearing it.
It’s been interesting then from the client side and the people applying to work with us just noticing that that has started to include people who were younger. We’ve had more interest from people who are in their very late teens, so 18-19, and 20-21, which is most probably down to Instagram, and we started to post more stuff onto YouTube as well in terms of all the podcasts. I think using both of those platforms has helped to bring in some of the younger audience – which has also been great. I love working with people in that age group. I’m happy that social media, and particularly Instagram and YouTube, has been able to help in that.
I would also say in terms of the podcast, I know we’ve started to do the book bonus, and that has definitely helped in terms of reviews and starting to see an increase in terms of listenership around that. So if you haven’t done a review and you enjoy this podcast, then, as I said at the top, please do that. It would really help, and hopefully you can win a book for doing that and supporting the podcast.
That’s kind of it in terms of things I’m thinking of to cover as part of this life update. I think the longer the amount of time goes by with one of these things, sometimes it’s more difficult because I’m trying to cover so much ground of what happened in a whole year. There’s probably a lot of details that I missed out on. I do definitely want to start doing these more regularly, but we will see, because I know I’ve definitely said that before.
00:35:15
Oh yeah, the last thing was just something that I’ve been watching recently that I think might be worth checking out or might be of interest: The Last Dance. This is on Netflix. It’s a 10-part series all about the Chicago Bulls in the late ’80s and through the ’90s and them winning the NBA on six occasions. It’s just really well put together.
I grew up through that time, and I was at school and high school for a lot of that time, and it’s interesting because there’s so much of it that I remember and so many names and players and people I remember, but I actually don’t remember watching much basketball. I don’t remember there being a lot of the NBA shown in Australia, so I’m not sure exactly how I’ve known all of these things. I guess I just picked it up by osmosis and chatting with friends or somehow.
But it was a really well put together program. There’s some great interviews, and getting people to sit for multiple interviews so that they can ask follow-ups based on what someone else has said or being able to show video footage of what someone else has said and getting their take on it.
Michael Jordan has always been a fascinating person to me. He’s obviously an incredibly talented sportsman, but there must be downsides as part of that in terms of just how driven he is, and some of that comes across as part of the documentary.
So I would highly recommend checking it out. I would say, like good documentaries, I don’t think you necessarily have to be into basketball for it to be of interest. I think hearing all the people and the characters as part of that is interesting enough.
The other thing that’s coming to mind is Andre Agassi’s book Open is phenomenal as a biography. I’m kind of into tennis, but not that into tennis. I can’t remember the last time I watched any tennis. But he wrote a really incredible book talking about his life and all the struggles in terms of the fact that he didn’t really want to play tennis. I’m always interested in hearing people who are at the top of their game because I don’t think it’s always as straightforward as we may think it is. But that was a bit of a digression.
So yeah, The Last Dance is on Netflix. I think all 10 parts have now come out because I’ve finished watching it. That would be a suggestion for something to watch.
That is it for this life update podcast. As I said, I’m going to do these more regularly, hopefully.
As I mentioned at the top of the show, we’re currently taking on new clients. If you would like help in terms of disordered eating and eating disorders, giving up dieting, dealing with body image, dealing with over-exercise, all of the things that we talk about as part of this podcast, then please get in contact. You can head over to seven-health.com/help. I will be back with another episode shortly, and I’ll catch you then.
Thanks so much for joining this week. Have some feedback you’d like to share? Leave a note in the comment section below! If you enjoyed this episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page. Also, please leave an honest review for The Real Health Radio Podcast on Apple Podcasts! Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated! They do matter in the rankings of the show, and we read each and every one of them.
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