SteveStreeting.com

I don’t watch a huge number of films, but I do enjoy watching them occasionally and I’ve been using LoveFilm for the last couple of months after a friend recommended it. It’s especially good for catching up on films you didn’t have time to see when they came out. This week we had Super Size Me through the letter box, which another friend had recommended to me a while back.

I like documentaries generally, at least the informative ones anyway, and this one was simultaneously informative, funny and utterly disugusting in equal measure. I have to admire the guy for putting his health horribly at risk in the name of research, although I think everyone involved was surprised at just how much damage he could do in 30 days.

Some of the stats were interesting - I really didn’t realise that in the USA (allegedly) 40% of meals eaten by the average person are bought rather than made at home (that includes restaurants, take-out and fast food). To me that’s an incredible number - in comparison in our house I’d guess over 95% of the food is made at home.

But then, I’ve never really understood fast food. I can count the number of times I’ve eaten at McDonalds on one hand (in the 20ish years I’ve been an adult), and it’s always a very, very last resort - usually in airports at 3am when I’m jetlagged, but in recent years even that bastion has gone really thanks to decent airport restaurants being open 24/7. Our Island must be one of the last places in the world with no McDonalds - we did have a Burger King for a few years, but it shut down and is now a cafe / bistro. And don’t get me started on KFC - quite how you can take something as potentially delicious and healthy as chicken and turn it into a greasy, MSG-laden monstrosity I’ll never know (we don’t have any of those either, thank goodness). Probably the most decent food I’ve had from a fast-food joint is In-N-Out Burger (you were right Eric) - I actually saw them peeling real potatoes and mincing real beef, which is certainly a plus compared to the factory processed garbage most of these places use. Even so, I wouldn’t choose to eat it if I had an alternative.

As a bizarre coincidence, I read today that Activision is setting up a promotional partnership between Guitar Hero and KFC. Ugh.

Anyway, worth watching if you haven’t seen it already. Look out for the extras on the DVD, they’re very interesting - they did a decomposition test on ‘real’ food versus McDonalds, and it seems that even bacteria refuse to eat McDonalds french fries because they lasted for 10 weeks in a jar with little to no decomposition. That’s scary.

Now to await the UK follow-up - the health effects of eating nothing but take-out curry for 30 days Or maybe the fish & chip diet; although despite the unhealthy cooking mechanism, at least the ingredients in your local chippie are usually fresh & local, rather than being heavily factory processed like McD/KFC. The curry diet is almost certainly more entertaining though

I’ve had a long-running back injury (a twisted vertebra in my lower back) which I’ve figured out how to manage through experience - a bit of stretching here, avoid certain types of activity etc. It’s a bit inconvenient but after a while you get used to living with it, and it’s not that painful most of the time provided I don’t go nuts.

However about 2 weeks ago, not long after getting back from LA, I was doing something quite simple (moving a coffee table back after a Rock Band session), when something in a completely different part of my back suddenly hurt really badly.  We had guests at the time, so I quickly took some painkillers and did a quick bit of my usual stretching upstairs, but that didn’t seem to work very well - I ended up just gritting my teeth most of the evening. While I don’t like the existing back injury I have, at least I ‘know it’ and how generally to cope with it, but this time it seemed different - like someone randomly knifing me in the middle of the back, just below the shoulder blades (et tu, Bruté?), rather than just by my right kidney like the old injury always was.

Stubborn git that I am, I gave it a couple of days of fairly frequent hot-poker agony before giving in and making an appointment to see the osteopath. I cancelled it once because it started feeling a lot better before the appointment came up, but then I wrenched it again while doing the grocery shopping of all things (damn you BOGOF offers, you basket-filling temptresses). Luckily I remained on my feet and avoided shouting the foullest obscenities in my repertoire at the top of my voice; no doubt the years of Brit cultural training to avoid making a scene at all costs - stiff upper lip and all that, what? - helped in that regard

Anyway, I finally made it to my second osteo appointment today, although again it had started to recover quite well so I felt a little bit stupid; “that used to hurt like hell” doesn’t have quite the same impact after all. Luckily as a professional he could still tell what I’d damaged even without me yelping, so next came the expected ‘manipulation’ - which basically means ‘beatboxing with your bones’. This time the targets of choice were the Thoracic vertebrae and the attached rib heads, and they can clearly make some quite interesting sounds when properly motivated.

I’ll be sore for a while but with a bunch of new stretching exercises it looks like this one probably won’t be a long-term issue. It’s likely to be linked to the number of hours I spent hunched like a troll in economy class in the last month so hopefully it’ll prove to be a one-off.

I’ve never really thought about my blood pressure - I’ve had it checked fairly regularly, but I’ve never previously taken much notice of what the numbers were or anything. Recently though a friend of mine was diagnosed with pretty high blood pressure, which he wasn’t expecting at all, and has had to make a few changes to try to reduce it. So that got me thinking, and since I had to go to the doctor for a routine check-up this week anyway, I thought I’d pay a bit more attention this time.

For those like me who didn’t have any particular idea about this before, blood pressure is technically called ‘vascular pressure’ and is measured via two separate metrics - the maximum (systolic) and minimum (diastolic) pressure in the arteries. Those numbers that they call out in medical dramas (like ‘ninety over fifty and falling!!!’) refer to those two pressure measurements, which are expressed in terms of millimetres of Mercury (mmHg). Apparently the normal, healthy measurements for someone my age is 120/80, ie a maximum pressure of 120mmHg when the heart is at the start of it’s major pump, falling to 80mmHg when it’s resting in between.

So I specifically asked my doctor what the measurement was this time, since he tends to just nod sagely rather than telling me the details. As it turns out, my blood pressure is ‘very healthy indeed’ in my doctors own words, clocking in at 100/65. That sounded pretty low but apparently ‘too low’ is under 90/50 - 120/80 is average but allegedly you should aim a little lower than that ideally, so 100/65 is doing rather well.

That was good news, although now I’m left kinda wondering why, since I don’t feel I’ve really done anything consciously to keep it healthy; I certainly don’t do a lot of exercise anymore compared to years gone by. But I guess I do eat pretty healthily most of the time - I’m not a health nut by any stretch of the imagination, but I do like good food so most of our meals are prepared with fresh ingredients and we favour rice / pasta dishes over heavy or fried foods; that by nature means we tend to eat lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, use olive & peanut oil more than fats, and probably take in a lot less salt than if we ate convenience foods most of the time. I’ll occasionally eat crisps and other junk of course but it’s not that often, probably just once a week. I also don’t drink very much which probably helps - a couple of glasses of wine a week is all I tend to manage these days, barring any social events, and even then my ‘maturing’ metabolism doesn’t seem to be able to handle Guinness like it used to so I mostly stay away from that now. Mostly.

You don’t tend to think about your health very much when you’re in  your 20s, but it’s funny how things sneak up on you (like my back injury, and my friends high blood pressure). I guess we could all do to pay a bit more attention to how we treat ourselves sometimes.

Dammit.

I had (perhaps foolishly) begun to think that I’d put most of my back problems behind me now - it has after all been over a year since I had any significant pain from it; just a few aches / cricks / stiffness occasionally but nothing major. However, while taking a shower Sunday morning I reached down and ‘whallop’ - something popped out (or in my case, rotated since my recurring problem is a twisted rather than slipped disc). I’m guessing that anyone who has had a back injury probably knows what it feels like - a splitsecond before the pain hits there’s a weird ‘weakness’ feeling in the affected area, like when you bend a paperclip too many times and it suddenly ‘gives’. You know in that splitsecond that it’s going to hurt like hell, so you have that tiny bit of time to prepare for it, which I normally fill by preparing my very best expletives.

So, that was Sunday down the crapper - simply straightening up / moving was a chore. I know from experience though that you have to keep moving - even though it’s wonderful when you finally find a sitting position that relieves the pain enough to be considered ‘comfortable’, staying there for a long time is a bad idea because everything just seizes up. So I forced myself to regularly get up and move around, stretching as much as I could manage (cue more swearing). It seemed to work, by the late evening I could actually get my back muscles to relax enough that I could stand completely straight for once. Hurrah.

I’m feeling pretty beaten up this morning but it’s an improvement over 24 hours ago - at least I’m no longer recreating the music video for ‘Walk Like an Octogenarian’. I guess I’ll have to spend most of today getting up and down to stretch again, not exactly condusive to productivity but necessary.