Bursting with wellness

I may have to change the name of this blog, as I just don't feel all that cranky these days.  In fact, I feel younger, stronger, and more like my old self every week.  This "old self" I'm referring to is back when I was more of a nature queen, the part of me eclipsed by a bad marriage and subsequent exhaustion from community college teaching and single-momhood in a landscape I didn't much enjoy getting out into.  I slid slowly into a pit of mental and physical ill health.  Now I think I'm slowly creeping out of that pit, almost able to peer over the lip.

Writing poetry has helped tug buried emotions out into the light.  Nipping back on "metabolic syndrome" in the nick of time has kept physical recovery within my reach.  Retirement has given me back the time to take care of myself.  A not-so-bad marriage has given me comfort and reassurance even as I see myself outgrowing it and wondering how to manage future changes.  The commitment I made to T, my younger son, to put him through college (thanks to my frugal mother) has pushed the limits at times but now appears to be bearing fruit.  He's definitely teetering on the edge of the nest and trying his wings with the "grand finale" Ecuador trip for his last university credits for the bachelor's degree.

Finding the trogon last week was symbolic.  I'm starting to feel like I can still do it -- "it" being toddle around in the woods finding stuff and knowing or figuring out what it is.  My knack with binoculars is back.  My knees are back.  I can mostly keep my balance and get around safely. Losing that has been sad and frightening.  I'm still too fat and too slow, but I definitely feel my body integrating and pulling itself together.  I am buzzing with energy and alertness -- the most recent improvement and suspiciously coincident with starting on alpha lipoic acid supplements on top of the glucose and cholesterol meds and exercise.

I've done some deep (for me) reading on alpha lipoic acid lately.  Cellular biochemistry has never been my strong point in biology, but I've been able to extract quite a lot of info to understand what this supplement does from a collection of review articles:  Oxidative Stress and Inflammatory Mechanisms in Obesity, Diabetes, and the Metabolic Syndrome, edited by Lester Packer & Helmut Sies, CRC Press, 2008.  My next step is to get hold of enough of the cited references to understand it even better.  Yeah, it's my latest project.  Briefly and simply, it promotes appetite suppression (action in the hypothalamus), accelerates glucose metabolism (action in mitochondria of cells, especially in skeletal muscle), and probably aids in reduction of insulin resistance (action in beta cells of pancreas).  Studies are ongoing, but what's known so far is exciting for aiding recovery of those of us who've allowed ourselves to slip into the triad of obesity, inflammation, and insulin resistance -- the slippery slope into type II diabetes. (Three of the 20 review articles in the above-referenced book deal specifically with effects of supplementation with alpha lipoic acid, including studies using rats, mice, and human subjects.)

Now that I've risked alienating readers with this dip into the technical . . . Ah, had to do it, but I promise not to overdo it!