Fitbit Hell

Recently I started using a FitBit. I finally gave in to this latest app/gadget, because I finally faced up to the awful truth - that exercising once, vigorously, first thing in the morning, does not entitle you to the life of a slob for the other 23 hours of the day. I am doing a 5k run next week, the Race For Life - I have been doing this run ever since my sister was first diagnosed with breast cancer, and now that she has died, I run it as a way of putting the ongoing, nagging pain of that loss into some sort of perspective. And I know 5k is not a lot for a runner, but then I am not a runner. I am an orthopaedic patient. I have had four rounds of orthopaedic surgery and in fact in Autumn I will be having my fifth, so frankly any kind of distance that I achieve at a pace faster than a cautious two step, is a miraculous victory of bloody minded determination over generic NHS prognoses, and I do tend to get smug satisfaction out of demonstrating my Underdog Status. So. A 5k run coming up, and my training, though helping to increase my pace a bit, was not doing a whole lot for my overall look. Basically, I was still wobbling in places that really shouldn't be wobbling. I figured the answer was, to find gentle ways to be more active throughout the day, rather than just doing one blast of exercise in the morning. Walking had to be the most obvious way of doing this. I easily walk 10000 steps a day just a result of my commute and the frequent back and forth to meetings in different building along the very long road I work at. But getting some consistency in that, plus challenging myself to a higher target, might, I thought, produce a difference. Well, it has. Grudging hats off to the walking advocates. I am almost into my third week and frankly I am a bit stunned to see how much more lithe I feel, how much more easily I zip into my skirts, and how much more easily I am sleeping (huge and unexpected bonus, that last one). But my friends, if you are inspired by this post to buy a FitBit, a word of caution. I had been using my IPod as a pedometer and the problem was, that it ran out of charge too quickly to be effective. The FitBit will last you a good 5 days or more before you have to charge it. Hooray. But by setting yourself up on the App, you join a vast community of people who all appear to have obsessive compulsive disorder. These are people who are logging the quality of their sleep, every millilitre of water drunk, every calorie ingested. People who pore agonizingly over the definitions of their frame and the characterisation of their lifestyle - critical for FitBit's basic stats that then determine what weight loss they calculate your various bits of progress add up to. The chat fora resemble nothing so much as a geeky Good Samaritan conversation. I am mildly horrified to find myself in this world and I try pretty hard not to get sucked into it. For example, the first night I experimented with monitoring my sleep quality, I couldn't sleep. I kept waking up thinking, was that REM or not??? So I stick to aiming for 15000 steps a day. But even then, FitBit tells you which are active steps and which aren't. And you get really, really hooked. I find myself looking at the flashing lights on my wristband and deciding to get off 3, no 4, no 6 stops earlier on the tube so I can add one more flashing light to the mix. It will also add 45 minutes to my commute, but hey, it's got to be worth it for one more flashing light!! Net result: I Am Exhausted. How this is possible for a girl who boxes, swims, pulls weights and is training for a run, I am still struggling to get my head round. Who knew walking so much could be so draining. And these days I am struggling to finish reading my paper on the tube because I keep pulling out my phone to check my fitness status on the FitBit app, which, excitingly, you do not need an internet connection to synch. Yay. So, I am in the Bermuda Triangle. I have been captured by the FitBit police and transported to a world where you obsess over every journey you take, even one to the bins, and value it on the basis of a daily target. But hey. I am back into my turquoise shorts, the ones I shoved to the back of the wardrobe in shame over three years ago because I couldn't zip them up any more. That is a win win.

Peanut Butter Squares

I've been working at the Ending Sexual Violence in Conflict summit all this week. My team and I have worked for months and months for this week, and turns out, it was worth all the effort. Hilary Clinton called this a "summit to end all summits".  Right, so no pressure then, for the organisers. But she was right - this was not a darkened room with Ministers round a table. This was noisy, colourful, swarming with people, installations, theatre, powerful pictures, painful testimony, mock trials of UN resolution 1325 (look it up)...somewhere in the middle of it, or to be more accurate, in discussion room 4, which was right at the back in a corner, I was chairing discussions on child soldiers, on women building peace, on..well I kind of lost track somewhere around the middle of day 2.  Friday afternoon it was over and the organising teams lay around, panting with exhaustion, eyes glazed, cheeks flushed with the sheer relief of having averted logistical disaster....it had been a good week. I headed home to write up a speech I was delivering in my local community on Saturday morning. My brain was still functioning on nervous adrenaline and I couldn't quite give up the ghost. The next day, I delivered the speech, tissues were out in the audience all over the place, plaudits all round afterwards, and I was finally at liberty to collapse. But, I've never really been that good at collapsing. I came home and considered my options. An afternoon of mindless TV. A 5 hour bath. Straight to bed to sleep off the week, no getting up again before Monday? I headed into the kitchen. Before taking up any, or all, of these options, I needed a celebration bake. And when I do a celebration bake, I get heavily into children's party food. Mini key lime pies, mini cheesecakes, fairy cakes with hundreds and thousands scattered randomly over them...I opted for chocolate peanut butter squares. If you google a recipe, you get about a hundred. Considering the ingredients for a chocolate peanut butter square are self evident and indisputable - chocolate, sugar, peanut butter, digestive biscuits and butter - it seems pretty extraordinary that there could be any debate about how to make them. But there is, and I've tried nearly all of them, out of sheer curiosity (and also because I have a baking obsession - nobody reasonable would spend whole weekends comparing chocolate peanut butter square recipes). I opt for the BBC Good Food recipe today, which uses dark chocolate instead of milk, smooth peanut butter instead of crunchy, and golden castor sugar instead of muscovado. I chuck the base into the food processor, melt the chocolate, pour one over the other in a square tin, throw it into the fridge, and 2 hours later, chop it up and pass it over to my teenage family for immediate consumption. Only then am I ready for that 5 hour bath.  Look, when you've spent all week campaigning to end sexual violence in war zones, making chocolate peanut butter squares is a humble and simple way to ease yourself back into the privilege of your safe, daily life.