The Skinny Daily Post™

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2004-03-10T08:49:00.000-05:00

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VERB Is What You Do

2004-03-09T09:09:00.000-05:00

VERB Is What You Do

Well, it's aimed at kids 9-13, but who says they get to have all the fun? The Center for Disease Control has a hugely popular Ad-ucational program going meant to instill active habits in U.S. youngsters. Studies show that nearly a third of the targeted age group who live in regions where the campaign is running are aware of the program, understand the message.

What's not to understand? "Move. It's good for you." We all know this, have always known it. Many of us, though, have transmogrified the message into "Move. Or You'll Die." Or "Move. It's a necessary evil." Or "Move. It has been shown in some subjects to mitigate the long-term effects of living."

There's good marketing, and there's bad marketing. Anyone in the business will tell you that the negative message is the hard sell, must be handled with care, often backfires. If you want to move people to act or change their behavior, go for the positive brand associations: "Move: It's Fun!!!"

And that's how the VERB campaign works. It's reminding kids and parents of kids how to have fun again. Not preachy, not prescriptive, these ebullient ads and websites (www.verbnow.com, www.verbparents.com) make you want to go outside and play. And stay inside and play. And play with your kids. And take up skateboarding. And try a three-legged race. And recall how to play four-square. And remember that skipping rope used to keep you occupied for hours. And how tag was IT. And kick the can, and hop-skotch. It shows kids some basic yoga moves, sticking techniques for hockey, helps parents find rails-to-trails, beaches, and parks near them.

Ah, Play! Fun! It's in the upper 40s here in Michigan, and the sun has been shining brightly for days, melting ice and snow, revealing our walking and bike paths. And underdressed, overeager, we're out in it, in shorts, with convertible tops down. (Michiganders who drive convertibles are staunch optimists, and deserve a wave and a smile at this or any time of year.)

One broken hole in the ice on the little lake near my home brought down rafts of waterfowl. My beloved Buffleheads, Redheads, Goldeneyes, and Mute Swans. Birders hiked down to the docs, up over rocks, maneuvering woods and beaches with their binocs to get a better look, and counted them off for me as I passed by, headed for the beach where ice floes had yet to break free and tumble into Lake Michigan. Horizon lovers were roaming the beach, taking in the wind and sun and remarking on the powerful landscape sculpting winter wind and ice performs on our beaches. Runners have begun training for the big local race in May. Helmeted kids leave fat bike tire tracks in the last of the sun-sparkling slush. I watched a kid shovel the heavy snowmelt from his family driveway so he could shoot hoops with his gloves and hat on. Poop patrol is underway in yards everywhere, hunting down a winter's worth of Fido's deposits. Bikes, trikes, strollers, and skates came clanking and squeaking out into the sunshine. And my irises are poking up, making my pruning hand itch.

It's time to VERB. Pick your pleasure. Keep it fun. All it has to be is action. If you like it, you're more likely to keep it up. Fun is fun for fun's sake. We all need it. (And yes, of course, it's good for you, will help you lose or control your weight.)

So, what'll it be, friend? A hoop, a bike, skates, garden shears this year? Pick an active hobby, and Move. It's fun.

About the CDC campaign

The site for kids

The site for parents

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Fear of Fat

2004-03-08T09:31:00.000-05:00

Fear of Fat

Every time I say this, I make somebody mad, somebody who has yet to lose weight, who's struggling hard to lose weight, is despairing of losing weight. I understand that this message isn't jolly, isn't positive. But I'll gently remind my dear readers that this column is about my experience of finally losing a bunch of weight and working hard to keep it off. I need to tell the truth of this experience, or what's the point? It's not all jolly, folks. It's not always easy.

So I'll say it again: Losing weight is easy, keeping it off is hard.

After two years at my goal weight, I put on a few pounds this winter, and it's playing with my head. My clothes are snug. I'm counting calories and working out lots again, but the scale isn't moving. At all. I've managed to stop gaining weight, but I'm not losing it. And I'm frustrated.

The research bears it out, regained weight is harder to lose again. It's sticky stuff. It wants to stay put. It refuses to budge. I cannot drop my calories any lower without hurting myself or risking malnourishment. I exercise 6 days a week, and at a pretty good intensity, with lots of variety. The numbers are all what they should be for weight loss, but I'm not losing weight.

I know enough to know that any number of things could be going on here. I might be experiencing water retention at the moment. I am at the wicked early stages of menopause. I have put on lots of muscle.

And while I try to soothe myself with all of these logical explanations, and though I know that as long as the numbers are right, I'll see some movement at some point, this extra weight is breaking my heart, distracting me, making me miserable.

I'm not overweight, but I'm scared. Scared, a little freaked out, a bit overwhelmed by how easily I can gain weight these days and how hard it is to move it. Everyone warned me. And I listened, but the truth of it is more frightening than I expected. Remember the wormholes in the movie, Dune? I feel sucked toward the wormhole of my obesity.

And of course, writing to you as often as I do, while this is going on? Makes me feel a bit of a fraud, frankly. Who am I to talk about healthy living, weight loss, exercise, if I present a pudgy middle to the world? Look how people have exhumed poor Dr. Atkins to poke over his corpse. What am I setting myself up for? How can I write this column without striated deltoids? I know. I need to give readers more credit, but we're not talking to my reasoning head. We're talking to my panicking heart.

I may need to adjust my expectations. It could be that I lost too much weight, too low a weight for my body to maintain. And if that's the case, alright, but where will it stop? Where is my "set point," if there really is such a thing?

So here is the cautionary tale, friends. This is what comes of focusing a bit too closely on a number. I'm at my healthiest state in years, but I'm miserable because of a number on the scale, a pair of jeans. The lump in my throat that won't clear away is being driven by my stats, while I'm able to run miles, lift more weight, do more pushups, than ever in my history.

Three years ago getting out of bed, pushing up from my chair, meant facing pain with courage. Today nothing hurts except my pride.

As a wise reader said to me recently, "It's not about the bikini." She meant, it is about health. It's about achieving the best health we can hope for, given all other variables.

It's not about the bikini. It's not about the bikini. It's not about the bikini.

I'm going to put my scales away for a month and ride this one out while I train for a local 5K run in May. I'm going to try to take it easy. I'm going back to my breathing exercises. I'm going to enjoy my healthy body today.

Does gaining a few throw you completely out of your saddle? That's not a good thing, poopsie. That's disordered thinking, right there. We do gain and lose weight naturally, as a reaction to seasons of greater and lesser mobility, hormonal shifts, and most especially, as a response to stress. Heaping more stress onto weight gain by freaking out about it works entirely against us.

Journal assignment for the next time weight gain or the interruption of weight loss has you freaked out: What is it about your weight that scares you? Spend some time thinking about what you've been going through lately. Has it been a rough time? Have you been afraid, anxious for any reason? Overworked? Sad? Angry? Are you actually overeating or under exercising? These last two are the easiest things to fix. The stressors may be temporary, but if they're not, consider getting some counsel from a friend or professional to help ease them. Consider, too, whether your relationship with your scale could use a cooling off period.

Regain studies, National Weight Control Registry

Stress and weight gain, Melissa Stöppler, M.D

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Edible Barley

2004-03-04T13:04:00.000-05:00

Edible Barley

I mostly drink my barley. To be honest, other than knowing it's a main ingredient of a beverage I admire, I have barely given barley a thought.

But during the past few weeks I've been falling in love with the stuff, and am on a campaign to try it in all of its forms. That's not going to be easy, because at the moment I can't get past how much I love the plainest possible form -- cooked, hulled barley.

Why bother trying something other than the wheat and rice we're all used to eating over and over and over again at nearly every meal? Well, there you go. I answered the question by asking it.

Boring!

For those of us who are sensitive to wheat, who need to control our calories, who need to raise our fiber consumption, control our blood sugar, whole barely is a great food. Its versatility and flavor make it one of the real rewards for people who are working at losing weight. Barley tastes good.

For flavor and fiber, I like hulled barley, available at your local health food store or through grain companies online. Pearled barley (scrubbed of its bran) is available just about everywhere, cooks a little faster, and is yummy too. You can find instant barley, barley grits (a great bulghur wheat substitute, if you're wheat sensitive), barley flakes, and rolled barley. Barley flour is a low-gluten flour great for use in pancakes, popovers, and quickbreads.

The whole grains take a little while to cook. Many people soak the grains all day or overnight before cooking them. Pressure cookers eliminate soaking time, and rice steamers work very well, although you need to watch out for bubbling over. In my rice cooker, I can cook barley in under an hour. Lately I've been cooking up a batch on weekends, then refrigerating it to use throughout the week as side dishes, in salads, or simply heated by the bowlful in the morning. Its high protein and fiber content make it a great food to eat alone, but I usually add a little olive oil, because I like that sort of thing.

Barley takes spices nicely, and works as well hot or cold. This makes it fun to play with, working as the basis of a cold salad or a hot pilaf. It can be cooked with water or broth, added to soups, breads, and casseroles.

I've been rolling up a half a cup of barley spiced with cumin and chili powder into my Ezekiel sprouted-grain tortillas with baby spinach and some shredded queso fresco for a great morning sandwich on my run out the door. Oh yeah. It's good.

It's good, and it's old. One of the grand old grains, among the first ones we ever thought to cultivate. It's good for more than beer. More than the malt in your milkshake. Give whole barley a try, or you might be missing something.

Barley recipes at Epicurious.com

Pearled barley nutrition facts, nutritiondata.com

Order barley products online, Bob's Red Mill

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The Smallest Things

2004-03-02T10:52:00.000-05:00

The Smallest Things

So I dropped my pen today. One of my average klutzy moves, my pen flipped out of my hand, landing in front of me in what would have been a worst-case-pen-dropping scenario if it had happened when I was at my heaviest. I dropped my pen in the middle of a wide and busy hallway.

In the old days, I would have considered letting the pen go. It might have been easier to pretend the pen wasn't mine than to try to struggle for it in such a public space.

Retrieving a dropped pen used to take a lot of thought. If I decided the pen was worth retrieving, I entered into planning mode. I would need to consider my approach. Should I try to lower myself using my bad knee, or drop down onto the bad knee? Either choice would mean an afternoon of pain. Which sort of pain did I want to manage, and did I have enough drugs?

Would there be a chair or wall nearby I could lean into after levering myself back up, or to help me push my way back to a standing position? Wide hallways offer no support here.

Dropping to the floor is a simple matter of using your body to control gravity, something I became worse at doing over time, but could still manage. Getting back up again required real work, use of my arms and legs to hoist 250+ pounds up into the air, and my body was never quite prepared for it. It responded by dropping my blood pressure, making my heart pound, and then I would see dark rings or perhaps my vision would go completely black for a few seconds. With a wall or chair to steady myself, I could recover without drawing too much attention.

Then the ego issues. Who is around? Will anyone see me? Is there a small child at hand who can hand me my pen? Will my flushed face return to its pasty paleness in time for my next meeting?

Today I dropped my pen in a busy, wide hallway among college students. I folded both knees to get it, stood back up again and took three or four steps more before I realized what I had done. And what I hadn't done.

It was nearly a thoughtless action. In the old days this event would have been one of a series of mean little physical challenges that built toward a difficult and frustrating day. Today pen-dropping is just a part of my natural awkwardness. Hardly worth noting.

But it is worth noting. It's actually worth celebrating as one of a hundred ways that a healthy body makes living easier. I keep track of these things, and recommend you do too. If you have lost weight, become more fit, start a list of the things, large and small, that are easier now than before. If you're planning on becoming more fit, make a list of the little annoyances you'd like to overcome.

It's so easy to take the small things for granted. I'm often guilty of missing the details in my busy run through my day. But noticing the good stuff helps me protect my health. It helps me do what I have to do to be as healthy as I can be for as long as I have.

Write down the details, friends. I will if you will.

Fainting, American Heart Association

Caring for your knees, American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons

Talk about small things, the world's dullest blog

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No Time for This

2004-03-01T12:46:00.000-05:00

No Time for This

Overbooked, overextended? It's the morning rush, the calendar haggles, the job, the lunch-hour errands, the doctors' appointments, meals, kids' after-school programs, committee meetings. Or it's pure overwork, plain and simple. Your life is so demanding. You don't have time to cook. You don't have time to exercise. No time. No energy. No way.

Bull.

Look, overbooked is a fact of life these days. You can be ridiculously overbooked, or very overbooked, or kind of overbooked, or slightly overbooked, but all these degrees of too-too-much amount to the same thing: You have more to do in a day than you have time to do it.

So adding cooking healthy meals and exercising to all of that won't actually make things much worse, now will they? It's just a matter of degree and priority. And they will make your energy stores and the years you have to enjoy overbooking yourself more plentiful.

If you put off eating well and exercising, you're not modeling good behavior for your kids (my favorite guilt card). If you put off eating well and exercising, you're doing damage to yourself that may become permanent, or very hard to heal. If you put off eating well and exercising, you're missing out now. Today. And you shouldn't miss out now, no matter how busy you are.

The busiest people I know who enjoy good health work in a workout and find a way to eat nourishing, whole foods every day. The rich and famous do, the grand and powerful do, the introverted geniuses do, the chronically busy do. Why not me? Why not any of us?

Some hints for eating well, exercising, and multi-tasking from friends who get it done:

*Cook up whole grains, roasts, and casseroles over the weekend to enjoy, reheated, stir-fried, cassaroled, sandwhich-wrapped during your busy week.
*Eat more vegetable-puree soups you simmer on the stove while going through your mail, catching up with friends on the phone, helping somebody with their homework.
*Bread machines and whole-grain recipies, people.
*Leave the fruit in a bowl in the middle of your kitchen. Keep the bowl full.
*Crock-pot cooking is back, baby. It's the groovy new old thing.
*Splurge once in awhile on good takeout.
*Grocery Store Salad bars are for families too, and faster than fast food.
*Shop together. Read labels together. Make good choices together.
*Many grocery stores now deliver. It's not cheap, but it's better than relying on fast food.
*You can get in a good walk while talking with your parents on a cell phone headset.
*You can get it in a good walk with your spouse or kid or parent or sibling or buddy.
*You can get in a good walk or jog while catching up with a co-worker or colleague, negotiating deals, or planning hostile takeovers.
*When you drop off your daughter at her Kung Fu class, look for classes for yourself that run at the same time.
*When you take your kids to the ball park, pack your walking/jogging shoes, and let the kids know you'll see half the game, but the other half you'll spend getting your own exercise.
*Sign up all your friends for a dance class.
*Meet your buddies for long walks on the weekends.
*Trade morning rush supervision with your dear other so one of you always gets the chance to exercise.
*Exercise with the family during commercial breaks, during TV viewing, or instead of TV viewing. Keep plenty of exercise equipment in front of the TV for everybody else: Therabands, Exercise balls, dumbbells. Make sure everybody knows how to use them.
*Dance around the house while dusting and vacuuming.

Don't try to sort out your life before scheduling eating better and exercising. Sneak it in to your busy day, which is likely to be overbooked no matter what you do.

Lots of ways to fit in exercise, about.com

Crock pot/slow cooker recipes from chefmom.com

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A Simple Thank You Will Do: Take a compliment

2004-02-26T10:41:00.000-05:00

A Simple Thank You Will Do
Take a compliment

"What an accomplishment." I hear that from a lot of folks. "That's really quite an accomplishment." They're talking about my weight loss. I don't mean to be ungracious, but I want to deflect that notion for some reason. I don't think of this as accomplishment. I think of it as a necessary project that I've completed. Like finally cleaning out the basement after letting it go for years. A necessary evil.

I made weight loss a primary focus in my life for about a year. I've elevated weight and health maintenance among my priorities since then. Lots of aspects of my life have taken a dip so that I could do this. I changed jobs, my house isn't as clean, my husband is neglected in so many ways, I don't see as much of family or friends. But I have a much healthier body. It doesn't feel like an accomplishment, it feels like a trade-off.

I traded one kind of living for another. But I am not a more accomplished person for living differently. I'm simply healthier than I was before.

I can point to actual accomplishments in my life. Things I've done or fought for, for which I truly am proud. Most of the time when I was caught up in doing these things, I wasn't taking very good care of my body. When I accomplished things, my body kind of dwindled through malnutrition and lack of exercise. Because I never developed any habits for maintaining my body, accomplishment went hand-in-hand with wasting health.

That's why the popular tendency to view overweight people as lazy has always baffled me. When I see an overweight person, I see a workaholic. I see somebody so absorbed with what they do that they never get out of their chair, too driven to do more than dive for the nearest vending machine or fast food drive-in for sustenance.

My prejudice works both ways. When I see extraordinarily fit people, I think, "Haven't you anything better to do?" I forget that it's possible to think and plan while on a treadmill (you can even take notes, draw models, sketch plans) or an exercise bike. It never before occurred to me that long runs are a great time to solve problems big and small, sort out the day's plans, catch up on the news, strategize the next meeting. Skinny people always looked pretty and empty-headed. And I really need to work on that prejudice, still. It's not fair.

The sad fact is, the personal is political. Bodies make all sorts of impressions. We have an innate tendency to size one another up, draw immediate conclusions. We are visual beings, and with every glance we make our sense of things on a subliminal level. We assign character and value to every sort of choice a person makes in their presentation from shoe leather to hairpins. And then we're so surprised to learn when Mr. Pretty Bleached Blonde has a brain, Mr. Tassle Loafers has a heart, and Ms. Grunge has a trust fund. We may try to overcome these conclusions with reason, but the impression comes first.

We hate that. When we're heavy we hate watching those conclusions happen, knowing we will have to find a way over the top of them. We'll have to work to make a different impression.

People will compliment you for losing weight. And when that happens, you may flinch. Try to remember that people don't know what to say. We all know the personal is political, and that has stopped us from saying anything when clearly, not noticing is not the right thing to do, either. So when people know that you've lost a lot of weight, it may feel they're congratulating you for joining a different team, one you have no intention of playing for.

But stop and think: they know, probably, that you had to make trade-offs. They know, probably, that it was important to you to lose weight, for whatever reasons. It may not be that they like you better small than large, but that they recognize you had to work hard to accomplish a goal you set for yourself. It's not fair to assume that they see fitness as something special, unless they're your doctor. Your doctor does want you fit. No doubt about that. Take a breath, and take the compliment. As hard as that might be for you.

About the bias against heaviness

About the bias against thinness (Hmm.. still looking for a link)

The Personal is Political, is political

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Got Guts? Taking care of them

2004-02-25T08:00:00.000-05:00

Got Guts?
Taking care of them

Can we talk guts? Is that alright? I mean, you know, we all have them. We all use them. They're important to us. We prefer not to live without them. And the good news is, we don't have to lose any part of them so long as we take care of them.

But chronic dieters have no regard for these organs at all. Not the intestines, not the colon, not the bowel. In fact, if you watch dieters' habits, you'd think we were bent on killing off our guts, our pipes, our main thoroughfare. With the diuretics and laxatives, carb- and fat-blockers, starvation and bingeing, really, it's no wonder so many of us complain of gas, bloating, cramps, constipation and etc. Just a couple of encounters with etc. is all you need, though, to remind you that you have guts. And your guts deserve some respect.

A caveat. What's good for your guts may not be good for mine. Figuring out what keeps them happy and functioning should be basic maintenance behavior for all of us. Disregarding the organs that are responsible for filtering and feeding every system in your body is just nuts. It's like disregarding your oil filter in your car, a sure way to shorten a healthy lifespan.

Water. You need a lot of water to keep your guts and your bladders functioning well. Drink up. Flavor your water with a little bit of juice or lemon or orange peel or cucumber slices to keep it interesting. Infuse it with herbs and drink it hot. But drink it.

Fiber. You need it. You know you do. Adults want at least 25-30 grams of dietary fiber, which you can get from your veggies and fruits, beans and peas, whole grains, and nuts and seeds. Fiber is a great regulator. It regulates your waste stream so it's neither too loose or too dense and keeps it moving along nicely, which helps your system manage any toxins from your food a whole lot more easily, getting rid of them before they can bother you too much.

In "Eating Right for a Bad Gut," by James Scala, a book focused on the problems faced by people with irritable bowel diseases, Scala reports there are five or six types of dietary fiber. Our bodies want them all, and the best way to get them is to eat a varied diet. But basically, all the fiber types can be categorized into two types: soluble and insoluble. The soluble types get a lot of press for their ability to bind up bile acids into your waste stream and carry them away. This helps lower your cholesterol and tryiglycerides, and helps prevent some types of cancer, arterial blockage, heart disease. Pectins, oat bran, guar gum all fall into this category. The insoluble fiber is what regulates the bulk of your waste stream and keeps it moving.

A nice whole grain cereal in the morning (Scala likes oatmeal for folks with IBD, but All-Bran and Fiber One provide great fiber counts for everybody else) with a high-fiber serving of fruit ("an apple a day"). Lots of leafy greens and beans with your lunch, another fruit snack, and two kinds of veggies at dinner should get you your fiber. But if you want more fiber still, or you have a hard time getting all your fruits, veggies, and grains, or if you are managing an irritable bowel, or if you are working hard to lose lots of weight, fiber supplementation is a smart new habit. Scala likes Metamucil, unflavored. Others recommend psyllium husk powder from the natural food store. A tablespoon mixed in a large glass of water or juice a half-hour before meals. One or two or three times a day. Follow it up with another glass of water. Obese folks need to know that a high-fiber diet and fiber supplementation can help control hunger, work to even out blood sugar and insulin effects, and may help to reduce the number of calories we consume.

Fiber for thought: Nutrition writer Jonny Bowden in "Living the Low-Carb Life" reports that the average American diet provides just 10 grams a day of fiber. The American Cancer Society recommends 30 grams. And our ancestors consumed perhaps 50 or 60 grams per day.

Eating Right for a Bad Gut: The Complete Nutritional Guide to Ileitis, Colitis, Crohn's Disease, and Inflammatory Bowel Disease, James Scala

How Digestion Works, Children's Memorial

Loving your guts, mothernature.com

Fiber Facts from eatright.org

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Go Ahead, Start Something: The value of the new

2004-02-23T10:56:00.000-05:00

Go Ahead, Start Something
The value of the new

I'm a Navy brat. I grew up in the military, and we moved around a good bit. Changed countries and homes and schools. I have a built-in internal clock that looks for change every few years. And I find it. I always find it. The need for constant change has dictated my career choices, home décor, and now it rules my body maintenance efforts. I'm always on to the next thing.

Many of us have no problem starting a new fitness or diet kick. A new class, a new way of eating, a new horizon, a new challenge, a deadline, a date, an event to work toward. These give us focus, energy. But then comes the day when the thrill is gone, and we slip back into our old habits, losing the momentum, regaining the lost fat. And then we kick ourselves in the shins. What happened? Why can't we stick to a fitness plan? Why are we such losers?

We're not losers. We just get bored.

For some of us, making fitness a healthy diet part of our regular day is awfully hard. But getting us to start something new is no problem at all. We're samplers. We're curious. We like the new. The new is exciting, interesting, it stretches our brains, it makes us think, it prevents boredom. The learning curve is cool. We love to learn. So when a diet or exercise program becomes familiar, it begins to die for us. We want the next thing.

But this start-again, stop-again stuff with our bodies can play havoc with our metabolisms, with our sleep schedules and self-image. What to do?

Here's a thought: How about embracing starting-something as your particular fitness habit? That is, pay attention to your cycles of interest and boredom. Do they last two weeks, two months, two years? How long before you're bored and need to move on? Then plan for it. If you know you're going to last in this Pilates class for three months before you need to move on to the next thing, then make sure after two months you begin to look into scheduling that next spinning class, or yoga class, or belly dancing class. If you know that you must make seasonal shifts, then look forward to them, and get that new pair of spring running shoes -- now. Download the training sheets for the spring road races, sign up for those walk-a-thons.

Hey, the secret's been out for some time now: all of those diets work. So consider shifting from diet to diet to keep yourself from getting bored with them. Change your focus from counting calories to counting nutrients, from counting carbs to counting fat if you like. You can always change back again. Try different counting tools. Keep a journal online, on paper. Make up your own serving counting system. Try Somercizing, Body for Life, WeightWatchers, eDiets. Plan to start something new every few months. It's not like changing religions, folks, it's just a new set of rules for mindful eating.

Plan to work with your natural-born curiosity, eliminate the gaps between your efforts, and your body will thank you, you'll learn how your body responds to different kinds of food and work, and you know how you love to learn.

Choosing a diet, ABC News, Healthology

Explore workouts at iVillage

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The Pill: What we're all waiting for

2004-02-20T08:47:00.000-05:00

The Pill
What we're all waiting for

We want the pill. We do. We all do. We are furious that modern science can split atoms, miniaturize machines, perform nanosurgery, manipulate our genes, microchip our dogs, but cannot yet cure fat.

Come ON. The pill. The pill. The pill! When will it be ready?

Well, it's not ready now, and never has been ready, and it won't be ready any time soon. Don't you worry, though. Millions and billions are being poured into research to deliver that pill some day.

However, we won't have it for awhile, and we're fat now. I had a friend on the phone the other day. He'd lost a lot of weight awhile ago, and put it all back on. The effort of keeping it off was just too much. He could focus on the problem for a few months, but eventually his real life brought him back to his businesses, his family, social responsibilities. He resumed his old habits, so the weight returned. He's furious that there is no pill. Something in his tone suggests he believes I'm taking it and just not telling him what it is. He's got money to burn and is willing to spend it on a cure.

There is no pill.

Well, wait, there are lots and lots of pills. They don't work the way you want them to or for very long. You can get all hopped up on caffeine and herbal speed, clean out the 10 lbs. or so of clingy waste in your intestines and lose the extra water with fiber supplements and diuretic herbs and tonics so you are lighter and feel lighter, but you're not going to find a pill that will help you lose a significant amount of stored fat and keep it off for the rest of your life. Even the prescription weight loss aids can only work for so long to regulate your appetite and boost your metabolism. The best ones are not really fat-melters, but help you rise above depression enough to feel like sticking to a diet and getting your exercise. You can try for fat and carb blockers, but there's that little threat of incontinence that may make the experience, er, unworthy.

The New Yorker magazine recently ran an interesting article on the state of the dietary supplement business in the U.S. The journalist, Michael Specter, focused on the popular blue-bottled diet supplement in his story. The upshot of his research: diet supplements cure by peddling hope.

Hope in a bottle may be a good thing. Hope in a bottle may have its own kind of curative effects. The very act of taking a pill may be enough of a physical cue reminding you of your desire for a healthy body. Maybe the ritual of it is enough to help you maintain your focus on caring for your body for a day, for a few hours.

If you find taking pills gives you hope, then how about meditating on your good health while taking nutritional supplements that help even out the nutritional imbalance most of us experience these days? Think about your desire for good health while you take a multi-vitamin, your omega 3 and vitamin E, a magnesium and a calcium supplement. Check with your doctor first to make sure any supplement you're taking won't interfere with other drugs you're using.

What we choose to eat is the real diet pill. Filling up on veggies, getting enough protein, cutting back on added sugars, empty starches. Keep your calories down, and you'll see the magic chemistry you've been looking for. Exercise every day to build the "stack" that melts fat away. Slowly. Get plenty of fiber in your diet, and you'll feel like doing it again tomorrow. Doing it every day keeps it off forever.

"Miracle in a Bottle", Feb 2, Michael Specter, Newyorker.com
Lynn Grieger, R.D. on diet pills, iVillage.com

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So Over Winter: Curing cold weather blues

2004-02-19T10:27:00.000-05:00

So Over Winter
Curing cold weather blues

It's winter in Michigan, where I live. It's been winter for some time now. It seems it's been winter for longer than it's ever been winter before at this time of year. I've been cold. I've been cranky. I walk stooped over, trying to cup my meager body heat toward my exposed nose and cheeks. Granted, I'm living with less insulation these days. Without extra body fat, with extra age, I've been leaking tolerance for the cold, for the snow, for winter.

I used to have enough northern-girl stamina to hold on until at least mid-March, but this year, my cold tolerance gave out by the third week of January. My warm weather fantasies have wandered much farther than Florida. They involve equatorial expatriation. A new language. A new identity. A new name. Meanwhile I'm more introverted, holed-up, irritable than usual.

Feeling as hollow-eyed and slime-pastey as Gollum, I whine to a friend of mine who rolls her eyes and suggests something really stupid: "You have to go out and play in the snow."

Yeah, right. A silly non-sequitur. Clearly she hadn't been listening. I repeated the problem. "See, I'm COLD. I'm CHAPPED. I can't STAND BEING COLD ANYMORE," I repeat, slowly, with emphasis because clearly she hadn't been paying attention the first time.

"Yeah," she says, just as patiently, "You need to PLAY in the SNOW. You definitely should try ski skating."

I smiled at the youngster, shook my head, and backed slowly away. Some people you just can't talk to.

And then one day I was snowed in (don't get me started on my husband's insistence on hand-shoveling the driveway when there are people around who have actual plows mounted on actual trucks and know how to use them), and trading email with a friend (probably with a plow service) who was stuck in a meeting. He suggested I head out cross-country skiing, that the trails near me were great, the powder would be perfect.

Now, this wasn't some insane kid suggesting this. Here was a friend approaching his sixth decade, a survivor, and notoriously fit person, among my more sane-ish friends. No, I explained that my skis were broken, or my boots were torn, or something was wrong with my equipment. There must have been something wrong with my equipment, because I haven't been skiing in 15 years or so.

But I hadn't moved in days and needed to do something. The snow was coming down heavily, but the temperature was reasonable. I went to the garage to find out just what state my equipment was in.

Other than being ancient, cobwebby, mildewy and maybe one boot a little mouse-inhabited, there really wasn't anything wrong with my gear. I cleaned it up, bundled up, and headed out. After a quarter of an hour fussing with goggles and mittens, gators and layers, I began to move. Though a bit wobbly at first, I remained upright. And my old fish-scale-bottomed skiis from the late 70s wouldn't run away from me or force me to go faster than my brain and body could manage.

I cut a half mile of trail starting from my house to a little wooded park, then tottered around the perfectly silent woods for a spell before heading back. The snow fell heavily and quietly, and I had the park and its low-bowing branches, its birds and deer to myself. All in all I was outside in the heavy quiet snow for 45 minutes, moving the whole time, but not killing myself. Peeling layers as I went, removing head gear, finally. I wasn't freezing. I was more than warm. Much toastier than when I've tried to walk in the winter. Much happier gliding above the snow than trying to walk through it.

At home, I peeled off clothes that were soaked and heavy with sweat. And for the next four hours, for the first time all winter, I was warm enough. I was plenty warm. I didn't require two wool sweaters, long underwear, woolly slippers, hot tea, a fire and a comforter to comfort me. I could just sit around, normally clothed, feeling fine.

I reported back to my girlfriend. "Yeah, but you really need to try ski-skating," says she.

Yeah right.

Another buddy bequeathed her old snow shoes to me, and a pair for hubby too. We used them last weekend to make the dogs jealous as we walked above the banks along a stream while they slogged, chest-deep behind us. We finally had to give them a break, go back home. This is a good sport for us, one where slowness and awkwardness are masked by the naturally slow and awkward gait that snowshoes enforce on people. We were made for this sport. And we were warm. We came back in and let the fire die out.

"Yeah but you'd really like ski-skating," says my young friend.

I'm starting to think she's may just have a point. I'm starting to think I may survive this winter after all. See, what you have to do is go out and PLAY in the SNOW.

Cross-country skiing, skipost.com
Snowshoe Basics, atlassnowshoe.com
Ski-Skating Basics, xcskiworld.com

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Habit Forming: Automating good health

2004-02-17T07:52:00.000-05:00

Habit Forming
Automating good health

It wasn't giving up certain foods or eating less for awhile. It wasn't going to the gym every day while I lost the weight. The hardest part of losing a big chunk of weight and keeping it off has been remembering to work at it every day. The longer I keep my weight off, the harder this is, for some reason. When I'm most myself, I'm completely immersed in my work and hobbies and family and friends. Time flies by, and I haven't attended to my body at all. I haven't eaten well, and I haven't exercised. I don't want to be obsessed with my body, but my most natural self completely ignores the presence of a body at all. What to do?

Habit. I have long held the theory that if I can automate body care, I won't have to Think about it or obsess over it, but it will still be done. I use passive verbs to describe the ideal state, here. I'd like my body to maintain itself through sheer force of habit. If I can make it so much a part of moving through my day that it's not even top of mind, but just part of the natural rhythm of a day, like letting dogs in and out and feeding them, like brushing my teeth, like using Carmex 12 times a day.

The Carmex Strategy
God bless Carmex. It should be like using Carmex. I have to make some small effort to use Carmex. I have to make sure there are pots of it nearby all the time. I need to note that my lips have dried, and find and open the jar and use it. So too with exercise and good food. I need the opportunities to be there always, shoes and gym clothes always in my car, gyms and class schedules and videos within a short distance or arms' reach, pantry contents clear in my head, healthy fall-back food in my back-pack. Having the resources ready is a good thing, so that when I feel the urge and have the time, I can find and prepare good food, get in a good workout.

The Tooth Brushing Strategy
Or maybe it should be more like brushing my teeth. I live at the whim of clients and projects. No single day looks anything like the one before it or the one that will follow. I wake at different times, go to bed at different times. I've whittled my beauty routine down to the occasional smear of moisturizer, random jabbing of mascara. The only habit I've managed to lock in place is brushing my teeth. I'm darned consistent about that. Body care should be more like tooth brushing, the thing I do before anyone or anything else can enter the day's picture.

I'm trying for a combination of the toothbrushing and Carmex strategies: A short series of old-fashioned calisthenics in the morning, just before tooth brushing, and/or a trip to the gym on the way to the office. Readiness for random fitness blasts at any point of any busy day. Planning meals and grocery management just before going to bed at night, and keeping my backpack equipped with protein-centered snacks.

Also, of course, keeping a log of what I eat and how much I exercise, until the habit is set. How long does it take to set a new habit? I'm told anywhere from 21 days to 3 years. I'm thinking it's more like 3 years.

And you? What habits are you trying to weave into or unravel from your day? Have you made a plan? How will you track your progress? How much do you think about your fitness and nutrition habits now? Not enough? Just enough? Too much? Let's find the right balance between unconscious effort and wacked-out obsessiveness. Make a plan today. Okay? I will if you will.

Starting New Habits, Breaking Old Patterns, nightingalecenter.com
Habit, the Household Wonder Worker, organizedhome.com
Developing a Habit Coaching Form, ideallifecoaching.com

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Fish In a Can? Sardines and herring and tuna, oh my!

2004-02-16T06:00:00.000-05:00

Fish in a Can?
Sardines and herring and tuna, oh my!

I don't know why, but we just didn't grow up eating sardines or herring. Maybe one or the other of my parents had too many when they were little, a bad experience, I really couldn't say, but sardines and anchovies and herring never made it to our table, into our picnic baskets.

In the past few years, as I read nutrition book after nutrition book, reading dieticians and doctors, it's clear it's time for me to experiment with these foods, recommended over and over again by people from every corner of the medical and nutritional communities. These people don't agree on much, but when I find them all promoting a food I'm not eating, a behavior I'm not trying, I have to at least try. I promised myself I would.

I can no longer ignore their advice about little fishes. Why? These foods are loaded with Omega 3 fatty acids, calcium, and protein. They're the cheapest open water fish you can get your hands on, and while they are still stocked in convenience food stores, they count as one of the healthiest "fast foods" you can hope to find on the open road, running between meetings. Read the labels on the cans, and you see they are also one of the few ready-to-eat proteins that are not loaded with the sorts of preservatives a delicate flower like me can't tolerate.

So, I'll start with a can of sardines. I have never even looked inside a can of sardines. I have never studied cans of sardines on the shelves of my supermarket, but skim right over this whole canned meat section of the store. Today I paid attention and found… mind numbing choices. I can choose sardines packed in olive oil, fish oil, salsa, mustard. There are several brands and options. I do what I usually do, and opt for the most impressive packaging and brand name. King Oscar of Norway graces the neat red package I choose. He's got an expression that embraces both awe and pain. He has epaulets. These are two good reasons to eat his sardines. Another is the copy on the back of the package:

"King Oscar Brisling, the world's smallest, most delicate sardines, are taken from the pure, icy fjords of Norway. They are then lightly smoked in oak wood ovens and hand-packed in a variety of natural oils, spring water and flavorful sauces."

Pure icy fjords? Oak wood ovens? Hand-packed? Natural oils? I'm transfixed by a country, a people, a water body I've never seen or met or imagined. These sardines must be good. They have to be. How could a package carry copy like this, if it were not true? The Norweigans I know are not terribly ironic. Not known for irony, bless them. However, they do eat lutefisk. I need to temper my expectations against this people's idea of a seafood delicacy. The ingredient list: sardines, olive oil, salt. This is straightforward. I understand the ingredient list. That is good.

Okay, I can see this package meets my every need. It grabs my imagination and satisfies my concern over scary food processing. Now, all I have to do is pay my $2.25, and then, eat up.

And there it is. I must summon the courage to open the can, and put something new, a new animal, into my mouth. I am a fairly adventurous eater, so I can't explain why this feels so difficult for me. I have asked around: What are sardines like? What do they taste like? How do they feel in your mouth? Are there bones? Is the head there? Do you eat the bones? And I get remarkably little information from long-time sardine eaters. "They're pretty fishy," people say.

Fishy? They're fish. Why wouldn't they be fishy? This is non-information.

When I don't have a clue what to do or what to expect, I run to the Internet. Google rarely lets me down. Rarely. Almost never. But in this case, I'm afraid, there is little to be had on how to eat sardines. Clearly no one thinks it's important to explain how to eat sardines. Who doesn't know how to eat sardines?

It turns out I am the only one. I remove the outer package and see this groovy flat can. I open it, and I swear to you, I gasped. I couldn't help it. I cooed.

I've seen images of cans of sardines, enough to know that I will find lots of little fishes packed in like… like sardines. What I don't expect is how pretty these little fish are.

They're beautiful, bright silver fishes. They look precious, like jewelry. Like coin. No heads, but the tails are there. They've been gutted. I can't tell if the bones are in them or not. Man, they're so pretty. They smell like tuna, and are bathed in olive oil. They remind me very much of the minnows I used to catch for fishing bait in the Michigan lake where I grew up. These sardines are minnows without their heads, bright, bright silver. There must be 20 or so. I check the can. One little can is one serving. 150 calories. I'm hungry. Okay. A fork. I choose a small fork. Somehow I want to eat these straight out of the can using a special little escargot fork that belonged to my grandmother. It seems the right thing to do. I can't imagine mushing or breaking up these little silver baubles in any way.

I select one out of the can, let the oil drip off. It's very tender. Never one to mince with tasting food, I pop the whole thing in my mouth. It's very soft. I can't detect bones, can't even detect the tail I know is there. It's less intense a flavor than tuna, not nearly so salty. A nice oily fish flavor. Not nearly so strong as the low tide in Maine smells. Not nearly as mild as a hunk of haddock. Only slightly stronger than salmon, frankly. It's the smallness of the nearly whole fish in my mouth that takes me a minute to get over. All I can think of is those minnows I used to catch in my hands from my minnow net as a young girl. I expect these little fish to wriggle.

They never do.

I ate the whole can. Happily. Where have these sardines been all my life? A new food is a rare thing for me. A new food so readily available at even the meanest of food shops is a real bonus. A food I can sneak into back packs and purses as an emergency backup ration for when I haven't planned my food well for the day is a find. A can of sardines is the perfect thing. The perfect number of calories, the perfect food.

And now, on to the herring. An even cuter can. Wish me luck.

Epicurious.com cooks with sardines
King Oscar Sardines
Nutritiondata.com reads sardines

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Focus on Hunger: relearning cues to eat

2004-02-13T06:00:00.000-05:00

Focus on Hunger
Relearning cues to eat

After a run of holidays, a week's vacation, a period in my life when it feels as if I'm eating all the time for reasons that have very little to do with hunger, I like to take a week to get back in touch with eating cues. When am I hungry? What does it feel like? When am I full?

I know, these may sound like odd or even stupid questions, but as we become adults, many of us learn to override true hunger and satiation to eat in response to events and emotions. I eat when I'm frustrated, eat to celebrate, eat because it's time to eat, eat because everyone else is eating. I eat to please a hostess, a parent, a friend. I eat just to enjoy the flavor of food, eat because I'm bored, eat when I'm unhappy, and sometimes, like a lot of overweight people, I eat to overload my senses and thoughts with something other than some unpleasantness that I don't want to feel. That is, I sometimes eat to avoid my feelings. I eat to procrastinate, eat while thinking about what I'll prepare to eat. Eat to keep myself awake. Eat to put myself to sleep.

I had a lot of reasons to eat hen I was heavy, and responded to each of them with the same thought, "I'm hungry," when what I felt wasn't hunger at all. Hunger is hunger pangs and for me that jittery, confused state that comes when my blood sugar drops. At my heaviest, I experienced hunger rarely, because I was eating so often for so many other reasons, actual hunger often didn't get a chance. Taking the weight off and keeping it off has meant learning to eat only when I'm hungry and stopping when I'm full.

And that's not actually that easy for me.

But that's my focus for this week. I'm concentrating on the experience of my own hunger, so I can reinforce the feeling of becoming hungry, eating, and becoming full. That means, for this week at least, I don't eat until I grow hungry, and plenty hungry, so I know it's the real thing. And then I eat as slowly as I can, focusing entirely on the food, the experience of it. Noting how my body feels before, during, and after eating. I can do this because I've run away for a few days, and can live slowly, away from work, focus for a spell. It's a good exercise, and it's been interesting.

Your own eating plan may vary, but most of us who have lost a bunch of weight settle on a series of meals and snacks spread out through the day to keep our calories low and blood sugar stabilized. I eat 5 or 6 200-calorie "meals," never eat carbohydrates by themselves, but always accompanied by a protein and/or a fat. Eating this way, hunger is not a big problem for me. I usually feel hunger pangs right at my regular mealtimes, and not much before. My trouble is, because my meals are so small, I'm often still hungry after I've finished them. That is, the food's gone before my stomach and brain and blood have had a chance to communicate that all's well, all systems go.

I've noticed some things. I've noticed that my hunger disappears faster when I chew more. This seems to have less to do with bulk than with the simple act of chewing. Chewing up raw veggies or a salad along with a goodly serving of protein works way better than just the protein alone. That is, a bed of baby spinach with the egg salad, works far better than the egg salad alone, though it doesn't add much more in bulk or calories. It takes longer to consume this lunch, and there's more fiber. If I skip the protein, my hunger will not be satisfied at all, and will likely be worse. With protein, 15 to 20 or even 30 minutes after I've eaten, I can feel that nice satiated feeling come back, and I'm good to go for another three hours. The delay factor is quite long, and kind of frustrating, but if I keep eating until I'm full or until I stop feeling the hunger, I'm sure to overeat.

Warm foods work better than cold. Solid foods work better than liquid. Chewy works better than foods that slither right down the old pipes.

Not eating until I feel that slightly uncomfortable, popping out all over feeling has distinct advantages. I don't become sleepy or dull from the effort of digesting. I don't experience heartburn or indigestion. I feel ready, fast, alert all day long. Never feel the need to nap off a meal, though napping is one of my greatest talents, one I've honed and perfected through hours of relentless and dedicated practice throughout my lifetime. I'm trying to redefine the feeling of "satisfied," in my mind, recalibrating my brain so that "satisfied" means "not hungry," rather than "ready to explode."

Is it time for you to get back in touch with your hunger? Or maybe feel it for the first time in a long time? I recommend you experiment with a journal by your side. Keep track of the times of day when hunger occurs to you. Note how quickly it develops, rises and falls. How do different foods affect it? What difference does exercise make? Caffeine? Medications? Does hunger trigger unusual feelings or emotions for you? Or do certain feelings trigger hunger? When do you want to eat without experiencing hunger, why? How long does it take to stop feeling hungry? How much do you need to eat, of what kinds of foods, and how often? Write to learn how your body works and responds to food and hunger. Knowing about your hunger will help you feed your body what it needs when it needs it. And that's a good step toward good health.

Understanding
hunger and satiety, Muscle & Fitness

What
Foods Fill Fast? Satiety Index, at diabetesnet.com

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2004-02-11T12:55:00.000-05:00

RSS Shift.

Hi gang. Looking for your Skinny Daily RSS feed? The address has shifted. It is now:
http://skinnydaily.blogspot.com/rss/skinnydaily.xml. I couldn't say why the change...

JuJu

Valentine's Planning: Strategies for kicking the candy habit

2004-02-11T10:02:00.000-05:00

Valentine's Planning
Strategies for kicking the candy habit

Believe it or not, the point of Valentine's Day is not to send your sweetie into insulin shock. It is not necessary to present blood sugar spiking, non-nutritive, trans-fat-laced cancer bombs as a token of your tender feelings. You always have that option, but it's not actually the point of the celebration. Really.

You don't have to give these things, and you don't have to get them. If you're working to avoid added sugar in your diet, and Valentines Day has you running scared, know that you have options.

First, Valentine's Day is traditionally a day to celebrate romantic love. We've stretched the celebration to include all forms of love, romantic, platonic, brotherly, sisterly, and other-worldish. I'm concerned mainly about you. The Valentine's tokens you give and the ones you get.

Giving
A Valentine's token can be candy, but candy is a pretty recent tradition in this constantly evolving and ancient celebration. Other tokens are more traditional. Handmade cards, small handmade gifts, photos or drawings, little mementos, poems, stones, pressed leaves. Valentine tokens used to be things you gave your sweetheart to remember you and your love by. It might be the words or sheet music of your favorite song, a photo from a special moment you shared. Tokens are intended to be romantic, personal, and carried by the person you love, kept close to the body or the heart. Yeah, this sort of gift takes a little bit more time and energy to produce. But that's not such a bad thing, is it? Focusing on the folks you love?

Getting
Let it be known now that candy isn't going to work for you this year. Give people hints. You want something handmade. You want socks. You'd like underwear this year. Or maybe you'd like a massage. How about a break from your regular chores for a day? Make up an idea list to help your valentines, so you don't send them into panic mode by declaring your sugar-free status.

So it's already raining candy hearts in your house or office? Decide now that you don't need them. You have been eating them all your life, no doubt, and know exactly how they taste. I can argue that I have had more than my share of them in my lifetime. Not eating them this year is not any form of deprivation for me, because I've already had all that I could ever need. Not eating them does not make me a scrooge. I can say with absolute confidence that I have fully lived the entire conversation heart experience, and now I'm moving on to other things.

Chocolate jonesing? More chocolate availability can make your chocolate addiction feel worse now than usual. Give somebody else the job of grocery shopping and drugstore visiting during this time when the shelves are buldging with the stuff. If you can avoid being in the path of the extra chocolate this year, you'll help yourself keep the monster at bay. Some people do well enjoying just one bite of chocolate to satisfy the craving. But you know if you're not one of those people, and instead need to keep the chocolate out of your line of sight to help you stay in control, do it.

Love is the point of the celebration. What is loving for you would naturally support your good health and well-being. Think along those lines, and you're likely to have a Happy Valentine's Day, indeedy.

Sugar-free Valentines from diabeticcandy.com
Valentine Crafts for Kids, amazingmoms.com

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2004-02-10T03:25:00.000-05:00

Hmm.. rats.

We're experiencing technical difficulty with Bloglet, the email delivery tool. Sorry about this, folks. We hope to resolve our email edition difficulties soon.

JuJu

Dumping the Resolution? Slow down, but don't turn back

2004-02-09T04:03:00.000-05:00

Dumping the Resolution?
Slow down, but don't turn back

You've been good for 5 whole weeks now. Maybe six? But it's getting harder every day, every minute. It's winter where you are, and you want to stay inside where it's warm and dry, or it's summer where you are, and you want to be inside where it's cool and dry. You're hopeless. It's not happening fast enough. It's too hard, too different, too time-consuming. It's too much, this New Year's resolution of yours to get in shape this year.

And you're hungry. Cranky. Hungry. Tired. Bored. Hungry. Sore, and hungry.

Oh, I know, honey. I know this feeling. This is the feeling of being overwhelmed by your good intentions, your elaborate plans, your gigantic goals. You made yourself a big, audacious promise, and now that you find yourself unable to achieve perfection, you're ready to toss the towel, call it a game, accept defeat with all the grace you can muster.

And already, a little relieved that you've wised up, you slip. You binge. You sleep in instead of heading to the gym. You skip your yoga class, pick up the office donuts, put the cream back in your coffee. A total reversal, and doesn't it just feel more like you? Comfy. Whew. Thank goodness that's finished.

May I propose a different conclusion?

Try taking a smaller bite out of your grand scheme. Chew it completely, swallow it before moving on. It's like our dads' old joke: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Broiled, preferably, with all the skin and fat removed.

What if you did little better this day, this week, this month, instead of a lot better by the end of the year? Instead of radically overhauling your diet, and wearing your body out with an ultra challenge at the gym, and taking a lot of new supplements, and eliminating all the goodies in your life, and drinking 10 glasses of water a day, starting now, how about making just a couple of these changes this week?

Or just one?

Instead of trying to get completely fit this year, try breaking it down to what you'll accomplish today, and maybe tomorrow. In what ways could you help your health today? Tonight? Right now? What looks doable? Don't focus on the washboard abs of your dreams, but on the crunches you'll do today. Instead of promising yourself you'll compete in a marathon by the end of the year, focus on today's training schedule. Skip fussing over following somebody else's diet perfectly, and consider what changes can you make to your diet and way of eating this week, this month.

Relax, willya? Just relax. Try breathing. Try giving yourself a break for a second while you think things through.

If you take it a day at a time, making healthier choices each day, then each day you're ahead of the day before. You head in the right direction. Remove the deadlines. There isn't a finish line. You simply want to face the right way and keep moving.

Today, I haven't exercised. At all. I'm sitting here, after dinner, writing to you. I have been battling a chest cold. It's too dark and cold to run, and my strength isn't up to a whole Pilates workout. Instead of getting discouraged about being "off plan," and letting myself slide into a nap or a bowl of ice cream (these sound so good to me right now), I'll do a few pushups, lunges, crunches. Then I'll stretch. And that'll be about it. It's not much, but it's facing the right way. It's not a huge help, but it's not hurting myself either.

Before you give up, give in, slide backward, think about just the day ahead of you. What can you do for yourself in this one day?

Behaviorist David Watson on making significant changes

Princeton Yoga on Resolutions

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Passing For Thin: Frances Kuffel's Fine Memoir

2004-02-06T09:46:00.000-05:00

Passing For Thin
Frances Kuffel's Fine Memoir

Frances Kuffel lost 170 lbs. Half her body. Gone. It took years. It was hard. It still is. Luckily for all of us, Frances Kuffel is a remarkable writer, and managed, somehow, to write brilliantly about the messy, confusing, painful, joyful, complicated, hard work of losing lots and lots of weight.

Don't buy this book if you're looking for diet tips. The real "how to" in the book is a lesson on walking into a recovery group - probably Overeater's Anonymous, but she never identifies her group, of course - and giving oneself over to the hard work one does there. Roll your eyes if you choose to, but recovery groups, 12-step programs, are working every day for hundreds of thousands of us. Why not you? Why not me? Brilliant, funny, jaded, busy Frances walked into one of these meetings one day. That's how she did it.

Get this book if you have a lot of weight to lose, love someone who is losing a lot of weight, want to lose your fattist edge, or just if you're a fan of the memoir genre, because this is a good one. It's actually also, weirdly, a great coming-of-age novel, if the heroine of such a novel can come of age in her mid-40s. Except of course, this isn't a novel. This is Frances' life, and it is hard, painful, touching.

But not at first. When I first met Frances in these pages, I had a very hard time warming up to her and her story. At the beginning of the book and 338 lbs, Frances was prickly, fell in for that brand of easy sarcasm that passes for comedy these days and is just so tiresome, distancing humor, self-deprecating humor, belittling humor. It's annoying in its monotone. But as the book goes on, as her fat comes off, as Frances becomes more and more exposed, vulnerable, willing to take on and take responsibility for changing things, she becomes more and more and more genuinely funny, likable.

I have to be careful here. It's not skinny that made Frances likable. It was Frances learning to like herself that showed us all what's to like. And there's plenty. Frances does have good stuff.

She carefully crafts this telling so that her brains really shine along with her courage at the point when she joins her group. Slowly, she becomes more tolerant of others, more generally accepting, appreciative, curious, gentle, funny. She never drops her wit for a second, thank God. And by the end of the book, I was not only sobbing along at her story, but also cheering for this woman as she literally and figuratively climbs the mountains of her childhood and finds a place to belong. It's that kind of book.

But it's not sentimental. There are no Cinderella moments. When Frances drops enough weight to "pass for normal," and realizes, in a dressing room, with her mom, for the first time, ever, "I'm pretty," the moment is not so much celebratory as terrifying. This woman who has been obese since childhood has been handed her femininity and has no clue what to do with it. Very little experience to draw from. Moments when she spies on other women, adopting their fashion sense, their gestures, when she considers everything from how she will dress to how to handle casual flirtations are full of pathos without being at all pathetic. It is all new, it's hard, it's upsetting. She can't go back. She often can't go forward. Or has too many choices, and is frozen with indecision. She almost has no choice but to rely on other people, and other people do what they do. They give her what she needs when she needs it. And they let her down.

I use journey and discovery metaphors a lot when writing about losing lots of weight. And here it is again. Frances has been on a long expedition. She bravely faced down a lot of things many of us have never seen or tackled before. She took good notes, and came back to tell us all about it. Read this if you like stories of hope hard won. Read it if you are losing lots of weight and just need someone around who understands how weird it is, how hard, how at sea you can feel. Read it if what you need is courage. This is above all, a good book for courage.

The slow, slow dawning, building, developing of her ability to trust in her own wisdom, claim her due, protect herself, discover what it is that people like, and have always liked, about her. The internalizing of lessons she has to learn over and over. The setbacks and unanswered questions, messy and so like real life. Oooph, that's good stuff, right there.

This woman did not need to write this book. It's a powerful part of her recovery, though, to reach back and help the rest of us. And she does that here in a big way, using all of her astonishing talent to do it. Exposing herself. Putting it all in. It's good. I recommend.

Passing For Thin at Barnes & Noble
Overeaters Anonymous

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Side Effects of Exercise: A Good Night's Sleep

2004-02-05T04:08:00.000-05:00

Side Effects of Exercise
A Good Night's Sleep

Last night the most amazing thing happened. I went to bed at night, as usual. Tucking everybody in, checking the lights, preparing as much as possible for the morning rush. Climbed into bed, set my alarm, dropped head to pillow.

And then, I woke up. It was morning, just two minutes before my alarm would go off. I had slept through the night.

I mean, my body slept the entire night. Start to finish. Sunup to sundown. I am not sure if I dreamt or not. My eyes opened, and I felt fine and awake and confused. It has been so long since I have awoken without the aid of an alarm, without feeling worse than I will feel the whole rest of the day, that I was a little lost. I stared at my alarm clock for some time, blinking, trying to take in what had happened. I looked twice at the clock on the wall, trying to make sense of this.

I didn't haul myself out of my bed in the middle of the night with heartburn or headache, feeling as quietly as possible for one medication or another. I wasn't wildly twisting in my knickers to relieve strained neck and back muscles. No night sweats, restless legs, or anxious ruminating.

What happened? Did I take something? Eat something? No, no, I couldn't trace it, until I looked back over my log. Here it is: I exercised every day last week. I finally got back on my exercise wagon and have been good about moving every day. Also, I drank all my water. I wasn't brilliant about my food choices, but at least I got in my exercise and my water.

Could this be enough to have brought me the gift of a full night's sleep in the middle of my middle age? Enough moisture and enough movement? Well, as it turns out, yes. It really could be enough. Exercise helps us sleep. Sleep and water give us energy and restore our bodies. It's a reciprocal thing, it turns out.

So, exercise more, drink up, get your rest, feel better. And keep a body log so that when things suddenly go right, you can figure out why.

Diet and sleep, healthology.com
Getting your water, Mayo

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Should You Trust Your Instincts? Or should you know better?

2004-02-04T04:10:00.000-05:00

Should You Trust Your Instincts?
Or should you know better?

We hear it all the time: Trust your instincts, listen to your inner voice where food and exercise are concerned. We find babies are naturally averse to foods that don't agree with them. We're told if we suspect a food results in an ache, a rash, a bloat, we shouldn't eat it. Monitor your body while exercising, and if it hurts, slow down.

On the other hand, human beings are growing huge, flabby, unable to climb short flights of stairs. We're frantic to buy the next brand of packaged food. We ache for the convenience of the microwaved meal. We can't face a day, a morning, a meal without our soda pop. Why? Well, because we follow our instincts.

That is, we follow the biggest, baddest of our instincts, our survival instinct.

This one is the ancient, gnawing one, the one that governs over all the others. It's the prehistoric one that tells us to eat sweet and starchy things wherever we can find them, the one whose primary objective is storing energy as fat for the inevitable future periods of flight and starvation. We follow the instincts that tell us to sit for hours on the couch, conserving the energy we'll surely need to run from the next predator that might cross our paths. This survival instinct of ours has served us so well throughout the history of mankind.

Thing is, we've outgrown it.

Today we live in an environment where food is plentiful, rest pretty much assured, and predators not all that hard to avoid. So these instincts, the ones that tell us to stay in bed instead of exercising, to find any way possible to avoid physical labor, to eat the most convenient calories available, to eat calorie-dense foods rather than going to all the work of eating lots of food that is lower in calories, these instincts that are all about getting and conserving energy have turned on us. We're so darned smart we've designed and built a world in which we don't need instincts to survive. But we're not smart enough to turn off our instincts. They run whether we need them or not, and they just keep telling us to eat and get our rest.

We can't turn off those survival instincts, and we're not very good at controlling the ever-wily, and rather miraculous biochemistry that governs energy storage, retrieval, and use. So what to do?

You have to use the reasoning part of your brain to outsmart your instincts. You need to recognize when it's your prehistoric little survival creature telling you to eat more calories than you need, and to rest when what your body really needs is exercise. You need to go to the gym anyway, and put down the donut even when you think you'll die if you don't eat it. Now.

For a long time I tried to think of exercising when I didn't want to as abuse, going without the food I wanted as deprivation, forgetting what real abuse looks like, how actual deprivation ravages bodies halfway around the world, but not in my house. I finally came to realize that I was programmed to eat food and rest, but not to maintain my health. If I wanted good health, I was going to have to actively think about it, spend energy working for it. I would have to do this every day, do battle with my instincts.

Of course, I spent a lot of time writing about how my instincts told me to do one thing when I knew that I should really do the other. The more I wrote about it, the more clear my choices became. Slowly, slowly, the healthier choices become, if not instinctive, then at least habitual.

So, your assignment: Write down the ways your instincts seem to overtake your best intentions to take good care of your body. When does it happen? In what circumstances? How are you feeling when it happens? What time of day? Where are you? What is it that you wind up doing? What do you think you should do instead that would be healthier for you in the long run? What you're doing is developing a battle plan, a strategy for helping your rational, emotional, evolved mind overcome your cold little reptilian mind.

So, when I wake up in the morning, and my inner reptile thinks it's a better form of survival to stay in bed for an extra hour, I have programmed my rational mind to kick in and tell me to get my feet on the floor and my butt out the door. When I am tempted to stand in front of the fridge and eat a whole meal before dinner, or while preparing it, my rational mind steps in and reminds me to squeeze my lips shut, wait for the meal, the moment. Even to enjoy the hunger I know will be satisfied very soon.

It's one thing to know these instincts of yours get in the way. But writing them down and deciding what you're going to do about these moments in advance has huge power. The act of writing helps you rewire your brain. Prepare to dominate during these moments. Do it. Get a journal, a sheet of paper, fire up your word processor, and start outsmarting yourself.

Put Down the Donut

Your inner reptile

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Skinny Sick Day

2004-02-03T04:10:00.000-05:00

Skinny Sick Day
Sorry folks. Taking a sick day from skinniness. A cold grabbed my asthmatic airways and is shaking them down. I'm drinking my fluids and watching old movies. Snoozing and sitting in steamy bathrooms. All the echinacea and Vity C and Zicam and Zinc couldn't quite fight my lifelong bronchitis, former smoking habit, and asthma.

Much as a girl wants to be a rock, sometimes a girl can't beat a stampeding herd of rhino viruses. My goal: not letting it go to pneumonia.

Oh the Staples creampuff mafia ad just came on again. I love that one.

I'm curled up with Frances Kuffel's "Passing for Thin," Broadway Books, 2004. It's a memoir of a funny, smart, beautiful woman's transformation as she lost, I can't remember right now, 170 pounds? Well, half her weight. Her writing -- and she is a writer, with her MFA in creative writing from Cornell, and having other literary works published in some of the most prestigious literary mags in the world -- is beautiful, haunting, careful. Her attitude is not. She's baldly truthful, jarringly honest, and.... I'm not writing this review now, but will when I've finished it. At any rate, it's not like I'm not thinking about you. I'm reading about Frances and thinking about you.

And going through boxes and boxes of tissues.

JuJu

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No One Will Love You: Oh, really?

2004-02-02T04:10:00.000-05:00

No One Will Love You
Oh, really?

There is some tiny part of me that admires spam authors. They used to be unimaginative hacks with four selling verbs under their belts. They had no idea how to lure someone at all, whether they peddled mortgages or biophysical miracles, websites or drugs. But lately, just lately, a new breed of spam peddler has surfaced who can write truly compelling headlines. Real grabbers. I got one today. The headline read:

No one will love you if you are fat.

And I thought, Oh, really?

I mean, yes, there will be people around who mock, think less of, avoid, ignore, feel sorry for people who are fat. Sure. That happens. But being without love because we are fat? No. No, see, that’s not the way it works, ever. I mean, there are plenty of reasons a person can be unlovable, but fat isn’t one of them.

Still, many of us are raised to believe it, and so with extra fat on our bodies, we feel unlovable. And feeling unlovable has a way of fulfilling itself. We react in two main directions. One way to go is by overcompensating, overreaching, over-nurturing, overdoing for others, over-performing at work. Or we react by shutting down, shutting out the world, other people, relationships, opportunities. Or maybe we do both. A very few of us manage to maintain a strong self image without swallowing this line of horse poo-poo.

What could possibly be unlovable about fat? It’s energy. That’s all it is. It’s potential energy. Storage. Walk-in closets, full of energy. Bins and boxes and barrels full of that which makes us go. It’s warmth, it’s heat. Sure, too much of it hurts us. No doubt about it. But that’s another issue for another day.

Stop and count up the big people in your life who you love. Would you say you would love them more if they were thinner?

Silly question, right. Absolutely.

Do you think you’d love yourself more if you were thinner?

Is that question not so silly?

Fat can be a problem in a lot of ways, but making you unlovable to other people? No. Actually it can’t do that. Some people may not find fat sexy. That’s okay. Many others do. Fat is mainly a problem when it makes you unlovable to yourself. And that’s what this wily spam writer knows. The spam headline wakes and shakes that little driveling fool that lives in all of us, big or small, that fears going through life without love. Silly old fool.

So, got a little extra hanging around? Hating yourself for it? Maybe spend a little time soon writing in your journal or body log to consider what fat does to your ability to care about and for yourself. Write out some memories of how you’ve felt about your extra weight. Where did those feelings come from, do you think? Read them over.

When you’ve really had a chance to analyze them, decide to change your mind about what you think about your own fat. We can do that, you know. We don’t have to live with every little feeling that shows up. We can reprogram our thinking. Spend a little time actively apologizing to yourself for giving yourself too hard a time about your weight. Apologize for beating yourself up. Apologize for punishing yourself excessively. Apologize for making yourself a doormat or shutting yourself off from the world. For being angry or defensive or bitter about it. Consider all the people you love who carry extra weight, and decide to put yourself in the same boat with them. All of you go on a nice cruise somewhere.

Then promise yourself you’re going to see your fat and anybody else’s for what it is, plain old stored energy, and nothing more. There is no magical person-shifting aspect to stored fat. You will not change for better or for worse by having it or not having it. And so, there’s no more poor you. No more poor unlovable you. Just you with energy to burn.

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Maude's Beloved Buckwheat: A grain you can love

2004-01-30T04:34:00.000-05:00

Maude's Beloved Buckwheat
A grain you can love

My grandmother, Maude Williams Garlinghouse, was an osteopath, a whole-body doc back in the early half of the last century. She was a friend of Adele Davis,' and preached from the same food gospel. That is, she spurned packaged foods, believed in eating lots of veggies. And she wanted us to use more buckwheat in our diets.

She made buckwheat pancakes instead of the white-flour sort. Nutty, intensely-favored things. I never had the chance to taste them, but my mother did, remembered them well, hankered for them. So we found and tweaked recipes to make one we feel closely approximates Maude's simple griddle cakes. They were a hit among three generations around our table that morning.

Why was she such a buckwheat nut? Why do we care now? Well, a whole lot of us are sensitive to wheat products. Refined wheat, whole wheat, it doesn't matter. If we have it, we have trouble. So we look for other things to eat. Many, many more of us are insulin resistant and looking for healthier carbohydrates that don't send our insulin production into overdrive with every bite. Those of us in that category cut most grains from our diets at least until we get our blood sugar back in line. Buckwheat offers one exception to grain restriction for those of us in that boat. Well, it's not a grain at all.

I started making my own pasta from buckwheat flour awhile ago. Easily done, you just whip up an egg per person you're serving, then knead in enough buckwheat flour until the dough is no longer sticky. Run it though your pasta maker as you would any pasta. Dry anything you don't want to cook right away.

Buckwheat has a slightly more distinct, nuttish, vegetable flavor that loves stronger sauces. When you cook it, in pasta or griddle cakes, it has a chocolatey look to it, or at least that's how one 14 year-old in my house described it.

Aside from tasting good, it's a higher fiber, higher protein, gluten-free, grain-like food rich in magnesium (we're nearly all deficient in magnesium) and potassium and lots of other goodies. There are compounds in it shown to lower your bad cholesterol and help people with Type II diabetes.

What I'm saying is, grandma was right. Again.

*Use in place of wheat flour in recipes that call for regular flour but don't require the gluten of a wheat flour for rising. Think muffins, crusts, quickbreads, crackers. You'll find buckwheat wants more moisture to work well, and the doughs will be very soft, needing a light hand. I've had great luck with a tart crust, and will soon share my buckwheat morning muffin recipe.

*Make your own pastas from it. Involve kids, who love to cut noodles.

*Eat buckwheat groats, kasha, cooked for breakfast or as a side dish.

*Exchange buckwheat flour for wheat in your cornbread recipe for a delicious difference.

Try Maude's pancakes:

For Maude: Simple Buckwheat Pancakes, 6 servings

Mix:
3 cups buckwheat flour
2 T. Stevia powder
1 tsp. salt
1 T. cinnamon
4 tsp. baking powder

Whisk together:
2 eggs
3 cups water (or milk if you're not carb careful, or milk and cream if you're not calorie nervous)
2 T Grapeseed oil

Heat your non-stick griddle until it's hot enough for droplets of water to dance like you remember dancing oughtta go. Fold the dry ingredients into the wet stuff. Use an ice cream scoop (If you can find it, because you're not really eating much ice cream any more, are you? That stuff can kill you.) to drop batter onto your griddle, which you may wipe with a smidgen of grapeseed oil or butter if you like. Cook those cakes until they're dry around the edges and bubbling a bit, then flip them. Let them brown on the other side, then serve them up to someone hungry for something real. This mixture will thicken as it stands. You can loosen it with water or milk as you make your cakes.

Lowcarb folks, these are not without carbs, so you may want to wait for your maintenance plan, or enjoy them on special occasions. They won't tank your program, though. Consider topping them with whipped cream or whipped cream cheese sweetened with Stevia, and a few strawberries. Other folks, go easy on the syrups, will you? I worry about you people. Everybody, keep track of the calories. Overeating matters. And these will encourage overeating.

Nutrition info, based on pancakes made with water, from dietsite.com
Servings: 6
Calories per serving 267, Calories from Fat 72
Fiber 6g
Carbohydrates 43g
Fat 8g
Protein 10g

Buckwheat flour facts from Nutritiondata.com
Doc Weil on buckwheat

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Those Wussy Athletes: Suck it up and move just a little

2004-01-29T03:33:00.000-05:00

Those Wussy Athletes
Suck it up and move just a little

I encounter this guy, Fred, everywhere. Fred very much wants to get back in shape, lose weight, regain his fitness. He hasn't exercised in years. He's tried. He laces up his old Keds and runs a few miles, he hurts himself. He gives up. I suggest to Fred that he try something a little easier, kicking laps in the pool. No, he's not getting in the pool with a lapboard. I suggest to Fred he try an elliptical machine. He crosses his eyes. No. Videos, no. Aerobics class, heckle no.

So, I have to ask, "Fred, by any chance were you at all athletic while you were growing up?"

The answer, of course, is yes, absolutely. Fred was a part of one team or another from about the age of 10 until marriage, the job, the kids came along. Fred can tell me his handicap, his averages, his speed, his distances, his events, his medals, the big game, the big night, the things his coach would say to him. He can recall to the most infinite level of loving detail the special piquant smell of his own beloved high school locker room, the taste of the victory steaks, the feeling of the pads as he geared up for a game.

Fred can't exercise now because anything short of his early performance just feels ridiculous. He's an athlete. He doesn't belong on an elliptical machine. He's a jock, he doesn't belong in a therapy pool.

For Fred getting in shape involves exercising until you puke. His recollection of "workouts," meant wind-sprints until he fell over, teammates fainting in their gear in the heat, running endless laps, doing endless pushups. Hours of practice every day, for a season. He tries to go back there. And of course he gets hurt. Or he makes a valiant effort for about the length of one season, and then his inner clock tells him to stop.

Just try to get this guy to go for a half-hour brisk walk every day, forever. Just try to hand this guy a set of 10-lb. dumb-bells for a few reps. A maintenance level of exercise does not compute. A metabolism-boosting level of exercise has no place in the mental model for "workout" that Fred locked into his brain many, many years ago.

You may at this point have a pretty clear picture of Fred in your mind. But I need you to understand I meet Fred in the most surprising places. I meet Fred in high school girls. I meet Fred among girlfriends at lunch. I meet Fred at the retirement village. I even meet Fred among fitness professionals. You might have a little Fred lurking inside you somewhere.

And I say to your inner Fred, and mine, and to all Freds: Just get over yourselves.

Your body needs to move every day. It doesn't have to move perfectly, dramatically, endlessly, or until you throw up or fall down. It needs to move some. Every day. Some movement every day, some strength work, some sweat. A bit. It never, ever has to hurt you.

Just, get over yourself, Fred, and move today.

Advice for the aging athlete from active.com
More advice for geriatric jocks

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Sugar Shark: What sets off your feeding frenzies?

2004-01-28T05:30:00.000-05:00

Sugar Shark
What sets off your feeding frenzies?

An all-day meeting. No, wait. An all-day brainstorming session. A room, a big table, 15 to 20 colleagues, a whiteboard. A time keeper. The charge: think hard all day while never losing focus. Be brilliant. Come out with a plan for the department, for the year.

Between you and me, I'm not very good at this. Not the thinking all day part, not the focusing part, and actually, not the brilliance part. Yet somehow I was invited to the meeting, because… Oh, because I own a watch. I was asked to be the time-keeper. Somehow, the most easily distracted woman in the room was charged with keeping us on task. We turned off our cell phones. We instructed everyone we were not to be disturbed. We would stay focused. No distractions at all.

Except for that large pile of scones, chocolate chip cookies, and sugary drinks in the corner over there.

Normally I can look right past these foods. I see them, say inwardly "I don't eat that stuff," and I move on. I wasn't born being able to do that, but have worked for years to recognize and shun high-sugar, low-fiber foods. They are not good for me. They are not on my diet. That's what I did when I arrived at this day-long meeting. I cased the joint, noted what was available, helped myself to the coffee, and decided snacking was out of the question this morning.

And that worked for the first couple of hours. Thinking, developing strategies, probing, expanding. These might not sound like the most active verbs, friends, but it was work. We were a unit of high-performance professionals from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds, taking one day to set a new direction for a whole department. I don't know about the others, but speaking for myself, I was working so hard, thinking with such intensity that tiny beads of sweat popped out on my upper lip and chin. The room became warm with the force of my own professionalism. Or maybe it was the heat of so many bodies. Or possibly it was the glitchy furnace. Whatever the reason, by 11 a.m., I was hot, drained, hungry, my blood sugar dropping through the floor, a headache coming on, my memory going fuzzy, and lunch was still a good hour or more away.

I normally have a mid-morning snack. I normally pack my food the night before a meeting like this, knowing I won't be free to go find something good to eat. There won't be cheese, nuts, veggies, fruit at this meeting, or any meeting. There will be cookies, donuts, baked goods, chips. No brain food, no sustenance, just white flour and sugar. At meetings, conferences, clubs, we humans have made a tradition of offering one another insulin releasing, non-nutritive substances, with the choice of corn syrup, caffeine, aspartame or nitrates to wash them down. We love this stuff, even as it kills us. I'll choose the caffeine, or water if I'm feeling strong, and take breaks to nibble on nuts or string cheese or dried vegetables or fruits I nearly always carry in my bag to pull me through between meals. But this morning I had no snacks in my bag. I had forgotten to pack anything. Failed to plan for this day.

I looked over at the scones. They smiled back at me with love, all greasy, doughy innocence.

No, I reminded myself, I don't eat those things. Another few minutes went by, and my head began to throb. In an hour I would have a full-blown migraine and be unable to finish the day. That would not do, I told myself. That would be irresponsible. Just a little sugar isn't going to kill me, I reasoned. Just a corner of one of those scones may be all my body needs to push through, until lunch, until veggies and protein come along.

Here's the impressive part. I was able to hold this debate with myself in my head for several minutes while simultaneously listening to my colleagues, reacting, and recording our entire transaction on the white board. While my reasoning mind was hard at work, my needy little prehistoric inner eyes kept darting over to the snack table, fixating on those scones. Not on the orange juice. Not the tomato juice. Not the far lesser of the evils set before me. The scones.

I saw my chance when one of us launched into a lengthy opinion. My inner predator made up its mind. A little sugar, in this instance, I was sure, was taking one for the team. I would be bad to be good. I went to break off a corner of a cranberry scone, one of those pound-and-a-half scones, which are really sugar cookies in disguise, that trendy little bakeries produce these days, and darned if a whole half of one didn't fall into my hand.

I ate it. I was immediately sorry. It didn't fix my headache. I found and swallowed my medication for that. Lunch arrived 20 minutes later, accompanied by large chocolate chip cookies. I ate one of those too. And I ate another one after the meeting, on the way home. Calculating my calorie load while finishing my cookie, I decided to skip dinner. Heaping terrible decision upon terrible decision, I went to bed early, sick, tired, hung over.

I am a classic sugar shark. And I'm not alone. This behavior is common among us. If we can stay away from the sugar, the white flour and potato snacks (sugar in disguise), we're fine, but once we have a taste for it, once there's a bit of it in the air or on the tongue, a feeding frenzy commences, and we're not happy until it's all been consumed. It took me days to recover from this feeding. I didn't have too many calories, but too little protein, no good fats, no fiber, no sense. I made my headache worse, sent my blood sugar spiking and plummeting repeatedly.

I know my body, know how it responds to this food, I know all of this about myself, but for some reason, I just didn't behave. I just didn't plan. I should have healthy snacks with me always. Always. Knowing at the start of the morning that I would need food, I should have excused myself from the meeting until I found some.

And why am I writing all of this now? Just a cautionary tale. For you and for me. I hope to remember this adventure the next time I'm scheduled for a long meeting, so I'll plan for it. I'll ask the hosts to provide something other than sugar. Why not? I hope you can think about your options the next time you're faced by a snack table or charged with filling one. If it's your meeting and you want to get the best out of people? Feed them veggies, nuts, fruit, cheese. Offer water and teas among your drink choices. If you're headed for a day-long trip, visit, or seminar, pack along foods you know you can nibble without difficulty.

Never let your inner shark do the thinking for you.

University of Hawaii Healthy Meetings Checklist
Doc Weil on fighting the energy slump

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Living the Low Carb Life: Jonny Bowden's field guide

2004-01-26T08:16:00.000-05:00

Living the Low Carb Life
Jonny Bowden's field guide

First, understand who Jonny Bowden is. He's a nutrition and fitness writer, educator, and advisor, the weight loss coach on iVillage's popular diet and fitness site. And if you asked him to draw a map of the contentious and fiery world of nutritional theory, he would not only draw it, but could clearly demarcate all the borders, rivers and passages, reveal the history of the indigenous tribes, name all the treaties, disputes, wars and skirmishes, pillagers and peace makers. And if you asked him where he fits into the picture, he would place himself in a pirate ship running the borders of this warring continent, gathering what riches each country offers, and giving them away.

If you don't mind me mixing a few metaphors.

He doesn't mind being on the fringe. He abhors inertia, politics, loses patience with policy and protocol. He can smell an agenda on the slightest wind, and will call it out. He doesn't pull punches, he doesn't always adore the same people I do, he doesn't agree with some people he respects and doesn't respect some people he agrees with, and he's never unclear about any of that. That makes him an awfully fun read.

With all of that, he's just the nicest guy. On paper and in person. I mean, for a pirate, he's just awfully peace-loving.

What he always is, what I trust him to be, is fair and clear. And funny. And kind. And smart enough to sort good research from bad, and clear results from unclear, then distill it into useful, doable things for those of us who can't possibly predict or dodge the magma of nutritional science that flows forth daily.

And in Living the Low Carb Life (Sterling, 2004) he's done what we needed someone to do. He has gathered up all the most popular of the Low-carb diets and created a field guide.

You know the field guides we use to tell one bird species from the another, the edible mushrooms from the poisonous ones, the groundhogs from the woodchucks? Yes, well, here Bowden draws out 14 low carb diets, from the earliest ones that far predate Atkins, all the way up to South Beach. You'll read the difference between the Zone and Somerciszing, the Paleo Diet and Neanderthin and recognize a Gittleman from a Schwarzbein at 20 paces.

He lays out the structure, history, influences of the diet, describes its essential principles, and then gives his opinion and rating of each plan. It's enough to give you a sense of which plans might fit your lifestyle best.

And that was a lot of good work, alright. But what I like best about this book is the fore- and after-matter. His first two chapters give the history of the low carb movement and the clearest description of why low carb diets work and for whom that I've ever enjoyed. His last chapters are a terrific guide to nutritional supplements (the value of this advice far exceeds the price of the book), great chapters on myth-busting and FAQs and tips, and a useful description of eating when you eat this way.

Finally that last little, innocuous looking chapter. Sneaky little bugger wrote his own low carb plan, all of 14 pages, and snuck it in to the back of the book. This little plan is all the low carb diet anyone really needs. Combined with his resources section (Yes, full disclosure, SDP gets a plug in there.), these last chapters will guide you to a low-carb way of eating that is the closest description to my own way of eating that I have ever seen. It's not dissimilar to the one he described in his popular Shape Up! Diet and fitness program, followed by many thousands through iVillage and many thousands more who buy and use his books. That one was the most useful book I read while losing my 100.

He also posits his own eating-and-lifestye pyramid, suitable for photocopying and taping on your refrigerator door.

Smart, sensible, clear-eyed, funny, warm, and doable. I like this guy. I recommend the book.

Living the Low Carb Life

Jonny Bowden's Practice

Shape Up!

Want to discuss today's Post? Visit The Skinny Daily Forum at 3fatchicks.com.

Kid Stuff: Are you up to it?

2004-01-23T03:57:00.000-05:00

Kid Stuff
Are you up to it?

I went to our community pool the other day. That's not unusual. I have belonged to the pool for a couple of years. My pool time is early in the morning, weekdays. Grownups everywhere. But this was a Saturday afternoon, and I was under the wing of my niece. I am still recovering.

I had no idea what my pool looks like on a Saturday afternoon. Kids. Everywhere. From tiny little tykes who have a hard time walking a straight line on a good day, much less while shivering and wet, to gigantic lugs who lope quickly enough around the edges of the pool to force the lifeguards to actually use their whistles.

I've never heard the whistle in use at that pool. But on a Saturday afternoon it goes off almost constantly, because the pool is crowded with wet young people.

My pool experiences take place in much emptier lanes where I churn dutiful laps in varying sets and strokes, alternating counts in a feeble attempt to keep things interesting. I usually pick the same lane, and swim at the same time with the same people.

But my niece works the pool this way: First you go to the water slide, and climb the stairs and slide down a half a dozen times, and then you go whirl in the whirlpool (not the hot tub, but the swirly thing that spins you around to anchor the nausea you picked up from the slide), and then go stand under a thing that dumps buckets of water on your head, and then dive into the big pool to toss a basketball around, and then over to the T-Bar, where you glide through the air for the length of the pool while hanging like a monkey and then back-flop into the water when you get to the end, and then you take on the big float-walk, where you try to walk across a floating sausage roll without slipping off into the water, and back onto the T-Bar, and then back to the slide and around. A few laps in between.

I'm not sure, but I think you can burn 780 calories per hour doing the pool this way.

Well, it turns out there is not upper age limit on this equipment. And she didn't want to do these things by herself. And I have given myself an able body, after all. What good is a functioning body if you aren't going to use it? Right?

Sure, I felt a little silly. Sure, I behaved in an age-inappropriate way. Of course, I was triple and quadruple the age of my nearest playmate.

But I did it. Because it was there. Because I could do all of these things. It wasn't long ago that maneuvering any of this equipment was outside of my ability and functionally impossible. I would have stuck in the slide, would have been too big to whirl, would not have tossed a basketball while treading water, because I couldn't tread water. The T-Bar. Well, we don't have to discuss the T-Bar.

While my nieces stay with me, we're having fun horsing around on my exercise balls, dancing, or trying to imitate the dancing we see in the movies we're watching.

We're playing.

I have friends who kid me about my new exercise routines. They wonder why I work so hard, when the body I need is one that can comfortably sit in front of a computer all day. Am I not overshooting my necessary fitness level? And they make a valid argument. We don't need to work as hard as Amish folks do. We don't need to grow our food or chase it down. Most of my days do not require the upper body strength I've been working so hard to develop.

But there are a few of those days. Raking leaves days, splitting wood days, clearing the garage days, washing dogs days, and days when your niece insists on gliding over a bright blue pool on a T-bar and back-flopping into the water. On these days having strength enough to do what must be done is a great thing.

I wasn't strong enough to play with these kids almost the entire time they were growing up. I missed a lot. I am so grateful I had the chance to get my strength back before they became "too old" for play. I hope to stay in shape so that I can play with their kids.

And you? Do you remember playing? Are you able to play with the kids in your life? Would you if you could? Are you able to play at things that you know you would enjoy if you were strong enough, fit enough, confident enough? Or have you given up things you wish you hadn't?

Play is a very good reason to get in shape. A functioning body lets you face water slides and wave pools without fear. Well, okay, not without fear, but without excuses. And while that might not sound like a good thing? Trust me, it is so good.

Amish diet and fitness plan

How water slides work

My pool

Want to discuss today's Post? Visit The Skinny Daily Forum at 3fatchicks.com.

Anti Tea? Learn new ways to enjoy the world's brew

2004-01-22T05:31:00.000-05:00

Anti Tea?
Learn new ways to enjoy the world's brew

By now you've heard that a cup or more of tea per day is good for you. And that's great. The only problem is, you don't really like tea. Or you haven't liked it any way you've tried it before.

But there are all sorts of ways to enjoy tea, no wrong way to drink it. If the only way you like it is with milk and sugar, you're in company with millions of others. So you've decided to cut back on sugar. And milk? Okay, you have more options.

It's time to try Stevia, an herb you can find where natural food supplements are sold. Try it in drops or powdered form. A very little bit goes a very long way. Or use an artificial sweetener. So far it looks as if sucralose, sold under the trade name Splenda, gives us the least to worry about. If you're cutting back on milk, then try a nut milk. Soy milk or almond milk make great additions to tea. They are not without calories, but the nutritional boost of either of these make every calorie worthwhile.

Drink your tea and live longer, they say. This stuff is antibiotic, antibacterial, antiviral, and antimicrobial. Add spices like fennel, cardamom, cinnamon, and anise, and it's antispasmodic too, helping ease the pain of menstrual cramps, gas, and heartburn.

Spicy tea has the extra benefit of helping control hunger pangs between meals. Warm tea can be exactly what you need to keep your hunger curbed and munchies under control in the evening before bed.

Fruit may make the difference. Add the zest of oranges, lemons, or limes to give your tea a citrus punch. Or consider blending hot tea with a fresh apple, or mango, or melon, then straining it.

Floral teas win over non-tea-drinkers every day. Dried rose petals, bee-balm petals, lavender, and marigold petals mix well with teas, softening their flavors, bringing summer memories to bear in the middle of snowy evenings.

What's not to love about that? Drink your tea with milk and sweetener, cream and sweetener, soymilk and sweetener. Drink it hot or cold, or freeze it into a sorbet. But don't miss out on the many flavors and benefits of the world's most popular drink. For instance:

Sugar-free Chai

8 teaspoons loose black tea
½ inch crushed cinnamon stick
½ inch slice fresh ginger root, crushed
12 cardamom pods
12 cloves
4 cups water

White Stevia Powder OR Sucralose to taste
Cream, or whole milk, or skim milk, or soy milk, or almond milk to taste

Bring water to boil. Add tea and all four spices. Lower temperature and simmer for 10 minutes. (Watch that the mixture does not boil over.) Strain. You can keep this chai mix on hand for a couple of days. Right now or when you're ready, sweeten to taste, add cream or milk to taste.

Tea benefits

About Stevia

Almond Milk, Enchanted Kitchens

Down but not Out

2004-01-20T18:54:00.000-05:00

Down but not out

Bit of a snafu with the old technology today. But fresh posts tomorrow.

JuJu

Trapped? Getting stuck inside the wrong body

2004-01-20T04:34:00.000-05:00

Trapped?
Getting stuck inside the wrong body

Look, gathering a lot of extra weight on your frame is not the worst thing that can happen to you. Not by a long shot. And there are probably many more important things in the world for you to work on, attend to, deal with, than worrying about your weight. Granted.

There are closets to organize, basements to clean out, your music collection to rip into digital, cross-index, and store. That project, alone, could take years. We have to wire or wireless our homes, move our children about, organize junk drawers, assemble oil cans, sort brads and washers, throw parties, paste together photo albums, reconsider our hair, organize communities, find that perfect pair of black pumps. Have to. We have our priorities.

Being heavy is not a desperate situation, at first, because it's reversible. You know this. You've dieted before. It worked. Eventually you will plan to lose the weight, when the time is right, when you can make the time to focus on that task. Meantime, it's just not as important as other things. Right? Sure.

I felt pretty much the same way for much of my life. I slowly put the weight on, a pound or five or more per year for 20 years. By my 40th birthday, I had stopped recognizing myself in the mirror, in family photos, stopped looking in mirrors. But still, it wasn't that important. My looks weren't important. Never mind that that body wasn't ME. That cloak, that mask, I knew, was temporary.

And then things started happening. My feet became easily injured, often injured, chronically injured. Followed by my knees. And then my hip. And then I couldn't walk a half mile without sitting and swelling. I suffered migraines, chronic infections of various kinds. I was sick a lot, placed on at least 5 rounds of antibiotics per year. And antibiotics to solve problems caused by antibiotics. Trips to physical therapists and massage therapists and alternative healers when the regular healers couldn't help. Over the counter medications to manage the symptoms brought about by the under-the-counter medications. And lots and lots and lots of ibuprofen. I put it all down to turning 40. But it was all a part of being overweight.

Here's the problem. If, like me, you let that weight hang around for too long, it gets a lot harder to lose. It's never impossible, but it does get harder. There are the biomechanical problems of carrying around a lot of extra weight for a long time, the wear and tear on your feet, ankles, knees, hips. These will increasingly make it harder for you to move, and when it's hard to move, it's harder to lose weight. Not impossible, but harder.

But there is also the havoc that too much fat plays on your body's metabolism and immune system. Extra fat is not benign, it turns out. Extra fat perpetuates itself. Extra fat and insulin resistance go hand-in-hand. We wind up overproducing insulin, straining our pancreas. Too much insulin brings on all manner of uncomfortable and frustrating symptoms, and is thought to wreak havoc on many systems, leaving us unable to conceive children, open to cancers, heart disease, a whole host of inflammatory diseases. It can also play some dirty rotten tricks with our metabolism, so that even when we do diet, the weight doesn't come off as easily as it used to.

You diet but don't lose weight? That, my friends, is more than frustrating. That can feel really very frightening. That's when you feel trapped in a body you don't even recognize as yours.

But still, even then, even when it's gone on far too long, it's reversible. The methods you may need to use to reverse weight gain may become more complex, more dramatic, moving from diet-andexercise to medically supervised diet-and-exercise, to surgery-and-diet-and-exercise, but it's reversible.

You really are never trapped. You're never completely without options. But the sooner you attack this problem, decide it is time to take care of yourself, the easier it will be. That's the good news. The great news is, with the extra fat gone, our bodies have a remarkable capacity for healing, gaining strength, getting well. Simply remarkable.

Diets A-Z, at ivillage.com

Medically supervised weight loss programs, from shapeup.org

The basics of bariatric surgery, 3fatchicks.com

Raise Your Inner Puppy: Reward healthy behaviors

2004-01-19T01:01:00.000-05:00

Raise Your Inner Puppy
Reward healthy behaviors

I have a big, introverted dog. He has the disposition of a pile of dirty laundry, content to lie on the floor all day long, smelling life as it unfolds around him. Lately, he hasn't been feeling well, and when that happens he becomes even more inert.

Yesterday I put him through his training paces, just to force him to move a bit, get him jogging through the house. Because, you see, despite his preference for remaining still, this dog is brilliant at companion dog work. This dog will heel, sit, stay, stand, lie down, shake, lie on his back, come to the front, by-heel brilliantly, crisply. He is doggy poetry in motion when he's working. He smiles. He enjoys himself. He is delighted to obey.

Just as long as there is cheese in my hand and the supply does not run out.

Without the cheese, there is no deal. Without the cheese, he is stone-deaf. Without the cheese, I may talk to the paw, but the dog isn't in.

And that brings me to the subject of Rewards. Getting ahold of our health -- losing weight, getting more fit, eating better foods - these are all new behaviors for many of us. It's hard to pick up a new behavior and make it our own. But it's not impossible. There is an art to it. It's a simple, old formula we use to raise our kids and train our dogs: Repetition and reward.

Repetition, repetition, repetition and reward.

As adults, we seem to think we can cut out that last part. We feel as if the new behavior should be its own reward.

In many cases it is. If you find a new vegetable dish that is delicious, you add vegetables to your diet in a way that rewards you immediately. If you are able to achieve that warm, languid, self-satisfied blood rush that exercise often brings, then you have instant gratification for moving more. Win-win.

But these new behaviors may feel very uncomfortable at first. You may need serious encouragement. If eating and moving in new ways present a hardship for you, then you need to find ways to encourage and reward your efforts. You need to become your own pet puppy, and commence a rewards-based training program.

*When you drink all your water today, say inwardly "Good Boy!"

*When you resist the chips somebody automatically put on your plate, scratch yourself behind the ears, give your tummy a rub, and wiggle all over. Or perhaps indulge in a nice hot cup of tea.

*When you lose 10 pounds, give yourself a gift, something that celebrates your accomplishment without food. A piece of jewelry, a new pedometer, a massage, a pedicure.

*When your blood pressure reaches a healthy range, take a weekend to head some place great.

*When you make your goal weight, throw yourself a big party. Invite your friends. Have a day at a day spa.

*If you entered and finished that first 5K race, you're entitled to a new pair of running shoes. Or maybe you should get those when you sign up for the race. Trust me, crossing your first road race finish line is its own reward.

*Between the big events, give yourself small gifts for good behavior. Have you given up ice cream to lose weight? Is it too hard? Then let yourself have it once a month. Did you cut back on red meat? Schedule a filet mignon at a steak house every three months or so.

*Set up a schedule of things you know you want, and will probably buy anyway, but tie your acquisitions to meeting specific goals. Complete 6 consecutive weeks of working out 5 times per week, and that gets you a new CD? A new car?

Plan immediate rewards for exhibiting good behaviors and avoiding bad ones, and anticipatory rewards for goal attainment and/or sustained good behavior over time.

But a word of caution: Do not make the same mistake I have made with my dog and become so reliant upon rewards that you need them to maintain your new habits. You could go broke that way, or run out of cheese, and then where would you be?

Treats and Rewards, Walking-a-dog.com

Behavioral Modification Principals, Valdosta.edu

Weight Loss Peaks and Valleys: The devil's waiting for you

2004-01-16T04:15:00.000-05:00

Weight Loss Peaks and Valleys
The devil's waiting for you

So I'm Gidgeing and Midgeing with Athena, a Skinny Daily Post pal, the other day, and she hands me a good metaphor: "All human learning," she paraphrases, "is a journey through a range of peaks and valleys." We set our compasses, of course. That much we can do. But the road itself is long, hard, there are retracings, missteps, wrong turns, highs and lows.

"It's the devil's job to wait at the first valley to persuade souls to quit," she said.

Is that like working to lose weight, get fit, get a handle on healthy living, or what?

That may sound discouraging, but really you should know this journey is hard before you start, so you can prepare yourself. You need equipment. You need supplies. You need maps. You need guides and strong backs around you. But most importantly, you need to know that there will be peaks and valleys, dearies.

Even the bravest among us could look at the mountain range that faces the morbidly obese, the chronically ill-fed, the desperately under-exercised, and decide to turn back, take up a quiet life in a border town. Don't decide lightly to walk through those treacherous mountains. The many devils in those valleys wear lots of disguises.

If you're prepared, you can recognize and deal with them. It's doable and worth it. You just have to equip yourself for the trip. Gird yourself. That means planning for failure.

Because you will fail. Over and over again. I promise. Know you will. Recognize it when it happens. Know you will pick yourself up and keep going. See yourself doing that.

If you're low-carbing, you will eat a donut when you shouldn't. Know the next day will be better. If you're counting points, you'll "forget" to count for a day or three or a week. Know you will start again. You will overeat sometimes, underexercise, put a few back on, not lose at all. But then you will rededicate yourself to giving yourself great health.

You may regain everything. You may lose all your muscle tone, or nearly. You could break a leg, lose your balance, get very ill.

But that's not the end of the journey. These are all valleys. You could quit. Or not. It's your choice. You're not done until you say you're done. You can always choose to keep heading in the direction you want to go.

Yeah. It's a great metaphor.

Mountain range

Make like Sakajawea

2004-01-15T09:32:00.000-05:00

Comments...

Sorry about the comments field being down, folks. That's life in the blogosphere. The clever little free program, blogspeak, experienced a hosting crash of some kind. There are hard-working, large-hearted folks hard at work trying to fix/solve the problem, preserve the databases, and etc. And they'll work it out in good time. And then comments will be restored.

Meantime, if you want to discuss a post, head to the 3FatChicks.com forum by following the link at the top of this page, or if you're a G.R. Press reader and want to submit a question, comment, complaint, write to flair@gr-press.com, and include "The Skinny Daily Post" in the subject line. It'll be sure to get to me.

Finding Your Mojo: Defining your own beautiful self

2004-01-15T04:08:00.000-05:00

Finding Your Mojo
Defining your own beautiful self

The beauty game has shifted. That much is clear. A friend and I were sitting about trying to define and track this change of direction, determine how it came about. We're not sure and we don't know, but we're enjoying the fact of it and the world it's created.

In my youth, and in most of the history of youth (huh?), there was and has been one ideal of beauty. Each generation and gender had its own, one clear image of she-who-is-beautiful, he-who-is-to-be-emulated, a template, a model, who was often, in fact, a model, or a sports figure, against which we could each measure ourselves and develop a long list of ways in which we fell short.

In my day that clear image was Farrah. Farrah Fawcett of the swimsuit issue. Farrah Fawcett of the hair. Jill Munroe of Charlie's Angels. And yes, of course, a very accomplished actress of stage and screen whose body of work includes important-to-women movies like "The Burning Bed," but in my day we all worked very hard to iconize the woman for her looks alone.

So we had this template, called Farrah. We placed the template over the image we saw in our full-length mirrors. And then we'd set about trying to fulfill the template using what we each had as material. We tried for the hair, we tried for the body, we tried for the smile, the smile, the smile.

When we couldn't get there, our hair became over-teased, over-bleached, over-sprayed, over-processed. We might cover our mouths when we smiled if we just couldn't get the smile right. We dieted and vomited and purged to try to achieve the little curled up body in the famous poster. Some of us dieted to death. Some of us are still killing ourselves with these diets. I'm not talking about today's teenagers, here. I'm talking about the women who are now in their 40s and 50s and still working against the poster. You know the poster.

But take a look at beauty today. Not in the magazines, but on the streets, in the schools. Perhaps it's a matter of having hundreds of channels instead of just three. Perhaps all of the messages about the importance of building a child's self-esteem early and reinforcing it often are getting through to us. Somehow young women have done it. I think they've done it. They have managed, as a generation to shatter the single ideal. They have multiplied, expanded, blasted apart the rules for what is attractive.

Hang out in a city center or on a college campus for a day. There appear to be no templates. Clearly young women today are working on their own beauty. That is, though some may still diet dangerously, most seem willing to adorn rather than hide their own shapes, and as a society they are embracing not only new shapes, but many of them. Thin is still in, but so is full. So is generous. Sculpted and ripped have their place, but right alongside soft and squishy. Small breasts are proud. Tan is not nearly as smart as untanned or as beautiful as black, but still accepted. Big hair, tiny hair, and medium hair all work. Glasses rock, clearly. Romantic frills can walk down the same aisle as bondage chain-mail and leather. "No look" is a very clear alternative look.

The more not-like-anyone-else a woman is, the better, obviously. Or so it seems. Oh there are still trends, and ubiquitous fashion. There must be that. But clearly things have loosened up, far more for women then for men, perhaps. Men are still fighting the same few templates they've lived with for centuries, the same few the Fab Five could abolish, but seem instead to perpetuate. Each gender is hardest on itself, and no gender more resistant to change then men, hetero-, homo-, and metro-sexuals, inclusive.

My friend, a fellow, finds this all very confusing. In our day it was clear to him who the most desirable women were. There were clear winners: women with the confidence that came from fulfilling the template with the least amount of effort. It was not so much the hair and teeth, but their confidence that gave them their edge.

"If I were a young man today," he said, "I'd have whiplash." There are confident women everywhere, and none of them look like the next one. "It's confusing," says he. "In a very good way." Where in one restaurant there might be one clear beauty, today every woman is beautiful. Where at one time a woman who had no hope of achieving the template would give in, give up, fade to wallpaper, now she can present her own beautiful self with great confidence.

This change in young women is already influencing young men. And darned if it isn't influencing older folks too, as hard as it is for us to give up our old rules. While we may still want what the other one has, we seem to not work quite so hard to change our own thing. We seem to want to find a distinct mojo. If our hair is curly, we push the curl. If it's straight, we flatten it further, cowlicks are licked higher with hot pink gels. Got a Freda-esque mono-brow? Fill it in and highlight it. If we have ampleness in an area, we are more likely these days to uncover it, slather it in a pearlescent lotion, and turn a spotlight on it. Big personalities go big, introverts can go anywhere they want. We are able these days to say more about what we're about than perhaps ever before. We can be who we are.

The hard part is knowing just who that is at any given moment. If you've spent a lifetime trying to look like somebody else, working to fit in, achieve an ideal, present an image of someone else's choosing, then having the door flung wide open can be pretty confusing, if not downright terrifying.

Left to your own devices, how would you describe your mojo? Your essence? Your magic? How would you describe and define your particular brand of beauty? What have you got that deserves to be highlighted? What are your favorite features? What is it about you that no one should miss? What should be crystal clear about you from 20 feet away? What first, second, and third impressions do you want to leave with people?

Pull up your body log, journal, a piece of paper, a napkin, and write it down. And this is not an exercise in goal-setting. This isn't the hair, body, skin, teeth, image you plan some day to have. We're talking about right now, this moment.

What is it about you that is beautiful?

Mojo Defined, urban dictionary

Farrah and her hair

That poster

Self-esteem primer for parents, from Kidshealth.org

No Public Displays of Effort: Body maintenance behind closed doors

2004-01-14T04:56:00.000-05:00

No Public Displays of Effort
Body maintenance behind closed doors

Gyms are not for everyone. Neither is outdoor exercise. Some people's modesty just won't allow it. For some of us, sweat on display is plain distasteful, or potentially painful. Or just plain wrong.

I have an uncle, a retired doctor, who is in his 80s. He lives in a not-huge apartment. And he walks a mile a day. Inside. While watching the stock tickers. He's worked out his pacing, the distances up and down the halls and around his livingroom furniture.

And then there's Mel, a regular reader who lost more than 25 pounds last year, doing her exercises faithfully. Mostly upper-body, mind you, because her lower body is in a chair with wheels.

So if you're too shy to sweat in public, don't despair. Clearly, we have options. Shoot, even supermodels and celebrities have exactly the same problem you do. What they do is find a way to make home workouts work for them.

Home aerobic conditioning and strength training are great tools for dedicated home exercisers and gym rats alike. We all could use the skills and resources to maintain highly functional bodies past the age of, oh, say, 30, within easy reach of our homes.

Here are options to consider, from the least cost on up:

You and gravity
Pushups, sit-ups, crunches, lunges. Walking in place, around your house, up and down stairs. These make up a spectacular workout.

Gym class television
Free with a cable subscription, channels like The Health Network run exercises classes from very early to very late, almost on the half-hour. You'll want to have a strong stomach and a lock on your wallet to endure some of the advertising here for products that are beyond dubious. But I assume if you're able to read this, you're able to avoid spending your hard-earned dollars on anything that promises weight loss without effort. So do the workouts with the instructors then turn your back to the television during commercial breaks while you jog in place.

Video/DVD Instruction
Leslie Sansone will get you up and moving, Karen Voight will chisel you, The Firm promises to carve your derriere into a form that pleases you, Tae Bo will give you heart in at least two dimensions. Start with one, add the next when you get bored. Build your library, trade with friends. Do them with your kids. Find them in your local library, at bookstores, wherever you rent your videos and DVDs, or online.

Mini Home Gym
My ultra-mini gym even travels with me: Therabands and an inflatable Pilates ball. Your home mini gym might include a large inflatable exercise ball for good ab work, some light, medium, and heavier dumbbells, a "sticky" mat for yoga and Pilates and floor exercises. These are enough to do great strength work at home. Try used equipment stores for your dumbbells if you're on a budget, or buy them at sporting goods stores to get matching sets in designer colors.

Major Home Gym
A good piece of aerobic equipment makes a great addition here, if you have the budget. And it will mean a serious chunk of change. A good exercise bike is likely the most durable, reliable, least space-consuming, and least expensive option. Treadmills with enough quality to last more than a season will start at around $1,000 for a good walking model, and will quickly climb to more than $2,000 for one that can endure the pounding a regular runner will put on it. An elliptical trainer, the low-impact aerobic trainer, will run about the same cost as a treadmill. Want more out for your strength training? Add an incline bench, or spring for a multipurpose weight machine or a Pilates reformer.

A Personal Trainer
You don't have to sign on with a trainer for life. It isn't necessary to have a trainer wake you each morning with a wheatgrass and alfalfa sprout smoothie to gain great benefits from working with one. Try a few sessions to see what these people can bring to your workouts. Consider having a trainer in to work with you and a friend to split the cost. Meet with a trainer once a week or once a month or every few months, if need be, to develop a workout program, check your form and progress. Look for one certified to work one-on-one with clients. In the U.S., the American Council on Exercise manages a database of certified personal trainers. Call them at 1-800-825-3636 x654.

Working out for the shy and gym-averse is not difficult to manage, expensive, or unreachable. In fact, knowing how to exercise in your own home is a great way to remove all excuses for not getting a regular workout.

Great video shopping

Gym Equipment

The Couch potato workout, Chicago Tribune

Find an ACE (American Council on Exercise) Trainer

Beating Gym Phobia: Reconnaissance to get you ready

2004-01-12T04:01:00.000-05:00

Beating Gym Phobia
Reconnaissance to get you ready

I visit three or four different gyms. I have a longstanding membership at one, a beautiful community pool with a terrific exercise room and good classes, which is right on my way to work. It is my beloved gym because I worked out there in a very accepting and encouraging environment while losing 100 lbs. If I've been gone awhile, I receive a great, kindly welcome when I return. A little chiding, but mostly good vibes.

Another gym I visit only during the winter. It's my emergency back-up gym, in the apartment building near my office. It's where I go if I haven't made my morning session. The facilities at the college where my husband teaches are free to me, too. And then there's the super groovy weight club, all high-tech and airy, full of good light, but too far away, where I have a punch card. And another gnarly, hard-rock, testosterone-driven, body-builder's sort of club, that I just dare myself to visit once or twice a year, but only when I need very specific advice on working a particular muscle group. I'm sure to get a lot of opinions there. Some of them scary. I love a good YMCA, or a dance studio with adult classes. I just love to visit new gyms, old gyms, shop around.

Why the collection? Because I'm still facing down my fears. These places still scare me to pieces, turn my knees to Jello. Walking into a new one is a naked bungee jump over an army of frat boys to me. Silly? Sure, but there it is. I dare myself to try new ones. And I like a dare.

Well, and also I like to see what the towels are like, whether there's a sauna, and who's there.

See, every gym has a personality, a culture. Some gyms work for me, and others decidedly do not. Some would work forever, like my pool, others make for a good short lark, like the testosterone club.

But none of them have doors I can't walk through. Not any more.

If you've never been inside one of these places, opening that first door can be a pretty frightening prospect. Don't feel silly about it. Many people fear gyms. I respect that. Before I opened my first gym door, I imagined all sorts of horrors. I imagined a lot of Arnolds and Arnoldesses. I was mostly afraid of the she-hulks who lived in my nightmares, the bulky ladies rippling by me, sneering at my jellied limbs and middle. I expected a lot of pointing, eye-rolling and judging. Impatience, rudeness. Ah.. what else? Oh, giggling. I expected to be either openly ridiculed or snickered over behind locker doors.

But I learned, those are the people in the billboards. They don't exist except in photoshoots. Well, and at some snotty gyms. Yes. There are those. But they're easy to spot and avoid.

Here's how I climbed up over my fears:

I talked my husband into walking through the doors of the gym with me when I was at my heaviest. Having a buddy with me for support gave me enough courage to ask for a tour. Right away I noticed the tour guide did not have sharp teeth. We were shown locker rooms, the weight room, the pool, the therapy pool. And what I saw there surprised me.

I saw very few perfect bodies. I saw mostly quite normal people, chatting amiably here and there, but primarily quite inwardly focused while they exercised. They read books and magazines, watched TV and listened to their CD players and radios while churning out miles on various aerobic machines. They looked like pastors and grocers and line workers and librarians and teachers and nurses, and that's because that's just who they were. They swam many inwardly focused laps. No pointing. No staring. They were too busy doing their own thing, efficiently, and quietly.

I went into the locker room. Here were women and children of all ages, shapes, sizes. Nobody looked scary. Nobody looked sideways. Nobody seemed to wonder what a fat woman like me was doing at the gym.

I went home and formulated a plan. I packed and repacked my gym bag. I shopped long and hard for a swimsuit, goggles. It took a good deal of courage to go back on my own, but I did, and then I very soon had a card. A membership card. The kind that clips right onto my keychain. It said I belonged to this gym.

Wow. What a feeling, to finger this card next to my keys each day. I laid low, learning the rhythm of the place for awhile, but slowly began to pal up with the regulars. The lady at the door knew me by name. It wasn't long before I became aware of the various plights and successes of my fellow gym-rats' children and grandchildren (yes… lots of grandmas in my lockeroom).

I came to see the place as a community, a great way to connect with other humans, a terrific way to reinforce the new me. I became a person who exercises, and I lived among others who did too. A new tribe. A clan of the sweaty.

I looked forward to seeing the morning crew. I began wearing a higher class of underwear out of respect. I began to shave my legs quite regularly, so as not to scare the children or offend the ladies. Aside from better grooming, I'm sure I became more organized, generally, because it's hard to get going first thing in the morning, my gym time. It must be orchestrated. Clothes laid out the night before. It changed me for the better, is what I'm saying.

Well, if you haven't been, but think gym workouts may provide you with the kind of exercise and structure you need right now, pore through your town's directory, grab a friend, your spouse, your kids, head for the first community center or gym on the list, and ask for a tour. Tour several. Take notes, compare pros and cons.

Ask about ages of people who belong, and the age and experience of the people who work there. What sort of classes? What are the hours? Are their trainers to assist you in learning to use the equipment? Do they provide fitness assessments? Designer water? Towels? Is the facility open on holidays? What are weekend hours? How often is the pool water changed? Is there a child care area, and who oversees it, and how do they function if there's a problem? How old do your children have to be to use the equipment? Test the showers for hot water. Look for Jacuzzis and saunas. How do people dress there? Is it all matched coordinates, or are torn t-shirts the rule? Which would you prefer? Study the bulletin boards. Hang in the locker rooms awhile as you pretend to rummage through your purse, and, well, eavesdrop. Go ahead. Observe a class. If you're interested in one or two of these places, ask for day passes to try it out before buying a full membership.

Date before you marry. Plan for a long engagement. That is, choose carefully. It's not unlike choosing a new family member or a new neighborhood. With any luck at all, you're going to live with these people, in this place for a long time. You should like it. I hope you're lucky enough to love it.

Gym jitters at Ask Alice

Gyms buying clues

2004-01-09T04:40:00.000-05:00

Changes that Work
Taking teensy, tinesy steps in the right direction

There are not thousands of ways to grow fit, to lose weight, there are millions. Maybe billions.

There are as many ways to do it as there are bodies. We each have a life, live in a specific environment, within a body that may be challenged by diseases or traits, guided by abilities and inabilities, informed by our cultures, our traditions, our lifestyles, our preferences. We have a reality within which we are comfortable, and jumping too far outside of that reality to work on fitness, to regain our health, just doesn't work for most people in the long run.

And it's the long run that we're worried about, isn't it? It's not really getting into that bathing suit for Spring Break, right? Or, well, maybe it is, but what about after that? How will you maintain your weight loss, keep your new fitness level?

Finding what works within your reality, at this time in your life, is key. And many diet counselors advocate trying on one new good habit at a time to make lasting changes.

I received a great letter from Sanidine (not her real name), which explains this method better than I possibly can. Here she is:

____________

I stumbled onto SDP sometime around February of last year. I was hanging onto about 20 pounds of baby weight, and was feeling tired. And discouraged. And pissed-off.

I read your words, about your internal transformation, and about your low-carb lifestyle, and thought "I'm not there yet." I wasn't ready to commit to journaling, to cutting out flour and sugar, to getting up even earlier, so I could spend time at the gym. But, I subscribed. And I read. And I was inspired.

Not quite a year later, I'm still not ready to commit to a lifestyle overhaul.

But.

I've cut out trans-fats and packaged crap. I drink about a gallon of water a day. I eat lots of veggies, and have incorporated the delicate flavor of stir-fried tofu into my life. I eat small portions of beautiful whole foods and focus on nourishing myself instead of stuffing myself. I've let go of 15+ years of all-or-nothing fitness mentality, and have realized that a little bit of moderate exercise every day is actually BETTER for me long-term than just one or two heart-pounding, sweat-drenching sessions every month. Not that I don't love the heart-pounding and sweat-drenching -- it's just more practical to be easier on myself right now.

I didn't wake up one morning and decide, "This is it. This is The Day." I decided that I'd try to drink more water, to help my energy levels. Then I read more about trans-fats, and got freaked out, and banned them from my house. After banning most packaged goods, it seemed a simple step to cut out added sugar, and most baked goods. And that left me with the need to fill in my diet with things like spaghetti-squash croquettes and pecan-crusted halibut and sauteed Swiss chard with garlic and walnut oil.

I still have weight I'd like to lose -- but now it's only five pounds, instead of 20. And it's been a beautiful, peaceful journey. No guilt. No obsession with backsliding. No diet mentality. No "totally new life on Monday." Just a series of making better choices about the small things,
every day.

Thank you so much for being a part of that.
______

Sanadine rocks. She eased her way into a life-style overhaul without ever planning to do it. So it always seemed doable. You see? Baby steps.

Sanidine's way worked for her. She never lost her focus, understood that learning is critical, and she took it easy, discovering which habits she needed to change, discovering healthier habits she could form, and tackling them one at a time.

She didn't swallow anybody's advice without considering whether it made sense to her, felt right for her, could work for her. This is key.

What will it be for you? Is it drinking more water? Eating more mindfully? Cutting out the bad fats? Portion control? Is it discovering your food sensitivities? Getting back on your asthma meds? Walking? Exercising every day?

Whatever it is, you will need to fold it into your present life. Trying to do too much too fast can overwhelm you. Try taking on one habit at a time, one focus at a time. When you're ready to try something else, try that.

I recommend prioritizing exercise habits first if you're not exercising now. Consider talking about any changes within your family, learning together, reading the food labels together, particularly if you have kids at home, so you can help model healthier behaviors and move a whole generation toward better choices.

Read up, go slow.

Harvard Family Health Guide, Diet and Nutrition
Sanidine
Random Link: Who Deserves the Spanking Here?

Stair Master: I do not fear the steep

2004-01-08T04:29:00.000-05:00

Stair Master
I do not fear the steep

I visited Pittsburgh, my husband's home ground, last week. Dear friends offered up tickets so we could see my father-in-law's old team, the Pitt Panthers, squish William & Mary on Pitt's new court.

The Petersen Events Center is a beautiful new facility. Not a bad seat in the house. This translates to seats set on 45-degree planes. And that means walking up and down those stairs. And up and down, and up. While this kind of terrain is pretty comfortable to native Pittsburghers, I live in flat country, where ups and downs can generally be avoided.

Running to the restroom during timeouts meant sprinting those stairs. Many stairs. Many. I lost count. Getting to the top, I was aware of my heart beating a little harder, but more than anything I was aware of what I wasn't doing.

I wasn't clamping my lips to cover openly panting and wheezing.
I wasn't blacking out around the edges or seeing stars.
I wasn't looking for a post to coolly lean into while my legs recovered.
I wasn't sweating.
I wasn't shaking.
I did not stop in the middle to pretend to take in the view from there.
I wasn't coughing.

In short, I wasn't doing all the things that 100 extra pounds on my frame made me do every time I climbed even a short flight of stairs.

Now I remember stairs. I remember losing my breath reaching the top of even my little 13-step flight in my old home, every time. I remember sitting in the middle of that same short flight to recover when a cold or low blood sugar would knock me down mid-climb.

I lived in fear of the steep. When traveling, the opportunity to climb an extra set of stairs into a tower to catch a view was out of the question. Kid stuff. I would route around hills, pyramids, switchbacks, canyons. I chose seats near the tops of stadiums, or took elevators to the bottom. I bought a house with no stairs. No basement. No down, and most importantly, no up.

So at this Pitt game, while Pitt squashed their opponents, I demoralized those stairs. I'm taking extra flights of stairs this week every chance I get, just to celebrate. Maybe get in a little time on the stairmaster too.

It's good to climb up high. You can see so much more.

The View from the Top of Petersen
Calorie Counting, Stair Climbing vs. Elevatoring, ESPN

A Bit of Buzz

2004-01-07T12:43:00.000-05:00

Skinny buzz at the G.R. Press today. My hometown paper. I'm really out there now. It's one thing to write it all out for a world I haven't met. Quite another to hang it out in my hometown. Yikes. Well, well. Welcome Grand Rapidians, if you're visiting for the first time!

Nutty Dips: Mayo just can't compete with this

2004-01-07T04:39:00.000-05:00

Nutty Dips
Mayo just can't compete with this

So I'm playing with "Raw," my cool new cookbook by Anne Klein and Charlie Trotter (yes THAT Charlie Trotter, bless him), and I run into a recipe for pine-nut mayonnaise. The hair stands up on the back of my neck:

Pine-nut mayonnaise?

I have this long-running love affair with mayo and its French cousin, Aioli, the egg-and-garlic-and-lemon-and-olive oil emulsion that should be made in vats big enough to bathe in, but is usually served in much more discreet and teensy dipping cups or dolloped discreetly atop frou-frou entrees.

My best encounter: the Grand Aioli at Gu&Fils in Aix-en-Provence, on a once-in-a-lifetime trip with my family. This is a spring feast of new potatoes and green beans and sea fare and beets and boiled eggs, all meant to be served dipped, spread, dribbled, with as much aioli as you can swallow. And the aioli is flavored with as much garlic as you can bear without crying too much, but just enough. And then a few extra cloves are thrown in so you will never forget this meal, this table, that wine, Messier Gu's terrific moustache. And it works. I will never forget.

But back in the States, in attempts to duplicate the meal, the raw eggs scare my guests (or is it the garlic?). And no mayo can sit on a picnic table for long, theoretically. So I have looked long for aioli and mayonnaise methods that can emulsify better-for-us oils (no trans-fats!) without the eggs.

And this pine-nut mayonnaise of Klein and Trotter's offers me my first really interesting alternative. Nuts.

So we use soaked nuts as an emulsifier, a little water, some olive oil, and you now have a new kind of spread, carrying the delicate flavor of the nut, your choice of oil, and a much healthier blend of fats. These can sit at room temperature, manage subtle or strong spices, depending on the nut and your taste.

The pine-nut mayo recipe offers a smooth, white spread, delicate and lovely and worth the price of the book.

Inspired by that one, and for an article in today's The Grand Rapids Press, I tried a sweet dip, made with pecans, sweetend with dates:

Asian Pears with Cinnamon-Pecan-Date Dip

1 c. raw, shelled pecans, soaked for 2 -4 hours in water
½ c. water
4 T. olive oil
1 T. orange zest
1 large Medjool or two small dates, pitted
¼ tsp. kosher salt
¼ tsp. cinnamon

¼ c. water for blending
4 Asian Pears, sliced

In a high speed blender, blend the first 7 ingredients. Add tablespoons of water one at a time, just enough to keep the blender working. Blend at high speed for two minutes. This dip can be served immediately with washed and dried strawberries, pears, apples, pineapple spears, or made in advance and chilled. Stir again before serving.

I've done this same dip without the date and cinnamon, but adding a half teaspoon of curry and serving it with asparagus or pears or baked beets.

I also like all of these spread lightly on sesame Wasa bread.

Well, if you're low-carbing, enjoy these nut spreads at will. You'll need to count the carbs in the dates, or you can exclude them. If you're counting fats, you may want to steer clear, although this is a great recipe for including healthy fats and blood-lipid-correcting pecans in your diet. If you're counting calories, figure this is a calorie wash with any other kind of mayo. The water just doesn't dilute things enough to have much effect on the calorie load here.

If you're not afraid of raw eggs, this is just one more cool recipe. I encourage you to try the real deal, with really fresh eggs whose shells are intact. Le Grand Aioli, by the way, is traditionally a spring rite. But I'm not sure anything's better than a garlic bath in the middle of winter.

Aioli Done Right, epicurious.com

Le Grand Aioli, cooking.com

On Salmonellosis, CDC.gov

Try a Body Log: I'm a broken record

2004-01-06T04:58:00.000-05:00

Try a Body Log
I'm a broken record

I wonder how long that metaphor, "broken record," will have any meaning?

Or maybe it already doesn't? Ah. I'll explain: We used to have a recording medium we called "records," which were large vinyl discs, very flat, bigger than a Frisbee. They were a bit fragile. If you scratched the record or cracked it, the "needle" on the "phonograph" or "record player" would skip, and the same groove of music would play over and over, driving your parents crazy if you happened to have passed out while listening to a "broken record."

Right?

And so a "broken record" also came to mean any idea whose redundancy irritates.

And this brings me to the subject of writing down what you eat, writing down your exercise, writing down your feelings about food, exercise, your life in your body.

(If you are a regular Skinny Daily Post reader, if you have no problem remaining mindful about what you eat, and if getting daily exercise is not something you have difficulty with, and your body has always more or less worked well, represented you well, you may excuse yourself. This particular column is meant for the rest of us and for our newest readers, who may not have yet been browbeaten quite enough.)

This particular broken record is targeted to those of us who battle obesity and morbid obesity, and the kind of obesity-related bodily breakdowns that can kill us.

And for those of us gathered in that boat, my advice to you is: Start writing it all down. Start today. Keep a body log. Just try it for awhile, and see what it does for you, will you?

I tried 20 or 30 diets over my lifetime. I'm a writer. I've made my living as a writer for more than 20 years. Each diet program I invested in advised me to keep some sort of log, journal, record of my weight, my measurements, my food intake, water, exercise. And I ignored that advice. I might have tried it for a few days while "getting the hang of" the new program. I might have tried it for a week or two, even. But then I felt, when I had the hang of the program, I didn't need "the crutch." It irritated me to have to drag around a piece of paper. It felt artificial, so I quit.

But I didn't lose my weight, reach a healthy BMI, until I learned to hang onto my crutches. It's the only advice and the best advice I have: Write it all down. I repeat it often, because it works for so many people. Because it worked for me. Because it's free. Because you learn so much by doing it. Because good data rules.

What you need: A notebook and a calorie/nutrient counter. That's it. Or your word processing software and a calorie counter. Or a blog account and the URL to nutritiondata.com, or fitday.com.

Or upgrade to one of the many diet/exercise tracking software programs like the one by Calorie King or HealtheTech's BalanceLog. Or subscribe to one of the online applications that allow you to track your food and exercise. FitDay.com is free, but WeightWatchers.com, eDiets.com, and others offer their versions too. Try a visit to 3FatChicks.com where dieters in the trenches review all the online offerings, diet software, and products and offer no-holds-barred reviews of what they like and what they don't.

Personally I like Palm-based programs and notebooks, because you can carry these with you. It's writing down what you eat when you eat it that matters. Writing it makes you mindful. Mindfulness curbs your eating, increases your commitment exponentially over time. It's taking a look at your log to see whether you need more fruit today or if you should focus now on your veggies. Did you get in all your water? Your vitamins?

Write it down. Try it. Really.

Three Fat Chicks

Groovy Wonder Woman journal

Want to discuss today's Post? Visit The Skinny Daily Forum at 3fatchicks.com.

Resolutions Are For Sissies: Try finding real resolve

2004-01-05T04:58:00.000-05:00

Resolutions Are For Sissies
Try finding real resolve

Resolutions are for weenies. What you need today is some way to find and strengthen your resolve to become fitter for life. Now, that's a different matter, entirely. That takes guts.

See, anybody can make a resolution. People will make them all week long this week. They may put some real thought into choosing their goals for the year. Maybe write them down somewhere, buy a book, some new gear. Maybe it's a resolution to lose that baby fat. Maybe it's a resolution to get in shape.

And they declare it in good goal-speak: "By the end of this year, I'm going to be in the best shape of my life!"

Way to go, Sparky.

Now what? Now Sparky runs to the gym, buys a membership or renews the one he didn't use last year, and for a good couple of weeks, maybe a month, maybe two, Sparky will huff and puff and sweat, and feel pretty darned good about himself.

Then spring comes.

Hey, where's Sparky?

I can't really fault him. I've been Sparky myself. I was Sparky for years.

Recognizing this pattern and scheming to break it is part of the battle. Preparing helps. Understanding what it's going to take to get to your goal, and then to maintain your goal is critical.

That is, to make reasonable resolutions, you need to resolve yourself not so much to make a huge, flailing leap in the direction of total fitness, but to make lifelong changes that will make you fitter over time.

I know, this sounds boring. Most wisdom does. I thought it sounded pretty dull myself, and I resisted it for a long time. Because I'm stupid that way. I recommend you take the smart route and submit yourself to this wisdom. Just for one year, to see how it goes.

Resolve this: that fitness, instead of getting up to it, touching it, and then checking it off your list, becomes a regular part of your daily life. Some part of your day is spent in exercise. Every day.

Like brushing your teeth.

Like eating your breakfast.

Like that morning cup of coffee.

Resolve that the day is not complete until you've done some form of exercise. The pushups, situps, and lunges that our fathers swore by. The salute to the sun asanas that wake up and shake out, strengthen and stretch your whole body. Your Pilates floor routine, or at least the stomach series. Put a half-hour walk on top of those things. Or three 10-minute stair-walking breaks at the office or between loads of laundry?

Go ahead and add the gym, or your spinning class, or barre, or videos or whatever blows your particular skirt skyward. But if you miss doing one of these things today, don't forget your calisthenics between commercials, before bed, as a break while Web surfing.

Don't make "this year," goal-based resolutions. That sort of thing is for sissies. Instead resolve yourself to form new habits for the rest of your life.

Contra Costa Times: Weight Loss Folks Share Tips

Discovery Health's Body Challenge, with our favorite, Dr. Peeke

Want to discuss today's Post? Visit The Skinny Daily Forum at 3fatchicks.com.

Diet Accounting: Keeping the books may be your solution

2004-01-02T05:31:00.000-05:00

Diet Accounting

Keeping the books may be your solution.

A goal that isn't measured isn’t achieved. So say the business strategy gurus. Number crunchers. Bean counters. If you count it, you can track it. You can understand it, see trends, watch relationships, identify causes and effects.

That's what they say.

Here's what I say: When I write down my exercise goals, commit to a plan, when I write down what I put into my mouth each day, I am able to lose weight. And when I don't, I don't.

There are other ways to lose weight: Let somebody else tell you what to eat and when, or try a whole new way or system of eating designed to reduce your hunger, confuse you out of complacency. Both of these work for me for a little while, until I get bored. Until I forget to pack the right kind of food. Until I just get so hungry I could gnaw off my arm. (Unlimited servings of arm are okay on Atkins and South Beach, by the way.)

Some people can just make tiny changes to their regular habits and the weight melts off over time.

But me? If I ate what I wanted when I wanted, I would balloon up within the year. I have to watch it. It’s sad, but true. So I count. I measure, I weigh.

And when, as now, I find my weight has crept up a few pounds after a spell of Not Counting, I pull out my spreadsheets, software, tape measures, spoons, scales, and cups, and get back at it.

*I weigh myself each day, and don’t worry about minor fluctuations.

*I track measurements of my waist, hips, thighs.

*I track minutes, time of day, performance and duration in my workouts.

*I track my blood pressure and resting heart rate. These don’t vary much any more, but are so much better than they used to be, I just like looking at them.

*I track water consumed.

*I note whether I took all my vitamins and ate my big pile of leafy greens for the day.

*I track body fat measures.

*I track pushups and squats.

*I log any difficulty I’m having with hunger. What time of day? What did I last eat?

*I log any other stuff going on with my bod that may be worthwhile noting.

This kind of thing does not come naturally to me. I have the worst possible disposition for accounting of anyone you could meet. I force myself to do this thing, and I don’t like it, and I don’t want to, and I pout about it.

But I suck it up and do it anyway. Because that’s life as a grownup. It’s just full of having to do stuff you don’t wanna. I throw myself a tiny pity party, while taking a walk, get over myself, then log my walking minutes.

I look over these logs three times in the day, to catch up, monitor my progress. After breakfast, after lunch, after dinner. That way I’m sure to catch up and plan for contingencies, give myself a proper butt kicking if I’m falling behind anywhere. For instance, right this minute I’m behind on water.

(See, there, I stopped, and finished the old glass and poured a new one.)

Some people can set a goal and keep it top of mind all day every day. Others need to write it down and hold it out in front of them to remain accountable to it. I am an astonishingly distracted, feeble-minded, attention-deficited, person with no short-term memory at all. Dory does a better job of keeping track of her day. Diet accounting is for fish like me. It’s a matter of keeping the ledgers, the books, the logs, so I can keep track. Ledgers help me develop mindfulness about my body, take care of myself while juggling every other thing.

I like diet accounting, because I can eat anything I want, even my arm, so long as I keep within my limits. Diet accounting works for me. It has worked for hundreds of thousands of people before me. It may work for you too. I can’t recommend trying it enough.

Good accounting software: Balancelog by Healthetech

Free accounting website: Fitday.com

It Pays to Keep Track, says American Journal of Clinical Nutrition

iVillage on writing it down

Want to discuss today's Post? Visit The Skinny Daily Forum at 3fatchicks.com.

Happy New Year and Thanks

2004-01-01T00:01:00.000-05:00

Happy 2004 Folks

Yes, The Skinny Daily Post will keep going.

If you've been here awhile, you know this post started as emails to some buddies, evolved into a newsletter, a blog, and finally a column. It's been a ride that began, innocently enough, with my 2003 New Year's Resolution.

Stick that in your be-careful-what-you-resolve pipe and light it.

Some changes. Because of thousands of subscribers (shocking!) x a post a day was costing me much too much using Topica, and because Topica mails bounce back for as many as a 10th of our email subscribers, I've dropped Topica, and am using Bloglet, a free, ad-free service that picks up my posts directly from my website to email to you. Still free, still ad-free, but if you're not receiving your emails, you may need to resubscribe in the box on the right.

To keep it always free, to offset server fees and for upcoming other modifications designed to save me on publishing time and to make life easier for people who are perusing past posts, I've struck a deal with the Tribune Media Services' Newscom.com. That means Skinny Daily is now a column designed for newspaper consumption. And that means somewhat longer development time for some of these posts. I hope the experience will be richer -- original interviews, deeper research.

My 2004 resolution is to keep weekends for my family. But then, the traffic takes such a nose dive on weekends, what the heck?

Thanks, thanks, thanks to all of you who contribute in so many ways, who have shared your stories, your experiences, your wisdom, your advice and concern and criticisms, who have opened up spots for me on your links lists, your bulletin board, in your publications, your sites, on your shows, in your email box, and as part of your day.

Thanks to Jack, of course, who gives more than he should to The Skinny. To Mom, my research partner, Dad, my quality control officer, and my whole family. To my good friends at BBK Studio, patient, patient, patient with my SDP absences, and so equipped to help with what's next.

2004 Resolution, same as last year, but better.

Want to discuss today's Post? Visit The Skinny Daily Forum at 3fatchicks.com.

Give Me Ten: 10-minute workouts work

2003-12-31T06:30:00.000-05:00

Give me Ten

10-minute workouts work

Now. Right now. For ten minutes, stop reading, stand, and move. Go for a walk, or climb stairs, or hop on a treadmill, or walk in place in the bathroom, or do a few calisthenics, some tai chi, or lift weights, or walk the dog, or use your therabands. Ten minutes. Set an egg timer. Put on some music, and dance for three songs. I'll do it with you. Ready? Let's go…

(10 minutes later…)

Done? There. How do you feel? Warm all over? Loose? A little sweaty? A little out of breath or a lot? Can you feel your circulation circulating? Can you just imagine how increased blood flow is helping all of your systems work better?

More oxygen traveling to all of your tissues, more give and take of nutrients? It makes sense that your digestive system, circulatory system, respiratory system, all those systems you learned about so long ago, they're all working better now, aren't they?

And don't you feel just a bit proud of yourself? Don't you? You're 10 minutes ahead of the game. If you already worked out today, you're way ahead. If you haven't, you have 10 in the bank.

Did anybody miss you? Did your world crumble? Did you get in trouble? Did anything go undone because you used that 10 minutes to improve your health?

No, me either.

So we just figured out how to fit exercise into our busy lives. Aren't we clever? You stop reading, and I'll stop writing, and let's go get in 10 more…

10 minutes counts, The Walking Connection

Men’s Fitness 10-minute Total Body Workout

Woman’s Day, Keli Roberts 10-minute Workout

Ed Note: New comments field.

2003-12-30T23:02:00.000-05:00

Ed Note: New comments field.

Oh well hey that's fun.

Blogspeak lets me put up my very own comments field. If you get in the mood to try it, leave a note at the end of the post.

J.

Crossing Over: Fighting the half-way-there blues

2003-12-30T09:25:00.000-05:00

Crossing Over
Fighting the half-way-there blues

Massive weight loss is hard.

How's that for a revelation? Massive weight loss, losing more than 50 pounds, is hard, but it's not impossible. Plenty of people have done it, kept the weight off. What do they have that you don't? Well, they have a deep understanding that: Massive weight loss is hard.

Figuring out how to lose weight is not difficult. Most of us know what works for us. We find a way to cut our calories, we move more, the weight comes off. What's hard is doing that for more than two weeks. Now we're talking about real change. Changing the way we live, building a host of new habits.

Even then, when faced with the alternative, the litany of diseases and disorders that obesity brings, the discomfort with a world designed for the thin minority, many of us can work up the gumption to stick to a new way of eating and moving for several months. We lose a great deal of weight.

And then, it hits us. The half-way-there blues. It happens so often, is such a common occurance, it deserves its own title.

The half-way-there blues comes when you've been working hard, seeing results, but then one day, you're struck by how much farther you have to go. Maybe you hit a long plateau, and you lose heart. Or you catch a bad angle in a fun-house mirror while trying on interim-sized clothes in a badly-lit dressing room. You don't like your body. You don't like your new way of eating. You don't want to go to the gym again. You don't want to write down what you ate today. It's been hard for a long time, and you can't see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Somewhere, deep inside you, there is a realization dawning: There IS no light at the end of the tunnel. Baby, there is no end. There is no tunnel. This watching what you eat and exercising? This is your new life. What you're feeling, these blues, is the death-struggle of the old you, the birth of the new you. You are crossing over, and you're scared.

Crossing over from morbid obesity is a scary prospect if you've been obese for a long time. You're pausing at the gate, deciding which way to go. If you keep going, you lose your shell. You become vulnerable. You're embracing living in a new way. You also give up life as a heavy person. Heaviness is its own club. If your family and friends are all heavy, it may feel as if you're leaving them behind. Rejecting them in some way. (That's nonsense, of course. But feelings are feelings, and must be acknowledged.) Maybe your people contribute to this feeling, whether they intend to or not. You may feel a daily pull away from some of these new habits of yours.

This can be awkward, this new life. You're getting too much attention right now, and it's all focused on your body. That's temporary, but can feel just awful. Creepy. You can long to dive back under your fat blanket.

The half-way-there blues are real and difficult. From half-way the changes ahead look and feel like far more dramatic shifts than they really are. And all I can do is ask you to trust that not long after you reach your goal weight, when you're still working on making these changes into habit, you will wonder why you were scared. Why you were thinking about dropping your diet and returning to your old habits.

Meantime, what to do about this?

*A little counseling right now can do wonders. Particularly if you have any trouble with depression. A visit with a family psychologist or professional diet counselor can do absolute wonders in a very little time. Just pick up the phone, tell your doctor about your blues and ask for a referral. Or try visiting a weight loss support group near you.
*Pull out old photos, from when you were heavier and lighter and consider what weight you want to be. What weight would feel good? Maybe your goals are a little too aggressive, after all?
*Consider whether you have the dreaded "all or nothing" virus. This is the inability to recognize that a little weight loss is better than none at all. Do you have to be supermodel skinny or it just isn't worth it? If that's where your head is, return to the list of diseases that too much weight and a poor diet bring on. This isn't about cosmetics, friend, it's about survival. Remember that you've already done remarkable things for your health by getting to the half-way mark. Giving up does not have to equal regain.
*Consider stopping for a while, working to maintain this weight. Sometimes the best way to cure the half-way blues is to try out maintenance for a bit. This means keeping up your new exercise habits, but giving yourself a few more calories each day to maintain this new weight for a month or two. This break will allow you to evaluate where you are, to see if you can maintain at this weight before trying to lose more.
*Take your measurements and study sizing charts before heading out to clothing stores. Or order your clothes by mail so you can try them on in your own home, away from the emotionally charged setting of a dressing room.
*Take a be-kind-to-your-body splurge to celebrate your half-way mark. Get a new haircut, a pedicure, a manicure, a facial, or a massage. Tell the person who works on you that you've been working hard at losing weight, and this is your reward for hitting your half-way mark. Let them tell you how wonderful you are. And smile. And say thanks. Don't forget to reward yourself for each small goal from here on out.
*Pull out your body log and make a list of all the things that have changed about you and your body since you started this effort. Include everything. Climbing stairs more easily, finishing a workout video, eating more veggies. Has your hair gotten shinier, your skin clearer? Are you sick less, is your coloring improved? How's your blood pressure? How about your cholesterol readings. Measurements? List it all, and then congratulate yourself for all these changes.
*Throw yourself a little half-way-there party. Invite your diet buddies and serve nothing but veggies and tea.
*Consider cutting back on sugar, or eat it only after a full meal. Sugar dips can really play havoc with your mood.
*If you have hit a plateau, recognize that your body is going through millions of tiny changes, adjustments, working very hard to respond to these new habits you're forming. It's tired. Get plenty of rest. Drink plenty of water. Be very kind to yourself.

Above all, remember that this is hard work. Losing a massive amount of weight takes real focus. It may be the hardest thing you will ever do. Reward yourself often. Develop patience as your greatest virtue. It will probably take a long time. It may take years. And it will be worth it. I swear it will. Even if it doesn't feel worth it right now.

Fighting the Weight Loss Blues, Psychology Today article from looksmart.com
IVillage Diet Rut Busters
Doc Weil on Sugar

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Thank Goodness That's Finished: Recovering from the holiday rush

2003-12-29T09:25:00.000-05:00

Thank Goodness That's Finished
Recovering from the holiday rush

"Thank goodness that's finished," said Old Man Kangaroo when he finished a dead run that lasted for days in my favorite of Rudyard Kipling's "Just So Stories."

I used to listen to a record of this story, read by Sterling Holloway, when I was a kid. Listened to it so often, it has its own deep synaptic groove in my brain. In the story, the original Kangaroo, with four short legs and a lot of pride, wishes to be more than he is. He wants to be extraordinary and famous. He begs this of the gods, and one little god with a sense of humor responds. Old Man Kangaroo is run ragged. He's chased after by a dingo for hours and days, forcing his legs and tail to grow all out of proportion. And when it's over, he's famous alright, although not for the reasons perhaps he'd hoped to be.

Anyway his world and his body are all upset, akimbo, discombobulated. He would like a little bit of his normal old life back.

Yes, I know it seems a bit, just a tad, ah, miserly? Old-poopish? Scroogilicious and sacrilegious, to feel that way about the holidays. But I can't help it. I can't help feeling, "Thank goodness that's finished."

Now to get back on track. I've shoved the sugar out of the house. Carried it off to my vet's office, where we spent a little too much time over the holidays (everybody's fine now). I've prepared a week's worth of healthy snacks and foods, stocked up on supplies. I'm taking my vitamins, drinking my water.

It's time, however, to pay back my exercise account, which is terrifically overdrawn. I'm out of shape, saggy, baggy, poofy, and stiff. Despite my best intentions, I managed no more than one or two workouts a week during the past several weeks. This is not maintenance-level exercise for me. This is ground-losing work. This is debt. My exercise debt looks worse than my credit card debt right now, and that's saying something.

So, it's time to form a plan. Pull out my calendar, gym class schedules, my gym bag, and get organized. Gear up, suck it up, and pay it back.

I know that the most successful exercising, for me, happens in the early morning hours. As hard as it is to leave my bed, my family, my dogs, my husband's amazing coffee in the morning, it's harder for me still to get in a workout either at home, or during my workday. It's too easy to give any and all other times away. With a good morning exercise plan, I'll have my debt reduced, or at least restructured, in a couple months' time.

Ooph, it won't be easy, getting up and going. But if it were easy, everybody would be doing it. Wait. Everybody is doing it. And that, at least, should make returning to the gym interesting.

Do you have an exercise or food debt to repay after your holidays? What really works for you? What do you suspect will work? Remember, just starting is the key. Just showing up. Just making the eating plan, buying the right groceries, removing the wrong ones, heading out on a walk, taking on the dog walking duties, putting in the exercise video each morning, stepping onto the treadmill, jumping in the pool a few times a week is plenty of goal for most people. There's no need to set high or difficult-to-achieve goals, resolutions that require perfection. One good effort begets the next and the next, and soon you're back on track, or on track for the first time, getting stronger, feeling better, looking forward to the next good turn. The question really is, what will you do today? Tomorrow?

If your holidays are not over yet, or are just beginning, give yourself the gift of a scheduled hour or so with your calendar once your celebration and vacation are over to make your own plan for getting on track.

It's not that hard to recover from the dead run of the holidays. You can let go of any guilt about it. You've probably beaten yourself up enough already. We are supposed to enjoy ourselves during this time, after all. We are supposed to rest. We are supposed to celebrate. Recharge our batteries. That's kind of the point of it all. A little stillness is not a bad thing. But once that time is over, put some of that renewed energy into maintaining your one and only body. Pick a day to start. Make a plan. Write it down. And start.

The Arthritis Foundation on Starting an Exercise Program
When to exercise? Jury's Out says CNN article
The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo, classicreader.com

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The Sugar Borg: Do not surrender

2003-12-26T12:20:00.000-05:00

The Sugar Borg
Do not surrender

I'm sitting here, in my new P.J.s and my new slippers, between a pile of wrapping flotsam and a teetering tower of tins full of shortbread, sugar cookies, fudge, and nut brittles.

You would never know, visiting us this morning after, that ours is a family working constantly to cut back on added sugars in our diet.

I spoke with a reporter the other day. She was asking questions about how we manage food in our household and how I personally manage food to maintain my 100-lb. weight loss, fight off diabetes. I told her when sweet foods come into the house, I ask my husband to help me by removing them or hiding them. Sometimes I can pitch the food myself, but many times I need my husband's diabolical mind and his access to ravenous students to move the supply to areas of demand.

The reporter, being a writer and a muck-raker, leapt on that passive expression. "How," she asked, do sweet foods "come into the house"?

And I was both surprised that she had to ask (Doesn't sugar just show up in everyone's lives all the time?), and a little troubled at my inability to put my finger on the actual source of the stuff. Sweet things seep in under the door. Treats come in stuck to people's shoes. My family sneezes cookies. Friends shed sugar all over the floor. It shows up, okay? It does. It just does.

I didn't bake this year. Didn't use sugar or flour at all to make any holiday treats. Didn't bake for the neighbors or my family. I didn't decide actively to do this. I have held out the possibility that I would get around to it, but I ran out of time, and chose sleep over the late-night baking binges of years past.

I thought it would be hard to not bake, not have anything to feed well-wishers and droppers-in. And, well, frankly, baking is one of the few things I do really well. There are family recipes that went undone, my killer ginger marmelade rugelach that exists in memory only, truffles that went undipped. I made none of it. It didn't hurt a bit.

And yet, here I am, sitting in the shadow of this leaning tower of treats. I'd say, pound for pound, there's as much sugar in my house this year as in any year past. Creamy fudges, salty-sweet buckeyes, almond cookies, sugar cookies, twists, sprinkles, mints and more. Whether people feel sorry for my husband, or this is residual paybacks for years past, I'm not sure, but in my most passive year ever, the sweet stuff has appeared. How? Who is responsible? Should I have put a sign on the door? Issued warnings in my Christmas cards? Well, when I get around to sending Christmas cards, I mean?

Am I even asking the right question? Hey, wait a minute. Why do we assume sugar is inanimate at all? We have always assumed it. But perhaps that's our mistake. We naive humans. Silly ancient species stuck on simple cause and effect.

Maybe sugar is its own force, a higher form of hive intelligence blanketing our planet like a fungus. Perhaps it carries a collective intelligence, and an intention that is not as sweet as its presentation. This would explain so much. It would explain the way it multiplies and changes form to disguise itself (high fructose corn syrup, fruit syrups, rice syrup, syrup syrup, and all those things ending in -ose). It would explain how it moves world economies, jumps oceans, mulches humans, puffing them up then breaking them down. We are one fermenting, bubbling planet, probably soon to become a bon-bon stuffed in some geometrically larger galactic being's holiday tin.

Ah ha, ha ha. Yes, Virginia. And our house is a target. The more we try to fight this onslaught, the more concentrated the borganistic bubbling fungus becomes. It started around Halloween, dribbling in in dollops and chunks, with the flow picking up considerably by Thanksgiving, and finishing (I hope), in a near avalanche yesterday. EeeeeeEEEeee!!!

And there it is, this tower of stuff, staring at me through it's beady buckeyes, in its mute intention to eat me alive, sure of its superior intellect, confident that its prevalence makes fighting against it futile. Lower your shields and surrender your ship. You will be assimilated.

Ah, but I have something the sugar borg doesn't have. I have my will. Or I did have. It's around here somewhere. It's under the wrapping paper, or perhaps stuffed in a closet somewhere. But it's here.

I'm going to shake it off. I'm going to press out the wrinkles in my will power and put it on again, good as new. And I'm going to save my family and myself from this sugar infestation.

Ready to fight the good fight?

Hidden Sugars
Borganisms

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Did You Forget Someone? Gifts you can give yourself this season

2003-12-24T15:04:00.000-05:00

Did You Forget Someone?
Gifts you can give yourself this season

Forget anyone on your gift list? The neighbors, the post workers, your cousins and coworkers? How about yourself? What’s on your list for you this season?

It’s the Eve of our family’s holiday, and I’m sitting here in a pensive mood, ready to head off to dine with buddies, considering gifts I have given, wondering if I’ve forgotten anyone, worried that I’ve left some gift hidden in a drawer somewhere, unwrapped.

And I realize I need to make a little gift list for myself. This year I’m giving myself a few things that will make me healthier, stronger, easier to live with, more energetic, more able to focus on what I want and need to do well. That’s right, these are gifts that give a lot to the people I love and to those who have to put up with me:

*Workout classes
*Mini commercial-break workouts every time I watch T.V. (pushups, situps, squats)
*Time to write
*Tools and time each week to make and pack nutritious meals and snacks
*Weight management support group meetings
*Wonderful teas
*A few appointments with an exercise trainer to check my form, make some tweaks
*A big jar of fish oil tablets – everybody needs them
*Magnesium and calcium supplements – we need these too
*Try 4 new vegetables this year
*Try 2 new fruits
*1 or 2 hiking trips with Hubby
*More family time
*Really actually eat those 6-8 vegetable and fruit servings every single day.
*Really actually, honestly, truly drink 8-12 glasses of water every single day.

That’s my list. What’s yours? Make a list in your journal, and open it several times during the year, to be sure you make good on these gifts you promised yourself. Put them in your planner, tap them into your Palm, post-it note them to your bathroom mirror, whatever way that works to help you remember that you need to give yourself the gift of great health this year. You need to invest a little effort to make it happen.

Also, by the way, you reading this. You, there. You are also a great gift to me. Thanks for helping The Skinny Daily Post become such an important part of my life this year. It’s one thing to write it. It’s quite another to know you read it. Thank you, so much.

Momma's Got a New Toy: Raw cuisine brought me a new dehydrator

2003-12-23T14:54:00.000-05:00

Momma's Got a New Toy
Raw cuisine brought me a new dehydrator

I can't see you tonight. I'm dehydrating.

I'm such a happy camper. My Excalibur dehydrator arrived yesterday. First, it's one of the few plug-and-play devices I've purchased in a long time that is exactly that. You plug it in, you turn it on, it works. Fabulous.

But now, I'm playing. Banana-Strawberry fruit leather. Perfect. Happy Hubby. Dried citrus slices make a beautiful topping to a froth of non-fat latte. We have dried apples, of course, my most favorite mid-afternoon snack food, and now I can make my own and save a bundle while avoiding the sulfites and nitrates and added sugars that make me suffer.

Within hours, life has gotten very interesting. I'm dehydrating leftover vegetable soup into leathers I can carry to work, add boiling water, and make whole again. That takes a lot less room in my freezer and in my bag, leaves all the nutrition while removing the worry that my container of carrot soup will pop open and leak all over my laptop. And the little soup leather bits make great gnawing if I'm running too fast to rehydrate them, or on a car trip, a plane trip, stuck in a hotel room.

But hands-down my favorite thing so far? Cucumber chips. Mushroom chips. Radish chips. These things are killer, crunchy, savory, teeny-calorie crunchy things so beautiful you'd present them to company easily. Drying a thing removes the water, and so condenses the calories by weight. You have to reduce your portions, drink more water, count the whole food. But while condensing the matter, you dramatically condense flavor, and though the heat of the dehydrator is very low, the veggies pick up a slightly roasted quality. When you eat dehydrated veggies, you may eat a few more, but the nutrition is so high and the calories so low when compared with anything else we traditionally call snack food.

Oh, I'm also dehydrating some leftovers. My cauliflower tabouleh is on a rack, and some roasted eggplant, green beans, and cauliflower. These are crazy experiments. But why not play? This is the oldest method we humans have for preserving food, and I'm in a mood to explore what we did before we became so huge and unhealthy.

Next up, running back through my inspiration for getting this device: Roxanne Klein and Charlie Trotter's book, Raw (Ten Speed Press, 2003), where we learn to use the dehydrator as a cooking device for making lovely shells and bases for savory confits and fruit tarts, and cheeses from soaked raw nuts, "flours" from sprouted seeds, and other highly nutritious and new foodstuffs that have risen from this new/old cuisine. Roxanne's pine nut mayonnaise, just for instance, is life-changing.

That's what's going on in my household this holiday. I'm exploring a new cuisine, and deciding what new tools and techniques I can take from it and bring into my home, into my life, to inform our way of eating.

And this cuisine is big. I can feel it having an influence on my cooking that is almost as big as the hold Chinese and French cuisine have had on me to date. I don't see converting my family from meat and fish eating, away from cooked things, joining a movement. But I am already drawing from this cuisine to bring more vegetables and fruits and nuts into my cooking, more variety, more flavor, more intrigue.

And new toys. Next up: a high-speed blender. Hmm…

(No kidding, the portobella chips are the best thing I've tasted in ages.)

Portobella Nutrition Info from Nutritiondata.com
Excalibur Dehydrators
Roxanne Klein's Restaurant
Ann Wigmore, and the roots of Raw

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Five Pound Gain Overnight? When your scale plays tricks

2003-12-22T09:35:00.000-05:00

Five Pound Gain Overnight?
When your scale plays tricks

Couldn't zip my boots the other night. Not by an inch or so. I wore these boots last week. What happened to my calves? They are huge!?

Elephantiasis?

I Googled elephantiasis. I don't have it, although I spent several wasted minutes wondering when I was last bitten by a mosquito. No. I'm pretty sure I don't have it. Our mosquitos are locked in ice until Junish.

I hopped on a scale yesterday. Holy cow. I'd gained 5 pounds overnight. Overnight! And it's not the week in the month when I ALWAYS gain a few pounds. Oh no! I'm a pig! I'm huge! I have ruined everything. I am a glutton, a worthless, spineless, slithering schmuck. I deserve this weight! I do! I have been enjoying holiday food. Who am I to enjoy holiday food!?! Might as well forget this diet and dive face first into the nearest box of Godivas.

Yes, I've been eating stuff I don't normally eat. I've been eating sugar. I've been eating chocolate. I don't feel great about it, and I don't feel great, period. Not as good as I feel when I avoid those foods.

And the scale doesn't lie.

Or does it?

Wait a minute… Despite those five pounds, I weigh a good 10 pounds less then I did when I bought those boots. I wore those boots comfortably a week ago. My rings are tight too.

Hey slow down, sister. It takes 3,500 extra calories to make a real pound of fat. I didn't weigh 5 extra pounds the day before. And I'm pretty sure I didn't eat 17,500 extra calories in one day. I may have been eating a little mindlessly, but not quite that mindlessly.

This is some kind of crazy edema I'm experiencing. My body has decided to hang on to fluids for a spell. Too little exercise, too many meetings, too much writing. Totally forgetting to take my fish oils, which I must have for so many reasons. A bit of eating things that bother my system. Too little protein. I'm eating foods that I know don't agree with me, and not eating the ones that do. This is holiday living, and my body puffed up like a Macy's balloon.

Though I know what this weight is, and that it will quickly disappear, the feeling, the shock, hangs on me like a shroud. A shroud that's fitting a bit snugly under the knees, if a shroud can do that. I may not be fatter, but edema feels like fat. I coudn't zip my boots. And though already today I can, the image of an inch of extra calf hanging there, wedged between the teeth of my boot zippers, really sticks in my brain. My rings are still tight. I feel puffy, heavy, slow.

It's not fun to be so affected by the scale. I'm a sentient being. I know these 5 lbs. are not obvious to anyone, are already going, and will be gone in a few days. I know they are a fluke, a chemistry upset, a moment of annoyance in a long, comfortable life. But my mood and self-image have been altered anyway. These pounds haunt my day, though I know I shouldn't let them.

I quickly grow too busy to worry about them, thank goodness. But as evening comes, as I wind down, they pop back into my conciousness, very much like a disease-carrying mosquito, and it requires some mental gymnastics on my part to keep this squishiness from upsetting me, from feeling my work to keep my weight stable is futile, from feeling the flop-sweat of weight gain.

On the one hand, for those of us who have a hard time maintaining a healthy weight, it's a good thing to remain conscious of shifts. We do want to be vigilant, and to have weight maintenance and control take a priority in our lives. On the other hand, we shouldn't be so tied to the number that the quality of our days is ruled by the scale. The number provides some useful information, but it doesn't tell us everything.

We each need to find our own best way to live with our scale. I know that nearly daily weigh-ins work best for me, because when these big fluid gains happen, it helps me to remember that I weighed a lot less just the day or two before. Sure, it would be great to live like a naturally thin person, who gets on the scale only every few months, but I'm not naturally thin. This weight battle is mine for life. But you may do best hitting the scale just once a week or once a month, focusing instead on your diet plan, food diary, or body log.

Speaking of your body log, it's a good idea to have other measures of success to rely on when the scale gives you a reading that doesn't seem to match your effort. A record of my blood pressure readings gave me great comfort. So did looking backward over shrinking body measurements. I'm so glad I wrote all of that down. But I think I gathered my greatest encouragement from my exercise log, where it was clear that I was growing stronger and fitter constantly, regardless of what the scale was doing.

On the diet boards, folks call these NSVs or Non-Scale Victories, and I've seen listed all sorts of marvelous accomplishments, like fitting into a new size of jeans, not having to ask for a seat-belt extension on the plane, going without fast food for a whole week, sitting in a booth, eating a salad every day, making a weight jump on the leg-press machine at the gym, drinking all of your water this week.

It would be an NSV for me to hop on a scale, mid-edemic heavy, and for my first thought to be "oh THAT again," instead of "What Did You Do?!?" Maybe some day. Going to take my fish oils now. In addition to being good for edema, they're supposed to be good for my brain. Which needs some fixing.

Cyclic Edema

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Doormats Grow Fat: Learning to say no may be a key to weight loss

2003-12-18T14:19:00.000-05:00

Doormats Grow Fat
Learning to say no may be a key to weight loss

I had breakfast the other day with a friend who runs human resources for a giant company. She's grown good at understanding basic differences among people. We were marveling at another friend's ability to carve out a very defined way of working at one important project at a time, his success at avoiding picking up other projects that really need to be done.

I said, "I want that to be my next job, a job where I get to focus on one project at a time."

She just LOOKED at me.

"Do you think you COULD?" asks she?

"I'd love it," I lied. And then, later, I had to admit, there is no way I'd be able to work that way.

That is, I haven't yet mastered the art of saying no. I haven't learned to limit what I take on. If there is a need or a project in my way that someone else has dropped, and I find myself tripping over it, I'm likely to pick it up, along with everything else on my plate, and try to do that too.

Because I'm a doormat.

I am not made into a doormat by virtue of being a girl, by virtue of my ability, my experience, my doggedness, my attention to detail, by any virtue at all. I have been a doormat because I need to please people. Or maybe because I fear displeasing them.

Oddly enough, it has been weight loss that has helped me identify my self-imposed doormattedness. By risking disappointing people when I choose to work out, choose to cook different foods or choose not to cook at all, choose to spend time learning about nutrition, finding sources for less processed foods, I learned that I wasn't risking anything at all.

No one cares what I don't do. It's what I DO that they focus on. And by taking on too much, always, the people in my life see me as an overcommitted, unavailable, distraught and distracted person. If I chose to do less, in fact, I would likely come off as more sane, more focused, and oddly enough, more accomplished. More complete as a person. More available and thus more loving and lovable. Seriously.

But back on topic: I would love to figure out how to study the relationship between doormattedness and heaviness. I'm thinking you'd have a pretty interesting correlation there.

My hypothesis: Doormats grow fat. With no time to exercise, no time to prepare healthy meals, doormats fly from duty to duty, grabbing candy bars and soda between commitments, never having time to chew their food or serve a fresh vegetable.

I WOULD conduct this study, but frankly, I'm not taking on any new assignments at the moment.

See what I did there? That's a start. That's called, "learning to say no," and it's a very sane way to live. If you've never done it before, these next two weeks are a good time to try it out. Here are some phrases you might try:

*I'm not taking on any new assignments right now.
*My plate is full, sorry.
*My cup runneth over at the moment.
*Can I get back to you in 2010?
*This resource is endangered.
*I can't this year.
*My quarter's overbooked.
*I'm stretched too far as it is, sorry.
*I wish I could do all I'd like to do, but I can't.
*It's a worthy cause alright, but there are so many, and I'm booked.
*Sorry, but I needed to reprioritize all of my commitments, and this one didn't make my list this year.
*Sorry, but more pressing personal matters are taking my time right now.
*I'm so sure!

And my personal favorite:

*No.

People who say yes become targets for people who say no. Try not to make things worse for other doormats when you're saying no. Don't direct people their way. Just say no, and leave it there. And, you know you really don't need to explain "busy." We all understand what busy is.

Doormat 1
Doormat 2
Doormat 3

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Highly Motivated Individuals: How to get you some o' that

2003-12-17T08:19:00.000-05:00

Highly Motivated Individuals
Where to get you some o' that

I run into this phrase a lot when I talk with medical professionals who serve obese patients:

"Highly motivated individuals."

This, brothers and sisters, is code for "people who lose weight and keep it off."

Getting medical help for obesity is a tricky prospect. I won't tell you that all of my experiences have been great on this front. Life grew remarkably better when I met Tim, a GP who struggles with his own weight. A little human experience with a slow metabolism is a wondrous thing, helps break down conversational barriers between doctor and patient. No doubt about it.

But turn the examination table for a second, and consider the life of a doctor who is in the position of advising patients about their weight and recommending weight loss efforts. Would you want that job? Roughly how many of your patients do you think would come to you expecting a prescription for hard physical labor, a new way of eating for life, counting calories, measuring servings?

Most people want an easier answer. They feel they deserve more from medical science. And who can blame them? They work hard, do what they're told, exhaust themselves through child-rearing and job responsibilities, community volunteerism, and house keeping. And they're cranky when they learn that medical science can't yet "cure" obesity. Even the pills, the surgeries, come with instructions for exercise, learning to eat differently, learning to count what you eat.

Can you blame doctors for wanting to move on to the next patient, possibly a nice ear infection, where they know that what they prescribe will, in fact, work?

The doctors who work with obese patients every day have come to recognize what's different about their patients who do succeed by choosing to exercise nearly every day, to count their food, to read labels, to participate actively in learning about the things they put into their mouths.

They call the difference "motivation." Motivated people lose weight. Highly motivated people keep it off.

So, how do you get some motivation? How does one become "highly motivated"? Many of us go looking for weight loss motivation. We surf the web, scour magazines and diet book aisles, scour the magazine stands for before-and-after photos, naked celebrity photos, for stories, secrets. We're happy with myths, too. Diet mythology is a great fallback for many of us, and a wealthy industry.

Unfortunately, only a very few of us and Dorothy know that the only place to find what you're looking for is in your own backyard. There's no place like home.

Somewhere inside you there is a voice, a self-preserving voice. This is the little part of you that understands innately what you need and what you don't. This is the little part of you that knows full well you should be out of bed and exercising before the demands of your day take over. This is the part of you that tells you not to reach for the cake even as you reach for it, that reminds you to pack nutritious food before you head to the office so you don't rely on holiday treats for nourishment.

Given an opportunity to speak, this little voice can become a big voice. Given the opportunity and a forum, this little voice can bellow. Can sing. Can yawp. Can bring you to life again. And transform you into a "highly motivated individual."

Write, friends. Give yourself the gift of a body log this season. A beauty bound in something pretty, a ratty old binder, or desktop file, or a blog (short for weB LOG, or Body LOG). Any space to give that little voice of survival room to squawk. A way for your own inner wisdom to pop up and counsel you.

When you have it chosen your medium, after working out, before grocery shopping, give yourself a half an hour to an hour two or three times a week to write about your body, your diet and exercise efforts, your medical concerns and queries. Write out what you're struggling with, why you think you're struggling, and what you plan to do to overcome any barriers you've found. If you write yourself into a difficult place, then take your log to a professional for help.

Don't know what to write? Start by answering a good question: What do I want to change about my body? What is my health worth? What am I willing to do to feel good again?

Is writing awkward for you? Pretend you're writing to a friend, a sibling, a child, an elder. Sometimes having an audience in mind helps us put one word in front of another.

Don't edit yourself, neatness doesn't count, you won't be graded. This record will be useful to you down the road, on those days when the going feels tough. When that happens, you can pull out your log and use it to remind yourself why losing weight is important, why you're working hard, why you're getting up every morning to exercise. You'll use it for the year it takes to drop the weight, for the two more years it takes to learn to maintain it, and for years after. Consider it the owners' manual for your self.

In it you'll create the motivation you've been looking for. I swear. It's the only diet magic I know.

About people who succeed, Intellihealth
About barbaric yawping, singing, and stuff
Skinny Daily Post Journal Exercises

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All Dried Up: Fruits and veggies preserved the old-fashioned way

2003-12-15T14:45:00.000-05:00

All Dried Up
Fruits and veggies preserved the old-fashioned way

I grew up reading and rereading the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. Read all the books two or three times, into the wee hours of the morning, flashlight under my sheets, imagining being a frontier girl. The harsh winters, the long periods between visiting real stores, butchering my own meat, chewing on jerky, working hard during maple sugar runs.

Playing with a pig-bladder ball. Somehow that seemed romantic.

When the Wilder family celebrated Christmas, their holiday treats were simple. They included things preserved in brine or salt or dried in the sun in previous seasons.

My sister married her beloved last week. With snow falling, we gathered the two families under one roof, and among the foods offered up was a large platter of organic dried fruits. Figs and bananas, mangoes and peaches, pears and apples, dates, prunes, raisins, pineapple. The platter was gorgeous, a real attention getter, and it gave the table a kind of graceful old-fashioned sumptuousness that felt especially right for the season.

I've been looking for something that felt healthy and traditional, and could clearly be marked as a Very Special Treat at this time of year, and there it was. Dried fruit. A beautiful platter of dried fruit.

And you know, that fruit was good. Without sulfites, it didn't bother my head or my nose, nor anyone else's. Dried fruit is very sweet, high in carb calories. With its water removed, it's not very filling. A quarter-cup of dried fruit is a whole serving. But with a glass of water by your side to help you fill up, dried fruit does take time to eat, chew, gnaw. Having eaten it, we receive all the fiber and nearly all the nutritional value of whole fruit.

Dried fruits, dehydrated fruit chips, fruit leathers. You can find these treats made with no preservatives and little to no added sugar if you shop in natural and whole foods stores. Or get your own dehydrater and have fun making your own dehydrated fruits, veggies, and leathers. Dried and dehydrated foods last a long time, pack lightly for car, camping, hiking trips, and trips into orbit, too.

When buying dried fruit in the grocers, watch out for fruits preserved with sulfites if anyone in your family is sensitive. And read the package to be sure your raisins, cherries, and prunes aren't overly plumped with corn syrup or other sugars. Most dried fruit don't need extra sugar for flavoring, it's generally added to make the food cheaper by weight and keep partially dried fruits from hardening too quickly. You don't need the extra calories.

Use dried fruits as snacks on their own, slivered and sprinkled onto salads, softened and heated with other fruit juices for a lovely warm dessert, baked into tarts and pies, added to morning oatmeal, folded into homemade energy bars, stuffed into omelets, whizzed into smoothies, ground with nuts to form crumb crusts for low-carb pies.

To soften dried fruits that have gone too dry to chew comfortably, lock them in an air-tight container with a few drops of water or a quarter slice of apple overnight. Keep dried fruits in air-tight containers to keep them for months, or at least until the next time that fruit comes into season.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
Excalibur Dehydrators
Lots of great, unsulfured dried fruits, from Diamond Organics
Good info for sulfite sensitive souls

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Small Comfort: Fitting in shouldn't be so hard

2003-12-12T09:54:00.000-05:00

Small Comfort
Fitting in shouldn’t be so hard

I’ve had a long, eventful day, in and out of cars and elevators and meetings. Pushing carts, managing shoulder bags, noticing all the little ways that my body, at 100 lbs. lighter, pushes through and fits into the world better than it did before. Even as I consider this, though, I feel a rising anger and indignity that the world is, in fact, designed for people of medium height with very little body fat.

When you’re overweight, it’s hard to fit into things and places, or to find things that fit you. Fact is, possibly two thirds of us are overweight, and fully a third of us are obese. So when the “design of everyday things” favors the vast minority, you know something’s wrong.

In one of my past lives, I worked for a New York-based company that produced a famous architect’s bentwood furniture. It was fun, working on that project, with one glaring exception. When I visited New York, the company invariably put me up in a fatally hip hotel, where the furniture in the lobby could not accommodate my hips. It was all designed by another superstar industrial designer, but the seats were too narrow to allow me to sit in the lounge. I thought at the time, and still do, that this was an easy and obvious way of making sure only the prettiest people grace your lobby.

Another scene comes to mind. Shopping for jeans my size. Jeans are designed first for the runway, with pockets and appliqués tooled once for the production line. As sizes grow larger, the pockets and patches remain in the sample size, so that the whole garment looks ridiculous and ill-proportioned once it’s sized to fit the majority of the population. I gave up jeans and patch pockets for years.

This preference for the un-typical body affects bra engineering. Straps don’t stay up on rounded shoulders. Sock engineering – sock length is determined by smaller calf length and width, so socks don’t stay up on wider calves. Boot engineering – larger women give up on knee-high boots. Your no-line panty styles? Please. Who cuts these things?

It’s been an uncomfortable life. And while the world is just starting to get more comfortable for the heavier majority – T-style bra straps, stretch-suede boots, clothes designed by normally proportioned designers -- I have joined the minority ranks.

It’s an amazing thing, not having to leave my coat unbuttoned so I can reach under layers to pull up bra straps several times per car trip. It’s an odd feeling to walk across a parking lot, up a flight of stairs, sit at my desk and reach to pull up socks that are already up. Odd to make it through my day without a wedgie. Well, most days. It’s really something to see a chair and think “I will sit,” rather than, “can I possibly sit in that?”

While I believe these small comforts should be everybody’s right, I grew accustomed to going without them. The indignities of bad fit weren’t deserved or fair, but I lived with them, feeling somehow I did deserve them.

Now I know better, and though I’m happy to have a body that fits better in the world, I’m mad that more people don’t. The world should be made to fit people. Actual people. Not some idealized, preferred vision of what people could or ought to be.

I don’t know how the industrial and fashion design communities can work to catch up with the rest of the world. But I hope they do soon. Learn what sizes and shapes people really come in and focus a little harder on function and experience to provide all people with a more dignified life.

The Design of Everyday Things

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Death to the Drama Queen: Learning to make small changes

2003-12-11T10:59:00.000-05:00

Death to the Drama Queen
Learning to make small changes

The 4,000 diets I’ve been on in my life usually started out the same way. “That’s it!” I would proclaim. “I’ve had it!” And fueled by disgust and visions of my future tanned and muscled self, off I would go on some wild adventure in starvation. Everything would change. I would eat foods I don’t like, drink beverages I could barely swallow, take lots of vitamins, supplements, “energy boosters,” stop seeing people, stop socializing. I became hollow-eyed and grumpy, cold and mean.

And I lost some weight.

At some near point, I would be kicked out of this self-imposed hell, either by an event that included some food I really wanted, thus “breaking” my diet, or I would feel too ill to go on, or my family and friends would rebel.

I was a diet drama queen. My world and the people in it were all required to bow to my new way of eating, to adjust, to work around it. I became as fragile as a corseted seventeenth-century socialite. Very high maintenance.

And because I couldn’t sustain that for very long, and no one around me could put up with it for very long, this way of eating never lasted, my weight returned with my old habits, and before long I was looking for the next “cure.”

But I’m working these days to put seventeenth century curatives aside. I know that my problems with weight and inertia are the result of habits of living I’ve developed over many years. With mild changes, slight tweaks, I can form sublte new habits in the way I live my life that will help keep me fit over time.

Forming new habits is the key, I realize to both taking the weight off and keeping it off. With just a few fewer calories each day, a bit more movement, I can do absolutely wondrous things for my health. I’ve been working on these things, but you could pick just two or three to get started, and see how you feel about them.

*Limiting daily desserts and evening snacks to once a week or once a month
*Giving up colas and sodas
*Giving up everything sweetened with anything described as a “syrup”
*Limiting or giving up things made with white flour as the main ingredient
*Eating a cup or two of leafy greens before starting most meals
*Including lightly cooked veggies in most meals
*Eating vegetable soups two or three times a week
*Eating fish two or three times a week
*Snacking on nuts and whole, unprocessed fruits twice a day (frozen is okay)
*Taking the stairs instead of the elevator
*Parking far away and walking in
*Walking to get lunch
*Walking to meetings
*Walking outside part of every day, regardless of the weather
*Exercising during commercials
*Giving up a half hour of T.V. each night to do exercises instead
*Making exercise social, meeting friends and loved ones at the gym, at a yoga class, for a jog, for a game of croquet

The problem with these changes is, they are dull. The effects they have are cumulative and take a long time to show up. It can be weeks before you see any results at all. But after a year, you’re a whole different person. After two years, friends don’t recognize you. And after three, you can’t remember the name of your family doctor.

As I pick up one habit and, with a little elbow grease, rub it well into my grain, I set to work on another. If I fall back on one, I focus on it again. This forming-new-habits stuff is hard work, requires vigilance, takes years.

It’s rewarded with very little fanfare. It’s all very subtle, I warn you. There will be few balloons, gold stars, or congratulations. There’s no On or Off this program. It’s a gradual ramping up toward living longer while feeling good enough to want to.

Remember these guys?
Are you a drama queen? Take the test at queendom.com

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Emergency Food: Putting good food before bad

2003-12-10T06:43:00.000-05:00

Emergency Food
Putting good food before bad

I’m not a fan of laying in a lot of food when there are grocers nearby. The act of going and getting the food, making a habit of that, is a good habit to get into. The more often you shop, the fresher your food can be. Buying little bits often is a better habit for eating in a healthy way.

But there are times when I don’t have anything planned, and don’t have fresh food in the house and I’m too tired, ill, or plain cranky to shop. At these times I need to rely on my stores.

Eating what’s in store can be a dangerous proposition. It can easily lead to a kind of grazing that has you consuming thousands of calories in a single evening. You know, a handful of marshmallows here, a half a dozen crackers there, some chocolate chips, a bowl of cereal, a can of soup, some ice cream. You never eat a meal, so you don’t feel as if you’ve eaten much, but by the end of the night, you’re a thousand or two thousand calories over the top, and not particularly satisfied.

Here’s what’s almost always in store in my house these days:

Sugar-free almond or peanut butter
Raw or roasted almonds, macademia nuts, walnuts, pecans
Yams
Wasa (rye crackers)
Dried fruit: cherries, apricots, figs
Frozen soup I’ve made and stored or bought and stored in microwaveable/boilable bags
Whole grains: brown rice, wild rice, quinoa, barley
Canned beans: Black, kidney, navy, garbanzo
Canned salsas
Canned or packaged tuna
Olive oil, nut oils, citrus oils (lemon, orange), toasted sesame oil
Frozen veggies and fruits, the sort without added anything, especially sugar or sauces: broccoli, asian mix, cauliflower, peaches, blueberries, cherries
Protein supplement (a whey/soy, vanilla-flavored blend)

With these things in store, I can make up a fast frittata with frozen veggies and wild rice. I can whip up peach-berry smoothies, or heat up a fast bowl of soup.

A stir-fried grain dish with the barley, frozen veggies and dried fruit will work. Or I might sauté up the veggies and serve them over a baked yam.

The peanut butter will mix nicely with a little olive oil, beer and chili pepper to make a great peanut sauce to serve over steamed cauliflower and broccoli, atop brown rice.

The beans could mix with the canned salsa to make a fast, dense chili, eaten with brown rice or without it.

Mix the navy beans and tuna and frozen broccoli with a teeny, tiny bit of lemon oil and an even tinier bit of toasted sesame oil. Cover and nuke it up for a fast, super nutritious, delicious, and not very pretty dinner.

Tuna, olive oil, dried cherries, a touch of lemon oil, almonds. Serve on wasa bread.

Play with the nature of hummus or bean paste by whizzing up with navy beans or chickpeas with any nut butter (though tahini is traditional). If you have fresh garlic, use it. Toasted sesame oil, used sparingly, can give it some of that tahini kick. If you have lemon or lime juice, use that, but if you don’t, experiment with the oils, and with cumin, curry, rosemary. No one says your bean paste has to be traditional to be good or good for you. Serve on the wasa.

At any rate, do have good emergency food in store AND a plan for using it. It can keep you out of a world of overeating.

The well-stocked pantry, Beverly Mills and Alicia Ross

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Exercise your Memory: Find out what's fun

2003-12-09T05:39:00.000-05:00

Exercise Your Memory
Find out what' s fun

Here is an assignment for your diet and fitness journal: Make yourself comfortable, pull up a cup of tea, give yourself a good hour or more for thinking and remembering. This is a three-part assignment.

Part 1, make a list.

List the times you can remember from your childhood when you were both very happy and very physically active. Just make a list as quickly as you can, giving each memory a short title. Work pretty quickly on this list. Spend no more than 10 minutes or so forming it. So for instance, here's mine:

*Mud pies at the creek, Rhode Island
*Biking around the naval base in Subic Bay with Nancy
*Hide and go seek at Burt Lake
*Ice skating with dad, Burt Lake
*Hiking with the dog in the snow
*Biking with my sister around the lake
*Swimming up and down the shoreline
*Lilias Yoga on T.V.

I finished this list quickly. It brought me only as far as my early childhood, but not past the age of 12 or so. I'm not surprised to see, for instance, that dance classes and track practice are not on this list. They were not happy times for me. Sure, I challenged myself, but I couldn't say that I was having fun then. We're looking for fun and movement here. Go ahead. Make your list.

Part 2, Study your list for clues.

Look at your list and consider what the items on the list have in common. What common elements made these things fun for you? If I look at my list I notice that in each case I was playing with someone, or several people. What was fun was not concentrating on the activity so much as on being with people, or my dog, while doing it.

I notice that in my list there is no competition at all. I've never been comfortable in competitive situations. I clearly liked playing best when there are no winners or losers.

There's a lot of learning and exploring going on in my list. Pushing, stretching my own abilities, or picking up new skills. Practicing to achieve a pose, turn, twist, spin.

Many of the experiences on my list take place outdoors. I'm not sure if that's just because my mom pushed us out of the house, or if I really prefer to be outside. The explorer/frustrated biologist in me certainly likes the outdoors.

So my idea of fun exercise seems to be that I'm with people but not competing. I'm learning and pushing. And I'm probably outdoors.

Part 3, Plan new kinds of movement around your idea of fun.

Hmm. Though I'm extremely introverted, I realize now that I have been far more likely to show up for exercise when I'm going to do it with people I love. I would not have taken ballet by myself, but ballet with my neighbor is the perfect sport. So is yoga with my daughter, running with my workmates. DH and I are getting ready to think about maybe some day trying out just to see if we could visit the same gym at the same time. Together. Might be intriguing. Might be a disaster. We'll see.

This list explains to me why I get such a charge out of Pilates and yoga. I like the people. There is always a horizon. I won't likely ever master either practice, but I can keep refining my own performance. There's always something more to learn.

But I don't get enough of the outdoors. Running helped me with this a little, but it's not what I really need. I think there might be a hiker in me. I don't know the first thing about hiking. Maybe this is where I need to go. I think I may be able to talk DH into this, too. Yes, indeed.

The point of this exercise, of course, is to help you get your exercise in by choosing exercise that is fun for you. Rather than learning to love your exercise, learn what exercise you love, and do that.

Okay. So hiking. I know I'll love it, AND I'm likely to need new shoes. What could be better?

Starting a fitness program, Intellihealth
American Hiking Society
Choosing the right hiking boots, R.E.I.

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How Very 13: From diet-brained to fitness focused

2003-12-08T17:17:00.000-05:00

How Very 13
From diet-brained to fitness focused

As a kid, I don't think I came to a full awareness of my weight until pretty late in the game. I was an overweight kid, not huge, but chunky. Soft. A kind of mushy, messy kid whose buttons didn't always match up with her buttonholes, whose hair didn't always land where it should, whose thick glasses slipped down her nose. No edges, just roundness and softness. I was heavier than my classmates and received comments about it, but it was my farsightedness that became the real focus of their jokes.

Then one summer, without trying at all, I dropped weight. Or maybe I grew taller. But anyway, I slimmed down. I had spent most of that summer in the water, swimming in a small lake. I lived in my bathing suit, pulling myself up onto and diving off of rafts, pretending to scuba dive, playing Marco Polo, underwater tag, keeping busy. We'd dive, too, into my mother's gardens to steal vegetables, taking these back to the raft. Vegetables and fruits were the only water-proof food we could find, so that's what we ate by day.

I didn't know I'd slimmed down until many people began to comment on it. I received lots of praise, lots of cooing for having developed such a flat tummy, for my new figure. Most of these comments came from women in my mothers' circle. They commented on body parts that were their own particular concern. One neighbor made a particular fuss over my tummy, another noted how my hips had slimmed down, a lady at church constantly commented on my height, another made comments about my "filling out" behind her not-soundproofed hand.

This fuss made me proud and curious. I had done something very right, clearly, and so, going in search of more praise, I suppose, and for the first time ever, I began to step on the scale in the bathroom, and consider what I weighed. I also began to wonder what I SHOULD weigh. I didn't know what that number would be, but suspected that it would be less than wherever I was.

Less is more, where weight is concerned. I'd figured that much out. I was 13. I was 5' 7" tall, and I weighed 135 pounds. And I was on a diet.

I read in a teen magazine about teen model, Christine Modean, who was my height and supposed to have weighed 120 pounds. Finally, then, I had a goal, a number to shoot for. That winter, of my 13th year, I learned to count calories. I learned to go hungry.

So, I didn't decide to lose weight because I was overweight and tired of the criticism. I wanted to lose weight because I'd experienced the attention that weight loss could bring me and wanted more of it.

By announcing I was dieting, I invited criticism of everything I ate from every corner, so I soon learned not to mention my diets in public. I would read diet books on the sly, try to manage my own eating, get too hungry, then sneak food to my room to fill up again. I gained and lost and gained and lost, but maintained a really very normal weight all through high school and college. I suspect now that I would have been exactly the same weight without trying or putting myself through cycles of starvation and feasting.

But I was never very active. Or, more correctly, activity came in cycles. If I took up skiing one winter, my weight dropped, if I sat still the next winter, my weight went up, but I never noted that the difference was exercise. I would try to correct the problem with whatever diet was on the air. If I had two dance classes one semester, my weight stabilized, three dance classes, and my weight would drop, no dance classes, and I ballooned. But I never equated dancing with weight control.

Weight control was purely a food equation for me, and along with my college buddies, I engaged in all manner of crazy cures for weight gain, from liquid protein diets and cider vinegar cocktails, to hot lemon water and hotdog binges. I went one week eating nothing but iceberg lettuce. I don't recommend this to anyone.

Many, many years later, having developed a steadily more inert lifestyle, and steadily higher weight, I worked with and read the works of exercise physiologists who somehow convinced me that exercise must accompany diet for permanent weight control. Once I believed them, the only problem ahead of me was that I don't really like to exercise.

I like to sit still. Very still. A fire. A pot of tea. A book. Some magazines. Some newspapers. This is heaven. The quieter the better. I have been this person all my life.

Finding some form of movement and making myself do it every day requires real mind work. I have to talk myself into it every single day. Still, two years after losing more than 100 lbs., I never go joyfully into exercise. It's shoehorning, bribing, cajoling, tricking that gets me there.

And that's the real work of this column. That's the real magic of any of our journals, I think. In these paragraphs, pages, blogs, we talk ourselves and others into a new way of living. In support groups, through bulletin boards, in chats, we plan a new reality for ourselves. This is what journals have always been for. We post our intentions. We say what we want to do, how we plan to do it, where, when, what we will wear. We find out how to get started, learn what to expect, get ready, gather courage, and then once we've gone out and done the thing, we come back to report on it.

And good report or bad, we get a lot of positive reinforcement for making an effort. It's very 13 of me, in many ways, to work on this thing. I suppose it is. But who among us ever really got over being 13?

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How About A Personal Trainer? They're not just for media moguls

2003-12-05T11:00:00.000-05:00

How About A Personal Trainer?
They're not just for media moguls

Oprah has one. Meg has more than one. Selena and Cher and Michael and Kevin. They all have their trainers, gurus, personal fitness coaches, counselors, nutritionists. When money is no object, why not?

What's great about personal training?

*You get a workout sculpted for you, your body, your preferences, your lifestyle.
*You get the attention your body needs to work out with its quirks, its strengths, weaknesses, unevenness, history of injuries, surgeries, etc.
*You get another pair of eyes who can tell, when you can't, just when your body is suppinated, pronated, twisted, pulling, curling when it shouldn't be, where it ought to be.
*You get accountability to another person. Sometimes someone telling you to get off your butt is just what you need, or you'll never get exercise done.
*You don't quit the exercise early. Someone else pulling you along can often squeeze out a couple more reps than you might be willing to try on your own.
*You can avoid injury, if you're someone who has a tendency to go "all out" in workouts, another pair of eyes might help keep you from hurting yourself.
*You get an expert. The advantages of working with someone who knows more than you do run deep.

But for must of us, money is an object. A scarce resource. And just before the holidays? The prospect of spending more money on fitness just seems ludicrous.

On the other hand… personal training, professional fitness expertise, comes in lots of forms. Making just a few appointments with a trainer can not only get you through the holidays on track, but help you to push your fitness program up just a peg or two to help you manage the extra calories the season brings.

How to find personal training to fit your budget?

Start with the gyms in your area. Your local YMCA and your sleekest spinach-juice-bar-bearing gyms all have rolodexes full of personal trainers who work in various ways at various prices.

Just joining a gym these days may include a package that includes private instruction, fitness testing, and coaching.

Ask the instructors of your favorite fitness classes. Most of these folks have fitness certifications or are working on them or know someone who does. They might not mind making a little more moula for the holidays.

Sign up for private sessions at your local Pilates studio. Private sessions on the studio equipment are among the best personal training experiences I've ever had. The eagle eyes of these highly trained professionals (Go for a Guild-trained, or Stott-trained instructor), will not let a single thing by them. You'll work, you'll sweat, but you won't hurt. Much. Find an instructor at pilates-studio.com

One of my favorite experiences ever was working with a Total Immersion swimming instructor. Okay, he was real pretty, and that certainly helped, but also he was a pair of eyes able to tell me things I simply didn't know about myself, that my left arm drags and pulls in a funny direction, that I kick harder with one side of my body than the other. There are TI Instructors all over. Find them at totalimmersion.net.

When you've found some possible trainers, your next step is to interview them. Be blunt. Ask questions. Find out if they have been certified for personal training, what their fees are, how and where they work. Recommendations from other fitness professionals, or from physical therapists, or members of your medical team are ideal. If you find them in the yellow pages, arrange to meet them away from your home first and work with them in a gym or at your workplace to develop a comfortable relationship before inviting them into your home.

What personal trainers give you more than anything is both focus and safety. You're more likely to work within your limits, and against clear and reasonable goals than if you try to dive into a new exercise program that may be over your head, or beneath your abilities.

Consider it. Madonna does. Why not you?

What to look for in a fitness trainer, IFPA

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Repatterning Your Food Life: Rethinking feeding yourself and your family

2003-12-04T07:39:00.000-05:00

Repatterning Your Food Life
Rethinking feeding yourself and your family

I was lucky. I learned to cook by watching my mom, whose own cooking was informed not by a lineage so much as by her own research and interests and memories, avid reading from Julia Child and M.F.K. Fisher, and world travels that began for her at a very early age.

Then my oldest brother went to work at the elbows of chefs in grand kitchens and brought home more skills.

Our dinners at home were the subject of great speculation and adventure, ranging from opened cans of Chef Boyardee to complex, old-world Chinese cuisine to pot roasts and green beans, to Indian curries hot enough to tickle your earbones.

The interest we have always taken in our food led to a lifelong habit of collecting cookbooks, collecting restaurants, watching and rewatching cooking shows, working in kitchens, and absorbing and reabsorbing the lessons of master chefs.

All this focus on food has been a double-edged sword. On the one edge, we are big, adventurous eaters, hankering for not just any food, but great food. We are food-centric. Foodies. On the other, we have the skills to make healthy, low-calorie, high nutrient food taste great and look gorgeous.

When I took on my final, extreme weight loss, I gave up cooking for a long time. I ignored my kitchen and my tools. Stopped baking altogether. Over the past two years my kitchen and the whereabouts of my tools, dishes, pans, have become a mystery to me. My knives have dulled from disuse. Chefs' tools catalogs come and go, unopened in my house. Flour company and spice company catalogs meet the same fate.

Over the past 3 years, we have repatterned our eating habits, responsibilities for buying and preparing foods. The foods we buy are completely different these days from the ones we bought before we began focusing on our health.

We have never once wondered if all these changes are "worth" it. We look at one another's healthy, fit bodies, consider the far fewer times we've visited doctors or lost time to illness in the past year. We've noted that we haven't lost friends or bothered loved ones with our new habits. We've put food in its place, for the most part.

For me, taking a complete break from food focus and cooking has been extraordinarily helpful. A great eye-opener for me and for my family. We've learned so much by disrupting our patterns. All of our food decisions now are made with great care. Disruption for us has brought a new mindfulness to our food lives.

This past holiday, we gathered the biggest food-heads in the family around our table. And it was a reasonably traditional feast. The bird, of course. The stuffing (made with a great sourdough bread, sausage, pecans, fresh herbs, etc.), natch. But then, creamed baby onions, barely steamed haricots verts, a salad of the freshest baby arugula, spinach, raddichio and edible flowers, yams baked with fresh pineapple, sugarless cranberry relish, a Waldorf salad (apples, grapes, nuts, celery). Healthy stuff. We also served mashed white potatoes and gravy. At the end of the meal, the leftovers mainly consisted of stuffing, mashed potatoes, and gravy.

We boiled that carcass down for two days into a turkey-and-wild rice soup with baby tomatoes and spinach, and loads of fresh herbs and garlic and cumin seed. So good the memory of it haunts. We're talking defatted turkey soup here, folks. One of the greatest soup moments we've ever had.

We didn't apologize for the new foods, introduce them as "diet" food, or in any way prepare people for change. We just served them healthy stuff, and they loved it. They felt good, even the next day.

I have experimented with serving people healthy food without fanfare for the past couple of years, and I find that every person appreciates it, no one ever complains. No one feels cheated. The other stuff is there, too, sometimes. Most people, given the choice, fill up on the healthy stuff first. We're not idiots. We know what is good for us. If what is good is available, we eat it. Even kids do, oddly enough. Or at least, they eat enough of the good stuff that they eat less of the nutrient-free calories.

Soon, I'm going to reclaim my kitchen. Run through the whole place, cleaning and reorganizing it, turning it into a kitchen any health spa owner would be proud to have. I'm moving the toaster from its center of focus, and putting the juicer in its place. Maybe I'll invest in a new veggie slicer, a few new pieces of equipment specifically built for transforming precious vegetable oil into spreadable aoli. That sort of thing. I feel ready to get back to cooking. But a new kind of cooking.

I don't expect to change my history, my interests, my nature. But I do expect to make as many changes within my world, my family as I can to help us all lead healthier lives, make healthier choices. I have the luxury of an eclectic tradition to work from. Because no one knows what to expect at our table, no one expects anything.

Many of you, though, are living within cultures that place requirements on foodstuffs during most dinners, or at least during holiday dinners and traditional feasts. Instead of throwing up your hands at the impossibility of making healthier changes, or upsetting the applecart by refusing to have or serve these foods, consider some options.

Consider adding new foods to the holiday table, filling vegetable dishes and soups that give people more nutritious options. Think veggies, fruits, nuts, beans.

Think about tweaking the ingredients of your traditional foods to remove trans-fats and saturated fats, adding instead vegetable and nut oils. Bake with real butter or lard rather than any hydrogenated fat. You might be surprised to learn that your traditional recipes were changed by enterprising cooks back in the 40s and 50s when margarines, highly processed flour, and manufactured lard-like products were introduced. Get MORE traditional by scouring up the original recipes, using more traditional ingredients.

Making healthier eating work within your family doesn't have to be enormously disruptive. It doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing affair. Making incremental changes, offering healthier choices, moving in the direction of better living bit by bit may be the saner choice.

You might need to take a radical break from your habits for awhile, as I did, to get your weight and health under control, but you don't have to make that break permanent. (Unless that sort of freedom appeals to you, and then why not?) And when you're ready to come back, you will know you're ready. My break took 3 years. Now I'm ready to move back into my kitchen creatively, with control, with a goal of better living well within reach.

Julia Child
M.F.K.
Diana Kennedy, Exploring Traditional Mexican Cuisine
Marcella Hazan, on Traditional Italian Cuisine
Martin Yan and PBS exploring many Asian Cuisines

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Support 101: find (and give) the support you need

2003-12-03T09:27:00.000-05:00

Support 101
Find (and give) the support you need

Of course it's possible to lose weight entirely on your own. It's possible to get fit on your own time too. Many people do it every day. If privacy is your virtue and keeping it all to yourself is your preference, and most importantly, if it works for you, then do it. Ignore this post.

But many of us need other people, need to remember we're not the only little soft-shelled creature dealing with the sorts of feelings we have when we do the work to change our behaviors, our habits, our selves to lose weight and keep it off. For us weight loss is hard, and having an understanding soul or 10 or 5,000 nearby helps a lot:

*We get unconditional understanding.
*We get interest, even three, six, 12 months, a year or three after starting.
*We get tips, recipes, grocery intelligence, diet program reconnaissance, book reviews. Many eyes and ears making research and testing move faster.
*We get understanding help through the plateaus, the setbacks.
*We get room to vent, laugh hard, or get a little weepy.
*We get reinforcement of our own intentions when we help somebody else.
*We get help when we are overwhelmed and can't think our way through situations.
*We get strength when we're weak, and give strength to others.
*We get the power of a community of like and unlike minds. There's always more brilliance and insight in a group.

Like face-to-face meetings? Many hospitals, churches, and school systems offer weight loss support programs for free in communities around the world. Or for a fee or donation there is probably a TOPS, Overeaters Anonymous, or WeightWatchers meeting near you, maybe several.

Like Web anonymity? There are many great boards available with communities of interest carved out for people of various age groups, religions, geographic boundaries, preferences, and dieting styles. Try 3Fatchicks.com, and dwlz.com to start with free boards that support any dieting preference or style. Use Google or Yahoo to find more specific boards. Choose a sport or fitness activity you like best, and find boards for these. Many include discussions on weight loss too. Coolrunning.com has an active board for people working on their health goals. Even motleyfool.com has weight loss and fitness discussions. Most of the diet programs offer support boards, of course. You'll find active boards at WeightWatchers.com, jennycraig.com, low-carbing folks at lowcarb.ca.

Tried all of that and it just doesn't work for you? You need something else, something that fits who you are more completely, or more discretely? Or both? Then grow your own.

Sure, why not? Run a group in person or online, or both, much as you would a book club, community program, or task team at work. Centralize it around a particular diet or form a no-diet club. Have weigh-ins or shun the scale. Meet at gyms, in homes, at coffee bars, at church, or don't meet at all, and run the thing entirely online through groups.yahoo.com, groups.msn.com, or ezboard.com.

Open it up to the world, or make it by invitation only, with group agreement before inviting any member to join.

Gather together three or four founding members, and make some decisions. Regardless of how open or closed your group is, consider establishing a few ground rules or guidelines.

First, describe the nature of the group. People should know whether this will be an entirely accepting community or a regular kick-in-the-ass. Is this group about prayerful empowerment, about hard-core bodybuilding, about learning a macrobiotic lifestyle? Is it a gentle helping hand, or a bracing bitch-slap? Is it weekly? Monthly? Say what it is, and maybe write it down somewhere. You may or may not go in for by-lines and Robert's Rules, but at least don't confuse anybody about who you are.

So great, you have a group, what else must you decide?

*Consider the type of meetings you want. What sort of effect do you want from each meeting? Finish the statement: Members should leave this meeting feeling ____________________. Design your meetings to deliver on this statement.

*Will you post discussion topics well in advance? Or surprise people?
*Will you lead each discussion, hire somebody, or will leadership rotate?
*Will there be rules of participation? Group members must present a food log, or must wear a blue hat, or must bring a book, article, or recipe for sharing? Or resist developing rules?
*How will you encourage attendance? Or discourage attrition?
*Will group membership require sponsorship for new members?
*Will group members call or contact one another between meetings?
*Who will write down the answers to these questions, keep a list of group members, remember what the topic is from week to week? A recorder, manager, administrator?
*Consider a succession plan. What will happen to the group once you've achieved a healthy weight and kept it off for a while? Will you stay with it, or move on?
*Consider inviting guests in to speak with your group. You have nutritionists, chefs, medical professionals, therapists, diet counselors, trainers, massage therapists, clothiers, plastic surgeons near you who might be delighted to speak with your group or offer up tours of their facilities.

My point is, no one ever needs to go through this alone if they don't want to. No one ever needs to "endure" groups that don't fit. There are always options. Shop around to find a good fit for you, or grab your bootstraps and form the support system of your dreams.

(Ed note: I'm honored that many groups, online and off, in various diet programs, at bariatric clinics, in hospital programs, use these posts within their support groups to generate discussion. Got a group? Feel free, please. Just be sure to communicate the URL to anyone who needs a daily hit, please.)

Ezboard.com
Yahoo Groups
MSN Groups
Guidelines for starting support groups from parenttoparent.org
Robert's Rules of Order, from The Constitution Society

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Fine Tuning: Listening to your body to choose the right fuels

2003-12-02T11:10:00.000-05:00

Fine Tuning
Listening to your body to choose the right fuels

I have eaten for so many reasons. I have eaten to celebrate, commiserate, concentrate. I've eaten angrily, defensively, fearfully, crankily, happily, mindlessly.

But I've barely ever eaten to give my body the fuel it needs to operate, much less operate well, much less cure what ails me.

Oh, I hear that it's good for us to eat cruciferous veggies, and I add those to my diet, dutifully, but I don't really give it that much thought. All I manage to think is "I SHOULD eat my broccoli." I think SHOULD when I buy it, think SHOULD when I stare at the uncooked stalks in my fridge, think SHOULD when I finally grab it and cook it and eat it.

That's a lot of SHOULD.

Maybe it's a feeling of mortality. Maybe it's just being over forty. Certainly it's because too many friends and loved ones are battling difficult diseases, but lately I've been thinking about what food is for.

I know this sounds a little stupid. I have always known that food fuels me, that food breaks down during digestion, and the various nutrients are absorbed through my intestines to be used by different cells and tissues to fire, grease, build, restore, bolster, spackle, tweak, and refine my body.

But all my life I've given more thought and care to the gas and oil I put in my car than I do to the fuel I consume. I don't think, as I stare down dessert, how this fuel will make my body run. I don't really think about whether I need fuel now or not. I think only about the taste, then shovel sugar into my gas tank.

So I don't feel so good. I get rashes. I get fat. I break out. I suffer indigestion. I can take pills for all of these side effects. Or I could just quit giving my body the wrong fuel.

Yesterday I sat down with my food journal, around mid afternoon, and recorded the food I'd eaten all day. My diet for the day consisted mainly of whole-grain toast and sugar-free pumpkin pie. By writing it down, I could see what was missing. I hadn't had any raw veggies or protein all day. But if I had just closed my eyes and thought about what I needed, I think my body would have told me. I felt the jitteriness that comes from too little protein. The toxic itchiness I get when I eat too few greens and too much wheat.

My body is always trying to tell me what to eat, but I am almost always too busy, too absorbed, too noisy, too overwhelmed by the food in front of me to listen.

What I want is to tune in to my inner fuel gauge. I want to know what my body needs. I want to choose foods for their performance value. I want to want the food that will satisfy me, keep migraines at bay, keep my tummy happy. But I also want foods that will help fight cancer, retain my eyesight, promote circulation, preserve and build my bones, help my heart do its thing, keep my skin as pink as possible for as long as possible.

*Eating well helps. Eating not just any old highly processed fruits and veggies, but a variety of really fresh, interesting, varied fruits and veggies has helped me to develop a hankering for them. Preferring non-processed over processed foods, and foods whose labels list ingredients I can both pronounce and visualize, helps a lot.

*Eating more simply helps me a great deal. Eating fewer foods at a time almost always helps me curb my eating and choose what I really need more carefully.

*Removing non-nutritive foods from my food storage area altogether, or at least from my line of sight works wonders. We have placed the fruit and veggies and nuts and beans and low-fat cheeses and cold cuts where they will be the first thing we reach for when we're tired.

*I am trying to stop and listen, in addition to reviewing my diet log, before putting anything in my mouth. I want to answer one question: What food does my body need to run effectively for the rest of the day? If it needs anything at all.

* I'm trying to put a higher value on my body than I place on my car or house, so that it gets the attention and care it deserves.

Consider today, what do you need to do or think differently to fuel your body better? Spend some journal time this week thinking that through, will you?

How digestion works, Children's Memorial Hospital

Preventing Cancer with Food, Intellihealth

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Loose Skin: Managing the leftovers

2003-12-01T07:57:00.000-05:00

Loose Skin
Tips for managing leftovers

Here's how it goes. You have fat cells. Eat more fuel than you burn, and your body stores the excess fat in your fat cells, which grow. Get more than 50 lbs. or so overweight, and you grow more fat cells, and store fat in those, too. All the while you're storing fat, your skin, like an elastic balloon, stretches over that fat, to keep you covered.

You're also stretching the little ligaments that attach the skin to the connective tissue and deeper structures in your body, which are under your fat, and over your organs and stuff.

When you lose the weight, your stretched-out skin and stretched connective ligaments sag.

If you're under 20 years old, if you have good genes, if you lose weight slowly, never smoke, keep stress under control, eat a nourishing diet, get plenty of exercise, and have less than 100 lbs. to lose, your skin, like a new balloon, may just snap back into place over time.

But if you don't have all of that going for you, if you have an old and tired balloon, you are very likely to be stuck with a bunch of extra skin after completing your weight loss.

It can be anywhere from disappointing to terribly disruptive to our social lives and self esteem to have these leftovers. Luckily, there are a bunch of things you can do to cope with them.

What you will need or want to do will depend a great deal on the amount and location of your extras. I have spoken with four doctors, all experts in their fields, to get help with understanding our options. Here they are, and some advice they each have to share with us:

David J. Leffell, M.D., Professor of Dermatology & Surgery at Yale School of Medicine, author of "Total Skin," (Hyperion, 2000)
*The skin is amazingly elastic, especially around the mouth and eyes, where it's opening and closing all the time. But our skin will naturally lose elasticity over time, which is why face lifts don't last forever. After weight loss, the body always wants to return to its healthiest state. That's the essence of how organisms survive in nature, fish or amoeba or human. Scars settle down. New collagen forms. Your skin will tighten some, but as you grow older, this process, the ability of the body to respond, slows. The body doesn't snap back as quickly or completely as many of us would like.
*The most conservative thing to do about excess skin is nothing. Wait and see. A year at least.
*Lipo can help pull skin up by creating fibrous bands of scar tissue, but it can result in puckering, dimpling. People have to be ready for that.
*The body does not auto-digest, or metabolize, excess skin. You haven't created new skin, but stretched out the skin you were born with.
*Do consult with specialists, and ask for a range of options. Consider each carefully. Do not rush a decision.

Dr. Robert Bell, M.D., M.A., Assistant Professor of Surgery and Director of Bariatric Surgery at Yale University School of Medicine
*Most of our patients have a great deal of weight to lose. They start with a BMI of 50 or more. So we see excess skin a lot, and the amount of it and experience of it are extremely variable. It's hard to pinpoint who will have how much at the end of their weight loss, and how they will feel about it.
*Most people who lose 100 lbs. or less don't have great issues with excess skin. The looseness may resolve itself over time. It's usually my patients who lose 200, 300 lbs. or more who consider surgery to manage the excess.
*For the vast majority of people, good underwear and clothing covers it all. You would never know they had excess skin at all.
*Insurance companies consider most excess skin surgery cosmetic, but in some cases, particularly at the tummy, where skin can form folds that encourage moistness, candidal rash becomes a problem, low back pain from supporting this excess skin becomes a problem, the insurance companies will agree to the medical necessity of the procedure. The company will want a lot of documentation.
*People who decide to have surgery are pretty determined to do so. The pain, recovery, cost, and risks of these surgeries are far higher than for bariatric surgery, so there's a lot to consider. But for many people, it helps their self esteem a great deal, and is a piece of the puzzle of an ongoing positive spiral of health.
*Fearing losing weight because of a fear of excess skin is an unreasonable fear. The experience of excess skin is nothing compared with the experience of diabetes, degenerative arthritis, sleep apnea, coronary artery disease, PCOS, and all the other weight-related diseases. It's simply unrealistic to worry about excess skin when considering a weight loss program.

Dr. Rhoda Narins, M.D., Clinical Professor of Dermatology, New York University, and President Elect of the American Society of Dermatologic Surgery:
*If you have just a little extra skin, liposuction can help tighten it. The focus for this sort of work isn't on removing fat, but on creating scar tissue that works in place of connecting ligaments to tighten the skin, pulling it back into place. Lipo for significant fat removal can also result in loose skin. So lipo works best for removing small amounts of fat to re-sculpt a specific area of the body.
*There are no crèmes or lotions that will help with either loose skin or with stretch marks. Some laser treatments are being evaluated for stretch marks, which can help with the red marks, but not the white. Not quite yet.
*For tightening just a bit of skin, we should keep our ears to the ground for treatments using radio frequencies to shrink the skin, not unlike the Thermage face lift devices currently available.
*For lots of extra skin at the tummy, breasts, arms, face, knees, surgery is it. The surgeries remove the excess skin, are time consuming to do, not inexpensive, require recovery time, leave scars. But you will know, through consultation, whether they would make you feel better about your new body.
*Though this work is considered cosmetic by insurance companies, Dr. Narin begs to differ. She says there is a clear psychic overlay to having this sort of work done. People who undergo this surgery feel much better about themselves, and that feeling can help bolster healthier habits in the long run.

Dennis J. Hurwitz, M.D., Clinical Professor of Surgery, University of Pittsburgh
*Factors determining the amount and location of loose skin seem to be age, speed of weight loss, smoking, exercise, poor diet, and stress. All of these factors, regardless of a person's weight, give us trouble with our skin.
*We do a comprehensive evaluation first, to determine the best approach, the logical approach for each patient. But for people who have achieved a BMI of 30 or less, and have multiple locations where excess skin bothers them, we have developed an 8- to 12-hour Total Body Lift surgery to shape everything in one session. This surgery is for highly motivated people who don't want to take the time for several operative sessions.
*Cost of this surgery can range from $10,000 to $30,000, depending on what is being done.
*Patients do have good luck getting financing for this surgery. It is tax deductible.
*We do use Endermology, or treatments with a fat rolling/suction machine, for light cases. It helps a bit with the appearance of loose skin, cellulite. A mild difference. It's a comfortable procedure we also use with post operative patients to help speed healing.
*In my 26 years of practice, I have never experienced any work so gratifying, that does as much good for people, so dramatically, so quickly. People can be depressed and angry and dysfunctional in their lives as a result of this excess skin. After surgery, they find it much easier to resume business, social, and intimate contacts with far greater confidence.

That's what the docs tell us. See their websites and plasticsurgery.org for clear descriptions of the various surgeries available.

Each of the doctors agree that people who have lost a significant amount of weight should wait for at least a year for their weight to stabilize and for skin to adjust before evaluating options.

When asked to speak to rumors circulating on the Net, none of the doctors had any knowledge of "skin donation" deals, where people with excess skin could donate it to burn victims to cover the cost of their surgeries. But none thought it was a completely crazy idea, and suggested speaking with burn clinics close to you if you'd like to find out more.

Discovery Health has been airing a program showing Val, a woman who has lost more than 300 pounds, undergo a lower body lift. The show will air several more times this year. The effect on people who watch it can be overwhelming. It's quite graphic, be warned. But it's truthful about the surgery, the recovery, the sheer investment of energy, nerve, and dollars to see it through. Visit health.discovery.com for schedules.

Discovery is also taping one of Dr. Hurwitz' Total Body Lift procedures, with air dates tentatively planned for Spring, 2004. The November 9 "People Magazine" featured a Total Makeover cover story profiling one of Dr. Hurwitz' patients.

My own experience has been good and lucky. After losing 110 pounds at age 43, while I do have extra skin around my tummy, it isn't more than most moms have after giving birth, and previous scars from childhood surgeries actually work to hold my tummy flat. Though my arms have been a bit flappy, that flappiness has diminished a good bit over the past two years, so I feel fine about exposing them. Loose thigh skin is "cured" by candlelight and my husband's diminishing eyesight. My under-chin flap is so dramatically preferable to a double chin, that it can't begin to bother me. Everything else is well managed by day by my friend Lycra, though there is a huge market for yet-to-be-developed, lighter-weight Lycra underthings going untapped in the world.

The upshot. Don't let the leftovers scare you. Your health is more important than any other thing. And wait awhile before evaluating your options.

Total Body Lift at Dr. Hurwitz' clinic
Dr. Narin's clinic
Discovery Health: Trash Can of Skin Schedule
U.S. folks, find a surgeon near you, review surgeries here
Thermage radio-frequency face lifts

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Take a Load Off: Freeing yourself to lose weight

2003-11-29T10:07:00.000-05:00

Take a Load Off
Freeing yourself to lose weight

Pens out. Keyboard ready. A Journal assignment for your weight loss journal, blog, letter, note to self.

For many people who finally lose weight, who lose it once and for all, there is a doorway. A transition. A threshold they step over. It's often a big, important one. Some people describe it as a "click," a "switch," a "point of no return."

I like that last phrase best.

Ask 100 successful losers how they finally lost weight for good, and you'll often hear something like this, "I don't know, something just clicked."

How do people get to that click? There appear to be lots of ways. Fear is one common path. Fear of impending loss, of life, work, ability, relationships.

Or instead of fear, many people "click" through the simple realization that we do each, indeed, have an inalienable right to pursue at least good health, at best happiness. Even if you're a woman. Even if you're a mom.

Finally acknowledging your grown-up status can help. Growing up comes with a slow, slow, so slow dawning that pursuing happiness is entirely up to you, no one can provide it for you.

And so, something clicks. And you're ready to lose weight, and keep it off forever.

Now what?

Now it's time to, quite literally, take a load off.

It's not always a good idea to look for the metaphor in your illnesses. But with extra weight, the metaphors can be useful. Being weighed down. Carrying extra weight. Carrying a load. Taking on too much. Taking on more than you can chew.

You see where this goes?

You may not be losing weight because you don't have time. If you don't make the time to lose weight, it's not going to happen. You have to make exercise and eating right a top priority in your life, if not THE priority, for the time it takes to remove the excess weight and form habits to keep it off. We're talking about a 3-year commitment.

So, for the next three years, what are you going to give up? What are you going to choose not to do so that you have time to give yourself good health? Do you need to change jobs? Give up committees? Resign posts? Who do you need to learn to say no to, and when?

Don't try to steal the time from your sleep, from grooming. But could the house be less pristine and still livable? Can the kids do a few fewer after-school activities? Can your significant other or your children or your co-workers take on some of your duties for awhile?

Make a plan. Write it out. Throw off the weight of the world to give yourself room to get well.

Wondering what I did? Quit my job. Quit three clubs. Scaled way back on activism. Scaled way back on social lunches and dinners and drinks. Stopped cooking so darned much.

Know what? I haven't lost a friend over it. My world hasn't crumbled. My family is relieved. No family member goes unfed.

You have to make time to take time. And you have to take time to maintain your body, or suffer the consequences of your own oppression.

Worth reading every few days: The Declaration of Independence

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Cool beans: Green beans as snack food

2003-11-28T12:28:00.000-05:00

Cool Beans
Green beans as a snack food

How's this for insane advice: Try replacing that bowl of chips with a bowl of green beans.

Don't roll your eyes. Don't turn the page. Don't click away. Give this a second or two more, willya?

I know. This is the sort of suggestion you'd expect from a crazed diet instructor? Who in their right mind would plunk down a big bowl of green beans where you would normally find chips?

Well, I have to tell you I did just that last week. Set down a large bowl of very lightly steamed green beans, tossed with a breath of olive oil, salt, and white pepper, on the table for my book club.

A test. I didn't tell anyone they were the subject of an experiment.

The beans were a hit. That night book club got strawberries and whipped cream cheese, steamed shrimp with a kiwi salsa, sesame crackers with a crab spread, dark chocolate no one ate, and a big bowl of steamed green beans, which they descended upon. They loved them. They returned to them again and again.

I've kept barely cooked green beans in the fridge all week, eating them warmed, eating them cold. Using them to take the edge of hunger off before cooking so I don't overeat.

They've been the hit of the household. A perfect finger food. Cheap. Incredibly easy to prepare. Easy to find.

I have steamed them (5 minutes in my steamer, no more), microwaved them (2 minutes in a container with a close-fitting lid, crack the lid for cooking, then close the lid and let them rest and steam for 3 minutes before dressing), sautéed them (non-stick skillet with just a whisper of oil, over hot flame for 3 minutes, covered off the heat for 2). I leave them with lots and lots of crunch. A very light drizzle or spray of olive oil while they're still steamy keeps them pretty. Salt and pepper to taste.

I could fuss with them more, add garlic, experiment with other seasonings. And I might. I might. But I encourage you to try them as close to their natural state as possible, eating by the bowlful, with your fingers.

I don't bother taking their stems off. Who has time? I consider crunchy green beans to be finger food, in the Emily Post-on-asparagus sense, and of course I never, ever cut off their tails. That would be cruel. Just rinse, five minutes of cooking, and they're ready. Faster than popcorn, fewer calories, and far, far more nutritious.

I know. I just set up green beans to compete with popcorn. What could I be thinking?

Well, I could be thinking nutrients. Potassium. Vitamin A. Iron. Fiber.

But I'm not. I'm thinking crunch. Flavor. I'm thinking guilt-free eating. I'm thinking green, green eats. That buzz you can actually experience in every cell of your body when you know you're fueling up with something good. No question about it, no arguments from any diet camp.

If your experience with green beans is informed by canned or frozen, chopped and overcooked, unseasoned and watery and flavorless beans served in great heaps to fill you up, divert your attention, fill your plate, fill in the green vegetable requirement without any consideration to texture, flavor, or color, then I don't blame you for thinking me nuts.

Withhold judgment until you try them fresh, barely cooked, crunchy. Those old beans are nothing like these beans. Perfect between meals. Perfect to pack in lunches. Perfect travel food. Eat them hot, cold, or at room temperature. But do give them a try as a snack food.

Seriously.

Great Green Bean Dig
Green Bean, Walnut, and Feta Salad Recipe
Emily's Table Manners

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Stuffing Your Bird: Form a simple holiday eating strategy

2003-11-26T07:29:00.000-05:00

Stuffing Your Bird
Form a simple holiday eating strategy

Okay. Our Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. is almost here. A time for feasting in this part of the world. Our typical Thanksgiving meal, with turkey, bread stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, squash, bread and rolls, veggies, corn, gravy, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie, and apple pie, and whipped cream, and ice cream, comes in at around 3,000 calories per person. More for the cook. That is, everyone overeats. It's part of the tradition.

You've been carefully watching your diet, working to lose weight, and this meal marks the beginning of a season of difficult eating. You're overwhelmed already, and the day, the season, the choices, the pies, the cookies, the candy haven't even arrived.

Panic. You're panicking. You are, admit it. You're freaking out well in advance, and fretting, frankly, Frank, over nothing.

Stop it.

Breathe through your nose, and think. What you need here, Harriet, is a strategy for the daily decisions you're going to have to make.

First of all, it's food. It's not after you. It's not going to get you. It's not going to undermine you. Or sabotage you. It can't DO anything, because it's inert, Ira. How could it possibly control you? How can it plot against you? It's got no plan. It's got no scheme. No lump of sugar is going to outsmart you now or any time soon.

Right? Right. You're in charge, Charlie, and you have put your health and happiness first. You know that gaining health and happiness requires eating within your calorie limit for the day. So you plan ahead.

You know what food you're going to encounter on Thanksgiving. You plan ahead to eat a little less on the days leading up to the holiday, a little less on the days following. You will exercise more throughout the month ahead, and you eat with a plan. Stan.

Some ideas:

*Focus on the people rather than the food. That's sort of the point of these holidays, after all, isn't it? Look at them, talk to them, enjoy them. Make eye contact. Attempt to speak with, cuddle with, play with every person at the party.
*Don't be an overworking martyr. Don't do it all yourself. Don't freak out if food gets cold. Delegate, and chill out. Enjoy this day and the whole process. Make the food with love, or don't make it at all. Start early, and get help.
*Don't eat angrily. Family holidays can bring out hard feelings for many people. Give your hurt the day off. Let the comments bounce off of you. Aquire selective hearing. Do what it takes to let it fall away from you, to not take it personally, to not put other people in control of your mood. Control your own mood. It's way more fun that way.
*Drink water before you eat.
*Have relaxing music and pretty lighting at your feast. Candles. Light them. It helps everyone slow down.
*Eat slowly. Put down your utensils between bites.
*Stop eating when you are full.
*Eat your salad and veggies first. Finish them. Then enjoy any fruit course or soup, finish that. Next the protein. Finally the starches, if you still have room. But you probably won't.
*Do you need to eat an entire piece of pie? Or is one bite, to enjoy the flavor, compliment the cook, acknowledge the tradition, good enough?
*There's nothing wrong with enjoying your food. Relax. Enjoy.
*Potlucks do not require tasting everything. No one notices what's on other peoples' plates. You will not offend anyone by not eating their food. Bring a salad or veggies to every pot luck, and don't be afraid to eat your own food first.
*Be the one person who doesn't serve cookies when friends come to call. You have no idea how much of a relief it will be to your over-sugared friends and loved ones if you serve veggies and fruit and nuts instead.

Happy, happy Thanksgiving folks.

And I thank you, for reading The Skinny Daily Post. You have made my whole year.

About the holiday

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When to Say When: Workout strategies to avoid injury

2003-11-25T07:37:00.000-05:00

When to Say When
Workout strategies to avoid injury

I'm typing this in almost complete comfort, five days, FIVE DAYS after attending my first body pump class.

For the past five days, straightening my arms has been excruciating, lifting anything out of the question, and typing - that little thing I have to do all day every day -- has ended in charley horses and no end of whimpering.

I have done this before. A few times. A lot. I take on a new form of exercise, overdo it, and get hurt. No one is impressed, because this is stupid behavior. Getting hurt is not noble. Playing through the pain is the surest way to damage my body, at least temporarily, perhaps permanently.

I worked out so hard I took myself out of play. Haven't been able to exercise for days, use stairs, lift bags. And all because of one class when I used some pre-reasoning part of my mind to decide I could keep up with everybody else. Keep up with people accustomed to these movements, this form of exercise.

Ego. And a little ignorance tossed in for flavor.

I am used to working with very heavy weights, performing very few repetitions. I like working out this way, because it gives me bounce. It's fast. It's effective. It doesn't land me with lots of muscle, but gives everything else I do more pop. My muscles get a little bit sore, but not much, and only pleasantly so.

But in body pump classes, we use much lighter weights and perform lots and lots of controlled repetitions.

There's that word: control.

Here's the mistake I made: I made up my mind that just because I can lift quite heavy weights doing a few repetitions, to the point of muscle failure, I should be able to lift lighter weights doing lots of repetitions without any trouble at all. I waited for muscle failure, and it never came. I did a lot of damage while I waited, when I should have been looking for other cues to stop.

I quizzed some trainers this week and learned that knowing when to stop in bodypump is the same as for any mind-body work, the same for Pilates, the same for Yoga, the same for running: Monitor control. When you can no longer do the exercise with perfect form and control, you are either injuring yourself or introducing an opportunity for injury. Ease up or stop.

*If the bar is tipping because one side of you is stronger than the other, reduce your weight or stop.
*If you're shaking anywhere to complete the exercise, stop.
*If you're hurting anywhere during the exercise, and the pain increases as you go, stop.
*Reduce the weights, reduce the reps, or just stop.
*One instructor suggested that when you perceive your form or ability to be reduced by just 10% of your greatest capacity, you should stop. I'm not quite sure how I know when I've lost 10%, but at least I know to look for reduced ability.
*In a class like BodyPump, working to muscle failure is never the goal.

Stopping is hard to do in a class setting if you let your ego get in the way. But we have to learn to check our egos at the door. No one around us really cares about what we can do or can not do on any given day. Stopping and resting is not only smart, but it models intelligent behavior for everyone else. On the other hand, stopping before the person next to you does might give them a cheap thrill. Why not a random act of submission to make someone's day?

Funny, isn't it? Learning how to stop exercising?

Avoiding Injury, from Women Today
BodyPump Classes
Classic Weight Training for Women, from Krista

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Sneaking Food: Write it out of your system

2003-11-22T09:57:00.000-05:00

Sneaking Food
Write it out of your system

I have always been a sneaky eater. I try very hard not to sneak food now, but I grew up sneak-eating, and it's a hard habit to break.

*I snuck food out of competition, getting my hands on cookies before my siblings did.
*I snuck food out of shame, eating when no one was looking to avoid comments about my size.
*I snuck "forbidden foods," food that was either forbidden, or set aside for special purposes (Christmas cookies baked well in advance of the holiday), or stashed by someone else as part of their own private hoard.
*I wasn't much of a hoarder myself, but would buy my own candy and try to eat it before returning home.
*I snuck food when I was babysitting.
*I snuck food when I visited friends.
*I snuck food on trips, working in restaurants. Pretty much everywhere I could.

Sometimes sneaky eating is one symptom of bulimia, or other kinds of disordered eating. But if you ask a roomful of folks if they ever snuck food, you'll find that most people did at one time or still do. And it usually comes down to one of three reasons: competition among sibs, shame, forbidden fruit.

As I grew up this sneak eating became eating crazy foods on the way home from the grocery store, then getting rid of the packaging before anyone could see it, stealing French fries from my husband's fast food order after not ordering them for myself, and eating snacks out of view of other people, so no one could watch me eat between meals.

My sneak eating has diminished to the rare event now, but I still find myself feeling very awkward about eating between meals in public. I carry around some crazy kind of shame associated with eating publicly. It's a hold-over. It doesn't make any kind of sense at all, but it's definitely there.

Also, honestly, there is a kind of thrill to sneak eating. It's not unlike sneaking cigarettes. A joy ride. I still feel as if I have gotten away with something very bad. As if I've been bad to the bone. Defiant. Working out some anger, maybe. Some kind of rebellion.

So today, I'd like to unravel the feelings I'm having when I sneak, try to figure out what I'm really up to during these times, make a plan for what I'm going to do instead of sneak the next time the urge comes up.

I have a right to eat food when I'm hungry, and to eat it in the open, as anyone would.

I also need to understand when I'm using food to deal with something that maybe I should deal with in a more direct, or at least less self-destructive way.

So if sneaky eating has been a problem for you and still is, here's our writing assignment: In your journal, or in a letter to yourself, recall a time when you snuck food, and why you think you did. Try to get to the details of it. When was it? What kind of food? Where was the food, and where did you eat it? How did it taste? How much did you eat? How quickly? What kind of work did you have to do to cover your tracks? Who were you sneaking or hiding from? Why? How did you feel when you were through eating? Do you sneak food now? Why? Are you hungry when you sneak food? Why would eating this food out in the open be out of the question? How does remembering this episode make you feel? What do you think it's going to take to get over sneaky eating? Do you think you can do it on your own, or do you need help?

Spend some time reading over what you've written, and then make a plan for changing things. Write that down too. The next time you get the urge to sneak, what will you do differently, or do instead? I plan to pull out my journal (it's always with me), and write and write until I figure out the real urge. Because for me, it's almost never hunger. It's almost always something else. And then I'm going to try to find some reward that feels as good as sneaking but isn't self-destructive to mollify myself at those times.

I'll find something that works for me. What will you find to work for you?

There's help here for serious eating problems

Overeaters Anonymous, where skillions get help

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Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: Walter C. Willett's guide to healthy eating

2003-11-21T07:53:00.000-05:00

Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy
Walter C. Willett's guide to healthy eating

There is a sane way to eat.

Hint: it's not eating submarine sandwiches one night and a whole box of cookies the next. It is also not eating an entire bucket of fried chicken for dinner, regardless of the carb count per serving. (I really wonder what some of these food advertisers take to induce sleep every night. It must be strong.)

A delightful, delicious, easily understood, and sane diet has been developed over two decades' time, bolstered by great bodies of research, flavored by personal experience, and published a couple of years ago by Walter C. Willett, the Fredrick John Stare Professor of Epidemiology and Chair of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard's School for Public health.

His credentials may make him sound like a scary read, but Willett is more than approachable. Immensely readable, gentle, clearly kind-hearted. Funny, even. And if his name sounds familiar to you, it's because I mention him a lot in this column. He's one of the guys working hard to redraw the food pyramid to give us all better health for generations to come.

To learn to eat well, devour every word of this book. Give it to young people you know when they leave their households. Be sure all new families receive a hard-cover copy to keep in their kitchens for all their lives together. Hand it off to old dogs who need to learn new tricks. This is the diet advice and primer we need. Here it is. One book.

Oh and the paperback version makes a great stocking stuffer. And now my family knows what they're getting for Christmas.

You should know it's not designed to be a weight loss book. However, if you read it and adopt the suggestions in it, you're more likely to reach a healthy weight in a safe and satisfying way than by following the advice of most of the diet books on the shelves these days. So you won't find this book in the diet section, unfortunately. You will have to look under nutrition at the bigger bookstores.

Because perversely the nutrition books and the diet books are not shelved anywhere near one another.

(You typically find the diet books shelved alongside the cookbooks, sending your synapses into a squealing wreck as you pass down the aisle, images of pastry and chocolate on your left, people holding out their former fat pants on your right.

But I digress.)

Willett's book. It's the book you need to help you sort through the nutritional half-truths that hit the airwaves in rapid fire these days. The first line of the book pretty much sets the tone and the promise to follow, "We eat to live." And then he explains how to eat to live well. He begins with three points of governing advice that will sound familiar: get moving, find a diet that works for you, and eat defensively.

By this last bit of advice, he means for us to develop strategies for surviving a difficult environment. These strategies are not unfamiliar to lifelong dieters. They include stopping before you are stuffed, eating mindfully, cooking creatively, snacking to keep hunger under control, minimizing temptations, and remaining vigilant against the food industry's wiley ways to sell their wares.

My favorite advice for eating defensively, and one suggestion that has permanently changed my household: Keep it simple. Like M.F.K. Fisher, another food guru I have loved for different reasons, Willett teaches us that a smorgasbord is not only not necessary, but not healthy. Offering one or two simply prepared good, whole foods per meal is plenty and will help prevent overeating.

Confused about fats, carbohydrates, proteins and their place in your diet? You won't be after reading each detailed, readable, plain-spoken chapter on these subjects. The chapter on fruits and vegetables will change your pantry forever. You are what you drink will save your diet and maybe your kids' diets too.

The back of the book, his section called Recipes and Menus is far more than the title suggests. It is a tutorial. A primer on how to read labels. You will learn about whole grains, which ones are good and how to cook them. Oils, which ones to cook with and when. Sugars and sugar substitutes. Sample menus, and not just recipes, but yummy food fit for busy families. Oh, yes, and sources for finding stuff you may not be able to find easily where you are. You can hand these lists over to your favorite grocers.

It's good. And now I'm hungry for something whole.

Eat, Drink, and be Healthy

Upcoming WIRED article ranks Willett's diet best, says PRNewswire

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The Un-Invisible Woman: A subtle reward for weight loss, maybe

2003-11-20T06:00:00.000-05:00

The Un-Invisible Woman
A subtle reward of weight loss, maybe

"You keep losing weight, and you're going to disappear!" says a colleague. She couldn't be farther from the truth.

The fact is, I'm no longer invisible. I seem to be gaining more visibility every day. I'm not sure what to make of it.

Most people imagine that the feeling of losing 100 lbs. is dramatic. It isn't. It takes quite awhile to safely lose that amount of weight, and so you have plenty of time to adjust to your new old body as the weight comes down.

In fact, losing is similar to the experience of gaining the weight in the first place. There is nothing uncomfortable about the process of storing fat, outside of your pants getting smaller, and then the chair getting smaller, and then your car getting smaller.

Losing weight is no sudden relief. The changes are gradual but in reverse. Things get bigger. Eventually you adjust the seat in your car, pull the chair closer to the table, get smaller pants. But there is little drama. Little fanfare. Seeing people you haven't seen in a long while will bring comment, but that initial surprise is over quickly too. And life returns to a new normal.

Except, of course, for the lack of fat prejudice. Now you get to walk through your day, meet people, joke with people on elevators, buy your groceries, buy your clothes, without having to work around or through the auto-assumptions people had about you when you were fat. Not all people, but it's certainly been proven enough times by the folks at the Rudd Institute and obesity researchers the world over that we make these assumptions.

And I know what I experienced. I know how hard I worked to climb up over my wall of fat to build credibility every day. I had the self assurance and luxury to dismiss most biased behaviors, and working independently most of my life, I could almost always walk away from it. But for many people, prejudice against their weight is a barrier to changing jobs, gaining promotions, getting the housing they want, entering the hottest parties at the best clubs, being accepted into fraternities or sororities, even being taken seriously by their doctors. Thousands of social situations, dozens of times a day, the overweight person has to negotiate assumptions about who they are that just don't match what they know about themselves.

So now, for me, the experience of not managing all of that is a bit startling. Where I'm used to meeting people and then being immediately dismissed, overlooked, passed over, today when I meet people for the first time, there are questions. Where am I from? What am I reading? Where did I get those shoes? What a lovely handbag. I blink, and step back as if the lights are too strong. I'm not used to having this much conversation this quickly. Are you talking to me? I look around. Indeed. I often handle it awkwardly.

It's as if I've cast off a big shell, and now I feel vulnerable. I'm soft-skinned, exposed to light and rain and air. People can see me, when apparently they couldn't before. Or thought they couldn't. Or didn't want to. And so, they want to know more when they didn't before. Being left to myself, able to achieve a certain invisibility in a room was a useful stance for an old introvert. I could observe the room. Able to look at everyone, pick up on nonverbal clues, I could sponge up the subtext of any meeting. But now, when I look at someone, they usually look back.

Whoa! What are they doing?

I can't passively observe. I'm present. People can see me.

I'll file this under rewards, because for the most part, I think, it is a reward. I believe I like being visible more than I liked being invisible. But invisibility had its uses. Some days, I actually miss it.

The Invisible Man
Seniors turn invisible too
Fat bias in medical care

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Down for the Count: Why are we so reluctant to add up our food?

2003-11-19T06:00:00.000-05:00

Down for the Count?
Why are we so reluctant to add up our food?

I saw it again the other day, a phrase in an otherwise lovely book about diet and nutrition, where the writer refers to the "tedium of counting calories," and recommends some way around the horror of addition and making lists.

I just don't understand. Why is counting calories and nutrients so much more abhorrent than counting exchanges, servings, points? Why do we buy into this notion that reading labels and counting protein, fat, carbohydrates and calories are too hard for the average person to do? That it's so much more complicated than checking off boxes, following a formula? Do we really imagine people are incapable of this simple act?

It's so easy to find this information. It's printed right on the packaging or readily available online or in simple nutrient counting books. So, can someone explain to me why we feel it's necessary to devise diet after diet specifically to help people avoid a.) writing down what they've eaten today, and b.) what the values of that food are?

It strikes me that reading the nutrition labels is just plain good training. Something we should all do from an early age. We should know what the values of our foods are so we know when we're eating well and when we're not. Satiety can't tell the whole story. Instinct doesn't completely work. If it did, few of us would be fat.

When we tell ourselves that counting and reading labels is tedious, complicated, boring, annoying, we build a communal idea that this is hard work. But it is not hard work. Nothing could be easier or more straightforward. Nothing could be better for reinforcing nutrient and calorie awareness day after day until you develop a sense for the counts you need each day to sustain your body and/or lose weight.

Counting and tracking your food and reading labels helps us develop an internal database, building it as we go, negotiating with our appetites, understanding our favorite foods, local snack options. We can better manage the foods that we are most likely to encounter with this sort of learning, rather than try to surround ourselves with some diet author's preferred foods, an artificial diet we would have a hard time sustaining after our interest in the diet scheme has worn off.

By learning to count what we know, what we actually eat, we can make smarter choices. We then learn from experience that we can fill up on a green salad for just a few calories and lots of nutrients, and that shortbread cookies "cost" us a lot for very little nutritional value or bulk. We are able to make smart choices without sacrificing that occasional cookie.

Learning by counting our food is the sane and sustainable choice, to my mind. It allows us each to eat as we will, what we will, when we will, the way we need to, and all of it under our own control.

Of course you can count. Of course it's easy. Spread the word, willya?

Jonny Bowden on calories and their place

Count stuff here

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There's No Feeling Like Fit: For the holidays

2003-11-18T03:00:00.000-05:00

There's No Feeling Like Fit
For the holidays

Excuses for not working out can really start multiplying this time of year. Nothing feels worse than putting on 5, 10, 15 pounds or more through holiday errands, plotting, and partying while you're losing muscle tone. It happens when all the extra errands and holiday eats have 'forced' you to lose control of your diet and stop moving. It doesn't have to happen that way. There is no law of holiday physics we're battling here. Just bad habits and insidious behaviors. We are clever enough to shake both of those off.

You can find or invent plenty of ways to keep moving during the big end-of-year dance. One tactic is to overshoot your goals, making plans to bump up your effort, giving yourself the gift of even greater fitness by the end of the year. Or go the other way, and keep moving while temporarily cutting back on your workouts, saving a little time for gift gathering and giving by getting a half hour in each day or every other day instead of a full hour. Meantime, find sneaky ways to move your body while managing your traditional year-end maniacal multitasking:

*Start an active Thanksgiving day tradition. A long family walk, bike ride, canoe trip, or game of hoops before or after dinner is good.
*A Thanksgiving weekend romp through some woods to collect wildflowers, seedpods, branches, and cones for your table and decorations will make romping productive and help everyone in your household make the transition into the season.
*Go cut your own tree this year, or get a potted one from a nursery and plant it at the end of the season. If you live in a cold climate, you may want to dig that hole now.
*Consider starting an inter-generational touch football league with tournament play throughout the season. Include everybody.
*Record holiday music for your workout walkman or MP3 player. Might help reinforce the idea that holiday time is workout time, too.
*Shopping for all those presents can help you burn calories if you shop on foot instead of online or by catalog.
*Find or stage a New Year's Day race or walkathon and start training for it.
*Take the family to some place warm or some place snowy for the holidays where swimming, walking, skiing, making snow angels, skating, running, playing are part of the scene.
*Host holiday parties that include some activity. Skating and dancing are good and traditional. But yoga parties are a new rage, and can really be a gift to your stressed out friends.
*Replace the cookie exchange party with a gift-paper-decorating party. Hire a massage therapist to give your friends shoulder and neck rubs.
*Give your family and friends gift certificates for yoga, dance, workout classes they can take with you.
*Open your fitness gifts early to get a jump-start on your New Year's resolutions. A new pair of running shoes, swim fins, a pedometer, a balance ball, new Pilates tapes or a family treadmill can be just the motivation you need to move more through this season.
*Hire a personal trainer just for the holidays, just for you, or split the cost with a couple of friends. Sometimes it's easier to meet an obligation to someone else than it is to yourself.
*Sign up for a new class now with a significant other. Spending quality time sweating may be the only time you get with your sweetie when the days become jumbled.
*Keep the dumbbells and a balance ball and therabands in the kitchen. Use them while waiting for those cookies to bake. You can do a lot of reps in the 8 or 9 minutes between batches. It'll take some explaining when it's time to clean the dough from the grips.
*Play music with a good dancing beat while cleaning the house and decorating. Move that booty while you dust, primp, deck your halls. This is supposed to be a joyful time. Make it so!
*Make a sticky note that says "The best gift I can give myself and my family is a healthier me. And the only way to give it to them is to move." Post it in your dayplanner, on your bathroom mirror, somewhere you're likely to see it every day between now and the new year.

Plan now. Don't take no for an answer. Exercise even when you are too tired to move. You will curse me then but thank me later. It's 10:30 at night as I write this, but I'm going to do some situps now. Yuck.

Beat Winter Weight Gain, from Shape
Thanksgiving Weekend Races listed at Coolrunning.com

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Thunder Thighs? Find freedom from friction

2003-11-17T06:05:00.000-05:00

Thunder Thighs?
Find freedom from friction

I've got my dad's thighs. Long, muscular, meaty. In my youth they were my biggest complaint. Thunder thighs, we used to call them. Thighs that upset the ratio I needed to fit into my Levis. Buying jeans to fit my thighs left waistbands bagging ridiculously. These thighs made linebackers jealous. These thighs could propel me up a flight of 100 stairs without breaking a pant.

These thighs chafed.

As I grew heavier, they chafed more. Scraping seams together with every step, I wore through jeans and cords, tights and leggings within a single season.

Summers were miserable. Trying to go without hose in the summer gave me prickly heat rashes that took weeks to heal. Shorts rode up between my legs and bunched in my crotch at every third step.

Losing the weight and growing older (perimenopause brings a shifting of weight that helps pare down those thighs, finally) have brought me relief for the first time in my life. Today my thighs barely know one another, and I find that I'm actually wearing the same pair of slacks in their third winter. That's a first for me. That goes on my rewards list.

What rewards list? This is the list you keep in you log or journal where you record the things you've achieved through your weight loss and fitness efforts. This is where you record your loosened rings, the first sighting of hip bone, your greater flexibility, your increased strength, your improved sleep, days without heartburn, more lustrous hair, all the things healthier eating and regular exercise have brought you so far. Keep this list handy for the days when you're feeling a little blue, a little unmotivated.

Meantime, if rubbing thighs are getting the best of you, look into silk leggings. Wintersilks carries a nice, lightweight silk longjohn for women and men. They're light and airy enough to work under anything this season, and relieve your thighs from the pain of friction, release your slacks and shorts from climbing up your legs. Unfortunately they come in sizes only up to XL.

But then look also at Spanx hose in thigh-length and calf-length styles for giving your keester and tummy seamless control and your thighs some movement and tone under anything you wear this winter.

Talc is your friend. A soothing, medicated one will provide both immediate relief and help ward off prickly heat wherever your body parts chafe. I liked Gold Bond Medicated Powder myself.

Runners use a special goo called Bodyglide to ward off blisters and chafing during long distance events. I discovered this stuff while my thighs still met, and it worked miracles in my early running days. Kept the blisters off my feet too. I expect it would help best in the worst of the summer heat. It's worth a try.

Try everything, friends. It's so much better to find the solution to chafing thighs so you can keep moving comfortably rather than sitting still so you don't chafe. You know?

Wintersilks Long Johns
Spanx
Gold Bond at drugstore.com
Body Glide

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The Joy of Soup: Filling up, feeling warm

2003-11-15T06:05:00.000-05:00

The Joy of Soup
Filling up, feeling warm

We eat lots of soups around this house. Since giving up saturated and trans fats and shunning empty carbs, we're finding that soups, especially ones we make ourselves, help us keep calories down and nutrients way up while easily filling our stomachs. I love making fast vegetable soups in the winter to drive the cold from my bones, fill up on phytonutrients, and infuse the house with cozy aromas.

Soups, like salads, will serve as great appetite managers, filling your tummy before you hit the main course at home or while dining out, curbing your hunger so you eat less of the fattening stuff.

So I was delighted the other day to run across joyofsoup.com, where another half-crazed blogger has established a beautiful collection of soups, which she shows off alongside her collection of soupware. Go there to find soups to lose weight by, soups to serve on a busy day, soups to serve when you have a lot of time, and loads of links for soup cookbooks.

The author of this plog (soup + blog = plog) is Susan Rizkalla, a registered nurse living in central New Jersey on the shore. Surrounded by engineers and engineering students (husband, son, daughter) who judge the soup recipes, her site's real function is to showcase her Stangl pottery collection. The soup is a ruse.

Why Stangl? Because that company, based in New Jersey, dug up New Jersey clay to make their wares. Susan is a proud Jersey girl. The patterns and pieces from the 40s, 50s, and 60s especially speak to her.

Because Susan follows the Sommersize plan for low-carb eating, her "soups to lose weight by" are creamy, cheesy, and lovely. But you'll also find a version of the ever-popular cabbage soup, if you're feeling a need to cut calories to the quick.

Do take a minute to visit this terrific site, and do try soup for dinner.

The Joy of Soup
Feeling full on fewer calories - Mayo Clinic
Close to 1,000 soups at epicurious.com

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Which Diet Works Best? The answer may surprise you

2003-11-14T16:46:00.000-05:00

Which Diet Works Best?
The answer may surprise you

Well, hey, there's actually some good news to report on the subject of weight loss: Researchers at Tufts studied Atkins, the Zone, Ornish and WeightWatchers, to see which diet works best, leaves its subjects healthiest. And the ruling is: They all work. They're all reasonably healthy choices. The differences among them are not stunning enough to be worth the extra keystrokes to describe them.

I have further news for you from my own extensive field research, on a population of 1: Cabbage soup, Scarsdale, Optifast, American Diabetes Association, Slimfast, Diet Center, Jenny Craig, South Beach, Subway, ediets, iShape, and the old hotdog, egg, and banana diet all work too. They're not all good for you, and some of them are too gross, complicated, annoying to sustain. But they do work.

They all work. Every one. All diets and bariatric surgery ultimately work the same way: They help you reduce the number of calories you eat. So you lose weight.

And people like all of these methods because they help you lose weight without requiring you to think very much or learn the calorie values of the food you eat. They offer formulas, are not complicated. They are Something New. And at least for awhile, when you hate your body the most, you can follow any diet. Anybody's instructions.

But if you have more than 5 to 20 pounds to lose, you need to choose a weight loss method that you can live with over a long period of time. Or you can plan for your boredom and switch from one plan to another every three months, just to keep yourself interested. Or, you can count calories, read labels, learn about nutrition, and find your own way to manage your own body.

My best advice is to look for a program that promises you continuous learning. If you think your weight gain is mainly due to nutritional ignorance, then pick a program that teaches you to balance your diet and read your labels. (Willett's Eat, Drink, And Be Healthy, WeightWatchers, Atkins)

If you think your weight gain is primarily due to bad habits and an unhealthy relationship with food, then look for a program that helps you manage behavioral issues (Optifast, Overeaters' Anonymous, private counseling)

Or get a group of friends, some good software or a good nutrition counter and start counting calories and nutrients and talking to one another. You will soon learn to make wise choices. You will soon understand the pros and cons between eating a banana and eating a Krispy Kreme donut.

Try different things, remain aware, read and write things down, log your diet experiences, and note how you feel on each diet you try. You may find that Atkins helps you control your hunger and eliminates your heartburn. And that makes it the best diet for you. You may find that WeightWatchers lets you keep your beloved chocolate, and that makes it make sense for who you are. If Ornish's plan makes you feel more secure about the state of your heart valves, well you can't buy that kind of assurance with all the bullion in his bank account. Go for it. Zonies get to work the numbers. And working the numbers is kind of fun if you like numbers.

Trust your own judgment. If you grow too constricted or bored, move to the next diet. Document your feelings, your concerns, your achievements in a log. Keep track of what you like, what you don't, what you find confusing, and what you find comforting. You'll soon know what the best fit is, or whether you need to strike out on your own, learning your own best path to controlled, healthy eating and regular exercise.

However you choose to drop the weight, if you are able to maintain your motivation, at some point you come to the other end of your dieting. When you reach your weight goal, if you haven't developed good new habits and destroyed bad old habits, then you're going to have a very difficult time maintaining your new body. At some point, you will need to drop the formula and learn about your own body and mind and how they react to food and exercise.

So do try on the maintenance programs for each diet you attempt. Don't wait until you've lost all your weight to learn about the maintenance plan. Read ahead and prepare yourself for that phase well in advance of reaching it.

Actually using the maintenance plan would put you in the vast minority of dieters, most of whom read the front third of any diet book only, lose some weight or a substantial amount, and then revert to their old eating habits, quickly regaining the weight they lost. The diet doctors put those maintenance plans in there for a reason, not just to use up trees. Give them a gander and plan ahead to complete a year or two of maintenance work before your new weight "sticks."

Washington Post Covers Tufts Study: Take your pick
Reuters reports on it

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Baby Fat: What is beautiful?

2003-11-13T17:25:00.000-05:00

Baby Fat
What is beautiful?

I'm writing this evening with a stupid grin stuck inside my face. I try to wipe it off, focus, get serious, but I can't.

Here. I'll try to furrow my brow. Okay, I'm furrowing.

Ach! Nope. No, I can't make it stick. It doesn't last. My eyebrows spread and rise right back up, my face pulls back into that satisfied smile.

No, my deadlines haven't been met. My email is not cleared. I haven't paid my bills or readied my tax files. I owe everybody something. My dog is still sick.

I'll tell you: Liam was born last night.

Well that's not quite true.

I'll try again: Liam's mom gave birth to him last night.

That's telling the truth. And I had the undeserved honor of being there and trying to help.

Liam's mom is 40. She had her first baby at 38. Liam is baby two.

Liam's mom is a strong woman. She has strength in her heart and mind and body. And like a lot of people we know, she has struggled with liking her body, despite all its brains and ability. She's always thought of this part or that being too big or too small, picked on her pieces like they were parts on a deformed chicken in a butcher shop, very objectively.

Let me tell you, she's liked her body a lot better in the past two years, now that she sees what it's capable of doing.

She put on plenty of weight with her first baby, and then worked hard to take it right off again after he was born. She put on a bunch of weight with Liam too, and is already looking forward to dumping it. And she'll do it. Carefully and methodically.

But I have to say I've never seen anything more beautiful than her baby fatted body. There have been a lot of art museums in my upbringing. I've seen one or two too many Italian cathedrals. So my standard of beauty has always been high. It is now a lot higher.

We put Liam's mom into a tub to let the water jets ease some of her pain. And there she was, the way she herself was born, a not very big woman with a big baby in her belly, her eyes closed, focused on breathing through contraction after contraction as she waited him out. Managing the pain. Working it through. No makeup, no fashion, no polish. She was beautiful, just beautiful.

And then it was time. Liam's mom pulled an awesome kind of power from that fueled up body of hers to push her big baby out into his first breath of air, into the big old world. And he came surfing out, on a wave of his own private ocean, spreading his arms wide, hollering at the air and light, and making us all his own in very short order.

Well, it happened the way these things happen. The way births happen every quarter of a second, everywhere. Right now, even.

I haven't given anybody birth and won't have that chance. But I'm of a mind at the moment to kiss and adore the potential of my female body today. All my own blotches, splotches, bumps, and scars, largenesses and smallnesses, droopinesses and flappinesses. The wimpering wimpiness of cellulite complaints and thundery thigh sighs, rants of breast envy and derriere deficiencies all seem far from possible today. Our womanly complaints about our female forms? Kind of cuckoo. Because you can't argue with the design. And you can't argue with the capability. And you can't argue with the result.

Girls! Look what our bodies can do! And even if, like me, your body hasn't had the chance to do it, and won't, you're a woman. You're a monster! You have that kind of strength, that kind of power inside you. We all do. We all can find it and use it for making babies or making some other kind of new noise in the old world.

So let's just say you get pregnant and go a bit Botticelli for a year? Or two? Let's make up our minds right now that this IS beauty. Laying in stores for the big event. Smart. Loving. Gorgeous. A beautiful thing, this baby fat. Because, because, because it IS.

And trading on the idea that it isn't is just plain crazy. No society has ever thought so before. Why should ours? We shouldn't say it, think it, pass the idea along to our daughters. It's crazy talk.

Ah, you should see him.

He's beautiful.

And so is she.

Botticelli's birthing scene
Baby Center's pregnancy weight gain estimator
Maternity styles are shifting

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A Little Time Management Riff: Getting over your busy self

2003-11-12T16:35:00.000-05:00

A Little Time Management Riff
Getting over your busy little self

Get to know a few fat people. Go out of your way to meet heavy folks, and you'll begin to understand that this entire third of the adult population is not, in fact, lacking in accomplishment, dedication, capability, productivity.

Not at all. Get to know these tens of millions of folks, one at a time, of course, and you will meet people who manage entire businesses, run civic organizations, raise wonderful or difficult children, or both, discover genetic clues to cures for intractable diseases. You'll meet brilliant parents, teachers, nurses, administrators, doctors, lawyers, journalists.

You're likely to meet people who give and give and give. They're booked. They're busy. They're multitasking. And they're fat.

And there is a link there. A vast majority of the people I talk with each day who are struggling to lose weight are struggling primarily with the issue of Time. Ah Time! My friend and foe. The scheduling nightmare. The "to do" list, the priorities, the pressure. The daily pressure to get it all done. The Franklin, the Palm that rules and plots every minute of every day.

Taking full responsibility for their girth, knowing that they let their bodies get away from them over the years, these so-so-so-busy people now find it difficult, if not impossible, to rob any of their commitments or dependants for the time to eat well and especially to exercise.

Not that it takes all that much time, frankly. But they are embarrassed. They feel guilty. They got themselves into this state, and now, what? Is the whole world supposed to wait for them to go to the gym? To attend a meeting? To prepare vegetables? To deal with this state of fatness that should have never happened?

Well, yes. In short, yes.

And the interesting thing is, it happens all the time. Once you get big enough, sick enough, hurt enough, your whole world will wait for you to do these things. Because the world must. The sooner you start, the better it is, the faster your world will adjust.

As soon as you start, you'll begin to notice that the guy on the treadmill next to you is a partner in a law office and the president of the local SPCA. And the lady on the stair-step machine runs her own business, too. You'll run into people in the produce aisle who hold down a job, attend classes, and coach kids' softball. You'll note that the whole world stops for these folks. Why not for you?

Watch the news and see how the world literally does stop for the leaders of the world to get in their daily jog. You'll begin to see treadmills in the corners of executive offices, and understand that your company offers a discount for membership at the nearby gym. Somebody must be using those discounts. Aren't those people busy too? Or are you the only one?

Oh.

Yes, in fact, the whole world can make room for you to do the things you need to do to maintain your body. No matter who you are, no matter what excuses you're currently making, or what mythology you've created about your schedule.

I'll just bet you're the nicest martyr we've ever met, but despite that, you're not actually so much more important than everyone else that the world cannot possibly do without you for the half hour it actually takes every day to get and stay fit. For the half hour-to-hour it actually takes every day to prepare and consume healthy meals.

The fact that you didn't choose to take care of yourself today had nothing to do with whether you had time. You had time. You just didn't do it.

I mean, um, I didn't do it.

Darn it.

I'm going to do a little yoga now. Right NOW.

University of Iowa tips for fitting it in

Read this one all the way to the end, please

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Super Food: Getting enough nuts and seeds?

2003-11-11T11:18:00.000-05:00

Super Food
Getting enough nuts and seeds?

Regular readers have picked up on a theme: I eat a lot of nuts, nut oils, nut butters. Never sweetened, but often salty. Loads of almonds, sometimes raw. It's hazelnut and walnut and grapeseed oil (along with olive oil, of course), making up my salad and cooking oil selection.

My goal of a daily first course of a cup or two of greens, dressed in a tiny bit of hazelnut or walnut oil and salt and pepper, keeps me from overeating anything else at supper time.

I counted calories, of course, while losing weight, and allowed for a full 35 to 40 percent of my calories to come from fat, so long as I knew I was getting my fat calories from good sources, from nuts and seeds and fish oils that build, rather than tear down my health. That's a lot of calories from fat, but fighting insulin resistance, a precursor to diabetes, made that a good choice for me.

Almonds and unsweetened almond butter that I get from a natural foods store are nearly a daily treat. Now that I've cut cracker, pretzel, and chip consumption out of my diet (well, that's my rule anyhow, sometimes broken), almonds, walnuts, and pumpkin and sunflower seeds in the shell have taken over to fulfill the salty/crunchy craving.

I'm generally pushing deadlines at work, and rarely take the time for a proper meal. When I haven't stopped to eat lunch, a tablespoon of almond butter a couple of times in the day will at least get me home to that pile of greens. Almost a magic food for me, a tablespoon of almond butter or an ounce of almonds will turn hunger off like a switch for a good two hours.

I don't worry about my cholesterol count, because it's always been really low, even when I was heavy. My nut consumption may be playing a part in that, it turns out. Studies are showing that fatty acids commonly found in nuts and seeds may help lower bad cholesterol, increase good cholesterol, help ward off heart disease.

Grapeseed oil is my new favorite cooking oil after olive oil. It has a lighter flavor and has a higher smoking point. I never fry anything, mainly because I can't be bothered with the mess, but will quickly grill or sauté just about anything, for the speed and flavor. Grapeseed oil goes a long way. I use less of it, a brush on non-stick pans, when quickly cooking up asparagus, summer squashes, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, fennel, onions and peppers. It's a ginger-flavored grapeseed oil for sautéed celery, one of my favorite veggies alongside pork this time of year. Grapeseed is my oil for proteins, too, especially tofu, fish and shrimp.

Because nuts helped rather than hurt my own weight loss efforts, I wasn't surprised to see a WebMD.com article about a weight loss study that showed daily almond consumption helping a bunch of dieters lose weight more comfortably while improving their health.

It may be hard to get over the fear of nuts and seeds if you're too young to remember life before the low-fat craze hit, because they are calorie-dense foods. But they have a place in your diet. Give them a try.

And please use moderation and the common sense you were born with when choosing and consuming your nuts and nut products. The FDA recently gave a nod to food producers who will soon label their products with a heart-healthy claim for foods containing almonds, hazelnuts, pecans, pistachios, walnuts, and peanuts. Proceed with caution. The healthiest nut consumption, as for any food, happens with nuts and seeds that have been handled as little as possible. Raw is best. Lightly roasted next. Oils should be cold-pressed rather than heat-expelled. And fresh, fresh, fresh. Buy in small quantities, store in cool and dark, and use these foods soon.

The soaked, slivered, sugared, parched nut flakes and nut dust you're about to see adhered with syrups to every conceivable brand of highly processed cereal and gummy baked goods? Those won't count for much, lovies.

Harvard School for Public Health on fats. Please read.
Tufts on nuts
WebMD almond diet article

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Respecting Consistency: Mom inspires new exercise goals

2003-11-10T07:17:00.000-05:00

Respecting Consistency
Mom inspires new exercise goals

I trained hard in the late summer, early fall, for a road race. Ran just about every day. Kept up with Pilates classes too. I was completely focused on training my body to do more, go farther. Then I got a little ill. And a lot busy. And I haven't been making classes, running, walking, or even really stretching, something I always do, each night.

This winding down has gone on for almost a month. Working hard, writing feverishly, thinking a lot about exercise without actually engaging in it. I've done a little yoga, but not enough to make progress, just enough to keep my body from locking up completely.

Finally last week, my friend and I joined a new gym, one close to the office, where we can duck out for lunch or between client meetings, where the equipment is plentiful, the showers warm, the towels thick.

I hopped on the elliptical machine.

The last time I hopped on an elliptical machine, I was running 8-10 miles at a go. The machine struck me as completely ineffective, kind of cute, but a little bit of a waste of time. That was only six weeks ago.

Last week, with the machine set at its lowest resistance, I stayed on for a half an hour, alright, but I struggled, was bathed in sweat, everything burning from my waist down. I waddled like a duck to the weight room, where I had to drop 15 lbs. per dumbbell for my curls, 10 for triceps curls.

Well. Dang.

It turns out you have to use it or lose it.

My weight, understand, hasn't increased appreciably. Three or four lbs. A bit high. After just a week back at the gym, it dropped right back into place.

But I'm weak like a kitten. And I don't like that.

I'm glad for the wakeup call of my weak performance. While it's a great thing to give your body a break now and then from your exercise routine, a really helpful thing to switch types of exercise, classes, machines, tapes, tools, taking too long of a break brings on atrophy. Getting in shape is just not something you check off your to do list. You can't call it a day.

Saturday afternoon my mom and I walked through the cold, cold last-gold-leaved forest to salute Lake Michigan. We walked straight up a pretty steep hill that used to knock me over 100 lbs. ago. Mom is a tad over 70 years old, and trying to adjust to the idea that she'll winter here instead of Florida this year. So, bearing her 10-lb. Michigan winter-resisting heavy weather coat on her back, she hiked that hill with me.

That's what I want. I want to be as tough and strong as she is when I'm 70-something. When I'm 90-something. At 110.

I have the genes for it, but I have to fight nature a bit. After we turn 20 we start losing muscle. As much as a half a pound of muscle per year. We counteract that with strength work, with weight-bearing exercise. My mom does. Pool aerobics and walking, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, hitting the weight room in their retirement apartment complex.

I just have to keep up with my mom. Taking a month off from exercise is simply not going to get me there. Okay. I climbed back on my horsey. Finally. With the encouragement, prodding, and poking of several readers. Thanks for that, folks. What I need more than anything is a goal to get me going. And climbing the hill outside my house on my 70th birthday is a pretty good one. I'm going to start training for that.

How about your long-range exercise goals? What would you like to be able to do when you're 70, if you aren't already? When you're 90? And what do you have to do to get there from here?

Write it down.

AFPA on beating atrophy with aerobics and weight training
National Space Biomedical Research Institute Studies Atrophy

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Adventurous Eating: Don't bore yourself

2003-11-08T17:18:00.000-05:00

Adventurous Eating
Don't bore yourself

I've never had an Asian pear before. I ordered some from a mail-order produce place, just to see what they were. Ordered up some fresh figs, too. What a week we've had, munching on these new fruits. The figs have gone in the salad, and accompanied a good brie. The pears have been mid-morning snacks, a wild delight of texture and flavor. Like no other fruit I've tried. And I've tried plenty.

It's so easy, while working to lose or maintain weight, to focus on limiting your choices. We focus so much on what we can't eat, and forget to explore what we can. I've got a pile of beet greens waiting in the fridge. I can't remember the last time I cooked or ate beet greens. But I'm really looking forward to wilting them down with some shallots, dressing them in a bit of walnut oil. Maybe a bit of ginger will steam with them.

I'm going to eat a healthy breakfast tomorrow morning, then spend some time looking about for whole grain stuff. Whole grain pastas especially. Or that Pappadini Lentil pasta. Then I'm going to go on a bean bender, looking for something besides navy or pinto beans and chick peas. I'm going to go looking for adzuki and borlotti beans. Widen my horizons. Stretch my limits.

It's going to be fun, looking for healthy foods that will contribute to my focus on eating within my limits, rather than just focusing on limiting my eating.

And you? Is it time you expanded your repertoire of foods and recipes to help you remain interested in your new way of eating? Maybe for you it's not a new foodstuff, but a new cookbook, or a recipe swapping website, or how about organizing a low-cal gourmet club among friends? Setting rules for the maximum calories in a dinner?

This is not about losing interest in food, friends. It's about gaining interest in healthier habits.

Asian Pears

Black Mission Figs

Cool Beans

Whole Wheat and Lentil Pastas

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The Secret of Your Success: Start writing your memoirs now

2003-11-07T15:53:00.000-05:00

The Secret of Your Success
Start writing your memoirs now

Of course this time your diet will be a wild success.

You've made great progress, lost a few pounds, started a new exercise program. It's all under control. The question is, why will it work for you this time? What made it click?

This morning over coffee, a buddy referred to "the mythical switch," that successful dieters are able to flip. Where is that switch, and what makes it possible, after trying and failing several times, to find it, finally find the conviction within oneself to stick to a program, commit to the long haul, lose extra weight, regain health by eating better and exercising?

For many people the switch is plain old fear: Your body begins to break down, and you're not ready for that. For some, it's a job change, or loss, that opens up time for working out, cooking healthier meals. For some it's having kids that brings the responsibility of modeling healthy behaviors home to roost.

What will be the secret to your success? This is a journal writing assignment. Start from the point of view of two years in the future. Sitting there in your new, older, healthier body, write down what it was that made it work for you this time. What made it click? What made it work? Was it a conviction? A new set of habits? A decision? A revelation? What finally gave you the power over food? Over inertia?

You will want to write this as if you were recording it for future generations of your own family, so they can learn from you, so you can help them. So they have a kind voice from their own nest who can help guide them. What would you want to say to future family members?

If you don't keep a weight loss and fitness journal, well, consider it. This is a great first writing assignment for a habit that has been shown over and over again to help people stick to their diets longer, form new, better exercise and eating habits faster.

If you freeze when writing anything, pretend you're writing a letter or email to a young person you know. Conjure that person in your mind's eye, and just talk to them on paper, or on screen.

Write it all out. No need to edit if you don't want to. No one will grade your work. But do save what you've written. On days when things don't seem to be going well, pull it out and read it again, just to remind yourself why it's going to work this time.

The Secret of My Success

Jim Karas' "Flip the Switch"

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Top Ten Weight Gain Tips: How to live your life to ensure maximum mass

2003-11-05T16:44:00.000-05:00

Top Ten Weight Gain Tips
How to live your life to ensure maximum mass

(Ed note: If you're an actual skinny person, looking to gain weight, keep looking. This article is a bit of comedy, an inside joke for people working hard to lose weight. A good laugh. Get it? No? That's okay. It's our joke.)

Suzfehr from the weightwatchers.com message boards gave us today's topic, and half wrote it too. Her premise: Let's say you're a skinny starlet who needs to put on weight fast to get a part in a movie, playing the plump love interest, sort of, of Hugh Grant? What would you do to put on weight as fast as possible?

We could make millions advising these actresses:

10.
Always eat while watching TV.
That includes meals and snacks. Also eat while reading. And bathing. In front of the TV, try to choose mushy, soft food so you can still hear the dialogue. Cans of frosting and peanutbutter work pretty well. Save crunchy snacks for commercial breaks. If you find your weight gain slowing down or hitting a plateau, you're probably not watching enough TV. If you alternate sweet with salty foods, you'll pack more in.

9.
Eat when you're upset.
Or mad. Or hurt. Or happy. Or confused. Or sad. Or cranky. Or tired. Or eat when you feel nothing, but want to feel something. Food is enormously comforting. There's hard science to back that up. In a pinch, food can replace all other means of coping.

8.
Do not plan meals.
Our ancesters were hunters and gatherers. Eating should be an adventure! Planning takes all the joy and excitement out of consumption. You'll never put on your maximum weight if you plan your meals.

7.
Celebrate everything with cake.
Not just because it's what your ancestors have always done, always, always. Do it because there is nothing like the combination of white flour, sugar, and saturated fat to lay on the blubber. Donuts work just as well and are a very festive substitute. Someone, somewhere is having a birthday or anniversary today. Surely.

6.
Identify with fatness.
Focus. Try to visualize yourself at your biggest and fattest. If you can identify yourself as a fat person, build your whole self image around bigness and roundness, you'll never slip into the habits of a thin person by mistake.

5.
Stress load now.
Try to maintain as much stress in your life as you possibly can. The more stress, the more your body fights to hold on to fat. Stress will pretty much ensure your hard work at gaining weight will not go unrewarded. Over-book, over-commit, over-do, over-promise everything. Over-expect, over-much from yourself. Always. It's the only sure way to keep that weight on.

4.
Eat it before someone else does.
Eat as much as you can as fast as you can before anybody else eats it first. Be sure to get yours. You never know when you'll get another chance at a package of Oreos. They may stop manufacturing them any minute, and then where would you be?

3.
Eat at night, all night.
Four hours before bedtime, begin to graze constantly. You should be swallowing your last bite just as you crawl between the sheets. Set your alarm to wake you up two or three times during the night to eat some more. Follow any meal with some sleeping time, so you're sure to signal your body you have no immediate need for those calories.

2.
Avoid water.
Water has no calories and tends to fill your stomach up. Avoid it at all costs. You need to fill up with calorie-rich food and drink. If you're going to drink something, choose something rich, sweet, or alcoholic to pump up your energy load. Warmed up palm oil is ideal.

And the number one way to gain as much weight as possible:

1.
Do not move.
Try to remain as inactive as possible. Park your car as close to the door as you can at work, when shopping, when visiting friends. Try to choose inactive work. Take elevators, escalators. If you can sit instead of stand, do it. If you can lie down instead of sit, do that. Really think before acting: Is it worth burning off that precious energy? Send others to fetch things for you. Children are especially good for this. They can bring you food in front of the TV, for instance. Preserve your girth. Stay still.

(With thanks to David Letterman and his writers and anyone and everyone responsible to or especially holding the trademark rights to "Top Ten" lists.)

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Crossing My Legs: The great goal

2003-11-04T18:03:00.000-05:00

Crossing My Legs
The great goal

Yesterday: I sat in a long meeting. Never successful at sitting still. Too much caffeine and natural-born fidgetiness. I crossed and uncrossed my legs a dozen times, perching first on one hip, and then on the other, slowly twisting this part and that, trying to unstick stuck parts. It was a big meeting among friends. I could get away with it.

Switch scenes: This morning, the alarm went off much, much too early, but the same time as any other morning. We were already awake. Dear hubby and I each made our list of all the things that went wrong in the night. Bad dreams, night sweats, dog problems, headaches, stiff muscles. The litany of the middle aging. As he got up to make the coffee, I realized I was lying there, knees up, with one leg crossed over the other, and then the calves crossed back again. Double-crossed legs. When could I ever do that?

Childhood: The day you begin crossing your legs while sitting is something your parents notice. They think it's a hoot. You look like a little adult.

Adulthood: The day you are no longer able to cross your legs is something you note all by yourself. It's a sad day. Whether pregnancy or weight or injury or illness brings it on, it's a sad day. You want to participate in the adultness of that particular posture. But you can't. It may seem like a small thing on the scale of possible disabilities, but still, it is a loss of ability that rankles. Ask 100 truly overweight people what they look forward to most about losing weight, and you'll hear this a lot, "I just want to be able to cross my legs again."

I did not give up the ability easily, pretended to be able to cross my legs when I couldn't. One method was to pantomime finger-pressing the crease of my pants while using my pant leg to sling one leg into position over the other.

Another technique was to prop the crossed leg in place by wedging the foot against a table leg. This put a great deal of pressure on my knee, by the way. I don't recommend it.

Or I shifted my weight onto the lower hip to keep the upper leg in place.

But I stopped trying to kid myself when my crossed leg pretty much stuck straight out, perpendicular to the floor and I couldn't maintain it without giving myself a groin pull.

When I stopped crossing my legs, I fixated on people who could. Studied starlets and diplomats on talk shows, performing their public duties. The ones who can cross their legs appear to be much more confident than the ones who can't. Leg crossing may be bad for you (contributing to varicose veins, blood clots, back problems), but it looks great. There is an elegant confidence to it that just can't be duplicated by crossed ankles, no matter what the finishing schools may tell you.

(My mother, who received training in ladylike deportment from some fearsome French nuns, taught us to sit on the very edge of our seats, knees together, feet pulled to one side, ankles slightly crossed so it's not too, too hard to hold the position, hands lightly folded in the lap, palms up, white gloves clean, back ramrod straight, crown of head being pulled by an invisible thread. Who's holding the thread? Your guardian angel, of course. I can fall into this position now without any difficulty at all, but somehow all of my childhood pictures show me slouching, knees flung wide, glasses fallen to the end of my nose. Hat akimbo. But my gloves looked pretty good.)

At my heaviest I never lost the instinct and urge to cross my legs, despite not being able to do it for a matter of years. As I lost the weight, I'd give it a shot now and then, when no one was really looking. And then one day I did it without thinking. My lower leg still pointed a bit north, but the leg was definitely up, decidedly over.

Next I was able to cross with my lower leg hanging fairly naturally. Then I could cross my legs AND fit them under a conference table. And now, I just cross and uncross them in a most annoying way, over and over again during most meetings, impressing myself and smiling inwardly each time.

It doesn't take much to please me these days.

Posturing

Body language

Fidgeting

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Grocery Store Anxiety: Winter drives me to buy good food in bad stores

2003-11-03T08:09:00.000-05:00

Grocery Store Anxiety
Winter drives me to buy good food in bad stores

Our farmers' market is winding down. Where I live, open air produce markets of just-harvested veggies and fruits sold by the people who grow them are a seasonal luxury. They run from May until now. Now we are forced back into the grocery stores.

In the rural U.S. the friendly little mom and pop grocers have been swallowed up by local chains, which are swallowed up by regional food distributors, which are swallowed up by megastores, where people are cranky, tired, rude to one another, and unhelped by non-customer service folks in matching aqua vests. Where women are afraid to negotiate the parking lots, which run a good quarter of a mile in every direction from the building itself, which is also a quarter of a mile square.

The megastores all work much the same way, regardless of brand. You must drive quite awhile to get there, fret about where you parked your car, slog your way into the store (through the dark, the ice, the snow), and when you arrive, you will be greeted by harsh, greenish overhead lighting, a hum of electricity, and a cacophony of signage that will confuse you, won't help you find your way. The floors will be muddy, the aisles crowded. The shelves will contain every brand of everything except that particular brand of tat particular thing you came for. You will receive incorrect answers to way-finding questions from an army of clock watchers. You will not see anyone you know, ever.

It's likely that you began this adventure in an exhausted state. Now it's time to find what you came for. You may have remembered your list, or not. You may be familiar with the layout, or not. But instinct drives you to the perimeter of the building, where the food you can count on to be close to un-manufactured is displayed.

(By the way, if you're in a poorer neighborhood, the food you're offered here will not be as varied, as fresh as the food offered by the same store in the mirror bins in the more affluent neighborhoods. You don't have to trust my opinion on this, just run your own test by visiting stores in demographically different neighborhoods on the same day. You'll see what I mean. Note the vast difference in choices, quality of food, and prices just in the produce sections alone. The grocers will say they stock according to buying habits, and that's true, but habit doesn't account for the quality of the produce, the fact that it's dented and bruised. Fresh produce is expensive because it's hard to handle without bruising. Poor-quality, fattening, less nutritious food is cheaper and can be tossed about or sit on shelves forever. In the stores in poorer neighborhoods, frosting-covered baked lumps of white flour and fat will overflow the aisles, and there will be a wrinkled up old green pepper sitting in a bin for what passes as the produce area.)

The experience of shopping for groceries is often miserable. There are a few exceptions, but those exceptions tend to be expensive ones. Gourmet grocery chains, whole food grocery chains, offering the most beautiful foods at unreachable prices for most families.

What do we do?

*First, decide that buying fresh food is important for you and your family. For your health. For your neighbor's health. It's how we behave in mass that changes things.
*Write letters to your preferred grocers. Get your friends to write to them too. Ask for better produce for you and for everybody.
*Ask around. Take the time to find where the best, freshest, cheapest, most reliable source of produce is in your neighborhood or along your commute. Shop there for everything. You're your friends to tell their friends. Move the market.
*Meantime, discover your local growers. Check out www.foodroutes.org. Even in the worst climates, there are greenhouse growers supplying local restaurants and grocers and buying clubs in your area. Find out who they are and whether they support consumers. Many do. How to find them? Ask chefs at gourmet restaurants. Ask at your favorite natural foods store.
*Join a food co-op or start one. Co-ops and buying clubs have been around for ages and have done much of the work of sourcing the best, cheapest, highest quality sources of food. You may have to work a little for your supper, but you make friends along the way.
*Get home delivery. If you live in a rural area where the choices are just too limited, and your food budget can manage it, have the good stuff delivered.
*Become a grocer with a mission to build smaller, friendlier grocery shopping experiences closer to the places where people live, providing good, whole food at reasonable prices. And then let me know when you've built something close to where I live, will you?

Exception to the rule

Find Local Food

Got the cash? Have good food delivered

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Beating Your Feet: Plantar Fasciitis, my old nemesis

2003-11-02T16:06:00.000-05:00

Beating Your Feet
Plantar Fasciitis, my old nemesis

I was able to ignore my advancing weight for a very long time. It wasn't until my first weight-related injury that I was forced to acknowledge that being heavy could hurt me.

That first and most pervasive injury was plantar fasciitis, an inflammation of the plantar fascia, which runs all along the bottom of the foot, from the toes to the heel. The inflammation occurs at the juncture of the fascia and the heel, and feels as if you are being stabbed in the heel with hot iron with every step you take.

When my heels became very inflamed, after a good bit of walking, my whole foot would swell, and I would be forced into a chair, forced to spend hours icing my feet. It would get better, then flare. I tried stretching, wearing bandages, splinting at night, injections, everything.

It was the stress of carrying my extra weight that kept bringing it back.

Plantar Fasciitis is also a jock's problem, a common complaint among runners. So though I knew I hadn't earned the problem through activity, still it wasn't quite the catalyst to losing weight that I needed. Diabetes was my lifeboat. But my feet gave me an early warning signal. And still today, it's a battle scar, a weakness in my feet that I need to manage.

How? Stretching. Massage. Strength work. Boring, yes? Yes, well, a lot of maintenance just is. Grow up. Get used to it. Stretching regularly, maintaining my flexibility through evening stretches in front of the fire, in front of the T.V., while reading. Yoga helps a lot. That downward dog pose gives you the flexibility you need in your legs and ankles and feet to protect you from all manner of missteps.

Strengthening helps too, making sure the muscles in my lower legs and feet and everywhere else in my body are able to help do the work of supporting my weight as I stand, walk, and run, so all the stress doesn't land there at the bottom of the pile.

It's a terrible thing to be sidelined with foot pain. It can wipe out your mobility so quickly, or change the way you walk so you wind up hurting your knees, your hips, your back. It ages you too, too quickly.

If you're overweight now, start stretching and massaging your feet, ankles, shins just as a preventative measure. Stand against a wall, and lean into it to stretch your calves. While seated, pull your toes back toward your body with a belt or Theraband. Use your thumbs to massage that fascia that runs all along the bottom of your foot, or better yet, get a friend to do that for you. Roll your feet over cans of produce to keep that fascia flexed.

Be good to your feet, folks. Immobility is nobody's idea of fun.

Medline defining Plantar Fasciitis
Johns Hopkins on care and treatment of Plantar Fasciitis

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How to Help Someone Else: The hard truth about motivating people to lose weight

2003-11-01T22:22:00.000-05:00

How to Help Someone Else
The hard truth about motivating people to lose weight

The hard truth about motivating somebody else to lose weight?

You can't.

Losing weight has to be a decision made by the weight bearer, not their moms, dads, sibs, buddies.

Sharing the facts about the problems that extra weight may bring may help someone decide to lose weight. Sharing success stories may help someone decide to lose weight. Demonstrating healthy exercise and eating behaviors may spur someone to adopt similar behaviors.

But cajoling, teasing, hinting, bribing, begging, pleading? Withholding affection, rewards? Establishing goals for someone else to fulfill? That's almost guaranteed to do more to harm than good. What you'll manage to do is to make your heavy person feel terrible, unlovable, like they're letting you down with every breath they draw. Don't do it.

Love your overweight person, respect them, take an interest in their interests. But don't nag, and don't try to make them lose. It almost always backfires.

Model healthy behaviors. Take them places where you both can move and have fun together, change your family or workplace diet to support healthier choices.

If you have an overweight kid, go see a doctor, and let your family doctor explain what extra weight means for their future. But let it be your child's choice to actively attempt to lose weight. Let them ask you for help.

Meantime, hug them. Love them. Tell them how wonderful they are.

If and when they do decide to work on losing weight, then be there for them with your ears and your time. Just listen and hang out, accompany them to the gym and shopping for workout gear. Recognize that these are hard transitions, big personal risks. There will be successes and setbacks. Encourage them through it all.

It can be very hard to have a loved one or friend who takes no interest in losing weight when it's clear the extra weight is hard on their bodies, their health. Just wait, with love and care in your heart. Just wait.

Julie

Family Education on helping your teenage daughter

Parent Soup advice on helping younger kids

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All or Nothing Brain: The dangers of black-or-white thinking

2003-10-31T20:22:00.000-05:00

All or Nothing Brain
The dangers of black-and-white thinking

I'm keenly aware that I've had a bad week. I haven't worked out even once. My regular classes were either rescheduled or I couldn't make them. My diet has been all off track. Memories of weeks when I've been very good seem distant to me right now. I'm working hard, I'm discombobulated. There are stacks of laundry, stacks of bills. Even the desktop on my computer is a jumble of unfiled files, and I'm way behind on emails.

I have no food in my house for a decent dinner, no desire to shop.

Basically, I'm out of control.

Now, this is the perfect setup for a pig-out. This is the time when normally I would call my dear husband, have him meet me somewhere for dinner where the first course is deep fried and the last course covered in a butterscotch syrup. Or chocolate. Or both.

I would basically bury my head in some setting far from home or work and anesthetize myself with carbs of no nutritional value. If I had taken up drinking when I was younger, I'd have used a bottle. But I didn't. I took up eating.

This is also the perfect setup for giving up completely. "See?" I would have told my old self. "You are destined for fatness. Stop pretending to be a healthy, skinny person! Quit faking it!"

This is all-or-nothing brain, deciding if I'm not perfect in my diet, I may as well give up. If I can't be Gwyneth-thin, why bother eating all these veggies? If I can't work out every day or every week, why work out at all? Why have that gym membership if I can't be consistent about it? Why buy those sneakers if I'm not going to run every day? Why get all worked up about writing down calories or points or exercise goals if I don't remember to do it always and forever?

The University of Oxford Department of Psychiatry conducted one of the very rare studies of people who have lost a significant amount of weight and published the results in the International Journal of Obesity back in August. The researchers were trying to understand who maintains and who regains weight. They interviewed women who had lost a bunch of weight and found a number of psychological factors - ways of thinking - common among the regainers. Specifically:

*failure to achieve weight goals and dissatisfaction with the weight achieved
*the tendency to evaluate self-worth in terms of weight and shape
*a lack of vigilance with regard to weight control
*a dichotomous (black-and-white) thinking style
*the tendency to use eating to regulate mood

Oh.

Well, okay. I've got some work to do. But it's the black-and-white thinking that really fascinates me. Now, I'm not inclined toward a black-or-white view of the world generally. Very much attracted to grey matter. But when it's time to flog myself for my dieting and exercise behavior, it's easy for me to go there, hard for me to cope with my own transgressions, easy to berate myself, easy to lose hope for building better habits.

I have to work hard, when having weeks like this past one, not to let it mean more than it means. A bad week is just a bad week. That's all it is. We all have them. It doesn't ruin anything. It doesn't mean anything. Next week can and should and will be better. I need to remember that I have no deadline for getting healthier. I'm constantly working on it, moving in the direction of better health, every day that I suck air.

I'll have bad weeks. I'll have the flu. I'll have difficult weeks at work. I'll have hardships at home. Things will happen, the stress will get to me. But I don't need to slather food on the pain of it, and follow that up with a heaping of futility pie. I'm not good or bad, on program or off, healthy or unhealthy. Nothing I eat today will "ruin" all my good work this day nor my best intentions. No single workout or string of missed classes will transform me into a blubber ball.

There. Well. That feels better.

JuJu

International Journal of Obesity Oxford article abstract

Black-and-white thinking defined and tips for getting past it

The link between all-or-nothing thinking and depression

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Eat Your Vegetables: Eat them first, eat them lots

2003-10-30T09:02:00.000-05:00

Eat Your Vegetables
Eat them first, eat them lots

The single best thing you can do for your diet and for the diets of people you love is to eat and feed them more vegetables. More than you eat now. Way more.

I know. It's hard. It's my biggest diet challenge: getting my veggies. Buying them, cleaning them, cooking them. Liking them isn't the problem. Doing it is the problem.

The best thing we can do to overcome our vegetable-resistance is to learn all about them and to learn to cook them well. Cook them so they are delicious, coveted, yummy, anticipated, warm, filling, good. Made with care, offered with love. Like that.

Problem: Most of us grew up thawing out frozen veggies or opening cans of them. These were the foodstuffs we were forced to choke down before we could have dessert. Still a good dinnertime rule, by the way, except for most of us it would be better to skip the dessert and tweak the rule. We should eat our veggies before we are allowed to eat *anything* else: the fruit, the grain, the potato, the bread, the meat, the snack.

Fruits are good too, of course. But a quarter of you are metabolically resistant, prone to blood sugar swings, so veggies are better than fruit for you. Eat them first.

Never choke them down. Find ways to serve them that please you. That means starting with raw as well as frozen veggies.

Find the great vegetarian and vegan cookbooks or seek out vegetarian and vegan friends to help you find ways to make vegetables the main attraction. Stretch your vocabulary beyond the 5 or 6 types of vegetables you may rely on now to include some you've never tried before. You don't have to become a vegan to own a vegetarian cookbook, but we meat-eaters could really learn some things from these folks who serve up a couple of types of veggies at every meal. Forget the cereal-mix and bring a platter of grilled veggies to the next holiday party. Gauge the reaction. You will be amazed.

Aim for more color. Rich, vibrant color. Oranger squashes, greener greens. You want the phytonutrients and the fiber.

The Phy-Fi.

The phytos will protect your cells from free radicals. You will live longer in a better body. The fiber will help to ward off all manner of diseases from diabetes to many forms of cancer.

Veggies eaten before other more calorie-dense foods will help prevent overeating.

Veggies prepared with a good nut oil will stick to your ribs longer.

You're aiming for 9 half-cup servings per day. At least five, but 9 is better, and 12 would really help you lose weight. More if you're hungry. Let yourself fill up on these lowest-calorie foods, satisfy your body with their spectacular nutrient content. You will crave less, feel full more.

Start with your leafy greens. The darker the better. Mix up or trade your iceberg for romaine or Boston or bib, add raw spinach and other greens. If you're a bagged lettuce fan, buy by the color. The darker the green the better. Add a variety of other vegetables, nuts and fresh and dried fruits to your salads. (While watching calories, of course.)

Try a homemade olive oil and vinegar dressing rather than the sugar and trans-fat-filled bottled sort. Like blue cheese dressing? Crumble real blue cheese into your salad - not too much -- and top with a drizzle of olive oil, salt and pepper. Toss. You might like it better, and it will be better for you.

Try whizzing up a ripe pear or a mango, or peach, or avocado with a little olive or grapeseed oil, half a clove of garlic and salt and pepper to make an interesting and light salad dressing.

Don't like vinegar? Use lemon juice or orange juice or apple juice or nothing at all with a good nut oil to dress your salad.

Veggies. Whiz them into soups. Roast them. Grill them. Make them into gratins. Shred or chop or flake or dice them. Stir-fry them. Bake them. Bubble them up in a stock and serve them over half the pasta you usually serve. Toss them into your roasting pan for the last 5 minutes. Take a really long time to make a great vegetable soup. Saute them quickly on the stove. Eat them raw.

Raw!?!

Well, that's what we used to do. Back when humans weren't fat. It might be worth a try. A whole bunch of folks would tell you the raw-er the better. And lately they've been convincing some really good chefs to write good cookbooks featuring raw foods. That'll make it easier for all of us to include these in our diets.

That's the message for the day. If you eat nothing else, eat your veggies. And you might try eating nothing but once in awhile. Just to see what happens.

Radical,

JuJu

Charlie Trotter gets raw

Cooks Illustrated cooks veggies

Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

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Trick or Treat? Finding new paths to exercise

2003-10-29T07:16:00.000-05:00

Trick or Treat?
Finding new paths to exercise

I've got a little trouble brewing. I like morning exercise. I've been a morning workout person. Most of this year I've written at night, worked out in the morning. That's worked okay, but it takes family time away at night. And there is very little of that.

So lately I've been writing in the morning, and not exercising enough. A few classes.

That's not going to work for me. I planned to head back to my morning gym this time of year. But I can't seem to shift my schedule back. Well, I don't want to. My hubby's coffee and writing in the morning is a pleasure. Argh. I need to get through the winter somehow.

So there's a gym near my office. I'm going to try lunchtime classes. If that doesn't work, or the people aren't as nice as the folks at my gym, then I will have to return to my morning routine, I'll need to give myself a big talking to, because while I have no problem writing in the dark wee hours, it's awfully hard to get moving at this hour. In the cold. Without coffee.

But there are tricks to make it happen.

I ran into an old buddy yesterday. We'll call her "Carrie." Carrie tells me she's been running, but with the time change, we've lost our morning light in these parts (clinging by our nails to the westernmost edges of EST, people who work late won't see the light of day from now until Juneish), and she's not comfortable running in the dark, so she runs on her treadmill at home. Her motivation: decadent TV.

I love this idea. She tapes the shows she feels decadent about watching (the match/not match making, will he/won't he, he/she's got money/or not, ew don't pick THAT one shows), and watches those tapes while she's on her treadmill. She wraps up this little pleasure with exercise. Workout-reward in one package. Very efficient, I think. A motivator that doesn't have to do with all that health-schmealth stuff. Because sometimes it just feels smarter to stay in bed, and the only thing that can possibly pull you out of it is a little Hollywood fairy tale.

Smart. Carrie's figured out what will get her out of bed in the morning. What gets you going? What gets thee to the gym? To your workout class? Into your sneakers?

*Some people walk in malls to enjoy some good people watching and vicarious shopping.
*Some people walk while praying or meditating.
*Some walk or work out on their treadmills or bikes while talking to a loved one on the phone.
*Some attend workout classes to "take in the scenery."
*Working out in the morning at a gym gets you your morning news shows.
*Working out with friends at lunch gives you a chance to catch up on life

You don't have to like exercise, ever. Just do it. If it helps to combine it with some socializing, some pleasure, a spoonful of sugar to help it go down, then do it. Do what it takes.

I'll figure it out if you will,

JuJu

One of "Carrie's" shows
Washington Post's Moving Crew offers advice

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