bearing blog

Pandora's sugar bowl.

Monday evening I announced, "Muffins for breakfast tomorrow!"

And the children fell to their knees (okay, it was only the 11-year-old) and begged, "Please, Mom, don't make them completely whole wheat!  Put some white flour in!"

I raised my eyebrow (okay, not really; I am physically incapable of raising one eyebrow; probably I just made a frowny face) and said, "Oh, come on, they're not that bad.  Muffins are quick breads. You barely notice the difference in muffins."

"They don't taste as sweet as other people's muffins."

He probably has a point there.  I don't like to eat super sweet muffins, so the slight bitterness of whole wheat flour has never bothered me, and I usually do not add extra sugar to make up for it.   

Maybe if I could have kept my children's taste buds safely sheltered from the world, he would not know what he is missing.  But this past year the 11-year-old has acquired the freedom to range around our urban neighborhood unsupervised.  He has, I suspect, tasted the illicit luxury of coffeeshop muffins bought with his own money.  There is scant going back once innocence is lost.

"Or, Mom, at least could you put more sugar in them?"

Hmph.  Philistines.  "How about I sprinkle a little sugar crust on top?"

"No, it's the middle that isn't sweet enough."

"But it'll have blueberries!"

"They're sour."

I turned to my spouse, the food processing engineer, who (a) has to stay somewhat abreast of the nutrition literature, and (b) has perfected the art of rapid calculation followed by a guess that makes it sound like he knows exactly what he is talking about.  "Mark."

"Hm?"

"If we had to live on homemade muffins, would it be better for us to eat low-sugar muffins made with some whole grain flour and some white flour, or would it be better to eat whole-grain muffins with more sugar in them?"

He rolled his eyes at me (okay, he probably didn't roll his eyes, but I'm not sure how to describe what he did.  Let's say he made a "here's a caveat" face).  "You realize that all the relevant research about this sort of thing is inconclusive."

"Yeah, yeah."

"Well, if it is an either-or, my instinct -- just my instinct, mind you --"

"Duly noted."

"-- is that it's better to keep it 100% whole grain and add the sugar.  Because the relevant research does indicate that more whole grain is associated with better outcomes.  And also the white flour has the same effect on your body as sugar anyway.  So at least you're not leaving out the additional nutrition and fiber, even if it comes with sugar."

"Got it."  I turned back to the pleading child.  "Okay.  This time I will make sweet muffins."  I stormed into the kitchen (okay, I probably did not storm so much as stalk) and made these.  They weren't blueberry because I discovered the dried cherries while I was rooting around in the fridge.

Extra-Sweet Cherry Yogurt Muffins

• 1 cup yogurt thinned with a little milk, OR 1 cup buttermilk, plus extra if needed (which you will)
• Heaping 1/2 cup dried tart cherries
• 1/4 to 1/2 tsp almond extract
• 1 egg
• 3 Tbsp butter or coconut oil, melted and cooled, or other oil
• 2 cups whole wheat flour
• 3/4 cup sugar (it hurts my teeth just writing that -- a *tablespoon* in every muffin!)
• 1 Tbsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt

The night before:  Put the dried cherries in a bowl and add enough thinned yogurt to moisten all the cherries.  Stir and let soak overnight in the refrigerator.  (Even a half-hour's soak will do some good, if you don't have overnight.)

In the morning, grease a 12-cup muffin tin and preheat the oven to 400° F.  Beat the egg and melted butter together with the remainder of the thinned yogurt.  Add the almond extract.  Mix the dry ingredients together in a medium bowl, then gently stir in the liquid ingredients and the cherry-yogurt mixture.  Add more yogurt and milk if needed to moisten all the dry ingredients (it's hard to say how much liquid will have been soaked up by the cherries).   Divide among the cups of the muffin tin and bake for 20 minutes; test with wooden pick before removing.  Allow to cool in the pan 5 minutes before taking the muffins out of the cups to finish cooling on a rack.

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Now let me tell you something.  I do not (repeat, do not) like sweet muffins for breakfast.  And the idea of these terribly sweet muffins -- I used the amount of sugar suggested in Mark Bittman's "Sweet and Rich Muffins" recipe, but did not add the extra fat -- kind of horrified me, which is why I used yogurt instead of the ordinary whole milk I usually used; I thought perhaps it would balance the sweetness a little bit.

Fatal mistake.   I should have left it unbalanced.

These were very yummy muffins.  I had a taste "of Mark's, to evaluate it" and now I am personally responsible for demolishing three of them.  

So now I have this "aaaaagh, what have I done?!?!" feeling.  I fed my kids a tablespoon of sugar in their muffins and I liked it.  This is less sugar than in the most current formulation of Cocoa Puffs.  

Argh.

 Of course the kids liked them too.  I am still going to write "dried cherries" on my grocery list this week.

But, argh.

 

Book review, part 2: Glucose and willpower.

(Part 1 of my review of  Willpower:  Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney is here)

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Sometimes, at the end of what feels like a long day, or a long mental effort, I have a feeling that I often describe as "brain-fried."  I've been struggling not to yell at the kids, I've been thinking about a blog post I need to write, I've been trying not to procrastinate the million things I need to do, and I have an inexplicable craving for things like mashed potatoes or chocolate -- and solitude.  Tierney and Baumeister use a different term, but I immediately recognized it.  They call it "ego depletion," and it is the state of having used up all your willpower.

Yes, "used up."  Here are what they have to say about it, based on the research described in the book:

1. Resisting temptation is only one way we use willpower. Three others are

• controlling display of emotion or emotional outburst; 
• making decisions; 
• and performing physical tasks that require skill, e.g., balancing speed and accuracy.

2.  You have a limited supply of willpower. Repeated effort at any of the willpower-using activities depletes it.  After trying to control yourself for long enough, you lack the self-control to do any of them.  It becomes more difficult to restrain your displays of emotion, to think about decisions you have to make, to practice your skills, or -- yes -- to resist temptations and urges.

3.  It's trying to control yourself, not succeeding, that depletes willpower.   Even if you give in, you're left with less willpower to work with.

4. When your blood glucose levels drop, your willpower depletes faster.  

5. Accordingly, raising your blood sugar (i.e., by consuming food) restores your willpower supply.  The fastest way to do this is, of course, easily digestible carbohydrates, but protein and more-healthful, more-slowly digestible carbohydrates also work, albeit more slowly.

6. At low glucose and low willpower, your brain turns its effort to other things.  It keeps working and consuming fuel at the same rate, but it gives up on the willpower-consuming activities.

7.  One of the things it turns to is trying to get you to raise your blood sugar.  Hello, carb cravings!

Tierney and Baumeister point out the obvious "Catch-22" for people who struggle with food cravings here:  You need willpower in order not to eat, and you need to eat in order to have willpower.  

Just as obvious is that, if what they are saying is true, then folks with impaired glucose tolerance -- insulin resistance, hypoglycemia, diabetes and prediabetes (even, they suggest, premenstrual syndrome!)  -- will frequently be in a state of (relatively) impaired impulse control and decisionmaking skills.  

We can get a little overfocused on overeating here at bearing blog.  Remember that impulse control applies to a lot of different areas of life (and indeed Tierney and Baumeister mention many):  drinking and drug abuse, procrastination, violent outbursts, child discipline, studying and schoolwork, performance at a variety of difficult tasks.

I have to go now (procrastinating long enough) but I'll post again with more insights about willpower, not so glucose related, and then try to tie them into some practical tips for behavioral change.

Mathematics, music, and hearing: Vi Hart does it again.

This, one of the videos from the remarkable Vi Hart, is absolutely brilliant.  It's twelve minutes long and worth every minute.  Watch with your kids.

(Incidentally, Vi Hart has recently been hired by Salman Khan to make videos for the Khan Academy.  Hard to imagine a better match.)

Information flow.

This is very good news:  The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that JSTOR, the database of academic journals, is about to beta-test a system that will allow users to access a limited number of journal articles for free.

It’s about to get a little easier—emphasis on “a little”—for users without subscriptions to tap JSTOR’s enormous digital archive of journal articles. In the coming weeks, JSTOR will make available the beta version of a new program, Register & Read, which will give researchers read-only access to some journal articles, no payment required. All users have to do is to sign up for a free “MyJSTOR” account, which will create a virtual shelf on which to store the desired articles.

But there are limits. Users won’t be able to download the articles; they will be able to access only three at a time, and there will be a minimum viewing time frame of 14 days per article, which means that a user can’t consume lots of content in a short period. Depending on the journal and the publisher, users may have an option to pay for and download an article if they choose.

To start, the program will feature articles from 70 journals.

This is an exciting development.  The Internet is a wonderful thing, but it has always frustrated me that it's comparatively difficult to access peer-reviewed research.  I know, it has always been possible to buy reprints of journal articles you want to read ($30 a pop is not an atypical charge), and it has always been possible (for me, an able-bodied resident of a major urban area) to trek physically to the libraries at the state university and do my searching from there, but face it ... with these obstacles, it's always been easier just to do the best one can with Wikipedia.  

Besides, at least when I was working on my graduate degree, I found that I generally didn't know if an article was going to be useful until after I'd read it.  That makes me rather unwilling to arrange childcare and cross town for a single article, or to pay $30 for the privilege of accessing it.  

Make no mistakes, the program described in the Chronicle is severely limited:  few people, however self-motivated, will be able to conduct significant independent research at the rate of six articles a month (partly because of that phenomenon I described -- with the exception of seminal "classic" papers or comprehensive literature reviews, it's hard to tell whether an article is useful until after you've read it).   But maybe this will be a step forward into a new era that makes independent scholarship more accessible to everyone.   As Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic points out, 

Why is this important? Well, get a load of this stat. JSTOR told the Chronicle that each and every year, they turn away 150 million attempts to gain access to articles. That's right. 150 million attempts! 

The way I see it, that's 150 million chances lost to improve the quality of the Internet. JSTOR, as the keeper of so much great scholarly work, should be one of the Internet's dominant suppliers of facts and serious research. But if something is not publicly available, key gatekeepers like journalists and Wikipedians, move to the best available source, even if they know that there probably is a better source behind JSTOR's paywall. 

150 million potential pageviews is a lot of potential transactions, and if awareness grew that you could actually access the content of scholarly journals, it's likely there would be many more.  If JSTOR can find a way to monetize these access attempts in a way that delivers decent bang-for-the-buck, a real win-win situation could be created:  profit for the journal, which after all has to pay the bills, and a more fluid -- if not entirely "free" -- flow of information.

This would be good for everyone:  patients who need to understand the latest research about their own medical diagnoses, activists who want to marshall the best arguments to rally people to their causes, independent scholars who seek to educate themselves, high-school level home-educated students, high school teachers, tech professionals temporarily absent from the workforce who need to stay current in their field -- and nerds like me who just like to go straight to the source and maybe blog about it.   It could be good for the journals, too.

Taubes responds to "The Fat Trap," among other things.

In response to the NYT Well Blog post "The Fat Trap," which I mentioned briefly here, Gary Taubes has posted several items.

Taubes' post is here.  It includes links to:

• a letter to the NYT signed by 250 health professionals and researchers
• a new blog by a colleague of his entitled "The War on Insulin";
• and an announcement of a new weight loss registry for those who attempted to lose weight via the paleo/low carb route.  

Check it out.

Book review, part 1: Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.

This past week I finished reading Willpower:  Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney.  I recommend it.  

As nonfiction goes, it's a fairly light and quick read, and interesting:  I would rank it with Brian Wansink's Mindless Eating in the pop psychology genre.  Like those Wansink describes, some of the psychological experiments that Tierney and Baumeister recount (most of which were designed and executed by others) are interesting and creative.  Interesting, creative, and cruel:  I really, really felt bad for some of the experimental subjects, who had to do things like

1. first, fast for many hours
2. then, hungry, be ushered into a waiting room filled with the smell of baking cookies
3. sit next to a bowl of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and be told "Those aren't for you, here, have one of these nice crunchy radishes instead"
4. finally be given "intelligence tests" which consisted of puzzles that, in fact, had no solution, the point being to measure how long the subjects sweated over them before they gave up trying.

The book also includes material gleaned from a handful of celebrities, either from interviews or from excerpts from memoirs.  Not sure why they had to be celebrities, but they do make for interesting stories.  How Drew Carey looked at his messy desk, said "Shit, man, I'm rich," and hired David Allen (of Getting Things Done) to work with him as a personal organizer for a year.  How Eric Clapton stopped drinking, and speculations as to how AA's "abandon yourself to a higher power" thing can work even for atheists.  How performance artist Amanda Palmer maintained composure as a living statue, standing perfectly still for three hours a day even in the face of people trying to anger or amuse her, and how it affected her for hours afterward.  There's also a historical discussion of Henry Stanley (he of "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?") and how his memoirs hint that he could maintain discipline -- both of himself and of the men under his command -- through truly horrific conditions.

But the real gem of Willpower is the insights it suggests from research, some of which are surprising -- but which explain a lot.  I hinted at this in a blog post I wrote  about sticking to your resolutions, which drew on an article written by Tierney, and also you can see a New York Times review of the book here which summarizes it pretty well.

Before getting into the specific insights, though, let's talk about the problem posed by the very idea of "willpower" itself.   Some people, to be blunt, believe there is no such thing, pointing to various research findings that convincingly show that we are so often driven by forces of which we are not conscious.  Others are wary of bringing up the possibility because it smacks so much of blaming people for the situation they find themselves in, which may largely be because of forces outside their control.  

In the obesity research world, there is a lot of evidence out there that "lack of willpower" is not the root reason for much of the obesity problem.  Take Gary Taubes's two books, Good Calories, Bad Calories (I reviewed it here) and Why We Get Fat (I reviewed it here, here, here).  Both of them make a very convincing case that intractable obesity is caused by a biochemical vicious cycle that is triggered by exposure -- maybe even as early as in utero! -- to a diet of sugars and other refined carbohydrates.   The cravings and the difficulty resisting them are both products of broken hormonal signals, according to this model, and so you simply cannot say that obesity can be "fixed" through application of willpower alone to resist the temptation to overeat.  From Good Calories, Bad Calories:  "Though the traditional response to the failure of semi-starvation diets to produce long-term weight loss has been to blame the fat person for a lack of willpower... [some] have argued that this failure is precisely the evidence that tells us positive caloric balance or overeating is not the underlying disorder in obesity."

So let's stipulate for the purposes that this is true:  our decisions to give in, or not to give in, very often come from unconscious processes, or biochemical urges, or explicable impulses.  How do Tierney and Baumeister deal with that?  And the answer is that they  do it through a careful -- and useful -- definition of the terms "will" and "willpower."

The will is to be found in connecting units across time.... Will involves treating the current situation as part of a general pattern... You must treat (almost) every episode [of temptation] as a reflection of a general need to resist these temptations.

That's where conscious self-control comes in, and that's why it makes the difference between success and failure in just about every aspect of life.

The way I read it is this:  We may have no conscious and immediate control over the impulses that overtake us, the urges and cravings and temptations.  They may come from our environment or from chemical signals inside us.  And we may have little conscious and immediate control over the strength of our resistance against those impulses:  once the impulse has begun, if we are "caught out," there may be little we can do to fight against them.  

 

But we do have power to predict the impulses that may overtake us in the future, and we can take steps to prepare.  We can shape our environment so that they meet us on a battleground we have chosen, or we can avoid meeting them at all.  We can also whip ourselves into shape so that we have a better chance at resisting even if we are surprised by our impulses.

That is where the "will" part of "willpower" comes in.

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In a future post, I'll list some of the insights from the book that resonated with me.  Some of them, I met with a sense of recognition, as a general form of the specific insights that I discovered for myself during my weight loss and subsequent struggles with maintenance.  Finally, I'll discuss how I think people can harness these insights to hammer out a plan of action for personal change.

(I think I can write with some conviction and experience about how to harness willpower to overcome the specific fault of gluttony.  What I'd really like to do, though, is figure out how to harness it to overcome faults I'm still mired in.  Maybe, through continued writing about gluttony, I can see a way to draw analogies that will create a map to escape from those other faults as well.)

 

A bit of a placeholder.

We've had a 12-hour stomach bug layered on top of a nasty cold, both of them percolating through all the family members, for the last few days.  I thought for sure I'd have time  to blog something today, but somehow between making chicken soup and running to the store for Gatorade and saltines I just don't have the energy.  Will be back when I can!

"Catholic guilt."

A good piece on it by Calah at Barefoot and Pregnant.

Strength training or no strength training?

Got a reader email this morning:

Maybe you've mentioned this on the blog at some point when I wasn't payingattention, but I can't recall seeing it.

Since I joined the Y  six weeksago, everywhere I go, I hear about the importance of strength training.How, with only cardio, people get skinny-fat and have high body fat percentages because they're burned muscle along with fat. Do you incorporate strength training into your workouts? How so?

So, my answer is "not really, but kind of sort of."  Here's what I wrote back:

One of the reason I chose swimming as my main form of exercise (besides the fact that, compared to running, it's more fun) is that swimming is inherently strengthening -- at least somewhat -- because you're always moving against theresistance of the water.

Swimming is not great cardio, and it's not great strength-training (it's probably insufficient for warding off osteoporosis because it doesn't load the bones along their lengths), but it's one of the few things you can do that combine both pretty well.

Like my reader, I have small kids and not tons of time.  At this time in my life I can't imagine going to the gym for "just weights." I feel like I need to do cardio every time I have a chance to go to the gym. So, the short answer is that I don't do *separate* strength training,but I always swim once or twice a week.  That being said, when I am ready to make weightlifting a priority, the first place I should start is in bone-loading exercises, because that's what my routine is missing.  (I do get impact workouts from running once a week.)

If you, like me, are attracted by multitasking exercise, there are at least two other things you can do at the Y that incorporate both cardio and strength training.  These are the kettlebells classes and the Body Pump classes (Body Pump is sort of aerobics-with-barbells).   Fitness Yoga is a fun entry-level class that is surprisingly grueling, even if it only uses bodyweight.  

Another alternative if you use cardio machines is to design a workout that incorporates weight machines and cardio -- either some kind of circuit training, or steal a little time from your cardio workout to use weight machines at the beginning and/or end. If I were going to go that route I'd probably sign up for a personal training session to help me figure out the most efficient use of my time.  I hear it is money well spent, and you may well be able to snag a free personal training session during member appreciation events.

If you want to read a really great site about strength training, particularly for women, I totally recommend Mistress Krista's enormous site at www.stumptuous.com . Very empowering, logical, evidence-based, and no-nonsense -- if you like the way I write, I think you'll like her, probably even more! Check out her articles on free weights especially, for example her series on the squat -- here's Part 2, "Why Squat?"

Side note:  Now that I've been over to Mistress Krista's, I feel shame at having neglected weight bearing exercise and must go flagellate myself, perhaps with a kettlebell.  Fortunately, I know darn well that I don't have time today, so swimming during my daughter's swim lesson will have to be it...

 

Tweaking the recipe: yeah, yet another maintenance post.

I have a Plexiglas frame stuck with magnets to my fridge, displaying in table form the Bread Machine S.O.P. Down the left side is a column of ingredients: milk, egg, coconut oil, sugar, whole wheat flour, bread flour, gluten, etc. The other columns are labeled at the top with the names of bread recipes: whole wheat sandwich, honey oatmeal, cinnamon raisin; and as you go down the column you see how much of each ingredient to use. At the bottom of the page are button-by-button directions for starting the bread machine.

I set that up some time ago so that Mark and the older kids could easily make a loaf of bread without needing to be walked through the steps. Before I could do that, of course, I had to develop a sort of personalized, foolproof standard recipe for each one. I started with the recipes that came with my bread machine and adapted them over many loaves until each had the right amount of salt, the right level of sweetness, and the right balance between liquid and my favorite brand of whole wheat flour. Once I had a good recipe that worked pretty much all the time, it got enshrined in the Bread Machine S.O.P.

I haven't added a new one in quite a long time, but after my stint in Cincinnati at Christmas I found myself craving more of the ubiquitous-in-southwestern-Ohio soft dark pumpernickel bread (Klosterman's Cincinnati Dark Rye being the classic example: http://www.klostermanbakery.com/products/grocery/cincinnati-dark-rye-bread ). That's all I need, another food item I can't get unless I am in Ohio! So I bought some dark rye flour and set out to develop my own recipe for the S.O.P.

After hemming and hawing over several online pumpernickel bread recipes, I decided to start with a basic recipe of one cup each whole wheat flour, dark rye flour, and bread flour; 3 Tbsp butter; 10 oz whole milk; 2 Tbsp each molasses and unsweetened cocoa; 2 tsp salt; 1.5 tsp yeast; 1 egg; and 1 Tbsp of gluten. The bread baked up nicely, but I decided the molasses flavor was far too pronounced, so that is where I will begin my tweaking. My very next loaf of bread will have white sugar instead of molasses; we shall see if the molasses is even necessary. I may try half-and-half next after that, and perhaps if I can find some I will experiment with some kind of malt syrup or malted barley flour. When I get the sweetener figured out, I will turn to the flour ratios. In any case, I will be making lots of pumpernickel loaves in a row.

As I added "rye flour" and "pastrami" to my shopping list, I reflected on this idea. When I am trying to tweak, I like to tweak as fast as I can. I want to lay the questions to rest so I can close the loop and say, "I've figured it out, now I don't have to think about it anymore." Even though my family will probably get sick of pumpernickel, by the end of the testing process I will know how to make the perfect loaf of Cincinnati dark rye to suit my cravings and the blend of flours that are available in my area. And the next time I want to make Reubens for dinner, we will be ready.

I realized that this has also been my approach to tweaking weight maintenance behaviors. Right now, I am testing the theory that I should always have half sandwiches, and I am working on getting used to the habit of always cutting restaurant sandwiches in half, and always making half sandwiches at home. And what I am doing right now is ordering sandwiches every time I am in a restaurant, whether that is what I would like best or not, and eating only half of them (in fact I am sitting in front of the remains of a ham-and-egg croissant right now in an Eat Street diner). When it is practical, I do take the other half home for later, by the way. I am also making lots of half sandwiches for myself at home for lunch.

And what I am finding is that, with practice, and the constant reminder that *this is what I am working on*, is rapidly forcing me to get comfortable with the practice. Half sandwiches are already starting to feel normal -- and indeed, they seem to be the right amount. But what really helps is repeating it as frequently as I can, until I have laid the habit to rest.