bearing blog

Good news!

Baby Darwin flipped for the external version!

An alternative that I hadn't thought of before to the grainy side dish...

Succotash!

Made because I wanted to put corn, beans, and squash on the table to correlate with Oscar's reading for American history.

The squash (acorn, baked with butter and brown sugar) was just okay.  The succotash, which I served as a bed for salmon patties -- Maryland crab cakes would have been more in keeping , I suppose, but I had the canned sockeye salmon and not the fresh Maryland crab -- was surprisingly yummy for something that takes two minutes to put together and 15 minutes on the stove. 

• 1 15-oz can kidney beans, rinsed and drained 
• 1 small bag (about 2 cups) frozen baby lima beans
• 4 cups frozen corn kernels 
• 4 Tbsp butter 
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg, or to taste (freshly ground would be better of course) 
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper 

  Melt butter in a saucepan or skillet that can be covered and that is deep enough to hold everything comfortably.  Add corn and both beans.  Stir to coat everything with butter, then cover and heat on low or medium, stirring occasionally, until everything is hot.  Season with nutmeg, salt, and pepper, and serve immediately.

It was equally good the next morning as a base for fried eggs.   I think it would make a great potluck dish if you were able to ensure it stayed hot (so the butter won't congeal).

Another installment...

...of How Not To Do It at In The Pipeline, featuring water aspirators to produce light vacuum in the chemistry lab.  I remember using these in high school, I think, but I'm sure Mr. D. never suggested that we run a tube all the way down the drain.

Well, one day, one of the guys in the lab next door to me was shocked to see water blasting around in his hood. It was a real fountain, just geysering out full blast from what must have been a cracked water line or something in the back. He ran over and immediately shut off every tap – but to no avail. Roaring, showering water everywhere. Getting a look at the source, he realized, to his consternation, that the water was coming up out of the drain in the back of his hood. I remember standing there with him, staring at this in disbelief. It looked like a special effect. How on earth could you get water blasting up out of a drain pipe?

This post is dedicated to Eric, my dear friend from grad school and Milo's godfather, who just this morning taught his very first class as a tenure-track assistant professor of chemical engineering in a major university.  (My husband imagined it might start out like this:  Welcome to bioseparations class, kids.  Let's get started.  You got mash; you want moonshine.) Congratulations, Eric!  I hope you enjoy it as much as I thought I would, back when I thought I was going to be doing that someday.

Biteback... in this case, literally.

Darwin has an interesting post up about management of the Komodo dragon population.

A reminder.

Jen at The Blog Formerly Known As Et Tu, Jen? -- that is, at Conversion Diary -- reposts a review of one of the most important books in my personal library.  

If you haven't read Hold On To Your Kids, you should.  And if you have, you should take Jen's commenter's advice and get hold of the DVDs she recommends.  I have learned so much from them.

Vanity.

A friend came up to me at doughnuts-after-Mass yesterday and complimented me on my blog post series chronicling my attempts to defeat gluttony and lose weight.  (Now helpfully gathered together under the categories entitled Gluttony and Weight Loss-- if you want to go back to the beginning, here's the page of oldest posts as of today, scroll to the bottom.)  She said it got her thinking about the spiritual sacrifice component of ending the habits of overeating and overconsumption.

I appreciated the compliment!  And I'm rather fond of that series of posts myself.  But the thought in my mind was....  Wish I'd thought of that.

As much as I'd like to say that I entered into the journey (that happened to take off thirty-something pounds along the way) with an attitude of spiritual sacrifice, of offering up the self-denial that it has taken...  I can't really say that.  It's been a very me me me me focused few months.  

Introspection, self-examination, is not necessarily bad, or irreligious or anything.  The celebrated Examination of Conscience is, for example, a rather "me-focused" endeavor -- it's done for God but it focuses on "me" and my own faults and sins.  Still, you're supposed to do it, once a day or so, and then move on to the rest of your prayer and your life.   The last three months have been for me one loooooong protracted Examination of Appetite.   Just as I started it by being tired of all the excess consumption, at this point I'm getting tired of all the excess navel-gazing.

I remember C. S. Lewis criticized teachers for trying to cure a boy of one sin, say sloth, by appealing to his pride -- an even worse one.  I've caught myself in buffet restaurants trying to cure myself of gluttony by damaging my sense of empathy, telling myself:  Look at the plate that woman is carrying.  It's piled grotesquely high.  And it's her third trip to the buffet.  And look how big she is!  Aren't you glad you're not like her anymore?   

Keeping before my mind, constantly, the particular vice I have been trying to root out was very effective.  I do not think it was a bad thing to do.  But it's probably time to move on, get on with the rest of my prayer and the rest of my life.  I don't mean that I'll stop writing about it here; but I'm going to try to quit obsessing over it between blog posts and between meals.  Anyway, as Mark keeps reminding me, at some point I'm going to have to deliberately start eating more, and then I'll be writing about that.

I still believe that something deep within myself has changed -- either because of, or despite, the ME ME ME of the last few months.  I will find out whether it really has changed come Ash Wednesday.

                                                 *   *   *

Some credit where credit is due.

About six weeks into the weight loss, I was kneeling in Mass.  The people in the pew in front of me were shifting and putting up the kneelers and picking up dropped toys, getting ready to go up to receive.  I was composing my heart for a petition -- a small devotion of mine is to save some special petition to have in my heart as I go up to receive the Lord.  And as I was searching for what to ask, I remembered something I'd entirely forgotten, which was that a couple of months before -- about a week before I woke up one morning and said "I'm ready to be hungry" -- my Eucharistic petition had been this:

Lord, remove my attachment from all foods but You.

I really had completely forgotten that I'd asked that.  When I ask God for things at other times, I know I catch myself "looking out" to see if my prayer has been answered.  Not so with these little requests right before Communion; a gift I've received, I suppose, is the gift of letting go of these once I've voiced them.  I ask for something on the way up to Communion, and I thank God for what I've already received on the way back to my pew, and that's that.  This time... I remembered.  In time for me to be extremely grateful.  

I know, I know, if I ask for something different every single week, sooner or later I'm going to get one of the things I ask for.  I'm aware of this.  Still, it was a rather breathtaking realization.  There it is; do with it what you will.

Modest swimwear.

Neat article about an observant Muslim woman, an avid scuba-diver, who designed her own line of modest and (this is key) functional swimwear.  Bonus:  It's UV-protective!

When Shereen Sabet made the decision to become a more devout Muslim, she was ready to adhere to the religion's modest dress code: A woman must wear clothing to cover her entire body, except for her face, hands and feet, in public.

Then another thought entered her mind: "But wait a minute, I love to go swimming and snorkeling and I'm a certified scuba diver. Can I still do those things and abide by the dress code?"

I don't agree with devout Muslims that women -- or anyone for that matter -- should be made to abide by such a restrictive dress code.  It certainly doesn't accord with my view of the dignity of the human person.  But it's wonderful that people are finding ways to make the clothing less restrictive in function.  

Hiking pants and swim caps didn't fare well, either, so Sabet, a microbiology scientist at Cal State Long Beach, decided to start a line of Halal swimwear, called Splashgear. The idea was to create swimsuits that would conform to the Muslim dress code, but also be comfortable and fashionable....

"I understand most people are accustomed to not seeing a lot of clothing on the beach or in the water," Sabet said. "We don't want to look like freaks or stick out like sore thumbs for being so covered up on the beach, but I wanted to help make water activity accessible to Muslim women."

That last point is key.  Muslim women and girls live with serious dress code restrictions, sometimes by choice, sometimes by coercion.  This doesn't have to mean that they must live with restrictions on their physical activity.  To open up swimming to conservative religious communities like local (mostly Somali) Muslims, my local YMCA has experimented with women-only swim hours and swim lessons (generally early in the morning); they can do this, because they're a private organization, but most public pools and exercise facilities can't legally institute "separate but equal" hours.  I often see women and girls in our pool wearing T-shirts and pants -- soggy, awkward, restrictive, possibly unsafe and technically against the posted rules, although I've never seen a lifeguard order them out ("ONLY SWIMWEAR IS ALLOWED IN THE POOL").

I should add that I choose my children's swimwear to provide generous coverage, too.  Not only does it cut down on their sun exposure, and make them easy to pick out of the crowd on the beach, but it is a deliberate attempt to counter the parodies of sexy string bikinis that I see little girls wearing to the pool -- even to their swim lessons, where the vigorous activity tends to make their bikini tops fall off! 

 I recommend the pricey but long-lasting (they'll hand-me-down fine, and they can be worn for at least 2 years) line of "Kids UV Sun Protective 1 Piece" suits produced by CWear Australia.  Where they know something about sun protection.  

Tweaking.

I keep tweaking my eating patterns as I approach my goal, now only 11 pounds away.  I realize that changing things a bit could slow the weight loss down, but that's okay; ideally, I suppose, the rate of change would asymptotically approach zero as I get nearer and nearer the magic number I've picked as my target, right?  What I'm trying to figure out is how I'm going to maintain.  I have no illusions or even desire to go back to the old patterns because, frankly, they kind of disgust me by now.  It is so obvious that what I was doing was eating too much -- was gluttonous, a word that sounds as gross as it ought to.  

I wrote in an e-mail some time ago:

It strikes me that with [this new way of eating], the most important thing is that your behavior is changing to something that's less grotesquely overconsumptive and more moderate. Less quantity, more quality. The real benefit... is that your behavior is more pleasant, frugal, attractive, generous; you become more fully human by exercising your will and your control over the appetites of the self. Almost like going on a retreat! If you lose weight in the bargain, bonus! But that doesn't seem to me like that's what it's all about (though I bet it helps motivate more than less visible improvements.) 

It really does feel better not to be grabbing more food all the time.  It's a change that has been worth making almost for its own sake.

But I still need to tweak a little.  Yes, the secret has been "eat less of everything."  But I'm achieving that by carefully measuring everything, for the most part.  I'm trying to find patterns of life that help me do so without all the measuring.  

So about ten days ago I decided that I will give up on "bedtime snacks" for good.

Mark and the kids are believers in bedtime snack.  Mark needs it to keep from blowing away.  When he was in high school, it was a giant bowl of premium ice cream every night.  Nowadays, it's much more likely to involve peanut butter and apples or whole wheat toast, but it's still a lot of calories and good wholesome fat, probably at least as much as he eats for breakfast most days.  Mark feeds the kids bedtime snack every night too, with an eye toward what they ate or didn't eat for dinner; sometimes it's a small treat, other times it's a real meal.  

I had been distributing my daily calories over three meals and three snacks, including bedtime.  I reasoned, though, that the fewer eating times I have each day, the fewer opportunities I have to overeat, so I should see if I can cope with cutting some of them out for long-term maintenance.

I've had mixed to poor results with cutting out my midmorning and tea-time snacks (remember, this is coupled with overall calorie reduction).  But it didn't take too many days of skipping bedtime snack -- moving the extra calories ahead to the next morning's breakfast -- before I was sure it was the right thing to do.  Going to bed hungry isn't that big of a deal.  I'm asleep for most of it.  It's not like I need extra calories to keep going!  And then I wake up and I am good and hungry for breakfast, which by rights ought to be a fairly substantial meal.

But the head games!  

Thursday evening at 8:30 I was driving home from my swim, and I could not stop thinking about getting home and having a fried egg on top of a scoop of leftover mixed-grain pilaf.  I'd made a crock-pot full of this lovely pilaf of wild rice, barley, and wheat berries, with onion, mint, and parsley, a couple of days before, and nobody in the family liked it but me, so there were pounds of it in my refrigerator (got to use up those leftovers).  And it's really healthful (so that would be a really good-for-me snack).  And I kept seeing the mental image of the fork piercing the top of the gently-fried egg, bedecked with sea salt and fresh-ground black pepper, and the perfectly cooked yolk trickling down amongst the chewy grains of pilaf (wow, that would really taste great, and did I mention that I was driving back from my swim workout?)

I gritted my teeth and told myself, Come hell or high water, I WILL EAT THAT FOR BREAKFAST.

And I came home, chewed gum frantically for the rest of the evening, went to bed (yes, I spit out the gum first and also brushed my teeth), woke up in the morning, and made myself a fried egg on top of a scoop of mixed-grain pilaf for breakfast.  Oh, and also a nectarine and a glass of tomato juice.  And it was just as good as I thought it would be, maybe better because it was seasoned with a little bit of triumph.

I think this will be one of my permanent patterns, I don't eat snacks after dinner.  Maybe it will even lead me to eat more filling breakfasts, and that will in turn enable me to cut the midmorning snack out as well.  I'm not sure about that.  For now I'm still toting a little baggie of almonds, cheese cubes, and fruit chunks everywhere I go.

Including to the mall today, to buy some new and smaller pants.

Northland.

Photos from our family week at YMCA Camp du Nord in northern Minnesota, at the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

Burntside Lake.  Slim Lake.

"Pitty jowers."  Oscar with his nature notebook, Milo at the Totem Pole in the center of camp.

Mark and I at the top of "Old Baldy," one of five hikes we took while the kids were in Age Groups.  

At du Nord, families live and play together except for one two-hour block each day from 10 AM to noon, when the kids are supervised in age groups by camp staffers.  We expected to be toting MJ along with us on the hikes, because she's been unwilling to stay with anyone she doesn't know, but the evening before when she had a chance to meet the young women who were in charge of the "0-2's", she announced firmly, "I stay with those class mommies."  And she did!  (They took her to throw rocks in the lake, an activity which was met with grave approval.)

 I took several books along to practice my botany.  Mark snapped this picture of me examining a plant which turned out to be something in the ginseng family.  Another favorite plant of mine is wintergreen, which I never met before I moved to Minnesota.  The scent of the leaves crushed between the fingers is marvelous.

The kids had a great time.  Sometimes a little too great, as you can see from this picture snapped after dinner, and after we extracted MJ's dinner plate from under her head:

Still going.

 Me, 119 lbs.  I think I am safely in the "normal" range now, with a BMI of 24.1.

I continue to be surprised that the scale keeps going down, and as fast as it has (roughly, between 1.5 and 2 pounds per week).  Come to think of it, though, it's not too different from what I've seen in the past.  My weight has tended to be stable at certain points (I weighed 156 for years, day in and day out), but has moved quickly between those points when I've changed my eating or exercise patterns.  That, and my hated, long-ago course in chemical systems kinetics, inspired my own informal theory of metabolism (mine anyway):  that people, being reactors, have multiple steady states.  

Metastable steady-state reactors produce a certain output, at a certain temperature and volume, for a given set of input parameters.  Change the parameters a little bit -- send in a bolus of different stuff, for example -- and if the change isn't too big, the output will change too at first, but the system will drift back to producing the output it produced before -- back to the steady state.  If you change the parameters to something different enough, though, the output can change enough that it drifts to producing a different set of stable outputs, perhaps at a different temperature.  Another steady state.  Once it's there, it tends to keep that state, unless you give it a big enough "kick" to knock it out of that steady state and into another.

Anyway, my body is a reactor that had a very stable steady state at 156 pounds with the eating and exercise habits I had a few years ago.  I might diet or exercise for a few months, or eat too much, and shift the weight up or down by a few pounds, but it always returned to 156.   That was my weight before and after I had my firstborn.   

After  my second was born, I switched to a low-carb diet and my weight dropped almost astonishingly rapidly to 137 or so, where it stayed stubbornly.  That was the second steady-state:  the state of me eating low-carb.  Upping my exercise got it down nearly to 130, with great effort, but when I relaxed that effort (winter came) it bobbed back up to 137.  I stayed there till I got pregnant for the third time. 

 After that baby was born, I weighed (you guessed it) 156.  I managed to find another steady state at 146 by eating low-carb again, but not as religiously as I had before, and increasing my level of exercise.

So just this past May, when I sharply changed the amount I was eating -- I think I'm eating about half to two-thirds what I was consuming before -- I knocked myself out of that steady-state, and I'm still traveling to another, wherever it is.  I hope it is a fairly stable one, one that I will tend to drift back to even with normal daily variations in the input.