bearing blog

Veiled.

"The Mom" at Shoved To Them finds a box of her grandmother's lace mantillas and decides to try them out.

I decided to wear one on Easter in honor of my grandmother, and offered one to my eldest. My sweet #1 readily accepted. She is no stranger to veiling, having a close friend who attends the Latin Mass regularly. She veils on those occasions when she sleeps over at their house, and to her it is simply a facet of Catholicism.

Easter morning I stood in my pew with this triangle of lace draped over my head and worried that I looked ridiculous. Then it slipped off of my head. I replaced it and bowed my head in an effort to keep it in place, not looking at the pews across the way, but at the empty space in front of my shoes. It was a posture of complete humility and was foreign and uncomfortable. The lacy sides draped enough in my peripheral vision that I couldn't see any further down the pew than my own husband and children. It became, for me, my family alone with God. All that I was responsible for was all that I could see.

Read the whole thing.

Why unplanned eating doesn't mean failure anymore: My habit constellation, part three.

(Parts one and two)

I spent the weekend with Kim (in IA) and her husband and children, and did most of the cooking since they are busy enjoying a brand new baby.   We arrived with Ohio-style sloppy joes and fruit salad; there was the coconut French toast  with Polish sausage; we had beef short ribs in a barbecue sauce, served over slow-cooked polenta, served with a simple green salad, and Never Fail Gingerbread.  I put chicken cacciatore in their crockpot before I left.

With all that comfort food -- and I know very well how to make comfort food that I like! -- I ate a lot.  Even though I began the weekend still working on dropping a couple of pounds.  Which spurred some more reflection on my "failure-free" weight control plan.  Can it really be failure free?  If so, what about this weekend?  I didn't stick to my plan -- isn't that a "failure?"

It's instructive to compare my intentions now with my intentions in the past.  Over the years I've been moderately successful as a low-carb eater.   I'm still convinced that low-carb is a workable weight loss strategy for many people.  Of course, "low-carb" covers a wide range, from mild restriction of refined carbs and emphasis on whole grains, all the way to strict ketosis-inducing diets of under 20 grams carbohydrate per day.  I spent a lot of time inducing ketosis, not without success.

But ketosis-inducing diets have one peculiarity that work on a special kind of craziness.  Simplified greatly, ketogenic diets -- more than any other I know of -- only work if they are adhered to meticulously.  It takes a few weeks of perfect very-low-carb eating to flip the biochemical switch to "burn body fat" mode.  It takes only a single meal or snack to flip it back to "conserve body fat" mode.

In other words, several days of hard work can be undone in a single snack.  A slice of bread or two will knock you out of ketosis, and it might take you days or weeks to trudge back in.

This messes with your head, if you're a certain sort of person.  You're focused on failure.  Episodes of unplanned eating, or even just nibbles, loom in importance; days and days of careful success fade into the background.  And then there's the recovering-bulimic thing.  You just ate something that will ruin the whole last week's effort!   Let's just say it creates a difficult-to-resist temptation to purge.

This unforgiving nature of ketogenic diets makes them really ill-suited for some of us, including me (because of the recovering bulimic thing) and probably people who are inclined to depression and despair in general, as well as people with poor impulse control.   It's really easy to despair when every string of successes is followed by a failure which you believe (scientifically!) eclipses all the successes that came before.

But that's in my past.  No more ketogenic diets.

So having eaten a lot over the weekend, I was struck by how much I don't feel like a failure, and how intellectually certain I am that I haven't "failed."  I'm not glowing with success either -- I'm in no denial, I know that I didn't eat the way I planned.  But it's not a step BACK.  More like I took a break for a couple of days, and I'll pick up where I left off.

This thought helps me distinguish a little better what I mean by "failure" and why I say that I lose weight (when I need to) "failure free" now.  I don't mean I never eat food I planned not to eat:  unplanned eating happens.  What's the difference? 

I think it's this:  I no longer believe that unplanned eating in the present or past has any power over my future behavior.   I never live in failure's shadow.

Next post:  The backdrop.

Coconut milk experiment.

I'm off for the weekend, visiting some friends.  Their 5-year-old is my godson.  We always have a good time over here.

That same 5yo is allergic to dairy.  And I had promised to make breakfast!  And I don't like soy milk.  :P

So I brought along a couple of cans of coconut milk, and some coconut oil, and substituted it for milk and butter respectively to make French toast.

Report:  French toast made with coconut milk and fried in coconut oil = very yummy.

Especially when topped with blackberry preserves and fresh blackberries.  Not that the maple syrup was bad, but the blackberries were fabulous with it. 

The texture was very creamy and, I don't know, fluffy.  I recommend it.

(Batter = 1 cup coconut milk, 2 eggs, 1 Tbsp sugar, dash salt, 1/2 tsp vanilla.  I used store bought bread, Brownberry Health Nut, which contains nuts but no dairy.)

Found an old photo.

It didn't scan too well, but you get the drift.  This was taken by my MIL on a visit to our house, probably (to judge from the baby's size) in the fall of 2006.

I'm starting to get to the point where the person in those photos no longer feels like ... "me."

Chicken with 40 cloves of garlic in the crock pot.

No, I haven't tried it yet, I'm just blogging it here so I can remember to try it soon.  Doesn't it sound good?  I think it'd be perfect with homemade French bread (even bread machine French bread) and a big spinach salad.

Link to recipe

More on cleaning up after yourself: Refusal to commit.

Remember when a few days ago I wrote a post called "Number Five Subdivided" about seven ways to clean up after yourself?  And how I said that I don't do any of these things regularly but that I was inspired to try them?

Well, I have been trying them!  And do you know what, I think I am really on to something!

I've mostly been working on these (see the original post for details):

• Clean up after dressing and undressing
• Clean up after going somewhere in the car 
• Begin cooking with these seven items available:  apron, dishwasher, soapy sink, trash can, dishcloth, two towels 
• Keep the kitchen sink empty (from the original article that inspired me)  

I have been surprised at how quickly they've become second nature, and how much they've cut down on the general visual clutter in my household AND the size of the cleanup after dinner.  There is a lot of bang-for-the-buck in these things (counting the original seven from the original article too).

As I have gone through my day making some of these changes, I realized there's a pattern to the habit of not-cleaning-up-after-yourself, whether it's in the car, in the kitchen, in the closet, or in the office.

It's this:  Refusal to commit.

Take measuring cups, for instance.  Let's say I'm making dinner and I measure a cup of stock and add it to my pot.  Now I have to do something with this measuring cup.  Do I wash it, or do I set it aside on the counter?

If the very next thing I have to do is measure a quarter-cup of soy sauce for the same pot, of course, it would waste time and water to wash the measuring cup, right?  But on the other hand, if I know I won't be measuring any more liquids while I cook this evening, I may as well wash it (or put it in the dishwasher) right away, leaving the counter a bit clearer and one less thing to put away later.

Of course, lots of times I'm not sure if I'm going to need the measuring cup again.  So I set it down on the counter and leave it there in case I might need it. 

See?  Refusal to commit.  I don't know for sure whether I will save more work by washing it or by not washing it, so I leave it till later.  

What am I afraid of?  That I will need to measure something else and will have to use a clean measuring cup for it?  Will I say to myself "Damn!  If only I had known before I washed that cup that those ten seconds would be in vain!"  Or (let's get real here) am I afraid of the effort of retrieving the dirty measuring cup from the top rack of the dishwasher, should I need it?

Refusal to commit!

The same thing happens in the closet.  Why do I take off a pair of not-actually-dirty jeans and toss it on the floor NEXT to the basket, or roll it up and stuff it on a shelf, instead of putting it IN the dirty-clothes basket or putting it away in the drawer?

Because I might decide to wear them again in a day or two! 

 If I don't get around to wearing them, then they could go in the laundry.  But if I put them in the dirty laundry, they might get dirty from contact with dirty clothes.  So why don't I hang them up or fold them into a drawer?  I guess deep down I think that because they've been worn once, they might "contaminate" my clean clothes!  For a while I contemplated creating a special separate "purgatory" section of my closet just for clothes I've worn once and could still wear again.   Finally it struck me -- this is ridiculous.  If something is clean enough for me to put on my body and wear out into the world, it is surely clean enough to hang next to freshly washed clothing, no?   If I'm really worried that something is going to contaminate my clean jeans -- what, does it smell funny or something? -- don't I deserve to WASH it before I put it on my body?  

Commit!  If it's not wearable, put it in the laundry; if it's wearable, hang it up or fold it away.  So simple.

All kinds of clutter come from this basic refusal to commit.   How many items in your house go unused?   We refuse to commit to a life with it, and we refuse to commit to a life without it; so instead of giving it away or getting rid of it, and instead of making changes that would allow us to use and enjoy it more easily, it just sits there taking up space.  

Refusal to commit also encompasses the refusal to accept the clean-up time as an integral part of any task.  Why, if we admitted that it really takes 45 minutes to make dinner (counting cleaning up as you go), instead of 30 minutes (not counting cleaning as you go), we'd have to start making dinner 15 minutes early!  I might have to sacrifice some of my blog reading!  And yet, that refusal to commit the necessary time can create a separate chore  where before there was none.

We're doing paperwork in the office and as each bill gets paid, the stack of papers to be filed grows.  It would take a few seconds to slot each paper into the right spot in the filing cabinet -- but it's so much more urgent to "get the bills paid" (meaning the part where you put the checks in the envelopes and the part where you put the envelopes out at the mailbox) -- and won't it "save work" to save all the filing for the end?  It might save some work, you don't know!  You refuse to commit the few extra seconds to file each paper because it MIGHT be faster to file them "all at once," and then you're left with an unhappy pile at the end... but that now becomes part of a different chore, called "cleaning up the office."  Maybe somebody else will get stuck with that one... in a month or two...

I have found that if I stay aware of what I'm doing -- You're leaving this thing here because you're worried you'll want to use it again and then the work of putting it away will have been "wasted!"  -- or --- You're leaving this mess on the table because you're hoping that you'll have some excuse not to do it later and then Mark will have to clean it up!  --- I can kind of shame myself into cleaning up after myself!  

Remarkable!

 (Credit where credit's due:  The original spark of this idea came from a book I read a couple of weeks ago by professional and semi-celebrity organizer Peter Walsh, whose point about "committing" to dirty or clean laundry rattled around in my head until I realized it was generally applicable to all sorts of clutter and cleanup.)

Failure-free: My habit constellation, part two.

So why do I call my habit constellation (described in part 1) "failure-free?"

I started to write a sort of philosophical post about having the right attitude, but I changed my mind.  Let me instead report on my behavior -- just give you my observations of myself -- of the day I decide that I need to drop a couple of pounds, and the days just after.

That first day, I step on the scale, mark a dot on my weight chart, notice that all the dots of the last couple of weeks are high, or maybe a trend going up.  I make up my mind:  It's time to go into weight loss mode.

I know what the extra habits are that will help me turn it around, curb my intake and bring my weight back down into the proper range.  I go over them in my mind and I resolve to practice them today.  There aren't very many of them.  It's a short list.

I don't execute them perfectly.  Some of them I don't hit at all -- I forget, or I decide in the heat of the moment "it's not really all that important, my weight will eventually go back down," or I simply give in to temptation.  Maybe I hit just one of them well.  Maybe I hit several of them, a little bit.

I notice that, nevertheless, I set out to "practice" those habits, those skills, and I DID "practice" them.  I behaved differently than yesterday when I wasn't "practicing," didn't I?  Well, then!  I practiced!  I can always point to at least ONE time during the day when I did something differently because I was trying.

That's the first day.

The next day I do it again, and my observation is that I usually do a little better.  I don't execute everything perfectly.  Some of the skills I performed well on the first day, I don't do so well on the second day.  Others I do better.  A lot of the "misses" I can attribute to simple forgetfulness -- the habits are a little rusty, since I haven't needed to deploy them in a while.  I haven't gotten into the groove quite yet.  But my overall impression is nearly always that I improved.  

This goes on for a couple of days.

After just a few days, I can usually point to one habit that I've gotten a handle on.  I may still be missing all the other ones, but there's at least one habit on my list that I am consistently remembering and executing with little trouble.    That's one thing that I'm definitely practicing.  I make a mental note:  Before I started "practicing" again a few days ago, I wasn't doing this one thing.  I've made a little change.  It's a real change and even if I made no other changes, I know it would help.  Scratch that, I know it's already helping.

Over the next few weeks -- or days if I'm able to really concentrate -- the other habits start to fall into line.  I stop forgetting.  I remember what I'm doing from hour to hour.  I can much more easily dismiss unhelpful thoughts.  I still don't have any days that are "perfect."  Usually there are a couple of the habits that I have not yet even begun to try to practice.  "I've got time," I'll think to myself.  "Right now I've got a couple of skills well in hand, still spotty on this one and the other one -- in a few days I'll have those more under control and I can put my effort into the next couple of habits.  And that last one, well, I don't even have to worry about it at all unless I get the others going and things aren't happening fast enough."

Meanwhile, I'm still charting my weight, and after just a couple of days the numbers have started to look a little better.  I keep that in mind, because it helps motivate me.

Eventually the extra pounds are gone, and I stop thinking about the habits, because, well, I'm done.  If I feel like continuing them (they are, at root, healthy habits) I can, but I usually let them slide after that.  They are there if I need them, ready to be called on again.

* * *

Here's what's missing from this scenario, which I've now repeated several times.

Urgency.  I know there's no hurry to get it right.  It took me a good year to learn these habits and to really get in the habit of practicing them; still, forty pounds came off and stayed off while I was learning.  Two or three or five pounds can also come off while I'm re-learning.

Self-pity.  I continue to be so thankful that I'm aware of these skills and that I have enough power in my life to make the changes -- thankful for my supportive husband, thankful for the increased awareness I have, and thankful for the many wonderful and healthy ways I can enjoy my food -- this gratitude engulfs any little "poor me" feelings that may surface in the moment.  I remember what it was like to wallow in confusion over what to eat and when and in what combination.  I know what works for me now.  That knowledge alone makes me so grateful, I notice it almost at every meal when I'm trying to be careful.  In a way, having to "diet" once in a while is a bit of a gift now, because it truly makes me aware of how much I have to be thankful for.

Perfectionism.  Now that I've been through this several times, I have seen that it is simply not true that a less-than-perfectly-practiced habit today means even more slippage tomorrow.  No, what really happens is that each day I am a little bit farther along than the day before.  Call it three steps forward and two steps back if you want; it's still one net step forward.  

All-or-nothing-ism.  I'm also no longer a slave to the "I slipped up here, guess the whole day is shot, pass the Doritos" mentality.  It's just another kind of temptation, you do realize that?  A particularly insidious one?  Everybody falls for it sometimes.  But I know from experience that one slip up reflects only on that single moment.  It does not expand to encompass that whole day.  It is possible at every moment to say "Okay, I haven't stopped yet, but I am stopping right now."  This far and no farther.  I have done it, at varying levels of "far" over the line.  I have seen myself do it time and time again.

Failure.  Yes, failure is missing from this scenario.  I don't fear it because it doesn't happen.  There is no failure for me anymore, not when it comes to these weight loss habits.  There's only "I practiced these" and "I didn't practice those."  There's an observation that today my behavior was not the same as before I decided to practice.  So the deciding was not in vain.  I can see it.  I don't have to pretend.  There is no failure.

Continue reading in part three... Why even unplanned eating doesn't mean failure anymore.

Short lived.

Something about this memoir of a severely malformed baby's short life, written by his 16-year-old sister, brought something home to me.  One of those things I knew in my mind but that nevertheless struck me with new, raw power as I read her words.

How crazy that a substance as unimaginably beautiful as the soul must be contained in something so material and tangible as the body.

Why does the world require that he bring a healthy body with him? 

Little Miracle is a gift, but he does not belong here. I do not belong here. None of us belong here. If the Divine desires only to grace us with Little Miracle’s presence for a few fleeting moments, so be it. 

It is pretty crazy that a soul must be contained in a body, that the body must be healthy for the soul to stay with us.  

A life so brief, and yet.  Haven't we all had brief encounters with people who touched us deeply and permanently even in the few seconds or minutes that our encounter with them lasted?

I remember that in the seconds of shock after I learned my mother had died moments before I arrived in her hospital room, a big warm woman, a hospital nurse, African-American, with glasses and bright-flowered scrubs -- she enfolded me in her arms and said to me:  It's a beautiful day out there, honey.  "A beautiful day to just fly away," that's what I told her.  She wasn't alone.

I never saw that nurse before and never saw her again.  I spent twenty seconds in the presence of that soul, twenty seconds in her embrace.   My life is fuller and happier for those twenty seconds.  

It's hard to know sometimes that, in this life, some people suffer so that others may thrive and grow.  Suffer involuntarily even.  Yet it's true.  It's one of the inescapable ways that suffering has meaning.  

If a short encounter can have meaning that lasts a lifetime -- well, then, a short lifetime can have meaning that lasts -- how long?  Forever, no?

(h/t Amy Welborn)

Exercise vs. antioxidants.

So often, health recommendations are offered in a vacuum:  "Do this, it's good for you."  As if there were no interaction between different "healthy habits," and as if certain habits might not be good for some people and bad for others.

I think there's a general tendency for policy makers to frame health recommendations almost as if they're moral imperatives!  

Well.  Here is an interesting conflict, via Derek Lowe's excellent chemistry/pharma blog In the Pipeline:  Studies seem to indicate that exercise and antioxidants work against one another.  Here's what Lowe writes (my less-technical translation follows):

Now, this is an example of an idea being followed through to its logical conclusion. Here’s where we start: the good effects of exercise are well known, and seem to be beyond argument. Among these are marked improvements in insulin resistance (the hallmark of type II diabetes) and glucose uptake. In fact, exercise, combined with losing adipose weight, is absolutely the best therapy for mild cases of adult-onset diabetes, and can truly reverse the condition, an effect no other treatment can match.

So, what actually causes these exercise effects? There has to be a signal (or set of signals) down at the molecular level that tells your cells what’s happening, and initiates changes in their metabolism. One good candidate is the formation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in the mitochondria. Exercise most certainly increases a person’s use of oxygen, and increases the work load on the mitochondria (since that’s where all the biochemical energy is coming from, anyway). Increased mitochondrial formation of ROS has been well documented, and they have a lot of physiological effects.

Of course, ROS are also implicated in many theories of aging and cellular damage, which is why cells have several systems to try to soak these things up. That’s exactly why people take antioxidants, vitamin C and vitamin E especially. So. . .what if you take those while you’re exercising?

A new paper in PNAS askes that exact question. About forty healthy young male volunteers took part in the study, which involved four weeks of identical exercise programs. Half of the volunteers were already in athletic training, and half weren’t. Both groups were then split again, and half of each cohort took 1000 mg/day of vitamin C and 400 IU/day vitamin E, while the other half took no antioxidants at all. So, we have the effects of exercise, plus and minus previous training, and plus and minus antioxidants.

And as it turns out, antioxidant supplements appear to cancel out many of the beneficial effects of exercise. Soaking up those transient bursts of reactive oxygen species keeps them from signaling. Looked at the other way, oxidative stress could be a key to preventing type II diabetes. 

Exercise might reduce your risk of diabetes, in part, because it makes your muscle cells produce certain compounds.  Those compounds, however, are known to accelerate cellular damage.  Taking vitamins that deactivate the "damaging" compounds also deactivate the good effects of the compounds.  

The whole post is worth a read.

A short series: My failure-free, real-life habit constellation for weight loss.

A few days ago I discovered that I'm definitely up a couple of pounds, as happens every once in a while.  It wasn't that long ago, it seems, that being up a couple of pounds sent me into a panic or an obsession.  (So did being down a couple of pounds.)  But the last couple of times this happened, I realized that the panic and obsession is gone.  I think I know what to do now, and I think I have settled into the right attitude -- an attitude that is positive not negative, calm not panicked, rational not obsessive, and helpful not destructive.

A lot of the things that I write that people really take off on (here's an example) make me laugh, because they're, um, theoretical.  I made them up.  People like them because I have the gift of sounding like I've got it all figured out! 

But occasionally I have something to share that is much more empirical.  This is one of those things.  It is my observation of what I really do that really works (caveat:  FOR ME).  So I'm going to throw it out there for you to chew on, with some suggestions (that's the theoretical, made-up part) on how to adapt its observations for your own life.

Maybe the things I do that help me drop my occasional 3 extra pounds, will help some other person begin habits that will help them take off 10 or 20 or 30. 

Just to keep you reading, I promise you at least one list of seven things.  Stay tuned.

Why did I decide to call this a "habit constellation" instead of a "plan?" 

Mainly, because there isn't any order to it:  no first do this, then do this, then do that.  I have a certain number of habits that I practice (not adhere to, but practice, with all the connotations of skill building by trying and falling short of the ideal and trying again) only when I perceive the need to control my energy intake.  

Also because I find that I often select subsets of them -- mini-constellations -- to work on.  (You know, the Big Dipper is only part of Ursa Major.) Just these three today, or just this one habit another day.   There is no reason I have to practice all of them every single day, though of course the extra pounds will come off faster the more habits I enlist.

The third reason I call it a "habit constellation" is that it is not without its background, the inky sky and the nameless fixed stars.  One of the reasons I need concentrate only on a manageably small number of habits when I need to buckle down and drop a few pounds, is that I have already established a firm background of certain habits I no longer need to think about at all.  Some of them set me apart from the average person, and others are quite normal behavior, but the point is that my particular constellation works for me because of the particular background against which it is set in me.

Next:  Why I call this constellation "failure-free."