bearing blog

First Holy Communion. The second one, I mean. For me.

Kneelers on rehearsal day.

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Practicing the procession.

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He made it to the correct pew.  I guess he's ready.

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Enjoying the bubble wrap that his present from Mark was wrapped in

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Is it time to leave for church yet?

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The cherry tree cooperated for the day.

 

Even the first-communicant is pressed into service, taking a picture of his godparents and their children:

 

The redhead is my godson.  The two boys were baptized on the same day:

 

 

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Awful cute, aren't they?

These chairs will soon be full of first-communicants.

 

We love to watch girls in pretty dresses around here.

 

Party time.  Who needs a cake when you can have first dibs on an entire assortment of donuts from the GOOD grocery store?

 

I may have missed the shot of him receiving first Communion, but at least I got this one:

What this is not.

I seem to have been added to a few blogrolls in the last several days, because there's been a giant uptick in my traffic.  (Or maybe it was just the Blogger outage.  Thank you, Typepad!  Fifty bucks a year has so far been pretty well spent.)  Maybe we have some new folks around?  

In the last post in the "acceptance" series, I identified a particular habit of mine (gobbling pinches of shredded cheese out of the bag while cooking, even though I always drop cheese on the floor) as an example of gluttony according to my own expanded definition.  A commenter disagreed with me:

Surely you *could* eat cheese while cooking and not get in on the floor. It's not *that* difficult. So "This isn't so much a problem because of the cheese calories" really doesn't ring true. It IS the calories that are the problem, no? That's the whole point of these posts.

I answered in the combox, but I've been thinking.  I wrote the posts, didn't I?  So don't I get to say what "the whole point of these posts" are?  

Okay, then, Erin, be more clear.

Ahem.

This is not a weight loss blog.

I'm glad I lost forty pounds in 2008.  But one thing I've tried to re-iterate over and over -- and you'd probably have to look at old posts to see it, I know, so if you've just arrived, it may not be obvious -- is that weight loss only came for me when I turned my attention to rooting out the habits of gluttony.  

I won't lie.  I pay a lot of attention to the weight.  It is hard work keeping it down.  I've written about that.  

Wanting to look good provides me a strong motivation to work on gluttony.  I think I've been clear about that!  

But I'm also interested in gluttony's technical definition as a vice, a fault, a sin.  It has consequences for my health and my relationships, sure.  Most sins do.   That's why we always have mixed motives in rooting sin out of our lives.  But I'm aware that gluttony has a spiritual component.  And I want it out of my life even if I never gain another pound from it.

As I've gone on blogging and blogging about gluttony, even though I am now at a healthy weight, I have seen a new dimension to these posts emerge.  I have a question which is emerging as a sort of obsession.  I bring it to prayer over and over again.  I write about it over and over again.  You could even say that it is the real point of these posts.  And that point is to figure out this:

How can I use what I've learned about gluttony to defeat my other besetting vices, faults, and sins?

 

So, no.  The calories are not the point.  Not at all.

Tomorrow's stats.

Number of pews reserved for each first communicant:  1

Number of pews in church:  54

Number of first communicants:  52

 

 

(I really hope the rest of the families in the parish are aware of this situation, because I'm afraid it's going to get ugly at about 10:35 AM.)

UPDATE:  Milo's godfather suggests "helmet cam" as a means of getting the communion photo.

 

Acceptance #7 - Just doing it.

"So would you mind terribly much if I started to talk your ear off about gluttony and weight loss again?  For a little while?"

That was me, asking my husband if he is willing to step once again into the roles he willingly played while I was losing the weight.   (Here's the guest post he wrote last year to tell his side of the story.)

Of course he said yes.

Check.  One off the list.

+ + +

And of course I'm blogging about it.  Check.

+ + + 

Another list item:  to think critically about gluttony, at least for a little while, so I can recognize it when it tempts me.   I need a condensed version of this post in the form of a question.   Something like, "That thing you're about to put in your mouth?  Is there some reason you ought not to eat that, charity or manners or money or plain common sense, but that you're ignoring because you Just Want It?"

An example I was thinking of when I wrote that post:  I like to eat pinches of shredded cheese out of the food processor (or these days, plastic resealable bag) while I'm waiting to flip the quesadillas.   This isn't so much a problem because of the cheese calories.  Instead, it's that I always drop some on the floor while I'm elegantly sprinkling the cheese into my upturned mouth.  And then somebody steps on the cheese and tracks it into the living room.  

Clearly plain common sense would say I should not sprinkle shredded cheese into my mouth while trying to cook quesadillas.  The virtues of multitasking only extend so far.   And yet, despite being aware of this for several months, and despite knowing what will happen at the very moment my hand snakes into the bag, I reject self-restraint, I continue to snarf shredded cheese by hand whenever I make quesadillas, and I continue to find inch-long yellow smears on the carpet.  

That, my friends, is gluttony.

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In the maintenance blues post (#4 in this series), I catalogued which of my habits are still working, and which aren't.  Now I'll take that one step past a catalogue and see if I can nail down what's going on.

A couple of the items have to do with availability:  there's more of what I don't want, and less of what I do want, coming home from the store.  That's pretty easily fixed, in our family that already knows how to make a list and stick to it.

1. Note on the grocery list, "no sauces or flavors on the frozen veg."  If I don't tell Mark what to buy, he has to guess what I want.  
2. Ask each verbal child to pick his or her favorite packaged cookie and buy only those three kinds for a good long while, rotating through them.  Variety in real food is good; too much variety in junk food or treats is bad for everybody, not just me.
3. Before cookies enter my pantry, preportion the big bags of cookies into Ziploc bags.  Because I have four children, I don't have to make the bags single serving; I would guess, for example, that a standard bag of Oreos should be halved.   And it's okay if there are a couple extra Oreos and I eat them.  The thing I want to avoid is the open bag of Oreos sitting around waiting for the next snacktime.  Because you know what?  It never makes it that long.

These three commitments ought to be near effortless, as the decision point is at grocery shopping time.    Not at a "will I eat this, or won't I?" time.

The remaining items are more about respecting my own pre-decided limits even when I'm tempted to ignore them.  I've learned that I feel much, much better if I stop eating while the available food still promises me a little pleasure; and yet, the thought of the pleasure still attracts.  I suffer, while sitting at table, from the illusion of being unsatisfied; after I get up from the table, I can see in hindsight that I have been satisfied.  "Satisfied," indeed, is something I am only sure about in hindsight.  Never "I can stop eating because I am satisfied," but later, "I stopped eating, and I have been satisfied."

(One reason why the "Eat till you're satisfied" admonition in Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family (reviewed here, here, here) leaves me shaking my head.  For me it's more like "Eat till you guess you will feel satisfied.")

Anyway, these are the items that I should re-test, to see whether they help me regain respect for my own chosen limits:

1. Stick to the mealtime/snacktime schedule.  (The schedule itself may need tweaking.)
2. Stop eating food that somebody else wasted.  It's amazing how often I have to recommit to this one.
3. Put the food on a plate so I can see how big it is and enjoy it more.
4. One (1) plate.  One!

Boy, I could print this up and put it in a fortune cookie and have room to spare.  Remember the simplicity of "Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants"?  

My fortune should say "Eat meals.  From my plate.  Then stop."

Check.

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I think that takes care of all the thinking.  The next step, of course, is do.  Or (thanks, Yoda) do not.

 

"You pretend to be some kind of grieving mother but it's just an act."

So saith Larry Vineyard, Chief Investigator with Knox County (TN) Medical Examiner, to a mother requesting a change in her son's autopsy report.

The blogger and allegedly grieving mother -- Katie Allison Granju -- has a witness.

 

Acceptance # 6. Is change possible? How is it possible?

(First post.  Second post.  Third post. Fourth post. Fifth post.)

I know very well that it's possible to get focused on the habits that keep me steered away from the old days of gluttony.  I did it before, so I can do it again.

I'm reluctant to use that argument to tell myself, "I lost weight and maintained it before by developing habits X, Y, and Z.  I developed those habits before, and so I can do it again."  In fact, I'm pretty sure that's a dangerous line of thinking.

My life is in a different place now.  Can I transplant them into new soil -- those specific habits that worked for me so well in another place?  Will they take root?  Will they bear fruit?  I won't have an idea until I think through it, and I really won't know until I try.  

But I am confident that I can solve the problem from scratch within the new parameters.  The point is to keep from sliding back into gluttony, after all.  The weight maintenance is supposed to be a pleasant side effect of non-gluttony.  Rooting out the gluttony is the point.  I need to remember that, and what's more, I need to act like I really believe it's true.  That is the thing that I did before, that I can do again.

+ + + 

Among the things I am sure I can transplant, here's what does help me:

1.  Thinking critically and objectively of the meaning of "gluttony" so I can identify it when it tempts me.
2. Making a plan of habits to try.
3. Trying out each new habit carefully to see if it sticks.
4. Blogging openly about the strategies I'm experimenting with -- specifically.
5. Talking about my successes with my husband.

All that, I can do.  And -- I will.

More later.

 

Bothering.

This is a fantastic post from a mother who switched from homeschooling to what we around here call "away school" -- and then back again.  I'm going to bookmark it and read it the next time I start stressing out about lesson planning.

... I had homeschooled all the kids from birth on, and I think we all had some illusions about public schooling--just about all kid movies show kids in a public schooling lifestyle, so the kids had impressions that public school was all about shiny yellow schoolbuses and fun sports and neat science experiments. (I know, such a load of crap. Those same movies also show everyone living in massive 3-car neo-colonials decorated by Pottery Barn. It's not like Disney profits by telling the TRUTH, hello.)

And I was taken in, too. I have many public-schooling friends, and just think......the school handles the transportation....the school pays for the textbooks.....the school offers free daycare for 6 hours a day. Man, that can get tempting when life is really real on the less-fun homeschooling days. Especially when scrounging through the bottom of the budget barrel for pennies to buy curricula. The idea of not having to buy ANY of it....wow, huh?

So we tried it this last year. And you know what I found? That sending kids to public school is easier in some ways--yeah, it's not all on my shoulders anymore; I don't have to find testing companies; I don't have to round up every single book, etc. No lesson plans. 

BUT it's also harder. Really. Waaaay harder than homeschooling. 

Just yesterday, while we were waiting with our seven-year-olds in line for the First Communion interviews (he passed!  woo-hoo!  now we don't have to cancel his pizza party!), a mother from our parish told me I was a saint for being a homeschooler, and I explained once again that I am a homeschooler because, well, basically, I am a slacker except when I am a massively incurable nerd.

There you have it, folks:  if you are a Slacker Nerd Mom, then homeschooling is for you.  That's my prescription.  I basically have two settings:  Why Bother (dealing with bureaucracies; getting library books back on time; crafting) and Geek Out (designing history curricula from scratch; pushing a shopping cart through Office Max; learning Latin grammar two steps ahead of a gaggle of middle-schoolers whose parents trust me to teach it to them).

In fact, now that I think about it, the story of my time on earth may be nothing more than the intense drama of trying to figure out which setting I should apply to which basic life skill.  

Since I became a parent, I've moved a number of things from one category to another.  For example, once I was Geek Out about getting good grades and earning professional praise, and that pretty much has to be Why Bother now.  Cooking elaborate dinners used to be Geek Out.  It's now Why Bother for the foreseeable future, replaced in the Geek Out category with a decidedly different style of cuisine that has its own challenges.

What's moved from Why Bother to Geek Out over the years?  Becoming fitter, stronger, and faster.  Learning to be kind to people.  Making friends with other women.  

I knew all along that some things, like tensor math, were kind of fun because they were difficult.  Somewhere along the way I figured out that this is true not only of the things that most people find even more difficult than I do, but also of many things that I find hard even though most people find them easy.

But I'm also pretty sure that I will never enjoy getting up early to force someone to catch a school bus.

Go Betty!

Betty Beguiles is now offering an online personal shopper service!

  I We will begin with an hour-long phone consultation (or online chat) during which we will discuss your needs, budget, body type, and stylistic preferences.

 II I will then spend the next week creating several outfit suggestions (all of which will be available for purchase online) that meet your requirements.

III Once I've identified pieces that meet your needs, I will present you with one or more “inspiration boards” (see below) that illustrate the outfits I’ve created for you. Accompanying the illustration boards will be direct links to the pieces I’ve suggested so that you can purchase the ones that most appeal to you.

I could really have used this help during my Year of Three Wardrobes (the size 6 wardrobe, the size 2 wardrobe, and the XS maternity wardrobe.)   I didn't do a bad job on my own, but I bet I could have saved more than what BB is charging if I really knew what I was looking for.

Maintenance: Will change help? (Acceptance #5)

(First post.  Second post.  Third post. Fourth post.)

In my last post I wrote about all the anxiety I've been having surrounding maintenance of my weight right now.  I decided to take my own advice, step back, and go through the process of discernment that I outlined.  The first step is to accept reality:  to look objectively at what's going on. 

As I wrote in the last post, the anxiety isn't causeless.  My habits are indeed slipping from desirable ones to undesirable ones.  My weight has changed just a bit, to a slightly higher (but still healthy) number; but it's clear that my attention is misplaced.  

• I am anxious about my weight number, even though
  •  I cannot directly control it; and 
  •  in any case it might be a perfectly healthy number for me.
• At the same time I am ignoring the slow infiltration of old habits, even though
  • I can directly control them; and
  • I already know they are not healthy habits for me.

That's the reality that I accept.  

Let's see, what's the next step in my process of discernment...  "Judge whether a change offers benefits."

Heck yeah.  I managed to gain all that willpower and lose all my weight when I concentrated my effort on the habits.  I never really did manage to stop being anxious about the number on the scale, but by emphasizing the habits rather than the numbers I was at least able to keep from getting discouraged.  I could see myself getting better at self-control, and that was incredibly heartening.  

So I'm not entirely sure whether it would benefit me to stop worrying about the numbers, but I am quite certain I would benefit by exerting effort, once again, on habits.   

I think it's interesting that when I consider making a change at this level, it's the change in attitude and focus -- not a change in eating.  I think that might have been part of the reason I've been feeling so frustrated, with so many false starts -- I've been trying to jump right back to "ZOMG must stick to my habits!!!!"  I never considered where my efforts will reap the most rewards.  And I never considered whether some of the habits that were useful in my first maintenance period might not be so useful anymore, now that I have four children including one toddler.

Maintenance blues: Acceptance, #4.

(First post.  Second post.  Third post.)

Here's something I've been wanting to write about but have been having trouble putting into words.

It's three years this week since my successful weight loss began.  And lately?  Weight maintenance has been hard.  

I feel as though I'm slipping, right on the edge.  I weigh myself every day and faithfully plot each point on a chart.  The paper charts stack up in a drawer in my bathroom, one for every month since I reached my weight loss goal in November 2008.  The zigzag lines rise up through my pregnancy and back down again after the birth of #4, not quite as low as I was pre-pregnancy but back to where I decided to be.

And lately I don't like what I see.   It's not that I'm not still at a healthy weight.  I am.  But after reaching my postpartum target, my weight crept back up, and I've been on the high side of it for months now.

Worse, I can't seem to bring it back down.  Several times since just before the baby's first birthday, I have tried to lose just one pound.  Not because I needed to but because I wanted to see if I could still do it. 

I haven't done it.  I haven't sustained the effort for more than a few days.  After about three days of sticking to my habits, I start feeling hungry and cold all the time, and shortly thereafter I find myself helping myself to a third plate of dinner, or eating all the kids' sandwich crusts.    I recognize this as classic "body defending its fat stores."  Still, it's frustrating -- I managed to overcome it once, what's wrong with me now?  Have I lost my hard-earned habits for good?

And that small gain since I reached my postpartum goal -- it's not bad in and of itself, but what if it is the beginning of a slow creep back up to where I was?  My mind races.  This is the kind of thing that, as I've said before, literally keeps me up at night.

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It's only fair I write about this.  Even though I never intended this to be a "weight loss blog," weight loss is the most popular topic I write about.  Probably every day, certainly every week, some person sits down at their computer and methodically clicks through every single post in the weight loss categories; I see it in the site statistics.  

And this is part of it.  That maintenance sometimes is frustrating and hard.

+ + +

Another reason I need to write about it is that writing helps me figure things out.  I had a draft of this post up last week when I got sidetracked by the comment about acceptance, the one where I suggested a process of accepting -- not the self, but the truth about the self; and accepting the sacrifices that are necessary to change the truth.  Then I thought -- why not take my own advice?

So let me look at the reality.  Let me figure out what's going on, and accept it.  

+ + +

First of all:  The numbers on the scale are still objectively good.  I may be feeling panicky about them right now, but that is not because of what they are, it is because I fear they may change.  If I could look into a crystal ball and learn I would be this weight indefinitely, I'd be happy, not disappointed.  I am at a healthy weight.  Or, to take the metric that Mark suggests is most useful (because it involves monetary expense), I don't need to buy new clothes in a bigger size.  

But what about my habits?  Well.  Let's take a look at the background habits that I wrote about in the series on my "failure-free habit constellation," almost exactly two years ago.  Have they changed?

• I still drink mostly water, black coffee, and black tea.  I have, however, been drinking more alcohol with dinner lately.
• I'm still eating lots of vegetables.  More often, though, since I haven't been specifying the kind on the grocery list, Mark's been bringing home more of the "lightly sauced" kinds of frozen vegetables.  The problem with this is that I lose some appreciation for real-food vegetables (plain or with real butter or olive oil).
• I'm still using small plates at home, and when I'm away I do remember to use only part of the larger plate.
• "Habitually wary of sugar and white flour?"  I have definitely been enjoying more of those.  I lost weight while sticking to a two-thumbs-sized dessert portion.  For a while there, flush with my good fortune, I was testing the limits of maintenance -- and in the meantime it seems I've gotten used to larger and more-frequent sweets.
• Only a very limited selection of snack food?  This has definitely changed.  It seems the children have been clamoring for a vast variety of packaged cookies for their afternoon snacks.  And yes, I have been joining in.  Novelty is not my friend.
• I still keep that jar of almonds in the car, and I still reach for them instead of hitting a drive-through when snacktime hits.
• And I still step on the scale every morning.  

How about that constellation of weight-loss habits?  When I was trying to drop the "just one pound," was I really using them?

• Signal breakfast:  Yes, I'm having the boiled-egg-and-tomato-juice for breakfast quite a bit.  Not every morning, but then I never had it every morning.  Today, for example, I had a boiled egg and two strawberries instead.  (The kids were having strawberries and yogurt for breakfast and the strawberries looked pretty good.)
• Eating on schedule:  Meals are still regularly spaced, and I've been having the snack at 3:30, but I've been skipping the 10:30 snack -- and I've definitely been nibbling in between.  Especially (yeah, I know) the kids' leavings.  Also, I've been having bedtime snack.  I know darn well by now that I feel better in the morning if I don't have the bedtime snack.  And yet it's hard not to join in when Mark and the kids are chowing down on ice cream.
• Control the size of the snacks:  not happening.
• No seconds?  I have been having seconds at dinner.  I admit it.  Including the second half of the sandwich.
• Control the plate.  This has always been easy:  the relative proportions of veg, starch, and protein on my plate.  No problem there.

So, clearly, not all, but some of the habits of temperance are slipping and being replaced by habits that characterize my old life.  

The summary:

•    My vegetables aren't as plain as I want.
•    I'm eating larger, more frequent portions of sweets than I want.
• There is too much variety of cookies in the house.  Especially Oreos.  Grr.
• I'm eating at times I don't intend to eat.
• I don't know how big my snacks are.  I would rather know than be ignorant.
• I am eating second servings that I don't want, and that experience taught me is in excess of what satisfies me.

But just to be fair, let's summarize the good news too:

•    I haven't gone back to big plates.
• I haven't let my almond jar run empty.
• I haven't avoided the scale, no matter how much I might worry about the number.
• I haven't been having two- and three-egg breakfasts.
• My plates still look the way they ought to.

In fact, there are lots of things I used to do in the old gluttonous days that I have not even come close to doing, not even once.  I have never again eaten a whole pizza by myself.  I have never again gone through the drive through to get a hamburger just because I suddenly wanted one.  I have never again binged on every leftover I could find in the fridge.  I have not followed any impulse to buy snacks from the vending machine.  I've practiced resistance on lots of occasions.

It is a little tempting to think that perhaps there is not really a problem.  I am, after all, at a healthy weight.  Perhaps I should not be alarmed that I am standing on a floor that is difficult to break through.  Perhaps my body is merely defending its reasonably-sized fat reserves against my unreasonable desire to prove that I can force it to a slightly smaller weight.

But if I look at the habits, it's clear that there is a problem:  a behavioral one.  Because I don't want to have those habits of gluttony, even if they don't make me gain my weight back.

So.  I have to accept -- once again -- that the number on the scale is not the problem.  My daily choices are.  And if I choose to change that, I have to accept that I must once again accept some daily sacrifice.

 

(UPDATED TO ADD:  Apropos the comments -- I have written about Gary Taubes' Why We Get Fat here, here, here, and here, and about Good Calories, Bad Calories here.