bearing blog

Sneaking up on it.

Last five:  111.4, 110.0, 108.2, 108.4, 108.2

Mean: 109.2

The most recent five.

110.2, 111.4, 110.0, 108. 2, this morning 108.4

Mean:  109.6

Averaging.

I decided last night as I prepped the dry ingredients for the pancakes that I really wanted to have some myself. So I planned whole-wheat blueberry pancakes (healthy!) and made berry sauce to go on top.  

And then I lay in bed and fretted about whether I wasn't going to be getting enough protein for breakfast, whether the carbohydrate overload would make my blood sugar crash and force me to make it up with Swedish Fish, and shouldn't I eat a boiled egg too just to be safe?

But wait!  That would mean eating TWO breakfasts.  Surely that can't be right.  Better just eat my egg.

But wait!  I already made the berry sauce.  Two whole wheat pancakes with a couple tablespoons of berry sauce is a fine breakfast.  I am allowed to have this.  Something different, for variety.

But I already know that I really do best if I get my egg.  Maybe if I eat the egg and ONE pancake.

Now wait a minute.  That's not "something different for variety."  That's "my usual breakfast, plus a pancake I don't need just because I want it."

Probably because I think of boiled eggs as quantum entities, it took me a long time to come up with what in retrospect seems obvious:  I made a ten-minute egg, peeled it, and cut it in half.  I had half an egg -- that is, half my usual breakfast -- and one pancake with a tablespoon of berry sauce -- that is, half the planned breakfast.  One single breakfast, the average of the "usual" and the "different."  

And I ordered Mark to eat the other half-egg.

Thanksgiving.

The irony has not escaped me that I will most likely achieve goal within a week or so of Thanksgiving.

I love going to my grandma's house at Thanksgiving.  I don't see my relatives very often, living hundreds of miles away as I do.  This year we'll be missing one of my cousins; she is the second person in the family to move far away.  I have not missed a Thanksgiving yet, except for the year I had influenza in eighth grade, and then there was the year that Oscar gave everybody the norovirus.

Yes, they're all still talking about that one.

Ever since I lost my mom five years ago to adenocarcinoma (a type of lung cancer that is not as strongly associated with tobacco smoke as other types), it's even more important to me to be at Grandma's table every Thanksgiving, even though (since Mark won't think of skipping the trip home at Christmas) it means two big driving trips within a month of each other.

So I'm going, and I'm going to eat the food that Grandma has for us, particularly the bread stuffing, which was Mom's favorite.  I'm not sure she ever ate anything else at Thanksgiving, now that I think of it.

How will I cope?

A couple things.

First, the bathroom scale is coming with me on the trip.  I know that sounds kind of crazy, especially since my in-laws (where we'll stay) already own one.  Here's the thing though:  I know what habits got me here, and I know I need to keep those habits, and the first couple months of maintenance are going to be especially important.  Well, one of those is stepping on the scale first thing in the morning.  I'm not going to do it if I have to wait till I can borrow the bathroom in Mark's mom and dad's master suite.

Second, I'm going to do something that as far as I know nobody has ever done:  I am going to bring a covered dish to Grandma's house.

(No kidding.  Grandma's pushing ninety and she still cooks everything for Thanksgiving.  My uncle helps her get the turkey in and out of the oven, and it helps that we're a fairly small family, but still.)

 Grandma MJ and me, long before my little MJ was born.

I brought some roasted vegetables (yes, it was the fatal vegetable medley) to a potluck last weekend.  It wasn't the sort of thing that anybody would rave about -- they were very plain, and there were a lot of them left at the end of the night.  But it was something I could fill half my plate with:  broccoli, yellow summer squash, and carrots, with a little bit of oil and some garlic and herbs.  I plan to bring the same stuff to Grandma's, for half my plate.  

And I'll fill the other half with whatever looks best.  Probably not just stuffing.  I like turkey, and sweet potatoes, and pumpkin pie, too.

The really weird thing I've already started doing?  Rehearsing it mentally.  I am picturing myself sitting down at Grandma's table with a plastic plate, half full of the vegetables I'm going to bring, and half full of the other stuff.  Over and over, surveying the loaded platters, piling on those plain vegetables, leaving room for only a little of everything else.

The mean rules.

If you're going to play the game, you have to agree on the rules up front, right?

OK, here's mine:  I reach goal when the average of 5 consecutive morning weigh-ins is 108.0 lbs or below.

Here are my last five weigh-ins including this morning:

109.0

110.2

111.4

110.0

108.2

Mean: 109.8

Positive eating.

Christy sent me this article a few days ago:

Instead of Eating to Diet, They're Eating To Enjoy

That doesn’t mean they’re giving up on health or even weight loss. Instead, consumers and nutritionists say they are seeing a shift toward “positive eating” — shunning deprivation diets and instead focusing on adding seasonal vegetables, nuts, berries and other healthful foods to their plates.

It's nice to see people focusing on what they should eat, rather than what they shouldn't eat.   That principle has helped me a lot over the past six months -- mainly, I added enormous amounts of vegetables to my plate and let them shove all the other stuff to the side.

Along the way, I read lots of different diet books, but also a number of books in the category "how to eat and live well."  Real Food by Nina Planck.  Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food.  The most recent one, which I thought would be kind of dumb but which turned out to be a fun little book to read, was French Women Don't Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano.  (It brought back some lovely memories, as I spent a college summer in Lyon.)

There is one big problem with all these books.  They make me crave expensive food.

Nina Planck's book had me dreaming of filling my cart with organic greens from the co-op, and lingering at the cheese counter at the good grocery store, you know, the one where they actually pay someone to put your groceries in a bag for you.  Michael Pollan's books -- well, ok, I've already drunk that Kool-Aid locally produced organic cider, my freezer is full of grass-fed beef that met its end in the glass-walled slaughterhouse of Cannon Falls, MN.  Guiliano's book had me wanting acacia honey stirred into my yogurt, and caviar and crème fraîche dabbed onto my boiled fingerling potatoes.

Not so good.  Well, I mean, it is good -- it's caviar and crème fraîche and POTATOES for crying out loud, how could it not be good?  But maybe not so good for me to be reading about.

Something I've learned:  You cannot eat all the good stuff there is in the world.  Certainly not all at once.  You must pick and choose.

Which puts the gummy bears I've been craving into some perspective.

Morning report.

I feel obligated to disclose that last night I dreamed this:

 I got up in the morning, came down to the computer, opened up Google Reader, and was greeted by this headline:

DARWINCATHOLIC DIES
Roast Vegetable Medley Implicated

I never got around to reading the linked article -- dreams are notoriously shoddy on followup -- but:  

Hey MrsDarwin?  If you need a recipe, just let me know.

Okay, I'm hungry. Hungry, I'm okay.

It's 9:20 and the kids are eating chips and salsa for their bedtime snack, a few feet away.  A loaf of whole-wheat bread, fresh from the bread machine, is cooling on the counter.  I happen to know there is a cabinet over the stove that is stuffed full of dark chocolate and leftover Halloween candy.  Plus, there's about two and a half pounds of my favorite pasta salad in the fridge, right next to a big bowl of leftover steak-and-black-bean fajitas.

Right now, I am not tempted to eat any of it.  I mean, it's true that a few hours ago I almost ate a piece of salami the kids dropped on the floor, but I didn't, and right now I'm hungry but okay.

I could feel my stomach growling as I drove home from picking up Oscar at his evening class, about an hour ago.  I noticed something interesting:  I wasn't thinking of the growly tummy as a "bad" sensation, Something About Which Something Must Be Done.  It was just... well, there, the way my tiredness was there near the end of the day.  Both will stop bothering me when I fall asleep tonight.  I'll be ravenous in the morning, and that is just fine, because in the morning there will be an egg.

It's just there... something I don't need to deal with now, something I can deal with later.

This has taken practice.

Fajitas.

We grilled steak for dinner last night, and since I defrosted a 1.4-lb sirloin, I kept a big chunk of it back for the next day.  Part went into Mark's lunch, but the remaining six ounces became skillet fajitas.  This is a great way to stretch a little bit of meat to feed the whole family.  Sliced onions and bell peppers, plus tomatoes either fresh or canned, are required; but the rest of the veggies?  It's clean-out-the-crisper time. Tonight's fajitas included mushrooms, red cabbage, and thinly sliced carrots. 

Do you really need me to tell you how?  Stir-fry the peppers, onions, mushrooms if you got 'em, anything you want to get caramelized, and any hard veggies (e.g. carrots) until they're tender.  Stir in a few cloves of minced garlic and some oregano and cumin, and maybe a minced chile if you have one.  Then put the soft veggies in, with water -- maybe a half cup -- and some salsa from a jar -- not much, a couple of tablespoons.  Let it bubble till the liquid is mostly gone and stir in what little meat you've got.  If it doesn't look substantial enough you can always throw in a can of well-drained beans of any sort.  Warm up some corn tortillas and you've got a meal.  If you happen to have sour cream and guacamole and chopped lettuce and cilantro, so much the better, but these things are not at all necessary.

I boiled up some plain turnip greens to have on the side; no reason, it just feels weird by now not to have a plain vegetable.  They're pretty good with salsa, did you know that?   And I also sliced oranges into half-moons.  I don't know why, but sliced citrus fruit always seems like the perfect side dish for salsa-based dishes.

I had two tortillas wrapped around the fajita filling, and two helpings of greens, and two orange slices.  I finished off my day with a quarter-ounce of Dagoba dark chocolate with chiles and cacao nibs, and then a nice hot cup of decaf.

I did not count calories for this meal.  When I choose to count calories, recalibrate my portion sizes and so on, I generally don't do it through dinner unless I have some reason to be exceptionally careful.  Rather, I count everything else, keeping it low enough to have a comfortable margin going into dinner.  Then I just try not to overdo it, relying on my eight-and-a-half-inch plate, and declining second helpings.

Seven almonds.

It took me a while to get used to the idea of a single-digit number of tiny things as a snack.   I do it almost without thinking now. 

Assuming you've already gotten control over the number of snacks you're having daily -- I allow myself exactly two -- a decent rule of thumb for controlling the size of snacks, especially snacks of unknown composition (are those baked or fried tortilla chips?) is to have one ounce.  Even if you were to eat one ounce of pure oil, you'd only be set back about 250 calories.  That's not insignificant, and you'd better not do it every day, but it's not going to break the bank, so to speak.  Think of it as a ceiling.

Almonds are another one of my talismans.  It is hard to believe now, but not long ago I did not like them very much.  I had tried to like them, because they're way up top of the "good for you" nut list.  I tried to switch from peanut butter to almond butter.  It never worked very well.  

But after I started adding nuts, a few at a time, into my snacks, I found myself choosing almonds more and more often.   Now they are the first nut I reach for.  I am beginning to think I should buy stock in Blue Diamond.  I keep these in my car cup holder as my emergency snack.   It has measurements on the side, as if I needed to be told; by now I know that there are about 24 almonds in an ounce.