Praying Horse

2011-11-28T20:10:00.000-08:00

Box of Beauty

2011-07-04T15:16:00.000-07:00

Over the last year, I have been participating in a women’s circle, a “group of women who are emerging”, as part of our mission statement states. In fact, at our last gathering, we celebrated our one year anniversary. I have been greatly inspired by our circle and by my circle sisters. One of our activities was to draw a card from Susan Seddon Boulet’s Goddess deck, a beautiful set of cards made from her paintings. The card I drew was Psyche (see the painting). As I read the back of the card, which contained a short retelling of the myth of Psyche, I found myself tearing up. I’m not a gal that tears up much (which drove one of my therapists to distraction practically).

You can read much more about the Psyche myth here, but the essence of it is that Psyche was the beloved of Eros, and in order to placate Eros’s jealous mother Aphrodite, was set four seemingly impossible tasks. Psyche accomplishes the tasks, even though she is in despair about her ability to do so, by allowing others to help her and listening to the wisdom of those coming to her aid. Her final task is to visit Persephone in Hades and bring back a box of beauty.

Here is where I stopped and felt stunned by the phrase “Box of Beauty”. It seemed to be an answer of sorts – this year, I have been questioning: what is my vision, what are the next steps I need to take, what ways can I grow? As I sat reading the card, I thought about Psyche’s first three trials and saw parallels between those and how my own life has unfurled; yes, I could identify three phases of my life that at the time I was not at all certain I would get through. And now, the task is to bring back a presumably full Box of Beauty. What does that mean exactly? What could be in the box?

As I am questioning now, at my getting-riper age of 55, what I need to do now with my life, especially on a spiritual level, and what I have to offer, this idea of returning a Box of Beauty explodes with meaning.

In the myth, Psyche gets the beauty from Persephone. So it must be, I think, even though all of us contain universes of beauty within us, none of us can take credit for it. It certainly isn’t necessarily related to our physical beings, although some of us could be gorgeous in a beauty queen sort of way. I see it more as imparting beauty in word or action by choosing what is most forgiving or compassionate or loving.

I also see that the Box will contain offerings of art and creativity and have been greatly excited this last week by the visions inspired by this myth. This digital painting/photo is my version of the goddess Psyche. I borrowed from the traditional association of the butterfly with the soul, which is another definition of the word psyche. The butterfly in this image is from a photo I took this spring of a California Sister (Adelpha californica) resting by a pool in our Lion Creek. And so, this image is the first from the Box of Beauty.

For poetry lovers, a verse from John Keats, “Ode to Psyche”, 1819:

O brightest! though too late for antique vows,
Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,
When holy were the haunted forest boughs,
Holy the air, the water, and the fire;
Yet even in these days so far retired
From happy pieties, thy lucent fans,
Fluttering among the faint Olympians,
I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired.
So let me be thy choir, and make a moan
Upon the midnight hours;
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet
From swinged censer teeming;
Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat
Of pale-mouthed prophet dreaming.

New Book

2011-05-06T19:43:00.000-07:00

As some of you may know, I seem to have developed a fondness for observing fungi. Over the last couple of years, I have made it a mini-mission to photograph as many fungi as possible - at least those that we spy at our beloved Dryad Ranch. I created a little book of my treasured finds:

Fungi of Dryad Ranch by Megan M Ralph | Make Your Own Book

The Ordinary

2011-04-20T09:42:00.000-07:00

One of the books I'm reading at the moment - the one I have here in my office for lunch time* - is a thoughtful work on creativity: The Widening Stream by David Ulrich.

I love this quote: "The world is interesting and becomes far more so as we closely observe things, people (including ourselves), and events, and contemplate their significance. Once again, heightened awareness becomes a transforming agent for ourselves and our work. through the action of directing our attention, we revel in the commonplace; the ordinary becomes extraordinary."

Here's another, that I highlighted with a question mark. "The creative act, regardless of how it takes shape, is one of service and devotion to the world." What do you think of that idea? Is that so for you?

* Yes, I know maybe just reading or just eating could be a better choice. Sometimes I do both.

2011-02-27T09:13:00.000-08:00

I'm taking a rest day today - oh maybe I'll go for a walk later on, but after being a veritable whirlwind yesterday, what with scrubbing and cleaning and cooking and working out and walking and some more cooking and a gripy knee, it seems like a good idea to Not Do So Much today.

It seems I have to force myself to slow down. It seems there's a part of my brain nowadays that says: go go go, burn calories, don't let yourself get fat again. Seems I still can't trust that it's the overall trend that matters, not what happens on any given day and that a rest day is needed on a regular basis.

My plan is to re-organize one of my dresser drawers (fun,eh?) and spend a lot of time working on photos: editing, tagging, filing and backing up.

Metabolic Pathways Graphic

2011-02-07T20:37:00.000-08:00

I was lurking on one of my favorite web sites / forums this morning (Calorie Count). The complexity of the metabolic system was under discussion. Someone posted a link to an amazing graphic. I don't understand it really but remain in awe. Both at our bodies and at the greatness of the artwork, such that it is. I got it here.

Yipes, How Did I Miss This?

2011-01-14T19:43:00.000-08:00

Somehow, this amazing singer had never hit my radar until yesterday (thank you Pandora). Eva Cassidy doing Autumn Leaves. Her version of Fields of Gold brings me to my knees, but I couldn't find a live video for that one.

Hot Diggety! A New Personal Best

2011-01-04T22:13:00.000-08:00

A few weeks back, convinced I wanted more data about my activity levels, I ordered this fancy gadget that purportedly measures the total amount of calories burned during the day. It's a Fit armband from BodyMedia - you wear it all day around your upper arm to provide various measurements to calculate energy output. Well. It's interesting and all but to date, I haven't decided whether I've wasted my money.

One of the more amusing aspects of this experience is that the armband assigns personal bests to various of its measurements: eg. highest number of minutes engaging in vigorous activity, highest number of steps taken during a day and so forth. It also measures sleep (how many hours of sleep one gets in a night), sleep efficiency (hours of actual sleep vs. lying down time) and then there's lying down time itself.

I rang in the New Year by achieving my best ever performance in both lying down time AND sleep efficiency. And here I thought Sloth was a sin.

(What do you suppose the lying down efficiency is of the aging witches butter fungus pictured above?)

On Fear

2010-12-28T20:34:00.000-08:00

I read this wonderful article in Yoga Journal yesterday, titled Befriending Your Fears. We all struggle with our fears - it sure seems that on any given day I'll somehow find something to feel fear about. Nowadays, I'm mostly able to let it be and tell myself, "Oh, there's that fear again" when I feel my stomach start to churn and that unpleasant adrenaline-y buzziness comes up again. When the mind starts to visualize The Very Worst Outcome. The author calls this a Trance of Fear; what a great phrase.

Recently, it seems that with nothing else to feel especially fearful about, I've chosen to worry about driving home. And look! The weather wants to cooperate by raining and being cold and creating horrible muddy spots in which neighbors get stuck (yes, we had to pull someone out the other day) and concocting thick tule fogs which are the worst of all. I'm such a city mouse driver even though we've migrated to the country. I already know that it's way worse elsewhere and there's the discomfort anyway.

I especially loved this paragraph from the article: "As long as you are alive, you will feel fear. It is an intrinsic part of your world, as natural as a bitter cold winter day or the winds that rip branches off trees. If you resist it or push it aside, you miss a powerful opportunity for healing and freedom. When you face your fears with mindfulness and compassion, you begin to realize the loving and luminous awareness that, like the ocean, can hold the moving waves. This boundless presence is your true refuge - you are coming home to the vastness of your own awakened heart."

2010-12-23T12:13:00.001-08:00

Same Topic

2010-12-17T18:47:00.000-08:00

Synchronicity is grand. It seems that over the last couple of weeks so much of what has attracted my attention has been vision-related. I go to the bookstore: a new book by Oliver Sachs called The Mind's Eye, all about people who have had varying degrees of blindness and their experiences with navigating the world. What richness of adaptation! Another find: a CD by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, called "Seeing in the Dark" where she relates the journey into the intuitive, creative nature. Of course, the key question to pose is "What would You have me do now?"

For some great podcasts on spiritual practices: Sounds True Insights at the Edge

On the Topic of Vision

2010-12-10T20:49:00.000-08:00

There are two aspects of Vision that I have been working with over the last couple of weeks. One is on the purely physical level. I have had an ongoing retinal problem (Presumed Ocular Histoplasmosis Syndrome) that has caused me to lose the central vision in my right eye and can become active in the left eye at any time. It has been some years since I have experienced those types of issues in the left eye, but a week ago, I noticed quite a lot of floaters in my left eye – it was definitely unusual, although I did not notice the distortion or shadowing that I would have had with a flare up of the inflammation. So I hauled myself into the Bay Area to see the retina specialist.
My visual field in that left eye at the moment includes about 20 little black dots that move as my eye moves. It’s almost like a constellation of stars – in reverse. Instead of shining, they’re dark.

The five days before I saw the doctor were anxious ones. I didn’t know if this was a harbinger of the “bad times” again and I reviewed all of the plans I’d made years ago the last time I was dealing with the problem. What I wanted to do if all the treatments failed? How would I live my life? Etc etc etc. My job depends on me being able to see, so how would I cope with that? (low vision aides for the computer) Driving! Oh boy, there’s a big one. I’ll work from home, give up the office and rope off my work space. And reading. My photography, what would I do about that? I’ve heard of blind photographers, but have no idea how that works exactly. Anyway, I realized that no matter what, I would be able to concoct a high quality of life, with room for things I love doing, some form of practical work/means of income and a creative life.

The examination gave my left eye a clean bill of health. He saw no inflammation at all. I just have some annoying floaters. Gratitude and relief don’t even begin to cover describing what I felt with that news.

Meanwhile, on a spiritual level, I asked myself what is it that I am supposed to see that I am not seeing? Is there something I’m closing my eyes to? Some sign I’ve blocked from sight? It seems that right now, I am prompted to really look inside. What IS the vision for how I want to lead the rest of my life? Those are the questions I’m grappling with now. I don’t have answers yet, but think those answers include service and connection. I don’t exactly know what that means yet.

A Complete Digression

2010-11-17T19:45:00.000-08:00

Praying Horse must laugh sometimes. I love these comics: this one (and I hope I'm allowed to show you this without violating copyright), the original web site is at Dinosaur Comics and this particular one is dated July 22, 2009, but it never fails to make me laugh. It so much reminds me of some of the silly weight loss ideas I've heard and of course the end result? Bleh.

Leptin Resistance

2010-11-12T18:52:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned in the last post, I've been reading up on appetite hormones, specifically leptin.

Leptin is a protein hormone that acts to regulate appetite, metabolism and energy levels. If leptin is doing its job properly, it signals the brain how much energy your body has and how much is required - in other words, whether you need to eat because you are low on energy or whether you have enough energy and do not need to eat any more. In the latter case, it should signal satiety. Because it is manufactured primarily in the fat cells, the amount of leptin in your body is directly related to the amount of body fat you have.

You would think that would mean that the appetite would decrease, but that is not the case. Unfortunately, for some of us, our bodies have become deaf to the leptin's message that we are full and should stop eating - our cells are unable to accept leptin's satiety messages and we keep eating. In fact, most obese people have high levels of leptin and have become leptin resistant, in a similar way that some diabetics have become resistant to insulin.

A WebMD article on appetite hormones levels quotes Louis Aronne, directory of the Comprehensive Weight Control Program at New York-Presbyterian Hospital: "With leptin resistance, you don't feel full and the more you eat, the hungrier you may get." Further, the article quotes Scott Kahan, co-director of the George Washington University Weight Management Program: "The general public tends to think of 'fat' people as lazy and as having no willpower [but] it couldn't be further from the truth...There is no question that certain people are preconditioned to gain weight more easily and more quickly regain weight after dieting."

So, what to do? It will come as absolutely no surprise that a proper diet and exercise were mentioned again and again as the key. Almost all of the articles I read also recommended that snacking be limited and that one should eat three well-balanced and nutritiously healthy meals, making sure to get plenty of protein. I don't know about this part of the recommendation - it is certainly not what I do, even though I am pretty sure that if I am not now still leptin resistant then I certainly was in the past. I actually eat 6 - 7 times a day consisting of three medium-sized meals and three or four small snacks. I'm not sure what the rationale is behind the three meals only recommendation, just passing on what I found in my reading.

Some Links:
Alternative Health for Today: Insulin and Leptin Resistance - Information Worth Knowing
Sharecare: What is Leptin Resistance
Suite101: Overcome Leptin Resistance with Exercise
WebMD: Some Dieters Are Set Up to Regain Weight
Harvard Gazette: Shining Light on Leptin's Role in the Brain
eHow: How to Check Leptin Levels

2010-11-08T20:37:00.000-08:00

While I'm working on a post about appetite hormones (trying to sort everything out is interesting to say the least), I'd like to "show off" this super-sweet blog award I received from my sister in spirit and fellow blogger at When The Spirit Moves Me, and also offer this lovely yoga invocation.

My hubby and I have been taking a Yoga Basics class on Monday nights since early spring, and we just adore the class. Anyone in the Oakhurst area, it's at the Old Mill Studio/Pure Heart Wellness Center.

For My Sisters

2010-10-25T21:44:00.000-07:00

Sisters, we weep with grief
Shout with anger
Tremble in fear
Stand tall in joy.

We grow strong as the biggest tree
Deep as the deepest well
Wise as the elders.

We echo and call
and call
and call.

We dream our circle to life.
Within, we cradle the newest
being – the babe we feed
with the nectar
of the goddesses and gods
the whatever is.
All of that.

We are spread about with sunshine
We are covered in rain
We soar with the wind
push up the green shoots.
Our legs are roots
Our bodies living wood
Our arms move in worship
We dance between the stars.

I’ve heard we are made of stars.
We are old as the oldest
We are the blackest night
And the newest light.

Formed from the dust of the galaxies
Conjured from lust and need
the moans of pleasure
slick seed
and yes.

We birth the mountains from our wombs,
Bring forth the seas.
From between our thighs,
the scent of ancient sands.
The old queens whose hands
hold the scepters
bestow the mysteries.

All that is.
All that is.

Recent Thoughts

2010-10-03T17:20:00.000-07:00

I got to thinking the other day that so often many of us talk about our emotions as something that are primarily difficult or negative. Just want to throw out there that many emotions are positive. How about the times you have experienced these?

affection love fondness liking attraction caring tenderness compassion sentimentality arousal desire passion curiosity joy cheerfulness amusement bliss gaiety glee jolliness joviality delight enjoyment gladness happiness jubilation elation satisfaction ecstasy euphoria zest enthusiasm zeal excitement thrill exhilaration contentment pleasure triumph optimism eagerness hope optimism rapture relief surprise amazement

The thing with emotions is that any given one doesn't necessarily last very long; they come and go. It does take some practice to avoid holding onto a feeling, whether it be a positive or a negative one. We say we don't want to feel the "bad" ones, but sometimes our minds will latch onto something and won't let us stop experiencing that feeling, as when we are angry about what another person did and we can't stop thinking about it and rehearsing and rehashing it in our brain. I read a book some time ago by Jill Bolte Taylor called My Stroke of Insight. She's was a neurophysiologist (or equivalent) and had a stroke and part of her recovery process was in being able to watch her own emotional process. She noticed a pattern in herself that she called the 90 second rule, where an emotion causes a chemical process in the body that lasts for 90 seconds. After that time, any remaining response is the individual choosing to continue experiencing that feeling, whether that choice is conscious or not. I don't know whether this is "true", but it is something interesting to think about.

I mentioned this to some friends who responded one of two ways: either they defended why they needed to feel the "negative" emotions or they explained how they work very hard at only experiencing the "positive" ones. That's not the point, the point is that ultimately, we are going to experience all or most of the whole gamut of feelings - if we hold on to a particular one, whether it be one we think of a good or one we think of as bad, then we can get stuck in it and make ourselves suffer. If we strive to hold onto happiness, oh my, aren't our hopes dashed. If we don't let anger flow through and out of us, that burns us inside.

More Studies. Sorry, I Find This Interesting

2010-09-08T21:46:00.000-07:00

I read the most interesting article in the magazine New Scientist about the addictive quality (for some people) of what the article terms "junkie" food, i.e. food high in sugars, salt and fats. It's a long article, but worth reading in its entirety.

A number of studies have found interesting clues to ways some individuals respond to food in a manner very similar to drug addiction where the reward circuitry of the brain is highjacked. Also, certain foods (see above) are more "addictive".

I know a lot of folks scoff at studies like these, and claim that by publishing results like this, the scientists end up (somehow) letting people off the hook of personal responsibility. I don't see it that way - a person who wants to deny their own complicity in engaging in addictive behavior doesn't need a study to do it. I find that learning about these correlations make it easier for me to understand some of my own past behavior. It helps to hear that there is some evidence for those of us who feel we have a food addiction, that we probably do. What it means then, is if we want to change our behavior, we can't just go on a diet and hope that our willpower is enough; the problem has to be addressed in a way that also works with the addictive quality of our eating habits and the kinds of food we eat. I fully believe that at the beginning of my weight loss, I made a very clear cut decision to save my own life. I guess that sounds dramatic, maybe I should phrase it, "decision to choose health above remaining mired in unhealthy overeating".

Studies

2010-09-06T20:19:00.000-07:00

I'm a participant in the National Weight Control Registry, which is a large, long-term study of people who have lost a significant amount of weight and maintained the loss for over a year. I'm going into my third year of participating; basically it consists of answering questionnaires each year. From time to time, I get letters from them that briefly describe some of the research findings that come out of the studies they conduct, using the responses to the questionnaires.

This year, one of the studies looked at "Psychological Characteristics of Successful Weight Losers". I'll just quote from the long paragraph in the letter, and apologies in advance for the wall of text, but I find all of this interesting.

"Some obesity researchers have argued that long-term maintenance of weight loss requires such extreme effort that few people are able to accomplish it, and that those rare individuals who do maintain their weight losses do so at tremendous psychological cost. We examined registry members' scores on a number of psychological questionnaires, and compared their scores to the scores of groups known to be experiencing high levels of emotional distress (patients with eating disorders, psychiatric patients) and to scores of groups with relatively low levels of distress (community samples, patients enrolled in university-based weight loss programs). These comparisons show very clearly that, for our group of "successful losers", long-term maintenance of weight loss is not typically accompanied by the high levels of distress observed in certain populations, e.g., eating disordered patients. On average, the scores of registry members on measures of depressive symptoms, general distress, and susceptibility to losing control of eating resemble the low scores seen in community samples and obesity patients, and are much lower (indicating lower levels of distress) than the scores observed in eating disordered and psychiatric patients. Thus, weight loss and maintenance do not appear to have created a "psychological hardship" for our participants."

Speaking from my own experience, if anything, my mental health has drastically improved as a result of the weight loss effort, if only because that process caused me to question so many of my own hurtful self-concepts as well as force me to change the unhealthy eating behaviors that brought me to being so overweight. Also, the more time has passed in maintenance, the fewer instances where I really feel the urge to pig out, which isn't to say I don't enjoy a big treat meal with full dessert from time to time.

Working Through That Nasty Anxiety Thing

2010-09-01T19:35:00.000-07:00

I found myself feeling anxious yesterday afternoon for no particularly good reason and it took me a while to sort it out. I used to feel anxious quite a lot but over the last few years that whole tendency seems to be diminishing. I don't know if it's because exercise tends to help me blow off a lot of that kind of steam or if the whole process of having gone through that weight loss and battling the Demons of Overeating made me better able to handle it. Or - maybe I'm just getting older and I don't give that much of a s*** about certain things any more. Yesterday, I sat myself down - well I was already sitting but you know what I mean - and said what are you worrying about now? Well, it's XYZ thing at work. Can you do something about it? Yes, I can make a phone call or two. Why aren't you dialing? OK, fine, I'll dial already.

So I did that and lo and behold sorted that little problem out in a rather tidy way. But still anxious. OK, another sit down. Well, I think I am worried about ABC thing. Can you do anything about it? No, not really, it's more of a Mommish generalized worry about my son and how he's doing and etc. OK, so can you just let HIM handle his own life and just tell him you love him and let it be? Sigh.

What I find interesting about this is that sometimes, if I can sort through those little worries, I sometimes find something that really does need attention. I was getting those little worried feelings about my car - and when I acted on that and took it to the mechanic, it did need some work on the fuel system, nothing major, but still.

The other thing I've found is that I can call myself anxious when actually I probably shouldn't have had that second cup of coffee. Ha ha.

Nostalgia

2010-08-10T20:17:00.000-07:00

I found a scan of this photo on my computer last night and couldn't resist working on it. This is my favorite-est horse ever, Chaps, long may he rest in peace. I had this photo framed but ended up having to put it away because I kept getting sad when I looked at it, but this time I didn't get that way. Oh, I LOVED this horse, we were muy simpatico. He was one of the horse herd that belongs to our neighbors and his group used to hang out down on our place, so I spent a lot of time those first few years after we bought the place with them. Poor guy, he colicked and couldn't be saved. In spite of the fact that this photo shows me at some level of my highest weight and that hat isn't as spiffy as my current one, I am so glad my hubby got this shot.

Yet Another Riff on Gratitude

2010-07-30T19:13:00.000-07:00

The other day, a quote appeared that caught my ear: "Gratitude is a magic wand."

As you may or may not know, I am fond of finding things to be grateful for. In my daily journal, I always have create a Gratitude of the Day. There are days when I dearly would like to fall into total snark with it and other days when I just don't feel a lick of it. Sometimes the very things that are most pissing me off are the ones I know I need to throw some gratitude at somehow. This whole thing has worked for me now for a couple of years. Sometimes I worry that it looks all goody-goody and I'm just not all that fond of goody-goodies actually. I'll take the risk. In the past when I've written about gratitude, I mention the origin of my interest in it, which all relates to an article by Joanna Macy in Shambala Sun and her proposition that gratitude is subversive. Now, that's an attitude I can get behind.

And what I mean by that, other than admitting to still having some sort of teenage rebellion-y type of angst still lurking in this middle aged soul, is that once you start expressing gratitude for something - anything big or small - and do that on a regular basis, I have found that it's nearly impossible to get sucked into a depressed or hopeless or anxious state even in unpleasant circumstances. To some extent I am fighting that "suckage" by using gratitude to re-point my thoughts toward what is life sustaining and healthy. That directly subverts that nasty, critical and fear-provoking voice many of us end up listening to, you know the one that tells us we're no good, we need more stuff, we have to look a certain way, we're not loved, all that.

Getting back to the quote I started off with, if "magic wand" is defined as a tool that is used to direct and place energy toward a desired outcome, in that context, gratitude is a very potent one indeed.

All that said, of course I did a little additional research (using a well known search engine) on gratitude and unsurprisingly found a wealth of nifty quotations. This one brought me up short a bit: "Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors." - François Duc de La Rochefoucauld. Monsieur, thank you for that little bit of cynicism, although I'm not sure how, if I express gratitude for river rocks, which I think I have done in the past (and if not, am now), they would ever provide future favors other than to remain rocks. I doubt they care whether or not I am pleased by them. Instead, finding gratitude is a way of staying in the here and now, not wallowing in the past and not worrying about the future.

Gratitude of the Day: I am grateful for breathing in and breathing out.

Ridiculous Amounts of Fun

2010-07-29T06:16:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I joined a group of friends to celebrate a fortieth birthday. The birthday girl had an interest in some maritime/water-themed fun and our supremely talented social director came up with our outing. We started in San Francisco, Pier 39 and took the ferry to Tiburon, braving the wind and chop, heh heh. Then we had a tasty dinner at Guaymas and just enjoyed each other's company. Here is a peek at part of the ride over:

Video and Holy Cr** by Ms. Sandra Molnar, posted with her permission.

One of the Ten Thousand Plants

2010-07-21T20:24:00.000-07:00

I finished a book recently: Zen Women by Mirian Levering. Hubby gave it to me for my birthday and it's a history of women in the Zen Buddhist school. I found the loveliest paragraph in there quoting a Buddhist nun, Maiodao, from the 12th century: "Moreover, each person is complete in every way, each thing is perfect and that which is totally complete and perfect covers the earth and reaches to heaven. Eyes are horizontal and noses are vertical. Spring courses among the ten thousand plants; the moon is reflected on a thousand waves. There is no lack and no excess."

That eyes and noses part fascinates me.

Emotions Weight Overeating

2010-07-07T23:30:00.000-07:00

A comment on a previous blog post, about my thought that emotions are stored in fat, and reading that commenter's own great blog post about having a similar experience, led me to pondering another aspect of weight and the varying beliefs we hold about body image. In her post on Inside Space, she talks about using her fat as a method of sheltering herself from her emotions as well as hiding in it.

I've been pondering that, as I have heard many of my weight loss "buddies" say similar things. What is true for me is not that I ever felt that I was hiding behind my fat, as in fact when I was fat, I felt totally conspicuous and as if there were no place I could hide. Barring those medical conditions that can make a person gain weight, we all know where overweight comes from - overeating. There's no pretending there.

So what did I get then from the behavior? What I believe is true for me, and is something I still have to work with often enough, is that food was my drug of choice. I used it to numb myself and stop feeling those emotions. In addition, food hits that pleasure pathway of the brain in ways that are very similar to other forms of drug abuse. Food tastes good, it feels good to have a full belly - and so on. Here's a link to an interesting article about this.

Watching the pull I continue to experience toward Food - with eating still probably my favorite activity - just being honest here - is a daily gauge of my emotional and spiritual state. If I find myself drawn toward secret eating or what I know to be overeating that sends up the red flag to examine attitudes. Am I falling into an old thought pattern? Suppressing anger? Feeling anxious? Nowadays, my tendency is to move into physical activity instead when I want to work through emotions - that also hits the reward pathway but in a way that seems to promote healthy resolution to problems and a joyous acceptance of the ups and downs life brings.

I still believe that our emotions are stored in our fat, and as we lose weight and burn off that fat, those emotions can resurface as memories - we can even experience the same bodily sensations.

In fact, one of the blogs linked to on Inside Space, has a post that makes related comments.
That blog author quotes a 19th century article by Wiliam James that discusses the physical sensations of the emotion fear and asked the question of what fear would be without the physical changes and came to the conclusion that there would be none without the presence of the physiological aspects: the fast breathing, the fast heartbeat, and so on.

Lollipop. Old Memories

2010-06-23T22:30:00.000-07:00

I was doing some grinding around on the treadmill this morning, just for grins, and up popped an old favorite tune from the depths of the iPod. This is one of those happy peppy little pop tunes that I admit to having a liking for sometimes.

It brought to mind some very pleasant memories as well. I first heard this tune while sitting (hiding from the world?) in the hallway of the school dormitory where we lived at the time - my father was an assistant headmaster and we lived at the school. I'd received a transistor radio for my eighth birthday and I was in love. It was a black one, maybe 3 x 5 and had a little earphone. Nope, not stereo or anything. The "My Boy Lollipop" song was one I really loved. Funny, I'd never seen actually seen Millie Small performing this until I looked up this video.

The View from Underneath

2010-06-20T10:42:00.000-07:00

I had one of those great days yesterday - I just ended up enjoying everything although nothing out of the ordinary happened. Just that my brain didn't get in the way with stupid stuff - anxiety or fretfulness or whatever.

Got almost all of the housecleaning done except for the floor mopping. I like to do that when no hubbies are going to come back in when the floor is still wet, and he was busy either in or around the house all day so I'm waiting till today when I think he's going to go out thistle-whacking again.

But the best part of the day was when I decided it was time to go for a walk, ostensibly just down to the red gate to pick up the mail. I did put on my camera pack, just in case, although didn't start out feeling very inspired. But, oh my goodness, it was one of those great walks. I didn't get back until three hours later with some interesting shots in the camera and four-five miles under my belt. The highlight was watching a mama mallard with her five adorable ducklings swimming on the river.

I got my butt damp taking this picture from underneath the metal bridge that crosses the Chowchilla about a quarter mile past the red gate. Even though I was on solid ground, everything is just kind of wet there so just sitting setting up the camera was enough. Once I got started walking again though, my pants didn't stay uncomfortable for long.

Looking Up

2010-06-13T08:26:00.000-07:00

I recently finished reading "Women, Food and God", by Geneen Roth. I rather liked it, but I do tend to admire her approach, although I wish there had actually been more "God" in this. Not that I'm avidly religious, photos of cherubim notwithstanding, but I have found that for some of us maintaining a healthy attitude toward eating requires a strong attention to the spiritual. This book advocates a "be here now" philosophy - feel your emotions now instead of numbing them with food.

What really got me going on an interesting side tangent was a quote she included in the book, from James Joyce's short story, "A Painful Case". The quote as I found it in Roth's book was along the lines of: "He lived a short way from his body" and it was used as an example of how most of us are so disconnected from our bodies and ourselves that we have no clue who we are and so of course we eat (or we drug or we do whatever we do to numb out). Well, since inquiring minds always want to know, I used a well-known search engine to do additional research. Turns out that is not the way Joyce wrote that sentence. What he wrote is: "He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glasses."

Disclosure: I am not a Joyce scholar; I'm not that smart. I tried to read Ulysses some years ago in college and failed. It made my eyes cross. I was grateful that this was just a short story.

What I found most fascinating about this research is not the actual story of Mr. Duffy or the intellectuals who dissect the Joyceian realm, but the fact that the incorrect quote that Roth used turned out to be so prevalent in that sort of self-help literature. Evidently no one thought that it would actually be useful or relevant to look up what Joyce actually said, which held ever so much more meaning.

Re: the photo. I found that little angel resting in the treehouse located in my parents' back yard.

Just Stuff

2010-05-19T19:37:00.000-07:00

(A miniature rose with a huge color)

Finally got myself convinced to take the plunge and do something about the hearing situation in my right ear and went to the hearing aid center yesterday for a fitting. I should get the hearing aid in a couple of weeks. Yikes, it was expensive! Insurance didn't cover a single penny of it. In spite of knowing in general how much it was going to be, it still was a little more than I'd hoped for, and I found my brain saying that I should be careful not to lose it, so maybe I shouldn't wear it. Isn't it dumb some of the stuff our brains come up with? Here - let me build a shrine to the hearing aid and only look at its costly little self. Sigh.

On the way to work yesterday, as I was opening the horse gate, I looked down the fence line only to spot a wild pig standing a hundred yards away, intently watching my activities. He looked like a darker uglier version of Wilbur the pig (from an animated version of Charlotte's Web) with his ears cocked just so and his front legs planted with toes out in what would be an endearing pose except that wild pigs are not very nice. I asked him just exactly what he found so interesting and at that he trotted to the fence, squeezed himself under and went on his hairy merry way.

Grabbing It By The Something or Others

2010-05-07T20:27:00.001-07:00

I found this nifty couple of sentences in the book I'm reading right now - well one of the books, this is the one I have in my office for enjoyment during my lunch break - from Eat, Pray, Love:

"When you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let it go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt – this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight."

After all the recent uncertainty about my work situation, and worry about my husband's heart attack from which he is recovering wonderfully, and still feeling grief over two deaths in the last year and still getting used to the move here from the Bay Area I felt like I was really in the soup there for a couple of weeks. Yet all along, there were those bright shining moments of beauty smacking me in the face - driving home down the hill and seeing that magic hour of light as the sun is starting to slant just right into our little valley.

I guess I really kind of hoped I would be laid off too so I could spend more time in the garden and do more writing and fiddle with the camera. That's not how it was so my choice is to make the best of it and look for the good stuff and the happiness right here and now anyway. Someone said that you're in hell if you want to be somewhere other than where you are.

Tomorrow, I am going to plant a big patch of purple petunias. And then I'll pull about 84 more cubic yards of weeds and add them to the pile. As I weed, I see visions of what the garden can be, will be soon.

Snagged

2010-04-19T21:26:00.000-07:00

Oh dear, it does seem that time has slipped by me again. I was going to write something sage-like about how it is that only one or two little things can trip us up - all wisely related to the poor fly pictured above, but I don't feel wise just now.

I've been in hermit mode, riding out a bit of stress related to work uncertainties. Those turned into certainties last week - or at least certain for the time being which is about all one can expect. So, at the moment I am still employed which means that I've now achieved 80% relief and 80% disappointment. Yes it adds up somehow. However, I've got a new boss, as my previous one (and favorite) did end up getting laid off.

The old mind is starting to get itself wrapped around all the changes, although there was the ickiest bout of neck muscle spasm-up over the weekend. I woke up Sunday morning hearing my own inner voice telling me "It's going to be OK." Oddly enough, that's exactly what I wanted to hear - my new mantra for the time being.

Wait, Is That a Little Joy Creeping In?

2010-04-11T19:16:00.000-07:00

With my husband on the mend and starting to get out and about, back to a more usual routine for him, I am less fretful and anxious. Deep sigh of relief.

I had a great afternoon yesterday and spent a couple of pleasant hours making a clay face. I'd gone to the Open Mind Bookstore in town because I wanted to meet the artist who made the wonderful Him and Her dolls I wrote about some months ago. I deeply appreciate the opportunity to talk and to work with the clay - heh, even though my little face turned out to have a bit of a duck-bill looking mouth. Since I LIKE ducks, this is not a criticism.

After I headed home, I took a little detour along the river road, as I'd seen a couple of nice vistas on our way home the other day from a Fresno medical appointment.

I'm Still Waiting for the Pass Part of This Too Shall

2010-04-07T20:50:00.000-07:00

One thing I can be grateful for at the moment is that spring is springing, the sun is coming out and the roads are drying out. The last post had me complaining about stress, and it's not over yet.

About a week and a half ago, my beloved husband had a heart attack, and luckily he got it taken care of early enough that it sure looks like all will be well. He spent a couple of days in the hospital, had a stent installed, and he's got a new sack of pills. First checkup yesterday found the cardiologist quite happy with progress so far. Hurrah. Do not be fooled if you think my tone just now is nonchalant, I stuck to his side like a limpet the entire time he was in the hospital.

Meanwhile, rumors are flying at work of an impending layoff. I suspect (worry?) I will be joining the ranks of the unemployed soon. The uncertainty isn't fun either.

Meanwhile, we have enjoyed a good wildflower/bird walk this last weekend, our first in a few weeks. We started a Monday night yoga class, which we both greatly enjoyed.

Luckily A Title is Not Strictly Required

2010-03-13T21:46:00.000-08:00

The last couple of weeks have been a bit challenging. I'm in a "This Too Shall Pass" phase just now. We drove north to Oregon last week to attend the very sad funeral of a close friend.

This week has seen me embroiled in a situation at work that is unpleasant on so many levels. Yes, I know where to find the most up-to-date version of my resume.

Tomorrow, I intend to do one of the things I love best, go for a walk in the great outdoors. Practice mindfulness. Maybe scratch the heads of some friendly equines, if any of them are around.

I really enjoyed this video of Temple Grandin - she is a fascinating woman. I read a quote of hers a couple of months ago: "Cattle is my favorite animal." I don't know exactly how I feel about cattle - mostly I find them dumb poopy things but I suspect that eventually I'll be compelled to write more about it. The holy cow and all that.

Internal Conversations

2010-03-04T20:02:00.000-08:00

This scenario plays out almost every morning.

P Horse 1: Mmm, I love this cereal, that was good. I want another bowl.
P Horse 2: Unfortunately, that's going to have to be it till later, remember calories and all that?
P Horse 1: But it's good, I like eating it.
P Horse 2: (Silent annoyance)
P Horse 1: (Silent petulance)
Stomach: I hate to break it to you 1, but I'm a little bit full here and don't forget you haven't even had your coffee yet, so that extra cereal may taste good, but I won't appreciate it much.
P Horse 1: Sigh, fine, I'll wait till snackie time. Are we there yet?
P Horse 2: Don't worry, it won't be long. Let's just drink a nice cuppa and watch the birds, OK?

2010-02-21T14:46:00.001-08:00

At dinner tonight, and I don't remember exactly how we got onto the topic, my husband put me in mind of a very pleasant memory from my childhood. My grandfather on my mother's side was the very very best at reading to little girls (moi) and I remembered one of my favorites: the Just So Stories by Kipling. I can still hear my grandfather toning: "Go to the banks of the great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo River all set about with fever trees". I had to look it up so I could remember the rest of it again.

It started raining relatively early this morning, right while I was working on taking some pictures of the daffodils that have popped up. I gave it up at that point, not wanting either my stuff or myself to get wet. It kept up a steady rain, or at least a sturdy drizzle, most of the day. We still haven't even caught up to last year's rainfall level, we need more, are you listening up there? (Ha ha, that ought to work.)

This photograph is one of an almond blossom on the tree we planted three or four years ago. It is just starting to bloom now, there are lots of great looking buds swelling. Maybe this year, we'll get to the almonds first.

I did fiddle in Photoshop obviously - I did do a straight photo of the blossom and it was nice but I have a deep fondness for the abstract and semi-abstract not that that's a technical term or anything. For those with a fondness for the f/64 style of photography - Ansel Adams and so on - I can see that it's way too loosy-goosy. I probably should be more reverent and worship at the feet of the gods of photography.

I probably shouldn't want to slit my throat if I hear the phrase "tack-sharp" one more time. I start wondering, what if the tack referred to isn't sharp? What if it's a pink fluffy tack, or a bent tack, what then? What if you decide to throw an infrared filter on your pretty picture and then push a few more buttons?

Learning New Stuff. Hard Process

2010-02-13T20:15:00.000-08:00

I've been debating what I want to do with this blog. I do post on the other blog, not as much as I could or should (whatever that means) and I keep a public journal on my favorite site Calorie Count. I don't want to stop this one though, so I think today I'll talk about what's up at the moment with my creative process.

Some years ago, I really got going with art work, learning to draw, sorta, and doing pastel paintings and silk painting. At some point I guess I burned out on it a little bit. At the moment, I seem to be in another period where all that pent up art is pressing on me to come out. I'm writing a lot and in the last couple of years gotten quite interested in photography.

Four weeks ago, I started a class in Photoshop. I've been using Photoshop Elements, and taught myself quite a bit just using a manual, but decided I wanted to take the next step up. I've really been enjoying that class, and have learned a lot - but mostly that at the moment I've barely scraped the surface of what it can do.

Meanwhile, I decided to buy a new camera, as I've been a little frustrated with the little unit I had. Got some good photos out of it, but again, time for an upgrade. This time, I really took a leap and bought a Canon 7D. I realize that I basically have no clue what I'm doing and spent the better part of today in a state of utter frustration. With the help of my husband, who does know what he's doing, we methodically sorted through my problems with focus and figuring out what buttons do what.

This was exhausting. I didn't get any decent photos today. But ultimately,I don't really mind that. I didn't stop learning. One balled up knot of a problem got unsnarled and the path is ahead of me. Tomorrow, I'm going on a Valentine's Day hike with my sweetie, we're going to do some birdwatching and yep, I'm taking the new gadget. Must.

Today's photo is from the old camera, but the new Photoshop. When a friend saw this, she said: "Seventies much?" Maybe so.

2009-11-15T09:49:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, I bought these wonderful dolls from one of the galleries in Oakhurst. They are made by a local artist, Julie Mitchell. I just picked them up the other day from the frame shop, who put them in a fabulous shadow box frame and today, we'll be finding the right place to hang them.

2009-11-10T20:58:00.000-08:00

Well, it looks like all that resting and recuperation after the surgery has not had the niftiest effect on my weight, I'm a tick over my "happy" range, so I'm going to start doing something about that as of today. I must say that I feel strong and back to normal, although the ear still looks a big larger than the other, but it will be a couple of months yet for that to change.

Here's a tasty recipe for Chickpea and Cauliflower Soup:

1 tbsp olive oil
1 cup onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
3/4 tsp paprika
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp ground coriander
1 1/2 cups cooked chickpeas
1 1/2 cups tomatoes, diced
4 cups cauliflower, cut into .5 in pieces
4 cups vegetable broth

In a large pot, saute the onion in the olive oil until it starts to get tender, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic, paprika, ginger, cumin and coriander and saute for an additional 2-3 minutes, stirring often. Add the vegetable broth, tomatoes, cauliflower and chickpeas. Heat to a bubble, then reduce the heat and let simmer for about 20 minutes or until the cauliflower is somewhat tender, but still retains a bit of crunch.

Definite Improvement

2009-10-20T15:38:00.000-07:00

I can say that today I feel something approaching normal. My ear still looks huge and swollen but overall there's a big surge of energy and very little pain. Lots of itchiness - and if I hear one more time that means it's healing, I'll have to bop someone. I am not a fan of itching - have had too many bouts of poison oak to view it as anything but intolerable.

I felt good enough to take a decent almost hour-long walk, although I stayed on the road which meant the exertion level was low. I ran into a neighbor coming down the hill; we hadn't met before so I was somewhat embarrassed to be doing so with a cotton ball still stuck in my ear. Just when you think you're far enough out in the middle of nowhere, you get caught.

I have my followup doctor's appointment tomorrow, I am very much looking forward to getting the stitches out and the other cleanup items that will be taken care of then also.

Found This in One of My Notebooks

2009-10-17T16:17:00.001-07:00

A quote from Thomas Merton:

"Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. "

Frankenstein's Monster

2009-10-16T16:37:00.000-07:00

This is day two post-surgery, and this afternoon the bandage came off to my great relief. The bandage involved a hard shell placed over the surgicized ear, then miles of gauze and tape to hold it securely on. Honestly, the bandage itself is more of a pain than the actual ear cuts. Now that it's off I feel about half-normal as long as one doesn't count the fact that I haven't showered in three days (I will later today, I promise) or the fact that my right ear is about twice the size as the other one.

Since we went back to the Bay Area for the surgery, it was lots of fun when I had to make a bathroom stop on the way home yesterday - got a few shocked stares. It's getting close to Halloween, right, just a little early hellish headgear.

Actually, of course, I am very grateful to have come through this third procedure so well. There was, indeed, another cholesteatoma, and I did get the more complex surgery, so supposedly from here on in, any clean-up can be done outside the operating room.

Here's a morbid little shot from our last weekend's walk - someone stuck this cow skull on a fence post.

Not Really Looking Forward to Next Week

2009-10-09T16:32:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, I will have ear surgery number three to remove another cholesteatoma. This time, the procedure will be a "canal wall down" surgery, which is a bit more complex, a longer surgery and possibly a longer recovery time.

The upside is that this version means that additional surgery will not be required as the required followups can happen with office visits. The downside is that it's a bloomin' nuisance.

I love that word for this, by the way. It's the term my doctor used in describing this condition, since there is really nothing that can be done to prevent it (other than this surgery I guess) and it can recur at anytime (if you don't do this surgery). If you don't have the surgery, well. Possible growth into the brain, meningitis, and other icky stuff. I like the phrase because it reminds me not to feel sorry for myself.

I've got my strategy for my week + of down time all worked out. Reading, watching DVDs, fiddling with photoshop, sitting on the front porch watching the birds. I may even go so far as to nap during the day!

2009-09-20T16:26:00.000-07:00

I broke my favorite coffee mug to smithereens yesterday during a bobbling clumsy moment doing the breakfast dishes. I literally shed a few tears over that. I suppose it's not good to get so attached to a thing, but I was. I bought it in a store in Moab, Utah on a trip a couple of years ago. It was a lovely handmade one, tall and slender with a perfect fire orange and dark ivory glaze that evoked the desert area there.

Consolation prize: waterbugs

Changing Things Around

2009-09-11T20:42:00.000-07:00

Since I last posted to this blog, we managed to get our Bay Area house sold and moved full time to our paradise in Central California, Dryad Ranch. Although the whole process of getting the house ready to sell and doing all the packing and moving was crazily stressful, it was all done knowing that the end result would be amazingly wonderful. And so it has been. My husband seems to be enjoying his retirement, only three weeks in, but his smile is broader than ever.

There are a few creepy crawlies around, such as this scorpion which was discovered lurking in between a couple of bowls in the cupboard. Even I thought it was just a bit too plug ugly to appear as is.

I've been allowed to keep my same job and telecommute, a circumstance that thrills me to pieces. I've rented a small office in the nearest town, which isn't large but has a couple of grocery stores and a small public library and various other amenities, such as high-speed internet connectivity, a must for the commute being over the tele and all.

I read this article in New Scientist the other day and honestly, I don't know what to think about it. It discusses gastric bypass surgery and how it has proven to be amazingly effective in some cases in bringing about an almost immediate reversal of diabetes. Evidently, the gut and the hormonal interactions of metabolism are much more complex than anyone can understand yet. I have had such a negative opinion about this type of surgery for such a long time and still don't like the idea of it, on many levels. An online friend of mine even knew someone who died as a direct result of having it, so obviously there can be some dreadful side effects. This article has really presented a different view of it.

2009-06-26T21:03:00.000-07:00

11 weeks or so into the knee recovery thing - honestly, if someone were not really motivated to get help it would be well nigh impossible to get through all of the hurdles put up by all of the various medical entities - just to get a few sessions of physical therapy.

All during this time, I've been doing my knee strengthening exercises, that I found mostly from this book: Healing Your Knees, and doing an upper body only weightlifting program. By the time I finally got my first physical therapy appointment, ol' Leftie the Knee was feeling not too bad. The physical therapist I'm working with is great, though, and is showing me all sorts of perfect strengthening exercises and really guiding me through what I need to do. Evidently, I need to really work the foam roller for the iliotibial band and also do lots of hip strengthening, specifically hip abduction.

What I still need to figure out is how to tell when I'm overdoing things. For example, yesterday, I had a great workout - some weights, a little walking, but the knee was really talking, as in sore, during the afternoon. I've promised her a complete day of rest today, but during the workout, I wasn't getting any cries, I guess because the endorphins kicked in and masked it? The New York Times had a great article recently about this: Link.

The photo is called "Crow on a Stick"; I know it's not a stick, but anyway.

Proceeding Apace

2009-05-17T16:17:00.000-07:00

The knee feels better, but not quite right yet - it'll still zap me a good one if I bend the wrong way. I went for an MRI on Friday morning, early (6:45) and was turned away because I didn't have the paperwork proving it was OK to do with the titanium implant in my right ear. (Yes, I know I sound like an old granny with all of her surgeries and so on. In reality, I'm an iron woman with killer biceps.) Just another hoop to jump through, I should have the written approval Monday.

Continuing my knee exercises which help.

None of this has prevented me from taking photographs of course. More from the Collier Canyon project, although this particular spot is outside the Canyon itself, nevertheless I've been enjoying this view for years.

Darn

2009-05-10T18:30:00.000-07:00

I'm currently healing up my left knee from a meniscus injury. (update: turns out to not be the meniscus, it's chondromalacia). I don't know yet whether it's torn or not, since the approval for the MRI is still winding its way through my health insurance bureaucracy. This little problem happened when I got over-enthusiastic about going up an escalator and missed or bobbled or something and twisted my knee. That was two weeks ago, and I've been limping ever since, although I must admit, feeling much improved the last few days.

As you can imagine, my brain sort of exploded a little at the lack of activity the first several days, but I've been finding ways around it that don't aggravate the injury or cause pain and I've been able now to get back to the gym for some upper body weights workouts, which feels great.
Although I would really like to get back to heavy lifting, it appears that it's going to be a while, so I'm playing the waiting game now while I let my sad little left knee recuperate. (I refuse to call it my bad knee - I have a sad knee and a happy knee - disgustingly perky, I know.) At any rate, I am constrained from doing knee bending at the moment, both doctor's orders and also frankly, just the thought of it makes me cringe. So squats and lunges are out.

I've been working on a pretty good substitute upper body program into which I'm incorporating some unweighted and prone or seated leg exercises. Quad sets: contract and hold the quads while prone; hamstring sets: seated upright, knee slightly bent, activate the hamstring by pressing the heel into the floor, hold. Straight leg raises, various varieties. Single leg balancing. Calf raises. The only weighted leg exercise I feel comfortable with just now are RDLs - oh I did some yesterday with a pretty light barbell and feeling that hamstring stretch and work felt great. The mighty deadlift! And I'm thinking that by the end of this recovery period, my upper body should be killer, even if my legs will have to catch up later.

Collier Canyon Project

2009-03-31T14:09:00.000-07:00

I've worked at the same job now for 8 years. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, I just this last week passed that anniversary date. As is true with all jobs, it's really awful and really great. I must say that just now I'm grateful for being gainfully employed, so I'm not griping, believe me. I have two possible driving routes to work, one on a piece of freeway that consistently makes the top 3 worst congested commutes in the Bay Area, the other using a scenic backroad. Guess which one I take?

I have seen so many interesting things on my little backroad, the aforementioned Collier Canyon. The bird life is wonderful, although a little difficult to see sometimes from a moving car, but I consistently see red-tailed hawks on the power poles, scrub jays making a racket that can be heard through rolled-up windows, killdeer swooping across the road and loggerhead shrikes sitting on their catbird seats. (I recently read a blurb somewhere that the phrase "catbird seat" was actually in reference to shrikes.) The residents of the houses along the road keep horses, several breeds of cattle including some longhorn numbers, llama, sheep and goats. I've seen lots of wildlife: deer, wild pigs, coyotes, skunks, the everpresent and numerous ground squirrels and the remains of opossum and raccoon.

Toward one end of the road is an absolutely magnificent view of Mt. Diablo.

All in all, this drive makes the extra few minutes it takes worth it and can anyone argue with avoiding the freeway?

I've started taking my camera along some days to record it. Here is something from the start of this project. This is a ewe from the sheep pen.

Yes, But Why Does It Have To Be So Invasive

2009-03-15T09:53:00.000-07:00

A week ago last Friday, I finally gritted my teeth and went and got the recommended screening colonoscopy that "they" want everyone to get when we turn 50. Yes, I procrastinated a couple of years. And of course everything went well and I got a clean bill of health.

I have to admit that I was more apprehensive about the day of fasting that's required beforehand than I was about the actual procedure or other prep. I have convinced myself that I go a little nuts when really hungry but it seemed to go just fine. Maybe just knowing that I couldn't and that it just had to be done made it easier. Also it's just a day.

The other thing that I have noticed in the last week since then is that I get fuller faster - or I notice my fullness more. Or I don't enjoy being really full the way I have in the past. Now, I've been just eating an extra bowl of salad to achieve this lately but still there's a marked preference for fullness, which is a leftover from the old stuffer days of eating. I haven't really been working on eradicating that preference but now I'm thinking that there's a little crack in the armor. We'll see. I don't know if that happened because that day of required fasting flipped a switch somewhere (I'm NOT recommending fasting by the way unless you have to do it for something like this, mostly I think the fasting craze a BS weight loss fad.) Maybe it's just because it took a while for my digestion to get back to normal and I'll go back to it? I think what I'll do, as an experiment, is to see if I can hold off on satisfying the urge for getting very full, even if it is just with lettuce and cucumbers that I do it with.

Ladybug Butts and Hunger

2009-03-03T16:43:00.000-08:00

I've moved on from New Rules of Lifting for Women and am now working the original New Rules of Lifting programs, by the same authors. Anyway, I'm in one of the fat loss programs, which boils down to doing relatively high reps and short rest periods during the workouts. Also, keeping a slight calorie deficit, because really, if you don't do that there is no fat loss. So I'm feeling a little hungrier the last couple of weeks, the prospect of which caused my husband, the Dinosaur, when I told him about it and said we'll see if I can stand it, to inquire whether he would be able to. Ha! There are only four more weeks, she said through gritted teeth.

But of course, with being somewhat more peckish on a daily basis, comes the usual dealing with the mental and emotional issues of eating. Here is an example of some of the food-related BS my brain comes up with sometimes. After supper the other night, with a nicely full/satiated stomach, some needy part of me was insisting that I "had to have" a bowl of cereal. Not just a little bowl - a big full bowl of it. Excuse me? And where would that fit exactly into the aforementioned Full Stomach? Somehow the earth continued spinning on its axis when I passed on that suggestion and drank some tea instead.

The Days Do Tend to Follow One Another

2009-02-15T20:56:00.000-08:00

I find that I'm not coming up with ideas for here much. Some periods of life are like that I suppose, the struggle isn't so "struggly" I suppose. I've been posting at my Dryad Ranch blog with all of our weekend walks and the beauty of the place. I have been enjoying taking photographs and sometimes they just don't fit for Dryad, so what the heck.

An aloe from the Lower Garden. This photo almost makes me want to get out my pencil set and some paper, but in spite of looking everywhere, even under the couch, I have not found the time to do it.

A Year Now Maintaining

2008-12-16T16:06:00.000-08:00

It's been a year now since I hit my original weight loss goal and I am thrilled more than you can imagine that I've been maintaining that success. In fact, I'm actually about 13 pounds under that original goal now, depending on what end of the normal fluctuation I'm seeing on a given day.

I still feel kind of half crazy about food and eating. And yet, it's only half crazy, which feels OK. It's not a hidden craziness any more if that makes any sense; when my brain starts trying to trick me into the old ways, I'm almost always able to call bullshit on myself before the food gets forked into my mouth.

Some things I've learned or that I'm starting to notice now:

1. It's not a great idea for me to get too hungry. I get crabby and I start feeling desperate even though intellectually I know starvation is NOT right around the corner.
2. I still love food and eating pretty much more than anything else. I think only half of that is related to the physical setup of being hardwired to enjoy taking in nutrients.
3. I'm comfortable enough in my ability to choose what I eat during any given day that I can start playing with my percentages - fat, protein, carbs - to see what works better and makes me feel stronger.
4. I still have a distinct and strong preference for eating until I have a full feeling. I haven't even come close to breaking this habit, I have to say I'm not really trying. I just use vegetables to get to the full place. I don't stuff any more even though there's the occasional impulse to just keep eating. I do sometimes find myself feeling a little sad when a meal is done and it's time to stop eating. I combat this by remembering how amazingly wonderful everything just was and reminding myself that in a little while there will be more.
5. I don't find sweets compelling any more. This is a huge relief. I still like the occasional treat and when I decide to have one I make sure to savor. I like to have some dark chocolate once or twice a week, but if someone brings something to work or there's just some run of the mill candy around, I'm indifferent to it. I never though I would ever be able to say anything like that, seriously. Indifferent.
6. I love my exercise now. I love the challenge of seeing if I can work just a tiny bit harder today and then succeeding.
7. Learning to cope with the emotional aspects of eating has helped me to cope with the emotions of the rest of my life, not that it ever was separate really. It's just that not using food to soothe or damp down the emotional upset of the day forces me to look at my life differently. Not that it's all perfect or anything, it's just more in the open.

New Rules of Lifting for Women

2008-12-10T14:50:00.000-08:00

This coming up Friday marks the one year anniversary of me having met my weight loss goal and maintaining a healthy weight. Wow, I never thought I would get here and stay here.

One of the things that I've taken up that has really helped me get to the goal and stay there has been weight lifting. It's not the first time I've tried it - unfortunately though I didn't stick with it and also didn't stick with the eating plan that time and gained all that weight, but I've found that now I've really come to enjoy it and look forward to hitting the gym, and hitting it hard.

At the moment, I'm following the program outlined in the book The New Rules of Lifting for Women, by Lou Shuler and Alwyn Cosgrove. The book lays out a well-structured program of building strength along with fat loss (not necessarily weight loss) strategies, specifically geared toward women. These workouts are almost all based on free weights exercises and are super-challenging. But I love it - I've seen my measurements improve even though my weight has not changed. And, my strength and ability has improved by leaps and bounds. Last but not least, my arms, which had been flabby, well er flappy if you know what I mean, are no longer so cringe-worthy, but are veritable works of art. Hyperbole aside, if it weren't so cold right now, I'd be going around showing them off.

I know that a lot of women are worried that they'll end up looking like hulking she-monsters but without the testosterone (and you don't want to be having any of that, right?) it just doesn't happen.

One of the things I love about doing this program is having found other women who are also working the program. There's a great online forum with lots of good advice, helpful videos and so on. I've also bonded with other women in the gym working in the "boys section" also known as the free weights area. Getting through this program - I'm starting the sixth stage out of seven - has also increased my mental toughness. Not that I thought I was soft before, but I did find that having to ask how to use equipment and how to do stuff and then making myself try it and push a little harder in an area that's maybe not so traditional has been a bit of a revelation for me.

Lemony Chickpea Stirfry: Cop-Out Recipe Post

2008-11-11T09:31:00.000-08:00

Yikes, I've been a while posting. Got busy with other stuff and posting to the ranch blog and lots of other excuses. To keep this going just for today, herewith a new recipe I recently tried that ended up a keeper.

Lemony Chickpea Stirfry

Got from this blog. Used tempeh instead of tofu and spinach instead of kale. Added garlic because I cannot cook without garlic.

3 servings

3 tbsp olive oil
1 cup onions, minced
1 1/2 cup chickpeas
3 zucchinis, chopped
3 cups spinach, raw
4 ounces tempeh
3 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp lemon zest
4 cloves garlic, minced

Cut up the tempeh into one inch slices and put into a bowl. Add 1 tablespoon of the olive oil and 2 tablespoons of the lemon juice, and the lemon zest. This needs to marinate a bit before putting into the skillet so do this first and then get the chickpeas going.
Heat 1 tablespoon of the olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat and stir in the onion and chickpeas.

Saute until the chickpeas are deeply golden and crusty. This will take a good 10 minutes or so. When everything is just starting to get to the crusty stage, add in the garlic and continue to saute, stirring. Bits will start to stick to the pan, which is good. Make sure to scrape up the crusty bits and keep it in the saute because they're yummy.

Stir in the tempeh and cook just until the tempeh is heated through, just a minute or so.

Stir in the spinach and cook for one minute more.

Remove everything from the skillet into a large bowl and set aside.

In the same skillet heat the remaining tablespoon of olive oil, add the zucchini and saute until it starts to take on a bit of color, two or three minutes.

Add the chickpea mixture back to the skillet, heat for a minute and remove from heat.

Stir in the remaining tablespoon of lemon juice.

Put back into the bowl and serve family style.

Per serving: 388 calories, 18.1 grams fat, 2.5 grams saturated fat, 42.6 grams carbohydrates, 12.4 grams dietary fiber , 6.7 grams sugars, 17.7 grams protein

More Obesity Studies

2008-10-18T16:32:00.000-07:00

I am quite interested in a lot of the studies that keep being published about obesity, genetics and so on. I read about one yesterday that looks at a genetic component that decreases the pleasure some people get from food, which may impel them to eat more to get more pleasure. Here are some quotes from one of the better articles about this, from WebMD. This discussion actually reminds me a bit of the articles about ear infections being related to obesity because they damage the taste nerve. Of course none of this absolves us of the responsibility of paying attention to what we put in our mouths, it's just adding another piece to the puzzle about why it's so hard to maintain a healthy weight, especially if you've already let yourself get overweight.

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"Some people carry a variant gene that dulls dopamine responses. These people, Stice found, are more likely to be obese. And even if they are not obese, they get less pleasure from eating -- putting them at risk of overcompensating by overeating.

"People with the most blunted reward circuits are at the most risk of overeating, and the more they engage in eating, the more you see downregulation of their reward circuitry," Stice says. "They eat more to get the same reward."

"Of course it is a vicious circle," says Pothos. "A person says, 'I do not get pleasure from high-energy food, so I am eating even more but getting less pleasure, I don't know what to do. So obesity and weight gain may result from what we may call addiction to high-energy food."
"The term "addiction" isn't a metaphor. Stice and Pothos note that the same vicious circle, involving the same brain circuits and the same underlying genetic susceptibility, occurs in people addicted to drugs.

"However, both researchers are quick to point out that a dysfunctional pleasure system is only half the answer to the puzzle of obesity. Metabolic functions that control body weight also play a major role.

"We don't want to say obesity is an addictive disorder and not a metabolic disorder. We just want to say, 'Pay attention to both,'" Pothos says.

"Stice is now looking at whether obese people who switch to a healthy diet can reset their pleasure circuitry. He finds that when obese people stop eating energy-dense foods, their craving for such foods goes down, not up.

"If we can get obese people to improve the quality of their diets and stay the course for long time, eventually they do much better in craving and their pleasure circuits should go back to their old balance," he says."
-----------------------------------
One of the articles said that exercise helps in decreasing the cravings because it activates the same dopamine pathways that eating does. The other way to avoid the problem is to not start eating the junky stuff to begin with. Ha ha, too late!

A couple of other links to articles about this: Link and Link

Blowing It On a Phenomenal Meal

2008-10-02T15:18:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, a meal is so amazingly wonderful that worrying about calories or fat content or anything "guiltifying" is out of the question. Last week, I traveled to Napa, California with a close friend and we enjoyed such a meal. We went to Ubuntu, a wonderful restaurant that prepares the best food I've ever had, all of which just happens to be vegetarian. Both my friend and I are vegetarian so we were really looking forward to being able to select anything from the menu.

They prepare what they call "small dishes" where a small amount of food is beautifully presented on the plate, and everyone shares and samples everything. I hope you're not too hungry, because I'm about to list the wonderful dishes we ate.

(The dish to the left is the fingerling potatoes.)

Chickpea fries with herbs and romesco sauce (vegan)

Heirloom tomatoes, assorted basils, 25 year balsamico, wild fennel crackers (vegan)

Chilled watermelon and lemon grass soup (vegan) - this was incredible.

Fingerling potatoes, lightly smoked, sauce gribiche, ficoide glaciale (that's a green of some sort), black garlic, capers (vegan)

Cauliflower in a cast iron pot, roast-puree-raw "couscous", vadouvan spice (somewhat curry-like), brown butter toast. Pictured at left.

Local stone ground polenta, finished with corn pudding, 3-day tomato soffrito, fried peppers (vegan)

Pizza with local chevre, torpedo onions and a romesco of friarelli peppers (we each had a slice and topped out, my husband got the leftovers)

Two ridiculously delicious desserts, the first with lightly roasted strawberries, and creamy things (at right), the other a chocolate number to die for.

I suppose it was very very touristy of me to take pictures of the food but I wanted to remember it.

31 Days of Gratitude

2008-09-16T10:56:00.000-07:00

I keep a daily journal, and part of that is finding something each day to be grateful for. Some days are easier than others. Here are 31 days of gratitude:

1. I am grateful for back roads and red-tailed hawks on top of power poles.
2. I am grateful for Belted Kingfishers and interesting neighbors.
3. I am grateful for hummingbirds and my favorite coffee mug with my name on it.
4. I am grateful for the yellow roses that are blooming now, for the fall acorn crop and a quiet weekend morning.
5. I am grateful for my husband who is a pretty darn good listener.
6. I am grateful for breathing in, breathing out.
7. I am grateful for Emmy Lou Harris's phenomenal CD Wrecking Ball, what a balm for the soul.
8. I am grateful for my husband, my son, my parents, my sister, the ranch. I am grateful for my health and the fact that I have been able to cooperate with my body (and vice versa) to bring myself to health and fitness. I am grateful for my senses and the feel of cool fall breeze as I walked out to my car this morning. I am grateful for a boss that lets me talk to her about my frustrations at work. I am grateful for my copper tea kettle that whistles to me in the morning that soon my yummy coffee will be ready.
9. I am grateful for a celebration of women.
10. I am grateful for the tang of a changing season, a bit of crispness in the air.
11. I am grateful for washing machines, I just can't imagine how much work it must have been before.
12. I am grateful for this cozy house, even though it desperately needs cleaning. I am grateful for the back patio, even though it's looking a tad scruffy right now. I am once again grateful for almond butter and raisin toast, yum.
13. I am grateful for the musical genius of Frank Zappa, Dick Dale and Jimi Hendrix, and of course, that of my son Will. I am grateful for my son and I'm remembering that day 24 years ago when he joined us on this planet. I am grateful for silly birthday cards and ridiculous song lyrics.
14. I am grateful for my treadmill, it has steadfastly carried me through mile after mile, calorie after calorie.
15. I am grateful for the gardens at the ranch, the quince and pomegranate trees, and all the roses.
16. I am grateful for having this extra day off to enjoy here at the ranch.
17. I'm grateful for almond butter. I came to the conclusion yesterday that almond butter was my second favorite food now, after asparagus, which still rules my heart. So, I'm grateful for almonds, almond trees and the bees which do the work of pollination.
18. I could be typing for hours this morning listing gratitudes, I'm pretty much grateful for everything this morning. I'm grateful that scorpion didn't sting me. I'm grateful that the second thing I saw this morning (after first seeing my sweet husband's sleepy face, for which I am also grateful) was a cloud of hummingbirds sipping nectar. What the heck, I'm grateful that the New Scientist magazine showed up in the mailbox along with the Audubon Society's journal and Birder's World.
19. I am grateful for the prospect of a long weekend and enjoying the ranch getaway.
20. I am grateful for the beautiful home-grown pear that is sitting on my desk waiting for my afternoon snack.
21. I am grateful for the sweet (sorta) memories from my youth.
22. I am grateful for my women's group. I am grateful that my husband is doing so well with his exercise program and is enjoying it. I am grateful for the heat that actually feels really good right now. I am grateful that my company stocks Peppermint herb tea in the lunchroom and I get to have as much of it as I want for free. I am grateful that the rabbit hole goes up as well as down.
23. I am grateful for our spot in the middle of nowhere and all of our furred and feathered friends.
24. I am grateful for echinacea and zinc lozenges, and the prospect of going to the ranch this weekend for some artful rest.
25. I'm glad that I still am on the payroll, seein' as how I have to go grocery shopping tonight.
26. I am grateful for muscles. Or mus-kels as my Dad always call them.
27. I am grateful for my family and friends.
28. I am grateful for my Mom and Dad.
29. I am grateful for questions, mysteries, conundrums and bits of circular logic.
30. I am grateful for this season's fresh peaches, which I had such cravings for through the winter.
31. I am grateful for lentils and all that protein and fiber and I'm also grateful for the folks who grow lentils. I'm going to be even more grateful for them when I'm having my lunch leftovers later on.

Judging the Obese

2008-09-12T15:06:00.000-07:00

The other day I followed a thread on a public weight loss forum about someone who professed to be so concerned about a woman she saw at her local market who was obese and thought she ought to talk to her about it and give her advice about changing. There was a lengthy description of the food in the cart (crap of course), the woman's appearance, greasy skin, poor clothes choices and the denouement - inability to gracefully get into her car, requiring a backwards plop! But the poster was very worried and really just wanted to help.

As a former obese person, I heartily object to this attitude. Two years ago, when I started down my weight loss path, I was so filled with shame and humiliation - we all know that eating too much food and eating crap food is the cause of our weight gain (in 99% of the cases). I vowed that I would not take it upon myself to start judging other people for their weight because I've been on the receiving end of the scorn too many times. It would be like continuing to hate myself in reverse, and I've done enough self-hating to last a lifetime!

All this brought to mind a conversation I had with a friend about a year ago, when I had lost about 100 pounds or more. She had also lost a good amount of weight but unfortunately had started gaining a lot back, for various reasons, I'm sure. She asked me if now I didn't look down my nose at her. Nope. No way. Been there. But I will support every effort and struggle to either 1. Lose weight and gain health 2. Love yourself anyway.

Ear Infections and Obesity Study

2008-08-29T10:19:00.001-07:00

Did you read that news blurb about a new study that links a history of ear infections with obesity? As someone who did have many ear infections as a child and as an adult, and in fact had to have surgery to remove a cholesteatoma from my right ear, almost certainly as a result of a not fully-healed ear infection, I was intrigued by it, and did a little more digging. Quoting from a UPI article about these findings: "In one study, 6,584 people ages 16 to 92 responded to a series of health questions that determined their history of middle ear infections and their body mass index. The findings showed that those with a moderate to severe history of otitis media were 62 percent more likely to be obese." It all has to do with ear infections causing damage to the taste-sensing nerves which correlates to an individual then having a more pronounced taste preference for fatty and sweet foods. There also seems to be a correlation to increased obesity in children who had tonsillectomies. (I did.)

Fascinating. Obviously, we're all ultimately responsible for deciding what goes into our mouths, regardless of what our taste preferences are. But it is nice to know that maybe there are factors that make it just that much more likely to go down one path instead of another.

Perfect causation? Of course not. For me, it just underlines the requirement for me to remain devoted to healthy eating and exercise for the rest of my life. And that's OK, better than OK even.

Confronting Fear, Thoughts about Meaning

2008-08-19T15:18:00.000-07:00

Goodness, it certainly has been a while since I've written a post for Praying Horse, I'm in the middle of writing a humongous document/manual at work (darn those paying jobs!) and haven't done much other writing besides my own daily journal.

(Pig picture from Project Gutenberg.)

I did write about a recent experience with confronting nature in all her awe-inspiring majesty, which ended up scaring the pants off me, during two close encounters with wild pigs. Obviously, everything came out OK, but what I've found fascinating is examining the stark contrast in the fear I felt while retreating from the pigs and the sort of undefined nervousness, or as one of my friends calls it, the "vague medium of anxiety", that I have experienced in the past on a frequent basis. I get it, that's what adrenaline is for, not for getting worked up about what someone else thinks about you, or whether your child is getting a B instead of an A in first grade, or whatever the issue du jour is. I'm starting to pause now when I get that quivery feeling - is this a wild pig, or is it a gruntin' ground squirrel? By no means have I sorted all of this out yet.

People I've talked to about it have said that I'm brave for going on hikes alone. Well, not really. It's just a walk, sometimes my husband doesn't want to go with me. I'm not going to stop doing walking just because he has something else to do. I'm also not going to start carrying firearms, as at least one person suggested. I will avoid the area where I saw them last however.

Also, I'm going to tell a story on myself here that for a few days after Pigapalooza II, I tried to figure out if there was some additional deeper meaning to it. I looked up wild pigs as totem animals. Etc etc.

This last weekend, I found a wonderful article in Tricycle Magazine, actually from the Spring 2007 issue, which we just received as part of our welcome for subscribing to the magazine, that more or less got me to pause a bit and wonder if I weren't indulging in the practice of Taking Myself Too Seriously. This is from an article by Lin Jensen entitled Wash Your Bowl: "To attribute meaning to an event or to a lifetime of events is an expression of dissatisfaction with things as they are. This is true of even the subtlest attribution. If I wash dishes as a practice in Zen mindfulness, I indulge my resistance to simply washing them in order to get them clean. I want the washing to be something more than what it is, and so I give it spiritual significance. I want my life to have meaning, and so I complain to myself and sometimes to others if what I do and what I am appears meaningless. Well, our lives are meaningless if we take meaning for a coherent narrative plot of some sort. When we strain to make our lives otherwise, we're merely telling ourselves a story. You and I don't manifest in the universe as meaning, we manifest as living human beings. We're not here to represent something else. We're here in our own right. A human being, or a garden hoe for that matter, is complete in itself."

Of Course We're Addicted to Food, We Have to Eat

2008-08-02T21:21:00.000-07:00

I continue to think about hunger, having just come off a week of recovering from food poisoning (bad hummus, I think), of which two days found me with No Hunger at all. I then had a couple more days of very low hunger levels and found it really hard to eat much of anything and now, well it's all back to normal with me wanting to eat more than I really should.

Let me digress here by saying that during the initial throes of this thing I lost five pounds in three days, even though I did my best to stay hydrated. One of my friends called it Dr. P. Horse's Shit-a-Lot Miracle Diet, but that's really really cynical, just sayin'. My husband wasn't the least bit surprised, but he's always been aware how full of it I really am.

Back to the hunger conundrum. I realized that I was kind of liking not having the hunger drumming at me all the time and was complaining in my journal the day it all came back to normal about how I had been hoping that maybe this had finally broken the back of the addictive quality of hunger. And how disappointed I was that no, it hadn't.

I was on walkabout today, fiddling with my new camera (like the lock photo?), and thinking about Stuff and came to the earthshattering conclusion that we're supposed to get hungry. It should bother us, at least enough to get us to go scrounge around for some grub. Duh, because otherwise, we wouldn't bother to eat and as a survival tactic that's pretty lousy. Call me a slow learner.

Not that stuffing food till overfull and using it as a drug is a good way to go either. It's just that hunger itself isn't the enemy.

The Mystery of Hunger

2008-07-26T18:24:00.000-07:00

The last week or so has been a state of wonderment about the mysteries of hunger, especially "real" hunger, the kind that's related to how much food is or is not in your stomach at a given moment. It never ceases to amaze me how variable my hunger levels are from one day to the next.

For example, some days, I wake up hungry and stay hungry all day and it seems I never quite reach satisfaction. One day week before last, my stomach was growling impatiently about 5 seconds after I got out of bed and I still had my hour on the treadmill ahead of me. Down girl! And I could definitely tell it wasn't just "want to eat", it was the real hunger deal.

Other days, the same amount of food overstuffs me. Last Thursday, I went through a not-hungry day yesterday. My breakfast filled me up and I pretty much stayed full all day, I ate some lunch, but didn't want to eat all of it (alert the media!). At supper, I got full right away and didn't finish it. I'm not doing anything different really from one day to the next. It's curious.

Of course, maybe it's always like this and I just never knew it. The fact is that the way I got so heavy to start with was because I ate a lot and never really let my tank get empty and didn't know what stomach hunger feels like. The whole time I was losing weight, I was pretty much a little bit hungry all the time, but that was deliberate and expected. Now that I've reached my goal weight and I'm working on maintaining it, paying attention to hunger cues and keying into what is going to be most satisfying and healthy is a bit of a learning curve.

For example, I was ruminating the other night about the old days of how I used to eat. Actually I was feeling a little sorry for myself about the fact that I couldn't eat as much of my pasta dinner as I wanted, which was just so tasty. And I got to remembering how "nice" it was when I could just eat as much as I wanted whenever I wanted and how I was always full and all. So after spending about 30 seconds in that thought pattern, called bulls**t on myself, because when I really remembered those feelings, it wasn't just full it was overfull and also full of shame. It couldn't have been that satisfying - otherwise I wouldn't have had to keep doing it over and over again.

So again, it still comes down to taking the time to prepare savory and tasty meals and focus on them as I am eating them so that I don't fall into the mindset of feeling deprived. I know what the healthy and appropriate quantities are, if only I listen to my stomach and its level of fullness at any given moment

The Book "The Rules of Normal Eating"

2008-07-20T19:49:00.000-07:00

The book The Rules of “Normal” Eating by Karen R. Koenig, is another very useful resource for those of us who want to change our attitudes about food. The author also has a great blog that is aimed at both over- and under-eaters and all of us who have surrendered in the past to emotional eating. Typically I would run for cover when confronted with a book that used the words “rules” and “normal” in the title, but I was so impressed with her blog posts that I took the plunge and read the book.

Her advice is similar in many respects to what can be found in the book “Intuitive Eating”, which I wrote about here. The main thrust of "Rules" is that there are certain behaviors in which people who are normal eaters engage, and those behaviors are different from how an over- or under-eater approaches food.

To cut to the chase, the normal behaviors are (quoting from her book):

1. Eat when you are hungry or have a craving for a specific food.
2. Choose foods that you believe will satisfy you.
3. Stay connected to your body and eat with awareness and enjoyment.
4. Stop eating when you are full or satisfied.

She offers a series of exercises and suggestions for how to understand our level of hunger at a given moment, how to pick the foods that we find satisfying, feeling our fullness and satisfaction levels with a given eating situation and how to stay aware of our body and what we are eating.

In addition, the book stresses that emotional eating is rooted in our inability to tolerate pain and discomfort. She exhorts us to “learn to tolerate discomfort around food and let your mind and body respond authentically.” Since we’ve used food as a way of comforting ourselves and soothing our pains, be they emotional or physical, to heal that not-normal relationship with it, we will quickly run head on into the necessity of dealing with whatever emotions we were trying to deny/suppress/soothe with the food. We are going to have to dig into our beliefs about ourselves – our fears, our pain, our yearnings and our joys. The process can be joyful when your curiosity becomes engaged and you are starting to figure out what is truly satisfying and actually finding ways to create satisfaction, and not just with food.

I know full well that I have not yet achieved what could be considered “normal” eating, but I’m getting there. I still feel obsessed somewhat with food and eating and weight, and to some extent, feel discomfort about it all. However, at this point, there seem to be fewer hidden corners in my attitudes about food and since I’ve gotten to a point of awareness about my thought patterns regarding eating, I can call bulls**t on myself sooner rather than later. Mostly.

One of the most awesome pieces of advice in this book that I have been working on lately is paying attention to what we want to eat - whether it's a craving or just something that seems like it would be good. I had an couple of days last week where I was extra hungry (no, not hormonally induced, I'm pretty much too old for that) and I really had to sit down and figure out what it was that would scratch the itch. Turned out that a couple of tablespoons of almond butter fit the bill - a little protein, a little healthy fat, not too many calories and yet, so delicious. This weekend, since I have the house to myself, I discovered that I wanted the same thing for supper two nights in a row - pita pizza - and so I had that. It felt good and tasted awesome.

Do Horses Pray, or why Praying Horse?

2008-07-18T19:33:00.000-07:00

I don't know if horses pray, but they certainly do have their heads bowed a lot! Except I'm pretty sure they're eating, not praying.

The reason for this particular post is to explain why I use the name Praying Horse. It is all based on a tattoo I gave myself for my fortieth birthday (fine, that would be 12 years ago) of a naked woman on horseback praying to the moon. I got it during a time when I was recovering from a relatively nasty horse wreck, i.e. I fell off and it hurt for a long time after, and wanted to celebrate my forgiveness for both the pain and the horse who tossed me off.

The image of has thus far resisted being captured via photograph but perhaps someday if I ask nicely enough, the pair will grace this page.

Food Reinforcement Genetically Related to Obesity?

2008-07-13T15:46:00.000-07:00

I’m going to be writing about a book I’ve finished about normal eating, but while reviewing a blog post by the author of that book, I found a reference to something that gave me an ah ha! moment. She referred to a study that found a genetic component to the strong urges some of us have to overeat that may make eating more rewarding to those who have this component. (By the way, her post calls it a willpower gene, which I would have never used because I think there's will and there's willpower and they aren't the same thing, but that's for another post.)

Here is a quote from the first paragraph of the published article: “Eating is a highly reinforcing activity, and there are individual differences in the reinforcing efficacy of food that may relate to differences in eating and energy intake. In the same way that the reinforcing efficacy of a drug is related to drug consumption, subjects who find food highly reinforcing may consume more energy in an ad libitum eating situation than those who are low in food reinforcement.” Further, “ The reinforcing value of food is related to activity of the dopaminergic system. Food consumption increases brain dopamine levels in animals and humans.”

Evidently, this study found that those who find food highly rewarding tend to have a particular genotype. And typically, this means that they would be more interested in and more motivated to eat, and would then eat more.

If I were to guess, I would say that I have this gene. My husband and I are a classic example of the dichotomy between those who live to eat and those who eat to live. I, of course, live to eat. I love food, I love to think about it, talk about it, cook it and eat it. My husband is not like that – he eats to live. Oh, he likes food and enjoys the good taste and all and has his favorites, but if he’s not hungry he could care less and spends no time thinking about eating.

Not only that but given my family history of alcoholism and other addictive and obsessive behavior patterns, makes me inclined to think that this is a possibility. Am I grasping at straws to explain my own poor behavior related to eating? Maybe so. On the other hand, knowing that there may be genetics behind the problem takes the pressure off feeling like such a “failure” all those years for being fat. One of the biggest factors in my weight loss was in successfully (for the most part) getting a grasp of the emotional aspects of using food to soothe upsets and depression. Another big factor in conquering the overeating urge was exercise – because, of course, it turns on the endorphins, and makes you feel good. Just one more reason to get off our butts and go Do Something!

Note: the strawberry has nothing to do with the content of this post, it's just that I bought a new digital camera, I'm learning how to use it, and I'm imposing the results on you, lucky reader.

Eating While Bored?

2008-07-05T14:30:00.000-07:00

While taking one of my favorite nature walks, I got to thinking today (always dangerous) about boredom and how it fits into emotional eating. It seems that a lot of folks complain about eating because they are bored. I'm still not entirely sure that it's an emotion. It doesn't really fit in with the biggies like anger, fear, or joy. It really seems to be more the lack of something, and specifically something interesting to look at, or do, or think about. As of late, I am very rarely bored. There's too much out there that piques my curiosity - books to read, things to write about, walks to take, birds to watch. Filling your stomach instead of filling your mind seems a poor substitute, and yet it sure does seem to be commonplace.

I've been doing a little web searching to find what other folks have said about boredom, and have found it interesting. (Thank God, because you wouldn't want it to be boring!) There seems to be a distinction between the type of boredom that is experienced during a long meeting, driving or a performing a repetitive task and the more long-term sort where you can't find something to do that you enjoy doing. Being stuck in the latter implies a more deep-seated dissatisfaction with your life, maybe a lack of meaning.

A couple of interesting quotes that shed additional light: http://businessofemotions.typepad.com/drrm/boredom/index.html: "Opinion seems divided on whether boredom is an emotion. It is often seen as a feeling of anxiety stimulated by a lack of engagement in what one is doing. Boredom is not passive surrender or indifference. It is an active feeling of irritability and restlessness. This unpleasant feeling is related to anxiety and it usually leads to doing something to relieve the boredom. We look for meaning, to that which interests us."

And http://www.metaphoria.org/ac4t9512.html: "The silence which occurs when no thinking takes place is alarming to the ego. This ego’s fear can be manifest as boredom, a signal that the ego is no longer being entertained. A need to eliminate the boredom then sets in and we resume our hunt for distraction. The distraction may be television, food, emotional outburst, negative behavior, obsessive involvement with a hobby, excessive running, being a couch potato or walking around announcing that we are bored as if the universe really was going to do something about our internal state of affairs, or as if someone other than we ourselves are responsible for what we feel... Boredom is closely associated with depression."

So, what to do about it overeating triggered by boredom? First and foremost - figure out if you are actually hungry. Is your stomach growling, and it's been awhile since you last ate? If so, eat! If not, dig in to the feeling - is it the temporary type of boredom? Are you stuck doing that repetitive task - add some music, find ways to "improve your task performance", indulge in active daydreaming. Pull out some old "dieters tricks" if you must put something in your mouth by making yourself herb tea, chewing gum, crunching on celery sticks. This boredom will be over with soon. If you find yourself experiencing the deep dissatisfaction of not having anything you love to do, you've got more work to do. Here is where I think we need to cultivate curiosity - what have you been interested in that you haven't had the time to investigate. Here you are, bored with nothing to do - now's as good a time as any.

Also, getting off our butts and out of the house into the great outdoors is a great way to counteract boredom. Take a walk, count how many different kinds of birds you can see (or dog breeds or pick your interest). Once you're back, if you're actually hungry for food, eat!
Last, this seems like another opportunity for looking within and examining our inner world and working out what we really want that will be satisfying. Oh yes, easier said than done, but so rewarding! It's just like figuring out what we want to eat - how hungry am I right now? What will satisfy that hunger?

(P.S. Turn off your TV! Better yet, give it away or have it die an early, unnatural death.)

Nature Walk - Some Peripheral Comments about Food

2008-07-03T15:17:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I just gotta talk about the fun stuff. I take great pleasure in getting my butt outside to see the "real" world and breathe some clean air and see non-human critters. Turning 50 (at least) has also caused me to become a bird watcher even though my eyesight isn't always up to the task. So here I give you a divertissement from the usual earnest how to fix your diet and your life stuff with a trip report on our visit to the Kern River in California. OK, I do mention food, but I love eating and can't help it. As info, I'm working on writing about Counteracting Boredom Eating, so that will be coming soon.

Tuesday morning, we headed south to a small highway that snakes east into the Sequoia National Forest up and into the Sierra Mountains. I got stuck with the driving chore, and it was a lot harder driving parts of that road than I was truly comfortable with. Parts of it were a 14% grade heading down with twisty roads and steep cliff-type things off the side. But obviously, everything turned out fine and we arrived in Kernville in one piece. After we got settled into our little lodge room (motifs of fishing, pine cones and moose) we decided to take a short walk by the Kern River before we went out to look for some supper.

We spent a good amount of time watching some Western Kingbirds, which are a species of the tyrant flycatcher family. There was one that was perched in the top of a tall pine snag watching the activity. I characterized him as the daddy, because there was a sort of patriarchal mien to him, but I could be totally wrong as birds don't give a diddly about that stuff, as far as I know. And there was a mama bird who was very very busy catching bugs and bring them back to the two juveniles who were waiting patiently for her in another pine.

After our walk we went into town and found three possibilities for dining: pizza, Mexican and Italian. We went with Italian, and I pretty much threw all caution to the wind: salad with blue cheese dressing, which I hadn't had in I can't remember how long, penne arrabiatta and oh yikes, garlic bread. And wine. And then since it was too damn late to worry about it also went with a cherry tart. (Note: this is a Very Bad Attitude probably. I'm throwing it in there as some sort of proof that sometimes eating has to be fun and just plain sinful.) We took a short walk around the town, it had to be short because there's not much town there, and stood on the bridge watching the Kern flow underneath and a bajillion bats fly above us.

Wednesday morning we got up at a reasonably not-early, not-late hour and had our breakfast in our room. We just brought along Bill's oatmeal and I brought my Kashi and we had fruit and used the motel coffee maker. Very convenient and cheap.

I had hoped to visit a fish hatchery just up the road, but it turned out that it's only open Thursday through Sunday, so darn it. When I was a girl, my parents took us to a fish hatchery a few times and it was always fascinating so I had good memories.

We did find the Audubon Kern River Preserve open. The south fork area of the Kern River is an amazing place to see birds, and has been designated as one of ten U.S. Globally Important Bird Areas. We certainly had some good luck. We were able to identify three new species for both of us, including a Tricolored Blackbird which although not endangered is considered a species of concern as its numbers have been declining. We also saw several other species that we weren't able to figure out at all, which was a little frustrating but points out directions we need to deepen our study. We both need to sharpen up on our knowledge of flycatchers. There are several species that are very difficult to distinguish, and we definitely failed. And there was at least one species that I had not a clue where to even start. We spent about five hours there tromping around, surrounded by floating cottonwood fluff.

And in the whole five hours we didn't see a single other human being until we made it back to the visitor's center. But we did see where a beaver had cut down trees and we also saw some bear tracks!

When we finally got back to the truck I was famished and ripped into some bread and almond butter along with a plum and a nectarine. At that point we'd had enough sun and fun and headed back, stopping off for some fresh veggies at the grocery store.

A quote from Merle Haggard's song about the Kern River:

And there's a place called Mount Whitney,
From where the mighty Kern River comes down.
Now, it's not deep nor wide,
But it's a mean piece of water, my friend.
And I may cross on the highway,
But I'll never swim Kern River again.

Gratitude of the Day: I am grateful for the Kern River and the Audubon Society who have made it possible for the Preserve to remain a wondrous sanctuary for birds and many other creatures.

Can Eating Be More Than Just Eating?

2008-06-16T10:01:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, I bought a little set of cards called "Present Moment Wonderful Moment" by Thich Nhat Hanh that can be used for meditation and pondering our daily lives. Along with the cards was a little book where he expands a little bit on each of the verses. I picked a card this weekend that really touched me and helped me see how eating can be a gift not only to myself but to others. Here is the verse:

With the first taste, I offer joy.
With the second, I help relieve the suffering of others.
With the third, I see others' joy as my own.
With the fourth, I learn the way of letting go.

Here is part of what he wrote about this: "Eating can be very joyful. I smile at it, put it in my mouth, and chew it with complete awareness of what I am eating - mindfulness is always mindfulness of something - and I chew my food in such a way that life, joy, solidity and non-fear become possible. After twenty minutes of eating, I feel nourished, not only physically, but also mentally and spiritually. This is a very deep practice."

I am only now starting to arrive at a point where I can pause before I start eating to become aware of my food. I have written down these verses and propped them by my eating space and will endeavor to find that moment to pause, so that my eating can be a gift to others as well as to myself.

Someone is Feeding on Your Anger

2008-06-13T14:55:00.000-07:00

It's probably trite to quote from popular songs, but I got the new Sheryl Crow CD yesterday and here is this line in one of the songs that really struck me. It really got me to thinking about all the times when I have been angry about something small - not anger at injustice or genocide or unfairness or abuse - but piddly stuff like who left a dirty fork in the sink and so on. And so - who or what does feed on that anger? It's insidious. Also this: was that anger part of what I was feeding myself when I ate and ate and ate in my past life? And what do we do with our anger then - for the big stuff, we have to take action of some sort, pick your method, voting, monetary support for charity, writing letters, whatever you can do. For the little stuff, hmmm, my nemesis? Let it go then?

Part of what I think may be an answer for me - my daily gratitudes, which I do in my personal journal. When I started doing that last fall, it was in response to an article by Joanna Macy I read in Shambala Sun. Here's a link to my original post about this: link. Having a discipline of frequently expressing gratitude is a way of rejecting the mindset of feeling inadequate or not good enough because it forces us to look at the present and to see more than just the doom and gloom of our everyday tribulations. Sometimes it's hard work, but I find that if there is something that is troubling me or that I find irritating, that is where I can best point my gratitude that day.

Yesterday, I realized that I was angry about my work and how annoying it all was and that I didn't get to go to the gym at lunch because of a falsely generated sense of "urgency". But in the grand scheme of things where people are starving and towns are flooding, this is minor, very minor. So what was I feeding with my anger about my work?

Gratitude of the Day: I am grateful for having the means to pay for a gym membership. I am grateful for pop stars who sometimes sing something wise that penetrates the fog.

Emotional Eating - What are You Feeling?

2008-06-04T14:55:00.001-07:00

In a conversation I had with a fellow overeater some time ago, we got to talking about emotional eating. She said a very interesting thing, which was that she had no idea what emotions she was feeling when she starting in on overeating or eating when she wasn't hungry, she just knew she wasn't very happy and wanted to eat something to make herself feel better. That comment has stuck in the back of my mind for all this time, and I thought I would see if I could offer up some choices. Of course there are a million different web sites out there that have lists of emotions, but here's one more such list. If you're not sure what you're feeling, is it one of these? Acceptance, Affection, Aggravation, Agitation, Agony, Alarm, Alienation, Amusement, Anger, Anguish, Annoyance, Anticipation, Anxiety, Apprehension, Arousal, Attraction, Aversion, Bitterness, Bliss, Boredom, Caring, Cheerfulness, Compassion, Contempt, Contentment, Courage, Defeat, Dejection, Delight, Depression, Deprivation, Desire, Despair, Disappointment, Disgust, Dislike, Dismay, Displeasure, Distress, Dread, Eagerness, Ecstasy, Elation, Embarassment, Enjoyment, Enthusiasm, Envy, Euphoria, Exasperation, Excitement, Fear, Ferocity, Fondness, Fright, Frustration, Fury, Gladness, Glee, Gloom, Glumness, Grief, Grouchiness, Grumpiness, Guilt, Happiness, Hate, Homesickness, Hope, Hopelessness, Horror, Hostility, Humiliation, Hurt, Hysteria, Infatuation, Insecurity, Insult, Interest, Irritation, Isolation, Jealousy, Joy, Jubilation, Liking, Loathing, Loneliness, Longing, Love, Melancholy, Misery, Mortification, Neglect, Nervousness, Optimism, Outrage, Panic, Passion, Pity, Pleasure, Pride, Rage, Rapture, Regret, Rejection, Relief, Remorse, Resentment , Revulsion, Sadness, Satisfaction, Scorn, Sentimentality, Shame, Shock, Shyness, Sorrow, Spite, Suffering, Surprise, Sympathy, Tenderness, Tenseness, Terror, Thrill, Torment, Triumph, Uneasiness, Vengefulness, Wonder, Worry Some of my favorite choices for emotional eating: boredom, worry, melancholy, longing, loneliness, shyness. It intrigues me somewhat that for me, the more pleasant emotions didn't make my favorites list, although I can certainly see that for some it could work that way, for example, overeating while having fun at a party.

Heh Heh Sometimes Praying Horse Has Fun

2008-05-29T14:01:00.000-07:00

Or: Bovinus Mortimus, I Hardly Knew Ye

How Much Did I Actually Eat Before?

2008-05-29T13:42:00.000-07:00

I weighed 278 pounds when I made my decision to change – I must have been eating millions of calories a day, right? Out of curiosity I thought I would plug in the numbers to see how many calories it actually was.

Interesting. Turned out to be 2300 calories a day to maintain that weight at my age and height. Guess how much I’m eating now, approximately? About 2000 – 2100. Not that much of a difference really when you look at it from a daily maintenance perspective.

However, I wasn’t exercising at all and I ate a lot of sugary and just generally unhealthy stuff. And even now, if I weren’t exercising a fair amount almost every day both on the treadmill and at the gym lifting weights or going out hiking, my maintenance calories would be just under 1600 per day.

More numbers – how many extra calories did I eat to gain all that weight? I know that somewhere in 1994 or so, I weighed 155 pounds. So I gained 123 pounds in 12 years. Supposedly, you have to eat an extra 3500 calories to gain a pound (and restrict by the same amount to lose one). So I ate 430,500 extra calories to do that, in 4380 days. That’s something slightly more than 98 extra calories a day on average.

To me this just highlights the need to vigilance and care. I already know that I have a propensity for gaining weight, and I have a lot of fat cells that are just waiting for some extra calories to show up so they can grab onto it and store it.

So now, in order to maintain, I know that I must

Pay attention to what I eat. This is why, even though it may seem obsessive, I still count and log my calories. It keeps me honest because I love food so much it would be ridiculously easy to start justifying overeating again. And the food I eat is as healthy as I can make it, with only the occasional straying off the path for a gooey treat.
Get as much exercise I can in a healthy, safe and fun way. I have a desk job where I sit on my butt all day, so I have to stay focused and dedicated to this. If I don’t exercise, I have to restrict my calories down to my estimated maintenance level.
Weigh myself on a regular basis. Again, I personally consider this a key factor in my own maintenance because it makes it impossible to lie to myself. It’s a number and it keeps things objective.

Metabolism and You: Some Numbers

2008-05-13T16:06:00.000-07:00

BMR: something interesting I’ve learned about metabolism while trundling along my weight loss journey. There are various methods of calculating what your metabolism is probably doing if you can’t afford or don’t want to go through lengthy or costly metabolic testing.

Here’s the idea – you want to know approximately how many calories you burn on any given day by taking your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) and adding in your typical activity level. Once you have a pretty good idea of that, you can figure out how much of a caloric deficit you want to create by eating somewhat fewer calories than your total burn. A calorie deficit means that you are setting the stage for weight loss. If you don’t want to lose weight, but instead maintain your current weight, you’ll want to eat around the same calories as you burn.

The BMR calculation produces a number that tells you how many calories you would burn if you did nothing but stay in bed and breathe all day – no activity at all, just how many calories you would need to continue existing. There are a number of calculations and online calculators, and I’m sure each has its proponents, but suspect that for most of us they’re going to come up with numbers fairly similar.

You don’t want to eat fewer calories than your BMR because if you deprive yourself below BMR, your metabolism will slow down so that you burn less – a double edged sword for sure. This is where regular exercise – both strength training and cardio – can help, by increasing your BMR. Exercise also just makes you generally more healthy and fit and boosts your ability to burn energy.

Here’s a link for more info about BMR: Wikipedia Link. This BMR calculation uses metric measurements, so if you need them, here are some converters for pounds/kilograms and inches/centimeters: Pounds/Kilograms and Inches/Centimeters

This is the BMR calculation for women that I’ve used to calculate my own BMR, as an example. Figure out and plug in your own numbers to see what you’re burning.

655 + (9.6 x weight in kilograms) + (1.8 x height in centimeters) - (4.7 x age)

655 + (9.6 x 65.77089365) + (1.8 x 166.116) - (4.7 x 51)655 + 631.4005 + 299.0088 - 239.7 = 1345.7093 BMR

This weight in kilograms is 145 Centimeters is converted from 5' 5", age now 51

For men the calculation is somewhat different:
BMR = 66 + (13.7 x weight in kilograms) + (5 x height in centimeters) - (6.8 X age)

If I were male, my calculation would look like:
66+ (13.7 x 65.77089365) + (5 x 166.116) – (6.8 *51)66 + 901.061 + 830.58 – 346.8 = 1450.78 BMR

Using the multipliers for activity level:
1.2 multiplier for sedentary
1.375 multiplier for lightly active (light workout day)
1.55 multiplier for moderately active (probably a typical day for me)
1.725 multiplier for very active (if I really push it)

These are my estimates for burn at different activity levels:
Sedentary burn: 1615
Lightly active: 1850
Moderately active: 2086
Very active: 2321

And if you want to do it the easy way, here’s a link to an online BMR calculator.

What Do You Really Want? Maybe Not Food

2008-04-29T16:36:00.000-07:00

Here is a great idea I read about recently for working with emotional eating.

As emotional eaters, a lot of our desire or desperation for food is really related to our desire for something else. For example, we feel lonely and reach for food to make us feel better. Our true desire here is for friendship or companionship or a loving relationship. Or we’re bored so we eat, but what we really want is some excitement or something to do that we find stimulating.

The idea is to make a list of what we really want in our life, five items or so. Write it down, memorize the list or carry it in our purse or wallet, and when we recognize that we want to eat when we’re not hungry or we’re overeating (ready to dive into a bag of cookies), we can look to our list of wants and see if what we really want is one of these items rather than food. If so, then rather than mindlessly eating or stuffing down our feelings with food, we can take some meaningful step toward meeting one of our goals or manifesting a true desire.

Here's my list as of today:

1. A strong muscular body and good health.
2. Financial stability with some level of security in knowing that I can retire comfortably.
3. A positive move to the ranch.
4. A loving relationship with my husband.
5. A creative outlet, or many creative outlets like writing, blogging, art work.
6. Close friends who can be trusted to support me and to whom I can offer support that is appreciated.
7. A method of generating income that is creative, interesting and fulfilling.

Food is the Pillar of My Life

2008-04-27T13:57:00.000-07:00

There was a question on a questionnaire I took last week about emotional eating habits - Is food a pillar of your life? Emphatically yes! Still!

There are times even now when i spend more time thinking about food than much else, what it is I'm going to eat next, and how long it will be before I get to eat again. A great deal of mental energy goes in this direction. I don't even know if this is something I need to consciously try to change or if it's something that will begin to change all on its own in time, as I get more comfortable with maintaining my weight and with my hunger patterns. A lot of it does have to do with actually being hungry a lot, since I do work out a lot now, not that I'm an elite athlete of course, but I have recently increased my weight training and that has a direct effect on my hunger level.

However, I admit to some circular logic here because it is also true that I exercise specifically so I can eat more. Yes, I do the exercise for heart health and it does make me feel good afterward and I love the results and I love being stronger, but here it is: I get to eat more because I burned more calories. Somehow that feels wrong - or at least, not quite right, somehow.

I feel that my basic instinct is still, to some extent, to want to eat a LOT of food and to get full. And I am afraid that I would just go nuts and eat way over the amount I need to maintain my current weight if I stopped counting calories and keeping track.

Another insight I have had recently about food and my emotional response to eating. Sometimes, I actually feel sad when it's time to stop eating, whether it's because the food is gone or because I'm full. (Usually the former.) Sometimes, I go to bed thinking about the grand moment in the morning when I am going to get to eat breakfast.

In addition, although I love to get full, it's the actual act of eating and the taste and deliciousness of the food that is at least as, if not more, important than the fullness.

Changing Beliefs about Eating

2008-04-17T16:13:00.001-07:00

I found a great web site today that gave me a great deal of insight into learning to change our relationship with food. Although I have now reached a healthy weight, I am still finding it a challenge learning how to trust myself with food and with eating. The web site, although it is aimed at bulimics and anorexics, has a lot of wisdom to offer those of us who have been emotional over-eaters. Link. One of the recommendations from that site was for us to examine what beliefs we hold about eating and about food that are negative beliefs that hold us back from trusting ourselves with food. Once we understand what those beliefs are, we can then "reframe" them into something positive that will assist us in changing our thought patterns and behavior. These are some of the beliefs that I have held, and how I would like to change them.

I always want to overeat. Change to: I eat the right amount of food to satisfy my hunger.
I like to get really full when I eat. Change to: I enjoy a comfortable feeling of satisfaction with the amount of food I eat.
I am afraid I will be unable to maintain a healthy weight. Change to: I easily and effortlessly maintain a healthy weight.
I love food more than I love anything else. Change to: My life is big and full and food is just one part of it.
If I get hungry, I'll starve. Change to: When I'm hungry, I can eat the right amount of food to feel satisfied.
I think about food all the time. Change to: I stop thinking about food when I'm not hungry.
If I let myself eat the amount of food I want, I won't be able to stop myself from overeating. Change to: I pay attention to when I am full and satisfied and easily stop myself at the right point.
I can't trust myself around food. Change to: I implicitly trust my body to inform me when I am full and satisfied with the amount of food I eat.
If I eat foods that I really love, I'll never stop eating them. Change to: By giving myself permission to eat the foods I love, I am able to eat them in the proper portions.

Emotions Stored in Fat?

2008-04-14T13:45:00.000-07:00

Along my weight loss path, one of the primary issues I have dealt with has been how to work with my emotions without turning to food. In addition, especially at the beginning of the process, I ran into quite a few issues, such as neck and back spasms that had no physical cause, but were obviously emotional in nature, stemming from anxiety and fear. All along, I have thought that as I lost weight, I also released a lot of the emotions I was feeling at the time I originally created the fat cells (or stored energy in them, however you wish to describe it). In other words, that we store our emotions in our fat. I’ve spoken to other people who have lost a lot of weight and gotten mixed reviews of this theory. From a scientific perspective, this would not seem to make any sense. However, for me on an emotional and spiritual level, it really resonates. I have emotions and memories being released that very much relate to what I was going through around the last time I was at the same weight. I feel fortunate in that I have a very good support system, a loving husband and good friends, because learning to find other outlets for my emotional eating has been challenging.

Differentiating between emotional hunger and real hunger is something I always have to evaluate, not to mention figuring out the third type of hunger I have - mouth hunger, that is, the true pleasure I get from the taste of good food. Not everyone feels this - my husband doesn't really, he just eats to stoke the fire.

Intuitive Eating - Book by Evelyn Tribolet and Elyse Resch

2008-04-03T15:59:00.000-07:00

I recently finished reading this book and found a lot of extremely useful information in it and wanted to provide a summary of the main points of the book and to point out one or two areas where I do not agree with their conclusions. I definitely recommend reading this book. The authors, both of whom are registered dieticians, define Intuitive Eating as eating what you want without experiencing guilt. They state that we can eat intuitively by listening to our bodies' hunger cues and levels and by not denying ourselves. They discuss their philosophy that dieting does not work, but in fact sets us up for massive cravings and feelings of guilt and failure when we give in and eat more than we think we “should”.

They spend a good amount of time discussing the outlook of those on a diet, which they define as a form of self-imposed deprivation or starvation. This is so because in order to lose weight, we must create a calorie deficit, thereby creating a period of what our under-fed body may interpret as a mini-starvation, to which it responds by intensely asking for more food. Hunger is a real biological urge, it is strong and it necessary to keep us eating, alive and healthy. When we are extremely hungry, we can more easily succumb to an intense bout of overeating as a normal response to the body’s call for more food.

The book asks us to learn what we want to eat, and then eat it. We are counseled to learn what it feels like to measure our hunger level and then eat until we are no longer hungry, but not overstuffed.

These are all good pieces of advice. However, there seems to be a philosophy that if we do this, all of a sudden, we will stop eating too much, start eating the right foods and that magically the weight will start falling off our bodies.

I don’t believe this. I think if we want to lose weight, we need to understand as much as we can about nutrition, and then deliberately create a calorie deficit to achieve it. Yes, we need to know what we like to eat and then give ourselves permission to eat it and enjoy it without guilt. At the same time, if what we want is a high calorie/low nutrition item, we need to have only a little of it and not very often. There must be thought and knowledge behind our choices as well as Intuition and we must take deliberate action to set the stage for a larger energy burn than calorie intake. Yes, we should eat what we want within the realm of all the healthy choices available – right up to the point of meeting our calorie goal. Knowing that number is just the facts, ma’am. We know we’re going to be a little bit hungry because we are intentionally creating that deficit.

Buried in a couple of small sentences in the book is the author’s acknowledgement that some people need to lose weight for health reasons, and that for those folks it may be necessary to embark on a calorie deficit scheme (not a diet).

That being said, the authors offer a lot of really good information about how to identify what foods we love, how to make peace with food and how to overcome emotional overeating. Their discussion of what they call the “Diet Backlash” sheds light on some of the reasons we have a hard time changing our eating habits (especially in reducing the amount of food we eat) as well as modifying the thought patterns that may have kept us stuck for so long.

One quote that sticks out is this one: “Chocolate starts to take on the same emotional connotation as a peach.”

Some key concepts:

1. There is a strong and very real, biological urge to eat. We are hardwired to want to get enough nourishment in the form of food; this food keeps us alive. We are supposed to get hungry and when we are hungry, we are supposed to eat. That’s the biology of it. They refer to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and state that “Food and energy are so essential to the survival of the human species that if we don’t eat enough we set off a biological fuse that turns on our eating drive both physically and psychologically.” (More information about Maslow)

2. Deliberately restricting calories in order to lose weight can in and of itself, can cause our brain to stimulate a very strong urge to eat more, because our bodies think they are getting starvation rations. “Dieting is a form of short-term starvation. When you are given the first opportunity to really eat, eating is often experienced at such intensity, that it feels uncontrollable, a desperate act. In the moment of biological hunger, all intentions to diet and desire to be thin are fleeting and paradoxically irrelevant.” In addition, when calories are restricted, you can start to obsess about food.

3. The Diet Backlash. The authors discuss the phenomenon that happens sometimes when we are starting to think about going on a diet, where the mere contemplation of the diet brings on the urges and cravings that sabotage us. They have found that we can fall into what they call “The Last Supper Syndrome” where you gorge on food, and especially your trigger foods, right before you start a diet because you think that it will be your last supper – you think that you will never be able to eat again.

4. We need to rebuild our trust in ourselves with food. They urge us to experiment with foods, trying new foods and revisiting old favorites, so that we truly understand what foods we love and what we don’t like at all. Once we know what we love, we should eat those foods. I would definitely agree with the concept of this, but would add that in many cases we need to retrain our taste buds so that we can learn to love foods that are healthy and shy away from foods that are not. I don’t agree that this will be automatic. Rather, I believe we need to take a deliberate stance in changing our taste, and that once we have made progress, to eat those foods we have taught ourselves to love and that are healthy.

The authors put forward ten principles of Intuitive Eating, which are:

1. Reject the diet mentality
2. Honor your hunger
3. Make peace with food
4. Challenge the Food Police
5. Feel your fullness
6. Discover the satisfaction factor
7. Cope with your emotions without using food
8. Respect your body
9. Exercise – feel how good it makes you feel
10. Honor your health

Principle 1 – Rejecting the Diet Mentality

We are urged to give up the notion of dieting, because it self-imposed calorie restriction can trigger overeating. When we believe that we won’t be able to eat again, it’s harder to stop eating once we begin. Dieting can cause us to ignore our hunger cues because we are deciding whether we “deserve” to eat based on our mental calculations of what we’ve already eaten that day. They offer the following set of questions for us to use when we are deciding what or whether to eat:

1. Am I hungry?
2. Do I want it?
3. Will I be deprived if I don’t eat it?
4. Will it be satisfying?
5. Does it taste good?

Of these questions, the one that most intrigued me was the third – “Will I be deprived if I don’t eat it?” If we believe we will feel deprived by not eating the object of our desire, we may end up eating more of something else in a futile attempt to conquer our feeling of deprivation. Principle 3 expands on the feeling of deprivation.

Principle 2 – Honor Your Hunger

Here the authors further discuss our biological drive to eat and our requirement to get adequate nutrition. We need enough energy to fuel our bodies, which we can only get from food. Learning how to honoring the biological signals our body sends when hungry starts the process of learning to trust ourselves with food. The book offers is a great discussion about how the body uses carbohydrates, reminding us that we need to eat carbohydrates. “The brain, nervous system and red blood cells rely exclusively on glucose for fuel”, which we get from carbohydrates. In addition, they urge us not to get too hungry and talk about reasons why we may not recognize real hunger – we may drink water or tea or diet drinks to trick our body for a while, or we just deny hunger until we get used to it. They suggest that we go no longer than five waking hours without eating as a guideline for paying attention to our biology if we have become numb to what honest hunger feels like.

Principle 3 – Make Peace with Food

In this principle, we are exhorted to give ourselves “unconditional permission to eat”. The authors discuss the paradox that once we allow ourselves to eat whatever it is we want our intense urges to eat will abate. Here we must learn to trust ourselves to be able to eat reasonable amounts of whatever foods it is that we don’t allow ourselves to eat, and thereby have strong cravings for. We may find that previously forbidden foods become undesirable once we are allowed to eat them, especially if those foods are available whenever we want them. We learn to trust ourselves with food, since self-trust may have been damaged by early eating experiences, especially if our parents attempted to over-control what we ate.

The authors connect our feelings of being deprived of food to emotions in other parts of our lives: “Deprivation is a powerful experience both biologically and psychologically. Psychological forces wreak havoc with your peace of mind, triggering cravings, obsessive thoughts, and even compulsive behaviors. If you are someone who has also experienced deprivation in areas outside of food, such as love, attention, material wants, etc, the deprivation connected to dieting may be felt even more intensely for you.”

Principle 4 - The Food Police

The Food Police are defined as internal censors that induce guilt by engaging our thoughts in self-criticism. The authors urge us to challenge the thought patterns that engage us in disapproving finger-pointing: “Negative self-talk often makes us feel despair. The feeling of despair can trigger sabotaging behaviors.” We can be incredibly hard on ourselves; I have certainly been much more critical of myself than anyone else ever has been critical of me.

Suggestions for combating the food police:

· Replace black and white thinking (should, must, ought to) with statements that give you permission to eat, such as “I can have anything that looks good to me.”
· Replace pessimism with positive statements, “I desire healthy foods.”
· Become aware of the actual thoughts you are having about food and eating.

Principle 5 – Feel Your Fullness

This principle directs us to listen to the signals that our body sends as we are eating so we can more easily determine when we are approaching getting full and have fulfilled our biological need for the food. The primary tool for this principle is the pause, where we ask ourselves whether we will continue eating. Anyone who has been a member of the Clean Plate Club, as I was, has been taught to ignore our fullness in order to finish all the food on our plates.

Some specific suggestions for pausing:

1. Does the food still taste good?
2. How full are you – how much food is in your stomach?
3. Don’t feel obligated to leave food on your plate.
4. Eat without distraction – do nothing else while you are eating.
5. Reinforce a conscious decision to stop – for example, push your plate forward a bit in the classic “I’m done” maneuver.
6. Defend yourself from obligatory eating by telling the food pushers “no”.

Principle 6 – The Satisfaction Factor

The idea behind this principle is that eating should be a pleasant and sensual experience, and that the more satisfying we find it, the less we will be compelled to overeat or make poor food choices. When we slow down and savor our food, eating what we really want to eat, we can “discover the pleasures of the palate”. We are exhorted to set the stage so that we are eating in a relaxed atmosphere, avoiding tension to whatever extent possible. The authors tell us: “If you don’t love it, don’t eat it, and if you love it, savor it.”

Principle 7 – Cope with Emotions Without Using Food

I have been an emotional eater, and have found that coping with my emotional states without resorting to food was one of the big challenges of my own weight loss. I have eaten when sad, anxious, frustrated, annoyed, lonely and especially, bored. I did this even knowing that food couldn’t possibly be the answer to my emotional upsets. And even knowing that I would beat myself up with guilt and shame for overeating. I have also used food as a reward when happy about something.

The authors tell us how to determine if we’re eating emotionally (we probably already know): “If you find that you’re doing quite a bit of eating when you’re not biologically hungry, then there’s a good chance that you are using food to cope.” They offer the following suggestions for changing an emotional eating pattern:

1. As yourself if you are biologically hungry? If the answer is “Yes”, then you should eat. If not, then ask yourself what is the emotional you are experiencing and what you really need instead of food. If you need help, ask for it. (This last one can be very difficult sometimes, speaking for myself.)
2. Find another way to nurture yourself other than eating. For example, you could take a wonderful bubble bath or go get a massage.
3. Deal directly with your feelings by writing in a journal, talking to a friend, pound the crap out of a pillow. Finally, if we are very troubled and unable to cope with our feelings alone, we can seek the help of a therapist.

Principle 8 – Respect Your Body

So many of us, and especially women, do not respect our bodies and in fact, we spent a great deal of time internally criticizing each and every part of our body that does not meet the “ideal” standard. Intuitive Eating urges us to “accept your genetic blueprint” and learn to honor our bodies and treat ourselves with respect.

One thing the authors recommend, that I do not agree with, is to stop using external assessment tools, such as weighing ourselves or measuring ourselves. Although I understand why they recommend this, which is that by using these tools we can set ourselves up for failure and can use a “bad” measurement as a reason to beat ourselves up, at the same time there seems to be some evidence that those of us who have reached a healthy weight have an easier time maintaining it if we continue to get on the scales. I find that weighing myself helps me keep myself honest, and as long as I stay within a weight range of five or six pounds, that’s good enough. Also, if we are exercising regularly, and especially if we are doing resistance training, knowing measurements is essential to tracking our progress in gaining muscles and losing fat.

What do the authors mean by “respect”? They tell us to:

1. Treat your body with dignity.
2. Meet your body’s basic needs
3. Make your body comfortable

In addition, they list some words of wisdom that we can tell ourselves to combat negative thoughts we may have about our body:

1. My body deserves to be fed.
2. My body deserves to be treated with dignity.
3. My body deserves to be dressed comfortably and in the manner I am accustomed to.
4. My body deserves to be touched affectionately and with respect.
5. My body deserves to move comfortably.

Principle 9 – Exercise

This chapter tells us about the health benefits of exercise and asks us to focus on enjoying how our bodies feel when we exercise, instead of using exercise for its ability to burn calories as part of a weight loss plan. The authors spend some time debunking the “carbs are evil” camp, explaining that carbohydrates are the premier fuel of exercise. Note that they don’t tell us to load up on carbs, just that we don’t have to shy away from a healthy mix of nutrients, including carbs. In addition, we are specifically told to include strength training to encourage muscle growth, as “muscle is metabolically active tissue that helps keep your metabolism revved up.”

Principle 10 – Honor Your Health

Here the authors discuss nutrition and how we can select healthy foods, while at the same time picking what tastes good to us. They point out that there is merit in variety, moderation and balance, and tell us that “balance is intended to be achieved over a period of time. It does not have to be reached at each and every meal…It is consistency over time that matters.” Their nutritional advice is very similar to the best such advice you can find just about anywhere. Finally, I love this quote: “In matters of taste, consider nutrition, and in matters of nutrition, consider taste.” Yes, healthy foods do taste good!

Secret Eating

2008-03-30T09:27:00.000-07:00

One of the behaviors I had was to hide my eating by eating in secret and sneaking food out of the kitchen to eat alone. This allowed me (in my own weird way of thinking) to eat more without having to admit to anyone how much I was actually eating. Of course, the results were obvious: lots of extra weight and a big reduction in the number of cookies in the bag. As part of my weight loss journey, I have cultivated carefully the principle of honesty about what I’m eating and the quantity of what I’m eating. If I ate two pieces of carrot cake, I’ll say I ate two pieces of carrot cake, both in my food journals and to anyone that might be interested in knowing about it. In fact, I think that if I start hiding food or lying about the quantity I eat, that is a big red flag that I’m falling back into the old disordered way of thinking about food.

The habit of hiding food started a long time ago, when I was a girl. I have specific memories of sneaking as many Cheetos as I thought I could get away with as well as cans of tuna. I had quite a few empty cans “hidden” in the storage space in my bedroom. And I can’t remember how many times I made sneak raids on cookies and thought I was cleverly hiding them as I sidled away. As if no one could tell that the quantity was mysteriously getting lower.

I got to thinking about this recently, because as I was returning from my Nevada City trip I found myself thinking that I could look forward to having some time to myself and that “I can eat whatever I want.” That thought was an old one from the pre-weight loss days where I gorged on stuff like vast bowls of mashed potatoes, humongous Jamba juices, canned green beans and pints of ice cream or large quantities of cookies whenever my husband wasn’t around. I wouldn’t do it when he was there because I wanted to be able to pretend I didn’t do stuff like that. What I was very happy about this time around was that I recognized the thought right away and was able to laugh and tell myself that I can always have whatever I want and know that what I wanted wasn’t the aforementioned gorge-menu.

Gratitude of the Day: I am grateful for the new habit of desiring healthy food.

Nature Walks

2008-03-23T12:13:00.000-07:00

This week I took a short road trip to Nevada City (in California) to visit a friend. The highlights of that trip were a couple of walks we took along the Yuba River.

Thursday we went to the Buttermilk Bend trail on the South Yuba River State Park. The walk was a designated "wildflower walk" with many of the plants identified by little signs which made it so much more interesting once we knew what we were looking at. There were so many wildflowers - including the quintessential Cal combination of California poppy and lupine. I also loved the blue tomcat clover, the glowing yellow pretty face and fiddlehead which is yellow also but the flowers lie on the stem shaped like a fiddle. There was one wildflower we never did figure out the name of which had small purple/maroon puffball flowers with the tiniest white poofs on the tips. Oh, and there is a wildflower with the hilarious name of Blue-Dick. And, I saw an American Dipper (water ouzel) doing his thing in the river, which of course lifted my heart, as these birds are one of my favorite. John Muir wrote a wonderful essay about this bird, and Harriet Monroe penned a lovely poem.

On Friday, we went back to a different spot on the Yuba, and went for a longish hike on the north side of the river. The microclimate on that part of the river was completely different from what we had seen the day before, but still lots of wildflowers and unbelievably scenic views of the river. The Yuba River has the most amazing green pools where the river is deeper. Oh my goodness, don't I just love a nature walk, or just a good hard hike, wherever it may be - the desert, the mountains, the seaside, the beautiful rolling hills of California. For me, it's a chance to come out of my thoughts, to abandon my overblown sense of importance and to become merely another being breathing in and breathing out. It's liberating. There are so many other creatures and beings of all sorts to learn about, to understand how this place sustains them. It puts me on the earth and in my body at a particular place and time.

Gratitude of the Day: I am grateful for spring wildflowers, green rivers, and friends who have open souls.

Why Gratitude is Subversive

2008-03-14T23:35:00.000-07:00

One of the new keystones of my spiritual practice has been incorporating gratitude into my life to whatever extent I can. This started in November 2007 after I read an article in Shambala Sun by Joanna Macy. This article had a big impact on me and since then I have been including a daily gratitude into my journal. Sometimes it is very difficult to identify something because my outlook that morning is not especially positive. Other times I can barely pick from so many things to be grateful for - those moments are ones of great and joyful abundance.

This quote from the article is very powerful: "Thankfulness loosens the grip of the industrial growth society by contradicting its predominant message: that we are insufficient and inadequate. The forces of late capitalism continually tell us that we need more - more stuff, more money, more approval, more comfort, more entertainment. The dissatisfaction it breeds is profound. It infects people with a compulsion to acquire that delivers them into the cruel, humiliating bondage of debt. So gratitude is liberating. It is subversive. It helps us realize that we are sufficient, and that realization frees us."

Yes, this is a pointed analysis of society. At the same time it tells us how to break out of mindless belief in the message of inadequacy by incorporating a habit of expressing gratitude. Over the years, I had certainly bought into that message and on a fairly reliable basis considered myself inadequate on some level.
I do believe that gratitude is a choice, we can move ourselves into an attitude of gratefulness. The processes of each day writing down what I can be grateful for has helped me see the parts of life that are bigger than me. It has opened a window for joy.

Gratitude of the Day: I am grateful for breath. Breathing in, the earth. Breathing out, the sky.

My Weight Loss Story and Philosophy

2008-03-13T13:15:00.001-07:00

One of the most important changes I have made in my life over the last couple of years is losing 130 pounds to get to my current healthy weight. It’s been an incredible, rewarding journey with lots of ups and downs – both on and off the scale! Because my relationship to food over the years hasn’t been very good – I’ve used food as a drug – a great part of the “battle” was emotional. Right now, as I am starting to maintain my new weight, I am still keeping track of all of the calories I eat so I don’t fall into the overeating trap. There’s a great website that offers a lot of tools and support for those of us trying to achieve and maintain our weight through healthy eating: http://caloriecount.about.com/. This has been a huge boon and I highly recommend it.

I started out at 278 in September 2006. The reason I started down the path was because I was scared about my blood pressure and my doctor was warning me that if my blood sugar tests got any worse I would be heading down the path to diabetes. I did not want to continue that direction.

I've had weight issues since I was a teenager. I've lost and gained a lot of weight over the years, but that fall I was at my highest yet, and I didn't feel very good. I didn't feel good physically and I didn't like myself much either. Pretty much at that point, the light went on and I made a pact with myself that I would Do Something. My doctor gave me 3 months to try a diet-based approach to reducing my blood pressure, and because I did not want to go on blood pressure medication, I decided to start there. I found a book on reducing hypertension through diet and incorporated those changes. I also knew I needed to make changes that would prevent my slide towards diabetes, so I threw out all of my cookies, candies, cakes and sweets and didn't buy any more. I hoped that what I was doing would help me lose weight too, but I didn't really start out with that as my goal.

The dietary changes I made were the same ones you hear everywhere:

Eat veggies. Eat a LOT of veggies. Eat a lot of different kinds of veggies. Even if you're not a big veggie fan, find ones that you like and eat them. Try new ones and if you don't like them, try something else till you find more that you do like. If you can afford it and they are readily available in your area, buy organic, buy in season and buy local. Go to the Farmer's Market if there is one near you - it's fun!
Eat fruit. Eat a good amount of fruit. I prefer to eat way more veggies than fruit because they are lower in calories, but eating a variety of different kinds of fruit is also important.
Eat whole grains. Eliminate the refined stuff to whatever extent possible. Again, aim for a variety. I had to learn to like whole wheat pasta and brown rice - now I prefer it.
Eat lean protein. I am a vegetarian, so for me this means tofu, beans and lentils primarily. However, most everything you eat has some protein in it, even veggies.
Eat healthy oils. I prefer olive oil. I also eat some raw nuts, primarily walnuts and almonds, and like to allow for avocado from time to time.
Eliminate as much processed food and sweets as you can.
Keep your sodium low.
Drink water or herb tea. I'm not all that great at this part of it still, but make the effort. I've found a few herb teas that I really like and that helps.

The other Very Important Part is EXERCISE. To whatever extent possible, incorporate exercise into your daily routine. When I started out, I could only walk at a very slow pace for 20 to 30 minutes at the most. Gradually I was able to increase it, and get faster. Now, although I'm not very fast and I'm no marathoner, I can jog four to five miles a day, five to six days a week. Also, again to whatever extent possible, start weight training. I wish I had started that earlier. Ladies, you won't end up looking like the Incredible Hulk, believe me. I go to the gym and lift weights 3 times a week for about 30 to 40 minutes. This made a huge difference for me and will make you appear slimmer even if you don't lose weight. Seriously.

I am an emotional eater. I have used food to soothe fear, anxiety, anger, depression, boredom and general feelings of emptiness. I also love the taste of food and I prefer to feel full after I eat. I found that the hardest part of losing weight was, well actually still is, learning to cope emotionally without turning to food as a balm. It's harder to talk about this side of the equation because we are each so different and have our own approaches and feelings and reasons for having gotten to where we are. The one thing I would say: love yourself anyway, use positive thoughts to combat any negative self-talk, and most importantly seek, and ask for help.

I also believe that we occasionally need to relax a little bit and let ourselves have a "day" off. That means that having a fancy dinner once in a while, or a small piece of birthday cake, or insert your favorite indulgence here, is OK. I truly believe that food cannot be the enemy, it is what nourishes us and keeps us well fueled. Not only that, but we must allow ourselves to feel the honest pleasure that comes from a delicious meal.