Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

13 Jun

Frozen Blueberries

Posted by hlward in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , .

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day.  Because I am naturally contrarian, I refused to believe them for much of my life.  And we all know where that got me.

I used to think, “Hey, I’m not hungry, I can save ten minutes and a bunch of calories.”  I was stupid.  From the above-linked WebMD article:  “Some people skip breakfast in an effort to lose weight, but the practice is more likely to cause weight gain than weight loss. Skipping breakfast is strongly linked to the development of obesity. Studies show that overweight and obese children, adolescents, and adults are less likely to break the fast each morning than their thinner counterparts.”

I am now a committed, confirmed eater of breakfast.

So.   Now I not only eat breakfast, I’ve been doing it long enough that I actually look forward to it.  On weekdays (I’ll get to weekends in another post) I drink coffee with half and half and eat some (yeah, some – I don’t measure) whole-grain Cheerios (not the multi-grain kind – regular Cheerios suit my palate and my nutritional interests better) with 2% (skim is just white-ish water) milk and some frozen blueberries.

Frozen blueberries?  For goodness sake, you say, why FROZEN blueberries when fresh ones are just steps away in the supermarket?  Because fresh blueberries are mushy.  Yes, all of them.  I’ve tried blueberries from all over the country (and the world), including fresh ones right off the bush (we grow A LOT of blueberries in north Florida), and they all feel mushy to me.  I don’t particularly like them, and I probably wouldn’t bother to choke ’em down just for the health benefits if I had to eat fresh regularly.

I like other berries fresh:  black, straw, occasionally rasp, but not particularly blue.

Alton Brown got me interested in the frozen kind, which, because they’re fresh-frozen, have the same nutritional value as the ones in the little plastic pint containers.  Plus, they create little Cheerio-cicles when I pour the milk over ’em.  Which makes breakfast fun.  Your mileage may vary, as they say.  By the way, I’ve tried two or three brands, but the Publix store-brand works best for me.  The berries tend to be plumper and not mashed and mutilated during the freezing and bagging process.

You may have noticed above that I use half and half in my coffee.  In copious amounts.  Because that’s how I like my coffee.  It’s also an ace-up-my-sleeve when I get down to the “short rows” of weight loss next year and am looking for things to eliminate to reach my goal.  But I’m putting that one off as long as I can.

11 Jun

The Difference Between This and Dieting

Posted by hlward in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , .

I’ve mentioned this before, but I realize not everyone has read every post on this blog, nor do those of you who have necessarily remember every pearl of wisdom and turn of phrase I write here.  I understand that to readers who aren’t working through a similar process (or haven’t in the past, or aren’t close to someone who has or is), it’s hard to distinguish between being “on a diet” and making permanent changes to the way one (me) approaches food and drink.

In an effort to be both clear about what I’m working on and to keep this blog relevant to readers who aren’t working on similar changes of their own, I’ve come up with a couple of examples that might be helpful:

The difference between what I’m doing and going on a diet is the difference between giving up smoking and just quitting until the cough clears up.

The difference between what I’m doing and going on a diet is the difference between giving up drinking and sobering up for a big meeting.

Going on a diet is fine if you’re trying to lose a few pounds for the reunion.  I’m not.  I’m changing my relationship to food and drink.  If I were on a diet … and I’ve been on plenty … I’d have a goal – like I do now – but I’d know that as soon as I reached that goal I could back off and relax.  Go get a cake from Publix and celebrate.  Open up a bag of Cheddar and Sour Cream Ruffles and wash it down with a convenience store drum of Coca-Cola.  Sure, that wouldn’t be ideal, but that’s what going on a diet is.  It’s a climb up the mountain knowing the downhill trip is, well, downhill.

That’s why I’m not on a diet.  There’s no “yippee, I made it!” party at the end.  Yes, I’ll be mighty happy when I get to 207 next year, but that’s not the end.  I’m not going back to soda, to white bread, to sweet tea, to any of that stuff.  I won’t tell you I’ll never have a slice of birthday cake again – that would be ridiculous.  I want to get to a point where I can do that occasionally.  I want to be able to eat “just one” without it driving me crazy.  And if I can’t get to that point, then yes, I’ll stay away from that stuff entirely.

This is a lifetime lifestyle change.  The part where I lose the weight, that’s just the short-term, getting-started phase.  That’s why it’s not a diet.  I hope this helps me explain it a bit better.  I’m not going to harp on this anymore but I felt it needed to be written.

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In other news, I’ve learned that at least one person I work with reads this blog.  Which turns up the accountability heat.  There’s nowhere to hide.  Which was kinda the point in starting this blog.  Thank you, readers!

10 Jun

Train Kept a Rollin’

Posted by hlward in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , .

Today’s Friday, and Friday’s weigh-in day:  268.  That’s 19 pounds in 13 weeks, or almost seven percent of my starting weight.

This morning I’m thinking about that lost weight as debris being thrown from a runaway train, littering the tracks behind me.  Don’t worry, it’s biodegradable.

And yes, I know the song referenced in the title above has nothing to do with losing weight or anything that could be construed as a healthy lifestyle.  I like train songs, and it’s a good analogy.  Give me some room to work, here.

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Some post topics to which you can look forward in the coming days:  Easing into an exercise program, How fake/overprocessed food might be affecting us all and Why avoiding a stroke has become a Big Deal for me.

Thanks for reading!

9 Jun

The Cheese May Not Have Been a Good Idea

Posted by hlward in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , .

Most days for lunch I’ve been eating some fruit.  A lot of pineapple.  I like pineapple.  Maybe a whole-wheat pita or two with some hummus or something.  Handful of mixed nuts or two at odd times during the day.

Wednesday I went to the Publix looking for the “fruit salad” (again, it’s mostly pineapple) I like, and because I was in the wrong Publix, they didn’t have it.  But they had cheese.  Lots of cheese.  Cheeses from around the world (or at least North America and Western Europe).  So I ate some cheese for lunch.  About fifty percent too much cheese.

Now, there shouldn’t be anything wrong with eating cheese for lunch.  And I love it.  But I haven’t been eating much cheese by itself, and apparently I need to re-calibrate my system for what is an acceptable amount of the stuff.  Because about ten minutes after I stopped, I felt pretty rotten and it sat like a lump of processed lead in my belly until about bedtime.

I’m not going to stop eating cheese, but I’ll have to experiment with quantities.  I’ll let you know how it turns out.

8 Jun

I Feel Good About This

Posted by hlward in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , .

Earlier this week I took my six-year-old daughter out for ice-cream (TCBY actually – they post her drawings on the wall, so she likes the product).  She looked over the offerings, consulted with me about the colors, made her choice and we sat down.  About halfway through it occurred to me that I wasn’t the least bit tempted to get a cone (or a golden-vanilla-and-cookie-dough Shiver) for myself.  Didn’t even think about it until then.

Then last night we went out to dinner at a local diner to celebrate the end of the school year and my lovely wife and spritely daughters shared a hot-fudge brownie sundae for dessert.  Again, it didn’t even budge my hunger meter.  To be fair, I had just finished a plate of corned-beef hash and eggs, but still …

I was never a big ice-cream eater, but if it was an option … even a remote one … I was always on-board for it, and would regret if I didn’t join in the fun.  Of course, sharing dessert or just having a taste or two was never enough, if I got started I needed a sundae of my own, and a big one.

I remember when our oldest was about three months old it occurred to me one afternoon that she was part of the family, part of my life.  That she wasn’t just visiting, and this was the new (wonderful, but different) normal.  Last night I had a similar realization:  Skipping dessert isn’t just something I’m doing for a couple of weeks.  This is the new normal, and I don’t miss the old one.  At least in this respect.

7 Jun

And My Shirts Will Fit Better Too …

Posted by hlward in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , .

Says here, in this CNN link, that according to the American College of Cardiology, “Waist size provides a far more accurate way to predict a heart patient’s chances of dying at an early age from a heart attack or other causes”  than Body Mass Index (BMI).  The story, from May of this year, is no surprise.

The American Journal of Epidemiology, quoted here in a 2008 piece, noted in 1998 that, “…  men in the top 25% for waist to hip ratio were twice as likely to develop coronary heart disease compared to men in the lowest quartile.”

And Arthur Agatston, of South Beach Diet fame, has been beating the drum against belly fat for years.  The Mayo Clinic agrees.

So … to sum up, if I lose belly fat and drop my waist size to below 40 (I’m planning for 36, down from a snug 44), I’ll be A LOT less likely to have a heart attack.  And my shirts will fit better.

6 Jun

“Eat Food”

Posted by hlward in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , .

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” – Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan writes a lot of really smart things.  Like the line above and this:  “Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”  Yes, I know you didn’t actually know your great-great grandmother, and you can’t consult with her while you’re standing in the aisle at the Publix.  You’re going to have to noodle some of this out on your own.

Both the Pollan quotations are from this (long) NYT piece published in 2007, which is a nice summation of his theories on food.  He’s written several books as well, including In Defense of Food, which I found particularly interesting.   His basic contention is that the epidemic of unhealthy bigness in America (which we’ve been kind enough to begin successfully exporting) is largely (pun intended) due to the strange relationship we developed with food over the course of the 20th century.  What we consume at mealtime (and the rest of the day) is, for the most part, so processed and twisted as to be unrecognizable as, you know, food.

Agribusiness, for a variety of really complicated reasons (political, industrial, financial, environmental, psychological, etc. in nature) doesn’t provide much our great-great grandparents would have understood how to prepare or consume.

I’m no scientist, but I feel comfortable writing that what our great-great grandparents did consume was the result of millennia of evolutionary adaptation.  What we consume is the result of strange and generally untested (on a long-term basis) experimentation.  I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t make me feel particularly comfortable.

I realize that weight loss, at it’s simplest level, is still all about the math:  Burn more calories than you take in.  But Pollan (and others) are onto something here.  Real food – the kind that grows out of the ground (or eats stuff that does) and gets processed (minimally) by you or somebody you know just before it gets to your kitchen – does good things for human bodies.  Stuff that has to find it’s way through multiple factories, over oceans and across continents and then waits in storage for weeks or months before it comes to your kitchen … might … be doing something to human bodies nobody really intended.  It might be that our bodies are just downright confused by all the strange things we’ve put into them.  Which is not an excuse, just something to think about.

It bears mentioning that local food (because it may be neighbor-to-neighbor) is often not subject to the same health requirements as what we get from agribusiness.  That could be a problem, and I don’t want to minimize the reality of food-borne illness.  Then again, agribusiness isn’t immune to that either.  Local food is also A LOT more expensive than the super-processed stuff, for a variety of reasons.  In our country food that’s bad for you tends to be cheap, and food that’s cheap tends to be bad for you.  Which is one of several reasons American poor people tend to be more obese than American rich people.

Please do go read Pollan and come to your own conclusions.

4 Jun

Strange Days

Posted by hlward in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , .

I’ve had some strange experiences lately as a result of this healthier-lifestyle thing.  They may not seem strange to most of you, but to me they were darn-near revelatory.

This past Sunday, May 29th, my lovely wife and I went out for a simple anniversary dinner (seventh, thanks for asking) at Outback Steakhouse (told you it was simple) and we shared a steak.  I’ve never shared a steak in my life.  It’s an entirely different mindset.  Apparently I’ve always, for some odd reason, approached my plate from a “scarcity” frame of mind:  Eat everything, eat if fast and move on.  Turns out I can get just as full if I not only share, but – get this – I don’t even have to finish everything on the plate!  I know, you’re thinking, “The hell you say, Harv,” but it’s true.

Then today we (me, lovely wife and spritely children) had lunch at an old favorite I hadn’t haunted in years, Hogan’s Heroes (It’s a sandwich shop/pub you should visit, but bring cash, as they don’t take cards.)  When I ordered my pastrami and swiss on whole wheat I thought I was being conservative by ordering the 6″ (that’s a medium) instead of the 8″/large the hungrier, larger me would have ordered.  I dug in in an anxious fashion … and then about 3/4 of the way through realized I was … wait for it … full.  With a quarter of a Hogan’s sandwich still on my plate.  Then I realized I could have kept a buck-fifty in my pocket if I’d ordered the  4″ (it wasn’t as tasty as I’d remembered, and I didn’t see the point in wrapping any up to take home.

Many – most – of you might think sharing a steak and not cleaning your plate are everyday activities.  For me, these have been strange days, indeed.

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I want to take a moment to welcome and thank those of you who’ve visited as a result of the link I posted on my Facebook page yesterday.  I appreciate your support, and hope you’ll check this site out as often as you will.   And thanks, also to those who were here pre-Facebook.  Feel free to leave comments, and, again, thank you for your support.

3 Jun

Back In Gear

Posted by hlward in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , .

Progress!  269 this morning, which is down two pounds from last Friday.  And the one before.

Eating intenionally makes all the difference in the world.  Last week, too many helpings and too much lemonade kept me stuck at 271.  This week I made the conscious – and necessary – effort to think about what I was eating and how it would affect my weekly weigh-in.  I ate the remains of a croissant this past Sunday (it’s a dad thing … kids leave a lot of food behind), but instead of randomly wolfing it down I thought it through first and made sure to savor.  That may sound ridiculous to a lot of you, which probably means you’ve never been where I am.  Others of you know exactly whereof I speak.

Which brings me to another point.  There are really two kind of grownups interested in losing weight:  Those trying to lose five or ten pounds to fit into their favorite jeans, suit, etc., and those who are working on shedding 20, 30, 40 percent (or more) of their body weight.  Those are two vastly different ways of thinking about weight loss.  There are similarities – both include an element of vanity (one of my motivations is to look better) – but five or ten pounds isn’t going to become an eventual medical emergency for most people.  Eighty pounds will.

My plan is to become one of you people who need to lose five pounds.

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For those of you scoring at home, that’s twelve weeks, eighteen pounds.

2 Jun

The Question Is, How Big Is The Plate?

Posted by hlward in Uncategorized. Tagged: , .

You may have seen this new US Federal guideline for healthy eating recently.  It replaces the “old” food pyramid, which I never much cared for.  I’m not really sure how I feel about this one either, since about five minutes of Googling can turn up experts who would argue for making any portion of it bigger or smaller.  It’s probably just fine.  More information about the new program here.

I do think it should be clear that the “grains” category needs to be whole grains, not ultra-processed white bread.  Speaking for my own metabolism only, whole grains are a big deal.  Regardless of whether we use a plate or a pyramid as a guide, the question is, “how much food are we talking about?”  This can be a healthy plate  … or not … entirely depending on how much food is actually on it as much as what that food is.

Some people will see this (ok, at some points in my life I would have seen this) as a call to add two pounds of fruits and vegetables to go along with my 16-ounces of NY Strip.  And biscuits.   And I know people (clearly not me) who would see this as a call to add an extra berry to their single slice of deli turkey.  How do we communicate healthy quantities?

I realize it’s tricky telling people how much food they should eat.  What I need to be healthy is entirely different from what a 120-pound teenage girl needs to consume to be healthy.  Unfortunately, we all have to engage in a little trial and error with a big dash of common sense to find the right formula.

Here’s hoping this new plate will surprise me and be a good starting point for people who haven’t given eating much critical thought

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