Skipping Dessert … and taking the stairs

Again this week friends of the blog are out there scouring the online world for me (and you) to find the helpful, the disturbing and the downright weird in food/health writing.

First up, you’ve probably heard of this Steve Jobs fellow.  I’d like to tell you I’m writing this on one of his machines, but I’d be lying, because they’re wicked expensive.  As a disclaimer, let me be clear that he was brilliant.  Inspiring in many ways.  A true visionary.  But let’s face it:  Ol’ boy was odd.  So it’s not exactly a surprise to me that he had some … different … gustatory customs.

It’s been fairly widely reported, even during his lifetime, that Jobs was a pescetarian – not quite vegetarian, but no land animals, just fish.   Nothing strange about that.  But that’s not the end of the story.

This article, reviewing Walter Isaacson’s authorized Steve Jobs bio, pulls back the kitchen curtain on one strange eater.  Isaacson tell us (and keep in mind, this is an authorized biography) Jobs fasted – often – eating only one food (carrots were a favorite) for weeks at a time.  He ate so many carrots he apparently proved the old story that if you eat too many carrots you turn orange.  And I am not making this up.

“He would spend weeks eating the same thing—carrot salad with lemon, or just apples—and then suddenly spurn that food and declare that he had stopped eating it. He would go on fasts, just as he did as a teenager, and he became sanctimonious as he lectured others at the table on the virtues of whatever regimen he was following.”

“A friend told Isaacson, ‘There is a story about Steve turning orange from eating so many carrots, and there is some truth to that.’ As Jobs says, ‘Friends remember him having, at times, a sunset-like orange hue.'”

Go read the article.  Again, brilliant man, serious food issues.  Maybe it fueled his genius.  Or maybe if he’d eaten a steak now and then he could have ruled the world.

Heard enough about Steve Jobs the past couple of weeks?  Hey, it’s county fair season!  People eat … strange things … at the fair.  Take, for instance, elephant ears.  You shouldn’t eat those.  And they don’t actually taste good.  Cotton candy.  It’s, umm, what’s the word?  Oh, yeah, vile.  And a hell of a big mess.  Don’t eat that stuff either.

Slate.com did us the favor of rounding up a doughnut-box full of, as they put it, “freaky fare”  From the fair.  Kool-Aid pickles?  Cheeseburger with Fried Ice-Cream?  Fried beer?  FRIED BUTTER?!?!  Do I need to tell you to stay away from this stuff?

I know.  It’s the fair.  Sometimes you can’t help yourself.  Me either.  Do be careful about riding the Yo-Yo after loading up on fried jelly beans.

Thanks for reading, friends.   I’m off to enjoy a sensible salad.  Without carrots or pickle pops.

Lazy blogging tonight.  Here’s what you can look forward to this week, however …

Monday – Your Weekly Reading Assignment

Tuesday – Reasons I don’t want to be a vegan.

Wednesday – Five Things Wednesday

Thursday – (I don’t know.  I’ll think of something.  What I need is a good assignment editor.)

Friday – Weigh-in.  Promise.  I’ll replace the batteries before then.

It’s a trick question.  Very few of you reading this ever have been.  Neither have I.  Not really, truly hungry.

Yeah, I get “hungry” for lunch, sometimes for dinner.  I look forward to my Cheerios and frozen blueberries in the morning.  But hungry?  No.  I’m blessed to have grown up (and remained) in the Great American Middle Class, and the classical definition of hunger is something to which I can’t relate.  Thank God.

I’m not trying to bring you down, but this blog – about healthy eating and healthy living – is a good place to ruminate on what hunger is … and the fact that it’s closer than any of us want to understand.

Just this evening, my Lovely Wife and I took the Sprightly Daughters out to dinner (pastrami on rye, thanks for asking), and after getting them to bed I ran out to the Publix down the street to pick up a gallon of milk and a few other quick items.  Just yesterday I deposited my paycheck in the bank, and tonight I slid my debit card through the machine, took my bag full of groceries and came home.  Tomorrow I’ll give my kids a nice healthy breakfast.

Across town there’s a dad wondering what he can possibly give his kids for breakfast.  The shelves in his fridge are as empty as his wallet.  He kissed his kids goodnight just like I did.  But while he worries about feeding his family – much less himself – my biggest worry is keeping myself from eating too much tomorrow.  There’s a lot wrong with a world like that.   A hell of  a lot.

Nearly 50 million Americans – 17 million of them children – don’t have enough to eat.  And I don’t mean they didn’t get a chance to go grocery shopping this week, I mean they don’t have anything to buy groceries with.

Around the world 925 million people (nearly three times as many people as there live – totally – in the US) are hungry.

I have to say again, there’s a hell of a lot wrong with that.  We live in a country … a world … full of abundance.  Most of us (again, all of us reading this, I’d wager) can’t even imagine what hunger is.  Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe if more of us had ever actually had to beg for food to feed our children we’d understand a little better, and maybe we’d do something about it.

The thing is, we can do something about it.  Individually we can all do a little.  But together – as part of the richest nation in the history of the world – we can make real – historic – change.  If we care to.

Do we?

This morning I stepped onto the digital scale where weigh in every Friday morning and the display said, “batt.”  Which means the batt’ry’s dead.  Or at least dead enough to not want to tell me how much I weigh today.  So … no weigh-in data today.  Sorry.

In keeping with the mood of my scales today, my batt’ry’s running low as well.  However, I refuse to allow my lack of creativity and the sloth of my scales to diminish your Friday.

Please click through and enjoy this clip from Professor Buddy Love, as well as this inspirational tool from Mr. Creosote.  If those don’t make you want to skip dessert, we’re living in different worlds, you and me.

Just a couple of things to share with you.  First, I don’t recommend telling the whole world you’re going to write a blog post every day for the next 31 days.  Somewhere around day sixteen or seventeen it starts to wear on you a bit.  Not that it’s not rewarding, it is.  But there are lots of things that are rewarding I don’t recommend.

Second, and this is the more salient point, I’ve known for many a long year that my response to bad stress is to eat, compulsively and randomly.  Since I started on this path a few months ago, I’ve done a pretty good job of putting myself in a mindful, intentional space when I feel bad stress coming my way.  As a result I’ve managed to keep myself away from my trademark overeating in those situations.  Which is something to feel good about.  It’s definitely progress.

Turns out, however, that my go-to, subconscious response to good stress might be the same compulsive, random overeating.  Yeah, I know, this shouldn’t be a surprise, but it is.  By way of background, I should tell you I have a lot going on at the shop these days, all of it quite positive, but it’s still a lot of work.

This week I’ve managed to make some big steps toward a couple of big professional goals.  Yesterday evening I clicked the send button on a big piece of a (really) big project (which ended up bringing lots of positive results today, thanks for asking), and when I got home and we got all the Sprightly Daughters securely in bed, I headed straight for the kitchen … without thinking about it.

Now, you’re thinking, “yeah, so?”  Well, the “so” is that we’d already eaten a fairly substantial dinner.  I wasn’t hungry.  But the food reward code hidden deep in my brain triggered and I made what turned out to be a tasty pb&j (actually a pb and organic orange marmalade on whole wheat bread – plenty healthy under normal circumstances).  And I wolfed it (and a glass of milk) in a few seconds, just like the old days.  So the problem isn’t the “what,” it’s the “why” and the “how.”

It was after 9 PM and i’d already eaten dinner.  That’s not the path to weight loss, especially on the heels of my birthday weekend.

When I finished and sat in the recliner staring at the empty plate I realized I haven’t done that in months.  So it’s good that I haven’t been doing it, but it concerns me that’s my default.

Clearly more work to do.  And I will.

Thanks for reading, always.

It’s Five Things Wednesday!  One of the more problematic issues I’ve encountered in this process is how to eat lunch – with healthy intent – when I don’t bring it from home.  Partially because I don’t like planning and bringing lunch.  Breakfast is easy.  It’s at home, it’s a routine.  Dinner is usually at home, and even when it’s not, it’s not necessarily the sort of rush that lunch is, of necessity.  Not eating fast food drastically reduces the number of lunch options available.  Here are five places I can reliably, and fairly quickly, find a healthy lunch.  

1.)  Publix.  Yep.  My go-to supermarket.  Sandwiches from the Publix deli are reasonably quick, reasonably inexpensive, the options are nearly endless and if it’s not healthy it’s nobody’s fault but mine.

2.)  Fresh Market.  For those of you not familiar with the Fresh Market, think of it as a wannabe Whole Foods.  And since Gainesville doesn’t have one of those, Fresh Market has to do.  And it does admirably.  Their selection of prepared sandwiches, salads and wraps is healthier and tastier than any other grocery prepared food I know.

3.)  Subway.  Sure, it’s pedestrian, and frankly, it doesn’t taste great. On the other hand, it’s fairly cheap and probably the quickest option.

4.)  Tasty Buddha (16th Ave.) If I have a little extra time and don’t mind actually eating in the restaurant (my preferred dining milieu is my car, in a shady spot, listening to whatever I want on the radio), there are plenty of healthy, tasty options at Tasty Buddha.  Yeah, I know, that’s not a lot of help to those of you outside Gainesville.  Write your own blog 🙂

5.)  The Wine and Cheese Gallery.  Sort of a Friday lunch mainstay around the shop.  It helps that it’s about fifty steps away, it’s easy to order for healthy takeout, and did I mention it’s real close by?  Again, local, but recommended.  And the local places need all the help they can get.  Plus, the local places all taste better than the chains.

I gotta tell ya, it’s been a long day.  If this were not Accountabilitober, I don’t think I’d be able to post this evening.   But it is, so post I am.

But as the title implies, consider this an open forum, or better yet, tell me – and each other – your favorite tricks to get past a weight-loss plateau.  Or tell us something else.  Open up to us.  Really open up.

Or tell us your favorite knock-knock joke.

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Tune in tomorrow for Five-Things-Wednesday …

Happy new week everybody!

As is becoming a tradition here, I’ve got some articles for you to read this Monday.  The first, from NPR, I offer for one primary reason:  In the first sentence they introduce a guy who calls himself a “food anarchist.”  I read the article and I still don’t know what that means, but it’s got to be cool.  Whether it is or not, it’s a great excuse for you to go listen to this.

Moving on from my Monday whimsy, here are a couple from a friend of the blog.  As we all know, work is the easiest place to get off track.  Other than vacation.  Or on your birthday weekend.  But work happens, typically, five or six days a week and those other things, not so often.  This piece has some solid recommendations for how to keep it on the straight and narrow at the office.  It also has given me some other ideas for future posts.  Which is good for bonus points.

The next piece is a good analysis of how to switch-up your exercise to jolt yourself off a weight plateau.  Good stuff.  Go read.

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Speaking of NPR, this coming Friday morning, from 6:45 to 10, I’ll be on the radio raising money for the local member station.  You should listen and call in your pledge.  It’s the best radio you’ll hear all week.  Plus, you’ll feel good about it.

Thanks for reading!

Any Richard Bachman fans out there?  Back in 1984 he wrote a bestseller about a guy who lost a bunch of weight.  It didn’t turn out so well for this guy, Billy Halleck.  But good golly, wasn’t he a whiz at losing weight.

They made a movie about it about ten years later, which, predictably, wasn’t as good as the book, but it’s nice to have graphic components that underscore the dangers of this kind of drastic bariatric action.  I’m watching it right now as AMC counts down toward Halloween.

It’s actually a pretty mediocre novel, and the movie’s pretty … ummm … what’s the word … bad.

But even bad literature can make a point here and there.  And this one, schlock aside, makes a nice commentary on the American obsession with weight loss, and all the unhealthiness that sometimes comes with it.

You say you don’t remember Richard Bachman?  How about Stephen King? And the name of the book?  Thinner.  File it under “be careful what you wish for.”

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But speaking of scary, while I was watching this movie I saw a commercial for Golden Corral.  Apparently they now have a “lusciously amazing non-stop flowing river of chocolate indulgence.”  One assumes it’s on the buffet right between the greasy chicken and soupy vat of mac and cheese.

Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

As I mentioned, yesterday was my birthday. We celebrated by going to an Oktoberfest party at church (yeah, beer and wine at church – we’re Episcopalians), where there were tasty German sausages, sauerkraut, sauerbraten, etc. Which I ate with gusto, you’ll be happy to know. I did not eat the cupcakes, although approximately 794 people tried hard to get me to.

I want to tell you again, because many of you don’t seem to have understood (despite the title of the blog), YES I eat stuff like bratwurst. What I don’t eat is heavily sugared, overprocessed desserts. Two days ago I posted a summary of my general eating habits … and what I ate last night doesn’t stray from them.

As I told a friend of the blog last night, “The blog is called Skipping Dessert – not Skipping Meat.”

All that said, in about an hour I’m going to eat a slice of generally organic, healthy apple cake my lovely wife has baked for my birthday.

Back to regular bloggy duties tomorrow.

Thanks for reading, as always. Now go eat some sauerkraut.