Skipping Dessert … and taking the stairs

Yes, plural.  But they’re both from CNN, so you know they aren’t exactly going to tax your brain.  Good news and bad news.

First, the good news, or the least-depressing, I suppose I should say.  Bill Clinton is a vegan.  No, seriously.  Same guy who they used to say would stop at McDonald’s at the end of a morning run.  Opinions on Bill Clinton vary (yes, you may call me the master of understatement), but it’s hard to believe he’s not interesting.

After a couple of heart scares – accompanied by the kind of procedures we consider routine, but which historically would be considered nothing short of miraculous – he’s made the decision that he wants to keep living … which means fixing the way he eats, permanently:

“I essentially concluded that I had played Russian roulette,” Clinton said, “because even though I had changed my diet some and cut down on the caloric total of my ingestion and cut back on much of the cholesterol in the food I was eating, I still — without any scientific basis to support what I did — was taking in a lot of extra cholesterol without knowing if my body would produce enough of the enzyme to support it, and clearly it didn’t or I wouldn’t have had that blockage. So that’s when I made a decision to really change.”

I believe he’s serious about all that.  This next part I don’t believe so much:

“‘I like the vegetables, the fruits, the beans, the stuff I eat now,’ Clinton told Gupta.”

That part sounds a lot like something I’ve seen before, under deposition.  It’s one thing to say, “I want to live a lot longer, and I don’t want to carry around a bunch of medical equipment, if I can avoid it, so I’m not gonna eat the things I like to eat anymore.”  It’s entirely another to say you enjoy the replacement stuff.  But if you need to tell yourself that to stay on the path, go get ’em Bubba.  I’m proud of you.

The second story is darker.  It’s about “tweens” with full-blown anorexia.  What the hell is a “tween” you ask?  Well, they used to just call ’em “kids.”  “Children.”  And yes, not incidentally, I believe our breathless cultural desire to demographically segment children out of childhood as soon as possible is part of the problem.  Seven-year-old girls who are convinced they are “fat” because they can pinch the proverbial inch.  Ten-year-old girls who feel too guilty about people starving in other places to have dinner.  Eight-year-old girls who stop eating to get their parents to stop arguing.

This is why it’s so important to talk about healthy eating and not dieting.  These are kids.  They’re biggest worries should be the spelling test on Friday or, better yet, whether to play on the swings or the slides.  Not whether they’re too fat to have dinner.

If you don’t get anything else from this blog, get this:  What you look like is a tiny little part of who you are.  Yes, I want you to be healthy, to live a long life.  But health isn’t just about the number on the scale.  Believe that, and share it.  Internalize it and tell everybody you know.  And for goodness’ sake, encourage the kids you know to just be kids.  They only get one shot at it, and they’ll have a lot longer to be grownups.

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Tomorrow, music!

Most of us, myself included, complain about travel, particularly business travel.  We use it as an excuse to eat poorly.  The airports are crowded and uncomfortable and the food options there are expensive and unhealthy.  When we reach our destination we’re usually eating in restaurants, or even worse, from room service.

But I’m here to tell you, things might be changing.  As I mentioned, I recently was in New York for a conference.  And as I also mentioned, I was pretty sure the food options were going to be less-than-stellar.  I was wrong.

I started in Jacksonville, whose airport, sadly, does not include improved options.  It does, however, offer the same yogurt/fruit/granola parfait you can find in any US airport.  And while that tastes, yeah, a little chemically, it’s not the worst thing you could eat.  So I choked that down for lunch on the way out.

Dinner, that was better.  A lot better.  I had a lovely filet mignon with sauteed spinach.  Which was not only tasty, it was healthy.  The fried onion strips and the fried calamari were also delicious, only not so healthy.  The Capitol Grille was the first serious steakhouse I’ve ever visited with a calorie count on the menu.  Which is apparently a Mayor Bloomberg thing in New York.  Longtime readers know I don’t so much care about calorie counts on menus.  People don’t go to steakhouses to worry about calories.  Which is, I suppose, why the “off-menu” fried onion strips didn’t have a calorie count available.

For breakfast both days, I had coupons for the continental bar.  They had Cheerios, but no frozen blueberries.  So I supplemented with (multiple) croissants.  Because they were there.  Which illustrates the true problem with eating while traveling:  It’s easy, even tempting, to suspend the rules.  Free croissants?  Really?  Right there in front of me?  Hard to turn down.  So I didn’t.

Lunch was a healthy chicken salad on a nice dark-brown bread.  Dinner the second night was not so healthy, but was the culinary highlight of the trip.  Katz’s Delicatessen, pastrami on rye, mustard, some pickles, order of fries and a cream soda.  Seriously, best pastrami anywhere.  I’m pretty sure I consumed a month’s worth of sodium at one sitting, but it was worth every gram.  An important note about the cream soda:  It was the first flavored soda I’ve had in 2011, and it was like going home.  It was wonderful.  And it made me want more, lots more.  I managed to beat that temptation, but it made me realize how slippery the slope is.

Lunch was a pleasant – and plenty healthy – lobster salad with oranges and avacodo over cold vermicelli.

Now here’s the part I want you to internalize.  Airport food, at least at LaGuardia, is good.  Pat LaFrieda burgers?  Fresh, huge salad bar?  Local pizza?  French Bistro?   At an airport?  Very, very cool.  The salad bar alone was like a trip to a Whole Foods/Fresh Market.  The most interesting, however, was Bar Brace.  Italian food (and a full liquor bar) at stylish wraparound bar complete with AC outlets for portable electronics at every place setting.  Holy cow.  (I had a burger, fries and a coffee at Bisoux, the bistro.)

In addition to the amazing food choices, I have to say the TSA officers and Delta workers were – get this – helpful and pleasant.  Again, holy cow.  I was wondering if I had somehow ended up in an airport that was not in Queens.  If you’re flying to the New York area, fly into LGA.  Trust me.

So, to recap, I wasn’t exactly a responsible eater, but that was my fault, not the circumstances.  Incidentally, I walked a lot.  A whole lot.

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Hey, look at that, two days in a row.  Only 29 in a row to go.  Stick with me.  Thanks for reading.

… my favorite month of the year.  Why?

Because it’s finally really Autumn, it’s the middle of college football season, National Arts and Humanities Month, German-American Heritage Month, Dwarfism Awareness Month, Fair Trade Month, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Domestic Violence Awareness Month, Country Music Month and, of course, ROCKtober.

It’s also my birthday on the 14th.  I don’t expect gifts, but if you feel moved, who am I to stop you from visiting my Amazon wish list?

More to the point, I dub this month Accountabilitober.  During which I’ll be posting here every day.  All 31, even my birthday and Halloween.  Yes, that’s a heck of a challenge, but my writing needs it and so does my weight-loss momentum.  This is how I row my way out of the doldrums.

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I didn’t weigh-in yesterday since I was travelling, so there’s nothing to report on that front.  Except that I probably ate too much.  On the other hand, I walked A LOT.  More on the nature and detail of both those activities in Sunday’s post.  On the non-weight-related health front, I have to say that New Yorkers smoke a lot more cigarettes than I’m used to seeing.  And breathing.

Thanks for reading.  Buckle up for Accountabilitober!

Early this morning a Facebook friend posted this link, which sort of fits the tone Skipping Dessert has built for itself.  I remember Cracked magazine (or maybe it qualifies as a comic) from my misspent youth as a cheap knockoff of Mad magazine (which, in truth, was a cheap knockoff of its former self by the late 70’s when I started reading it).

Today, Cracked is a humor/satire/pop-culture-commentary website.  Generally speaking, I enjoy it, but it doesn’t have anything to do with healthy eating/living/etc.  It’s always well-sourced, however, so when you go read this article – The 6 Most Horrifying Lies The Food Industry is Feeding You – you can rest assured it’s true.  A little funny, a lot scary, but true.

So go read it.  And stay away from the sawdust and fake blueberries.

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As you may read here, weigh-in day was yesterday, and the results continue to be positive.

… that I only blog when Amy Stice calls me out on not blogging.  It just seems that way.

But BOY have I been lazy about blogging.

First, updates:  Last Friday, September 16, even though I didn’t get around to telling y’all about it, I weighed-in at 260.  That’s down another pound from the previous week, just like it’s supposed to be.  Today (Yeah, I know it’s Thursday – tomorrow isn’t likely to give up much blogging time.  Busy time at the day job.) I weighed-in at 259.  That’s 28 pounds in 28 weeks.  <Confetti rains down from above, fireworks explode>

Why the celebration?  Because I’m finally out of the 260’s!  That was a long ten pounds.  My new micro-goal, the goal within the goal, is to get through the next ten pounds in less than ten weeks.  Which will be interesting, because I’ll be travelling next week.

It’s hard to eat well on the road.  At home you can build a pattern of eating that’s not only sensible, but sustainable.  There are no healthy options in major American airports.  None.  And I’m either too lazy or too curmudgeony (Yes, that’s a word.  Because I say it is.  And it’s my blog.) to bring my own food on the plane.  I’ll be away from home for eight mealtimes.  Two of those will be spent either in airports or on planes.

Now, let me take a moment to explain to any new readers that when I say “healthy” I don’t mean low-calorie or low-fat.  I believe fake food promoted as “diet” food is bad for humans.  I define “healthy food” as real food. Stuff that actually grew out of the ground.  Animal parts that are identifiable as animal parts.  Food that, in the words of Micheal Pollan, your great-grandmother would recognize as food.  I’m pretty sure great grandma Hortence would have identified a frozen Lean Cuisine as a doorstop, not dinner.

But don’t cry for me, dear reader.  I’ll be in New York City.  There are options.   I already have plans to eat steak one night (and that counts in the “real food” category).   I fully intend to eat some things that probably aren’t so healthy, and I have at least one reception offering finger foods of questionable provenance.  Rest assured that I am planning my sustenance in such a way that I get good fuel and enjoy eating it.

Except the airport part.  I haven’t figured out how to enjoy airport food.

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Beginning Sunday, October 2, in an effort to atone for my general bloggy slothfulness of late, I’m challenging myself to a post a day for two full weeks.  Real posts, not like this one.  The problem with that is that I don’t have fourteen topics ready.  Sure, two will be weigh-ins, one or more will be travel recaps (see above) and something is bound to piss me off enough to generate a jeremiad or two, but I still need ideas.  Which is where you come in.  Don’t be shy about leaving comments with ideas.

Thanks, as always, for reading.  Go get something good to eat.

‎”You don’t have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces – just good food from fresh ingredients.”

-Julia Child

Let me be clear that I am not complaining.  This morning I weighed in at 261, which is a full pound less than last week.  That’s 26 pounds in 26 weeks.  You may note that 26 weeks is fully half a year.  Which kind of surprised me just now.  It seems like I just got started down this path, yet I’ve already burned half a year.

Part of me wants to celebrate – 26 pounds is a lot to have lost, and I know there are people who would give anything to be able to lose that much.  Another part of me, a part that resists reason, is stunned and discouraged that I have so far (54 pounds) to go.  I have more than a year ahead of me on the current path, and then the rest of my life to spend keeping myself on the straight-and-narrow path that is weight maintenance.

That’s just where I am.  In the doldrums.  A long, slow, windless part of the journey where sheer will is the only motivator.

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Some of you may have read, on my Lovely Wife’s Facebook feed about a curious incident that Sprightly Daughter 1 relayed to us from her school.  The gym/PE teacher told her and her (first grade) classmates that the reason they need to play sports and active games (and I am not making this up) is, “So you don’t get fat.”  Followed by her pointing out that the skinny kids among them (Sprightly Daughter 1 being thus), “Have a head start.”

Now, she’s a nice lady – a dedicated teacher, and God BLESS anyone willing to take on the treacherous work of public-school employment.  But … really?  The reason kids should play is so they don’t get fat?  Seriously?  How about because it’s fun to play?  Because the playing fields are where you learn about teamwork and character?  Because competition makes you strong?  Because being fit feels good?

No, society has so deeply ingrained in this poor woman’s mind the importance of not being fat that this is the message she’s passing on to six-year-olds.  As if the magazine rack at the grocery store and everything on TV didn’t already reinforce it.  Bad news:  All that massive reinforcement of the evils of being not-skinny isn’t working.  Americans are getting bigger, and feeling worse about it.

Imagine how much more likely we might be to get off the couch if the reasons for doing so were having fun and feeling good – rather than punishing ourselves by spending an hour on a fake bicycle that doesn’t actually move.

How much more likely would we be to eat well if the options being sold us (hard) tasted good, were filling and gave our bodies proper fuel instead of fake food that tastes kinda like good food, leaves us hungry for more and isn’t what our bodies need?

I am not upset with the gym teacher.  A friend (and friend of the blog) sat down and talked with her about it already, and she felt horrible about the choice of words.  No, I feel sad for the teacher.  She’s trying to do an honorable thing.  She’s trying to get kids moving and interested in sports.  Brava!  I just find it a sad commentary that the first reason in advocating play that came to her mind was to warn them against the evils of not growing up skinny.

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Next time on Skipping Dessert, something happy and smiley.  I haven’t picked the topic yet, but I don’t like the tone around this blog lately, and SOMEBODY’S going to have to do something about it.

Thanks for reading, as always!

If you don’t know my Dad – or didn’t know him before May of this year – this won’t mean all that much to you.

But if you did, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

“Big Harvey” had a big voice.  A huge, clear, distinct voice.  No matter what else you knew (or liked, or didn’t like) about Dad, you knew that voice.  Dad has lived with pretty severe physical limitations for most of his life, but that voice, man, I’m telling you, it was BIG.

You might notice I refer to his voice in the past tense and him in the present.  That’s because a stroke took Dad’s voice away a few months ago.

As strokes go, it wasn’t as devastating as it could have been.  He’s weaker than he used to be, and he moves slower, shakier.  But that big voice, that bell-clear, earth-shaking call, it’s gone.  It’s better – much better – than it was in the days after the stroke, but it’s never coming all the way back.  As Sprightly Daughter 1 has noted, “When Granddaddy gets tired his voice is mushy.”  And even when he’s not tired, his voice isn’t what it was.  It never will be again.

Now, he smoked off and on (mostly on), and heavily, for about 50 years, until Sprightly Daughter 2’s mild asthma made him fix that habit.  But more importantly – especially to this blog – for the past 40 years or so he’s carried a belly that rivaled his voice.

I can’t blame the stroke entirely on the extra weight he’s carried all my life (as long as I can remember, at least), but I also can’t be convinced it didn’t contribute in a big way.  Anybody who tells you being overweight doesn’t dramatically increase your chance of having a stroke is fooling themselves, but they’re not fooling me and I hope they won’t fool you.

A quick Google search brought me these three studies.  But seriously, you don’t have to read any journal articles to know this is true:  If you’re fat (and I mean FAT, not that you’d like to shed 15 or 20 pounds), you’re more likely to have a stroke than the slim guy in front of you in the checkout line.  Simple as that.

The good news is that you can fix it.  Yeah, you can joke about it (One of my best friends and I used to have a pact that we’d sneak a rib plate from Sonny’s into the cardiac ICU for each other.  I think we were joking.) and make half-hearted attempts at losing it, but this is serious stuff.  I’ve watched it happen too close to home.

I’m never going to hear my Dad’s real voice again.  A combination of bad physiology and years of bad habits took it away.  Strokes take something very real from their victims, and sometimes they take everything.  In that respect, Dad was lucky.

My voice isn’t what his was, not by a long-shot.  But I like my voice just the same, and I don’t want something that might be in my control to take it away from my daughters.

My readers know I’m more at home with sarcasm and what-passes-for-wit than I am with melodrama.  But I want this to scare you.  I want you to skip dessert, at least occasionally. I want you to take the stairs.  I want you to be, you know, fit. Your friends and your family deserve it.  You deserve it.

When it’s your time – or my time – time will be up, that’s all.  But there’s no need to make the clock run faster.

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Sports fans – especially those here in the Sunshine State – know who Lee Roy Selmon was.  Mr. Selmon took a lot of shots to the head that probably hastened the stroke that took his life, but big men like him tend to have big appetites.  I’m guessing too much of the wrong kind of food sped up our loss of one of the rare professional athletes who was a better man than football player (and he was one hell of a football player).

I can find plenty more examples.  Just take my word for it.  You don’t want to have a stroke.  If you’re at risk for a stroke, find out what you can do to decrease that risk.  Please.

…  this would be a FAQ.

Hello new readers, and welcome!  Regular readers, please bear with us.

As you may (or may not) surmise, here at Skipping Dessert I write about my journey from an overfed cardiology-patient-in-waiting to a healthier, happier and (hopefully) longer life.  This early post includes some background detail you may find helpful in understanding where I’m coming from and where I’m headed.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with blogs like this, here’s some basic info to getting around:

–  I use links fairly liberally.  If you see short bits of text in a different color than the rest of the words, click that text and another page will open.  Sometimes that page is an earlier post I want to reference, sometimes it’s somebody else’s web page.  This functions sort of like old-school footnotes.  Special hint:  If you hover your cursor over the highlighted text you’ll see some bit of smart-assery I’ve written about the link.

–  If you click through to the main page you’ll find, at any given point, the latest five or six posts.  At the bottom of the page, if you scroll all the way down, you’ll be able to click through to “older entries,” which will give you the previous five or six.  As of this writing, there are about sixty posts in all.  This feature helps you navigate them.

–  See that box to the right that says, “Don’t Miss a Post?”  Click in there to sign up, and every time I write a new post it will be delivered to your email inbox.  You won’t even have to remember to visit the blog.  I’m all about the customer service.

–  And below that, where it says, “Blogroll?”  That’s a list of blogs from friends/family I like to read.  Some are food-related, some are just, well, related.

–  I often make reference to “My Lovely Wife.”  She’s awesome.  Gillian Lord Ward is, in addition to being beautiful and brilliant, a magnificent role model for the other references I make often, our “Sprightly Daughters” – 1, 2, and 3.  Number 1 is six and a half years old, number 2 is three and a half years old and number three is, right now, eleven weeks old.  My Lovely Wife manages to be an amazing wife and mother while simultaneously chairing the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Florida.  (Go Gators)

–  If you click the title of any post, you’ll just get that post.  Click at the title at the top of the page, where it says, “Skipping Dessert” and it will take you to the main page, as referenced above.

–  At the bottom of every post, you’ll see a bunch of icons, including Facebook, Twitter and some others.  If you’re members of those sites, and you enjoy reading Skipping Dessert, you can click those and share this page with others.

–  I have a long way to go.  I’ll be writing this blog at least through my goal weight, which is at least a year away.  So, again, thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll return!