Skipping Dessert … and taking the stairs

Forgive me readers, for I have sinned.  It has been 64 days since my last blogging.  I accuse myself of the following sins against bloggery:  Sloth, pride, indifference and, yes, the occasional gluttony.

Sloth, in that I’ve just been lazy.  Yeah, sure, work is demanding, dad-ery is demanding, blah, blah.  No good excuses.  

Pride, in that I was getting pretty cocky about my regular readership, which I have taken for granted and now must re-earn.

Indifference, in that after a few missed weigh-in posts, it got easier to forget, and, well, here I am two months later.

Gluttony, in that if I’m not keeping myself publicly accountable, it’s easy to eat things I know better than to have eaten.

How ’bout that.  Roman Catholic elementary education has come in handy. 

I haven’t weighed in for several weeks, but I’m fairly certain I’ll be needing to re-take the high ground in this long campaign.  I’ll wait until Friday to weigh, just like I’m supposed to.  For what it’s worth, I haven’t been eating dessert, and am still not missing it.  Haven’t been eating fast food, drinking soda, etc.  Just eating too much and not being careful to stay away from white bread, etc.  All easy to fix.

SO … yes, I’ll be back on schedule.  I like writing this blog, I like being healthier and I like you reading my blog.  Thank you for reading, and  I’ll be back with you sometime Monday.

Dream.

Now that I’ve written about getting some rest, it’s time to talk about dreaming. In every sense.

“We all dream; we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are awake.” –Erich Fromm

The dictionary first defines “dream” as “a succession of images, thoughts, or emotions passing through the mind during sleep.”  We know the physical process of dreaming occurs during “rem” sleep, and we know it’s vital to health.  It seems to just happen once you slip into a good deep sleep.  And, of course, that good deep sleep is necessary to a healthy life.

Dreaming is a lot more than just a by-product of good sleeping.  We don’t have to know much about sleep science to know how important dreaming is to life. Sleeping dreams are where we process all that strange stuff that happens all day long.

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure my subconscious filters a lot of what my eyes see and my ears hear during the day to keep my what I experience in line with what I “know.”  And then my dream cycles process all that filtered information into something my conscious mind can work with.  At least that’s the best way I can understand it.

Whether my feeble understanding of the process of physical dreaming is correct or not, I think we can all agree that dreaming is a cornerstone of healthy living.

“When you cease to dream you cease to live.” –Malcolm Forbes

There’s more to dreaming than the physical process that occurs in your sleep.

The dreams we dream in our waking hours are the ones I have a better grasp of.  Those are the dreams that separate growth and achievement from monotonous existence.  Dreams – followed by active, intentional visualization – are the stuff off success, and of the healthiest living.

Sometimes it’s easy to walk through life immersed in the minutiae of the day-to-day.  There’s work to be done.  Planes to catch.  Bills to pay.  But you know what?  The people you’re working for?  The people who designed those planes?  The people you owe those bills to?  They dream.

While you’re wrapped up in going from Point A to Point B, spending all the time you’ve been given on things that won’t matter next week, the people who are living are busy dreaming.  Don’t get me wrong, they’re doing something about those dreams – taking intentional action – but the whole process starts in dreaming.

Does thinking of it as “dreaming” put you off?  Does it sound too “touchy-feely” for you?  Call it “visualization” if that makes you feel better.  Call it “brainstorming.”  Call it whatever you want – but do it.  Give yourself license to think about how things could be instead of worrying about how things are.

And by the way, if Malcolm Forbes is comfortable calling it “dreaming” … maybe it’s not too touchy-feely for you after all.

“The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers. But above all, the world needs dreamers who do.” –Sarah Ban Breathnach

Yes, dream.  But remember, there’s a point at which the dream has to become action, and that point will never be reached without you (and me) moving to make it real.  The substance of what can be – what needs to be – is the dream, but the nuts and bolts that hold reality together are found in the doing.

It’s a fine line.  Too much dreaming, nothing gets done.  Too much doing, innovation never happens.  “Dreamers who do” are the people about whom books are written.  They’re the people you studied in school, the people whose names are on buildings and in headlines.  They’re the people who live lives that matter – to the people around them and to themselves.

“In dreams begins responsibility.” –William Butler Yeats

 When you’ve dreamed the right dream, you know it.  You’ve felt that “click” that happens when the right idea floats across your mind.  At least I hope you’ve been there.

Here’s the thing:  Once you know you’ve dreamed the right dream, once you’ve felt the key turn the lock in your heart, it’s not just a good idea to do something about it, it’s an obligation.

There are people who “live” their entire lives without finding the right dream (or any dream at all).  Even if you don’t owe it to yourself to take action when you find that dream (and you do), you owe it to all of them.

When you find the right dream, you’ve found responsibility.

“Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.” – Goethe

 Granted, the size of the dream is relative to the dreamer.  One size does not fit all.  My dreams might seem insignificant to you, yours might seem silly to me.  Or your dreams might intimidate the hell out of me.

The point is that you – we – need to stretch our dreams.  Being open to dreams is the first step, but we can’t limit those dreams.  We have to be intentional about dreaming, as in everything.  Small dreams are as pointless as not dreaming at all.

If you need it, I’m giving you permission to dream big.  To dream the kind of dreams that have the power to move the hearts of men (and women).

Go.  Now.  There’s much to be done, and it all starts with your dream.

I stole that line from a consultant at a conference I attended a couple of weeks ago.  He wasn’t talking about my weight, he was talking about fundraising, and “up” isn’t the direction I want to go anyway.  But I like the line, and since my weigh-in today was the same as it was last week (flat at 257), I figured I’d steal it and use it for my purposes here.

Busy day, back to the grindstone.  Thanks for readin’!

Yep, it’s Wednesday again. That means it’s time for your weekly list.  This week, five things I have to remind myself of as I stay on the weight-loss path.  When I go a week or two without losing a pound, it’s a good bet I’ve conveniently forgotten one or more of these.  If I treat these with Gospel reverence, I lose weight.  

1.)  No Seconds.  That’s tough.  It’s easy to rationalize that if it’s a healthy meal there’s no reason not to have a little more. And if I wasn’t trying to lose weight, that would be true.

2.)  You Gotta Feel Hungry Sometimes.  At least “hungry” in first-world terms.  As in, “Hey, dinner sure seems like it was a long time ago, I think I’ll make a peanut butter sandwich.  On whole-wheat bread, of course.”  You know what I mean.  If I give in, I gain weight.  To lose weight, I have to recognize that feeling, isolate it and move past it.  The truth is, it goes away pretty quickly.

3.)  No Late-Night Eating.  Sort of a corollary to number 2, but not exactly.  Sometimes I miss having had dinner at a reasonable hour and I really am hungry (again, in a first-world kind of way).  But if I use that as a reason to eat dinner at 10 PM, I’ll regret it. I’ll have heartburn and I won’t lose weight that week.  Besides, skipping dinner entirely at that point isn’t going to hurt me (I do not advocate this for my diabetic readers.  If there are medical reasons for you to eat at specific intervals, little of this applies to you.), and a (very) little fasting does me good.

4.)  Snack, Intentionally.  Not, “Hey, I need to snack a couple of times a day, so I’d better stop at this convenience store.”  I mean a handful of almonds, maybe some fruit.  Not a bag of chips and some honey-roasted cashews.

5.)  Eat Breakfast.  It sounds kind of trite, but breakfast really is the most important meal of the day.  I find it helpful to eat basically the same thing for breakfast every day.

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Thanks for reading, Skippers. As always, if you enjoyed it, share it!

So … it has come to this.

An eagle-eyed Skipper sent me this link last week.  Turns out Mark Bittman of the New York Times regularly produces the Key to All Modern Food Knowledge.

All the food stuff I write about, Bittman covers also, and better.  So pick up the Michael Pollan library, read Bittman’s columns and you can stop reading most of my posts. Of course, you could still visit back here for old time’s sake.  And, you know, out of gratitude for me turning you onto them, and to keep tabs on my progress.  And to get your intentional living fix.

OK, on second thought, screw Bittman and Pollan.  You just keep coming back here and I’ll fill you in on what you need to know.

🙂

While you consider your reading options, here are a couple of stories you might have missed at NPR’s “Shots” blog.  First, for reasons the researchers don’t seem to be able to pinpoint (to my satisfaction), it turns out that women who keep their core temperature a little cooler during workouts tend to work out longer.  That sounds a little common-sense-y, but you should read it anyway.

Second, gentlemen, if you want to make babies, this study says you should cut back on saturated fat.  Apparently those fats reduce sperm count by around 1/3.  It also occurs to me that if you eat too much saturated fat, mating may be an issue for a variety of other reasons.  Also, I don’t know what that stuff on the fork in the picture is but I’ll tell you this:  If all saturated-fat-laden food looked like that, saturated fat consumption wouldn’t be a problem.  Just sayin’.

Thanks for reading, as always.  Don’t be shy about sharing a link to this blog.

Get some rest.

Do I need to tell you this?

Yes, I think I do.

You hear it a lot.  You read it a lot.  So do I.  But still we don’t rest.

Why is that?

Even when our bodies tell us to stop, we keep moving, doing, going through the motions.  Why is it that we – as a society – are so proud of being too busy to sleep?

And we are.  Too proud and too busy, that is.

I don’t need to remind you how important it is to get your rest, but I will anyway. We’ve talked before about taking care of our bodies by being careful of what we feed ourselves.  We’ve talked about breathing, thinking and a variety of ways to live better and longer, but there isn’t much that’s more basic to a good quality of life than simple rest.

Normally, if you’re willing to look around long enough on the internet, you’ll find an expert who contradicts whatever your thesis is in regards to health.  You think a low-fat diet is good for your heart, there’s a doc waiting to tell you why you need more fat.  You think running is great exercise, there’s a doc with a crusade against running.  But I can’t find anyone who thinks sleeping less is a good idea.  Even on the internet.

That should tell you something.

If I ask five friends the simple question, “How are you doing?”  I’ll promise you at least two of them will respond with some variation of “Tired.”  So if we all agree sleep – or at least rest – is valuable … how come we’re not sleeping more?

The joke is that you can tell you’re growing up when you start wishing you had a naptime scheduled but nobody will let you nap (as opposed to kids, who do  have naptime scheduled, but refuse to nap).

I’m not sure that’s true.  Not sleeping seems to be one of the badges of honor we wear in modern western society – “I’m the toughest, most productive person you know and I can prove it by how poorly I treat my body.”

If we did manage to get some decent rest we’d feel bad telling our friends about it.  It would mean we stopped working for a few minutes, and that would brand us as lazy.

So what do we do about it?

First, let’s consider the situation.  You know, be intentional about it.  How much do you sleep every night, on average?  I know I’m at about five and a half hours, maybe six on a good night.  Is that enough?  Well, judging by how quickly I fall asleep anytime I sit down in a quiet spot for about thirty seconds, probably not.  How about you?  Can you sit still and be for ten or fifteen minutes every now and then without your eyelids slamming shut?

If not, congratulations, you’re under-rested.

How much should you be sleeping?  The old standard is eight hours a night.  That’s more than I can do, for whatever reason.  About seven, give or take a few minutes, seems right for me.  Although I’ll be damned if I can tell you the last time I slept seven hours three or four nights in a row.  More than seven and I’ll wake up and if I drift back off I’ll have a headache when I wake up again.

If you can’t fit in the sleep you need at night, can you clear time for a nap during the day?  That’s been a priority for me lately, but while I’ve thought about it every day I haven’t actually done it more than a couple of times in the past few months.  You know, if I close the door to my office and turn the ringer on the phones off I might miss something important.  And God forbid I stop checking my email for twenty minutes. I’m way too important to miss anything.  I must be, if I’m willing to sacrifice my health to wait for phone calls I don’t even expect.

Or … maybe I need to rethink my relative importance in the great scheme of things. If I really am important, I really do need to get some rest.  A nap would go a long way toward that.

If you can’t sleep – by which I mean you can’t sleep, not that you think you’re too important to sleep – you still need to rest.  You need quiet, purposeful time to sit or lie still.  Not reading, not answering email or reading Facebook.  Resting.

You need some rest.

And you know as well as I know that neither of us is so important or so busy that we can’t take time to sleep.  The truth is, if we don’t take time to get our rest now, that time is going to be taken away from us eventually, on the back end of a shorter life than we want to enjoy.

All the living and working we might think we’re doing by not sleeping when we should be is a poor excuse for the living and working we could be doing if we squeezed in another hour a night.

You need some rest.  Find a way to get it … unless you enjoy your badge of sleepless honor more than you might enjoy a good quality of life.

Sometimes, in amateur blogging, the blog has to take a backseat to the rest of the world.  This is one of those times.

I did want to share with you, however, that I’m down two pounds since my last reported weigh-in two weeks ago, to 257. I like the 250’s thus far.  I’ll be sick of ’em soon enough.

Thanks for checking in!

Is it Wednesday already?  By golly, it is.  Which means I’ve got a list of five things for y’all.  In an effort to work on food topics, here are some ways to think about leafy greens, which you know you ought to be eating more of. 

1.)  Spinach. I love spinach.  Which is convenient, because it’s awfully good for me.  And you. You know how I like spinach best?  Raw.  Why would anybody use iceberg lettuce as a salad base when you can get baby spinach, which actually tastes like something. Plus, you get great big forearms if you eat enough of it.

2.)  Collards.  I also love me some collards.  The question is, how much nutrition is left in collard greens by the time they cook as long as I like ’em to cook?  I don’t need you to answer that.  And yes, I recognize they don’t do it for a lot of people.  That’s good.  More for me.  And forget what you may have heard about substituting smoked turkey legs for pig parts with collards.  You need a ham hock, or maybe some fatback.

3.)  Turnip Greens.  You know what’s great about turnips?  Two vegetables in one – the turnip and the greens.  Re-read number 2 above for my feelings on preparation.  The same applies here.

4.)  Romaine Lettuce.  I’m sure there’s plenty you can do with romaine other than Caesar salad, but why would you?  And please don’t put chicken on it, just enjoy the salad.  I prefer it the way that has become traditional – plenty of Parmesan and croutons. I’d just as soon you left the anchovies off as well.  As a matter of fact, if you choose to involve anchovies, I can’t eat with you.

5.)  Cabbage.  Two words:  Cole slaw.  Two more words:  Corned beef.  And a funky-phresh eighties dance. What’s not to like?

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Thanks for reading.  Here’s a hint that often applies to this blog:  Not only should you use the links (particularly on this post), you should hover over them before you click.  I write more stuff there.

Skippers, I reflect that it’s been too long since I scared the hell out of you.  I can remedy that with this link to a heart surgeon’s take on what really causes heart disease.  Preview: Nearly everything we’ve been doing for the past generation to combat heart disease has made the problem worse.  Yay us.  The more I read, the more I think Michael Pollan has the answer:  “Eat food.  Not too much. Mostly plants.”  Which is, of course, less easy than it should be.  But the image of raw, infected blood vessels is enough to make me want to be on-track.

I think there’s more contributing to our cardiac-nation status than the wrong food, however.  Our all-stress, all the time, culture bears responsibility as well.  This piece about our personal relationships with time offers an interesting way to think about stress and how we manage our lives.  I’m not ready to declare the kind of independence from the clock the author has, but brava to her for giving it a whirl.  There’s more to life than the to-do list.

Thanks, as always for reading.  I’m working on a few more food-oriented posts, ’cause it helps me keep my thinkin’ right.  Open to your ideas.