Zumbaversary!

So it’s official: I’ve been going to Zumba class about three times per week for a whole year!

I have two teachers with very different styles: one class is like dancing in the basement with all your friends in a party of youthful enthusiasm and the other is a bit more like participating in a Pitbull music video. Both of them use completely awesome music, and both of them probably get tired of me asking, “Oooo – what song was that?” so that I can go home and download it. The positivity, patience, and enthusiasm of the people who teach Zumba is infectious and something I’m eternally grateful for.

I’ve also made friends in class and met other Zumba instructors for outside events such as the two Master Classes I’ve attended, and soon I’ll be going to a special “Glow Zumba” event which takes place in the dark with black lights. I may crash into somebody, but it’s going to be awesome.

My gym is very judgment free and I’m so grateful for that as well. I’ve never felt out of place or looked down upon for being the biggest/slowest/clumsiest/weakest person around (which I frequently was during this first year and often still am).

That being said, here are some health improvements I’ve enjoyed over this past Zumba year:

Greatly Improved Stamina – I have always loved to dance, and for a non-dancer person I’ve got pretty good rhythm. When I was in my twenties I used to go clubbing a lot, not every weekend but a few times per month, and I would spend hours on the dance floor. At some point in my thirties (I don’t recall exactly when) I found myself sedentary, weighing around 300 pounds and in a situation to dance again. I found to my horror that I couldn’t dance any longer; one song in I was exhausted, sweaty, in pain, and done, and it was a heartbreak. I started Zumba after losing seventy pounds, but it was still an uphill battle to get my stamina back. When I first started I did none of the high impact movements (things that take both of your feet off the ground simultaneously). Now? I do all of them. All the jumping, all the hopping, all the lunges (and I used to really hate lunges). Also, I went to a wedding a few months ago and danced for three hours. Nonstop.

Resting Heart Rate – My resting heart rate is 60 beats per minute. I know this because I wear a Fitbit and it reports to me each day what my resting heart rate was over the past 24 hour period. 60 beats per minute for a 41 year old is fantastic, when I began Zumba I believe it was around 75 beats per minute.

Coordination and Balance – I’m naturally clumsy with poor balance due to a combination of fluid in my inner ear from persistent allergies and completely flat feet. Although I’m still clumsier than an average person (there’s no cure for flat feet) I’ve improved noticeably over the past year. Within the first few months of starting Zumba I fell in class twice, one time spraining an ankle badly enough to keep me home for the next week. That hasn’t happened in about six months now.

Confidence – Zumba forces you to get over a lot of your inhibitions. When I first started there was no booty shaking for me, just a sort of embarrassed little wiggling shimmy. Now? Yeah, I shake what God gave me like nobody’s watching. I don’t care who’s watching or what they think because I’m enjoying myself. That physical confidence actually carries out of the classroom and into everyday life as well.

What hasn’t happened this past year? Well, I’m still not thin. This is no fault of Zumba and entirely the fault of continued binge eating episodes in my life. I’ve said it a hundred times and I will again now: you cannot outrun your fork. But if I didn’t have Zumba in my life? Who knows, I may have skyrocketed back up to 300 pounds by now and beyond. My body is prepped from a lifetime of destructive eating patterns to gain weight almost effortlessly, and Zumba has been a big part of keeping my weight stable for the past year. That’s something to be extremely grateful for.

The best piece of advice I have ever received about health and fitness came courtesy of James Fell who writes the fabulous Body for Wife blog and it is this:

“Find something physical to do that you love, and then eat to perform better at it.” Truly words to live by.

Kitchen Sink Salads: A How-To Guide

I’m not a fan of the traditional Woman-On-A-Diet salad. I see them being eaten for lunch often enough: iceberg lettuce leaves, a few cucumber slices, a few grape tomatoes, and fat-free vinaigrette dressing, probably with the word “balsamic” in the name. A lunch like that for me would mean a sure trip to the vending machine an hour later looking for pretzels or chips, or more likely lead to a binge episode once I got home from work feeling half starved. A salad like that isn’t satisfying either physically or mentally and doesn’t have much to offer in the way of nutritious fuel either.

Lately, I’ve been making something I call a “Kitchen Sink Salad”. Because it’s got everything in it but… well, you get the idea.

To make a Kitchen Sink Salad you begin with a grain. Recently I made one using wheat berries which led to a lot of speculation on my family’s part as to what exactly a wheat berry is (they’re whole, unprocessed wheat kernels). Other good grains include quinoa, farro, rice, barley and millet. Pick whichever you like best, or one you simply want to try. Cook the grain according to package directions. I like to cook mine in low sodium vegetable, chicken, or beef broth as this imparts more flavor.

When the cooked grain has been relocated to a big mixing bowl but is still hot, add one to two bags of greenery. I like a mix of spring greens, baby spinach, and baby arugula – but again, it’s your salad so add what you like. The hot grain will wilt the greens down and make them take up less space.

Then as things are cooling, chop and add whatever vegetables looked appealing to you when you were most recently wandering a farmer’s market or the produce section of your local grocery store. I like grape tomatoes of all colors, bell peppers, cucumbers, Brussels sprouts, red onion, carrot, scallion, jalapeno, zucchini, and squash. (I don’t really recommend mushrooms because if you store your salad for more than 24 hours they can get weird).

Chop and add a fresh herb; basil, dill and cilantro are my favorites.

Add a sparing amount of fatty, delicious, indulgent extras; like avocado, kalamata olives (or whatever olive you like), Muenster cheese, Havarti, or creamy mozzarella. I like mild cheeses but if you like sharp, add sharp. I’ve never added nuts to a Kitchen Sink Salad, but nuts would be awesome too.

For dressing I use an acid and a base. This usually means squeezing the juice of a fresh lime over the whole thing and then drizzling on good olive oil. Any acid will do though (lemon, orange, vinegar… whatever you like).

Salt and pepper to taste, and that’s it!

The grains provide protein, the vegetables provide nutrients, there’s healthy fats involved (and some fats that are simply satisfying). This salad obviously has more calories than a traditional Woman-On-A-Diet salad, but it’s also a lot more physically and psychologically appealing, at least to me.

This is what was in the Kitchen Sink salad I made for my Dad’s birthday over the weekend:

• 2 cups of wheat berries boiled in low sodium vegetable broth (takes an hour, they’re hard)
• 1 bag of baby spinach and arugula
• 1 bag of mixed spring greens
• 1 gigantic, delicious, monster heirloom tomato that my friend grew in her backyard
• 1 yellow bell pepper
• 1 small red onion
• 1 small block of Havarti cheese with dill
• The juice of one lime
• Several tablespoons of good olive oil
• Salt and pepper to taste

Feeds: many! With leftovers to spare.

Tasty!

Happy Birthday

Ted,

I wish I could write poetry. You make me want to. I want to create beautiful things for you on this the anniversary of your birth.

The past fifteen years have flown past us, and I wish for fifteen hundred more. If there is one thing with which I've truly been blessed in this life, I know it to be love.

I love you, I'm so grateful for you, I will always always always be with you.

Happy Birthday, Bee.

-Bebe

****************************

If ever two were one, then surely we.

If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;

If ever wife was happy in a man,

Compare with me ye women if you can.

I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,

Or all the riches that the East doth hold.

My love is such that rivers cannot quench,

Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.

Thy love is such I can no way repay;        

The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.

Then while we live, in love let’s so persever,

That when we live no more we may live ever.

-Anne Bradstreet "To my Dear and Loving Husband"

Beetnik Frozen Food Review

Beetnik products have a lot of variables going on that I really don’t care about, such as being certified USDA Organic, Gluten Free, and Paleo approved. I chose them simply because their sodium content is phenomenally low for frozen food (below 300 mg. each) and I am trying to get my sodium intake below 1,500 mg. per day without totally giving up the convenience of a frozen lunch. As a result my first comment on a lot of these is probably going to be, “tastes bland”, because my overly salted American palate is not used to foods that aren’t pickled in salt.

The store I purchased them from sells them for around $6.00 / entrée.

Organic Moroccan Seasoned Chicken Stew (Ingredients: chicken, sweet potato, carrot, bell pepper, lemon juice, olive oil & spices-garlic, cumin, turmeric, ginger).

280 calories

160 mg. sodium

9 g. fat

4 g. fiber

25 g. protein

Taste: It smelled really good and the chicken had fantastic texture, also the portion was generously sized for less than three hundred calories. That’s where the good news ends because the flavor was bland (of course), and unpleasantly sour. The ingredients listed are all tasty ones so I have no idea where the weirdly sour flavor was coming from. Maybe too much lemon juice? I won’t be buying this one again. Bleh.

Looked tasty, but no.

Organic Peruvian Seasoned Chicken Stew (Ingredients: chicken, tomatoes, bell pepper, onion & spices – garlic, cumin, basil, pepper, cayenne).

130 calories

240 mg. sodium

1 g. fat

2 g. fiber

23 g. protein

Taste: Rich with tomato flavor and hot! Probably not so spicy to someone who eats hot food a lot, but as I am a casual consumer of spicy food it was enough to make my nose run. The taste was complex and good though, not bland and not sour like the other stew I tried. A very thin consistency, really more like a soup, and it looked absolutely nothing like the picture on the package. This one would be better with a chunk of Italian bread and a dollop of sour cream or some rice mixed in, and I will probably purchase it again.

This one seriously did not look like the picture on the box.

Organic Sesame Ginger Chicken (Ingredients: rice, chicken, onion, bell pepper, carrot, zucchini, broccoli, honey, garlic, ginger, lemon juice, green onion, sesame oil, grapeseed oil, pepper, tamari, salt).

270 calories

280 mg. sodium

3 g. fat

2 g. fiber

18 g. protein

Taste: This was easily the best of the three I tried, and also the most satisfying (probably due to the presence of rice). It wasn’t spicy, but seasoned just enough to be flavorful and not bland at all, yet still very low in salt for a prepackaged food item. Their chicken remained good and fresh tasting throughout, and the vegetables were still bright and perky despite being through the freeze/thaw process. I will absolutely get this one again! Yum!

We have a winner!

The Age and Size Paradox

We were celebrating a birthday at work today, which got me thinking about how incorrect our attitude toward age is in the society I live in.

In my mind, the more years of experience a person has the more valuable they should be. Younger people are certainly lovable and interesting and creative and intelligent – but they haven’t yet had time to ripen and season, to earn the wisdom or experience or learning that their elders have achieved.

Since our society is obsessed with beauty, and youth indicators like bigger eyes and fuller lips are currently considered more beautiful, that seems to be what primarily matters to us. As such it’s hard to grow older because people feel as though they lose something every year instead of seeing what they gain with each passing year in the value of what they know and have seen. I’ve felt it myself as I stare into the mirror and notice my thinning lips, the network of laugh lines road mapping their way across my forehead, and the way the skin on my chest is taking on the consistency of crepe paper.

I find our whole attitude toward aging to be pretty messed up. Just as I find it messed up that the largest in physical stature among us are paradoxically seen as the least in social stature. What if humans were like lions or other apex predators, with the biggest standing de facto at the top of the pecking order?

Maybe it’s easier for me, being married to Ted who is turning 57 this month and aside from being annoyed with the occasional ache in his back and lessening ability to tolerate heat and humidity, couldn’t really care less about the number of birthdays he’s had. He likes his birthday and to celebrate it, but the number of candles on his cake is irrelevant (so long as there’s cake).

And maybe it’s easier for him than most people too, since if he bothered to dye his hair darker he would look as young as or younger than me – his face is boyish and unlined, his hair full and soft, and his body is firm and tall.

But what if a lined face, a softening figure, and a receding hairline were considered breathtakingly gorgeous as markers of the worth of a person’s experience in life? What if we gained value with each passing year instead of feeling as though our social currency is slowly running out? What if we waited hopefully as young people for the day we would become beautifully mature? What a world that would be.

The Pasta Conundrum

I’ve made it pretty clear at this point that I’m not a fan of fad/crash diets like Paleo or Atkins, and I absolutely think that HMR is a bad idea. That being said, I acknowledge that every body works in a unique way and if something works for you in a way that makes you feel great and is sustainable long term without causing dangerous weight yo-yo’s, then cool. Listening to your body is key.

I’m not an anti-carb or even low-carb eater. I think carbs are part of my balanced diet, and I like them. They do need to be limited somewhat because they tend to be very calorie dense, but outside of that I think carbs are yummy and great.  However, something weird is going on with me and pasta.

I make pasta about once a week for dinner, and then portion out the leftovers for lunch at work for the next couple of days. At dinnertime I’ll prepare myself a bowl, eat it too quickly and feel as though I’ve eaten nothing at all, then go fetch myself an entire second bowl. It’s like when I eat pasta the mechanism that tells me I’m full just completely shuts down. Afterward, I feel uncomfortably bloated, bubbling, and sick.

At first I thought it was just because I was eating too much, but I came to realize I was bloated, bubbly, and sick even after eating my carefully measured portions of pasta at lunch.

Thankfully this can’t be celiac disease, true celiac is still fairly rare and I do not suffer from it or any other kind of food allergy. I eat bread and plenty of other gluten containing products daily with no problem whatsoever, but pasta apparently does not agree with me so I’m thinking I’ll have to eliminate it from my diet.

This makes me sad as I love pasta, it’s a quick easy dinner that provides plenty of lunch leftovers, but it’s just not worth the cost – it causes binge behavior and makes me feel awful afterwards. In keeping with my own advice to listen to my body, it’s got to go.

Now to come up with some tasty pasta alternatives that the guys I live with will actually eat...

The Irony of David Wolfe & the Avocado

Recently I was discussing my favorite food, the avocado, with a friend – and he pointed out that the avocado does not actually make sense in the human diet.

Curious, I asked why, and he explained that as a fruit it doesn’t work with us the way it biologically should. It has a seed that is far too large for a human animal to swallow and later deposit with a convenient pile of fertilizer to grow elsewhere. In fact, the avocado’s golf ball sized seed is actually poisonous to human beings.

I then inquired as to what type of animal was supposed to be eating the avocado, and he replied with ground sloths, an extremely large, now extinct type of land mammal also known as megatherium. I did a bit more research and turned up this interesting article.

That's a big sloth...

After the disaster that caused the ground sloths and other megafauna to die off, avocados survived against all odds probably getting spread about by smaller animals like big cats for a while until being discovered by us primates who began deliberately spreading their seeds and farming them for their deliciousness.

Not only did we farm them, we genetically modified the heck out of them. The avocados that megafauna used to eat were much more seed than flesh and we’d likely barely recognize them from our gator pears of today. We’ve manipulated the avocado to make it produce a much smaller seed with much more delicious green stuff for us to feast upon.

This led me to thinking about David Wolfe...

One of my least favorite modern snake oil salesmen is named David “Avocado” Wolfe. I’m not going to link to his site because I don’t want to send him any traffic, but feel free to peruse this article about him. In short, he’s a food scaremongerer who sells an unhealthy dose of orthorexia along with sham products on his website like “David Wolfe Nutrition Certifications” that help you convince people that genetic modification of food is evil and bad for you despite their being no hard scientific evidence of this (and yes, I have looked for it), vaccinations are deadly, and chocolate is “an octave of sun energy that lines up planetarily with the sun”… or something. He’s right up there with the Food Babe when it comes to anti-science hokum. And this stuff can be deadly, particularly the anti-vaccines part.

It always annoyed me that he calls himself David “Avocado” Wolfe, because I love the avocado but I do not like him very much. One of the only things he and I agree on is that the avocado is both delicious and healthy to eat, but he pollutes its goodness by attaching it to his name.

The gorgeously ironic part is this:

David Wolfe has named himself after a food that has a poisonous seed, which should have become extinct along with the creatures that ate it thousands of years ago, and he is apparently ignorant of the fact that it was artificially preserved through exactly the kind of genetic modification and deliberate human food tinkering that he espouses to be “toxic.”

I find this absolutely hilarious.