Unattainable Beauty

Teddi sent me a rather fascinating article about unattainable standards of Hollywood and fashion beauty that is well worth a read. It’s about the photographic retouching scandals (some of the worst of them) that have been perpetrated by various magazines in the past couple of years. It’s well worth a read, and here is the link for your viewing pleasure.

http://www.newsweek.com/feature/2010/unattainable-beauty.html

Men are made bigger, women smaller, and any hints of the approach of middle age are air brushed away. It should make us feel a bit better, I think, that even the perfect are nowhere near perfect anymore. No one is perfect enough.

People even do this on their own these days. If you go to You Tube and type in “photoshop makeover” you’ll find a number of fascinating tutorial videos that make fat people slim, young people old and ugly people beautiful.

I’m not totally innocent of this either, I once uploaded a picture of myself in a bathing suit into Photoshop and tried to make myself slim. Unfortunately, I’m so bad with Photoshop that all I succeeded in doing was to distort myself into a shape not recognizable as human. Which in it’s own way was sort of fun but not the goal I was looking for.

It wasn’t just an exercise in self flagellation, I wanted a picture of ‘future-me’ for inspiration. Something I could look at and go – yeah babe, I’m comin’ for ya. In that sense I don’t think it’s entirely a bad thing.

I’ve heard it said that society wants whatever is harder to obtain; so in times of famine the rounded, chubby woman was ideal because food was hard to come by and it wasn’t easy to be bootylicious. Now that unhealthy, fatty food is so much cheaper and easier to get than healthy choices it’s slimness that we prize.

Looking at the pictures in this photo editorial though it’s easy to see that we’ve gone way too far. I think my favorite is Kate Winslet’s outrage over GQ erasing the curves of her stomach. One of the things I love about Kate is her comfort with her own natural, stunning, curvaceous beauty. Good to see that she loves that too.

Food and Sleep

Two very basic necessities which are inexorably linked.

I’ve had insomnia for as long as I can remember. As a child, my mother would creep upstairs with laundry baskets at midnight trying not to wake anyone only to find me reading in bed, or before I could read just looking at the pictures.

I attribute my sleeplessness most often to a busy head; I have too many thoughts to fall asleep. When it’s time for rest, my imagination would far rather play – usually with happy things but as I grew older and matured that imaginative trait would turn into cruel worry more often than not.

Sometimes, I simply don’t want to sleep; because life is too short and I have too much else I’d rather be doing.

Sometimes the very concept of sleep kind of freaks me out. I mean – think about it, when you’re focusing on falling asleep you can’t. So when does that strange twilight moment happen when your brain distracts itself enough to not be paying attention to… well… anything? And then you loose consciousness. I mean if you really really think about it, sleep is a very strange thing.

Thinking about that will keep you up at night.

There’s also the fact that I don’t ever sleep peacefully; I have nightmares. When I’m not having nightmares I have very vivid dreams. Sometimes they’re a lot of fun, but sometimes they’re confusing or I wake up wondering; is someone trying to tell me something? Sometimes I dream things that happen later. Could be pure coincidence or just the natural trait of thinking about and thus dreaming about things that my conscious mind knows are probably going to occur – it all depends on what you really believe about sleep.

But my metaphysical dream journeying aside, I have at varying points in my life had no less than four separate conditions that doctors classify as ‘sleep disorders’. Insomnia is the chief one, but in addition to that I have woken up in places other than where I fell asleep (very disconcerting), had mind scrambling nightmares and also suffered something called ‘sleep paralysis’; where the conscious brain wakes but can’t make the connection to the body, causing me to suffer a paralyzed state until I could shake it off. That one is easily the least pleasant. Back in medieval times they used to refer to it as ‘having a hag on your chest’; they believed it to be a supernatural attack of some sorts by a nasty critter.

And speaking of nasty critters I often wake up with what appear to be fingernail scratches all over me. The logical conclusion would be that I’m scratching myself in my sleep, except they frequently appear on my back where I cannot possibly reach. Again, looking forward to waking up with claw marks all over me is yet another in a long list of things that make me less than thrilled with the prospect of closing my eyes at night.

I also sometimes dream ‘lucid’ meaning that I’m aware of being asleep and control the dream state. That one is actually pretty fun, so I don’t classify it among my disorders.

So how does this connect to diet? According to most of the learned researchers I’ve been able to read, an average person trying to be healthy needs seven to eight hours of sleep per night. A person trying to loose weight needs that even MORE. Apparently there’s some kind of stress hormone that builds up when you don’t rest that causes your body to hold onto fat more tightly. And then there’s just the obvious; the more you’re asleep the less time you have to wander the house Midnight snacking.

I average five hours of sleep per night. When in vehicles I fall asleep almost instantly because I’m so exhausted all the time that the moment I’m still and undistracted I’m out like a light. Plus I guess I like the soothing sound of a car, or something like that.

Somehow I need to make peace with my personal sleep-demons… because this constant deficit of tiredness is making my long road seem that much more like a slow, upward incline.

Weighing In - 266 lbs.

I'm down three pounds this week. Thank heck!

If I'd had a second hard work / no results week in a row I would have gotten really really hard to live with.

I have a dinner off tonight, so I'm eating really sparingly all day in preparation. I'm really hoping there's shrimp on the menu...

Happy Saturday!

Pretty Things

One of the things that inspires me is people I find really, really attractive. They can be male or female, and they’re usually so totally off base from both my appearance and personality that they may as well be aliens from another planet. It’s not necessarily about me being attracted to them in a romantic way (though sometimes I definitely am), it’s about being attracted to something in them that I want to be closer to in myself.

They inspire me…

When I see certain people I don’t feel jealousy I but see something in them, some quality that I want to emulate. I see a tiny fraction of the person I want to be inside myself – the person that is currently too blanketed by fat layers to be visible to the outside world.

I see them and I think; yes – that’s it, that’s how I will be. Whether it’s a gracefulness or a self confidence or sexiness or simply fabulous eye makeup.

Sometimes when I’m feeling discouraged and I want to go binge; I instead go into the folder of pretty things on my computer and I look at them.

And I think – I’m getting closer to you, to the you that is going to be a part of me. Every single day I’m getting a little bit closer. Tiny steps closer on a very long road.

Here are some of my ‘pretty things’ – I hope they inspire you too.

Making Pickles - Part 2

Okay last night I tasted the half sour pickles that have been fermenting on my countertop for the past three days and I have a few things to note:

1) My salt solution is way too strong, no wonder it was burning my skin whenever I splashed it on myself. If you attempt making pickles; ½ cup of salt to 6 cups of water is TOO MUCH! Next time I’m going to try ¼ cup or so and see how that works out. Since I’m also pickling some banana peppers I immediately watered down their solution when I realized this, hopefully I didn’t ruin them.

2) You really do need the pickling spices. My end result didn’t taste bad but something was absolutely missing, and I’m pretty sure that was it.

Here’s the positives; the flavor really wasn’t bad. I dumped out most of the brine and am cooling them in the fridge in a mostly water solution now which will hopefully desalinate them enough to be eaten comfortably. Ted of course is willing to eat them anyway (he says they’re very good with cheese) but I’m somewhat concerned about pickling HIM if I let him eat something that salty.

Also the color, texture and consistency were all spot on; just like the half sour pickles I’ve had at good Jewish delis. So I’m very close to the secret of half sour pickles; I can feel it lurking just out of my grasp…

Making Pickles

At the farmer's market this morning I found these cool multi-hued peppers - I'm including a picture simply because they're pretty.


My find for the week though was actually these cute little Kirby cucumbers that I noticed are the exact same size and shape as the delicious, crisp, garlic soaked half-sour pickles I like to buy at the Amish market near work. So I grabbed a pint intent on making them myself at home.

Cucumber shown here with my hand for size reference:


Looking up a recipe online I found there really wasn't much to making half sours, considering how much they go for when purchased on a store. The instructions said to dissolve 1/4 of a cup of kosher salt per 3 cups of water. I did 6 cups of water, thus 1/2 cup of kosher salt. The salt, thanks to Alton Brown, is something I always have on hand.

I made sure all the salt was well dissolved in the water before proceeding by stirring the crap out of it - then took a quick taste to make sure it was salty enough. Boy howdy, it reminded me of the salt water my mom used to make me gargle when I was a kid to ease sore throats - just not disgustingly warm.

The recipe called for six garlic cloves, which I sliced to make sure all the oils could get out into the brine. It also called for pickling spices which I don't have in my kitchen - so, I just didn't worry about it. I tend to be an off the cuff cook, diversion from recipes does not scare me.

I packed my Kirby's into a glass jar that used to hold (surprise surprise) pickles. I frequently argue with Ted about his need to keep every glass jar or foam mushroom container that makes it's way through our kitchen, so before he'd give this one back to me he made me say "Ted I'm so glad you kept this glass jar so I can use it now."

Anyway I packed in the cucumbers and loaded the sliced garlic into the jar - then poured the brine I'd made over top until the jar was full.


The problem is that the little buggers float - so I filled another small plastic container with plain water, capped it and used it to weigh them down. The smallness of the container still leaves room around the mouth of the pickle jar for my tiny green monsters to breathe.


Now? I wait. About three to four days. The instructions said to just leave them out on the counter uncovered so they can ferment. I admit this made me slightly nervous but I know what a good preservative salt is, so as long as they stay submerged I think they should be fine.

Come Tuesday after a chill in the fridge, I should have my own home made half sour pickles!

Weighing In - 269 lbs.

Saturday morning weigh in put me a pound UP from last week.

I had two days (Wednesday and Thursday) where I went slightly over on calories, ending both days at around 2,100 to 2,200 - but I'm still a little puzzled about the gain as on every other day this week I was several hundred calories under where I needed to be each day.

I'm trying not to get upset, but - well, everyone knows what a disappointing week feels like. Bad enough that I didn't loose, I actually gained.

It's pretty depressing.