Mamenori!

For years I have been known to say how much I want to love sushi.  Its a beautiful food: you feast upon it with your eyes before it ever even gets to your mouth.  It’s filled with good things: like fish, avocado, fruits and vegetables.  Its super fun to eat: there’s wasabi paste and candied ginger to play with, there’s sauces to dip with, and then to top it off you usually eat it with chopsticks.

I’ve always wanted to love sushi – and I never have.

The problem is a dark green paper-like substance that holds almost all sushi rolls together.  It’s called nori, or seaweed paper.

When I was around twelve I was swimming in the ocean when a large and unexpected wave knocked me down so hard and fast that I actually took a mouthful of sand, grit and other miscellaneous matter off the ocean floor.  Choking, I managed to sputter to the surface and spit it all out in favor of air before I drowned, but it was a near thing.

That flavor of ocean floor mixed with near death is exactly what nori tastes like to me.  When I put it in my mouth, my brain insists that it’s not food and I begin to gag.

As an adventurous and non-picky eater this was absolutely appalling to me the first time it happened, so I tried again.  And again, and then again.

I couldn’t get past it.  I absolutely hate nori and I always will.

Today: a revelation.

A co-worker had suggested to me that it’s possible to get sushi rolls made with something other than nori.  I was skeptical, but today at a local Japanese restaurant I asked, and the waitress informed me that yes – rolls can be made with substitute soybean paper, also called mamenori.

Cautiously optimistic – I immediately ordered a plate of Hawaiian roll.  Crispy tempura shrimp, creamy avocado and sweet mango slices soon arrived in front of me with a mango drizzle on top like a little piece of edible artwork.  Nowhere could I see the dark green menace of nori lurking about in my food, instead there was a hint of a light, orangey colored wrap holding everything together.  Damning the torpedoes I picked up an entire piece and went for it, simply popping the whole thing into my mouth.

And my taste buds exploded with pure happiness.

Sushi is SO GOOD!  I didn’t know!  All these years, I’ve been missing out!

I kept wriggling in my seat at lunch like a maniac but I just couldn’t help myself.  I’m a foodie, and now a whole new realm of unbelievably tasty food is mine all mine to explore!

 

My Narrow Fellow

I’ve always liked snakes.  They’re so strange, and different from us mammals.  Their movements are both alien and graceful, they have tiny flickering tongues, and their skin feels like something unique and expensive.  I’ve always thought there was something inherently cool about a snake.

I harbored the idea of keeping one as a pet for most of my adult life.  Nine years ago, on my first wedding anniversary, my husband bought me a baby banded California Kingsnake as a present.  Might seem like a strange anniversary present to some, but I loved him right from the start.  He was about six inches long, adorable, and colored in beautiful alternating stripes of chocolate brown and butter yellow.  We brought him home in a brown paper lunch bag.

I named him Lovecraft.  Lovie for short.

Over the years, he grew from that cute six inches to an impressive three and a half feet in length.

He escaped once and spent two weeks hiding out in our basement underneath the hot water heater.  I don’t think he liked being on his own much because when Ted went down there to put a load of laundry in he stuck his head out from beneath the unit and stared at Ted with an air of expectation.  We successfully lured him the rest of the way out with a mouse, and once I had my hands on him I was so relieved that I cuddled him.  Cuddling a snake is tricky, I admit, but possible.

I kept trying to institute “bring your pet to work day” at the office.  My co-workers kept protesting that this was not a good idea, because they knew I owned a reptile.

Some people were afraid of him, some thought he was awesome, some he and I were able to teach that snakes are not slimy and are, in fact, very nifty creatures.

Occasionally I’d have dreams about him.

Last night, Ted, Kyle and I found that he had passed away.  He was half inside, half outside of his little house – like an old man sitting on his porch watching the world go by.  I have no reason to believe he didn’t go peacefully in his sleep.  When I picked him up for the last time, he felt like one of his discarded skins – except this time he’d managed to discard his entire body.

It was exactly one year to the day since we lost my cat, Wish.

I do not like January 12^th.  I think I’ll skip it next year.

A narrow fellow in the grass

Occasionally rides;

You may have met him—did you not

His notice sudden is,

The grass divides as with a comb,

A spotted shaft is seen,

And then it closes at your feet,

And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,

A floor too cool for corn,

But when a boy and barefoot,

I more than once at noon

Have passed, I thought, a whip lash,

Unbraiding in the sun,

When stooping to secure it,

It wrinkled and was gone.

Several of nature’s people

I know, and they know me;

I feel for them a transport

Of cordiality.

But never met this fellow,

Attended or alone,

Without a tighter breathing,

And zero at the bone.

-Emily Dickinson

Strong is Beautiful

“Strong is Beautiful” is the exercise motto I’ve adopted for 2013.  I’ve borrowed it from some of the American Olympic Women’s Weightlifting team – some really nifty girls that you can read about here.

I don’t need to be quite as powerful as they are, nor will I be.  In order to achieve their level you have to dedicate yourself to training like it’s a full time job.  Same goes for professional bodybuilders.  We ordinary girls who put in a half hour of weight training three or four times a week can expect to reap the benefits of weight loss, toned limbs, increased endurance, increased strength and healthier hearts all around.  All good things.

I have no fear whatsoever of getting “bulky”.  I’m already bulky – I can only see myself getting sleeker, fitter and stronger.  A few years ago a friend of mine was proudly showing me the fine, graceful curve of the bicep muscle she’d developed from the hard work at training she’d been doing of late, and all I could think was: “wow – that looks awesome.  I want that!”

Last year my fitness routine primarily included cardio: dancing and walking.  These are great, and they make my blood sugar great and help keep my cholesterol perfect – but alone they are not giving me the appearance change that I’m looking for.  The more research I do, the more I find that toning and muscle development needs to be added in a serious way, so I set about trying to figure out what I could add to my home routine that wouldn’t take up too much space or break the bank.

This is how I discovered kettle bells.  I’d seen them before and always thought of them as this intimidating, spine damaging thing being thrown about by scary, growling guys at public gyms.  These things:

But the more I looked into it, the more great things I was hearing about workouts that included them.  Nobody seemed to be throwing their back out during use either, so off I went to the store to investigate.  I wound up purchasing the 3-in-1 Kettle Bell sold by Empower Fitness.  It costs around $40.00, something my workout budget could handle, and comes with a DVD containing workouts and instructions as to its use.  It’s a pretty innocuous looking device, shown here:

As the name suggests it can be adjusted to weigh five, eight or twelve pounds depending on your level of fitness.  After figuring out how to detach and reattach the weighted parts correctly and how to safely stand while wielding it, I launched into my first workout.

The DVD has a warm up portion that’s seven minutes, three training sections that range from eleven to fifteen minutes, and an eight minute cool down.  Since it was my first time, I did warm up, the eleven minute cardio/strength combo, and then the cool down – resulting in a total half hour or so of exercise.  I kept the bell on its lowest setting, which is five pounds.

It wasn’t easy, but it was doable even for a beginner like me.  The instructor on the DVD is pleasant to watch and work with.  The only parts where I had difficulty keeping up where when she went to the ground and did squat thrusts off the kettle bell.  My stomach and thighs literally get in the way when I’m trying to perform a quick move like that, but obviously I’ll keep at it in the hopes that shrinking stomach and thighs will cease to be a problem eventually.  There are also some high/low impact jumping jack type maneuvers that were tough, but I managed to get through and felt good about it when I did.

I’ve suspected for a bit now that I don’t push myself hard enough when I’m just dancing on my own, so having an instructor to push me along is helpful.

Afterward my hands were pretty shaky.  This is normal for me since I have ET, and it went back normal (for me anyway) within an hour or two.  I suspect that as the muscles in my forearms grow stronger this workout will actually improve my general shakiness a bit, since physical therapy with hand weights is a recommended treatment for ET patients.

In general though I felt good.  I could tell that my body was going to be sore the next day by the slowly gathering ache, but I can confirm today that it’s the right kind of ache – the kind that tells you you’ve had a workout that did you some good in all the right spots.  Also, my back seems perfectly fine.  Today I’ll do some cardio, then pick the weights back up on Monday.

I plan to add “belling” to my routine at least three times per week in minimum half hour sessions, and continue either dancing or walks with Ted for another two sessions – for a total of five workouts per week or cumulative 200 minutes of workout per seven days.

Strong is beautiful!  Rhar!

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

Update:  I received the following nice letter from the Marketing Coordinator at Empower shortly after I emailed them to tell them I'd written about them on my blog.  I must say, really liking this company!

"Good Morning Carolyn!

 

I wanted to send a quick note to tell you I really appreciate you sharing your post with us!  We are very honored when someone writes a review about our products.  It’s a wonderful feeling when all of the hard work that went into making specifically the 3-in-1 Kettlebell pays off.  What I mean by that is... you completely understood and got exactly what we were trying to do with it.  Show women that Kettlebells are not something to shy away from.  They are amazing tools and my team and I are extremely happy that our product can help women see how unintimidating they can be so they can move down their road to a healthy lifestyle.  So thank you again for sharing and keep up all your hard work… It is worth every minute of it!"

Misconceptions

(Warning – post contains conversation about poo.  We’re all adults here and I’m going to try to be as discreet as possible, but you’ve been warned.)

Everybody’s got misconceptions about everybody else.  I’m most acquainted with the ones that go along with being a bigger girl because that’s what I am – but I know that we as human beings pretty much judge everybody badly when given a chance.

Girl in a short skirt?  Must be slutty.

Super slender?  Anorexic.

Drive a Hummer?  Tool.

Plus sized?  Fast food scarfing piggy.

Got money?  Must have hurt someone else to get it.
Poor?  Lazy.

Older?  Out of touch.

Younger?  Annoying and possibly dangerous.

Tattoos and piercings?  Criminal.

Gun owner?  Definitely criminal.

Etcetera etcetera ad infinitum.

They’re all unfortunate and I doubt anyone has escaped getting hit by one at least once (but most likely much more than that) in their lifetime.  My husband thinks I’m paranoid but I believe I’ve been turned down for jobs on more than one occasion because the person doing the interview took one look at me and did the following equation in their head:

Lazy + Undisciplined = Fat.  End result?  No job offer.

There’s no way to prove whether he’s right or I am.

I digress.  Today I was exposed to a fat assumption (or misconception) that I’d honestly never heard before.  Fat people must poop bigger than average sized people.

I need to stop listening to trash morning radio shows.  I’m not even going to mention which one was having this conversation because at this point I don’t want to promote them.  However, this is the second time these yahoos have managed to offend me when all I’m trying to do is get a laugh while attempting to not die on the PA turnpike in the morning.

And this one is just… ridiculous.  The justification behind it is that fat people must be gobbling down so much food so frequently that it’s amazing we don’t have to stay in the bathroom all the time as it re-emerges.

Sweet merciful crap.  Literally.

If anyone out there is suffering under this particular ludicrous (and offensive in a way I cannot really explain) delusion, allow me to explain something.

Waste volume is largely determined by how much fiber your diet contains.  What this means is, that healthy people eating those high fiber diets are going to be the ones leaving a larger deposit at the porcelain bank.  People eating a lot of fast food with its high saturated fat and salt content are, ironically, a lot likelier to be constipated.

In addition to that, many overweight people do not necessarily have a problem with consuming too much food but rather they are consuming the wrong kinds of food.  Which is why it’s easy to by mystified over why you’re heavier than the people around you when you feel as though you’re eating the same volume as everybody else (or possibly even less).

Here’s an example.  At Christmastime the Oreo company releases a white chocolate covered Oreo cookie.  They are very slightly larger than the regular cookie.  I absolutely love these things.  One of them (one!) contains 110 calories and 6 grams of saturated fat.

This means that a person only has to consume a few of these cookies to start drifting over the red zone for how much fat should be consumed in a single day (let alone a single sitting).

Allow me to reiterate – it does NOT take a huge quantity of food consumed to be overweight.  Some people are overweight and / or type 2 diabetic entirely because of drinking sugar filled soda.  That alone is enough to do the trick.

Yes, many overweight people are so because they consume a high volume of food, but I believe most overweight people are so simply because their diets are too rich in pre-processed garbage and restaurant meals.  Processed foods are made as cheaply as possible (thus the cheap cost) and many restaurants basically dip each entrée in butter before sending it out.  Many people are sadly unaware of how badly this stuff can be hurting them.

Your best friends are fresh ingredients and your kitchen.  Know them, love them, learn how to use them.

And please, ditch the silly misconceptions.

Inadvertent Activist

I never set out to be a size activist.  I make a lousy one since I’m still fully engaged in a lifelong struggle to possess and maintain the lower body weight that I find aesthetically pleasing, and yet I seem to have stepped in it anyway.

I’ve mentioned before that I utilize a service that my company provides which assists with health care (rather than sick care) – providing advice and resources to achieve and maintain good health in day to day life.  I genuinely think this benefit is a great thing.

Once a month, my health coach calls and checks in with me to see how I’m doing and provide me with advice, encouragement, and resources.  I’ve mentioned her here before too and she’s very cool (and deserves a raise for putting up with me).

What happened is this…

I noticed that I was being called more than the other people around me who I knew were also participating in the program, and I got curious as to why.  A lot of them told me they were contacted once and then were done for the year.

My first thought was that my coach called me once a month because I’m a cool health blogger and amateur nutritionist and she enjoyed talking to me and giving me some extra attention that I deserved!

Deep down though, even as I thought this, I knew it probably wasn’t true.

So at my last session – I asked.  The truth is that yes, my coach does think I’m cool (score!) however, the number of calls received is based on a computer algorithm that classifies you according to a grading system.  Since the computer classifies me as a “C” for health I get labeled as “high risk” and receive the maximum number of calls per year, which is twelve.

No offense was meant by this whatsoever, certainly not by a computer algorithm that can’t even think for itself.  But when I found that my suspicion was true, my heart literally sank like a rock.  Both my regular physician and the independent company’s biometric screeners had registered me as having textbook blood work (check out this post if you’d like to see the numbers for yourself).  Which left me with the ugly truth that none of those numbers made a difference – the BMI registered me as obese, ergo I needed extra attention.  The suspicion that this might be the case had been bugging me for some time, but as a bigger girl I’ve been taught to accept things like this as my due, I’ve earned being singled out by choosing to be overweight.

And then something in my brain simply said: “No.  No, I won’t accept this.  No I’m not okay with this.”  So that’s exactly what I said.

Believe me, pushing back is not my normal behavior, normally I’m quite the mouse.  There’s also the fact that I volunteered for this program of my own free will, a decision solely motivated by my cheapness and the fact that my company offered me a significant break on health insurance costs if I joined.  So in a very literal sense, I really did ask for this.

However, I’ve dedicated the last three years to studying, cooking, exercising, and even teaching others about how to be a healthy person.  Along the way, I’ve had to accept that although my education and hard work has indeed made me into a healthy person it has not (yet) made me thin.

It may seem like a small thing to some, but I danged well deserve to be classified by that stupid computer as “healthy”.  I have earned it.

So I said all of this to my coach (okay, maybe I whined it but that’s besides the point) including letting go with both barrels about my disappointment that they as part of the medical community were still clinging to the useless BMI score as an indicator of good health.

And something happened that I didn’t expect: she agreed with me.

Apparently the system just isn’t set up to account for healthy fat people – whoever designed it didn’t compute for the possibility that we exist.  I had, quite simply, fallen through the cracks in the system.  In addition to this I admit I have a lousy perception filter, I was seeing myself as the only person who gets a monthly check in – and I was reassured that this is absolutely not the case.

So she agreed to go talk to her management about me and asked if I could be contacted to discuss this issue further at a later date.  To which I think I may have stammered a bit, but ultimately I said yes, of course I would help – that’s the goal after all: to make the system optimally useful to the greatest number of people, even those of us who buck the norm.

All this being said, it still holds true that I quest to be thin.  However, that quest is aesthetic at this point, not health based.  I genuinely enjoy talking to my health coach and I want her advice – but her checking in on my weight at this time is the equivalent of her calling to inquire about whether or not I’ve yet gotten that nose job I’ve been wanting.

Maybe it’s my mental health about my body image that could use some assistance now?  I can’t argue that this is a possibility.

Still, I feel hopeful and positive about what occurred.  They seem to want to work with me, even use me to make the system better – not just for people like me but for everyone.

Maybe being an activist isn’t so bad?

Merry Christmas!

As my husband pointed out to me last night, I've been doing a lousy job of blogging lately.  My attendance to my blog accurately reflects my attendance to my health: when one is neglected it's an indicator that the other is suffering as well.  It all started with Thanksgiving and has been going strong now through Christmas.

It's true, it's been a hard semester and difficult to fit in anything else between work and a homework avalanche - I don't mean that as an excuse, just a reason.

So, starting on Wednesday I'm attacking this with renewed dedication and determination.  I was up to five excercise sessions per week and I need to get back there fast.

As for today though - I would simply like to wish everyone a very Merry and blessed Christmas and a very Happy and healthy New Year!  Thank you for reading!

Inspiration of the Day

Not gonna lie, this made me cry like a baby.

Dallas Page's article on Arthur as is appears on You Tube:

"Arthur Boorman was a disabled veteran of the Gulf War for 15 years, and was told by his doctors that he would never be able to walk on his own, ever again.

He stumbled upon an article about Diamond Dallas Page doing Yoga and decided to give it a try -- he couldn't do traditional, higher impact exercise, so he tried DDP YOGA and sent an email to Dallas telling him his story.

Dallas was so moved by his story, he began emailing and speaking on the phone with Arthur throughout his journey - he encouraged Arthur to keep going and to believe that anything was possible. Even though doctors told him walking would never happen, Arthur was persistent. He fell many times, but kept going.

Arthur was getting stronger rapidly, and he was losing weight at an incredible rate! Because of DDP's specialized workout, he gained tremendous balance and flexibility -- which gave him hope that maybe someday, he'd be able to walk again.

His story is proof, that we cannot place limits on what we are capable of doing, because we often do not know our own potential. Neither Arthur, nor Dallas knew what he would go on to accomplish, but this video speaks for itself. In less than a year, Arthur completely transformed his life. If only he had known what he was capable of, 15 years earlier.

Do not waste any time thinking you are stuck - you can take control over your life, and change it faster than you might think.

Hopefully this story can inspire you to follow your dreams - whatever they may be.
Anything is Possible!"

Arthur's story is highlighted from the beginning, in the upcoming documentary, INSPIRED: The Movie. http://www.inspiredthemovie.com

Thanks to my friend Liz who guided me to the article that made me find this!