People on the Road

A few weeks ago a friend at work invited me to eat lunch with her at Panera.  I was a bit concerned.

Panera is one of those restaurants that kind of looks healthy at first glance, but in reality most of their menu items can really ruin your nutritional day.  Oh, they’re delicious all right, but the carb and fat content is too high for lunch – which is a meal I try to keep modest if possible.

On the upside, Panera has graciously posted the entire nutritional contents of their menu online and available for download.  I think they rightly figure that although people like me will be shocked at how calorific some things turn out to be, they will come and eat there anyway if they realize that there are a pretty decent selection of menu items they can have – rather than avoiding the restaurant altogether.

For example, the tomato and mozzarella Panini I would have ordered had I not known any better clocks in at a staggering 740 calories and 27 grams of fat.  Without looking at the menu I would have thought: vegetarian, fresh bread, fresh cheese, yummy tomatoes – how bad could it be?  And wound up munching over half my day’s calorie allotment and more fat than I should have in a day, in one meal.  Not good.

Armed with information, I selected half of a roasted turkey & avocado BLT on sourdough at 260 calories and 11 grams of fat, and paired it with a cup of yummy vegetarian black bean soup at 170 calories and 2 grams of fat – for a lunch total of 430 calories and 13 grams of fat.  That’s still a big lunch, but it’s not a disastrous one.  They try to serve you another hunk of bread with the soup, but you can exchange that for a small apple instead.

Planning ahead (when I am not currently hungry) is key for me with regards to eating out.  Restaurants these days are catering to the nutritionally conscious and providing ample information for us to order by.  Red Robin (yes, the burger joint) has a fun interactive part of their website where you can plan and tweak your meal until you’re totally satisfied with its calorie count – then print your finished selection to bring to the restaurant with you and simply hand to your server.  Plus it has cute graphics that remind me a little of Burger Time (remember that video game?)

At any rate, that Thursday I found myself in front of the register at Panera holding a printout in front of me and ordering off of the nutritional menu.  It was easier and less tempting to do that than to even try looking at the selections up on the board.  The boy behind the register was a cute, tan skinned kid with curly black hair who was puzzled by what I was reading off of.  I showed him and he was surprised by the extent of the nutritional info available.  He asked what weight loss plan I was following, and with a wry shrug I told him I was simply trying to make sure my outgo exceeded my income.

He leaned in and in a conspirator whisper told me that he’d recently lost eighty pounds.  My first instinct was to be slightly jealous as I admitted to trying to win my own weight battle for the past twenty years (so far), but he was so adorable and so encouraging and proud – I found myself feeling that way for him too.  Here we were, two strangers, who suddenly understood something about one another.  We were fighting the same fight, and travelling the same path.

He also told me he mostly avoided eating bread – that was his secret.  Which, considering the fact that he works at a restaurant which specializes in bread made both of us chuckle.

He has thirty pounds left to go – and I sincerely wished him all the success in the world in achieving his health goals as he too wished me well.

It’s funny how you can meet these people, never to be seen again, but who can give you a little lift – a little encouragement, maybe even just a small confirmation that at least in that moment, on that day, you were doing what was best and healthiest for your body in a world that makes doing so into a consistently difficult task.

An Empty Tomb

I did not come up with the following rationale on my own, rather I listened to a good friend who is a deeper thinker than myself explaining to someone why they were a Christian and found it to be one of the best and most rational reasons for giving the Bible a good looking into that I had ever heard.  On this our most important, and sacred day of the year it seems like a good topic for the blog.  I was already a Christian when I heard it, but if I hadn’t been it would have caused me to do some serious thinking about the issue.

The empty tomb of Easter Sunday is an extremely compelling thing.  Roughly 2,000 years ago – a sizable group of people saw something they could not explain: a man who apparently rose from the dead.

Christianity, in it’s infancy at the time, was basically a lunatic fringe offshoot group of Judaism which was viewed with great suspicion by the government in power.  After all, its leader had just been very publicly executed in an excruciatingly painful way – shortly after which his followers were hiding out in terror of meeting the same fate.

And then that leader turned up again – very much alive.  Had this been some kind of hoax pulled off by the tiny, powerless and frightened group of people in question it would have been a very easy one to put down.  Instead – it grew.  Instead – more people saw him, and saw him, and touched him, and heard him speak, and the lunatic fringe group only continued to grow like a wildfire despite all of those holding power at the time wanting it to go away.

More than any feeling I may have, I find this simple set of straightforward historical details well worth some looking into.

Hallelujah, my Redeemer lives!

Diet Bending 1 - Resolutions

Today I have a guest blogger for you!  Linda Bender is a friend I met a few years ago who practices unconventional healing for a living.  I've asked her to share her perspectives on weight loss, and here is the first post she wrote for me.  Thank you, Linda!

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One of the biggest resolutions we Americans choose year after year is to lose weight.  We pick it several times during the year, some for reasons like an upcoming wedding or having to wear sleeveless summer clothes.  Of course we are also prompted to loose weight because of our health, even though scientific studies now show that being a little overweight is healthier than being skinny.   I was looking at the history of diets and it goes back centuries.  We may have the issue exaggerated today, but even the ancients looked for the secrets of weight loss.  Weight is a big issue and I wanted to give you some food for thought as you fight the battle of the flab.

Know that the weight loss game is highly personal; you will not be able to win the game trying to blend into a 'one fits all' program.  You need a personal solution to reach your wellness goals including diet and exercise guidance.  The following will seem discouraging, but they are factual truths of what you are up against in the weight loss battle.  You should know these items as you are going through your process.

1) Weight loss efforts fail 95% of the time, people regain the weight and more back within a year of stopping their diet.  Most of the time their system is left in a worse health condition than before they started, shifting their muscle / fat ratio to less muscle and more fat in the end.

2) The list of negative side effects of weight loss is as long as my arm, starting with decreasing our immune system leading to more colds and eventually going to serious side effects such as gall bladder disease and even death.

3) Ten to fifteen percent of the population is resistant to diet and exercise.  No matter what they do, they will not loose weight through these two activities.

4) Science has now officially determined that exercise does not cause weight loss.   Weight loss is a possible side of exercise but it is more about improving health.  Exercise helps you stay healthy but will not necessarily help you drop weight.  Sometimes it will cause weight gain as you add muscle to your frame. A cup of muscle weighs more than a cup of fat so you could drop your pants size and still add numbers onto the scale.

5) Science has shown that the greatest percentage of weight loss actually occurs during sleeping hours. Sleep is a major component to losing weight.

I am going to be bold and say that total wellness is important to your weight numbers. Science hasn't been able to quantify these yet, but proper levels of stress, physical activity, community social opportunities, inner faith and intrinsic meaning are all components to weight levels.  Diet and exercise alone is not going to win the long term war.

Too often we want to see big numbers falling off the scale with easy solutions, but bodies do not work that way and if you want real weight loss you need to understand how your body works, and not just calories in vs. calories out.

Let's now look at one of the major things you will be battling: homeostasis.  Your body has a built in mechanism to keep things the same.  As soon as you make changes it will try to incorporate the changes so that your body is stabilized.  It is part of your basic health mechanisms.  It is good because the body naturally wants to return to wellness and balance.

As an example, let’s say you start a walking program of two miles a day.  Initially your body reacts in surprise and starts to make changes to address the new exercise.  You will see some changes, but as soon as it can your body will try to go back to the way it operated before the changes.  Your body becomes more efficient and you will need greater effort to make equivalent changes.  You only get frustrated.

Let's try an example that chronic dieters might understand.  You try a weight loss plan and loose ten pounds pretty easily.  You go off of the plan and then think, ‘I'll just do the same thing as before’.  This time the plan doesn't work as well and it is harder to loose weight.  It isn't that the plan has changed, it is your basic system that has changed.  It became more efficient and able to run off of fewer calories.

The key to weight loss is to find the limits of your body's homeostasis and work with those limits.  This explains why there are many diet plans which work for some people, or some diet plans that are only tested for six weeks because any test beyond that would show that homeostasis kicked in and the plan doesn't work in the long term.  Think about it, if diets fail 95% of the time then it is possible that the success which happens 5% of the time is most likely an abnormal body response.  It isn't about weight loss as much as being healthy and letting your weight go to a healthy level for you.

For now, know the fight!  Your body and you will need a good battle plan if you wish to really get in and stay in shape.  It isn't impossible, it is a huge battle and there are no short cuts.  You will need new life style choices which work within your body's unique limitations.

Linda Bender is a personal wellness coach.  She uses over 20 holistic life coaching and touch therapy techniques from reiki to personal training to help you reduce stress and pain so your body invokes its natural healing ability. She is at Bender Healing on Church Street in Phoenixville. Bender Healing provides massage, reiki, reflexology, personal training, nutrition, life coaching and energy medicine.  See www.BenderHealing.com or call 800-706-1354 for more information.

I Know Too Much

Social media can be both a good and bad thing.

Good when you get to connect with friends and family that you don’t often see.  Good when people use it to share pictures of kids, pets, themselves, good news in their life, humor, useful tips, and inspiration.

Bad when people use it to simply display whatever they hate in front of the world.

I’m not talking about the political stuff so much.  In that case I think people genuinely believe they’re going to change the world by enlightening the Facebook masses to their way of thinking, so it’s not precisely coming from a negative space.  I just don’t care to share or argue over such things in that format, so I’ve simply learned to scan past such things and carry on.

No, the bad I’m talking about in this case is more a quick, hard, painful shot of mean.  In today’s example it came to me via Twitter.

Twitter is a unique beast.  I’m not overly fond of it because it feels like constantly walking in on a conversation I missed the beginning of.  I use it though to keep in touch with friends I mostly know via internet related means, and also to follow some celebrities I’ve taken an interest in.  I admit, it’s sort of fascinating to see what’s on William Shatner’s mind today (he’s a bit random) and as many people know George Takei is quickly becoming the most epic, funny person to follow via social media EVER.

In some cases though, following a celebrity I like on Twitter has been a horrible mistake. 

For example, I enjoy Owl City, the experimental electronic music project created by Adam Young.  The music isn’t exactly deep, but it’s whimsical and enjoyable and always puts me in mind of being a kid again and being able to believe that something Fae and Magical really might be waiting around the next corner.

Today I found out that Adam Young is a weight bigot.

I like to swim with fat people in the ocean because a little peace of mind is nice whenever there are sharks around.
— Owl City (@owlcity) March 6, 2013

I’m way, way past the stage where I laugh off hurtful things like this and accept them as my due.  If he had made a similar comment about someone, ANYONE of any other group – ethnically or orientation related – he’d have brought down a world of backlash on himself.

Instead, because it’s fatties, it’s okay.  It’s SO funny.

I stopped laughing back around the time I was twelve and a few boys in my class decided to use a desk as a battering ram to repeatedly bash the fatty in the seat in front of them.  Because coming home from school with my back covered in bruises was ever so funny too.

Adam’s “harmless” joke is part of the same blind, hateful groupthink that made those school bullies believe it was okay to beat me up for the crime of existing and taking up too much space in their world.  For having the audacity to not be a pretty enough girl for their looking pleasure.  It’s masquerading as witty banter, but its still all part of the same social disease.

What it boils down to is social media making it a little too easy to get to know people.  I didn’t want to know that Adam was a mean spirited weight bigot, I wanted to go on liking his music.  But now it will be forever be tainted and ruined with slightly too much information.

It’s a lot easier to go on believing that people aren’t hurtful, insensitive jerks when you keep a greater distance.

P.S. Considering the fact that I was a competitive swimmer for almost a decade, I bet I could out swim Adam if a shark came for us both.  Just sayin’…

A Kind of Magic

My husband possesses a certain kind of magic.

When I have a headache, he can wrap his graceful fingers around my skull and somehow wish the pain away from me.  He simply calls this, “fixing things”.  One night when I got sick and was suffering from a particularly bad asthma attack he sat up all night, one hand on my chest, speaking quiet words and helping me breathe until the morning came and we could make it to the doctor.

Likewise I’ve seen him sit all night on the floor beside our son’s bed when he had a fever, keeping careful vigilance so that he was only an arm’s reach away if needed.  In the morning, the fever had gone.

I’ve seen him pick up a wailing newborn and tuck it under his chin, where it promptly quieted and eventually went to sleep.

I’ve seen him offer someone a hug and witnessed the profound comfort and warmth he can infuse into such a simple, human gesture.

There’s also the disconcerting fact that he continues to grow more attractive with the passing of each year.

People just gravitate toward him.  There’s something indefinable about him that makes people want to be near and to know.  It’s kind of ironic to watch since I know he’s really an introvert.  Most of the time he wants nothing more than to be safe at home with family.

Ted infuses every day with his magic.  Sometimes by bringing home little gifts, be they something I mentioned wanting or something he saw that he believed I would like.  I actually have to be a little careful of what I admire, since much like a loyal wolf he’ll go great lengths to retrieve something his mate wants.  Sometimes it’s by heading back out into a cold, snowy night with my car after he’s worked a very long day to fill the gas tank – so that I don’t have to stop and do it in the morning.  Sometimes it’s just because he always takes care of his share of our housework without ever needing to be asked.  If I’m being honest, that last one isn’t always true of me.

He makes something like Valentine’s Day entirely redundant.  Why would we need a day dedicated to romance or cherishing one another when he makes me feel that way every day?  I don’t need a calendar date to remind him to tell me I’m beautiful since even after ten years of marriage, he spends every day chasing me around the house like I’m the most desirable creature he’s ever laid eyes on.  And just in case I managed to miss the point, he tells me so every day as well.

There’s no one else I want to see every day, talk to every day, touch every day, and who always smells good to me no matter what state they happen to be in.

Sure, sometimes we make each other nuts.  Sometimes there’s screaming and crying, but screaming and crying is just another form of passion if you think about it.  If we didn’t care so much about one another and what the other thinks – would we bother?

One of my friends refers to Valentine’s Day as, “Relationship Obligation Day.”  A day where people (usually men) are supposed to come up with some grand, stupidly expensive gesture to prove that they really do care about the people they romantically love.  But when you’re doing something just because the calendar told you to – does it really have any meaning?  I think another good name for it is, “Painfully Remind People That They’re Single Day.”  I remember this feeling well, and being completely miserable because the day was all about being in love – when I wasn’t.

Just my opinion, but I think this holiday needs to go.  Be good and loving to the person you choose to spend your life with every day.  Otherwise, why did you choose them?

As for Ted – thank you my best friend and true love, for filling each and every day with your unique and wonderful kind of magic.

Love you forever and ever.

Quitting Shampoo

I don’t often give fashion and beauty advice because they’re not exactly my area of expertise.  I’m about as fashionable as your average frumpy soccer mom and my nice skin is mostly genetic dumb luck.  I’m also fortunate enough to have hair that looks reasonably decent with only a blowout for styling – convenient since I have zero ability to style hair.  This may be because during that phase when little girls are practicing how to “do” each others hair I was too busy playing with my Voltron toys.  I’m not a tomboy, I just couldn’t get into hair – makeup I adore, and could go into at length, but that’s a whole other post.

With regards to a basic beauty regimen, there are a few things that I have learned and believe to be true.

Regarding skin: wear sunscreen, don’t go to bed with your makeup on, and moisturize.

Moisturize a lot.

The second I get out of a shower, even if my next stop is bed I’m putting some kind of cream on my skin to keep it pliable.  I don’t even use crazy expensive ones, I just pick whatever smells nice and stay diligent.

With regards to hair, I’ve had something of a similar revelation.  About six months ago I quit shampoo cold turkey.

I know what you’re thinking; no bubbles?  No squeaky clean strands between my fingers?  Ew.

Turns out those two things are incredibly bad for hair.  Let’s face it, hair is dead material.  It’s still attached but it can’t heal after it has left your scalp no matter what nifty graphics in hair product commercials try to tell you.  Once your hair is split and damaged the only future for it is growing out and falling off.

Shampoo strips all of the natural oil that your hair needs in order to not look like the dry, limp, lifeless dead thing it actually is.

The cleaning and care technique I use is generally referred to as “co-washing” or “condition-washing”.  It’s pretty simple; you load up a sizable palm full (two or three ounces depending on length) of whatever conditioner you like.  Can be cheap, doesn’t matter, if you like the fragrance then you’re good to go.  Work the conditioner very thoroughly through your hair, gently scrubbing your scalp with your fingertips and distributing the product evenly through the length.  I rub for a few minutes to make sure I’ve got a really thorough coat.  Leave it on for a couple of minutes while you do whatever else you do in the shower, and then very thoroughly rinse.  The conditioner seems to carry away dirt as it rinses and hair is left feeling surprisingly clean without the squeaky strands that indicate complete follicle strippage.

And that’s it.

My hair is shiny, it smells good, and it feels soft.  Much to my surprise it’s never limp or greasy either.  I have splurged and purchased certain brands of extremely expensive “cleansing conditioner” now and again.  I like it, but I’ve realized that if you do this the right way that really isn’t necessary.  Every six weeks I use a sparse amount sulfate-free shampoo as a clarifier the night before I touch up my dye job and other than that I skip soap altogether and I’m happy with the result.  I don’t even use styling product anymore, I just blow it dry and go.

So there’s my best beauty advice, take or leave: moisturize, rinse, repeat.

Whatever Motivates

I’m planning my spring and summer.

I don’t really take vacations like some people.  My husband and I run a tight ship financially and places like Aruba aren’t in the deck for us right now.  Even for our Honeymoon we just went to my parent’s shore house in Jersey.  We’re not splurgers, we’re savers.

One thing I’ve recently realized I don’t want to live without though is concerts.  Music is my heart, my favorite thing after Ted, and being in a crowded concert hall with the light show going crazy and an amazing band stepping out onto the stage is my happy place in the world.

I can remember being a kid and going to see Motley Crue and Aerosmith for about twenty bucks each, but ticket prices have changed a lot these days.  When I saw Rush last October one seat was around $125.00 (granted, they were GREAT seats).  It’s not cheap, so I have to pick and choose wisely.

This year I’m going to revisit my first great band love: Bon Jovi, and see a new English love for the first time: Muse.

Concerts are fixed points, they come up on you like a wedding date and they’re a great motivating goal to keep in mind when I’m working through my health plan.

Example:   Yesterday in work I was faced with the following poor food choice temptations (and this is all just in ONE day) – soft pretzels, donuts, chocolate bars and ice cream birthday cake.  Seriously, I don’t know sometimes how anyone I work with stays on plan.

To all four of these things I had the following to say: “GO AWAY, I am going to see MUSE.  Thhhbbtt!”

I don’t know why, but it works.  It’s not as though Muse is going to see ME, my seats are in the 50^th row back.  Maybe it’s enough to strive toward having the energy to jump up and down screaming for three hours straight without giving myself a strained back.

Whatever motivates you is whatever works.