I really, really appreciate all the comments and emails checking on me. Yes, I’m still here, and I’m holding on, with prospects looking up.

I probably should have mentioned at some point that I historically get into a major funk around my birthday (middle of June), and this year was a doozy, what with the health issues and the work issues compounding the normal birthday blues.

Seriously, we are talking major mid-life crisis. I mean major. It wasn’t just about relapsing as far as eating goes, it was a full-blown depressing and existential “what the hell is going on” kind of episode…things were pretty scary for a while.

Well, the good news is that after skidding down the slippery slope for nearly two months, I finally realized I was out of my league, and last week, I got myself back to my therapist.

Things aren’t quite back where they were in April, but I’m feeling a lot more confident, and am feeling optimistic for the first time in many weeks.

That said, entries are still going to be a bit sparse, as I’m off to Nags Head for a week (or two) of vacation with the family. I promise to get back to regular posting no later than mid-August! Really :).

Thanks again to everyone for your kind words…they really meant a lot!

Interesting:

Human happiness comes not from infrequent pieces of good fortune, but from the small improvements to daily life. -Benjamin Franklin

See more from this thread at MetaFilter.

Okay, I really resisted, but I can’t any longer! I’ve tried hard to keep Act Boldly posts on topic, but if one of the foremost political blogs can do it, so can I…it’s time for Friday cat blogging!

Anyways, I hope you’ll humor me. It won’t be an every Friday thing, but alas, I am one of those folks who think: “aren’t my cats cute?”

The one good thing about blogging about it is that if I move in the direction of scary cat lady, maybe you’ll kindly alert me to the error of my ways :-).

Wow…that week went by fast. In general, if I’m not posting and I’m not traveling, it’s probably not a good sign. Yes, the eating has been not so hot, and that has been contributing (along with my very horrible work situation) to a pretty depressing state.

However…I got some great news today. I mentioned in early May that my boss, a guy I really liked, had been forced out.

Well, well.

They say what goes around, comes around. Today, the guy who forced my boss out was forced out!

Ding, dong, the witch is dead!

I don’t know that this makes the long-term situation much better, as this group may be too dysfunctional to save. But this is a good start!!

…insert Beatles clip here…

Yep, it’s my birthday! I’m 30…in hex.

Sorry math joke…I just turned 48. Gosh, where did the time go? And why don’t I feel that much differently than I did at 24? Same problems, I just make a lot more money :).

Not any major celebrations this year. My family celebrated with me while I was on vacation over Memorial Day, and I was taken out to dinner last night. Tonite I’m hanging out for a while, then heading off for my regular Thursday choir rehearsal.

Anyways, I share this birthday with Wade Boggs (the great Red Sox 3B) and Doogie Howser. Actually, Wade is 48 today as well. Years ago, I was sitting next to Wade and Bob Stanley (an infamous Red Sox player) at a bar at Logan Airport in Boston. I was waiting for my brother to arrive; they were with the team waiting for the weather to clear so they could leave for some AL city.

I sat there thinking “hey, you should tell Wade you have the same birthday.” And then I turned chicken. Ah well. Like what would he have said? “Uh, isn’t that something.”

Well, it’s always amused me!

Over on Weight of the Evidence, Regina has a very interesting post about a study of monkeys and dietary trans fats that had scary findings as far as weight, glucose levels, and insulin resistance. She summarizes it this way:

The trans-fat fed monkeys gained more weight on the same calories as their trans-fat free counterparts! More important - the trans-fat fed monkeys had higher blood glucose levels and were more insulin resistant than the trans-fat free monkeys.

Wow. Okay, it’s animal research, blah blah. But it really does make you wonder just what kind of damage decades of eating trans fats and low-fructose corn syrup may do.

A while back, I mentioned that I was happy to find Camille’s, which sells a healthier alternative to fast food. At the time, Maria noted that it was easy to make an unhealthy choice, which is true, but what I was really happy with was that they at least had healthy ingredients. If you let them pile on the cheese and the mayo, yep, not much of a healthy choice, but you also could pile on the nutrient-rich choices too.

Now there’s another entry in this market (at least new to me): Robek’s.

Shocker, Robek’s started about ten years ago in California, where they were primarily a juice bar. Now, many of them are getting into salads and wraps. The one closest to me has some really interesting wraps, including a southwestern roast beef, a mediterranean tuna, a turkey and cranberry, and an asian veggie. Yum!

Like with Camille’s you may need to cut back on some of the dressings, but I like the choice of ingredients…a whole lot more than iceberg lettuce and bland tomatoes. And I think I may try switching to a Pomegranate Passion smoothie instead of my morning Diet Coke…at least occasionally :).

Well, me yeah, but…it’s Susan Powter!

If you’re a long-time dieter like me, you may well have remembered the buzz cut Susan and her Stop the Insanity program, a book and video series that focused on exercise and a low-fat diet as the key to weight loss.

Back now after an long absence (she says she took time off to have and raise a third child), Susan is sporting funky Christina Aguilera-like blond dreadlocks and is bringing Stop the Insanity back, this time with an infomercial selling the revised plan and a membership-based website (warning epileptics: this site may induce seizures as there are a ridiculous number of text crawls and other moving images).

The new Stop the Insanity looks like it hasn’t changed much, with low-fat diet and exercise the key. The ABC/GMA article notes that:

The truth, Powter says, is that she “worked [my] butt off,” literally — and that is what overweight people must do to make significant change.

I don’t think so. But your mileage may vary. If you like your drill sergeant to be a size 2 with dreads, Susan may be for you!

Me, I’d like to see Susan in a steel cage death match with The Biggest Loser’s Jillian :).

Back June 4th or thereabouts!

Just a quickie during lunch (really more of a placeholder for later).

This may be a bit of a duh, but it occurs to me that it’s worth thinking about the differences between impulses and compulsions.

For example, I consider that I’ve been pretty much on track since Sunday. That makes today day 5. However, I had to really think about whether or not to count yesterday, as I was at Ruby Tuesday’s last night for dinner. I was looking at the Smart Eating section of their menu, and was waffling between ordering something more healthy (like the petite sirloin with just 8 grams of fat) or less (the Church Street Chicken with 31 grams of fat).

Yep, I went with the chicken. And you know what? It was really good :).

Now, I count yesterday as on track, because while it wasn’t as healthy as I could have ordered, it wasn’t horrible. Yep, I had a little bacon and some cheese with my chicken, but I also had broccoli, mushrooms, and brown rice with a tomato garnish. Not exactly a Big Mac and fries!

Ultimately, what I did was give in to an impulse; I meant to order something more healthy, but when confronted with a choice (two supposedly “healthy” option with more or less fat), I chose the less healthier of the two options. Yeah, I know that it isn’t that “bad,” but on the other hand, I’m off for vacation for a week. I could have banked those calories!

What this wasn’t was a compulsion. The impulse was “hey, this looks yummy, let’s eat that.” Which is just like the eating good stuff at a party, stopping into the bakery when you walk by, etc.

This, to me, is considerably different from my more problematic behavior, which involves doing something that you know is pretty much harmful (stuffing yourself with a whole pizza or drinking a whole bottle of wine followed by a whole crapload of Chinese food). That’s compulsive. And for almost a month, I was really having difficulty stopping. Seems to me that both need to be worked on.

BTW, Susan had an interesting comment earlier this week which is on the same kind of topic:

I feel that binges arise from one thing — deprivation. Deprivation and insatiability go hand. When you are depriving yourself of something you really want and you finally get it, you want as much of it as you can get before it’s taken away again.

I think compulsive eating and bingeing are two very different things. I only binge when I’m trying to diet and starve my body. I eat compulsively when I’m not taking care of myself emotionally. You can’t feed a feeling with food, but I think when I get to urge to eat when I’m not physically hungry or continue eating at a meal when I’m already satisfied, it’s because I’m trying not to feel something.

I don’t know that I agree that compulsive eating and bingeing are two different things. But I see her point about different origins for these behaviors.

I’m technically on leave this afternoon, so I’m gonna sneak in this quick at-work post before I leave to pick up my aunt at the airport. We’re off to a family reunion week on Friday, so posts will likely be sparse until I return June 4th.

I got an email ad for a book from the folks at The Chopra Foundation re their new book, The Ten Commitments, which you can see by this page are a riff off the ten commandments (e.g., “I commit to forgiveness” rather than “Thou shalt not kill”).

But of course as a Google-fiend, I did some searching and found a much more interesting set of commitments at a less well-known spirituality site:

1. Pursue the dream in your heart.

2. Create new ways to generate positive energy.

3. Know what you believe in & why.

4. Find your place thru choices you make.

5. Believe that you are all-ways more.

6. Nurture yourself as a friend in need.

7. Seek lessons of life hidden in every moment.

8. Know that your mind is the lifeblood of your future.

9. View confusion as a prelude to clarity.

10. Cherish the Earth, thankful for each breath you take.

I love these! In particular, number 2 has been really fundamental to my being on track (this is day four).

I hope you find them inspirational too.

Hey, look at me, I’m live blogging :). I’m watching Oprah’s Legends Ball. Boy, do I wish I was an influential black woman…what a party!

But Oprah just shared this as part of the show, and it was a bit of an “a ha” for me:

I think happiness is having something to look forward to.

More later. I think this may be relevant to the “law of attraction” theory I’m working on.

BTW, I’ve just put two on-track days together. Maybe I’ve found something. Hmmm.

Cook’s Illustrated (I’ve been a long-time subscriber, and have mentioned them here previously) just sent me out a sample copy of their relatively new Cook’s Country magazine. This is the second sample issue, and it reminds me a lot of Penzey’s One Magazine.

In both cases, neither of these really appeal to me (though I love both Cook’s original mag and Penzey’s spices). This is probably not an accurate characterization, but both of these mags strike me as county fair cooking. Not exactly my style.

But hey, it was a free magazine, so I’ll read it. What was interesting was that the sample of Cook’s Country I got had a makeover for macaroni and cheese in it. I don’t recall how they did their makeover, but I do recall that they mentioned that a serving of traditional macaroni and cheese (which is definitely a fave comfort food for me) has over 1,000 calories!

Yikes!

Now, I tend to do boxed mac ‘n cheese (you know which one), and I typically throw a can of corn in mine, so perhaps the damage isn’t so great. But still!

Anyways, all of this is just a long preamble to bookmarking a recipe for a healther macaroni and cheese I saw on Healthy Appetite with Ellie Krieger (a relatively new FoodTV show).

According to the nutrition info, a serving of this mac ‘n cheese has less than 400 calories. But what I really like is that she uses winter squash as the base for the sauce. How cool is that?

Now mac ‘n cheese is not going to be a staple of mine (even with a whole grain pasta), but at least this version has a lot of nutrient power going for it!

I had this in my other post on the June issue of Oprah, but there was just so much good stuff in it, I decided to make it a separate post.

There’s a great article by Eve Ensler on her new play, The Good Body. Here are some highlights:

[The Good Body] is an examination of what we women do to our bodies: the sucking, scrubbing, … flattening, and starving we do in order to be good, to be loved, to be accepted.

Read the rest of this entry »

I mentioned last week that I picked up the June issue of Oprah. And at least one of you (hi Debbi!) took me up on the suggestion to buy it, since it was an issue that focused on the body.

They now have the June issue online, though what’s there is just a few of the articles, and those that are there are mostly excerpts. That said, I’d definitely encourage you to check out Oprah’s regular feature, What I Know for Sure, which she always closes the mag with.

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I managed to snap this pic on my way to work. The water on the left is the Potomac River, and since there is greenery all along it, it gets really overpopulated with geese when they are doing their migrations.

But ya gotta love spring and goslings! It’s a bit fuzzy since this is a tiny crop from the view from my dashboard.

Things are both looking up and down this week. I’ve had two good days, which to me is a promising sign. But the work situation continues to be a stressor, as there’s nothing like an uncertain future hanging over your head. Me? I’m not worried about being out of work. My problem is that I’d actually like to stay with this company but move into a different group. The stress comes from wondering whether that can work out.

On a separate note, I came across a really great quote in a book that I picked up recently:

There are two great days in a person’s life — the day we are born and the day we discover why. William Barclay

The book was The Passion Test, which is a very quick read and a fairly simple idea. Write down 15 things that you envision yourself being passionate about (in your ideal life) and then use a simple sorting trick to come up with your top five. There are a variety of simple, supporting strategies to help you “manifest” these things in your life.

For some, this may be a bit to esoteric, new-Agey, but I happen to have some sympathies for what Oprah calls “the universe trying to give you a message.” (Like the other night, when I dropped the bottle of wine I had bought on the garage floor and it broke.)

It’s only $10 on Amazon, so it might be worth the investment!

Okay, so Jimmy Morris is a low-carb evangelist (which I am not completely on board with), but I really like what he says about the issue of calories in versus calories out:

The problem with calories-in/calories-out is that it relies on a subtle bit of misdirection that has had a dramatic and negative impact on America’s health. Further, it is a grossly oversimplified solution to a very complex problem, that truthfully, no one fully understands. The misdirection is this. If the problem of weight gain is food, shouldn’t the solution to weight gain be food as well. Instead, the second half of this equation puts far too much emphasis on exercise as the solution. By doing so, it lends the impression that all foods are equal… that they’re nothing but calories and that it doesn’t matter what you eat, so long as you balance those calories with exercise. A quick glance at our collective statistics on overweight and obesity should be all the proof one needs to see how the calories-in/calories-out dogma has failed us.

Go read the whole post for his radical perspective, which I’d argue isn’t quite so radical.

In simple terms, when you are talking about calorie math, quality may be much more important than quantity!

Oh, I know, nothing for a while, and now I can’t stop posting! But if you don’t regularly buy Oprah magazine, you may want to pick up the June issue. According to Oprah.com, it’s not on sale until May 16th, but I picked it up today. It’s their third “body” issue, and there are some interesting reads on the subject.

I’ll share some of the highlights I found interesting over the next couple of days, but thought some of you may want to buy it yourself.

Last weekend I went to see Akeelah and the Bee with my nieces. What a great movie! If you like feel-good stories, I’d encourage you to go see this even if you don’t have a child escort :).

One of the inspirational parts of the movie is its (edited) use of a Marianne Williamson quote:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

I love this quote, and am planning to use it to try again to practice a regular habit of passage meditation (which I’ve mentioned before).

I’m also going to make a visual version to print up for my nieces. I’ll post it here when I’m finished.

I’m happy that Regina Wilshire (of Weight of the Evidence) is back. I’ve been trying to post a comment there, but Blogger seems to be uncooperating. Here was my point:

One semantic quibble. I’m not sure I would call a diet of 43% carb low-carb. Is it be a low-carb diet when nearly half the cals are from carbs?

I would call it controlled carb, or reduced carb, or even lower carb.

Like I said, it’s a quibble, but IMO, it’s worth differentiating a 43% carb diet compared to the 10-15% carb of an non-maintenance Atkins or Protein Power.

Now, you could argue that those are very low-carb diets, but I think that low-carb sites and books tend to mean very low-carb, not moderate carbs.

I’ve mentioned before that I have had some success with low-carb diets. But in this last go-round, I found myself being really resistant to go back to an Atkins or Protein Power style of eating.

I guess I have two issues percolating in my mind on this subject.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jimmy Moore (of Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb) turned me on to Jimmy Morris (of Bread and Money) a while back. Both are low-carb evangelists who have lost lots of weight low-carbing.

The latter Jimmy recently wrote an article on the relationship between emotional eating and diet that really resonated with me.

In Is Emotional Eating Another Chicken and Egg Conundrum?, he writes:

Emotional eating is defined as the conscious or unconscious consumption of sweetened, salty or fatty foods, usually to excess. This eating behavior is believed to be triggered by negative emotions arising from unpleasant events like an argument with someone, a stressful day at work or a poor grade on a test. Many people, even those who are not overweight, have some sense of the connection between emotions and diet. The core theory behind emotional eating is that strong negative emotions (the cause) trigger the desire to eat high-calorie foods (the effect).

Sounds plausible, but what if we’ve got the cause and effect part of this equation backwards? Up until now, we’ve only focused on the eating behavior that follows an emotion-fueled binge, but what about the content and quality of the food that precedes the event/binge? What if it’s actually what we’re eating that determines our negative response to life’s ups and downs, which in turn, influence eating behavior?

I’m still off track, and while events at work (as mentioned recently) have been difficult, I think that this two-week retreat into old behaviors is really all a reflection of what I ate over the last day (or days).

I do think my old friend (”just one more day”) has been playing a role, but I also think that all I need is one or two good days of solid nutrition under my belt and I’ll be fine.

Well, we had a meeting today with our group’s senior vice president. He did announce that our boss had resigned (yeah right). However, the good news is that our new interim boss is well liked by our team. This is a huge relief, as we had been expecting the SVP to put one of two of his brown-nosers in charge, and that would have led to chaos.

So, while the longer term view is still grim, our team has been spared, at least for now. For that I’m truly thankful!

Sorry to be so quiet, but I had a feeling this was coming. The last time it seemed like all the planets were aligning and things were good, my mom had a heart attack and died four months later.

So the events of April (a successful embolization for my fibroids, a huge bonus at work, and a fab new window office) really had me feeling a bit unsettled.

And now the first shoe has dropped. We don’t know what’s going on, but it looks like my boss is being forced out after more than a decade with our company. This is bad enough for him, but it’s almost as bad for the rest of us. It reminds me of Keith Olbermann’s Countdown feature: the prospects for my future in my current job are worse, worser, or worst.

I really liked working for this guy, so that’s what I’m bummed about. Me? I’ll get by even if I’m laid off tomorrow. But the reality is that the tea leaves had been bad for our group for some time now, so the silver lining is that most of us in this situation will now be able to move on. with most of us being much better off than we were.

Some (like me I hope) will stay with the company, but move to other groups. Others will probably change firms. Alas, the folks I feel badly for are the ones who wind up having to stay in their current jobs (a difficult situation), only to be laid off in a year or two when this group fails to meet its revenue expectations.

Hopefully there will be more on-topic posts shortly. But for now, my mental energies are elsewhere. (Today I moved all my personal valuables out of my office just in case.)

Okay, so tomorrow is two weeks, but I’m still not back completely on track. Sigh. More about that later.

But first, a bit of good news. Today, I took the Metro to work for the first time since I think sometime in 1998 or so.

When I first moved to DC, I did the bus/Metro thing regularly. But then I started grad school, and my school wasn’t really Metro-accessible. At that point, I started driving to work. This may have been a chicken or egg thing, but that is the point that I went from being really heavy (probably high 200s or low 300s) to being physically challenged (as I started heading to the high 300s).

Why did I stop doing Metro?

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Okay, maybe in hindsight, going to two happy hours the same day I gave up Diet Coke was a mistake. I did fine at happy hour #1 (ordered a virgin Mary), but wound up ordering a beer at happy hour #2.

Big mistake.

That one led to a second, and then on my way home, to the package store where I picked up a bottle of wine, which I polished off at home before calling in my order for Chinese takeout.

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