Who Shouldn’t Fly- And It’s Not Who You Think

Last week Carter and I flew to NYC and tomorrow I am off to Texas.  This frequency of air travel is reminiscent of my life before Carter was born and I flew over 100,000 miles a year, but that was pre-9/11.  Thank goodness all this flying is not my normal life anymore.

Recently I have noted there are certain segments of the population that should never attempt to go anywhere via commercial airliners.  First, hoarders.  With most airlines allowing only one small carry-on before charging you outrageous fees to check a bag, a hoarder has a hell of a time deciding what not to bring home from a trip, what with all the sample size shampoos and lotions available at hotels and the half–eaten lunches, that are still perfectly good and deserve to be brought home to be eaten at a much later date, perhaps 5 or 6 years in the future.

The second segment is the technology non-savvy.  I can’t even imagine how in the world someone who is not a computer whiz can even purchase a ticket on an airplane, let alone get a seat or a boarding pass.

The third group is the out of shape, at least if you don’t have a direct flight.  Now a- days airlines don’t seem to give a hoot that they are selling tickets where passengers have to make a connection in less than 45 minutes.  Heaven forbid you are seated in the back of the plane on your first leg, with a full flight of people who all carried on all their bags because they had to, and those bags are really heavy with stolen shampoos and lotions.  So you are spending 25 minutes trying to get off the first plane parked at gate A24 only to discover that your next flight takes off from D99.  As you deplane the “I can’t be any more bored with my job” gate agent’s helpful words are, “You better RUN.”

The fourth group, are the dieters.  The good news is that airlines no longer serve you bad food that is also fattening.  One might think that no food would be good for dieting, but not for six hours or more.  And the TSA really frowns upon you trying to bring anything liquid or wrapped in foil through the security line, so none of the food the hoarders doggie bags are going to make it pass the screening machine.  So you are left to try and hunt down something healthy, as you run between flights and if you are not technology savvy you are unable to pull a list off the internet of the food vendors available along your route between gates, even if you did have time to stop and buy something it is all more fattening than the horrible stuff they used to serve on the airplane back in the good ‘ole days.

What’s Left to Give up?

I love watching weight loss stories on the news.  First, people who are terrifically skinny, even in the camera-adds-ten-pounds world of TV are the ones doing the reporting.  I am not sure that Robin Roberts or Diane Sawyer have ever had an issue with their weight.

Obviously, dieting stories are good for ratings, because they are constantly running them, but somehow more and more people are getting fat.  If the stories were even somewhat helpful some part of the population would be getting thinner; perhaps the group who watched the news.   But that does not seem to be the case.

My favorite reporting about weight control is when the anchor reports on the outright dangers of consuming one food or drink, such as sugar-laden sodas or 600 calorie Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappuccino.   No S**t.  I have not had a drink with real sugar in it in at least 30 years.  Oh, maybe I had a sip of real lemonade, but once I realize that liquid sugar had just gurgled down my throat, I throw down that cup and run.  I would always rather eat my calories, than drink them any day.

Another liquid culprit often blamed for weight gain is alcohol.  I have a friend, who shall remain nameless, announced to a group of women on a church retreat that she was not drinking wine that weekend, but instead was having vodka because she was on a diet.

Since I gave up drinking in 1984, not for dietary reasons, but because I drank too much one night in Miami and lost my underpants.  When I woke-up with the worst hangover on earth without those panties I swore I would never drink again until I found them.  Suffice it to say I no longer have alcohol to give up to help lose weight.

Gluten is the new darling of foods-that-should-never-pass-your-lips, as is the anti-white-food group, white food being made up of white flour and sugar.  So I too have given up sugar and most flour, except a little of that magic Wondra that makes pan-sautéed fish so good.  But is that the answer?  Probably not.

The latest report on the news that I actually think might be a winner is giving up your big plates.  They say that if you use a smaller plate and fill it up, your brain thinks you actually ate more than if you used a big plate and put a smaller amount of food on it.  So small plates it is.  And thank god, because I am running out of things to give up.

Note to readers:

If you have been missing recipes, I have been away in NYC and taking Carter to Camp Cheerio so I have not been home to cook.  Please send me messages of what you are craving so I can make up some new recipes for things you want to eat.

Foodie Torture?

When a Foodie dreams of nirvana, that dream is set in New York City.  Every type of cuisine is available there, sometimes better than the original version.  Italian, French, Afghan, Szechuan, New American, Old American, Raw Food, Jewish, Indian, both Southern and Northern, etc, etc, etc.

So what happens when a Foodie goes to New York, but has to ignore the cup cake shops on every corner, the baskets of croissants left casually under her nose at breakfast, the platters of artisanal cheeses offered at dessert or the pistachio gelato gleaming green in the window of the shop she was waiting in front of?  What happens, what happens?  Salads, tuna tartar and omelets happen.  And thanks to the diversity that is New York, even eating the same foods multiple times  never feels, or tastes repetitive.

The fabulous meals at the Modern and Atlantic grill were mirror images of each other in name only.  Their own renditions were so different from each other that I felt as if my diet was as varied as the clothes on an Upper East Side socialite and a meat packing district drag queen.

The best find was the salad bar in Macy’s flagship store basement.  There amongst the fresh made manicotti and the hot pastrami sandwiches was a huge bowl of peppery arugula.  Thank god, a Foodie was so satisfied.

Teeny bopper diet

I think that I might have stumbled upon a new diet while in NYC with Carter, my 13 year old daughter.

Its basis is in the overwhelming love a teenage girl can have for a young, barely discovered teen idle with all of two songs to his name. Say, someone named Austin Mahone perhaps.

If you and that daughter have to go stand in a line wrapping two blocks from the front of the line along with 2,000 other star struck girls with one bored parent in tow, there is no thought of food.

If, while standing in that non-moving line for an hour, lightening and thunder happening, followed by, you guessed it, torrential downpours — there is no thought of food while you huddle under a cheep street-vendor umbrella.

Once inside the mostly standing room only venue, the crowd of young girls, all equally in love with this teenaged
-boy chartreuse, begin to pulsate with excitement. Raising arms high in the air to fist pump to the music, bouncing in unison; clearly the best workout on earth.

At the end of the concert, the overwhelming excitement of having been so close to the next Elvis, creates such a rush of endorphins that the young teen does not even realize she had not eaten anything for the last seven hours.

Now, that is a diet. If only there was a middle-age woman version of this diet I would write the book and make a killing.

Sweet Corn and Cherry Tomato Salad

I love to grill corn in the husk.  It keeps it moist and develops the sugars when it caramelizes a little.  It is easy.  Pull back the husks leaving them attached and clean out the silks.  Pull the husk back up and soak the ear with water.  Grill on a medium high fire about 15 minutes turning it so all sides get the heat.

You can choose to cook the corn any way you like.

6 ears of corn- cooked and kernels cut off the cob

1 pint of cherry tomatoes- halved

1 shallot minced

25 basil leaved cut in thin strips (Chiffonade)

5 T. white wine vinegar

1T. Olive oil

5 Splenda packets

Salt and Pepper

Whisk together the vinegar, oil, Splenda salt and pepper in a bowl.  Add everything else.

How Old Is That Meat In Your Freezer?

Have you ever seen the TV show Hoarders on A & E TV?  It basically takes people with a fairly serious mental illness and trades them help from professionals if they allow cameras to film how crazy they are.  It is a somewhat disgusting show, but I watch it.  The best thing I get from watching the show is the feeling that I must get up and clean something out of my house right away and I always have some area in my house that could use some serious purging.

There are a couple of traits I have noticed over the years that many of the hoarders have in common besides the obvious trouble with throwing much of anything away.  One is that often have too many pets to remember and so when a cat goes missing amidst the piles of magazines and cabbage patch doll collections they don’t really miss it because one of the other 23 cats will keep the hoarder’s attention.

Another common trait is hoarders often have things in their freezers that have been there for decades.  Each Hoarder considers the freezer some magic box that can arrest all decay from any food put inside.  (I am not even going to discuss the contents of their refrigerators.)

If you have never worked in a commercial kitchen or taken a food safety course let me be the first to tell you that even food in the freezer has a “shelf life.”  So get up right now and go open the freezer and throw at least three things away.  Good items to start with are ice cream that is over two months old (if you have been able to keep ice cream that long, congratulations on your will power), bread or ground meet that is more than 3 months old, or here is one I hate, but bacon that is more than a month in the freezer needs to be disposed of.

I am guilty of filling my freezer full of food I have cooked too much of and then never gotten around to eating it.  It does not help that I have a child who hates leftovers; I tell her she was born in the wrong family.  I also have a freezer in the garage that tends to fill up with ice so I have to do a giant defrost and throw everything away all at once.

The TLC TV channel has a show called Extreme Couponing that practically celebrates hoarding just because these people have been able to get stuff for pennies on the dollar.  There is no way that a family will ever be able to eat 700 boxes of hamburger helper before they die of a coronary.

So I am committing to be more mindful of what I already have and try and use it before I purchase something new.  And if I find things that no one in my house is going to eat I am going to give it away while it is still good.

I’m going to the freezer now, and am thankful the garbage will be picked up in 36 hours.  What about you?

Dieting Is All In Your Brain

Some people eat to live, all 6 of them and then there are the rest of us.  One of the things about doing this challenge is I have become the “diet whisper” to so many.  Now I certainly don’t mind sharing my 40 plus years of dieting knowledge, since I have lost multiple hundreds of pounds over my lifetime.  What most people and I really need is a “weight maintenance whisperer.”

Losing weight is exciting and maintaining that loss is dull boring and really a life’s work.  It is certainly not something I have mastered and am clearly a long way off from worrying about right now.  First, lose the weight.

So if you are looking for the real secret about losing weight, here it is…your brain has decide to do it and then your body will follow.  So if you are struggling with trying to lose weight stop trying.  Ask yourself if you really want to do it.  Once your brain says it’s in then your body will join.  Why?  Because changing your habits takes every bit of strength your brain has.

I heard an interesting bit of information the other day.  You don’t just make a couple of decisions about what to eat everyday, but more like two thousand decisions.  Do I have the turkey?  If I do, should I have cheese with it?  What kind of cheese? How much cheese?  I probably should not have the cheese, but now that the idea of cheese has entered my brain I really want the cheese.  I could just forget the turkey and eat the cheese.  But one little piece of cheese won’t fill me up and I will still be hungry.  Making the right decision 2000 times a day is practically impossible.

The exhaustive fight to do the right thing begins to take up all your brains computing power.  No wonder most of us give up the fight because we actually have to do something else, like go to work, the laundry or remember to pick your kid up at school.  The headmaster does not accept the excuse, “sorry I was late, my brain was fighting over the apple versus cookie decision.”

So find a way to get your mind in the game first and then do everything possible so your brain can’t get you out of it.  My way is publicly announcing I am doing this, but I know that way is more than a little crazy.  It is my crazy brain I have to work with.

Mindfulness — or more often than not, Mindlessness

This morning while looking out our bedroom window that overlooks my precious vegetable garden Russ calmly says, “There are three deer outside.”

I jump from bed and flew open the sash and scream at these unknowing thieves at the top of my lungs, which most of you know is quite an unholy sound.  The two does and one buck lazily look up at me, some 100 feet in the air from them and feel no fear what so ever.

It took Russ running outside, clapping loudly to run off the pepper-plant-eating-vermin.  Now I don’t want to hear from all you Bambie lovers until you have had a few hundred plants that you tended lovingly from seedling into just-about-to-bear-beautiful-fruit-full-grown-plants mindlessly gnawed on by deer who decide half-way through destruction that maybe this was not what they were craving.

Mindlessness is something we all can be accused of.  Just last weekend I received an invitation from a relative I refuse to name for a family reunion on May 4.  This being May 30 I consulted another relative who had received the same card and we quickly figured out she meant August 4.

Later that day I went to visit a different relative, whom I also refuse to name, who had ruined a pair of $6,700 hearing aids because she had put them in the microwave.  Apparently she was supposed to put just one small part in the microwave to clean it, but in a moment of distraction she just put the whole thing in the cleaning tube and sparked it all up.

Those mindless eating deer drove me to such perturbation that while making my standard breakfast of high protein Special K with some beautiful sweet blackberries I poured iced tea on it rather than milk.  As soon as I saw that brown liquid rise to flake level I came too and quickly dumped the liquid out of the bowl while holding all the solids in place.

Since the tea was in just a moment the flakes were still crisp, thanks to that industrialization process Kelloggs perfected to help keep cereal from turning to mush within seconds of liquid touching it.  I went to the fridge and pulled out the bottle of Maple View Farms skim milk, which had only about one cereals’ worth still in it.  I tipped the bottle up and poured the remaining milk into the bowl only to be met by a yogurt like substance covering my delicate blackberries and doomed flakes.

Cursing the deer for diverting my attention away from my regular routine of always smelling the milk before pouring (there is no excuse for the tea) I realized how easy it is to get distracted from doing the simplest things.

So is the case with heathly eating.  I know that I can go mindlessly about eating something I shouldn’t and never really realize, appreciate or register that I have eaten it.

With this wake up call I am dedicating myself to mindfulness.  Not just about eating, but about living, and a little about finding those deer and scaring them so badly that they vow to never come near my garden again.

The Numbers

“How much?”  Is the question I keep getting.

“How much what?” I ask.  The answers have been all over the place.

“How much weight have you lost?”

“How many people are pledging?”

“How close to $1,000 per pound lost are you?”

“How many green beans are in the green bean recipe?”

“How many people have you e-mailed this stuff to?”

To satisfy all these seekers of information I will be publishing all the numbers on the first of every month.  And this being June 1, oh no, it’s already June 1, I am reporting.

Weight lost:  12 pounds.  Now don’t get excited you skinny people who never had to go on a diet before.  12 pounds in three weeks is not my run rate, and if you know me, you know I rarely use the word run in any sentence that has to do with me.  If I remain diligent I might be able to lose 6-7 pounds a month.  Remember I am old, I take thyroid medicine and my life-long love affair with food has not changed.  I just have to keep coming up with more healthy recipes.

How many people have pledged?  146 pledging units, (a unit is an individual, couple or family.)  Pledges are coming not just from North Carolinians, but also from boarding school and college friends who live in places like Ohio, Rhode Island, New York and Pennsylvania.  One touching pledge came from a thirteen year old friend who is donating part of her Bat Mitzvah money.  Now that’s a good deed.

How close to $1,000:  Right now I am at $461.73 – easy math – That is 46% to dollar goal.  I am overwhelmed with the generosity of you pledgers.  If you do the math the average pledge is $3.16.  The highest pledge is $25 per pound, but every pledge, big or small is important.  I love the  enthusiasm of one friend who liked the blog so much she upped her pledge from $2-$5.  I hope you feel like you are getting value for money.

How many Green beans?  As many as you have.  Remember they are addictive and you will be sorry if you don’t make a bunch.

How many people have I e-mailed?  Too many to count.  It has got to be obnoxious when people see my name in their in-box.  So if you are reading this maybe you could e-mail it to a few people you know.  Once I get to $1,000 I will stop asking you to do anything except maybe work out with me, still not so good at running.

It is not too late to pledge.  In fact it is never too late to pledge.  So if you or your unit has not received a thank you note from me click on the pledge tab now!!  I need you and you know I will love you and your unit more for it!