Arizona On The Wrong Side of History
Posted: February 26, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: anit-gay, Arizona, Jan Brewer, SB 1062 1 Comment
A bunch of state politicians in Arizona came up with this bill, SB1062 that allows business owner to refuse service to anyone they want based on the owner’s religious beliefs. The people supporting the bill say that it is not an anti-gay bill, but a religious freedom bill. Come on people. Religious freedom means you have the right to worship who and what you want, it does not mean that as a business you can pick and chose who to serve.
Nothing about your religion says you have to have a business, but if you do then you should serve all customers equally. If this bill passes then not only will prejudice people find an excuse not to serve gay people but also all minorities could be in jeopardy based on the way this bill is written. Any shortsighted, bigoted business owner could say their religion does not believe in African Americans, or Native Americans or Hispanics.
Business owners are down right crazy not to want to serve gay people. Don’t they know they have more discretionary income than the average bigoted white guy? If the gay community likes your business that usually means you are on the way up. If you want to buy a house in an up and coming neighborhood when there is a lot of potential to make big bucks find out where the gay men are moving. They are good for improving the neighborhood for sure. Lesbians are loyal customers. Once you have a devoted Lesbian following you will have steady income because if they like you they will be back and bring friends.
Gay rights are the civil right of our time. Arizona is not only behind the times but taking more than a few huge steps backwards in history by even getting this bill this far. Governor Jan Brewer is taking too long to veto this bill. She says she will do what is right for Arizona, but the damage is done. Those of us who have gay people themselves should not step foot in that state and give them any of our hard earned dollars. Religious freedom is one thing, but lack of revenue is what worries most business owners.
Smash Day
Posted: February 25, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: breasts, mammogram 1 Comment
Losing weight when you have extra pounds is a good thing, right? But where it comes off and in what order is something most people just have control over. I seem to melt like a candle losing from the top down with a little bit of losing from the bottom up with my feet getting thinner long before my thighs.
One area on the top that seems to go fast are my boobs, which is not a bad thing because if they did not get smaller as the rest of me did I would probably fall over. The real problem is that the fat disappears but the skin sticks around. Now my boobs are like blueberry pancakes with one blueberry each.
Thank goodness for modern day shape wear that can hoist, hold, mold and cup my malleable breasts into a more pleasing shape and no one is the wiser that I could tie them in a knot and throw them over my shoulder like a continental soldier. That is until today.
Today was my annual smash day or mammogram day to use the correct terminology. If you are a man or a woman under forty you don’t have intimate knowledge of the contraption they use to smash down a woman’s breasts to the flattest possible shape to take pictures of them. In the mammogram community my kind of soft tissue, stretched out and pliable breasts are a bonus for the smash tech. She can lay them on out and lower the clear plastic smasher cover on me without any trouble. The pictures she snaps are perfect first take. In the mammo tech world I am the client that gets them back on schedule.
So hooray that today my flabbiness made someone happy. I appreciate the tech’s comments that I was the patient of the day. I know why and she did not even have to spell it out. Thanks for not mentioning my soft breast tissue like bra fitters do when they are trying to come up with the right bra to act as scaffolding for my chest yet is still comfortable.
364 days a year my boobs are usually undesirable, but one day, the day dedicated to their health they are just right. No matter what kind of breasts you have get them smashed once a year. Don’t listen to those men who think you don’t need a mammogram every year. Get one anyway. Whatever shape you are in you need to take care of them.
Giving Yourself Credit
Posted: February 24, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: fitbit, pre-nup Leave a comment
I like credit. Not the kind that involves money but the kind you get when you do something good. That could explain why I am addicted to my fitbit. I like getting credit for every step I walk. I wear the thing to bed not so it can track how well I’m sleeping, but so it can count the 32 steps I take when I get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night.
I hate when I get an e-mail from my fitbit that tells me the battery is low in the middle of the day because it worries me to death that it is going to stop working before I have a chance to recharge and I will take a bunch of steps and get no credit for them. I don’t know why it matters. Only a couple of friends are part of my fitbit community and they don’t give two shakes if I get 140,000 steps in a week or 40,000. Whatever this addiction is it is working for me. Counting, credit, accountability I’m addicted to them all as long as they are created, and counted by me!
I was talking to a friend today who told me about someone who married a much older and much richer man who put a clause in her pre-nup agreement that said if she gained ten pounds he was allowed to divorce her. Now that kind of accountability would work the total opposite on me. I don’t like when someone else tells me what to do or sets the parameters for how I am supposed to live. If I were married to that man I probably would gain the weight on purpose just to see what he would do. I can’t imagine living under that kind of dictatorship.
I am sure that wife did not get credit for keeping to her weight range. It was demanded so then it’s like a punishment and not a reward. I wonder what other stipulations were in that pre-nup? I’m sure that husband demanded his own kind of regular rewards. That’s not a marriage; I think it’s called something else you pay for.
So many times people ask me how I’ve lost weight and then ask me if I could talk to one of their loved ones they wish would lose weight. That is where I stop them. No one can talk someone into wanting to lose weight. Each person has to come to that decision on their own and only then will it be possible to happen. It can’t be a clause in their life.
I take credit for what I have done, but I am thankful for the help my loved ones have given me. I am mostly thankful that I have been loved at every weight up and down the scale. I give my loved ones credit for their support.
Mindlessly Ruining a Good Look
Posted: February 23, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: chewing, gum 2 Comments
When I was in boarding school I had plenty of friends who smoked cigarettes. They were allowed to do it at any age as long as they had permission from their parents. There was one room, the butt room where they were allowed to smoke and it was a disgusting and fowl smelling room that never tempted me to visit.
I once asked a friend who was a smoker why she did not smoke outside rather than in the gross butt room. She said that a lady should never be seen smoking outside and the butt room kept her allusion of being a lady. I think that Jackie Kennedy, who attended a rival school to mine, followed this rule. There are no pictures of Jackie smoking even though she was a reported butt addict.
Today I was at a the grocery and I saw a very elegant lady, dressed in a St. John Knit suit get out of her new Mercedes coupe. She was at least ten years older than I was and I thought she looked so nice compared to me in my tennis shoes and khakis. That was until I looked at her face and saw her jaw bobbing up and down, mouth half opened as she chew a piece of gum. She mashed away on the gum with no idea that she resembled a cow chewing its cud out in a field alone. If only she were alone.
Just as “ladies” of the last century were schooled in the no smoking in public graces it seems like chewing gum needs to have a similar campaign. Today’s St. John lady lost all elegant points because of the little wad of gum. Perhaps it was nicotine gum and she needed it because she is not allowed to smoke inside public places anymore, but it that was the case she needs to learn about the patch.
I wish I had been bold enough to videotape her to show you how unattractive the gum chewing was, but then I surely could be sued for deformation of character if this woman ever saw my blog.
My mother started smoking when she was young because her mother told her to have a cigarette to help curb her appetite. I know some people who chew gum to help them not eat. Listen, the calories are worth not making you look a barnyard animal. Gum chewing is fine in the privacy of your own home or car; just remember to spit it out before encountering the public. Just don’t spit it on the ground that is littering.
Harris Beverage Good Guys
Posted: February 22, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: Budweiser, Food Bank of Central and Eastern NC, Harris Beverage 1 Comment
A few months ago my neighbor and friend Jay Harris who owns Harris Beverages the local Budweiser and other craft beer distributor told me about how much fun he had when he went to an national meeting and all the beer guys volunteered at the local food bank. Knowing I am the chair of the Food Bank of Central and Eastern NC he asked me if we had volunteer opportunities at our food bank. “Boy, do we,” came out of my mouth as fast as if I was a child being asked do you want candy and cookies for lunch.
See our food bank is in the top ten of the two hundred Feeding America Food Banks across the country in terms of volunteer utilization. We have seven branches in our thirty-four counties and everyday we have volunteers working in our branches that more than double our paid work force.
Jay and I started to talk about what might be a good one-day job for Harris Beverages to do as a team building exercise for the whole company. Now people can come and sort food, package potatoes or do any number of valuable jobs, but there was one thing I had in mind that was made for a group of strong men with big trucks so I floated the idea to Jay to have Harris help the Durham branch move from it’s old location to it’s new bigger branch.
The cost of moving would be thousands of real dollars to us if we had to pay for it. Paying to move would have taken food away from people who need it. If it cost us $8,000 that would equal $80,000 worth of food since we can turn every dollar into ten dollars worth of food. But moving our warehouse was a big job. Jay did not hesitate and got right on working out all the logistics with our staff.
This morning Harris beer trucks, pallet jacks and employees showed up early on a Saturday morning and moved us. I hope they had fun because I know it was a big job. That is the kind of corporate giving back that makes Harris a wonderful Durham company. Thank you Jay for not even blinking an eye when I suggested helping with the move as a volunteer opportunity. I am proud you are my friend.
To all the citizens of Durham and Chapel Hill if you are thinking about buying a beer this week or this month buy a Bud, or a Big Boss, Carolina Brewery, Sweet Water or a New Leaf Tea if you don’t like beer. No one made Jay Harris volunteer to help the Food Bank. We don’t give beer away as part of our mission to make sure no one in Central in Eastern NC goes hungry, but Jay wanted to do something to help us and boy did all those Harris Employees ever help. So thank them by buying a beer.
Virgin No More
Posted: February 20, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: Charlotte, Lynn, Pure Barre 1 Comment
For years my friend Lynn has been addicted to Pure Barre. If you have not heard of this exercise obsession you might be living under a rock in North Korea or you are a middle-aged man. The Barre, said like bar and has nothing to do with drinking, stands for the wooden ballet barre attached to the mirrored wall. I don’t know why it’s called Pure because plenty of the exercises are done in the middle of the room with no bar to hold onto.
Lynn would ask me every once in a while if I wanted to go to class with her. Since I was emotionally scared by my Russian ballet teacher Martha Kruger when I was ten I tend to stay away from those wooden dowels attached to mirrors. Fear of being whapped on the back of the knees by a swift yardstick is a strong bad memory not to be repeated.
After years of being a student of Pure Barre Lynn and our friend Charlotte bought not just the existing Chapel Hill studio, but built a new one in Durham. The craze was spreading and it was time for me to see what all these friends claiming their lifted derrieres was due to this class was all about.
Since I was a Pure Barre virgin and I was not interested in going to a class of well trained, well toned, very young people I asked Lynn to go with me. Lynn is two of those three things so I knew she would look out for me.
The first thing I really liked about the class was the clothing rules, pants at least Capri length and shirts that covered your middle are required, check and check. I refuse to put anyone through a class with me that shows my bare stomach. The third clothing item is socks, but sticky socks are recommended. Lucky for me Lynn hooked me up with a pair of the branded sticky socks that are supposed to help you stay in place.
As we entered the carpeted room where Rita out instructor was, Lynn staked out the perfect spot and gathered the equipment I would need, hand weights, a small red rubber ball like a grade school four square ball, but just the size of a cantaloupe, and looped stretchy bands.
The class began and clearly I was the only new student. Rita helped me but there was only so much help I could get when planking. Most of the exercises were familiar to a point until we got to tucking. Tucking involved something akin to tilting my pelvis in and pulling my butt under me as much as possible. I certainly do not have a grasp on exactly how to do it so don’t bank on my description. I do think that twerking had to evolve out of tucking, but I am not exactly sure what twerking is either.
As others around me could hold one leg in the air, while lying on their back, tuck and lift to a pulsating beat I was just trying not to drown in the sweat pool I was creating around myself. Perhaps I needed doubly sticky socks for some exercises that involved holding myself in place by one foot on the ground while lifting all my other parts.
When it was all over Rita said I did a good job for a first time student. What was really nice of her not to say was I did really well for an uncoordinated, non-dancer, non-gymnast, and non-athlete middle-aged woman with no rhythm. Other students gathered around me as I lay immobilized on the mat after class and told me it takes a little while to master the moves and then it gets harder.
When they said harder I hope they were talking about their backsides and not the class. It was hard enough. Like all things exercise I know that it takes a few tries before it should be judged. I am measuring how low my butt is now and after I do this Pure Barre thing a while I will report if my backside is lifted. Since I rarely look back there it has not been a big area of concern for me, but that seems awfully selfish to those people who have to walk behind me.
Not Killed By My Pants
Posted: February 19, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: workout wear, yoga pants 1 Comment
A couple of weeks ago my trainer looked at me in my stretchy workout/yoga pants and told me I need to buy some smaller ones. Really? Stretchy black tight pants that have not worn out are just fine with me especially if they are not skin tight. I am never going to wear a pair of those things out when I only wear them to work out and don’t live in them like real athletes do. I also have no need for total body hugging since it is not like I am running so fast and am worried about drag. The only drag I like is the kind that my Washington friends do when they borrow my old formal wear.
I had noticed that I had a little more room in the thighs of my yoga pants, an area that is almost always the tightest spot on me, but I was kind of enjoying non-thigh-clinging pants. The idea of having to go try on athletic wear, even in a smaller size is not my idea of fun. In the world of tight bodies I am still a non-performer. The women who work out for a living and work at workout wear stores just for the discounts look at me as a failure athlete.
If I had a giant paper cutout of what I used to look like a hundred and forty five pounds ago they might treat me differently, but since I am still not a hard body and probably never will be, I am dismissed as a person who is buying yoga pants because they are stretchy and forgiving and not because I might actually do yoga, or lift weights or walk 20,000 steps a day, which by the way is over nine miles of my pitiful strides.
I continued to wear my baggy pants. That was until yesterday when I was walking at my treadmill desk at a brisk 3.2 miles per hour that is almost running for me and my pants fell down. I am happy to report I was coordinated enough not to have been dragged under the belt of the treadmill and strangled by my pants.
So my trainer was right. I needed to stop wearing those too big pants. I went to my trusty closet of dreams where the too small clothes live and found a lovely pair of barley used workout pants that seemed to fit the size I am now just fine. The thigh area is a little tighter, the butt is definitely not as lose, but hey I did not have to go to one of those stores that makes me feel badly about myself.
I wish that the same people who conceived the Dove beauty campaign that celebrates all types of women would move into the workout wear segment. If all women were praised for working out the body they have and not made to feel like they are unworthy if they don’t already have a perfect body then the sales of workout clothes would soar. I doubt I will get to be a smaller size in yoga pants than the pair I am wearing now so I am going to have to baby the few ones I have. I am happy with myself and don’t need to go in a store and have an hourly worker make me feel otherwise.
Compliments Go a Long Way
Posted: February 18, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: crown, Dentist Leave a commentToday I got my second of two crowns in the New Year. Not my favorite thing to do, but better than the alternative. I have a really nice young Dentist, Andrew who came into his father’s practice a couple of years ago. I lay silently and still in the chair following all the instructions Andrew gave me as he checked and adjusted the tiny new molar. When we were almost done he said to me, “You are a really good patient.”
I thought it was a funny compliment. I just did as I was told and why wouldn’t I? I figure if I do something wrong it would make his job harder and that might cause me pain. Rather than asking what makes a good patient I just took the compliment and reveled in being good at something even if it was as small as being still and compliant.
Accepting compliments is an art I feel is under appreciated. So often when I tell a grown woman she looks good that day the comeback is hardly ever just, “Thank you.” More often than not the laudation is met with some discounting. “Oh no. The bags under my eyes are horrible,” or “I have not even had a shower today.” Those statements are not meaning to fish for more compliments, but they sometimes end up making me intensify the original statement. What I should say is, “Wow, if you look this good dirty imagine how great you would look if you put some effort in it.”
By not responding to my Dentist’s comment I was able to just enjoy being told I was good at something which does not happen as often as we need once we get to adulthood. Perhaps he did not mean to even say it out loud, but I’m glad he did. It made my day a little better and smoothed over any feeling I had about having to get the crown in the first place.
I have no idea if Andrew tells all his patients they are good, but his tone sounded very sincere. It seems like it would be the best client retention program ever if when you left the dentist you felt a little better about yourself and not just that your teeth looked better.
I think this practice could be adopted by all kinds of service providers. When my plumbers come to my house they could tell me that I have the cleanest toilets. When I go for my annual annual (you women know what I am talking about) the Doctor could tell me I’m really good at putting my feet in those stirrups.
It’s just a better practice than telling people they aren’t good at things. Like when I walk through a department store and a lady at the cosmetic counter asks a question like, “What are you using on your face? I have something much better.” Yes, you may have something better, but do you think I want to talk to you now that you have insulted me?
So give someone a sincere compliment tomorrow. I hope they can accept it and enjoy it. Not only will you brighten their day, but they will probably think a little more kindly of you. That’s a win win.
Happy President’s Day
Posted: February 17, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Washington Leave a comment
Today is the holiday known as Presidents’ Day as well as Washington’s Birthday or Washington and Lincoln’s Birthday. It also happens to be my friends from college Suzanne and Rena’s birthday too! Seems like a good enough reason to celebrate.
When I was a kid we had both Washington’s Birthday off and Lincolns even though they both fell in February. Then along came the Martin Luther King birthday day — off in January and Washington and Lincoln got lumped together because the government was just giving away too many holidays!
Who knows when the next politician or great social leader is going to appear and be worthy of a holiday? Seems like with all the media we have on people it is going to be tough for anyone else to be clean enough to warrant getting a day of their own.
I am not in the mood to reward any politicians except for one who might be able to bring back the art of negotiation and compromise. That seems like a tall order given the polarization of the parties.
It seems to me that President’s Day is a lower ranking Holiday than most and I wonder if that is because since it is now named for all the President’s we are averaging how worthy they all were. I have not heard of anyone lobbying for a national holiday for Pierce, Tyler or Harding. According to a ranking done by great American Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. there are only three Presidents who rank in the “Great” rating, Lincoln, Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt. There are seven in the “Failure” ranks, Pierce, Grant, Hoover, Nixon, Andrew Johnson, Buchanan and Harding. These rankings were not Schlesinger’s opinion alone, but a poll taken of a large group of famous University Historians and scholars like Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Have we diluted the importance of the original day by honoring all the Presidents no matter how effective they were? My suggestion is we lump President’s Day together with Martin Luther King’s birthday and have one holiday called Great Leader’s Day. Anytime someone comes up that we are thinking we should honor we could throw him or her into that day. No discussion needed, just jump on in.
This would free up a lot of congressional time not arguing and voting on new holidays so they could spend time actually solving real problems. Not that I actually think congress is capable of solving real problems. I just want to take away all the excuses for wasting time on things like ‘Flag Burning,” deciding if we need “Emergency Chiropractors,” or a “Jay Walking Database” – real bills –look it up.
So today is Great Leaders and Great Friends birthday to me. One day is no different than the next to a middle aged woman without full time employment I just like a reason to celebrate without argument.
Dancing Fun
Posted: February 15, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: valentines dance 2 Comments
Last night a group I am part of had a Valentines dinner dance. After the snow days of the last three nights it was great to get out of the house, dress in non-thermal clothes, catch up with friends, eat a dinner that someone else made and dance.
This Valentines dance is not Russ’ idea of the perfect way to celebrate, but it certainly got him off the hook to come up with a better plan. I guess that his agreeing to go should have been seen as his gift to me. Not that Russ is anti-social, but dancing is not his first choice activity.
After a nice cocktail hour and a dinner at long elegant tables set in the ballroom that reminded Russ of a Harry Potter Hogwarts set up, the band came out. The lead singer, Gwen had been my friend Stephanie’s nanny when her kids were little so of course I wanted to support her and do some dancing. It was the polite thing to do.
I had already walked almost 20,000 steps before I got to the party so I also thought dancing might be a way to get to a higher step milestone and reach 30,000 steps in one day, a level I have never reached. As the three singers dressed in red sequin tops and tight red slacks with very high heels belted out one classic after another Russ willing stayed on the dance floor with me.
Friend Holley said to Laura the ever-present photographer, “Get a picture, the Lange’s have never spent so much time on the dance floor.” For the almost two hour first set we danced to every song, well I danced to every song. Russ was allowed to be a spectator with the other husbands when the majority of women took the stage as back-up singers to my favorite tune, “Proud Mary.”
After doing all that rolling on the river I finally gave Russ his valentine’s gift of getting to go home. It was eleven at night on a Friday and he had hardly slept more than four hours the night before. As soon as we left the no-wifi ballroom I pulled out my phone to see how many steps I had added during the dance-a-thon. I was shocked that in two hours of dancing I had only gotten 6,000 more steps. What a disappointment. My day ended with just over 26,000 steps. Yes, it was a record for me, but not a milestone in the world of fitbit, no congratulatory e-mail, no virtual badge, nothing.
Although I did not reach the mountain top I did have a very fun night with my sweetheart. He did sacrifice and dance and dance and dance with me. Dancing for exercise is probably better than just walking so I am looking it that way. I just wish my dumb fitbit had a way to give me credit for arm movement and hip shaking.
Valentines Advice For All
Posted: February 14, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: valentine's day 1 Comment
Valentines Day needs to go back to being a day for grade school kids to trade small snoopy cards with corny, but true sayings like, “Love is a warm puppy.” For most of us the pressure is too great to have one day where we must declare our love for our sweetie in the grandest form, or even worse for those without a one special someone it makes you feel even more alone.
No “holiday,” especially a Hallmark one, should make people feel badly, yet those in love have every right to celebrate. But really if you have someone in your life who makes the sun shine brighter, the wind feel less cold and a peach taste sweeter you don’t need a declarative day to celebrate how blessed you are.
For anyone for whom this day makes you want to stay under the covers I have a few bits of advice:
- Loving yourself is most important. If you don’t like you it makes it hard to recognize when others love you.
- Friends of the same gender are as important as a sweet heart.
- Don’t concentrate your efforts on one person who does not appear to know you are alive.
- Real people are not like celebrities and don’t walk around as airbrushed as movies stars, so stop looking for someone who might show up on Entertainment Tonight.
- If you are looking at someone who is not looking at you, turn around and look at who might be looking at you.
- More importantly, listen to what others are saying and stop listening with your eyes. The right person for you might not make a swimsuit issue.
- Life is long and when you do find someone you want to love him or her forever. Looks will fade, but funny lasts forever.
- Everyone needs someone who will hold his or her hand in public at every age. If you find that you have found gold.
- A dog will always love you.
For those who have a sweetheart I have this advice for you:
- Love yourself first; it makes it easier for others to love you.
- Friends of the same gender are as important as a sweet heart.
- Ignore people who don’t know you are alive.
- Don’t worry about your wrinkles; if you ever are on Entertainment Tonight they can airbrush them.
- Don’t turn around to see who is looking at you it will just cause trouble.
- Listen to your sweetheart and don’t ask them how you look in your swimsuit.
- Laugh at your darling’s jokes, even if they are not funny.
- Hold hands, everywhere at every age.
- Your dog will always love you.
Triple Shoveling Workout
Posted: February 13, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: shoveling, snow Leave a comment
As a child of Connecticut I learned that the earlier you shovel snow the easier it is. As a southern resident my neighbors often accost me about my need to shovel while snow is still coming down.
“Why don’t you just walk with us in the snow?” a friend asked as she passed by while I was pushing the light fluffy flakes from my walkway last evening. “It’s still coming down, what’s the use?”
I don’t love snow. I guess I had enough of it as a child to keep me for the rest of my life. Yes it is beautiful to look at, especially when it just falls, but as it melts and refreezes, or turns a grey dingy color from being mixed with the dirt in the world, or worse yet, yellow from visiting dogs, it does not hold that same magic it does when it is small silent flakes floating to the ground.
Last night I shoveled our front walkways. There was not much need, I did it for the exercise and so I did not have to put on full winter boots every time I needed to take Shay out to make snow yellow. Then the freezing rain came so this morning I got up early and chopped up the crispy layer on my shoveled path and threw it to the side of the walkway.
Now it is snowing again. Carter announced the path was filling in. Ah, but it wasn’t hard heavy snow, just another layer of light and fluffy. I went out and with ease I pushed away the newest layer before it has a chance to melt and refreeze and become tough and heavy snow that refreezes into ice overnight.
Shoveling is the kind of workout I like to do. It is full body, aerobic and free. I do get a few steps while doing it, nothing like the treadmill, but I have the added bonus of getting core and arm workout. We had a gravel driveway so there is no way to have fun shoveling that. It would be a lot more useful if I could clear a path for cars, but I hate to throw the gravel into the lawn and unfortunately that is what I end up doing in the driveway.
Perhaps I like shoveling because it reminds me of the carefree days of my youth, not that I ever shoveled willing as a child. I am sure that my mother had to scream plenty at me to go outside and shovel. My father had a snow blower since we had a very long driveway and it was the north after all, but it was started with a rope pull, something I was never very good at. An old fashioned metal shovel was my tool of choice. Now I have a better plastic model that is much improved over the cold metal types.
If you are reading this in North Carolina consider going out and shoveling now. The longer you wait the worse the job gets. And if you do it long enough you can enjoy an extra cup of coco without guilt. If you chose to stay inside, no worries, it is going to be 45 degrees tomorrow and it will all be melted by dinnertime. This is North Carolina after all.
The Best Medicine
Posted: February 12, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: baby Chick 1 Comment
Day five of being home with Carter and her concussion, no thinking, no reading, no TV, no fun mode. It is enough to drive us all crazy. Our friends Lynn, better known as Baby Chick at our house and her daughter Ellis came by for a check-in-cheer up-half-day of-school visit. It was a great distraction to have them here as the snow started to come down.
As we are known to do with our daughters Lynn and I started telling stories. Lynn told Carter of her many falls from her horse Flika, with no helmet on and no grown-ups checking her for concussion. If you know Baby Chick it explains a lot.
I related the story of my being hit by a truck on Mykonos while I was riding a moped with no helmet on. I dislocated my hip, broke my leg and broke my arm in that accident, but was lucky enough to not hit my head.
In that accident I flew over the hood of the truck, which was my choice rather than veering away from it over the side of a mountain, I went twenty feet in the air, flipped and landed on my butt. Fat saved my life. As soon as I realized I could think and was therefore alive I looked down at my hip, which was a good six inches away from where I thought it should be. My first thought was, “I’ve gained a lot of weight on vacation.” It was then I realized that my hip was out of it’s joint and I pushed it back into the socket myself. I was just thankful about the non-weight gain.
My friend David took me to the Vet slash Doctor on the island where he was told by the dubious medical professional there that I was a Strong American Woman and would survive this accident.
As I told the story Lynn piped in and said, “Oh Yeah, you are a STW.” I burst out laughing to the point I gasped for air, and said, “STW? What does the T stand for?” Lynn then joined me in the three-minute bellyaching as our daughter looked on in themselves when laughing is something that horrifies the average fifteen-year-old girl.
Eventually Baby Chick was able to compose herself and explain the ST was for “Strong” she forgot the “American” and threw in the “W” for “Woman.” I think it was the best medicine for Carter to see that if she does not rest her brain until her headache goes away she could end up like Baby Chick and me. Who knows how many head injuries we have had between us.
My Childhood Idol
Posted: February 11, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: Shirley temple 1 Comment
Nobody ever loved Shirley Temple more than I did. When I was a kid a local TV station played one of her movies every Sunday afternoon and I never missed one. There played the same 20 movies over and over. As the world around me was rocking out to Janis Joplin I was singing, “On the good ship Lollipop.” It used to drive my father crazy that I would sob uncontrollably as the sweet mop top little girl would face adversities like being an orphan or losing her beloved grandfather. “It just a movie,” he would tell me trying to consol me, but annoyed at the same time with my Shirley obsession.
Shirley Temple toped the movie box office for three years in a row during the height of the depression when movies were the major form of entertainment with little competition. I watched her feel happy flicks during the turbulent late sixties and seventies. Like people during the depression I was blocking out things I did not understand like the war in Vietnam and hippies.
I think I used Shirley Temple movies to learn history, like the Boer War in The Little Princess or the civil war in The Littlest Rebel. It is amazing I ever went to boarding school myself after watching how Shirley was treated in Captain January and The Little Princess. I also thought that I was an unusual girl since I had both my real parents, neither sang nor danced for a living and the mob was not after us.
Life in Shirley Temple movies was either more glamorous or more destitute than my suburban Connecticut upbringing, but I was addicted to those stories and that sweet girl. I loved when she would look right in the camera and say, “Oh my goodness.” She was clean cut, sometimes sad, more times joyous and so cute.
One of my dear friend’s Tricia and her husband Danny bought Shirley Temple’s Potomac, MD house where she lived during her years in Foreign Service. I always felt that going to their house was almost like getting to meet her. They had a room size safe and I imagined what important mementos she must have stored there.
Shirley Temple is the child star all child actors need to emulate. The day she was given her junior size Oscar award, she said “thank you Mr. Whoever gave it to her,” turned to her mother who was always by her side and said, “Mother, can we go home now?”
Shirley Temple has gone home, but she will always live forever on the big screen and in my heart. I never was embarrassed that as an adolescent I loved Shirley Temple and her living a superlative life she has never let me down.
Soldier On
Posted: February 9, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: jan, kim. blake, rex, wedding shower 4 Comments
In the life goes on mode I threw an engagement shower today for our wonderful friends Jan and Rex’s daughter Kim and her betrothed Blake. Since they had moved to Texas almost four years ago we had a hard time finding a date when we could get all these longhorns back East so the North Carolina crowd could meet Blake before the wedding. Not that Kim needed our blessing, but we were still excited and wanted to fete them.
After much work with calendars Jan and I discovered that today at 2:00 was absolutely the only time we would all be able to gather. So I sent out invitations for a Tea Party Shower, what else could possibly happen on a Sunday afternoon? I knew it was going to be tight to get the whole thing together since Russ and I were going to be out of town until yesterday afternoon, but making finger sandwiches and scones is something I thought I could do in my sleep.
Best laid plans… I never anticipated spending a lifetime in the ER yesterday and having a child with a concussion, terrible headaches and no short-term memory. Today she is not really improved much and the doctor’s order of “no thinking until her headache goes away” is much harder to do than you can imagine.
Despite all that we had a shower today. The happy couple is darling together. It was great to actually meet the groom and see how well he and Kim are suited for each other. I have known Kim for twenty years and it is hard to believe that she is going to be a “Sadie, Sadie, married lady,” as we sing in our best Funny Girl way.
The guests arrived just as I was baking the dried cherry heart shaped scones and putting out the chicken salad, pimento cheese, smoked salmon and cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches. All these things along with the sea salt brownies are forbidden to me, only the lone bowl of red grapes were in my food choice group.
Thank goodness people came hungry and ate and ate and even took a few things home. With the stress of the last two days I easily could have slathered a scone with cream and jam or popped a chicken salad finger in my mouth, but I withheld. I feel like that is a huge turning point.
Now if I can just help Carter recover quickly and not miss too much school I think I can maintain my don’t handle stress with food regime. Life is long and sometimes we just have to soldier on.
The Chef and the Farmer Trip
Posted: February 8, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: Ben Knight, Kinston, NC, the bentley, the chef and the farmer 2 Comments
If you are a PBS devotee, a locavore, a reality TV Junkie, someone born east of I-95 in North Carolina, a chef or a farmer you may have heard of the best show on PBS that was made in America. It’s a first season hit called “A Chef’s Life” that chronicles how Eastern NC girl Vivian Howard escaped the rural life to become a chef in NYC and once married to her front of the house and artist husband Ben Knight, was lured back to her birth place by her parents with the promise of a restaurant of their own.
Russ and I heard about the TV show and since we both love food and all things documentary we did our favorite thing and binged watched it in three nights before Christmas. The show about Vivian and Ben told in each episode through the lens of one local ingredient laid out the tale of the creating a successful restaurant in the unlikely place of Kinston, NC, the demise from a fire, the rebuilding and the flourishing with a few hiccups due to order entry systems and the like, all while having twins and building a new house for themselves.
Russ would salivate over the “Pimp my grits” or the perfectly runny tomato sandwich so it was no surprise to me when I opened a Christmas gift that read, “A night in Kinston at the Chef and the Farmer.” Since Kinston was two hours away and the restaurant is a dinner only kind of place Russ had found the best place to stay in the quaint small town with more empty store fronts than full, a grand Bed and Breakfast called the Bentley.
With hard to obtain reservations in hand and all the logistics to have Carter stay with friends the Hannans who were will to get up and drive her to riding at 7:30 this morning and be picked up by a college friend, Russ and I drove off to Kinston yesterday afternoon. The traffic was not bad and we arrived early enough to meet Linda the fabulous owner of the B&B and settle into a comfy room in the house on the only hill in town.
We arrived early to the restaurant knowing we were in the right spot since it was clearly the place with the most cars in the parking lot. The inside was so familiar since we had practically sat in the dinning room while watching the show on a giant flat screen TV for thirteen hours. Locals greeted us at the bar as if we were kin this was Kinston after all. Russ enjoyed a drink and I had club soda in anticipation of thoroughly breaking my regular diet for this meal.
I won’t make you wait another minute — dinner was worth the drive. We started out sharing a sausage, mustard green and house made mozzarella pizza. Russ, who has red sauce cursing through his veins and can rate every pizza crust from here to Napoli, declared it spectacular. I agreed and not just because it was the first pizza I had eaten in the New Year. Russ followed with one of the three “Pimp my grits” choices, the one with shrimp. To die for. I had the Oyster, & clam pan roast with shrimp and Carolina Gold rice. Delectable, especially for two ingredients that aren’t even listed, the fennel and vermouth that made the whole dish sing. I skipped eating the butter soaked toast in the broth and just sucked up the liquid on a spoon. For dessert Russ got the apple crisp with rosemary ice cream and salted caramel. My bite was cruel since I could only afford the one.
While having coffee Ben refilled our cups and we had a great conversation about his fantastic art on the walls, the TV show and how important we thought the front of the house is to the success of a good restaurant. TV does not convey how generous and what a perfect host he is. Vivian was not on the line last night so we did not get to meet her — An excuse for another visit.
After dinner we retired to the Bentley where we slept soundly and woke to a gorgeous breakfast. Ward, Linda’s husband, who works the corporate life, was conscripted into serving us, this being a Saturday. The B&B is clearly Linda’s passion that they don’t have to do to put gas in their cars, but both Ward and Linda were so delightful that it was the icing on the cake to talk with them for hours after breakfast.
Suddenly we realized it was noon and we wanted to explore the town and have lunch at the Boiler Room, the Oyster Bar that Vivian and Ben started for lunches. As we pulled into town the phone rang in the car and up on the screen it said, “Rolling Hills Stables.” As a mother of a horse back rider when the trainer calls you while your child is there your stomach goes to your throat.
“Is she OK?” I answered the phone.
“She had a fall,” Piper, the trainer tells me. Then my crying child takes the phone. She is alive! Piper gets back on the line and says they are taking her to the ER because she hit her head when she fell off.
Russ backed the car out of the parking lot and we were out of Kinston in a shot. Two hours later we arrived at the hospital where Carter’s two trainers, Piper and Solveig and our great friend Susan were keeping an eye on her as they waited for a CT. While there our friend Ellie who happens to be a radiologist came in to check and our friend Darren an ER nurse was on duty and kept an eye out. Thank god for great friends who are good mothers and fathers to other peoples children.
Carter has a concussion, but no broken bones and is alive. When the doctor told her she was not allowed to do anything including thinking suddenly homework became important.
Russ’ beautiful present ended with six hours at the ER. Carter is asleep in bed, just until we have to wake her and check on her cognition. I had not eaten anything since breakfast and I guess this was a higher powers way of getting me to balance out the fabulous dinner I had last night.
Kinston, I hardly knew you, but what I did meet I really liked. We will be back and we will bring friends and maybe even bring Carter so I can keep an eye on her.
We are Always Students
Posted: February 7, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: Dan Kimberg, Morning Brilliance, Student U 2 Comments
This morning I had the honor of attending the Student U Morning Brilliance breakfast. For those of you who don’t know what Student U is it is a college access program that starts with 50 kids in the summer before 6th grade who have potential to go to college, but have many obstacles to getting there. Student U surrounds, supports, encourages, teaches, introduces, energizes, feeds, cajoles, and just does not let go of these kids until they not only get into and go to college, but now with their first class graduating this year the plan is to continue supporting of these kids through college to ensure successful independence at the end and people who can come back and be the best Durham has to offer.
I am always impressed with the kids, staff, teachers, parents and volunteers at Student U who work hard all the time. When Hilary Clinton wrote it takes a village to raise a child she did not know how Dan Kimberg the Executive Director and his cohorts would expand on that idea to involving a whole big city.
The lessons these kids are learning at Student U are the same ones everyone wishes for their kids. Hard work, curiosity, and accepting help are some of the stepping-stones to having the life you want to have. We don’t go on this journey alone.
These same lessons are ones that we all could take away and use to improve our own lives. At middle age I think I finally got this message and have learned to apply it in things I want to upgrade in myself. The good news is that it is never too late to change, advance, grow and better yourself.
So what do you want to do? Who can you ask for help? How will you give back after you have advanced? It does not have to be a daunting task like being the first person in your family to go to college, but it could be to get a new job, run a 5K, learn a new hobby, or lose ten pounds.
As they say at Student U:
Discover your best self
Achieve greatness
Respect yourself and others
Dream fearlessly
Share your brilliance
Energize your community
To learn more about Student U visit http://www.studentudurham.org
Laugh Yourself Thin
Posted: February 6, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: humor, laughing Leave a comment
When people ask me what my blog is about I sum it up in two words, Diet Comedy. Now that is not all together true since this blog includes healthy recipes, stories about my childhood and some not so funny tips to about losing weight, but the thread that I try to run through most posts is that it is humorous.
For people who don’t know me and somehow have stumbled upon this blog they don’t always know when I am joking about something. Some of the comments I get clearly illustrate their lack of understanding when I am being glib or sarcastic, but their serious replies never bothers me. See, I don’t think that many people think of dieting as being funny and perhaps that contributes to why people hate to do it.
I have taken the opposite tact not just when it comes to dieting but in terms of almost every part of life. Seeing the ridiculous, up surd or funny in things is just more enjoyable. Now it is not always fun for the people around me. I have trouble holding in a good remark when I am in serious meetings. If only I could claim turrets syndrome as my excuse for calling out, but I can’t.
Some people have been down right horrified when I write about my underwear falling off as I walked because I had lost enough weight to warrant smaller panties, but were too cheep to go and get them. The chance to laugh, especially at myself, fills my day with joy. I no longer use food for happiness and that has sharpened my eye on the other things that bring glee.
Laughing is actually a good core workout. The bigger the belly laugh the smaller the belly. If I could occupy my whole day surrounded by the funniest people on earth I seriously doubt I would ever miss eating chocolate.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am very happy about what I do get to eat, but I am not sad about what I don’t get to eat. Learning to have a balanced relationship with food is something I came late too in life. I wish that I had realized earlier that the thing that gives me the most satisfaction is not food, but making others laugh and laughing often myself.
My dieting tip for the day is next time you want to try and keep yourself away from the girl scout cookies in the freezer, don’t do that serious thing that real diet coaches suggest like go for a run, instead watch a funny movie. For someone thinking they want cookies running is never their next choice, but I guarantee that laughing is your best distraction.
Now It’s Sugar, No SH#T
Posted: February 5, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: sugar 1 Comment
For the last couple of days all I have heard on the radio and TV is how bad sugar is for you. Is this news? On All Things Considered on NPR they were talking about the “NEWS” that no grown woman should have more than six teaspoons of sugar a day.
I hardly know any woman who knowingly eats that much raw sugar in a day. But each teaspoon contains about 4 grams of sugar and if you were to look at any processed food 24 grams of sugar is a very small amount. So most of us who eat anything processed is probably consuming way more sugar than you think. Especially if you eat fat free processed foods that use sugar in place of fat to get flavor.
Most people who can read already know that sugar is bad for them, but boy does it taste good. But the news is not that sugar just makes you fat, but that it is a major factor in heart dieses, something you don’t necessarily see when you look in the mirror. So you may be fairly thin, but if you live on just a tiny bit too much sugar your heart might not be as happy as you think.
The easiest thing to do is to eat real food that you can recognize in its most natural form. Now you can cook it and change it, but start with things you can spell, like chicken, oats, apples, and peppers, just not all together. If you make it you can get a good idea about how much sugar you are eating.
One horrible hideout of sugar is in fat free yoghurts with fruit. One small serving is more than your whole day’s allotment of sugar. This is easy to fix. Buy plain yogurt and add real fruit. If you add fruit in season that is ripe it will be sweet.
I am a sugaraholic. Given my choice I used to always pick dessert over anything else. That was not helping me weight wise, and now I understand heart wise and even apparently skin wise. Sugar does not contribute to a good complexion. When I started my weight loss challenge sugar was one of the easiest things to cut out. Yes I know there are huge groups of people that believe in no forbidden foods, but not me. Once I got over missing sugar I stopped craving it. If I slip up and eat something sweet now it does take me a few days to break the addiction again so it is so much easier to just stay away from it.
If you don’t have a weight problem go on and eat things with fat, and cut out the sugar. Your body needs a little fat to function, but not sugar to work well. I think back to my Grandparents who ate lard, Crisco, butter, cream, and even some real sugar, but they ate no processed foods since they hardly existed then. They were fairly healthy in spite of the drinking and smoking. I am not advocating you take up smoking, but just look at the labels on your foods and tally up your sugar. Your heart will thank you for sticking to under 24 grams.
When There Are More Hobbies Than Hours In a Day
Posted: February 4, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: hobbies 3 Comments
My friend Stephanie has always called my “office” Dana’s playhouse. It is a cozy room on the ground floor of our house that most people do not know exists. It originally was the home office for the first owner of our house who was a retired bank president in the fifties. It has all the makings of a room a once powerful man could run his empire from with a wall of shelves and cabinets, a corner fireplace and a wet bar.
When Russ and I first moved into this house I was a full time workingwoman and ran my empire from this same room, although I am yet to use the wet bar in twenty years. After retiring to become a full time Mom I transitioned the “office” into the room that the all crafts and hobbies command center.
The shelves filled up with hundreds of cookbooks, scrap books, decorative papers, trinkets, beads, wire, string, yarn, stickers, glue, tools, embossing machines, rubber stamps, sets of scissors that could cut deckled edges to wavy lines, dozens of cameras and lens and the millions of photos they produced, fabric, canvas and threads, fibers and ribbons. Eventually the room filled up so much that the adjoining shower was conscripted for hobby storage. Then like a character in a Shel Silverstein poem my playhouse was too full to be useful and I just moved out and closed the door.
It helped that I had a laptop and some portable needlepoint. I left my office as a shrine to all my creativity with my old desktop computer holding court on my giant desk/craft table, lonely and neglected. Now that did not mean that I cut out all my hobbies, but other more meaningful work had a greater share of my time.
Then came the treadmill desk with a reason to makeover my playhouse. Now I spend more waking hours in the shrine to creativity than I ever did when I was paid full time to work for others. Being in this room, which is like a time capsule to an old life has rekindled my interest in many old hobbies. The issue is that newfound fire did not come with any more hours in the day, or the disinterest in the newer things that had filled my days. The worst part is that now I try and do as many hobbies as possible all while walking on my treadmill desk.
I went to get a massage today and my therapist was quizzing me about how many hours I was working on my computer. “Not that many,” I told her, “why do you ask?” She told me that although my leg muscles were tight from so much walking my real problem area were some part of my pectoral muscles.
I thought about the places she was pushing near my shoulders that were hurting from the massage and I told her, “It’s not computer work but my needlepoint.” I quickly told her I was not giving that up and she showed me several “Needlepoint exercises.” Now I not only have to find time to fit in all the hobbies, but the exercises that go along with them.
I think that if I live another fifty years and don’t take up one new hobby I will still never learn, create or finish all the ideas that are in my head now. The only saving grace is that I certainly will forget them before I can feel remorse about not completing them.
I Will Walk 500 Miles
Posted: February 3, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: walking 500 miles Leave a comment
Yesterday while I was walking at my treadmill desk and working on my computer a message popped up from my fitbit. It flickered in a small box in the upper right hand corner of my screen and before I could read more than “500 miles” it was gone. My curiosity was perked and I was looking for an excuse to abandon what I was working on so I logged into my fitbit account to see if I could see what that message meant.
It was a congratulatory note telling me that I had just gone 500 miles. I looked at the whole site and determined that I had been wearing my fitbit since November 1. Wow, 500 miles in three months. Suddenly a Peter, Paul and Mary song from my childhood came flooding back, 500 miles. I guess all the reminiscing about the life of Pete Seeger had folk songs on the brain. I started humming their 500 miles song, but could not get all the words right.
I went right to You Tube and there it was along with another 500 miles song by the Proclaimers. Totally different, yet folksy song about walking 500 miles and in theirs they go 500 more “to be the man that gets back home to you.”
Apparently going 500 miles is quite something, at least to folk singers and the fitbit company. I certainly agree. I seriously doubt I have ever walked 500 miles in three months before. If you do the math it is just a little more than five miles a day, but when you look at my actual stats I have really picked up the pace in the last month.
Yes, we all know I have a treadmill desk, but I also was in a walking competition with some other people that go to the same trainer I do. For the month of January all her clients wore pedometers and we turned in our step totals every week. The one man in the game did a lot of trash talking in the beginning and was sure he was going to be the big winner. He had never met me. Needless to say I came in first and he came in fourth. It was not really a fair game since I think all the other people who were in the contest had real full time jobs, but I still got the most steps.
I started November with the 10,000 steps a day goal. Then after Christmas I upped it to 15,000 steps and now I am averaging 20,000. It is a lot of time, but hey it’s winter and what else is so important for me to do? I’m not going to write a song about it since that has clearly been over done, but I am going to try to walk 500 more miles in the next two months rather than three. I like a little game in my work out routine and since I already beat my trainer’s people I need some new cohorts. If you have a fitbit and want to be on my “friend” list send me a message. You don’t have to commit to any number of steps I just like the company.
The Second Biggest Day of Eating
Posted: February 2, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: Super Bowl Leave a comment
Yes, the Super Bowl in officially the second biggest day of eating after Thanksgiving, but it certainly has to be the first day of eating bad for you food. At least on Thanksgiving you have vegetables and turkey, not so much today.
I am going to be so glad when this day passes so I can stop getting e-mails from cooking websites about “the world’s best chicken wings” and “super special Chili.” I don’t normally care a thing about chips, but if I watch one more advertisement for Queso dip I am going to devour a whole bag of Tostitos.
Luckily we are going to our friend’s Michelle and Richard’s house and I have been told there will be a salad there. I was racking my brain about what I did last Super bowl so I went to the blog archives and was reminded that I spent last year in New Orleans with my sisters and my Dad. That was a whole weekend of eating fest so the Super Bowl part was low key since we ordered room service and watched the game in my sister’s hotel suite.
I have spent the day walking at my treadmill desk in preparation for the sitting part of the evening. My plan is to needlepoint through the whole game. I am very particular about not getting any crumbs on my projects as I stitch them so that will prevent me from reaching for any finger food.
The good news about going to friend’s house for the game is they have been very supportive of my whole weight loss journey so they will not push any food on me. I hope that for those of you who have been working off your holiday pounds that you don’t do any damage today.
The worst thing about big eating occasions is not so much the one event, but it is getting back on the wagon tomorrow. If you can avoid over doing it tonight it will make eating healthy the next few days that much easier.
Good Luck to your team and rather than enjoying every food available watch the advertisements, they are the real stars of the day and they are calorie free.
Hockey looks like the best exercise!
Posted: January 31, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: Carolina Hurricanes Leave a comment
Posting from the Carolina Hurricanes game where I got to accept a big ass $50,000 check for the Food Bank. They made a three year commitment to give us $50,000 each year.
Watching hockey is not enough exercise but they would not let me on the ice to play.
Sorry about the short post, but I’m gonna enjoy the rest of the game.
Thanks hurricanes.
Hero Worship
Posted: January 30, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: Food Bank of CENC, Haywood Holderness, Hunt Morgridge award Leave a comment
Today was one of my favorite days. Not the whole day, since we had a second snow day, but the evening. It was the Food Bank’s Hunt Morgridge Award and night of Appreciation. Every year the Food Bank thanks our top donors and volunteers and honors one individual who has exemplary service over many years to the organization.
I got to be the master of ceremonies, a job I love to do and this year it meant even more to me because the Hunt Morgridge winner was Haywood Holderness, a person I hold dear in my heart. See Haywood was my pastor for ten years until he retired and it was Haywood who first got me involved in the Food Bank.
I was not part of the committee who picked the award winner, but when I heard they had chosen Haywood it was one of those moments that made my heart happy. Haywood not only was the board chair for three years, created the Breaking Bread capital campaign that raised $6 million dollars, opened both the Durham and Greenville branches, but he spread the feeling that we can and should do something to help people in need of the most basic thing in life, food.
It was thrilling to see so many wonderful people come out to the new Durham Branch to honor Haywood. We had a standing room only crowd and as I looked out over the sea of faces listening to the stories we told about how Haywood would ask people to donate to help those in need I saw many nodding heads and smiling faces of those people he helped “see the light” that people could get much joy from giving generously. Haywood is the one who taught me that and I try to work everyday to spread the message that hoarding brings heartache and giving euphoria.
Tomorrow I get another fun opportunity to accept a big check on the ice at half time of the Hurricanes game. So if you are going to the hockey game Friday night look for me in the middle of the ice, no skates, just a big smile and a word of thanks for the generosity of the Kids and Community Foundation of the Carolina Hurricanes for the $150,000 they are giving us.
These kinds of events make my job as the chair of the Food Bank board exciting, but nothing like the feeling I get when a child who we feed writes a note on a paper plate thanking us for the “real pear.” I know Haywood would agree that is what all the work is really all about.
Grown Up Snow Day
Posted: January 29, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy Leave a comment
The best days ever are the ones were you are given a pass from all responsibilities and the bonus is being told the day before so you can sleep in. That was the gift given to us last night that the impending storm meant calling off school well before bed so I did not set my alarm and wake up only to find out that I could have slept in.
It has been a few years since we have had any real snow here in Durham. I know this because this is the first time that Shay Shay has seen snow. It was the nice fluffy kind, not covered by a layer of ice so she was able to run and bound in it, with the flakes sticking to her face. When she realized she had to do her business in it I was happy not to have the tough coating layer so that the pee did not run downhill and possibly run into her other paws.
Carter got to sleep in too, which makes a teenager very happy. All my real work was canceled and my favorite activity of the week, Mah Jongg was moved to my friend Christy’s house where mothers with kids were able to come and let their kids go sledding while we traded bams, crack and dots, shared a yummy lunch and whiled away our day of play.
I love a guilt free day off. Hey it’s not my fault that it snowed and so sorry you had to cancel some important meetings, but what are we to do? Although it was not much snow we just don’t have the equipment here in the south to handle even the thinnest layer of ice, which is what happens when the snow gets packed down and melts just a little bit.
Hooray for permission to play all day. It is only really fin when everyone else is off too. I don’t think I need everyday to be a free day, but I was ready for this one. Luckily it was not so much snow that we are going to be stuck inside for days on end, so I will be ready for school to start back up tomorrow with maybe a delay so the icy roads can thaw a little. Two days in a row will start to feel decadent and I am just too Presbyterian for that much lazing around.
All this sleeping in and full day of Mah Jongg has kept me from my treadmill desk. Now it may be a snow day but I have no excuse not to get my steps in so I must walk away for the rest of the evening in the warmth of my cozy office. Just because there is snow I don’t get a pass on getting my steps. At least I did sleep in.
Only Idiots Can’t Use Spanx Correctly
Posted: January 28, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: girdle, Shape Wear, Spanx 1 Comment
You know it is a slow news cycle when not one network, but three are reporting on SPANX. If you are a man who has been living in a cave you might not know what SPANX are so let me be the first to tell you they are modern day “shape wear.” Shape wear is the updated name for a girdle, which is an updated from the corset.
It seems like for as long as there have been women there have been people inventing things to make women into a shape that is considered superior to the one she has naturally. Face it, if women were left to their own devices I doubt the long line bra ever would have been invented.
I digress, so the big “news” in Spanx is that the ultra stretchy and compressing spandex can cause harm to internal organs. Well big news, so can an ace bandage if wrapped too tightly. The story should not be that some dumb floozy squeezed her spleen too tight, it should be that Spanx is now required to have user instructions to protect the idiots of the world, like McDonalds had to put warning labels on coffee cups telling people it was hot.
Apparently some delusional women are wearing spanx that are multiple sizes too small or worse yet, wearing multiple spanx at the same time. Really ladies. No stretchy material is going to be able to hide all that you are and all that you have. It may get a little smoothed out and hooray for Spanx I am all for that, but you can’t squeeze all your fat out of you. You can push it in one place, but it is just going to have to roll back out someplace else. Have you heard of back fat?
So please let’s not blame Spanx for causing your bodily injury if you are using the products incorrectly. Hello New Directors, the story is women are not buying the right size shape wear. No one can see the label if you are wearing clothes over your “Under garments” so please buy the right size. I will never judge you be you a XL or XXXL. But I will ridicule the hell out of you if you are taking up valuable emergency room space because you bruised an organ so you could look smaller.
Spanx is quite frankly a big improvement over the previously available shape wear so let’s not take the company down over a few non-compliant users. This is in no way an advertisement for Spanx, but if you are a woman you wears them and loves them I am hoping to save the reputation of a wrongly maligned product!
Programmed to Eat
Posted: January 27, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy Leave a comment
When we first got our dog Shay Shay as a nine-week old puppy we were told to give her a treat after every successful visit outdoors to potty. This training obviously worked because she never once had an accident inside. I am sure that at sometime we should have stopped giving her the tiny square of freeze dried liver she loves the most every time she comes in from the outside, but here we are more than two years later still treating her after every visit to the great big potty that is the outdoors.
I think sometimes she asks to go out just to be able to come back in and have a treat.
She is a fairly thin dog who does not eat a huge amount of dog food, so I guess keeping up the treating is not too terrible for her.
I got to thinking about the expectation for getting food and wondering if she is actually hungry or just in the habit of getting a nibble no matter what. I am a human who is equally programmed to eat. I can’t tell you the last time I missed a meal — Breakfast, lunch and dinner, everyday, no mater what.
I know that my parents did the right thing by feeding me regularly as a baby and young child. Do I think that has programmed me to expect food at those three meals at the very least? Meals are not the only times I eat. I wonder if I had not been so programmed to expect food at such regular times that I might have learned to eat only when I was hungry?
If left to my own devices I might actually eat more often than the three meals and one snack that is part of my regular routine. What if I were given a favorite food every time I performed some mundane task like clean out the dishwasher. I might never do anything else.
Not eating can be just as much of a problem as eating too much — both are unhealthy. I am much too old to be deprogrammed from three meals a day now. Perhaps five little snacks would be better for me, or just two good meals. I will never know.
What I do know is that my dog is very happy getting a liver treat when she comes back inside the house. I am not about to be the one who is going to stop her routine as long as she continues to be a good dog and always do her business outside.
As for myself since I am going to continue sitting down to eat at the same times everyday I am going to do my best to think about every bite and decide if I am done before my plate is clean. Just another ingrained habit — damn those starving children in China.
Preemptive Worrying
Posted: January 26, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: beer 2 Comments
Sometimes my child is nothing like me, like when she says she has spent too much time with people and needs a good long time alone. As an off the scale extrovert I have a hard time fathoming what that feeling is like. Clearly it is something she got from her father.
Other times my child is so much like me that I feel like I am having an out of body experience watching my younger self all over again. This afternoon was one of those times. After a jam packed weekend of go-go-go where I had hardly seen Carter for more than ten minutes we had some time coming home from horseback riding. Knowing that I was going to have a salad for dinner that would not suit her I told her we would stop at the Fresh Market and she could go in and get anything she wanted for dinner. I handed her a $20 bill and withheld my normal lecture on trying to find a healthy choice.
While I was waiting in the car she texted me to ask if we had any asparagus at home. At first I thought that someone else’s texts were coming into my phone. I said, “No, go ahead and get as much asparagus as you want.” A few moments later she jumped in the car with her bag of groceries.
“What did you get?” I asked, thinking it would be a sandwich or something equally readymade.
“I got some chicken sausage, asparagus and chips.” Shock and surprise. An actual meal, made up of a healthy protein, green veg and a starch. I was not about to complain about the chips, baby steps when it comes to letting a teenager pick out her own food.
“Yeah, I found the chips first and really wanted those so I ruled out sushi or sandwiches or wraps. I looked around the store and saw the sausage and I thought I could cook those.”
Even better I thought. Not only did she buy real food she is planning on cooking it herself.
“The only bad thing is I was standing in the beer section looking at the different choices that I might cook the sausages in and all of a sudden I remembered I am fifteen and am not allowed to buy beer. An old guy was looking at me while I was standing there probably thinking the same thing.”
I had a big laugh. Carter has been watching me cook her whole life and has learned that the right alcohol makes food taste better when you cook with it.
“I just realized something horrible,” Carter said. “I am going to have to go half way through college without beer or wine to cook with.”
Oh the things you worry about when you are Dana Lange’s child.
Happy Birthday Mom
Posted: January 25, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: Janie Carter's birthday 3 Comments
When I was little one of my favorite things to do was to go through my mother’s scrapbooks from her childhood. She had tiny black and white photos of her family and friends at her house in Knoxville, Tennessee and at their lodge in the great Smokey Mountains. I loved to look at the clothes they wore and the hairstyles they had back in the forties and fifties, so different from the style or non-style of the late sixties and seventies.
There were also many newspaper clippings of my mother from a picture of her at five years old receiving a “Call from Santa” to her engagement photo at the young age of twenty-one. My favorite pages were the pictures of my mother and her dates taken at dances with the dance cards, and invitations attached to the pages. One memorable invitation was a soda glass my mother had drawn with fluffy cotton coming out of the top to represent the bubbles and a real straw. I used to tell her she was the best artist I had ever seen based on her scrapbook entries and she just shied away from that, not having started painting at that time.
I was always secretly glad that she did not end up marrying Woody Wood, who in an eighth grade cotillion photo was a good four or five inches shorter than my not very tall mother. When I would point this out to her she would always say that he went on to be a successful dentist so I should think more highly of him. I was just considering how short I might have ended up if he had been my father.
My mother was also a “College Girl” at Riches, the local department store. That meant that she modeled clothes and appeared in advertisements. I thought it was an incredibly glamorous thing to do and so grown up. We had nothing like that in our small town of Wilton, Connecticut, not that I ever could have been a model.
Those images of my mother as a little girl all the way through college are burned into my brain and even though I was not alive during those times I still can see my mother’s beautiful face from then. It is easy because she has hardly aged at all. The only big change is her naturally straight hair now compared to her tight home permanent back then, now is so much better.
Today is her birthday and some decades later she still very much resembles that young girl climbing on the rocks of the river that ran by her parents lodge. When I think of my mother I see her face in the pictures I have of her and the pictures she creates in her art. Sometimes in her thirties she started painting and all that talent that was evident in her scrapbooks came pouring out. She still paints almost everyday when she is home near her art barn. I love that now I have not only pictures of her, but also pictures by her. Happy Birthday Mom, thanks for all the scrapbooks that helped me know you better.
Potential Squirrel Obesity
Posted: January 24, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy Leave a comment
Fat people are not the only beings that are addicted to food. Yesterday while walking my sweet labradoodle Shay Shay I witnessed proof that animals too will risk life and limb for food. No, my dog did not run out into the street to get a meaty bone. But a squirrel who had found a well aged acorn stood her ground to enjoy eating it a mere two feet from me with a squirrel stalking dog pulling at her leash trying to play with her.
Now this squirrel was not oblivious to our existence. She stared at the two of us much larger and well-fed beings down while she systematically peeled away the tough covering of the nut to enjoy the tender meat. Shay jumped up and down on her hind legs trying to gain a few feet so she could grab the furry creature while it just sat there, one eye on Shay one on her food. Once she had consumed her meal she scurried up the trunk of the pin oak tree she was standing besides.
My dog was none to happy that I did not give her enough rope to grab that lazy ass squirrel while she had a chance, I was more amazed that the wild animal would risk certain death over one small nut. She was not a skinny squirrel so I am sure this meal was not her life saving or starve to death moment. Perhaps her eye contact with sweet Shay made her think that she was not really in harms way, but she would be wrong since Shay would certainly want to squeeze her tightly until she found and ripped out her squeaker.
Is being addicted to food what has kept this squirrel alive or has she been tempting fate? We all have heard of the fight or flight reflex but maybe the more important one is the eat or flight? I think this animal standing right next to a tree that she could use as a safe harbor could have taken the nut in her mouth up and out of our way very easily. Or just dropped the food and take cover and come back and recover her prize later. Have squirrels grown too familiar with both man and beast and feel no fear for their lives or has dining become an event they are not willing to give up?
I am sure that I have done this squirrel a great disservice by holding my dog back on her leash. She certainly is on the way to rodent obesity. I decided that if I were to only eat in a place that I was in constant danger I might feel less addicted to food. Next time you see me with a cookie in my hand feel free to attack me. I don’t ever want to risk my life for food, especially if it is fattening.
Grocery Store Shrinks
Posted: January 22, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy Leave a comment
If you are an American you probably already know that there are hundreds of thousands of grocery store psychologists. These are not people who have a couch set up in a grocery store asking you how you feel about your childhood. No, these are the people who systematically plan out how to advertise, display and partner foods so that you unknowingly are drawn to buying things you never intended too. Food manufactures also employ these same types of people to design packaging that scream, “You have got to buy me.”
This is not a purely American phenomenon. I have been to grocery stores in lots of countries and they all are employing the same tricks. Things like the highest profit margin items at eye level and red and yellow packaging.
Since January is national “the whole country is on a diet month,” until the Super Bowl, the second highest eating day after Thanksgiving, stores are running lots of promotions on diet foods. Special K must make half of their annual sales in the month of January. Come February people are sick of sugar-free dry flakes and go back to sugar pops.
Nothing in a major grocery store is left up to chance. Those Psychologist are getting paid big bucks to design every aisle, end cap and store flyer to maximize store sales. Today, while I was at the Harris Teeter I saw one of my favorite store gimmick pairings I have ever seen. In the soda aisle under the diet Coke display hung a shelf basket full of Hershey bars.
Now I don’t drink soda, but I don’t usually think of a cola and a chocolate bar being the best taste combination, not like chocolate and peanut butter or Hersheys, marshmallows and graham crackers, classics! I know exactly what the thinking was behind this; it’s diet month, everyone is going to buy diet soda, but it’s week three and their resolve is getting weak, it’s the perfect time to sabotage their diet with a chocolate bar. Of course the person buying it can justify buying the candy since they are having a diet soda. Damn those grocery store shrinks. How are normal, non-advanced degreed humans supposed to withstand such wicked tricks?
The stores have come up with the answer to this, Internet grocery shopping. My Harris Teeter has a service where you can order your groceries on-line, a store clerk shops the store with your list and bags them and you just pull up to the front of the store and they put the groceries in your car. The store charges some fee for this, like say $5 and you can avoid all their tricks to get you to buy stuff you never needed. The store makes money on the fee so it works out the same for them. I’m waiting to see what those store Psychologists are going to do to entice us when we don’t even walk in the store. Perhaps the person bringing the bags out is going to have donuts and cookies hanging in baskets around their neck.
A Life Rear View Mirror
Posted: January 21, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: rear view mirror Leave a comment
As I was driving home today on the highway I witnessed a driver a few cars in front of me cross over two lanes without signaling or any regard for the other cars behind him in those lanes. It looked to me as if he never even lifted his eyes to the rearview mirror, which as far as I know is standard equipment for every car on earth. Lucky for all the cars behind this idiot, the ones he cut off reacted appropriately and avoided causing a big accident. Not that the original offender knew or possibly would have known had their been a crash.
The rear view mirror is a tool I wish I had in all parts of my life. Not just to ensure I am being a polite and safe, but for every situation where I go blindly off the way I want to go without much awareness for those who are following behind me.
It would be great to have a tool to check to see if the route we want to take is clear before we go that way. Then to be able to look behind us and see that all is well and we did no harm would be a bonus. I also would love to be able to look behind me to see what is barreling towards me that I might want to avoid. A life rear view mirror would be so helpful.
I have been known to say something inappropriate and hurtful without realizing it and leave collateral damage in my wake. A rear view mirror won’t prevent me from making those gaffs, but if I were able to look back and see what I had done right as it was happening I might be able to at least apologize for it.
At the least a life rear view mirror would keep me from going blissfully forward like the guy on the highway today with no idea the wrongs I have committed. We tend to learn best from our mistakes as long as we knew we had made a mistake. I am not advocating constantly looking behind but a more informed going forward.
To the guy who could not be bothered to look in his mirror, or even signal his intentions, I hope you learn your lesson before you hurt someone else. Chances are the way you drive you won’t hurt yourself just others around you.
Someone Else Needs to Plan the Menu
Posted: January 20, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: what's for dinner? 2 Comments
If there is one thing I am always tired thinking about it’s, “What’s for dinner?” For a person like myself who loves to cook, but is being particularly vigilant about what I will eat until I get down to my goal weight the answer is fairly simple. I would just have a salad, but I am not alone in this world. I have a not-picky-eater husband who likes spicy food and a picky daughter who does not and neither of them would be happy if I told them they were having a salad for dinner.
Dinner has become a meal that people thinks need to be something special, all the time. How has this happened? Breakfast is easy, there are a couple of choices and almost all of them are considered acceptable in my house. Lunch, everyone is on their own. I am never quite sure what my family is eating for lunch and I appreciate that they don’t torment me with descriptions of yummy meals I won’t let myself have.
But come dinnertime everyone wants different things at different times and different from things they might have had in the last thirty days. I take back that last part about Russ, he is happy to eat leftovers, but I am wary of making too much of anyone thing that it might go uneaten.
I know I have created my own problem because I am a good cook. I have raised the level of expectation to be a four star meal every night. I would not even mind cooking at the James Beard level every night if only someone else would come up with the menu, buy the ingredients and guarantee that everyone would eat it without complaint.
I could just start cooking like most of America and make a simple meal of some bland meat, a starch and an overcooked green vegetable, throw it on the table and announce that is all there is so take it or leave it. The issue is that it would get left and then the snacking meals would take over.
I never want to hear, “What do we have to eat?” again. I wish I could do away with all extra food in the house so that the meal that is served is the best you are going to get so it would be appreciated. If I have this much trouble with my forty plus years of cooking dinner I can only imagine the problems most people have. It certainly is a first world problem since so many don’t have any choice about what they eat and I don’t just mean prisoners.
Football, the Last Bastion for Big Butts
Posted: January 19, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: foot ball 1 Comment
Russ completed the installation of the last part of my walking desk Christmas present, a flat screen TV on the wall of my office to watch while getting my steps. He argued for the largest one that would fit in the space and I talked him down to a smaller size. Now as I walk and work I am confronted by images of people that are more than life size.
Today as the last four teams battle it out for the spots in the Super Bowl I am watching football. I am not a crazy fan until it comes to these final games and then I watch with the intensity of a twelve-year-old boy.
With the HD LED giant screen a few feet from me at all times I am struck with the size of these offensive linemen. Never before have I had such a close up shot of these athletes’ big back sides and ample love handles. I know that these well-trained athletes are covered in pads and protective gear, except on their butts that are taking up a full 55 inches on my office wall.
It is nice to see that there is one place left in America where an ample backside is not just appreciated, but prized. It’s not just butts but there are some ample stomachs barely restrained by their polyester uniforms out there on the field. Now the running backs, and the QB’s hardly have an extra ounce of fat on them, but I am sure that they appreciate more than anyone those massive teammates there to protect them.
So hooray for the supersized, you make the game fun to watch. I’m glad that there is one place left for those who are more than just large, but skilled and scary. Football would not be the game it is if it were played by supermodels.
Moody Study, Really?
Posted: January 18, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: mood disorders 2 Comments
In the world of medical research do you think that doctors are trolling the Internet looking for candidates for their studies? If someone wrote on Facebook that they laughed so hard they almost peed in their pants, is that person then targeted for an incontinence study? If someone tweeted they had a hard on for the pizza they ate last night will some researcher send them an invite for a sex study?
Today I received a personal invitation from the Women’s Mood Disorders Team for a study on the beneficial effects of hormones on mood and health. The invitation was more like a greeting card and although it was from two doctors there was no mention of how they got my name, address or knew that I was actually perimenopausal.
If you are a regular reader of this blog you might be able to piece together enough information about me to infer that I could use some beneficial hormones, but you would have a hard time knowing if I had or had not already gone through menopause. Since I just wrote my blog about anger yesterday they could not have read that and mailed my invitation to get here today.
I am intrigued with the general idea of the study but terrifically put off by the name of the group doing the study, “The UNC Center for Women’s Mood Disorders.” Yes, women have moods, and some are in disarray, but I wonder if there is a corresponding “Men’s Mood Disorders” group? I can think of quite a few moody men who could probably benefit from some beneficial hormones to help them out too.
I wonder how much my diet might affect my mood? Is it possible I am nicer when I am not going through any sugar spikes or could I get generally cranky because I have not eaten any chocolate in months? I probably am a good test subject since I have almost two years of daily documentation on my mood in this blog.
There was one post a few months ago when I got really angry about something, what I can’t remember now, but one reader who does not actually know me well read me the riot act for expressing my bad mood. If ever I write something that pisses you off so much that you feel the need to write me a few dozen times and tell me, please just stop reading what I am writing. I am not trying to put you in a mood.
I find the appearance of this invitation confirmation that women are moody and therefore let me off the hook for ever being in a bad mood. If you are female and have not been in a bad mood then I want to know what you are on and I actually don’t want to know you. How dull it must be to just be flat all the time and how in the world do you ever keep your family on their toes if they always think you are going to be happy? Moody has some side benefits, but please don’t call it a disorder if you want people to join your study.
Anger, the Most Useless Emotion
Posted: January 17, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: anger Leave a comment
Someone who does not know me well recently called me a “nice person.” I was a little taken aback. I looked at her as if she had two heads and considered that she was being sarcastic then I thought a little more. Well, to her I guess I was nice.
As a younger person my childhood family might not have characterized me as “nice.” I think that some of them might have described my younger self as angry, but never nice. The more I thought about it the more I realized that I am much “nicer” and less “angry” than I used to be.
As I was growing up somewhere in adolescence I learned to use humor in all situations, when I was mad, or being nice, but it took a long time not to appear angry. I have no idea when I finally gave up anger as my go to emotion, but I certainly think my health improved since I did. Don’t get me wrong, I can get mad, really mad, but I am less likely to take that anger out on anyone now so perhaps others don’t notice it as much.
For me anger is a big waste of time and can cause derailment in living a healthy life. I was talking to a friend about someone who had publically said how much she disliked me. He mentioned that I was awfully nice to this person. I replied that I was not angry with anyone who did not like me; it really did not affect me, just them.
Letting go of things I can’t change or that hurt or make me mad has enabled me to just be more balanced in everyway. I still can have a sleepless night over something that is going wrong, but I am much more likely to get over it or see a problem as less important more quickly now.
I’m sure that through my life I must have “eaten my anger” because no one gets to be as fat as I was without eating for a reason other than hunger. Of course eating is something pleasurable so it soothed over one problem just to create another. Now I try and deal with one problem at face value and not let it multiply and turn into many problems.
Anger is one emotion I have realized has very little redeeming quality in the life I live now. I don’t have to fight with anyone to stay alive unlike cavemen. I do try and look at the funny in situations that used to make me angry. I have no idea if cavemen used humor but it certainly is a more evolved emotion, at least in me. I am in no way completely anger free, but I must be fooling enough of the people that someone mistook me for nice. I am waiting for the day that some thinks of me a quiet. I probably will actually be dead when that happens.
More Cook Than Gymnast
Posted: January 16, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: sore mucsles 2 Comments
You really have to be coordinated to take care of your own sore muscles. This is something I am not, meaning coordinated. Exercise is a major part of my day and I am not one of those women who live to workout. I exercise for one reason, to lose weight. I am not particularly interested in having a really tight and hot body. The time for that is so long past. I just want to get to a regular size that I can maintain and still get to eat every once in a while. I do not experience any out of body nirvana from exercise, other things perhaps, but this is a PG rated blog.
Since I have been on the big push to reach my skinny clothes closet contents I have upped my exercise considerably. Yes it works as long as I combine it with strict portion control and really smart healthy eating, blah, blah, blah – no secrets, no tricks, no short cuts, boring.
My trainer, who I see twice a week for half an hour, you can hardly call that much work out, has upped the weights I lift and the reps I do when I am with her in an effort to help tone, I guess. Since I am doing the crazy amount of cardio at home I am happy to do something different at the gym. The only problem is that heavy lifting is making my muscles ache.
I know that aching equals working, but I really hate pain. Tiff, my trainer told me to get a foam roller so I can roll the pain away at home. This sounds like a great idea, except that the muscles in my upper thighs that hurt the most are hard to roll when you are a klutz like me.
I have to perch myself on a big foam tube, and when I say foam it is not something spongy and soft, but a cylinder of hard torture. Once I am lying with one leg on the roller and all my other parts sprawled out to keep me balanced like a seal on a ball, I am supposed to be able to roll my whole large body back and forth with the only contact being the already aching leg muscles on the hard roller.
Needless to say I am not good at this. Twice I have fallen right on my face because I rolled too far and could not stop my forward motion combined with gravity. I told Tiff this was not working out for me and I needed more help since my leg muscles were about at the point that I could not lower myself onto the toilet without holding on to something.
Apparently the answer was a roller I was much more familiar and adept with, my rolling pin. Now I take my little used kitchen tool since I certainly am not making any piecrust and push it hard on my sore leg and roll back and forth from where I am told the pained muscles attach to my bones. Why in the world did no one tell me about this before? It is so much easier to roll my own muscles in a seated position and not be expected to balance myself at the same time.
I’m sure the foam roller is considered the best option since it take the weight of my whole body and pushes it against my taxed muscle, but since I am not trying to make any Cirque du Soleil team I am just going to use the rolling pin.
I’m Obviously No Cinderella
Posted: January 15, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: black tie 1 Comment
Fashion is not my thing. I have never really been interested in following trends or wearing the latest and greatest clothes. I have always liked fairly classic and timeless stuff and thanks to a number of friends who sell or have sold clothes in their homes for Doncaster, Carlisle, Etc. and Worth I have tended to buy good enough quality of those more timeless pieces.
Since shopping for clothes is more of a chore than a treat for me I tend to hold on to what I have. This has proven to be a good strategy as I have lost weight. I currently have full-on wardrobes in between six and eight sizes. The bad news is that if I gain weight I have something to wear, but since I am on a downward slope the good news is that I have something to wear that is smaller and practically new to me.
Yesterday I went to my closest of skinniest clothes, otherwise known as the closet of dreams. It has been about five years since I could wear most of the items housed in this crypt of reminders, “you were fairly thin once.” I went to this closet because I have a black-tie affair to go to next week and when I put on my current closet’s choices they were all too big.
This would normally be most women’s dream come true. For me it is more like a pain in the you-know-what since I hate to buy something new under a deadline and I certainly don’t have much time in my calendar to shop. Once I started flipping through the rack I decided to try on the smallest items just to see where I fit in the Dana’s endless wardrobe continuum. Much to my surprise I was able to get in all but the very smallest size, and of those there were not many. I promptly moved a few season appropriate items to my regular closet. I tried to weed out some of the too big items to go to a third location that I hope I never have to visit again, but I still have a lot more trying on to do.
The bad news was I did not find a dress I want to wear next week. I found a good blouse, but no bottom. I found a bottom that I could take in, but no top that went with that. Now I am thinking about shopping, ugh. You would think that shopping for a newly skinnier person would be a joy, except for the sales people, the money I don’t want to spend on a dress I hope to shrink out of, the driving hither and yon. The only good part for me is possibly the steps I would get walking from my car to a store and throughout a store shuffling aimlessly, gathering choices and going into a poorly lit dressing room where I don’t want to take my shocks off because the carpet is so nasty, but looking at myself in a black tie outfit with my short black socks on is so unattractive that I become discouraged.
Why can’t I have a fairy godmother who with the twist of her wand-laden hand could drape me in the perfect outfit fit for a ball, complete with perfectly fitting beautiful shoes? I would not even care that I would have to get home before midnight, or bear the embarrassment of being seen in my normal tater wear, we all know that I will be home by ten no matter what. I also guess I need to remind Russ about this event so he can get his twenty-two year old wedding tux out of the closet. I guess you can say I was his fairy godmother since I convinced him to buy his tux for our wedding knowing he would get so much use out of it. I wish women had that same option.
One Last Simple Pleasure Gone
Posted: January 14, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: ice, ice maker 2 Comments
As a person who has been working on losing weight most of my life I decided long ago not to drink my calories. I really like to eat and that usually means solid food. So I stopped drinking alcohol at 23, and yes if I found my lost underpants I might take it back up, but that’s another blog. I never drank sodas because as a child the only time I ever was given cola was when I had a tummy bug so I forever associated soda with vomiting.
Since juice is nothing but sugar that has been banned from my glass leaving me with two basics drinks I down in gallons daily, iced tea and water. I do drink a decaf espresso as a treat on some afternoons, but other than that I have a fairly limited drink menu.
Since my 20 ounce glass is almost always by my side with a cold drink I am very attached to my refrigerator icemaker that dispenses crushed ice. I really like a lot of ice and not big giant cubes that can fall forward on your face while drinking and splash tea all over the bodice of my shirt, but the tiny small pieces that let the liquid filter through them as you tilt the glass up.
My friend Jan and I both really like the small-aerated ice pieces that sonic drive-ins have. She has deeply researched those types of icemakers only to discover they are only available commercially with no plans on making a home model. Good thing since I don’t have a place to install one anyway and therefore remain dependant on my refrigerator.
With all this build up about my love of ice, really when you are as calorie started as I am, zero calorie ice is a big thing, I am now going to complain about my icemaker. Two weeks ago the four-year-old machine just stopped making ice. Russ tried all the factory recommended tests that you have to have an IEEE for (that’s a master’s in electrical engineering) with no luck.
I called the factory authorized repair service and was told I had to wait more than a week for someone to get to Durham, as if it were a small town in the middle of Montana. Today the repair arrived and although I had already told them that we needed a new icemaker and to bring one with them they did not bring the right one.
After testing to confirm what my overly qualified husband repair man had determined was the case and calling the factory to consult one hour and many dollars later I was told that a new unit had to be ordered and I was going to have to go without machine made ice for another week. I am also going to have to wait at home for the repairman to show up one minute before the three-hour arrival time window ends. How horrible.
Ice is one of my last pleasures in life. Yes, I buy ice at the store and I could put an ice tray in the freezer, but I am addicted to the filtered water, crushed clear ice that comes from my machine. If we had a sonic in Durham I would go there and buy ice, but alas I am not going to drive to Mebane for my fix.
Palette Expansion
Posted: January 13, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: new spice Leave a comment
Do you ever go to a clothing store and buy something and when you get it home and put it in your closet you discover you already have five items that are its twin? You don’t even have to go look at your closet to say yes, especially if you are a middle-aged woman. Naturally we are drawn to the same things over and over again. In your defense as far as clothing goes you probably already know which colors and cuts look best on you, but there is something about looking at a store full of clothes that draws your eye to what you already have.
The same thing happens when we go to the grocery store. A giant building full of thousands of different products and you probably buy mostly the same things over and over again. Now you don’t have the “that soup looks good on me,” defense, but you may say, “I already tasted that and know I like it.” There is one unattractive word for this buying the same thing over and over again phenomenon, “RUT.”
I am not a clothes expert and I do own more black pairs of pants than I can wear in a season, so I don’t know how to solve the clothing problem. Of course you can buy something out of your element and it can hang, tags still on, in your closet never worn. So the clothing rut is a more expensive problem.
But as far as food goes I do have a few suggestions to spice up your eating. Actually spice is my suggestion. Next time you go to the grocery stand in the dry spice aisle and blindly pick a new bottle of something. Now if you are not that adventurous pick wide-eyed, but chose something you have never used before, like turmeric or smoked paprika. Once you are at home with your new ingredient just do a Google search for recipes that use that spice and make one.
There is a great website called Smitten Kitchen by a blogger who takes great cookbook recipes and creates them in a step by step way with good photos, so if you are a truly unadventurous cook you can follow the steps easily. If you really can’t find a recipe that uses your chosen ingredient message me and I will help you.
The whole point of this exercise is to expand your and your family’s taste buds with very little investment. What you end up making does not have to be so foreign if you are just using a new spice with some familiar ingredients like a chicken or carrots. The point is just to push yourself one step beyond where you normally go.
I seem to have every spice in the grocery store already so I can’t do the blind picking, but I do have a number of very exotic spices I bought on vacations and have never used so I will practice what I am preaching and am going to open one up and create a new recipe with it.
The good thing about trying this palette expansion with a spice is that it probably has few if any calories. That makes January the perfect time to experiment. So post back to me what you end up buying and trying. I’m here to help so get out of your rut.
The Walking Desk Report
Posted: January 11, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: walking desk 6 Comments
Two weeks ago Russ put together my new walking desk. I have gathered a crazy amount of data based on my fitbit, my walking desk and my scale and I think that the results are worth reporting. I will start with the bottom line so if you are actually interested you can read on. In the two weeks since I got the desk I have lost 4.8 pounds.
A little more than two pounds a week is a very good rate for me given the following factors: I am a fifty two year old woman, in the two months before I got my walking desk I had lost ten pounds. So this 4.8-pound lost was not new weight I was losing, nor just water weight loss that is normal when you just begin reducing.
Thanks to my friend Jan who turned me onto my fitbit I had been trying to get 10,000 steps a day since the end of October. It was hard. I just met my goal most days by having to run around the house late at night. I think that the late night push to get to 10,000 steps did not help my sleeping and I don’t think that walking around the dining room table was the best way to keep up my pace. But I was losing weight at 10,000 steps, which was a big improvement from before the fitbit.
Enter the walking desk. I started doing all my computer work and walk at the same time. Some things started happening; the bills were paid ahead of time, e-mails were responded too in a timelier manner, I wrote my blog earlier in the day, I was reaching my 10,000 goal by two in the afternoon.
I upped my goal to 12,500 but my daily average was more like 15,000-17,000 steps a day. I was sleeping better because I was not exercising after 7:00 at night. I was doing other exercises to stretch out my legs and get some arm workouts in. My little used office has never been so organized and the laundry even gets folded more quickly because I do it while walking at my desk.
I do write my blog while walking and you regular readers will have to weigh in if the quality has gone way down. I try and proof read things while sitting at my regular desk just to make sure I am making as much sense as I regularly do and you all get what you pay for. I can’t hand write letters while walking unless I want to appear that I have aged about forty years. I can talk on the phone while walking and so far no one has noticed any background noise. I just don’t seem to notice that I am walking while I am working.
I have been asked by a few people to post a video of what it looks like so I am doing that here. Dana’s Walking Desk on You tube. I try and not use this blog to promote products and I get no money from so if you want to know what kind it is, send me a message and I will let you know.
I have been eating the same way so I think that I can say the desk is the only difference. It’s a significant enough improvement to warrant this report. I am not going to do a controlled study and not use it for two weeks to see what happens. We all know I am no scientist.
Take My Card
Posted: January 10, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: business cards Leave a comment
Carter has been home with a tummy ache for the last two days so I have tried to stay close to home. I did some cleaning out of my shirt drawers, the downstairs refrigerator and then some old files in my office. I know it all sounds very random and it was. There is so much reorganizing, cleaning out and throwing away to be done at my house that it feels overwhelming. I know that it might be more effective to pick one room or closet and completely clean that before I move on to a new place, but that requires a level of concentration and dedication that I don’t seem to have.
While cleaning out my office I came upon a business card for me as “Nude Photographer.” Read that as you like! The card was a joke that my great college friend Laura Sherck made for my twenty-first birthday and put in every mailbox in the whole college. The worst part about it was she put my real phone number on the card.
Back in the day if you had a card you were whatever that card said you were! I can’t remember how many calls I got from her joke, but somehow the many cards she got printed up ended up being highly circulated. I do recall fielding an inquiry from so old man who called to see if I would take photos of he and his wife. I stopped him fairly quickly before he got to the question of exactly who would be nude, the photographer or the subjects.
I learned from that experience the power of the card. When I got out of college and had a real job my card read “Sales Engineer.” I sounded so much more highly qualified to sell mail opening and extracting machines as an engineer. Little did anyone know that I barley passed calculus.
While selling machines I also had a catering business on the side. It was a highly “unofficial” business, but I had cards. À la Carter – creative caterers, with just my phone number. I certainly could not put down an address since I cooked out of my home kitchen. No one ever seemed to ask. I had a card that was all they needed to know.
Now a days anyone can make themselves cards on their computer so they don’t hold quite the sway they once did. Now I guess if you have a website you are more official, but just like cards, anyone can make one. I’m just glad that the web did not exist when I was in college. Lord knows what kind of joke website Laura Sherck might have created for my birthday. Luck for me I have changed phone numbers a few dozen times since college but if it was a website it could follow me forever.
The Velveetalike Affair
Posted: January 9, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: not cheese shortage 4 Comments
Picture a cartoon like corporate office, not unlike Mr. Burn’s office in the Simpsons. There sits an old corporate raider, bald, who happens to look just like Mr. Burns, hunched over his gigantic desk with a wall of windows looking out on the factory floor where billions of pounds of Velveetalike are being produced. His office door opens and his sniveling assistant, akin to Smithers, walks in with a big graph showing sales of Velveetalike are plummeting.
Mr. Burnslike: “Smitherslike, what is going on? Why are people not buying our not-real-cheese man made product?
Mr.: Smitherslike: “Well it’s January and the giant fat population of America has been brain washed into thinking that they have to lose weight this month since they ate too much in November and December.”
Mr. Burnslike: “But in February are they going to go back to consuming our liquid gold calorie laden faux cheese?”
Mr. Smitherslike: “Yes in a big way because the Super Bowl is in February and that is the biggest eating day of the year. Velveetalike makes up at least 25% of the calories consumed that day.”
Mr. Burnslike: “Yes.” He says drumming his long thin fingers together in an evil way. “ Velveetalike is perfect on all foods consumed while people talk through football and watch the commercials. I like the newest craze of melting it on Krispy Kremelike donuts.”
Mr. Smitherslike: “Yes boss, but your bonus this year is dependent on how much we sell in the first two weeks of the year.”
Mr. Burnslike: “What? Quick we need a scheme to get people to buy our faux cheese now, since it has a shelf life of 19.34 years it will keep until the Super Bowl.”
Mr. Smitherslike: “All the news and talk shows are talking about is dieting how can we get Velveetalike in the news?”
Mr. Burnslike: Looking out at billions of boxes of cheese, “If we were to tell people that there is a possibility of a Velveetalike shortage come the Super Bowl I’m sure we can get everyone to make a run on the supermarkets now.”
Mr. Smitherslike: “But Boss, we have plenty and there is nothing stopping us from making more.”
Mr. Burnslike: “I know that and you know that. I only said there might be a POSSIBILITY of running out.”
A Gringo at the Asian Market
Posted: January 7, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: asian market, hot pot Leave a comment
Officially it is the coldest day on record for this date in Durham. It is probably a record-breaking day in most of America. Lucky for me it is not snowy or icy, just freezing. Cold days like this are a two-soup day for me.
I started my day being fitted for a new crown on my back molar so the idea of chewing was a little daunting since I could hardly speak normally with half a numbed up face. After the joy of drilling and impression creating biting I decided to stop at the Asian Superstore to get a few items to make a Japanese hotpot soup for dinner. Carter had given me a Wagamama’s cook book for dinner and the last time I was this cold was last March in London with Carter eating at Wagamama’s – it all made sense in my mind.
Bundled in my 30 year old full-length mink coat, big scarf and gloves with only half a moveable face from Novocain I ventured alone into the Asian Market. The place was practically empty since the rest of the world was heeding the don’t-freeze-your-face-off-warnings and stayed home.
Most of the stuff I needed to buy I could figure out by sight, oyster mushrooms, Napa cabbage, snow peas, scallions, cilantro. In the vegetable section I was a pro. I went next to find fish sauce, Miran, a sweet rice wine and dashi no moto, to make a broth with. The Asian market is divided into nationality sections. All the Japanese in one place, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, but they are not marked in English.
Every aisle has soy sauce, hundreds of kinds; thank goodness I was not buying that. Many aisles had noodles, good luck finding the ramen I was buying for Carter. I eventually found the sushi vinegar and figured I was in the Japanese section.
I found fish sauce, and Miran, but Dashi which was my whole reason for going to the Asian market was nowhere to be found. I searched for someone who worked at the store, but they must have stayed home, no one to ask.
Eventually another human came by, a nice Mexican woman who looked as lost as I did. She saw the fish sauce in my cart and pointed at it as if to ask where I got that. I pointed to it on the bottom shelf. I took a chance and showed her the word Dashi on my list. She looked me in the eye and then just over my shoulder and pointed it out right behind me. I could have been in that store all day and missed the tiny jar since it was called HonDashi, sounds like a car to me.
Now my stock is simmering on the stove. I hope this tiny jar of instant dashi is good since my mouth knows what a Wagamama’s real hot pot is supposed to taste like. Even if it is different it will at least be warm and I think that is what counts on a day like this.
Just When You Think It Is A Good Day
Posted: January 6, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: dallas, friends moving 1 Comment
Today started out good. Carter went back to school, my trainer reported that I was winning the January steps contest in the first three days of a month long challenge, I got my haircut, wrote my article for the magazine, had a finance meeting and a good salad for lunch. Russ called at three to check in and I told him I was having a good, productive day without any drama… I spoke too soon.
Just after I hung up I got a call from one of my favorite people on earth who lives here. After she asked me how New Years was and I whined on about missing Christmas she dropped the bomb on me, “We’re Moving to Dallas.”
Suddenly I was back in fifth grade when my best friend announced on the last day of school that her family was moving, same pit in my stomach, what-about-me-selfishness feeling.
Now this move to Texas is a great one for their family work wise so of course I am happy for them, but these are friends that are on the top of our list to spend time with since we like the whole family, they have similar sense of humor as we do and are not just fun, but smart fun. We met them at a dude ranch where we were the least dude like people at the place and immediately bonded over the bad food.
My friend said, “Look, you can come to Dallas on your way anywhere.”
“Yeah, “I mopped, “like on my way to London I can go through Dallas.”
“Yes,” she encouraged me.
“Yeah and on my way to Greensboro, I can go through Dallas.”
I know how these things work. I can go through Dallas, but it will be hard, especially when I have another good friend in Houston who I don’t visit enough. Sure I have always been the Big D and Dallas considers itself the Big D so it seems like I should spend more there, but I also should spend more time in New York visiting friends, and Boston and, and and.
I texted Russ to let him know and his one word response was “F#$k.” He does not say that much about that many. Now I have to have a pity party for myself and one without chocolate, even though this is a friend who I love more than chocolate.
Repurposing Leftover Torture
Posted: January 4, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: leftovers Leave a commentI am cheep. I come by this naturally from an unnamed relative’s side of the family. Although this relative hates to throw food out even when it has gone on the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide side, that being either penicillin or poison, I am more concerned with food safety.
In order to satisfy both my penurious and life saving sides I took some leftovers and repurposed them. I made a bolognaise sauce from our leftover short ribs that Russ and Carter claimed was way fab. Then I made homemade vanilla ice cream with flourless chocolate cake chunks folded it.
Both of these items enabled me to change what Carter thinks of as leftovers, and therefore is disinterested in them into totally new food. The best part is that they are foods that can or should be frozen so I have significantly extended their shelf life.
The bad part for me is that I can’t share in their deliciousness. Usually repurposing involves making something more fattening in its change up. I have rarely been able to lengthen the life of an ingredient and make it salad ready at the same time. Casseroles, sauces, wicked desserts are better remake candidates.
Soup is the only really good repurpose healthy food. It is wonderful to take a dwindling carcass and some great veggies and make a hearty soup. Sadly I did not have any of those today. I did make myself a really nice egg white omelet with some of my friend Sara’s roast broccoli she brought to my house. I had the egg whites leftover from making the vanilla ice cream and I am certainly the only person in our house that will eat leftover broccoli. The omelet was the perfect answer because I hate creating new leftover ingredients when repurposing other leftovers.
When I was in college a sorority sister Lisa used to look at the weekly menu posted on our hall bulletin board and follow the food through the week; roast chicken – Sunday, Open faced hot chicken sandwiches – Tuesday, Chicken salad – Wednesday and Chicken noodle soup- Friday. Certainly the food service had to add more chicken somewhere along the week, but they were hedging their bets incase it did not all get eaten.
For me the secret is not in the reworking food, sometime the second dish is way better than the first, my issue is making sure I take it out of the freezer and serve it. Since it is rarely in my calorie wheel I have to convince someone else that they want a frozen meal. Being homemade is not the big selling point here. I hope the ice cream goes before I hit some monthly craving and remember it’s in there.
Officially My Least Favorite Day
Posted: January 3, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: putting Christmas away, Return to sender, UTF Leave a comment
Today is officially my least favorite day of the year so it’s nice to get it out of the way so every other day this year can be better. This is the day that I strip my house of all things glittery, shinny and twinkling bright, and put the Christmas ornaments away. To be truthful I am not done putting it all up yet so tomorrow will be my second least favorite day.
See, with 31 hinged-toped crates, nine giant bags, six odd-shaped specialty boxes and seven larger-than-a-piano Christmas tree bags it is a lot to put away. That does not include the flowerpot soldiers, large lanterns, The Happy Birthday Baby Jesus wire glitter tree and the larger and more tasteful wire tree. I also have not taken down this year’s addition to the Christmas extravaganza, the needlepoint garlands. I am not sure I have enough hinged-top crates and this may mean a trip to Costco tomorrow. If our attic ever caves in and kills us in our sleep the headline should read, “Crushed by her love of Christmas.”
The other thing that just happened to occur today that adds to its sadness is the postman returned four Christmas cards I sent as “UTF.” Sounds like a sexual disease, but it means “Unable to Forward” or, as Elvis would have said it, “Return to Sender.” One of the cards is my fault, I had two addresses for my friend Tom and his wife Ev and I chose the wrong one, but the others are for friends whose only contact was the Christmas card.
These people who are not Facebook friends, or that we even have valid e-mail addresses for are probably lost for good. I also got two misdirected pieces of mail that were for neighbors. One was for a neighbor who passed away and the other was for a neighbor who had moved about 16 years ago. Neither of these envelopes had return addresses and I guess that the postman figured I might know where they should be sent since after living here for 20 years we are the longest residence still around. Sadly, I have no idea where these cards should go, so the senders will go on thinking their well wishes were received. Maybe that is better than getting them back “UTF.”
Since this is my least favorite day I finally got around to getting Carter and myself our flu shots. I know it’s late, but I was waiting for the joy of the holidays to be over so I did not ruin a good day.
Good-bye holidays, good-bye the glow of the lights of the tree, hello darkness and cold of January. At least the days are getting a few minutes longer now and I can begin to dream of spring break and summer vacations. Time to start researching foreign lands and new memories to make.
Did You Weigh Yourself Today?
Posted: January 2, 2014 Filed under: Diet- comedy 3 CommentsI have a friend who worked hard to lose weight last year. She did a great job eating salmon with lemon and spinach at lunch until she got to her goal weight. Today she confessed that she got on the scale this morning for the first time since October and had gained six pounds. When she did the calculations it worked out to just about one glass of wine and half a cookie extra each day in those three months to gain six pounds.
One glass of wine and half a cookie does not seem like much but if she had just 230 extra calories everyday all year she would gain twenty four pounds in a year. Now how does that wine and cookie sound?
I like to get on the scale every morning. I know there are people who say they only do it once a week or once a year at their physical exam, but I need a daily reminder so that I don’t have that extra 230 calories for a couple of days in a row.
If I was not very good the day before not getting on the scale is not going to make it disappear. Accountability to myself means that I have to face the music, and dealing with it right away rather than three months later is much easier. If I ate 400 calories more than I should yesterday I can eat 200 fewer for the next two days and at least get back to a zero sum game. One pound gained is 3,500 calories more than you needed. That is fairly easy to do. 3,500 less than you need is really hard.
That same accountability is what I need for exercise. That is why keeping count of my steps has been a huge boon for me. Carter wanted to go horse back riding today. I said I would take her and get my steps in then. I also brought Shay Shay for a good walk for her. Of course it started raining as soon as we got to the barn. Carter said I could sit in the car, but she did not understand this was the allotted time in my day to get my steps. Since I am not a runner walking 10,000 steps takes some time. Time is a luxury.
Shay and I circled the farm traipsing through horse you-know-what in the rain. When we both looked like wet rats covered in poop we went to the car and stripped down. Carter volunteered to give Shay a bath when we got home which seemed like a fair trade. Tomorrow I am going to have to do a through cleaning of the inside of my car.
Just like calories in, walking, working out or other exercise is already calculated in my day. Without working some of the calories off, and I know that my totally efficient body does not work off half as much as the exercise machines predict it is burning, I could easily stop losing and start gaining. Those tiny amounts add up quickly.
If your resolution is to get in better shape, take note of how hard it is to get those pounds off. The worst thing is to lose them only to find them again, soon and quickly. Trust me on this, I am an expert and I would love to save you the yoyo heartache.
Less Dana, More Good 