Chew On This

I picked up the Vegetarian Times Complete Cookbook at Whole Foods the other day. I’ve been a little fascinated by the occasional sidebar and thought I’d share some.

• In a lifetime, according to the authors of The Animal Rights Handbook, the average meat-eating American will consume 1 calf, 3 lamb, 11 cattle, 23 hogs, 45 turkeys, 1,097chickens, and 15,665 chicken eggs.
• Of the 127 million overweight adults in the U.S., 60 million are obese and 9 million are severely obese.
• The number of calories from fat in a typical meal from the U.S. government’s school lunch program is a whopping 38%.
• Soybeans contain more protein than beef, more calcium than milk, more lecithin than eggs, and more iron than beef.
• There are approximately 2.1 million farms in the U.S. Of those, 0.2 % are organic.
• Corn is used in more than 800 different processed foods.
• About 80% of vegetarians are women.
• Vegetarian meals are the most commonly requested special meal on airplanes.
• If Americans abandoned their meat-centered diets, 200 million acres could be reforested.
• Vegetarians tend to have lower blood pressure than non-vegetarians.

Diet Denial

Here’s something of a paradox, apparently 2/3rds of Americans claim they’re healthy eaters even though the same fraction of Americans are overweight or obese.

When I read that pair of facts, I couldn’t help but recall these two women I once was behind in a cafeteria line. One of the women was telling the other how “good” she was being because she’d gotten the taco salad for lunch. The taco salad was in one of those tortilla bowls with greasy taco-seasoned beef, salsa, shredded cheese, and globs of sour cream, on a bed of nutrient vacant iceberg lettuce.

Have you ever checked out the caloric value of the taco salad at Taco Bell? It’s pretty much the worst thing you can pick at Taco Bell, calorie-wise. It gets a lot better if you choose not to eat the tortilla bowl.

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The Good With The Bad

I’m having an incredibly bad fibro day. The pain started yesterday evening and just kept increasing until everything hurt. I do mean everything. Even my butt cheek muscles seem to be screaming out in pain. Last night I couldn’t even pet my poor dog because just the task of lifting up my arm to make the petting motion was agony.

And I didn’t sleep well at all last night. The Flexeril didn’t appear to do any muscle relaxing and the Melatonin didn’t make me sleepy enough to be able to sleep through the pain. I couldn’t find a comfortable position because everywhere hurt and no matter which way I tried to lay on the bed, this or that limb or muscle group complained angrily.

So, I’m cranky today and I don’t feel like being on a diet or sticking to my 12oz of caffeine or drinking 24oz of water.

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Thirteen Ways To Lose A Pound A Week, 11th

In honor of the first week-aversary of starting my new “diet” - er - weight loss plan -er - healthy eating lifestyle or whatever the politically correct term is this year and in memory of the one pound I lost and hopefully will never find again, I’ve decided to do this week’s Thursday Thirteen on ways to shed a pound a week.

Many of you don’t know this but in another alias, I used to be a weight loss guru; so while I may have put on a few pounds, I actually do know what I’m talking about and I do know how to misplace the unwanted weight. I dedicated plenty of time and money educating myself on the very intricate details and the practical knowledge of it all. Listen to me, my friends, and I will show you the way.

First thing you should know is that a pound is the equivalent of 3500 calories; so you just have to cut 500 calories a day to lose a pound a week. Medical professionals recommend that you lose no more than ½ to 2 pounds a week for a healthy weight loss program. Any quicker than that and you risk doing damage to important body things you might want later.

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And No One Died

It never feels like the right time to start a diet. There’s always something going on that it seems wiser to wait until after before getting started on the obsessive deprivation — I mean, healthy portion control. Sometimes, there’s just so much going on that you just have to dive in and hope for the best. One year, I started Weight Watchers the Saturday before Thanksgiving and managed to lose weight too.

This has been an extremely stressful work week for me. More stressful than usual. It’s just been one of those weeks where everything seemed to be happening at once. I had several projects that were “going live” as we say in the IT world and one project that should have been in testing mode, but there’s been nothing but problems with the connections and the people I have to work with on the Vendor side. Sometimes, I am so surprised at the new levels of moronic stupidity I encounter with Vendor Interface people. These are people who represent themselves as having experience interfacing their applications with other applications at hospitals nationwide and most of them are older than me, so I assume they’re more experienced and yet, I always feel as if I’m dealing with someone who has the same knowledge about interfaces as my mother, who I suspect is slightly computer-phobic.

But I digress.

My Diet2Go food arrived Wednesday night, so I “officially” started my “diet” on Thursday. Of course, that was the most chaotic and stressful day of the work week, filled with co-worker thoughtlessness, Vendor stupidity, inexplicable co-worker moronic stunts, a go-live gone really wrong,and a day gone on too long. The fact is that even one of my co-workers commented to me that he was surprised I hadn’t blown a gasket at some point.

The thing is I didn’t realize until the next day that it never even occurred to me to head over to the vending machine or to the desk of the woman selling candy for her kids’ football and cheerleading programs. I didn’t stop by my favorite pastry shop for a diversion. I actually ate only the food I’d planned to eat, no binging. I even cut my caffeine down to 12oz.

So, I’m thinking for the first day, it wast a success.

And no one died.

Feeling Frumpily Grumpy

I had a bit of a meltdown yesterday afternoon when my mother phoned. She practically started the conversation with “You know what you should do; you should take some classes at night at the local university.” Well, I’d pretty much had it with everyone in my life telling me what I should be doing with my time. For two weeks, all I’ve heard from doctors, therapists and parents is what I should be doing and I’m 36 years old and I’m feeling stressed out and overwhelmed and I feel like I’m barely treading water as it is. I can’t figure out how to do it all and afford it all and then have time to relax, which apparently I’m also supposed to be able to do.

I really would like my therapist and my doctors and my parents and my boss to all get together and figure out my schedule so I can go to work, go to therapy, exercise plus do aqua aerobics, go to doctors’ appointments, take night classes in something they approve of, clean my house, run errands including going to the dump, take care of the extra stuff that needs to be done with the house, keep up with the surprise things that come up, pay my bills, get 8 or more restful hours of sleep a night, and make new friends.

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Big Butts & Accomplishments

I guess you could tell I’ve been a little out of sorts for the last week. I’ve actually been mulling over some grumpiness since my last therapy visit on the 4th. I went to my session feeling kind of proud of myself for everything I’d accomplished since the last session about a month before when I’d basically decided that I wasn’t going to let my depression “define” me. I had come to the conclusion around that time that my depression was reinforcing itself and I wanted to put a stop to that.

And I feel as if I’ve come a long way…or at least a way. I’ve been making a constant effort to clean my house, something that never seems to be done and never seems to be close to done and seems to be more like one step forward two steps back. (I still can’t figure out how my living room got so messy since I was only awake in it for about 2 hours yesterday and don’t recall doing anything in those 2 hours. It was clean on Sunday. And how does one person make so many dirty dishes and so much dirty clothes?)

And I had signed up for a couple of classes/lectures — one on Seasonal Affective Disorder and a six-week thing for people with chronic illnesses. I was very excited about the prospect of getting Pugly into the next training class and eventually agility training.

Really, except for my frustration with the fibro pain and my problems with communication with my GP and the Rheumatologist, I was in a fairly good mood overall as far as the direction I was heading. I thought I was making good progress and I was ready for my pat on the back and some support and sympathy for the communication issues.

Clearly, that’s not what happened.

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Book Review: The Inflammation-Free Diet Plan

Friday night I finished reading The Inflammation-Free Diet Plan by Monica Reinagel and I figured what better place to share my opinion of the book than right here?

First of all, it’s important to note that the book is not written by a doctor. Also, since the copyright is 2006, I expected the book to talk about chronic inflammatory diseases such as Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome but there wasn’t any mention about them. Reinagel focused on diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, cancer, and aging. Since I suffer from Fibromyalgia and not diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, heart disease, Alzheimer’s or cancer, I was disappointed. Despite my disappointment in my ailment being left out of the book entirely, I pushed onward.

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She Knows Better

Back in 1998^*, before all of the bad stuff started coming out about Metabolife, back when all of the DJs on the radio were singing its miracle weight loss praises and I was pretty desperate, I tried it for a few months. You know, in those days, they were basically saying that you could eat what you wanted as long as you took Metabolife and you would lose weight and it was perfectly safe and it had been lab tested and blah blah blah. None of the stuff about how the owner of the company had been in prison for selling drugs before had come out yet and none of the questionable information about how the “tests” had only been for like a day or two had been revealed. There hadn’t been any news reports about people going to the hospital with high blood pressure and heart problems and other fun stuff.

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Revisiting Alternative Medicine

I’ve been thinking a lot about (re)focusing on alternative medicine lately as a means of improving my health. I got to thinking about it because of a bad experience at the doctor’s office where I didn’t see the actual doctor but a nurse practitioner who’s “advise” was basically useless. Plus, my anti-depressant medication doesn’t appear to be working anymore and I’m having a flare up with my fibromyalgia with the extreme heat and humidity from last week.

So, I pulled out the diet recommendations from the Alternative Med Doctors I saw last November and December when I got my IgAN and fibro diagnoses. I figured now was a good time to check in and review how I’m doing.

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