Grow up, America.

The murder of 20 first graders in Connecticut has undone me in a way that nothing since September 11th has.

I intended to get back to blogging about health and wellness today, but I can't stop thinking about Newtown. I pretty much succeeded in avoiding political commentary throughout the elections- and God knows it wasn't for lack of material or opinions- so I hope you'll excuse me if I use this forum to express some of what I'm struggling with.

Source: cagle.com via Rebecca on Pinterest

I don't want to "Like" pictures of cute kids with "R.I.P." in the corner on Facebook. I can't watch "The Voice" sing "Hallelujah" and then transition to "Great Balls of Fire". I am heartbroken, and I am FURIOUS that we go through this ridiculous pantomime of grief.

This is a terror we brought on ourselves, and on all of those little kids and their teachers, families, and community. We created this heinousness through our repeated refusal as a country to behave like rational, humane adults and outlaw the sale of the weapons of mass destruction favored by murderers looking to inflict as much pain and suffering as possible.

The guns used in Newtown were the same type used in a movie theater and in a high school in Colorado, at Gabbie Gifford's constituent event in Arizona, on campus at Virginia Tech, by the snipers who hunted people around DC, and in a shopping mall in Oregon last week. The vast majority of the guns used in these tragedies were purchased legally. If you have the stomach for more fun facts, this article is very informative.

So why are we pretending that we don't know what causes these horrors? When I hear newscasters or experts say things like, "We may never know why this happened" I want to throw something. True, we do not know what particular twisted, seeping, seething logic drove the black hole that was Adam Lanza to do what he did. But we all know why this happened.

This happened because we are a country which has gotten comfortable lying to itself about facts we find inconvenient, and which has fallen in love with a self-image created by Hollywood and Fox News that was never true.
 
We like to pretend we are all cowboys and heroes, each of us the last stand against some imagined threat, from home invasion to government repression. We insist that OUR rights to unrestricted access to semi-automatic weapons, enshrined in the Second Amendment, override the Declaration of Independence's "certain inalienable rights" of others to, among other things, life.

In the past, we have accepted facile arguments ("Guns don't kill people..") against gun control, despite all evidence to the contrary. Last week, a madman in China attacked 20 school children, injuring 20 of them but killing none- because he had a knife instead of a gun. The murderer in Newtown slaughtered those children with guns purchased legally by his mother.

I call bullshit.

Yes, of course we need more mental health services (and this letter is a heartbreaking example of the gaps in our system), but you can't legislate away the human condition. We will always have the mentally disturbed in our midst; we don't have to have them heavily armed, and there is no regulation that would keep those types of weapons out the hands of people like Adam except to make them completely illegal. Period.

I am about the least likely person in the world to cite a Bible passage, but 1 Corinthians 13:11 came to mind: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

I am sorry for those for whom these guns are a recreational pass time, but I'm asking you to grow up. If my giving up reading novels would save the lives of 20 6-year olds who had just written their first letter to Santa on their own, I would put books down and never read again.

Last week, 20 actual children paid the debt we've incurred by indulging our selfish childishness.

It's time for America to grow up.

Source: cagle.com via Rebecca on Pinterest

Research Shows, Life Isn't Fair

This just doesn't seem fair.

Direct from the annals of Research That Is Really Not That Helpful, in 2010 a study established that some people are genetically predisposed to respond more quickly than others to exercise.

The findings mean that two different people who do the exact same physical training may progress in their fitness at different rates.

This is, in short, a crock. A sham. A bamboozle. The fact that my fitness at any given time is a direct reflection of the amount of work I've put into it is a truism that has always both frustrated and driven me. 

But now it turns out that my truism is not, technically, true. Based on my physical makeup, the work I put in may or may not have the impact it would have on someone else.

A company called XRGenomics has devised a test that can determine how likely you are to respond to aerobic training. The test's predictive power is tied to the genetic marker that determines your VO2 max, which is the volume of oxygen that your body is capable of processing in a given period of time. The higher your VO2 max, the better you'll do with aerobic exercise.  

So the question is- would you want to know? 

The test makers point out that, if you knew that you were not so blessed genetically for aerobic activity, you could focus your fitness efforts on something like strength training instead. Alternatively, just knowing the fact that it was going to take you a little longer than average to build up aerobic capacity might save you from giving up prematurely if you failed to see results as quickly as your peers.

But I don't know- I feel like, if I knew going into it that I was only going get 75% of results that my counterpart was going to get for the same work, I would be disheartened. 

Maybe Obama can get a Lily Ledbetter Act for my alveoli on the agenda for a second term.

Want to read more? Are You Likely To Respond to Physical Exercise, by Gretchen Reynolds, NYTimes. October 10, 2012.

Back to Basics

Only a 1 because 0 isn't an option.

As a general rule, I am a very stable person. If you created a disposition scale of 1-10, wherein 1 is totally despondent (Pippa getting a bath) and 10 is beyond thrilled (Pippa in the car after eating ice cream for the first time), I am typically around 7 or 8. 

Favorite toast? Marble rye- a little rye, a little pumpernickel.

Favorite ice cream? Late Night Snack- a little salty, a little sweet.

Favorite cocktail? Gin and tonic- a little tart, a little crisp. 

Wheeee!!! A perfect 10.

Which, I think, is why Paleo threw me for such a loop.

True, it did a pretty good job of meeting the criteria I set for diet acceptability. It was adaptable to different social situations, it's a diet that Ron was willing to try, and we didn't have to buy any weird new foods.

But just because we didn't have to add anything weird doesn't mean it wasn't weird to cut things out. I wrote a couple of times about how meals just felt strange- unbalanced- without a starch.

Like this. Except she's still super-awesome.

Also, because we were leaning so hard away from starches, we leaned way too far towards protein, especially meat. I felt slow, greasy, and off-keel.

When I called it quits a couple of weeks ago, I intended to launch right into research and experimentation with the Maker's Diet, aka the What Would Jesus Eat? Diet. Basically, it restricts your diet to what would have been available in biblical times.

When the time came, though, I found I really didn't want to do that. Like, at all. I needed a couple of weeks to eat normally and to regain my balance. 

I also needed to stop obsessing about what I was eating.

Diet plans like Weight Watchers recommend not making major changes to what you eat when you're trying to lose weight, and for me, that's key.

Maybe a little...no. Nope. Not a all.

Switching to a drastically different eating pattern like Paleo required a ton of mental energy, thinking through every bite I ate, researching recipes, and making multiple trips to the grocery store every week. What am I, a wizard? I have too much going on beyond what I'm eating to invest that much mental energy into every meal.

So, where does that leave me, and this experiment?

For now, I'm going back to basics. There have been a lot of really interesting articles recently, about organics, balanced eating, and exercise, and I'm going to spend some time thinking and writing about those. I'll also be trying out and sharing some new seasonal recipes. I'm going to restart my food diary, which has been a really useful tool for me in the past. Also, Ron and I signed up for the New Orleans marathon in February, so I'm going to get back into running and training regularly.

If you have any suggestions or ideas for topics, I'd love to hear them.

And maybe, after a little chance to regain my balance, I'll be ready to take on a new diet. As for now, I'm working my way back to an 8 on the diet disposition scale: Pippy on a sunny day.

Because Laughter is Good for Your Health

Happy Friday!

Good News for Slow Runners!

Just click on the image below for the Romney/Ryan ticket's solution for those of us just barely ahead of the sad wagon.

Source: paulryantimecalculator.com via Rebecca on Pinterest

(If you don't know what this is in reference to, you can check it out here.)

That's the Spirit!

Source: dcist.com via Rebecca on Pinterest

DC has become a huge triathlon town. It has just the right mix of weather, trails, and type A personalities with lots of money and limited athletic backgrounds to nurture a vibrant tri community

Breaking Up Is (Not That Hard) To Do

It's official. I'm breaking up with Paleo.

I think we all saw this coming, no?

We had so much in common. Bacon. Flank steak. Salmon. Lamb. Bacon. I thought we could make it work. Paleo had most of the characteristics I was looking for in a diet.

First, Paleo got along well with my husband (and it can be so awkward when that relationship is strained). I didn't have to cook separate dinners or shop for two sets of groceries.

Ron missed being able to take sandwiches to work for lunch, and he missed yogurt with granola for breakfast, but fundamentally, he wasn't complaining about a meal plan that regularly included steak for dinner.

Also, I didn't have to buy anything weird. We could eat food, and not "food". Although some of the food fakery recommended on Paleo sites on the Web was a little silly, I discovered not one, but two, recipes that will remain in high rotation even now that we've broken up.

Small Victory

Ron and I take turns walking Pippa in the morning. My days off from walking her are supposed to be my running days.

However, this morning, Pippa refused to go with Ron. She looked at me like this:

Recipe Success: Garlic Cauliflower "Mashed Potatoes"

I dunno. I just feel like
 something's missing.

One big challenge to Paleo eating is coming up with a meal that feels complete, and not like a bunch of groceries. Without a starch, the plate just seems a bit unbalanced to me.

In my search for ideas, I found the awesome website Nom Nom Paleo.  The author is a mom and a nurse, but she must have some sort of deal with the devil that allows her extra hours in the day, because she also blogs and takes gorgeous food porn photos.

Whatever she's doing, it's working.

Last night I tried one of her recipes, for Garlic Cauliflower "Mashed Potatoes", and it was perfect.  It was super-easy to make, cheap, delicious, and sufficiently "starchy" to make a Paleo dinner of chicken sausages and salad (for Ron), or a crab cake, tomato and avocado (for me), feel tied together and satisfying.

I'm baaaack!

Better than my usual commute.

Pop Quiz:

In which location is it most challenging to secure an Internet connection?

A. Lusaka, Zambia
B. Cranberry Lake, New York

OK, these set ups are always a little obvious. But still, it's a little surprising, right?

I spent the last week at my family's vacation place in the Adirondacks, in upper New York State. It's a 10 hour drive from DC, and our cabins are at the far end of the lake. There are no roads, no phones, no electricity, no indoor plumbing- and of course, no Internet. It is fabulous.

For the week at the lake, I didn't worry about Paleo. There is only one week a year when I eat s'mores, and I'm not going to skip them because cavemen were too dumb to figure out marshmallows.

I researched this extensively.

The 2 weeks in Zambia were also less than stellar, diet-wise. I posted about nshima, the staple of Zambian food. It is a tasty, slightly sticky corn pudding that is eaten at every Zambian lunch- and it is definitely not Paleo.

Nor was the delicious South African red wine I drank at dinner pretty much every night, for that matter.

I weighed myself this morning, and the damage was not as bad as it could have been.  I also went for my first run in 3 weeks, and felt pretty good.

And now, it's back on the bandwagon with Paleo. I'll report the findings after the end of this week- I'm hoping the little bump up is a result of these bad boys:

Sadly, totally not worth it.

Ron and I eat fast food exactly twice a year, on the way to and home from Cranberry Lake. This year, we made it a mission to consume these tacos, which have a shell made of Doritos and have given the foodie blogosphere a massive collective orgasm.

And... meh. They were salty, which is my favorite flavor. But, you know, they're still filled with Taco Bell meat (Ron corrected me- "meat").

A quick aside: a friend of ours told us once that she went into Taco Bell and ordered a taco, and the guy said they were out. So she ordered a burrito, and he said they were out of those as well. "How can you be out of tacos and burritos?" she asked. With a totally straight face, he said "Well, the meat hose is clogged."

Huh huh. Meat hose.

Anyway, I won't miss them between now and next August. And we noticed that Dunkin' Donuts was advertising Oreo donuts, so the mad geniuses are already work at next year's hideous/delicious Frankensnack.

Happy Weekend!

I'm in Livingstone for the weekend, going to see Victoria Falls and some rhinos and whatever else we come across.

Internet connection is spotty at best, so just going to post this fabulous video- a recreation of a fairly well known experiment testing kids' ability to balance immediate gratification against long-term reward. They draw all kinds of Big Conclusions from the real study (summarized here), but basically, I'm posting this because it's cute, and it's Friday.

Have a great weekend!

Chiwawa, Kapenta and Nshima, Oh My!

Here is the truth about traveling for work: it is mostly just a lot of work.

I was a bit worried about what I'd write about today, because since arriving my activities have included:

1. Working in my hotel room
2. Working in my hotel dining room
3. Working my hotel bar
4. Working in a training session
5. Working in my Zambia team's office

But there are upsides as well, such as hotel breakfasts. I like them. A lot.

I Fought Airplane Food, and I Won

1st rule of business: Know your customer

You guys, someone should alert the UN about the size of KLM's economy class seats. Someday we will look back on these days in the same way we look at the imprisonment of debtors and the mentally unwell- as a dark period of barbarity before enlightened thought triumphed.

After 24 hours of being kept in a stress position and deprived of sleep, I have arrived in Zambia.

There was plenty that didn't go right with the trip, but one thing that did go right was my snacking.

Me and My Salami Are Outta Here!

Thanks for checking in! I'm somewhere airborne at the moment, trying to avoid being murdered by my seat mate for eating hardboiled eggs and salami in an enclosed space. In the meantime, take a look at this cool infographic from PaleolithicDiet.com:

Source: infographic.paleolithicdiet.com via Rebecca on Pinterest

Paleo Week 2 Review

Sorry. Sometimes cute cat photos just say it best. 

Week 2 was a doozy- a major client report was due, and I am leaving for 3 weeks of travel, so getting prepared to get out of the office was a killer. 

OMG I can't believe I say things like that now. When did I get so old? Pass the Metamucil, would you?

Week 5 Round-Up: Olympic Edition

I just love the Olympics, like the great big jingoistic fool that I am. Not surprisingly, there've been tons of great health and and athletics articles out around the games.

This is my favorite link of the week:

I just love her. (Michelle, call me! I totally love vegetables too! We can hang out!)

And my 2nd favorite, demonstrating how NBC is propagating its homosexual agenda (and thank god for it) (Really NBC? Seacrest? REALLY?)

Source: buzzfeed.com via Rebecca on Pinterest

Breaking (Paleo) Bad

I cooked up something preeeety special last night, guys.

This recipe coulda saved poor Walt so much heartache.

Paleo Is, Like, Superhard, Y'all

Duh, y'all. Dinner with no starch is like
 a short skirt with no panties. At first you're all
like, "Who'll even notice?' and then, like,
EVERYONE TOTALLY DOES.

So, remember 2 days ago when I said Paleo was pretty easy to work into your everyday life? I'd like to reconsider.

Two things:
1) If you don't grocery shop and do most of the cooking on the weekend, you are totally screwed. I intended to make a Paleo granola to eat for breakfast all week, which takes an hour plus to cook.

But I did the grocery shopping on Monday. By the time I got home from work, it was too late to cook. So we ordered Thai (very easy to do Paleo) and didn't cook the granola. Tonight, surprise dinner plans came up and again, no cooking.

I am holding out hope for tomorrow and the granola, but by then, Ron will have had 3 mornings of "Paleo" scones- which are like regular scones, in that they are actually just regular scones that he is calling Paleo.

Today, I'm Coming Out of the Closet

Oh Ricky. I just can't quit you.

Well, my inner gay man is coming out. I keep him hidden, because he's a little embarrassing.

I take some pride on reading good books and serious magazines. I follow independent food blogs to learn about supper clubs and artisanal popsicles. I keep abreast of fashion trends, even if I can't afford to follow them, and I prefer the small indie theater to the big multiplex.

But man oh man, my inner gay man (let's call him Lance) just insists on some good, cotton candy, fluffy, worthless, total junk food music, especially for running.

The Results Are In! Paleo Week 1 Review

From cartoonstock.com

I was talking to a friend about this blog this weekend, and about FitBit and all of the tracking and measuring I'm doing. He summarized it as "data-driven decision making", which is exactly right. 

So, it's time to review the data from Week 1 of Paleo. Care to join me as I geek out?

Week 4 Round-Up

It's crazy to me that this blog is old enough to have traditions, so it's with great relish that I am going to break with the "traditional" format of my weekly round-up.

Instead of talking about a bunch of articles from this week (and there were a number of good ones) I want to focus on just one.

Scientific American, which is a real, legit news source in my book (sorry, Shape) ran a story this week in which the author looked at the rules of the Paleo Diet-type diets (also called primal eating, or ancestral) and compared them to what is really known about what people ate in the Paleolithic era.

This could not be more dead-on what this blog is about, so I'm going to devote the whole post to talking about it.

The Meat Sweats

Yesterday morning, I went for my usual little 3 mile run, and I felt absolutely, truly terrible the whole time.

I woke up tired- which is a super awesome feeling, by the way. Just love that one.

There's no mystery to it though- it's been a big week at work, so I've been working like crazy and staying up late.

On days like that, when it's so hard to get up, I make a little deal with myself. If I just get up and dressed and run for 10 minutes, if I'm still totally miserable, I can come home.

I have run a lot of really miserable miles in my life, and I have never come as close to quitting and heading home as I did yesterday. The only thing that kept me going was the fact that it was a gorgeous morning, and we're headed for another heatwave- there won't be another nice run day this week.

When I finally dragged myself home, I had a terribly sour stomach and a headache, and I felt awful all morning. When I pulled that damn casserole out of the fridge to pack it up for breakfast, I almost lost it.


I was officially suffering from the dreaded Meat Sweats. 

You Can't Food Shame the Shameless

Me too, buddy. Me too. 

You know, dieting is a lot of work. I spent 5 hours on Sunday grocery shopping and prepping our food for the week- cooking Chorizo and Sweet Potato casserole, grilling chicken sausage, hard-boiling eggs, washing and chopping veggies and fruit for salad and snacks.

And then Monday morning (Day 1), I remembered that I had planned to go to a book signing with a friend during lunch, and so I didn't bring any of the food I'd meticulously prepared the night before.

I went to work, heated up my casserole surprise, and opened up my calendar for the day to find...that the book signing is next Monday, which meant that I was now without lunch plans OR my Paleo lunch. Sigh.

Ode to Chorizo

Mise en place des hommes des cavernes

Pre-Paleo Diet, my typical weekday breakfast was either Kashi cereal with fruit and yogurt, or oatmeal- both a veritable Paleo catastrophe.

On the weekends we typically make scrambled eggs on at least one morning, but we barely get ourselves out the door with our pants on during the week. I shudder to think what might occur if we threw cooking into the mix.

Let the Games Begin

Thas a whole lotta meat.

First up, the meatathalon!

So it's FINALLY time to actually start the Paleo Diet and...what? You doubted me, didn't you? I am hurt.

Ron and I braved the P Street Whole Foods on Sunday afternoon and stocked up. I think the guy at the meat counter was a little weirded out- it's awkward to have to keep asking a stranger for little more of that sweet, spicy sausage- but I have a feeling we are going to be gooood friends by the end of this. 

Week 3 Round-Up

Week 3: July 13-19

Week 3 done! Each day seems so long but each week is so short.

I am ready to start Paleo next week- I'm looking forward to starting the Experiment fo' realz. I am looking forward to eat salmon steaks for breakfast, testing out new recipes, and losing a little weight. I'm looking forward to reporting on some results, too.

The Fitbit has been a great success- it's already given me some interesting insight, and it's motivational. I'll do a full report when I have a little more experience with it, but so far, I love it.

A lovely weekend to everyone!

Top Story of the Week

The article: Weekends in the Kitchen with My Fat Dad. Dawn Lerman, NYT, July 19, 2012.

What it says: The author has written a series of articles about growing up with a morbidly obese father. She spends a couple of weeks with him at a weight loss spa, and taught herself to cook as a way to deal with her fear and conflicting feelings about him.

Why it's interesting: Lerman explores the impact of growing up with her father's self-destructive behavior, her family's unhealthy food habits, and establishing a healthy relationship with food for herself. It's a really interesting discussion of how our families impact the way we see ourselves and our world, and about learning from your history and using it as a tool to set your own path, rather than allowing it to trap you. 

To Meat, or Not to Meat

From washingtonpost.com

Did you know pigs wiggle and wag their tails like dogs when they're happy? This horrifying detail was mentioned in the first of a series of 3 articles in the Washington Post, about a couple in the DC area who is planning to raise, and then slaughter and eat, 3 piglets.

In the article, the woman who is raising the pigs describes getting their living area ready and then picking them out and bringing them home. She describes naming them and worrying about their well-being- clearly, this woman is taking good care of her pigs. The little piglet in the picture above is in fat piglet heaven- until November, when he will be divested of his mortal coil so that it might be turned into a delicious pork chop.

Comparing Apples to...Rib Roast

As I'm gearing up for this project, I thought it might be helpful to review the different diets' rules and restrictions, to make the comparison between them a little more straightforward. The table below lays out the 6 different diets I'm planning to test out, and their basic rules about various food categories. 

I didn't include fruits or vegetables as a category because consumption of these food groups is almost totally unrestricted in all of these diets. Some of the low-carb diets, like Paleo, caution against eating too much fruit, and dried fruit is meant to be limited, but otherwise, you're free to go to town. No one ever got fat eating too many carrots.

One caveat here: I haven't researched all of these diets in detail yet, so some may be off. If you see something that needs to be changed, please let me know and I'll fix it.

Diet Comparison Chart

These diets share some similarities- the chart below makes that a little easier to see. The green boxes show food categories that the diet doesn't restrict at all, yellow boxes show food categories that a diet allows with conditions, and the red boxes indicate food categories that the diet rules out entirely. Verbotin!

He's Jewish like Olive Garden is Italian

Book Review: "Drop Dead Healthy" by A.J. Jacobs

 

My Jewish guilt wants me to make clear that "Jewish like Olive Garden is Italian" is not my line- it belongs to A.J. Jacobs, the very funny, nebbish-y, Woody Allen-y author of Drop Dead Healthy.

He is an editor at large for Esquire, and previously wrote two fairly well-known books: The Know It All, about improving his mind by reading the entire encyclopedia, and The Year of Living Biblically, about improving his spirit by following all of the biblical tenets for a year. This book is the last in the series, and focuses on improving his body.

Next Monday: Always the Best Day to Start a Diet

On Friday, I said that I was going to start the Paleo Diet today. 

However, it has come to my attention that years of rigorous scientific research have irrefutably demonstrated that the best time to start a new diet is always next Monday.

Kidding, kidding. (Mostly).

Actually, what came to my attention was something called the FitBit.

Week 2 Round-up

Ouch.

Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Week 2: July 6- 12

Done with Week 2! Below, I've posted the best of the news of the week. If you know of anything I missed or any sites I should be checking regularly, please let me know.

Next week, I'll launch Phase 1 of the experiment and kick off my Paleo Diet. I am excited to actually get started- I have to speed read through Cordain's Paleo Diet book so I can a) figure out exactly what I'm going to be eating and b) report to you what I think of it. Until then... happy weekend!


Top Story of the Week
The article: In Dieting, Magic Isn't a Substitute for Science. Gina Kolata, NYTimes, July 9, 2012.

From Chicago-Hearald-Tribune

What is says: The article profiles an interview with an obesity researcher, Dr. Jules Hirsch, responding to a recent JAMA study which showed that, "after losing weight, people on a high-fat, high-protein diet burned more calories than those eating more carbohydrates."

Dr. Hirsch spends the rest of the article poking various holes in the study, including the fact that there were only 21 participants- not nearly large enough to draw conclusions. He also brings up what I think is essentially the Law of the Conservation of Energy, or at least the dieter's equivalent of it. The Law of Conservation of Energy is a physics principle which states that matter (i.e. energy, i.e. calories) can neither be created nor destroyed. That is, calories going into a system (your body) will always equal calories leaving the system. Therefore, it doesn't matter what form you eat your calories in, you're not going to get rid of extra calories (ie, stored fat) without creating a calorie deficit by burning more calories than you put into your system, either by reducing your calorie intake, or increasing your energy output through activity, or a combination of the two.

Why it's interesting: The question of whether a calorie is just a calorie is really the key issue for every single diet. On one hand, I took physics; I understand the principle and, you know, I'm not really ready to take on whatever genius came up with it. On the other hand, I can't quite believe that my body will really react to 250 calories of Doritos in the same way it might react to 250 calories of blueberries. That's what this blog's about- finding out for myself! One other note: Loren Cordain, who wrote the Paleo Diet book, would argue that a high-fat, high-protein diet like what was studied in the JAMA article is TERRIBLE for you. Paleo is a VERY high protein, moderate fat, low carb diet, and he would argue that that is a significant difference.

Bonus:  Someone suggested on Twitter yesterday that the staff at NYT must wander around with "If you like Gina Ko-la-ta, getting caught in the rain..." stuck in their heads. Ha! That must kill them.

A Word about Motivation

In most areas of my life, I am a highly motivated person. When I really, truly want something, I go after it, hard.

In grad school, when the rest of my classmates were building pit latrines in Africa, I wrote the Department of Health in Hawaii, told them I was coming and to please find a job for me, and showed up on their doorstep a few weeks later for a paid internship in paradise.
  

He's sorry you missed it too.

Image by Chevron McIntyre

Sidenote: Most international development experts will not respect this as "field experience". This is because they are sad and bitter that they spent their youth building pit latrines instead of drinking Mai Tais all night and watching the sun rise over the Pacific with hot Australian surfers.

Exercise and Weight Loss

Yesterday, I talked about how important running is to me, for my physical, spiritual and mental health.

However, for weight loss, even running is not enough. It is necessary, but not sufficient on its own. I've learned this through some seriously painful trial and error.

On the upside, I didn't poop my pants.

Image from blog.opentable.com/tag/tori-tsu

I trained for and completed the 2008 Marine Corps Marathon while about 20 lbs overweight. My sweet husband Ron jumped in to run with me at mile 18, to try to encourage me on. "You can do it, babe!" he cheered, just as I was hitting the wall. I couldn't even reply- I was just holding it together. "Babe?" he asked, concerned that perhaps I was experiencing some sort of exhaustion-induced deafness. "Don't be so nice to me right now," I croaked through a tear-tightened throat. "I can't handle it."

Running is My Religion

     Forrest Gump, Patron Saint in the 

Church of Runnin' Fools

Not really. I'm Jewish.

But I love to run.

I recognize this will make me somewhat suspect to a large number of people, and I recognize that running can be the absolute worst. If you're not in shape, or if it's too hot, or if you didn't drink enough water yesterday or drank too much wine last night, or if it's too hilly, or not hilly enough, or you ate too much dairy at lunch or WHATEVER, it can be absolutely awful.

It's really hard to write about what's great about running. One of my favorite authors, Haruki Murakami, gave it a go with, "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running." And it's good. Really.

But it still doesn't quite capture it for me, which makes me fairly certain that it can't be written about well. I suspect it's because it's just something that's too intensely personal, and that each person's experience with it is unique to them.

Ironman Cozumel 2011

Hi! We're about to become Ironmen! Yay us!

This week, I'm going to talk a lot about exercise and how it fits into my overall health. In planning things out, I realized that the topic of completing the Ironman triathlon with my husband Ron last year is going to come up repeatedly.


Honestly, I'm pretty proud of this achievement- I can work it into just about any conversation.


Example:
Them: "Did you hear Kim Jong Il died? They're installing his son as the new dictator."
Me: "Oh, that's really sad. You know what else is sad? When my toenails all turned black and blue after I finished the Ironman." 

Week 1 Round-Up

This is neither Gary Taubes
nor Mark Bittman. Getty Images.

A quick run-through of relevant news items from the week- I'll keep a running tab of all of these on the "In the News" page, too.

Would love suggestions for other good sources for health news- please tell me in the comments if you know of one.

July 5, 2012
Chinese athletes are suffering from meat withdrawal. Or is it the lead they're missing? NPR.

July 4, 2012
Eat a hot dog! It's what Thomas Jefferson would want. Also, you know what will kill you way faster than your diet? Shooting fireworks out of your butt.

July 3, 2012
This lady can eat whatever she wants and she's got great skin too. Feel free to shake a fist. Washington Post.

Ooh, gurl, you betta werk!

The point of this experiment is figure which diet works best for me. But how to define what "works best"? I need a set of criteria to use to measure the diets against each other.


The whole blog will serve as a review of how following a particular diet makes me feel, whether or not it impacts my workouts, my skin, or my weight. 


In addition to that, though, I want to try to capture how liveable the diet is. I am only going to try each of them for a month or two; could I actually see myself working this diet into my life? These measures might change as the project goes on, but it's a start. 


Except...all of these measure how easy I find the diet to live with...Maybe I need to ask Ron to measure how easy he finds me to live with while I'm testing things out? 

The Experiment (n=1)

I love food- pretty much all of it. I love to cook, especially with my husband Ron. I love to entertain. We subscribe to Bon Appetit, Saveur, and Cook's Illustrated, and read blogs like The Kitchn, to find delicious new recipes to wow our friends when we have them over for brunch or dinner on the weekends. When we travel to a new place, we plan our trip around awesome restaurants or unique local cuisine.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how to make delicious food that's healthy, too. But recently, I've been feeling inundated with conflicting information about how to be healthy- eat less meat but more protein, less gluten but more fiber, less dairy but more yogurt, etc.