Kale, glorious kale!

Long ago, in a far away land, I went to college. When my mother drove me there . . . ooooooo. Well, she had spent about two hours between me standing in line to get my keys and then carrying things up to my third floor room. Then we ran into town to set up a bank account for me, run an errand, and dashed back to campus in time for the welcoming speeches for orientation. There we were surrounded by new, incoming Hanpshire-ites (who actually LIKE being called "Hampsters" - Hee, hee.), older students who were there to lead Orientation activities, and of course, staff and faculty. My mother spent most of THAT hour looking around, with her jaw visibly hanging open, at the students and incoming students and their distinctive images and appearance, shall we say. At the end of this she said, "I've always taught you not to talk to strangers, and now I just don't know what to tell you." (Ha! As an important note, when I graduated, my mom had come full circle on this. Hampsters don't walk across the graduation stage in cap and gowns; they wear what they want. And BOY DO THEY. My mom took three or four pictures of me, and about 37 of the fellow graduates saying, "I hope you don't mind, but for me it's a little like going to the circus!")

Hampshire College is a place that encourages and supports extreme individuality (I say that knowing I'm bringing to mind "extreme sports." It's intentional - Hampshire is a glorious, and extreme place. Worthy of another post unto itself . . .  oh yeah, I've been working on that post for nigh unto 3 months now.  .  . so stick a pin in that). It does this in terms of educational philosophy and curriculum, as well as in other ways. What's hilarious is that from pretty much the moment that I entered kindergarten I was very obviously, "that girl who's a little different" in my K-12 school experiences, and in comparison at Hampshire, I was something of a subversive because I was so "mainstream."  I found very quickly that the ways I had tested the boundaries and pushed the envelope were not so great as those of my new peers. I hadn't taken a year off to hike Europe, I had never dyed my hair or made my own clothing from natural fibers, I hadn't quit high school in favor of homeschooling myself so that I could do MORE, I hadn't published anything, and I had to ask someone what kale was! I went to a vegetarian potluck and was thrilled about the rice salad, the grilled corn and roasted red pepper salad, the stuffed zucchini, but, "what's this green stuff? Spinach?"

A few years later, I moved out of the dorms and into Hampshire's on-campus smaller setting housing (I hesitate to call them "apartments" because they are generally shared with 5-8 people. Which is a lot. But they have kitchens and living rooms. Which was what I was looking for at the time) and my "mod-mates" and I split a share of Hampshire's farm. I want to say that for a semester's worth of vegetable we each chipped in something like $30-40 dollars. The catch with farm shares is that you get whatever portion you get of whatever has been harvested. It's not like you go in and say, "I want tomatoes, garlic and zucchini this week." Early on we got a few strawberries, tomatoes, and things like broccoli, basil, and onions. Even fresh flowers one week! But once we got into November and December, the winter vegetables populated our share - sweet potatoes, other roots, and lots and lots of kale. I used to go pick up the share, take the kale, and just stick it gingerly in the fridge and hope fervently that the adorably young, hippie, dancing student we lived with would know what to do with it. Often times she picked up on the silent brain-wave from me and obliged.

But, I also was part of a group that met every Monday with a potluck dinner attached to our meeting. And so, finally, inevitably, it was an early December afternoon and I had been so busy finishing math assignments (another thing that branded me as subversively "normal" at Camp Hamp), planning my teaching, and writing a chapter of my thesis that I hadn't had time to plan what I would bring to the potluck. In the back of my mind I thought, "I'm sure that we have some corn chips and cheese . . . ??" No. I descended to the kitchen and found no crackers to put peanut butter on, no corn chips, no sweet potatoes I could quickly roast or mash, aiiiiiIIIIIIIEEEEEEE. (I made this noise in my head A LOT that year as I balanced being engaged with work with teaching AND writing a thesis. Sometimes in excitement and other times in utter, flat-spin-esque PANIC.) Ok, self, what DO we have. Well, we have kale. A quick walk down the hall to knock on Sara-dancer-girl's door, "Umm, what can you tell me about kale."

I think she saw the anxiety in my face because I remember distinctly her pausing for a quick beat before saying, "Why don't you just steam it lightly and then borrow some tahini from me to serve with it for the Counselor Advocates." (I might not've known what all of our vegetables were when we got our weekly share portions, but one of the things I had done for our mod/flat was to create a calendar/board thingy so that we could communicate the 28 different directions we were all going in at all times and be sensitive to what was going on in each other's lives. Ahhhh Organization, my long-time companion.)

I did just this, and all of the vegans at my meeting DELIGHTED at my offering. I was kind of like, "Umm, ohhhh-kaaayyy." But here's why: first, I'm not a vegan. Second: I ADORE vegetables. I have always felt this way. Mushrooms, asparagus, salads, bring it on. My parents never had to negotiate with me to get me to eat my veggies. With only two exceptions: not a fan of beets. Aaaaaand, I don't like cooked cabbage. Well, kale is a form of cabbage.

Fast-forward many years, and here I am in Boulder. If ever there was a place MORE dedicated to local,  farmers-market, veggie-full eating than Hampshire, here it is. I am a long way from Kansas, as it were - in my first month living here alone I encountered kale 4 times. (And while I didn't think, "ewww" I also wasn't like, "Oh, I'm definitely getting THAT.")

But, the story doesn't end there. I have wonderful, entertaining, health-minded, whip-smart friends, and two that live in Jersey mentioned kale or cooked it in foods I was sharing with them. One of them is the "Ima" (mom) in my Jewish family, and when I returned to visit, she had kale in a soup for the start of the Shabat meal. I thought, "hmmm, kale. Perhaps I have judged you unfairly." Another is perhaps the most entertaining person I know in real life. She revels in making fun of stereotypes and can often be found discussing how, as a lesbian woman, she knows she is expected to eat kale and bang her tambourine with tabbouleh and quinoa flying out of it. (Biggest giggle of all.) She also posted a recipe for kale salad on FB.

Eureka!!

Simple, not cooked, fresh ingredients, come to meeeeeeeee. I made this salad last summer because I needed a break from lettuce and cucumber based salads and didn't want to cook vegetables. Very quickly, kale became something written in bold, all-caps on my grocery list each week. In fact, when I lost my job and started planning my budget down to the tiniest detail, I cut many things out of my grocery list, of course. But what was remarkable were the things I cut from my grocery list specifically IN ORDER TO SAVE KALE.

If you had told me that the year before, I would have bet money on the opposite result. But, here is the thing, despite all of the hype about super foods (we hear it hawked at us all the time. Acai! Pomegranites! Brussel Sprouts!) kale is pretty much a super-hero. It has a great anti-oxidant profile (of course) but it's also a green so it can stand in for lettuce or spinach, but pound for pound has massive amounts more of fiber. It also has high amounts of absorbed calcium, vitamin C, B6, potassium, and folic acid. (Read: my friend was right in that lesbians should eat kale, but not because they love women; instead, because they ARE women.) Kale is profiled as helping to prevent cancer, heart disease, high cholesterol and blood-pressure and osteoporosis (Psssst! The leading disease threats for women in the U.S. are cancer, heart disease, and stroke. Cello.) Most of us would have to eat a stir fry of vegetables to get all of that, and then something separate to get the eye-health promoting lutein and folic acid kale also has. See? Superstar.

But, since kale was a little intimidating for me, I had a knowing nod and smile when my good friend posted yesterday, "I'm never intimidated by any vegetable (or most food for that matter) but I bought kale at the grocery store this weekend and I'm ascared of it!" Kale is wonderful and amazing, but I too had some not great introductory experiences with it. One feels a little like they need to either MAKE themselves eat this power green, or like they need to be credentialed by the Food Network as an expert or something to unlock the tastiness of it.

So, I'm here to tell my friend (and I suppose all of you, also) that kale need not be feared. First, think of it as being tougher (as in, able to withstand more handling, cooking, etc. ) than lettuce, but milder than spinach. Thusly, it will seem like something you can add to pasta, soups, or stir fries much more easily in your head, instead of some elite vegetable that you place gently in your fridge and hope someone else eats (as I once did).  Secondly, unless you really LIKE steamed vegetables or tahini, let us give my former friend and roomate Sara-the-dancer her due for bailing me out of a jam, but don't steam it and eat with with tahini. You will feel like a vegan, and then you'll begin to worry that you need to BE vegan in order to appreciate kale. In my experience this is followed closely by a panic of, "If I'm a vegan, I can't eat cheese! If I can't eat cheese, then I can't have cheese-fries. Why would I ever give up cheese-fries for KALE? aiiiiiIIIIIIIEEEEEEE! " So, no, no tahini. Don't set kale up as the enemy of bar food. That's not a winning strategy.

Next up, when buying kale, you march yourself bravely into the produce section, and don't worry about the people in hemp clothing! You have just as much right to that kale as them! Fourth, I prefer the flat-leaf or "dinosaur" kale, but whatever you get, it should be such a deep green it should almost have hues of blue and purple in it. And finally, kale is listed on the "dirty dozen" of produce that is high in pesticides. Here's the gig, as I see it: even if you're buying organic, we all need to acknowledge that labeling things as organic is a business, and there's big money in it. There's a list of CHEMICAL pesticides approved for use in certified organic farms, and they aren't necessarily less harmful than those used by non-organic farms. Buy local if you can, but whatever you do, let's all just agree that thoroughly washing our produce is something that's part of life now, mm-kay? (As a sidenote, I will note that like lettuce and spinach, your leafy, deep green-blue kale will last longer in your fridge if you don't wash it until you're using it and it's dry in it's little bag in your crisper drawer.)

Now, eat some yummy kale. (DO EEEEEEETTTT!)

Here are my recommendations:

Kale Salad (courtesy of the lovely and indomitable T-budd): Kale, grape tomatoes, pine nuts, lemon, olive oil, salt and pepper (scallions, carrots, feta optional)

Cut the kale into thin ribbons, almost chiffonade. Then I cut those in half cross-wise so they are more fork-able. Cut your little tomatoes in halves and thirds. Add to bowl. Mix well and add pine nuts to taste. Squeeze a whole lemon over the salad (I use bottled juice in a pinch but an actual lemon makes a taste difference for me) and add about 1.5-3 tblsps of olive oil. Salt and pepper to taste. (Add chopped scallion and/or shredded carrots and/or crumbled feta to change up this salad). I eat some version of this almost every week.

Kale Soup (courtesy of Allrecipes): Now, almost all of my winter soups go like this - oil, onions, whole spices or fresh ground spices, saute, then add either carrots or bell peppers and bay leaves, then add broth, beans or lentils, salt, other spices and herbs, boil, simmer. (I add other "secret" ingredients to dress up soups depending on which one I'm making. Beer, mustard, lemons, fresh rosemary, etc.) Kale can be added to any one of those soups. It can also be made in the recipe in this link with sausage, beans, potatoes, and hot peppers.

Kale chips: Kale, oil spray, mixed spices of your choosing, oven.

Admission - kale chips have horrified and worried me for some time, even after my kale-conversion. My cousin oven baked some this year and then tagged me in her FB post describing them as having dried out and turned to "salty dust." Ugh. I felt almost responsible since I had been touting my kale-love-affair on FB for many moons at that point. Also, store-bought kale chips are groddy and expensive. aiiiiiIIIIIIIEEEEEEE!

My awesome friend Lauren (I think she is a Hampster at heart, though she attended a different college) turned me around on this one just a couple of days ago.

Set oven to 375-400 degrees. Spray a baking tray lightly. Cut the spines out of your kale leaves, and lay the halves down on the tray. Spray them lightly. Sprinkle with you spice mix of choice (We used Savory Spices "Capitol Hill Blend" which has shallots, salt, pepper, chives and parsley in it but I could have used salt and lemon pepper, the pesto blend, or many others . . . and probably will begin experimenting!). Flip the leave halves over and repeat this process on the other side. Place in pre-heated oven for about 5-8 minutes, You want them to make a crunchy sound when you bight them but not be fall-apart-baked-to-death. After we reached minute five we began checking them each minute in order to hit just the right amount of bake-age but not go overboard.

Kale stir fry: vegetable oil, low sodium soy sauce, fresh ginger finely chopped, scallions, garlic, white pepper, meat of choice (we use cheap boneless chicken), kale leaves chopped coarsely, veggies of choice (the best blend so far have been mushrooms, bell peppers, and broccoli)

I marinate the chicken cubes in a bowl with a medium amount of vegetable oil and soy sauce with some white pepper and a sprinkle of chopped ginger, add oil to a skillet/wok and then quickly saute the ginger, garlic, and scallions. Then I add the protein, reserving the "sauce", and add vegetables according to how fast they cook (mushrooms last because they cook down faster, kale in the middle, things like carrots or broccoli at the beginning since they cook slower. ) Add sauce at the end, serve over rice noodles.

Things I plan to try:

Kale with pasta: pasta, kale leaves, garlic, tomatoes, feta, olive oil, pine nuts

Add some cut tomatoes and torn kale to cooked pasta (spirals? orrechiette?), lightly roast pine nuts in olive oil and sauteed garlic, add to pasta, sprinkle with feta.

Kale with apples: kale, green and tart apples, walnuts or almonds, balsamic vinegar.

Braise kale leaves and apples lightly, garnish with chopped nuts, add a splash of balsamic. YUM!

So, although this post is really a gift for my friend (be not ascared of kale, chicca! I overcame and transcended my first impressions and you can too!) I hope this will also help some of you embrace my new favorite green friend. Also (shameless pug), please share your kale recipes with me! 

The story of this blog

Out of the mud, grows a lotus. 

This is literally true, of course. But more figuratively, this is mentioned and quoted in different ways in Buddhism. Thich Nhat Hanh was quoted as saying, "There is the mud, and there is the lotus that grows out of the mud. We need the mud in order to make the lotus. "

At the moment that we're in the mud, of course, we don't think about the lotus. We think about the cold, the mess, and the feeling of being stuck. From down in the mud, beneath even the water, and the algae, the mud doesn't feel good, and it's difficult to see the flower that isn't yet.

But, creativity and pain correlate. Beethoven lead a miserable life, and (not BUT but AND) produced some of the worlds most recognizably moving classical music. It is the foundation of so much music that came after it. Writers, artists (just look at Frida Kahlo), most anyone with a creative bent will acknowledge that even if they were not able to produce at the moment they were in the mud, they were inspired by the time they spent down there.

It's not really any different for me. I mightn't ever produce things that move or reach people as much as the artists I know best for being inspired by and then out-stripping their pain in order to create, but all of my biggest creative projects came from distress.

My 365 photo-a-day self portrait project came from the realization that grieving the loss of my father and my relationship in one fell-swoop had shut me off to living and knowing the new and beautiful place I was residing in, and because I tried to mourn both at once, I had done neither properly.

My best poems were about that processing.

And this blog . . . well, it came from recognizing the need to, as the wonderfully wise Pema Chodron says in her best book, "lean into the sharp points of life."

Recently, a friend asked me about this blog. Why I started it, what inspired me, how I held myself to such a high standard of honesty and where my topic ideas "come from." She said she felt she was creative and prolific when it came to fiction writing but was having, "a difficult time when it comes to writing about 'real life.' I know the question might be a bit simplistic, but am really curious, and value your opinion as a fellow writer."

Well, first of all, anyone referring to me as a "writer" flatters me more than I can say. I think of myself mostly as a hack who can't keep herself from begging for attention. So, being included in the "fellow writer" circle with someone who had the guts and talent to go the hard road of getting a degree in writing is a sure bet to make me blush.

I gave her advice that may or may not have been satisfying, but also told her the story of this blog, at least partially.

This blog was in my head for months before it was ever on this site. And . . . even when it was one this site, I wrote three or four posts before I announced it on Facebook . .  . thus allowing everyone to see it, and then show it to everyone else. If I think very carefully, this blog started with a piece I wrote for a friend's book about a year before I ever wrote the first post.

This friend is an incredibly talented chef, and when her family began getting various diagnosis where diet changes could make a big difference, she made the command decision to do a full cleanse. As a family that was already Orthodox Jewish, and thus, keeping Kosher, dietary limitations weren't news in her house, but she then added on top of that: wheat free, gluten free, and dairy free. And yet, she magically makes some of the most amazing meals and baked goods I've ever had the pleasure to eat. In a series of long and long-distance conversations, she shared with me that she wanted to write a book. Not just a cookbook with recipes, but essays, research, and discussion on the benefits of eating and cooking your own food, how to do a cleanse and determine food sensitivities, and how to plan meals and events with this lifestyle of mindful eating. I had been experiencing a complete mental road block on the poems I was writing (see above) and found myself one night sitting at my neighborhood pub, drinking a beer, and just gushing out hand-written paragraphs about how eating and health aren't or shouldn't be disconnected from our other life choices. It was edited as an intro to her book.

But it got me thinking about how food worked for me, or didn't. It stayed on my mind and I found myself watching myself from the outside.

Then, another friend inspired me. One of my mommy friends started a blog writing about her family, the intentional and mindful child-rearing decisions she was making, health, and finding balance in her life as a mom and still being a person outside of that. I can't link to it because she ultimately decided to end the blog and give that time back to her family, but the simple, clear, straightforward way she spoke to these topics was compelling enough that I read it eagerly despite being a non-mom. It also taught me that real life doesn't have to be spectacular or exceptional to be interesting.

I carried these ideas and inspirations with me for several more months though, before doing anything with them.  I tentatively started a list of possible topics, but couldn't quite make the leap to writing anything online that others saw. What I found though, was that I started to notice myself from the outside with regard to those topics. One of the first ones on the list was "Perfect is damaging." What's ironic about this is not just where this topic arose from, but that it has yet to be written! The act of putting that topic idea on a list caused me to notice things about it, and it spawned other topics. As I started to observe myself, and how I made day-to-day decisions around those topics, how I thought about them, how I would reason them out if I was discussing them with a close friend, other things started to drift up against those ideas. Quotes. Things my friends said or did. Something I saw or heard in a movie. Some of these things, in turn, got re-purposed into other topics when the ideas got too big to be under one umbrella. Before I knew it, I had a list of 15 or so ideas and some skeleton structure for where I would go with them.

And still I didn't do anything.

It really wasn't until August of last year that I had the will to write and post. And at first I let just a few, select, people in on those posts. (One of my friends who had seen my 365 creative efforts on Flickr, another friend who had a secret blog, and a third friend I discovered had a blog on this site.) The right questions to ask was EXACTLY what my young writer friend asked - what motivated me to do it? What pushes me to be this publicly honest? She remarked that she knew her question was "simplistic." The answer is simple, but in the discipline of doing this, nothing could be less simple.

I was finally moved to do this because I was hurting inside, and the jagged pieces were no longer ignorable. I was faced with a choice of numbing myself and furthering the feeling of being broken and having jagged, broken edges poking me from the inside, wounding me further, or leaning into the pain and letting it teach me and guide me to new places. I chose the latter, but it meant acknowledging the mud I was in.

That mud included far too many dysfunctional relationships. I was not merely dissatisfied at work, I felt . . . misled and neglected to the point where neglect becomes passive abuse. I was noticing addiction everywhere in my loved ones. And I was in a romantic relationship defined by lies and denial. It hurt, but more than that, it made me sick because my engine runs on integrity and honesty and the chance to learn and contribute to making things better. I had sugar in the gas tank, which is a sadly hilarious metaphor since sugar was part of what I turned to in my brief stint of trying to deaden the ache.

It didn't work of course. And so, I did a bunch of things. I started going to a 12-step meeting for the loved ones of addicts, I got myself a therapist, I looked long and hard at a proverbial mirror and tried to come to terms with my beliefs and my needs, and I created some systems of accountability and honestly with myself, including this blog. I told my "fellow writer" friend that, "I started this blog at a time when I was facing a lot of dishonesty. Dishonesty at work, dishonesty in what is now my previous relationship. I was seeking more open doors." I truly felt like it was the element in my life that was lacking, like not getting enough sun or water. So, I decided I needed to BE the change I wanted to see. I had no idea how far I was going to have to reach down to do that, and so the other piece of this story is that when I find myself hedging around something now, I imagine my (incredibly loving, generous, extremely tiny and fierce) grandmother saying, "Now, Christie. Is that the whole truth?"

The short story is, we can be moved by the art, the ideas, the things happening around us, the people who teach us and show us new things, and I am. But I had to be in the mud to make a go of this kind of writing. As much as it feels like a bruise on my soul to be writing this post five months after losing my job with no new career in hand, I was far more wounded and far less functional and healthy on August 27th, 2011 (9 months ago, with a job!) when I first sat down to write something here. I know I am a better version of me now, I know the things that aren't ideal will change and change again. I know more about who I am, and who I can be, and what lengths I will go to to make that positive and meaningful, and I see myself in a much kinder light. I know everything is impermanent and I'm learning how to breathe through that. I know that I bruise easily, but that as thin as my skin sometimes is, the rest of me is tough and keeps going.

The long story is the tale of a blog that started with an idea about accountability, eating mindfully, exercise and health, and became a blog about the work of looking at myself, health in much broader terms, and the occasional post about zombies.

You know how people who lose 200 pounds always say, "I'll never go back to that. This feels too good." There is more behind that story. There is also the fact that there are days where it has to also be true that it doesn't feel good. Where putting the time in at the gym is the last thing they want to do. Where all they want is ice cream. But they know how working past those hard moments makes them better able to enjoy everything else, gives them more opportunities to feel good. Because when we dampen down pain, we aren't able to selectively anesthetize just pain. We shut out out good things also. That's me. It doesn't always feel good to feel all of my feelings. It's harder than going to the gym (which, let's be honest, I still don't always like doing). But it is better than being dishonest with myself, knowing that that leads directly to accepting dishonesty and dysfunction from others. And it makes me better equipped to feel and see and accept good things in my life. Sometimes leaning into the sharp points of life is like using sandpaper to uncover the natural beauty in the wood grain and shape us into something even better.

So, in that vein, I've decided to bring back another venue of creativity, structure, accountability, learning, outlet, and feedback into my life.

Welcome all to the first day of my second 365 (well, ummm, second in terms of it being version 2.1 since I did start a second 365 in 2010 and then . . . failed to finish it.) with a photo collage acknowledging that this is not just my birthday but the fourth anniversary of my residence in Boulder. I hope you enjoy it because I got up at 5am to make this happen!

Birthday List

Nearly a month ago, I noted that I needed a job before my birthday. Well (shuffle, shuffle) . . . ummmm . . . ahhhh . . . errr. Yeaaaaahhhhh.

In a week, it's. My. BIRTHDAY.

I've been joking around about this being the one week countdown to my midlife crisis (yes, yes, I know most people wait until their 40's to do this, but I figure a running start is warranted. I also think, as long as I'm freaking out, I should multi-task my anxiety and just package this in. And, a good friend pointed out to me today that Dante had his mid-life crisis at 35, so, there's precedent!) but I'll admit this is dfficult for me.

My birthday is also the anniversary of my becoming a Colorado resident, and, for anyone who has read this blog, you know that the story of how I came to live here isn't really a good one. I remember that first birthday here as a blur of unloading boxes and furniture after having been driving for close to a week (it feels like most of that week was spent in Nebraska. Ugh). Somewhere in there, there was a bad movie, and a broken promise. So, birthdays here in Colorado are always seem to come part and parcel with feeling a little tender and tentative.

And this year, my birthday also feels like it is bound up with other drama. My need to figure out my living situation. This arbitrary deadline I set for myself to get a job. The end of the month . . . yayyyyy, more bills due. And, well, 35 doesn't feel like a small number. I want to not have hang ups about that, and to be enlightened and to feel that age has made me better, but without a clear picture of where I'm headed, looking back and saying, "all of that got me here" doesn't work as well. Meh.

For many weeks, as this date approached, I had the ostrich reaction and my instinct was to stick my head in the sand and IGNORE. NEGLECT. And, if things got really bad, maybe uproot from the proverbial sand, RUN AWAY.

But the truth is, I will turn 35, and be unemployed, and wake up with these same unsettled questions whether or not I acknowledge this birthday. So, I'd better get on with it and acknowledge the impending arrival of my mid-life crisis. And as long as I'm acknowledging it, I should go ahead and celebrate. Sitting here, right at this moment, I'm not sure what there is to celebrate to be painfully honest. But I have always adored birthdays (yours, mine, birthdays are just great) so I'm trying to fall back on that.

Of course, what everyone has asked me is, What do you want for your birthday? I have some pretty phenomenal people in my life, both near and far. Some of them have settled this questions by telling me what they are doing to celebrate my day, and others have asked me. One of my smartest, funniest friends put it this way, "what do you want for your birthday aside from word peace and an awesome job?"

Actually, if those things could be gift wrapped, that would be just awesomesauce. Way to hit that nail on the head, RR!

I don't think Amazon has a category for those, so I've put some thought into what else I'd enjoy. My mom askes me to make two lists, each year. A Christmas list, and a Birthday list. I try really hard to make the first no longer than 10 items, and to ask for things that aren't things (Can you make lasagna? Can we go get pedicures?) and the later no longer than 5 things. This year, something about free-falling and not having my feet on any kind of solid ground means I feel free to ask for just EVERYTHING I want. Here goes:

• I would like to excise the parts of my head and heart that tell me, with searing repetition, that I have become "less than" in my weeks of unemployment.

• I want to be able to do the bound yoga poses without fear of losing my balance.
• I want someone to create head bands that don't slide off the back of my giant head

• I'd like for dresses that accommodate girls with GIRLS to be made more flattering.

• I want to put honey in my yogurt without the honey bottle getting all sticky.

• I want my friend to be released from prison and exonerated. I'm grateful that he still has a loving heart, and kindness, but I want him out sooner rather than later to keep it that way. 

• I want children to be wanted and planned. And loved beyond all belief. All of them. 

• I want all of my friends who love each other and are willing to risk everything to be allowed to get married and have those marriages be recognized by my government.
• I want for our country to stop thinking that separate but equal works. Because it never does.
• I want for the U.S. voters and leaders to remember that in a free society you need a reason to make something ILlegal, not a reason to make something legal. And, bee-tee-dub, "the bible" isn't a good thing to point to when it comes to our laws since we eat shrimp and don't sell our daughters.

• I want women to not feel so limited and judged that they treat life as a zero sum game, and learn, all too well, to tear each other down. 

• I want men to not feel so pigeon-holed and pressured that they feel competition and destructiveness are expected. Required even.
• I want a cure for cancer.
• I want to hear my dad read Brer Rabbit stories, with the killer accents and voices, one more time.
• I want more people to go to therapy prophylactically.
• I want more people to hold themselves accountable for their own issues, wounds, and baggage. I need people to be accountable for how their actions affect others.
• I need for us to realize how broken our education system is. How wrong it is that we will spend money to incarcerate, but not to educate. How forced into lock-step my teacher friends feel. How unhappy parents and students are. How wrong our curriculum is and how sticking with it is throwing good money after bad. And, why, oh why, do we think it is ok for us to require college in order to aim higher than Walmart in the job market, but then expect to pay them with no regard to the cost of that education . . .which keeps going up.
• I want people to be kind to each other. And if that's too much to ask, can we at least not be engaged in (and horrendously thrilled by)  being cruel to one another?
• I want things to stop being at this constant fever-pitch of black/white, right/wrong, good/evil where somehow we picket funerals, call women "sluts" on national broadcasts, and say that we wish certain groups of people would die out. (Can you believe it was a pastor who said this?! It actually made me physically ill.)
• I want a way to have all of my closest people at one dinner party - my Colorado people, my Florida, Maine, OK, Illinois, NY, Boston, and Jersey people. And my brother in New Haven for good measure. Then I want, as I once did with Heather, to come up with a curriculum so that people understand each other better, as David and Rob and I have, talked about how to actually do good for people in the world. Then, I'd put Wil in charge of implementation. The rest of us would be his minions. I'm sure I'd be hired on as a personal masseuse. (And if that comes with health insurance, that solves my job problem. La!)
• For just ONE day (it would have to be limited for reasons of will power) I want Dunkin Donuts to be down the street from me so I can spend $3 or less on really good coffee and a donut.
• I want more choices available for streaming on Netflix. Don't you?
• I want popcorn to be magically carb free. Especially when I eat it at 11pm

Barring all of that, because, really, I think it will be hard to get Dunkin Donuts to set up shop here on time, and because none of us know what to do about the crazy people who take it so lightly to propose concentration camps for gay people, I'll take some beer, a burger, and a nice quiet birthday with a few of the people who I think of as teachers and friends and loved ones. But, you know, if you happen on some carb-free popcorn that tastes as good as the stuff I make at home . . . send it on over.

ADD and focus

Everyone in my family has "special needs." (I know that term has a specific meaning, but hate it. Because . . . don't we all? I have friends who are allergic to dairy and I attend to this when I cook for them. And friends who are introverts and won't enjoy a large group. Friends who are afraid of heights or elevators. Cello, we all have things, yeah?) Although my father had the kind of singular focus that all engineers do (in my experience), he also had some pretty apparent hyperactivity. And for those who think hyperactivity is the same as kids being boisterous and that people "outgrow" this, well, umm, no. You'd need only to meet my brother who is still the most ADHD person I know, now in his 30's, to see the incredible effort it is for him to sit in one seat for more then 10-15 minutes. While strong leanings towards math, science and mechanically complex knowledge as well as allergies and diabetes are traced on my mother's side of the family, strong leanings towards creativity, art and writing, nurturing and teaching, OCD, and ADD/ADHD cascade through my father's side of the family. (Both sides have poor vision and asthma, so, there was just no way out there.)

Growing up in house full of talented, smart (if not always conventionally so) people the expectations were high. (And no, this doesn't impact me at all now; I have no idea what you could be talking about! ) We were all expected to work hard, do our homework, get good grades (really good grades), as well as participating in other activities with dedication and some success. Swim lessons were not an option, and taking a musical instrument was strongly promoted. We all played soccer, for various lengths of time, and we all had at least one sport each year all through high school (My brothers typically had three or four, while I switched to music, writing, and what can only be described as the busiest high school drama program EVER). This on top of speech therapy and other kinds of assistance for me for years, and some early intervention for my brothers as well.

My mom's attitude was always, "Oh, that's harder for you. Hmmm. Too bad, you still have to do it." She wasn't unwilling to help, to try and strategize ways to make life more functional, or to be an advocate for us at school. But she was unwilling to let us make excuses. Spelling was surprisingly hard for me, considering my large and growing vocabulary in elementary school and my high school reading comprehension by grade 4. This was probably because of the delay in my hearing (my ears were blocked until I was about 5 or 6), which in turn probably caused my speech difficulties in addition to some weakness in phonemic awareness . . . which we now know through reading readiness research is linked to spelling. My mom fought for a speech therapy IEP for me, but she also wasn't going to let me off the hook. Whatever lists of words I was practicing for speech, she adamantly inserted into our conversations at home. And I was drilled on spelling words every night.

Much the same was true for my brothers who were identified early as struggling with focus and concentration. She wasn't unwilling to adjust the daily schedule to include laps around the house to burn off energy before homework or dinner . . . or both. There was never any blame or lack of understanding. My brothers weren't berated for their struggles and I was never made to feel badly about my spelling or mushy speech, but I was expected to work on it and consistently get better. My brothers weren't excused from acting like human beings, but there was often plans on how to best make things work for them so they could function. There is a subtle but important difference there that I've come to appreciate as an educator who heard over and over, "Well he has _____ and that means he can't ______." Ahhhhhhhhhh!!

In my house it never meant "s/he can't" but instead: it might take longer, you might have to work harder at it, or we might have to do that a different way to make it feasible.

So, I have of course carried this view into the world. Differences in what is easy or hard for me about a task aside, I should just do it and find the way that makes it work. (Case in point: who thinks it's a good idea for an asthmatic with two bad knees to run? ME!) I look down on no one who medicates their ADD kids, but know that it's not necessary for all ADD kids. I also think that whatever intervention or therapy is used or not used, environment and expectation management at home bears huge relation to successful management of learning differences and challenges.

All of this has been on my mind for the last month as I have, alarmingly, noticed the marked increase in my own ADD tendencies. I was never diagnosed as a kid - I certainly rarely exhibit any hyperactivity, and I would add that this is why so few girls are diagnosed with ADD. But two therapists in my adult life have remarked on it. I CAN focus, but I don't always PREFER to focus on one thing at a time. Our current societal norms of texting, while I check my FB status and send an email, while drinking coffee and making a grocery list of course, do nothing to disuade this. The interestingly unanswerable question is: am I genetically wired to multi-task to the point of dissipating my focus or ability to concentrate on one thing? Or is it learned behavior from being surrounded by a family who rarely did one thing at a time, and never did it without fidgeting? Or both?

Whatever the case, it has always been true that even when it looks like I am doing one thing, it only looks that way - with a couple of important exceptions. By this I mean, I can do a very good impression of total focus, but when I'm taking a test, I'm also managing a panic attack, and when I'm on an important phone call, I'm probably also folding laundry or making a to-do list. When I'm running, I'm doing interview prep.

But there were always exceptions. It has always true that I could sit quietly and read or write. This was importantly true in my family of loud, chaotic, bouncing-off-the-walls-climbing-the-bookshelves (Literally - when my brother was less than 3 he was found sitting atop high things frequently having scaled his way to get there) people. If I needed to not be part of that, I could throw my legs over the side of an arm chair and read . . . for hours. I could escape to my room and write, and write, and write. Now, well, it's been months since I could read for more than 30 minutes at a time, which rings the alarm bell for me since that's the measure my brother used to pace himself in getting through college - study or read in 30 minute blocks and then go do something and start again. And I was doing fine on writing (maybe because I had so, so many feelings in so, so many directions as I go through all of this?) but the last month it's been harder and harder for me to gather myself together to sit in one place and collect my thoughts on one topic. I find myself, even when I don't mean to, avoiding it. Or sitting down to write, and then as I get up to pour coffee, drifting off through a series of actions I don't even realize are taking me farther and farther from the keyboard - coffee, mug, mugs are in dishwasher, dishwasher needs to be unloaded, unload, did I fold laundry?, check dryer, drink coffee and plan interview outfit, wash coffee cup and then all other dishes in sink . . .  and before I know it I'm multi-tasking four other things and a half an hour has gone by.

I have been struggling with focus since November when things got very hard and emotional on the job. I had a brief reprieve of peace and quiet in my brain when it looked like two or three job options were shaping up in February, but now . . . It's been four months and ADD is rearing it's head so much that I realized last night that I'm basically not watching TV because the thought of sitting in one place to watch something for 30-60 minutes sounds massively unappealingly uncomfortable to me unless I'm already exhausted, in which case I've found myself falling asleep to the three things I've tried to watch in the last couple of weeks. I mean, come on, unemployment is when you're supposed to sit around and watch TV!

Filling my days through only my own initiative was something I had to do every day for close to four years working as a remote, solo office here. But, of course, I was guided by deadlines, things that needed to get done for my instructors or supervisors, and the tasks involved in the work I was doing. Now, I have to generate not just the initiative and motivation, but the tasks themselves and the structure to do them in. It's been really tiring, if I'm being honest, and it has meant that I go to bed almost every night exhausted, ready to turn my brain off from this constant process. Not to mention, of course, staving off panic, anxiety, disappointment, and at times, depression.

Being tired and emotionally worn is definitely not helping with the ability to concentrate, but it also can't be entirely blamed since I've been tired and emotionally worn in the past and, you know, written 100 page thesis papers. More, I think, I feel ungrounded. And I need my feet to be a little more planted to sit quietly and read or write - it's hard to lean into only one thing when you're running in six directions, I think.

Here are some other strategies I'm thinking of:

• My mom made my brothers run around the house. Not as in "go out and play" but as in, "I think you should do eight laps tonight - I'll count and wave when you run by the window!" I probably need to run or walk every day, even when it's my "day off" from working out. Burn off some of the anxiety or whatever it is coursing through my veins these days.
• Conversely, my family never had much of the just sitting quietly and being going on. And this is something that I struggle with. I was so much better at it when I was walking as one of my two primary forms of transportation (see above), and had weekly practice from my attendance at Quaker meetings. But, when I do it I feel better. I feel like I know who and where I am. I feel . . . resolved and strong. So, I've decided to try the same thing I used to advocate to parents who asked me why Kumon work for their child started from such an easy point. I told them that the idea of doing something every day is actually hard - how many things could they say they do EVERY DAY without fail, after all (It's a short list for most adults. Something I became keenly aware of when I did a 365 days photo project in 2009-2010). I asked them to think about, if they wanted to do pushups every day - should they start with 50 pushups tomorrow having done none for the last several weeks? No, then they'd be too sore the day after to do any and the psychological process of building a new daily habit would have been disrupted. Start easy, build up to 50. Seems logical.
  
  So, for my meditation practice I'm following this suggestion of starting small - at first, 2 minutes a day. 
• Caffeine has helped me eat less and let's just be honest, I make some killer good coffee . . . but it is probably not helping me focus. I may not need to go all the way back to my 2 cups a month standard, but probably would do well to do less than coffee every day. And let me just own up - I love me some Diet Dr. Pepper but it has no redeeming value other than it being yummy. So, there's another source of caffeine I should let go of.
• Getting enough sleep is crucial - I will work to keep that out of all of this. It's been great to sleep 7-9 hours a night instead of calling 5-7 hours of broken a sleep a win, as I was in 2011.
• I probably need to make myself sit and read daily if I want to relocate that capacity.
• Similarly, I probably need to write some every day. Cover letters don't count, but this blog, my creative writing, and my journal do.
• I probably need to acknowledge that part of happy for me is having creative pursuits. In 2008 - 2009 a creative writing group, in 2009-2010 it was photography, every day, without fail, for 365. In 2010- 2011 it was all about performing and singing. Right now I'm putting so much towards staying afloat that I can't afford (literally) to sing, and I'm missing it. Writing is cheaper, but also complicated since it uses the same part of my skills that are being tapped to try and sell my wares to potential employers (write cover letter, adjust res, apply, lather, rinse, repeat.) I'm thinking the first thing on the list is to do some tutorials for the new (free!) photo tool someone awesome directed me to recently. It's also spring in Colorado, which, you know, is just the worst time to get out the fancy cam. (sarcasm)
• I also probably need to acknowledge that the times in the last 10 years when I was most grounded and focused, I was also pretty unhappy. Despite the stress of really-really NEEDING to find a job now, I'm pretty happy. I don't think this means that I can only be grounded when I'm grimly determined to beat tasks that are unsatisfying into submission, or that being content equals being all over the place. But it does probably mean that there's some renovation going on and that finding out what happy AND grounded looks like will likely be a process for awhile.
  
  

Now, one other thing. Diet. Both of my brothers (and I will proudly mention that they came to this conclusion after investigation that was instigated by a conversation with me) have determined they are "glutarded." I had seen the enormous health benefits of reducing or eliminating gluten when my Jewish family was able to resolve not just skin, celiac, and allergy concerns by taking it out of their kitchen, but were also seeing major improvement in their two children who had sensory based learning differences and/or hyperactivity. I mentioned it to my brothers, and though the notion was initially rejected, they both have become avid gluten-free eaters and have felt better for it. I have been "gluten-reduced" for 4 years now, and have always done full gluten cleanses at least twice a year to try and re-set my system. I may never trip the scales on the incredibly expensive test that medically diagnoses gluten allergy, but I know this: when I limit myself to one serving of gluten a day my energy level and concentration level go up, my skin issues and allergies are decreased. Not eliminated - it's not magic. But I'm less reactive.

It is harder to eat gluten free on a budget - fact. I do better than many because Boulder is pretty much the gluten-free (GF) capitol of the world, but replacing normal every-day items with GF ones is often expensive. I do my best to just take bread out of the equation most days, and have found a good source of oatmeal and rice cakes, that are not certified GF, but hav no wheat products or "natural flavorings" (the bane of anyone trying to track down hidden sources of gluten) in them. But when it comes to things like pizza, waffles, beer, bagels, and my person mainstay - low calorie snack bars (think nutri-grain or cliff bar type items) a person can easily spent $6 - $8 on the GF equivalent of something that for everyone else costs $2.99. So, I admit it - although I'm basically not a bread eater anymore and there is plenty of rice at my house, I need to meter my other carbs a little better. Or, you know, get a job and start being able to put the 8 GF items I enjoy back on my grocery list.

And, now, for the first time in the illustrious history of this blog (ha!) I will make an inside joke for my bestest friend everst's benefit. Rob, I need some FOCUS.

A week without logging

I have been aware that food logging is a valuable tool for managing not only my weight but any issues I face with food for a long, long time. It was mentioned to me as a calorie tracking tool when I was (well, this is shameful) 10 years old. Like most people, the idea of counting all calories consumed, every day, forever, failed before it ever began. As in Benny and Joon, "The answer is in the question." Can I successfully count calories forever? No. For lots of reasons. It's tedious and daunting, and so without my emotional buy in, it will not help me feel helped. It's also really, really easy to miscalculate, because most people don't have a lot of training on judging what a serving is, and carrying around a food scale is impractical. And, I was TEN.

The other problem with food logging, is that without some training, some counseling, and a lot of introspection and self-knowledge, it can easily devolve into just counting calories or servings of food types. Here's the problem - not all calories are created equal and neither are all people, with respect to those calories. Diabetics need to concern themselves very closely with carbs. If making a trade off, protein and fat will always be better for someone with any insulin issues - this was illustrated when someone close to me recently made a birthday cake for a diabetic and told me that she had substituted apple sauce for oil in the recipe. I quietly informed her that I'm sure it tasted good but that she had added carbs to the cake. Meanwhile, someone like my brother who is almost entirely gluten free can eat carbs, but needs to carefully consider what kind (rice, amaranth, oats, and almond flour much better than wheat flour or wheat products). If you lined up my diabetic friend, my brother, and I, and put us all on an 1800 calorie plan, where we got those calories would make a huge difference to our successful eating, but I doubt any of our food logs would match. People have particular needs because of their pathologies, because of food allergies, because of preferences (I don't care how gluten-free and protein-full cottage cheese is. I just can't do it, folks.) and because we're all special and unique like snowflakes. (smile)

Calories are special too. For me, 280 calories could be over my discretionary calorie allowance, could be what my trainer is recommending as a small bump in fat servings for a week (a really good week of almonds, bacon, and some olive oil, I might add), or could count as a way to estimate two carb servings. In my case, I need to also be very, very careful where those 280 calories come from, not just because of my food allergies (which are weird, and more extensive than I'd like. I am lucky in that strawberries and peanut butter aren't off limits, and I have it all figured out as to how to eat dairy in a way that works for me. But, I do sometimes wish I could be a grown up and drink wine or eat dried fruit. ) or my suspected insulin resistance, but because food is my kryptonite.

Like most people, I suspect it would always be better to get 280 calories of broccoli than 280 calories of M&Ms, and yes, I'm gluten sensitive, so brown rice or spaghetti squash is always going to be better than bread. But I also have to think about if the thing I'm thinking about eating is going to set off a desire to eat something ELSE. I do eat bread, about twice a week. This is less than most people eat bread in a day. and I have to carefully place it in my path because if I eat it early in the day, I will metabolize it faster, but it might also fire cravings for other bad carbs. I do eat pizza, sometimes, but I have to decide ahead of time what the "rules" are for eating off plan, and if possible, store up some discretionary eating and extra cardio to "pay for it."

The real price I pay is when something sneaks up on me and clobbers me with its enticing smell, or beguiling voice telling me that popcorn for dinner sounds like a really good idea. I have to work very carefully to avoid these moments, much the way I see alcoholics trying to remove temptation from their lives, particularly early on in their sobriety. Those addicts can choose to seek out new friends and activities, so that they will find themselves confronted with their drug less and less. They can't live in a bubble forever and will eventually be offered a glass of wine or to go to a party, of course. But they can side step it for awhile - for long enough to log some time in a new normal. I've written about this before - I can't. I can't go to a wedding without being confronted with food, or most recently, a birthday party with a lovely funfetti cake. I can't go on a date or to a friend's awesome awards ceremony without food at least being a consideration. What I can do is decide that I'll have twice as much salad on my plate as pizza, on that date, and only eat two slices, to say no-thank-you to the cake, and then get busy doing something else, and to ask someone who is getting up to bring me ONE breadstick at the awards ceremony and then drink two bottles of water and remind myself I don't need to eat dinner twice. (Having someone else get the breadstick was key, by the way, because it meant I never had to be faced with any other food choices, or a plate to fill. I've said it before - I am lucky to have awesome friends). But here's what I can't do, even if I do all of that. I can't NOT bring food into my house, and I can't not eat.

I wish I could reach down and find some supernatural ability to not eat for, like, 28 days. Like the movie I imagine I would magically, and with heartwarmingly hard-won victories and new choices, find my feet on the path of recovery if I could manage this for a month of rehab. I also imagine that if eating weren't such a necessity I'd feel released. It would be a relief because it's actually exhausting to think this hard about food every day, every meal, every snack, every choice, from the moment I wake up (with my low blood sugar screaming in my head, "Wake up! Eat. ASAP!") until I go to sleep. The only thing more exhausting is the numbing, woolly-headed feeling and accompanying guilt brought on by NOT thinking about it and discovering I ate the whole box of Cheezits. So, I choose the lesser of two exhaustions but sometimes wish I had a less thorny, less insidious, less ever-present kryptonite.

So, for those keeping score, I am eating around the following limitations and restrictions:

• Gluten sensitive. In case you didn't know, gluten is hidden in absolutely everything. (Not just things with wheat in it! Tea! Mixed spices! Fruit bars! Protein shakes!)  For me I try to have this work out to one serving or less of gluten a day, or 7-8 a week. I sometimes am way under or sometimes a bit over. (Right now, it's a bit higher because while some things are easy substitutions - e.g. eat rice instead of bread - others are more difficult and things like gluten free chips, waffles, and granola bars are expensive and I'm on a tight budget these days.) But if I'm doing well with it, it makes a big difference in my energy level, skin, and allergies.
• Allergic to MSG - no Chinese take-out for me. Boooo.
• Allergic to preservatives - this means I can almost never eat dried fruit or off a buffet. It also affects me in certain cheeses, dried fruit, and wine. So, when I eat at your house and you make something cooked in a bottle of Merlot and garnished with Craisins I'll have to politely decline.
• I do much better with dairy if it is partially broken down and lower fat, such as yogurt. (Y'all can pry the greek yogurt from my cold, dead hands. I'm unlikely to EVER give it up even if it turns out it's not as miraculous as I think it is.)
• I can only eat 4-5 servings of carbs a day, and honestly, it is better if half of them were during or before lunch.
• I avoid most soy, because, let's face it, I don't need any more hormone issues. (But I love miso soup so I haven't completely removed soy. Also, in case you don't know, soy is secretly in everything too.)
• And I hate Dill and Mayonnaise with the passion of a thousand burning nuns.

Oh yeah, and eating itself is a problem, because it might set fire to the fuse and cause me to rapidly want to consume moremoremore.

This is where planning comes in. I can read all the books I want on strategies to beat cravings (and I do) and I can go to therapy and meditate (and I DO) but the very best thing I can do is to take charge of my food AGGRESSIVELY. This means a campaign of austerity including planning meals, planning what I will cook, and then shopping for that and only that. When shopping it means being thoughtful and ascetic and feigning ignorance of the existence of trigger foods. Then, as quickly as possible, I need to cook said food, because if it sits uncooked, popcorn for dinner starts to sound like a most excellent idea. Once the food is cooked and in my fridge, it should be idiot-proof, but of course there is the matter of avoiding temptation outside my house, and exercising a lot of control inside my house when it comes to portion size, added calories, and making sure I'm getting my 1-2 servings of fruit, 4-5 servings of vegetables, 4 servings of carbs, 2-3 of dairy, 7-9 of protein, and 2-5 of fats. It's a big job, and cruel task-master, keeping track of all of this. (Note: I measure portion sizes, and meet those servings, but only measure calories on certain items. I'm not against measuring calories anymore, but this works better for me to function and not feel overwhelmed.)

So, of course, this is where tracking my food comes in. I've been using various methods to log food for 4 years. FOUR!!!! I've done it online, carried a couple of different journals around, used logging tools created by my dietician, and all kinds of permutations of these activities. One of the best things I ever heard about the value of food logging came from Weight Watchers. I have to say, Weight Watchers should probably have a disclaimer that says, "does not work for those with insulin resistance" because they do treat all carbs as if they are created equal (4 points of M&Ms are just as good as 4 points of yogurt!), alas. Still and all, I would re-pay every cent I spent there to have learned this way of thinking about logging: Logging your food means acknowledging accountability as your best weapon. If you see patterns emerging, you can tackle them. If you find meals that are working for you, or food choices that help you with portion control, you have a record. But most of all, if you mess up, you write it down in full, and then you walk away with clean hands and a fresh start because you held yourself accountable. You don't have to keep beating yourself up about it. If it means releasing judgment, if it means not always hating myself for something I did three weeks ago then I. Will. Do. It.

So, I log food. Every day. At its best, its invaluable for not only accountability but for planning. Because as I'm writing down that I had some lovely (gluten free) oatmeal with breakfast, I'm thinking about what carbs would make sense in the rest of my day - a cup of rice at lunch gives me 2 carbs, and leaves one more for dinner, maybe a pita with some hummus to get a serving of fat in? Planning and anything I can do to support it is a great predictor of success for me, even if it also increases my control-freakishness. And even when logging is not at it's best, at the very, very least it lets me check in with my trainer and he can either nod approvingly, or he can say, "Umm, two beers? Two?!"

Why then, would I not log last week? Well, for one, I was out of paper. And didn't have it in my bank account to go get some. But, then, I started wondering . . . what would happen without my clipboard to keep me in line? This article suggests that logging is a way of evaluating ourselves, and thus, supplying our own behavioral modification. I became really interested to see what new patterns would be at work, and what old pitfalls would await me.

Here's what happened.

• I still did 5 hours of cardio and nearly 3 of lifting
• I had two drinks
• I ate pizza, but only two slices
• One day I was really hungry and had 3.5 servings of dairy instead of 2-3
• I drank two diet sodas instead of one during the week
• I ate half a small bag of M&Ms but then got such a sugar-rush headache I threw them out
• I ate all the vegetables in my fridge. Like ALL of them.
• The two loaves of bread in my freezer remain there
• I did limit myself to that one breadstick at the awards banquet
• I yelled down a serious voice in my head advocating for for yo with reeses pieces on it and had half a mango instead.
• I was still anxious at each occasion where I ate food not prepared in my house
• My only big unplanned eating was a bowl of popcorn with some butter. 3 of the 4.5 cups of the popcorn count as one serving of carbs on a day when I was low on carb servings, but the rest, the butter, and eating them at 8pm were less than ideal

Now, the nature of logging as you go through the day means you have a tighter rein on what you actually ate. So, it's possible that in there, I ate an entire box of Cheezits and forgot, but I'm pretty sure that didn't happen. I ate off-plan, but not radically off plan in any given deviance, and most importantly, when I ate a big bowl of popcorn, or a breadstick, it didn't set off a chain reaction of eating everything in sight. Again, I could be mis-remembering, but since I also lost 2 pounds last week, I don't think I am.

I'm cured! Ha! Not really. Addicts are always addicts, and I will go right back to logging this week, but it's good to know that I'm headed in the right direction and building new habits in a way that is starting to take hold in my brain. New neural pathways are catching fire. They may not be able to burn faster or hotter than the old patterns YET but they are present. It took 10 weeks of grocery shopping carefully (eating healthy on a budget is the subject of another post coming soon), doing something like 95% of my own cooking, and lots, and lots of quiet time to myself to get here. (I would guess but don't know for sure that doing the cooking myself is almost as important as planning the meals and measuring the portion sizes - being intimately connected with my food makes it much easier to know what I'm eating and be very accountable but also to be very mindful when I'm eating our of my fridge.) But, there is a new consciousness taking root from all of this time I've had to do this thoughtfully, all this getting right with myself, all this meditation, reading, logging, and creating a new level of accountability for myself. It now seems like with enough attention, with enough mindfulness, and with enough professional supervision and input, I could handle birthday parties and banquets very differently some day. So, you know, check back with me in 4 years. (smile again)

Black Friday in review

In order to talk about my Black Friday experience I also have to talk about my Thanksgiving. Of course, I wrote about getting ready for the holiday and I posted recipes, but talking about the day itself means being accountable for for how I celebrated and whether or not I allowed FRED to join in.

I wrote on my food log on Wednesday night that my holiday plan was to have 2-4 drinks, one dessert and ONE plate at dinner, which was at least half veggies. For the most part I succeeded, and FRED was nowhere in sight. (I'm so proud) There was an incident with some M & Ms as we were putting food out but I was able to walk away. I had some butternut squash soup, and then a dinner plate with green beans, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, turkey (my first turkey in 12 years or more), a small dollop of cranberry sauce, and about a cup of mashed potatoes. I turned down stuffing and bread, since I knew there was beer in my future. I had three drinks. And come time for dessert I had a small sliver of pumpkin pie and a small piece of apple cake. Yes, technically, two desserts, but small ones. And then I walked away from the kitchen and made the day about having time with my friends. I made it to the Thanksgiving without having to replace the whipped cream on my way there (this is to say, I kept a can of whipped cream in my house for more than 48 hours!!), and I walked away without it and left it with my hosts. So, not a perfect "on plan" meal, but pretty good by Thanksgiving standards (actually, I weighed myself this morning and I lost weight this weekend . . . ).

On my drive back, I had been given some dessert leftovers, and had some pumpkin bread to give to another friend, so I headed to her house. The dessert feast was still very much in full swing at her house. I had an orange, but was glad to deposit the pumpkin bread I had made for her, as well as my remaining dessert leftovers!

As I left her house at 10 I realized I had had enough to eat during the day, but wasn't uncomfortably full or tired or overwhelmed. Or pissed off at myself, or disappointed, or worried about my jeans. Or, or, or. No ors. If I had gone home, I might've eaten out of boredom. But instead I headed to Target.

Now, I had done some research (looking up some prices on Amazon and preparing an order) and preparation for this trip (packing my coat and a pair of sneakers), but wasn't sure I was actually going to make it. I've never done Black Friday shopping outside of placing an Amazon order because I'm always a plane ride away from home on Thanksgiving, with no good way to get real shopping done and then get it where it needs to go. I wasn't looking to get a gaming system of 40" TV so it didn't feel dire to me to line up and wait, but sleeping isn't something I'm good at when under stress (ahem, like a break up), so I didn't think I would be sleeping soundly that night anyways. And the lure of a few good deals and having this experience was intriguing. There's no way I would have attempted it at 4am (with a line up at 1 or 2am) or in the cold, but Target was opening at midnight and it was about 40 degrees so . . . it seemed like go time.

I had talked this idea down to a few people saying that I might drive by, and if it looked crazy, I would leave. Or even that it was possible I would get in the line and then decide it was overwhelming and cut out. I knew for sure I would be nowhere near a Walmart or Best Buy - I'd heard too many stories of rabid crowds. In my mind I thought, "Target. The place to go for TP and cheap gloves. How much crazy could there be there?"

So, I drove up at about 10pm and saw about 20 people in line, with two more walking towards the doors, and thought Why not? So, I pulled on  my coat, my comfy sneakers, and grabbed my book and headed for the door.

Within about 10 minutes of lining up the two people in front of me had me laughing so much that I put my book away. The brother had an awesome "Batman" voice and the sister was hilarious in talking about Best Buy. Soon, a couple lined up behind me, and they joined our conversation too. The five of us began sharing shopping stories, talking about Black Friday and what we were shopping for, sharing stories about shopping, and just generally enjoying each others company. We talked about how cool it would be if the big ticket items were hidden in the store, like a scavenger hunt, and made comparisons with SAW - like what if there was only one TV and two people were handcuffed to it and given  saw and a gun. Ha! The brother and sister were in line for two TVs, and the couple for a gaming system. Then of course they asked me what I was there for and I said, "I just want to get god deals and get my shopping done. Plus I feel I need to cross this off my bucket list." They laughed but agreed I would probably get good deals on non-big-ticket items too.

Around this time, a manager came out and gave us all floor maps and Luna bars. The crowd was restless but not mean or pushy. People traveled up and down the line asking,"Are any of you here for the ___ " feeling out their chances for the items they were there for. Food trucks came by, and it was hilarious to me that there's a whole cottage industry for Black Friday shoppers. We all agreed that things were pretty congenial, and that Target was the place to be. We mused that the several hundred people that lined up at Best Buy at 8 and 9pm probably weren't laughing or eating Luna bars.

We did consider that the 100 or so people lined up behind us might think of us as targets and we might be the trample-ees, but we also felt like, "this is Boulder. Land of the rich hippy. People will try hard but it seems unlikely that they'll elbow people out of the way when push comes to shove."

I was impressed with the number of staff we saw get let in the doors. It looked to me like the store was going to be very well staffed, including opening their Starbucks. They lined up carts to prevent people from zigging through the registers going into the stores and forcing everyone down the main hallway. And it became clear to us that they weren't going to open the big sliding doors, but rather planned to take us through the single side door in order to control traffic flow.

Cameras showed up about 30 minutes before the doors opened, and it was around that time that I said, "I kinda wish there was a CU grad student here from sociology studying the crowd mentality." My companions whipped out their floor maps and started seriously considering their strategies of how to get to what they wanted. I suggested a couple of strategies and offered to look for their items. They asked if I was even running when the doors opened and I answered," I want the full experience with the adrenaline rush and running, and I need to burn some calories!"

So, the doors open, we ran, and I helped someone get a TV. I grabbed the one electronics item on my Christmas list and then went back for a cart and did my shopping. And you know what, I did get some really good deals! I can't name what they were in case certain people read my blog, but between my midnight Target shopping and an Amazon order I have only about 4 more things to buy and have saved about $100 - $150 by doing it early.

This doesn't have much to do with my lifestyle changes, except that it frees me up to have a semi-normal life in the next month. It means Christmas doesn't have to derail me from cooking my healthy food and going to the gym. It also, for me, signals that I managed to pull off a mostly healthy Thanksgiving, and not feel so full that I was ill.

Black Friday success and Thanksgiving triumph - Woot!

Thanksgiving recipes

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I am doing some serious cooking for Thanksgiving. I have always helped with this meal, from being a little girl helping to "clean" spoons, to getting a little older and helping to set a table, serve and clear, to becoming a young adult and beginning to contribute first one, and then a couple of dishes at each Thanksgiving meal. This was the first time that I was cooking so heavily for the meal, but I was so excited to dig into most of a Thanksgiving menu . . . you will notice that I had nothing to do with the protein. That is most definitely the way it should be - as someone who recently returned to meat eating after a 12 year absence I am so not worthy when it comes to buying, much less preparing meat! Luckily, I had a good friend who not only made the turkey and stuffing, but invited me over.

Here is what I made, and how people liked it.

Butternut Squash soup
Credit: adapted from www.epicurious.com

This was a big hit. I made this mostly because I wanted to do something with a butternut squash, but was surprised that it was yummy and that I wasn't the only one who was really into it!

Ingredients:

• 4 large shallots, chopped
• 1 medium carrot, chopped
• 1 celery rib, chopped - I excluded this since celery isn't my thing
• 1 (15-ounce) can diced tomatoes, drained
• 3 large thyme sprigs
• 1 Turkish or 1/2 California bay leaf
• 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 1/2 pounds butternut squash, peeled, seeded, and cut into (1-inch) cubes (about 3 1/2 cups)
• 5 cups water - I used three cups of veggie broth and 2 of water
• 1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg
• 12 bottled cooked chestnuts, chopped (1/2 cup) - I am unsure I'll do this
• I added chopped fresh rosemary

Preparation

I halved the squash, oiled it, and baked it at 400 degrees for 45 minutes

Cook shallots, carrot, celery, tomatoes, thyme, and bay leaf in oil in a 4- to 5-quart heavy pot over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally, until softened, about 8 minutes.

Add squash, water, nutmeg, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 teaspoon pepper and simmer, covered, until squash is very tender, 20 to 25 minutes. Discard thyme and bay leaf.

Purée soup in batches in a blender until smooth (use caution when blending hot liquids). Thin soup if desired and season with salt and pepper.

Ladle soup over chestnuts in bowls - I did not do the chestnuts

Cooks' note: Soup can be made 2 days ahead and chilled, covered once cool. Thin slightly with water if necessary.

I also whipped some heavy whipping cream and served a dollop in the soup. Yummmmm.

Roasted Brussel Sprouts

Credit: Michelle Brazier and Heather Robinson

I was probably the only person there that was really into these, but I loves them. I wasn't going to roast veggies and not make them!

Ingredients

• Fresh brussel sprouts
• Coarse salt (I use a Himalayan pink sea salt)
• Olive oil (about 3 tablespoons)
• Crushed red pepper

Preparation

Cut the tough end off of the sprouts, and halve them. Toss them in a bowl with the olive oil, salt, and crushed red pepper. Place on a cookie sheet, bake in high heat oven (400 - 450 degrees) for 15-20 minutes or until crispy and carmelized to taste.


Roasted Cauliflower
Credit: Me

This was another hit. I think the thing that makes them so good is the special salt I used.


Ingredients

• 1 head of cauliflower
• Olive oil - about 2-3 tablespoons
• Salt - kosher salt, or smoked grey salt

Preparation

Slice the stalk and leaves off of the head of cauliflower. Cut the heads and stems into pieces that are Goldilock's-sized - not too big, not too small. Toss with oil and salt. brown in the oven at about 400 degrees for about 10-15 minutes until the tops begin to brown.


Fork Mashed Potatoes with fresh herbs

Credit: Me

These went over VERY well. I had tested these potatoes at three previous Thanksgivings so I was glad they fit well into this Thanksgiving too.

Ingredients

• 2-3 bags of mini-red potatoes, soaked but skins on
• butter
• salt, to taste
• pepper, to taste
• Fresh herbs - chopped (Rosemary, Thyme, Sage)

Preparation

Boil the potatoes until tender (but not mushy). Drain and cool for a few minutes, and leave the skins on. Split the potatoes with a hand-masher, and then add butter a tablespoon at a time - start with a couple of tablespoons. Sprinkle in salt and pepper and begin to use a fork to mash the potatoes. Slowly add more butter, and the freshly chopped herbs.


Chocolate Chess Pie

Credit: My Mama.

This is not everyone's thing, but for those who like, it, they really like it.

Ingredients:

1 stick butter (melted)
1 1/2 C sugar

2 eggs

3 T cocoa

1 small can of evap milk

1 t vanilla

Preparation

Stir sugar and cocoa into butter.  Add eggs one at a time, beating well, that's beating, not heating after each

(** BEAT-NOT-HEAT is a joke from back in my high school days. On a boring Sunday my bestest friend everest came over and we capriciously decided to see if their were ingredients to bake cookies. We scoped out a recipe from my mom's giant recipe box, and got started. My mom has beautiful handwriting, but her "h" curls back towards the stem, looking a little similar to a "b." On a faded recipe, we couldn't tell the difference and thought it said to HEAT the butter and sugar.  So . . . we did! And as we added the other ingredients the dough turned into cement. Without baking. Beat! Not Heat!) 

Add vanilla and milk.

Pour into an unbaked pie shell.  Bake at 350 for 45 minutes.

Apple Bundt Cake

Credit: www.epicurious.com

I took this to Thanksgiving and then brought it as a dessert to another friend's house. It was well liked by several people, and honestly, once the apples are peeled it's super easy so I think it may become something I make more often.

Ingredients

• 4 medium Golden Delicious apples (about 1 1/2pounds), peeled, cut into 1/3-inch pieces - I added one gala apple as well
• 5 tablespoons plus 2 1/2 cups sugar - I used only 4 T of sugar on the apples and only two cups of sugar in the batter
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 4 large eggs
• 1 cup vegetable oil
• 1/4 cup orange juice - I used a little extra.
• 1 tablespoon grated orange peel
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 3 cups all purpose flour
• 3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

• Powdered sugar

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease and flour 12-cup Bundt pan. Mix apple pieces, 5 tablespoons sugar and ground cinnamon in medium bowl. Combine 2 1/2 cups sugar, eggs, vegetable oil, orange juice, orange peel and vanilla extract in large bowl; whisk to blend. Stir flour, baking powder and salt into egg mixture. Spoon 1 1/2 cups batter into prepared Bundt pan. Top with half of apple mixture. Cover with 1 1/2 cups batter. Top with remaining apples, then batter.

Bake cake until top is brown and tester inserted near center comes out with moist crumbs attached, about 1 hour 30 minutes. Cool cake in pan on rack 15 minutes. Run knife around sides of pan to loosen. Turn cake out onto rack. Cool at least 45 minutes. Dust with powdered sugar. Serve slightly warm or at room temperature.

Cranberry Sauce

Credit: Adapted from www.allrecipes.com

This was the easiest thing I made, and it was . . . ok. Most people don't really care about the cranberry sauce, and I think that's how this one went.

Ingredients:

• 12 ounces cranberries
• 1 cup white sugar (I only used 3/4 C)
• 1 cup orange juice
• sprinkle of Cinnamin
• Sprinkle of fresh ground nutmeg
• Sprinkle of orange zest
  

Preparation

In a medium sized saucepan over medium heat, dissolve the sugar in the orange juice. Stir in the cranberries and cook until the cranberries start to pop (about 10 minutes). Remove from heat and place sauce in a bowl. Cranberry sauce will thicken as it cools.

Pumpkin Bread

Credit: adapted from my Mama

Ummmm, on second thought, this is one of the only things I bake really well, to the point that people ask for it. And I don't want to reveal how I've altered my mom's recipe. So, this, and one other recipe of something that I cook (black bean soup!) will remain the creative property of me. But I'll make them for you!!

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and had a lot of reminders of things you are grateful for.