Walking Challenge

A couple of weeks ago, I received an e-mail from the Wellness Team at my company titled “Walking Challenge”. Given how much I walk, I was intrigued. They’re challenging people to do more walking and activity for 6 weeks, with prizes for people in first, second and third place. To facilitate that, they gave us all pedometers, as well as getting things set up on the American Heart Association’s website. 

My competitive nature, usually dormant, roused a bit at seeing that. After all, I already walk quite a bit. How hard could it be to win this? I knew that I did a lot more than most of the people in my office, although I did wonder about one man who walks to the gym every day (a mile each way) and works out for an hour. But I was the only one I knew of who walked to work. As for my co-workers in California, it seemed that many of them spent most of their free time commuting to the office by car, not out walking or getting other forms of activity.

I was also curious to see how many steps I got since I was vaguely familiar with the http://www.10000steps.org.au/. Even though we weren’t doing that specifically, I wanted to see if I was meeting that goal, which is recommended for better general health and longer life. 

When I started using the pedometer, I was surprised to learn how much walking it took to achieve 10,000 steps - about five miles. Admittedly other activities count, such as swimming, yoga, weightlifting, etc., and the greater the intensity, the more steps you get. I realized that despite what I considered a pretty good activity level, some days I had to get creative to get in all those steps.

For instance, I discovered a while back that my kitchen counter is a perfect ergonomic height to use with my laptop. So now, while I’m checking and answering e-mail, I mostly do it there and do some stepping in place. Similarly, when doing dishes, I move around a little more. 

Happily for me that was about all it took to get me up to the amount, since I already was exercising every morning for about 40 minutes, often taking a 10-15 minute walk during lunch, and getting a built-in 1,700 steps during the work week by going to and from the bus stop. In fact, I was often getting closer to 11-12,000 steps. I was feeling good and perhaps even a little smug.

Then after the first week they announced the top five - and I wasn’t in it. The person currently in first place seemed incredibly to be getting something like 13 miles in per day! It occurred to me that she might be a runner, which gets you a lot more points than just walking. 

That’s when I decided that, competitive or not, I wasn’t going to kill myself to try to win this. After all, I was doing quite a bit, and I found out later that I’m 8th out of 65, which is quite respectable. But it’s been an interesting process to realize how much I’ve been obsessed with trying to meet the numbers. I’ll keep that up for the last month or so of the challenge, but after that, I’ll go back to focusing on how I feel. I already know that getting plenty of exercise does make me feel better, so it’s something I intend to keep up - and I suppose that’s the real point of the challenge, in which case I’ve already won. 

Diet Pill Approved

For those who might have missed the news, the FDA approved a new diet pill last week, although it won’t be available until later this year. According to the article, “Qsymia is a controlled-release formulation that combines low doses of two older generic drugs: the stimulant phentermine, which cuts appetite, and topiramate, which increases the sense of feeling full.” It stated that “about 70% of patients lost at least 5% of their body weight compared with 20% on a placebo”.

Sounds great, right? But there was a side comment in the article that I fear will be overlooked by many people: “The approval was based on two clinical studies involving about 3,700 obese and overweight patients who were treated for one year with medication as well as diet and exercise.” (emphasis added)

My concern with this diet pill, as well as others, is that people will feel like it’s an easy solution, that once they take it, they don’t have to do anything else and pounds will magically melt away. (Or perhaps walk away, if you’re a fan of Doctor Who and the Adipose.) 

At least, that was my thought when I was younger. Not that I ever tried diet pills, per se, but I tried a variety of other things, including some pills that were meant to stimulate my metabolism, or herbs to stimulate my thyroid, etc. I always assumed that if I took this one thing, that was all I had to do.

The problem is that it doesn’t work that way. I know that for me, eating junk food doesn’t promote much satiety, which made it easy for me to get more calories than I needed with relatively little food, and likely not the nutrients I needed. I’ve also found that exercise helps me feel less hungry, as well as better in general, but many people may ignore that part of the study’s results.

Besides which, if people are already eating for reasons that have nothing to do with hunger or how full they feel - eating out of boredom, stress, loneliness, celebration, etc. - this sort of drug will not help. Those underlying issues will remain. The diet pill may help slightly, but it won’t solve what caused the problem in the first place, and then what happens when they stop taking the pill? Probably the same thing that happens when most people go off diets - they’ll gain the weight back.

I’m not saying that this can’t help some people, but I hope that those who take it will recognize that this alone will not solve all their problems, or be the only thing they need to do to lose weight. 

Home Videos

A while ago my dad unearthed some home videos that we decided to transfer to DVD. I recently took a quick pass through them to make sure they were as expected, and it was a fascinating tour down memory lane. What caught me by surprise, though, was my reaction to seeing my younger self, particularly two instances.

The first was when I was eleven. That was the year my weight gain really started. Not that I’d been skinny before, but this was different. I watched as the younger me, clearly not accustomed to the new reality, struggled to climb into a tree. It was my favorite cedar tree on Swan Island, with low, easy branches that I had clambered up every year since I was four. My heart ached as myself at eleven suddenly found this hard, especially knowing how much worse was to come before it got better. (I did, at least, finally get into the tree.)

The second instance was when I was nineteen and twenty, watching my niece’s first year. At the time I weighed about 240 pounds, so not quite my heaviest but not too far off. The first glimpse of me was just a bit of my hair, my profile, and a hand, and before I quite realized it was me, I thought, “She’s pretty.”

Then the irony struck. When I was heavy, I had never been able to think of myself as pretty or attractive. Occasionally I might concede that I liked my hands, or perhaps my face wasn’t bad, or my hair was nice, but the whole of me, taken together? Perish the thought. I was too grotesquely fat for such a slight word to apply to me.

Yet watching myself now, from my older and thinner and more experienced perspective, I recognize that despite my earlier alarming size, I was pretty. Not conventionally so, but I had a certain grace. Not that being pretty is the most important thing in the world, but when you’re a teenager, it’s fairly important, and I wish I’d been able to recognize it then.

Then as I watched my interactions with my family, I realized something else. Back then, I was convinced that no one could love me as I was. Again, I was blind, because now I see a different truth. My family did love me, and no one made this more evident than my niece. 

Yes, she was only a baby, but babies can be quite discerning. Then, and as she got older, she wasn’t shy about giving me hugs and kisses and telling me she loved me and generally getting excited when she saw me. This was even somewhat apparent on the day she was born. I remember holding her, and she immediately relaxed and snuggled comfortably against me. Her mother, impressed, said, “I think she likes you.” But I didn’t take that into account when I considered that I might be lovable; I was too judgmental of myself to accept the non-judgment of others.

It was both fun and sad to watch and remember, knowing how badly I thought of myself then, wishing I could go back and tell myself that I didn’t deserve such malignity, that I was lovable and yes, even pretty. I’m not sure I would have believed it, but it would have been nice to hear.

Vegan Ice Cream

Cherry

My sixteen-year-old niece recently discovered that she’s lactose intolerant, right before she was going to an ice cream festival. When she lamented this fact on Facebook, someone commented that these days a lot of people are making vegan ice cream.

That’s when I got excited. You might even say obsessive. I spent my entire lunch hour and some of that evening looking up different vegan ice cream recipes online, plotting what I would try in my ice cream maker. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, debating what alternatives to use, which flavors, and when I could attempt it.

My enthusiasm startled even me. As I thought about it, though, I could start to understand where it was coming from.

I was diagnosed as allergic to milk at age ten; my mom and brother were diagnosed at the same time, so that only my dad could continue to freely indulge in dairy. (Although he probably would have anyway, given how much he loves cheese.) Sure enough, once I stopped the milk and cheese and ice cream, my perpetual “cold” went away. No more sneezing, running nose, or sore throat. That was all good, but it didn’t mean that I didn’t still want the dairy treats. And this was long before soy or other alternatives were readily available.

I learned to live without milk and even cheese, but somehow ice cream was harder. Not just for me, either. My mom loved soft serve, and summer evenings would sometimes find us getting cones in Naples, licking them as the sunlight reflected off Sebago Lake, or sometimes stopping by the Dairy Queen in Windham. The most telling example was when my mom was finally able to leave the hospital after her mastectomy and reconstructive surgery. She’d been there five days, and on the way home she insisted we stop for ice cream; my dad and I weren’t going to argue.

And so I realized ice cream is incredibly comforting. That creamy smoothness, the satisfying cold on a hot summer day, the way it melts so sweetly on your tongue. This is true for most people, but for me personally, it goes a little deeper. The idea of eating ice cream without worrying about my allergies bring me back to some of my earliest happy childhood memories, when we’d stop for cones on the way home from swimming lessons, everyone relaxed and happy. It’s also a connection to my mom.

Perhaps it is no wonder, then, that I was so eager to try this. I started simply, with a vanilla base and adding a splash of mint, using just almond milk. It was good, but not that exciting. The chocolate banana was more like it, although that still didn’t have quite the creamy texture of regular ice cream. Then last weekend I tried cherry ice cream, which was more involved, between pitting the cherries and making a simple syrup (using agave nectar instead of sugar and thickening with tapioca), but I was very happy with the result. I think next will be a true mint chocolate chip, this time with some soy creamer.

Chocolate Banana

I’m not quite as addicted as this might make me seem. The batches are fairly small, and I don’t eat much every day. But I have to admit that when it’s sunny and humid out, it’s delightful to have my own ice cream as a cool treat.

And so I close with a slightly modified version of the old expression: “I scream, you scream, we all scream for vegan ice cream!”

This Life Is In Your Hands

I didn’t expect the book This Life Is In Your Hands to be so much about food.

When I heard Maine author Melissa Coleman talk about and read from her memoir, my impression was that it centered around the tragedy of her younger sister drowning at age three. That was certainly part of the book, but it didn’t happen until about two-thirds of the way through. And in the pages leading up to it, a lot of the focus was on food and organic gardening.

Not having known the history of the organic movement, I was fascinated to read about Helen and Scott Nearing, authors of Living the Good Life, who came to Maine and inspired many back-to-the-landers in the late 1960’s. Among them were Eliot and Sue Coleman, who purchased land from the Nearings and built their own house on it; Eliot has since become an authority on organic farming, writing The New Organic Farmer (among other books) and now running Four Seasons Farm with his current wife.

But Melissa Coleman’s memoir is not about these later successes. It instead focuses on the early years of her life and even before, including how much her parents’ love of health food brought them together.

For instance, early in their relationship, Eliot and Sue went on a date of sorts - to a health food store! Such stores were not so common then, and the couple was excited by items like a yogurt maker, bulk almonds, and coconut peanut butter. Later, when they were married, Sue was reminded all over again why she loved her husband when they snuck out to “rescue” fallen apples from an abandoned orchard. Melissa wrote: “Food, from its procurement to its enjoyment, was the force that held them together.” (p. 70)

As back-to-the-landers, food was also a critical daily focus. Eliot spent much of his time gardening and harvesting, especially at first, in “the urgency to put away food to survive” (p. 40), and later to sell at a vegetable stand. Sue was also constantly busy: “Carrots and beets to be placed in sand in the root cellar, string beans to be canned in mason jars, winter squash to season on the patio, onions and garlic to braid and hang from the ceiling alongside spearmint, chamomile, and lemon verbena for tea and basil, rosemary and thyme for seasoning.” (p. 40)

They did all of this because they were worried about big agribusiness and pesticides and being dependent on others. They also believed that if they ate well, they would be healthy, agreeing with Scott Nearing’s comment: “Health insurance is served on the table with every meal.” (p. 81) Eliot applied this logic to plants as well, developing what he called “plant-positive” farming. His idea was that as long as the plants were healthy, they would not attract pests or disease, thus preventing the need for pesticides or even more natural ways of controlling pests.