April's CR Diary

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May 31, 2005

Can't You Have Just One Bite?

That's what I overheard one of the nurses saying to VLC this afternoon as VLC politely refused to eat one of the fifty thousand or so donuts that were served at today's all day contract ratification meetings.

You got that right, bloggiefriends, for those of you who have even the foggiest what I am referring to. We settled the contract. And a great one it is! Still the best paid nurses in the state, and now with one of the best retirement packages. And yes, the nurses at this particular hospital can now get health insurance for themselves and their spouse if they retire at sixty. The ratification vote was overwhelming, almost all of the 741 nurses showing up to vote. One of the nurses said to me, "I've been in nursing for thirty years, and I have never felt so empowered as I do today." Wow, that warms the organizer's heart.

But this is not a blog about organizing nurses, this is a blog about CR. Which is good, cause for two very long days I've been drowning in an ocean of evil gak, clinging to my cottage cheese snack packs and the sound of MR's voice on my cell phone as though they were a life boat. Yikes, these people eat crap!!!

I knew it would be rough on Monday when the nurses showed up with their contributions to our impromptu Memorial Day picnic, eaten during a caucus break in the hotel conference room. All kinds of pasta salads, covered with mayo and oil... cold cuts and cheese, rolls. All homemade, so I didn't want to offend by not taking any. My strategy: I took the lettuce that someone had brought as sandwich garnish and made a big bed of lettuce on my plate. Then I topped it with tiny dollops of the homemade salads, not even a tablespoon of each. That way, when one of the nurses saw my lunch and commented, "I see you're eating sensibly," I could truthfully say, "I tried your salad and it was delicious!" Of course their food tastes good... it just isn't good for me!

I was ecstatic that one of the nurses, the tall fit one from the ER, had brought a giant fruit tray. Ignoring the silly whipped cream dip in the middle, I went straight for the melons, apple, grapes and pineapple. Yum yum yum! See, I eat fruit! I ate a big plate of that, and dug the almonds out of the trail mix to munch on while others were downing potato chips and such. I also had one of my cottage cheese packs (80 cals) for lunch with my salad, to be sure I was getting some calcium and protein.

For dinner we ordered out pizza, but I got just the house salad, which was pretty generous and included carrots, celery, and all variety of bell pepper. They ignored my instruction to give me JUST VINEGAR on the side and instead gave me oil and vinegar. I HATE THAT!!! I really dislike the taste of bad quality olive oil, and I don't want to eat it if it's been sitting on the stove all day and all night. I actually heard myself say to a co-worker, "It's like totally oxidized, dude!" So I put mustard on my salad instead and drizzled some roasted red peppers (packed in water, not oil) and a few homemade dill pickles on top.

We finally got a tentative agreement, and the bargaining committee all went out to a local bar of moderate dive-ish-ness, where I joined in the festivities by ordering my new favorite drink: the Skinny Bitch. That's vodka and diet Coke with a lime. Delicious! Don't worry, I wasn't driving... the insurance company hasn't gotten me a rental yet so I've been catching rides with a co-worker who lives relatively near by.

It was very late and we live far from the negotiations hotel, so the staff folks all got rooms and parted ways for the night. Of course the first thing I did when I got to my room was call MR... I felt like I deserved the wonderful treat of hearing his voice on the phone after my long and harrowing day of negotiations. Talked for a little while, and went to sleep dreaming of my Orange One and megamuffins.

The hotel had a free breakfast buffet, and I had a small scoop of eggs and two snack packs of cottage cheese. More calories than I would usually have at breakfast, but I didn't want to go crazy on saturated fat and they had cottage cheese snack packs at the hotel breakfast, so I was very excited about that. Put two in my cooler bag for later, and ate one mid-morning. Also made myself a little snack from red and green peppers and fat free salsa that I bought at the corner Wawa convenience store. For those of you who aren't from around here, Wawa is a big Northeast US convenience store that is getting into fresh foods and has some pretty good offerings in terms of fruits and veggies. Not cheap, but if you're on the road and desperate they're great.

Between the 1 pm meeting and the 4 pm meeting we had a going away luncheon for a co-worker who is leaving us now that she's graduated from law school, and we went to one of those excellent local Italian places. I negotiated with the waitress and got an amazingly delicious dish. They offered a seafood pasta dish with steamed clams, scallops and shrimp in a marinara sauce over pasta, so I asked if I could have all the seafood but instead of putting it over pasta, if they could just throw it over a big plate of raw broccoli. My co-workers expressed doubt when I claimed that the heat of the seafood would steam the broccoli, yielding freshly steamed but not overcooked broccoli without exposing me to overly heated oils (it's like totally oxidized, dude!). When the dish came everyone was jealous... it just looked so good. And it was! Not sure how many calories, of course as it was "out" food, but tons of zinc and protein. It came with a house salad of just lettuce, tomato and green pepper with red onion, to which I added only red wine vinegar.

Between the 4 pm and the 7:30 pm meetings VLC and I decided to remove ourselves from the meeting room for a few moments of quiet girl time, and wandered over to a place called the Gumbo Shoppe, specializing in cajun food. I ordered a tiny cup of crawfish soup, which was amazing, and we sat there long enough to catch our collective breath before the final meeting.

Over all, the day was a victory, both in terms of the union and CR. It's not easy to eat right on those days when you're going from 6 am till 9 pm non-stop, and it's hard in social situations to strike the right balance between fitting in (which is to some extent essential for my work) and sticking to what you know is good for you. As always, I probably could have done better, but I think I did pretty well.

Posted by april at 10:01 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 29, 2005

Give Me Forever

Or: the blog entry in which our heroine admits that she owns a John Tesh CD.

I bought my John Tesh CD with the line from which today's headline is taken back in 1997, when I was working on an organizing campaign at Mercer Medical Center in Trenton, New Jersey. I was a 23 year old organizer, about to turn 24, and I had just lost the first campaign I ever ran by myself by 6 votes. It was brutal, the worst anti-union campaign anyone around had seen in years and years, and I was pretty badly beaten up. I remember working out on the treadmill, reading Suzanne Gordon's writings on nursing, and trying to bring myself back to life. It wasn't until we got the call from Mercer and I met Dale that I started to be myself again.

Dale had been a registered nurse for about 25 years. She was a nice girl from Levittown, PA, one of those nurses you would trust your life with. I still imagine that if anything ever happened to me or someone I love, I would want Dale to take care of me or my loved one.

She came to her first union meeting with that attitude that a lot of long term, excellent nurses start with: What's the union going to do for me? Who are you, and what do you get out of this? What's the catch?

I was so young then, but already pretty battle hardened, and tougher than any 23 year old you're likely to meet. I knew how to move the conversation. "It's not about what the union is going to do for you: the union is nothing but the nurses in the union. It's about what you and your co-workers are going to do for yourselves, by claiming the rights you have but can only exercise as a collective group." Cutting through class prejudices and ideas about what it means to be a "union person"... so many things I've learned in the intervening years. Dale was a tough cookie, and it took awhile to earn her trust.

But like all good nurses, once she was on board, she was 100%. Hours and hours we spent talking to other nurses, going to meetings, figuring out how to move those who were too scared to even show up to a meeting on their own time. We spent an almost unbearable amount of time at a Friendly's in Morristown, PA, and an IHOP in Trenton, NJ, meeting with nurses. One thing that comes with my dearly beloved great work is a lot of hours logged in bad restaurants.

I remember driving home from a late night meeting one night and hearing this song on the radio, thinking that the words of the song described how I felt about my nurses.

Won't you give me forever
To show all of the love
I have here for you...

It is such a great gift from the god or goddess or chaos or random chance or whomever to be present at the moment when another human being realizes for the first time that she has power over her own work life, and when all the anger and despair and frustration and hopelessness that she's felt for maybe fifty years finally turns into powerful, collective action. It is a blessing to be the catalyst for this action. "I can give you the tools, and I can push you to do what you know you should do anyway," I say to my nurses now. "But in the end, it is your decision."

MR gave me the tools, and pushed me to do what I knew I should do anyway. But in the end, it was my decision.

And I promise that I'll never let you down.

The decision to live our lives as though they are own is hard.

For years and years I put my work above everything else, and to be honest with you, my dear bloggiefriends, I don't regret it for a minute. I lived entirely to help nurses push past the ingrained fear and sense of futility and take control of their worklives, and through that, of their entire lives. I would not trade the beautiful moments of victory and even the moments of defeat for anything.

But now at thirty, now that I've finally fallen in love with someone who is worth taking a few days off from work for, someone who can support my work and who I am as a whole person, I am glad that I can have my great work and still have love. It's a tough call for organizers... may marriages have broken up due to the stress of the job, and lots of girl organizers give up the organizing once they meet a guy and decide to marry, have kids, etc.

Luckily, MR has no more interest than I do in such silliness. Long before we met, we had both accepted that the yellow brick road of marriage, children, and consumer debt, and all the trappings of middle class life would not be for us. How nice that we figured that out separately, and don't have to spend time negotiating it! Leaves more time to fight over the thermostat... I swear, the man is doing slow motion cryonics! He's going to be frozen long before he's dead!!!

Okay, gratuitous dig at MR freezing himself to death aside, when I think about what I have learned from practicing CR and allowing myself to be totally transformed and empowered by the writings of a brilliant if slightly orange man from Canada, I can't help but think about the process that my nurses go through when they first realize that they have power. Even now, nearly ten years in, I am still brought to tears by the beauty of my every day experience of living with these women (and a few guys!) as they stand up for their patients and their profession. They have so much to lose... not only economically, though that certainly is a concern when your job is putting food on the table and health insurance cards in your husband and children's wallets. But when they step out on that limb and risk not just economic loss but the loss of class status, the sense of being the perfect little middle class girl... I can't describe to those of you who have not been there how hard this is.

So no matter what, I'll be there for my nurses. They have saved me so many times, in so many ways they will never understand. They gave me my reason for living, and through them I came to believe in the power of good to triumph over evil. It's not easy, it's not clean, it's certainly not glamourous... most of my job is making hundreds of phone calls and meeting with nurses in smoke filled diners! But it works.

Billy Joel pipes in from "All About Soul:"

It's all about soul
The power of love and the power of healing.

It's going to take so long to see my dream of a world where the workers share equally in the profits they make come to fruition. Just the other day, my colleague and close friend said to me:

"I don't expect to see radical change in my lifetime anymore. I just hope that what I do every day makes it possible for that change to happen someday, even if I'm not here to see it."

My first reaction is to call Aubrey and say, "Make those scientists do the rodent studies and find the cure for aging!" To call MR and say, "Write faster, my angel! I'll do the cooking, you just write!" To raise more money for the Mprize, so that we can break the logjam of hopelessness and pessimism and actually put the SENS ideas into practice. This is life and death to me: give my friend a chance to see the world he has spent his entire life fighting for! I can't convert him to CR, it's way too late. I thank God every day that I have MR to journey with me into the unknown future, someone beautiful whom I love to hold my hand as we stand defiantly against the advancing armies of biological aging. I can not stand the thought that some of my non-CR'd friends may not make it. Fight harder! Thank you, new Three Hundred members, for bringing us closer! Thank you Matt for joining the Three Hundred and starting CR yourself... you're doing everything you can, and MR and I consider you a brother! Thanks to all of you scientists out there actually handle mice (John S!) in search of the cure. I believe in you... and if you come to Philly, I'll make you a really nice dinner!

The next few days will be draining... we are in negotiations tomorrow, and we may settle the contract, but we may not. I'm packing a cooler bag full of calcium and protein and hazelnuts, and I'm packing a bag with anything I might need if I have to stay over at the contract negotiations hotel, cause we often at the very end negotiations we don't get out till 3 am, and then we have to be doing meetings at 7 the following morning. Luckily, lack of sleep has never bothered me much. Sure, I like to sleep if I can but I'm more than willing to sacrifice sleep to the cause.

I am very lucky to have a job that is more of a calling than a career, and more of a passion than a grind. Doesn't mean that it's not stressful and boring and irksome at times (Groundhog Day, anyone?) but it's always had a way of making me certain that I'm alive.

To (very loosely) paraphrase MR: I plan to take on aging, disease and dying -- and the political economy of this country -- and the unfortunate habit that so many Northerners have of wearing white shoes before Memorial Day -- as a literal life and death struggle, entailing self-discipline, commitment and sacrifice.

BTW, it's Memorial Day now. You can wear white shoes.

Posted by april at 8:45 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Is It Really Normal for a Woman Over Thirty to Be This Thin?

It never fails. I read a beauty magazine, I get blog inspiration.

I was flipping through Glamour yesterday when I came across an article claiming that older women (like over thirty! like me!) are now acquiring eating disorders in an attempt to look like the women in "Desperate Housewives." I imagine there are (and have always been) women over thirty with eating disorders, and those women should get help and I hope they get better.

But do we really have to address this problem by claiming that it's not healthy for women over thirty to be thin??? Okay, granted, they said normal, not healthy, but reading the article confirmed what they meant.

Why oh why would we counsel women to "accept" gaining weight every year after thirty as a natural process, when it is a deadly process? Sure, it may be harder to stay thin after thirty, especially for people who have kids. But people gain weight because they eat too many calories and don't exercise enough, not because they keep having birthdays. Personally, I found it quite easy to get fat before thirty... if I had not started CR at 29, who knows what I might weigh now? I was gaining weight at about three pounds a month with no sign of stopping. I hadn't had children, I was just eating too much, and bad foods!

I wish the magazines that women turn to for advice would confront the problem instead of shoving pictures of thin fashion models in our faces then telling us that we should accept gradual weight gain. What a depressing message! How about a feature with all the CR'd grown up girls (to be a grown up girl, in my mind, you have to be over fifty, and be prepared to show ID) talking about how real women stay thin and healthy at any age.

Another feature in Glamour asked "Full skirts for real bodies?" implication being that some bodies are not real. I wondered, do I have to look forward to a CR'd future in which I am not real, not normal, because I'm not fat?

At least now, when MR and I are together, we look more like a nice couple who just graduated from college than like supermodels. I've always thought that he looks more young than skinny, like one of those teenagers who eats a pizza every night before bed. I'm still not particularly thin looking... anyone who has actually seen me can comment that I'm not skinny looking at all! And yet, I find the Banana Republic size 0 slightly too big. MR's mom was noticing how sizes have crept in recent years... what is now a size 0 used to be more like a size 10. People are growing, and so are sizes. Thin short women can't find clothes. Should I gain weight? Should I grow taller? Should I shop in more expensive stores (oh no!)?

It's even worse for men. One of my male friends who is not particularly thin but is in shape and works out all the time has trouble finding pants that are both long enough and small enough in the waist. CR'd men seem to just give up on finding clothes that actually fit, relying instead on belts to keep their pants from falling down. It always cracks me up how when a woman says a pair of pants are too big, a man will often say, "Why not just wear a belt?" As if!!!

I can understand that there's not that much demand out there for clothes that fit men who are six feet tall and 123 pounds, but really, a six foot tall man who weighs 180 but is in great shape should be able to find clothes! Is it a requirement that everyone get fat? This same friend was hanging out with some of our nurses the other day, and they started to tell him he was too thin! One of them said, "You have to have a milkshake!" When we all went out to dinner, they wanted him to eat dessert. These are nurses! If you genuinely think someone should gain weight, shouldn't you suggest that they eat healthy yet high calorie foods, like a little more olive oil and some hazelnuts? Grrrrr...

Contract negotiations go on and on, and the room is filled with gak. Friday was a rough day... I hadn't planned to spend the afternoon/evening in negotiations, so I hadn't packed enough food, thinking I would get out for lunch. VLC and I met nurses at noon in the hospital cafeteria, where I marvelled at the horrific choices that hospital visitors and staff are offered for lunch. Chicken fingers (do chickens have fingers?), pepper steak, macaroni and cheese. A truly wilted salad bar. Ugh. I did try a Cherry Vanilla Diet Dr. Pepper, which was exciting. I guess they skipped the steps of having Cherry Diet Dr. Pepper and Vanilla Diet Dr. Pepper and just went for the whole thing.

We had to do some scouting out for office space, so by the time we got to negotiations it was about 2 pm. I was still thinking I would get out and go get a real lunch, but I eventually decided to stay at negotiations, so I walked up to the little hotel restaurant to order a salad to go. I had to have some protein, and the choices were horribly limited, so I had a grilled chicken caesar salad with no dressing, no croutons, and no cheese. The man who took my order argued with me that it wouldn't be a caesar salad anymore, and I said, "That's right, I just want lettuce with chicken on top." That settled that.

Someone had brought trail mix with almonds, so I munched on those, and towards the end nibbled at the last of a club sandwich that someone had ordered and not eaten... feeling terrible but also really hungry.

Yesterday was another interesting experience... I took a break from work last night to go out with some new friends, and we all went out to a bar that had absolutely nothing I would eat. I decided to pull an MR and not eat at all, as I had dinner plans later, which fell through at the last minute when an out of town friend didn't end up making it into town.

Going into work this afternoon and may end up making dinner for my mom, not sure yet. Tomorrow we're back in negotiations (no holidays for the union people!) and I will be packing my cooler bag full of cottage cheese and yogurts and hazelnuts. There's a pizza place near the negotiations hotel that had an excellent house salad with a ton of veggies, so if I can convince the others to get lunch from there, I'll be in good shape. Who knows how long we'll be there... could be all night... so I'll just have to stuff my cooler bag as full as I can. It's times like these that I wish for megamuffins, and of course it's times like these when I am least likely to have time to bake them! Not to mention that the memory of green endive flecked goo dripping from my kitchen walls the last time I made them does not inspire me to attempt the process alone.

Posted by april at 7:57 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 27, 2005

Wow! My First (and Hopefully Only) Car Accident!

I know you're freaking out, so let's start with this: EVERYONE IS OKAY!!!

I actually think I just had the best car accident experience ever.

I was on my way out of work when a car turned from a side street directly in front of me, like right into my car. I pulled over and jumped out (putting on my hazard lights) and walked up to her car. She jumped out and we said simultaneously, "Are you okay?"

We were both totally okay... I have a bruise on my shin from where my leg hit the car when I slammed on the brakes, but that's all. Then she gave me a big hug and said, "We're all okay, that's all that matters!"

Yes, my first moment after my big car accident involved the person who hit my car giving me a big hug. I told you this was a bizarrely positive car accident experience.

We proceeded to exchange insurance info, and it looks like her insurance will pay, as she was turning from a side street. A man appeared to ask us if we had anyone in particular we used for autobody work, and as I've never been in a car accident before, of course I do not. As it turns out, I had my first car accident ever right in front of an autobody shop. So he was very helpful, as he is hoping to get my business, and he explained how we need to call the insurance companies and get a claim number and such. We exchanged tons of information, and the autobody guy said he'd never seen such nice people get into a car accident. Usually, it appears, people yell and scream at each other.

I wasn't hurt, but was a touch shaken up, so I went on home and stopped by my mom's house... mom's are so good when one is a touch shaken up.

Ate dinner at her house, aka the Carb Castle: 3 slices of seven grain bread (I know MR is horrified at the notion of me eating bread no matter how many grains are involved... it doesn't happen often!) with roasted red pepper hummus, three small (one Weight Watcher point each -- my mom is a hardcore WW) frozen (well, thawed and baked and then fished out of the fridge) crab cakes with Trader Joes' seafood cocktail sauce, and two glasses of wine. More than I had planned to have for dinner and not my greatest CR friendly meal, but when I stopped to think of what most people would have eaten for dinner after having a car accident, I didn't feel too bad. The rest of the day had been light: usual breakfast, kale salad with yogurt for lunch.

You're probably expecting to read some long rant about how getting in a car accident, however minor, really made me think about my mortality and either a) give more money to the Mprize b) decide to give up CR and "live for today" or something stupid like that.

Sorry. The first thing I thought was, "Glad my car insurance is up to date." The second thing I thought was "Glad I'm not in the slightest bit hurt cause MR and my mom would be really upset." I drive so much that I've always considered it a little odd that I'd never had an accident. Sure, I'm an extraordinarily careful and non-agressive driver, but still, one can't control things like people driving right into your car. I have often thought that with as much as I drive, I am statistically dead already. So I try to minimize my risk in other areas of life... for instance, I don't ski. Now all you skiers out there will say that skiing is not dangerous, but I know lots of people who've gotten pretty twisted up in ski accidents, and I also don't understand why people pay money to be cold and wet on a mountain. Haven't humans evolved things like shelter and electric heat to avoid just such situations?

Anyway, I'm fine, so don't worry. To quote the woman who hit my car,
"We're all okay, that's all that matters."

Posted by april at 3:50 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

May 26, 2005

Guest Entry: MR Answers Your Questions

All:

OK, this is MR (and not April pretending to be MR) attempting to clear
up some confusion I've caused second-hand.

Howard: one of my many concerns about people not having personal CR
physicians (aside from the most important, which is that it prob means
they aren't getting regular lab tests, which is criminally irresponsible blind navigating on a controversial, experimental diet and also prevents one from supporting CR Science via the CR Society Cohort Study is that your lab tests will by default look a great deal
different from what a doc expects to see in a person of what passes for a healthy lifestyle, which may lead to a misdiagnosis.

This is enough of a pain in the ass when you're just in for a routine
checkup, but suppose that something really bad landed you in the
hospital & you were unable to explain your situation to a doc (or didn't understand the science and expected findings, or your own "normal" labs, well enough to have such a convo). S/he orders a diagnostic lab test and sees that (eg) your white blood cells are so low that you MUST have an immunosuppressive disorder, or (OTOH) your normally-ultralow WBC count is elevated relative to your norm because you have a nasty systemic infection, but to the doc it looks like you are free of infection because your relative increase looks just "normal" to hir.

Similarly, you might look like you have liver damage because of elevated liver enzymes (not uncommon on CR esp in the initial weight loss period), or like you have some kind of wasting disease because (a) your lipids are freakishly low and (b) you look like you just stepped out of Dachau or Calista Flockhart's living room -- or even, you just have a "normal," healthy body weight distribution, but your doc is used to the sea of overweight that is America, 2005, making you look "too thin."

You gotta have baseline tests and a doc that knows what's normal FOR YOU and why if you expect to have competent medical care.

Laura: CONVENTIONAL pickles are indeed pretty toxic due to the high
sodium (a 50 g serving, which is not much pickle, has > 600 mg), and are lacking in nutrients from having been cooked to death and left to sit for extended periods, but can be made into a perfectly respectable CR food at home. I half-fill a 1 L pickle jar with straight pickckling vinegar, into which I dissolve just 1/8 tsp of table salt (I will now perhaps try 1/4 tsp Half Salt), plus 2 tsp pickling spice, 1 tsp dried dill weed, 1/4 tsp turmeric, & 1 tsp Bernard Jensens Special Broth Or Seasoning (yes, that's really what it's called -- and it's dispensible, really, for this recipe). I then put in 1 thinly-sliced cucumber & add in enough straight pickckling vinegar to top up the container and let sit for at least 48h in the frige.

Also: glad you like the Mulligatawny Mess! *I* like my food, but I'm
often surprised when other folks do. FWIW, I've changed a lot on the
stew with kaffir lime. I now put 1/3 C of wheat bran in with the black
beans, which gives them a long time at warm ttemperature and water to
break down the phytate. I replace the eggplant with 700 g "hairy squash" (a Chinese vegetable), which is lower in energy density (more bulk) and has a much higher zinc and lower copper than eggplant, which pattern is better for my diet (which otherwise tends toward the reverse). I replaced the beet greens & stems with 1 can of sliced beets, which I further slice, and for "Remaining Ingredients" (which go into EACH SERVING as it's prepared, not the batch, in case that isn't clear) I now use 135 g zucchini, 100 g sin qua, 1 okra (great slimy texture -- I know that sounds unappetizing, but it's a smooth, fatty mouthfeel that's quite satisfying) and enough eggwhite so that it, plus the okra, make 28 Calories (I recently dropped my Calories a bit, so I need to bring up my protein grams here & there to keep the total constant from some foods of which I eat less).

This makes VERY vinegary pickles, which are to my and (happily, in yet
another sign that the universe is attempting to fool me into thinking
that it has a design) the Magnificent April's taste. You can use weaker vinegar or cut it with water, too, but you'd have to use more salt and/or let it sit for a lot longer (NB that the salt and vinegar kill bacteria, which is what prevents the cucumbers from just rotting from sitting in water for long periods).

Misc comments:

-Thanks to all for supporting April thru' this plateau-breaking energy
deficit period. I'm the sort of anal freak that just deals with hunger
etc. and slogs thru', but April's been having a real challenge and while she's clearly overall making progress, the emotioinal & practical support thru' her struggles is appreciated by us both.

-Did everyone see Dani's comments on how to deal with docs (and family, friends, & coworkers, I might add) who insist that you MUST be damaging yourself??

"Explain "the challenge". If anyone can prove to you, via any medical
test, you are unhealthy, you will stand before them and eat 10 Snicker's
bars."

LOL!

Posted by april at 5:29 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 24, 2005

Don't Feed the Mice

Now this is funny. I broke down and made an appointment with a family doctor so that my Orange One could stop worrying about me, and in talking about what info I'll need to give my doctor (who has never seen me before) on CR, I asked MR if he could write me a letter from the CR Society Human Study explaining what CR might do to my various bloodtests and such, and why I'm perfectly healthy and not anorexic. He's going to write me a note!!! It got me to thinking about my early CR days, and how I used to wish for just such a note. Then I remembered that months ago I wrote a blog entry on this very topic! But I never published it... so here it is now! What a fun little historical artifact... funny to think that I had so much fat to burn in those days that I could eat 800 cals a day and feel just euphoric. Don't try this if you're already thin... if I try that now, I get hungry and weird.

Saturday, July 16, 2004
Don't Feed the Mice!

Finally back to my little blog! Hello out there, whoever you are!

Yesterday, after my late spinich salad following my not having time to eat catastrophe, I had a meeting then went out for dinner with a co-worker. I definitely went over 800 for yesterday's total because I ate a piece of bread with olive oil, followed by an appetizer portion of spaghetti with tomato sauce, along with two restaurant pours of red wine. A lot less than I would have eaten in my pre-CR days, and my averages have been staying solidly around 800, so I'm not too worried about one day of going quite high on the calories.

That brings me to the thoughts I've been having over the last few days. My regularly scheduled insomnia attack (2:30 am, like clockwork) has lately been devoted to thoughts of CR. On Wednesday night, I spent a lot of time thinking about how I have to get more serious about both my CR and my ON. I'm still to some extent allowing my social life to dicate what I eat. Case in point: Wednesday evening, I went out with a co-worker for a drink after work. She's not doing CR, but she's a very healthy eater and extremely supportive of me. So we went to the place where we usually have margaritas, and instead of a margarita of unknown calorie content and much sugar, I had a glass of wine (I know some of you are thinking that I should give up wine too, but I'm not there yet and there seems to be no consensus about the benefits/costs of small amounts of wine.) Alex, the bartender there who we're friendly with, usually hooks us up with a bunch of free happy hour appetizers, unless we specifically tell him not to. (Remember that post early on in my blog explaining how I gained weight when I took this job and stopped being vegan, eating a lot of nachos and margaritas? Most of those were consumed at Alex's restaurant.) This time we forgot to ask him to hold the appetizers, and I felt weird about not even taking a bite when the nachos he brought us were sitting right in front of me. We told him not to bring anymore (he almost came over with some cheese things, but we saved ourselves.) So he asked if we were dieting, and we said no, we just had dinner plans later (a lie for both of us.) I had about four nacho chips, not exactly a crisis, but an example of food that didn't do my body any good that I didn't even want, I just ate it for social reasons. When I started to de-construct this in the middle of the night (I am so productive during my insomnia hour) I thought about how when most people see an already thin, obviously fashion conscious young woman in her early twenties (I am actually going to be 30 in August, but I have always looked younger than my age and got carded twice last month) eating sparingly or turning down the yummy appetizers, they think "anorexia." They say things like, "Oh, honey, you're so thin, you don't need to be dieting. Just try one." I know they mean well, but it's so annoying! Now I recognize that my problems with what people think of what I eat are very minor in comparison to those who have to deal with hunger on a daily basis (I am not excessively hungry, even at 800) and I'm lucky to be a woman in a time when the fashion ideal for women is a very low BMI. However, I have to get past this need to fit in with what I eat if I am going to hit ON at 800. It's not that I can't keep to 800 calories... for the most part, that's not that hard (I know this sounds odd to any guys reading this who have to eat a lot more just to survive, but I am a very, very little mouse.) Of course there are some days like last night when I go over, but that's getting cut to about once a week, without me really trying or experiencing hunger. If anything, I feel great all the time except for those occasions when I go over my target, then I feel a little less energetic, a little more like my old pre-CR self. Still, I have to focus to get the right nutrients. On that score, you'll be pleased to see this:

Thank you for your order!
Your order 31381 has been successfully processed.
Your authorization code is 222210 and transaction ID is 635631411.

If you would like to enquire about your order or need further information, please write us at sales@walford.com.
Return to the Walford.com home page.

Now we're onto some serious CR inside baseball. For those of you who are not into CR (first, I am impressed that you're reading this at all since non-stop chat about what I ate must be boring for you!), this is the processing of me ordering Dr. Walford's Interactive Diet Planner. This is long, long overdue. I still don't have my own laptop but I'm just going to load it onto someone else's for a little while if I have to. I can't take digital pics like Mary Robinson, but I hope to figure out a way to post my nutritional analysis. If you're not a CR person, please go to Dr. Walford's website and read up about it... it's an excellent website, full of easy to read information.

But back to my issues about being perceived as an anorexic. When people ask me if I'm dieting or express offense that I won't eat whatever they're offering, it makes me very uncomfortable! It's not that I'm unaccustomed to odd discussions in social situations... after all, I'm a union organizer (which is a radical, weird thing to do in this country, the kind of thing that makes people ask if you're a Communist.) But there's something much more unpleasant about having to deal with people who think you're anorexic. From women, it's a combination of jealousy and pity. From men, it's that "She's weird, probably won't eat hot dogs with me at the ballpark" kind of vibe. Luckily, my good friends and colleagues are very supportive and have been educated about CR (more than they would like!) so they understand. And anyone who has been around knows that it wasn't long ago that I weighed twenty pounds more. I still look quite normal, not even all that thin, with a BMI of 21 and falling. But in a world where most people are obese and pigging out is a social ritual, CRON makes you different.

I wonder if I could get a note from the CR human study people that I could put on business card sized pieces of paper and hand out to anyone who seems offended by my food choices. Something like:

"We are certain that whatever you are offering is delicious. However, April is one of our mice. So please do not feed her. She is not anorexic or in any way unhealthy. In fact, she is much healthier than you are."

Okay, so I'm joking about the note. But I'm seriously considering printing up a little card, complete with the CR Society's web address and Dr. Walford's, that explains in brief what we're doing. Then I could turn down food that I don't need without feeling rude, and maybe do some educating in the process!

To live in a world where you frequently found yourself saying at social occasions, "You're such a cauliflower pusher!" as people passed the vegetable tray.

You know, I feel better just writing about this. Which, I suppose is the point of this blog.

More thoughts on the point of the blog later.

Okay flash forward to the present. Here's my nutritional info:

Food List : 5-24-05.fls
DATE : 05/24/05
Num. Foods : 16
Food #1 : Egg, white, raw, fresh 1 cup
Food #2 : oil 2 teaspoons flax, 1 olive
Food #3 : Tomatoes, red, ripe, raw, November thru May average 150 g
Food #4 : Broccoli, frozen, spears, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt leftover soup
Food #5 : Brewer's Yeast 2 tbsps
Food #6 : Brussels sprouts, raw 100 g
Food #7 : Mushrooms, raw 50 g
Food #8 : Soup, chicken broth cubes, dehydrated, dry 1 cup veggie broth
Food #9 : Alcoholic beverage, wine, table, red 6 oz
Food #10 : Coffee, brewed, prepared with distilled water a lot
Food #11 : Kale, raw 100 g
Food #12 : Salsa, med. chunky 2 tablespoons
Food #13 : Dannon Light and Fit Yogurt 1 cup
Food #14 : Lemon juice, raw juice of half lemon
Food #15 : Nuts, filberts or hazelnuts, dried, unblanched 20 g
Food #16 : Yogurt, fruit, low fat, 9 grams protein per 8 ounce 130 cals (1 container)

NUTRIENT TOTALS:

Abs. Values %RDA/SA

Calories 1052.90__cal 53%
Protein 72.23__gm 131% RDA
Total Fat 29.37__gm 45%
Sat. Fat 6.27__gm 31%
Mono. Fat 14.04__gm 49%
Poly. Fat 6.70__gm 101%
Carbohydrate 129.43__gm 43%
Fiber 13.71__gm 46%
Cholesterol 80.03__mg 27%
Vit. A 12639.57__IU 253% RDA
Vit. B6 3.57__mg 223% RDA
Vit. B12 1.50__mcg 75% RDA
Vit. C 283.61__mg 473% RDA
Vit. E 9.23__mg 115% RDA
Thiamine 1.56__mg 141% RDA
Folacin 217.71__mcg 121% RDA
Riboflavin 3.42__mg 263% RDA
Niacin 14.71__mg 98% RDA
Panto. Acid 15.82__mg 316% SA
Calcium 1229.88__mg 102% RDA
Copper 2.32__mg 116% SA
Iron 8.25__mg 55% RDA
Magnesium 275.12__mg 98% RDA
Manganese 3.66__mg 122% SA
Phosphorus 2404.76__mg 200% RDA
Potassium 3548.67__mg 177% RDA
Selenium 127.85__mcg 232% RDA
Sodium 2276.61__mg 95% SA
Zinc 5.14__mg 43% RDA
Tyrosine 5.37__gm 559% RDA
Lysine 10.26__gm 1424% RDA
Phenylalanine 6.21__gm 647% RDA
Leucine 10.64__gm 1109% RDA
Valine 7.95__gm 946% RDA
Methionine 2.45__gm 816% RDA
Cystine 1.41__gm 470% RDA
Tryptophan 1.74__gm 968% RDA
Threonine 6.30__gm 1312% RDA
Isoleucine 6.97__gm 968% RDA

The cholesterol is making more sense now... I wonder what happened?

Here's the day:

Breakfast:
1 cup eggwhites scrambled
1 teaspoon flax oil

Lunch:
100 g kale with two tablespoons salsa, 1 teaspoon olive oil, balsamic vinegar, 150 g grape tomatoes
1 cup plain yogurt with the juice of one lemon and a little garlic powder mixed in
10 g hazelnuts

Snack:
1 cup fruit yogurt
10 g hazelnuts

Dinner:
leftover soup (broccoli, brussels sprouts, mushrooms, flax oil, brewers yeast)
6 oz glass of wine

I forgot to add in my wheat bran, grape juice creatine chaser, or calcium chewy, so add about 40 calories to the total.

Solid under 1100. Good nutrition.

Now if I can just get my new doctor to order me some bloodtests for free...

Posted by april at 8:38 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Dealing With Feeling Like A Failure

Now that I've outed myself as a Good Kid, I feel like it's safe to talk about how horrible I feel whenever I don't live up to my fairly high standards. I think that CR tends to attract very serious people who have a touch of perfectionist in us, and the struggle to stick with our plan, whether it's Calories, exercise, or whatever, is a particularly charged emotional issue. People are always posting to the list asking for advice about how to stay on track, get back on track, or make the track a little more pleasant. So clearly, I'm not the only one who struggles.

Yesterday I was having a great day. Got up at twenty till five, did all my usual morning activities, went to the gym, went to work. Had very productive day, including calling 100 nurses. I am not exaggerating... I called precisely 100 nurses Will probably call a few more than that today.

Went out to lunch with my friend whose graduation dinner I missed on Friday night. I took her out to a nice place in my little town called the Fayette Street Grill where they have excellent salads. I ate a house salad that included about an ounce of blue cheese, tomatoes, cucumber, dried cherries, spring mix greens, and a raspberry merlot vinegarette that I had on the side. I ordered grilled shrimp on top and dipped the shrimp in the vinegarette before eating, but put plain vinegar on the rest of the salad. It was quite delicious and seemed like a good meal out... low calorie, high protein shrimp, lots of veggies, just a little cheese.

Lunch was low calcium though, so for my late afternoon snack I ate a cup of my cottage cheese with 10 grams of hazelnuts. Then on my way home from work I stopped at the produce store and got some beautiful veggies... a giant head of flowering green kale, two pints of grape tomatoes, several bunches of broccoli, portabello mushroom caps, and brussels sprouts. Also picked up some Wild Berry Zinger herbal tea, as I have been drinking a lot of berry teas lately. Went home and made a fantastic vegetable soup with broccoli, brussels sprouts and portabello mushrooms in veggie broth, to which I added my requisite two tablespoons of brewers yeast and a teaspoon of flax oil. Had a glass and a half of wine.

I was feeling great... here's how the day was looking nutritionally:

Food List : 5-23-05.FLS
DATE : 05/23/05
Num. Foods : 16
Food #1 : Egg, white, raw, fresh 1 cup
Food #2 : Oil 2 teaspoons flax, one olive oil dressing
Food #3 : Cheese, blue about an ounce
Food #4 : Cherries, sour, red, canned, light syrup pack, solids and liquids
these were dried and sprinkled on top but this is the closest thing DWIDP has
Food #5 : Lettuce, butterhead (includes boston and bibb types), raw
Food #6 : Tomatoes, red, ripe, raw, November thru May average on salad + 50 g grape
Food #7 : Crustaceans, shrimp, mixed species, raw guessed at amount on salad
Food #8 : Cucumber, with peel, raw on salad
Food #9 : lowfat cottage cheese 1 cup
Food #10 : Broccoli, frozen, spears, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt fresh, close enough
Food #11 : Brewer's Yeast 2 tablespoons
Food #12 : Brussels sprouts, raw 100 g
Food #13 : Mushrooms, raw 50 g
Food #14 : Soup, chicken broth cubes, dehydrated, dry actually veggie broth -- Dwidp
Food #15 : Alcoholic beverage, wine, table, red 1.5 glass
Food #16 : Coffee, brewed, prepared with distilled water a lot

NUTRIENT TOTALS:

Abs. Values %RDA/SA

Calories 1009.88__cal 50%
Protein 98.55__gm 179% RDA
Total Fat 23.18__gm 36%
Sat. Fat 9.11__gm 46%
Mono. Fat 5.89__gm 20%
Poly. Fat 5.93__gm 89%
Carbohydrate 80.75__gm 27%
Fiber 10.25__gm 34%
Cholesterol 243.75__mg 81%
Vit. A 4167.17__IU 83% RDA
Vit. B6 3.33__mg 208% RDA
Vit. B12 3.28__mcg 164% RDA
Vit. C 134.62__mg 224% RDA
Vit. E 4.72__mg 59% RDA
Thiamine 1.32__mg 120% RDA
Folacin 229.88__mcg 128% RDA
Riboflavin 3.26__mg 251% RDA
Niacin 15.84__mg 106% RDA
Panto. Acid 15.34__mg 307% SA
Calcium 1006.65__mg 84% RDA
Copper 1.84__mg 92% SA
Iron 9.07__mg 60% RDA
Magnesium 213.99__mg 76% RDA
Manganese 2.90__mg 97% SA
Phosphorus 2569.39__mg 214% RDA
Potassium 2905.90__mg 145% RDA
Selenium 179.44__mcg 326% RDA
Sodium 2955.66__mg 123% SA
Zinc 5.08__mg 42% RDA
Tyrosine 7.63__gm 795% RDA
Lysine 15.04__gm 2089% RDA
Phenylalanine 8.63__gm 899% RDA
Leucine 15.45__gm 1610% RDA
Valine 10.68__gm 1272% RDA
Methionine 4.08__gm 1359% RDA
Cystine 1.95__gm 649% RDA
Tryptophan 2.46__gm 1369% RDA
Threonine 8.69__gm 1811% RDA
Isoleucine 9.79__gm 1359% RDA

Keep in mind: the cholesterol is probably showing up as higher than it actually is due to a bug in DWIDP that we can't figure out. The calcium is over the RDA cause the RDA changed... or something... MR told me I was getting plenty of calcium but I can't remember why. I have this habit of remembering what he tells me to do but not why, just to save space in my brain for things I actually have to figure out for myself, like how to organize all the registered nurses in Philadelphia.

So it was a wicked awesome day, nutritionally, if I may channel a skate rat named Kurt I went to seventh grade with. He was always referring to things as "wicked awesome."

Then, in my infinite stupidity (and feeling a little hungry) I decided to eat one of my low carb snack bar things that I had purchased to have as purse food during the last week of negotiations. Purse food, for you men out there, is food that's small enough to put in a cute little purse but filling enough to keep you from eating gak or taking a bite out of a colleague.

That was stupid.

Wow, they were really yummy. Tasted exactly like a Butterfinger candy bar, which is the only chocolate candy that I really really love. It was quite the sensory experience. And only added 120 calories. So I was up around 1129. That's really not bad, if you consider that I'm cutting down on those wild and crazy go out days, so averaging in the 1100-1200 range seems smart. Now it wasn't the best use of Calories -- MR would have had a little hazelnut oil instead -- but it wasn't exactly going to kill me, at least not much.

But then, in the heat of the Butterfinger remembrance moment, I ate another.

Bringing my total Calories to 1250. And really, the things are just fortified candy, much like my calcium chewy but with lots more Calories.

I felt terrible. Well, I felt really good while I was eating it... wow, I used to love Butterfinger candybars! But when I finished eating it and added up my total Calories for the day, I felt so bad!!!

And then the "I am a failure" tape starts to play in my head.

Now I recognize how absurd this is. I work a very demanding job, volunteer for the Mprize, write a blog about CR, entertain my mother and my cats, manage to be a pretty darned good friend to a whole host of people all over the country and the world, drive a fuel efficient car, cook excellent CR food, am basically a good person. I even did laundry! I used environmentally friendly products to clean my shower!

But I ate two low carb peanut butter crunch bars and immediately decided that I am the lowest of the low, a major failure, bereft of moral value.

Now to the brothers, this may seem a bit odd. I think that the brothers are less familliar with the "I am a failure" tape than the sisters, cause boys are just trained differently. But I'm sure the sisters are saying, "Yeah, I know what you mean."

It's so easy, when you're a Good Kid almost all the time, to get really freaked out when you're even a shade off of perfect. Food shouldn't be a moral issue... it's not "bad" to eat gak, it's unwise, if you want to live a long and healthy life. It has bad short term effects and bad long term effects.

I know, intellectually, that eating 1250 yesterday is still putting me in the range of nice, happy, moderate CR and is probably a much better day than many of most of the wild and crazy going out days I've had since I started CR.

But when I'm having such a good day, and then it seems like the Spirit of Gak invades my house and jumps into my mouth, it's rather disheartening.

The moral of the story: don't beat yourself up. I figure that by blogging about it and telling you bloggiefriends about how I screw up and how I feel when I do, it will help you to forgive yourself next time and get right back on track, skipping all that useless energy wasted on guilt.

Also, don't leave temptation lying around. I brought the rest of the low carb Butterfinger bars into work today to give to my officemates, who will find them to be an improvement over their normal fare. Why take chances? Life, however radically extended, is too short.

Posted by april at 8:01 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 23, 2005

I'm In Trouble Now...

Or: Why I Do Not Have A Family Doctor.

I considered it alarming when my mother stopped answering my personal emails, instead only writing comments on my blog. Now I'm answering my very own MR's email in my blog. Don't worry, you're not in for "too much information." It's all about health.

Thanks to all for your wonderful comments on the doctor's visit issue. Dani -- I am totally going to give the doctor The Challenge! You're all just wonderful... with bloggiefriends like this, how can I be afraid???

MR sent me some fabulous articles about CR, including one by our very own Luigi Fontana, for me to print out and take to my doctor. I was feeling better already, almost as though MR was going with me, to argue with my doctor while I sat quietly in the waiting room reading fashion magazines. Over the course of discussing the doctors' visit, MR asked me if I have a family doctor, to whom I go for an annual physical.

I think you know the answer. The answer is no.

He was NOT HAPPY.

Basically, he said that I have got to find a doctor who understands what CR is about, else if I get hit by a bus and end up in the hospital, something terrible will happen to me cause of my white blood cells. He is worried. He is distressed. Y'all know I can't stand to stress MR out... I am willing to take supplements, exercise, and stop talking on my cell phone while I drive, if it will help my Orange One sleep better at night.

And it is kinda weird, isn't it, that someone who is so obsessed with her health that she does her RDA's on software everyday and even does the nutritional info for a fictional woman named Cindy doesn't have a family doctor? What???

There's a history. MoMR, get our your kleenex. This one is sad.

Those of you who have been with me for a long time remember in the Women's Magazines entry that when I was 11 and weighed 108 at the same height I am now (just under 5'2"), my pediatrician said I was too heavy and that I should lose weight.

I stopped eating lunch. I lost weight. I weighed 92 pounds.

That was the first bad doctors' office experience. And you know what it taught me, bloggiefriends? That doctors make you sick. I didn't become anorexic... I fixed myself and granted, I've had some wacky times with food before I discovered the life-saving CR religion of low calories and excellent nutrition, but I figured out that my doctor was wrong and that my own instincts were right.

The story goes on. When I was fifteen, I went on birth control pills because I was having menstrual cramps so bad that I would take doses of naproxin sodium that would give an ox an ulcer. But even the low dose estrogen version of the Pill was so strong for my sensitive little body that I would throw up the morning of the first day of the cycle, just like I had morning sickness. I was at boarding school during the year, and I'd go to the school health center and ask if I could sit out just my first class of the morning (8:10 am) until I could stop throwing up.

The school nurse said no. Birth control pills, she said, don't make you throw up.

Now let me put this in perspective. I was what they call a "good kid." No, I take that back. I was perfect. I made excellent grades, was nice to my elders, had SAT scores so good that my father spent five years quoting them to random strangers (I was mortified, believe me) and I never, ever, got into trouble. So to have this medical professional telling me, while I was barfing my guts out, that I was just making it up to get out of class was pretty upsetting.

Did I mention that she was my boyfriend's mom? Ugh, I forgot that part until just now. I dated Jeremy Chamberlin, creative writing major, Michigan native, and son of the ecology teacher and the school nurse.

Wow, have I graduated to much better Mothers of Significant Others. Let's take a moment to thank MoMR for being so darned nice to me. She'd made me feel so welcome in the family, I'm starting to think I'm Canadian.

So my boyfriend's mom the school nurse was saying that I was making it up as I threw up once a month, and I just went to class anyway. Ran to the bathroom to be sick, staggered around unable to eat. Ick. Not good!

Let's fast forward to a few years later. Discussions with doctors about getting birth control. You'd think that women doctors would be really liberated and helpful, but that was not my experience. To judge from the women doctors I went to, it was nothing short of harlotry for a woman to have more than one serious boyfriend before the age of 30.

I finally gave up and started going to male gyns. I had this one particularly good one who referred to me as "The Princess," was about ninety years old, and found my stories hilariously funny. I noticed that I never saw anyone under 65 in the waiting room. No wonder he liked me so much.

He retired, and I went to Vermont, hippie capital of the universe, for a year to run a giant organizing campaign. The doctors there weren't too bad... and the nurses were awesome! I still have a soft spot in my heart for one particular anesthesiologist who managed to get an IV started on me when no one else could. That was a good doctor experience.

But overall, my experience has been that doctors don't know much, and that they often make me feel worse than I did before I showed up. So I've avoided forging personal relationships with physicians of any kind. And I stay so healthy that it usually doesn't matter.

But now MR is worried that I'm going to be hit by a bus... he's always thinking about public transportation... and so I have to find a family doctor who understands CR.

A lot of people have asked me if MR puts pressure on me to change what I eat or be tougher in my CR. I think some folks wonder if someone who is so serious about his own health could be a bit of a pain about mine.

The fact is, he watches me very closely. He noticed today that the cholesterol numbers that show up on my DWIDP seem oddly high for what I'm eating, and that I should figure out if it's another bug in DWIDP, since I'm obviously not eating that much cholesterol. I haven't figured out the bug yet (though I did spend some time checking on my normal workday foods to see if any were entered wrong) but I'll keep looking. He reads my RDAs like they're baseball stats, and he was so worried about my bones that I actually started exercising.

Some people might consider this intrusive or pushy, yet it is the most wonderful expression of love I can imagine. To have someone out there who actually knows things that can contribute to my health and well-being, and who cares enough about me to follow my daily life as though his own life depended on it, is worth more than any gift I can think of. Other women may feel loved when their man gives them fancy jewelry. I know that I am loved when MR worries that I eat too much salt.

Now this doesn't mean that I want MR to cut down on the showering me with fabulous food when I'm in Canada. I expect an avalanche of low-carb Zoned pizzas, low carb pancakes, stews with stems, and breakfast salad for lunch. I will settle for no less. Oh, and I want a whole lot of homemade pickles. I am a vinegar freak, you know.

I am living proof that love is a stronger motivation than fear.

I left a message on the answering machine of the family doctor that my insurance company assigned me to. And I printed out a bunch of articles about CR.

Still, I think I'll look both ways before crossing the street. I don't want to get hit by a bus.

Posted by april at 6:40 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Preparing for Exhaustion

One of the advantages to doing a particular kind of work for a long time is that you know how things go well enough to plan pretty well. Or at least, to plan for the unplanned.

For example, in the last ten days of a contract campaign, I know to plan to be exhausted. From now until June 1, I know that I'll be either a) talking to nurses on the phone b) assisting with negotiations c) talking to nurses at the hospital d) meeting with nurses e) dealing with some kind of logistical problem with a meeting space. I didn't become the Mistress of Logistics for nothing, you know.

Negotiations frequently go very late or all night at this point in the game, and just because I don't sleep one night doesn't mean that I take the next day off... nope, it's those times when it's most important to be in constant contact with the membership.

So I spent a lot of time this weekend preparing for the stretch. I went to the grocery store and stocked up on all my CR staples. I cleaned out and organized my fridge so that all my easy breezy CR food would be easily accessible and look happy when I go to reach for it. I did a giant load of laundry, even though, like most organizers who have spent much time on the road, I have enough underwear to last for approximately two months. That's what happens when you're often so busy that it seems more efficient to buy more underwear than to find a laundromat.

I also caught up on my correspondence and returned all phone calls. Hung out with people I won't have time to see until the contract is won. Thanked any and all deities that I have the world's most supportive significant other, considered making a burnt offering in thanks just to be on the safe side... but then realized that burning food probably creates some kind of toxic chemical with a fancy name, and that wouldn't please MR or the gods, goddesses, or random chance that sent him to me at all.

You're probably getting worried by now that I won't have time to blog. It's possible that I might miss a day here and there if I absolutely can't get out of negotiations. But one thing that tends to happen during this stretch of time is that I spend a lot of hours driving back and forth between the office, the negotiations, and the hospital, and as we all know by now, I do my "writing" while I'm driving. So as long as I have ten minutes to sit down and spit out the text that is pre-written in my head, I should have time to keep you at least vaguely updated.

I'm planning to keep my diet pretty simple during this time. I won't really have time to cook, and I won't have much time to play with DWIDP, so I may as well stick to the tried and true. It's hard not to fall into the pattern of eating all the junk food that swirls around the negotiations room, and not overeating when we go out for meals. To ward off cravings and possible disaster, I picked up some Atkins bars (160 cals) and some low carb chocolate peanut butter protein bars (120 cals.) I normally wouldn't eat these things, but every once in awhile when the other option is eating nothing or eating bagels and potato chips, I think it will be okay.

Keeping up my new exercise routine may be a challenge. I've been either going to the gym or walking or both every day, but I doubt that I'll have time for my nice long walks. Hopefully I can keep up the morning treadmill half hour and at least a little weight training, push-ups in the office between calls if nothing else. That should be entertaining to watch.

I woke up this morning craving a grilled cheese sandwich. Chalked it up to the overly strong Cosmopolitian I drank last night when out with a friend. Perhaps I should go back to the red wine only policy... has resveratrol, never makes me crave grilled cheese.

I am not, however, going to have a grilled cheese. We've come this far by faith... and by faith we shall avoid the evil gak.

Posted by april at 8:20 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 22, 2005

Annual Cancer Scare... Or: How I Will Explain To My Doctor Why I Am Twenty Pounds Lighter

It's that time again. Time to go back to the doctor and be scared to death again that I will have cervical cancer.

Like almost any woman you ask, I've had a couple of irregular pap smears. Every time, I've freaked out and gotten scared and undergone a painful and invasive test (I'll spare the details, out of concern for our more squemish brothers) and waited on pins and needles for two weeks to find out whether or not I have cancer. I never did, and my doctor always said we'd just keep watching it.

Now I'm on I-3-C, a supplement that MR made to combat the thing that causes cervical cancer. You can read about it here. So I'm hoping that this year I will discover that my annual cancer scare is no longer so scary.

Here's the other thing that's frightening about going to the doctor this year: I've lost twenty pounds since my last visit.

My last visit was on June 7 of last year, and I weighed 123 when I stepped on the scale. That was already a few months into CR and I had dropped from 137, but I hadn't been to the doctor during the year when my weight really sky-rocketed, so my previous recorded weight had been 126. That's dead center of normal for my height, and the nurse even said something to me about being jealous that I was so thin. I think she was being nice.

This time, unless I take steps to prevent it, I'll weigh 103. That's clear underweight for my height. Now if I want to add water weight and show up to 108 on the scale I know how... eat a lot of salty carbs and exercise a lot the day before my appointment and then eat a big meal right beforehand. I can show at least five pounds in water weight that way, probably more if I really pull out all the stops. But who wants to eat a giant meal before her gyn appt? Ugh, not I.

So I may just forget about it and take the flak from the doctor about my weight loss. Cause you know the doctor is going to be a total idiot about it. "Are you anorexic?" Even though I am obviously the healthiest person in the world.

I don't feel like arguing with the doctor. And yet I feel like I must defend the integrity of our lifestyle. Maybe I'll print out some good articles to shove in his face.

Once again, I must point you to an excellent blog entry by Liz on at http://www.seespotcron.blogspot.com about her recent visit to the doctor. She's so great... I wish she would move here and kick my butt so I'd lift more weights. She's awesome. She got the same stupid reaction at the doctor's office: we don't know what to do with a woman who is so healthy that she's actually slowed down her own aging process!

Ya know, it's a little weird to go chatting about these women's issues on a public blog that's read by a bunch of the brothers. But I think it's important that we girls talk about this stuff... if we don't, how the hell are we going to know if we're normal or if we should freak out? And the men out there might find it easier to be more supportive of their wives/girlfriends/sisters/moms/friends if they weren't totally in the dark about things like the hell a girl goes through when she has an irregular pap smear and thinks she must be dying of cervical cancer.

You'll be wanting some nutrition info right about now. Please don't die of boredom. Note that I ate some whole grain bread! That should entertain you. It was 6 g of protein per slice and lots of fiber. See, even I eat bread every once in awhile. It was good too, though I don't think I'd ever go back to eating it every day.

Food List : 5-22-05.FLS
DATE : 05/22/05
Num. Foods : 14
Food #1 : Bread, mixed-grain, toasted (includes whole-grain, 7-grain) 2 slices
Food #2 : Egg, white, raw, fresh 1 cup
Food #3 : Oil 1 teaspoon flax
Food #4 : Coffee, brewed, prepared with distilled water lots
Food #5 : Hot dog relish (pickle relish, on bread)
2 tablespoons
Food #6 : Yogurt, plain, skim milk, 13 grams protein per 8 ounce 1 cup
Food #7 : Oil 2 teaspoons olive oil, 1 teaspoon flax
Food #8 : Lewis Labs 2 tablespoons
Food #9 : 1 Cosmo -- met a friend for a drink -- approx 1 shot vodka
Food #10 : Broccoli, frozen, spears, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt 25 cals
Food #11 : Cauliflower, frozen, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt 25 cals
Food #12 : Carrots, frozen, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt 25 cals
Food #13 : Nuts, filberts or hazelnuts, dried, unblanched 10 g
Food #14 : Salsa, med. chunky 2 tablespoons

NUTRIENT TOTALS:

Abs. Values %RDA/SA

Calories 1057.40__cal 53%
Protein 76.78__gm 140% RDA
Total Fat 29.21__gm 45%
Sat. Fat 5.55__gm 28%
Mono. Fat 15.36__gm 53%
Poly. Fat 6.17__gm 93%
Carbohydrate 95.20__gm 32%
Fiber 20.15__gm 67%
Cholesterol 126.81__mg 42%
Vit. A 14157.47__IU 283% RDA
Vit. B6 0.74__mg 46% RDA
Vit. B12 1.23__mcg 61% RDA
Vit. C 97.10__mg 162% RDA
Vit. E 6.21__mg 78% RDA
Thiamine 1.63__mg 148% RDA
Folacin 228.27__mcg 127% RDA
Riboflavin 3.12__mg 240% RDA
Niacin 14.79__mg 99% RDA
Panto. Acid 2.49__mg 50% SA
Calcium 721.58__mg 60% RDA
Copper 0.52__mg 26% SA
Iron 7.67__mg 51% RDA
Magnesium 214.80__mg 77% RDA
Manganese 2.84__mg 95% SA
Phosphorus 496.16__mg 41% RDA
Potassium 2397.49__mg 120% RDA
Selenium 145.39__mcg 264% RDA
Sodium 1628.82__mg 68% SA
Zinc 4.22__mg 35% RDA
Tyrosine 3.48__gm 363% RDA
Lysine 7.10__gm 986% RDA
Phenylalanine 4.81__gm 501% RDA
Leucine 8.39__gm 874% RDA
Valine 5.77__gm 687% RDA
Methionine 2.78__gm 927% RDA
Cystine 1.71__gm 570% RDA
Tryptophan 1.28__gm 710% RDA
Threonine 4.33__gm 903% RDA
Isoleucine 5.08__gm 705% RDA

P:C:F = 29:46:25

Posted by april at 9:26 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

May 21, 2005

The Protein Challenge

I said that I'd figure out how much protein an AL woman might be eating on any given day, in order to refute the charge that my diet is unusually high in protein. So I created a non-vegetarian ad lib woman and DWIDPed one of her days. Let's call her Cindy, shall we?

For breakfast, Cindy eats:
2 slices of bacon
1 hard boiled egg
1 glass of 1% milk
1 glass of orange juice
cup of coffee with half and half

For lunch Cindy eats:
a turkey sandwich on white bread
a container of fruit yogurt

For dinner Cindy eats:
grilled chicken
baked potato with butter and sour cream
salad with spinach, romaine, tomatoes and green pepper, olive oil dressing
a half cup of vanilla ice cream for dessert
glass of wine

That's not a freakishly high protein low carb diet. If anything, I'd say I'm being nice to Cindy by having her eat that well. I mean, how many people eat only a half cup serving of ice cream? And I didn't put any mayo on her sandwich, nor did I force her to eat blue cheese dressing on her evening salad that she thinks makes her so healthy, sitting there next to a white baked potato dripping with not overly large servings of butter and sour cream. Her portions of meat are not particularly large. She had a hard boiled egg and two slices of bacon for breakfast, not a three egg omlet with sausage or an Egg McMuffin. Cindy didn't have beef jerky or pork rinds for an afternoon snack, nor did she nibble on the bagels with cream cheese that were served at her morning meeting. Cindy could do a lot worse... most people do.

Here is Cindy's nutrition info:

Food List : AL Protein Game.FLS
DATE : 05/21/05
Num. Foods : 20
Food #1 : Pork, cured, canadian-style bacon, grilled 2 slices
Food #2 : Milk, lowfat, fluid, 1% milkfat, with added vitamin A 80 cals, about 1 cup
Food #3 : Turkey, all classes, meat and skin, cooked, roasted 100 g
Food #4 : Yogurt, fruit, low fat, 9 grams protein per 8 ounce 130 cals -- 6 oz
Food #5 : Bread, white, commercially prepared, toasted 2 slices
Food #6 : Coffee, brewed, prepared with distilled water 1 cup
Food #7 : Cream, fluid, half and half 30 g in the coffee, 39 cals
Food #8 : Chicken, broilers or fryers, back, meat and skin, cooked, roasted 150 g
Food #9 : Spinach, raw 50 g
Food #10 : Lettuce, cos or romaine, raw 30 g
Food #11 : Tomatoes, red, ripe, raw, November thru50 g
Food #13 : Olive oil 1 tablespoon
Food #14 : Potatoes, baked, flesh and skin, without salt 1 baked potato
Food #15 : Frozen desserts, ice cream, vanilla 1/2 cup, 66 g
Food #16 : Alcoholic beverage, wine, table, red 6 oz
Food #17 : Egg, whole, cooked, hard-boiled 1 hard boiled egg
Food #18 : Orange juice, California, chilled, includes from concentrate 1 cup
Food #19 : Cream, sour, cultured 1 spoonful on the potato
Food #20 : Butter, with salt 1 pat on the potato

NUTRIENT TOTALS:

Abs. Values %RDA/SA

Calories 1882.94__cal 94%
Protein 108.69__gm 198% RDA
Total Fat 89.47__gm 138%
Sat. Fat 32.66__gm 163%
Mono. Fat 34.48__gm 119%
Poly. Fat 13.93__gm 209%
Carbohydrate 132.93__gm 44%
Fiber 11.29__gm 38%
Cholesterol 618.06__mg 206%
Vit. A 4862.42__IU 97% RDA
Vit. B6 2.28__mg 143% RDA
Vit. B12 3.28__mcg 164% RDA
Vit. C 129.52__mg 216% RDA
Vit. E 4.97__mg 62% RDA
Thiamine 1.24__mg 113% RDA
Folacin 231.63__mcg 129% RDA
Riboflavin 1.81__mg 139% RDA
Niacin 24.26__mg 162% RDA
Panto. Acid 6.46__mg 129% SA
Calcium 730.91__mg 61% RDA
Copper 1.21__mg 60% SA
Iron 10.74__mg 72% RDA
Magnesium 246.28__mg 88% RDA
Manganese 2.22__mg 74% SA
Phosphorus 1293.29__mg 108% RDA
Potassium 3167.67__mg 158% RDA
Selenium 43.13__mcg 78% RDA
Sodium 1292.30__mg 54% SA
Zinc 10.94__mg 91% RDA
Tyrosine 5.31__gm 553% RDA
Lysine 12.19__gm 1694% RDA
Phenylalanine 6.07__gm 632% RDA
Leucine 11.64__gm 1213% RDA
Valine 7.73__gm 921% RDA
Methionine 3.92__gm 1305% RDA
Cystine 1.86__gm 619% RDA
Tryptophan 1.68__gm 931% RDA
Threonine 6.37__gm 1327% RDA
Isoleucine 7.17__gm 996% RDA

P:C:F = 23:34:43

Cindy's diet is low protein as a percentage of Calories, but that's cause there's so much gaky carb and saturated fat calorie laden food in her day. Her total protein grams are 108.7.

My freakishly high calcium day on which I ate my normal weekday diet but added in more yogurt to up my calcium and ward off the osteoperosis nightmares comes in at 78.75 g protein.

On days when I eat meat in addition to eggwhites and yogurt/cottage cheese, I sometimes go higher. But I almost never go above 100, and on days when I eat meat I usually am not having my brewers yeast, which takes 16 g of protein out of the total.

Here is my total for today. I went out to eat with my mom at the Ruby Tuesday's salad bar, where I guessed at portions on things like fruit and tomatoes. It was really fabulous. I had a glass of cabernet with dinner, and then decided to walk to town to my favorite little bar/restaurant to have a glass of pinot noir later in the evening. I really enjoy taking myself out alone, and bringing some reading material. It's like a Saturday night date with myself.

Anyway, tonight I made the forty-five minute walk, and just as I arrived at my destination, the Gypsy Saloon, it started to rain! I had to call my mom and get her to rescue me in the car... thank heaven for moms! It may seem that I spend a lot of time with my mom, and indeed I do, but we are more like sisters or best friends than like mother than daughter. She is one of the most entertaining people I ever hang around, and it's nice to know that there is one person on earth who still has to love me even though I spent nine months fanatically quoting a man I had never met. That's what moms are for!

So today was relatively low protein: take that! And keep in mind that the calcium is a little higher (about 10% of the RDA higher) cause I'm scared to modify the food in DWIDP to fit my brand of yogurt.

Food List : 5-21-05.FLS
DATE : 05/21/05
Num. Foods : 12
Food #1 : Egg, white, raw, fresh a cup
Food #2 : Flax oil teaspoon
Food #3 : Cottage Cheese Lowfat Light and Lively 80 cals
Food #4 : Lettuce, cos or romaine, raw a lot
Food #5 : Tomatoes, red, ripe, raw, November thru May average 100 g ish
Food #6 : Pepper, banana, raw a lot
Food #7 : Peppers, sweet, green, raw 100 g ish
Food #8 : Fruit salad, (peach and pear and apricot and pineapple and cherry), canned, light syrup, solids and liquids 1.0 servings
Food #9 : Olives, ripe, canned (jumbo-super colossal) 12
Food #10 : Alcoholic beverage, wine, table, red 2 glasses of wine
Food #11 : Yogurt, fruit, low fat, 9 grams protein per 8 ounce 1 container
Food #12 : Grains, Tabouleh a big scoop that I probably over counted

NUTRIENT TOTALS:

Abs. Values %RDA/SA

Calories 1097.24__cal 55%
Protein 50.15__gm 91% RDA
Total Fat 30.12__gm 46%
Sat. Fat 9.64__gm 48%
Mono. Fat 15.83__gm 55%
Poly. Fat 3.02__gm 45%
Carbohydrate 109.90__gm 37%
Fiber 13.17__gm 44%
Cholesterol 59.03__mg 20%
Vit. A 10454.83__IU 209% RDA
Vit. B6 0.95__mg 59% RDA
Vit. B12 1.28__mcg 64% RDA
Vit. C 235.86__mg 393% RDA
Vit. E 8.38__mg 105% RDA
Thiamine 0.46__mg 42% RDA
Folacin 155.99__mcg 87% RDA
Riboflavin 1.75__mg 135% RDA
Niacin 4.76__mg 32% RDA
Panto. Acid 1.88__mg 38% SA
Calcium 760.48__mg 63% RDA
Copper 0.97__mg 49% SA
Iron 9.55__mg 64% RDA
Magnesium 155.13__mg 55% RDA
Manganese 3.13__mg 104% SA
Phosphorus 602.37__mg 50% RDA
Potassium 1995.31__mg 100% RDA
Selenium 59.88__mcg 109% RDA
Sodium 2042.22__mg 85% SA
Zinc 2.80__mg 23% RDA
Tyrosine 4.56__gm 475% RDA
Lysine 10.06__gm 1397% RDA
Phenylalanine 5.67__gm 591% RDA
Leucine 10.33__gm 1076% RDA
Valine 6.86__gm 816% RDA
Methionine 3.45__gm 1149% RDA
Cystine 1.83__gm 611% RDA
Tryptophan 1.50__gm 831% RDA
Threonine 5.55__gm 1155% RDA
Isoleucine 6.09__gm 846% RDA

So there. I win.

Well, until MR comes back with some more evidence.

I know there's a danger in challenging the King of the Zonies to a contest of this sort, but I can't resist. I understand that I eat *enough* protein for a 258 pound man (let's call him Cindy's husband, Jack) but I bet Jack is eating way more protein than that! Cause most meat eaters eat way way way too too much protein. I think the lowfat vegans were right about that one. MR?

As the 80's band Scandal once so aptly put it:

"Hit me with your best shot."

Posted by april at 9:56 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

What's Your Favorite Color Food?

Fruitgirl raised an interesting point off-blog this morning... what color food are you attracted to? It was in the context of mentioning the Orange One, whom she abbreviated as OO. Made me think of the first time I read the abbreviation "evoo" and thought Kenton was talking about some kind of Star Wars creature. It was about twenty-four hours before I figured out that he was referring to extra virgin olive oil.

For those of you who don't know, the Orange One (aka Genius Boy, MR, and a few others that are none of your business... the Orange One has many god names) has a slightly orange tint to his skin because he's very pale to begin with and eats a whole lot of natural beta carotene in vegetables. He eats quite a bit of orange, and there's also beta carotene in green veggies like kale.

Fruitgirl says she's attracted to green foods, for the chlorophyll. It got me thinking about how powerful color is in our food choices, at least for those of us who aren't color blind.

I am attracted to red foods, but I wonder if that's just a function of the fact that I'm obsessed with tomatoes. I would eat tomato foods for every meal if I could, and I often do. A pint of grape tomatoes, barbeque sauce on my eggwhites, a can of stewed tomatoes in my evening soup, etc. I also love red peppers, both raw and roasted. When I was a kid, like most kids, I liked the cherry and strawberry candies. I also like red Twizzlers.

My step-brother used to only like white foods. Mashed potatoes, vanilla ice cream, white bread... you get the idea. For his birthday my step-mother would make him a white cake with vanilla icing. I liked devil's food cakes, even though I was not a huge chocolate person. I think I just liked the name. I was such a good kid that I had to express my bad girl tendancies through the name of my birthday cake flavor.

The associate pastor of the church where I grew up would eat nothing green. No green vegetables. Not even lime jello. That can't be healthy... I mean the lack of green vegetables, not the lack of lime jello. One can live without lime jello, though I'll admit I did enjoy the 10 calories of sugar free lime jello MR made for us last time I was visiting.

The now retiring president of my union will eat salads and green vegetables, but she won't eat anything green and creamy. She is viscerally horrified by anything green and creamy. Guacamole, cream of broccoli soup, etc. She can't even watch someone else eat it.
She says there's a story behind this, but that if she told us we would be grossed out forever. When a nurse says that something is too gross to tell you, do not push her further. She's right.

Remember the story of how I was making dinner for MR and turned the cauliflower soup light pink? He didn't mind at all, but I was horrified. Food, it seems, should not be pink. Even those sheet cakes with strawberry icing are kinda scary.

Some people avoid black foods. They don't like licorice, won't eat black olives, etc.

Presentation is so important in the way we perceive our food. I often think that people taste the presentation more than they taste the flavor. When I'm serving a meal, I really enjoy messing around with different dishes and garnishes and pretty things. I love to light candles, get out the pretty dishes and the linen napkins, and serve a beautiful meal.

When I was a vegan and hanging out with a whole lot of anarchists who used to have potlucks, I lived with a man who was an amazing vegan cook. He had this theory that you should never take a stew to a potluck, because people associate vegan stews with tastelessness. He called it "vegan slop" and carefully avoided bringing anything vaguely like that to a potluck. No matter how good it tastes, the second people are confronted with a pot of vegan stew at a potluck, they want to run to the nearest McDonald's.

I really like to serve and eat soups and stews, so I've worked at how to present them such that they don't seem like slop. I often serve a colorful soup in a pretty mug in the middle of a white plate full of colorful vegetables.

One of MR's regular meals has a bunch of colorful side dishes: homemade pickles, eggwhites, blood oranges, hazelnuts. It's fun to work around the plate eating the little goodies up. It's also entertaining when he makes this dinner to see his giant portions and my little baby portions. Watching MR eat vegetables makes me understand how giraffes can eat tons and tons of leaves and stay so thin and gorgeous. There's something naturally graceful about critters that are tall and skinny... giraffes, fashion models, tall men who do hardcore CR. They can also reach things on high shelves, which is useful to those of us who are under 5'2". I mean, the tall men and fashion models can. Giraffes, as far as I know, don't have hands, and therefore might be perplexed by a request that they remove the Vitamix from the top shelf in the kitchen. Of course by that time the question would be, what is a giraffe doing in the kitchen? But I digress.

I'm sure there's an evolutionary reason why we're attracted to phytochemical filled yummy foods that are good for us. It's sad that so many people have been brainwashed into avoiding these foods in favor of processed white gak. In fact, there are whole diets based on the idea that you should eat nothing white. People are such cheaters though... I can imagine dieters using food coloring to turn their pasta blue and claiming that they were following the rules, then complaining that the diet doesn't work.

Today I'm going to have a beautiful colorful dinner because I'm taking my mom to the Ruby Tuesday's salad bar! It's just amazing... the mind boggles at the number and quality of gorgeous veggies, beans and fruits. I'm having a light day today in preparation, and also to wash out the side effects of that high calorie day on Wednesday that seems to still be messing with me. I had my breakfast late (you know what I ate for breakfast, there's no point in telling you for the zillionth time) and we're going for dinner at five, before it gets crowded, so I won't be eating lunch. I was planning to go to an event and potluck at the home of some new friends tonight, but the plan changed so I get a quiet evening that I hadn't planned on. I'm sad that my event got cancelled... was really looking forward to hanging out with my new friends and also to showing off my potluck cooking skills (no vegan slop!) but truth be told, I probably need the rest. It's been a very busy week, and next week will be brutal. We're down to the wire in contract negotiations, and I'll be making approximately 400 phone calls to nurses to keep them updated on what's going on, in addition to helping out in negotiations and doing anything that needs to be done.

Did I tell you guys about my new shoes? VLC decided that I was no longer allowed to wear those square toed Mary Jane type shoes I'd been wearing since the CRS conference... they were too beat up and just not cool enough... so we went to DSW shoe warehouse and I got a pair of nice black pointy toe pumps. They are so cool. I feel very fashionable with pointy toes. And get this... I've lost half a shoe size! I used to be a 6.5 - 7... now I'm a 6 - 6.5! My mom lost a whole shoe size when she lost 70 pounds, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that I've lost 35 pounds and a half size. Still, it's an unexpected and entertaining side effect. I wonder if MR lost any shoe sizes when he started CR... I'll have to ask. I'm thinking not because he often wears these shiny black Canadian army boots that I think are really cool, and I know he's had them since pre-CR.

I almost forgot to tell you that I never ended up going to the restaurant last night! I had to pick up my mom from the airport and her plane was very late, so I couldn't go! But thanks for all the suggestions... wasn't that a fun game??? My plan was to eat the mushrooms stuffed with lump crab meat and an insalata gardenia (garden salad, I presume, though my Italian is rusty) with just vinegar. Alas, I didn't get to try out my choices. It was tons of fun to read all your suggestions... thanks to all!

Okay now I'm just chatting, running the clock to put off doing the laundry and trying to come up with a clever last line.

How about this:

Eat fewer Calories.

And don't dye your pasta blue.

Posted by april at 12:59 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

May 20, 2005

Read the Online Menu

Eating out is a challenge for us CRON folks, and I can readily see why some of my favorite CR people... well, okay, only one, but he's my very favorite one! don't even bother.

There are times in my life when I can't avoid eating out without giving great offense to people who are important to me, and the fact remains that I still enjoy going out and eating good food. Tonight is one of those occasions when I'll be going out with a lot of people, none of whom are CR friendly, and I don't want to call much attention to myself. It's a dinner for my friend's graduation from law school... the same friend who got married back in March. We're going to a fancy Italian place in New Jersey where she lives. The food is great, but not exactly CR friendly. This is what Laura would call a challenge.

Recently I've started reading menus online before I go to restaurants so that I can scour the selections for the most CR friendly (or least CR hostile) options and be prepared with my order before I go. It cuts down on anxiety beforehand and drama at the table. I read the menu for this place, Villa Barone in Collingswood, New Jersey, this morning online. I've picked out what I'm going to order, a full twelve hours in advance of the dinner.

I would like to propose a game. You can read the restaurant's menu here. I want all you bloggiefriends to check out the online menu and see if you can guess what I'm going to have.

Here are some clues:

1) This is not a CR friendly crowd AT ALL so I am going to do minimal negotiating with the waitron. I will basically order off the menu with minimal modifications.

2) I will plan my lunch to be on the low end so that I have more Calories available for dinner.

3) MR thinks I eat meat too often.

The bloggiefriend who guesses closest to what I actually eats will win a magnet! BTW, Laura, you never sent me the address to send your magnet to. I am not kidding about the magnets. I really do give them away.

So write in your guesses on your comments... and may the best CR'd folk win!

Posted by april at 3:27 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

May 19, 2005

You're A Good Little Girl, Aren't You?

That's what a nurse said to me today at contract negotiations as I ate my little snack pack of lowfat cottage cheese.

I was unsure of how to respond to the question. It reminded me a bit of when I was in college and people would ask me where I went to school. When I said Yale, they would invariably say, "You must be pretty smart."

That's a tough one to answer. I mean, it seems impolite to say, "Yes, as a matter of fact I am pretty smart. Thank you for noticing."

But what am I supposed to say? "No, I'm actually a complete idiot and the admissions committee made a huge mistake."

You can't win.

So when this particular nurse asked me if I am, in fact, a good little girl, I was similarly puzzled.

I could say, "Yes, as a matter of fact I am a very good little girl. In fact, like Little Miss Muffit, I am sitting here here enjoying my curds and whey."

Or I could say, "I'm actually a very bad little girl, I just happen to enjoy eating lowfat cottage cheese."

Or I could engage in a discourse about the moral value of food.

Or I could point out that at thirty, I am hardly a little girl, though I am finally reaching the age when I consider that a compliment, not an insult.

I finally responded, "I didn't eat particularly well yesterday, so I'm trying really hard today."

That seemed satisfactory. I think people like to think that you screw up sometimes. People have this weird visceral negative reaction to the appearance of perfection.

I did, in fact, screw up quite a bit yesterday. It was a very long meeting day on which I left my house at 6 am for work and got home shortly before 10 pm. I ran out in the morning so long before my normal breakfast hour that I skipped my usual eggwhites and flax oil. I had a great lunch at Ruby Tuesday's, which has a new salad bar that I highly recommend. It was amazing: all kinds of veggies, hot peppers, kalamata olives, tabouleh, lots of fruits, beans, even edamame! If MR had been there with his portable scale we could have constructed a perfect CR friendly measured out meal. Of course, the waitstaff might have had us arrested for weighing all our food at the salad bar, but that would have made a kinda cool headline in my local paper: "We Shall Not Be Moved: Skinny Redheads Refuse to Relinquish Food Scale."

Then the afternoon took a turn for the problematic when I thought I would have just one little bite of the sour cream and onion potato chips. A bite turned into a handfull. And a handfull turned into two. I recognize that the world will not come to an end over this, but it still seems like such a stupid waste of calories. One of my co-workers came over to me and said, "I can't believe you're eating potato chips," which made me feel even worse.

The nurse bargaining committee went out to dinner as a group at an Italian restaurant, and VLC and I negotiated with the waiter to get the shrimp scampi over steamed broccoli rather than over pasta. That was delicious. I had my house salad with just plain vinegar, as there was plenty of olive oil in the scampi to fatten out the day. Not that the potato chips left me low on fat, carbs and salt. Ugh.

So yesterday was one of those days when I'm not sure what I ate because it was all restaurant food, and while it might look like a very good day for a normal person (shrimp over brocoli? giant salad?) it's not good enough for someone who is trying to push her calorie averages ever lower without getting so hungry that she eats the neighbors' pets.

So today I am solidly back on track. Eggwhites and flax oil for breakfast, cooler bag packed with cottage cheese and yogurt and hazelnuts for during the day. At lunch mid-negotiations we ordered out from a pizza place, and the nurses urged me to try some of the pizza, but I politely said no. I ordered a house salad that turned out to be fabulous: spring mix greens, arugula, red and yellow bell peppers, carrots, celery, and red onion. I ate it with just vinegar and a cup of cottage cheese along with 10 g hazelnuts for fat. I didn't feel deprived as I watched everyone chow down on pizza... remember how crappy I felt yesterday after eating sour cream and onion gak was enough to convince me that the straight and narrow path is the one for me.

The social implications of unusual food choices are numerous. Liz wrote an absolutely rockin blog entry about it the other day
http://seespotcron.blogspot.com/2005/05/she-looks-like-scrawny-crow.html. People act really weird around thin people. It's just darned freakish to be in control of your health these days.

I've been pleased that for the most part my nurses have been supportive of my life and health changes. They often ask me how I lost so much weight, and I tell them about CR and refer them to the CR Society website.

The issue of weight is so emotionally charged for women. I know that I breathe a big sigh of relief whenever I am in the company of other CR girls... we can genuinely discuss the possiblity that our partners might think we're too skinny without anyone throwing a donut at us. I'm so lucky that my genius boy likes me just the way I am... and I suspect he'll like me just as much even if I get skinnier. He'd be a damned hypocrite not to, as he has about the lowest BMI out there, but taste is, as we all know, a matter of taste.

Food is such a moral issue in our society... and like beauty, it's one you just can't win on. If you're fat, you're lazy and lack self-discipline. If you're thin, you're anorexic and self-centered.

I think there comes a point where we just have to tell everyone else to deal with their issues elsewhere, and leave us to be happy with our kale salads and megamuffins. VLC and I have a certain harmony when we're together where we can attack the vegetable tray with genuine enthusiasm keep each other company while everyone else eats their way to an early death.

We weren't always like this... I am definitely a woman who has to work hard at eating right and staying thin and healthy. Back before CR, on meeting days like yesterday when we would do four or five meetings in a day from early in the morning till late in the evening, my eating would be just out of control. The stress and exhaustion combined with being surrounded by free, bad food was overwhelming. For example, here's a day that really happened back in September of 2004 when I was working on a giant contract campaign at a Philly hospital.

5 am: pick up the bagels and donuts for morning meeting. Eat: 1 toasted bagel with veggie cream cheese, one large coffee with cream and sugar.

8 am: cleaning up after meeting: eat another bagel with cream cheese

1 pm: pizza at the 1 pm meeting. at least two slices, maybe three.

6 pm: dinner between 4 pm and 8 pm meetings: probably at a diner near the hospital: pasta with marinara sauce, garlic bread, salad with fat free dressing.

After meetings (10 pm ish): a couple of beers or glasses of wine with co-workers to unwind post meeting.

Next day: bagel with cream cheese and coffee with cream and sugar for breakfast.

Is it any wonder that I eventually weighed 137?

Yikes!

I was all angstful about yesterday's slips, but when I look back on how I used to be, I feel rather cheered up about my progress.

A couple of reader questions:

Laura:
Eggwhites are better than eggbeaters because eggbeaters have synthetic beta carotene in them for color and that's bad for you. I think that kefir has more probiotic goodies than yogurt, but I'm still not drinking it. It's gross, and its name sounds like my cat.

Chris:
My diet, which proportionally high in protein to total calories, is not particularly high in protein when compared with any normal non-CR'd non-vegetarian. I just talk a lot about protein because it makes me a lot less hungry, more energetic, and mentally focused. Also because one of the first changes I made when I started reading your brother's writing was to up my protein, so eating protein reminds me of him. I'll see what Genius Boy says about your question.

[Later -- I asked Genius Boy, and he says I eat way more protein than that. He really did the calculations to determine that I eat enough protein for a 258 pound man. I don't think I even know a 258 pound man! But anyway, I'm not convinced of this, so I'm going to DWIDP some sample days of AL meat eaters and see what I come up with. I know, it's probably stupid to challenge the Orange One to a contest of any kind where nutrition is concerned, but it's fun for us to disagree from time to time. It cuts down on the danger that we will turn into one giant Orange One, who would still not weigh anywhere close to 258 pounds. :)]

Mary:
I asked MR to promise me he would never ski. No dangerous sports for us. I drive the NJ turnpike so much that I figure I've already used up my nine lives.

Liz:
Your blog absolutely rocks my world.

Fruitgirl:
So glad you're back! I miss you!!!

Dani:
Same to you! You've been with me from the beginning!

Jacob:
Yea Nurses!!! More on that soon.

Dan:
You haven't commented in awhile... am I boring you? ;)

Enough for now.

I'm off to be a good little girl elsewhere.

Or a bad girl who gets a whole lot of calcium.

Posted by april at 6:21 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

If You Choose Not To Decide You Still Have Made a Choice

You know that old saying, a favorite of followers of Chomsky, that goes, "You can't be neutral on a moving train?" I've never really thoguht that made much sense, no doubt because I was born after the sixties. When I woke up this morning with the song in my head that is quoted in our headline for today, I finally got the train thing.

We're all aging, the train is going forward. Unless we *do* something about it, we're going to keep going, and the destination isn't a place where we want to be. We can't just hang out and claim to be indifferent... if we don't drastically change our actions, we know what will happen.

Right now, we don't have a way to stop the train, or to jump off at one stop and go back a few stations. We do, however, have a way to slow it down. You know what that is.

For some people, CR is a spectator sport. It's interesting to watch people who carefully monitor their Calories and nutrition, and it's certainly got to be fun to observe as I screw up over and over again in my quest for hardcore CR. But for some, there's no compelling reason to actually take up CR as a lifestyle. It's too hard, too weird, too much of a hassle, might not work, might work and might lead to living longer which might for some reason be bad, might cause you to become obsessed with exotic salad greens, turn orange, and carefully read your girlfriend's RDA percentages with the rapt attention that most men only give to the sports page.

Friends, the train is moving forward. There are two things you can do about it, and you know what they are. Come on, it's a quiz. What are the two things you can do?

You guessed it.

1. You can donate to the Mprize. That's not that hard.

2. You can use the only tool we have right now to slow your own aging process. Lots of readers are doing it. It's a little odd, but it's actually a whole lot of fun.

If you choose to do nothing, you have by your very inaction damned yourself to dying earlier than you need to.

It's really that simple.

It's none of my business what you do with your life... eat eggwhites or not, see if I care.

But I do care about you because if you're reading this, chances are you're the kind of person I'd really like to hang out with. I'm planning to be around for a very long time, and I want to make sure that the fun people are here too.

The nightmare I had night before last about MR being so sad that I wasn't going to make it escape velocity was a big wake up call for me about my exercise. It's just silly to ignore something I can do to improve my health and keep my bones from getting fragile. So today I was back at the gym at 7, and did thirty minutes on the treadmill followed by leg weights. I've always found that love is a stronger motivation than fear, and the hope of spending many, many years with my genius boy is more than enough reason to drag myself to the gym.

Last night, I had another interesting dream. I was on my way to a birthday party for my grandparents, who are in their nineties and doing great... they go dancing more often than I do! In the dream, I had to navigate through a run-down building that was missing a few walls and windows on my way to the party, and a cousin named Amy was leading me through the maze.

We got to a point on the eighth floor of a building where Amy said that I needed to jump through the window and onto the ledge of a next door building. It wasn't a far jump, and I might have been able to make it, but it was a big drop eight floors down to the street. I didn't want to risk it.

People on the other side in the building made fun of me and said, "Come on, jump, we did it, you'll make it!" "WHat are you, some kind of wimp?" But I continued to refuse, and said that I'd be happy to walk the long way around the building and go up eight flights of stairs again, but that I just wouldn't take the risk with the short cut.

Finally Amy agreed to show me the long route, and as we walked, I explained to her that now that I do CR and volunteer for the Mprize and put so much of my energy into living longer, I'm no longer willing to take stupid chances with my life and health.

Amy said she understood, and that there was another person at the party who had also refused to make the jump and had taken the long way around. She said she'd introduce me to him once we got there.

I walked into the party, and sitting quietly in the back of the room was MR.

Posted by april at 7:52 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 17, 2005

Another Boring Weekday

My diet is getting so boring on weekdays at work that I have to entertain you with philosophy and dreams. At least I'm keeping my Calories low. I'm definitely getting hungrier as time goes on and I get further away from one of those way over average days. The exercise is no doubt contributing as well, but I really like the way my body feels when I'm working out, so on balance it's definitely for the best.

Food List : 5-17-05.fls
DATE : 05/17/05
Num. Foods : 17
Food #1 : Egg, white, raw, fresh 1 cup
Food #2 : Oil 2 teaspoons flax, 1 teaspoon olive
Food #3 : Dannon Light and Fit Yogurt 1 cup
Food #4 : Kale, raw 50 g
Food #5 : Arugula, raw 20 g
Food #6 : Salsa, med. chunky 2 tablespoons
Food #7 : lowfat cottage cheese half cup
Food #8 : Yogurt, fruit, low fat, 9 grams protein per 8 ounce 1 container (140 cals)
Food #9 : Nuts, filberts or hazelnuts, dried, unblanched 10 g
Food #10 : Brewer's Yeast 2 tablespoons
Food #11 : Alcoholic beverage, wine, table, red 6 oz
Food #12 : Soup, chicken broth cubes, dehydrated, dry 1 cup
Food #13 : Nuts, filberts or hazelnuts, dried, unblanched 10 g
Food #14 : Wheat bran, crude 5 g
Food #15 : Broccoli, frozen, spears, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt 25 cals
Food #16 : Cauliflower, frozen, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt 25 cals
Food #17 : Carrots, frozen, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt 25 cals

NUTRIENT TOTALS:

Abs. Values %RDA/SA

Calories 1055.20__cal 53%
Protein 78.75__gm 143% RDA
Total Fat 29.44__gm 45%
Sat. Fat 5.44__gm 27%
Mono. Fat 18.17__gm 63%
Poly. Fat 3.96__gm 59%
Carbohydrate 117.01__gm 39%
Fiber 14.88__gm 50%
Cholesterol 116.12__mg 39%
Vit. A 18955.30__IU 379% RDA
Vit. B6 3.37__mg 211% RDA
Vit. B12 2.05__mcg 102% RDA
Vit. C 159.01__mg 265% RDA
Vit. E 8.17__mg 102% RDA
Thiamine 1.33__mg 121% RDA
Folacin 192.38__mcg 107% RDA
Riboflavin 3.23__mg 249% RDA
Niacin 11.43__mg 76% RDA
Panto. Acid 14.50__mg 290% SA
Calcium 1378.75__mg 115% RDA
Copper 1.87__mg 93% SA
Iron 6.25__mg 42% RDA
Magnesium 254.37__mg 91% RDA
Manganese 3.73__mg 124% SA
Phosphorus 2433.68__mg 203% RDA
Potassium 2664.25__mg 133% RDA
Selenium 132.34__mcg 241% RDA
Sodium 2674.69__mg 111% SA
Zinc 4.96__mg 41% RDA
Tyrosine 5.80__gm 604% RDA
Lysine 11.00__gm 1528% RDA
Phenylalanine 6.74__gm 703% RDA
Leucine 11.71__gm 1220% RDA
Valine 8.53__gm 1015% RDA
Methionine 2.78__gm 925% RDA
Cystine 1.51__gm 503% RDA
Tryptophan 1.85__gm 1027% RDA
Threonine 6.70__gm 1396% RDA
Isoleucine 7.52__gm 1045% RDA

P:C:F = 30:45:25

Look at that calcium! No collapsing bones for me!

Add my 20 calorie calcium chewy and my 15 calorie grape juice creatine chaser in the am. Holding steady just below 1100. Not bad.

Planning ahead and being prepared with my good food is very important at this stage. I feel like if I went out when I'm really hungry and were confronted with a bread basket, it would be hard to say no. But as long as I pack food with me that I want to eat and avoid situations where I'm tempted when I'm really, really hungry, I think I'll be okay.

This is an important transition time. Since November I've been in relative calorie balance and losing weight but only very, very slowly. Now I'm changing two things at once: chopping a lot of calories off my eating out events and adding quite a bit of exercise to my routine. I am feeling the difficulty, but it feels like a challenge, not like deprivation.

When I first started CR, it was a like a switch flipped in my head, and all of a sudden it was much easier for me to control my eating than it had been before. I am amazed now looking back at how little I did sometimes eat, especially considering how much my diet has improved nutritionally since then. Of course, I was burning off a whole lot of fat!

This time there hasn't been a magic switch, but rather an accumulation of little decisions and changes and new pieces of information that make it easier. Going for walks. Going back to the gym. Discovering the cooler bag. Figuring out how to eat lower calorie on nights out.

Things are definitely not going to be perfect, or anywhere close to it, from here on out. So don't worry that the blog will get really boring! But I think I'm making progress.

Now if I can just keep out of the Quorn...

Posted by april at 8:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 16, 2005

It's All About Calcium

A big shout out to all you Billy Joel fans out there... you may think it's all about soul, but today, it's all about calcium.

After that awful nightmare about my bones falling apart and distressing MR something terrible, I was determined to get my calcium today. It's even higher than it appears, as the fruit yogurt is not as high in DWIDP as as it should be in real life, but I am scared to modify a food since the last time I did that all my carbs went to 0% every time I ate flax oil. I'm way over on calcium today, and did tons of exercise... my hour long walk in addition to my morning gym workout.

Food List : 5-16-05.fls
DATE : 05/16/05
Num. Foods : 14
Food #1 : Egg, white, raw, fresh 1 cup
Food #2 : Oil 2 teaspoons flax, 1 olive
Food #3 : Dannon Light and Fit Yogurt 1 cup
Food #4 : Broccoli, raw 140 g
Food #5 : Kale, raw 50 g
Food #6 : Arugula, raw 20 g
Food #7 : Salsa, med. chunky 2 tablespoons
Food #8 : lowfat cottage cheese .5 cup
Food #9 : Yogurt, fruit, low fat, 9 grams protein per 8 ounce 130 cals
Food #10 : Nuts, filberts or hazelnuts, dried, unblanched 20 g
Food #11 : Brewer's Yeast 2 tablespoons
Food #12 : Alcoholic beverage, wine, table, red 6 oz
Food #13 : Soup, chicken broth cubes, dehydrated, dry 1 cup
Food #14 : Asparagus, raw 100 g

Abs. Values %RDA/SA

Calories 1042.80__cal 52%
Protein 80.23__gm 146% RDA
Total Fat 29.60__gm 46%
Sat. Fat 5.54__gm 28%
Mono. Fat 18.19__gm 63%
Poly. Fat 3.95__gm 59%
Carbohydrate 110.73__gm 37%
Fiber 10.47__gm 35%
Cholesterol 116.69__mg 39%
Vit. A 7734.68__IU 155% RDA
Vit. B6 3.35__mg 210% RDA
Vit. B12 2.13__mcg 106% RDA
Vit. C 226.42__mg 377% RDA
Vit. E 11.17__mg 140% RDA
Thiamine 1.42__mg 129% RDA
Folacin 331.24__mcg 184% RDA
Riboflavin 3.35__mg 258% RDA
Niacin 11.73__mg 78% RDA
Panto. Acid 14.87__mg 297% SA
Calcium 1408.64__mg 117% RDA
Copper 1.94__mg 97% SA
Iron 6.45__mg 43% RDA
Magnesium 241.58__mg 86% RDA
Manganese 2.97__mg 99% SA
Phosphorus 2451.97__mg 204% RDA
Potassium 2900.22__mg 145% RDA
Selenium 133.31__mcg 242% RDA
Sodium 2681.85__mg 112% SA
Zinc 5.08__mg 42% RDA
Tyrosine 5.86__gm 611% RDA
Lysine 11.13__gm 1545% RDA
Phenylalanine 6.79__gm 707% RDA
Leucine 11.83__gm 1232% RDA
Valine 8.60__gm 1023% RDA
Methionine 2.81__gm 938% RDA
Cystine 1.51__gm 503% RDA
Tryptophan 1.85__gm 1028% RDA
Threonine 6.75__gm 1405% RDA
Isoleucine 7.61__gm 1057% RDA

P:C:F = 31:25:44

Breakfast: eggwhites and flax oil
Lunch: broccoli, salad with kale and arugula and olive oil and yogurt with salsa, 80 cals cottage cheese
Snack: apricot mango yogurt with 10 g hazelnuts
Dinner: brewers yeast and broth with asparagus, 10 g hazelnuts, glass of wine

I forgot to enter my 15 cals of grape juice as a creatine chaser or my 10.8 cals of wheat bran, so throw another 25 onto the total.

Close to 1100, not bad if I can sustain this pace without freaking out when I eat out and with exercising twice a day.

I was very, very hungry for dinner, but after I ate felt stuffed. Really enjoyed my walk... the weather is beautiful here, though still a touch chilly. Work is going to be very busy for the rest of this week, so I figured I'd better enjoy my walk while I could.

More philosophy soon, I promise.

Posted by april at 8:02 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Going Back To The Gym

Do not attempt to adjust your computer screen. You read it right. I went back to the gym.

Considering that I've been saying for months that I needed to go back to the gym, you're probably wondering why I finally actually did it.

Well, last night I had a horrible nightmare. I was sitting in a doctors' office and MR and I were looking at my DEXA scans and he was crying and saying, "I don't think you're going to make it."

Now granted, it's unlikely that one could figure out that I was going to die any time really soon from a DEXA scan, but it scared me bad enough that I added going to the gym to my morning routine. It's a good thing I like to get up early because I have every minute from 4:40 am until I leave for the office at 8:30 am scheduled.

I did twenty minutes on the treadmill at 4.5 mph and an incline of 4, and I was amazed that I could do it with really no difficulty. I even skipped at 4.6 for awhile. It's been so long since I technically worked out that I expected to have lost more cardio endurance than I have. I do walk and take the stairs and such, but that doesn't take much effort. I'll increase the twenty minutes to thirty tomorrow, and today I did some push-ups so tomorrow I'll lift leg weights. I'm going to my apartment complex gym, which is small but has quite a few machines. I kinda miss my old fancy gym, but I cancelled my membership once I moved to a place that had a fitness center.

I used to really like going to the gym, even though there were long periods of time when I hated the way my body looked in workout clothes. I remember looking at myself in those mirrors that are so plentiful at the gym and hurling a whole host of negative thoughts at my body. "If I weren't so fat..." It's kinda bizarre to look in the mirror now and think to myself, "Gee, I'm one of the thin girls now!" It makes it easier to confront the mirror, that's for sure.

Of course, most of my workout clothes are too big, so I need to get new ones. I have a couple of pairs of yoga type pants that I bought before my first trip to Calgary... thinking I might freeze to death just hanging out in the house unless I had something warm and comfortable to wear, which was not that unreasonable considering that MR keeps his house so cold that I think he's engaging in slow-motion cryonics. He's started keeping it warmer when I'm there, even though it's probably taking a few seconds off his life, and I'm working on ways to adjust to being cold without *feeling* cold. I'm hoping that by next winter I'll be able to stand MR temperatures, so that he can have all the life-extending chill he wants while still enjoying my company. If that doesn't work, I could just buy a large hot rock, the kind people get for their pet snakes, and carry it around with me.

Meanwhile, back at the nutrition information, yesterday was a nice Sunday.

Food List : 5-15-05.FLS
DATE : 05/15/05
Num. Foods : 16
Food #1 : Egg, white, raw, fresh 1 cup
Food #2 : Oil 1 teaspoon olive, 1 flax
Food #3 : Yogurt, fruit, low fat, 9 grams protein per 8 ounce 130 cals
Food #4 : Dannon Light and Fit Yogurt 1 cup
Food #5 : Arugula, raw 40 g
Food #6 : Kale, raw 100 g
Food #7 : Salsa, med. chunky 2 tablespoons
Food #8 : Grape juice drink, canned 1.5 oz
Food #9 : Wheat bran, crude 5 g
Food #10 : Alcoholic beverage, wine, table, red 6 oz
Food #11 : Squash, winter, spaghetti, cooked, boiled, drained, or baked, without salt 155 ish g
Food #12 : Asparagus, raw 100 g
Food #13 : Tomato products, canned, sauce Jarred sauce: did by calories and split
into tomato sauce and olive oil
Food #14 : Oil olive oil in tomato sauce
Food #15 : Nuts, filberts or hazelnuts, dried, unblanched 10 g
Food #16 : Coffee, brewed, prepared with distilled water a lot

NUTRIENT TOTALS:

Abs. Values %RDA/SA

Calories 982.50__cal 49%
Protein 53.22__gm 97% RDA
Total Fat 31.99__gm 49%
Sat. Fat 6.50__gm 33%
Mono. Fat 18.05__gm 62%
Poly. Fat 5.08__gm 76%
Carbohydrate 100.13__gm 33%
Fiber 11.93__gm 40%
Cholesterol 179.94__mg 60%
Vit. A 12380.61__IU 248% RDA
Vit. B6 1.12__mg 70% RDA
Vit. B12 1.38__mcg 69% RDA
Vit. C 189.14__mg 315% RDA
Vit. E 10.85__mg 136% RDA
Thiamine 0.62__mg 56% RDA
Folacin 266.69__mcg 148% RDA
Riboflavin 2.10__mg 162% RDA
Niacin 7.89__mg 53% RDA
Panto. Acid 3.15__mg 63% SA
Calcium 1042.84__mg 87% RDA
Copper 1.36__mg 68% SA
Iron 6.99__mg 47% RDA
Magnesium 289.67__mg 103% RDA
Manganese 3.78__mg 126% SA
Phosphorus 611.43__mg 51% RDA
Potassium 3202.76__mg 160% RDA
Selenium 60.63__mcg 110% RDA
Sodium 1953.84__mg 81% SA
Zinc 4.25__mg 35% RDA
Tyrosine 3.66__gm 381% RDA
Lysine 7.62__gm 1059% RDA
Phenylalanine 4.66__gm 486% RDA
Leucine 8.14__gm 848% RDA
Valine 5.61__gm 668% RDA
Methionine 2.65__gm 884% RDA
Cystine 1.53__gm 511% RDA
Tryptophan 1.13__gm 626% RDA
Threonine 4.34__gm 904% RDA
Isoleucine 4.93__gm 685% RDA

P:C:F = 22:29:49

My mom brought over spaghetti squash with a jar of olive with olive oil spaghetti sauce and asparagi for dinner, so I ended up skipping my brewers yeast and eating a ton of the delicious sauce, which had a generous portion of olive oil... as you'll see, I entered it as calories tomato sauce and calories olive oil. I probably should have had my brewers yeast instead of so much sauce, as I was low on the usual suspects nutrition-wise, and I was also low on protein, which almost never happens anymore. Oh well, it was a very yummy dinner.

Today I'm at the office all day, and I've packed my now typical kale and arugula salad with olive oil and vinegar and a cup of plain yogurt mixed with salsa. I also have a cup of fruit yogurt, Stoneyfield farms apricot mango, and 10 g hazelnuts. I'm eating fruit yogurts in the afternoon now and they seem to keep me from getting wiggy with hunger later at night and eating something unfortunate. The hazelnuts at least slow the carb absorption and up the fat in the day. I'm a little worried that going to the gym, as well as walking yesterday, will make me hungry, but that's a chance I'm willing to take. Gotta have strong bones!

Posted by april at 8:18 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 15, 2005

What Is Healthy?

Prepare yourself for a rant.

What do you do to prepare yourself for a rant? If I had known, the first time I read RANT: Moderate CR, that I would be having a rant experience, I would have had a stiff drink first. I barely felt like I could drive for hours after reading it, and that was stone cold sober. I think that's when I knew for certain that MR was the man for me... any man who can write an email message that knocks me off my feet for several hours when I haven't had a drink in days is too good to let slip by.

So if you need to, mix yourself up a stiff drink. Here's one I would recommend:

Lowish Carb Margarita-ish Object:

1 shot Grand Marnier
.5 shot tequilla (don't buy the cheap stuff, you're only allowed to have one)
Juice of one lime (FRESH!)
Diet tonic water

Mix. Drink. Now you're ready to read a rant.

Now y'all (there's my Southern girl coming out) know that I get a little stressed out when I argue with either of my MR's, the Tall or the Small. Remember that time Tall MR totally got on my case for fasting and eating Chilean Sea Bass? Not pretty. Anyway, this time I've gotta argue with my CR mom, Little MR.

[That's Mary, for those of you who just joined us or have been living under a bloggie rock.]

Here's her quote from a few days ago:

If I was as passionately distressed over aging as April and MR, I would be unable to cope with it at my age. I see aging every day in the mirror. Some acceptance is necessary, in order to enjoy my life.
You have to enjoy every day, and you know your time is almost certainly limited. As you get older, the trade-offs between quantity and quality of life become so very obvious. At 30, immortality seems so much more possible. I beg your tolerance for my minor fatalism, April. When you are 20 years further down the road, perhaps you will understand that my attitude is "healthy".

Now to begin with, I agree with most of that. You do have to enjoy every day. I make tons of compromises... I drank a Cosmopolitian on Friday night! And I am one of the lucky ones whose QOL seems to be only enhanced by CR. Even now that I've discovered that hunger exists, CR is still on balance so much fun for me.

Also, Mary can't be seeing too much aging in the mirror, cause she's really gorgeous. If you're a girl and you need any motivation to cut your calories, the promise that you will look as good as Mary does in twenty years is more than enough motivation to drive on past that Dunkin Donuts, refraining from picking up a bagel with cream cheese.

That being said: uh-oh. Someone used the word "healthy" to describe not a food, but an attitude.

Mary has no way of knowing this, but I actually have had a rant about the use of the word healthy for years. My theory is that "healthy" is the new "virtuous," and that these days people use "healthy" to describe things that are actually normal, or endorsed by society, the powers that be, the capitalist system, etc. For example, if you're a girl of about 29, you hear a lot about how it's not "healthy" that you're not interested in dating, and that it's certainly not "healthy" that you would rather stay in on a Saturday night reading print-outs of rantings about some wacky low calorie diet by a 123 pound man in Canada instead of going out. And it's certainly not "healthy" if you put your work as an organizer above "having a life" -- you know, getting married, having kids, cultivating your garden.

First, I despise gardening. Can someone else please do the gardening? I can not be bothered.

Second, Mary never said anything of the sort, and would have probably encouraged me to hold out for the skinny Canadian boy had I ever confessed, pre-CRS Conference, to my mad crush on Genius List-Boy.

My point is that "healthy" is rather arbitrary, when it is applied to attitudes. Sixty years ago, the idea that I would want to pursue a career and not want to have children would have been considered very unhealthy! However, a bagel with cream cheese would have been just as unhealthy then as it is now.

I am all for people dealing with the reality of aging however works for them. But my orientation on the world is that if I see a problem, I do something about it.

Now any CR practitioner, no matter what they say, must feel the same way, cause you don't cut your calories unless you believe that you can make a difference in your own aging process. So while Mary may be living with some acceptance of aging, she's clearly a whole lot less accepting than 99.999999999999999999999% of the population!

To me, there's a difference between the acceptance that one must have to function, and satisfaction with the status quo. Just because I spend almost every waking hour and ounce of my life energy fighting something, be it aging or economic injustice, doesn't mean that I'm miserable! As an organizer, I've had to come to terms long ago with the fact that the world is not as I would like it to be, and that often it will seem like my efforts are not accomplishing as much change as I would like. The same is true of CR. As Tall MR has said about a zillion times, CR is crude, weak medicine. He and Aubrey need to push those scientists to discover the real means to reversing aging... write, my angel, write!!! And you, my dear bloggie reader, need to donate to the Mprize! Go ahead, click Contribute!

But that doesn't mean that I sit by for one second letting nature take its course. Sure, I make compromises. And I enjoy every second of my life. All day, sometimes 12 or 14 or 16 hours a day, I fight injustice. And 24 hours a day, I fight aging with the only weapon I have... Calorie Restriction.

For me, this struggle is very real. It's not an academic question about whether or not CR will work in humans. It's about not wanting to leave MR on earth without me to hold him as he falls asleep and make him delicious little creations with hazelnut oil. It's about not wanting to miss the dawn of radical life-extending biomedicine. Not wanting to miss the day when once again the disempowered stand up for themselves. Not wanting to miss a really great vintage of Pinot Noir!

Why, oh why, would I want to give up one minute of life?

It is quite possible to be dissatisfied with the status quo, to fight it with all my life energy, and yet to be happy while doing so.

In fact, I think I wouldn't be happy any other way. When I'm not sure that I'm doing the absolutely most important thing I could be doing, using my energy, time, talents, money, etc., in the best way possible, I get a little wiggy. That's the main reason why I went back to organizing: I realized that I could free up the cash it took to pay me to fund life-extension research, while continuing to contribute as a volunteer for the Mprize and returning to the work that has made my life worth living: organizing.

To be happy doesn't mean to accept that which should not be. Those of us who are lucky enough to have enough to eat and a warm place to live to some extent choose our own happiness: I have lots of friends who have gone down the path to much more material wealth than I have, and yet don't seem to be all that happy.

Tall MR and I have chosen paths which entail constant struggle with things we consider to be unnecessary and wrong: aging and economic injustice. We may seem a bit extreme, and I won't argue with anyone who says we're pretty darned weird, but we're awfully happy. And if you were able to eat MR's low carb CR friendly Zoned pizzas, you'd be really happy too.

Healthy, to me, is about being consistent in what you want and what you do. One of the things I most admire about both of my MRs is that they live lives consistent with their values. They make different choices at times, but they're both making choices based on the information they have and the results they want. So many people live in a fog where their intentions and their actions don't match. I'll freely admit that I've spent a fair amount of time in that space myself. Now that I do CR, I am indeed happpier.

Plugging away every day at something that takes a whole lot of work and comes with no guarantee of success isn't easy. That's true for CR and for being an organizer. I live on hope, but I also live on the concrete evidence I see every day. I look younger, my blood pressure has gone down, I have more energy and need less sleep. I see nurses improve their working conditions, and I know that patients are safer because of the work I do. Sure, it's a slow, sometimes (usually) agonizing process, but it's working, piece by piece.

I could be wrong. Perhaps CR won't work, Aubrey is wrong, and I'll be dead at ninety instead of on the cover of Vogue. Maybe I'll spend my entire career organizing and leave the world with just as much injustice as I found it.

But I will have had fun trying. And I will have lived every day burning with a passion to try and make things better.

I wouldn't trade the life I have for anything. CR, with all its hassle and weirdness, has given me so much more than it's taken. And organizing, even when it's hard, is for me the difference between being part of the problem and part of the solution. I tried to walk away and I can't. Apparently, there's something I can't leave behind.

It may not work out in the end. I may not live longer than my obese smoker friends. I may never win another union election again. But I will continue on, living on dreams and the belief that things can be better.

And I hope you will too, because hope is a lot more fun than despair.

At the risk of quoting Depeche Mode:

Reach out and touch faith.

Posted by april at 8:16 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

I Never Knew What I Was Missing

Before I got my cooler bag, that is.

I carried it around with me all day yesterday while I travelled from one end of the world to the other. I am amazed at how much peace of mind it gives me to know that I have nice chilled low calorie high calcium food with me at all times. I ate breakfast before leaving for my New Jersey hair appointment, and grabbed an iced coffee at the coffee shop next to the hair salon after getting my hair done. Then I had to drive out to about an hour west of Philly for a meeting at 2 pm. Usually I'd be in a bit of a panic looking for somewhere like a Subway where I could grab food, but now that I have my cooler bag, there was no fear! I stopped at a Turnpike stop and ate an 80 calorie snack pack of cottage cheese, 150 g cherry tomatoes, and 10 g hazelnuts.

A friend whom I hadn't seen in months called and asked if I wanted to meet for dinner, so I put off my date with a good book and a bunch of asparagus and walked to down to a new restaurant in my little town. Had a very nice dinner... ate a salad of grilled shrimp over garlicky greens, and had a few bites of a mushroom ravioli appetizer that we shared. I also took a few bites of the orange sorbet that we got for dessert, which was served in an actual frozen orange. When my friend took the little top off the orange that looked like a cookie and bit into it, he discovered that it was actually the top of the orange peel, frozen! I suggested that he should eat it, as MR says we should eat orange peel because it has limonene and that's good for us. I proceeded to take a bite out of the frozen orange, which was really quite delicious, but my friend didn't follow suit. Oh well. I was glad I had consumed very few Calories earlier in the day so I had the Calories for a dinner out, and while I suspect that I went a bit over 1100, I doubt that I went over 1200 total for the day. Shrimp has so few Calories, and I felt nice and un-full at the end of the meal.

Today is another light Sunday... I had my usual breakfast, and have packed my darling little cooler bag with cottage cheese, yogurt and hazelnuts for work (yes, I am at work on a Sunday). My mom is coming over for dinner tonight and I'm making a whole slew of veggies with flax oil and brewers yeast, so I'm concentrating on getting my calcium at lunch.

I have lots of thoughts provoked by the thought provoking comments of the other day, but work and social life have been so busy that I haven't had an extended period of time to think them all out. I promise I will soon!

Posted by april at 2:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 14, 2005

I'm Packing A Cooler Bag For A Place None of You Have Been

New Jersey, that is.

One of the keys to effective CR is planning ahead, so that you don't end up stuck somewhere starving with nothing healthy to eat. My mom recently gave me a little cooler lunch bag, and it's really improved my quality of life to be able to pack my high calcium dairy foods and carry them about. I'm on my way to get my hair cut in New Jersey... yes, I still drive to New Jersey to get my hair done. Say what you will about monogamy, once you find a hairstylist who is really good, you remain faithful until death do you part. So I drive about forty-five minutes to an hour, depending on traffic, to see Diana, the only woman in the world who can really cut my hair right.

For this excursion I am packing a delicious little kale and arugula salad with plain yogurt mixed with a new salsa I got at my grocery store called Dessert Pepper. Sounds like fun. I'll put a little olive oil on my salad, and I'm also packing a nonfat fruit yogurt for a later afternoon snack (this is a big field trip) with 10 g hazelnuts. No need to "live off the land" as Kenton would say... not when you have a cooler bag.

Tonight I might check the little produce store next door to my apartment for tall, skinny asparagus. They're amazing with flax oil, fresh lemon juice (do not use bottled!) and a little fresh ground pepper. Add that to my brewers yeast soup and maybe half a cup of eggwhites and I'll have a delicious healthy dinner. I don't really feel like going out tonight... last night was my wild and crazy girls' night out so today I feel the need to detox on perfect CR food. If I can't have a date with my beautiful, tall and skinny genius boy, I may as well have a date with a good book and some tall and skinny asparagi.

Posted by april at 8:28 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

You're On The Right Track

Does anybody remember the musical Pippin? It's one of my favorites, though I've never actually seen it, only listened to the soundtrack. Well, this morning I had a song from it in my head as soon as I woke up, the one that goes:

Now I can see you're in a rut and disarray
And I'm not one to butt in, but in fact
I must say

If you take it easy
Trust awhile
Don't look blue
Don't look back
You'll pull through
In just awhile
Cause you're on the right track.

I have no idea what is happening in the story line at the time... I think it has something to do with a talking duck. But in my case, the reference is pretty obvious.

I've been struggling since I made the discovery that yes, eventually, even I will get hungry. I loved everyone's comments... thanks to all! (Laura -- I'll answer your questions shortly!) I talked it over in detail with MR, and he thinks it's a good sign. My body has burnt off the extra fuel I was carrying around in the form of fat (though I still have plenty of fat, unlike some people I know, which is good because I am after all, a girl, and I've gotta have something to put in my size 0's.) I'm finally in real Calorie deficit... and that's what CR is supposed to be! I'm certainly not malnourished... you read my nutrition info every day and as MR pointed out, I eat enough protein for a 258 pound non-CR'd man. So I'm doing it right... I'm on the right track.

All of your comments were thought provoking, and I have lots of thoughts still swirling in my head, taking shape in half-written entries that will be coming soon. However, I thought I'd better spit out some content, especially nutritional info, before you started to get worried that I'd given up CR entirely and run off with the manager of a Quorn factory.

Here's Thursday. Lunch out with co-workers over a staff meeting, at a place where they have a great shrimp cocktail for 125 Calories. It's also a brew pub so of course I had to have a beer. I did take the occasion to consider how well Aubrey de Grey would fit in with my co-workers, and wonder if some sort of exchange program could be worked out. VLC came over for a glass of wine after work, but I had the carbs for it, as you'll see.

Num. Foods : 10
Food #1 : Egg, white, raw, fresh 1 cup
Food #2 : Oil 1 tbsp olive, 2 teaspoons flax
Food #3 : Crustaceans, shrimp, mixed species, raw 125 cals
Food #4 : Lettuce, cos or romaine, raw 1 cup ish
Food #5 : Avocados, raw, California 50 g (estimated)
Food #6 : Alcoholic beverage, beer, regular 1
Food #7 : Strawberries, raw 2
Food #8 : Yogurt, fruit, low fat, 9 grams protein per 8 ounce 110 cals
Food #9 : Cottage Cheese Lowfat Light and Lively 1 cup
Food #10 : Alcoholic beverage, wine, table, red 6 oz

NUTRIENT TOTALS:

Abs. Values %RDA/SA

Calories 1118.13__cal 56%
Protein 92.62__gm 168% RDA
Total Fat 36.58__gm 56%
Sat. Fat 12.72__gm 64%
Mono. Fat 16.20__gm 56%
Poly. Fat 5.08__gm 76%
Carbohydrate 53.07__gm 18%
Fiber 5.51__gm 18%
Cholesterol 297.31__mg 99%
Vit. A 15781.16__IU 316% RDA
Vit. B6 0.62__mg 39% RDA
Vit. B12 2.81__mcg 140% RDA
Vit. C 54.71__mg 91% RDA
Vit. E 3.57__mg 45% RDA
Thiamine 0.25__mg 23% RDA
Folacin 171.77__mcg 95% RDA
Riboflavin 2.51__mg 193% RDA
Niacin 6.64__mg 44% RDA
Panto. Acid 2.39__mg 48% SA
Calcium 751.07__mg 63% RDA
Copper 0.67__mg 34% SA
Iron 5.31__mg 35% RDA
Magnesium 179.70__mg 64% RDA
Manganese 1.84__mg 61% SA
Phosphorus 899.15__mg 75% RDA
Potassium 1946.09__mg 97% RDA
Selenium 130.64__mcg 238% RDA
Sodium 1054.62__mg 44% SA
Zinc 2.75__mg 23% RDA
Tyrosine 4.42__gm 460% RDA
Lysine 9.41__gm 1307% RDA
Phenylalanine 5.78__gm 602% RDA
Leucine 9.86__gm 1028% RDA
Valine 6.72__gm 800% RDA
Methionine 3.55__gm 1183% RDA
Cystine 2.03__gm 677% RDA
Tryptophan 1.45__gm 808% RDA
Threonine 5.26__gm 1096% RDA
Isoleucine 6.11__gm 848% RDA

P:C:F = 33:37:30

I think the calcium was actually higher as I have not yet modified my DWIDP to reflect the fact that my fruit yogurts have 30% of the RDA, not 20%. I am scared to modify foods now that I've discovered so many hard to find DWIDP bugs.

Yesterday was an interesting day because it was a "Girls' Night Out" with VLC and my mom, the kind of day when I would have in the past gone crazy and consumed heaven knows how many Calories. Those days definitely kept my average up, so that I could have several under 1000 days in a row followed by a going out day and not lose weight too fast. This time, I didn't want to go crazy, so I only went moderately crazy. I ate a light but basically normal day at work, taking care to get in all my calcium foods (again, the crunch will be about 10% lower on the calcium than it should be.) The plan was for VLC, me and my mom to take the train into the city after work, go for a drink at a bar with good happy hour specials (certainly you didn't think that CR meant never enjoying Friday happy hour specials again???) and then Mom and I would go to the art museum for their Friday night wine and appetizers jazz concert in the main hall while VLC left to meet a friend and do a jigsaw puzzle. We got to the bar with the happy hour specials, and it was about my dinner time. Last time I did an art museum Friday with my mom, I ate the art museum appetizers: a fruit and cheese plate and crab cakes. Delicious, and it was a special occasion (Mom's birthday) but very high Calorie! So this time I told Mom that I didn't want to actually eat at the art museum, as I've been a little over already on Calories due to the little Quorn incident. So I ate a grilled chicken salad at the bar, mostly just boneless skinless chicken over lots of lettuce and some other veggies. I had just vinegar with it, as I fear restaurant salad dressing. I drank a cosmopolitian on happy hour special, that drink made famous by Sex and the City. I entered that into DWIDP as vodka, as that's basically all it is with a touch of pink stuff and a lime. Anyway, it was a nice dinner, and I was no longer tempted to take large bites out of my dinner companions after eating it.

Mom and I adjourned to the art museum, where I had a glass of pinot noir while listening to the excellent jazz concert, then I walked around and came across a film exhibit. There's a giant Dali exhibit at the Philly museum right now, and this film featured a collaboration between Walt Disney and Dali. It was amazing! As with much of Dali's work, the main character was a woman who looked a lot like his wife, Gala. The combination of Disney and Dali was just fascinating... I can't describe it.

Then I met Mom back in the main hall where she had been listening to jazz and people watching, and we had another glass of pinot noir. We took a cab to the train station to go home, and by this time I was really hungry again, so I stopped at the Subway and ate a 160 Calorie Subway club salad. I probably could have done without the Calories, but remember, this is my wild and crazy night out, the one where I used to consume at least 1800 and possibly more, mostly in the form of seafood, cheese and wine.

Here's the total crunch for the day: not bad if you consider that this is supposed to be a bad day:

Food List : 5-13-05.fls
DATE : 05/13/05
Num. Foods : 14
Food #1 : Egg, white, raw, fresh 1 cup
Food #2 : Flax oil teaspoon
Food #3 : Grape juice, frozen concentrate, sweetened, diluted with 3 volume water, with added vitamin C 0.9 servings
Food #4 : Cottage Cheese Lowfat Light and Lively 1 cup
Food #5 : Yogurt, fruit, low fat, 9 grams protein per 8 ounce 1 cup
Food #6 : Tomatoes, red, ripe, raw, November thru May average 150 g
Food #7 : Chicken, broilers or fryers, back, meat only, cooked, roasted 150 g
Food #8 : Lettuce, butterhead (includes boston and bibb types), raw a lot
Food #9 : Turkey, all classes, breast, meat and skin, cooked, roasted Cals in Subway salad
Food #10 : Peppers, sweet, green, raw veggies in salad
Food #11 : Lettuce, cos or romaine, raw big day for lettuce
Food #12 : Alcoholic beverage, wine, table, red 2 glasses
Food #13 : Alcoholic beverage, distilled, vodka, 80 proof that's the Cosmo
Food #14 : Coffee, brewed, prepared with distilled water a lot. It has niacin.

NUTRIENT TOTALS:

Abs. Values %RDA/SA

Calories 1186.60__cal 59%
Protein 94.42__gm 172% RDA
Total Fat 34.64__gm 53%
Sat. Fat 13.88__gm 69%
Mono. Fat 12.24__gm 42%
Poly. Fat 5.55__gm 83%
Carbohydrate 54.71__gm 18%
Fiber 6.40__gm 21%
Cholesterol 195.43__mg 65%
Vit. A 10244.23__IU 205% RDA
Vit. B6 1.25__mg 78% RDA
Vit. B12 1.53__mcg 77% RDA
Vit. C 164.51__mg 274% RDA
Vit. E 3.96__mg 50% RDA
Thiamine 0.49__mg 45% RDA
Folacin 287.67__mcg 160% RDA
Riboflavin 1.96__mg 151% RDA
Niacin 13.89__mg 93% RDA
Panto. Acid 3.14__mg 63% SA
Calcium 764.62__mg 64% RDA
Copper 0.55__mg 28% SA
Iron 6.47__mg 43% RDA
Magnesium 171.04__mg 61% RDA
Manganese 3.12__mg 104% SA
Phosphorus 966.62__mg 81% RDA
Potassium 2492.15__mg 125% RDA
Selenium 64.10__mcg 117% RDA
Sodium 711.34__mg 30% SA
Zinc 5.51__mg 46% RDA
Tyrosine 5.33__gm 555% RDA
Lysine 12.24__gm 1700% RDA
Phenylalanine 6.50__gm 677% RDA
Leucine 11.95__gm 1245% RDA
Valine 7.98__gm 950% RDA
Methionine 4.15__gm 1383% RDA
Cystine 2.13__gm 709% RDA
Tryptophan 1.70__gm 944% RDA
Threonine 6.57__gm 1369% RDA
Isoleucine 7.46__gm 1037% RDA

P:C:F = 32:42:26

It has some problems: lowfat, and too much saturated fat in the meat. Much of the carbs are coming from wine and the Cosmo, where on a normal day there would be many more veggies and one glass of wine. I'm lacking my brewers yeast as it was a night out, so it's low on some of the things brewers yeast usually provides. But this is a bad day! If I can change my going out routine so that it involves not cheese plates but salads with a little meat or seafood and keep my cals under 1200 even on big nights out, then I am definitely on the right track!

Posted by april at 4:08 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 12, 2005

Half the Truth Is Of No Use

This is where the rubber hits the road.

Actually, I've never really understood what that cliche means. Is it something to do with driving? Are tires made of rubber? If so, don't they hit the road all the time, in the normal course of going from point a to point b? If anyone can explain this cliche to me, I would appreciate it.

Anyway, I think that I'm finally hitting the point where CR gets difficult. I've burned off the extra fat, and now I'm getting hungry.

For example, today, you read what I ate. I had a nice, healthy day, full of protein and unsaturated fats and mostly almost Zoned. I was feeling great! Came home from work, ate my health dinner, drank my glass of red wine. All was well. Satisfied but not stuffed.

About two hours later, I was hungry. REALLY HUNGRY! There wasn't much in the house, since I have a normal policy of not keeping too much food in the house so I won't be tempted to eat it.

But in the freezer, there was Quorn. I went a little nuts last time I was at the Whole Foods and bought lots of different kinds of Quorn. Tenders, Grounds, Patties, Nuggets, Cutlets (not breaded), etc. So I figured a small snack of Quorn wouldn't be a disaster.

An entire box of Nuggets later, with Carolina bbq sauce, and I declared it a disaster.

Let's see, that's 180 Calories per serving, and 3.5 servings in the box. So let's do the math... 630. YIKES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That's a lot of extra Calories!

Now it's probably about right for how many Calories over my normal weekday target I would eat when I go out. Maybe even low, if you consider those nights when I go out with my friends and share a cheese plate in addition to eating some nice shrimp or scallops. But this was a weekday, and one on which I had not planned to go Quorn crazy!

Some of you girls out there are probably wondering if I'm pregnant, as eating like a maniac is one of the early signs of such. I can assure you that I am quite certain I'm not. So stop worrying about that.

No, I think I'm just hitting the point where CR is going to get difficult. The veteran CR practitioners often talk about periods of time when they've battled hunger, and I always thought "Maybe that won't happen to me!" and on I went with my easy breezy version of CR. Now it seems that the hunger monster has come for me.

The only thing I can attribute it to is that I've upped my exercise. I've added a forty-five minute to an hour walk to my daily routine, and that could certainly be to blame. I am really enjoying the (finally) nice weather here, so I've been going for a walk at night after work, and I'm sure that's making me hungry. Between the extra water weight that exercise always adds and the extra food, much of it very salty, the scale was up three pounds this morning, and that totally freaked me out as well. This CR stuff is getting hard.

In a way, I find this validating. I've often wondered if CR could really be working for me if it's so painless. I mean, I've lost 33 pounds and I'm technically underweight for my height, but I don't look all that skinny. I love my food and spend less time cooking now than I did pre-CR. I've always been cold, so I'm no colder, but I have greatly increased heat tolerance. My libido hasn't suffered at all... in fact, I could say it's greatly increased as a result of CR, but I always feel like I'm skating on thin ice when I come close to calling my relationship a side effect of CR. Results not typical, I assure you.

So I'm now starting to feel CR, in a real way. I'm burning some more Calories, and instead of taking them out of the gas tank of fat I used to carry around, I'm eating them! Yikes!!! It's a scary feeling, to eat like that again. To be really really hungry and really want to eat. I don't like it.

I'm sure that I could stay the same weight I am now (holding steady between 103 to 105, depending on the time of the month and proximity to very salty foods) forever, and get all the benefits of obesity avoidance: low risk of heart disease and diabetes, being able to wear an authentic Catholic schoolgirl uniform, etc. Being able to feel self-righteous in the presence of public health "authorities" who do not practice what they preach.

But honestly, I don't think that will get me the extended lifespan I want.

And to quote James Taylor, that's why I'm here.

In the beginning, before I knew about the possiblity of radical life-extending biomedicine, I was pretty content with the idea of CR making me look better longer, and the possiblity of maybe an extra 10 years. I mean, 10 years is a long time! 10 more years of health is nothing to sneeze at, shake a stick at, or utilize any of those cliches that do not accurately describe any action I have ever seen anyone take when faced with a piece of information that is not significant.

I even thought back in those days, pre-eggwhites and brewers yeast and all the other little blossoms in my CR garden, that "moderate" CR would be enough to attain my personal goals.

Then I read the RANT. You know the one. The story of how my thinking about CR and life-extension changed as a result of reading the RANT has been somewhat eclipsed by the April and MR love story, whcih really is too cute for words (again, a confusing cliche. Are there really no words to describe extreme cuteness? I can think of lots of words. adoreable. sweet. awwww... you get the idea.) but it's rather important for our context here. When I read the RANT, my mind was blown (now that is a messed up cliche. What the hell does that mean?) by not just the beauty of the writing but by the uncompromising power of the message. Here are the hard facts: you want to live longer, you've gotta act really weird. Be hungry, be cold, be skinny, deal with friends and family complaining about how you eat, etc. Deal with it. You don't like it, fine. Age and die like your neighbors. See if I care.

The funny thing about MR is that he actually does care if you live or die... so much so that he has devoted hours and hours of time over the last seven or so years to educating other people about how to do CR. Of all the things I love about him, the fact that he does this, with no reason to expect there to ever be a reward other than the knowldege that he's saved a whole bunch of lives, is my favorite. Well, the low carb pancakes he makes for Sunday breakfast is a close second. And the Zoned pizzas are definitely in there. Come to think of it, the breakfast salad is high on the list. But nothing compares to his dedication to teaching people how to save themselves.

Part of that is being uncompromising in delivering the bad news. Moderate CR, whatever that is, is a great thing for obesity avoidance and wearing cute clothes well into your nineties. (Actually, as far as I know, MR has never said a word about CR and fashion. The cute little outfits thing is all me.) Compromise is a fact of life and we all do it, but the more your compromise on your total number of Calories, the more you're cheating yourself of years of life.

YEARS OF LIFE! My friends, this is a serious matter. This isn't just some sort of freaky lifestyle that we've adopted to entertain ourselves because playing Dungeons and Dragons is frowned upon past the age of thirty. This is a life and death struggle!

The title of this post is from one of my favorite Carly Simon songs, called "Give Me All Night." It's all about how half of this and half of that is not good enough. I can only speculate about what circumstance in her life caused her to write such a song, but the result is a beautiful anthem to the truth and beauty of all things NOT in moderation!

The entire line goes:

Half the truth is of no use
Give all, give it all to me.
I can stand it
I am strong that way.

I always think of the RANT when I hear that song now, in large part because I hope I am strong enough to stand the truth of the message. I've been going round and round the same set of questions about my CR since the conference, and my Calorie intake and weight have dropped just a touch but not much. I've hit the point where I look good and feel good and get a million little day to day benefits from CR, with at almost no cost. All this for $19.99 a month, plus the cost of plane tickets! A great deal! You can even eat the cheese plate sometimes!

Yeah, if you want to die.

This is the point where I'm afraid some of you will part company with me. You may be thinking that the fact that my body is fighting further attempts to restrict Calories and reacting to even mild exercise with mad Quorn cravings is a sign that I should be content with where I am. You may even want to have another round of calling me anorexic because I want to cut my Calories further when I'm already thin.

If you're thinking either of those things, then you either don't understand the purpose of CR, or you don't understand how serious I am about life-extension.

I suspect that most of my readers are actually on board with the entire project. No matter how far you plan to take your own CR, you can sympathize with those of us who are dead set on making it to the finish line. Especially if you've come to me from the Mprize front page... you're interested in radically extended healthy lifespans. You get the idea of actuarial escape velocity. You may not choose to do CR yourself, and you may not believe it works, but you agree that wanting to live way longer is a valid and achievable goal.

It's also possible that you don't like Carly Simon. In fact, I'd say it's more likely than not. But don't let that stop you from doing CR. No one will force you to spend the rest of your dramatically extended lifespan listening to "You're So Vain."

I don't have any easy answers. If you want to know what to pack for lunch at work, or what to make when you have hardcore CR'd Zonie company coming over for dinner in fifteen minutes, I have easy answers for you. But this is a tough one. We know what the goal is, but getting there will be a struggle, and I have no choice but to take each day as it comes.

Having you along for the journey makes it easier. Knowing I have someone to "talk" to about my struggles, even if you occasionally think I'm a narcissistic freak with bad taste in music, really makes this whole CR thing a lot more fun.

I will live forever... or bore you to death trying.

Posted by april at 12:05 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

May 11, 2005

Catholic Schoolgirls, Childhood Obesity, Salvation by Quorn

Yesterday I went to a rally in Harrisburg, my state capitol. The rally that immediately preceeded us seemed to involve a lot of school children from Catholic schools. The array of short plaid pleated skirts was truly impressive... VLC and I spent some time thinking about which ones were the cutest and how we could acquire some authentic Catholic schoolgirl outfits of our own. One advantage to doing CR is that you can wear high school girls' clothes well into your thirties... and if that's not an incentive to cut your calories, I don't know what is!

The afternoon took a turn for the grotesque when the school children began eating their lunches on the capitol steps. Suddenly I was surrounded by the obesity epidemic in the making as the children dug into giant hot dogs, potato chips, and chocolate cake with bright white icing. All these cute little kids, elementary to high school age, being poisoned by gak. Many of them were already getting fat, and the thin ones, eating the way they ate yesterday, won't be thin for long.

I felt so sad at the sight of all these children becoming addicted to sugary, high saturated fat foods. What they eat is largely determined by their parents and their schools, and they're learning bad habits from people and institutions they trust. It made me so glad that my mom fed me well when I was little, laying the foundation for later healthy habits. Even when I ate badly, I never ate hotdogs and potato chips on a regular basis!

Even Jay Olshansky would have been with me on this one. Children are getting fatter and sicker and no one seems to be doing anything about it. DISCLAIMER: I do not have children, I do not want children, I do not claim to have any earthly idea how to parent nor would I tell anyone how to raise their children. That being said, there are parents among my faithful readership who often comment that they put effort into feeding their kids nutritious food (hi Danielle!) and I think their kids are the lucky ones. It must be an uphill battle in a world where it's just considered normal to poison children at mealtime and brainwash them into becoming mindless consumers of fast food. But hats off to the parents who fight the fight and feed their kids right!

We had lunch on our journey, and I did okay though not great. We went to a restaurant that had a bunch of salads, so I had a tossed salad that had grilled zucchini and squash as well as the regular lettuce, tomato, etc. It also had some sprinkles of feta, and I had it with just vinegar. I also ate a vinegar marinated portabello mushroom stuffed with crabmeat and pesto. I asked them to hold the havarti cheese, thinking I had enough fat of the unsaturated kind in the pesto and didn't need the extra saturated fat in more cheese. Speaking of marinated veggies, MR's mom has contributed this recipe that strikes me as yummy and CR friendly:

MR's mom says:

I marinate both peppers and 1/4" thick, long slices of zucchini in half olive oil and half either Braggs or light soy sauce or Balsamic vinegar for about half an hour, drain them, then grill them either on the BBQ or my indoor grill. Sometimes I add just a sprinkle of garlic powder or a bit of minced garlic. Using any of these choices, they come out incredibly delicious. I've also done this with asparagus with equally delicious results, although for the outdoor barbie, you need some kind of mesh rack or they fall through the grills.

By the time we got back to my house, VLC and I were starving for our healthy dinner of Carolina barbequed Quorn! We cooked it in the wok with a bag of Trader Joe's bell pepper strips: green, red and yellow. Then we served it with a teaspoon each of flax oil on top, which made it taste incredibly buttery and rich. It was one of the most delicious things I've ever eaten. My mom has figured out a website where you can order my barbeque sauce, "Carolina Treet" brand: Carolina Sauce Company. Her favorite brand is Dillard's. Try them both!

VLC and I also ate a giant arugula salad with Trader Joe's Salsa Verde on top, an excellent combination. By giant I mean giant: we split a 420 gram box of baby arugula out of which I had already eaten 100 g, so we had 160 g each of arugula. Delicious! The salsa verde, rather than competing with the smokiness in the arugula, seemed to draw it out.

Meanwhile, I've been having unusual hunger late at night lately, so bad in fact that night before last I woke up in the middle of the night and ate a cup of cottage cheese and twelve olives! While it's good on some level that I'm zoning my midnight snacks, it's kinda scary that I'm waking up hungry. I'm definitely getting to the point where my body is defending the weight I'm at, so hunger is starting to happen anytime I cut down a bit. I still want to cut my calories so I can live long enough to see the dawn of radical anti-aging biomedicine (Click Contribute!) so I can't exactly go eating a 300 calorie midnight snack. I have decided to address this by upping my calories earlier in the day and cutting back on carbs at lunch. I was thinking of cutting back on my dairy, but when I mentioned the possibility of getting less calcium to MR he sounded absolutely terrified -- no doubt visions of my bones falling apart were dancing in his head -- so I decided not to do that. I'm just switching around my meals a bit so that I don't get a giant lunchtime shot of carbs. Today I've packed my brewers yeast soup with one tablespoon of Lewis Labs and a half a cup of eggwhites added for more protein and a teaspoon of olive oil for fat in my lunch box. I'm going to have that with my traditional cottage cheese, but instead of a cup at lunch, I'm going to have a half cup at lunch. I'm adding an afternoon snack of a cup of yogurt with 15 g hazelnuts. Then when I come home I can have another serving of brewers yeast soup with the second tablespoon of Lewis and Labs and some flax oil, and the final half cup of cottage cheese. I seem to react much better to carbs at night than during the day, so I'm just re-distributing my food to make my earlier meals higher protein, lower carb, and save the largest carb hit for dinner. Even that isn't exactly a huge hit of carbs. I also think the nicely Zoned yogurt and nut snack will take the edge off of the hunger later. I guess I am still getting in the Zone here... in spite of my earlier threat that I was heading Atkins-ward. In order to get my calcium through food, I really need to keep the dairy in my diet, and that ups my carbs. So there you go. I continue to Zone my world.

Food List : 5-11--5.FLS
DATE : 05/11/05
Num. Foods : 11
Food #1 : Egg, white, raw, fresh 1.5 cups
Food #2 : oil 2 teaspoons flax, 1 olive
Food #3 : Kale, raw 100 g
Food #4 : lowfat cottage cheese 1 cup
Food #5 : Yogurt, fruit, low fat, 11 grams protein per 8 ounce 1 container
Food #6 : Nuts, filberts or hazelnuts, dried, unblanched 15 g
Food #7 : Brewer's Yeast 2 tbsps
Food #8 : Broccoli, frozen, spears, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt 25 cals
Food #9 : Cauliflower, frozen, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt 25 cals
Food #10 : Carrots, frozen, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt 25 cals
Food #11 : Alcoholic beverage, wine, table, red 6 oz

NUTRIENT TOTALS:

Abs. Values %RDA/SA

Calories 1045.80__cal 52%
Protein 94.83__gm 172% RDA
Total Fat 27.51__gm 42%
Sat. Fat 6.02__gm 30%
Mono. Fat 15.99__gm 55%
Poly. Fat 3.64__gm 55%
Carbohydrate 99.16__gm 33%
Fiber 13.28__gm 44%
Cholesterol 116.98__mg 39%
Vit. A 23063.83__IU 461% RDA
Vit. B6 3.44__mg 215% RDA
Vit. B12 2.74__mcg 137% RDA
Vit. C 199.93__mg 333% RDA
Vit. E 7.26__mg 91% RDA
Thiamine 1.32__mg 120% RDA
Folacin 197.71__mcg 110% RDA
Riboflavin 3.78__mg 291% RDA
Niacin 11.15__mg 74% RDA
Panto. Acid 14.31__mg 286% SA
Calcium 1171.28__mg 98% RDA
Copper 1.84__mg 92% SA
Iron 6.29__mg 42% RDA
Magnesium 228.03__mg 81% RDA
Manganese 3.34__mg 111% SA
Phosphorus 2443.35__mg 204% RDA
Potassium 2749.05__mg 137% RDA
Selenium 156.55__mcg 285% RDA
Sodium 1767.15__mg 74% SA
Zinc 4.49__mg 37% RDA
Tyrosine 6.81__gm 709% RDA
Lysine 12.64__gm 1755% RDA
Phenylalanine 8.01__gm 835% RDA
Leucine 13.76__gm 1433% RDA
Valine 9.88__gm 1176% RDA
Methionine 3.51__gm 1170% RDA
Cystine 1.93__gm 643% RDA
Tryptophan 2.12__gm 1178% RDA
Threonine 7.73__gm 1611% RDA
Isoleucine 8.85__gm 1229% RDA

P:C:F = 36:40:24

Wow, I feel like I'm doing nothing but eating fat all day and I still come out low on fat. How much longer will I be a recovering Priestess of the High Carb Darkness? Will I have some kind of road to Damascus experience where I am blinded by the brilliance of the hazelnuts? That flax oil on barbequed Quorn was pretty close... yet I woke up this morning with my vision intact (good thing as I have to drive to work) and my fat at only 24%.

Maybe I will try Zoning my meals. I know how to do it cause I do it for MR when I cook for him. What's good for the tall one might be good for the tiny one. It just seems like after all the times I've said "I can not be bothered to Zone all my meals," I am getting closer and closer to that point.

I am a little worried about becoming a carbon copy of MR. You'll know it's too late when I start eating six different vegetables in my breakfast and actually liking kefir.

Live long -- live young.

Posted by april at 7:47 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 9, 2005

Unafraid of the Future

There are only two things that can inspire me to quote Disney sountrack lyrics. Love, and a good campaign. I've quoted plenty of song lyrics related to love, so this one is going to be about a good campaign. Contract campaign, that is.

This morning I was listening to my Anastasia soundtrack, jamming along to that duet between Richard Marx and some then-starlet female singer whose name I don't even remember. That song was for me the theme song to a contract campaign I worked on in 2003, and is a really cheesy happy song, pure Disney. I was thinking of it because we are once again involved in a difficult contract campaign, this time at our second largest hospital, and many of the issues are the same. In the contract campaign of 2003 at our largest hospital, one of our major victories was winning the best retirement package for nurses of any hospital in the state of Pennsylvania. The average age of a nurse in this country is 49, so retirement is a huge issue. It's horrifying to think that people who spend their entire adult lives caring for the sick have to worry about whether or not they'll have enough money to live on when they retire. On Wednesday in negotiations, we were discussing the issue of retirement. Our lead negotiator brought up the fact that nursing is such back breaking physical work that most nurses can not physically do the work until the age of 65. It's even worse now that cuts in ancillary staff have forced nurses to do almost all the heavy lifting. Patients are getting heavier and heavier, and most nurses are women. I know very few nurses who don't struggle with daily back pain. They are so short staffed and pressed for time that they make choices between protecting their own health and saving their patients' lives.

So the idea of working on a nursing unit until the age of 65 is hard to entertain for those nurses whose bodies are already collapsing under the strain of the work. Retirement is a big, big issue.

I have oddly mixed feelings when we discuss the issue of retirement. On the one hand, of course I want nurses who spend their entire careers caring for acutely ill human beings to retire with dignity and security. No question about that.

But on the other hand, it makes me very sad that people expect their bodies to be mostly destroyed by the time they're in their fifties. The hard physical labor of nursing is difficult anytime, but the fact that we simply must assume that most nurses will be physically unable to keep working until a normal retirement age at 65 strikes me as a tragedy.

Lots of steps could be taken to improve this situation. If hospitals hadn't cut back so much on ancillary staff, there would be orderlies to help lift, move and transport heavy patients. If nursing staff weren't cut to the bone, nurses would have more time to take more care in lifting so as to minimize injuries.

But what about those heavy patients? My nurses tell me that their patients have gotten dramatically heavier in recent years, so that now nurses regularly have to lift patients who weigh 300 and even 400 pounds. And that's not on the bariatriac treatment floor... that's in the ICU. Cause guess what? All those statitstics you read on how obese people end up having heart attacks and strokes and diabetes? Well guess who takes care of them when they get sick? Nurses. Mostly women, mostly in their forties or older. The obesity epidemic isn't just hurting the obese -- it's breaking the backs of those who care for them.

And nurses themselves, like most anybody else in this country, aren't exactly paragons of healthy lifestyle. Many smoke and most are overweight. Between working at one of the world's most stressful jobs: twelve hours or more at a time often with no break even to go to the bathroom, much less to eat a meal, and then running home to take care of spouses, children, aging parents, etc., nurses don't have much time to take care of themselves. So the cycle of starving all day and then overeating the second they come into contact with food, not to mention sleep disturbances from years of shift work, creates a vicious circle of stress, weight gain, illness, injury, and more stress.

They just can't make it, working like that, to 65. Desk jobs are few and hard to get, so many leave the profession all together. After years of sacrificing their own health for the health of others, many are forced to take low paying jobs in the service sector to make ends meet. And the effects of years of physical labor and unhealthy lifestyle make it difficult to work a job that requires standing all day, as so many in the service industry do.

I'm horrified at the lack of respect for these hard working professionals who hold our lives and the lives of our loved ones in their hands. When I think about the people I care about who are alive today because of the work of nurses, nurses whose names I'll never know, I become even more dedicated than ever to the fight for dignity and respect for nurses everywhere. Someone could well have been on her eleventh hour of work, exhausted and hungry and worried about picking up her kids on time from daycare, when someone I love ended up in the emergency room. Someone ignored her own needs and put all of her life's energy into saving a stranger's life.

And then she came back in the next day, and did it again. And again and again, maybe for thirty years or even longer.

I wish I could go back in time and space and thank all the nurses who have taken care of people I love. The nurses who cared for my mom at Duke Hospital back in 1974 when she had a dangerous high risk pregnancy and a terrible emergency C-section three weeks early, all the while fearing that her child was brain retarded because the doctors didn't quite know how to use the ultrasound yet and had measured my head wrong. The nurses who cared for my grandmother when she had colon cancer, from which she made a complete recovery. The nurses who took care of my father on the public ward at Duke when he was barely out of college and had a miserable operation for a slipped disk in his back. Even the nurses, Chris and Jim, who took care of me at Yale New Haven in the summer of 1996 when I showed up in the emergency room after dropping a couch on my foot. Being in the emergency room at Yale New Haven with the gunshot wounds and stabbing victims was more upsetting than the pain in my foot, but Chris and Jim managed to make it all better, even though it meant drilling a hole in my toe! They promised me I could wear open toed sandals again, and many successful pedicures later, I am able to wear all the cute shoes I want to, due to their quick action in the face of sure disaster.

So what in the world does this have to do with CR?

I believe that nurses should be able to retire with dignity and economic security and health insurance at 65 or even earlier if they need to. But it makes me sad and angry that we live in a society where even the most highly educated of health care professionals can expect no better than to watch their bodies slowly degenerate so that they are physically unable to do the work they love, just as they are reaching the peak of their skill and experience.

Age related degeneration and disease don't just happen, they are a result of specific processes that we have the power to slow down. We can't stop them or reverse them yet -- that's why you need to click the "Contribute" button and donate to the Mprize! -- but we can slow them down. And CR is the way to do it.

Not everyone is going to want to be quite as hardcore as MR, or as I hope to be. But even mild to moderate CR could make the difference between that nurse who saved the life of someone you care about ending her career at 55 in pain and ill health, or going on to save many more lives. Everyone loses when age robs society of experienced, skilled people, in any profession.

And most nurses don't even know about CR! The medical community is so slow to embrace anything weird and new that the lifesaving information isn't even out there! Even for those who do know, our entire society is set up to make doing even the mildest form of CR very, very difficult. The kids want to go to the Wendy's drive-thru. The husband can't live without his steak and potatoes. The hospital cafeteria -- THE HOSPITAL CAFETERIA! -- sells only high carb, high fat gak and a few limp greens on a "salad bar" that is only open at lunch time. Healthy convenience foods are almost non-existent, and information about how to cook FAST, healthy food, is hard to find.

I do my little part every day to write the blog and teach you how to make quick, easy, yummy food that your non-CR'd partner and kids will eat (and I offer to set you up with some nice CR'd men who have jobs and everything if you get tired of the whole non-CR'd dating scene, which I certainly did. I once said to a brother, "I won't settle till I meet a man who can make a good salad!"). And I do my part to help nurses get the respect they deserve. Sometimes I even manage to put the two together... when the nurses notice that I've lost so much weight and ask how I did it, I tell them about CR, and they do get interested.

I want to live in a world where people have choices about how they live their lives, even as they become chronogically older. Where people have the information available to them to slow down their own aging process, and the support that it takes to CR successfully. Imagine a world where you went to the McDonald's drive-thru and ordered an eggwhite omlet with a side of steamed broccoli! Or where instead of ordering a pizza, you might be able to order a vegetable stir-fry a little Quorn mixed in for protein (calling all Quorn lovers... VLC and I are going to feast on Carolina bbq Quorn tomorrow night!). Where kids ate healthy food in the school cafeteria, and everyone knew how to cook quick and easy CR friendly meals.

The nurses I work with, who have sacrificed their own health for the health of others, look to the future and they're scared. They don't have enough money to retire on, and they don't think their bodies are going to make it even to 65, much less beyond. They've given so much, and now what do they have to look forward to?

When I look at them, I sometimes imagine that I see the faces of the nurses who saved the lives of the people I love. I can't go back to those nurses and thank them... I'll never have any idea who they are. But I will do everything I can in there here and now to fight for their right to retire with dignity, and show by my example how we can live healthier now, so that retirement will be a choice, not a surrender.

[Serious, impassioned entry ending. Nutrition information beginning.
See, you can have it all!]

Food List : 5-9-05.FLS
DATE : 05/09/05
Num. Foods : 18
Food #1 : Egg, white, raw, fresh 1 cup
Food #2 : Fish oil, menhaden 1 teaspoon
Food #3 : Grape juice, frozen concentrate, sweetened, diluted with 3 volume water, with added vitamin C 1.0 servings
Food #4 : Dannon Light and Fit Yogurt 1 cup
Food #5 : Salsa, med. chunky 2 tbsps
Food #6 : Tomatoes, red, ripe, raw, November thru May average 50 g
Food #7 : Arugula, raw 20 g
Food #8 : Olives, ripe, canned (jumbo-super colossal) 12 olives
Food #9 : Lemon juice, raw half lemon
Food #10 : Yogurt, fruit, low fat, 11 grams protein per 8 ounce 1 cup black cherry nonfat
Food #11 : Broccoli, raw 150 g
Food #12 : Nuts, almonds, dried, unblanched 15 g
Food #13 : Coffee, brewed, prepared with distilled water a lot
Food #14 : Wheat bran, crude 1 tbsp/5g
Food #15 : Alcoholic beverage, wine, table, red 6 oz
Food #16 : Turkey, all classes, light meat, raw 17 g of protein worth
Food #17 : Lettuce, cos or romaine, raw (veggies in subway salad)
Food #18 : Olives, ripe, canned (small-extra large) (in subway salad)

NUTRIENT TOTALS:

Abs. Values %RDA/SA

Calories 1015.76__cal 51%
Protein 73.79__gm 134% RDA
Total Fat 32.79__gm 50%
Sat. Fat 5.91__gm 30%
Mono. Fat 19.19__gm 66%
Poly. Fat 5.51__gm 83%
Carbohydrate 85.48__gm 28%
Fiber 15.49__gm 52%
Cholesterol 85.76__mg 29%
Vit. A 4837.62__IU 97% RDA
Vit. B6 1.08__mg 68% RDA
Vit. B12 1.81__mcg 91% RDA
Vit. C 191.95__mg 320% RDA
Vit. E 14.43__mg 180% RDA
Thiamine 0.40__mg 36% RDA
Folacin 226.54__mcg 126% RDA
Riboflavin 2.16__mg 166% RDA
Niacin 8.99__mg 60% RDA
Panto. Acid 3.37__mg 67% SA
Calcium 1129.22__mg 94% RDA
Copper 1.15__mg 58% SA
Iron 12.66__mg 84% RDA
Magnesium 260.99__mg 93% RDA
Manganese 2.89__mg 96% SA
Phosphorus 778.71__mg 65% RDA
Potassium 2524.77__mg 126% RDA
Selenium 62.68__mcg 114% RDA
Sodium 2979.81__mg 124% SA
Zinc 5.40__mg 45% RDA
Tyrosine 4.14__gm 432% RDA
Lysine 8.76__gm 1216% RDA
Phenylalanine 5.09__gm 530% RDA
Leucine 9.03__gm 941% RDA
Valine 6.28__gm 748% RDA
Methionine 3.05__gm 1015% RDA
Cystine 1.62__gm 541% RDA
Tryptophan 1.33__gm 740% RDA
Threonine 4.83__gm 1007% RDA
Isoleucine 5.54__gm 770% RDA

Breakfast: eggwhites and flax oil, grape juice to wash down creatine
Lunch: plain yogurt with salsa, arugula salad, tomatoes, olives
Snack: black cherry nonfat fruit yogurt with almonds (Zoning my snacks???)
Dinner: Subway turkey club salad -- entered as turkey and lettuce and olives
based on amounts of protein, fat and carb in the Subway nutrition information.

Should have had brewers yeast but am working late so had to grab something.

P:C:F = 29:42:29

Zoning my world, one day at a time.

Posted by april at 8:04 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Should I Poison My Co-Workers?

From time to time in life, we are faced with these great existential questions. Should I join the Three Hundred? (Answer: Yes!) Should I use half-salt instead of salt? (Answer: Yes!) Should I tell that random passer-by that it is not yet Memorial Day, so white shoes are inappropriate? (Answer: No, even though it's true.)

Today I am dealing with an age old question. Should I poison my co-workers?

Now don't pick up the phone and call 911 to alert the Philadelphia police that a tiny red-headed murderess is on the loose. I'm not talking about slipping arsenic into everyone's happy hour cocktails.

No, I'm debating whether or not to buy them chocolate.

Before I left my old/new job, I used to keep a candy jar on my conference table stocked with fancy Lindt truffles. My co-workers would file into my office after lunch for their little treats. I had all varieties, and I enjoyed handing out little bites of pleasure. I also considered it an effective tool for managing their moods. A little sugar and caffeine in the afternoon and everyone is happy. The chocolate is perfectly safe from me because I'm not a chocolate person... while I like a bit of it occasionally, I'm not drawn to it, so in all the time that I had chocolate on my desk, I never ate one of the Lindt truffles. I did eat a Halloween snack sized Butterfinger once, but that's another story...

Anyway, I was always the supplier of chocolates, but I haven't gotten any since I came back. And you know what? I may not.

Even though it's just a needle in the haystack of gak that some of my co-workers eat (you know who you are and who you aren't) I still feel somewhat guilty contributing to a high calorie, high sugar, high saturated fat lifestyle.

I felt very good about myself when I passed out my megamuffins, and the gang really, really scarfed them down. I know they'd love brownies too... several of them have been allowed to try the sacred brownie, and it went over quite well.

I just don't think I can do it. Buy the chocolates, that is. I love my co-workers too much to poison them. I want them to live as long and healthy as possible.

Maybe I could teach them to file in after lunch and take little spoonfuls of Essential Mix?

Here's the crunch for yesterday. A nice, boring Sunday. Mom and I did our Mothers' Day on Saturday -- an outing to a gorgeous estate with amazing gardens and a mushroom outlet -- so don't freak out and think I didn't do something for my mom. She had a nice trip, lunch out (and wow did I have an awesome glass of pinot noir!), mushrooms, and then this morning I brought her flowers, the Sunday times, and her coffee, complete with nonfat milk and two Sweet and Lows.

Food List : 5-08-05.FLS
DATE : 05/08/05
Num. Foods : 18
Food #1 : Egg, white, raw, fresh 1 cup
Food #2 : Oil, vegetable, flax 2 teaspoons
Food #3 : Grape juice, frozen concentrate, sweetened, undiluted, with added vitamin C 1.5 oz
Food #4 : Kale, raw 100 g
Food #5 : Arugula, raw 50 g
Food #6 : Salsa, med. chunky 2 tablespoons
Food #7 : Yogurt, plain, skim milk, 13 grams protein per 8 ounce 1 cup
Food #8 : Coffee, brewed, prepared with distilled water two grandes
Food #9 : Lewis Labs 2 tablespoons
Food #10 : Soup, chicken broth cubes, dehydrated, prepared with water 1 cup
Food #11 : Broccoli, frozen, chopped, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt 25 cals
Food #12 : Cauliflower, frozen, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt 25 cals
Food #13 : Carrots, frozen, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt 25 cals
Food #14 : Olives, ripe, canned (jumbo-super colossal) 8 olives
Food #15 : Alcoholic beverage, wine, table, red 6 oz
Food #16 : Calcium chewy 20 cals
Food #17 : Olive oil 2 teaspoons
Food #18 : Mollusks, clam, mixed species, canned, drained solids 30 g

NUTRIENT TOTALS:

Abs. Values %RDA/SA

Calories 964.00__cal 48%
Protein 78.73__gm 143% RDA
Total Fat 26.55__gm 41%
Sat. Fat 7.24__gm 36%
Mono. Fat 11.37__gm 39%
Poly. Fat 5.55__gm 83%
Carbohydrate 77.87__gm 26%
Fiber 20.80__gm 69%
Cholesterol 64.92__mg 22%
Vit. A 24693.70__IU 494% RDA
Vit. B6 0.96__mg 60% RDA
Vit. B12 30.91__mcg 1546% RDA
Vit. C 239.23__mg 399% RDA
Vit. E 7.73__mg 97% RDA
Thiamine 1.26__mg 114% RDA
Folacin 250.97__mcg 139% RDA
Riboflavin 3.07__mg 236% RDA
Niacin 12.62__mg 84% RDA
Panto. Acid 2.36__mg 47% SA
Calcium 982.11__mg 82% RDA
Copper 0.99__mg 49% SA
Iron 18.02__mg 120% RDA
Magnesium 232.52__mg 83% RDA
Manganese 3.49__mg 116% SA
Phosphorus 512.67__mg 43% RDA
Potassium 3228.18__mg 161% RDA
Selenium 139.14__mcg 253% RDA
Sodium 2481.77__mg 103% SA
Zinc 5.11__mg 43% RDA
Tyrosine 3.84__gm 400% RDA
Lysine 8.10__gm 1125% RDA
Phenylalanine 5.11__gm 532% RDA
Leucine 9.04__gm 942% RDA
Valine 6.26__gm 746% RDA
Methionine 2.94__gm 980% RDA
Cystine 1.70__gm 566% RDA
Tryptophan 1.39__gm 772% RDA
Threonine 4.83__gm 1006% RDA
Isoleucine 5.60__gm 778% RDA

Breakfast: eggwhites and flax oil

Lunch: kale and arugula salad with flax oil, topped with 1 cup plain non-fat yogurt
salsa and balsamic vinegar

Dinner: Lewis Labs brewers yeast soup with broccoli, cauliflower and carrots
and 30 g canned clams, plus 2 teaspoons olive oil
8 olives
glass of wine

grape juice to wash down morning creatine, calcium chewy to keep my bones healthy and cute.

P:C:F = 33:43:24.

Not Zone perfect, but I've come a long way, baby.

Posted by april at 3:20 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 8, 2005

Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing

You're probably wondering how I'm going to create a blog entry that somehow manages to quote both Stevie Wonder and Aubrey de Grey. Well, you're probably not wondering that at all, since 99% of you don't understand my pop music references. But for those of you who do, you're thinking: this is going to be a stretch.

Here's how it goes.

Lately I've been listening to a mix tape I made for myself when I first took the job that I just now went back to, after a rather unpleasant year of working in Vermont. It was like coming home from a very bad trip, or waking up from a horrible nightmare. The name of the mixtape was "Kansas" because I thought of my return as the end of the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy realizes that there's no place like home. I put that Stevie Wonder song on the tape, second to last song. Obviously I've been listening to the tape as of late because I've gone home to my job yet again, and it's so cheerful to blast Stevie Wonder loudly as I drive around to meetings and sit in traffic and such.

Yesterday as I was listening to it I thought about how writing a blog about CR on the Mprize website is a bit like saying, "Don't you worry 'bout a thing... except for this one thing!" The message of hope that we can actually reverse the damage caused by aging and restore our bodies and brains to youthful vigor is so exciting, so intoxicating, that it makes me want to run out and drink beer with Aubrey de Grey. Eat, drink and be merry... for tomorrow we'll fix it all.

And yet, I'm not convinced that if I run out and drink all the beer I want right now that I'll be in the shape I'll need to be in to take advantage of the real anti-aging biomedicine when it does become available. So I am putting quite a bit of energy in the here and now into CR.

It's a mixed message, really. Give money to the Mprize so that we can get scientists to focus on the real cure for aging... but in the meantime, cut your calories, get really skinny, eat your eggwhites and flax oil, pass up the free bagels at office functions, and I MEAN THIS use your nutritional software to make sure you're getting everything you need! Don't take chances, don't miss the escape velocity train by four minutes (I feel like I can really speak to this because after my girls' night out with VLC on Friday I managed to miss my train by four minutes and had to sit in the station for another hour.) and enjoy getting carded well into your thirties. As MR commented on the blog the other day: we're fighting for our lives. To do otherwise is to commit slow motion suicide. The stakes are very high, and it's sometimes hard to remember on a daily basis why it's so darned important that we stick to CR.

I feel torn all the time. I do all I can for the Mprize, but I worry that the fruits of our labors won't come in time to help those of us who aren't practicing CR. I look at my closest friends, and I feel sad imagining a future that they're not around to share. It is dramatically better now that I have MR and we can look forward to being skinny together indefinitely. I think we both feel conflicted when we talk with the people in our lives who don't do CR. On the one hand, we don't want to be pushy or annoying... it's everyone's own choice how they want to feed themselves. But if you really like someone, you don't want them to die any earlier than necessary! So it's a delicate balance. I wish I could tell my friends "Don't you worry 'bout a thing... we'll solve this little aging problem in plenty of time for you!" But when I see the people close to me flirting with a heart attack by eating high saturated fat, cholesterol filled diets, I can't pretend everything is okay.

For example, I have three good friends who are all 41 years old. Well, one just turned 42 but close enough. Two of them do not do CR, one does. One of them is Aubrey de Grey. He's really fun, and it's going to be a darned tragedy if he doesn't get to hang out with us for our extended lifespans. He doesn't believe that CR will get humans more than a year or two extra life, so he doesn't do it. However, I have discovered that he will eat whatever is put in front of him if someone else cooks it. So it seems like the obvious solution is for me and MR to adopt him and feed him our CR food. It would be like raising prize winning mice, except for the conversation would be a lot more exciting.

My second 41 ish year old friend is Brian Delaney, the president of the CR Society. He's been doing CR since the dawn of time, and though I've never quite understood why he eats cereal for breakfast, he looks so young that I feel certain the the CR thing is working. He's going to be around to hang out with us indefinitely, so whenever we disagree we try really hard to patch things up. It changes your perspective when you're planning to live a very long time... makes you want to resolve conflicts with other CR'd folk, since you can't count on them dropping dead any time soon.

My third friend who is 41 ish doesn't do CR, not because he doesn't believe in it, but because he just doesn't want to. He's in great shape and plays sports and has been in excellent health... doesn't smoke, drinks red wine, exercises all the time. He's very supportive of me doing CR, but has no interest in it himself. I've worked with this friend for zillions of years, and we frequently talk about our vision of a future in which there is more equality, more dignity for workers, a saner, more free, society. When I first took up CR, it was in large part so that I could live long enough to see such a time. It makes me sad to think that my long term friend and co-worker might not make it there with me.

Still, I try not to be a pest. Putting pressure on people never seems to work, so I try to set a good example and provide lots of tasty healthy food. Kidnapping is not a practical option, and you can't put your friends and colleagues in cages and raise them like mice.

At least I haven't figured out how. Yet.

Ever since I hung out with Aaron and Christine and Kevin and Aubrey in Alberta, I've thought that if we could just get enough of us together in the same place, the CR'd would cook and the non-CR'd would quickly become CR'd cause they wouldn't realize they were eating fewer calories. Our food is just so much more satisfying that it really feels like you're eating much more than you are. I never realized until I dramatically cut back on grains how very empty they are. Eat a bagel, you're hungry two hours later. Eat a megamuffin, and you're satisfied in body and soul for hours on end.

I don't have any good answers here... I have no magic formula for converting friends and family to CR. But if I come up with one, I'll let you know. In the meantime, keep cooking, keep engaging in public displays of extraordinary health (yes, I am glad it's almost bikini season!) and donate to the Mprize so that our non-CR'd friends might have a chance.

Posted by april at 6:44 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 7, 2005

You Know A Starving Soul Can't Live Like That For Long

Yes, it's another line from "Everything Is Different Now."

When I think about my life pre-CR, it's all a blur. I remember feeling like I was not in control of my eating... every day I would say to myself that I would stay on the no-fat vegan program, and then I would be tempted by some cheesy treat and fall off the wagon. I was hungry all the time... I now understand this to be a function of a protein deficiency.

You go round in circles
Just keep getting smaller
You wake up one morning
And half your life is gone

I looked in the mirror one morning after a night of overeating and realized that if I kept going down that road I was going to be sick and ugly at 35. I was 29, and I wanted to be young and beautiful forever. It's as simple as that.

I did that google search, I bit that bullet, I dropped my calories, and I developed a huge crush on a genius boy who wrote a bunch of posts to the CR Society list.

And everything is different now.

I don't know what's going to flip the switch for you. Sometimes I ask my friends, "What the hell just happened?" I remember that one day I was overweight, out of control, unhealthy, unhappy, and the next day I was eating 1200 calories a day and dropping weight and feeling like I was on drugs I was so euphoric. My weight has pretty much stabilized now... losing about a pound a month, very slow... but I'm comfortable in my CR practice.

I can't tell you what changed because honestly, I don't know. It's as though I knew down to my cells that I had to change. It all came easy after that... I just stopped eating. Gradually I changed what I was eating and as I ate more protein and more unsaturated fats, it got easier.

There was a moment after I really started to understand Aubrey de Grey's work when I thought of becoming less serious about my CR. I mean, if Aubrey is going to save us, then why bother?

Cause everything is different now. Because the immediate term benefits of CR are so good for me that I can't go back. Because I don't want to miss escape velocity by 10 years. Because I don't see a reason to be old and sick for one more minute than I have to be.

Because I love life, and I want as much of it as I can get. Because the cost of eating less is more than worth it if I can enjoy my time on this earth a little longer.

If I didn't love life so much, if I didn't find such beauty in that which surrounds me on a daily basis, perhaps I would be more willing to take chances.

But I don't want to die... not now, not ever. Life is too precious, with all its ups and downs, all its difficulties, all the things that make this world complicated and dangerous.

"Yeah I miss the old crowd sometimes
The wild wild nights of running..."

I got so tired of that
I got so lonely
I dropped down and I called out to Heaven
Send me someone to love
Heaven shot back
You get the love that you allow
And everything is different now.

I don't know what will make everything diffferent for you. When I am asked, I honestly say I don't know. It just happened. One day I weighed 137 and my eating was out of control, the next day I was eating hard boiled eggs* and 1200 calories a day.

I bit that bullet
I took that vow
And everything is different now.

*I was eating hard boiled eggs before I discovered the delicious and nutritious eggwhite. I still occasionally eat a hard boiled egg, but I do not endorse them as regular food because you get a lot less protein per gram and they have tons of cholesterol and saturated fat. MR is working on a post about that... I think you egg yolk lovers have finally goaded him into taking you on on-list. If he'll let me, I'll post it to the blog so that non-CR Society readers can read it too.

Posted by april at 8:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 6, 2005

Making CR Meatless

One of my most dedicated readers who is relatively new to CR asked about making CR meatless. No problem! Your girlfriend and kids do not have to eat sardines!

Making CR meatless is easy if you're okay with eating egg and dairy products, and if you're a man, it's easier still. Why is it easier for men? Because your calorie requirements are higher than mine! So you can afford to eat bean soups with rice protein powder without killing your entire calorie target for the day.

Eggwhites are your friend. Well, no, they are my friend. Get them in a carton. Do not attempt to separate eggs from eggwhites unless you live with a souflee chef. Scramble them like eggs or cook them in the microwave. Top them with anything and everything: veggies, hot sauces, NC bbq sauce, Texas bbq sauce, Texas Pete, vinegar, oil and vinegar, salad dressing (beware of soybean oil and sugar!), the NY Sunday Times, etc.

Dairy products are also your friends. Since lowfat and nonfat versions of most dairy foods are easy to find and just as good if not better than the "real" thing, not to mention cheap and also findable in organic versions, you can get both calcium and protein in one fell swoop. As you know, my favorites are nonfat plain yogurt, which you can add to almost any sauce and make yourself a "cream" sauce or soup, and cottage cheese. Skim milk is also good. Nonfat riccotta is my newest high calcium steal... 40% of the RDA in 60 calories!!!

Beans make great soups and stews and dips, and if you grab some rice protein powder you can make a complete protein out of them.

You can also make vegetarian favorites like pizza and lasagna by being creative with low carb substitutes for high carb gak. MR makes wonderful pizza with low carb tortillas, but beware... if you get them at the regular grocery store and not a Whole Foods type store, you may end up with transfats! So read the label. As you know, I love to substitute lettuce for pasta. French cut green beans also work.

Meatless CR is easy and fun, and once MR posts his anti-saturated fat post, we will understand even more about why it is better for us.

PS -- Jacob, we're talking about the CR Society email list. Go to http://www.crsociety.org and click Lists to subscribe!

Posted by april at 7:26 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

Tonight VLC and I are having a CR friendly girls' night out! We've planned our evening of resveratrol hopping based on where we can get nice pinot noirs and tiny plates of healthy food. We're starting out at a winebar called Tria that has an excellent olive plate, so I'll be getting some unsaturated fats. Then we're moving on to 20 Manning, a very cute little place that specializes in Asian fusion type food and offers some little fish type appetizers, so we can get some protein with minimal fat and carb. After that, who knows? We may go somewhere else and split a salad of some kind.

It's so nice to have someone who is also into CR to hang out with. I enjoy going out bar hopping (that's a translation of resveratrol hopping) in Center City Philly, and it's fun to be able to go out with someone who shares my food values. VLC and I like almost all the same foods, so we can share dishes if we want to try some of different things. And she likes to go to sleep early! So we'll go out right after work and be done by 10!

Meanwhile, we're interviewing two candidates for a job at work today, and we'll probably be taking one of them out to lunch. I have some food at work -- one of my delicious high calcium yogurt dishes. I may eat it before lunch so I can just have a salad when out.

More soon.

Posted by april at 5:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 5, 2005

Wait, I Think We're All on the Same Page Here!

Everyone read Dan's comments... he wasn't referring to my post, he was referring to the post I was critiquing! Looks like we're all on the same page here!

I'm glad our blog family is all back together again. I felt terrible when I thought I had upset one of my favorite readers. These choices are so personal, yet they're life and death. It's hard not to get emotional about them. I personally find that getting pretty emotional about them, and sharing my feelings with my CR brothers and sisters, is one of the best ways to stay on track. I don't just want to live forever... I want to live forever with these awesome people I've come to know through the CR Society and the Mprize! We're tons of fun.

Thanks to all for your supportive comments. It's nice to know you're finding value in what you read. I feel like I've had ten different pep talks all in one day.

More nutritional info soon.

Posted by april at 2:57 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Different Choices

Well now everyone's up in arms again... probably not a bad thing,at least you're not bored!

Allow me to clarify. I am not saying that there's anything bad about "moderate CR" (except for the fact that we really have no way of defining that) or the people who practice it. I'd much rather wait in line all day at the DMV with a moderate CR practitioner than with almost anyone else... especially as he or she is more likely to have packed healthy snacks. We all have to stick together, and I sincerely apologize to any and all who were offended or hurt by my last post.

What upsets me, and I've written on it before, is when there are posts to the list that either state or imply that everyone who practices more hardcore CR is either obsessive compulsive, anorexic or crazy. Or all of the above. There's been a lot of background noise like that as of late, and one particular post replying to one of MR's recent messages finally got me. And yes, I am aware that I get really mad when I feel like people are picking on MR, even though I know that he is more than capable of defending himself. I have a bit of a Princess Leia complex, I freely admit it.

Having gotten to know several of the hardcore CR folk pretty well, I can attest that they are serious people who love life very much, and want to squeeze all they can out of it. They have very different styles of CR (though Kenton and Dean get more alike every day... it's kinda cute, really) and different priorities in life, but none of them strike me as crazy or OCD. You don't have to be crazy to want to do everything within your power to live longer and healthier, even though you might make choices that others would not make. I think of it a bit like how serious atheletes make choices that I certainly wouldn't want to make, even if I could be as cute as Mary Lou Retton was back in 1984. If you want a specific goal, it's not crazy to do what it takes to get there. It may be a little odd, but not nuts.

We all make different choices, and I think the most important thing is that we make choices based on as much information as possible and that we're happy with our own choices. My choices are very different from MR's for example -- it's very important to me that I still go out to eat with my friends from time to time, and that I can fit in easily with co-workers and in work situations involving food. I get frustrated about the compromises I make, and I'm constantly re-adjusting, but they're my QOL issues.

CR is a weird way of living. No matter how we do it, we're diverging from the beaten path, and we've all had struggles with the people in our lives who disapprove of us. When there's stuff on the list that takes a condescending tone towards those who turn down grains because they believe there are more efficient ways of getting nutrition in fewer calories, it makes me mad! I totally support their right to say it, and I don't really want to bother the entire list with my rantings, but those of you who choose to tune into my blog will occasionally get more than the cheery recipe.

Still, I want you to leave the blog happy and inspired, not mad and upset, and I'm genuinely sorry if I offended or upset anyone (which clearly I did, at least in Dan's case.) I'll keep it to food related content in future.

Speaking of, here is yesterday's nutrition info. Note compromise: I was at an all day meeting and there were no CR friendly options besides a tossed salad, but luckily I had packed a cup of cottage cheese. By about five the meeting was nowhere near over and I was starving, so I ate some of the free fruit. An apple and a banana. I rarely eat bananas anymore because they're not a great deal nutritionally at my calorie leve, but this time it was better than getting all shaky with hunger when I had to concentrate. Next time, I will pack more CR friendly food. I now have little frozen packs for my cooler lunchbox, which should help in future.

DATE : 05/04/05
Num. Foods : 14
Food #1 : Flax oil 1 teaspoon
Food #2 : Tomatoes, red, ripe, raw, November thru May average ish
Food #3 : flax oil 1 teaspoon
Food #4 : Lewis Labs 2 tablespoons
Food #5 : Alcoholic beverage, wine, table, red six oz
Food #6 : Broccoli, frozen, spears, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt 75 cals
Food #7 : Cauliflower, frozen, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt 75 cals
Food #8 : Carrots, frozen, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt 75 cals
Food #9 : Soup, chicken broth cubes, dehydrated, prepared with water 1 cup
Food #10 : Cottage Cheese Lowfat Light and Lively 1 cup
Food #11 : Apples, raw, with skin 1 apple
Food #12 : Bananas, raw 1 banana
Food #13 : Egg, white, raw, fresh 1 cup
Food #14 : olive oil (they say) dressing on salad 1 teaspoon

NUTRIENT TOTALS:

Abs. Values %RDA/SA

Calories 1021.18__cal 51%
Protein 66.21__gm 120% RDA
Total Fat 26.53__gm 41%
Sat. Fat 11.01__gm 55%
Mono. Fat 9.59__gm 33%
Poly. Fat 4.01__gm 60%
Carbohydrate 111.93__gm 37%
Fiber 26.49__gm 88%
Cholesterol 117.91__mg 39%
Vit. A 19432.71__IU 389% RDA
Vit. B6 1.67__mg 105% RDA
Vit. B12 0.63__mcg 32% RDA
Vit. C 115.85__mg 193% RDA
Vit. E 4.41__mg 55% RDA
Thiamine 1.19__mg 108% RDA
Folacin 179.96__mcg 100% RDA
Riboflavin 2.77__mg 213% RDA
Niacin 10.85__mg 72% RDA
Panto. Acid 1.98__mg 40% SA
Calcium 598.85__mg 50% RDA
Copper 0.50__mg 25% SA
Iron 5.13__mg 34% RDA
Magnesium 183.51__mg 66% RDA
Manganese 2.24__mg 75% SA
Phosphorus 590.68__mg 49% RDA
Potassium 2804.59__mg 140% RDA
Selenium 120.38__mcg 219% RDA
Sodium 1708.01__mg 71% SA
Zinc 2.48__mg 21% RDA
Tyrosine 3.07__gm 320% RDA
Lysine 6.68__gm 927% RDA
Phenylalanine 4.19__gm 437% RDA
Leucine 7.50__gm 781% RDA
Valine 5.14__gm 612% RDA
Methionine 2.54__gm 847% RDA
Cystine 1.48__gm 494% RDA
Tryptophan 1.18__gm 655% RDA
Threonine 4.01__gm 836% RDA
Isoleucine 4.62__gm 642% RDA

That's weird... there was lettuce in the DWIDP file and it's not showing up on the text file.

Well, I ate a lettuce and tomato salad for lunch with my cottage cheese... please adjust accordingly.

Posted by april at 3:05 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

May 4, 2005

Will You Walk With Me Out On the Wire?

Lately I feel like this blog has been missing something. Well, two things: philosophy and pop music. This is due in part to a fear that I would offend some of my audience, and now that I am on the Mprize front page, I am very conscious of a need to be correct and inoffensive in all things. But I fear I am becoming bland... stuffed vegetables are nice, but there is more to life than cooking!

Today a confluence of events: my first day back at negotiations, a "Battle Cry of the Moderates" email on the CR Society list, and the Philly classic rock station playing "Born to Run" on my way home from work has created the perfect storm. You are going to get some pop music and some philosophy this time. Don't worry... nutrition information to follow.

I first started to love the song "Born to Run" during my senior year in college (1996 if you must know) when I was making the decision to leave the promise of a secure, economically rewarding career in human relations for a large corporation you've heard of (they make your toothpaste) in order to become a freedom fighter for the disenfranchised, ie, a union organizer. I had huge loans to pay off and all my friends were going on to law school or graduate school, except for the tiny group of student activists who were also setting off to become organizers. The song was my anthem as I left the beaten path to try something much harder and much more dangerous, and I believe, in the end, much more rewarding.

Today in negotiations when we were talking about the nurses' pension program, our lead negotiator, an old friend of mine, got going on the subject of how real people's choices have led to a situation where people who should be retiring with dignity and economic security have to work at Wal-Mart and Home Depot in order to pay for their medications and their heating bills. His speech reminded me again of how glad I am that I decided to walk out on the wire with the people who don't just roll over and play dead in the face of injustice. Who stand up and say that they deserve to retire with respect after 30 years of caring for the sick and dying. He spoke of how someday there will be more equality, and I thought to myself, "Because I didn't eat that cookie, even though it looked really good, I might live to see that day!" I was proud to be in the room this afternoon with twelve brave nurses, elected from amongst their co-workers to stand up for themselves, their patients, and their profession. It would have been so much easier to take the other path... more tomorrow on my first two years of driving around the South getting doors slammed in my face... but I wouldn't trade the ability to sit there with these women and men who stick by their convictions and their patients, even when those around them say, "It's bad everywhere... why bother fighting?"

Which brings me to the "Battle Cry of the Moderates" email on the CR Society list. It was another of those messages in which the moderate says "What's so bad about an egg yolk? Why not eat bread and oatmeal?" and implies that those of us who are a little more hard core are just neurotic freaks.

I find these messages almost unbearable, but I've realized that if I respond to every single one of them on-list I will end up using all of the extra lifespan I gain by doing CR combatting idiocy on the list. I'm all for people making their own choices about what constitutes quality of life to them, and we all draw the line in different places. I am constantly drawing and redrawing my own line in the CR sand. But the fact is, we're going to live longer if we lower our calories. That means we find more calorie efficient ways to get our nutrition than bread and egg yolks.

The battle cry of the moderates is that we don't know for sure that CR is going to work in humans. And of course they're right. None of us has lived long enough to know if we're going to live longer... though our bloodtests are excellent and I must say, we look fabulous! But for those of us who decide to go further, it is an article of faith that what we are doing will work. We know we can't be sure, but we CR anyway, because the alternatives are unthinkable. To imagine that we would, through our own inaction, damn ourselves to sickness, infirmity and death, is impossible. And for those of us who truly believe that the SENS approach to *curing* age related disability and disease is going to work, the idea that we would miss "escape velocity" because we just had to have one more margarita is really beyond the pale.

I think it's hard in our society which values the quick fix and instant gratification of all sorts to engage in a practice that requires tons of self-discipline and marks you as different (well, I'm still pretty normal looking, but even I will eventually look skinny). You'd better be pretty darned sure it's going to work. Yet we can't be sure... all the animal evidence seems to say it will, but scientists we respect like Aubrey de Grey think it won't. And our friends and family think we're nuts.

Which brings me to our song line quote in our headline. The entire lyric goes:

Will you walk with me out on the wire?
Cause baby I'm just a scared and lonely rider
But I've gotta know how it feels...
I wanna know if love is wild
Babe I wanna know if love is real.

I can't promise you that you'll live longer if you cut your calories and make my stuffed squash. I strongly believe that you will, and that my recipes and endless silly chatter can help you make the transition. But in the end, all I am doing is holding out my hand and asking you to walk with me out on the wire. Asking you to join me in an experiment whose success is far from assured. And hoping that together we will live to see a better day. A day when we no longer see our aging relatives live out their last days in misery and horror. A day when we face the future filled with hope even when their are 89 candles on our birthday cake (does anyone ever really put that many candles on their cake? Wait, I don't eat cake anymore!)

I will not cheat myself out of one minute of youth and health. I will carry around my cottage cheese and eat my eggwhites and turn down the cookies even though I'm really really hungry because there was nothing CR friendly to eat for lunch besides the tossed salad and give my $85/month to the Mprize instead of going out with my friends on weekends, and I will believe with ever shred of life in me that we can make things better.

I am honored to be joined in both of my journeys by some of the most amazing people on earth. From the nurses I spent my day with: the 27 year RN who spoke up today to defend her patients from an unsafe practice on her floor, though her voice was shaking and she feared for her job; to the Mprize brothers and sisters all over the world who give so much of their income and their time so that others may live. From MR, the most brilliant man I have ever seen up close, also possibly the skinniest, who is a constant inspiration to me, even when he's just chopping vegetables; to his bearded boss with his vision of a world in which we are can live in youth and health even though we weren't all so terribly good in our younger days... I often feel that I am not worthy of the company with whom I travel. But they like the food, so I guess they'll let me come along for the ride.

I think Bruce Springsteen will get the last word tonight.

The highway's jammed with broken heroes
On a last chance power drive
Everybody's out on the run tonight
But there's no place left to hide

Together Wendy we can live with the sadness
I'll love you with all the madness in my soul.

Posted by april at 8:05 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

No, I'm Not Eating Fish Oil!

I'm running out the door to go to negotiations, but I wanted to at least put in the crunch for yesterday on the blog before I leave. Unfortunately, I don't have time to edit all the serving sizes so they make sense, and I don't have time to change the randomly chosen fish oils to flax oil. DWIDP doesn't list flax oil, so I must choose some other oil every time I use flax. Last time I tried to fix this there was a disaster... don't make me go there. Let's just say that I found a quick way to make my carbs go to zero. Anyway, here's the general idea, it's the same thing I eat every day anyway, so you can figure it out.

Food List : fl0000.fls
DATE : 05/03/05
Num. Foods : 18
Food #1 : Egg, white, raw, fresh 7.5 servings
Food #2 : Fish oil, cod liver 0.3 servings
Food #3 : Dannon Light and Fit Yogurt 0.4 servings
Food #4 : Tomatoes, red, ripe, raw, November thru May average 4.8 servings
Food #5 : Grapefruit juice, canned, sweetened 1.0 servings
Food #6 : lowfat cottage cheese 1.8 servings
Food #7 : Olives, ripe, canned (jumbo-super colossal) 12.0 servings
Food #8 : Alcoholic beverage, wine, table, red 1.6 servings
Food #9 : Lettuce, cos or romaine, raw 1.0 servings
Food #10 : Strawberries, raw 4.0 servings
Food #11 : Blueberries, raw 0.0 servings
Food #12 : Brewer's Yeast 10.0 servings
Food #13 : Carrots, frozen, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt 0.5 servings
Food #14 : Broccoli, frozen, spears, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt 1.0 servings
Food #15 : Cauliflower, frozen, cooked, boiled, drained, without salt 0.7 servings
Food #16 : Soup, chicken broth cubes, dehydrated, prepared with water 1.0 servings
Food #17 : Fish oil, sardine 0.3 servings
Food #18 : Coffee, brewed, prepared with distilled water 16.9 servings

NUTRIENT TOTALS:

Abs. Values %RDA/SA

Calories 1034.32__cal 52%
Protein 83.55__gm 152% RDA
Total Fat 24.99__gm 38%
Sat. Fat 5.50__gm 27%
Mono. Fat 13.64__gm 47%
Poly. Fat 4.24__gm 64%
Carbohydrate 112.52__gm 38%
Fiber 20.56__gm 69%
Cholesterol 69.76__mg 23%
Vit. A 20579.86__IU 412% RDA
Vit. B6 3.25__mg 203% RDA
Vit. B12 2.21__mcg 111% RDA
Vit. C 170.04__mg 283% RDA
Vit. E 12.21__mg 153% RDA
Thiamine 1.26__mg 115% RDA
Folacin 229.17__mcg 127% RDA
Riboflavin 3.25__mg 250% RDA
Niacin 12.33__mg 82% RDA
Panto. Acid 14.53__mg 291% SA
Calcium 1521.51__mg 127% RDA
Copper 1.94__mg 97% SA
Iron 11.74__mg 78% RDA
Magnesium 199.12__mg 71% RDA
Manganese 3.08__mg 103% SA
Phosphorus 2372.30__mg 198% RDA
Potassium 2914.65__mg 146% RDA
Selenium 142.13__mcg 258% RDA
Sodium 3744.79__mg 156% SA
Zinc 4.28__mg 36% RDA
Tyrosine 6.36__gm 662% RDA
Lysine 11.83__gm 1643% RDA
Phenylalanine 7.24__gm 755% RDA
Leucine 12.73__gm 1326% RDA
Valine 9.09__gm 1082% RDA
Methionine 3.10__gm 1032% RDA
Cystine 1.58__gm 527% RDA
Tryptophan 2.02__gm 1122% RDA
Threonine 7.17__gm 1494% RDA
Isoleucine 8.13__gm 1129% RDA

Off to negotiations. Today should be a more difficult food day as I'll be eating out in a group with the nurses. I'm hoping for a salad bar... I'll pack some things, but I can't keep food cold during the day so I don't want to pack any of my usual dairy lunches.

More later.

Posted by april at 5:03 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

May 2, 2005

Starting Early

No, this is not an entry about the joys of being an early-riser, though I could go on at length about how wonderful it is to have more fun before 9 am than most people do all day. This is about starting CR when you're an age when most people think they're immortal.

I got a very exciting email last week from one of our newest Three Hundred brothers who is thinking of starting CR. He is in his early twenties, and clearly has a very strong interest in life-extension as he's made the commitment to spend the next 25 years standing up with the other Three Hundred members in the fight against aging. He is thinking of beginning CR in order to maximize his chances of seeing the results of all of our work.

I am downright inspired by this brother's decision. He is young enough to have not yet seen the signs of aging that pushed me to do that google search on "calorie restriction." He's already thin, so he doesn't have that weight loss motivation that eggs on so many of us, especially the women among us. He's thinking about his own aging process, and taking every action available to him, from joining the Three Hundred to starting CR.

Isn't that cool? Welcome aboard, brother. The CR'd are soon going to outnumber the non in the Three Hundred! There are a few more out there who are thinking of making the switch... come join us... we're a bit odd at times, but we're really tons of fun.

Here's the crunch for today:

Food List : 5-2-05.fls
DATE : 05/02/05
Num. Foods : 18
Food #1 : Egg, white, raw, fresh 1 cup
Food #2 : Flax oil 2 teaspoons
Food #3 : Grape juice drink, canned 1.5 oz
Food #4 : Dannon Light and Fit Yogurt 1 cup
Food #5 : Salsa, med. chunky 2 tablespoons
Food #6 : Tomatoes, red, ripe, raw, November thru May average 100 g
Food #7 : Olives, ripe,(jumbo-super colossal) 10 olives
Food #8 : Kale, raw 30 g
Food #9 : Lettuce, cos or romaine, raw 30 g
Food #10 : Arugula, raw 10 g
Food #11 : Broccoli, frozen, chopped, cooked, boiled, drained 25 cals
Food #12 : Cauliflower, frozen, cooked, boiled, drained 25 cals
Food #13 : Carrots, frozen, cooked, boiled, drained 25 cals
Food #14 : Soup, chicken broth cubes, dehydrated, prepared with water 1 cup
Food #15 : Brewer's Yeast 2 tablespoons Lewis Labs
Food #16 : Milk, nonfat, fluid, without added vitamin A (fat free or skim) 1 cup
Food #17 : Coffee, brewed, prepared with distilled water 2 cups and 1 iced cafe au lait
Food #18 : Olives, ripe (jumbo-super colossal) 4 more olives with dinner

ADD HALF MEGAMUFFIN!!! 110 calories, Zoned

P:C:F pre-megamuffin = 33:41:26 (megamuffin should improve ratios)
Add 20 cal calcium chewy

Total calories: 986

NUTRIENT TOTALS:

Abs. Values %RDA/SA

Calories 856.45__cal 43%
Protein 70.64__gm 128% RDA
Total Fat 24.89__gm 38%
Sat. Fat 5.03__gm 25%
Mono. Fat 13.82__gm 48%
Poly. Fat 4.66__gm 70%
Carbohydrate 116.62__gm 39%
Fiber 19.04__gm 63%
Cholesterol 71.74__mg 24%
Vit. A 19208.58__IU 384% RDA
Vit. B6 3.18__mg 199% RDA
Vit. B12 1.79__mcg 90% RDA
Vit. C 161.65__mg 269% RDA
Vit. E 14.70__mg 184% RDA
Thiamine 1.30__mg 118% RDA
Folacin 234.80__mcg 130% RDA
Riboflavin 3.16__mg 243% RDA
Niacin 12.13__mg 81% RDA
Panto. Acid 14.47__mg 289% SA
Calcium 1405.79__mg 117% RDA
Copper 1.95__mg 98% SA
Iron 11.84__mg 79% RDA
Magnesium 194.92__mg 70% RDA
Manganese 2.04__mg 68% SA
Phosphorus 2312.57__mg 193% RDA
Potassium 3021.58__mg 151% RDA
Selenium 129.23__mcg 235% RDA
Sodium 4006.10__mg 167% SA
Zinc 4.35__mg 36% RDA
Tyrosine 4.29__gm 446% RDA
Lysine 7.66__gm 1064% RDA
Phenylalanine 5.00__gm 521% RDA
Leucine 8.31__gm 866% RDA
Valine 6.47__gm 770% RDA
Methionine 1.68__gm 560% RDA
Cystine 1.06__gm 352% RDA
Tryptophan 1.49__gm 825% RDA
Threonine 4.97__gm 1036% RDA
Isoleucine 5.68__gm 788% RDA

Posted by april at 10:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 1, 2005

Getting Ready for the Week

Now that I'm back at a job where I'm in an office much of the time, I'm packing my lunch, along with my pill box full of just a few essential supplements, every day before I go to work.

For tomorrow I have packed:

a salad of kale, romaine and arugula
1 cup of fat free yogurt (40% of the RDA of calcium in 110 calories!)
10 olives (a salty way to get my requisite fat)
half a megamuffin (a delicious dessert... bound to make your co-workers demand a bite, which will throw off your calorie count)

I'm thinking of making an adjustment to my breakfast. Don't freak out but I'm thinking of making a brewers yeast, broth and yogurt feast instead of my traditional eggwhites. Of course I would add flax oil, as the world will no doubt end if I don't balance my omega 3
s and 6's. It would just be so efficient to get my brewers yeast early in the day, get a head start on my calcium, and lately I've been so hungry in the morning! Today I had a cup of cottage cheese with my eggwhite and flax oil breakfast. Maybe it's because I've started to add NC bbq sauce to everything... I often use fat free yogurt as a thickener in soup, and to make it into "Cream of Whatever." So why not in my breakfast? When I was a kid I used to love eating soup for breakfast. Lots of mornings of Campbells chunky this or that. Not bad at all, if you consider that most kids were eating sugary cereals or pop tarts. So eating soup at breakfast is just as natural as eating scrambled eggwhites.

Don't worry, I'll still be the priestess of the eggwhite magic. I might just have my eggwhites later in the day. On days like this when I go out unexpectedly for meals, I still manage to get my protein, but I miss a lot of the nutrients that are found in brewers yeast. If I ate my brewers yeast first thing in the morning I could be sure of getting those nutrients before I did anything else.

Meanwhile, not sure on the crunch because I ate lunch out with a friend in Center City Philly and then wandered around reading a book that MR gave me and drinking a giant iced latte with skim in a favorite coffee shop. For dinner, I went out with my mom to the Ruby Tuesday's, where they have a great salad bar, filled with veggies, salsa, olives, and Heinz salad vinegar, as well as a huge selection of various kinds of pickled hot peppers.

Looking forward to the week... more recipes to follow!

Posted by april at 5:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack