April's CR Diary

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December 31, 2009

Living Isn't Only A Fantasy*

[WARNING: This entry contains spoilers about the "Twilight" vampire novels. I figure that either you've already read "Twilight," or you've decided you're not going to, so either way, you can read the entry. But if you haven't yet decided whether or not to read "Twilight" and value suspense, please look ahead to the recipes in later entries. There's not much suspense there.]

MR was a bit surprised when in the Calgary airport, I purchased two of the "Twilight" series of teenage vampire novels. After all, I am what my best friend Edward (who got the blog name long before I read "Twilight," and whom I assure you would have some other blog name had I read "Twilight" before) describes as a *very serious person.*

"All my girlfriends are reading them and raving about them," I said.

"Like who?" he asked.

"Donna, Jenn, Jane, and all the California organizers."

"But those are grown women, not teenage girls!"

I explained to MR that grown women are actually just the same as teenage girls, except with big jobs and mortgages to pay, and occasionally (as in my case) staff to supervise and occasionally (though not in my case) children to care for.

It's true that the average age of the "Twilight" readers I know is over 30.

I read the first book on the flight and finished the second within days of coming home. Yesterday I ventured out to Barnes and Noble in search of a book that RDF had suggested I read. The book, Here Comes Everybody, was out of stock at the Barnes and Noble, so MR ordered it for me on Amazon.com, but while at the bookstore I picked up the other two "Twilight" novels and a historical novel about the steamy affair between Igor Stravinsky and Coco Chanel.

I totally get the whole vampire thing. The obvious metaphor is that the vampire is the young girl's ultimate fantasy. He's dark and dangerous and infinitely more experienced than she, while somehow managing not to look it. The vampire seduction is a classic variation on the female coming of age story, a story that always (for straight girls) involves a man. Preferably older, preferably from a foreign land of some kind, and preferably not actually a vampire, cause those things can kill you.

The beauty of Stephenie Meyer's books is that she does not even attempt to run away from this classic story. This book is what it is: a story of the kind of obsession that only a teenage girl can work herself into (though I certainly gave it a shot a couple of times in my twenties) over a man who is, indeed, perfect. He is super-human. Granted, he has this little problem with desperately wanting to kill her and drink her blood, but other than that, he's perfect. He doesn't eat, he doesn't sleep, he protects her constantly, and she does not have to clean his bathroom. He never ages, never does anything, well... human. I think one reason why all us grown up girls love this story is because we've long since gotten over the fantasy of the perfect man. We've learned that once you scratch the surface a bit, all men are human... but it sure is fun to pretend.

So that's the obvious metaphorical level of these books, and I think that's the level at which most people will read them. But as the background noise in my mind is often about CR, life-extension, and these days, CR (the other), I started to read the novels through that lens.

Bella, the heroine of our novel, seventeen when we start, when she meets Edward, the seventeen year old vampire who has been seventeen for approximately 90 years, is obsessed with the question of immortality. She desperately wants to become a vampire so that she can be with Edward forever, and (this is my own conclusion, not explicit in the novels though I'm not done yet) so he can sleep with her without risking killing her. She worries constantly that she is aging, and she dreads her eighteenth birthday because it will make her older than Edward. She wants to stop aging, now, no matter what the cost.

And there is a cost. Constant hunger for human blood. Makes CR look easy, eh? I'm only joking when I talk about eating the neighbors.

But she's more than willing to pay the price for a shot at immortality, or at least at being young and beautiful with Edward for a very long time.

So she strikes a deal with the head of the vampire clan, Dr. Cullen, that after her high school graduation, if Edward won't make her a vampire, Dr. Cullen will, and allow her to join their vampire family. Isn't that sweet?

Still, she wants Edward to be the one to change her. Back to the original metaphor... we can see where this is going.

Edward insists that he will only change her into a vampire if she marries him first. He wants commitment. (Note correct spelling.)

Last night I put the book aside when Bella jumped on a motorcycle with her old friend Jacob, a werewolf who is in love with her, and who got her though a truly terrible time when Edward (out of concern for her safety) left her for months. If Edward had one fault, it would be that he is overprotective. He practically put Bella on house arrest when he went out to hunt (these vampires call themselves vegetarians because they eat only wild animals, not humans.) So Bella risks her life seeking freedom because though she loves Edward more than life itself, she feels trapped by his watchful eye.

I would never, ever ride a motorcycle, but I understand the urge to run away, to find some sort of freedom. And I remember Dean Ornish writing years ago in a book I can still largely recite about how people crave freedom more than want life. That's why restrictive diets often fail. People always want what they can't have. It's the ballpoint pen example: if I told you that you could have anything you wanted, except you couldn't have a ballpoint pen, ever, for the rest of your life, you'd suddenly want a ballpoint pen.

Still, I was annoyed at Bella. How could she risk her relationship with Edward, and her one shot at immortality, to get on a motorcycle with her old best friend?

I have risked my life many times going out eating and drinking with my old best friends, in spite of MR's sad face, so I can actually understand Bella's decision, and that's probably why it bothers me so much. When faced with the real prospect of immortality, how can you let anything silly like a fleeting feeling of freedom get in the way?

Of course none of us thinks we'll be immortal. Even Aubrey de Grey doesn't believe in that... and CR, at very most optimistic, might gain us 8 years or so. Long enough to catch the bus to radical life-extension? We hope so, but we don't know. Some days we are more optimistic than others.

Yet there is this phenomenon among CR practitioners where the way they look seems frozen in time at the point when they started CR. They don't age anymore. Robert K, Mary, Matt, Mike are all examples. They look the same conference after conference.

I feel like I am at a turning point. I can freeze in time where I am now, a feat that can only be accomplished by hardcore CR, or I can continue to age like the neighbors (assuming I don't eat them) and die sooner than I had to.

MR has been saintly in only pointing out a few times that he'd told me about carb restriction many years before I ever met the revolutionary RDF. And all that's true. Why I was never able to see Ariadne's red thread in the form of CR squared remains a mystery, but what matters is now, and the possibility of really being able to get there... to freeze in time. To go back to hoping that the bus to radical life-extension might wait for me, if I run for it, the way MR always seems to make us run to public transit when we're visiting Calgary.

In my own personal version of the story, the issue really is life-extension. I know CR works... I've known Robert K. for over five years, and he's not aging. I live with MR, and he's barely aging. RDF may not be consciously on CR, but is obviously doing some something with a low carb diet because he looks ten years younger than he claims to be.

The question for me re: CR is not if, it's how. And carb restriction (moderate) seems to be working for me. MR can tell I'm thinner. My clothes are starting to fall off (not cool when you have to run to catch a flight) and I'm not hungry very often.

The great thing about CRCR is that you don't have to convince someone to bite you. The entire process is one of individual choice. Yes, there is a price. Some hunger, more social stress. Not being just like everyone else. But everyone gets the choice, and can act on it, regardless of whether or not others approve. Unlike Bella, I don't have to beg and plead with the vampires to make me one of them. It's all up to me.

Still, I wish it were easier. If it was just a matter of a good bite and three days of painful transformation as the venom soaked through... well, I'm sure I could convince either MR or RDF to bite me. I imagine I taste pretty good. Eggwhites and red wine and diet Coke and cruciferous veggies? What's not to love? Free range, if not organic.

Alas, in the real life version of the story, it's not so easy. No one can choose my path for me, though certainly others can be powerful inspiration. My good friend Agnes (who is 27 today! Happy b-day little sister!) pointed out in a recent email that food is all a matter of choice... the choice we make right here, right now. She's right about that.

I've suffered for a long time from the tension between freedom and health. I'll admit that in my falling off of hardcore CR there was always an element of rebelling against MR's watchful eye. "I'll never be like you," I'd say, and over time he came to accept it. That I would always eat Thanksgiving dinner, that I would always go out sometimes with my friends, that I would not always measure my grape tomatoes. Over time, I went from being the ultimate CR bloggie-girl fantasy to being a real woman, one with real struggles and faults, but on balance, still pretty fun to live with. He's been extremely gracious about the entire matter.

The great thing about low-ish carb is that it has all the fun of jumping on the back of Jacob's motorcycle, with all the advantages of staying young and ageless with the translucent, glowing Edward. Because I was so indoctrinated into the low fat dogma as a very young woman, I get tremendous thrills out of eating FAT! Haha! Now, granted, I'm still not allowed to eat whole eggs (Edward won't let up on that) but I do get a little bit of good girl gone bad excitement every time I eat ten more grams of almonds or pumpkin seeds. And my hair is magnificent, in a very bad-girl appropriate way. Of course, I pin it up conservatively for work.

So I make my choices, eat my veggies and eggwhites and almonds and pumpkin seeds, and hope for the best. No one is coming along to bite me... I have to do it myself. (Though the suddenness of the revelation after I heard RDF's talk makes you wonder... ) In the end, there's a huge element of individual choice, as we battle a hostile food environment and fight a risky battle. All we can know for sure is that it beats the alternatives.

*the headline is taken from Starship's "Tomorrow Doesn't Matter Tonight," for those of you who actually follow the song lyrics

Posted by april at 6:13 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

December 30, 2009

Reader Poll

It's time for another reader poll...

MR and I always stay home on New Year's Eve since he doesn't like parties and I don't like being on the road with a lot of drunk drivers. So I make a fancy dinner and we light the candles and I drink champagne while he doesn't.

The night before, we're celebrating Christmas with my mom, who was not able to go to Calgary this year, and we're having Christmas lasagna. Lasagna is MR's all time favorite (pasta-less, obviously) but since we're having that Friday, I don't want to have it Thursday.

So... suggestions for things to make for New Year's Eve?

Naturally, New Year's Day lunch will include collard greens and black eyed peas... you lose your credentials as a Southern girl if you don't have black eyed peas and collard greens on New Year's. And I would hate to lose my Southern girl credentials. I have an idea for making the black-eyed pea dish low-ish carb... will post it once it works.

Posted by april at 8:13 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 29, 2009

This May Be My Favorite

When MR and I were getting on the plane in Calgary, they told us we wouldn't be allowed to take our carry-on bags, just a purse or laptop case. I carefully removed my turkey lunch and spiced nuts (Thank you MoMR!) and MoMR found me a plastic bag to keep them in... after she spilled coffee all over her son while hugging him goodbye... then I checked my bag. The only other thing I saved to keep with me was my stash of Feinman et al. papers. "If they will only let me hold onto one," I thought to myself, "It would be Volek and Feinman, the one where they put the entire contents of the paper into the title." That's my favorite. I thought briefly about trying to hide it by putting it under my sweater, but then realized that they're patting everyone down, so they'd find it, and it would look a whole lot more suspicious if I were trying to hide it under my sweater than if I just carried it in my hands. "Don't let the low carb paper into the country!" It's a dangerous world we live in. Some people might stop eating "whole grains."

I made it through the day with all my papers, my turkey, my spiced nuts, and two new "Twilight" books in tact. Good thing, cause my attempt to yoga breathe and practice non-attachment was definitely not working when I thought I was going to be separated from my papers. "You can print out new copies, baby," said the ever-rational MR. Then he proceeded to steal the Feinman and Fine one about cancer treatment with low carb diets. I noted that we were very cute, sitting together reading our scientific papers. He's got a new Spindler that I'm planning to grab when he's not looking. It's only fair.

Anyhow, we're back, and I just found a Feinman article that I think is my favorite so far. I love to watch people calmly and politely slice apart the opposition, leaving them bleeding on the floor, all the while coming off as witty and dignified.

As all the List-girls will observe, I am nothing if not consistent.

Posted by april at 7:13 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

CR-Friendly Canadian Holiday!

Well, we are finally home... after nightmarish air travel that has convinced me to boycott air travel for as long as possible. Trains are lovely. I adore trains. Some of my best friends met their spouses on trains.

The week long whirlwind of parties and family dinners began with a party at the home of MoMR and SFoMR. (That's Mother of MR and Step-Father of MR.) MoMR created a very CR-friendly appetizer feast, the menu for which she sent us in advance:

HOT

Roasted Spicy Lime Shrimp Skewers (on Salton hot tray)

WARM /COLD

Cendre de Lune Cheese on Apricot Halves (on silver charger)
Elizabeth’s Mango Guacamole with Sliced Cucumbers (2 – on glass plates)
Veggie Tray with Mango Salsa Dip (on large glass plate)
Smoked Salmon, Wasabi Mayo & Green Onion on Cucumber Slices (on silver charger)
Goat Cheese, Caramelized Onion & Pear on Jicama Slices (on silver charger)

Spiced Nuts (in Margarita glasses)

SWEETS

Tiny Chocolate Mousse Shooters (in tiny glasses)
Coffee

The chocolate mousse shooters were made with whipped eggwhites, so they were much lower calorie than you would think. I don't think that the guests realized that the food they were eating was pretty healthy... they just enjoyed the delicious bites! By substituting cucumbers and other veggies for crackers and bread, MoMR drastically reduced the calories and the carbs in traditional party dishes.

We have made a tradition now of eating my CR-friendly pasta-less lasagna as our lunch on Christmas Day. We do our big Christmas dinner, complete with turkey, Jack Daniels sweet potatoes (cut with pumpkin), cranberry sauce (my homemade, sweetened with Spelnda, no sugar) and mashed cauliflower (MR makes the best mashed cauliflower on earth, and has now added scallions to the recipe at my request, which makes it even better.) MoMR made her traditional stuffing, and I loved it, so I had that for dessert, along with a tiny bite of Emily's CR'd crustless pumpkin pie.

I saved up my calories for the Christmas Eve festival of high calorie foods at MR's Uncle Jack's house. I mentioned to a friend that Jack likes to feed us as though he's going to kill us and eat us the next day (though I have been reading those vampire books!) and I've never been the kind of person to religiously stick to my diet absolutely no matter what. So I just compensate elsewhere... that day I think I had a cup of eggwhites a teaspoon of flax oil, and two pieces of cheese.

On Boxing Day, which is a real holiday in Canada, MoMR made an amazing dinner of steelhead trout, which I'd never had before. Here's the recipe:

Salmon/Steelhead with Avocado Salsa

Serves 2.

1, 180 gm salmon or steelhead fillet

1, 120 gm salmon or steelhead fillet

Rub for Salmon:

In a small bowl, mix together:

½ tsp salt

1 tsp ground coriander

1 tsp cumin

1 tsp paprika

1 tsp onion powder

1 tsp pepper

1 TBsp olive oil (1/2 TBsp would be enough)

Smear evenly over the fillets and let rest for ½ hour or longer.

Avocado Salsa:

In a small bowl, mix together:

1 small, ripe avocado, diced or thinly sliced

2 TBsp red onion, minced

½ small jalapeno pepper, minced

juice of ½ a lime

1.5 tsp mnced cilantro

few shakes of salt

Grill or panfry fish fillet for about 5 minutes, skin side down. Turn over and cook for another couple of minutes. Remove skin.

Place on plates, distribute avocado mixture on top.

That was probably my favorite meal of the trip. It can also be made with salmon.

Dessert that day was a bit of a fiasco. MR had wanted to try chayote fruit, which apparently are a big favorite of the low carb people because they are much lower carb than apples but *allegedly* have a similar taste and texture. So MoMR bought a bunch of these, and MR convinced her to let me make my apple bake with the chayote.

I tasted it. Ick! I do not like it. I don't want to discourage any of you from trying it... MR quite liked it and MoMR liked my final dessert very much, but it was not to my taste.

And I was in charge of making dessert for eight, including two children, and only one of these participants was on CR.

MoMR said to use equal parts apple. So far so good.

She was out at the store picking up more stuff for us (we go through a lot of food and diet sodas) and SFMR was hanging out with me and Maxine, their dog.

"I don't think that even I can save this fruit," I said to SFMR. We decided that I would phone MoMR and get her opinion.

She really wanted me to try to make something with it (she had after all bought six of the things) and MR really wanted me to try to make something out of it, so I said I would.

The thought of making a dish for eight that would be, to my mind, inedible, was causing me considerable stress.

Then she said I could use the butter in the fridge.

That changed everything. Butter! I hadn't cooked with butter in at least six years, maybe longer. I made MR's dish separately... no butter for him, to be sure, but the rest I made like I used to make apple pie: butter, splenda, vanilla extract, cinnamon, cloves, and...

"Frank," I said to SFMR as he read on the couch with Maxine, "Can I have a shot of your Grand Marnier for the dessert, and a shot for me too?"

"Absolutely," said the good man, and poured us both lovely little shot glasses full. The dessert got about a quarter cup, all of the alcohol having plenty of time to cook off before being served to children.

The Grand Marnier helped the dessert, and it definitely helped to calm my nerves, which by that point needed calming. As is often the case, SFMR saved the day.

In the end, the dessert turned out okay, and I think people liked it, though they may have been lying.

We had a wonderful time with MR's family. It's nice that they're so supportive of CR... not all CR practitioners are so lucky.

Now it's back to "real life" and I have to get ready for work!

Posted by april at 4:06 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 26, 2009

Fiery

I used to love to tell the story of how Aubrey de Grey taught me how to spell "commitment." Seriously, for years, I had this bizarre mental block on that word. Then five years or so ago when I was working on a press release for the Mprize, I misspelled the word, and Aubrey corrected it. (Aubrey, in addition to the other things he does extremely well, is an excellent proofreader.) For some reason, that time the lesson stuck, and I have spelled commitment correctly ever since.

I had a rather amusing experience this morning that reminded me of that. I was working on an email to RDF, a sorta mega-message suggesting organizing strategies for the low carb movement. I attempted to use the word "fiery," but I kept misspelling it, and so it came up wrong in my spell check. Having already bragged to RDF about what a great proofreader I am, I couldn't very well send him a message with a misspelled word, so I did the trick of putting the spelling I thought it was ("firey," if you must know) into Google, and sure enough, it comes up with the proper spelling. Did you mean "fiery?" it asks? Yes, yes I did. Thank you Google. How did we function before Google? How did we even pick out our shoes before Google?

Then it occurred to me: albeit indirectly, RDF just taught me how to spell fiery.

Anyone who has read this blog for awhile can reflect upon the amusing nature of the fact that someone else just taught *me* how to spell fiery.

Ever since I got that sweet email from Agnes (thank you so much Agnes!) I've been reflecting on the life-changing nature of nutrition and health information. I'd often wondered, especially in the dark days of media attacks, if keeping this blog was a good idea. Putting myself out there to be attacked and called everything from anorexic to obsessive compulsive to too fat (none of which, anyone who knows me can attest, I am) often seemed like a stupid idea. At times the attacks distracted me from more important things in my life, like my work and friends and cleaning the house. Yet the ongoing support from wonderful readers kept me going.

Still, I wondered if the blog was really just a pointless exercise in self-indulgence. I started it in the beginning because my friends and family were so sick of hearing me talk about CR that I knew I had to find someone who was actually interested to listen to me. I remember the time VLC threatened to throw herself out of a moving car on the PA Turnpike if she heard the name MR one more time. Had a rather amusing scene a couple of weeks ago when Susie said something similar... "I'm really mad about the reporting of evidence on dietary trials too, but can we talk about something else?"

So the blog has kept my friends from throwing themselves or me out of moving vehicles, but talking for nearly six years about diet, nutrition, health, etc... what's the point?

As any of you who've been around since 2006 know, I went through a period of being very excited about advocating for a healthier food environment. Those entries were so full of hope and plans, but gradually I got so beaten down by the nasty articles and mean comments and occasional death threat that I just gave up. Let the world go to hell in a bread basket (complete with bagels, muffins, and cookies) for all I care... and I'm sick of being a role model.

Those were dark times.

Sad too, because the media stuff really did help a lot of people. And ever since I was in my early twenties, surrounded by huge stacks of nutrition books, I've wanted to turn some of my activist instincts to the public health problem of obesity. I'd always been so tough as a union organizer, able to withstand all the attacks that come with that line of work, and huge downloads of anger and frustration from workers who have been oppressed their entire lives and can't kick their boss but can yell at their organizer. No problem, that. Thickest skin of them all, and it's a large part of my job to teach toughness to the young ones.

But all that media stuff really was devastating, and like Rick moving to Casablanca, I said goodbye to all that.

The revolution is in your own body, I've said many times, thinking about how you don't have to wait for scientists to figure out the pill or politicians to approve the funding or your co-workers to get their heads out of the... uh... sand, to lose weight and improve your health. There's something wonderfully individual about diet. We all have different resources, and too many people don't have enough, but diet is something we can control a lot more than we can control most things in life.

Yet at the same time as diet is individual, the obesity epidemic is a profoundly collective problem. None of us are immune to the food environment. (Well, maybe MR, but as Robin points out, he is very likely a robot.) And few of us are immune to the conflicting messages we get on what's healthy. I read evidence better than most, and there's a whole lot that I'm learning now that I had no idea about when I started my CR journey.

When I've wondered if the blog was a pointless exercise, or worse, just bait for the sharks who write columns for mainstream media and are looking for someone to pick on, I've always come back to the fact the blog has helped at least a few people get control of their weight and be healthier. My own mother-in-grace (that's what those of us who don't believe in marriage call the parent of our partner) has lost 50 pounds, and kept it off. That's a pretty stunning result, but even those who have just made a few key discoveries or even just had fun watching me screw up make it worth it.

I'm glad I've been honest about my struggles, because I don't think it helps to pretend to be super-human (unless one is, in fact, a robot.) And it gives you some perspective with which to evaluate how I'm doing now that I'm on a different plan. I was struggling for a long time, and now I'm not. Now it's a lot easier. Low-ish carb, high-ish (mostly unsaturated) fat = shiny hair, healthy skin, and I'm losing weight again. I won't lose much... there's not that much there to begin with, and I want to preserve the yoga muscle, but it's working!!! And if CR can add a few years of life and health to my time on the planet, then this could be the difference between life and death.

The revolution working in my own body makes me want to share the good news. And the ever-fiery RDF woke up that piece of me that wants to actually *do* something about the obesity epidemic. So convinced was I that I was going to just meditate on my yoga island and organize my nurses and forget all that public health stuff that I almost skipped the morning session on the second day of the CR Conference to go take a yoga class. But after the first day of the Conference, I knew there was no way I was going to skip out on the biochemist from Brooklyn's presentation. (For the record, which this is, I did practice yoga in my hotel room that morning.) And sure enough, within a week, I'm trying low carb, and within a month, I'm back to waking up in the middle of the night coming up with strategies to help people meaningfully change their behavior.

"Welcome back to the fight. This time I know our side will win."

Or as Christina says in the song that I think should be the national anthem of all 35 year old girls:

Next day I'm your super girl, out to save the world
And it keeps gettin' better!

-- Christina Aguliera, "Keeps Gettin' Better"

Posted by april at 6:22 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

December 23, 2009

Re-invention

Last week I received the sweetest email from a reader, Agnes. We exchanged a few messages, and then she said,

Well the very interesting fact about your blog is that it’s always reinventing. It’s like Madonna! It’s not like a book where once published, revisions are impossible. It’s ever changing with good reason and constant experiment. This is the beauty of your blog, and the gift that what you write about you live about.

Now, to someone who was a kid in the eighties, probably one of the best compliments you can receive is that you are in any way like Madonna. It's true... she is constantly re-inventing herself. The most dangerous people are those who, in the face of new information, refuse to change their behavior.

RDF (that's Dr. Richard David Feinman, for those of you who just joined us or have just crawled out from under a bloggie rock beneath which you had been hiding since I met him at the CR Conference a month ago) has me thinking that most of the supposed health organizations in the country are among these dangerous people. The low fat experiment has clearly failed, and whether you want to say it's because people didn't actually do a low enough fat diet (which I don't believe, but it's an argument I am familiar with because when I was an evangelical fat-hating high carb nutbar I spouted it frequently) or because low fat diets don't work and make people crazy, it seems obvious that the near universal endorsement on the part of public health authorities of the low fat diet has not improved the obesity epidemic.

When I look back at my own life, it makes so much sense. (Well, the macronutrient thing makes sense. I guess my life in general does have this sort of "I could have seen that coming a mile away but I didn't" logic to it too, but anyhow...) I tried so, so hard to be a good girl. I counted my fat grams. I avoided all oil like poison. I remember getting into a fight with one of my best friends in college because he wanted to put a drop of olive oil in the collard greens. In my twenties, I dated a vegan lawyer for two years, a relationship that didn't work out but was largely held together by the fact that we were both vegans in a very anti-vegan world. However, he was a high fat vegan. Tofu, oil, nuts, avocadoes... in what I thought at the time were huge amounts, but I realize now were really quite reasonable servings of fat for someone who isn't a lipophobe. Unfortunately, the rest of my diet was extremely, extraordinarily carbs, and I was gaining weight (even bagels with mustard, tomato and onion will do that.) But I blamed the boyfriend... I remember screaming at him, "You're feeding me so much fat and it's making me fat!" Now, this man deserved to be blamed for a great many things, but it wasn't the teaspoon of olive oil in the pasta that was to blame for my weight gain: it was the pasta.

Back when I was trying to stay on a low fat diet, I had to absolutely fight to get my weight down to 115: now it seems it never goes above that, even on a moderate fat diet. Every time I drop my carbs and up my fat (I've been less careful in the last week or so due to the holidays, but the effect is instant as soon as I get careful again. I adore the mechanistic nature of the universe.) I lose weight without really trying. I'm just not as hungry. I don't have that gnawing feeling that I used to have all too often, even when not really on CR.

I just finished reading a book called Diabesity by Dr. Francine Kaufman, former president of the American Diabetes Association who practices medicine in LA. It is a beautiful book, filled with compelling anecdotes from her practice, truly heart-wrenching, often heart-warming, often tragic stories of people whose lives were torn apart or even ended by diabetes. I was loving the book, and thinking that there were a lot of things that one could learn from the way it's presented that would be applicable to a popular nutrition book. Then as I neared the end, I came upon a chapter where she talked about a kid going on a low carb diet and getting sick. Of course the kid hadn't done the diet correctly, and Kaufman did point that out. But I thought to myself, "Do we really have to interrupt this excellent book to trash the Atkins diet?" The kid was taking her mother's diuretic and vomiting before bed on top of doing a low carb diet. "Cami's experience by itself can't be taken as an indictment of low carbohydrate diets," Kaufman writes. HUH??? Cami's experience indicates to me that one should not take diuretics and vomit! Talk about confounding factors!

Then she goes on to cite the 2003 study in which U Penn researchers followed people on a low fat and low carb diet, and the low carb dieters lost more weight initially, but after a year the results were the same. I don't have the paper in front of me -- it's on my desk at home, I had a lot of others to carry! -- so *please* correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that the reporting of this study's result is a classic example of the problem with how medical studies in general are reported. The variables of who stayed on the diet and what results they achieved are not separated from each other, so when you read the press releases, the data include numbers from those who *did not even complete the protocol!* Can you believe that? So you're trying to decide what kind of diet to go on, and in making your decision, you're considering how much weight those who didn't even stay on the diet lost, but you don't know that... you think you're reading the results from people who actually stayed on the diet!

The rationale for reporting results this way is that it's just as important that people stay on a diet as how much they lose on any particular regimen, so it makes sense to keep the numbers of those who didn't even stick to it in the final results. In this paper, RDF + Dr. Eugene Fine and Dr. Jeff Volek make a compelling common-sense argument for a better way to report results, and I don't want to diverge too far from the topic at hand to describe that, but I strongly encourage you to read that paper, and this one about the original problem of how results are reported, for yourself.

I will review Dr. Kaufman's book in more detail later, because I think it is a very valuable, important work. If I hadn't liked it so much, I might not have been as frustrated when she started to recycle tired old platitudes about a low-fat diet and how people can't stick to overly restrictive fad diets (in the context of talking about low carb) because they begin to crave the foods that are off limits. While I am all too familiar with the phenomenon of wanting that which one can not, just at present, have, I note that this logic is not applied to low fat diets, which I and many others have found to cause extreme sugar and carb cravings that are completely knocked out by a higher fat diet.

"... a combination of a low-fat, low calorie diet and physical activity. Not rocket science, not magic, just the plain and simple truth," Kaufman writes, discussing the methods by which those participating in the National Weight Control Registry had kept off at least 30 pounds for over 5 years. She notes that their average weight loss was 66 pounds, and I find myself wondering, "What happened to the other 36 pounds?" And why are there only 4000 people participating? Can we conclude that a low fat diet is the plain and simple truth when it comes to weight loss on the basis of this? What about all those people trying to lose weight on a low fat diet who either can't stick to the diet in the first place or can't maintain it?

The beauty of Kaufman's book is that she eloquently describes the real human costs of diabetes. It is a page-turner. I ate it in two sittings (I mean that metaphorically... I didn't pick up where my paper-eating cat left off when she died, I assure you.) Speaking from her own experience as a physician, she paints a horrifying picture of the future of our country and indeed the world if the twin epidemics of obesity and diabetes are not beaten back.

In later chapters, she talks about public health approaches, especially in public schools, to changing the food environment in ways that will make it easier for youth to stay healthy. This part of the book echoes Kelly Brownell, one of my favorite writers on the topic of the toxic food environment (sad story: one of the lowest moments in the story of how I got beaten up for doing CR media: not once, but twice, blog entries appeared on the website of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, Brownell's organization. Only when I said I was going to write directly to Brownell about the absurdity of an organization that advocates for a healthy food environment trashing the delicious meal I made for New York Magazine, and publicly accusing me of having an eating disorder without ever even contacting me for comment, did they offer to let a CR person put up an opposing viewpoint. Yes, I'm still mad. Here is my reply to the first nasty article. Though the reply, I think, sounds calm and rational, I assure you, I cried a lot over these two, mostly because they were coming from an organization headed up by someone I respect so much. Perhaps, in retrospect, these experiences were good to toughen me up for the fight that lies ahead?)

Anyhow, Kaufman tells great stories of getting sodas out of schools and getting med students to abandon their Krispy Kreme. But her book leaves me asking if there might be an easier, more long term effective diet than the low fat diet she refers to. I can only speak from personal experience and that which I've read, but if we can all hold hands and agree that excess carbs are a major culprit, (perhaps *the* major culprit, but while we're all holding hands and agreeing, we're not going to say *the*) then wouldn't it make sense that a diet that cuts down on craving for these foods is likely to be more effective than one that in fact exacerbates these cravings?

RDF and JV (that's Jeff Volek, not junior varsity. This is a blog about diet and nutrition, remember, not about the cheerleading squad. However, I think we can all hold hands and agree that if there were to be a cheerleading squad, I would be its captain.) put forward compelling information on how replacing carbohydrate with just about anything but cyanide improves Metabolic Syndrome. Don't take my word for it, read this.

So how did we get from Madonna to Diabesity to the junior varsity cheerleading squad (at 35, I really am way too old to be a cheerleader, but since I went to an arts school where we didn't have sports, I have always wondered if I may have missed my calling. There's just not enough cheering in yoga. Chanting, yes, but not cheering. And something about reading the low carb boys' papers, of which I am carrying around several, makes me occasionally want to jump up and down. Not an instinct I'd advise you to act on on an international flight, but that's a story for another day.) to the current crisis in public health? And where are we going with it?

Agnes says that I am able to re-invent myself, and indeed, I am re-inventing my own diet and also the recommendations I make to my readers. The passion for the fight to end the obesity epidemic and all the horrible health conditions that come with it is running strong again, after a few years of despair as we were attacked for the public display of thinness when we did CR media. The most dangerous people in the world are those who learn new information, but refuse to change. I have no problem with changing my mind, as long as with every iteration, I am getting closer and closer to right.

It remains that I am an organizer, not a scientist. I don't consider a scientific paper read until I've read it six times. I am learning some biochemistry now, which is incredibly useful if you're going to spend a lot of your time and effort on nutrition, but my talents will always be in applying the results that the scientists discover. I know how to move people, one on one and in groups. I never thought that CR was something that masses of people should adopt, and as much as I love what it does for me, I never wanted to organize around it. I wanted to and tried to organize around the SENS work that Aubrey and Michael are doing, because I do believe in it and yet I could never work up the visceral passion for biotech that nutrition ignites in me. There's something about what you can do right here, right now, in your own body, without waiting for the scientists to discover the formula or the drug company to manufacture the pill, that just flips my switches. I do believe that low fat has been a failure, and there's an alchemy of high fat and high protein (we'll argue later about saturated fat, today we're all holding hands around the bottle of olive oil and getting along) that destroys hunger and makes for an odd ineffable sense of satisfaction that no amount of bagels with mustard, tomato and onion or fat free Light Chips ever did.

Part of being alive, I think, is being able to re-invent yourself as often as necessary. This is true not just for rock stars but for the rest of us. Clinging to old beliefs when they no longer fit is just as demoralizing as wearing a size 8 suit when you're really a size 2. Or 0. There's a new person in there, waiting to get out, if you'd just let yourself believe that something different is possible.

From Shawn Colvin, "Whole New You," one of the best songs ever about re-invention:

Shake the lonliness and shine the light
Take all your tears and save them for a rainy night
Go and wish on every star that's fallen
Shake your head in wonder when it's all too good to be true.
Like a whole new you.

Posted by april at 10:49 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

December 18, 2009

Cranberry Tangerine Relish with Jack Daniels

This is a gift for one of my co-workers who loved the cranberry relish at the holiday party for our Temple bargaining committee:

1 bag cranberries
about an eighth of a bag frozen berries
the juice of one large tangerine
ginger powder
sweetener -- I used neotame, but you could easily use Splenda
just a cap full of Jack Daniels
lots of cinnamon

boil it all together in just enough water to cover the berries until the cranberries have all popped, then allow to chill as it congeals. It's a tough balance with the water... too much might need to be drained off.

I love homemade gifts that aren't the super sweet put us all into sugar induced comas that a lot of folks make at holiday time. A couple of years ago I made everyone spicy nut mixes, but too busy this year. Maybe next.

Posted by april at 7:15 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 17, 2009

The Woman Who Mistook Her Partner's Megamuffin for a Bag of Pumpkin Seeds

"Hi baby. I don't mean to be a pest," said the familiar voice on the voice mail, "But have you seen my megamuffin? It was on the kitchen counter and now it's gone."

Oh no. It was 12:49. MR eats lunch at 12:30, sharp.

I knew instantly what had happened. I had mistaken the well tied up bag that in fact enclosed megamuffin for the bag he had made me of my new pumpkin seeds. It was now in my fridge at work. I had no pumpkin seeds, he had no muffin.

I called. He had just zapped up another frozen muffin and was moving happily along with his life. Everything was fine.

"I just don't see very well," I said, explaining how I could possibly have mistaken a megamuffin for a bag of pumpkin seeds.

Might be time to get new glasses.

Posted by april at 7:03 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 16, 2009

Praise to Pumpkin Seeds!

Under the New Deal (the agreement that I will eat fat, that is) I escaped the dreaded evil hemp oil and MR figured out that I would probably eat pumpkin seeds. Historically I have liked them, and I love the seeds from spaghetti squash. Sunflower seeds would also be a good source of Omega 6's, slightly better, in fact, but I don't like them as well.

So MR ordered me some unsalted, unroasted, raw (because he says that fats peroxidize if you cook them so no roasted nuts for me) pumpkin seeds online (he buys often from a company called "Nuts Online," which I used to always say should be the alternate name for the CR Society... I say that lovingly, maybe it was a 2005 thing and you had to be there.) They arrived yesterday, and this morning I decided to try them. I'll be out most of the day: Pilates, grocery shopping, end of Christmas shopping (all before 9:15 am) and then a leaflet/protest (my job is not as glamorous, usually, as I thought it would be when I was a student activist, but it is entertaining at times that our job is often to disrupt things... we're really easy to get along with for employers who are willing to settle a good contract that rewards good nurses and allows them to advocate for their patients... but anyway) so I wanted to get my Omega 6s in early.

I could tell MR was dreading the possibility of another Omega 6 rejection. Happy that I was going to try them, but hoping that the disaster of Yuck Oil would not be repeated (I wonder if the Yuck Oil lobbying group will try to sue me for disparagement. Defense against libel is it's true!)

I tried 10 grams. I loved them. They are so little and cute and green. Omega 6 success. Crisis, however narrowly, averted.

So my fat sources now:

flax oil (2 teaspoons)
pumpkin seeds (raw, unsalted) 10 g at least
30 g almonds per day
the olive oil I'm about to get as a Christmas present from a co-worker
occasionally olives or avocados
whatever fat happens to be in the small amounts of meat I've eaten... RF warns against supermarket meat, and while the meat I cook at home is overwhelmingly free range organic, heaven only knows what they have out, which is where I tend to consume the most meat.

The most shocking is the effect on my hair. More about that later... but the preview is: if you have dry, frizzy hair, you will want to increase the fat in your diet. I liked my hair pretty well before... now it's like out of control glossy and curly.

Makes me miss Hazel, who used to say, "CR: for a shiny coat!"

Posted by april at 4:09 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Cause I Feel Like Such An Insomniac

I can't sleep.

Surprise! This blog may not have been possible without my insomnia. I get up in the middle of the night and write.

But it's actually getting a bit bad. Monday night I went to bed at a normal or slightly late hour for me, just before ten, and woke up at 2. Couldn't sleep, wrote for a little while, went back to bed for an hour (didn't really sleep) then had to get up and be on the road by 5:30 am to get to 7:30 am meetings in a distant location, was in meetings till 5 pm, then drove home two hours. Was exhausted of course, went to bed at about 9:45, and started waking up at 1:16 am. Went back to sleep until about quarter till 4, and now it's really my wake up time anyhow so I'm up, contemplating insomnia, biochemistry, and how to finish the Christmas shopping.

It's actually a very good pattern for me to be up at 4 because more days than not, I take the 6 am train to yoga, and on days when I don't, it's because I have an early meeting for work that I usually have to leave somewhere before 7 to get to. It's amazing how much I get done before 9 am... but I really, really need to be able to sleep through the night.

I take low dose melatonin every night before bed, and that used to work quite well, for years. I'm not eating a lot before bedtime... usually I don't eat much after 7, and I eat a light dinner anyhow, as lunch is my biggest meal of the day most of the time. I'm not watching disturbing TV (we don't even have a TV!) or thinking scary thoughts before bed. And it's not like I'm up worrying about something: in fact, when I do wake up, most of the time I wake up feeling extremely cheerful. Just not sleepy. In fact, I sometimes wake up with an entire blog entry in my head, and I want to run downstairs and write it down. The other day I woke up with a short story in fully finished form in my head.

Susie thinks I should look into sleeping medication, even if I only took it occasionally when I really needed to get a good night's sleep, but I'm terrified to take drugs. MR wouldn't let me anyhow... he won't even let me eat eggs!

To clarify: I have no trouble *falling* asleep at night. If anything, that's what I'm best at. It's *staying* asleep that is extremely problematic.

Suggestions are welcome.

Posted by april at 2:09 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

December 12, 2009

Because My Dreams Are Bursting At the Seams

I hereby command all of my readers to download and listen to "Fireflies" by Owl City. It is a) the insomniac's national anthem b) really profound beyond the pop-ish sound it has c) really great and poppy without being techno.

I was working on the next entry, in which I mention long time reader Shelia, and she commented on the previous entry! It reminded me of how wonderful online friends are, and how grateful I am to all my bloggie readers, even those I've never heard from.

So here is my request: if you're reading, whether you've been reading for a long, short, or medium time, write me a comment just to let me know you're there. I've missed you, even though I don't know you, when I've had my long absences, and you've kept me going through all the media hell, the difficulty staying on program, the social stress, everything.

Now that we're in this new era of CR + CR happiness, help me celebrate by coming out of the woodwork!

Writing a blog is something that one does, in large part, because one's own dreams are bursting at the seems. Regular life can not contain the imagination, so it has to be written down. And sharing it with someone(s) who care about the same subject is so much more life-affirming than just writing to oneself.

Thank you so much to all, both old and new, who have shared in the journey.

Something tells me the best, by far, is yet to come.

Cause I'd get a thousand hugs
From ten thousand lightening bugs
As they tried to teach me how to dance...

I'd like to make myself believe that planet earth turns slowly
It's hard to say that I'd rather be awake when I'm asleep
Cause everything is never what it seems...

Posted by april at 4:26 PM | Comments (38) | TrackBack

Psychoactive Pierogies!

On Friday, Edward suggested that we go for lunch at our favorite sushi place, and I agreed. However, for the first time, I was going to order sashimi rather than my typical sushi. Now I know that for years readers have been urging me to eat sashimi (Shelia from Nor Cal, who miraculously commented on the previous entry while I was first writing this!) but I'd found fairly accurate readings on calories in my favorite sushi creations (Philadelphia roll and smoked salmon roll) so that's what I'd eat, and count the calories towards my daily goal.

This time I ordered the sashimi, and wow!!! It was amazing. A chef's tasting of 10 pieces of whatever was freshest for the day... I don't even know what it was. It hit the spot so well that I wasn't hungry for dinner. Then I wasn't hungry for breakfast. That huge hit of protein and fat with no carbs was so powerful that I was far, far into CR + CR induced euphoria. I could tell I was high. I went Christmas shopping, and wasn't even annoyed that the guy at the place where I was buying a lovely present for my dad couldn't seem to get the computer system to work so it took 30 minutes to make a purchase that should have taken 2. I was listening to Cascada's "Evacuate the Dancefloor" on continuous repeat, something I only suggest one do in a state of CR induced euphoria, and reflecting upon the fact that I haven't felt like this in years... the weight loss phase of CR, where something about the burning off of fat makes you high... this is your brain on CR.

Carbohydrate restriction both intensifies the effect and brings it on quicker. It took a few weeks on CR for the first euphoric effects to kick in, the first time. Just one day on carb restriction and I'm sailing. If I sound a little overly cheerful in the blog, be sure to register that a) I'd been in despair of ever being able to stick to human Calorie Restriction with my yoga and other practices before meeting Richard Feinman, and after being sad for so long, it is more revolutionary than ever to be happy b) I am probably brain chemically speaking high. That's how powerful the weight loss phase is. Try it and you may like it.

So this morning I tore myself away from the most recent article draft that RF sent me to do the Christmas shopping and get my nails done. Yes, I get my nails done. The woman who usually does my nails wasn't working so I went to the other place, the one that is notoriously slow but today they were unusually slow. They are like my friend Josh who would not stop revising his senior essay so he graduated from Yale some years late because he took that long to turn it in. They do a great job, but they are such perfectionists that they take a very long time.

So I got a pedicure. That was great. I texted back and forth with a buddy about his love life and my infatuation with a low carb diet, and we renewed our pact to do hardcore low carb, low calorie, in the New Year.

Then I moved on to getting my nails done. And the sweet nail tech asked me if I like sushi, which of course I do, so I told the truth and said that I do.

So she served me up a bowl of six pieces of homemade crab and avocado sushi.

With rice.

Now far be it for me to offend the nail techs. These lovely women do an amazing job on nails, and they're so sweet... it would break their hearts if I didn't eat the food they so lovingly offered. So I started to eat the sushi, and sure enough, it was incredibly good. Problem was, it was very high carb, with all that rice, and very little protein and fat, comparatively, and I was on an empty stomach, not having eaten since the sashimi fest the day before at lunch.

Major buzz kill. If I was high as a kite on low cal, low carb, there was nothing like six pieces of rice heavy sushi to bring me down.

Meanwhile, they have the local radio station playing all Christmas music going in the salon.

I hate Christmas music. I think it should be classified in international law as a form of torture.

So there I am, on the second hour of my nail service, beginning to realize that I will need a radically extended lifespan to make up for the time I'm wasting getting my nails done, with Christmas music (and really horrible Christmas music) blaring in the background, and I'd forgotten to pack my scientific papers, so I had nothing to read but an extensive account of Tiger Woods' affairs (which I assure you, I find of no interest whatsoever) in the tabloid magazines they had at the salon.

And the carb is bringing me down from my low carb low cal buzz and I'm starting to feel a bit anxious and I'm really annoyed at the woman who went to the tabloids with the story of her affair with Tiger and I'm late for lunch at home and my nails are not done!

All of this, I reflect, I could have handled with equanimity had I still been buzzing on my low carb, low cal psychoactive diet. But the rice hit was plenty to bring me back to earth with a bump.

The psychoactive effects of diet have always intrigued me. I know that both sugar and coffee give me anxiety attacks... I don't even like to walk through the candy aisle at the grocery store. I know that hardcore CR produces a Zen-like state of calm, and I know that the weight loss phase of CR produces a high, which is intensified by combining it with Carbohydrate Restriction. CR squared, if you will, because the effect is more exponential than cumulative.

A few days earlier, at the cheese covered in dough fest of a bargaining committee holiday dinner, I had eaten a few of the pierogies (one of those planned excursions from the diet, not a slip) and I noticed the come-down immediately. It was awful. I'm glad I never tried real drugs... withdrawl from my own diet-induced brain chemical high is bad enough. Just a few psychoactive pierogies is all it takes.

It's Sunday now and I'm happily back on CR-squared. The sushi seems to have lost its effect, and after a delicious dinner of cauliflower mash + yogurt + flax oil (note: no more hemp!) and the fancy eggwhite scramble with veggies that MR makes me every Sunday for Sunday breakfast, I'm buzzing again. I'm so chipper I may even vacuum the floors.

Let me be clear: I am not on a ketogenic diet. I'm still consuming enough carbs between veggies, yogurt, and wine to blow any ketogenic effects, which you would expect would cause a mental high (it does, I've tried it.) It's just that Carb Restriction intensifies the effects of CR-induced euphoria.

So if I sound so cheerful as to be irksome, I beg your indulgence. This only lasts during the weight loss phase, and I don't plan to lose more than ten or so pounds (not far to go this time to get to the bottom, and I don't want to get to my lowest-ever weight because that would of necessity involve losing the muscle I've worked so hard to build.) so you'll probably only have to deal with CR-induced euphoria for a few months.

Unless, of course, the psychoactive effects of carb restriction never end...

Posted by april at 12:58 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Mr. Yuck is Mean. Mr. Yuck is Green.

Do you remember those commercials from the eighties, about how you're not supposed to eat anything with the Mr. Yuck green label, cause it's poison? And if you do, you should have mom or dad call poison control?

Yeah, well.

One of my readers was asking about the unfortunate case of having more Omega 3s than Omega 6s, and what one might do about it.

Until recently, I had this problem myself. My diet was so low fat that on a lot of days, the only real fat I got was my daily dose of flax oil, which is very rich in Omega 3s. MR was very worried about this, and so he sought a source of Omega 6's to add to my diet. But because he was convinced (and rightly so, before I met RF) that I would not add more fat to my diet, even under threat of sad face, he searched for a source of Omega 6s that would also have enough Omega 3s to balance out one of my doses of flax so that I would iso-fat-caloric manage to balance the two.

So he bought Hemp Oil. Apparently it has both Omega 3 and 6, in such a dose that he wanted me to take one tsp flax oil per day and one tsp hemp oil per day.

Problem is: I love flax oil. And I really, really hate hemp oil.

I hate it so much that I refused to put it on food, and would only shoot it after a meal. And wash it down with a lot of diet soda. Ugh. I really, really hate it. Not as much as I hated the chia seeds he tried to feed me (and I can't help but feel sorry that my actions had somehow deprived the world of another chia-pet, but anyhow) but for someone whose main credo re: food is: I don't eat anything I don't like, this was not a pleasant exercise.

It's not like MR enjoyed torturing me. "You remember that I love you and the only reason I'm asking you to take your hemp oil is because I'm worried about your omega 3 and 6 balance," he said, and kissed me, as though that would somehow make it taste better.

"Can I eat eggs? RF thinks I should eat eggs," I say, blatantly playing for time.

"They're really bad for you, baby," he says, and puts the hemp oil on the table. Ugh. It stares at me throughout the lunch, which was otherwise quite enjoyable -- a couple of days ago MR had surprised me by making my favorite Thai green curry, and I was eating the second half of it.

Over the course of the meal, we discuss this problem. I really hate hemp oil. I do not want to eat it. I do not, however, want something terrible to happen to me as a result of having an Omega 3 and 6 imbalance.

As it turns out, the value of hemp oil is that it has Omega 3s too, so if I am willing to commit to eating a source of Omega 6 (he's upstairs looking for one now, I mean on the computer, not in the linen closet or something) and keep up my two doses of the beloved flax oil, I can get rid of the hemp!

The extreme success I've had with this higher fat, lower carb diet has encouraged MR to the point where he believes I can commit to all of this fat and not flake out (I almost wrote "flax out!") and skip some of my essential fat sources. "I've been telling you this for years," he said, as I mentioned this morning that I really am much more satisfied on a low carb, high protein and fat diet. "Yeah, well, I'd stopped listening."

You would think that it would be a bit frustrating for MR that he's been telling me to cut carbs and up fat for years, and the message had fallen on little deaf ears until I met the bad boy biochemist from Brooklyn. (This is obviously a reference to the revolutionary nature of his scientific work: to the former Priestess of the High Carb Darkness, low carb/high fat is definitely the other side of the tracks, and I can assure you, it really is much more fun over here!!!) But MR isn't the sort to argue with results, and has ample time to admire the results. I'm re-engaged with CR, losing weight, feeling amazing, and still making great eggplant dishes.

So I've been liberated from the yucky green hemp oil, which to my mind tastes about as good as chewing on a rope.

Ha! Bye bye Mr. Yuck!

Posted by april at 11:46 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

December 11, 2009

Oil

Oil used to be something I thought about every 3,000 miles. If you don't deal with it, I was told, the car will eventually blow up.

I don't think I owned a bottle of oil of any sort at any point in my twenties. No, that's not true. At the age of 21, living in the apartment I shared with my college roommate, we had olive oil. That was before I discovered the low-fat dogma, back when we ate whatever we wanted regardless of the consequences. We used to take turns cooking dinner, and one of our staples was angelhair pasta with a fresh tomato basil sauce with garlic and olive oil.

Those were also the days when we hosted giant dessert parties, and made dozens and dozens of cookies from scratch, pies, and cakes. Our signature pie was a tart cranberry apricot pie with a homemade crust that a friend nicknamed SamberryAprilcot pie (my roommates name was Samantha.) It had frangelico and a whole lot of powdered sugar. But I digress.

Flash forward to the summer after I graduated from college. Waiting to be placed on my organizing internship, I crashed at my mother's little apartment in South Bend, Indiana, where without a car or any money, there was really nothing to do other than read pop nutrition books and take long walks with my walkman (or as my father, jokingly I assure you, used to call it: walkperson.) Like everyone, I had gained weight in college, and like everyone, I wanted to lose it.

I started with the complete works of Susan Powter, from which I learned to count fat grams, and for quite some time I attempted to limit them to under 6. Seriously.

From Powter I ended up at Robbins, McDougall, and finally Ornish. That was when the fascination really kicked in: I was interested in the science. I read Reversing Heart Disease so many times that I assure you I can still recite large portions of it from memory. (I can also still recite large portions of Green Eggs and Ham, another book that gives questionable nutrition advice, because I did a stage combat scene using that as the text when I was a theatre major at a performing arts high school. Silly talent for memorization, served me well in school, is great for memorizing huge lists of workers and knowing exactly how each one is going to vote, also fun to quote people's writing back to them verbatim.)

Lose weight I did: you don't go from eating pasta and throwing dessert parties and going out for French fries at 10 pm nearly every night to an ultra low fat diet, eating tons of veggies (in addition to beans and rice) and walking hours every day without losing weight. I was thrilled with my results, and after finding out that my internship was delayed till late September, I went back to New Haven to what was, prior to the job I have now, my favorite job ever: testing the ethernet system that had just been planted at Yale. Hours a day of walking up and down the stairs in the old buildings, testing that the fancy new system would work.

My friends were all impressed with my weight loss, but I wanted more, and kept thinking that if I could get my fat grams down further and eliminate indescretions with things like pizza and fries, I'd lose more.

Fast forward to my early twenties, living in a little apartment and working as an organizer. Here's a typical day:

breakfast: (I kid you not):
spinach pasta in vegetable broth

lunch:
if in office: vegan potluck. all were assigned to bring either: starch, bean dish, fruit, vegetables. The rules: all vegan, fat free.

if on road: Subway veggie sandwich, no oil no mayo no olives, or a bagel with mustard, tomato and onion. seriously. no cream cheese for the lowfat vegan!

dinner:
usually late at night, after returning from a long day at work and then hitting the gym. I lifted in those days, and my personal trainer tried to get me to eat some protein, but I was vegan and low fat, so all I would eat was beans (which as we know now aren't that high in protein, per calorie.) So I'd go home and eat about half a can of beans, a pint of grape tomatoes, maybe a box of frozen spinach. Then I'd crawl into bed with one of my nutrition books... I checked out probably hundreds from the public library... and I'd read till I fell asleep. It's still my favorite way to fall asleep, though during early CR I graduated to scientific papers, which though more difficult to understand for those of us who lack formal science education, are much lighter when you fall asleep and they fall on you.

Over this time period, I would frequently "slip," and eat French fries, or vegan sushi with avocado instead of cucumber, or a greasy sandwich with grilled veggies on bread, but I considered those slips, not an ideological shift, and I beat myself up for them. Why was it so hard to stay on the lowfat bandwagon? I attributed it to a lack of moral character on my part at the time.

I had terrible dry skin, and my hair was frizzy in winter. During early CR when I dramatically increased my protein and started to eat flax oil, my hairstylist told me that the quality of my hair was much improved, and that whenever her clients went on diets (invariably low fat) their hair would go bad: frizzy, dry, and much quicker to split at the ends.) Flax oil cured my dry skin.

Eventually I abandoned the vegan bandwagon and replaced my low fat breakfast with the Dunkin Donuts bagel that was so much the culprit in my weight gain/signs of aging crisis that caused me to start CR six years ago. But even as I increased my fat, a voice in the back of my head reiterated McDougall's credo: "All oil is poison!"

I did, I assure you, continue to change the oil in my car every 3000 miles.

More soon on the evolving consciousness re: fat, but the computer clearly doesn't want me to finish this entry and keeps locking up and deleting text. I have to finish some real work before my 8:30 am Pilates class, so the rest will have to wait.

-- Recovering from fat phobia in Philly

Posted by april at 4:17 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

December 10, 2009

You Say You Hunger For Something You Can't Think Of

Here's how it goes:

So you didn't eat breakfast, but you haven't eaten breakfast since you started losing weight again, and now it's lunch time and your co-workers want to go out. No problem: you go out and order your typical salad with grilled chicken, no dressing, just plain vinegar (NO OIL!) on the side. The meal goes just fine, but at the end, your best friend who doesn't even like French fries has left a whole mountain of them on his plate, and passes them to you, knowing that you love fries. Even though this is what we call in labor circles and Unfair Lunch Practice (ULP), for some reason the fries just seem to jump into your mouth. Not all of the mountain, but enough to throw you off your calorie goals for the day.

Or: You've had your healthy lunch, 100 g kale, 1 cup nonfat yogurt (40% of the RDA of calcium) and 10 g almonds (a big step for the recovering lipophobe.) All seems well. Then at 3 pm an almost uncontrollable craving for sugar hits, and the Swedish Fish that a co-workers insists on leaving in the common area in the office start to call out to you... you abandon all reason and eat the fish, rationalizing that you know the calorie count so can balance them off later in the day. But sure enough, a couple of hours later you're even hungrier than usual for dinner.

Here is what I've learned since I started increasing my fat and carefully avoiding any unnecessary carbs: the absence of fat in my diet makes me hungry. 30 grams of almonds in a little baggie, eaten fairly early in the day (around lunch time), plus a high protein breakfast with some fat but no carbs at all, is like insurance against food cravings of any kind. I can eat much, much less, and still feel full, energetic, and satisfied.

Great! Lesson learned! So why did it take this long to figure that out? I've known for years that I should add some more fat to my diet, yet psychologically, I resisted. Why?

I think it's because if you're a child of the eighties, there are three things of which you are irrationally terrified:

-- Drugs (this is your brain on drugs. Thank you Nancy Reagan.)
-- AIDS
-- FAT!

Yes, right up there with drugs and AIDS is the demonized fat.

And here's how the thought process goes:

"I don't really need to eat fat, I can save those calories, so I'll just skip it, no one will notice if I seem to keep misplacing my almonds, they can just sit here in the work fridge, and I'll save 100 calories that way."

Then, bang, after work, the gang wants to go out for happy hour, and they order a hummus plate, and sure enough smashed chick peas and pita are irresistible.

I am fascinated to discover that it's actually the very absence of fat that seems to make me hungry, especially for high carb foods. When I get enough fat, I just don't want the bread or hummus or Swedish Fish.

This is doubly true when I'm very physically active. Yoga muscles, it seems, prefer to be fed protein and fat. And you don't argue with yoga muscles.

Off to pack for another low carb day!

Posted by april at 3:15 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 8, 2009

Workers Rescued from Public Health Disaster by Biochemistry Professor!

Tonight is the cheese wrapped in pasta fest, aka the Temple bargaining committee holiday dinner. We're bringing our own desserts for the "sweet table," and I had planned to make a fruit salad, but then I found out that the staff rep who sent out the email about the dinner had neglected to mention that it was a bring your own sweets event, so I was feeling guilty that people would be unhappy without baked sweet junk that I don't eat anyway, and I was going to, somewhat reluctantly, make cookies.

I ran up to the store to buy ingredients... was just going to make them from a mix, got over that whole baking-from-scratch thing back in college. So I was reading the mixes and discovered that they would require eggs and butter.

Here is how long I have been on a low saturated fat diet: I had to enlist the help of a store employee *to locate* the butter aisle.

Butter located... I knew MR wouldn't let me keep it, but I figured I could find a good home for the other three sticks in the box after I had made the cookies. MR had just sent off a mega-message to RF about saturated fat (for the record, RF asked MR's opinion... MR wasn't just looking to start a fight.) and remains quite convinced that it is very, very bad.

Then I found the eggs, and spent a moment missing my single girl days when I used to eat hard boiled eggs and thought they were good for me. And had an entire Hello Kitty bathroom: carpets, towels, alarm clock, toothbrush, soap dish, everything. I changed the decor style a bit when MR moved in... as Martha Stewart I think it is said, "We can not house our men in fluffy pink palaces!"

Now I have very dignified blue towels, and no hard boiled eggs. On balance, I suppose, this is an improvement. He's fine with the Hello Kitty pillow cases.

[Funny little Hello Kitty diversion: when I finally sent my now infamous message to MR putting my cards on the table, I wound up to the final punch line by saying something to the effect of, "Unless you're secretly married, or gay and in love with Aubrey de Grey, or you really, really hate Hello Kitty," as the only conditions under which it would be acceptable for us to be "just friends." I thought the Hello Kitty thing was priceless. If you're going to say something really, really serious and life-changing, you may as well have a sense of humor about it. Needless to say, he was not married or gay (as I had intuited from seeing his horrible green placemats in the Discovery Channel piece) and we all lived happily ever after. Well, in so far as one can live happily without hard boiled eggs.]

But back to the Giant supermarket, December 2009.

Having acquired both butter and eggs, I went back to where I had left my cart next to the cookie mixes. I was just reaching for the sugar cookie mix when my blackberry buzzed its "You have new mail!" buzz.

It was a message from RF... nothing substantial, just writing to both me and MR saying that he had to do some things but would get back to us asap. In addition to the MR mega-message, I'd sent him a long and winding message outlining my theory of classist bias against low carb diets, and a bunch more questions. Relieved to read that he hadn't run into a group of low fat nutcases with baseball bats in a dark alley in Brooklyn, I put my blackberry back in my bag and was about to reach for the cookie mix and...

I couldn't do it.

I just couldn't manage it. The entire world may be intent upon poisoning these fifty wonderful union members with sugar, but I won't be a party to it.

Believe me, I am sufficiently reflective to be amused by the Martin Luther-esque nature of the moment. "Here I stand, I can not do otherwise, no cookies for you!" Leave it to me to turn an ordinary trip to the grocery store into an epic poem with all the dramatic conflict of Star Wars. Trust me, I know I'm silly, but you'd have to admit, you're both reading and laughing.

I wonder, I think to myself, if the workers might like a cheese plate?

But Edward will be at this dinner, and he would mercilessly make fun of me if I brought cheese. Edward is one of my closest friends and we have been partners in running an organization for over seven years. That makes us as close to being brother and sister as you can be, minus the parts of childhood that we missed out on, like hair pulling, pushing each other down the stairs, and dating his older friends. I would never, ever hear the end of it if I brought cheese as my contribution to the "Sweet Table" at the bargaining committee dinner.

And MR would be really freaked out if I brought a whole bunch of cheese into the house. Didn't I just read the mega-post? I can not stand sad-face from MR: that face that means, I recognize and respect your right as an adult to poison yourself with saturated fat, but I'm going to be so sad when you die a miserable death way younger than you had to and leave me all alone...

Yeah, not worth it. And unless RF can convert MR, I'm staying low on saturated fat, so I would have just been torturing myself by buying cheese (which I adore) and watching other people enjoy it when I can't.

In the end I decided to make my low calorie cranberry sauce, which is festive, holiday-themed, delicious, and healthy.

There.

I probably won't actually eat it because it's a bit high carb and I'd rather be spending my carbs on other stuff (I just had it at our "Thanksgiving" last Friday night) but it will be a much healthier alternative to sugar cookies for my brave union members.

Crisis, however narrowly, averted.

Posted by april at 12:43 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

December 7, 2009

If You Want To Live Forever, You Probably Want to LIVE!!!

So said a friend of one of my closest friends, and I could not agree more.

Life extension is so much about wanting to LIVE, in all capital letters, no matter what it takes.

For me, it's low carb (that's new and fun!), CR, and yoga. And Pilates. And building a movement of workers prepared to take on the ruling class, and really make a difference in our political economy. For others, really LIVING might mean something else.

But take a moment today to think about what LIVE in capital letters means to you. Are you doing it? If not, why not?

Let's all live in all caps and see what happens!

Posted by april at 5:53 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

December 6, 2009

Date

The best marriage advice I ever got I received from a nurse in Scranton who had been married for forty years. She said, "No matter what, always have a date once a week with your husband. Even if you just go out the garage and make out in the car, always have a date."

I trust that if she and her husband employed the making out in the garage strategy, they did not turn the car on... that would be one way to drastically shorten one's life expectancy.

Since we moved in together five years ago, MR and I have religiously stuck to the concept of having at least one date per week, when we turn off the cell phones (these days my Blackberry) and pay attention to each other. I tend to do my best cooking for these occasions. Many an excellent stuffed eggplant has been created, because if you think the way to a normal man's heart is through his stomach, this is ten times more accurate in the case of one who is calorie-restricted!

The other day we were contemplating setting a date night, and this email exchange transpired (don't worry, it's G-rated!):

April: Yes, let's have a date. I strongly prefer them to figs. Though maybe now that I'm doing this low-carb thing, I should have a nut instead. Oh, wait, I have you! Perfect.

MR:
Well, I AM low-carb ... and I probably have one of the best fatty acid profiles of any meat you're likely to encounter, let alone my amino acid composition ...

Rigorous accuracy may be my undoing ...

Be that as it may, I prefer him as a partner than as a feast.

He's very supportive of my new low carb kick, since I've promised that at least for now I've promised not to eat hard boiled eggs. Even though I really, really want them.

So what am I actually eating? Turkey, chicken, all my normal cruciferous veggies (yay mashed cauliflower!) yogurt (Nancy's organic is to die for, or live for) eggwhites, Laughing Cow Light cheese, 30 g almonds a day, flax oil, olive oil, hemp oil (which is gross but MR says I have to eat because of some sort of imbalance in my Omegas.) olives avocadoes. I'm alarmingly not hungry. It's awesome.

Side note: what is it about this particular era in my life that makes me compelled to overuse the words "amazing" and "awesome?" Seriously, I am a 35 year old woman with a degree from Yale. You'd think I could do a bit better.

What I am not eating: cottage cheese. Too high carb to calcium ratio to make it worth it, except perhaps as an occasional treat.

Any bites of anything off anyone else's plates, which has historically been my undoing. Ever notice that the only thing left on the plate when someone is done eating is carb? Nobody leaves a piece of steak. No, they leave the mashed potatoes. Ah, the seductiveness of the "just one bite" theory. It's like Whole Foods samples: they're so small that you think you're just having one bite. I once added up an approximate calorie total for that day's Whole Foods and Trader Joe's samples, and it was at least 300! That's a big bite!

Light Chips. I'm amazed at how much of those I had gotten into eating. If I don't have time to pack a meal I often end up at Subway, where the Subway Club salad is quite respectable. But I'd gone from eating a bag of Light Chips every once in awhile to making it a regular event. I even bought them a few times at the grocery store. Pointless calories there. RF suggested making chips out of Daikon radishes. That sounds really good to me...

Okay, I've spent a great deal of time this weekend writing, now it's time to go to the gym.

Working on an entry right now re: fat phobia. Stay tuned!

Posted by april at 6:35 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 5, 2009

I guess it's half timing, and the other half's luck

I'm not surprised
Not everything lasts
I've broken my heart so many times I've stopped keeping track
Talk myself in, talk myself out
I get all worked up then I let myself down
I tried so very hard not to lose it
I came up with a million excuses
I thought I'd thought of every possibility...

-- Michael Buble, "Haven't Met You Yet"*

"Haven't Met You Yet" (from which all the lyrics quoted in italics in this post are taken) is by far Michael Buble's best song. It's got all the cheery dancey-ness of his remake of "Save the Last Dance," while simultaneously including some seemingly genuine longing. Of course it's over-produced, but that comes with the pop territory. If you can take a break from the cynicism that is so in fashion in this decade (I guess something had to replace Calvin Klein minimalism) give it a listen. The video is really cute too.

For all of us who have ever struggled with the entire food issue (which is all of us, right?) do those lyrics resonate or what? I remember before I started CR nearly six years ago, I had tried almost everything. I had beaten myself up over putting olives on my Subway veggie sandwich cause OMG they have fat!!! McDougall says that if we can avoid all sources of fat, we'll lose a lot of weight! Flash back to 1997, on the road near Charlotte, North Carolina, on a housevisit campaign, but a really bad one, meaning twelve hours a day (I am not exaggerating) of knocking on doors of workers who worked at this giant textile plant, mostly getting the door slammed in my face. Very hardcore on the lowfat bandwagon, I would stop for "dinner" at a Chinese takeout place and order just white rice. Nothing on it. Or at a Subway and have a veggie sub with no cheese, no olives, no oil, no mayo. I was hungry all the time. And I did lose the extra weight I had put on in college, but I never came even near my CR weights.

The only thing that ever worked for me was counting calories. I love to count things! Any real organizers out there will identify: being able to count is key to winning union elections. And you have to be honest with your count: is that really a yes vote, or are you telling yourself lies? An observation I've had consistently over six years of CR practice is that those of us who actually weigh and measure our food report higher calorie levels at lower body weights than those who don't. Go figure. It's cause we are really counting, not just engaging in wishful thinking. If you've ever stood in the room where the Labor Board agent counts the votes at a union election and won by a few or lost by a few, you know the value of counting.

Yet somewhere I lost the habit of counting everything... mostly during those two years when I was on the road at least half the week in Scranton, hanging out with my co-workers who are definitely not CR practitioners. And with the introduction of yoga, which has been so amazingly healing and strengthening for both my mind and body, came the introduction of something totally new in my CR practice: muscle! Yikes! You have to feed that stuff! So I started to eat more, and ended up on the low end of "healthy" weight for my height, etc. But getting back on real CR... how many entries have we read about the challenges thereof?

Until I met Richard Feinman at the CR Conference and started seriously looking into low carb diets. Now it seems easy. Lost a pound already. Looking to lose not more than one pound per week, and will probably stop at 105. So eight to ten weeks and I'll be there? Here is how confident I am that this will work: I am systematically gathering the items in my closet that look best when I have a bit more curve on me, and wearing them *now* since I know they look silly when I am ten pounds thinner. Most people actually think I look better at the weight I'm at now, but I attribute that to the yoga muscle. If I can hold on to most of the muscle while losing fat, I think I'll look just as good at a lower weight. And even if I don't, who cares? I already have my life partner, who thought I was beautiful at 99 and all the way up to 115... no need to impress anyone else. And it's not like MR can complain that anyone else is too skinny!

"When the student is ready, the teacher appears," is an oft quoted little aphorism, and I would like to know who said it. I thought of it a great deal when I met Jonathan, my amazing, child prodigy yoga teacher. Jonathan is only 30, yet he seems to have the wisdom of someone twice his age when he's in the yoga studio. Working with him healed the horrible tailbone injury that had given me pain, at times excruciating, for over a year. My yoga has taken a huge step forward in the two months I've studied with Jonathan, and now I am practicing at home while Jonathan is on retreat in Mexico... I miss Jonathan something terrible, but I do find that my home practice is taking off. I have a confidence I never had before, and the muscles are pretty awesome. Since I started studying with Jonathan, I feel like I'm practicing yoga for the first time. I love vinyasa,and got great benefits from the practice, but never the kind of quieting of the mind that I experience in practice now.

Fact is, though, if I had taken Jonathan's class a year or two ago, I would have been bored. I wouldn't have understood the magic being done there. I needed the dance-y flows as an introduction to yoga, so that I could recognize the real thing when I finally met it. Within an hour of meeting Jonathan, I knew he was my teacher. I've followed him all over the city of Philadelphia to take class since then, and it's working. I can't even describe the improvement in every area of my life since I started studying with Jonathan... and MR definitely approves of the physical benefits!

I was puzzling yesterday morning re: the miraculous appearance of two such amazing teachers in my life within just two months. I guess I was really, really ready. When I look back at the previous CR conferences, I find myself wondering if Feinman's message would have resonated with me as much as it did this time. I don't think it would have. At the first conference, I was already eating a high protein diet and managing to get a bit of fat in, but was still a refugee from the low fat nineties, and frankly was way too focused on seducing MR and dragging him back to my country to pay close attention to what any of the scientists had to say. I honestly have no idea what the presentations were at that conference, other than MR's. When a woman is 30 and has her sights set on a particular man, whom she wants to be her life partner, she is not easily distracted by scientific presentations, however brilliant and insightful.

At the second conference, I was very interested in the scientific presentations, and really enjoyed them. The third may have been the best from that perspective though. Even though David and Robert invited all anti-CR scientists, I really loved their talks. Dr. Steven Austad was my favorite, with his tales of catching wild mice. But still, I wasn't at a point where I would have heard the low carb message. I was frustrated with my own CR practice, but I still thought I knew everything. (Check earlier blog entries if you have any doubt of that!) Social life and going out made CR difficult, but it wasn't until I discovered yoga that I really found hunger to be an issue. Nearly two years into yoga and with probably 7 pounds or more of muscle put on, it was hard to keep to CR calorie levels while consuming any extra carbs. Of course, I didn't know that. I was starting to think it was an unsolvable problem. Was I just going to have to live with either a) hunger or b) disappointment, aging, death, and sad-face from MR?

I thought I'd thought of every possibility...

I definitely liked Feinman when I attended the press conference the first day of the CR Conference. Having been beaten up in the media quite a bit myself, and a labor organizer in the 1990's - now, I am familiar with being on the wrong side of the authorities, But it wasn't until the second day when he gave his entire presentation about the effects of low carb diets that I started to think, "This guy might be onto something." Could you use a lower carb diet for CR? Sure, why not? I mean, how hard can it be?

So I did some research. How low is low? FYI, I'm not doing a ketogenic diet, unless I misunderstand the term. I've been holding steady at about 100 - 130 g carb per day. Aiming to go lower, gradually, but the fact is, it's already working. Apparently, carbs make me hungry. I am just a lot less hungry when I avoid them, especially early in the day. Later in the day it seems to be less of an issue. And the things that cause me to "slip" on my diet are all carbs. French fries off someone else's plate, bread at a restaurant, a Lean Cuisine with pasta... sure enough, all of these make me much hungrier later in the day, and add unnecessary calories. Just getting rid of them could account for the pound loss.

Last night we had my mother over for a belated Thanksgiving dinner (we spent the actual holiday with my dad) and we made our traditional Thanksgiving low-cal feast: sugar-free ginger cranberry relish, Jack Daniels sweet potatoes with lots of pumpkin mixed in to lower the calories, mashed cauliflower, and while we usually have turkey, this time Mom picked up a free range organic chicken, which we had with MR's homemade mushroom gravy. I found that I didn't even want the sweet-ish (though sugar free, sweetened with pure sucralose) side dishes. After a couple of bites, I put them back, and just ate chicken and mashed cauliflower with flax oil.

More revolutionary, really, than the weight loss or the lack of hunger, is that I'm having fun again. Maybe she's just looking for something to count... I really enjoy reading carb counts on labels. It's the only thing I've never counted! I've counted fat grams, protein grams, calories, calcium, B vitamins, everything... but never carbs. And reading and studying something new... it's been way too long since I was excited about being a human experiment.

If you look back at my two entries before the CR Conference, you'll find that they were very sad. Some hope there, to be sure, but a lot of resignation.

The resignation has now resigned. Yes, I can do hardcore CR. And do yoga. And have a social life. And not go insane with hunger and eat the neighbors. (With as often as I refer to the possibility of eating the neighbors, you'd think it was a very dangerous proposition to live near me!)

Maybe I had to go through the resignation phase to get to the point where my ears were open to hear the low carb message. (Is "resignation" the phase before "induction?") The former Priestess of the High Carb Darkness couldn't process the low carb message until every other alternative had been exhausted.

I might have to wait
I'll never give up
I guess one half's timing
And the other half's luck.
Wherever you are
Whenever it's right
You'll come out of nowhere and into my life.

To be clear: just plain counting calories and eating a healthy diet worked just fine for me to maintain a low-normal-healthy weight. But I'm looking to do real CR, in hopes of slowing aging. That's what was hard to impossible, before I met RF. (You know you've hit the big leagues in this blog when you are referred to by your initials.)

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that the despair and resignation phase was an essential prerequisite to the low carb phase. By the time I showed up at the Conference, I was paying attention.

Listening to Luigi's results on how well the CR people are doing on every possible marker of health, followed by RF's presentation on low carb... I am tempted to believe in angels, because that line up was the perfect thing to flip my switches. It took a few days for the epiphany to fully dawn, but when it did, it seemed obvious.

I'd have to say, I don't miss despair and resignation one bit.

Nor do I miss the Light Chips.

And I promise you, kid, that I'll give so much more than I get.

I just hadn't met you yet.

Posted by april at 5:44 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 3, 2009

Free Feinman!

So said the subject line in my email inbox.

"Why?" I thought, "Is he in jail?"

When you're a leftist activist with a history of being involved in civil disobedience, the phrase "Free (insert name here)!" usually indicates that someone has been wrongfully imprisoned. I knew that low carb diets weren't exactly welcomed with warm and loving arms by the NIH and the medical establishment, but seriously, they arrested him? What kind of country do we live in? Next thing you know, they'll be arresting people for making puppets! Wait, that already happened... 2000 Republican National Convention in Philly, 420 people jailed on little to no cause, including about 100 who were arrested making puppets in a warehouse. So I guess anything is possible. But still...

One of my commenters asked for links to Feinman papers. MR showed me how to download a bunch of stuff for free, hence the subject line of the email that I briefly misinterpreted.

Here's what you do:

1. Go to PubMed (which is the first step in almost any process for MR.)
2. In the search window type exactly this: "Feinman RD"[Author]
3. Hit Search.
4. You'll get a whole list going back to 1973.
5. Click on one and you'll get an abstract.
6. Go to the bottom of the screen and click on "Link Out"
7. Click on Full Text Sources
8. Click on one of the full text sources and see if it has the entire article for free. Not all of them do but a lot do.

You should also check this out: Nutrition and Metabolism.

Hours of entertainment for the entire family! Well, if you're me and MR, that is. The other night our dinner turned into an impromptu biology lesson as I asked MR to explain various things I don't understand. He's so convenient that way. I'm not sure if your family would enjoy chatting about such things at the dinner table.

Off to do a leaflet at Temple... they're not arresting us for that... yet.

Posted by april at 1:17 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Spontaneous Reduction in Appetite

I had always heard, as recently as last week, that on low carb diets people just eat less, all on their own, due to reduction in appetite. Well, now I believe it.

I'm not going to tell you exactly how little I had eaten in the last two days because really, I should know better. Suffice it to say, on the under side of 1000. But I honestly haven't been as hungry as usual, nowhere near it. I'll be hungry for a meal, but then get halfway through it and not want the rest, or I'll order a Subway Club salad and not eat the entire thing, and not be hungry again until the next meal or later.

Weird.

Tuesday night, while riding home from a work event fairly late, I noticed that I was feeling the onset of CR-induced euphoria. Ah, I remember it well, the calm, happy, slightly giddy feeling that we all get during the weight loss phase. At the extremes, it can be an almost religious experience. At the minor end, it's very similar to having a crush on a rockstar. Either way, I recognized it, and was amazed that it had hit so quickly.

The next day (yesterday) was spent entirely in CR-induced euphoria, on the low end of the spectrum (no sightings of God or anything) but a very happy little buzzing along feeling. Sorta like how one feels after one glass of wine, but without any impairment whatsoever. Actually, I find it improves my mental focus.

So... I finally got a good night's sleep (work had kept me out past my bedtime the night before) and I woke up feeling great. Got in the shower, and thought: two days of counting carbs and I'm already in the middle stages of euphoria... wow, they should market this stuff! (Wait, that's been done. Well, you know what I mean.)

Shortly after that thought, as I was rinsing the Dove green tea and cucumber soap off, I thought to myself: "I don't just feel happy... I feel lightheaded."

As I was drying off, I thought to myself, "I have to lie down."

I quickly pieced together what had happened, since this used to happen to me in early CR before I had the sense to control it. I had eaten way too little for two days, and was starting to feel it. Now really, I should know better. I was counting all those calories as well as carbs, and I know how much I have to eat to support a healthy pace of weight loss and not faint.

Oh, I'd been to the gym too.

Yeah. AprilCR, you have no excuse for this sort of thing, says the sensible side of me.

"But I just wasn't hungry!" whines the unsensible side of me.

Well, the spontaneous reduction in appetite thing really works for me. Good to know.

Before I went to lie down, I yelled down the stairs and asked MR to please put two cups of eggwhites in the microwave. Then I went back to bed for an hour.

Now I've eaten a cup and a half of eggwhites, a teaspoon of flax oil, and ten grams of almonds. And a Coke Zero. I feel fine. Better than fine, I feel great.

MR wonders if I might have been in a brief hypoglycemic crisis. I'm not sure, but I'm definitely not going to allow myself to go below 1000 calories again.

I thought about eating a little carb along with my protein/fat breakfast, but decided to save that for my veggies at lunch. I have a turkey and brussel sprout soup waiting for me at work that I made yesterday, and I'll probably also have my cup of yogurt with dinner, and some more veggies, so that will be plenty of carb, and along with the increased number of almonds I'm eating, I will get enough calories.

I can't believe that after two years of struggling with CR, I'm struggling to eat enough. Of course, I know how to fix that problem. Add fat! I'm making myself guacamole! And buying Trader Joe's Australian Olive Oil! MR is going to be so happy... as long as I stay away from bacon and whole eggs and steak.

Oh, and Sara -- I haven't eliminated my nightly glass of red wine. I'm not doing Atkins, and there's a lot of disagreement out there on if wine is metabolized as pure carb. I asked RF but haven't heard back on that one... he answered a ton of my other questions, though, including about whether or not to do the extreme carb restriction (not necessary for people without much weight to lose... good news!)

Seriously, I feel like I've run across some sort of miracle. I'm eating plenty of veggies, still eating my yogurt, not increasing my saturated fat at all, and yet I'm just not hungry. And CR-induced euphoria is back! Or is it carb-restriction induced euphoria? I'll have to check the low carb forums to see what other people's experience is. At least they have the same initials!

Okay, off to work... fun day today of hanging out with Team Temple!

Posted by april at 7:03 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

December 1, 2009

Guess Who's Back With A Brand New Track?

That's a line from my current favorite song, Cascada's "Evacuate the Dance Floor." My taste in music is nothing if not eclectic.

Is it just me, or has anyone noticed that the blog has a new life to it? I was re-reading old entries from the last two years, and while some are very happy, so many are sad. Sad about not sticking well to hardcore CR, despondent about finding a balance between yoga muscle growth and low calories. Now I'm full of energy, and to me, the blog reads like the old blog: excitement and curiosity and well-worn printouts of scientific papers shoved into my handbag so I can refer to them anytime.

I got home late from work and need to get to bed so I can practice yoga in the morning before work, but a few things:

Dr. Feinman says he eats 60 - 100 grams of carb a day, and doesn't think that a diet as severe as the Atkins induction phase is necessary for someone who doesn't need to lose significant weight. Wow, that's a relief! I can do that! I can still eat my yogurt for calcium, and my veggies, but I'll just avoid all other unnecessary carbs. The focus is already helping me cut calories: I'd slipped into the habit of eating a bag of Light chips (75 calories, fat free) with my Subway Club salad (140 cals, all meat and veggies), but today I skipped out on the chips and saved 75 calories, lost no nutrition, and actually felt less hungry and more focused for the rest of the day.

MR is dead set against me eating any more saturated fat, so I will probably do a high protein, high un-saturated fat version of low carb. Unless RF can give me some ammunition to win the argument about saturated fat with MR... but I doubt it, MR's read it all, and he thinks saturated fat is poison. So I won't be eating whole eggs anytime soon.

However, I am making a stew with turkey breast and brussels sprouts. And this weekend we're doing a belated Thanksgiving with my mom that will yield both turkey and turkey bones for stock! Yum!

It's almost 1 am and I have to go to bed... more on all your questions soon... thanks so much for commenting, and I apologize for the delay in answering you!

Posted by april at 10:18 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack