7ToF: crone-y

1. Everyone knows about dry, chapped lips in the winter, but a few years ago my lips were so unusually dry and cracked that it was painful. After a bit of thought, it occurred to me that a couple of weeks before I had started taking a daily cranberry supplement on the advice of Somebody On The Internet. "UTIs are the cause of all kinds of trouble for older women, take a cranberry supplement to keep them at bay!" 

I stopped taking the cranberry, and my lips were back to normal in a few days. It is actually true that UTIs can be the cause of all kinds of trouble, but apparently a daily cranberry supplement is too much for me. Now I only take cranberry (or drink some cranberry juice) if I feel something coming on.

2. This winter, it happened again, but my painful lips were so painful that it was keeping me awake at night. Believe it or not, it was a couple of weeks before I thought about what supplements I was taking, and realized that the culprit might be an anti-migraine supplement I had spotted at the health food store a month before. 

The supplement had several different herbs/minerals that I had heard were helpful for migraines (ginger, feverfew, etc), so I thought I would try it. I have no idea which ingredient was causing the problem, but once again when I stopped taking the supplement, my lips were better within a couple of days, although it was about ten days before they got back to normal. 

3. Moral of the story: not sure, because I'm not going to stop taking all supplements. A couple of them seem to be helpful. How about this: if I'm going to try something new, be on the lookout for unusual symptoms for a few weeks so it doesn't take so long to figure it out.

4. Switching gears: thirty years ago, I believed that for the most part you were done changing and growing by the time you hit 30. At that age, I had a child, my spouse and I were both working and keeping ourselves afloat, we had even bought our first house--a shabby rancher in a 1970s subdivision. We were fully grown adults, right? But by my 40s I knew that wasn't true-- I was learning new stuff all the time. And now I'm surprised to find out how much I'm still learning in my 60s. It's not a small amount. I'm learning a lot these days. 

5. One of the many new-age teachers I knew back in the 90s when New Age was still a thing (I posted a bunch about this many years ago, here is the most interesting of them) said something that still comes to mind. If you open yourself to growth, you will grow. I hate to use the phrase "setting an intention," but she probably said, if you set an intention to pursue spiritual growth, the resources you need will find you. 

6. I get less and less woo-woo as the years go by, but I have to admit this has been true every time I've tried it. As long as I stay open to growth, the tools and information I need come to hand--in the form of books or newspaper articles or podcasts or even conversations overhead at the post office-- anything. To try it for yourself, just say, maybe even out loud, I'm ready to grow whenever you think of it. I was feeling kind of stuck a few weeks ago and tried it. It's such a relief to find out that I can still grow and change at age 61. 

Make of that what you will. Of course, it could be things that would have happened anyway, and the only change is my level of awareness. Be skeptical if you want, you have my blessing.

7. A few days ago, I was looking for a post I wrote years ago. Instead of finding that one, I ran across a half dozen other posts that said pretty much exactly the same kinds of things I've been thinking about in 2023. Apparently, I can grow and change, but yup-- also I'm still exactly the same. I think it was Karen Armstrong who wrote about growth being a spiral: you keep circling back around to the same issues, but you're in a different place each time you visit them. 

Wow, I wasn't intending to go that direction when I started this. We're headed south for a couple of weeks in search of (we hope) some sun, so I'm not sure if I'll post again until we get back. Have a great weekend and enjoy the rest of January, wherever you are.

7ToF: changing my demographic, headaches, and my favorite Kind bar

The color of spring

1. Years ago, I realized one day that one of my best friends was the same age as my younger sister (i.e., less than two years younger than me). When my sister and I were young, twenty months seemed like a huge difference. But with my adult friends, I never think about age differences. It's always seemed like all women between mid-thirties and some unspecified older age were my peers.

2. But it has been gradually and then suddenly dawning on me that this is no longer the case. Finally at some point last week the whole idea burst into bloom in my head all at once: I'm in a different age bracket now. I think it's been evident to my younger friends for years now-- no, you are waaaay older than me, not just a little bit-- but it was news to me. After the initial shock of realization, I'm totally OK with this. I am embracing my inner crone. I envision rocking on the front porch with friends and a pitcher of vodka tonics and cackling over inappropriate jokes. I think it took me so long to figure this out because I was still a mom with a kid at home until I was 55. That's my excuse, anyway.

As you can imagine, there will be more on this topic in the future. Can this still be a blog about mid-life? Am I a senior citizen now? The AARP has been sending me stuff for years, so they certainly think so.

3. Since I may be offline for a couple of weeks, here is the headache update. I am way better, and same as the last time I tried an elimination diet, there weren't any foods that made a difference. Stretching and working with my neck and shoulders seems to be the key-- which means I need to avoid spending all day hunched over the computer or curled up with a book. DAMMIT. So I've been getting out more and reading less, and reminding myself to get up and stretch, etc etc.

4. Elimination diets are interesting. Since I've never done one unless I was desperate--three weeks of headaches will do that to you--I never do it in an organized enough way. There are so many variables, and unless you can go live in a convent somewhere, it's just impossible to shut everything down. Or at least, it is if you're me and you don't really care about it that much. I ended up going about two and a half weeks with no alcohol, sugar, or artificial sweeteners, and about one and a half weeks with no dairy and no grains (gluten or otherwise). I've slowly been adding stuff back over the past ten days or so, and since at the moment I've only been headache free for five or six days, I don't think it's any of the food items.

5. Over the last few days, I've added back corn-- I waited on that one since I was a little suspicious about it. The worst migraine I've had in a couple of years was after I had tamales for dinner the previous night. But I've had corn every day for the past three days, and I feel great, so I think that's ok. I still haven't had any peanuts or peanut butter, so that's the only thing left to add back in. But I think it's going to be fine.

6. The "no dairy" and "no gluten" evangelists, I think, would say I didn't give it long enough. And yeah, maybe they're right. But I know people who are gluten sensitive or lactose intolerant, and they can tell within hours if they've eaten something they shouldn't have. If that were me, I would totally get on board. It wouldn't take five minutes for me to sign on to that program if it made that big a difference. But if you have to avoid something for weeks, and then three days after you add it back in you still can't tell any difference, I'm not convinced it's a problem. The stretching and the activity level seem to make a much bigger, more noticeable difference for me.

The color of spring #2

7. But there are headaches, and then there's how I feel in general. And doing this did remind me how much better I feel (headaches aside) when I avoid sugar. I feel no need to become a zero sugar person, but I do feel better if I limit sugar, and if you want specifics, at the moment that means that I'm avoiding anything that has more than 6g of sugar, which I somewhat arbitrarily picked because my favorite Kind bar has 6g of sugar. I feel noticeably better when I'm not eating a sugary snack two or three times a day-- and that can happen if I'm not paying attention, because I have a definite sweet tooth.

On an entirely different topic: I've been learning a lot recently, and we've had a couple of significant life changes--like MadMax moving back home after college-- but it's not stuff I'm ready to type about yet. And also, we're headed out to our favorite lake for the holiday weekend, so I'll be out of range for at least a few days. And since I'm supposed to be spending less time at the computer, I thought I'd take advantage of the opportunity to be offline for awhile. So, not sure when I'll be back-- probably soon, I don't seem to be able to stay away-- but I hope you have a great weekend and a good start to your summer.

Things worth reading/listening to:
- This older post about writing and storytelling from Jenny Crusie
- Modern Mrs. Darcy's Summer Reading Guide (you have to sign up with your email address)
- Book rec: Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson (heavy on the profanity but sharply observed)
- Fascinating podcast episode of the week: An interview with Ezra Klein on the Ten Percent Happier podcast, episode #248. Klein dissects our polarization and what can (and can't) be done about it. I'll be thinking about this one for weeks.

7ToF: we're reopening around here

This got long. Save it for when you have time.

1. The governor of Montana has started a three-phase plan for reopening the state, starting with allowing non-essential businesses to reopen, but keeping in place all of the social distancing guidelines, limiting groups to no more than 10, etc. Montana has the lowest incidence of COVID-19 of any state (per population), and most of the cases have been in Bozeman and a senior care facility in Shelby County.

2. Montanans as a group are nothing if not stubbornly opposed to anyone telling them what to do, and some have taken the lack of virus as a sign that the whole thing was just an over-reaction by the liberals who are trying to take control of our country. And, you know what? If we follow the rules of social distancing and cautious public gathering, maybe we will be able to avoid an outbreak long enough for a vaccine to be developed, and they will be able to believe that they were right.

3. Which is a really strange thing about this whole situation (among about a million other strange things). There are all these people, one is tempted to say all these idiots, who in spite of the mounting numbers of cases and deaths, are determined to believe that it's not really a crisis. That this is just another in a long string of examples of liberals over-reacting and getting hysterical about something that's really not a big deal, and that if we'd just treated it like the flu, it would have gone away-- and I wouldn't have lost my job/had to home school my kids/had to cancel my wedding/etc.

As, one is tempted to say, a more reasonable person, you're left in the strange situation of almost wanting things to get bad so that you can prove to these people that see, it really is a real thing. We're not exaggerating. It's like the classic lose-lose situation: either you're right, and hundreds of thousands more people are going to get sick and some of them die (lose); or you're wrong (lose), and those idiots are going to say they were right all along.

4. Anyway. I hate wearing a mask, I hate having anything on my face, and always have. But I'm wearing one, because Dean is one of the faces of our medical community, and I'm trying to be as supportive as I can. Sometimes I forget, but for the most part, when I'm in a building besides our house, I wear a mask. I have a bunch of oversized bandanas that I bought to use as napkins last year when I was trying to cut down on our use of paper products, so usually I wear one of those, quadruple folded. But as it is becoming more apparent that we are going to have to stay masked at least in certain situations for a long time, I finally got on Etsy and ordered half a dozen homemade masks. Yet another time I've wished I could sew.

5. I don't think I've talked all that much about my never-ending sickness, which I've had for a couple of months now. There is a fair amount of evidence that it's not COVID-- I'm pretty sure I did tell you about Mel's negative test when she went back to work after spring break, and it hasn't behaved like COVID seems to behave. But still, once antibody testing becomes widespread enough that I can justify getting tested, I am looking forward to finding out.

What I'm getting around to here is that I have had a lot more headaches than usual. In a good month, I have maybe 10-12 headache days, and about half of them will be bad enough to take migraine drugs. But recently, I've just had a headache all the time. I've had to not take migraine drugs, because I'm worried about running out. In the past month, I had maybe three or four days of feeling healthy and headache-free.

6. So I've finally decided I have to do something to make a change. And the only thing I can really try right now is changing the food I eat. I'm somewhat skeptical about this. Believe me, I tried all the things back when I was having a similar headache-intensive stretch in my 40s. I tried dairy-free, gluten-free, sugar-free, caffeine-free. Sugar and caffeine made a difference, although not a huge one--my headaches decreased in frequency, but were not "cured." Dairy and gluten made no difference at all.

7. But my metabolism has changed. It changed for the first time in my late 40s/early 50s as I was dealing with pre- and post-menopause. And now it seems to be changing again. For example: I've been drinking black tea with unsweetened soymilk first thing in the morning for more than a dozen years now, but more and more often, I come downstairs in the morning and the idea of tea is not appealing. Or coffee, but that's less surprising since my stomach dictated that I quit drinking coffee long ago. I've switched to green tea for the moment, but maybe it's time to get off caffeine again.

ALL THAT LONG RAMBLING MESS was just to tell you that I'm on an elimination diet at the moment. If it was for weight loss, my inner rebel would come out with flags flying and refuse to participate, but since it is to see if I can freaking feel better for a change, I seem to have sucked it up and gotten on board with the plan. I read about Whole30, but the logical inconsistencies in their theories made me nuts (don't get me started), so I just made up my own plan. No alcohol, which is easy because I don't drink much alcohol anyway, no dairy (not too hard since my only dairy is yogurt and cheese), no gluten (harder), and low sugar (which also comes under the heading of "don't get me started" but I'll save that for another post).

Who knows how long I'll be doing it. My initial commitment to myself was to try it for a week and see how I feel and re-evaluate. I'm five days in right now and although I do feel a bit better in terms of energy and general well-being, as I'm sitting here typing this I'm trying to decide whether or not this headache is bad enough to warrant migraine drugs. Ugh.

So in spite of that downer of an ending, other than physically not feeling well, I'm actually doing fine. I seem to have figured out a rhythm for sheltering at home, and my mental status is pretty good. Headaches are status quo for me, so having them isn't necessarily a sign that things are bad.

Have a great weekend. Sorry this got so long. It's about twenty things instead of seven.

dispatch from home

1. We had plenty of time to talk about pandemics last week as we self-quarantined here in our house on our Not-a-Vacation. Here is my Not-an-Expert takeaway. Among the many complex factors involved in pandemics, two of them are the rate of complications/mortality, and the rate of contagion--how easily you can catch the disease as you, say, walk through an airport. AIDS and Ebola had high percentages of complications and mortality, but they were difficult to catch. In fact, it wasn't possible to catch them while walking through an airport.

COVID-19, on the other hand, appears to be pretty contagious, but thankfully has a relatively low rate of complications/mortality. If an otherwise healthy adult comes down with COVID-19, the great risk isn't that you'll die from it--although that is possible, as are complications-- but that you'll pass it on to someone who is not so healthy and thus is at much higher risk. You probably already know this, unless you've been living under a rock. And if you have, good idea! Stay there.

2. Anyway. All of that was to say, we are lucky that we're having this as our massive wake-up call. Because if something comes along that is both highly contagious and also deadly, we're in for it. We can look at COVID-19 like a practice round. Sadly it's a practice round with dire consequences for 2-5% of our population. Be safe, people. Stay home.

3. I knew that. I know that. But it's so hard to take it seriously. I'm not a person who has ever been afraid of viruses, head colds, or the winter crud that everyone around here gets and can't shake for weeks. I keep catching myself thinking, I could just run out and get a few more things. We're almost out of yogurt. I forgot to get hamburger buns. Maybe I should pick up some batteries.  And since there weren't any confirmed COVID-19 cases at our hospital before Friday, I probably did more running around than I should have. Not a lot, but you know, some.

4. Then today I woke up with a dry throat and some muscle aches and now I am panicking. If I have it, it's probably not going to do anything other than make me feel sick for a few days. But if I have it, I've probably had it for 4-5 days before the symptoms showed up, and there was that last-minute running around. What if I am Typhoid Mary? What if our town suddenly turns into a COVID-19 hotspot, and I'm the one responsible for spreading it around?

5. So, yeah, I hope you are rolling your eyes at my ability to make everything all about me. Because if I have it, I almost certainly got it here locally, and that means it's well on its way around our town and couldn't possibly all my fault. But that paranoid fear has been strong enough that I am now committed to staying home. As I probably should have been all along.

6. There will be an easy way to find out if I have it, because we were packed in this house like sardines last week on our Not-a-Vacation, and PellMel was required to be tested today before she could go back to the hospital where she works. She left before there were any warnings against travel within the US and nobody had any idea how quickly things would change. Now they are requiring anyone who has been out of state to be tested before they can return to work. She'll have her results tomorrow, and then we'll know. Because if she's got it, we've all got it. Lemmings in shiny metal boxes and all that. Although we may have done more running around than we should have, we really didn't do much.

In fact, I'll wait to post this until I can tell you her results. (IT WAS NEGATIVE. PHEW.)

7. Back in the first week of March, when there was something dire on the horizon, I did some stocking up--not hoarding, but enough so that we could stay home for 3-4 weeks. I might have bought a 12-pack of toilet paper instead of the usual 9-pack, but that was about as extreme as I got. Of course, I didn't buy any perishables, because we were going on vacation, right?

Then we didn't leave town, and three people with young-person appetites came and stayed with us for a week, and just about all of my carefully stocked food was eaten. (Fortunately, we still have a fair amount of toilet paper. *she says drily*)(ha. did not intend that pun, but it made me smile.)

*shrugs* I'm still glad they came. We're not going to starve, although we may eat some strange meals. So here I am. I've got plenty to keep me busy: our taxes, for starters, which we decided to go ahead and get done even though the deadline has been extended. Hope you are able to stay home, too, and if you have some kind of essential job, thank you for being out there.

7ToF: ding dong the decorations are dead

1. Finally got the Christmas decor put away. It seems like it took 7 or 8 hours divided between last night and today, but that can't be right, can it? No wonder I was dreading it. I do love all my Christmas tchotchkes but that seems a little excessive. If I had to do it again next week, I would do something about it. But by next December I will have forgotten, so I will do it all again. Happily.

2. Do you keep up with food and nutrition news? In the past few years, many of the sacred cows of healthy eating have fallen -- it's OK now to eat eggs, fat is no longer the big demon it once was, and more and more signs are pointing to sugar as the real problem in our diets-- and then did you notice that it's OK to eat full fat dairy products again? (as long as you can handle dairy, I guess. I have several lactose-intolerant friends/family.)

Montanans were never fooled. The dairy industry has been part of the local economy for decades, and long-time locals have never varied from their preference for full fat milk. If we have full fat milk at the food bank, it gets grabbed off the shelf so fast you'd think there were $20 bills inside. I used to think they were uneducated, but turns out they were right.

3. But you know what food advice has never, ever changed? Eat your vegetables. No one has ever come along with a fad diet that said to avoid vegetables. (Have they? given the insanity of the diet industry, maybe they have.) I was raised in the sixties and seventies in Middle America, when veggies were usually soggy and canned, or frozen and then overcooked. I was not a fan. Is there anything more disgusting than canned spinach? What was Popeye thinking? I didn't experience fresh veggies lightly cooked until I was in college. I liked those just fine.

4. But you can only get fresh, in-season veggies a few months of the year in Montana. So I am making a concerted effort to investigate creative ways to use winter vegetables, or frozen out-of-season ones. Maybe I will even try some canned ones. I read an article that with modern canning techniques, less time elapses between harvest and processing canned vegetables than getting them to your grocery store. (I'm still not doing canned spinach, though. I have my limits.)

5. The first try was cabbage. When I was a kid, cabbage was always a soggy, overcooked mess that smelled terrible. I was determined to try it, though, so I found a recipe in Joshua McFadden's Six Seasons cookbook for steamed cabbage. Result: I was so worried about overcooking it that it was still practically raw. The recipe called for coring and quartering the cabbage and then steaming the wedges and drizzling with butter, lemon, and thyme. But it was almost impossible to eat those big chunks (possibly because it was still crunchy-raw). I think I need to give it another try, because the outside leaves that were reasonably cooked tasted pretty good. What doesn't taste good with butter and lemon drizzled over?

6. However. It was also a perfect illustration of the problem with organic produce (at least after it has been shipped three or four states over to Montana). The 3 lb head of organic cabbage was nearly $7. I bought a 2-pound pork roast (hormone- and antibiotic-free and no additives) that was less expensive than the cabbage. It's ridiculous. (The pork roast was also an experiment, I'd never cooked one before. It was OK. We are not big eaters of roasts.) It's not going to break our bank to pay $7 for a head of cabbage, but that puts it out of the reach of many. We're talking about cabbage.

7. Lots going on around here. It always seems a little silly to announce that I'm taking a break, because why don't I just do it without feeling like I need to tell everyone? Plus, I'm not sure how long I'll be offline. Maybe a weekend will be enough. Or maybe I'll post once a week instead of twice. But since I'm in the sort-of habit of posting on Tuesday and Friday, it always feels like I should give you a heads up if I'm going to miss one or two. Or ten. Last time I said I'd be gone at least a month and it only ended up being a couple of weeks (did you notice?).

This week's interesting read: hope vs. cynicism (from 2015)

Have a great weekend.

7ToF: how much of this stuff can I take?

1. I had a bad migraine today (as I'm typing this, it's Thursday), so I'm not sure I'll make it to seven things today. But I'll give it a shot.

2. I've been having a lot more headaches than usual recently, which-- to be honest-- sucks. Plenty of people have worse health problems than I do, so I'm not going to complain too much, but when you have a headache for ten days in a row, it's hard not to get frustrated. And it's hard not to spend entirely too much time trying to figure out why. My usual is 1-2 headaches a week, and just a few months ago, I went nearly three weeks without having any headaches at all, so I know it doesn't have to be like this.

3. So I'm thinking about hormones again. I don't think I have many (any?) male readers right now, so I can be snarky and say I used to think it was unfair that women had to deal with hormonal issues so much. But we've been watching various sporting events recently and there are endless commercials about male hormones and testosterone supplements, so now I'm thinking eventually things even out.

4. I had a rough time with peri-menopause and menopause, including terrible migraines (much worse than now). But things got significantly better when I started using over-the-counter supplements like black cohosh (sold in combination with other herbs as Estroven and Remifemin), Dong Quai (a chinese herb that is supposed to balance female hormones), and a progesterone cream.

5. But you're not supposed to take them forever, so for the past couple of years I've been gradually phasing them out. The cream was the first thing to go. Last spring I stopped taking the dong quai and started cutting the Estroven tablets in half. This fall I switched from Estroven to Remifemin, which seems to me to be a little less potent (ymmv).

6. Now I'm wondering if I need to just stop taking them entirely. As someone who is headache prone, it's hard to tell if my recent increased headaches are because I'm taking too much of something, or not enough. Either way, my body would respond with headaches (I know that from experience). The only way to find out is to stop taking them entirely, but the last time I tried that-- last January-- it turned out to be premature (resulting in--you guessed it-- bad migraines). Maybe I could try every other day? Maybe I should stand on my head and hold my nose and take a quarter of a tablet? I swear that's what it feels like sometimes as I try to figure this stuff out. If you have any advice, please please let me know.

7. This isn't really seven things, obviously. I'm just numbering paragraphs. So let me see if I can think of something entirely different for #7. OK, here is something I haven't told you. We took advantage of one of the many pre-Black Friday sales to get a new TV. Our old one was at least 10 years old, did not support HD, and was pre-smart TV. The new one is not that big compared to what's available, but it's considerably bigger than our old one, and the picture is an order of magnitude better. I like it. So maybe we will spend the weekend watching movies.

There. Made it. Have a great weekend!

7ToF: Will you help him change the world, can you dig it? yes I can

I've been waiting such a long time, for Saturday....
Listen children, all is not lost, all is not lost....

Love that song. Not feeling even slightly apologetic for putting it in your head, too.

1. I'm trying to stop reading on my Kindle. Only temporarily, because I love the thing, and there is nothing better for reading in bed at night. (We've discussed this before.) But I'm not reading the actual books that are sitting on my shelves, and there are a bunch I want to read. I'm so attached to my Kindle that this oddly feels a little scary. (how weird is that?)

2. My waitlist of e-books at our library's website has coincidentally come to a halt-- my next one is Amor Towle's Rules of Civility, which I'm supposed to get in six weeks, and the next half dozen are stacked up after that, so it's a good time to do this instead of rooting around for more kindle books to read.

3. This week's interesting column, from the UK version of Elle: I stopped eating carbs after 2:30, not because I think we should stop eating carbs at all, ever, but because of the discussion toward the end about how everyone processes carbs differently, and we each need to figure out our individual metabolism. I think this gets discussed way less often than it should be-- there is no one healthy way to eat that works for everybody. What looks like a healthy diet for you may not be healthy for me. And what worked for me twenty years ago is not going to work for me today. I guess the key is to pay attention to how my body responds to different things and figure out my own healthy way of eating.

4. Update: you may remember that a couple of months ago, I told you that I was going to try exercising more without dieting to drop the pounds I gained over the winter. I hate to weigh myself, but I thought this was working because my clothes fit again the way they did last summer, and I'm definitely stronger than I was when I started this. But then I had my annual physical this week, and not only had I not lost any weight, I'd actually gained some. I know, I know, muscle weighs more than fat and I can tell myself that the workouts are working and etc etc etc.

5. But at some point, I have to be shocked that I weigh within a few pounds of what I did when I was nine months pregnant with MadMax, and I gained forty pounds during that pregnancy. I am not a skinny person who is obsessing about a couple of extra pounds, I am a dumpy (plump?) 56-year-old who weighs more than 170. I really should not be carrying this much weight. So how can I work on this without a) obsessing about it, or b) beating myself up about it (because I got a thumbs up on everything else in my checkup, including all the bloodwork)(except I'm low on Vitamin D). I guess it goes back to the previous Thing: pay attention, and figure out what works for me.

6. And the most important Thing to remember: I have a basically healthy body that is taking good care of me. I need to continually remind myself of that-- to be gracious and thankful to my physical self for allowing me to be here--rather than to feel that stupid frantic sense of panic that I let myself feel all to easily-- how the hell did I get this heavy?? I'm a whale! I'm a disaster! No, actually, I'm not. On the whole, my body is coping remarkably well with the challenges of menopause.

7. I'm taking a Facebook vacation for the rest of the summer. I took about ten days off recently (partly because of being out of town), and when I went back to it, in ten minutes I was stressed and depressed. I do have my beloved groups there, so I won't be deleting my account or anything drastic, just taking a break.

Also due to my mental summer mode: I may not be posting regularly. Not sure about this yet, but I may ignore the usual Tuesday/Friday schedule, and get back to it after Labor Day. Also, at some point I am going to re-post the "Celebrating mid-life" posts from a couple of years ago (which, in spite of the name, are not always celebrations) so we can get started on that again.

And that's it for me. Hope you have a great weekend.

7ToF: a bunch of updates, belly fat, and bookstagram

1. Declutter update: I didn't get much done this week. My main accomplishment was pulling everything out from underneath our bathroom sink, throwing out a bunch of old lotions and samples of skin care products, and reorganizing it. But since that only took a couple of hours, I can't claim to have had a good decluttering week. Next week I tackle the dreaded under-the-stairs storeroom, though, which has been the big, nasty part of this that I've been working up to all along. I'm saying it here so I'll have to do it.

2. Reading report: Thumbs up for The Dry, a murder mystery set in Australia, Sing Unburied Sing, a story about a black family on the Gulf coast which would be terribly depressing except her writing is so beautiful, I Am I Am I Am, a memoir about the author's surprisingly frequent brushes with death, A Study in Charlotte, a YA novel about Sherlock Holmes' great granddaughter at boarding school with Dr. Watson's great grandson, The Talent Code, non-fiction about the neurology behind skill development (which sounds yawn-y but he has such great stories to go with it that it's a good read).

2a. Thumbs sideways: The read-all-day book from Tuesday's post was The Rules Do Not Apply, by Ariel Levy. It starts out really interesting and entertaining, but the end as she grieves the complete dissolution of her life devolves a bit. It's good but trigger warning for pretty much everything. Don't tackle it unless you're in the mood for some heavy reading.

3. *slight blush* Remember I told you I was trying to figure out an alternative to my nightly use of face wipes? Yeah, well, I decided I didn't care that much. So I don't have an update to report on that. I'm still using face wipes.

4. Several years ago, I wrote a post about post-menopausal weight gain. We all deal with it. (And actually, a lot of men in their fifties are dealing with it, too, so maybe I shouldn't restrict this to women.) I'm really conflicted about this, because on the one hand, out of the dozens of women I know who are older than 50, I only know one woman who hasn't thickened around her middle, so why are we so worried about it? Why don't we just accept it as normal and get on with our day?

5.  And the reason why is because of this week's "Interesting Read": The Dangers of Belly Fat. Apparently gaining weight deep in your abdomen--which can happen without actually registering as overweight on the scale--leads to a host of health problems. Those of you who have been around awhile know how much I hate dieting, and I still do. But eating sensibly and (most importantly) staying active, are really important. Damn it. It's easy to do now in the summer when the weather is nice and we can go for frequent walks, but in the winter this is tough.

6. The short version of #6 and #7: I have a new account on Instagram for bookish pictures, @bookspate, if you're interested.

Long version: Last year I discovered #bookstagram, which is simply a hashtag on Instagram used for pictures of books. It's nerdy and fun. A couple of months ago I posted a few. Then I took an online class about taking better #bookstagram pictures.

And then, as seems to happen with all things on the internet, I discovered #bookstagram is A Thing. It's become so popular that publishers are paying attention and sending out free books to bookstagrammers who have lots of followers. The fun snaps of your #currentread or your favorite books or an organized bookshelf (#shelfie) have turned into professional quality photographs of shiny new collector's editions.

7. And yet still I'm doing it, because figuring out interesting groupings of books and how to take photos of them has turned into the creative project I was looking for a few months back. I know it's nerdy, and since I'm not the world's greatest photographer and I'm taking pictures of books I actually own and in many cases have owned for decades, I'm bucking the gorgeous #bookstagram trend.

But I've decided I don't care. (Keepin' it real on Instagram.) I created a separate account for this, so if you're on instagram and you're interested, it's @bookspate. Like all internet names these days, bookspate isn't the one I wanted, or even the fourteenth one I wanted, it's just what I came up with while endlessly trying to find a username that wasn't already taken. But it fits well enough-- google defines "spate" as "a large number of things or events occurring in quick succession."

And I'm off. Have a great weekend.

7ToF: mid-life aches and pains. Also what I learned from podcasts this week.

I added an email signup over there on the right side so you can type in your email address and receive posts in your inbox as they are published. Thank you for being interested, person-who-asked-for-it!

1. Fair warning: I am bad about editing and re-publishing my posts, so if you sign up, they may show up in your inbox more than once. All I can say is that I'm better about it than I used to be. (Originally this was followed by a long discussion about self-editing and the pros and cons of writing snobbery, but it was way too long so I'm moving it to a later post.)

2. A friend of mine who has young kids looked at me with panic in her eyes when she told me she had read my post about de-cluttering. For the record, the kind of decluttering project I'm doing right now probably wouldn't be possible with kids around--and is way less necessary, anyway. You've only got ten? twelve? years of stuff, not thirty-four. It's an empty nester project. I probably should have said that in the original post. When I had young kids, I was lucky to make a sweep of unwearable clothes and broken toys every year or two. Don't panic.

3. Dean and I were on one of our evening walks this week and the topic of aging came up. You spend your whole life knowing intuitively that you get older every day (and for the first half of your life you're really excited about that!!). We all know from our parents and grandparents and popular culture that getting old involves aching joints, less refreshing sleep, wrinkles, and an endless series of tiny indignities. But still, in spite of knowing this practically from birth, we are both frequently surprised and personally outraged as each new sign of age appears. And then, every time I adjust to the new normal, it gets worse. *grimace emoji* Aging is not for sissies.

4. I have a friend who told me once that Aleve worked as well for her as codeine, so I went out and bought some that day. But you know what? Aleve does nothing for me. And I bought the Costco size bottle. So since I had that big jug of Aleve, I've started taking one Advil and one Aleve when my particular ouch-y spots flare up, instead of my usual one Advil. The combination works better than either one of them alone.

Full disclosure: Dean, the medical professional, says-- with a barely suppressed eye roll-- that's because you're taking two painkillers instead of one.  You be the judge.

5. Also, arnica. May God bless the person who discovered arnica with an unending rain of blessings (seems likely that it was an Indian or a wise woman, since *clears throat* unnamed medical professionals are skeptical). I hesitate to even say this-- because the surest way I know to experience one of the signs of aging is to smugly note to myself that at least I don't have that yet-- but so far my knees are good. *knocks on wood* But when I do something a bit out of my normal level of athletic activity, they ache, and arnica clears it right up. What works for your aches and pains? Am I the only one thinking of trying copper?

6. I Heard It On a Podcast #1: From the 10% Happier Podcast, episode #133 with Catherine Price. Before you figure out how to eliminate the negative side of obsessive phone use, it's a good idea to figure out what positive things you want from your phone. Back in Jan/Feb when I was trying to dial back my phone usage, I spent lots of time figuring out what I could eliminate, but I never did the opposite: what do I want my phone to do for me? This seems worth some time. Texting-- the #1 benefit of my phone. GPS. Information like weather, movie times, business phone numbers and addresses. What else?

7. I Heard It On a Podcast #2: From The One You Feed, episode #224 with Cheri Huber. Everybody gets stuck in a downward sprial of negative thinking occasionally, and it gets worse when we're stressed. I'm the worst person ever. I'm such a failure. We've been endlessly told that the solution is to think positively! But unfortunately that usually means saying things we don't believe: I'm awesome! I'm amazing! I can do this! 

Really what we should be doing is telling ourselves things that are true: I love my family. I have good intentions. I care about the outcome of this situation. Even silly things like I love the color blue. Music makes me happy. Whatever you can tell yourself that you know to be true can break the cycle of negative falsehoods, because --I'll let you in on a secret here-- none of us is really the worst human being ever. 

p.s. Cheri Huber, who must be a genius to have come up with this, actually recommends recording yourself saying the true things so that you can play it back when you're down and hear your own voice telling you true, positive things. I'm not sure I'm quite brave enough, but I'll try it if you'll try it. We all have voice recorders on our phones, I guess.

Have a great weekend.

7ToF: Sugar, Marriage, and the Mystery of Washi Tape

1. I've tried several food crazes over the years, and none of them has made much of a difference in my health. But here is the one thing that does make me feel better: avoiding sugar. Not carbs in general, because in spite of the fact that all the nutrition gurus say that fruit, white flour, etc. are metabolized by your body in exactly the same way as refined sugar, fruit and white flour don't make me feel sick. But if I eat a big piece of cake or a bunch of cookies, I feel awful.

2. Why is it so hard to avoid sugar? People make their special sugar-y treats and their feelings are hurt if you don't have one. Or the entire office breaks out in an orgy of chocolate for Valentine's, and you're not any fun if you refuse. I would be more than happy to just go to the office party and not have any, but people seriously want you to have some treats. They do not feel neutral about this in the same way that you might feel neutral when you know someone avoids gluten or cheese or animal products.

3. Which is not to say that I'm not tempted. I have a terrible sweet tooth. I could eat a whole plate of cookies, and I've done it before. But I pay for it later, and the older I get and the more my metabolism slows down, the worse it gets. I'm working on this--both my own food choices, and dealing with the choices people want to make for me. I need to come up with some snappy, self-deprecating one-liners to sub in for no, I do not want to eat 2,500 calories of candy before lunch today. It's a strange thing about sugar-y treats that sometimes you have to choose between being kind and your own health.

4. Recommended: If you've been married for a long time, track down the Big Boo Cast podcast and listen to episodes 93 and 94. The Big Boo Cast is run by two women writers that I've been listening to off and on for years. It's always fun-- they just sit and gab, and it's like eavesdropping on the next table at a coffee shop. But their discussion about what it's like to be married for a long time is even better than usual-- it's down-to-earth, hilarious, and wise. I've been married way longer than either of them but I couldn't give you any better advice.

5. I've been looking around for awhile now for a craft project of some sort that I could do in the evenings while we watch TV or listen to an audiobook. I am hopelessly Not Crafty, so there is no simple answer to this--anything that requires a glue gun or a complicated three-page pattern is not going to work. A couple of months ago I read about washi tape somewhere. Washi tape is small rolls of beautifully printed tape that you can use to do various crafty things with. Stock up and check Pinterest for dozens of ideas of what to do! they said.

This isn't even all of it.

6. So I'm thinking: tape. I can do tape. Scissors and tape, that's kindergarten stuff. So I bought a bunch of washi tape--it's everywhere, Target, Michael's, various websites--and it is pretty. Tiny, but there are some really interesting color and design combinations. And then I went and checked out Pinterest for what to do with it.

7. Here's what you can do: Wrap your pencils. Fold it over the edge of a notebook page to color code your pages. Wrap the stems of silk flowers. Whaaaaat? That's it? Do you guys know what to do with it? I have a bunch, all dressed up and nowhere to go. Next time remind me to check Pinterest first.

What I Wish I Knew My First Week on Weight Watchers: Advice for Newbies / Beginners

I had a terrible time my first couple of weeks on Weight Watchers because I couldn't figure out what to eat. The veterans must have a bunch of things they pick up without thinking about it, because if you ask, they tell you, "Oh, just poke around on the Weight Watchers website! There are great recipes! I love the chicken teriyaki with greens!" or "Flip through the guide! There are great ideas, organized by points!" or "Eat whatever you want! That's the great thing about WW! Just make sure you track everything!"

That last one is particularly bad advice, because if you do that, you've used up your points by the time you're done with lunch (or maybe before). The others are actually good advice, and true, but they don't help any when you get back from running errands at noon and you're starving and you don't want to fix poached salmon and roasted asparagus for lunch. That's not to say you shouldn't cook lunch from scratch, but sometimes--especially that first week--you just want to eat.

They didn't understand that I needed actual food recommendations, not just generalized advice. So, here you go, the foods I wish I'd known about my first week. I'm a newbie myself, just four months in, so take this with a grain of salt. Also, forgive the amateur photos, I don't have the patience to set up those gorgeous food shots.

- I've said elsewhere that I'm not a fan of wasting points on supermarket bread, but sometimes you need to get the sandwich filling from the plate to your mouth. Sara Lee Delightful works well for that, and it's one point per slice. Also, "light" english muffins are two or three points, depending on the brand. Compare either of those to my old favorite sandwich bread, which is five points per slice.

Sara Lee Delightful sandwich bread and
Thomas light english muffins

- What to put between your Sara Lee slices: deli turkey and canadian bacon are 1 point for 2 ounces, which is plenty for a sandwich. Turkey bacon is one point per slice. My go-to breakfast is a single slice of Sara Lee bread made into a half-sandwich with either deli turkey or canadian bacon. Thank the lord I love deli mustard because it's zero points and adds a lot of flavor.

- The single serve pack of StarKist Chunk Light tuna in water is ZERO points. How amazing is that? So you can add a tablespoon of light mayonnaise (1 point) and two pieces of bread and you're still at 3 points. You can stir in minced onion, carrot, or apple for extra flavor (zero points). Or you can add capers and a squeeze of lemon (also zero points) to go Mediterranean.

Progresso Light soup and a Chunk Light Tuna pouch

- More lunch ideas: If you don't have a problem with salt (and recent research has shown that not many people do), Progresso Light soups are good, easy choices, although be aware that there are two "servings" in a can. The chicken and vegetables with rosemary in the picture above (my favorite) is 2 points per serving, so four points for the can. Other brands of light soup are also good.

PB2, both flavors, and lightly salted rice cakes, also known
as edible styrofoam, but sometimes they serve a purpose

- PB2 is powdered peanut butter which has somehow magically had 85% of the fat removed. At our grocery store, it is on the top shelf over the regular peanut butter. Is it as good as real peanut butter? No. But it's not bad. Two tablespoons are one point (as opposed to three points for one tablespoon of regular PB). You stir a tablespoon of water into two tablespoons of the powder and you have peanut butter (use a little extra water so it spreads easier). It also comes in chocolate, which is-- astoundingly-- the same number of points. My favorite late afternoon snack at the moment is a plain rice cake (1 point) spread with two tablespoons of chocolate PB2 (1 point), topped with banana slices (zero points). It's actually pretty dang good.

- More snack ideas. I really, really needed something I could carry in my purse for when I'm out running around. WW has some mini granola bars that are two points, but they're hella expensive and they're about a bite and a half. I've finally settled on Nature Valley Peanut Butter Dark Chocolate Protein bars. They're six points, which is a lot, but they're relatively inexpensive, they're easy to carry, and they have 10 g of protein and only 6 g of sugar. If you're having a craving for something sweet, they do the job without blowing 15 points on a small hot fudge sundae from Dairy Queen (which I have also done, and sometimes it's worth it). There are lots of other options-- I spent about fifteen minutes in front of the granola bar section at the grocery store scanning bar codes in the WW app to find one that I liked.

Nature Valley protein bars and Pop Secret 94% fat free popcorn

Also in the picture above: 94% fat free microwave popcorn is 2 points for 3 cups of popped corn. I ate about five gallons of popcorn my first week because I didn't know what else to eat.

- And check this out. If you ate everything on the plate pictured below, it would be ZERO POINTS, and of course that goes for almost all fruits and vegetables eaten without any added sugar or fat. (The only exceptions I know of are avocados, corn, potatoes, and sweet potatoes.) This is my favorite thing about weight watchers. If I put out a plate of cherry tomatoes, baby carrots, broccoli florets, clementines, etc, not only do I eat them instead of other snacks, the rest of my family does, too. They don't need to lose weight but it never hurts to eat your veggies.

I know. If I were a real blogger I would have
found a banana that looked more appetizing. 

- If you can't eat raw veggies without dipping them in something, try Opa Greek Yogurt salad dressings (with the refrigerated salad dressings in the produce section). They have a definite plain yogurt tang, but that's OK with me. The Feta Dill flavor is one point for two tablespoons. Yogurt can be a good snack, too, as long as you check carefully-- my old favorite (Dannon Cherry Orchard) is eight points, but various different "light" and non-fat greek yogurts are 3-5 points per serving. The Oikos Triple Zero shown in the picture is sweetened with Stevia, which has kind of a funny taste but is only 3 points.

- Late evening hot beverage. Having a cup of decaf coffee or herbal tea about an hour before I go to bed has saved me from many an evening snacking binge. I doctor it up with a quarter cup of soymilk (1 point) and a half teaspoon of maple sugar (0 points) and it is a life saver.

One more little trick. On the Weight Watchers app, if you pull up an item-- say deli turkey-- there is a default serving size. For deli turkey, it is two ounces. But if you edit the serving size, you sometimes discover that the next size up is still the same number of points-- three ounces of deli turkey is still one point. It's surprising how often that works. That's how I know that 94% fat free popcorn is two points for three cups, even though if you pull it up on the app, it says two cups are two points. Obscure WW knowledge.

So, hope that is helpful. And may we all persevere, even after we screw up and have to forgive ourselves and get back to it, which is where I am right now. I got halfway to my goal and got lazy, but I'm not giving up. I know a few of you are also in WW, any tips to add? 

7ToF: the world's gonna wake up and see / Baltimore and me

1. Since I seem to have lost my enthusiasm for fiction these days, I've been reading memoirs. There are so many good ones out there you could read forever and not run out. When I get to the end of my current TBR list, I'll pass along the best ones. If you've got any recommendations, let me know. My favorite so far is Indian Creek Chronicles by Pete Fromm, the story of the winter he spent 40 miles from a paved road babysitting a couple million salmon eggs. Or maybe Upstairs at the White House, written by the guy who was the chief usher at the White House from Roosevelt to Nixon.

2. Some of you may remember my stories from back in the 90s when I was involved in several women's circles that were exploring feminist spirituality (this post, for example). It's a phase of my life that I'm not really planning on revisiting, but there was some genuine searching going on, and I loved those women and our group meetings. One of the things I loved most was the smell. You would walk in and there was this spicy scent, maybe a little bit of sandalwood, a little patchouli, a little cinnamon, but I could never find it when I was standing in front of the incense section of our tiny new age store. I looked for it off and on for years.

3. A couple of days before we left on our trip, I was wandering around our local beauty supply store looking for sample sizes of various toiletries for our travels. I've heard about Kenra hairspray for a long time--in my mind it's the original fancy, expensive hairspray, and I've heard many women swear by it-- but I'd never tried it because it's so expensive. But it was on sale, and the trial size was $7, so I thought what the hell, and bought it. I pulled it out of my bag in Mexico and sprayed it on, and OMG, there was that scent. The smell of 90s New Age feminism that I'd been looking for all those years was hairspray. Made my week.

(for the record, it doesn't work as well as the cheaper stuff I get at Target, but it does smell better.)

The rest of these are my Weight Watchers update, move on all ye who are not interested.

4. So, Weight Watchers. Still doing it, still working, although slowly. I can't tell you how happy I am about this. Other than post-pregnancy, I've never successfully lost more than about three pounds in my life. I only joined WW as a last-ditch effort, one final thing to try before I gave up and moved on to size 16. But after the first couple of weeks (which were admittedly awful), it hasn't been bad, and it's working. I've been losing a half a pound to a couple of pounds a week for three months now (with, admittedly, the occasional week where I go up a half pound). I'm more than halfway to my goal.

5. The main thing I've learned is that I eat too much. I live with two athletes, guys who can eat massive amounts of food without gaining weight, because they exercise like crazy-- Dean is a runner/skier/tennis player/hiker/biker, MadMax is a skier/lifter/thrower. I never ate anywhere close to as much as they did, so I didn't think I ate all that much. But once my body adjusted to the new way of eating, I realized that I was eating way less than I had been before and not really feeling hungry.

6. My one big complaint about the program is --and I think this is probably true of most diet programs-- it's really easy to start seeing food as the enemy. That's not built into the program-- you can eat whatever you want on WW, as long as you account for it in your points. But there's certainly a flavor of that in some of the conversations that happen at meetings.

I'm not going there. Food is not the enemy. I don't want to get to the point where I can't enjoy food, where I panic at the idea of gaining a pound or two on vacation, or can't eat a piece of my own birthday cake, or feel bad about having a margarita with my friends. For all of human history, food has been part of human celebrations, part of the joy of socializing with people you love, part of the celebration of being on a bountiful planet with amazing resources. I need to lose some weight, but I don't ever want to get to the point where I can't enjoy good food. I just needed to cut out the crap, eat nutrient dense food, and stop stuffing myself (which I didn't even know I was doing, see #5.)

7. I'm getting up on a soapbox here, but I really think this is important. I think it's why so many of the people who were so vocally enthusiastic about the program back in January are no longer there. If you deny yourself, deny yourself, deny yourself, eventually you're going to binge and/or quit. On the other hand, if I eat healthy most of the time, I seem to do just fine if I have the occasional bowl of ice cream, or a piece of bread out of the bread basket at a good restaurant (my theory on bread-- if it's good, and fresh, I'm eating it. It's the boring, supermarket stuff I can live without).

Word geek extra: Google tells me "eat healthy" is now considered correct, even though "healthy" is an adjective and it's being used as an adverb. I know I'm not the only grammar goddess around here, so I'm feeling a bit defensive. I did have "eat healthily" in the previous paragraph, but changed it because The Google says it's OK. :-)

So, packing up my soapbox.... Sorry to rant at you. Have a great weekend, and celebrate spring with some good food. And a margarita.

7ToF: Weight Watchers edition

Obviously I don't have much to say these days since I missed posting on Tuesday again this week. Not sure when I'll get back to it. Sometimes when I'm driving around I think of half a dozen post ideas, other times my brain is a barren desert. I'm headed to Texas in a couple of weeks for my mom's 80th birthday, maybe that will get me back in writing mode.

The rest of this is about Weight Watchers, now that I've been going for a month. You've been warned. If you're new, you missed all the posts in my old blog about my objections to our culture's obsession with thin-ness, and my absolute conviction that no one except you can tell whether or not your weight is healthy for your body and your life.

I won't re-hash all that right now, I just wanted to make it clear that I'm only doing this because a) I want to be able to keep up with my active family, and b) I'm starting to have some joint problems that I suspect will clear up if I lose a bit of weight. If I hit my goal, I will still be well above the culturally deemed acceptable weight for my height--no worries that I'm going to be fashionably thin, because that's never happening again.

OK. Now that we've got that out of the way.

1. The first question people ask me when I tell them I joined Weight Watchers is if I have to eat their food all the time. The short answer is no. I think you can buy various different snacks that are Weight Watchers brand, but I've never tried any of them. I fix my own food and look things up when I'm at a restaurant.

2. Do I go to the meetings? Yes, I do. The meetings are a mixed bag. On the plus side, they're probably the main reason why I stuck with the plan when I wanted to quit early on. Even though no one would know if I utterly screwed up one week (there is a weigh-in, but it's not public and no one looks at what you ate), still the embarrassment factor of quitting so soon after I started kept me from throwing in the towel. Our leader is upbeat and positive, even a little snarky occasionally, without being overly cheerleader-ish. I have to confess that the meetings can be kind of fun. There's lots of laughter and friendliness and you learn some good tips.

On the negative side, though, it is 45 minutes of listening to talk about food and weight loss and dieting, which is really difficult for me to sit through sometimes. Some of the members are absurdly enthusiastic, which makes me roll my eyes. But in their defense, WW has given them a program that works and some have lost vast quantities of weight using it. I would probably be a bit of a fanatic, too.

3. How does the point system work? You get a certain number of points per day based on your height and weight and how much you want to lose. You also get a set number of weekly points, which you can use for extras. You can divide up the weekly points to get a few extra points each day, or you can save them up and use them to splurge. One woman said that she uses her weekly points for a nightly glass of wine.

You could be extra exemplary and never use your weekly points--apparently that's what a lot of people do-- but that's never going to be me. The second week when I was about to quit, I still had most of my weekly points, so I went to a bakery and bought two 4" peanut butter chocolate chip cookies and ate them both sitting in the car (they were fabulous). I had enough points to do it, it kept me sane, and I still lost a pound that week. That's what keeps me going -- if I keep within my points, so far the system has worked, even if I use my points for stuff that is not at all diet-ish.

4. The good parts about the points system: Pretty much all fruits and vegetables--eaten without added sugar or fat-- are zero points. So if you get hungry, you can have a banana or an apple or a handful of sugar snap peas (or all three) and it doesn't count. The only exception I know of is avocados, which are crazy high points. (Disappointing, because I love avocados.) After a few weeks, you become adept at knowing a handful of low-point foods that work for you so you're rarely without something you can eat, even if you're down to one or two points at the end of the day.

5. The bad part about the points system: You end up chasing after foods that are low points rather than figuring out what you want to eat or what is healthy to eat. For example, there's a powdered de-fatted peanut butter called PB2 that I've been using in smoothies for couple of years now, but I would never have eaten it by itself (you add water to make it into a peanut butter-ish substance). But I do now, because PB2 is 1 point for two tablespoons, and real peanut butter is three points for one tablespoon. Also, many of my favorite go-to quick foods (Kind bars! I miss you, Kind bars!) are off-limits for now because they're so many points. You start choosing your food based on the points rather than any other consideration.

6. But you know what? A few weeks in, once you get the hang of it, you realize that the points sort of make sense. They're based on total calories, with points added for sugar and saturated fat, and points reduced for protein. If you stick to your points, you lose weight. I suppose the literal truth is that for the most part, things are low points because they are low calorie, but while I'm absolutely opposed to counting calories, for some reason this doesn't bother me so much. Maybe because of the freebie fruits and veggies-- there's always something you can eat.

7. The best advice I received (thanks, Mary!) before I joined: when you register, don't set a huge weight-loss goal. First of all, you'll hit your goal sooner, and when you do, you become a "lifetime" member and Weight Watchers is free thereafter. Secondly, the higher the number of pounds you want to lose, the lower your daily points total (I think. I haven't actually researched that, it's just my impression from listening to the talk around me at meetings.) Oprah made a big deal this past week saying that she had lost 26 lbs while eating bread every day, which surprised me. I've eaten bread every day, too, and it never occurred to me that I couldn't, but maybe I have a fairly high points allowance.

So there you go. After only a month, I'm hardly an expert, but I'm starting to feel a tiny bit confident that I can reach my goal, and I was completely demoralized by my weight before I started. That's a plus.

p.s. The point system was completely overhauled a couple of months ago, and many of the people who have been in WW for a long time hate the new system. I can't compare them because I joined after the new system started. The new system is working for me.

So....I joined weight watchers.

I wasn't going to tell you about joining weight watchers until after I'd been through the first month, but let's face it-- it's January and I haven't read a good book in a couple of months and if I don't write about this, I have nothing to write about.

I joined online Sunday night after New Year's, and went to my first meeting that Wednesday. I've never been a huge fan of New Year's resolutions, but I had given myself until the end of December to find a way to lose the weight on my own. Which didn't happen.

I thought maybe I should just take another blogging break rather than subject you to my musings/thoughts/rants about points and food tracking. But I finally decided, as I always do, that you don't have to read it. I put "weight watchers" right up there in the post title so you can click away if it's not a topic that interests you. I'd probably do the same if our positions were reversed.

I've thought for several years now that if I couldn't manage my weight loss on my own, I'd try Weight Watchers. Mainly because I know several people who have had good success with it (some of whom read here). But two things kept me from signing up: one, I was so sure I could manage it on my own; and two, I hate tracking what I eat. 

The first thing--I was so sure I could lose the weight myself-- has proven to be abundantly false. I have more or less figured out how to maintain, to stop the upward creep, but I have not managed to lose more than 2-3 pounds on my own. (For those of you who are new, I gained about 20 pounds a few years ago when I was in grad school and went through menopause at about the same time, on top of already being a bit on the plump side.)

The second thing--that I hate tracking what I eat-- is trickier. I've done it (tracking) several times before, and although I start out with enthusiasm, in a couple of weeks I'm playing all kinds of mind games with it and it completely backfires. I end up mentally arguing with the tracking, and losing touch with the idea of developing better eating habits. If there were mind games at the Olympics, I would win the gold medal in a flash. I am terrific at mind games.

But that ended up being a non-issue because WW has a new plan that doesn't require food tracking. I haven't tried it yet--I can manage the tracking for the first couple of weeks, so I thought I'd try the "Smart Points" plan for awhile until I adjust to the new eating style. But I'll probably switch over to the no-tracking system eventually.

I'm not saying anything about the results, maybe never will, because TMI. But I'm hoping the fact that I pre-paid three months will mean I stick with it at least that long. Stay tuned.

Day 28: pain and its relief

A couple of weeks ago I was flipping channels on Sunday night and I ran across an episode of 60 Minutes that was about teenagers who have died from heroin overdose after getting hooked on painkillers. Astoundingly, heroin is cheaper and easier to get than prescription painkillers.

The five minutes of the show that I saw showed a group of parents, probably a dozen of them, who were dealing with the unimaginable pain of losing a child to heroin overdose--something that anyone our age associates with inner city, ghetto crime, not life as we know it. I found myself tearing up as I listened to their grief and pain.

Day 23: the post of shame

OK, I'm not really ashamed, that was just to make you laugh. But I am a bit embarrassed, and I was going to tack this on to the end of last night's post in just a sentence or two so maybe no one would notice. But then I decided it would be better as an entire post on its own, because it might work better to motivate me to change my ways if I put up here front and center on Monday morning.

Friday my spouse and I went in to our local athletic facility for our healthy lifestyles checkup, the one I told you about in this post that we did a year ago. Last year we passed easily, which meant we got a reduction in our deductible. This year, we passed again, but I didn't do nearly as well.

TBT: The Feel Bad post

This is the post from my old blog that has almost twice as many pageviews as any other post I've written. I edited it quite a bit to shorten it. Originally published January 2012. It's a bit of a rant so avoid if you're not in the mood to be ranted at.

the midlife middle

I've been watching us, those of us who are in our fifties. For the past several months, every time we've been in a social situation with our peers, I've observed the fifty-somethings. We're a pretty great bunch of people: experienced, interesting, a bit older and wiser, but still capable of surprises, still dreaming--even if they're retirement dreams these days.

But let's face it: very few of us have made it to this age without collecting some pounds around the middle. And it's true of men and women. I started this observation experiment at the beginning of the summer mostly watching women, but I quickly realized that men are experiencing the same thing. Maybe it's distributed a bit differently, but with the odd exception (like my spouse), none of us can wear the same pants we wore twenty years ago.

Mini-beers, donuts, and trust

I was raised Southern Baptist. Unlike some Southern Baptists, my parents were never strict teetotalers, by which I mean that you could occasionally catch them at a dinner party self-consciously holding a glass of wine. There was rarely any alcohol in our house, though, and I don't ever remember them serving it to guests.

Ha—that reminds me of a story. One of the moments when I was most embarrassed by my parents, in the way only a snotty recent college grad can be, was the weekend of our wedding back in 1984. My parents had invited the wedding party and various family friends over for a barbecue.

I gingerly approached them about serving beer at the barbecue. I wouldn’t have been too upset if they had said no—because what a great story to tell to the amusement of the groomsmen, none of whom were raised in the Bible Belt—but to my surprise, they said they were OK with it, and my dad even drove twenty miles or so out of our dry county to a liquor store to buy some beer.

He came back with mini-beers.

8 oz cans of beer--do they even make these anymore?

I think they were called ponies. Now, a pony is a half-keg, but back then a pony was a half-size can of beer, probably eight ounces. They looked like little toy beers. Dean and the groomsmen--like most college students--had plenty of experience with beer. They were so bemused by those little cans they hardly drank any of it, and my parents were left with a couple dozen mini-beers that they probably eventually threw out or gave to the neighbors. Who knows, I never asked.

Anyway. The point is, my parents never drank much alcohol. Behind that was a deeply, deeply embedded suspicion of the addictive properties of alcohol. Sure, it was OK to have a couple of drinks a year, but more than that and you would inevitably find yourself sliding down the slippery slope into alcoholism, unable to hold a job, stay married, or take care of your children, etc etc etc. And that exact sequence of events occurs often enough that their opinion was never really challenged.

Once I grew up and left home, I quickly got over that when I discovered the joy of an ice cold beer after a hot, sticky company softball game. Then I discovered the value of a pitcher of margaritas shared with girlfriends, or a slowly sipped shot of Grey Goose, or a microbrew with pizza, or any of a number of other harmless occasional uses of alcohol.

But that said, I’ve never been much of a drinker. I could count on one hand the number of times that I’ve finished two drinks in one night. And I rarely have more than half a dozen drinks in a month. I just don’t think about it. So I’ve never really challenged my own inherited fear that if I let myself break my own loose rules—only drink at night, only have one—I will inevitably turn into an alcoholic.

This is turning into a long story. Sorry about that.

About a month ago, I came home from the second or third meeting of my noontime Ulysses reading group, and I was so stressed (for many reasons, but if I explain I'll get way off track) that I couldn't figure out how to de-stress. Suddenly it occurred to me: I am 53. I am a fully functioning adult. I can have a drink to relax.

Oh, boy, another part of me thought. Here I am at the top of the slippery slope. If I do this, I’m on my way to being one of those housewives that is drunk and disheveled in the middle of the day. But I did it anyway. I fixed myself a drink, and sat down in front of the window and watched it snow while I drank it.

And you know what happened? Well, that day, it made me sleepy and I took a nap. But long term, you know what happened? Nothing. In fact, about two weeks later, I suddenly remembered that I had done that and hadn’t given it a thought since.

Huh, I thought. Well, that’s interesting. I guess I don’t have an addictive personality. Which may seem like no big deal if you grew up in a family where drinking was no big deal, but to me, it was like this cascade of calcified assumptions dissolved away in a matter of minutes—assumptions about alcohol, about people who drink, about what would happen to me if I cut loose in the middle of the day like a crazy person.

I had a similar experience during Lent when I let myself eat whatever I wanted for a few weeks. A couple of times I decided I wanted old-fashioned donuts, so I’d go out and buy half a dozen. Then I’d get them home, and I’d eat three of them. Three donuts is still plenty decadent, but you know--I didn’t eat all six. I wasn’t even tempted to.

What I discovered is that if I trust myself, I can trust myself. The old-fashioned donuts were totally awesome—especially if I drive all the way down to the grocery store south of town where they make them from scratch—but they’re not something I want every day. In fact, after letting myself “gorge” on donuts twice during Lent, I may not eat another one for months.

Which is making me question some deeply held fears I have about myself and food. For years now, I’ve approached food as an enemy. If I give in, if I let myself eat what I want, I will blimp out. I will never stop eating. I will eat until I’m sick. But what I discovered was the opposite. If I give myself permission to eat what I want to eat, I usually make pretty good choices. Once I ate my way through the inevitable overblown reaction to deprivation (which took about three weeks), I discovered that I can pretty much trust myself when it comes to choosing foods. And that's a good thing to know.

odds and ends: there's a neon light at the end of the tunnel

This one ended up being extra-ordinarily about food and weight and etc. Since I hate being obsessed about that stuff, I'm feeling a bit apologetic. But it's what I was thinking about this morning, so you're getting it anyway.

1. Last summer I tried going gluten-free and dairy-free for ten days, but I never told you what happened. I have to tell you, I was not unbiased. I find the whole gluten-free thing to be a little irritating, even though I have friends and family who truly feel it has made a difference in their health—a big difference. So I was a little surprised that there was a difference. Not a huge difference, and certainly not enough to make me rearrange my entire diet, but there was a... , ....., hmmm, I'm trying to think how to describe how it felt without making into more than it was. I felt --lighter? maybe. About 5% lighter. Noticeable, but not really enough to worry about.

Anyway. When I started adding gluten and dairy back in, I found, to my surprise, dairy was making the difference, not gluten. Happily, it is much easier for me to give up dairy than pasta and bread. I'm not too terribly strict about it, but I pretty much avoid dairy these days. I've never been a milk drinker, ever—and maybe that should have been a hint—so mainly that means cutting out yogurt and cheese. Which means I don't make yogurt anymore. Local people, if you want a yogurt maker, let me know.

2. OK, since we're talking about food. I decided a long time ago, no more diets for me. Diets, I abhor you. But I'm not happy about my current weight. It's a dilemma. I think I found a, um....., system (I'm not calling it a diet because it doesn't have anything to do with calorie counting or major restrictions) that will work for me, but at the moment, I'm not in a place where I want to deal with it. I'm a little chubby, but my health is otherwise great (which is exactly what the guy who did my "Healthy Measures" test at our athletic club said after measuring all kinds of things like cholesterol, BP, muscle tone, etc). So.... yeah.

3. But in one of those endless articles people post to FB, I read that the problem most people have with maintaining weight loss after they lose weight is, they don't know how to eat a healthy maintenance diet--i.e., a normal diet that doesn't cause you to either gain or lose weight. So *My Brilliant Idea* for the moment is to pretend like I already lost the weight and learn how to eat a healthy maintenance diet. It's actually kind of fun. Pretend I'm at my ideal weight, and now how am I going to eat? Successful so far, and if I do lose the 20 lbs at some point, I'll be all set.

4. And the other thing I'm doing (sorry, for those of you who hate endless discussions about health and weight)(usually I'm one of you). For Lent, almost as a joke, I gave up beating myself up about my weight. It has turned out to be a surprisingly positive experience. Every time I catch sight of myself in a mirror and am a little bit depressed to see the frumpy, 53-year-old woman looking back at me, and I start to tense up and begin the internal harangue about how awful I look and how bad I feel about it, etc etc etc, I just make myself stop. STOP. And substitute something more positive: I'm pretty damn healthy. I'm actively enjoying my 50s. That kind of shit. :-) So then the day after Easter, I'll start right back up with the weight bashing again. (Kidding.)

5. Cheery-o and I have been challenging each other to read books that aren't exactly easy to read. We started with The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen, which I had been avoiding for years), and then moved on to Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel). So far, so good. Both of them are books I wouldn't have finished without some extra motivation, but I'm really glad I stuck with them. I really intensely disliked the first part of Corrections, but once I got past that, I think it might be one of the best books I've read in a long time. Wolf Hall was less my kind of book, but it was definitely worth reading, and had me googling all kinds of things about the sixteenth century. Both recommended. We're doing Jane Eyre now because I could kill two birds with one stone since I'm teaching it. Join in if you want and we will discuss at a future date.

6. MadMax, perhaps in rebellion against his parents' love of rock, has developed a taste for country music. I was horrified at first, but I've started to kind of enjoy it. The current stuff isn't like the country music I remember from high school. As long as it isn't too twangy, I'm OK with it. (I draw the line at baby take a ride in my big green tractor. just sayin.) The odd thing is, with country music you can actually understand the words, so I find myself wondering, hmmmm, am I OK with this? when I know good and well it's way less offensive than some of the rock and hip-hop I listen to on the treadmill. It's just that with my treadmill music, I have no idea what they're saying.

7. We're headed south for the weekend. Usually we want to get out of here in March/April because the weather is so awful--the snow is gone, but it's raining and 45 degrees. Nothing is green and certainly nothing is blooming. This year our weather has been so beautiful (relative to our usual, not relative to anywhere else in the country), escaping the weather isn't our primary motivation. It will just be good to get out of town. I've been using self-tanner on my legs to try and get to the point where I won't be embarrassed to wear shorts (it's supposed to be 90+ in SoCal, where we're headed). When you live in the frozen north, by the time March rolls around, your legs aren't just white, they're some sort of fungal-looking pasty beyond-white that is downright scary. The self-tanner won't make me look bronzed but at least I won't look like something that crawled out from under a decaying log.

And that's it. Have a great weekend, because I'm pretty sure we will. :-)