mizducky's migrations: a weight management blog with attitude

The Politics of Obesity: Confronting Our National Eating Disorder

                 

Obesity has become an epidemic in the United States with one out of every five Americans facing this health crisis.  In this presentation, the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism examines "The Politics of Obesity". Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism presents" [Health and Medicine] [Public Affairs] -- (wonderful, refreshingly hard-nosed political analysis of how our capitalist food industry, in the almighty quest for profit at any cost, is screwing up the nutrition of our nation and the world. And some thoughts on what to do about it. -- editorial aside)

Presenters:
Marion Nestle
Kelley Brownell
Joan Dye Gussow

Moderator:
Michael Pollan

From Google's new stockpile of stuff it's hosting for UC Berkeley.

Quickie weekly weigh-in:

Got a jam-packed day today, so just the numbers this time:

• Today's weight: 242.0 lb
• Change since last week: -1.5 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 92.0 lb

Nice! Onward and outward ...

CNN.com - Low calorie count key in bone injury risk for athletes - Sep 25, 2006

Link: CNN.com - Low calorie count�key in bone injury risk for athletes - Sep 25, 2006.

"This research is well understood in the medical community," said John O'Kane, a sports medicine physician and associate professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. "I think that there's been a lot of work by the NCAA and others to make people more aware of this, it used to be coaches would tell their female athletes, 'You know you are training hard enough when you stop having your period.' Today, we understand that (no menstrual cycle) means a calorie deficiency and it can be dangerous." (Emphasis added)

Dayum. Glad they're getting this stuff figured out now, at least. I just wish someone had known to tell me this back in my 20s, when I was amenorrheic for two full years because I was maintaining goal weight through a ridiculously low calorie count plus serious weight training workouts. As it was, my nutritionist thought everything I was doing was just fine; my OB/GYN's solution for the lack of periods was to offer to give me an artificial period with pills; and nobody took seriously my deep premonition that whatever was happening in my body was wrong, wrong, wrong.

MedlinePlus: Salad eaters have higher levels of key nutrients

Link: MedlinePlus: Salad eaters have higher levels of key nutrients.

In addition to the findings cited in the headline, the linked article makes the very good point that a number of vitamins are destroyed by heat and thus are easier to obtain from raw foods.

Not that I'm planning on turning into one of those all-raw-foods folks anytime soon--for one thing, there's a whole bunch of foods which the body can't properly digest to get at any of its nutrients without some heat or other processes appled to free up those nutrients. And for another ... three words: Roast. Meat. Yum.

But it's true that this former salad-hater has grown a lot fonder of raw veggies in recent months, and articles like this persuade me to keep on that track.

Oh yeah, the article makes the additional interesting point that a number of nutrients are more easily absorbed in the presence of fats, and so the oil in salad dressings actually has a nutritional function beyond just tasting good. (In other words, more proof that fat, in moderation, is not evil.)

What I'm eating and/or drinking this evening: the minimalist smoothie

I'm feeling kind of tired and achey this evening, so I went for really simple foods needing little preparation. I thawed out an IQF boneless/skinless chicken thigh, threw it on the Foreman Grill, and had it between two slices of sprouted-grain bread. It was a pretty humongous chickie thigh, so that made a decent sandwich.

And right now I'm sipping on what may be the world's simplest smoothie. I had some cubed almost-too-ripe papaya in the fridge, so I chucked about two cups of that in the blender along with a cup of apple juice. No ice cubes, no yogurt (frozen or otherwise), no fancy-schmancy add-ins, and absolutely no additional sweeteners of any sort needed. The papaya and apple juice were plenty sweet on their own, the papaya provided ample body to the mix, and as the ingredients were chilled, so was the product.

I never understood why people felt the need to muck up a perfectly good smoothie with all that other stuff anyway. Especially the frozen yogurt--yeah, it's yummy, but if you're thinking it's "diet" food just because it's lowfat, think again folks--yogurt doesn't come that sweet on its own. And while I like an ice-filled smoothie on a super-hot day, in the cool of the evening it just makes my teeth hurt. And all the "power" add-ins--the powdered proteins, the greens, the potions, and on and on--well, okay, if you're looking for a full meal in a glass, I guess that's groovy. But c'mon--fruit is plenty nutritious on its own without all that gussying-up. I'm sucking down four full servings of fruit in my minimalist smoothie here, and that's nothing to sneeze at.

I've noticed that Jamba Juice, a chain that has built its business on elaborate smoothies chock-full of healthy add-ins of this sort, has recently added a whole new category to their menus: fruit-only smoothies. Obviously there must have been demand from a whole bunch of customers who, like me, feel that there are times when less is indeed more.

Weekly weigh-in -- plus: more convalescence news; personal makeover time?

Today's numbers:

• Today's weight: 243.5 lb
• Change since last week's weigh-in: 0 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 90.5 lb
• Adjusted average weekly loss: 2.66 lb

Heh. What was I saying in my last weekly weigh-in post about my little weight loss pattern? Here it is again: a flat week immediately following a week with a large drop (in this case, last week's drop was 5.5 lbs). And again, I swear I wasn't doing anything significantly different with my food or activity level this week compared to last week. Not sure what's up with this pattern, but hey, in the long run it's all averaging out, so I'm not gonna sweat it.

Meanwhile, as of Monday I have passed the "six weeks since surgery" milestone--significant because I am now officially done with all post-surgery activity restrictions. Technically, I guess I'm supposed to wait to have that verified by the docs in my final followup appointment on Thursday. But I could not wait one more second to kiss that goddamned elastic abdominal binder goodbye--so it's now history! Yay! My huddled kishkes yearning to breathe free are now liberated!!!

Seriously, you have no idea how much that binder was getting on my nerves. I hate clinging restrictive clothing of any sort, and this medical girdle was like my worst nightmare of that kind of garment--ill-fitting and uncomfortable no matter which way I tried to wear it. Plus, on the occasions I removed it (to shower and take care of my incision), it was pretty damn obvious to me that my torso muscles were becoming dependent on the damn thing and losing tone, something like how leg muscles begin to weaken from lack of use while a broken leg is encased in a cast. Obviously, in the case of the binder, taking a load of work off my muscles was the whole point--specifically, giving my abdominals a break while they healed up from being cut open. But now I've got a bunch of catching up to do in terms of re-conditioning all those muscles. Fortunately, to judge from how I feel right now after my first day out and about without the tummy-rubberband, the muscles seem to be getting back on the beam pretty quickly. Wonder how they'll feel tomorrow ...

Anyway, one of my little errands today was buying some more clothes, as even the clothes I bought to replace my pre-regimen clothes are now falling off of me. Not complaining at all--as far as I'm concerned, this falls into the category of Problems You Like To Have. But it's still at least a logistical problem. For one thing, even though I'm not going to push myself all the way down to my supposed "ideal" weight on the official doctors' charts, I'm still expecting that I'll be dropping several more sizes before I'm done ... so all this wardrobe replacement can be a bit of a financial drain. I'm trying to stave this off by shopping the discount stores, clearance racks, and consignment shops; buying naturally loose-fitting styles I can get away with wearing through at least a couple of size changes; and only buying a relatively few versatile pieces to tide me over through each change. But at the same time, I don't want to look like a shlub, so I'm trying to buy nice stuff rather than total crap.

As my wardrobe is morphing right along with me, I'm realizing I'm sorta backing into my very own real-life fashion makeover. Who needs reality shows when one's personal reality offers so many possibilities? So, even though my efforts to keep costs down are somewhat putting my clothing choices at the mercy of what I find on the sale racks, I'm still giving some thought to how I want to display my changing bod to the world. I don't know that I want to change all that much--I've been into informal, high-comfort, hippy-dippy, mostly-natural-fiber clothing for years now, especially since my employment in high-tech and then freelancing has freed me from any need to ever dress more formally (or less comfortably). But I do like to be more conscious of my process--if for no other reason than using it as yet another tool to personal understanding.

Now, any fat person in our culture can tell you all kinds of horror stories about clothing humiliation. Things have admittedly gotten a helluva lot better than when I was a kid, when being fat doomed you to a wardrobe of truly ugly clothing in that 1960s frumpy doubleknit that seemed to be backed with a thin layer of sponge rubber. Oh yeah, and then there were the trips to what my mother, herself significantly fat, used to call "the fat ladies' store" to buy clothes for herself as well as me; she radiated humiliation at having to buy her clothes in such places, which of course did wonders for my self-esteem too (vhat, you mean you hate that your first-born daughter isn't nice and skinny because you can't get vicarious thrills out of dressing her up like your personal living Barbie doll?)

I wish my mother could have lived to see what some of the producers of larger-size clothing are putting out these days (hell, I wish my mother could have lived to see today, period, but I've whined about that in a previous post). But anyway--yeah, I wonder what she'd think to see actual designer denim jeans in plus sizes, lots more natural-fiber clothes, and even some stabs at high fashion and sexy/romantic garb--and in shops you can actually find in mainstream malls, not in some hidden-away warehouse district in the back of beyond (no wonder my mother felt shame going to such shops--the way they hid those stores you'd think they were porn shops or something).

Still, there's plenty of cheesy crap to be found in the plus size clothing industry even today. Many manufacturers still seem to have no idea how the hell to fit the large-size body. Sometimes they just take a missy-size garment and make it big in all directions, winding up with sleeves proportioned to fit King Kong, or gaping armholes on sleeveless garments, or dresses shaped to fit a boxcar rather than a body. I especially love when they do this blow-up trick on a style that, while it looks great on a missy-proportioned body, looks totally wrong on one with big tummy, hips, ass, etc. Dresses cinched  in at the waist with a belt, for instance--that leaves most plus-sized women looking like a potato sack with a rope tied around the middle. Why these people can't realize that plus-sized bods are often proportioned entirely differently from missy ones, I have no idea. Probably because it's just so much cheaper to do the blow-up thing with existing garment patterns than come up with an entirely different pattern.

Oh yeah--and there's still a ton of cheesy fabrics out there. The sponge-rubber stand-up-on-its-own doubleknit may be gone, but there's still more than enough polyester out there to choke a bunch of plus-size customers.

So--into this jungle of clothing choices I made another expedition today, and managed to escape with a few finds:

• Two pairs of black leggings in a mostly cotton blend knit (there's some polyester and a little spandex in there too, but the 57% cotton content makes them feel pretty decent). One pair is capri length, the other cropped just above my anklebones--very useful lengths in the still-hot SoCal autumn.
• One very girly pink teeshirt, 100% cotton. I usually don't do girly clothes, especially in pink. But this shirt is trimmed in black stitching and binding, which takes the girly edge off (and reminds me of my punk-rawk days); plus it's got an oh-very-trendy butterfly design in wee black and silver glittery studs on the front. Nice to feel like I'm sorta-kinda keeping up with some kind of trend somewhere. Plus I can get into butterflies. Symbol of transformation, and all that.
• One tie-dye teeshirt, 100% cotton, in shades of a Georgia O'Keefe Arizona landscape. Trust me to pick through nearly every single item of clothing in a bourgeois plus-size chain store and find the only tie-dye shirt in the joint. And it's a damn fine one too--multi-level horizontal dip-dye, with scattered crinkles and vertical stripes throughout, plus a smattering of little sequins sewn here and there. And even despite the tiedye and sequins, the label says it's machine washable! Hurrah!

Best of all, all the above was on clearance, so I paid just a little over 60 bucks for the lot (including sales tax). See? I did learn a thing or two from my mom about Olympic-level bargain-shopping.

I realize the above is hardly destined to set the fashion world on its ear--let alone that insufferable duo who host that dreadful "What Not To Wear" series (I almost wish somebody would nominate me for that show so I could tell those two exactly where to stick their yuppie-conformist fashion sense). But it does show in microcosm how I want to drape my bod for display to the world--with comfort, color, and joie de vivre. Vive le difference!

Today's cooking experiment: baked spicy pumpkin

This isn't so much a recipe as a work-in-progress. I still have to try it a few more times and administer some tweakage. But I think it has definite possibilities once I've got the bugs ironed out.

When I was in my local food co-op last week I saw the cutest baby pumpkins. So I bought one that was about six inches in diameter. It's taken me until today to have time to play with it, but one of the great things about winter squash is that they store for seemingly ever.

The past day or so, the weather has been cool enough to contemplate turning on the oven, so I hauled my little pumpkin out of the fridge and considered what I would do to it. Just the night before, I had made ma po tofu, and that spicy Chinese flavor profile was on my mind. I was also thinking of this fabulous baked whole kabocha squash stuffed with meat and spices I had had a few months ago at my favorite Szechuan restaurant. I felt more like having a meatless dish today, and without a stuffing, but decided to do something with the seasoning flavors anyway.

I washed the little pumpkin and chopped it in quarters. I removed the seeds and stringy innards, but decided not to peel it; peeling winter quash can be a real pain. I then made a little sauce/rub consisting of:

• 1 tsp sesame oil
• 1 tsp dark soy sauce
• 1 Tbs hoisin sauce
• 1 tsp five-spice powder
• 1 tsp powdered white pepper
• 1 tsp chile-bean sauce

This was quite thick, so I added a couple tablespoons of water, just enough to loosen it up, and then spooned this stuff into the hollows of each piece of pumpkin, spreading it around until all cut surfaces were covered. Then I put the pumpkin pieces into a pyrex baking dish and slid it, uncovered, into a pre-heated 350 deg F oven.

I let it go for a good hour and a half. When I pulled it, it was tender enough to easily slide a knife tip into it. The sauce had gotten extremely dark--not sure every person would find that attractive, but I though it had possibilities. Tasting it, I found the flesh could have stood another half hour of cooking, or maybe to have been cooked covered so that it was more tender and juicy. Either that, or I should have put more fat in the sauce--but I'd rather not do that, so perhaps a covered steam-bake is the way to go. I liked the seasonings pretty well, but it could have penetrated the flesh a bit better. Searching on the web, I saw one recipe for baked stuffed winter squash that instructed you to score the interior surfaces so that the stuffing flavors could permeate. I think I'll try that scoring technique next time.

Winter squashes provide a terrific assortment of nutrients, and when not gunked up with mass quantities of sugar or syrup or--horrors!--baby marshmallows the way so many cooks do, can be really delicious. Yeah, they're starchy, but hey, you're supposed to be eating starches in a balanced diet--as long as they're nutritious starches, which winter squashes are. They're even "diet friendly" --  while my food plan counts a mere 1/3 cup of rice as a single starch serving, it figures a single serving of winter squash at a full cup. That comes in particularly handy when I'm going through one of those inevitable phases when I'm having trouble feeling satiated and need a little more volume in my intake.

So yeah, I'll definitely try this experiment again, to see if I can get a perfected recipe out of this idea. And maybe I'll also have a go at that Szechuan stuffed pumpkin too. That dish was a real winner--and with the right choice of stuffings I think I can make it a super-healthy dish too.

Weekly weigh-in -- plus: convalescence continues

First, the numbers:

• Today's weight: 243.5 lb
• Change since last weigh-in: 5.5 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 90.5 lb

Hmmm ... another sizeable drop, even though I swear I wasn't undereating or otherwise doing anything screwy. In fact, there was one night I went out to a bar, and basically inhaled an entire cup of rather oily (but yummy!) fried spiced mixed nuts along with a big glass of red wine, thereby intaking enough fat for an entire week in about ten minutes. Nor do I think the drop can be attributed to physical activity. True, I am gradually getting more active as my convalescence proceeds, but I wouldn't call it tons of exercise--in fact, I'm still not yet cleared for strenuous exercise, that won't be until next week.

But looking back over my records, I see that this has come up over and over again, where I'll have a big weight drop one week, and then either a small drop or none at all the following week, even though I've done nothing much different either week. So I'm beginning to conclude that this is just a rhythm my bod has with regard to this weight loss thing. In any case, inasmuch as I'm satisfied that I'm getting enough food and eating a balanced diet, I'm going to quit worrying about it and just observe the phenomenon.

There's no denying that it does feel good to know I've now lost over 90 pounds. I can't remember when I last weighed so little--I want to say it was at least a good fifteen years ago or more. I can majorly see the changes in my body, and in the way my clothes fit--or fail to fit! Yes, the first bunch of stuff I bought to replace my original clothes that I'd shrunk out of, are now also falling off me. And I'm currently wearing a shirt I'd owned for years but had become way too tight to wear in public--it now fits perfectly, and is in fact a tiny bit loose. Cool!

As I implied above, next Monday will be the last day of the six-week post-op restrictions on my activities. I'll be cleared to take tub baths, swim in chlorinated pools, do exercise more strenuous than walking, and lift objects heavier than ten pounds. Oh yeah--and I'll be able to stop wearing this goddamned elastic abdominal support binder I'd been sentenced to wear non-stop since the operation. God, what an annoying gizmo this binder is! Like wearing an old-school girdle--it's taken me weeks to figure out how to wear it without it chafing or binding or otherwise driving me crazy. Finally, I took to wearing it inside out and backwards, so that the velcro is facing outward and can't chafe my skin, and the closing flaps are no longer over my belly where they can cut into me. Man! I'd have a little binder-incineration party to celebrate my freedom from this bondage, except that the rubber and synthetics in these beasties would probably stink to high heaven.

Generally, I'm feeling pretty darned good, but I'm still not back to 100% operating capacity. The main thing I'm noticing at this point is that my energy level is not what it was pre-op, and can give out on me without much warning. For instance, on Sunday I had a very full day with church in the morning, then lunch with friends, then rehearsal with the women's chorus I've recently joined. I was fine through all of it, but when I got home I was staggering tired, and all the next day I spent either napping or not doing much of anything. However, I have finally started sleeping through the entire night again (my sleep patterns had been majorly goofed up post-op), and when I awoke this morning I was all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to go.

Still, that's a marked improvement over just a few weeks ago, when I wasn't going nowhere nohow, and I have every reason to believe I shall keep on improving. So--once again: onward and outward! (Man, at least you can't say this has been a dull journey!)

Sorta-weekly weigh-in: re-calibrating

Yesterday I got tired of fighting with the borrowed bathroom scale--it's damn near impossible, with my nearsighted eyes, to read the weight from the teeny line-markings on the analog dial by my feet. Plus as I've whined previously, I never know how the damn thing is calibrated; it's one of those spring-loaded jobbies that can change its calibration depending on where you place your feet, where you place the scale on the floor, where the planets are in the sky, god knows what-all else. (In fact, I became convinced that last week's abnormally large weight drop was probably more likely an artifact of that flukey scale, and so I wound up not adding any extra food this past week.)

I eventually concluded that, for my continued weigh-management sanity, I really needed to quit all this damned bathroom scale madness, throw out the squishy data that scale generated, and go back to my official, much more reliable, and much easier to read scale at my HMO. So yesterday I made the trip back to my HMO's weight loss clinic to use their souped-up scales ... and then as is my wont since my recent surgery, I came home kind of bushed, and crashed.

So here I am today, entering the official figures:

• Yesterday's weight: 249.0 lb
• Change since last official weigh-in (7/31/06): -20.00
• Cumulative weight loss (since 1/24/06): 85.0 lb
• Average weekly weight loss: 2.66 lb
• Average weight loss over hiatus (approx. 5 weeks): 4.00 lb

There--now I feel a whole lot more scientific about the whole thing. Or something.

Note that the apparent weekly rate of weight loss over the surgery/recuperation hiatus is pretty damn high--but as I noted in a previous post, a lot of that loss is no doubt artificially inflated by the quantity of tissues surgically removed from my bod. In any case, now I have a new, non-squishy data point for my post-surgery bod, from which I can continue reliably tracking my progress.

And I'll be happily returning the bathroom scale to the friend from whom I borrowed it. Hey, it was better than nuthin' at the time, but thankfully that time has passed.

Recipe: mushroom madness soup/pate/mousse

As you can see from the title, I don't know whether to call this concoction a soup, a pate, a mousse, or what. But whatever you call it, it was a very successful experiment--great mouthfeel, great nutrition, naturally low in calories, and damned delicious. Not the prettiest looking stuff in the world, but I'm sure it could be tarted up for a dinner party (if you don't wind up inhaling it all first).

Ingredients:

• A couple pounds of assorted fresh mushrooms, sliced, stems included: it's actually okay if these are just plain ol' supermarket white mushrooms--I had a huge package of same which I bought on special--but creminis or other mild-flavored shrooms would be good too. I wouldn't recommend portobellos because I find they can get umpleasantly strong-flavored--especially because you're also going to add:
• About two ounces of dried gourmet mushrooms. I happened to use a packet of mixed European shrooms from Trader Joe's, but I bet dried shiitakes would also be great.
• One large onion, chopped
• A few cloves garlic, minced
• Olive oil, 1 Tblsp
• Non-stick cooking spray, as needed
• Red wine vinegar, approx 1 Tblsp.
• Dried tarragon, 1 scant tsp.
• 1 cup stock (chicken, beef, or vegetable)
• Salt and fresh-ground black pepper, to taste.
• Optional: enoki mushrooms, separated, for garnishing

Special equipment: a blender

Method:

1. Set the dried mushrooms to soak for at least 30 minutes or until soft in about a cup of hot water.
2. In a large soup pot, heat the olive oil over medium-low heat; add the sliced fresh mushrooms, season lightly with salt and pepper, and allow them to sweat down until they have shrunk down, gotten very tender, and exuded a bunch of liquid.
3. Meanwhile, sweat the onions and garlic (seasoned lightly w/more S&P) separately in a large saute pan sprayed with cooking spray over moderate heat.
4. When the dried mushrooms are properly reconstituted, remove them from their soaking liquid and wring them out, making sure to catch all the exuded liquid and reserve it along with the soaking liquid. Chop the dried shrooms finely.
5. When the onions are tender, or even taken on a little color, add them to the mushrooms, along with the tarragon, vinegar, dried mushrooms, their (strained) soaking liquid, and the stock. Simmer for about 20 minutes or so to combine flavors, correcting seasoning as needed.
6. Run the mushroom mixture by batches in the blender until pretty well pureed. You may leave some of the shroom mixture un-pureed for texture. The puree will be nice and fluffy/creamy without any need to add any dairy product.
7. Serve hot in bowls, optionally garnished with a bunch of shredded enoki. Alternately, you can chill this stuff and serve it as a dip/spread.

Some variations I haven't tried yet, but which I think would really work great:

• Vary the types of mushrooms used--the only limit here is your imagination!
• Instead of red wine vinegar, try other vinegars (I think a balsamico or sherry vinegar would be fabulous), or a shot of wine or sherry.
• Vary the garnishes: maybe a little sour cream or lowfat yogurt; or some snipped chives or other herbage.
• Use different herbs and spices than the tarragon; again the only limit here is your imagination.
• If you do want a cream-of-shroom soup with actual dairy, by all means go for it. I think I would add it during step #5 above so it has a chance to absorb all the flavors before being pureed together with everything else.