mizducky's migrations: a weight management blog with attitude

ScienceDaily: 'Mindless Autopilot' Drives People To Underestimate Food Decisions

Link: ScienceDaily: 'Mindless Autopilot' Drives People To Underestimate Food Decisions.

Also known as: while you're not paying attention to all those unconscious food decisions, the almighty Lizard Brain slides into the control seat and makes those decisions for you. And you just know the Lizard Brain always decides in favor of more food, not less.

(Yeah, I'm on a roll with this Lizard Brain thing--but damn, does it ever explain a whole raft of different dieting behaviors...)

Weekly weigh-in: catching my breath

Today's numbers:

• Today's weight: 232.5 lb
• Change since last week: 0.0 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 101.5 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -2.11 lb

Considering the number of potlucks I attended this past week of holiday celebrations, I'm actually relieved my weight stayed flat rather than rising. It's not like I totally blew off the rules and inhaled a whole pumpkin pie or something; but in the midst of making my way through the bazillion food choices involved in a buffet, it's inevitable that the Lizard Brain raised its ugly head and some overestimation crept in.

Plus I apparently have my calories-in vs. calories-out formula finely balanced that it's only very slightly tipped towards loss; it only takes a few bouts of over-estimating to tip the scale the other way, towards gain. Fortunately this goes both ways; it only takes a couple days of tightening up on the attention to shift the equilibriun once more, towards loss.*

Also fortunately, the Festive Fressing Season is finally nearing its end. Once I get past New Year's Day, I can hunker down to an everyday routine again. I have to say I'm looking forward to that. The momentary thrill of fancy foods is fun, alright, but the serenity of more balanced everyday eating is easier on the ol' psyche (not to mention the physical body).

Eat More Veggies recipe: hippie vegan roasted borscht-stew

The weather's been nippy around here for the past week or so--okay, it's nippy only by Southern California standards, but there were actually frost advisories the other night for some areas, and that's nippy enough for me. Anyway--that, and a call for a Christmas Day potluck item, turned my thoughts to borscht.

I've read that in some places in Eastern Europe, borscht is simply the word for soup. There are other places where borscht has to have beets in it, still others where beets are optional. Seems like every region and ethnic group has its own variant. As usual, some nice person at Wikipedia has explained a bunch of this.

In my 20s I became enamored of hippie-style borscht with lots and lots of stuff in it, such as the recipe in the original Moosewood Cookbook (which stained and battered book I still own; that version is apparently out of print). The following recipe starts with the Moosewood recipe but then takes off in a whole other direction. Roasting the beets, onion, and garlic gives my version added umami/caramelization umph, and skimping on the liquid results in something much more like a hot cooked salad/stew than a soup.

This recipe makes a huge vatful of the stuff, but that's okay; this is definitely the kind of dish that's even better the next day.

Ingredients:

• 8 fresh beets, whole, 2.5 inches in diameter or less; if they came with greens intact, remove, leaving an inch worth of stems (be sure to save the greens for some other dish)
• 1 large red onion, peeled, trimmed, and cut into large chunks
• 1 head garlic--pull as much skin off it as possible while still leaving the head intact
• 1 medium head of cabbage, cored, quartered, sliced into thin shreds
• 4 medium red potatoes, quartered, cut into thin slices (do not peel; keep slices submerged in cold water until ready to use)
• 2 carrots, diced
• 2 stalks celery, diced
• 2 cups vegetable stock
• 1 large can whole peeled tomatoes, deseeded and drained--reserve juice
• 5 dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked in a cup of hot water for 1/2 hour, then sliced thinly--reserve soaking liquid
• 1 tbsp fresh dillweed, minced
• 1 tsp caraway seeds
• 2-3 tbsp red wine vinegar
• olive oil as needed
• salt and fresh-ground pepper to taste

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 350 deg F.
2. Give onions, beets, and garlic a light coating of olive oil. Place on lightly greased rimmed baking sheet, keeping beets separate from onions and garlic, and roast in oven. Remove onion and garlic after about 30 minute or when the onion is well-browned and the garlic very soft.  Keep roasting the beets until their skins rub off relatively easily. Rub those skins off while they're still warm, quarter the beets, and slice thinly.
3. Squeeze all the garlic out of its remaining skins and keep with the onion.
4. In a very large soup pot over medium-low heat, sweat the carrots and celery in a little olive oil with some salt, until the veggies soften up and release some liquid. Add the shiitakes and the roasted onion and garlic; saute for a few minutes. Add the mushroom soaking liquid, stock, wine vinegar, potatoes, beets, tomatoes, dill, caraway, and a generous grind of pepper. Stir well to blend, cover, and let it gently come up to a simmer.
5. Gently fold in all the cabbage, cover, and let cook until the cabbage has just gotten soft, still retaining a little crunch. Add reserved tomato juice as needed to not-quite-cover the vegetables. Cover and bring back to a simmer again, It's done when the potato slices are just cooked through.

Serve hot, warm, or cold. You can garnish it with a little sour cream or plain yogurt, or just with more fresh minced dill. Great with thick slices of chewy crusy dark bread, the more artisanal the better. Happy holidays!

The Biggest Ideas - You Have Three Brains

Link: The Biggest Ideas - You Have Three Brains.

A fascinating essay about the triune nature of the human brain. We've got chunks of brain wiring we inherited from way down the evolutionary chain, informally referred to as the "lizard brain," responsible for such primal functions like fighting, fucking, and feeding;  the "dog" brain, specializing in social emotions such as loyalty and love; and the human layer, the neocortex, the seat of rational (and rationalizing) intelligence. A great deal of paradoxical human behavior can be explained by the way these three only semi-connected layers of our brain work independently of each other. In particular:

"Have you ever wondered why you reach for that pile of hot greasy fries while you tell yourself you are on a diet? The answer is that you have three brains, and the older brains were wired to put on weight long ago when food was scarce. Your old brains are not easily controlled by your fancy new brain hardware that reads diet books."

Right on.

Weekly weigh-in: a century of poundage, a half-century of life

Today's numbers:

• Today's weight: 232.5 lbs
• Change since last week: -2.5 lbs
• Cumulative weight loss: 101.5 lbs
• Average weekly weight change: -2.16 lbs

Yay! I have busted right through the 100-pounds-lost milestone! And furthermore, it's just two days past my 50th birthday! Yeah, my weight management trip isn't ultimately about the number on the scale, but just the same I have to admit that hundred-pound milestone feels really satisfying--especially on my fiftieth birthday. To paraphrase Marilyn Monroe's line in the movie "Some Like It Hot," that's half a century. Kind of makes a girl think.

And what this here girl is thinking about that half-a-century:

• Yes, I do still feel like a "girl." Even despite the cranky joints and other bodily/health weirdnesses, in my head I'm still an overgrown teenager. And I plan to keep it that way.
• I am blessed with a number of people in my life in their 70s, 80s, and beyond who are my role models regarding the joys of growing older. These folks are still gleefully wild, free, and growing in consciousness. They don't fuss or fret about wrinkles and gray hair, because they know keeping their brains young is the real fountain of youth. They combine that forever-youthful outlook with the senior's perogative to be as eccentric and iconoclastic as they wanna be--they've lived long enough to know what of life is real and what is bullshit, and feel no more compulsion to put up with the bullshit parts any more. With these folks as my inspiration, I too plan to be a freaky wildwoman to the end of my days in this plane of existence.
• My little cancer/surgery scare this summer really helped me sort out what's important in life (i.e. just being alive!) vs. what's not (all the ridiculousness of status, position, power, prestige, money, material goods, etc.). I admit that at the beginning of this year, I was looking down the barrel at 50 and having all kinds of blues about all the things I have tried in my life that have just not worked out the way I wanted. Since the surgery biz, I'm just glad to still be here, still moving towards greater physical, emotional, and spiritual health--that's a much more important achievement than any of the societal-success goals I'd been bashing my brain over.
• I used to constantly bum out over all the people in my life (family, work associates, acquaintances, total strangers) who would witness me acting like my natural self and respond as if that self was unutterably, unattractively weird. I would further bum out over those people and institutions I'd run into who would treat me with disdain or even outright hostility. I  often found myself fretting over whether the problem was with them or with me--with so many disapproving of me, maybe I was way off base after all. Well, at 50, with everything I've seen of life and learned about my family's and society's dysfunctions, I can stand up tall and declare, nope, the problem was never with me, it was with them all along. In reality, the world is chockful of people and institutions who live and breath conformism. They're all just way too tight-assed, way too terrified of difference, to handle anything that challenges their hidebound little worldviews. So all the time they were hating on me, it was not because I was doing something wrong--it was because I was doing something right! Question authority! Challenge the status quo! Smile and keep 'em guessing! She who laughs, lasts!
• This year leading up to my 50th birthday has been all about me taking my power back, fully assimilating the knowledge that I have been right-on all along despite all the disapproval I have gotten, freeing myself from the last remaining shreds of that disapproval, and throwing my liberated self out upon the universe. And you know what? It's been working. I have trusted in the Universe, and the Universe is actually providing. I am enjoying such a deep feeling of  vindication at this point, it's indescribably beautiful.
• And you know what? It's only going to get better. If this is how far I've come after just half a century of life, imagine how much more trouble I can get into in my next half-century!

Not sure how much time I'll have to post as we head into the next week of holiday festivities, so if I don't write to you all sooner, let me now wish you all a most beautiful Chanukah, Winter Solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa, New Year, and/or whatever else you may be celebrating at this festive season. Blessed be, and peace out.

Weekly weigh-in -- plus: surviving the holidays, round two

Today's numbers:

• Today's weight: 235.0 lb
• Change since last week: -2.5 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: -99.0 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -2.15

I had a followup visit with my primary care physician last week. She looked over my month's worth of blood pressure readings and decided that, while I didn't need the full amount of blood pressure meds I'd been taking before my little fainting spell, I did still need something to ratchet down the blood pressure just a little. So she put me back on the lisinopril only, at half the dose I'd previously been taking. She decided not to restart the Maxzide, even at a reduced dosage--it was dehydration due to pissing away too much fluid which caused the low blood pressure and the fainting spell, so staying away from a heavy diuretic like Maxzide sounded pretty reasonable to me! The lisinopril does have its own little diuretic effect, so I wonder if a little of this week's weight loss isn't due to losing a little water weight. Not all of it, however--while I still haven't quite gotten back on the exercise routine, I have been extremely busy physically; plus I've continued to trundle along with my food plan even though we're now in full-on holiday mode.

Interestingly, the holidays are not stressing me out around food all that badly. At least part of that is due to the fact that, while my non-religious Jewish family did observe a secularized version of Christmas, we never picked up all the food traditions. So I don't have any childhood nostalgias about all the cookies, cakes, eggnogs and other rich foods associated with Christmas. My family did also do Hannukah, and those potato latkes can definitely be little caloric bombshells--but as it's a bit of a bother whipping up latkes just for myself, I haven't been particularly tempted to do so.

Still, there's lots of those holiday sweets turning up everywhere--the Sunday coffee hour at my Unitarian church is getting pretty fierce!--but somehow they're not calling to me the way they might once have done. I think in this case it's my growing food-geekish pickiness that's saving me. You see, I've eaten enough of that stuff in the past to know that the majority of it--especially the store-bought stuff--isn't really all that tasty. In fact, a lot of it is plain old mediocre -- insipidly-flavored, overly-sweet, the baked goods too heavy and of poor texture, the candies not much more than bland sugar-bombs. I find myself thinking: "yeah, I could count a taste of this stuff as one of my allowed splurges--but, damn it, if I'm gonna do a splurge, I'm gonna spend it on something truly worthy, not low-grade crap like this!"

And besides, like I've said before I'm not really all that much of a sweets person in the first place.

I do have at least one holiday splurge planned--and it's going to be my kind of splurge. On Monday the 18th, I turn fifty (to paraphrase Marilyn Monroe in "Some Like It Hot": That's half a century--kind of makes a girl think!). And I plan to celebrate by having dinner with friends at one of my favorite Chinese buffet restaurants. Lots of yummy savory stuff ... including lots of yummy vegetables so that I'll still be eating healthy.

There's still a danger of massively overeating, even if it's healthy stuff ... but fortunately I'm no longer able to put it away the way I used to. My stomach has actually shrunk a little from all these months of eating lighter, smaller meals; these days, I actually get that satiation feeling well before I put myself in physical pain. For a person who used to be an incorrigible high-volume eater, this change is a major big deal. I suppose if I really worked at it, I could stretch my stomach out again and re-train myself to ignore those feelings of discomfort ... but why the hell would I want to when what I'm currently doing feels so satisfying? And that may be the best birthday/Christmas/Hannukah/Solstice gift of all.

Protein deficiency is cause for concern, especially in elderly | The San Diego Union-Tribune

Link: Protein deficiency is cause for concern, especially in elderly | The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Some cogent and helpful information about daily protein requirements, regardless of one's age.

Interestingly, I did the math and discovered the amount of protein I'm consuming on my food plan, according the the formulas this guy gives, is about on-target for a goal weight of 150 to 170lbs. or so.

Now, as I've said before I'm aiming for functional health and fitness goals rather than a specific number on the scale. But for now, I'm good with consuming a protein level appropriate for that weight range. When I eventually do declare goal, I can change my protein intake according to whatever weight that winds up being for me.

Weekly weigh-in -- plus: having a life is happening

This week's numbers ... one day late (and thereby hangs a tale):

• Yesderday's weight: 237.5 lb
• Change since last weigh-in: -2.00 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 96.5 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -2.14 lb

And there you go: another week in which I swear I wasn't doing anything different, and got no formal exercise, and my weight's down. I mean, I'm certainly pleased, but at the same time I'm still confused by my bod's performance. Hell. Maybe it's sunspots after all.

Meanwhile, you'll notice I broke my unwritten rule about having at least one post between weekly weigh-in posts. Well, remember what I said in that last post about starting to get a life again? Well, that life kicked up another level today--picked up a part-time job outside the home. In an artsy/groovy little giftshop and online shop. Yet another ball to keep up in the air, along with the home contract work, the church volunteer work, the community chorus (which is getting really busy now that we're in December), the spoken word work ... no wonder I haven't had time to post?

But it's all good stuff.

This new job has to be the mellowest I've ever taken in my life. But any change brings stresses ... for instance, my damnfool knee is out again--not from the store job. But the new job means I can't just take a day off and stay off my feet like I could when all my work was at home, so the knee is not getting a chance to recuperate.

And then there's this little side gig I picked up reviewing restaurants ...

My food has been staying within bounds through all of this. In fact, the greater level of busyness seems to be helping with some beginning pangs of food craving/obsession I was feeling coming on.

Not to mention the fact that these gigs are so enjoyable. It's awesome to me to contemplate that I've finally found some work to do that is stuff I *want* to do, under conditions which promise to not drive me crazy for a change. I have finally lived so long.

And such good feelings can't help but make it easier to me to take good care of myself, including feeding myself healthily.