mizducky's migrations: a weight management blog with attitude

Weekly weigh-in: a return to normalcy, or something like it

This week's numbers:

• Today's weight: 199.0lb
• Change since last week: -0.5 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 135.0 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -1.48lb

There are still a few wildfires burning around Southern California, and the weather forecasters are predicting another, albeit weaker, Santa Ana "wind event" for this Friday, so San Diego may yet have another go-round with the disaster-movie scenario. And of course there's tons of cleanup yet to be done in the areas that got badly burned. But for the time being, it looks like life is getting back to normal in the community.

And it looks like my weight is back to the normal round of jogging around a plateau point--which is just fine by me, especially since it looks like I'm plateauing around my new under-200-pound setpoint.

This week is going to be kind of hectic on the work/social life front, so I'm getting my weigh-in done early before the chaos starts. I'll report later on how I survive all the work deadline and birthday party action (not my birthday, but that doesn't make it any less hectic).

Firestorm healing vibes -- plus: oh yeah, weekly weigh-in

Hi folks--

Yep, I live in San Diego. Fortunately for me personally, I live well within the urban core (University Heights), so I was not in any danger. But of course I know plenty of people whose lives and homes were threatened by the fire, so I've been spending the week helping where I can, staying out from underfoot otherwise, taking care of myself and Mr. E (who was put a little under the weather by all the smoke in the air), and sending out massive positive vibes for the weather to turn so the fires can be shut down by the firefighters, and for all people affected by the fires to receive the protection and help they need.

Meanwhile, in an effort to get life back to something resembling normalcy, here are my numbers for this week:

• Today's weight: 199.5 lb
• Change since last week: +0.5 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 134.5 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -1.49 lb

Eh. Especially given all the orders-of-magnitude more earth-shaking life crap that's happening to people all around me in Southern California this week, I'm certainly not going to sweat a little thing like a half-pound upward jog in my weight. In fact, I'm pleased that I did not seize upon the week's emergencies as an excuse to pig out and blow a hole in my routine. Last thing anybody needs around these parts is somebody going into freaked-out bitch mode just because she blew her "diet" in the midst of this crisis. Let's hear it for a sense of proportion!

Continued best wishes for all those affected by, and continuing to be affected by, the fires. This is gonna be a real long haul for a whole lot of folks.

Weekly weigh-in: Back under 200! Plus: walking

First, the numbers:

• Today's weight: 199.0 lb
• Change since last week: -1.50 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 135.0 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -1.52

I dunno that crossing the 200-pound line again is worthy in itself of massive flags-and-fireworks celebration. After all, this is "again," and is also partly an artifact of switching scales (as I think I've already mentioned ad nauseum). But what I do find worthy of celebration is that, after lots of slow, plateau-ridden weight progress the past several weeks, I've had back-to-back 1.5 pound losses, preceded by a one-pound loss. In this process of inches and ounces, 4 pounds in three weeks is definitely something to note.

And just as I expected, it started happening when I started getting off my butt even a little tiny bit. I've finally started taking the occasional walk in my neighborhood--we're not even talking massive regular walks, I mean just every few days walking the four blocks to the corner grocery store and back--and look what an impact even that modest amount of effort seems to have produced.

And also as I expected, walking--or more specifically, walking in an interesting walker-friendly environment--is turning into a perfect exercise to me. As I think I've also droned on about in this blog before, lots of conventional exercise just bores me to tears. Stationary bicycle? Treadmills? Snore! Silly-ass exercise videos with insipid music played on cheezy synthesizers? Positively deadly to a music geek like me. And frankly, exercise classes would be kind of deadly to my wallet at this point in time.

But the neighborhood I moved into this past June is eminently walker-friendly -- not only are there a plethora of nice level sidewalks, but the neighborhood itself is charming and interesting. So a short-attention-span geek like me can derive endless entertainment from checking out what everybody has done with their garden or cottage, which antique shops are selling which gewgaws, what wacky crap is being sold by the 99 cent store, and on and on and on. And now that the temperature has finally dropped around here, it's actually comfortable to walk.

In fact, it's actually been raining off and on the past couple of days--and you thought that song was right about it never raining in southern California, huh? But I'm now so taken with my first few forays into walking, I'm strongly contemplating suiting up in raingear and going for a walk anyway. How's that for breathing a little new life into the exercise part of my program?

Weekly weigh-in: More deja-vu

Today's numbers:

• Today's weight: 200.5 lb
• Change since last week: -1.5 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 133.5 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -1.52 lb

So once again I'm verging on crossing that ol' 200 pound mark. I'm pleased, but it kind of takes the thrill out of it to have already done this according to the old scale. Especially since I have no way of knowing, short of hauling the new cheap-ass scale in for calibration, whether this 200-pound mark is any more accurate than the previous scale's 200-pound mark. Ah well. The important thing is that progress continues to be made, and healthy eating continues to happen.

My knee is now completely recovered from its AIDS Walk flake-out. I think it just didn't want to be taken on such a long walk, and thus took evasive action. But I also can't help thinking it wouldn't go out nearly as easily if I were being much more rigorous with exercise. I'm still extremely sporadic, and it requires regular exercise to build up the muscles that would keep the knee properly stabilized.

Maybe if I keep on fulminating about exercise this way, I'll eventually persuade myself to get on with it. Hey, it worked with getting on with weight loss in the first place...

ScienceDaily: Diet With A Little Meat Uses Less Land Than Many Vegetarian Diets

Link: ScienceDaily: Diet With A Little Meat Uses Less Land Than Many Vegetarian Diets.

Wow. This is fascinating stuff on a number of different levels--not the least of which is journalistic manipulation. In other words: don't let the sensationalistic headline distract you from the fact, right in the second paragraph of the article, that even though the low-meat diet edged out the vegetarian diet on efficient resource use, both the vegetarian and low meat diets offered huge resource savings over the typical American high-meat high-dairy diet.

By the way, the secret of the seemingly paradoxical finding about low-meat diets being ecologically a hair more efficient than all-vegetarian diets is that grazing animals like cattle and goats can eat off of land too low in quality to grow plant food for human consumption. It's all there in the article.

But also note the cute little zinger statistic right at the end:

"According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average American ate approximately 5.8 ounces of meat and eggs a day in 2005. 'In order to reach the efficiency in land use of moderate-fat, vegetarian diets, our study suggests that New Yorkers would need to limit their annual meat and egg intake to about 2 cooked ounces a day,' Peters said."

Wow. I'm eating eight to ten ounces of protein a day, most of which is usually meat. And here I thought I was being so ahead of that curve. And while I have no stats to back it up, I have trouble believing that low average is exclusively due to ethical by-choice vegetarianism. I suspect there's a lot of people too poor to afford a lot of meat behind that little stat. Hmmmm ...

Weekly weigh-in: resuming the downward creep

Oh yeah--today's numbers:

• Today's weight: 202.0 lb
• Change since last week: -1.0 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 132.0 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -1.52 lb

Yay! Off the plateau at last! And that even after the AIDS Walk turned into a bit of an anticlimax for me personally. Not for the event as a whole--that went off splendidly, and much moola was raised to support people living with HIV/AIDS. But as for me, my knee decided to give in to Murphy's Law and go out on me the night before the walk.

So I did show up on the grounds, convene my team and see them off on the route, and then hobbled around the staging area checking out all the informational booths (and scoring leftover healthy snacks like bananas and SoyJoy bars--hey, the booth staffers were begging people to take stuff so that they didn't have to lug it home). And then I hobbled back to the shuttle, reclaimed my car, and put my knee and the rest of my bod in a nice bath full of Epsom salts.

As of today, my knee is mostly persuaded to cooperate again, though it's still clicking at me a bit. I am told that the surgery for correcting a meniscus tear, the probably cause of this clicking weirdness, is one of the easier knee surgeries out there. But I'm still so deeply weirded out by the experience of my hysterectomy last summer that I'm just not quite willing to go under the knife again. Not just yet. I may well come around, but for now I'm humoring myself on this point.

Anyway--progress is happening one way or another. Yay!

More diet foods that don't suck: konnyaku noodle frenzy!

I realize that I've posted before about the joys of konnyaku, that fascinating traditional Japanese gelatin with almost no calories and lots of cooking uses. Well, I've discovered some new-to-me forms of konnyaku that I'm really enjoying, and so I want to share the joy.

This pre-packaged little lunch kit is labeled as "konnyaku noodles," rather than shirataki, the word I've learned to associate with noodles cut from konnyaku gelatin. And in fact, whereas shirataki tend to be thin like spaghetti, these are rather broader like fettucini. The kit also comes with little packets of hoisin sauce, sesame oil, and sesame seeds, and even a wee plastic fork so you can assemble and eat your little noodle lunch while on the go.

A lot of people find konnyaku's natural odor and flavor out of the package a tad off-putting, but I don't mind them, especially after I give the noodles a nice rinse in hot tap water. I then assemble my little kit, and voila: almost-calorie-free snack! (I give it a stir to get the condiments thoroughly distributed throughout the noodles before chowing down).

Alas, I am unable to find an online source for the noodle packet above. I bought it at 99 Ranch Market, an Asian grocery store chain with branches in Southern California. I'm willing to bet that noodle packets like this could be found in many other Asian groceries as well--it looks like a product packaged for wide distribution.