mizducky's migrations: a weight management blog with attitude

Come visit my new primary blog

As you may have noticed, there hasn't been a whole hell of a lot of action on this blog in recent months. That's mainly because I've been spending more of my creative energies these days on other topics and in other places. This reflects my determination to integrate this healthy eating/weight management routine into the rest of my life, as opposed to continuing to make my whole world revolve around the health/food thing.

What this means for this here blog is that, at least for the time being, it's going to go dormant. I'll definitely be keeping it online, but more as an archive than an active blog.

If you'd like to keep following my little life (mis)adventures, I happily invite you to check out the blog that is now the "front door" to my website: The Duck's Nest. There you'll find me going on not only about food and health, but a wide variety of other things that amuse, interest, concern, and/or obsess me. Fun times!

Life on the plateau continues

I'm having another one of those hectic life periods--just add a community theatre project, an additional freelance gig, and some other random assorted volunteer commitments, and voila: schedule overload! But meanwhile, I continue to cruise along on the same weight plateau of 192 pounds I've been on for several weeks now. Given that a hectic schedule used to mean excuses to eat crazy while pulling all-nighters at the computer, I consider this plateau a raging success--it means I'm maintaining my food disciplines even when life gets crazy. Either that, or all this excess activity is wearing off any slight food excesses I might have committed. Either way, I call it good. (Though I'll be glad when I get to the end of this latest round of deadlines and can have myself a little vacation-at-home.)

Somewhere in there, I did also succeed in finishing The Omnivore's Dilemma, and while I do have a few criticisms of the book here and there, by and large it's really made a strong impression on me. I'm now on the library waiting list for Pollen's followup book, In Defense of Food: an Eater's Manifesto, in which he sets out his nutritional desideratum: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants," and then lays out all the obstacles to achieving that goal in American mainstream processed-food culture. I can't wait! (Although given the waiting list at the local library--last I checked, I was #72 in the queue!--it looks like waiting is what I'm doing.)

Weekly weigh-in: plateau? bottom? And whither this blog?

First, the numbers:

• Today's weight: 192.0 lb
• Change since last week: 0 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 142.0 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -1.32 lb

As regular readers of this blog may have noticed, I've been plateaued at 192 pounds for about a month now. You'll also remember that I had vowed I was going to let my weight find its own natural stopping point, without doing any extraordinary alterations to my routine to force my weight lower.

So I'm wondering now: is this it? Have I reached my body's natural preferred stopping point? Not that I'd be changing my current routine one whit, any more than I planned to change it if I weren't at bottom. In fact, this may well be a moot point from a practical standpoint--I've got a healthy routine, it's working for me, so if it ain't broke don't fix it.

It does, however, make me wonder what I should do with this blog from this point forward. After all, it's no more exciting for me to keep entering essentially the same data week after week than it must be for you folks out there to read it! And the truth be known, I pretty much laid out the bulk of my philosophy about healthy weigh management--and vented the bulk of my angst about the dieting industry--in these first two years of blogging.

So I'm considering expanding the focus of this blog, from a personal weight-management journal to a more wide-ranging blog about my interests in food. This would of course still include my weigh management routine--after all, I'm not going to stop any of my disciplines just because I'm changing the blog's focus. And if something should change about my weight management routine, of course you'll hear about it here right off. And I have occasionally mentioned my other food interests here from time to time. I'd just be bringing those other interests more into the foreground.

I'm not sure exactly how and when these changes will start showing up on this blog, but watch this space, and sooner or later all will be revealed.

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.

Re-arranging the virtual furniture

So I just finished my latest eGullet foodblog, and just like the previous two it was a helluva lot of fun, and also hella exhausting. In fact, I spent most of yesterday recuperating--mainly by sleeping, drinking plenty of fluids, and eating only mild kind-to-the-system type foods--geez, it sounds like its a flu I'm dealing with, not a post-blog crash! But at least the way I do those one-week intensive blogs, there's lots of running around town to document foodish places involved, and after a week of that, well, it was still being fun but I was well ready to stop!

As you'll see if you follow the above link to my eGullet food blog, I spent a great deal of it going on at length about my weight management routine and what I've learned from doing it so far. This was a great opportunity for me to be consciously mindful of all the stuff I've learned, which turns out to be considerable! And it was great to get people's reactions, comments, and feedback--it appears that I definitely struck a chord with a lot of folks, which I found extremely gratifying, not to mention re-affirming of my approach.

And the whole exercise also got me thinking some more about where I want to go with this blog. As I muttered a couple of posts ago, I want to prevent this blog from devolving to perfunctory weekly weigh-in posts, with the odd posting about some outrageous news item thrown in every now and then. Whereas at the beginning of the blog I was just bursting with stuff I'd always wanted to rant about concerning the whole weight-loss/"dieting" mystique, by this point I've gotten a majority of that material blurted out in this blog, and the original blogging fire in the belly has died down considerably. Yet I'm loathe to totally revamp this blog, because I don't yet have a sense of any new passions I want to follow in these pages.

Soooo--I've decided to conduct an experiment. I've already defined a blog post category called "Off Topic." I hereby give myself permission to wander off on tangents that are off-topic with regard to this blog's original focus on healthy weight management. I anticipate that some of these tangential wanderings will have to do with my still-newish gig as a food writer for the brand-spanking-new restaurant recommendation website SanDiego.Eats.It (more about that on the eGullet foodblog). Some will tangent off of the restaurant recommendation biz to my thoughts on food and culture, as I wander about San Diego playing amateur culinary anthropologist/sociologist/ethnographer. And some stuff may wind up being not even remotely related to food.

I dunno how all that will play out--that's the "experiment" part of the program. At a certain point, I'll take stock and see whether I've even bothered to make use of this permission I've given myself to go off-topic; and if I have, in what directions I've felt moved to wander off-topic. I'll then consider if I want to explicitly amend the theme of this blog to follow any new passions as discovered by the tangents I've taken. The more I think about this approach, the more I like it--it's organic and evolutionary. Now to see if it works!

In the meantime, I decided to spruce things up a bit around the blog design-wise, starting with a new avatar picture that reflects my current slimmer shape. And since that new picture clashes even more wildly with the old color scheme than the previous picture did, I decided to pick a new theme and colors. Awwww ... playing house with the blog draperies is fun!

Oh, and one more random change--I've finally gotten sick and tired of shlepping all the way up to my HMO's wellness program offices each week just to do my official weigh-ins, and so I am now the proud owner of a digital bathroom scale. I figure that, at this point, I'm a lot more stable about the whole bathroom-scale routine, and can trust myself not to freak out over weighing myself 47 times a day to see if my weight changed after that last glass of water or whatever.

Of course, there is no way to calibrate this new scale with regard to the scale I had previously been using, short of driving to my HMO's wellness program office with bathroom scale in tow to do a side-by-side comparison--and that obsessive-compulsive I am not quite willing to be! So, there will be an inevitable glitch in my weigh-in data as I switch to this new measuring device; but ultimately this is a much better solution, because I now own the scale I'm standardizing on, and nobody can come by and "helpfully" recalibrate it without my knowledge.

That's it for now--tomorrow: my first weigh-in on the brand-new scale ... and the freedom to be as tangential as I wanna be.

Today's numbers--plus: future directions for this blog

Today's numbers:

• Today's weight: 220.0 lb
• Change since last week: -1.0 lb
• Cumulative weight loss: 114.0 lb
• Average weekly weight change: -1.93 lb

So I continue to edge downward, however slowly. Works for me. Nice to see 220 pounds--I don't think I've weighed that little in about eighteen years or so.

Changing the subject ... I've been thinking about some new directions in which to take this blog. At first I had huge amounts of information to process about this whole weight loss business, but it seems like I've gotten a lot of that material covered. Recently, I've been in this rut of just posting the weigh-ins and the occasional link to an article of interest, and maybe once in awhile a recipe. It's not like I've lost enthusiasm for the whole weight loss venture--far from it. Rather, it's become such a part of my daily routine that it's not generating a lot of news in my life. This is a good thing, as far as I'm concerned! But it doesn't makes for particularly exciting blogging.

So I'm thinking of expanding the focus of this blog, and maybe transforming it a bit--from geekery about healthy weight loss to geekery about food in general. This would include thoughts about my food doings here in San Diego (cooking, shopping, dining, etc.); as well as my thoughts about food and culture (especially my local forays into culinary geography, sociology, ethnography, economics, and politics). Healthy eating, weight loss, and my progress would still be very much on the agenda, including the weekly weigh-ins, plus any new articles I find or brainstorms I have. In fact, I think that will integrate into the new stuff in some interesting ways.

I've got a slug of activity coming up within the next couple of weeks, so I'll postpone any drastic changes here until after that. And then ... well, we'll see where things go.

One week of food frenzy, documented

Well, the cat has officially been let out of the virtual bag, so I am now pleased to reveal that I will be the next "foodblogger of the week" over on eGullet--or to give the site's full and proper name at least once somewhere on this blog, The eGullet Society for Culinary Arts & Letters.

eGullet has evolved this entertaining practice of having members take turns at presenting a week-long blog of their culinary activities. This has turned into a really popular thing, as the foodbloggers have regularly risen to the occasion in all sorts of wonderful ways--documenting major cooking projects, restaurants, markets, dinners, festivals, picnics, and all sorts of other fascinating foodie lore of their lives and locations with copious photos and great joie de vivre.

They're a colorful lot over on eGullet, both pro and dedicated amateur, from all walks of life and many different nations, and they all also seem to share that other common trait of epicures, a devotion to telling great stories. And because it's in forum format, the blogger gets to interact with readers. It's like a virtual dinner conversation--the kind that goes on till way too late because you're having too much fun talking to each other.

I got to do one of these foodblogs back in January, and I had a helluva lotta fun with the thing. Ironically, that blog (and the food excesses it documented) fell just the week before I started my current health regimen. I literally finished the blog late one night, and then at 9:30am the next morning I was sitting in the first meeting of the weekly class my HMO had enrolled me in, being handed a humongous looseleaf notebook and a food plan. So that blog turned out to be my last hurrah for fressing, a week-long mini-Grande Bouffe that, while fun, actually left me relieved to switch to lighter eating. I didn't even plan that, but it sure worked out serendipitously in terms of my psychology.

Doing that blog had another effect--it left me itching to do more blogging about food. And then, as my new regimen began to take off a whole lot better than I could have imagined, it hit me--duh! blog about this whole "regimen" business--and anything and everything else you can think of to keep you on the damn thing! Cheap therapy, and a creativity challenge! And so, here we are.

Meanwhile, back at the eGullet ranch ... I didn't expect to get to do another of their foodblogs so soon, but apparently there was a last-minute hole in the schedule due to a cancellation, and I am massively flattered that I was one of the people asked to fill in. And again this is serendipitous, because now I'll get to go nutz documenting a lot of the really neat local markets and hole-in-the-wall cafes I've found in my quest for interesting and natural healthy food.

By the way, I've sort of avoided going into strictly local-to-San Diego resources in this blog, figuring it wouldn't be quite so interesting to anyone reading this who wasn't near enough to actually get any use out of such resources. But maybe I should rethink that assumption. Opinions, anyone?

Anyway, this special blog will be starting next Tuesday, and I'll be sure to post the link over here once it gets created--because one of the side-effects of doing that blog is that I'll be a little scarce over here for that week. So--y'all come visit me over there, y'hear?

Weekly weigh-in -- back on track; plus: water water everywhere

Well, I have busted out of the plateau that had assailed me at last week's weigh-in: 296.5 pounds, representing a loss of 3.5 pounds since last weigh-in.

In hindsight I do believe that plateau was all about a fluctuation in water retention, because the bloating I was noticing in my feet and ankles last week has eased off considerably since then. It probably helped no end that I got a lot more careful this week about remembering to drink my full 64 oz of water each day. Yes, it sounds counterintuitive, but it's a medically confirmed fact that drinking plentiful water actually helps relieve water retention, because it helps balance out the body's sodium levels, and sodium is one of the body's main tools for regulating water content.

And weirdly, I have had a real struggle keeping up with my water consumption. I dunno if I just have a mental block about it, or what. But I'd lose track of how much I'd consumed; I'd get buried in my work and only eventually look up and realize it was 10pm and I'd only drunk something like 3 glasses; and a million other little things would distract me from this simple task. It doesn't help any that I find water kind of boring. And San Diego's tap water is not the tastiest stuff in the world either. Yet something in me rebels against shelling out good money to buy bottled water when it's available free from the tap. I think it's the tightwad training instilled in me by parents who grew up in the Great Depression.

Whatever the reason, it became clear that I needed to get the hell over myself and quit letting these little mental games sidetrack my progress. So I have been trying various strategies. I tried some of those flavored sport waters--I found them too sweet, and kind of flat. I really like drinking those selzers flavored with no-calories fruit essences; alas I finally had to admit that the carbonation was making my tummy feel like an inflated balloon. So finally I was back to plain old water--but with some helpful tools.

Firstly, I found at the grocery a clever water bottle designed to contain exactly the 64-oz recommended daily allotment of water; I now fill that up at the beginning of each day. Next, I set a reminder to drink water in the calender/scheduler program on my computer--every hour, it bings at me with the message "DRINK WATER!" and I take a few more swigs from my day's allotment. By these two simple steps, I was able to assure myself that my innards were well-watered this entire week--and just look at the difference!

You want to be drinking plentiful water when on a weight-loss regimen anyway. When you're losing weight, your body is basically drawing on your fat stores and digesting it for any energy needs not met by your (diminished) food intake. The waste products of that digestion need to get out of your body, their exit route is your kidneys, and your kidneys need sufficient water to help flush this stuff out. Especially of concern is the fact that your body fat is more than likely storing a lot of environmental pollutants and other fat-soluble toxins--not unlike the way fatty ocean fishes such as tuna have a tendency to store mercury in their body fat. When those fat deposits start being burned off, those toxins are also released into the bloodstream, so you really want to flush that stuff the hell out too.

So now, properly watered and properly back on my weight-loss progress, it is time to contemplate dinner ... and getting ready to do it all over again tomorrow.

The gravity of the situation: some random thoughts

Earlier today I was standing at a counter in my kitchen chopping up some food, when it dawned on me: my body wasn't complaining. Not so very long ago, my back would have whined mightily over the very slight bend forward required to lean over a chopping board like that.

The mind-blower behind that little observation is that just the 34 pounds I have lost so far has made that much difference in my body already. Because the program I am participating in is focused on protecting knee joints, our instructor has been camping on the fact that each pound of weight lost results in a four-pound decrease in pressure on your knees. What goes unstated is that similar secondary effects are happening all over my bod. There's now that much less pressure on a lot of my weight-bearing joints, and on my frame in general. Moreover, my center of gravity has shifted--there's just the slightest bit less gut and ass pulling the spine out of alignment, and so I can now do things that I used to need work-arounds for--like whipping through my dinner mise en place standing up at a counter, rather than having to fetch a chair.

The cloud attached to that particular silver lining, though, is the realization of how much further I still have to go. I'm trying not to dwell on that, and rather to concentrate on getting really comfortable with just living the process on a daily basis.

It is beginning to get a little more challenging on the psychological level. On the food front, I fear I am no longer in the honeymoon phase, when I felt no cravings whatsoever and everything seemed to be coming with so little effort. Now, however, I do feel that ol' food jones waking up in the back of my brain. It's growing discontented with carrots, or even the occasional healthy mini-splurges I've been appeasing it with, and is starting to whine (the subtheme for this post, folks, is "no more whining") -- starting to whine, I say, for a couple of pounds worth of barbequed spareribs.

Not that I feel the least bit like giving into it--right now when I'm paying good attention. But it's at those moments when my guard drops (due to fatigue or crankiness or distraction or hormones or whatever) and there's food too conveniently at hand, that the jones seizes control of my consciousness, and next thing I know I've discovered I've eaten a bunch of crap without even meaning to.

That may sound like a cop-out (my subconscious held me down and forced that pound of cheddar down my throat). But I swear that the damn habit is that insideous. Ever start driving somewhere, get deep in conversation with your passenger, and realize all of a sudden your brain went on autopilot and you've pointed the car towards your workplace instead of the movie theater or whatever? It's like that. Only more aggravating. There's nothing quite so mortifying as heading towards the refrigerator fully intending to get an apple, and finding yourself with the freezer door open and your hand on the Ben & Jerry's instead.

Now obviously I'm not buying Ben & Jerry's at this point in the proceedings--not wasting precious food plan units on silly sugar calories. But hey, I do have some cheese in the fridge--after all, it's perfectly healthy in moderation, and moderate amounts of protein are what I'm supposed to be eating. Still, as I've already documented, protein is my binge food of choice, and yeah, those foods continue to have a certain psychological "hotness" for me.

Now a previous weight loss program I participated in was all "food is dangerous--get rid of those binge-trigger foods forthwith!" But one of my groundrules is that I refuse to treat food as if it were literally crack. Frankly, I think that's just engaging the inner Food Jones on its favorite territory, on which it really knows how to mess with one's mind. And in fact, that program's food-as-addiction model eventually did backfire on me. No, instead of doing negative reinforcement, this time I'm going for the positive approach.

I looked up and realized I had slipped into an overly predictable rut in my food. I need to fix that STAT. Hit the market and pick up some fresh veg to make something really nice. Including lots of ingredients that max out the natural glutamate content--it's time to go for all the veg-based umami I can pack into my meals--and just see what calls out to me at the market. Hell, it's been ages since I went to the food co-op, I should drive all the way out there, and see what interesting things they might have to kick up my routine.

I need a new recipe thrill. Last major thrill, the Chinese porridge known as congee or jook, has become a beloved regular in my repertoire. Total comfort food--but definitely a cool-weather dish, and even though this overlong rainy season has kept nights cool enough that I've been continuing to do congee way into April, I think the weather's about to turn and I'll need something lighter. Hmmm ... how about gazpacho? It's been a real long time since I made that. Or--hey, what about tabbouleh? With lots of veggies, and the bulghur, which is a great grain for me to be getting into my diet. And I have the terrific North Park Produce market nearby for all my Middle-Eastern ingredient needs. Yeah, time to go Mediterranean. I'll need some at least semi-decent tomatoes, but I think I can find those at North Park.

Oh yeah, and not to forget about the mushrooms. I am blessed with access to lots of cheap dried shiitakes, and there's so many interesting fresh ones in the Asian markets. This kind of strategizing not only helps me come up with cooking ideas, but the process of thinking about the foods themselves gets my foodie-brain engaged as an ally.

I need to get the exercise part of the program back underway too. Fortunately my knee finally stopped freaking out on me, so I'm now going to cautiously try some walking again. Has it really taken moving to car-crazy Southern California to reconnect with my old love of walking? Well, the pretty weather and scenery sure don't hurt. I still haven't tried the swimming pool in my apartment complex, but you know what I realized? My brain just finds the prospect of showing my bod in a bathing suit way too stressful. Just way too much bad history with people feeling free to be asholic at the fat girl, I'm afraid. (yeah, I could wear a teeshirt and shorts over my suit, but as any wet t-shirt contest participant can tell you, once you're wet those clothes provide no camoflage whatsoever.)

I know, one of the reasons I moved into this place was to use the pool, and I will--eventually. Right now, I'm working on keeping my regimen as pleasant and inviting as possible so I'll enjoy doing it, and stressing over whether there's a neighbor behind any of those several dozen living room windows overlooking the pool, looking at my bod and thinking hateful things--nope, does not sound pleasant or inviting. So I'll be a hero another day; right now I need to focus on taking care of myself.

But I've gained some useful experience from dealing with my knee's recent out-freakage. I was definitely carrying an additional burden of stress over the knee--the pain, the inconvenience, the crimp it was already putting in my plans ... and always the undertow of anxiety over whether it was going to get better this time. But at the same time, I could still feel that this pain was happening in a generally healthier bod than before, such that I felt like I had better physical resources with which to deal with the situation. And reminding myself of that really made the whole psychological level that much easier to deal with.

Well, this has turned into quite the stream-of-consciousness meander, hasn't it? But it did really help to think through where I'm at with this whole project. So I think I'll just leave it as-is. And I'll no doubt blather on like this again. Whatever works to keep me on the program.

No foolin'--I want more site traffic! :-)

Okay, I'm having a good enough time with this blog that I'm feeling good about inviting more people to check it out.

So--if you're reading this blog, and finding it useful or at least entertaining, pass the word on to people you think would appreciate it.

Now don't be passing it on to people who you think should be dieting, but who have expressed no interest in or willingness to do so. I can tell you from personal experience (from both ends of that equation) that such suggestions never go over well, and inevitably end in tears. If not thrown crockery.

But anybody who has been trying to diet and been driving themselves crazy with frustration over the bullshit and doubletalk? Bring 'em along. The more the merrier. We can have a grand old time together throwing spitballs at the diet industry establishment and figuring out between the lot of us what really works and what doesn't.

No, this is not an April Fool's joke--I confess I've never been all that skillful at that particular kind of humor. But I do wish you a most excellently foolish day, and urge you not to forget your daily dose of laughter--perhaps the best damn medicine in the world.