Daaaaaay-O

That’s me singing the Banana Bread Song.

WOW, that joke is horrible. Get me, I’m intolerable!

So I had these bananas that were clearly within a day or two of going bad, but right before bananas go bad, they go through that phase where they’re very dark and very soft but not yet bad, and that’s the moment where they cry out to you, “Use me to make banana bread.”

And for once, instead of watching something go bad while chastising myself for not making something out of it, I actually made banana bread. I used this recipe from Cooking Light, pretty much exactly as written. My only modification was that after the prescribed hour of cooking time, it looked good on the outside, but when I put a knife into it, I pulled out banana pudding. So, needless to say, it required about another ten minutes of baking time, but it didn’t dry out or overcook on the outside in the meantime. As a friend of mine was saying the other day, quick breads can be kind of temperamental, and I think with something as vague as very ripe bananas, the cooking time could be altered by anything from how ripe and mushy they are to how much volume you actually get — I just used three ripe bananas; it’s not like I measured the mashed banana to make sure it was a cup and a half.

Let me tell you, this stuff is so good. With light quick breads, as you know if you’ve ever made them, the risk is that they will be incredibly dry. If you’ve ever made a supposedly healthy applesauce bread and wound up feeling like you’re trying to do that parlor trick where you eat six Saltines in a minute, you know just what I’m talking about. But with banana bread, it’s so moist from all the fruit that there’s no danger of that at all. You could probably make this with oil instead of butter for a bit less saturated fat, but a quarter-cup for an entire loaf…you know. It’s not that bad. My only hesitation is that it uses white flour exclusively. I’d like to try it with some whole-grain flour or something else that would give it a bit of fiber, but the texture is so divine that I’m afraid to ruin it.

As it happens, a couple of days before I made the bread, it was Errand Day, so I had my Zipcar, and Ames and I went to Trader Joe’s, where I became fascinated with their “cashew macadamia nut butter.” You know, like peanut butter, but with cashews and macadamia nuts?

You know what’s an insanely good breakfast? Two thin slices of homemade banana bread, toasted, with a very small amount of cashew macadamia butter and two bitty clementines. It has fruit, it has protein, and it makes me feel pampered. It’s a tad higher in calories than I’d usually have, but I was heading into a big workout, so it seemed like a fine idea.

I felt so good, in fact, that I went and did the Biggest Loser Power Sculpt, which I’d purchased by not tried yet.

What the hell is with Kim? Jillian, good. Bob, weird but good. Kim? OH MY GOD, I hate her guts. What is her problem? It’s like she’s both really twee and really judgmental. You can only be one of those! Basically, the structure is that there’s a five-minute warmup with Jillian, then a twenty-minute sequence with Jillian, then a ten-minute sequence with Kim, then a ten-minute sequence with Bob, then a five-minute cool-down with Jillian. (This may be why Sarah noted no warmup; if this was the same “power sculpt,” it’s in modules, so the warmup is separate, and it’s on the DVD, but it might not be part of the same On Demand thingy.)

Anyhoo, it was interesting to watch this video, where the participants are Biggest Loser contestants, some of whom still are obviously working on losing some weight. Bob, in particular, wants you to spend an obscene amount of time in standard push-up and plank positions, which even the BL graduates simply can’t do. You wind up looking at people whose “push-up position” involves butts high in the air, which is not right, but that’s just not a position that larger people can hold for that long. It was frustrating to me that, during the course of the workout, nobody said, “You know, even our demonstrators can’t do this, which isn’t good for morale for the people watching at home.” I did as much of it as I could, and I wound up doing all the segments, which is supposedly the most advanced version of the video. It’s definitely very difficult and imposing, with 40 minutes of pretty hard labor.

As always, I liked the Jillian parts the best. I just liked it that, when one of the demonstrators was doing the move wrong (not in the “bad and injuring form” way, just in the “that’s not what we’re doing” way), Jillian was like, “No, tap. Tap. TAP!” in this voice that wasn’t really mocking and wasn’t really critical, it was just amused, like, “Hey, Sweaty McGee, you want to pay attention?” It brings a little bit of needed lightheartedness to the proceedings when the exercise lady is like, “Hi, we’re over here, and we’re doing this, so whenever you want to join in.”

So things are good today. Sweaty McGee, reporting.

An Exercise In Artificial Excitement

Okay, Sarah has really waited for this one.

Finally, finally, I am back on a regular workout routine, which has stabilized my mood and taken a few pounds off and all kinds of good things. I have a pretty decent daily schedule set up, which I’ve been pretty good about sticking to, except when it’s disrupted by weird little things.

One of my staples is the new set of The Firm workouts, which no longer require that you have a big plastic step in your living room, which makes them much more apartment-friendly and also keeps me from having to throw things at the television when they keep making me step up to the high step.

This one includes “Hi-Def Sculpt” (with Annie!), “Cardio Overdrive” (with Alison!), “Hard-Core Fusion” (with Allie!), and “Cardio Party” (with all of them, plus Rebecca!). The one that Sarah and I have spent the most time talking about — even though she was flatly refusing to do it last time we talked — is “Cardio Party.”

IT IS NOT A PARTY, you morons. If I wanted to go to a party, I would know how to do that. It would not involve Allie Del Rio announcing that she is beginning the “fiesta,” and it certainly would not involve Rebecca at all, for any reason. I fully understand that everyone likes different instructors, and I’m not really mad at Rebecca, but…she drives me crazy, you guys.

For one thing, Rebecca has a hard time figuring out the timing to take you from one move to the next. She frequently says “do whatever” at a moment when it’s impossible to tell whether she means THIS time or NEXT time, and it isn’t consistent from one time to the next. Furthermore, there is this part where…man alive. There is this part where Rebecca keeps saying “step touch…both arms,” and she does it about a hundred times in a row, and she sounds precisely the same every single time: “Step touuuuch…both aaaaarms,” and it sounds like she’s a robot, seriously.

Annie has a different problem. Annie stops smiling, and then someone off-camera tells her to smile, and it’s way too obvious, because she goes, “DING!” all of a sudden. She’s working out perfectly normally, and then she suddely flashes this completely random toothy grin.

Among other things, these workouts make an interesting contrast with Jillian Michaels of The Biggest Loser fame, whom I have also grown to like even though I don’t watch that show. There’s something about the way she announces that taking the stairs is bad advice compared to doing jumping jacks that I just really like. “There is no modification for jumping jacks; I have 400-pound people who can do jumping jacks.” I like her, and I like the fact that she spends workout time making you want to die of sweat, instead of doing what some of the Firm videos fall into, which is making it too complicated so you spend half the time just trying not to step on your own feet. Alison’s “Cardio Overdrive” is like this; it keeps making you change feet needlessly, alternating sides by inserting one-beat pauses instead of just doing, like, eight on one foot and then eight on the other. Constantly changing the lead foot is actually sort of hard, and it distracts me.

There’s no getting distracted with Jillian. It’s like, “Hi, do this until you pass out.” I also really, really like her patter. It’s very encouraging, but it’s not demeaning or insulting. It sort of says, “The only way the body changes is by being placed under stress, so that’s why you’re doing this thing that feels really unpleasant.” It’s not like this is news, but the way she puts it really works on me. I have her “30-Day Shred,” and I can juuuust barely get through the first level (it’s not even a half-hour long, really) with a few little stops in the middle to catch my breath. It’s very, very challenging, but it’s also pleasantly mindless., because it only changes once every 30 seconds to a minute, and it changes between easy, obvious things.

I also took a tip from the Tomato Nation commenters and tried Inhale, the yoga show on Oxygen with Steve Ross. When Virginia Heffernan reviewed him at Slate, she made him sound kind of mean and negative, but I don’t find him that way at all. I think he’s almost always kidding, and I find the fact that he actually has a sense of humor to be refreshing. I mean, I can’t imagine a yoga class that wouldn’t be somewhat annoying at some level, because IT’S YOGA, and Steve can certainly get pretty goofy going on about your center and accessing magic by touching your belly button and so forth. But for the most part, I find him amusing.

But when Heffernan talks about the balancing poses that she finds are “difficult,” she’s singing my song. I can’t do that stuff at all, and I doubt I could with a year of practice. It’s hard to explain if you’ve never done it, but if you come equipped with some soft squishy spots on your body that Steve doesn’t have, some of his poses simply aren’t going to work for you, and the balancing stuff is among the hardest, I think.

Still, I do find it kind of interesting and invigorating, and I’m happy to have something else to fit into the routine. Right now, I’m not feeling an overwhelming need to join a gym, which is nice. I figure that if I can be as artificially happy as Annie and as mellow as Steve, but also as plain-spoken as Jillian, I will do fine.

Numbers Come To Starbucks

Because, I believe, of the New York law now requiring calorie information to be displayed by more establishments, we now have little signs on all the food at Starbucks indicating how many calories those delicious pastries actually have. I’ve always been roughly familiar with the content of the drinks, but the food varies so much from place to place that it’s really interesting to see it laid out like that.

The restaurants, of course, always resist this — they believe that it will cut into people’s desire to eat a muffin if they have to look down the barrel of how many calories it has. But my guess is that it will affect choices among pastries more than it will affect whether you buy one or not. When I looked at the case on a morning when I hadn’t gotten my act together enough for a real breakfast (tax time — don’t judge me!), it was really interesting to look and see that a blueberry muffin had a fairly manageable, breakfast-sized 320 calories, while a raspberry scone had a much more daunting 470. I think of both of those as “a treat with coffee,” and if one has 150 calories less than another, that’s good to be reminded of while I’m standing there. And look at the rustic apple tart, which is really quite tasty — only 190 calories, largely because by volume, it’s largely a sliced cooked apple.

I can’t say having a blueberry muffin every morning would be any kind of a good idea, but I was struck by the fact that standing there, it really was helpful to have those numbers staring at me, not for guilt reasons, but for what felt like very logical cost-benefit reasons, and in that moment, I was proud of myself a little.

Long Time No See

So when we last spoke, I was trying to learn how to eat without lists, which has actually been pretty educational and helpful. Particularly since I moved to New York and took a job that was (1) very stressful and (2) located in the recreational-food paradise of Rockefeller Center, I did gain some weight back, boo.

But as I said when I started this thing, the key is not quitting, and now that I’m working at home and have infinitely more flexibility and far less easy access to delicious but unproductive lunch options, it’s started to come back off, which is a relief.

Honestly, rather than rehashing, let’s agree that we will just GET ON WITH IT from here, because there has been more than enough dallying.

Right now, I am working a system that involves eating five or six times a day, more evenly distributed than the usual MEAL-snack-MEAL-snack-MEAL-snack theory that hasn’t always served me well. I realize there’s nothing particularly revolutionary about the small-meals idea, but it really has been a help. My biggest problem is actually lazing around and drinking coffee until 10 in the morning (after The People’s Court…don’t judge me) and eating nothing until then, by which time I’m overhungered. If that’s a word. Which I think it isn’t.

Anyway, it’s going to take me a little time to get back in the swing, so for now, feel free to leave a comment and let me know what’s working for you. Do you believe in small meals? Is there any possibility you’ve discovered a combination of chocolate and cheese that makes you shrink? Okay, maybe not the last one.

At any rate, let’s get on with it already; the cow’s not going to lose itself.

Everybody Hurts

You will remember how Dave The Personal Trainer approached me over the summer while I was on the elliptical trainer, and you will remember that I didn’t do anything about it at the time. This message is being brought to you by my sore… everything, the result of the fact that finally, I got around to getting it going.

I am not working with Dave TPT, which is probably just as well, because Dave TPT would be distracting. I would conk my head with weights while staring. So it’s just as well that Dave TPT was not there when I showed up at the desk one day. Instead, at the desk, was… well, TPT. Different TPT. TPT was not sure whether he wanted to train me at first, because as we talked about what I was looking for from the experience, he quickly became concerned about a deep philosophical divide between us: I professed not to care that much as between the Browns and the Bengals. He immediately announced that he would not be training me, but would find me someone good. I asked him why he cared, and he said he was from Cincinnati. After I explained that I had relatives in Cincinnati, and after I was able to explain to him within a reasonable degree of certainty where in Cincinnati they lived, he agreed that perhaps it would work after all.

That was before my glorious vacation of early October, during which I visited my beautiful sister, increasingly awesome nephews, lovely pal Ames, and inimitable Music Stylist — now accompanied by his charming family, which finally got out from under the horrible strife of living in Wisconsin. Yuck. At any rate, TPT and I agreed that rather than skip a week and a half when I was just starting out, I’d just start after I got back. I got back on Sunday the 15th, and because the world tends to conspire to make me procrastinate even when I’m not trying, I immediately became deathly ill with a chest full of crackle paint and sinuses full of wet sand. This did not seem like a good way to start either, not to mention the fact that I wouldn’t make even a Bengals fan sick on purpose (just kidding!), so I had to cancel, and we reset for this past Sunday as opening day.

Here’s the thing about me and stuff like this: the most important thing is getting past the part where I feel like a complete wad. Seriously, you get me out there with my hair in a ponytail and my clumsiness blazing (although, in fairness, I was rocking my special-edition Glarkware shirt that says “Is This Because I’m A Recapper?” on the back), and I am in goddamn gym class all over again, and I can’t climb the rope, and you would think that maybe some of this would have left me, but none of it has. So the first thing I have to do is get used to the fact that if we’re going to do weight machines and whatnot, I’m going to hang out in the half of the gym with the Guys Who Go “RUH!” You know, those guys. They wear muscle shirts, and they wear little leather gloves, and with every move, they go, “RUH!” At least they’re thinking it. My half of the gym is the half where the people walking on treadmills and watching TV and playing their iPods hang out. That’s the mellow half. The half where it’s just distracted sweating. Hanging out with the GWGR is totally different. RUH! There aren’t as many of me over there as there are over by the treadmills. I instantly feel more… presumptuous. I trail TPT around very carefully, partly because I’ll get lost otherwise, but partly to lend myself legitimacy. “He’s making me do this,” I try to say to the GWGR via mental telepathy.

The first day was really not bad, with the exception of one thing, and for those of you who know what I’m talking about, you’ll instantly know what I’m talking about: GODDAMN BIG BALL. You know how those balance balls look kind of friendly and floaty, like you could cuddle up with one to listen to someone read you a story? Well, you can’t. Because they are made of evil. If you’ve ever seen the episode of The Office where Dwight is sitting on one and Jim stabs it with a pair of scissors? I now love that episode for an extra reason, which is that those things are not nice. TPT makes me sit down on it, then roll forward until my head and shoulders are on it and I’m flat like a plank out to my knees. Are you picturing this? Okay. Now, he wants me to lift up each leg in turn.

This sounds easy. It is not easy. It is designed to humiliate you, as he basically admitted. See, once you have nothing but your head and shoulders on the ball, moving your leg means moving your hips, which means falling off the ball. You wouldn’t think you could fall off a ball, but I assure you that you can. This is the soundtrack from me, doing this exercise: “Oops. Whoops. Oops. Oops. Whoops. Shit. Oh, sorry. Oops. Goddammit.” All I do is fall off. If falling off were the exercise, I would already be queen of it.

The rest of it? Not that bad. Acceptable, though very difficult. At the end, I wasn’t sore, exactly. I was just made of rubber. I went downstairs and discovered that changing for your shower is very hard when you can’t lift your arms over your head. I waited a couple of minutes.

That night, while I was over at M. Giant and Trash’s, Trash tried to convince me to drink, like, eight gallons of water before bed. “It will wash out all the… I don’t know… the thing? And the whatever? There’s a thing that makes you sore, and the water. Mm. Drink water! Shut up!” If you know Trash, you know that this is almost an exact transcription. I chose not to take her advice, because I think its only possible value is that it would have made me get out of bed five times overnight, which might have helped keep me from stiffening up, I admit.

And then, there was the being very sore. Not bad, not like I was injured. Just… sore. And as I explained to Tara, the only things that didn’t hurt were the things I care about not hurting: back, neck, knees. So I give TPT big props for that.

Today was round two. We started out with treadmill walking, which saves me a few minutes with the GWGR, but which also makes me… stand there while someone watches me walk on a treadmill, which is disconcerting. I feel like I should be entertaining him or something. I’d tell jokes, but… I don’t think so. We somehow got on the topic of him trying to help me keep from dropping weights on my head later, and we discussed what would happen if I did drop weights on my head and need to be taken to the hospital. We agreed that he would probably call me an ambulance, but he would definitely try to get himself another client for whatever remained of my hour.
The only bad development was that this was the day TPT learned that I will not be doing pull-ups. At least not at this time. I was a good trouper and I tried. But… no. Actually, more like “HA HA HA! No.”

For whatever reason, the machines were more crowded than they were on Sunday, even though it was Wednesday (crazy Minnesotans), so we did a bunch of other things, including walking lunges. What I “love” about walking lunges? It’s the closest you’re going to come to actually going up to every individual person at the gym, knocking on the side of his head, and saying, “Hi, would you like to stare at me?” Because “walking” means “walking.” Down the aisle. Of machines. I kept feeling like I should wave to everyone. I almost stepped on the head of a guy doing sit-ups. This was also the only thing during which I actually hurt myself. You may or may not know this, but you have this muscle halfway down the outside of your thigh that you use for getting out of the car. You aren’t even aware that you’re using it, but you are. You’ll only learn you have it if you ever harm it in any way, as I did, while doing walking lunges. Getting out of the car will immediately become substantially more challenging.
Also on today’s agenda: something that felt a lot like a field sobriety test. Stand on one foot, put the other foot forward… to the side… behind you. Do this for one minute. I told TPT that this would help if I were ever pulled over, which resulted in his telling me a very amusing story about proving to a friend that he wasn’t drunk by doing a row of back flips. This is why he’s a trainer, and I’m… a writer.

At the end, we attacked the thing on the side of my leg. The Getting Out Of The Car Muscle. Specifically, he taught me how to give it a massage (this had an official name starting with “self” and ending with “release,” which caused me to do my Beavis laugh, but only on the inside), which he told me would hurt like holy hell at first. Which — mission accomplished!

At any rate, I am still what I would describe as “fuck-all sore,” but mostly in a good way. Today wasn’t as much Arm Day as Sunday — it was more Leg Day, which is why instead of being unable to lift my arms over my head, I almost had my leg give out on the way down to the locker room. But other than the Getting Out Of The Car Muscle, it’s all going well. I am encouraged by the fact that TPT tells me what to do, but does not feel the need to be all “rah rah,” because I would have to punch him in the face if he did that. In fact, we have a growing sense of trust — a dude came strolling by while I was working out today, and he was clearly kind of watching and observing, and he slapped TPT on the back, and I was thinking, “QUIT STARING.” But it turned out that it was TPT’s boss. “So this would be the wrong time to scream for help,” I said. “No,” said TPT. “That would be good. It would draw attention to us and make it clear that I’m a jovial trainer.”

The Experimental Cook

I can always tell things are going better when I do something like invent a soup, as I did yesterday.

I chopped about half an onion with my little chopper, which is the best thing ever if you work in small amounts — a million times faster to use and clean up than a mini food processor, and just as good. See the Pampered Chef version here; I can’t remember if I technically got it from them or if it’s a similar one, but that’s the idea. Anyway. Chopped the onion, dropped it and a little bottled minced garlic into a sprayed nonstick saucepan, cooked it up a little. Added about 2 1/2 cups of chicken broth, some minced jalapenos, some chili powder, a little cumin, about a cup of canned corn, about a cup of canned black beans, and about a half a can of stewed tomatoes. Simmered it for a while, then stuck my hand blender right into it, just like they used to do on the infomercials, blending the soup while it was still on the stove simmering. Didn’t puree it perfectly, but got it nice and thick.

Then I mixed two tablespoons of flour and two tablespooons of skim milk with a fork until it was smooth and added that, which made it nice and thick. Shredded a skinless boneless chicken breast half I had poached on the stove while the soup cooked, let that cook some. Added a small handful of shredded reduced-fat cheddar cheese, and finished it with a couple of tablespoons, believe it or not, of nonfat half-and-half, which gave it a creamier look. This wound up making two generous servings of soup for me, and when I ran the nutritional information, what do you know? It was just about perfect for what I would want for dinner. Well-balanced, right number of calories, and — if I do say so myself — very tasty. I would probably add the whole can of tomatoes next time, and either some cayenne or more peppers.

The point of this (short) entry is that this is what I’m trying to do — learn to do it by feel. I couldn’t tell you exactly how many points it had, and I couldn’t break it down into breads and milks, and the shredded cheese isn’t Core, and I didn’t consult any lists of what to eat and not to eat, but I know when I make that on the stove that it’s good for me, that I’m not overfeeding myself, and that it’s what I want at that particular moment.

Funny story — when I first ran the nutritional information, it was coming back at 675 calories a serving, which was a lot more than I thought it should have. I could not figure out what the hell I was doing wrong, and I was like, “Man, maybe I’m wrong, and I don’t know how to do this as well as I thought.” It just seemed off somehow; I know approximately what food values are, and I was really discouraged by it. Then I realized that it was counting a cup of dried black beans. Which cooks up into about a truckload of beans. So that’s what was wrong. I fixed it so it (by which I mean MasterCook 7, the program I use for recipe analysis) knew I was using canned beans, and bang! About 375 to 400 calories, which is exactly right for dinner.

It is possible. You can do it by feel, but you have to be patient and train yourself, and that’s why I encourage people to use a program for as long as they still feel like it’s good for them. At some point, you begin to internalize it and you can do a lot of it without counting, but it takes a long time to do that, and I’m just kind of establishing myself there, which is sort of fun and interesting.

Also, I have leftover soup to have for lunch.

Back. Better. BOOM!

Okay, so that was a little break.

Here’s the thing. The whole time I’ve been doing this, I’ve worked in steps. Lose a bunch, go full-out, then lose a little ground. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Mid-September was the beginning of the “Lose a little ground” phase. Now when I saw “lose ground,” I’m talking about gaining back, like, maybe five to seven pounds, two or three of which are already gone again. It’s not a collapse. But I’m not really doing it, either, and I tend to stop working out, and I kind of don’t want to talk about it, and I’m just too busy, among other things, to put a lot of time into cooking and so forth. And the thing is that I don’t even feel really down about it. I’m just on hold.

But at the same time, I don’t really want to keep doing it that way. For one thing, stopping working out is always a bad idea, because not only do you lose your fitness improvements pretty quickly, it just makes me less energetic and less happy. So I’m not happy with the status quo, no matter how easy it is to see that I’m still doing really well, and will end the year easily 20 pounds down from where I started. And I have kept a substantial and ever-increasing amount off for, like, five years now. And it’s not coming back. I don’t even worry about that, because as soon as I get to the five-to-seven stage, it’s like . . . okay, well, enough slacking.

So I got thinking about what to do, and how these periods begin in the first place — these times when I just kind of hold rather than continuing to progress, and I realized that it’s always when there’s some interruption. I’m interrupted by a trip or a change in schedule or something, and it’s not at all that I’d ever claim that I can’t stay on track when that happens; I just don’t. And in diagnosing why I don’t, I had this revelation.

I don’t want to be on a plan anymore. I don’t want to be counting anymore. I don’t want to be on Core or Flex, even though I think they’re both really good. I was at the grocery store yesterday, and I was trying to restock the house after living on Lean Cuisines for a while, and I was thinking . . . “Well, I learned on Core that I occasionally really like a piece of lean meat, and really like the shot of protein. But . . . Core is so hard on bread, and I really like to be able to have bread . . . and I have to count all my lowfat flavored yogurt, so . . . ” And I stood there, debating about which one I wanted to try to be on.

And then I just thought . . . I know how to eat. I know how to have a good breakfast, a good lunch, a good dinner. I know how much is too much. I’ve counted points for so long that I know what benefit you get from not putting cheese on your sub, or getting the small instead of the medium. I know from Core that lattes are really nice and are basically milk, so they’re a very good idea. I know from years of experience that whatever my opinion of the anti-carb vigilantes is, a bowl of pasta may be very tasty, but I will indeed be hungry half an hour later.

I know how to eat. I don’t always do it, but I know how to do it, and I think I’m tired of being on plans where I invariably feel like I’m either on or off, either doing or not doing. I just want to do what I think is healthy for me for a while and see what happens.

So I’m inventing my own “plan,” which I am calling the Eat By The Seat Of Your Pants plan. I want to emphasize that I don’t condone this, as I haven’t even tried it. Maybe I’ll gain five pounds in the first week and come back here all, “Uh, no.”

But I don’t think so. I think I’m just . . . ready to stop eating like my eating is disordered somehow, which it isn’t. I snack on yogurt and fruit or whole wheat crackers, naturally and easily. At worst, I snack on, like, Baked Doritos. When I gain a few pounds, it’s because I take a couple of trips and eat really good food that I really enjoy and drink margaritas and lie around. And I’m not sorry about any of that, and it comes back off when I go back to normal.

We’ll see. We’ll see what happens. All I know is that I look at myself, and I feel like . . . honestly, what is anybody with a book or a plan or a graph going to tell me that’s any better than what I already know? I have a lot of confidence in my experience. I have a lot of confidence in what I’ve learned about myself. That’s why when Core came out, even when I was having a lot of success with it, I was modifying it a little bit. I never counted my occasional handful of raisins. Because I know myself, and I know that isn’t the problem for me. I know I can have lowfat raspberry yogurt and not binge on it.

I’m wanting to do it myself. I hear people who like points talk about “accountability,” and it just baffles me, because . . . how am I ever going to be any more accountable than I am when I see every day whether things are going the way I want or not? And every time I think that, I think, “Right, but they say that at Weight Watchers all the time — that everybody thinks they can do it themselves, and that’s when they gain it all back.” Respectfully . . . I’m not everybody. I’ve already done this. It may not all be gone yet, but it doesn’t come back. I don’t have to go twenty years before I get to say that perhaps having learned the lessons I did from following all these things, I am ready to apply them in a way that might be right for me even if it wouldn’t suit everybody. If I do best with some Core/Flex hybrid, who’s to say that’s not right for me? What if I had invented Core while Weight Watchers only had Flex? Would that have been bad?

I want to make it clear that I encourage people who are in the early stages of this to follow something like Weight Watchers. I think it’s incredibly helpful to have that structure, and like I said, I’ve learned a huge amount from following those plans and from learning about trade-offs in a way I never would have if I hadn’t been on a counting-type plan.

But I know how to eat. When I don’t do it, it’s not because I don’t know what to do, and it’s not because I’m not committed enough. It’s because I choose to prioritize something else, and however I feel about that, that’s the level where I’m going to have to handle it. I don’t want to count anymore, and I don’t want to obey rules I think are overly restrictive for my personal lifestyle anymore, either.

It’s the Eat By The Seat Of Your Pants Plan. And now that I’m back, you will get to hear all about it.

Dear Eric Hentges

Dear Eric,

I read about you over at Mo‘s blog — no, Mo’s other blog. She linked to the article about the new food pyramid. You know the one. The one where you were talking about how if people eat wisely and exercise, they can earn “discretionary calories” that are the ones that are available for things like the occasional pat of butter or the occasional small dish of ice cream. It’s the article that has this passage in it:

Discretionary calories are the reward for living right. And Americans who are overweight or obese don’t have discretionary calories, Hentges said. “They used them up a long time ago,” he said. To get them back, they will have to burn more calories by being more active, he said.

Eric, don’t take this the wrong way, but I say this in total seriousness. The article says you are the executive director of the Agriculture Department’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, so it sounds like your job is mostly giving general advice about eating healthy, and perhaps in that role, you are qualified.

But I am here to tell you this: You owe it to the health of the people you have been appointed to serve not to say one more word about obesity, obese people, or losing weight until you have figured out what you are talking about, because as it stands now, you are one of those people who makes it worse.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. Your background, after all, isn’t exactly in medicine or psychology. Your background appears to be in political advocacy. For pork, specifically. No — literally, pork. I see from the press release announcing your appointment that you were “vice president of Applied Technology and Education Services for the National Pork Board” before arriving at the USDA. As I understand it, the National Pork Board doesn’t actually work to improve the health of fat people. Neither does the National Pork Producers’ Council, where you were the director of Consumer Nutrition and Health Research before that, and neither does the National Livestock and Meat Board, where you were the director of human nutrition research before that. These groups are there to put money in the pockets of pork producers, Eric, not to give sound medical advice.

What you say suggests that when it comes to fat people, you don’t know anything. And because you don’t know anything, you owe it to the people you’re supposed to be helping in your capacity as a government official to shut your mouth.

You see, your little comment — your smug, self-satisfied, tsk-tsking, finger-waggling, smirking little comment — is, while far from the most offensive thing I have ever heard, a remarkably concise, perfectly formed, densely packed example of the one approach to helping people get and keep their weight under control that I absolutely promise you will never, ever work.

It does not work to tell people that they must suffer now to make up for their past mistakes, and that they’ve already spent a lifetime of indulgences and can now look forward to living like monks. Let me repeat my objection, lest you mistake it for a soft-focus, psychologically generous, misty-eyed plea for kindness to people who have suffered enough. It does not work.

I’m appealing to your practical side. I’m appealing to you as a strategist. You know, the kind of strategist who knows how to move some money on behalf of the National Pork Producers Council. I’m appealing to you as a planner. As an operator. As a guy who wants results.

Trying to shame people — to embarrass them, to make them hate themselves for every drop of Coke they have ever swallowed, to make them believe that the reason they haven’t changed their habits yet is that they have not offered adequate repentance for a lifetime of sin — this does not work.

I mean, honestly. This is the one approach that has been tested on more people than any other. Telling fat people how much they suck, how much they have to make up for, and how much they should appreciate all of the great times they’ve had eating ice cream because they will never know them again? This does not work. It doesn’t.

You know why, Eric? Because no one knocks herself out if the only reward is absolution. If all she can hope for is to get back to zero. To be forgiven.

Don’t you see it? All of these people you are talking about, who have “used up” all of their calories — used up their treats, their slivers of birthday cake, their opportunities to have just a taste of what everyone else is having — they don’t owe a debt to anyone but themselves, and deep down, they know it. They are the only ones they’ve put at a disadvantage. Oh, sure, public health implications and so forth, but that’s not really what it’s about. When it’s just you and the mirror — or you and the scale, or you and the bread, or you and the treadmill — it’s not about insurance costs or the national debt. It’s about you.

You’re the one who’s going to benefit. You know who benefits when I choose to change how I eat? Me. You know who benefits when I hit the Precor? Me. Those benefits go to me.

Is this beginning to make sense to you? Are you there yet? Do you get it?

You’re asking all of these people to stop treating themselves. You want them to live a pared-down, apologetic life until the scale says “Ding!” and they can live among the Regular People again. Sure, you say they could earn their “discretionary calories” back by being more active, but there is no mistaking what you are really saying when you say we have “used them up a long time ago.” You are saying that the cupcake we do not eat today is to make up for the cupcake we ate . . . when? Last week? Last year? When we were six years old? How long will it take? How sorry do you want me to be about a handful of potato chips when I was twelve?

See, all of this debt? It’s not owed to you. It’s not owed to the Vatican, or the United Nations, or the Pork Board. It’s owed to ourselves. And because it’s owed to ourselves, you can’t convince us to pay ourselves back if you tell us all we’ll get out of it is that we’ll be as virtuous as everyone else has been all along.

Don’t you get it?

Do you really think I could get up at 4:00 in the morning to pay a debt I owe to someone I don’t have any respect for? Do you think I could change the way I eat, or drag myself into the kitchen to make dinner instead of ordering in, or pass up the free pizza lunch . . . in order to pay off a wedding from 1993?

People don’t work that way. They don’t. You don’t work that way, and neither does a fat person.

I do not work hard to make up for the things I’ve done. I work hard to put myself in the position to have the things I want. I haven’t been sentenced to three hundred hours at a cardio sweat to make up for anything. It’s not punishment, and it’s not penance. I’m not bailing out a sinking ship, you arrogant jackass, I’m just steering it in a different direction, and nothing makes it harder than people who can’t tell the difference.

And it’s so sickeningly ironic, because speaking solely for myself, nothing worked until I gave myself a clean slate. Nothing worked until I stopped writhing around trying to make up for everything I had done wrong. Nothing worked until I stopped assuming I had “used up” anything. Nothing is used up. There’s no expiration date on your right to make your own choices and make yourself feel better. You wake up every day in whatever situation you’re in, and if you do it with shame, like you’re sorry — like you’re apologizing for being in the room, for making people see you, for taking up space — you will get nowhere. It’s unfair, isn’t it?

Yeah, I think so, too.

But do me a favor. Until you’re ready to talk to me about what’s in front of me instead of the pouring sand into the barrel of guilt you expect me to be lugging around? Just close your mouth. You’re making it worse.

Lessons I Shouldn’t Need To Learn Again

I know! Twice in two days. But this was so striking, I had to run right home and prattle about it.

So, the Precor, right? To review, it’s an elliptical trainer, and I’m in love with it. It’s not one of the ones with arm thingies, so it’s really mostly . . . well, if you’ve never used one, it’s sort of halfway between running and pedaling a bike. That’s as close as I can get to a decent description. And the reason it’s so awesome is that it’s a really, really hard workout, but it’s absolutely cake for your joints.

See, even as I’ve gotten into better shape, I haven’t ever been able to pound a treadmill for, say, 45 minutes for several days in a row, because something winds up hurting. A knee, an ankle, a shin, a hip. It’s just a lot of pounding, and something winds up taking a beating. Bikes are even worse — I can tell you what will hurt. That one will be a hip for sure, and the next day, I will feel like crap. So, of course, when you do something that makes something hurt, then the next day, it’s very hard to go back and do it again, because it’s hard to tell whether to push through it or rest it, so you wind up on a very erratic schedule trying to work around this week’s sore whatever.

But. I can sweat like a pig — an athletic pig — for an hour on the Precor, working my ass off, and nothing will hurt. Absolutely nothing. Not that day, not the next day, not any day. My legs are kind of jelly when I first get done with it, and they were even more that way when I was first starting on it, but nothing hurts. At all. And that’s a major accomplishment, and that’s why I’ve done it for seven out of the last eight days.

So far, so good, right? Right. Well, anyway. I get up this morning to go to the gym, and I wind up putting on this pair of shorts. Now, the shorts I usually wear aren’t all spandex-shiny by any stretch of the imagination, but they are fitted, not because I think I look hot in them, but because it’s the most comfortable thing to wear. They’re like, you know, mostly-cotton bicycle shorts or whatever. So I own them in, like, forty colors or whatever. But the last time I went to buy a couple of new colors, I didn’t really realize they had started cutting them shorter by, like, two inches. And it turns out it’s a very crucial two inches. Because, as I discovered today, the shorter onces react to the Precor by rolling up on me. Which is seriously the most unflattering, embarrassing, totally obnoxious thing to have happen when you’re trying to work out. You feel like turning around to the people behind you and being like, “I know you’re looking at more of my thighs than you probably want to, and . . . you know, sorry.” But I was already there, and it wasn’t like I was going to go home and change. So I decided to just endure it.

It pretty much brought back every gross, self-conscious feeling from gym class, ever, even though I think that if you’re already sweating when somebody gets there and you’re still doing it when they leave, they have little room to look down their noses at you. And honestly, most people are thinking about themselves. They’re not thinking about you, no matter what you’re wearing. It’s much more in your head than anybody else’s. But still, I was kind of annoyed by it the entire time, and I was reeeeally looking forward to being done.

And at one point probably halfway through, this woman came and got on a treadmill right near me, and I was just thinking, “Yes, her too, she’s all, ‘That girl on the elliptical machine needs some fashion advice.’ Believe me, lady, it’s unintentional, so BACK OFF.” Yeah. My mind is paranoid.

But I survived the thing, and I left, and I went and had a shower, and when I got back to the lockers, she was there, having just come back from her workout, and only a couple of lockers away. Now, this was about 8:00 on a Sunday morning, so there was practically nobody there, and I was thinking . . . Great. I can’t get dressed in peace, because the one person in this place besides me decided she wanted to locate right here. Yeah. My mind is bitchy.

And as I’m putting my shampoo and stuff back in the locker and starting to get my clothes out, I hear her talking to me. “Can I ask you a question?” she asks. I swear to God, I thought for a minute she was going to say, “Are you aware that what you were wearing really wasn’t flattering?” I really did. But she didn’t. Here’s what she said.

“That thing . . . that machine you were on. Is that hard? Is it hard to get used to?”

So, to review, I was on the thing thinking, “That lady is on her treadmill thinking about how stupid I look,” and she was literally — literally — actually thinking, “Hmm, I wonder if I could do that.” It is at moments like this that you become embarrassed to be in the same room with your neuroses.

It gets better. I started to explain to her about how it’s easier on the joints and stuff, and she started to talk about how much less she weighed when she was younger, and I started to talk about how much more I weighed a couple of years ago, and we had about a three-minute conversation — really, three minutes — in which we discussed the fact that (1) I had done the stupid shakes and the fasting and we both think that’s really stupid, because you can’t not eat forever; (2) she’s an alcoholic and has to constantly tell people that weight is actually a harder battle for her because she doesn’t have the option of never eating again; and (3) she’s bulimic, which has made it even more complicated. And all this took place while I was changing into my clothes. And it didn’t feel weird, like TMI, it’s just that we were there, and we had this conversation, and . . . there you go.

Sometimes, the lessons just reach right out and grab you by the neck.

Changing Tracks

So, one week down on Core.

I am eating, as we speak — er, write — one of my best discoveries of the week. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not claiming that I invented this. People have been doing this since forever. But this is a great example of how this new program has turned my head around in a really good way.

The thing is, I used to be a snacker on stuff like reduced fat Cheez-Its and baked tortilla chips and stuff. It’s munchie-seeming, and low in points, but there’s basically no food in it. Again, don’t misunderstand — I’m not dissing the salty or sweet snack. However, it’s not going to make you less hungry, usually. I can buzz through a pack of little lowfat cookies, and while I will have satisfied the desire for a sweet, and the desire for a snack on a psychological level, I’m just as hungry.

See, I think a lot of people sell themselves short and assume that they can’t stop eating when they’re full, when in fact what they’re doing is eating such that they’re never full. Maybe of calories they are, but not of, you know, food.

So what am I eating? A bowl made of cans. You take a can of petite-cut diced tomatoes, a can of black beans (rinsed), and a can of corn. Dump in bowl. Drizzle with bottled lime juice (not Core, but far from enough to add up to a point). Drizzle with small amount of olive oil (which the Core plan wants you to eat anyway). Eat.

That’s it. So now, in my fridge, there’s a big plastic tub of that stuff. Hell, if I threw some cilantro in with it, that would be a bona fide recipe. And it’s basically Core (like I said, not enough lime juice to worry over), so I can eat it “until I’m satisfied.” So after I had lunch — which consisted of a real hamburger, made of real extra-lean meat on a light wheat roll for 1 point — and I was still hungry, I had a bowl of Linda’s First Core Week Stuff From A Can Bean-Corn Salad Thingy. It doesn’t take five minutes to make that, and as I said, you can then throw it into a container, save it (I save it without the dressing and I drizzle on the juice and oil a bowl at a time), and spoon some into a bowl whenever you want. And it’s really very tasty. Yesterday, I mixed it with a little lunch-sized can of chicken, and that was my lunch.

And there’s FOOD in it. You can’t compare what you give your body to run on when you feed it tomatoes, beans, and corn, as opposed to when you feed it reduced-fat Cheez-Its. You just can’t. And I feel like I ate some real food, as opposed to that “I just ate a snack, why am I just as hungry as I was before?” feeling.

So how was the week generally? It was good. My biggest struggle was making sure I ate enough. Core-type food — real food — takes a little longer to make than some of the quick stuff I had gotten used to. So this week, sometimes, when I didn’t feel like cooking, I would respond by not eating at all, and that’s not a great idea, because then I would wind up having lunch at 3:00 in the afternoon and dinner really late and kind of be thrown off by the end of the day. I wasn’t skipping, I was just being slow to get down to eating a meal sometimes.

Was I hungry? Only when I got busy. Trying to find some quick Core meals was how I happened on the Bean-Corn Salad Thingy in the first place. Like I said, it takes longer than a Lean Cuisine, the whole-food eating.

Did I feel restricted? No. I ate ice cream, drank beers and a margarita, had a couple of light mocha frappucinos (best way EVER to spend three points), and had a serving of potatoes every day for about the first five days I was doing it.

BUT. I would also point out that I earned about 35 activity points this week that I counted, and I counted conservatively. I became — as I’ve said — totally infatuated with the Precor, and spent four and a half hours on it between last weigh-in and this one. The day I had to quit after thirty minutes, I’m almost sure it was because I did it at about 1:00 and I hadn’t had lunch yet. Breakfast had been oatmeal and berries, so not much protein there. I think if I had eaten some protein before I went, I wouldn’t have punked out at the half-hour mark. But yeah, I worked out five days this week, which is very unusual. As I’ve said, Core is very motivating for exercise, because not only can you spend your points on treats like my beloved light mocha frapp, but you can spend them on things that are really good for you but not Core, like whole wheat bread and nuts and things.

I ate a steak this week. A STEAK. Not a big steak, not a huge steak, not a “run for the hills, she’s renaming the blog Eating The Cow” kind of steak, but a steak. Only once, but I ate it. I ate real eggs — not a lot, because I still am happy with southwestern Egg Beaters for breakfast much of the time — but a couple. I ate shrimp and beans and carrots and raspberry-banana smoothies and mandarin oranges and chili and cornbread and improvised hash browns, and I drank milk and coffee and lattes and a giant margarita.

Did I miss bread? Well . . . I missed bread as a habit. I missed being able to go for bread out of familiarity. Bread, or crackers, or a bagel, or whatever. But this morning, when I actually spent a couple of points on real whole wheat bread at breakfast, I realized that I have been eating mostly light wheat bread (2 slices for 1 point) that has, basically, no taste whatsoever. I had practically forgotten what good bread tasted like. I would much rather do this — spend a couple of points on bread and have really good bread — than be in points-hoarding mode, where I’m constantly afraid to eat anything in case I’m even hungrier later, which is kind of what Mo and I were talking about yesterday. I don’t really miss the kind of bread or crackers that I was eating most of the time. Especially if I can have fruit or something instead. I know that sounds like hippy-dippy happy talk, but it’s true.

So yes, I felt restricted at first just in the sense that I was being restricted from eating some of the things I normally would. But in the long run, do I believe the plan is more restrictive? No. It’s just different. I don’t want to talk down the Flex plan, because it’s worked awesome for a lot of people, and I had a lot of success with it myself. But I’m eating a whole lot better this way, and I’m more inclined to exercise, and I think I’m more well-prepared to exercise (in other words, better fueled).

Is it perfect? No. As I’ve said, if I were designing this plan, I’d have left one serving per day of whole-grain bread as Core. And they didn’t. And I still am not eating fat-free cheese, I don’t think. It doesn’t totally make sense to me that 1% milk isn’t Core, because it’s reportedly better for you, and the fat and calories aren’t that different. And I really am still bitter about lowfat deli turkey and ham not being included. That’s grumping me out.

But I’m digging the whole thing. I feel like I’m eating by feel a lot more than I was before — eating what I’m hungry for, rather than by what’s lowest in points. I’m not really eating more, I’m just eating differently.

And I don’t usually do stats, just because I kind of don’t think it’s the point, but for the purpose of providing complete information, I lost 4.2 pounds this week. Which is partly the exercise, but the program certainly didn’t result in my eating a lot more than I was before.