bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • Everything you know about the foreclosure crisis might be wrong.

    Maybe it wasn't subprime loans.  Maybe it wasn't fraudulent paperwork.  Maybe the culprit is really no-money-down:

    Many policy makers and ordinary people blame the rise of foreclosures squarely on subprime mortgage lenders who presumably misled borrowers into taking out complex loans at low initial interest rates. Those hapless individuals were then supposedly unable to make the higher monthly payments when their mortgage rates reset upwards.

    But the focus on subprimes ignores the widely available industry facts…that 51% of all foreclosed homes had prime loans, not subprime, and that the foreclosure rate for prime loans grew by 488% compared to a growth rate of 200% for subprime foreclosures…. 

    Sharing the blame in the popular imagination are other loans where lenders were largely at fault — such as "liar loans," where lenders never attempted to validate a borrower's income or assets.

    This common narrative also appears to be wrong…The analysis indicates that, by far, the most important factor related to foreclosures is the extent to which the homeowner now has or ever had positive equity in a home.


    (h/t Instapundit)

    It certainly shakes up the narrative, but it isn't hard to construct an alternative narrative that makes sense.  When you owe more money on your house than it's worth, walking away from the mortgage can be rational behavior.  And what of the "has or ever had" positive equity?  Not surprising that even having ever, once, held equity in your home, tends to keep people from walking away, especially when you consider how strongly people become attached to the notion of "I invested in this house, dammit" to the point where they won't sell it at a paper loss in the face of all rational evidence that they should cut their losses.  

    Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were still promoting no-money-down purchases last June when the foreclosure wave was gathering steam.  

    There are all sorts of ways for government and nonprofits to help people financially — I am getting more and more convinced that the best assistance is that which doesn't destroy people's sense of having invested their own resources in their success.  Yes, it means that people with less resources have fewer options than those with comparatively more.  Still, it seems to be safer for the economy, and I think more respectful of human autonomy.

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  • In praise of this morning’s breakfast: Fried egg and pot greens.

    It's nothing terribly special, and I think I have mentioned similar things before, but I thought it was a particularly elegant solution to my dual problems of "get more green leafies into me since they aren't appealing to me very much" and "what to put under my egg in the morning so I don't overload on carby things."

    • 1/2 to 1 cup cooked leafy greens (with about a tablespoon of pot liquor if you have it)
    • 1  tsp balsamic vinegar, or to taste 
    • Up to 2 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil — at minimum, just a bit more than you need to fry the egg comfortably
    • 1 egg  
    • Salt and pepper to taste 

    Toss the hot greens in a bowl with balsamic vinegar and pot liquor.

    Fry egg in the generous pour of olive oil.  When the egg is done to your liking (me:  crispy on the edges, over very easy) slide the egg, oil and all, on top of the hot cooked greens.  Hear the sizzle as the hot oil comes into contact with the greens?  Top with salt and pepper to taste, pierce the yolk, and dig in.

    Let's talk about the greens.  The easiest way to make this dish a quick weekday morning breakfast for one is to keep some precooked pot greens in their pot liquor in the fridge.   It's a great use for leftovers.  But you could also begin with fresh tender greens, like spinach or chard or young kale, and quickly steam-saute them in a little water in the egg pan before transferring them to the bowl.  Wipe out  the pan, then fry the egg.   

    The culinarily gifted will immediately see ways to make this dish more interesting and/or fancy.  The two most obvious to me are (1) saute some sliced garlic in the oil and remove it before adding the egg and (2) same thing with chopped bacon, use less oil. If you are desperate to eat less fat, you could toss just a drizzle of olive oil with the greens and use a poached egg; it is quite nice that way.  If you like Asian flavors for breakfast, you could do coconut oil and a bit of fish or soy sauce instead of olive oil.  But I think my version is simple, rich, and healthful.  It is good down to the last drop of vinegary, egg-yolky pot liquor at the bottom of the bowl.  

    I have not tried this with frozen greens.  We eat a lot of frozen greens in this house because they're so conveniently added to almost any meal, but I much prefer fresh.  In almost any season, pot greens are among the best bargains in the produce department, especially if you measure nutritional bang for the buck, so there's no excuse not to buy some fresh every week.

    P.S.  I would think that if fate has dealt you an egg allergy, that some fried Canadian Bacon would be a very tasty thing to put on top of your greens for breakfast, and would be just about as quick and easy. Sausage is another possibility — I would choose a leaner sausage here so that the olive oil provided a higher proportion of the fat.  Maybe a turkey kielbasa.

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    1 comment on In praise of this morning’s breakfast: Fried egg and pot greens.

  • Wedding night blues.

    I should have pointed to this post by MrsDarwin when it was fresh, but better late than never.  Here's the opening paragraph:

    When I was a newly-wed, I worked at a theater. One afternoon, as I was working on tech with two other girls, the subject of sex came up, and both were surprised to hear that I had been a virgin when I got married. That set them off reminiscing about their first times. For all our cultural and moral and experiential disparity, we could all agree on one thing: the first time had been awkward, painful, and kind of alarming. This was a bit surprising to me — surely the heat of the moment ought to be more conducive to getting it on than after a long and stressful wedding day? Not so much, it seems.


    It's a good post, but particularly because of the comments — she got a little flak for being, in the eyes of some readers, insufficiently reverent toward marital intimacy.  Others (including yours truly) disagreed.  I'm glad she didn't take the post down.

    Occasionally I will hear someone defend premarital sexual activity as a positive good, even necessary, as a way of making sure that the couple is "sexually compatible" with each other before making a long-term commitment.  Pragmatically, I suppose that argument has its own logic, but even pragmatically it falls flat.  There are no guarantees that the superficially sexually compatible will remain so.  The one guarantee is that you're both going to get older, and things are going to change, some for better and some for worse.   So why be so fixated on whether you're "sexually compatible" at this one particular moment in time?  The inexperienced will gain experience; the interesting will become mundane.  Libido will wax and wane in response to all the myriad influences of rest and exhaustion and presence and absence, in the cycles of childbearing and childrearing.  Medical problems may intervene.  So why not just accept one another where you are, and learn together how to be together as you go?  It's the philosophy of the young, foolish, and naive, and yet… it has served many people very well, including Mark and me.  

    Pragmatically, I suppose it requires patience, generosity, honesty, and a sense of humor.  But then, maybe it can help develop those things too.

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    1 comment on Wedding night blues.

  • If you haven’t read the stories I speak of, this post won’t mean much to you.

    With all the resting and putting my feet up, I've been doing more reading for pleasure.   A couple of weeks ago I pulled out and re-read The Habit of Being, the volume of collected letters of Flannery O'Connor edited by Sally Fitzgerald.  I am intrigued by reading somebody else's correspondence — maybe it is the sense of eavesdropping, maybe it is the mystery of only getting one side of the conversation, and having to fill in the interlocutors' questions and responses with guesswork, or else just let it go.

    Re-reading THOB got me in the mood to read O'Connor's stories again, so I opened up my copy of A Good Man is Hard to Find, and again, having finished that, requested the collection Everything that Rises Must Converge from the library.  I was struck again by the first impression I had upon reading straight through a volume of O'Connor's short stories:  I do not think the best way to read them for the first time is several all at once.  The overall impact is dulled.  One can only be shocked by the grotesque so many times in one afternoon.   (I remember this happening, too, with stories by Roald Dahl when I encountered them in junior high.)  I think Flannery O'Connor deserves to be read one story at a time, at least the first time.

    And yet, when you are coming back to them for the second or third or tenth time, there is an entertaining dimension to reading them all together.  This time through it — with both AGMIHTF and ETRMC in hand, and able to turn back and forth from the earlier stories to the later ones over a period of several days while I let them percolate through my brain — I noticed the stories having a peculiar effect on me.  

    In many of the stories, Flannery's omniscient narrator is more omniscient than most.  The protagonists of her stories are all deeply flawed people — everyone in the stories is deeply flawed, and if I had to guess I'd guess her point is that people in general are deeply flawed.  They are also people who often have an inaccurate view of their own motivations.  But it's so crisp and precise — it has taken me a while to put my finger on it, but I think the peculiar brilliance is that her narrator simply, objectively, and faithfully tells the inner monologue of the characters, completely nonjudgmentally,  but in a way that lays bare to the reader all the character's flaws and prejudices and self-aggrandizements, leaving only the pure inner thoughts.   You know what the character is thinking, and the character knows what she is thinking, but somehow you can know the character better than the character does.  It is a clarity that burns away all the facades, the ones erected for others and the ones erected to protect the self from self-knowledge. 

    So, the effect on me.  After reading some of these stories in a row (to name a few, the ones that have really stood out for me this time around are "Revelation," "Everything that Rises Must Converge," "The Enduring Chill" especially, also my dearly beloved "A Temple of the Holy Ghost", and "A Good Man is Hard to Find" which I didn't appreciate nearly as much the last time I read it)…

    …I started to get this weird sense of my own mind being laid out like that on the page.  I had a notion, a brief one, of what it would read on the page if Flannery's narrator were inspired with my own internal monologue.  It was kind of horrifying to think what my thoughts would look like if I had the ill fortune to be a character in a Flannery O'Connor story.  Because after reading a number of the stories in a row, I started to feel like I would fit right in among them.  We can't all be Southern, and we can't all have artificial legs or hated overbearing mothers, but we can all be a little grotesque.  

    Just a brief, fleeting glimpse of "what if I could read Flannery's narration of my own inner thoughts?" followed by the chilling certainty that it would be, um, a purgatorial experience.  

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  • Something else to look at.

    After reading my last post, Christy P pointed me to a blog on Slate called "The Happiness Project."  It looks like there's a lot of thought-provoking reading there.  

    For example, a post called Forgive an Accident.  Which is Harder Than it Sounds.  That one hits home — it ought to, for almost anyone who lives with small children.  Isn't it astonishing the things that make us needlessly angry?

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  • Immediate results.

    I'm sitting in an Eat Street diner called the Bad Waitress, musing about inflation.  Remember the Five Dollar Milkshake in Pulp Fiction?  This place has milkshakes for $5.25.  (Bananas in your milkshake will set you back an additional dollar).

    0704090902-00

    Waiting for my eggs Benedict.  I just finished my morning swim, so I think I've earned it.  It comes with asparagus.  That's a vegetable.  (UPDATE:  Two stalks?  That's a garnish, not a comes-with.  Sheesh.  Oh well, it was REALLY good hollandaise.  I'm not going to have to eat lunch now, I'm sure of it.)

    Thinking about habits and about outcomes.

    What do you really want to change about yourself?  I mean — among the things that you could change.  Really.

    I know I have a long list.  I wish I reflexively, automatically, responded to my children by strengthening connections, not rupturing them.   I wish that desire for the Lord, rather than duty, would draw me to prayer several times a day.  I wish that my irritation at an untidy house didn't get in the way of welcoming people into my home;  I wish I was more generous to my friends.  I wish I had a better grasp on how much money I spend.  I wish I knew how to teach my children love for Jesus as well as I think I know how to teach them theology and logic.  I wish I didn't waste any time sitting in front of the computer each day.   The list goes on.

    Once I would have said "I wish I wasn't so heavy and out of shape."  I don't say that anymore.  So:  hope.

    And skill.  I have a theory — still untested — that I can apply something I learned with the heavy/out of shape thing, to all those other wishes and longings.  It's the meta-advice that I do dispense to people who really mean it when they ask me, "How did you lose the weight?  How can I not be so fat anymore?"  And that is to let go of the outcome, as much as possible—-let go of what you want to BE —and concentrate on the relevant behavior—what you DO.   Yes, I had weight loss on my mind that whole time, how could I not?  But I tried to put all my mental effort, self-blame and self-praise, onto the habits of regular exercise and control of my eating.  I tried to want those things for themselves.  And as time went on I did want those things for themselves.  That has made the difference.  I am now the sort of person who wants to wait for a nibble till lunch.  I am now the sort of person who looks forward to a vigorous swim.

    This is the insight I would like most to share with people who ask me how I did it, how to do it.  A lot of the answers are "I don't know."  I simply don't know why last year and not any of the 20 years before that.  I don't know what changed.  Some grace, I think, an answered prayer, but I would never want to suggest that your problem is that you haven't prayed the right prayer or prayed hard enough.  But I do sincerely believe that cultivating the desire for new behaviors — not slavishly adhering to behaviors because I thought they would gain me my far-off desire — was a truly new, truly different, ultimately successful strategy.

    It's sort of like "fake it till you make it."  I tried to behave like a healthy, athletic person, and to want to do the things a healthy, athletic person would do, rather than just wish I were healthy and athletic and hope that this wish would drive me to do the right things.

    I've wondered in this space before if it is possible to MAKE yourself want something.  The more I think about it, the more I think the answer is yes.  Some things are probably harder to want than others.  But why not try?

    Can I apply this to the other things I would like to change about myself?  Probably not all at once, but I could pick one thing and work on it.  Take my response to the children.  I cannot make myself be patient and self-giving.  I can resolve to change behaviors, and I can really want to change them.   Here is an example, a tiny one.  I have an image in my mind of myself that I do not like.  It comes from a day when my five-year-old got a hold of the camera and walked around the house taking pictures — you know the kind, all the furniture slightly distorted from the kid's-eye view.  There are several pictures of me in that set.  They are all pictures of my back, hunched over the computer.  I do not want my kids to think of me as focused on the computer.  In the picture, it is impossible to tell whether I am reading blogs, or writing email to good friends, or planning the school day.  The kids don't see this.  All they see is my back to them.  I know I do not want to spend their lives with my back to them and my face turned to the computer screen.  If I concentrate on this image, I think I can make myself feel dissatisfied with looking at the screen instead of them.  I think I can make myself want to save the computer time for the blocks I have set aside for it, for early mornings, for the after-lunch recess, for daddy's bedtime story time, for Saturday mornings at the coffee shop.  I think I can make myself want to turn it off when the first child comes stumbling and yawning down the stairs wanting breakfast, so that the first thing he sees is a smile and a good morning, not "Aaagh!  What are you doing up already!?"

    "I will be more connected" — overwhelming, open-ended, vague.  "I will learn to keep the computer in its place –" much more do-able.  And more immediate, too.  At the end of the day I can feel good about having turned it off when I was supposed to and saved it for the right time, even if I don't feel any more patient or connected or different in any way than yesterday.  And the next day is another day.  And then there is another, a string of opportunities for success as long as life lasts.

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  • Schedule.

    The odd thing about this time through the first trimester (10 weeks today by conventional counting):

    You know, not that many weeks ago I was a fairly effective person.  I rarely accomplished every task I had on my mental to-do list each morning, but I tended to hit Minimum-Plus with some regularity.  Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were all made and eaten.  Schoolwork was done.  I ran the dishwasher at least once.  I answered email and wrote a blog post or two.  Some house-tidying and/or laundry happened.  I nursed my daughter a few times and got the next day's school more or less ready.  If it was an exercise day, I got my workout; if a kid had a lesson, he got to it.  I had time for a beer or at least a cup of tea with my husband at the end of the day.  Usually a few things got left off the list, but I think my family and friends would agree that I got around to the really important things, and carved a bit off the optional things, every day.

    Now I'm scratching my head.  How did I do that?  Because from where I'm sitting (or sometimes lying with my feet up) I really don't see how the math all works out.  How many hours are there in a day again?  What time did I get up in the morning?   How many cups of coffee did I drink?  How long of a break did I take?  When did all these things happen?

    Even if I subtract off the daily nap I am needing every day, it just doesn't seem possible that I could have done all that.  I try and I don't even come close.  I teach one child some math and I don't have time to read to the other.  I get some laundry done, and dinner has to be peanut butter sandwiches.  The only answer is that I am simply moving a lot SLOWER.

    One of those things you just have to shrug off, I guess.  It's the first trimester.  It happens.  On the housework end, Mark is cheerfully picking up the slack; on the schoolwork end, well, it's summer, and even though I theoretically school year round, I'm not going to sweat it if we have some days of building blocks and an excursion to the playground and, yes, a video or two so I can doze off for an hour.  The one thing hanging ominously over my head is that I haven't finished my school planning for next year, and next year has to begin on August 18 (because of the block of time off in the middle of the year when the baby's born), so I'm quickly approaching the point at which it's impossible to get all the books I need from the library in time to figure out the reading schedule for American History.

    That's why I am announcing that I expect to have all my energy back TWO WEEKS from today.  Hear that, body?  Get your naps now.  The clock is ticking. 

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    2 comments on Schedule.

  • Refrigerator dough.

    My bread machine cookbook includes recipes for two different refrigerator doughs, each with a set of recipes using the ready-made dough in the fridge into a variety of different snacks, meals, and breads.  I had heard of this particular timesaving technique before but never really used it.  This week, with even less energy to make breakfast and lunch than usual, I decided to give it a try.

    The first recipe is mostly white flour, with some added fiber, nutrition, and texture coming from added oat bran.  I made it with water instead of with milk because I intended to try to keep it more than a couple of days, and I thought it had a better chance of not spoiling that way.  I always have oat bran around for muffins, so I'm not sure why it took me so long to try this out.  Another time I'll try substituting some whole wheat flour.

    • 3 cups all-purpose flour
    • 1 and 1/2 cups oat bran
    • 1 Tbsp yeast 
    • 2 tsp salt
    • 1 and 1/2 Tbsp sugar
    • 2 Tbsp coconut oil
    • 1 and 1/2 cups plus 2 Tbsp water

    Put in the bread machine on the DOUGH setting, but set a timer to go off after the bread has risen 25 minutes.  Remove the dough.  Transfer to reclosable plastic container coated with cooking spray.  Cover tightly and refrigerate at least 6 hours.

    My recipe says "up to two days" but I kept using it for about 4 days and it was fine.  The dough is sticky and moist compared to, say, a pizza dough.  It seemed the easiest way to handle it, at least when making small items like turnovers, was to press it into rounds with your fingers on a greased cookie sheet.

    Here is what I made with the dough:

    • Little burrito-shaped turnovers, open at the ends, stuffed with fresh chopped broccoli and cheddar, which we ate for lunch next to leftover minestrone soup.  Verdict:  yum. 
    • Soft pretzels, which I salted heavily and ate with mustard.  Longtime readers know I am extremely picky about my soft pretzels.  These weren't the best I had ever had, but eating them still hot from the oven was a definite plus. 
    • Pizzas for the kids' lunch.  I didn't get to try the pizzas because they disappeared too fast. 
    • Little hot apple turnovers for breakfast, sprinkled with cinnamon sugar.  These were roundly enjoyed, and something like this may replace cherry bran muffins as my get-up-and-go-morning breakfast.  (I cooked the apple filling — apples, raisins, sugar, cinnamon, apple juice, corn starch — in ten minutes on the stovetop the night before, refrigerated it overnight and then reheated it before stuffing and baking the turnovers in the morning).  They were kind of small so I supplemented the grownups' breakfast with some scrambled eggs, but the kids were content to eat the little turnovers.  They were surprisingly un-messy, even eaten out of hand.

    Every one of these things were unplanned, last-minute kind of things (except that I decided to do the turnovers the night before, but it was kind of the last minute before bed, which counts in my book).  The dough was maybe a little too savory; the recipe called for less salt, but I reflexively added more because I think every bread recipe in the book is undersalted.  So the hot apple turnovers had a faint saltiness under them, which I actually associated a little bit (not unpleasantly) with McDonald's Fried Apple Pies.  Remember those?  Ahh, I miss them.  The baked ones are so inferior.

    Other suggested recipes included "coffee cakes" (looked more like strudely things to me), dinner rolls, calzones, that sort of thing.

    I'm not sure I'd want to do refrigerator dough every single week — the tub took up a lot of real estate in my fridge — but I give it a thumbs up for speeding up hot lunches and breakfasts during a week when there are a lot of things going on or when you need to take many naps.  If you wind up with too much of it, you can always turn it into dinner rolls.  But if you had a lot of it ready in your fridge, I'd wager you could make a workweek's worth of different breakfast pastries every day without a lot of added work.

    Next week I plan to try the other recipe, which is mostly whole wheat plus a little potato starch, and will report back.

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  • Skin crawling.

    Last night, every time Mary Jane nursed, I thought I would crawl out of my own skin — it just set my teeth completely on edge and I had to clench my jaw to keep from screaming.   I have no idea what was different, if I was more sore than usual, or if she had a lazy latch, or if I was extra tired or what.  I just wanted to get away.  I really, really, really hope that doesn't happen again anytime soon.  We intend to night-wean sometime during the pregnancy, but I had imagined doing it in an emotionally neutral mindframe, not the kind where I hide under the blankets and weep I just can't take it anymore.


    I have been glad each time that I was still nursing my toddler at the time the next baby was born, and that we took our time weaning afterwards, but that doesn't make it fun every single second.  

    She's still asleep and I'm glad.  I'm going to make sure that before she wakes up, I'm completely dressed with a really supportive bra she can't break into, so that I can nurse her on my terms today.  I have always found in the past that re-asserting a little extra control over the nursing relationship helps keep the screaming willies at bay when they rear their ugly head.  Obviously this is only appropriate with an older toddler.  Not that it isn't always appropriate to listen to what your body is telling you.  It's just that there's a lot more leeway in the space you can give yourself when your child is older.  

    Fortunately I almost never feel that I need more space when the baby is very young — the baby needs to be with me, and I need to be with the baby, and I just don't ever perceive much of a conflict.  Maybe not everyone's so lucky that way; in any case I am thankful for it.  The crawling-out-of-my-skin sensation did creep up once when I had a young baby, and that was when I was tandem nursing Milo and Mary Jane when she was pretty young, less than 6 months old.  When that started happening I took it as a danger signal — I am not supposed to have nursing revulsion towards a newborn — and decided it was time to wean Milo.  That weaning went extremely well, all the horrible skin-crawling went away, and I'm still very confident it was exactly the right decision.  You might think this experience would make me more likely to wean my toddlers earlier, but actually the signal (the revulsion which I interpreted as the sign I should wean him) was so strong and so unmistakable that I really have high confidence that when it's time to wean somebody in the future, I'll know it.  So I don't feel conflicted about continuing to nurse the toddler, and to gain all the benefits that come from it, right up to the moment when I suddenly can't stand to do it anymore.  

    So maybe the sudden onset of nighttime revulsion is the signal that it's an appropriate time to start changing the night-nursing routine — again, not a total weaning, just at night.  I could certainly use the extra sleep right now.  We'll see if the sensation returns or if it was just a one-time thing.  Mark has a business trip coming up, and I'll really need his 24-hour support for such a push, so I'll want to put it off at least for a week or two if I can.

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  • For word nerds.

    Fun new alternative to an online dictionary:  Wordnik.  Try it next time you want to look something up.  Or play the game (similar in concept to Googlewhacking):  see if you can come up with a word that nobody has yet tried to look up on Wordnik before.  

    I suppose this could make Boggle more interesting.

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  • Can this already be happening? Really?

    Okay — I am 9 weeks pregnant, and I already appear to have "popped out."

    This defies logic.

    This is not my uterus:

    Photo 88

    No, wait, it gets better.  The above picture is me with my gut sucked in as hard as I could.  This is what happens when I let it out:

    Photo 89

    This bump is too high to be uterus anyway.  I can prove it:  my pants all still fit.  Although I now have the Muffin Top From Hell.

    The only explanation that makes sense other than NO NO PLEASE NO twins is that some sort of hormonal cascade has gotten the message to my pre-separated abs that they may as well loosen up, and so they've prematurely released the tension that normally holds all my entrails in.

    I assume this sort of thing is normal once you hit your fourth/seventh/twelfth pregnancy or so?  Right, ladies?

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  • More on eating while pregnant, and yogurt carbohydrates.

    A reader who is about as pregnant as I am emails:

    So, I guess I wanted to email you to say, keep up the posts on eating/pregnancy etc. I am really feeling my way through this as well. Sweets don't really tempt me right now. That's good. I  despise having to think about food so much. I really need to be putting something in my mouth every 2-3 hours. That's when the hunger pangs start, and I start feeling sick if I don't eat. I'm trying to do something healthy like a protein with a carb. Peanut butter and banana. Cottage cheese with tomato or apple. Shaklee bar.  Can I ask how are you handling being hungry more??? I was just getting used to telling myself, Oh, supper will be in an hour! I can't seem to do that now!

    Hmm, how am I handling being hungry more? 

    I stopped to think about it:  the thing is, I am not feeling hungry more often now that I am pregnant.   I already eat five times a day; maybe those snacks at 10:30 and 3:30 are effective at keeping my blood sugar steady?

    What I am feeling is a slight aversion to vegetables, and that aversion has changed the composition of my diet.  Though I am discovering that if I can just make myself eat the darned things, they stay down, and so I'm trying.   Oh, and  plain water repulses me for some reason, so I'm spiking all my water with juice or Gatorade.  

    You know, it's okay to gain weight when you're pregnant, and  so it's okay to eat if you get hungry.  It sounds like a dumb thing to say, but believe me, it is worth saying, because I have to keep saying it to myself to keep the panicky feelings at bay.   How can I already have gained four pounds?    Well, duh, Erin, it's okay to gain four pounds at 9 weeks pregnant.  

    On the other hand I think it is possible to develop bad habits in pregnancy that you then have to deal with later.  Carte blanche is not okay, nor is eating for two unless it takes into account the fact that one of the two is the size of a lima bean.  So I guess if I were feeling hungry every couple of hours I would probably be spacing out a bunch of little micro-snacks.  If I were to need a snack every 2 hours, it probably wouldn't have to be an ounce of cheese and six crackers every single time.  If I want to stay in the habit of "mealing" rather than "snacking," then maybe it's worth figuring out how much snack it takes to keep the nausea and light-headedness at bay.  I'm willing to bet that for most people, assuming the snack contains some fat and protein, less than an ounce at a time is necessary.  Like, not a half sleeve of cheese-topped saltines, but TWO cheese-topped saltines.  Five or six almonds.

     I also wanted to ask you about yogurt. How do you do that? All the yogurt I look at has so much sugar and carbs!! I was borderline gestational diabetic last time, so I'm really trying to not eat white flour, sugar and watch for the high sugars. You would think yogurt would be okay, but I'm tending more toward 1% cottage cheese.

    I eat plain, full-fat yogurt.  No sugar added, no artificial sweeteners, no flavorings.  I like to mix chopped fresh fruit into it, but I also like it just plain.  I had to wean myself onto plain by mixing it with sweet stuff for a while, but that was years ago and I've never looked back.

    But maybe you're already thinking about plain full-fat yogurt, and it still seems to have too many carbohydrates and sugars.  It's not as bad as it looks.  Plain yogurt has fewer grams of sugar in it than are listed on the label.  If you compare the nutritional labeling of a cup of milk and a cup of yogurt, you'll notice that it's the same number of carbohydrates and sugars.  Obviously, though, this can't be correct because bacteria make milk into yogurt by converting lactose (milk sugar) into lactic acid.  I'm not really clear on why the labeling laws allow for this, but apparently the number of grams of carbohydrate in a food is calculated by some sort of subtraction process, and so in lactofermented foods, the label reflects the lactose content of the milk the product was made from and not the final total.   So, this goes for kefir and buttermilk as well as yogurt.  (Not necessarily nonfat or lowfat plain yogurt, however.  Manufacturers sometimes mix carb-laden thickening agents into these to make up for the lost butterfat.)

    About one-percent cottage cheese:  I love cottage cheese but I don't touch low-fat anything, it's full fat or none at all for me.  I'd so much rather eat real food, and I think most people don't give enough credit to fat's role in satiety, in slowing down digestion and helping you feel full for longer.    One thing worth trying any time you find yourself constantly hungry is to raise the percentage of calories you're getting from fat.  

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    3 comments on More on eating while pregnant, and yogurt carbohydrates.

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