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].

  • Small victory of the day.

    It is really amazing how those old habits can rear their ugly heads.  I mixed up a bowl of tuna salad with the right proportions of mayo, minced onion, chopped grapes and pecans to match the volume of tuna in the can.  It's about twice as much as I need to eat for lunch.  I made my plate of tuna salad, Wasa crackers, tomato soup and plain okra, ate it, and promptly headed back to the kitchen with my fork already deployed, ready to eat the rest of the tuna salad.

    I stopped myself at the last second and went for a stick of gum instead.  That was a close one.

    It's not that those calories would be insurmountable.  It's that the habits are all so very fragile, and we need to build up our strength of will every chance we get.  Willpower is nothing but the sum of all your difficult decisions made right.

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  • Back in weight loss mode.

    Yesterday I decided to put myself back in weight loss mode.  I have, a couple of times, eyed the rising numbers on the chart, and the next day cut back on food intake forcing a single reading below my target, then let the numbers bob right back up again.  Yesterday I decided I'd go into weight loss mode and remain there until my 5-day running average drops below 108.  So, several days of work.

    I planned three goals: to eat on schedule, abstain from sweets, and keep portions small.  So, how did I do?

    I am more or less pleased.  

    • I had a medium breakfast, preparing for a day of errand running and going to the gym:  two poached eggs, one piece of toast, and salad.  Coffee of course.
    • Still out and about at midmorning, and with only a Starbucks to sustain me, I chose a good snack:   Cafe au lait with whole milk.  Yes, that counts as a snack! A few ounces of whole milk, I've found, is an excellent midmorning infusion of protein, fat, and carbohydrate.  If you think you need a snack and you find yourself in a coffee shop, try a whole-milk coffee drink, and skip the sugar syrups and pastries.  Oh yeah, I also had a few almonds.
    • In retrospect, I should have had a lunch with more protein in it.  I was not very hungry and I got a sushi-veg spring roll from the fancy grocery store.    It was the right size, a small bite, but I'd have done better if it had more than just a sliver of tuna in it.
    • Back at home, about to head out to the mall with the family, I grabbed a handful of grapes, a few almonds, and a chunk of cheese.  Thank goodness I did because by the time we got to the restaurant, after carrying MJ halfway around the Enormous Mall of America, I was depleted.
    • In the reliable Italian restaurant in the Enormous MoA, Mark and I split our whole dinner:  Caesar salad (I admit I could easily have eaten the whole salad myself) and gorgonzola-encrusted beef medallions with broccoli and mashed potatoes.  I gave Mark the potatoes and ate the broccoli.  After we split the steak we each had at least four ounces!  
    •  I hadn't specifically planned not to have alcohol, so I count it as no shame that I had a glass of wine with dinner. 
    • We stopped at the home of friends in the evening and so I finished up my day with tea.  I didn't touch the cookies that were offered to the children.
    • I admit to eating bits of chocolate chip cookies my kids had left behind at bedtime snack.  In my defense, I was actually hungry at the time. 

      

    So, you can see, I stayed "on habit" all the way up to the point where I should have thrown away the bits of uneaten chocolate chip cookie.  I think that is not terribly bad.  Especially since at one point yesterday I was standing downtown outside a fairly famous-for-being-good restaurant, open for brunch, looking at my watch and wondering if I could possibly justify stopping for lunch HERE, NOW, instead of where I would likely be at actual lunch time, where there was not nearly as high a concentration of restaurants.  That's the point where I turned and went into the Starbucks instead.

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  • Exercise, induced and otherwise: Beginning.

    This week I saw my weight creep up just a bit, persistently into the 109’s.  It’s time to try to bring it back down again, for the second time since I went into maintenance.  Breakfast this morning was salad, two poached eggs, and one piece of toast (plus coffee); late morning snack is 3 almonds plus a small whole-milk café au lait (excuse me, a tall caffé misto) at Starbucks.

    I just dropped off some clothes for alterations (including that blazer that Kim H. talked me into buying!) which is why I’m downtown.  I forgot that there’s a YMCA downtown, or I might have stopped in for my morning swim there.  As it was, I went to my usual Y and had an excellent workout.  Today I swam 50 yards in 50 seconds.  That’s a new record for me.

    In posts about weight loss, I’ve written mostly about food.  Not too surprising.  I have always been a foodie, probably since age eight or so if not earlier.  I have always had an interest in nutrition and in culinary practice.  I once put a great deal of effort into learning new techniques and exotic ingredients; these days, I have just as much interest in learning how to cook and plan meals under the peculiar constraints of schedule and pickiness that comes with the territory of “busy mom.”  There’s still plenty of learning to be had there, plus the extra interest that comes from exploring the effects of other constraints, like restricting ourselves (mostly) to grass-fed hormone-free meats and locally produced raw dairy.

    I haven’t written very much about the role of induced exercise.

    Induced exercise?  What’s that?

    OK, I admit, I just made the term up right now.  Must be the caffé misto working on my brain.

    By “induced exercise” I mean exercise-on-purpose.  I mean artificial exercise.  I mean, not the kind of exercise you get from chasing your kids or doing whatever it is you do for a living.  Nor the kind of exercise you get from doing fun stuff you would do anyway, like a day at the park with the family or a game of racquetball with a buddy or rearranging the furniture in your living room (what?  Some people do that for fun).  Not even those “10 simple ways you can move more without noticing it” magazine-article suggestions, like parking at the far end of the mall lot or taking the stairs instead of the elevator or learning to fidget.

    No, I mean THAT kind of exercise.  Induced exercise.  As in, “I induced myself to exercise this morning.”  Running on the treadmill.  Going to the gym.  Sweating to the oldies.  Having a WORKOUT.  That kind of thing.

    Do you do that?

    Do you hate it?

    Do you not do it because you hate it?

    I am going to let this post percolate a bit, and then write a bit about why I think induced exercise is an important part of weight loss and weight maintenance and fitness in general — why I don’t buy the recommendation of just working bits and pieces of movement into your day, why I think it’s worth moving your schedule around to accommodate.  Why a big change might be better than a small change, and why nobody should expect “10 simple ways to move” either to be simple or to get you moving — at least enough to make a difference.

    So!  More later.  My caffé misto is almost gone.

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  • Salad for breakfast.

    Saturday mornings I take myself out for breakfast, a trip to the gym, and then run errands (of the "easier without kids" variety).  The earlier the better.

    Most of the restaurants around here open between 7 and 8 on Saturdays, but there's one place that I recently discovered opens at 6:30, and I've been going there a lot.  It's a lovely bakery cafe that touts its local cheeses and produce (in season!) and many varieties of house baked breads (and pastries — I can see the case from here — strawberry rhubarb muffins and spinach-swiss scones and chocolate croissants — not that I would ever eat these things for breakfast). 

    Its menu was a revelation to me for one big reason:  They have salad for breakfast.

    The first time I came in (still in weight loss mode) I ordered the scrambled eggs and smoked salmon.  It was a big plate and I had to limit myself to eating only half of it, and only a half piece of the "healthy hemp toast," too.  Instead of hash browns, this particular meal came with a side of "organic mixed greens."  Which was a beautiful tender green salad with just the right amount of a classic French-style vinaigrette.  Even at 6:30 a.m., the salad felt good all the way down to my toes — I gobbled it up before I even touched my coffee, let alone the eggs. 

    I came back a few more times and discovered that they would substitute the salad for hash browns, at no extra charge, on any of the breakfasts.  Well, that was a no-brainer!  I have found myself coming back here more and more often, not just because they're the only place open at 6:30 a.m., but also because I wake up and think… poached eggs, a piece of toast, and a salad.  That's what I want for breakfast.  The remains of such a plate is at my right elbow as I type this.

    I mean, most breakfast places, if you want a serving of veggies, you're stuck with tomato juice.  I like tomato juice, it's a great solution, but a little more variety is nice.

    Isn't it strange that with all my effort to pack more vegetables into my day, it would take me so long to realize that salad can be a fine breakfast food?  Tomato juice, that makes sense.  An occasional omelette stuffed with last night's leftover greens.  But salad — if the greens are already washed and ready, and the vinaigrette in a jar in the fridge, what could be easier? 

    One can, of course, buy the lettuce and wash it oneself.  I struggle with time constraints especially when trying to establish a new habit, so we decided we could fit the cost of a pound of prewashed organic mixed greens into our weekly grocery bill, at least for the time being. There they are now, enough salad for me to have salad for breakfast daily if I like.  A bottle of dressing is easy (and it's what Mark and the kids prefer) but I always mix my own dressing in a jelly jar:

    Erin's Idiot-proof Mustard Vinaigrette:

    One part Grey Poupon Dijon mustard, one part red wine vinegar, two parts olive oil, salt and pepper to taste in a jelly jar.  Cover and shake.  Toss one tablespoon with a portion of greens.

    Erin's Nearly-idiot-proof Cream Dressing:

    Half a jelly jar of heavy cream, plenty of salt and pepper, cover and shake to mix (only about fifteen seconds — you don't want to make butter).  Add vinegar to taste — 1 tsp to start, then more if you like it more sour.  Shake very gently just to mix.  Toss a bit more than 1 tablespoon with a portion of greens.

    One of those salads, a soft-boiled egg, and a half piece of toast is just perfect. 

    UPDATE:  I think I must have the only blog in St. Blog's Parish with a full time staff epidemiologist.  In the comments, Christy P reminds us all that for maximum food safety one must still rinse prewashed greens.  

    Careful now… the bite back from recommendations like that is that people will say "Wash the pre-washed greens?  Hang it all, I'm just picking up an Egg McMuffin on the way to work."  So *I* remind you all not to let Christy P and her ilk stop you from enjoying your salad.    

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  • “The Beck Diet.”

    Not too long ago a friend told me "I'm reading the Beck Diet Plan that you were talking about."

    "Huh?  What did you call it?  You sure didn't hear about it from me."

    "No, really, it must have been you, I'm sure of it."

    "Seriously, I have never heard of that one.  Must have been someone else."

    So another friend of mine has recently gotten the book The Complete Beck Diet for Life and begun to follow the recommendations.  She brought the book over to my house, and I had a chance to skim through it yesterday.

    First of all:  I definitely had never seen the book before.  

    Second:  What the heck?!?  I must have been channeling this woman (Dr. Beck, that is) the whole time I was losing weight!   No wonder the first friend thought I had recommended it —a lot of the strategies she recommends were things I deliberately set out to do, and wrote about at some length.  Briefly, there is little prescriptive emphasis on exactly what eating and exercise plan to follow, and instead a heavy emphasis on cognitive and behavioral strategies to help the dieter stick to the plan he or she chooses.

    I plan to get the book and read it over myself and post a longer review later.   I could still use some help with strategies for weight maintenance.  But for now, here's the website (including a blog with motivating anecdotes) and here's the book.

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  • “Here we go again…”

    … says Christy P, forwarding me another article about a study that will be said to show that co-sleeping is dangerous.

    She also sent me the .pdf of the journal article (Mendoza et al., Pediatrics 2009 v. 123 pp. 533-539), which I am pretty sure I don't have the legal right to reproduce in entirety.  I have only had time to skim it but didn't see any outrageous anti-co-sleeping recommendations on the part of the scientists—that kind of extrapolation is usually the domain of journalists and "consumer advocates."   However, Christy P assures me she will assign some epidemiology students to "tear apart their methods" for a homework assignment.  Perhaps she will favor us with some commentary as part of her lesson planning.

    The glaring assumption error that I usually notice is a failure to distinguish between families who sleep together daily (and thus develop nighttime co-sleeping awareness and skills) and families who usually sleep separately (and thus never develop awareness of each other).  As far as I can tell, there is some reliable data and a reasonable argument that taking your baby into your bed for one night is relatively risky—or rather, that failing to sleep together regularly creates a risk that rears its head should you and your baby happen to drop off to sleep together!  But I have yet to see any data that regular co-sleeping is more dangerous than regular separate sleeping.

    As an aside, that seems to me a single representative from an entire class of logical errors.  The common thread among them is a sort of assumption of linearity.   Generally:  We are comparing two contexts of behavior, say Context A and Context B.  Less neutrally, but perhaps with more clarity, we could call them the "Conventional Context" and the "Alternative Context."  A context is made up of a set of practices in a certain environment.  What we see people doing is observing that a given practice  is more common in the alternative context than in the conventional context.  Then they observe (or sometimes merely imagine!)  "When the practice occurs in the conventional context, something bad happens."    Then they extrapolate that the alternative context is itself harmful, because it contains so much of the practice that's proven (or imagined) harmful in the conventional context.

    Like:  "When people take their babies into their beds for one night, there is a higher risk of suffocation or entrapment than if everybody stayed in the sleeping environment they were 'used to' that night.  Therefore, sleeping with your baby every night puts them, every night, at a high risk of suffocation or entrapment."

    Homeschoolers are really familiar with this, especially in the imaginary versions.  Our context is so very different from the context of an institutional school that very little extrapolation from the experiences of one can be made to the experiences of the other.  I remember my mother sniffing about the homeschoolers in her district, "You see those kids outside playing at all times of the day!  They can't be spending much time on schoolwork."  And yet, it turns out that in the home school, you don't actually have to spend much time on schoolwork to accomplish learning.  The context (even simplified down to:  three kids vs. 30) makes a huge difference.  Or I'll meet a teacher who says to me with a straight face, "How can you teach anything with younger kids underfoot?  A baby in the classroom seems like a big distraction."   Well, perhaps the fact that the home is a normal context for a baby (as well as a normal context for learning) makes it not quite so distracting.

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  • Morning political essay.

    There is a very thoughtful essay by Yuval Levin making the rounds this morning.  It's entitled "The Meaning of Sarah Palin" and I thought it was an excellent piece of political writing.  Even if the thought of one more piece on Gov. Palin makes you want to hurl, for whatever reason, I think this one is worth reading because it analyzes the kind of symbol she became to the American left and to the American right, how both of those symbols were divorced from reality, where the McCain campaign really failed in political terms, and what lessons both left and right can take from the whole episode.

    It's a non-vitriolic, balanced, level-headed, non-point-scoring discussion (at least I think so).  There aren't many of those out there.  This one's worth looking at.  Particularly interesting to me was the identification of a double axis:  cultural elitism vs. cultural populism, and economic elitism vs. economic populism, on which to think about political figures and political attitudes.  

    Very much interested in what others think of it.

    h/t VC.

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  • Nightmare.

    I've read Amy Welborn's blog daily for years now.  Last night I clicked on her blog just before bed to read the sad news of her 50-year-old husband Michael Dubruiel's collapse and death yesterday morning.

    Truly we don't know the day or the hour, and it is all too easy for those of us who, like Amy, are raising small children, to imagine ourselves left to do it as widow or widower. 

     Comments on her blog are closed but thoughts and prayers are being gathered here for her.

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  • “I get filled up on the smell.”

    That's what my grandma says when the rest of the family is sitting around the Thanksgiving (or Christmas, or Easter) dinner table, wolfing down the feast she's made, and someone says, "Hey Grandma, sit down and eat something."  

    I don't think I've ever seen my Grandma eat anything more than a Christmas cookie at holiday gatherings.  I hope that's because she really is full, from eating an earlier meal (since she got up earlier than the rest of us) or maybe from several hours of nibbling and tasting the various dishes to make sure they're coming out right.  Or maybe she polishes off a dozen cookies when they come fresh out of the oven, and the rest of us get the seconds.  Who knows?

    I think about that "filled up on the smell" thing a lot when I am cooking these days, because I've worked pretty hard at abolishing the habit of eating nibbles, ends, licks and crusts in the kitchen.  This is an extremely hard habit to break, but it's a worthy one, especially if (like me) you're the primary cook for the family and also participate heavily in the cleaning up after meals.  An awful lot of peanut butter and jelly crusts pass through my hands, if you know what I mean.  

    I made dinner this morning.  The menu is tomato soup (it's simmering in the crockpot, I'll run it through the blender later), homemade bread, ricotta-and-egg salad, and green salad.  I was mixing up the egg salad and thinking about eating scrapings from the bowl.   

    There are at least three advantages to dropping the nibbling-while-cooking habit that I can think of.  First, most directly, you can mindlessly eat a lot of calories in the kitchen.  Three kids' bread crusts amounts to maybe half a sandwich.  The scrapings from a can of tomato paste can be a whole tablespoon.  And then there's stuff like sweet cornbread batter — a quarter cup can come out of that bowl!  You should have baked it.  Second, there's the general habit of putting things in your mouth when you're not hungry.  It's better not to reinforce it every time there's a meal or snack, because it bleeds outward.  You start to expect to be chewing something, Pavlovian doggy style, every time you walk into the kitchen.   Finally — Grandma's right, you do get "filled up on the smell."  If I ate several mouthfuls of egg salad scraped out of the bowl twenty minutes before coming to the table, I wouldn't enjoy the egg salad nearly as much as part of the meal.    It's rich.  Eat a little bit and you don't really need a lot more.  So much nicer to sit down and have it spread on fresh homemade bread, with a little minced black olive on top and a hot mug of soup on the side.

    I am a pretty good cook, if I may say so myself, and I put some thought most of the time into crafting meals  that are nutritionally complete, with a variety of flavors and textures that complement one another:  the sweet with the tangy, the hot with the cool, the creamy with the crisp.  I do this because I like to make things pleasant  for my family.  I wouldn't hand my husband (or even one of my children) a wooden spoon and a big bowl and say "Hungry?  Here, scrape some egg salad out of here and stick it in your mouth.  I'll get you some crackers to go with it in a minute."  No, I wouldn't do that, and you know what?  I deserve to have my food as part of a meal just as much as they do.

    Maybe even more, since I cooked the darn thing!

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  • Hahahaha.

    Loved today's xkcd.

    Boyfriend

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  • What a child needs.

    Margaret in Minnesota quotes Caryll Houselander:

    In Caryll Houselander’s Wood of the Cradle, Wood of the Cross, she explains (with tremendous insight for a woman who herself never bore children) that “there is nothing more mysterious than infancy, nothing so small and yet so imperious. The infancy of Christ has opened a way to us by which we can surrender self to Him absolutely, without putting too much pressure on our weak human nature.

    “Before a child is born,” she continues, “The question which everyone asks is ‘What can I give him?’ When he is born, he rejects every gift that is not the gift of self.”

    Emphasis mine:  A reflection on human nature, and the nature of Divine nature taking on human nature, all at once.  Isn't it lovely?

    I'd add one more thing:  "Everyone" may ask "What can I give him?" before a child is born.  The mother already knows the giving of the gift of self, long before birth.

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  • “The World’s Flags Given Letter Grades.”

    For no particular reason, I suggest you kill half an hour reading this website.  I stumbled upon it a couple of years ago.  I still think it's one of the funniest bits of the Internet.

    Every once in a while I send the link to someone, who either loves it or hates it.  I guess it's a kind of litmus test.  If you think it's funny, well, you and I would probably get along.

    To my surprise, there is no international body responsible for upholding simple standards of vexillilic aesthetics. Nor do the UN or Interpol have the power to call in and punish those responsible for such atrocities as the Brazilian or Cypriot flags. I suppose there is probably a conspiracy of rich western nations (those with permanent seats on the UN security council, no doubt) to prevent such crimes from being brought to justice; however, in the meantime I am giving letter grades to the existing flags of the world.


    From the "Methodology" section:

    To receive an F, a flag had to be so awful that its level of badness was clearly qualitatively different from that of any flag receiving a D. I had to feel that a country receiving an F had really set out to create a genuinely horrible flag, or didn't really know what a flag was. One prominent vexillologist I consulted put it thus: "Some countries' flags look like tea towels. If you'd rather be using the flag as a tea towel, and your tea towel as the flag, give it an F."

    In the end, only three countries received such a distinction, all U.S. territories (hence my suspicions about the US using its security council veto to block the bringing of bad flag designers to justice). Of these, I wouldn't even trust the Northern Mariana Islands flag to clean my cutlery – it's probably not colourfast.


    Some of the criteria:

    Rule 1b: Do not write some stupid slogan on your flag.

    British colonies and former colonies love putting widdly little coats of arms on their flags with Latin slogans like 'et cetera' and 'Caecilius est in horto' on them (e.g. Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands). This is because junior civil servants in the Crown Office of Naming Other People's Countries want to show off how valuable their Etonian education is.

    …

    Rule 3: Do not use a tricolour unless you are in Europe.

    …The real problem with tricolours is not that they are bad flags – some are quite good – it's just that they are a hang over from a time when fewer countries had flags and tricolour space wasn't so crowded. These days no-one should be using a tricolour if they can avoid it. It's not that tricolours are bad per se; people should just know better than to start using one after say, 1900.

    Africa is particularly full of awful tricolours. What makes them particularly bad is that they are all the same colours: that red yellow green thing. Why aren't countries just embarrassed by the fact that their flag is the same as their neighbours, except backwards, upside down, or with a big green star on it? Rwanda deserves special mention for unbelievable unoriginality in this field.

    And then you get to the letter grades, with commentary (my favorites include the flags for Central African Republic, that of Uruguay, and yes, the good old starts and stripes).  Read it and let me know if I like you or not.  Hm, come to think of it I've never tried this test on my husband.

    http://www.blogpoll.com/poll/view_Poll.php?type=java&poll_id=164636Free Blog Poll

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