Grazing Along

The Week of Eating Dangerously is going well so far. Today I pigged out on Wensleydale with cranberries on crackers, potstickers, some chili, a Heath bar, and some ice cream. Yesterday was also pretty disgusting. It included frozen lasagna, potstickers, Weetabix with milk, lots of wine, some whiskey for good measure, and an entire pot-roast dinner. I think I'm doing this gorging myself thing some justice. I will be ready to de-tox myself next week.

So Ms. RD, if you're reading, am I making you cringe yet? Are your dietitian fingers itching to get to the keyboard to type me out a nutritional plan that won't kill me in the short or long-term? If you're not cringing yet, I can try harder!

The Week of Eating Dangerously

My friend the nutritionist, we'll call her Ms. RD (for "registered dietitian"), started a new job today and had to move out to Nashville's furthest out ring of 'burbs, so I'm thinking it will take her all this week to come up with parameters for me of what to eat, how much, and when. I'm really wanting a list of how often and how much I can eat (and drink) certain things.

This week started out badly. I went to a pizza party and Cracker Barrel yesterday, so it was pretty calorie heavy. I decided that while Ms. RD gets settled in, I will eat up all the bad food I have in the house, plan what I'm going to buy at the grocery store, and generally have a last week pigout. (I also went out for Indian today).

So I'm not going to watch anything. Hopefully by next Monday, I'll feel ready to start reining in the waistband because I will be sick to death of the excesses of "The Week of Eating Dangerously." It actually worked for me and smoking. I smoked myself silly, chain, one after the other, the night before I quit and I was so sick of it that I decided to stop altogether. Maybe food will be the same.

It can only go down, right?

So my weight has now ballooned to an unprecedented level. I don't think I've ever been this fat in my life, and being fat and single at the same time doesn't work as well as fat and complacently in a relationship. I need to trim it down so I can feel confident going out, not like a big bloated thing.

I'm in the process of finding a job, which if you've ever been out of work for a while, you will know is a demoralizing, boring, uncertain time. Although you have a lot of time on your hands, you can't really enjoy it because you're too worried about not bringing in a paycheck. The stress also makes me eat more. I'm bored. I'm stressed out. I eat. I also have difficulty finding the motivation to do anything. I've been staying up late, applying for jobs online, and watching my Netflix movies and M*A*S*H. This week I made a conscious effort to get up early, get out and walk, and go to bed early - to keep as close to the schedule I would have if I were working. I feel a little better, and more ready to make some positive changes.

I also quit smoking almost three weeks ago. This has provided a big boost for my health, but it has also resulted in oh so strong cravings for cookies and potato chips and anything that's as calorie dense as possible. The first couple of weeks were murder, but it's getting a little easier, so I have less excuse to plow my way through any food in my path.

I'm ready though, to start changing things. I've tried to for a year, and I keep getting on the wagon, falling off, dusting myself off, and getting back on. It's difficult and I've struggled with my weight for years now. I felt very defeated until something today gave me hope and a purpose.

My friend and I were talking about work. She's bored in her job and wants to do something different. She spends hours a day at work on gmail chat, game sites, and anything she can waste some time on. We talked about being bored, about having unchallenging jobs, and she randomly remarked that she wanted to write a book, but she's not a good writer.

This gave me an idea. Ping. Lightbulb goes on.

She's a nutritionist. I'm a writer. I need to lose weight and she would like to design a diet. We both agree that people should eat real food, nothing processed, nothing artificial, and as local and in-season as possible. I offered myself up as a writing consultant and guinea pig for her new diet. I believe we could combine her knowledge and experience with my willingness and need to try out a new healthy lifestyle and we could chronicle my struggles along the way.

It's a story of two friends helping each other, scratching each other's backs and making a decision to take some control over their own lives and realize there's something better out there than dead-end, time wasting (have to sneak a nap in the car during the workday) jobs and soul-deadening job searches.

The Wagon and Crawling Back on it

So I've fallen off the healthy eating wagon, fallen with a thud, several thuds, several very heavy thuds.

I've been horrible. Getting off the wagon last year involved me breaking up with an unhealthy influence, an influence who was, just like Jack In The Box spicy chicken biscuits, Arby's French Dips, and Caesar's Pizza, quite treacherous to my health. It happened again, this time for the last time, and I am equally inspired to regain my grip on my life and my health.

I have, through all this, retained my interest in the environment, recycled obsessively, cut down on my energy usage, and generally tried to be a good citizen. However, frequenting the fast food giants has undermined my efforts.

I went to our newly opened Trader Joe's this weekend, me and EVERYONE else in Nashville, I think, and it has renewed my sense of purpose and inspired me to cook - that and the cold weather, I think.

Anyway, goodbye landfill-body, hello temple-body, again. Wish me luck.

More Thoughts From the Silver Screen

Last week, we went to see Wall E, thanks to our dear friend over at Green Hills Regal. I kept hearing before I saw it about the homages to 2001 (which I only saw recently, shame on me) and about the amazing graphics and storyline.
I was amazed however, on watching it, that the movie even made it to the big screen. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but it seems that most movies with such an overt message that our consumerist, corporation-dominated culture will ultimately end in disaster only see the dim light of day on limited DVD release (think Idiocracy). I'm gratified to see a kids' movie with adult appeal that grapples with these controversial, but ultimately unavoidable issues (if the human race continues on its current path). This movie is essentially saying to kids and the sometimes conservative parents who bring them to the movie that global warming is real, that our waste and consumption is choking the planet, that we are allowing ourselves to be ruled by money and corporations to the detriment of our intelligence and our bodies and that if we continue, this is what our future will be like. And you know what, kids (and parents), that cute little Disney-created-Number 5-lookalike robot might not be there to save us. That's the scary bit.

Why is it so hard?

Why is so hard for me to remember to bring my reusable bags to the store? I am getting better about remembering to bring them to the grocery store, but I am useless at remembering to bring them anywhere else. Since watching the 30 Days episode about going off the grid, I feel guilty every time a new plastic bag comes into my possession. I think about it sitting in a landfill for thousands and thousands of years. I think about poor Wall-E having to crush and spit my plastic bags out into a part of a giant skyscraper of waste.
Hopefully these guilt motivators will help me remember!

Murder Mystery

The other day I came home with a splitting headache, you know the kind where you see spots and the ground keeps moving? I came home at about three in the afternoon and crashed out on the couch. I woke up about eleven that night, of course not knowing where I was or what time it was. I tried to move myself to the bed and go back to sleep.
I laid there, and laid there some more, and laid there some more. No sleep.
I finally decided to give in to my awake-ness. I got up, pottered around for a while and started playing on the computer. I had completely forgotten that I had an .avi file of Who Killed the Electric Car? on my computer. It was about 1:30 or so in the morning by this time, but I figured that sleep wasn't going to happen anyway and I might as well watch it.

During the movie, I had the unnerving thought, for an optimist, that the world we live in must be truly evil. I sensed a black cloud forming and I admit to some Darth Vader imagery as well. It seems that if the things depicted in this documentary were actually allowed to happen, were so efficiently covered up, and continue to happen, then the world must actually be a very evil place.

How can people allow themselves to be so controlled by money?, we ask. It must be that the high-ups at GM and Toyota and Shell, etc... must be truly controlled by agents of the Dark Side. I think though, that the human power of denial has much more to do with it. Many of the interviews in this movie show people who justify their decisions and the decisions of their employer and truly believe that they were in the right. I know I'm guilty of making decisions sometimes based on what will be selfishly most profitable for me in the short term. I'm trying to do it less these days, but I think we all naturally have that tendency.

Still, it doesn't excuse the part those companies, their employees, and government agencies played in killing a very viable technology in favour of prolonging our dependence on the status quo, the internal combustion engine. The movie talks to families who live in high smog areas and lists statistics on the lung capacity and efficiency of children brought up in those areas. That alone should make anyone willing to shatter that status quo and embrace new and different solutions.

During my long and tortuous route through my undergraduate education, I took a journalism class. On the first day, my professor said, "Follow the money - that's all you need to know in journalism. Do that, and we can all go home now." Ten years later, when I watch the news, read articles and listen to political posturing, that advice comes back to me time and time again, and its wisdom is continually renewed. Someone is making too much money from oil. They are riding that gravy train until the gravy is all gone and we're left with a very very dry dinner. (Did I just seriously mix my metaphors?). They are hanging on until the very last second so they can squeeze every last dollar out of oil, while we still have it.

Here's what worries me though. It's not the shortage of gasoline. We all know that a diesel engine can run on just about anything, so we don't have to worry about that. We also know that we can harness the power of the wind, sun, and even the earth to power our homes and our various gizmos. Do you remember the advertisement from a few years ago about plastic? The one that showed an emergency operation and doctors hooking up plastic bags full of fluid to an endangered patient? Well as I watched the movie, I thought about this. Plastic is a petroleum by-product and we are just using it and throwing it away without thinking twice. I recycle mine, but I'm still guilty of using too much of it. What will happen when the oil runs out? Will we have to go back and dig all of that plastic out of the landfills? Will plastic become ridiculously expensive? Will it become a controlled substance only for use in hospitals or in the military? Can you imagine that? I haven't heard much said about this possibility, but it seems to me that if plastic is made from oil and we have an oil shortage, we will also have a plastic shortage.

I've digressed from my original topic of Who Killed the Electric Car, but watching the movie did lead me to thinking about all the other repercussions of our current environmentally irresponsible policies and corporate practices.