"The Weight of the Nation"

HBO's four-part special, The Weight of the Nation, aired last week and it's now available on their website to watch for free, in its entirety. Part one shows the dangerous long-term effects of the standard American diet; part two focuses on the steps individuals can take to improve their health; part three focuses on childhood obesity, with a spotlight on school lunches; and part four shows how we can take collective action to reverse poor health trends in our communities.

My main problem with the series is that it makes a lot of statements that indicate a causal relationship between obesity and various health problems. It says that obesity causes diabetes and heart disease, etc. It doesn't. Obesity is just one of the more visible symptoms of a body that can't regulate its blood glucose effectively. The inability to regulate blood sugar causes obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc. Saying that obesity causes diabetes is like saying your sore throat caused your runny nose. Just because one happens before the other doesn't mean it caused it. But obesity is a good indicator that you need to change your habits in order to head off health problems.

In general it's disappointing that we're talking about an obesity crisis rather than a diabetes crisis or heart disease crisis. It's sadly and typically American that we're fixating on physical appearance and assuming that being too heavy is the evil behind all our health problems. It's not. Out of diabetes, heart disease and other problems, obesity is just the one that offends us the most.

Another problem is that the show uses that old myth about calories in equaling calories out. This so-called weight loss formula has gotten us nowhere in thirty years of counting calories and gym memberships. If you want to be scientific, the formula would be physical mass = energy in - energy out + energy stored. And what causes our bodies to store extra energy in excessive amounts? Poor blood glucose regulation, not physical activity or lack thereof. Exercise is critical to health, but not to weight loss, although people tend to improve their eating when they exercise regularly. Part two of the series emphasizes calorie counting when the focus should be on high-starch and high-sugar foods, plus sugary beverages. Cutting those out would get us much farther than parsing out low-carb pasta and fat-free cookies. The old eat-less-move-more advice has gotten us nowhere in 30 years and I'm disappointed that the creators of this series don't seem to know that.

Now the good advice that the series gives. Two big messages are: 1) cutting out sweetened beverages (including fresh squeezed juice) is a great first step, and 2) even a small amount of weight loss makes a big difference for your heart and liver. I take this to mean that even a small change in your lifestyle will have a significant impact on your health. The program suggests going for a 10% reduction in weight, which sounds okay to me because in order to lose 10% and keep it off, you have to make a permanent change for the better in how you live.

According to the program, ideal cardiovascular health is defined as -

• Optimal levels of total cholesterol
• Normal blood pressure
• Lean body mass index
• No smoking
• No diabetes
• Healthy diet
• Regular exercise

- but this is the reality: less than 1% of Americans fit all seven of these criteria.

One more striking assertion that the program makes is that if you live a typical American life and just go with the flow, you will be overweight, which is to say, you will have blood sugar regulation problems. This underscores what I've suspected: no matter how much you exercise or how good your natural metabolism is, you will eventually have blood glucose problems (and probably become diabetic or overweight) unless you actively avoid the typical American way of eating. Since this requires vigilance and resistance, every hour of every day, no wonder most of us are having health problems. It's not anyone's individual fault that they're diabetic or have heart disease due to diet, but it is our collective responsibility to change things.

It really is a problem that's entrenched in our beliefs about food, our cultural habits, the power of the food industry and our relentless American drive to make money, including by feeding unhealthy substances to our kids. It's a four part series that should make us feel ashamed, not because of our size, but because we've sold out the health of our children in order to support American agribusiness that churns out wheat, corn and soy products in toxic amounts. Since those businesses aren't going to stop willingly, we have to make changes ourselves. Start by watching it.

[5/26 - "Obesity not always tied to higher heart risk" More evidence that obesity isn't the cause of our health problems, but a symptom of the true problem. And another viewpoint on how the HBO series misses out on the true problem. ]

Totally cool party ideas

A friend says that with the job market moving so slowly, this will be the decade of innovation. My cousin Jenny Densing, who lives in Houston, Texas USA, has already started. She's a 24-year-old artist creating her own business in unusual items: felt play food, vintage items and fake moustaches for people, cupcakes and cars. OH, yeah.

People order her moustaches-on-a-stick (or on a beverage straw) by the hundreds and thousands for weddings, bachelorette parties and other occasions. You can find her on the Etsy website where she also offers pipe-on-a-stick, lips-on-a-stick, huge moustaches you can put on your car, etc. I’m impressed that Jenny is not only good at thinking up and creating these things, but also makes a great model for them. Take a look.

Jenny has a BFA degree from the University of Houston and doesn't like idle hands, which is good because she alone fills huge orders all week long. Those Etsy artists obviously work very hard to make a living, and yet Jenny is ready to discuss a custom made order if you have a special project for her.

I’m impressed by my cousin. It often seems like there aren't many jobs for anyone graduating in this decade, but some grads are definitely making money.

Bifocals, yeah!

I'm excited to announce that I've decided to get bifocals. I needed them a year and a half ago, but didn't want to spend the money. Since then my eyes have gotten worse, so it's time.

I want the old-fashioned bifocals with the line, so I can appear properly middle aged. They're cheaper than progressive lenses, but mainly I just want to look mature and respectable. I'll never be white or male or tall, but at least I'm getting older. I think for women there's a window of time between being too young to be taken seriously and being too old to be taken seriously. I'll be 46 in July, so I think I'm there and I'm milking it. OH, yeah - bifocals. This is going to be great. Are you cool enough to wear bifocals?

What's it like to be in an interracial marriage?

I was born in California USA, my parents were born in Texas USA, and my grandparents were born in Mexico. I was raised in the very homogeneous Walnut Creek, California in the 1970s and '80s when it was very Anglo and middle class.

There were few people of color in my high school and I sometimes say that I was a teenage white girl, but that's not completely true. My parents conveyed to me a decent level of Spanish competence and were very connected to the Mexican American communities of nearby towns. Walnut Creek was very white, but nearby cities such as San Francisco, Pittsburg and Martinez were not.

Because my main contact with other Mexicans and Mexican Americans happened only on weekends, vacations and special occasions, it seemed to me that Mexican music, Spanish speaking and tamales were the stuff of a very specific demographic: adults. Spanish was the language of old people, wheezed out in cumin-scented living rooms that had plastic on the furniture. Tardeadas (big afternoon parties) and weddings had Mexican American kids, but they seemed foreign to me, which I suppose is ironic. Like many American kids, I rarely interacted with people who were outside of my school or my city. I just wasn't used to seeing people with brown skin, besides my immediate family.

In Walnut Creek at Las Lomas High School, I dated Anglo, middle-class boys. The awkward, funny, translucent-white male was almost my only option. When I came into contact with Latinos my age, in one of the neighboring cities, I felt ashamed because I wasn't as Mexican as they were. I wasn't authentic. My Spanish wasn't native, I sounded white and I dressed like everyone else at Las Lomas, not like Mexican Americans who went to school with mostly Latinos. Being a brown girl raised in a white environment was often confusing. My self esteem wasn't high.

June 2007

Bob grew up in Illinois USA and the school he went to had a good mix of Latinos, African Americans and whites. He dated girls of different backgrounds from the very beginning and that pattern continued throughout his life. The two of us being attracted to each other was probably culturally inevitable.

Our union never faced any resistance from family or friends and any tension is strictly internal to our marriage. I admit the cultural differences between me and Bob are an integral part of our dynamic. He's kind of exotic to me: the constellation of freckles that cover his face, arms and torso, his limbs that go on for days, his Midwestern manners, his dialect and his vocabulary all fascinate me. We're learning a lot from this 24/7 cultural exchange. For instance, I had no idea how white Midwesterners like Bob handle conflict, but now I do. It's very different from the let's-get-it-out-on-the-table approach I and my family tend to use.

Every once in a while I'll notice someone looking at me and Bob when we're out in public and I usually assume it's because we're a tall white man and a short brown woman, but it might not be. I'm aware of the prejudices against dating someone of a different color and specifically those against a woman of color marrying a white man, but I haven't felt this bigotry touch me.

What is remarkable is when I'm talking with a white friend or acquaintance and I refer to me and Bob as an interracial couple and she responds with, "I don't think of you as an interracial couple." My acquaintances who are people of color haven't said this to me. Why do white people sometimes say it? It reminds me of times when I call myself short and someone says, "I don't think of you as short." It's like they're trying to be nice by denying what I've just said.

I don't think of you as an interracial couple. Maybe the person wants to make clear that she isn't racist and doesn't think that way or that she's okay with me being a Mexican who's married to a white man. Or it could simply be that she doesn't think of me as Mexican, just as she doesn't think of me as short. But there's nothing wrong with being short or Mexican or in an interracial couple. Doesn't everyone know that?

I don't think of you as an interracial couple sounds like you're okay with me, Regina, no matter what names you want to call yourself. Anyone else have any ideas? Please weigh in if you do.

But rather than feel erased by people who think I'm no different from Bob, I appreciate this marriage because this relationship makes me feel more Mexican than I've ever felt. In the context of Bob's life and family, I'm the real deal. I speak Spanish and have hundreds of memories of food, music, tradition and idioms that are specifically Mexican American. Bob can never step into this experience with me, which marks me as the ethnic one, a role that I've often felt doubtful about.

Being in an interracial marriage works very well for me. For most of my life I've uncomfortably straddled the cultures of the whites and the Latinos. But with Bob my life finally feels seamless: he's the white one and I'm the brown one, and there's no doubting that.

Must Eat Brains: Animal Organs Are Good for Us

In the AMC series American Horror Story, Jessica Lange’s character brings animal offal to her neighbor, Vivian, to support Vivian's pregnancy. She says that parts such as brain and liver are critical to having a healthy baby. We watch Vivian’s horror, but see her gamely take a bite of each dish as it is presented to her over several days. In spite of her initial disgust, Vivian ends up polishing off each organ with gusto, even going so far as to scrape the bowl to get the last of the raw brain.

I admire the writers of that show for including traditional nutrition that most of the world knows, but that many Americans have forgotten: organ meats (liver, brain, intestines, heart, etc.) contain far more vitamins and essential fatty acids than any other part of the animal. These parts have been critical to human health through millennia, especially to ensure that women have hearty, strong babies. Fruits and vegetables have important nutrients, but they also have a lot of water and sugar. They’re important for things like vitamin C, but we need fat to process fat-soluble vitamins like A, D and K. These nutrients are best absorbed from animal foods like dairy, meat and organs.

Dr. Catherine Shanahan’s Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food makes a case for how our body parts are nourished by the correlating body parts of animals. Eating cartilage is good for building cartilage, eating eyes gives you excellent nutrients for healthy eyes, etc. Gram for gram, organs like heart and liver contain more vitamins, folate and magnesium than an equal amount fruits and vegetables. These are the nutrients critical to a healthy body, especially for women considering pregnancy. Fetuses need this stuff, so start eating it now.

[photo by Michael Nagrant and taken from this webpage]

What’s sad is that the whole world knows this except for just a few of us. My friends born in Korea, Mexico and Lithuania enthusiastically tell me of their favorite offal dishes. Other cultures ply their pregnant women with organs and intestines, knowing these are the healthiest foods they can eat. American Horror Story got it right. It’s us squeamish Americans who are missing out on the good stuff, although in rural parts of the U.S. they enjoy things like Rocky Mountain oysters (calf testicles) and other such delicacies. So really it’s us city folk who need to get in step.

Beef and chicken liver have been the easiest offal for me to find in the regular supermarket, so I loosely followed a recipe for flourless liver with bacon and onions for the first time last week and it was surprisingly good. Yes, I’m a squeamish urban American who did not grow up eating things like liver, but if it’s good for me, I’ll give it go. I’ve made that liver recipe twice this week and I enjoy it more each time. I also had my first tacos de tripa (cow intestines) last Saturday and they were delicious. A little chewy, but not more so than squid or calamari. I went back for more yesterday.

Some feel concerned about the amount of saturated fat or cholesterol found in animal organs, but I think the benefits outweigh the risks. We know vitamins and minerals are good for us, but no study has ever clinically proven (as in a double-blind experiment) that saturated fat or cholesterol conclusively cause heart disease. Researchers have drawn that conclusion based on questionnaires asking people what they’ve been eating. While high heart disease rates correlate with people who eat lots of red meat, those meat-eaters usually consume a lot of buns, French fries, bread and baked potatoes with their burgers and steaks. Is the meat causing the health problems or is it the starch? Since no one has proven anything, you have to decide for yourself. (Hint: homo sapiens and our hominid ancestors have been eating animal fats and cholesterol for millions of years. If those things were bad for us, how could we be here now? Wheat has only been ingested by humans for the past 20,000 years and man-made frying oils for only a few decades.)

I recently discovered that Brown’s Chicken sells fried livers and gizzards. Foods fried in vegetable oil aren't good for us because vegetable oil is a chemically produced, toxic fat, but Brown's might be a place to at least taste gizzards. A friend promises to take me with her to a taquería that sells tacos de sesos (brain) and tacos de lengua (tongue). I can’t wait. I’m proud to have left the population that turns up its nose at the healthiest part of the animal. I’m happy to have joined the global majority that knows that animal offal helps to maintain strong bones, joints and healthy tissues.

International No Diet Day

Get ready for International No Diet Day on Sunday! How about it?

You might wonder if a day of eating everything in sight really better than watching what you eat. I think the day isn't about going off your diet, but about trusting yourself to eat in a healthy way without fixating on food. I believe it's a day of rest from counting, measuring, weighing, considering nutrients and limiting things. Of course, the best approach to food is to simply eat when you're hungry, stop when you're no longer hungry and trust your body to tell you what it needs, but that's surprisingly difficult to do in our American food-fixated culture. What do you really want to eat if you're not worried about calorie counts or triggered by racks of candy bars? Disconnect food from all the emotions and rules and thoughts of this-treat-compensates-for-my-wretched-life and eat what your body is truly asking for.

That's how I'm approaching International Diet Day, anyway.

Still an atheist

This Thursday on the United States' National Day of Prayer, nontheists will have a National Day of Reason and recently Washington D.C. saw the Rally of Reason. Coming out as an atheist is becoming one of the bravest moves an American can make, especially if she's a minister. Apparently the U.S. is the most religious Western country in the world, which probably puts me on the cutting edge, being Mexican and all.

But you won't hear me argue against the existence of a spiritual being because I believe that faith can be extremely useful. It just doesn't work for me.

"Everything in moderation" is used without moderation!

As my fixation on nutrition continues, I'm becoming more irritated by people talking about moderation. I might say that wheat gives me a stomach ache or that starches cause weight gain or that natural animal fats are actually good for us, and someone will respond with "I say: everything in moderation."

Everything in moderation. I hear this so frequently in discussions about the wretched state of American health, I'm really beginning to question it. Clearly, Americans can't do things in moderation. We suck down sugary and starchy foods all day long. We buy soda in 32-ounce sizes. We polish off entrees that could feed two or three people. We binge drink. If Americans -- and I include myself -- were capable of moderation we wouldn't be facing the health crises we are facing.

Yet the word appears frequently in diet articles, weight loss tips and health discussions. It's as if we think that if we keep repeating the word moderation, we'll magically bring it into our lifestyles.

The only part of everything in moderation that Americans practice is the everything part. Most of us don't believe there's a healthy amount of cigarettes or arsenic or asbestos, but we do believe there's a healthy amount of wheat, sugar, unfermented soy and vegetable oil that we should be consuming every day. That's how we do moderation: we include even toxic substances in the things we think we need for health.

So please, no one tell me "everything in moderation." Everything isn't good for us and Americans are worse with moderation than we are with grammar.

What's Wrong with Separate Bedrooms?

I will not comment on this topic here, but encourage you to read about it on The Spinsterlicious Life blog. The Spinsterlicious Life discusses topics that don't get a lot of airplay at social gatherings and happy hours, such as why a woman might not want children or why a woman might not want to get married. She also talks about dating and relationships in general.

Even though I've been legally married for four whole years now, I still feel like a single person. I guess that's because I was really single through my 20s and 30s, which means that I strongly identified as single, relished being single, wrote about being single, examined the experience of being single and then desperately fought to stop being single. All my friends were single and I didn't receive a wedding invitation for about 12 years during that time. I got married at age 41, so singledom was a big part of my adult life and I don't count out the possibility of being single again one day.

I like The Spinsterlicious Life because I appreciated a lot of things about being on my own and this blogger completely affirms those things. Having your own space, your own time and your own everything is wonderful. I love my husband, but even he knows there are things I miss about being single.

I like reading The Spinsterlicious Life because many of the topics feel like they still apply to me. Separate bedrooms? No desire for children? Advantages of being never-married? NOT being afraid of ending up alone and childless? Yes, I definitely fit in the Spinsterlicious demographic and I'll keep coming back because, after all, the blog should probably have some token married readers.

Why do Americans treat our pets like people?

[Does this photo look like cruelty to you? It does to me.]

As a new dog owner, I'm irritated by people treating their dogs like humans. American pet owners like to call our animals our "best friends" or the person we can always "talk to." But no one really talks to an animal. All we can do is talk in the animal's presence while it does its best to read our emotional state and try to respond as we want.

Although many pet owners don't like to think of ourselves as "owners," we are owners. Most of us paid good money for these animals and hold the power of life and death over them. Our animals are not our equals, however we might live in the fantasy that they are. They aren't going to grow up one day and take their seat beside us in decision-making and family-raising. They just animals. Yes, I said "just."

Here's my theory: Americans anthropomorphize our pets because we're lonely. We're a splintered society that has mostly forgotten how to build community, nurture true friendship and tolerate our families in close quarters. We don't get sufficient emotional intimacy or physical touch from each other, so we turn to animals. In past centuries, people used dogs for guarding, herding or hunting. In the U.S. most dogs don't hold such a practical position in the household anymore. They're there to be our companions.

We draw on pets to fill in for the children or friends or partners we wish we had (even if the children, friends or partners actually exist in our lives). Pets boost our esteem and help our depression. We stroke their fur and hold them close because that makes us feel better. We tell ourselves our animals enjoy this stroking and petting because they love us back and feel about us the same way we feel about them.

They don't. Humans practice "love" in all kinds of different ways, many of them very fear-based and self-destructive. We would really have to stretch the definition of "love" to make it apply to how animals feel towards us. I've seen evidence that our dog trusts us and feels loyal to us, but does Ozzie "love" as humans practice love? I haven't seen it and I'm glad. Human love can be extremely harmful in ways that the trust and loyalty of a pet aren't.

But the idea of a pure and nurturing love is irresistible to us, so we call our animals' licking and rubbing "love." It's not, of course, because love as we practice it is complicated, with hundreds of nuances and reasons. But Americans want an unconditional ideal of love in our lives, so we tell ourselves true love is what our animals are doing.

There are so many lonely Americans with no idea how to connect with other humans in an intimate and meaningful way. The modern dog's main job is no longer guarding or herding or hunting. Their jobs are now better described as being the child I haven't had yet, or keeping me from feeling lonely, or taking my mind off my unhappy marriage, or reducing my pain and helping me sleep at night. These are the kinds of jobs American pets have. Is that good? Is it bad? It sounds emotionally vampiric to me, but what do I know? I've only been a dog owner for six months.

I understand that people have similar relationships to their pets in other developed countries like the U.K and Japan. Is this a developed nation phenomenon? Can anyone weigh in from outside the U.S?

Save the Planet?

I don’t believe we humans have the power to save or destroy the planet. That’s hubris. All we can save is ourselves, and we probably can’t even do that.

Ozzie's First Easter Egg Hunt

Happy Easter to everyone who cares about Easter. Easter's a rough holiday for me (don't know why), but this weekend is pretty good. I took Ozzie to an Easter egg hunt in Horner Park in Chicago, Illinois USA. There were well over 150 dogs! Each plastic egg contained a mini Milk Bone dog treat. I had to open them for Ozzie because he never did figure it out, but he was very good at hunting them down. Some dogs lost interest quickly or didn't like the Milk Bones. More for Ozzie!

Don't listen to a hypocrite (me)

In the initial flush of my discovery of Gary Taubes' Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It (which I strongly recommend), I've gone whole hog low-carb. As I've posted in the past, I go on the candida diet every several years for health reasons and get great results from cutting out sugar, wheat, grains and dairy products. My chronic health problems always get better when I eat that way, and they come back when I go back to the wheat products and sweet stuff.

But this time I really developed the fanatic's gleam in the eye. I've been stuffing my head full of information on nutrition, human history and research on vegetarian diets as well as starvation diets and high animal food diets. I became convinced that my pro-meat way is the only way and everyone who thinks humans should avoid eating animals, or who thinks grains are actually good for us, doesn't know much about nutrition and doesn't know what true health feels like.

It's fun to say and write things like that, but I hereby officially, publicly take it back. A website called Beyond Vegetarianism contains various articles about the zealous and unhealthy attitudes of vegans and vegetarians who demonize those who eat meat and I recognize myself in the descriptions. Tom Billings' Functional and Dysfunctional Lunch Attitudes describes:

• Lunch mindfulness: you eat healthy foods in a healthy way, but don't think too much about it.
• Lunch obsession: you stick to strict rules about an ideal diet because you are actively afraid of what will happen if you don't (fears of becoming ill or spiritually impure, for instance).
• Lunch identification: how you eat is part of who you are. if someone criticizes the way you eat, you take it personally and become emotional.
• Lunch righteousness: because of your diet you feel superior to all others. Everyone who doesn't eat exactly as you do is destructively evil or an idiot or both. When you keep doing this even though your diet is making you ill or is having a negative social impact on you, it can be called orthorexia nervosa.
  

So! To stop being the nutrition @#$-hole, I am making a commitment to take the religious edge off my nutritional posts and conversations. I will keep in mind that there are very few hard conclusions about health and diet and the best way to go is to simply listen to your own body. Decide for yourself what foods work best and don't listen to jerks like me.

That said, I won't stop talking about nutrition and health, but I will no longer expect anyone to listen.

And now because I'm just as big a hypocrite as the next person (so here I go with my advice), here is my list of the few things that anti-meat and pro-meat (to pick an arbitrary distinction) nutritionists seem to agree on. These are probably safe to accept as true:

• Diet strongly affects health.
• Avoid refined sugar and refined flour. There is nothing good in them.
• If you eat the foods that are truly right for your body, weight and general health will self-correct without effort or calorie counting.

Did you get that last one? When it comes to wholistic living and losing weight in a true and lasting way, calorie counting isn't part of it.

My final evidence for being a hypocrite is the foods that I've eaten in the past three weeks that are not on my candida diet:

• rice cakes
• raisins
• bananas
• blueberries
  
• 85% dark chocolate
• bacon
• beef wieners
• potato chips
• coffee w/ half & half and table sugar
• And of course the anniversary celebration of 3/25 when I ate every kind of sweet treat I could think of.
  

And yet, I've still managed to drop 10 pounds in that three week period. This shows me that:

1. I'm a big, not-quite-so-fat hypocrite.
   
2. It's possible to go off a diet periodically and still do well if I stick to it most of the time.

There are nine weeks left to the weight loss challenge we have going at my workplace. Again, I think focusing on weight is not a good way to think about health, but since I'm dropping the weight anyway for health reasons, I want to win this thing! It turns out that I don't have a competitive bone in my body for games or contests, but I do for health and weight loss.

This hypocrite is signing off for now. Time for some eggs and bacon.

"But I wanted a table on the patio."

(A fictional story, although stuff like this happens all the time.)

Bob the restaurant manager checked the weather one more time. It was 8:00 a.m. and while Chicago was tricky, he tried his best to predict the temperatures each day.

"Warm and sunny. Great!" Bob said as he stood up from the office computer and strode out into the main dining room. He gave the word to set up the patio tables and made sure he had five servers to staff the deck. This was in addition to the four servers he had scheduled to work the inside tables that day. He knew that when the weather was nice, he'd better have those outside tables ready to go or his guests would be mad.

Four hours later, his enthusiasm was gone. His outdoor servers huddled in the dining room, glaring at him for making them work on a gray, chilly patio that no guests wanted to sit on.

"Hi, folks. How are you today?" Bob asked of a group of four business people who had just walked in for lunch.

"We're good," a stout man replied, "though it's a bit windier than I expected."

Bob tried to keep a cheerful front as he seated the foursome at the last table he dared to seat. With only four servers inside, he couldn't allow any more customers to sit down until some left. Meanwhile, the patio sat empty and cold.

At 1:00 p.m. the temperature still hadn't hit 65 degrees, with no sunshine in sight. "What the hell are our weather forecasters good for?" he muttered. "They were completely wrong about today." Glumly, Bob joined some staff in breaking down the patio, bringing in tableware and glasses and pushing all the tables and chairs up against the building. He told four servers that they didn't need to stay for the dinner shift and prepared for an evening inside.

Then the Chicago weather changed. By 4:30 p.m. Bob was facing his third irritated guest.

"Your patio isn't open? But it's beautiful outside!" a woman in a red blazer insisted. She gestured toward the calm, bright afternoon.

"I'm sorry, but I can give you a nice table in the window, overlooking the river," Bob said.

"Ridiculous! It's seventy degrees out there!" the woman said to her companion as they followed Bob to the best table he had available.

For the next two sunny, warm hours Bob did his best to handle countless people who wanted a patio table, including people who said they'd only come to his restaurant because of its beautiful patio. In private moments, Bob cursed the skies for tricking him. "God damned Chicago weather!"

The moral of the story: please have mercy on restaurants when they can't give you the table you want. They are truly doing their best, but when circumstances conspire against them, getting mad won't help. Please keep in mind that they aren't idiots or lazy, but the Chicago weather in spring and summer make it even harder to run a restaurant.

It's the New Me (again)

My workplace is sponsoring a wellness challenge, which has formed the participants into teams who can win prizes. One team will win and one individual will win (even if they're not on that team) for the greatest weight loss. I'd like a wellness challenge that focuses on eating well or lowering your blood pressure, but they chose to start with weight loss. Fine, let's do it.

Coincidentally, my prolonged need for antibiotics last holiday season caused me a case of candidiasis, for which my doctor prescribed macrobiotics and my chiropractor suggested that I go back on the candida diet. I decided to do this just days before our wellness challenge was announced. How convenient!

Every several years I've needed to go on the candida diet for health reasons. I've done it three times over the past 18 years, for about six months each time. On the diet I eat plenty of meat, fish, vegetables, eggs, nuts, seeds and some legumes. I don't eat any food that contains sugar (even fruit), wheat, grains, dairy, or fermented foods (including condiments and alcohol). Yeah, this diet is like Lent Extreme, but my health and all chronic conditions improve a lot when I eat this way.

Each time I've gone on the candida diet, I've lost a considerable amount of weight that has gradually come back after I go back to eating everything. But each time some of the healthy habits have stuck. Over 18 years I've noticed which foods cause me digestive pain, so I've gradually let go of my worst sugary habits, reduced my grain consumption and stopped eating dairy products. I don't miss the dairy, but I've never managed to let go of the sugar and wheat completely. I'm hooked on it.

Well, here I am: back on the candida diet and determined to make this final dietary shift of letting go of sugar and other carbohydrate-rich foods for good. Sugar, potatoes, wheat, corn and most other grains cause me stomach aches and I'm tired of being in pain. So here goes. But this time I'm tweaking the diet by going heavy on the animal products and lighter on the vegetables and nuts (I've been reading a lot about low-carb eating).

On Monday 12 March our wellness challenge began and we all had to check in (in private, of course). I'm 5 feet, 2 inches tall (1.57 meters) and I weighed in at 138.8 pounds (about 63 kg or almost ten stone). I admit, I stuffed cake and cookies for days preceding the weigh-in because of my desire to show real progess. It was unhealthy and stupid and is an example of why focusing on weight loss does not bring out the best in people.

Since Tuesday 13 March I've stuck to only animal foods (meat, fish, eggs, poultry), vegetables (but no potatoes), nuts and seeds. The only fruit I eat is avocados. I notice that each time I return to the candida diet, it feels easier. Each time my taste buds adjust more quickly to the lack of processed sugar and I'm satisfied with nuts instead of cookies. Of course, it's early on. The temptations will follow.

I've all but stopped going to the gym for exercise since I spend so much time walking the dog now, plus while I re-adjust to my low-carb ways, my energy can be uneven. The weight lifting can wait.

In the past week I've dropped five pounds. That rate of loss won't continue, but it's a typical start to a low-carb diet. I haven't counted calories or gone hungry. This is what I do:
I eat my fill of eggs, bacon and green vegetables for breakfast.
I enjoy plenty of vegetables (no potatoes) along with something like either dark meat chicken or tuna with mayonnaise or a beef patty for lunch.
My dinners are something like beef-and-vegetable stew or grilled dark chicken with green beans or deviled eggs with salad (only olive oil for dressing).
I often follow lunch and dinner with as many cashews or almonds or fingerfuls of peanut butter as I want.
My snacks are vegetables or nuts or a beef weiner (hot dog w/o out the bun).
I eat plenty of sunflower seed kernels.
I drink lots of water and herbal tea (okay, a few sips of coffee)
My slip-ups have been rice cakes, potato chips, raisins and blueberries.
The best part is how peaceful my digestion is and how well I sleep at night.

My strategy is to eat lots of proteins and fats, with as few carbohydrates as possible. My short-term goal is to drop about 15 pounds by the time this wellness challenge ends in June and win that free massage. My long-term goal is to eat this way for good. Wheat, dairy, grains and sugar cause me pain that badly affects my quality of life. It's time to let go of them permanently.

Watch a special on face blindness

This past weekend 60 Minutes aired a segment on prosopagnosia, which is face blindness, which I definitely struggle with. Prosopagnosia can manifest in different degrees. Some people don't recognize their own faces in a mirror or photograph.

For me, it means I don't recognize people easily. It can take weeks or months for me to memorize a new face, depending on how often I see the new acquaintance or co-worker. I've introduced myself more than once to the same person at a party. I've failed to recognize people I work with every day. I've started telling people upon meeting them, "I have prosopagnosia which is face blindness and it means I do not remember faces. So if I see you at the supermarket tomorrow and I totally ignore you, please don't be offended. It's just that I'll have no memory of what you look like."

People have usually never heard of this brain dysfunction, but they're nice about it, lucky for me. If I see a face over and over again, it eventually sinks in, but it can take a quite a while. There are countless people I've seen only once who I'll never remember.

The 60 Minutes segment was very well done, but if you didn’t catch it on TV, you can see it on the 60 Minutes website in two parts. It’s about half an hour long.

I’m very grateful for this show because the more people know about face blindness, the easier my life is. My dream is that one day people will have this information in mind every time someone appears to snub them. I want them to think, “Why didn’t she say hello? Did I make her mad? Doesn’t she like me? Or does she have face blindness?”

That would be so helpful for people like me!

Dog owner now meaner

Although it was rough at first -- very rough -- I have come to accept and feel affection for our shelter pitbull mix, Ozzie. He's cute and has turned out to be a great learner. Combine this with a woman who tends to be a diligent student and strict master and we've got a pretty good owner-pet dynamic.

We're taking a beginner's class at Bark Bark Club that is going very well. Ozzie and I are solidifying commands like "sit," "stay," "leave it" and "down" (as in "lie down"). Kim, the instructor is great and I really like the class. Having just finished week four, Ozzie is showing signs of boredom with it, but too bad! This is the new order.

Thus, even though I'm now more affectionate with Ozzie, giving him long hugs, allowing him to lick my face and curling up with him to read a book, I'm also stricter than ever with treats and going for walks. He gets no food from me at all without paying for it. He must either sit or follow one of the many commands we now know. We're also becoming a better walking unit, with Ozzie staying at my side, not pulling, not running ahead and not stopping the show because he's rather go in a different direction. Now The Woman decides where we're going and how fast. The Woman decides when we stop and go. The Woman even gives him permission to relieve himself only when we've reached an appropriate spot, like a public park or the front of the property we rent. No more leaving his mark wherever he wants.

Right now sunlight splashes into our front room, hitting the futon sofa and the hardwood floor. When we got back from training class, the furry one spread himself out in the square of light on the floor. A few minutes later he switched to the futon, which is the one piece of furniture he's allowed on because it's easy to wash. A few minutes after that, I decided I wanted to lie on the futon sofa, but I found a dog on my usual end. When we're on the sofa together, there's my end and his end.

Did I take my place on the opposite end, since they're identical anyway? Nope. Ozzie knew exactly what to do when I said "quítate" and waved my hand. He's now where he belongs.

Nutrition is my new religion

Photo of the last huge bowl of corn masa I'll ever eat.
When you open a newspaper or find a new news website, what category is your favorite? What do you like to turn to first? Some say they're most interested in sports or world news or politics. You know what my category is? Health.

This is the subject I read about on the Wall Street Journal and New York Times websites. Health articles are what get me to The Huffington Post or motivate me to buy a copy of Harper's Magazine. I just want the health news. I've been this way for years, but it might be getting more fixated in my middle age. It's not that I want to live forever. It's just that as I head toward my 50s, I'm increasingly concerned with living without pain. I devour any information that might help me reduce or avoid the aches and pains of aging.

Items with titles like Effects of High Cholesterol blah-blah-blah or Diabetes Linked to you-name-it are irresistable to me. I have to know whether Body Mass Index or Waist-to-Hip Ratio is a more reliable health indicator. I must know what causes arthritis or what can best treat eczema. I can't stop.

These days I'm obsessed with nutrition. Like a woman who's had an experience of God that makes her seek others to support her beliefs, my experiences with digestion have me seeking health articles and books that support mine. Years ago dairy products started giving me problems, so now I avoid them. In the past couple of years I've noticed that wheat and grains also cause me pain and discomfort so I've reduced those. Sugar completely screws with my energy levels and makes me hungrier. Alcohol and coffee might occasionally taste good to me, but they don't make me feel good.

These experiences make me very open to articles and books that criticize the nutritional value of dairy, wheat, alcohol and coffee. It's easy for me to believe that dairy was never meant to be consumed past infancy and that tofu endangers your hormone levels and that cutting carbs improves health because these are foods that have not worked for me. I'm wide open to anyone who says the human digestive system evolved to thrive on meat because that's what my body thrives on. I fully agree that everyone is better off without sugar and wheat because I know I am.

We like to think a subject like human nutrition has been scientifically researched with hard data that has led to inarguable conclusions, but it hasn't. At this point, you can find data to support anything you want to believe. Need support for your belief that meat is killing us? Or that high cholesterol is caused by eggs ? Or that grains harm the liver? Or that humans can thrive on an all-meat diet with no vegetables or other foods at all? The research is out there for any of those assertions and more. As with religion, people have strong nutritional beliefs and are drawn to others who agree. I can argue a vegan all night about whether wheat or meat is good for us and neither of us will run out of published evidence to make our points.

When people use their own experiences as the basis for what they believe, it leads to extreme closed-mindedness as often as it leads to the truth. My experience might teach me that skin rashes are caused by what I eat. Your experience might teach you that they're caused by external factors like detergents. Maybe we're both right or maybe there's a more all-encompassing reason that no one has figured out yet.

Thus is nutrition my religion. Despite decades of research, little about diet has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt and we take most of our food information on faith. What's the healthiest way to eat? The expert-backed answer changes each decade. I am certain about what I know about my body, but I realize there's no point in trying to change someone's mind if they're committed to their bread or brandy.

I'm still an atheist, but my fervor about diet might rival the passion someone else has about Jesus. Go ahead. Just try to tell me that humans are meant to eat daily amounts of wheat, grains, soy or sugar. Just try to convince me that meat is worse for me than tofu. I'll argue all day, wild-eyed and full of zeal.

Regina the Food Grinch

This is what I'm studying this weekend: The Dark Side of Wheat. It details evidence that people with celiac's disease, which causes the inability to digest wheat, are not the only ones who are harmed by eating wheat. According to the author, wheat harms everyone because cereal grains were never among the plant foods the human body evolved to digest.

I've also been reading articles like "The Truth About Unfermented Soy and Its Harmful Effects," which dispels the myth that soy products like tofu and soy milk are good for you, at least in the daily quantities that American vegetarians and vegans tend to eat them.

And I've ordered my copy of a new film called In Search of the Perfect Human Diet, which documents the history of human nutrition, including the millions of years our ancestors spent living on what they could hunt and gather. I believe the film shows that our digestive systems developed to eat animal protein and plants, not the wheat and other grains we began cultivating in the last 20,000 years (and certainly not the cow's milk that Americans consume all day long). I'll confirm this after I've watched the film.

All this means that I'm about to become the most obnoxious dining companion ever. Before long I'll have memorized the addictive qualities of dairy, sugar, wheat, corn and other grains. I'll irritate vegans and vegetarians alike, criticizing soy products and cow's milk and arguing that all grains are destructive to the human body. I'll antagonize anyone who avoids animal protein by insisting that humans were born to eat animals and their eggs, backing it up with the evidence of the experts I'm reading.

Up until now, I've open-mindedly maintained that maybe cow's milk and wheat work well for others, but just not for me. I figured dairy products and grains caused me stomach aches, but were good foods for others. But now I'm learning that milk, wheat, corn, soy, etc. aren't actually doing anyone much good. This puts me at risk for hovering over other people's lunches and saying things like, "We're the only species on the planet that consumes the milk of another species," and "You know, that pasta is slowly destroying your liver," and maybe even, "Recommending a balanced diet with a healthy amount of grains is like recommending a balanced diet with a healthy amount of cigarettes."

What appeals to me about all these awful truths is that they confirm my experience with digestive troubles. I had to cut out dairy a while ago and have been gradually reducing my wheat and grain consumption as they cause me more and more pain. I feel much better without these things in my diet, and also without coffee, alcohol, carbonated drinks and processed food in general. I'm becoming the dullest consumer ever, preparing most of my own food which is mostly grilled, steamed or boiled animal protein, vegetables and nuts. What's disturbing is that finding the science to back up my nutritional choices arms me with an arsenal of holier-than-thou, know-it-all food knowledge. Soon I'll be intolerable.

Someone recently asked me, "So what the heck are we supposed to eat? Nothing but boring food?" My answer was, "Yes. The human body is meant to eat only the simplest, unprocessed foods and to drink nothing but water."

Sorry everyone, but we're eventually going to have to realize that there's no pill to make us healthy and the only way to turn around the declining state of American health is to stop eating crap. And by "crap," I mean everything you currently enjoy eating and swilling.

Just call me the Food Grinch.

Benefits of Fasting

The March 2012 issue of Harper's Magazine contains this article "Starving Your Way to Vigor: The Benefits of an Empty Stomach."

Since you can't access the online article without paying, I'll summarize. The author, Steve Hendricks speaks from the experience of having performed a 19-day fast which resulted in weight loss and a greater feeling of health. During that time he drank only water and maintained his usual activities, including daily exercise. He describes days of alertness and days of lethargy and says one of the reasons he did not prolong the fast after reaching his goal weight, was that others complained of his bad mood. I guess hunger will do that.

But Hendricks also gives a brief recent history of fasting in our culture. Obviously, Americans do not like to skip meals, yet he describes medical breakthroughs that have shown fasting to treat diabetes, high blood pressure and epilepsy, especially in children. He mentions that fasting has improved chemotherapy results in cancer patients, as well as reduced the side effects of chemo. But again and again, interest in fasting has always been short-lived in the U.S. and our medical establishment prefers consumer-based treatments like pills and shots.

You might be wondering how one could possibly go without food for days, unless they have extreme will power, but Hendricks explains that the longing for food fades after about four days. He was fine on just water for 19 days, but my favorite example is one he gives of a 456-pound Scot who, in 1965, approached Scottish doctors for help losing weight. They monitored him closely and kept him on water, vitamins and supplements for several days. When his weight loss progressed with no bad effects, the fast grew into weeks. Since his vital signs and health remained normal, his fast continued from summer to fall, and fall to winter. This guy made it down to his goal weight of 180 pounds after a fast that finally ended one year and 17 days after it had begun! He basically lived off of his own flesh for months.

But that's not what Hendricks recommends. In fact, at no point does he say fasting is a good way to lose weight, even though he did it. His article really focuses on things like the American Cancer Society ignoring research on the benefits of fasting on cancer patients, and the almost criminal neglect of American medicine to use fasting to save the lives of epileptic children. Fasting can result in a permanent reduction of seizures. The same is true of blood pressure and, apparently, weight. He mentions that the 24-hour fast has been used to remedy colds and the flu, and that fasting once a week or even every other day can extend one's life.

I've been reading more about fasting and how even doing it one day a week can improve one's health. There's a process called autophagy that Wikipedia describes as "a major mechanism by which a starving cell reallocates nutrients from unnecessary processes to more-essential processes." Basically, a cell without its usual nutrients coming in, will burn its own waste products for energy. This increases the health of the cell as it means getting rid of dead viruses and dead cell membranes, etc. that clutter the cell when fresh fuel is constantly coming in. Some even believe one of the reasons exercise improves health is that exercise also increases autophagy. Since I read that a couple of weeks ago, I've been more focused on exercising all day long (taking stairs, etc.). Let's hear it for autophagy!

I read the Harper's article on Friday and decided to try it. I'm currently fighting a cold and, as I previously posted, have a new determination to weed sugar and wheat out of my diet. Why not start my new health habits with a 24-hour fast? It would be great to lose these cold symptoms by Monday. A 24-hour fast gives an American liver a much needed rest from having to plow through all the junk we force it to process hourly. The digestive system also has a chance to clean out and renew, as your body burns internal resources to keep its energy up.

I ate lunch yesterday and have had nothing but water and some herbal tea since. It's now 12:56 p.m, so I'm hitting the 24-hour mark right now. I tend to be a hungry person and my stomach lets me know the second I've gone more than three hours without eating, so it hasn't been easy. Mr. Hendricks described no great hunger pangs on his first day. Not true for me, although I am feeling more alert than I would have expected.

I'm about to take a drive, so I'll go ahead and have a snack first. Although I'm awake, I also feel a little light-headed. I'm not the most confident driver and don't like to take chances. I think I've done enough to see if this experiment has shortened the life of my cold. Maybe I can kick out the symptoms sooner than in the week or ten days it usually takes.

Hendricks' article certainly counters the American tradition of cleaning your plate three times a day. I doubt it will start a new interest in fasting, although I remember recently reading an article on how fasting improves chemotherapy results. Will this message start to seep into mainstream media? It would be great if it did because fasting for improved health and weight loss is an idea we Americans could definitely use.