Archive for April, 2008:
Another Burn
I’m cross posting today because shit like this really pisses me off.
First of all, the link to “The Great Burn” Web page showed up in an email from Shape Magazine. At first I thought it was some Shape-sponsored event, like when they do the workouts in Lincoln Park. No. Not exactly. This site is about Enviga, a new “sparkling green tea” beverage from our friends at Coke and Nestle. But, as best I can tell, this site is dedicated to further confusing the hell out of people who want to lose weight.
Basically, Shape, Men’s Fitness, Coke, and Nestle are all putting their stamps of approval onto a drink that they claim burns “negative calories.” Yes. Simply drink Enviga, and you’ll loss weight. From the email:
When it comes to burning calories, you’re not going to find a better partner than this one. See, Enviga is more than just a refreshing sparkling green tea. It has ingredients like caffeine and the mighty antioxidant EGCG, which are proven to burn extra calories by gently boosting your metabolism. Of course, weight loss requires a reduced calorie diet and regular exercise*. Enviga is just a little something extra to complement the things you do already.
Vomit.
Soft science at it’s best (worst?). First of all, if you want the benefits of green tea, then drink green tea! Don’t drink this crap. Second, when you separate nutrients from the original source the benefits are not as great. That is why taking vitamins are a distance second to eating fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes as a source for nutrients.
As for the caffeine… Here’s what Jillian Michaels, the Biggest Loser trainer has to say about caffeine and weight loss.
Lately there’s been a lot of talk about caffeine and exercise. Studies have shown that consuming caffeine before working out enhances performance and helps to burn fat. Hey, don’t down that pot of coffee just yet! You need to hear the whole story behind caffeine and exercise
First of all, coffee and Diet Coke isn’t going to do it. As a fitness aide, caffeine is only effective when taken in pill form in conjunction with aspirin. When you drink coffee, tea, and soda, caffeine gives you short-term energy. That’s because caffeine stimulates your adrenal glands. These glands dump adrenaline into your bloodstream like it’s going out of style. When the caffeine leaves your system, your adrenal glands will be depleted for a while. This will leave you feeling weak and tired from low adrenaline levels.
What abotu EGCG?
One-A-Day WeightSmart vitamins advertised EGCG as the active ingredient that promoted weight loss.
I swear, you read something different every single day about weight loss, but this kind of soft science, magic bullet crap does far more harm that good. I don’t give a shit that the entire Enviga clinical study has been posted. The University that researched this product was paid by Nestle. Of course the findings are positive. Big business and powerful lobbies (think dairy, meat, artificial sweeteners) are behind much of the weight loss and health information that is disseminated into our American culture, which means the information is biased at best, and outright lies at worst. Keep that in mind. We should be nothing short of outraged that companies are willing and able to make outlandish claims like this one.
Update: I was infuriated enough that I decided to email Shape customer service just to tell them I would be removing my email from its lists and would never again subscribe to Shape. I understand how advertising dollars work, which is why I get the diet pill ads in the back of the magazine (though it would be great to see a magazine ixnay that kind of BS). But to actively endorse a beverage as a diet aid, I mean, come on… it’s just impossible for me to consider Shape a reliable source of health and fitness information anymore.
*Whaaaaaaa?
Vegan Product Review
While I love trying recipes, I also crave convenience, and I regularly try new products to up the convenience factor — especially when I’m attempting to keep a vegan kitchen. Sometimes, when I’m wandering through Whole Foods I find a product that appears as though it may be an answer one of the my many questions about vegan living. Like, “Uh what about ranch salad dressing dude?”
Important, yes?
Yes.
Enter NASOYA. Last week I purchased a bottle of Creamy Dill Vegi-Dressing. I was skeptical.
Sure, it’s not full fat buttermilk ranch dressing, but this dressing has found a home in my refrigerator. It’s creamy and slightly sweet, totally satisfying if you’re someone like me who needs a little bit of persuasion to eat a salad. It’s not the lowest fat salad dressing, but two tablespoons are 2 WeightWatchers points. But again, in my opinion, if it convinces me to eat a salad, those points are well spent.
Try it.
Controlled Freak
Sometimes I believe that if I could just control my environment, I could control my eating. For me, making healthy choices Monday morning through Friday afternoon is pretty easy. Sure, there are midday moments when I’d trade my firstborn for a cookie, but the cravings often pass quickly with the help of a piece of gum or some whole grain crackers. The truth is, if I grocery shop, stock up on healthy foods, and pack my lunch every day, I’m pretty good to go for the work week.
Enter Friday afternoon and life’s little variables.
No one wants to give up having a social life — friends, a boyfriend or girlfriend, events, restaurants, bars — for an all healthy, all the time lifestyle, but some days I think if I could just skip… well… everything fun… I’d lose weight quickly and without much effort.
So, that’s one issue.
Here’s another one: I don’t want to be the whiny friend-on-a-diet who makes requests of others — be it specific restaurants, or no dessert, or whatever. No one else should be “punished” because I think I need to lose a few pounds.
This is particularly a problem if you are dealing with people who love and accept you for you are, at any weight. Plain and simple, they just don’t get it. Those of us who are truly only ten or so pounds overweight, or ten or so pounds away from being comfortable with our bodies, probably have it the hardest. Sure, we may not be “fat” or “obese,” but our goals are our goals and sometimes I think I sabotage myself just because I don’t want to make “big deal” out of my weight to those who may say they support us, but don’t actually know how to support us.
It took me a long time to come out to my boyfriend that I am a WeightWatcher. I knew he wouldn’t be judgmental, but I think part of me didn’t want to bring it to his attention that I was unhappy with my body. Maybe I thought that if he knew, he’d suddenly realize I was overweight, and he’d be unhappy with my body. Considering that I’m not dating a complete ass, this was not the case. I broke “the news,” and he responded with a nod and, “OK.”
He tries his best to be supportive, but the situation remains the same: he doesn’t get it because he’s never been where I’ve been. Sure, I think there’s been times in his life when he hasn’t been particularly happy with his weight, but this is a guy who sneezes and gains muscle mass; this is a guy who, as long as he’s training for a marathon or a triathlon, can eat his body weight in meat and cheese and bread and sweets, and not gain an ounce.
But that’s just it. I can’t do that. Some people start working out and the weight — whether they were trying to lose it or not — just melts off of them. He’s one of those people. I’m not sure he had any weight loss goals when he decided to train for his first marathon six years ago, but — like magic — 30 pounds gone.
Sadly, when I started running and training for distance events, I initially gained weight, and no, my clothes didn’t fit that differently. But, for me, that’s reality. I cannot workout like a maniac, train for endurance events, and eat whatever I want. I just can’t. It sucks. Let me tell you.
I am reading Learning to Drive by Katha Pollitt, which has nothing to do with weight loss, but this passage made me laugh out loud:
Gradually, I forgot what I knew and lost the confidence to try new recipes, nor did I ever learn to use any of the numerous appliances he collected: the espresso machine with cappuccino attachment, the Cuisinart mini-prep, or the deep-fat fryer he bought the day after I said I was going on a diet.
Now, the ex-boyfriend she’s referring to in this passage is probably a bit of an ass in real life, but it made me think about a day not long ago, when I was feeling particularly unhappy with body and my ability to motivate myself to lose weight. I spent a decent portion of the day making demeaning comments about myself and my body to my boyfriend, who decided at dinner, to order a piece of cake. I don’t think he in any way wanted to sabotage my efforts, but he wanted cake and frankly, he can eat cake without repercussions. I, however, cannot. It’s not his job to monitor what I eat, and I realize that, but it just makes it… harder… my weaknesses are exploited in those moments. And, it’s not always easy to rely on shear willpower and determination.
Tonight, I made plans to eat at a tapas restaurant. I’m preparing myself because going in with a game plan is really my only defense. It must be an amazing feeling to not have to plan to “be on the defensive” simply because you are eating out at a restaurant. And, I’ll be honest — this “defense” often fails. Regardless, I’m scouring the Internet, reading the restaurant’s menu, searching for nutritional content, trying to figure out what the best choices are, and kind of kicking myself for feeling as though it’s not my place to burden other people with my weight loss issues.
And, of course, I do love me some tapas.
Once More with Feeling
At what point do you consider a recipe officially part of your meal repertoire? I have decided – today – that I have to make the recipe three times, in a reasonable amount of time, like say a month or so, in order to consider it an old stand-by. The first time I made Chickpea Noodle Soup from Veganomicon, I raved about it on A View from the Park. I’m not sure anyone was listening, except perhaps, my sister, who now also makes this soup on a nearly weekly basis.
Seriously people, would I keep making the soup if it wasn’t fantastic?
Check out the original recipe.
This soup has so much going for it – beans, buckwheat soba noodles, veggies, the option to add some greens. It’s a no-brainer, health-wise, but for the sake of too many snacks pre-run tonight, I decided to WeightWatcher-ify the recipe tonight. Look at that, I made a new word.
Here’s what I did:
2 tablespoons olive oil –> I reduced this to 2 tsp, and to compensate, I used a few splashes of vegetable broth as needed to sauté the vegetables.
6 cups water or vegetable stock –> I actually up the amount of liquid in this recipe to approximately 8 cups, sometimes I use all vegetable broth (store bought), but last night I used half water, half broth. The effect was a somewhat lighter soup.
6 ounces soba noodles –> Soba noodles expand a lot once cooked. Six ounces isn’t necessarily too much, but I reduced this to four ounces and still felt like I had noodle-palooza going on in my soup.
Finally, I added a handful or two of spinach at the end of the cooking process (at the same time as the miso).
Based on six servings, the WW points value of this soup is 3. That’s approximately one and a half cups of soup per serving. Keep in mind, the original WW points value of this soup is only 5, still very low, so go on with your bad self and make yourself some soup. Either way works!
Tuesday Training Update
Apparently, the Flying Pig race organizers over in Cincinnati think it’s a good idea to send me an email each morning to remind me how many days are between today and the half marathon.
Yesterday it was 26.
Today it’s 25.
What would I do without mass email blasts? Why, I’d be expected to perform elementary functions manually — like count, or look at a calendar — if I didn’t receive an email every day.
So, in the interest of alliteration, I thought Tuesday’s would be a prime day to update the world on my training, which currently, is for the Flying Pig Half Marathon in Cincinnati on May 4 (25 days from today).
Training Schedule March 31-April 6
Monday
Cross training — Generally I like to do a circuit workout (weight training with short cardio intervals, but I was so exhausted from my weeklong business trip, it was all I could do to get myself to the gym. Luckily, my running buddy persuaded me and she and I walked on the treadmills set to a steep incline for 40 minutes.
Tuesday
2 mile run — If I remember correctly, this sad little run was a little rough, but we managed to get it done.
Wednesday
Cross training — I workout with my trainer on Wednesdays, which usually means a lot of heavy weights. I began questioning his methods when he handed me two 20 pound dumbbells with which to do biceps curls. I was sore with a particularly achy back and neck for a few days after.
Thursday
2 mile run — It started raining, and I totally skipped this run.
Friday
7 mile run — My running buddy and I both took Friday off so we set off around our neighborhood on Friday morning. Originally we planned to do a nine mile run on Friday and a seven mile run on Sunday, but it became evident that we were struggling. After a few walking breaks, we decided to cut it short and rearrange the schedule.
Saturday
Nada.
Sunday
9 mile run — Hooray for sunshine and temperatures that do not make you want to curl up into a little ball and die. The nine mile run wasn’t the greatest, but it was good enough, and frankly, after a spotty training schedule over the winter, good enough is good enough. And honestly, it didn’t get tough until we reached about seven miles. Sometimes I forget that nine miles is still a long distance to be running and getting tired is acceptable.
So there you have it. If it’s Tuesday, it’s the training update.
Adventures in Vegan
On and off since the New Year, I’ve been experimenting with a vegan diet. While I’ve given up meat (poultry, beef, and pork) entirely, I found myself shifting seamlessly from vegan to vegetarian to flexitarian depending on the situation. For the most part, I have been keeping a vegan kitchen, though a pint of the B&J finds it way into my freezer from time to time (who am I kidding… like it ever goes into the freezer… it goes directly into my face). I eat vegetarian out because I don’t really want to dissect menus and question waiters. And, I have continued to eat fish — but only for sushi or on the rare occasion I find myself at a steakhouse where the restaurant’s vocabulary excludes the word “options.”
But, after a week-long business trip where I primarily spent my time shoving every piece of food I could find into my mouth — sans the meat, obvi — I have decided to challenge myself to eat vegan for the entire month of April. Combined with WeightWatchers, I’m hoping to drop approximately 8 lbs before the Flying Pig Half Marathon in Cincinnati.
[Road trip!]
Does that sound like a lot? Eight pounds in one month? Maybe it is. But if I hadn’t gone nuts on the cookies, rolls, ranch dressing, croutons, cheese, and God knows what else during my trip, I would be talking about wanting to lose 5 pounds. Not eight.
So eight it is.
I’ve found that the hardest part about eating vegan is reading the labels of every packaged food you buy. So many products include some form of dairy or animal products — buttermilk, eggs, cream, whey, whatever — slyly tucked away in the middle of a long ingredient list, between high fructose corn syrup and xanthan gum. You can’t just pick a product off the shelf and assume it’s kosher — so to speak. You have to go all detective on that product’s ass and investigate. Fo’ real.
Luckily, as I was wasting time on the Internet yesterday, I found this — Trader Joe’s Web site offers a list of the vegan products available in its store. It also provides lists of products for other types of restrictive diets: low sodium, fat free, heart healthy, etc. If you’re not interested in the vegan products, go here and pick your poison.
So, Trader Joe’s saves the day, per usual. If you don’t heart Trader Joe’s, it’s probably only because you don’t have one in your state, because if you did, you would pilgrimage there even if it was 100 miles away. Life must be unimaginably hard for the Trader Joe’s-less among us.
Dissecting My Decisions
I left a rambling voice message for my workout partner Meg yesterday afternoon. It was something along the lines of, “You know I think I’m going to skip out on the gym today. I’m just exhausted. And my throat is a bit scratchy. I don’t know… maybe it’s allergies. This usually happens to me once a season, but then I’ll take one Claritin, and I’ll be fine for the rest of spring.”
In reality, I wasn’t feeling great. I was completely rundown after a week long business trip, and I had every right to bypass the gym and head straight for bed last night. But, I knew the hidden subtext of the message I left.
I was looking for an out. Not just a “get out of gym free” pass from Meg, but an opportunity to convince myself that it was OK to say, “Not today, healthy habits; maybe tomorrow.”
As I pressed send on my phone to leave that long, rambling message for Meg, I was mentally mapping the quickest route from the train station to my grocer’s freezer case packed with pints of Ben & Jerry’s. I knew exactly what I was doing.
Has it really come to this? In my world, are there really only two options: workout and have a healthy meal or don’t workout and eat an entire pint of Chubby Hubby for dinner?
I walked to my apartment convincing myself to call Meg back. I knew that if I went to the gym, I’d go to Whole Foods afterwards, and buy the ingredients necessary to make a healthy dinner. Do not to stop at the grocery store before you get home, I warned myself, because if you do, it’s all over…
Moderation is not a word often present in my vocabulary… or my eating habits.
It’s this kind of behavior that has lead to me to define entire chunks of my life in terms of fat or skinny. And I’m smart enough (now) to know that if I don’t stop swinging from one end of the spectrum to the other, this sad fact is never going to change.
In the end, I went to the gym. Meg and I walked uphill on the treadmill for 40 minutes, a compromise since I wasn’t physically up for the full circuit workout we had planned. We went to Whole Foods, I bought carrots and spinach and other similarly healthy odds and ends, and I made soup for dinner.
One day. The battle won, but still… there’s a war to fight.
For some reason I never had the courage to ‘fess up on A View about my weight loss goals. I talked around it a bit, but I had issues with “going there.” But since this blog is a bit more focused, it’s seems as though I ought to start fresh.
I want to lose some weight. There. I said it. I’d be happy with 10 pounds. Delighted with 20. Ecstatic with 25.
And I’m going to give WeightWatchers a shot. Scratch that. Another shot.
On Fate and Blogging
No time like the present, am I right?
I’ll be honest, perfection really isn’t my thing. I don’t really believe in it. Perfection, that is.
So this is my thinking… I could screw around editing the Wordpress theme I have selected, purchasing a new digital camera, begging my boss to buy me Photoshop because I desperately need it for “my job,” and taking photos of food that will one day be part of the best masthead known to bloggerkind, or I could just get started and let everything else just fall into place eventually, no matter how long it takes. I am choosing option two in the hopes that my energy and excitement for this new blog will perpetuate, and my serious plans for this site will someday be realized. The future is going to be nothing short of awesome.
Where to begin?
I’ve been doing this for awhile. Blogging, that is. You can read all about me, the training, the food, the raving, and the ranting at my other blog, A View from the Park. I plan, for the time being, to post on both sites, perhaps cross posting from time to time. I’m a bit sentimental and have issues with giving up the blogger site that started me down this path nearly two years ago.
This site, Reading Cookbooks, is my second attempt at setting up a blog on a domain that I own. The first attempt was, obviously, not successful or you’d be reading that instead of this or my blogger site. I think I was just waiting until the absolutely perfect name for a new blog hit me like a punch square in the jaw. And, amazingly, one day, a year and a half later, it did.
True story.
Reading Cookbooks is the namesake of a creative non-fiction essay I wrote as a senior in college, which I plan to post here if I can find it and continue to have the burning desire to re-type all 12 pages of it. While the title really only scratches the surface of topics I will post about, I couldn’t resist the little bit o’ history, and when I found the domain was available, I assumed it was nothing short of fate.
I plan to use this site to talk about food and recipes, cooking and eating, diet and weight loss, health and wellness, body image and acceptance, exercise and training — all of the things I enjoy thinking and learning about combined with my one true love, my first love, writing.
So… I guess it’s official. I am one of those crazy bitches who believes she has so much to say… so much to — ahem – offer… she needs not one blog, but two.
Welcome to Reading Cookbooks.
