Tom made this pie. I ate this pie. It was my final "farewell to pie" slice. So, until I can get back to my official pre-Thanksgiving weight - which I refer to as my fighting weight - I'm on a - geez, I hate that word! - let's just say I'm on a consumption watch.
For any of you others who feel the need to go on a consumption watch and are physically and emotionally ready to step into Hell Week, I'll share some of my consumption watching practices. Some of this sharing may be presented in the format of advice, only 'cause that's the easiest way of getting it said. (But if it looks like advice and anybody feels like trying it, feel free to. Or not): 1. Always eat three adequate meals a day. That is, each meal should provide sufficient fuel to get you to the next meal. They say ("They" being that anonymous group that gets together and says things) that it's better to eat six small meals than three big meals. Not for me, I'd end up eating six big meals. Nope, three meals, nothing in between unless you're about to have a spell. That's a word Tom made up, as in : "Patti, it's one o'clock, you better eat something before you have a spell". A spell generally involves shakiness and a mood drop, I think due to a drop in blood sugar, whatever that really is. 2. A good breakfast option is a bowl of protein Special K (10 grams of protein! Wahoo!) piled with fruit and accompanied by unsweetend vanilla almond milk (35 calories per cup - skim milk has 80 calories per cup; almond milk has 45% MDR calcium - skim milk only has 30%. So program your brain to like almond milk on your cereal!) Then, since I've saved all those calories with the Special K and the almond milk, I splurge with a 15 -calorie sprinkle of sugar - that's one sugar pack. Sorry I like sugar. I love sugar. Which tends to be my downfall. 3. For Hell Week lunches, I have myself convinced that a bag of frozen brussel sprouts and two (or more if you're a big hungry dude) 45-calorie hot dogs (45- calorie hot dogs do exist, I just can't remember what brand they are. I think they're some kind of turkey frank), microwaved, salted and dipped in Hellmann's Dijonnaise Mustard are delectable. For dessert, try a pink grapefruit peeled and eaten like an orange. 4. If you need a little break from brussel sprouts and hot dogs, a small baked potato topped with one (or more, if you need 'em) sunny-side up egg is good, too, with a huge side of spinach sprinkled with shredded (not grated!) parmesean and a little salad dressing. 5. I only eat light bread - 35 or 40 calories per slice. I think it's just regular bread sliced thinner, but it does the trick to hold a sandwich together. My standard sandwich: 1 or 2 slices of lunchmeat avocado slices sliced olives tomato slices onion slices a few shredded carrot pieces (I buy them buy the bag) a couple of romaine lettuce leaves a wedge of Laughing Cow Lite (35 calories per wedge) cheese spread on the bread Hellmann's Dijonnaise also spread on the bread Just be sure to wrap the whole thing tightly before you pack it! 6. I love the above sandwich served with kettle chips, but I've hypnotized myself that salted raw cauliflower crowns are just as good as kettle chips. 7. If you're having a between-meals spell, a few turkey or ham (or both) & cheese wraps dipped in a little Hellman's Dijonnaise are good. Use a romaine lettuce leaf for your wrap. If the leaves are too narrow use two leaves as "bread" slices with the meat & cheese in between. 8. I usually just eat dinner as usual. Except for dessert. No dessert. 8( 9. I never drink anything that has any calories. Including alcohol. I'm a teetotaler, but... 10. My sweet tooth is my Achilles heel. (It also causes me to mix my metaphores). The old pink-grapefruit trick sometimes helps tamp down the craving, or maybe another bowl of cereal with fruit and a sugar packet helps, or a slice of light bread with some fake butter spray and a little sugar and cinnamon will get me by. But the only problem is, if I'm in a heavy jones mode for something sweet and I try to substitute with something not so bad, The not so bad thing doesn't satisfy my craving so I'll just keep eating more and more of it until it's become, by the quantity I've consumed, a bad thing, and I'm still craving a real sweet. So with sweets, my best strategy is to just fight the craving for so many days, then I let myself cave and have a doughnut, or a bag of caramel creams, or something. 11. Sometimes you just have to tough it out. Welcome to my Hell Week! If you're entering your own, well, "May the odds be ever in your favor." (A quote from, aptly, "The Hunger Games").
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The celebrating is all over, but the year is still new, so there's still time, hopefully, for a New Year's Resolution. My usual modus operandi regarding New Year's resolutions is to kind of take stock of what I'd like to resolve about myself and then conclude that it's just not gonna happen. However this year I've resolved to make, and even ty to keep, at least for a while, for as long as necessary, that is, a New Year's resolution. My New Year's resolution, alas, does not seek to bring anything of particular value to the planet or my fellow earthlings. It's not even the least bit creative or original. My resolution is to go on a diet. Well, not an actual diet per se; more of a just getting back to where I belong. Or think I belong. See, when I stepped on the scale on January 1st it read five pounds heavier than it did the day before Thanksgiving. So I just need to get rid of those five pounds. Just to get back to my fighting weight. That's my plan. I guess that is called a diet. Here's a couple things I believe, based on personal experience, about losing weight: 1. The really hard part about losing weight is trying ot change your old foodie habits. Habits are developed over time until our brains get programed to make us continue to do what we always do. Breaking an old habit and replacing it with a new one involves re-programming your brain. This re-programming takes time and Herculean effort. 2. No matter what any weight-loss program might claim, losing weight is hard. Really hard. If you commit to going on a serious diet then you have to be prepared for a period of self-denial until you've managed to get the re-programming ball rolling. I call this period Hell Week. Or it could be Hell Month. Or, for those whose habits are entrenched in bedrock, Eternal Damnation to Healthy Eating Hell. In any case, if you go on a diet, be prepared for at least some intial suffering. 3. You won't lose weight just because you're exercising more. You have to eat less. I see folks of a good size at the gym who've been at it for years and don't appear to have lost a pound. On the other hand they're probably pretty healthy all the same. 4. And then there's my experience: on the Camino I walked about 12 miles a day, all day long, over rugged terrain, and didn't lose a pound. That's because the whole time I ate like three Sumo wrestlers. 5. In our society, where so much of what we eat is calorifically pumped up with high fructose corn syrup, corn starch, oil, fat, salt, sugar, more fat, and all those other naughty additives that make our food so tasty and irresistable, anyone who can stay thin through adulthood and into middle age an is working at it. They have to work all the time at keeping their brain programmed to eat the right things. They have to consciously avoid, and with some degree of effort, the "bad stuff". 6. Any thin person over forty-five who says they can eat anything they want is probably lying. Unless they've somehow succeeded in programming their brain to only ever want to eat the things that keep them thin. Ha! 7. Once you reach your mid-to-late 40's, if you just keep eating the way you've always eaten, you'll put on weight. 8. It's okay to splurge once in a while. I splurge on a regular basis but not all the time. Except between this past Thanksgiving and New Years when I was spluring all the time. 9. If I always ate everything I felt like eating I'd still look like I did when I was 24: 10. And it wouldn't matter. That's how I looked when my future husband fell in love with me, I had lots of friends and fun back then and my world was overall a happy, interesting place. If I still looked that way I doubt my life would be any worse or better than it is now.
11. So why do I want to want to get back to my pre-Thanksgiving weight? Eh, I guess it's just that it took so much time and effort to get there in the first place. I'd hate for all those Hell weeks to have gone to waste. A few weeks ago Pastor Doug Warburton of Peace Lutheran church, during his sermon on the ever-present possibility of a person's life taking a new direction, told us this story:
The priest was 75 years old and ready to retire. He'd submitted his request for retirement to the Vatican and had already picked out a place where he'd like to live out the rest of his days. But some friends of his, believing that his work was not yet done, convinced him not to retire. So the priest, whose name was Jorge, continued his work, and at age 76 his life took an unexpected new direction. Now he no longer goes by Jorge. Now he is called Pope Francis. Now, it may have been just a couple of flukes, or it may have been isolated incidents due to the crowds of antsy, demanding passengers travelling over the holiday season, but now I’m kind of wondering if a certain level of, well, snottyiness might be creeping into the ranks of the airlines. More specifically, the ranks of US Air since that’s the airline I flew so I can’t point a finger anywhere else.
The first incident, which I figured was just a gate attendant being – well, in truth I couldn’t figure out what exactly she was being, besides snotty. It happened at Port Columbus, at the front end of my Los Angeles trip, at the departure gate, shortly before my plane left for Los Angeles. I had a carry-on suitcase, and whenever I have a carry-on I usually ask at the gate if they’ll be needing volunteers to have their carry-ons checked ( that way I don’t have to schlep the thing around with me during the lay-overs. Which wasn’t even the case this time, my flight was direct to LA, so I don’t know why I even pursued it . Just force of habit, guess), in which case I offer to volunteer before the general announcement is made. I just figure it saves time to get it done before the rush, and the gate attendants often take me up and give me a bag-check tag in advance. I did the same this time, but this particular gate attendant, a nice-looking middle-age-ish blonde lady, appeared to be too engrossed in her computer screen to acknowledge me. What I did next was, in retrospect, a little goofy, I guess, and I’m not sure why I did it, except that it was a thing I’ve always felt like doing, purely out of curiosity: Okay, so, you know those measuring things they have at the check-in counter , a wire slot thing, supposedly the size of the overhead bins, that indicates how big a piece of overhead luggage can be? Well, that slot always looks ‘way smaller to me than my carry-on suitcase, and I’ve always wondered if a carry-on would really fit into that slot. Well, next to the the desk of the too-busy gate attendant was one of those slots. For some reason I chose today as the day to do that thing I’ve always wanted to do, that is, stick my carry-on bag into it the see if it would actually fit. And that might well have been all well and good, except that as I lifted my suitcase to stick it into the slot I said, to no one in particular, and probably a little too loud, “I wonder if this’ll fit.” As soon as I said that the gate attendant became suddenly more interested in watching me than in watching whatever was going on on her screen. And my suitcase didn’t fit. Not exactly. Not very well. Halfway down the slot the wheels got stuck. “That’s too big!" the gate attendant cried. " You should have checked it at the counter!” I gave my suitcase a gargantuan shove and squished it into the slot. “It fits!” I cried. “No it doesn’t fit,” the gate attendant snapped, “you have to able to slide it in and out easily. That bag has to be checked!” She returned to her computer and began typing fast and furious. I assumed she was typing up a $25 bill for me for not checking my too-big bag at the check-in counter. I waited there at the desk, publicly busted, digging into my purse for my credit card. Feeling like the kid standing outside the principal’s office, I waited. And waited. But the gate attendant never turned back to me. Was I going to be charged to check my luggage or not? Did she mean that I supposed to go back out through security to the check-in counter and take care of it myself? Finally I just slunk back to the waiting area. I looked at everyone else’s carry-ons. They all looked the same size as mine. How come mine was too big? How come nobody else was in trouble? Of course I knew it was because nobody else was dumb enough to draw a target on themselves. A little later the gate attendant made the announcement requesting volunteers to have their carry-ons checked. “provided,” she added “your luggage does not exceed the allowed carry-on size.” I figured I knew who that was directed at. Now, if I had some chutzpah going on I’d have marched right up to have my bagged checked for free with the others, unminding any grief that blonde biddlyatcher gate attendant might sling my way, prepared to sling it right back. But alas, I seldom ever even dip my toe into the chutzpah pool, I’m to busy flopping around for dear life in the choppy waters of the Anxiety Ocean. So I waited until my boarding zone was called, sweating slightly and hoping that my nemesis gate attendant wouldn’t rat me out to the other attendant, who was scanning the boarding passes, before I made it through. I tried to look all innocent though my heart was pounding as the scanner waved me by. Then I was on the entrance ramp to the plane, only one more hurdle to jump – had the gate attendant alerted the flight crew to watch out for a lady who might be trying to smuggle on a too-big piece of overhead? Would my suitcase not fit this time? Had they shrunk the size of the overheads to the actual size of the measuring thing? The flight crew smiled and welcomed me aboard. My suitcase fit into the overhead just fine. Like it always does. The moral of this story?: Those overhead luggage- measuring things are BS-ing liars. The second event , which occurred yesterday on the Los Angeles-Phoenix leg of my return trip, was less involved but, in view of the first incident, was, I felt, weighted with significance. Most of the passengers were already on board the plane, which was as crowded as a sardine can. A sweet, chirpy female voice came on over the microphone and requested that smaller carry-on bags be placed under the seats, not in the overhead. The overhead was only for luggage and large roller bags. Then the voice added, in a no-longer sweet, chirpy tone: “It’s a new year. How about you all start trying some courtesy.” “Whoa,” though I, “harsh!” And, well snotty. Epilogue: Later on the second leg of my trip, Phoenix-Columbus, one of the flight attendants was the friendliest, motherlyest, most job-enjoying lady. This lady, as if sensing my previous travails, offered me during this trip such a wealth warm-fuzzies that, I must say, she more than made up for the transgressions of her sister crew members. The moral of this story: Well, it’s just so obvious, right?! 8) Hi again, Romaine!
That was a thoughtful comment. To quote you: "Whenever a neighborhood gets gentrified (as my own where I live now has been) I always wonder where the original occupants moved to. What is the first step to turn around a neighborhood? Does it start with a new coat of paint and a plant in the front yard? I wonder how long it takes to change a street and then a neighborhood." I've also wondered where people go when they leave their upwardly changing neighborhood. Other things I've wondered about: What makes a neighborhood go "downhill"? Is it lack of money? Or lack of caring? Or both? Even if a neighborhood is "poor," could its streets not be kept clean and safe? And wouldn't any neighborhood with clean, safe streets be a good neighborhood, no matter the economic status of the neighbors and the state of the houses? Or is it in reality the state of the houses that determines the state of the neighborhood? So, then would a new coat of paint and a plant in every yard make a difference even if the people living in the houses remained the same? What if you took all the rich people and put them in the poor people's houses and then took all the poor people and put them in the rich people's houses, would the neighborhoods change? (I've actually thought about this one quite a bit) Just thinking, is all. Hi, Romaine! Thanks for all your comments! On your comment yesterday: Yes, you're right. All of Venice, California, including the canals, used to be very divey and run down. A California acquaintance of mine lived in Venice in the early 90's and he said that back then the neighborhood was gang-infested and down right dangerous - he once told me how during the 1992 Los Angeles riots a rabid mob burned down the house across the street from his. But over the years since then Venice became gentrified and the gangs moved on and today you can't touch the smallest no-yard bungalow in Venice for under a million dollars. As for the manses along the canals - we're talking many millions. Ah, well. So even though most of us couldn't afford a house along the Venice Canals, anyone is free to stroll around the neighborhood and enjoy the scenery. And, as you foresaw, Romaine, somebody likewise thought that this could be a cute neighborhood, which it now is. Cute on steroids! Venice Beach, however, is still medium divey - tattoo parlors, "medical" marijuana "clinics", funky ( way funky!) tee-shirt shops - but I still like the place. All kinds of diverse folks (including me!) going about their business, and you can snag a great slice of pizza along the beach! Happy New Year everyone! |
"Tropical Depression"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTPN7NYY "Equal And Opposite Reactions"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa or from The Book Loft of German Village, Columbus, Ohio Or check it out at the Columbus Metropolitan Library
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April 2024
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