weight loss

Juice Fasting With the Husband


Sweet Potato, Celery, Ginger and Orange Juice 3of3

Image by Food Thinkers via Flickr

It’s day two of a juice fast that I foolishly suggested to my husband a few weeks ago. We’d meant to do and be done with it before our holiday before the May Long weekend, but time, space and another plague kept us from it. So I find myself juicing and hungry today.

For me, it’s day three of limited intake. The “rules” of the fast stipulate that a person should slowly eliminate foods from the diet and gradually decrease intake for about a week-ish prior to juicing. I held back on Monday and journeyed into yesterday with a half-empty tummy.

As I packed Rob off to work yesterday, I did my best imitation of a cheerleader,

“Aren’t you excited?” I said. “At the end of the week, you’ll feel light and revitalized. All those toxins flushed away.”

He regarded me quietly. His tummy rumbling in protest against a breakfast of orange juice and herbal tea.

“I don’t feel excited,” he said. “I feel hungry.”

By lunch, when we spoke again, it was, “I don’t care about being light or ridding myself of toxins anymore.”

And by the time he strolled in for dinner, “I am betting whatever smells really good isn’t the juice we are having for dinner.”

It wasn’t. I’d made veggie chilli for Dee.

“Why does she get to eat?” he asked.

“Dad! I’m too little to juice fast,” she chimed in quickly because the child’s self-interest is never far from the surface.

“Sweetie,” I needlessly pointed out, “she’s barely 50 lbs soaking wet. She can barely sleep through the night without chewing her own foot off.”

“A likely excuse,” he grumbled as she souped and he slurped back another glass of green goo.

Later at Dee’s soccer game, he asked,

“So, how long are we juicing?”

“Until Friday.”

“What?! Who decided this? I’ll be the husk of man by Friday.”

“You decided,” I reminded him.

“I think not.”

“Yes,” and I dug back in my memory for the tape of the conversation that basically had me pointing out that we should fast a couple of days and him over-ruling me in favor of the end of the week.

“I don’t recall it that way,” he said.

“Can you say that with certitude?” I asked.

When I spoke to him today right around lunch, he sounded like Frodo as he was slipping into the land of the Ring Wraiths.

“We can quit tomorrow night,” I offered. “Jade says that the body knows when we should eat food again and it should be listened to.”

“No,” he replied listlessly, ” I am committed.”

And I am involuntarily so.

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Resolving to Be Myself in the New Year


Happy New Year 1910!

Image by Puzzler4879 A Blessed New Year To All via Flickr

As the last days of 2010 speed by, some of us are plotting new courses for a new year, and this means – naturally – making those awful, and often fruitless, resolutions.

Most people concentrate on the concrete. Resolving to lose weight, which more often ends up with the health club having a fatter wallet and no significant body improvements for them save a skinnier bank account. Diet improvement or renouncing counter-productive habits are biggies, as is the ever popular “getting organized”.

Make-overs are big because of the broad applications. Nearly anything can be “made over” and “improved”.

A smaller portion of the population tackles the interior with goals intended to improve, cultivate or jettison relationships.

Typically, I don’t make resolutions anymore. I have goals but my success is not measured by how quickly they are achieved. Rather I look at how they incorporate into my life and I would say that my goals are in a constant state of refinement as I pursue them in a non-manic way.

One thing I have noticed about myself as I head into my fourth year living in Canada, is that I am more and more myself.

In my old life back in Iowa, there were obligations and responsibilities that obliged me to stifle who I am more often than was good for me (though it probably benefited a small group of others). I don’t employ many of the checks by which life was precariously balanced. Nor do I masque myself.

Oh, I can still be inscrutable, but more often, what you see is who I am.

This year, I resolve to continue being more and more myself.

Perhaps you might too. It would certainly be easier and more inexpensive than a lot of other superficial options.

In case I don’t see you again before the new year, have a joyous and peaceful one, dear reader.

You were not meant for crawling, so don’t.
You have wings.
Learn to use them, and fly.
-Rumi

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The 12 Ill-Fitting Outfits of American Women


 

Just to prove the muffin top is not limited to LA

Image by Malingering via Flickr

 

Though there are likely more than 12, I am guessing that the number one bad fit is some sort of trouser. It gathers unflatteringly at the crotch and produces a muffin-ish roll at the waist. It’s too long or a tiny bit too short depending on the female in question’s inseam because in America it’s 30″, 32″ or 34″. Period. With 31″ being the inexplicable default when manufacturers’ feel that catering to girth is duty enough.

What strikes me as amazing is that pouring ourselves into pants that obviously don’t fit has been in vogue for so long that women, more or less, can’t tell when they are wearing the wrong size.

Take muffining for example. Most young women spill over the waistband. Even those who are thin – by real life standards or Hollywood ones – feel that unless they are being squeezed up and over the top of their pants – they must be too big.

What a fantastic bit of salesmanship! Fashionista Americana must still glow pridefully for pulling off that neat trick.

A recent U.K. study* revealed that women, generally, have at least 12 outfits in their closets that don’t fit them at all. Too big.  Or, more likely, too small. And the decades old nonsense of buying something too small to encourage yourself to lose weight or get in shape is still one of the culprits behind this unsurprising revelation.

When I posted a link to the article on my Facebook feed, my sis, DNOS, replied that she probably had more outfits than that. Her husband is forever imploring her to thin the unwearable herd.  If I lived closer, I’d offer to help.  Some of the flock is mine.  Things I grew weary of or decided didn’t suit me. I bet that a good portion of my college days wardrobe is currently huddled together in my sister’s closet, discussing their days of yore – when someone actually wore them.

My youngest sister still wears a couple of my old pre-Dee pair of jeans I gave her during one of her many cash-strapped periods. Whereas DNOS will accept much of what I offer (though she considers my style and colour preferences fuddy-duddy), BabySis – a beggar if ever there was one – is choosy as hell. The only items she’s ever accepted were jeans and sweatshirts.

I pruned my own closet again mid-summer in anticipation of a garage sale that will have to wait until spring now. As I glanced through the closet the other day, I realized that Rob takes up most of the space. I would be hard put to find 12 ill-fitting outfits, but I could probably rid myself of four or five that I don’t truly love anymore.

True love is my criteria for keeping or purchasing clothing.

Which brings me to a list of sad statistics about women that this study also (re)discovered:

  • most women own at least three different sizes of clothing to accommodate their yo-yo dieting
  • Just 2% of women were happy with their looks
  • Most women think they are “frumpy”
  • 1 in 10 women thinks she is fat

I accidentally discovered I’d gained a bit of weight and am farther over my “happy weight** than I have been in a long while. The interesting thing is that I didn’t have much of a reaction. I happen to think that I look pretty good at the moment. The yoga I am doing has added a bit of muscle – which accounts for some of the weight – but it’s also changed how I “fill out” so-to-speak.  First time in my life that the number on a scale hasn’t sent me into a dieting free-fall. It was kind of nice.

It is nice.

I am whittling down my fabric possessions. It doesn’t have much to do with ill-fit. Much of what I sell or donate doesn’t fit my life-style anymore and what I can’t garage-sale, I have to pitch because it’s simply worn out. I have so few pieces of clothing that I am actually wearing them out – like I did when I was a kid.

*Boggles me a bit what people get paid to study.

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