These doctors just keep getting younger

Dr Patrick Blair

Meet Dr Patrick Blair, my new Primary Care Physician (PCP). It was five years ago now that I wrote about my new doctor at the time, Dr Brent Whitehead and how young he looked. Brent has gone onto to a different clinic, and I was given a new PCP without any input from me. I saw him for the first time yesterday, and I was amazed that he's even YOUNGER than my previous doctor, who looked so young to me. I'll bet he isn't even thirty yet.

But lucky me, Patrick is a gem! We chatted for awhile about various things and I learned that he is just out of residency and this is his first job. He is from South Dakota but his wife grew up in Seattle, so they ended up here. He loves it as much as I do. I realized when I read that earlier post that I had decided to lose ten pounds I had gained and that I've kept it off since then. I patted myself on the back, but so did Patrick! He said that whatever I'm doing, I should keep on doing it. All my lab numbers are good, and he ordered a bone density test since it's been awhile. He cautioned me, however, that the drugs available for osteoporosis are not as effective as weight-bearing exercise.

I told him of my activities and he was suitably impressed and said that hiking and walking are the best things I could be doing for my bones. He told me that it's important to keep flexible and when I told him about my yoga classes, he suggested that I continue with them, so I will consider that my "prescription" when it comes time to sign up for the next semester.

Today when I took the bus to my yoga class, I got off a little early so I could walk in the brilliant sunshine and enjoy the sights of our early spring. I saw daffodils in bloom, and the trees everywhere are sprouting blossoms and tiny new green leaves. We have three days of sunshine and blue skies ahead, with above-normal temperatures, so I suspect that you'll be seeing lots of springtime pictures on my Thursday post.
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Saturday rolls around again

Edible borage flower

I got up this morning and looked at the calendar, and I simply could not wrap my head around the fact that it's already almost the first day of summer (3:51am PDT, two weeks from today). But then when I go out and look at the garden, it's obvious that we are well into the time when we can begin to harvest our first fruits and veggies. I've already gathered salad stuff three times now, with yesterday the first time I picked any arugula, which is fantastically strong, at least compared to the stuff at the supermarket.

I'm going to be inundated with borage, which is good to eat. I steamed some up and found it to be slimy like okra, and I ate too much of it, I think. Now I almost have an aversion to eating more. The flowers, however, are just fine and will make a nice addition to any salad.

I've finally managed to see some results of my lowered calorie consumption. I see why it's important to weigh myself every day, since the fluctuation from day to day can be as much as two pounds. But the good part is that every day I see the scale trending in a downward direction. I've seen a fairly consistent 3-pound loss, but I've got a ways to go before getting to my ideal weight. And then the hard part comes anyway, which is maintaining it.

This morning I would normally be joining the walking group right now, but my skydiving friends and I will be getting together in Snohomish to have some fun in the air, hopefully. Right now there are low clouds and we're thinking it will be clear by noon. That means I could have gone on the walk, since it's usually from 8:00 to 9:30 or so and then a more-than-an-hour drive south, but I decided against it. I'm in a different mode right now.

Sugar snap peas already!

I went out this morning to check my garden plot and saw to my amazement that I've already got some sugar snap peas that I could pick and eat! But there are only those two, and there will be many more very soon, so I'll wait. I'm now finding a half dozen ripe strawberries every day, but soon there will be lots of them all ripe at once. It's a great year for strawberries.

Broccoli and red cabbage

My broccoli is also doing great, along with the red cabbage. I was disappointed to learn there's not much you can do with those great big cabbage leaves. Every day I peer down into the middle of the cabbages, wondering when they will begin to tighten up and start to make a head. Not yet. You'll know when that happens.

Enough! I'm going to gather my stuff together and start that long drive. After I stop for my latte, that is. Have a great weekend!
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Weight, weight, don't tell me

Last week's attempt at losing weight

You know, it's never over, when you want to keep to what you consider to be your ideal weight, and life gets in the way. It's not like I can stay away from food, or if I would even want to, so every day it's a struggle to keep myself from overeating.

My latest problem started after I returned from my trip to southern California. I was not weighing myself, and I'd been busy with skydiving and eating whatever I wanted while there. That included beer, pizza, and pasta. When I returned home, I began to eat my normal diet, but I wasn't willing to get on the scales. I also noticed that I didn't feel quite satisfied, and I craved more variety. Lulled into complacency by having maintained my ideal weight for a couple of years, I figured it would be a simple matter to lose any extra pounds and get back on track.

No, I just didn't want to get on those scales, as I noticed my clothes beginning to fit a bit tighter. On one of my Saturday morning walks, a conversation with a friend who inquired about whether I'd been able to keep the weight off (she was celebrating a full year after having lost thirty pounds), and I confessed that I had been backsliding and was unwilling to weigh myself. She said she learned that weighing oneself every day was the only sure way to maintain weight loss.

Okay. After that conversation, I got on the scales the next morning and found that I had gained four pounds. Well, that won't be hard to lose, I thought to myself. I went into my handy "Lose It!" app that I use to track my calorie consumption and confessed I had four pounds to lose. The app immediately cut 250 calories out of my daily ration, and I tried to keep inside those bounds. You can see, above, that I was unsuccessful last week, at least.

The week before I was also under curtailed calories, but I realized I hadn't been honest with the record of what I had eaten. Forgotten were the things that entered my mouth between meals, and portion sizes had increased but what I recorded was the same as before. I decided last week to get real, and as you can see, I was over every day, except Thursday when I exercise enough that I get to eat an extra 1,000 calories. 

This post is to give myself yet another boost to lose those extra four pounds. I thought it would be easy, but again I must change my attitude and think of it in terms of a lifetime of vigilance. I really like being thinner and don't want to go back to wearing those extra sixteen pounds again!

:-)

Falling into fall

Sigh. The flowers at the Farmers' Market all have the same look to them, since the summer bouquets are gone. Dahlias seems to be the only ones left, beautiful as they are, but when they are gone, it will be only dried bouquets (maybe a few chrysanthemums) until next spring. Fall is in the air, and many of my blogging friends are posting pictures of the riot of colors appearing in their parts of the country. Here, we are just now beginning to see the maples turn.

Yes, the title of this post was hopeful but alas, not to be. I was hoping to "fall into fall" at the Drop Zone in Snohomish this weekend, but today it's raining and tomorrow has a 40% chance of rain. So I am reluctantly thinking that the season is coming to an end. Here's the Climate Prediction Center's temperature forecast for the next 6- to 10-day period:

This is not hopeful for the next few weeks, at least in this part of the country, but it does mean that the fall colors should pop out reasonably soon. There's always an upside somewhere. The bruise from my flu shot is almost gone and my arm is no longer sore. I'm glad I got it, since everywhere I see people coughing and sneezing already, and it's only October. October! Where did YOU come from? Wasn't it just spring the other day? There's no doubt that time passes much faster when you're older, or at least it sure seems to. Only three more months left in 2011!

This is the time of year when I will be fighting to hold onto my hard-won weight loss. For whatever reason, it's when the chill in the air makes me feel cold most of the time that I begin to eat more. The fifteen pounds I lost this spring and summer will want to creep back on if I don't stay vigilant. There is a reason that the definition of the amount of weight I lost was also known in the U.K. as a "stone."

The stone is a unit of measure, abbreviation st which, when it ceased to be legal for trade in United Kingdom in 1985, was defined in British legislation as being a weight or mass equal to 14 avoirdupois pounds (about 6.35 kilograms). It was also formerly used in several Commonwealth countries. (Web definition)

Carrying it around felt like a stone, all right, and I sure don't want to add it back on. Any ideas about how to keep weight from creeping up during the winter months? Other than dieting, that is. For some reason it seems almost anathema to diet in the winter. Maybe it's time to start a knitting project to keep my idle hands out of mischief.
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Mindless eating

I'm reading a fascinating book right now, called "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think." After having lost ten pounds over two months, I went off the reservation when I went to visit my family last week. I gained two pounds back in five days, although I was pretty careful with what I ate and didn't eat, there was so much more food around that what I usually have in my own environment that I know I ate more than I would have otherwise.

Smart Guy gifted me with this book, which he is also reading, and I'm absolutely astounded with what I am discovering about food and dieting. This cartoon illustrates the story of Brian Wansink's (the author of the book) research on why we eat more or less than we think we do. One of the studies he conducted involved college students who were seated at a table of four diners, but two of the 18-ounce bowls (which they agreed not to touch) were rigged with a hidden tube that kept the bowls filling back up. Although they didn't reach the original full mark, I'll let Wansink tell you what happened (p. 30):

People eating out of the normal soup bowls ate about 9 ounces of soup. This is just a little less than the size of a nondiluted Campbell's soup can (10.5 ounces). They thought they had eaten about 123 calories of soup, but, in fact, they had eaten 155. People eating out of the bottomless soup bowls ate and ate and ate. Most were still eating when we stopped them, 20 minutes after they began. The typical person ate around 15 ounces, but others ate more than a quart -- more than a quart! When one of these people was asked to comment on the soup, his reply was, "It's pretty good, and it's pretty filling." Sure it is. He had eaten almost three times as much as the guy sitting next to him.

The interesting thing to me is that most people didn't comment about feeling especially full, since they thought they had only consumed about a half bowl of soup. They had 62 people conduct this experiment, and every single one consistently underestimated the calories and the amount they had eaten. What he points out is that the visual cues we use to tell us when we are full are every bit as important to satiation as the actual amount we consume.

I'm in the middle of the book right now, but the main premise that I am excited about putting into practice is to find those mindless calories that I can stop consuming every day, thereby not needing to continue to diet to keep those favorite jeans fitting just right. He says that 100-200 calories every day can be cut out of one's daily diet without even noticing, using his techniques. This adds up to about ten pounds by the end of a year, but if I increase by the same number of calories every day, then I'll have gained that amount in a year's time. Slow but steady, either direction.

It took me those two months of measuring and calculating to find out how many calories I was actually eating. Now I know what 1800 calories looks like in the kinds of food I usually consume. I will continue to skip avocados and cheese, snack crackers and other kinds of comfort food that were way too available all day long in Texas with my family.

Now that I've lost most of the weight I originally wanted to lose, I think I'll try this method of weight maintenance and eventual loss to see if it works. I'll also continue to monitor my progress with the scales, since I finally broke the barrier that kept me from stepping on them and don't want to backslide. The link in the first paragraph takes you to information about the book, the author, and the entire premise behind why we eat more than we think we do.
:-)

Blogger woes and more

Click to enlarge

I tried to download this new header onto my blog yesterday, and after getting entirely frustrated with trying to download it properly (it showed up all pixelated and the wrong size), I decided to download my previous header (the one that SHOULD be there now). I went to the "Help" button and put in a query and was directed to this thread, which shows that there is something wrong with the header widget and it has been going on since last Thursday!! They have a whole lot of very unhappy people, but one of them suggested that I find my previous banner in Picasa (which has all of my pictures downloaded from this blog) and link the URL instead of a picture, and it worked. I just checked a few minutes ago, and the issue is still not fixed and several people are heading over to Wordpress in disgust.

Besides not wanting to start over, I will wait patiently until the problem is fixed before trying to put another picture in my header. It was fun to put that header together but now I've decided it's too big and so I'll work on another -- and wait for the fix. Hopefully if you want to change your header picture you will decide also to wait before going through all the frustration that hundreds of us have dealt with in the last few days.

Just a quick update on the calorie counting front: today after my workout I weighed myself on the same scale and have lost an apparent two pounds. Now, I know from previous efforts that the first few pounds are the easiest to lose, and they may not be gone at all, actually. Water weight fluctuations cause changes that appear to be actual weight loss, but it sure made me happy. I know that last night I woke up and realized I was hungry. According to Calorie Count, I was 300 calories short of what I need to maintain my weight (1500 calories taken in), and it surprised me to be hungry at all. I figure I must have been eating at least 2000 calories a day before this effort began, and that caused the imperceptible creep upwards. Imperceptible a day at a time, that is.

My friend Rae over at Weather Vane is hosting an unofficial giveaway and has asked anyone who might be interested in winning this cute little spoon holder (or a couple of other prizes) to link to her post in order to be officially entered in this unofficial prize party. Although she didn't mention what the other prizes are, I am intrigued by this fun event and don't want to be left out. I have already won a key chain from SquirrelQueen at The Road to Here and use it every day. (It has a picture of the Walla Walla Sweetie Onion on it.)

The blogosphere is expanding for me. I have reluctantly begun to follow another four blogs just this past week, and I see that I recently stopped being in the double digits in followers by gaining my 100th follower. (This might be different if you look over at the sidebar, because people come and go, as most of you already know.) It made me smile to see that "99" turn to "100" for no reason I can surmise, except that I know I am not the ONLY one who spends a huge amount of time reading the blog posts of her virtual community. It's time consuming, but it's also really fun.
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