Hey y’all.

I swear I’m going to get to the Taubes book project. It’s coming.

I’ve hit a passel of little bumps in the road:

1. Learning an awful lot about blood (it needs our respect, this goo), about clotting, and about electrolytes, and the system that keeps blood volume in balance, and stuff like that. Not sure it’s going to be of general interest here, but you’ll likely hear about it all anyway, once I feel enough on top of it to report coherently. Meantime, let me just say, drink your dang water, will you? At least 2 liters a day. Make a point of attending to it. Get a bigger mug. Commit to lots of herbal tea, mkay? Because it just may be that those of us who work hard at dieting (too hard?) and exercise put ourselves in a particularly dicey place where consistent blood volume is concerned. Isn’t that one more lovely worry to worry about?

This learning is not entirely at my leisure. I am being studied. It’s interesting to be a lab rat. You know that feeling you sometimes have that you’re sitting on your own shoulder, watching the proceedings of your life? This living-under-study stuff is very much like that but moreso, because you can’t talk yourself out of the feeling. You really are a lab specimen. And I really have to collect perfect data. Collecting data about body fluids is plain awkward. You can extrapolate and understand.

2. And then the hubbub of the holidays, for which I am never actually ready, no matter how much I flatter myself that I’m on top of things.

3. And now that 2-week cold that we’ve been nursing at the office came home with me, and is all bronchial and sinusy and gut-grotty.

4. Oh, well, and I got a Kindle. And have been downloading and reading almost everything at Manybooks.net while nursing my cold. And thinking a lot about the Transcendentalists, and Hawthorne, and Austen. I love my Kindle. It’s my second ebook. And it’ll be awhile before there’s a perfect ebook in the world, but if anybody’s going to get there, I’d put my money behind Bezos. I’ll likely write about that over on my company’s blog site one of these days.

(Speaking of blogs. I’m also acutely aware that I am trying to keep up around 6 blogs. That seems like a lot, doesn’t it? I may have to think about that little problem one of these days. Who needs six? Who needs one?)

So, I’m late on my homework, but still intend to sum up Taubes, and still interested in participating in that discussion, but just a lot of stuff is jumping in the way. I beg your patience, if, in fact, you’ve been worried. Which is assuming a lot, I realize…(smile).

First on my list, even before Taubes, is getting out from under clots and colds and getting a new/old sort of daily movement program underway. One of my docs wants me to return to swimming (to avoid injuring myself, causing bleeds, starting inflammation). And I see the sense of it. I need to rejoin my old pool, and reestablish my early morning habit. It would be a far easier thing to do in July than in January, let me tell you. I well remember the cold transition from icy parking lot to never-warm-enough showers to never-warm-enough water in January.

But I have just this one body, and this is what it needs. So there it is. Taubes is coming.

Here’s what I’m thinking on this January 1, 2008 for my Skinny Daily friends. Be gentle with yourself this year. Excessive dieting, excessive exercise — these can cause more problems in the long run. I continue to learn about this the hard way, and don’t want you to have to repeat my mistakes.

And you’re in this for the long run, right? Do change your habits to lose weight, because it’s a healthy and wise thing to do, but take pride in changing as slowly as you can so that you know you can sustain your new habits over time. Drama is for the stage, for the screen, but certainly not for a delicate system like your body.

So… I’m not a fan of resolutions, but do like the idea of taking a day like this to assess my life and habits. I need to think about how much and how often I’ve tried to fix my body as fast as I could. How most of my diet efforts have begun with a frenzy of change and rather severe restrictions, goals, and expectations. I have even encouraged that sort of thing here now and then, and regret it.

So these few holiday pounds I’ve found? I’ll worry only if I haven’t dropped them by June.

This will be the year of going slow. As slowly as I can. To gain as much as I can in health and longevity and daily well-being.

That’s what I’ve decided. How about you? Any ideas for today?

Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. Okay.

Here’s the dealio.

I’ve learned from Jimmy Moore’s Living La Vida Lo-Carb (I need to catch up there. Jimmy’s been burning up the interweb with Taubes news.) that my other personal boyfriend Andrew Weil (yes, I have touched the beard) is asking all of his students and researchers to read Good Calories, Bad Calories, as he has, cover to cover. I won’t share the link to the contentious Larry King show that featured Weil giving his stamp to the book, because the segment is just stuffed with images of headless obese people, and I won’t perpetuate that kind of yellow journalism.

However. Here’s my concern, and my pledge. I’m concerned that the book, informed by 7 years’ research, and pared down from Taubes’ original 400,000 word first draft, is too much reading for most of us. And yet, to paraphrase another great thinker, people are dying every day for want of what is found there.

I’m thinking cliff’s notes. I’m thinking instead of one book report, I’ll take on Taubes’ book, and offer up my version of cliff’s notes of its contents. This is just to help spread the contents around. But it is not to keep you from:

1. Buying a copy of the book and giving it to your doctor.

2. Buying a copy of the book and keeping it on your coffee table, to engender discussion among your circle of friends.

3. Buying a copy of the book for anyone who’s got the job of preparing your food or your children’s food, at schools, churches, hospitals — particularly institutions.

4. Buying a copy of the book for your local library.

5. Buying a copy of the book for another local library where there isn’t much wealth or many book donors.

6. Sharing the book with your weight loss support group.

Okey dokey?

I can’t promise the cliff notes will come as fast as you want them to. I also can’t promise that they won’t be laden with my own snarky editorial commentary (I KNEW that Ornish was a prig! Stunkard’s onomatopoeia ain’t lyin.)

I REALLY hope — those of you who will absolutely read the book along with me — that you will jump in and question, correct, add to, subtract from my notes. I’m going to go chapter by chapter. And… if you’d like to help with this project, holler, will you?

This is big, y’all.

JuJu

Here’s a good way to enter the holiday feasting season, with a copy of Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories by your side. You remember Gary Taubes. He’s our friend from the 2002 NY Times article wherein Taubes begins to lay out an argument that refutes the low-fat diet so fashionable these past few decades.

Well, in Good Calories, Bad Calories, he’s finishes his thought. Boy does he. We stand to learn a lot, judging by the interview with my personal boyfriend, Ira, at Science Friday (give a listen, especially if high cholesterol and heart disease haunt you or your family.)

Those of us who have finally lost and maintained a significant weight loss by giving up sugar and flour will feel supported and sustained by this guy’s research and hard work. All of us are bound to gain a militant edge — again — over the means and methods by which public health recommendations are developed and issued. That is, it’ll get your back up. Oh it will.

So. A book report, or at least a list of favorite lines, when I’m done with the big read. I have a hunch it’ll keep me focused on the bird and not so much the spuds this year.

There should be a prize for this kind of writing, the kind that stands to save lives. Don’t you think?

I don’t think there is anything quite like a big bunch of investigative journalism on the food and diet industry that does quite so good a job of building my own personal resolve. I’m so glad for his timing.

Well, there’s one good thing about your tax dollars… they pay for this big research hospital in Washington (NIH, the nation’s hospital), where lots of lovely medical geniuses work to make medicine better, and sometimes that means doing great work on somebody you know!

Really, the experience of a not-for-profit hospital is a wholly different experience. I can’t quite process it all yet, but trust me, it is. I am well aware I am opening a gigantic can of words by bringing it up and then dropping it… but really. We need to do better.

While the patient is still not entirely the customer in this medicine, either, the patient is certainly a partner or collaborator, and that makes a big difference.

So, I had arguably the best radiologist and intervention radiologist and hemotologist in the country staring at my pasty, clotty left leg or the past few days.(Along with a horde of technologists, nurses of very ilk, and hospitality folks. Washington hospitality ladies are all the spitting image of my mom. I kept them with me longer than usual, I suppose.) I learned a lot about clots, their diagnoses and treatment, and came away with the understanding that…
0. There are a lot of undiagnosed clots out there, which sometimes kill and sometimes never cause any problems, but can cause a lot of problems later on, down the road, as we age…

1. The ultrasound tests that most of us can afford can help us deduce the existence of a clot, but it doesn’t give much information about the clotting in your veins at all. A venogram (contrast die injected into a vein in the top of your foot, + expertise, +xray) will help you understand where the clots are and what’s going on with them. Your insurance company may not pay for that.

2. Lots of medical folks and most of the rest of us don’t understand clots very well. Turns out they actually don’t melt away with the anti-coagulents. Those drugs prevent more clotting. Your body takes care of the rest, BUT actually most of the time the clots just tend to stay put and scar over, and cause narrowing of veins, or eliminate the use of that vein, and your body creates collateral veins — new routes around the clot. But these new routes don’t have the same ability to return blood/fluid that your original equipment has, and especially don’t have the valves needed for good flow, and that’s why long-term leg pain and ulceration happen with the current recommended therapy in 50-66% of cases.

3.That clots in the thigh almost always start in the calf and travel up. And that was true in my case. I had a bigger problem with clotting in my calf, but never felt it there, and might not have felt it in my thigh either, because…

4. I am officially a “variant” (Explaining my draw to X-men and Spiderman movies…), owning strangely duplicated venous systems in my thigh and calf. Probably both legs, but they spared me the venogram in the other leg. This is where things get a little too detailed to be of interest to most of you, and also makes my eyes cross, but just take away this one piece of truth. I’m more evolved than most of you… or less. Or neither.

5. Our family probably has a genetic clotting factor or two. They were able to do some of the tests, but not the important one, because I came already on Coumadin. They will give me more info in 6 months. But our family history (Grandmother’s death from pulmonary embolism, Dad’s vericose veins, etc.) x being of
northern European extraction suggests this already. High liklihood that we have and pass along a gene that predisposes us to clots. This is important for all the women in our family to remember, that birth-control pills will be especially hard on us. Also, I may not be the only variant among us… We should form an army….

7. I need more protein in my diet. I am addicted to caffiene, and need to get off of it.

8. Standing doesn’t do you a bit of good. Walking is the thing. It’s the action of your calf muscles that make your blood go, and keeps your leg veins and valves happy and healthy. Pull your toes back and point them forward often while you’re sitting or on a plane, but especially on a plane.

9. The head radiologist here thinks 10% of people who get off of long airline flights have clots that go untreated and cause problems later.

10. Be. Careful. Wearing. Spanx. Or any undergarment that restricts circulation in your thighs, but not in your knees and calves. If you feel you must wear them, get a size bigger of these garments than you think you need, and don’t wear them all day. And walk a couple of miles after you take them off before you go to sleep. I’ll be editing my I-love-spanx post to say so…

11. It’s not at all unusual for women, even young women, to get clots in their left leg as a result of the proximity of our veins to our arteries, and the way they bump together as we walk. Apparently our arteries can just beat our veins to pieces, causing a narrowing of the vein, which leads to clotting. Unfortunately, without Thrombolysis, the narrowing won’t be discovered. It should be, and should be treated through thrombolysis, and maybe even stenting, especially in young women. This is called May Thurner’s… something. And my doc made a point of telling me about it, because he wants to spread that word.

12. Thrombolysis is getting safer and safer all the time. Anybody who wants to know more about that should call Dr. Richard Chang or Dr. Don Horne at NIH. This protocol study I participated in is for vastly reduced exposure to rTpa, and no mechanical removal of the clot, making the treatment quite safe.
Their paper on the subject may be out as soon as March, 2008.

13. For thrombolysis to work well, it has to be used early, before the clot forms scarring. This therapy doesn’t work on scarred over veins.

(Just for my sibs: get ready for a giggle… but I get to join Dad in sartorial splendor with my new PRESCRIPTION KNEESOCKS! TOLD you I was Daddy’s girl! For 6 months only, but still… Yipes!)

“We mock the thing we are to be.” –Mel Brooks

Missed you guys, but I’ve been on a narrow table in an intervention radiology unit for three days… seems like without a break. Back home soon.

My grandmother, Leone, was not a slim woman. She was sturdily built. Fairly tall for her time, and round all over. Strong.

She was raised on her family’s farm, along with a boatload of sisters. Among them, she was the least slim. She was a teenager, and lamented her figure. Why couldn’t she be thin like her sisters? Her father, my great-grandfather, in an effort to console her, famously said, “Leone, there are race horses, and there are workhorses. You, my dear, are a workhorse.”

This line has been held for now five generations as an example of male idiocy. But I’m interested in re-examining it.

He was, after all, a farmer. He had little use for race horses. But he could not survive without a good workhorse. He knew their value, and they were far more valuable — we might say beautiful to him — than the sleek, sexy race horses who could offer only a momentary entertainment, at best. He was paying Leone a compliment.

It didn’t work.

I live in a very modern home. This place was built two owners ago by a guy who completely embraced a clean-lined, modern aesthetic. It is all clean lines and planes, steel and glass and concrete. It is a modern house at its foundation and down to its bones. The owner between the builder and me? Did not embrace the modern. This guy made several runs at remodeling the place to change its nature. Every effort to change it made it function less logically. He didn’t want a modern house. He wanted country charm. He sold the place when he just couldn’t make it work. Our job has been to restore it. We love the modern aesthetic, so restoration is fun for us. Trying to figure out what the house was before and is trying to be is a good puzzle.

I was born with the body I will live in for the rest of my life, and I’ve never been happy with it. Always wished it was something it could never be, no matter how many remodeling abuses I subjected it to, no matter the crazy diets, extreme exercise, circulation-cutting fashions, foot-crippling shoes, bladder-abusing diuretics, no matter the beauty chemistry or diet pharmaceuticals, the carcinogens, the bleaching agents, the dyes, the paints. I’ve taken up or fallen for pretty much every sort of product, procedure, service or habit designed to make me something else. Something I’ll never be — a race horse.

And you know the rest of this story… Now that I’m old enough to know better, I would give anything to have the body back that I had before I started hurting it and hating it. I’d like to rewind, go back, and appreciate what I had. It was a perfect specimen of its type. The fact that its type wasn’t fashionable, and has never been during my lifetime, is a painful memory. But I should have gotten over that a great deal sooner. What is maturity good for anyway, if not accepting your one body?

Every time I made a great effort to transform my sturdy, strong frame into a slim, willowy one, I weakened myself a bit more. I am very sorry for that. What I’d like to do now is take it all back, apologize to my cells and circulatory system and skin and muscles and bones and brain and endocrine system. I’d like to sooth them all back, make peace, and restore them all. But I’m not made of stone and steel and glass. Restoration is not so easy.

But that’s my new goal. Not to remodel my body, but to *restore* it to its natural, sturdy, strong, workhorse state. Not some fashionable ideal. Back to what it was before I knew enough to hate it. There are race horses and there are workhorses. I am a workhorse. Or I could be, if I take good care of myself.

And my other new goal? To try to ensure no future generation in my family learns to hate their bodies because they aren’t entertaining enough for the times. That’s much harder work. I can figure out my own restoration. I have no idea where to begin on the last part.

Do you know? If so, spill it please. And how about you, anyway? What sort of horse or house are you?

So, as I reclaim the contents of the SDP from the old site, I am, of course, reviewing it to see what holds up, what’s new, what isn’t working any more. And I’m glad to note that everything that’s here still rings for me. But something’s missing… and I could use your help filling in the blanks.

We have a definite point of view here, and we’d hate for people to come looking for something they’re just not going to get and waste a lot of time, right? And though we have worked hard to be supremely supportive of everyone’s path, still… we’re only human… we have a point of view.

So I’m thinking of writing a little POV statement to put in the top navigation of the site, just, you know, sort of tack it to the front door, to alert new people of the nature of this community we’ve formed. I can’t do that without your input, now, can I?

So let’s use this post as a kind of writeboard, a way to share ideas about what should be in the POV statement. How to tell people who we are and what we’re about. I imagine we’ll keep working on this document over time. It’ll be a kind of “living document” and grow and change as we learn things and change and add new people, and etc. I also expect it’ll be a collection of pithy statements. Kind of a creed. Kind of a manifesto. Kind of a constitution. But not that heavy.

Here is the beginning of a rough drafty draft:

1. Your health cannot be measured with a measuring tape or scale or calipers, or the size of your jeans. We recommend real measurements like bloodwork, resting heart rate, blood pressure.

2. If you form and stick to great body maintenance habits, including eating well and exercising daily, then the body you achieve by sticking to your maintenance plan is a great and beautiful body.

3. If you form and stick to great body maintenance habits, including eating well and exercising daily, and your health measurements continue to decine, or you continue to put on an alarming amount of weight, you should seek medical attention.

4. Forming and sticking to great body maintenance habits is hard work for everybody, and should never be a source of shame or embarrassment.

5. You get one body. It’s not like anybody else’s. You must learn what it needs by listening to it constantly.

???

What else? What else? Do you agree? Is this a good start? Do you disagree? Why? Let’s write this baby and put it up there and keep working on it. Worried that I should change the name of the site now… hmm…

Weird timing, my return to blogging.

So I returned recently from a trip to Maine, and Deer Isle, a place I love to visit. And while there, as usual, I put in a little walking/hiking time, in particular a really nice trail, the Tennis preserve. Just a lovely trail. This is the sort of Maine hike along a granite, treelined shore where every step you take is on a root. That is, your foot never lands in a predictable or flat way. And so a few times along the route, I had this thought, “Oh, I’m going to feel that tomorrow.” But the trail was breathtaking, unbelievably so. I kept thinking the whole thing had been hallucinated by Tolkien. And I was somehow wandering through an idea of an idea of a beautiful coastal forest.

Well the next day was the day we flew home, which turned into a bit of an ordeal, with the plane having technical malfunctions, we were held on the tarmac for a while. In the tiny plane. Strapped in. For a while. And another while. And a while after that.

And since then, I’ve had this pain in my left leg. And it’s gotten worse, and worse. I thought — arthritis? I thought — bursitis? I thought — muscle tear? But there was functionally nothing wrong with my leg. No specific spot where it hurt, no movement that made the pain sharper. Just a bone-deep, tooth-achey sort of pain that over the days started to travel up and up… By the time it reached my groin, I was calling the docs.

Did I mention I’ve been working to understand/manage the special joy-filled season of peri-menopause. Didn’t I? By which I mean I’ve been a pain-wracked, sponge-brained, sweaty, hot, sleepless emotional slug. Not to put too fine a point on it. And after several months of that, my resolve to avoid hormone therapy completely melted, and I succumbed to a low-dose birth control pill. Which worked really well, by the way. I have loved my little pink pills.

Loved them. Loved them. Loved them.

Except that….

I spent last night in the hospital because I have a goodly blood clot (which my kids have decided to call Cleveland) in my left thigh. And now I’m on two kinds of blood thinners, making me a functional hemophiliac. And I’m not allowed to take up fencing or sword swallowing for awhile, or play with sharp objects.

Seems birth control x being strapped down for a long flight = Deep Vein Thrombosis.

And I’ve been kicked off of my beloved estrogen.

So while I’ve taken back up with blogging, you will get to watch me devolve back into crazy land. But being up at 3 in the morning for hot sweats should make for interesting posts, don’t you think?

Anyway, I’m fine. I have new skills (self-injection!) and a deeper appreciation for the complexity of our human systems, and a reminder that hospitals aren’t actually as much fun as you might think. Although the nurses are amazing. Really. Nurses and teachers. There ought to be a separate heaven just for them, with a lot more perks.

Dang. Life’s rich pageant, eh?

Now how to I deal with maintaining some semblance of muscularity while confining my activity so as not to loosen a clot? Delicate… this…

That’s the question, isn’t it? Did she gain her weight back? Is that why she stopped writing? It’s a pretty logical if-then scenario. And the answer is NO. And, well, YES. And, Is that all there is?

For the record, I did gain back around a fifth of what I lost, maybe a bit less. I gained that weight back long before I stopped writing here, however. And I have held my weight steady now for almost two years. My reason to stop writing was because my time has become even more precious.

Family matters have delivered a whole new lifestyle, and blogging was starting to supplant exercise time. If I have to make a choice, I’ll take a walk before I blog. I hope you will too.

It was fun to be thinner. It was even more fun to be more fit than I am now. But it was really very time consuming. I needed to choose a body I could maintain without quite so much effort (I was working out 10-14 hours per week on top of a 50-60 hour professional week.). And this is that body. Or pretty close.

Yes, I took a long side-trip into grief during these past couple of years. I’m sorry that I didn’t have more grace to see that period through, but I’m actually quite pleased at how little ground I lost, physically, through that time. I lost a great deal more mental than physical ground there, trust me.

So, I’m not now concerned about my weight. (Actually what I’ve lost interest in is Fashion, but we’ll get into that ere long…) I’m concerned about my fitness, my health, and time. I’m not as fit as I’d like to be, and I have to choose every day to do all the things I need to do to stay healthy. That is, forming healthy habits that fit my life and my body is still hard work for me, still a work in progress. That’s still my focus. (…Little break to go take my vitamins, which I sometimes forget to take…)

I have lost interest in diet programs that promise pounds lost by guaranteed time, but remain interested in watching carefully what I eat, making sure I don’t eat more than I need but do eat all I do need (still struggling to get in my veggies and fiber and water). I’m still very careful about sweet and starchy foods, and suffer when I eat too much of them.

I ‘ve lost interest in prescribed exercise regimens, but still love to move, sweat, and work my muscles until they fail.

So I still enjoy a really low resting heart rate and blood pressure, but I can’t climb the dune steps in the park near my house without stopping, which I must defeat before the winter ices them over. (If, in fact, we ever have icy winters again.)

I am no longer thin, no longer wearing single-digit sizes. But I’m pretty darned fit, and getting fitter, and still working to, as Danielle in Seattle puts it, change my LIFE. (Hi there, Danielle.) Which is all it’s been about all along.

So, I guess, nothing’s changed, has it? However, everything’s changed. Is that good news or bad news? Or all there is? Details coming…

So THAT took longer than I ever thought it would. If any of you are still there, I am still Juju, and still here. Still have a body. Still trying to care for it. Still succeeding in small ways and once in a while failing spectacularly. But learning. You know. I’m always learning.

When last I checked in, I was trying out a new plate-spinning act — keeping Dad care, family and pet care, coworker and client care, and self care all going at the same time. Not always successfully.

In the time since I wrote regularly here, I have aged a bit (Is this blog really 5 years old? Holy cow!), given up contacts for a goofy pair of glasses, tried to make sense of peri-menopause, become obsessive about knitting (which does help me kick the old evening binge habit, but is too sedentary to count as my daily exercise), respectful of grief, and addicted to French tea towels.

I have not kept up with the latest nutrition/fitness press, but have a long reading list I’m in the mood to tap.

I have found an interesting peace with my body, which is not nearly so fit as it was when I started this blog, but is a strong, healthy body nonetheless. I may be forming a kind of miltancy about the 50-year-old female body, but I can’t articulate it yet, and guess that’ll come from writing here, as usual. This new peace is something I’m in the mood to explore…

Sitewise, I’ve pulled the old blog into WordPress, a lovely application I can’t say enough nice things about. That will make it a whole lot easier to keep the content safe from the crazy spam artists who made Jane’s and my blogging life a real chore for awhile there.

I’ve checked in with Jane, and will provide updates as soon as I have them. Meantime, it’ll be just me, offering up help and support as I find it to share.

If you’re new to this little corner of the blogosphere, The Skinny Daily Post is intended to be a source of support for people who have undertaken a significant weight loss. We are agnostic about method, but share the same point of view: losing the weight is just the beginning. Maintenance is the hard part.

Oh, did I mention that I still have a hard time getting my daily exercise in? Yep. It’s still hard. But I’m going to work out in the morning.

I will if you will…

JuJu

Well, at least that’s what the magazine cover said! This whole big bowl of yummy looking soup for 102 calories.

How can they measure that so precisely? What happens if you use a slightly larger mushroom or a few more shreds of carrot? and if you add these wee little bits, do the extra calories have any real meaning?

Geez. Sounds like I’m going into a ‘deep meaning of life’ discussion here. But I’m not, really.

However, the ‘102 calories’ line DOES bring up the essential point that we need to be able to measure our portions accurately. We need to know what’s going into our food.

Do a few extra veggies actually make a difference? Well, no. But another couple of tablespoons of cheese, or dressing, or oil, well, that’s a different matter.

And following recipes - a small onion makes some sense, as we all have an idea of how big that is. But our ideas are not identical. Putting things in terms of cups and tablespoons - actual measures - is more accurate, and gives us a better count.

That translates into better control.

I promise to stop chuckling at recipe counts that are so exact. But I also promise to keep a closer eye on what goes into a recipe. Extra veggies are fine, but as much as I love it, maybe those few extra bits of cheese aren’t such a good idea.

I promise to look more closely. Honest!