Monthly Archives: May 2011

The Rhubarb Festival

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I’m going to try a couple of things here.

One is to try and add a blog post every day for the next 30 days.  It may or may not be about my weight loss journey but, most likely, it will be.  I’ll try not to get to depressing but a lot of my life seems to be a little bit of a struggle and food tends to be the comfort factor.  Of course, there are parts of my life are pretty upbeat, too.  I just need to remember them.

The other thing is that I really need to get into the habit of posting/writing, again.  I used to do it all the time either here or on my real estate blog and I’ve really slacked off on both.

It has been said that even if you write a couple of hundred words a day, it’ll kick in the creativity.  We’ll see.

Rhubarb

OK.  So I was tired of sitting around and not doing a whole lot that was anywhere close to fun or different.

Running around taking care of the things my business needed and doing the volunteer stuff for my local Realtor Association and the volunteer stuff for my Rotary Club.  I even took a class on how to make Outlook a great and wonderful resource. It all just got a little bit old.

I got this e-mail from a place called Kitchen Kettle Village in (are you ready?) Intercourse, PA.  It’s about 15 miles east of  Lancaster, PA in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch Country.  Think lots of Amish. Think quilts. Think rhubarb.

Rhubarb is in season so this little oasis of a shopping village has a Rhubarb Festival every year.  The place is really very nice.  They also have lots of nice shops that you just don’t run into in the Metro DC area.

Well, this was the 28th Annual Rhubarb Festival complete with a baking contest (are you with me?) that included pies, cakes, cheesckaes, cupcakes, jams and all kinds of other rhubarb delights.  Of course there was raw, out-of-the-ground rhubarb which, if you’ve never tasted it, is kind of bitter/sour. It’s when you put it together with tons of sugar and other goodies that it tastes good.

Rhubarb is full of great nutrients.  More potassium than a banana. Folic acid. Vitamins A and C.  All kinds of good stuff.  And, if you can pull it off, you can eat it like celery.  Only the taste is not that wonderful.  Bake it in a pie or cake or whatever and….you get the point.

Aside from the great rhubarb baking contest there was the ice cream vendor (straight from the local Lancaster County cows!), the coffee place that was selling rhubarb/strawberry smoothies, there was a fudge place (thankfully, we were able to pass up the fudge. no small feat.). Of course, there we quite a few other non-food shops.

Pretzels

Pretzels are also big business in Lancaster County, PA.

We stopped at Hammond’s to pick up some of the regular handmade pretzels as well as some chocolate covered pretzels (in dark chocolate and milk chocolate, of course).  The regular pretzels are 70 calories a pop.  I have no clue about the chocolate covered ones except that they’re….more.

I have to say, they make the best pretzels in the world.

But, still….

Sugar, Motivation and Forgetting Why

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One of my Twitter buddies @LStephenCleary was tweeting the other day about the difficulty of kicking the sugar habit because sugar is in everything.

It is sooo true.

Sugar and high fructose corn syrup are in just about anything you put in your mouth. More important is that fact that many of sugar’s cousins or half brothers are in even the healthiest of foods like, say, a banana or orange. Sugar substitutes like Splenda® (a sucralose-based artificial sweetener derived from sugar) or its “natural” alternative. Stevia are in lots of things or available as stand alone products.

Then there is the “fake” sugar like aspartame.

What it all boils down to is that we love sweet and the food industry is going to make certain that doesn’t end anytime soon.

The downside to this, for me, is that is sets up a sugar craving or sugar addiction that needs to be fed from time to time.  With me, it tends to be the occasional nibble on a graham cracker or, more recently, real cookies and a Dairy Queen Blizzard.

I have a hard time, for some reason, staying motivated to keep on the “healthy” lifestyle of counting calories and eating only the good stuff.  The sugar jones is part of it.  The other part is forgetting why I want to reduce my weight to something I will feel good about.

It’s struggle, exercise, count and see a little progress at the scale. One day of going “off the wagon” and the needle starts spinning around the dial like a top.

It’s no wonder people opt for surgery.

Weekly Weigh-In … Week 22

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I probably should contribute to this blog a little more that I have been.  Especially since I’ve been on this plateau for awhile and, lately, been craving nice sweet, sugary treats.  I also recently went through — with the ables assistance of my lovely wife —a pound and half of hard pretzels and a ound of chocolate covered pretzels.  Not just any pretzels, mind you, but Hammond’s Old Fashioned Handmade Pretzels from the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, Lancaster, PA.

Here’s the weekly breakdown:

Week 21 – 282.6 lbs
Week 22 – 281.6 lbs
Decrease – 1 lb
Year to date decrease – ~21 lbs or .95 lb/week

This is still not the optimum.  I have been losing at a much faster pace but, of course, I’ve been getting lazy by not logging in my calories and not exercising as much.  I went back to the gym yesterday for some time on the treadmill.  I’ll go back today.  Hopefully, that will help jump start the loss, again.

Who knows?

Weekly Weigh In … Week 21

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This will be another quick one….

I’ve been getting lazy about posting on the actual day I weigh-in – Thursdays.  I do weigh myself.  Trust me on this.

Week 20 – 282.0 lbs
Week 21 – 282.6 lbs
Increase – .6 lb
Year to date decrease – ~20 lbs or ~.95 lb/ week

The pattern here is that my average weekly decrease is, er, decreasing which means I’m not continuing to lose weight at a pace that will get me anywhere anytime soon.

The Reasons

  1. I’ve been lax about logging in my food to My Fitness Pal and, thus, losing track of the number of calories I’m consuming.
  2. I’ve been away from the gym way too long (I went back yesterday for the first time in a long time). – No exercise.
  3. I’ve been eating stuff.  Wednesday I went to a minor league baseball game sponsored by a title company that provided lots of hamburgers and hot dogs and potato salad and…you get the point. Last night it was Cinco de Mayo sponsored by another title company and mortgage lender which included all kinds of high calories stuff.  I could go on.
  4. I started getting into pretzels, again. Bad for the blood pressure. Bad for water retention. Not high calorie but not low calorie either.

So, I just really need to get back on track. Get re-dedicated.  It’s tough.  This “lifestyle” thing is not as easy as it sounds. There is food everywhere and occasions to eat it all the time.  It’s mind boggling.

 

Conditioned Response

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In 1927 Ivan Pavlov discovered that his dogs would begin to salivate first in the presence of food, then in the presence of the lab assistant that bought the food and then just by hearing a bell that would normally mean the onset of feeding.  The discovery of this Pavlovian Response of Classical Conditioning is the forerunner of all kinds of behavioral therapy.  The idea is that you can teach yourself or someone else can teach you to respond to certain stimuli in a certain way.

Many hypnotists try this by planting a post-hypnotic suggestion that you don’t like this or that type of food or that this type of food really tastes horrible.

The more common way we try to do it for weight loss is to try and establish new habits.

  • box up half our meal when we eat out
  • drink more water
  • avoid sweets
  • reward ourselves when we’ve reached some positive milestone

Sometime this works.  Many times it works only temporarily.

Undoing the habits or conditioned response built up over the years is extremely difficult.  Here is a story from my own experience:

Every so often I have the occasion to visit a certain part of town.  Normally, it’s a doctor’s appointment but it could really be anything.  In this part of town is a place called Bagel City. It has dozens of different bagel sandwiches and bagel preparations along with dozens of different bagels. It also has lots of snacks — potato chips, pita chips, pretzels, sodas, etc. — that you don’t see in your run-of-the-mill bagel place or any other sandwich place.  It also has a glass display case of dozens on pastries, cookies and other sweet delights.

It not a fancy place but it has fancy stuff.

Yet, I always go there, if I’m in the area, and I always get the same thing.  Purely a conditioned response. Reflex.  I sometimes even go through a little thought process trying to tell myself to pass it by. It almost never works and I almost always end up there.

  • roast beef on a pumpernickel bagel with lettuce and onions (which they automatically serve with cole slaw and a pickle
  • Dr. Brown’s Black Cherry soda
  • a small bag of Rold Gold pretzels
  • …and on my way out, a black and white cookie which is probably about 4′ in diameter

I can’t begin to count the calories and, truth be told, I don’t care (almost).  I tell this story because there are dozens of little things that have been embedded into my life that are almost purely conditioned responses.

You would think that being a human and not being a dog that it would be easier to break the bad habits.  28 days and all that stuff.  I’m hear to tell you it ain’t that easy.