round these parts

it was spring when i first fell in love with brooklyn.

just over a year ago.

and it's been a spring-sort-of-love-affair ever since.

these last few weeks have seen a rolling progression of the trees in bloom. first came the magnolia trees and then the dogwoods and the cherry blossoms and many others i can't yet name.

the trees just out of my apartment have caught fire with green and my tiny studio apartment feels like a grown up's tree-house (in the best possible way).

everyday in this second spring is a lesson in how easily gratitude can sometimes arise.

gratitude for the flowers and the trees and the angling in of the morning light. gratitude for the quiet of the neighborhood. for the sounds of the birds and all the sidewalk sales. for the court street fair and the parade to and from the garden shop because absolutely. everyone. here. tends to their herbs and flowers and front yards.

gratitude for how very much the whole of this place feels like home.

gratitude for the cool air that demands nothing more than a jean jacket. gratitude for such good girlfriends and their very perfect children and a meatball sandwich shared with my father on a monday afternoon before wandering through the whole of brooklyn heights.

it's such a good time of year this spring.

why i try to avoid sugar as much as i can: part two

a little while ago i went on a few dates with a man and i told him i'd once weighed quite a bit more. and he told that he'd once weighed quite a bit more. and we both sort of laughed and commiserated about having once weighed quite. a. bit. more. and he asked how'd you lose it?

i ate a lot of cheese.

no kidding. that was my answer.

in fact, i'm pretty sure there was a cheese plate before me as i said it. (i haven't met a cheese plate i can't make a meal of).

the first time i really thought i'd give "quitting sugar" a college try was about a year ago. i can so clearly remember heading to brunch with two of my girlfriends and eating a small dish and being ravenous for something after. and when i say "something" i mean something sweet. i wasn't full. i needed something sweet and sugar-loaded to fill me up. but because i couldn't eat sugar i went through a list of foods in my head. and where every other food was concerned, i felt full--there wasn't room in my stomach. but for sugar--just the thought of sugar--my brain and my stomach sort of miraculously opened up, made space. it was one of the more eye-opening experiences of my life.

it was also around this time that i was eating cheese one evening when i had a very clear thought: that's enough. i'm full now. (i'd never before felt that way when cheese was around).

here's what i can tell you about avoiding sugar just as much as i can: quitting sugar was (and still very much is) an experiment.

to begin i gorged on the information that's out there (like this exceptional new york times article). and i invested in the very simple notion that sugar is bad and fat is not. i was willing to say yeah, i'll give those full fats a go. i'll start eating butter without fear. hell, i'll even cook with bacon fat upon occasion.

having learned first hand (in a full body sort of way) that diets don't work and that very often doctors and nutritionists are not well informed where weight is concerned (politics and commerce really come into play here) i was willing to invest in the notion that the prevailing ideas of what is healthy, were totally wrong.

so how did i begin? well, i started reading this tremendous blog. and then i bought her ebook. and i went from there. slowly and with great love for myself...

this is what i understand to be true:

fructose is the problem.

when fructose enters into the body it is not immediately converted to energy but stored away as fat.

anything sweet and found in nature is safe to eat. (and by safe i mean not poisonous). sweet was in fact nature's little calling card that said yup, eat this, it's safe.

thing is, very few sweet things existed in nature. a berry bush was a rare and unusual thing to come across. and so when our ancestors did they would gorge on its treasures. but they came across such berry bushes very rarely (and when they did they had usually just expended tremendous energy to get there).

there was no hey-you're-full message associated with sugar because it was so rare that there was no need for it. but now sugar is anything but rare and the rate at which it became so easily accessible far surpassed our evolutionary ability to deal with such a change.

so the simple lack of the hey-your'e-full message is a huge problem.

in fact, sugar (fructose) gets in the way of the hey-you're-full messages from other foods, which may be an even bigger problem. leptin is a hormone that regulates our satiety and fructose sort of taps down on it and confuses the message or renders it all-together-absent and so we. just. keep. eating.

high fructose corn syrup is no more dangerous than any other sugar except but for how easy and cheap it is to make. which means everyone is making it. and putting it in everything. (especially in all those no fat, low fat foods).

4g is about 1 tsp of sugar.

yoplait's 99% fat free yogurt has 27 g of sugar per 6 oz... you do the math.

just start looking at labels. forget about calories. forget about fat content. just look at the sugar content. it is startling.

i don't eat any sugar/calorie free substitutes (splenda and the like). they are dangerous because they 1. desensitize our brain to what sweet it and 2. create a deficit in our body. we get this huge hit of sweet and none of the accompanying calories and our body becomes aware of an imbalance and craves calories (food) to make up the difference.

part three coming tomorrow. (part one here).

i've been so encouraged by the responses to my most recent food + health posts and plan to answer any and all questions that have been posed in the next few days. i'm weary of doing any posts that accurately show what i eat over the course of a day or a week because knowing that it'll appear on the blog will cause me to skew my choices so that they appear "better" than they might otherwise be--that being said, i'm going to do my very best to present an accurate depiction of what i do actually eat over a given period of time. know that much as i avoid sugar and skip dessert at the end of the meal, there are still days when i can eat the whole container of ben and jerry's oatmeal cookie crunch, ya know?

a day in the park

 

i'm really not sure there is anything better than a small child reaching up for your hand. i mean, that moment that they grab it, or the moment they plop in your lap, or call out your name in that very perfect little voice...

so good.

living in new york is mostly quite hard.

but every once and again there is heaven-sent-spring-day and you make a stay-cation of it and play tourist with your big camera and central park sites.

and you get to do it all with one of your very best friends and her very perfect little ones.

and it makes living in new york and being young feel like the very greatest thing that could ever happen to anyone. ever.

why i try to avoid sugar as much as i can: part one

in an attempt to move past the eating disorder i experimented with everything--took every sort of healthy lifestyle into the dressing room and tried it on for size. i wanted to feed myself with as much information. i wanted to know what would sit well with me--what would feel right. and by feel right, i mean feel right in the everyday-for-the-rest-of-my-life-kind-of-way (FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE--i can't emphasize that enough).

and about a year ago i began reading about and researching sugar and its ills.

and if you're interested what follows is a really good place to start:

60 Minutes video on the dangers of sugar

NPR's On Point: regulating sugar

and holy heck if the information isn't terrifying and unnerving. but also, really, really comforting.

because it's an easy fix.

look around. people are fat. they are.

and i don't think fat is bad word. it is not a cruel word. it is a descriptive word. what is unkind or unfair is our emotional attachment to the word--or rather, all of the unkindness we empty into it. fat simply is. and if we're going to address the health issue we can't be afraid to use this word and we can't be afraid to acknowledge when someone is.

i truly believe if everyone cut out sugar (added and otherwise)--or at least drastically reduced it--we would see a tremendous shift in weight and all of its associated ills.

fat is not bad for us. sugar is.

and what happened is (keep in mind this is my very cursory understanding) that in the 1970's heart disease was on the rise and doctors were trying to figure it out and two schools of thought came about. 1. fat was to blame. and 2. sugar was to blame.

but there wasn't enough information to know which and essentially the health community decided to put all of their eggs in one basket and invest in the notion that fat was to blame. it was a grand experiment, one that has seen a rise in obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. (its also a fascinating political study because the man behind the notion that sugar was to blame was then cast as a fool and a sort of subversive campaign to undermine him took place).

ah, politics.

fat-free is a huge industry. it makes a lot of money. it employs a lot of people. but fat-free usually almost always means added sugar. when the fat is removed the food tastes terrible (like cardboard!) so sugar is injected to make it palatable.

and an interesting story begins to take shape...one with a widening waistline.

when i began to invest in the notion that i could no longer diet--that i wanted to move past the eating disorder stage of my life--i began to avoid all of the foods i had eaten during that period of time. and most of those foods were fat-free.

but that was years ago.

it was last year that i began eating full fat foods and avoiding sugar as much as possible. and in this last year i've stopped binging in full. and i'm very close to having gotten rid of my belly-fat--fat in that place that is so very bad for the health of the heart. as it turns out, and i know this from experience, when you put on quite a bit of fat (in an unnatural way, which is to say by eating a heck of a lot of food--and most of it processed) much of that goes to your belly--and damn if that isn't hard to lose).

this is such a big and important issue (on a personal level and a global one) that i want to write about it without throwing out too much information at once. so with just this very simple idea planted: that fat isn't the culprit, sugar is, i'm going to step away from the computer and return with more science and personal anecdote tomorrow.

"i hate my body"

I was standing in the kitchen last week, barefoot, up to my elbows in water just a bit too warm. And dirty dishes. Always, the dirty dishes.

There I stood, scrubbing and washing and rinsing and only half-thinking.

And I was aware that I felt a little bit of unease--sometimes I won't know what I'm feeling, I'll just know that it's uncomfortable or uneasy or at odds with normalcy.

So there I was, hands plunged into soapy water, with a pit in my stomach. What does this feel like, I asked myself? Have I felt this before? And within moments it was pretty clear that it was just a low-level anxiety about money.

Ah, finances, of course.

And so I let it be. But then came another thought, without me asking:

I hate my body. 

And that brought me round. Fully in the moment.

Wait, hang on. That's not right. I do not hate my body. 

The thought had come so quickly and so casually that I nearly missed it.

But it occurred to me, right then and there, that that thought--that single thought is the best tread path in my brain. It is so well worn and was once so oft-used that it'll find myself suddenly on it just out of habit.

People are forever in search of the why of an eating disorder. And it always comes down to control. That's what everyone says. That's what everyone's always told me. You're life lacked structure--you went in search of it. You found in in the rules and regulations and rigidity of calories and points and the whittling of your waist. But the thing is, never have I felt more out of control than when I was really sick. And I'm a pretty bright girl, if it had been as easy as balance and structure and a set of mandates I would have searched for those things elsewhere. Because it was very clear, very quickly, that whatever the hell i was doing, wasn't working.

Control--that notion never made sense to me. And maybe it's about semantics, but if it is then let me offer up some other words: to condense.

It was about being overwhelmed in a holy-shit kind of way. It was about being overwhelmed by things so large that i knew nothing more than that they were unnameable--that they were bigger than language allowed for. And so I attempted to harness them by emptying all of that looming and ambiguous and terrifying unknown into one thought: I hate my body. 

Which was sometimes true and sometimes not, but at least known. I am afraid, I am overwhelmed, I am lost or a little alone or totally unhappy in this place...I hate my body. Like laps in a pool I'd go away from the thought, only to return. It was my touchstone--the lip of the pool I clung to even as I was drowning.

It never occurred to me to swim to the side and climb out.

Or maybe it did. Or maybe I was more afraid of what getting out would feel like: cold and vulnerable.

And sometimes it was as simple as everything else might be terrible: I might be unhappy and I might be heartbroken and I might be out-of-my-depth, but at least I'll be thin. And then I'll get to feel superior and that'll be worth it--that'll be a good-enough-stand-in for all the things that I can't have.

But the thin never came. And that was both my particular blessing and my particular curse. Because I didn't get what i wanted I could only fool myself for so long, but because I didn't get what I wanted I couldn't disprove my false notions that thin would make for an easier, happier,  more manageable life (which sounds like control doesn't it?), but i thought the thin would bring the control--not the process of getting to thin--which is a big difference.

But in the end, in this life, all we really have is the process. Nothing is an end point. And so we have to invest in the-getting-from-here-to-there, as opposed to the goal.

When the thought came last week it unnerved me. And then it amused me. And then I got a good little laugh in. Because this is health in a new way.

And damn if it doesn't feel good.