Suite Dreams

I'm sitting here in my snazzy suite on the 44th floor of the Chicago Marriott, pretending I have a different life. 'Cause this one doesn't seem like mine.

So the deal is, I helped plan this big national conference to be held here in Chicago the last three workdays of March, and I didn't get paid by my professional organization. I get paid now, with perks, I guess. So I'm in my honkin' big suite, looking out over a chilly Chicago as a thick fog rolls in off Lake Michigan. I was supposed to be taking one of my favorite authors, Rick Bragg, to dinner tonight but his flight was delayed, so dinner was also delayed. I head out for late dinner at 8:30.

BUT I was happy to see a "carb conscious" menu here at the hotel. Yay! There are steak & eggs for breakfast. Spinach salads. Shrimp Cocktail. Pan-seared Ahi Tuna with vegetable caponata, and more. Nice touch, Marriott.

Of course, I DID see that french toast on the menu...

More later.

Feast or Famine?

Well, the serious packing has commenced, the house-cleaning has begun so the dogsitter doesn't get too grossed out, stress has finally reached the point where it's too overwhelming to even stew over--add to the flying stress and the public speaking stress the newest kink: my elderly mom has fallen and suffered a lumbar fracture and is afraid to stay in Crime City Central alone, so I'll drive her six hours in her back brace and vicodin stupor to stay with a relative before catching my flight to Chicago.

Now, what does all this have to do with diet and weight loss? Uh, can you say "stress eating?" Not to mention "vacation diet?"

Actually, the stress is almost incidental. Always in the past, leaving my home routine for any length of time has meant I'm going from "famine" (diet) to "feast"--pigging out on anything not nailed down in a debauchery of cheesecake and Blue Bell ice cream and anything with caramel in it. In other words, uncontrolled abandon involving foods that I can't have again when I come home and go back to "famine."

I'm going to seriously try not to do that this time. For one thing, I've been trying to accept slower weight loss in exchange for not feeling like I'm in a famine. Now, I can hear it, the voice of my buddy Jimmy Moore in my head. Yes, low carb diets do let you eat more and lose weight faster, but for me personally, I cannot eat with abandon, even consuming no or very low carbs. Sad, sad, sad. But true. But I digress.

I'm trying to shed the "all or nothing" mentality that has sidetracked me so often in the past.

I'm hoping that will allow me to eat out at the dinners and luncheons in Chicago with some degree of self-control. Enough to keep me from feeling sorry for myself watching everyone else eat "normally"; not so much that when I get home I have three months' work wiped out only to have to lose all over again. It took me two months to lose the 10 pounds I gained over my seven-day Christmas trip. Ain't fair, is it?

I'll be posting during the week but will be spotty, so keep checking back!

The Buzz: Probiotics

Probiotics seem to be one of the big buzzes going on in the food industry these days. Some yogurt has them, the new Kashi Vive cereal has them, and the "World's Healthiest Pizza" I'm having for lunch--it's the name of a local company--has them in its crust.

Of course, in the case of yogurt, you also have to do some label reading to make sure you're not taking in a lot of sugar with your probiotics, and since Kashi was bought out by Kellogg's--boo hoo hoo--it's easier to find their products but there's more sugar creeping in, too. (I've tasted Vive, by the way. It tastes kinda like a graham cracker and, yes, it has sugar in it.) Yeast is another probiotic we're all familiar with--that would be live yeast cultures.

So, what are probiotics, and why do I need them?

According to the handy-dandy Physicians Desk Reference, probiotics are microorganisms that can help balance our intestinal microflora. In other words, help our digestive systems run more smoothly.

And it's nothing new. The Bible (Old Testament, no less) makes reference to probiotics. Genesis 18 finds Abraham feedings his guests yogurt. Yogurt appears in several other Old Testament references.

Recent research suggests ingesting dietary probiotics could have anti-cancer properties and reduce systemic inflammation.

Antibiotics are the opposite of probiotics. When you have an infection and take antibiotics, it kills off the good bacteria along with the bad. Probiotics puts it back.

Which makes me wonder. At the risk of sounding too hippy-dippy-chick, could there be a cause-and-effect relationship going on? Could the antibiotic residue we ingest in our meat, poultry and eggs be contributing to the rising rates of chronic inflammation (which in turn is believed to contribute to heart disease, among other things)? If so, perhaps probiotics could tip the scales back in our favor.

Oh well, that's too deep a subject for a Friday morning when I'm stressing out over my upcoming trip, anyway.

Insanity Report 3.22

Usually this space is reserved for idiotic new food products--you know, like Life cereal with "chocolatey" bits or strangely colored, sugar-free Peeps.

But today I want to talk about a new cell phone. Specifically, the sleek and attractively slim Philips 598.

Designed for women, the phone has all the features we modern women like to have at hand 24/7: shopping lists, discount sale organizers, body weight index....

Whaaa??????

Yes, the phone has BMI and basal metabolic rate measurements built in.

I'm envisioning it all now. I've downloaded the old Dave Edmunds song "Girl You Let the Knife and Fork Dig Your Grave" and am using it as my ringtone. As the song's verse intones "...wearing a size 44, you have to turn sideways to get through the door" my new phone flashes my BMI just in case I forgot since my last phone call.

And, I have to wonder, what is the male version of this? Prostate dimensions? Beer gut measurement?

I mean, really. Who thinks of this stuff?

Somebody Has WAY Too Much Time

I couldn't resist passing along this photo. It's supposed to be a window display at Selfridges department store on Oxford Street in London. The store's website says it's hosting a "Surrealism and the Shop" exhibition at the store through June 24--I don't know if this is part of the exhibit but it's definitely surreal. So if you have a lot of jellybeans lying around that you didn't eat up before starting your low-carb diet...

And Speaking of Speaking

Cindy's comment on the last post (thanks, Cindy!) was so on target for me. I hate hate hate speaking in front of a group. I'd rather have teeth pulled. I'd rather have teeth pulled without anesthesia. I'd rather re-enact Dustin Hoffman's dental scene from "Marathon Man." I'd rather...well, you get the idea.

The only thing keeping me from freaking out about the public speaking on my upcoming trip is my dread of the airplane flight to Chicago. As soon as that plane lands, baby, I'm all over that nervous breakdown.

Seriously, though, it made me start thinking about why-oh-why I keep accepting "invitations" to do things like this speaking engagement/conference planning thing. It always sounds like fun at the time but, even when I accept, I know it's going to be sheer misery when the time arrives.

Could it be I have a problem saying no? Well, yes.

I recognize this problem in myself. I guess I am pathetically anxious to please. People might not like me if I say no. Is it because, as someone with a lifelong weight problem, I always felt I had to try harder and be more accommodating in order to be accepted? Or am I just a weak-willed wuss?

Probably a little of both. And some of that leftover Puritanical "I should do things that are good for me even if they're unpleasant" karma. I'm a lot better at saying no than I used to be, believe it or not. By the time I'm 80 I should have it nailed.

Pigs on a Plane

Well, make that singular. That would be ME on a plane, actually. I leave next Monday for a trip to Chicago where I have to do a number of things that really stress me out: Fly, speak in front of a group of 400 peers--several times, fly, help keep a huge four-day event I co-chaired running smoothly, and fly. Did I mention I hate to fly?

It isn't a fear the plane will crash, though I surely hope it doesn't. It's the old fat-person's fear and loathing of squishing into an airplane seat. Should I get the window, where I can press into the side of the plane, or the aisle, where I can hang out in the middle? Will someone be sitting in the center seat and be horrified/angered/obnoxious about having to sit next to someone who's overweight? Will my seatbelt fasten? Will someone complain? Will I have to buy an extra seat?

Granted, I have lost 65 pounds (yea!) since I last flew but, what a nightmare that was. It was a couple of years ago, actually, on a short jaunt from New Orleans to Houston, via Southwest. I got there ridiculously early so I could get the bulkhead seat, but there were continuing passengers that already had them, so I picked a window seat. On the way over I squeezed as close to the window as I could and began reading "The Purpose Driven Life," which my church was doing a study of at the time. A man sat on the aisle seat, and the middle seat was thankfully empty. But then the man struck up a conversation. We chatted a few minutes about the book I was reading, and then he said: "I hope you don't think this is too personal a question to ask, but have you ever considered weight-loss surgery?"

Well, thank you Mr. Complete Stranger. That is WAY too personal a question to ask. But I covered well and told him that, yes, I had considered it but my insurance wouldn't pay for it. So then he told me about his wife, who had had the surgery, and it ended up not being as awkward a conversation as it could have, but still. Sheesh.

Sweet Nothings from Fat Land

Warning: this will be a long post!

I’m currently reading Fat Land by Greg Critser, and while it’s a less-intriguing read than The Omnivore’s Dilemma, this weekend I came across one of the clearest explanations I’ve seen of the impact of the pervasive (since the 1980s, especially) presence of High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) in American foods. Since farm subsidies for corn in the ‘70s made corn cheap and plentiful, and HFCS could be had much cheaper than real sugar, or sucrose, more and more manufacturers began using it.

Critser summarizes the effect:

“For years, food technologists and academics alike knew that, in addition to its properties of sweetness and stability (which made it so useful to convenience food makers) there was something else unique about fructose. Unlike its cousin sucrose, fructose is selectively ‘shunted’ toward the liver; it does not go through some of the critical intermediary breakdown steps that sucrose does. This was interesting, but for years no one knew exactly what it meant. Eventually, cell biologists figured out that fructose was being used in the liver as a building block of triglycerides. This it did by mimicking insulin’s ability to cause the liver to release fatty acids into the bloodstream (as demonstrated by Zammit in Scotland). Bombarded by fatty acids, muscle tissue develops insulin resistance. Whether humans consume enough high fructose corn syrup to activate the effect was something that eluded scientists until the year 2000, when researchers at the University of Toronto in Canada fed a high-fructose diet to Syrian golden hamsters, which have a fat metabolism remarkably similar to that of humans. In weeks, the hamsters developed high triglyceride levels and insulin resistance.”

“Preliminary human studies also indict concentrated fructose. Two years ago, the clinical nutritionist John Bantle at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis fed two dozen healthy volunteers a diet that derived 17 percent of total calories from fructose—the percentage that Bantle believes about 27 million Americans eat regularly (particularly all of those fast-food “heavy users” and drinkers of 32-ounce Cokes). Bantle then measured the volunteers’ blood fats and sugars, and then switched them to a diet sweetened mainly with sucrose. The results were dramatic. The fructose diet produced significantly higher triglycerides in the blood—in men about 32 percent higher—than the sucrose-sweetened diet. The fructose diets also made triglyceride levels peak faster—just after the meal, when such fats can do the most conservative American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published one article that bluntly (and uncharacteristically) concluded that ‘these deleterious changes [by dietary fructose] occur in the absence of any beneficial effect…and these abnormalities…appear to be greater in those individuals already at an increased risk for coronary artery disease.’ ”

“The fructose trouble hardly ends there. Fructose consumption—it now constitutes 9 percent of the average individual’s daily energy intake (and up to 20 percent of the average child’s diet)—has lately prompted science to look at another, more controversial, theory—that fructose consumption itself may have led to increased rates of obesity, not merely through increased calories but through a variety of complex chemical reactions it stimulates in the human body.”

The book goes on to cite a number of studies conducted more recently that show a direct correlation between the rise in HFCS consumption and the rise in average BMI, however flawed that indicator of fitness might be. It also notes that public health workers and nutritionists have been “reluctant’ (understatement!) to single out HFCS since “most of their careers had been made in demonizing dietary fat.”

Now, all of a sudden, the cost of corn—and, as a result, HFCS—has increased dramatically leading Coca-Cola to consider returning to the use of real sugar in their soft drinks instead of HFCS. Could it be the beginning of a shift away from HFCS, and could a return to sucrose as the primary sweetener help tip the scales back in the other direction—figuratively if not literally? Only time will tell, but that’s probably wishful thinking on my part. I really don’t believe I’ll ever be able to actually “have my sugar-sweetened cake and eat it too.”

Driving Under the Influence

Now here's a story for you. The most recent issue of the International Journal of Obesity reports the case of a 59-year-old teetotaler who set off the breathalyzer alarm bells when he attempted to drive a car fitted with an alcohol-detection device. The problem?

He was on a ketogenic diet, and if you've ever done Atkins or other very low-carb diet, you know all about ketosis and keto-breath. Apparently, when your body goes into ketone mode, you release a form of acetone when you exhale. In some people, it can be significant enough to register a "false-positive" on a breath test.

"This 'side effect' of ketogenic diets needs further discussion by authorities when people engaged in safety-sensitive work (e.g. bus drivers and airline pilots) submit to random breath-alcohol tests," the authors conclude.

Pretty funny, eh?

Kiss Me, I'm Irish

Actually, more Scottish, but it's all in the family.

Happy St. Paddy's Day to ye all. Here in New Orleans, of course, we love any excuse for a parade, and today was parade day. In addition to throwing beads from floats (green, of course), float riders hand out...yep...cabbages. Here's a photo from today's parade.

And here's one of my favorite ways to cook it.

Take green or red cabbage, and chop coarsely. Stir fry in olive oil with garlic and chopped onion. Add balsamic vinegar just before serving. Yum!