Quickly, Before it Evaporates

Since last I blogged, I gave birth.  My kid's 15 months old now.  I spent the last 4 months of pregnancy and the first 10 months of my daughter's life with no energy to do anything.

Then, I started playing rugby.  That was better, and once I'd started to do that I found do other things as well.

Today, I woke up at 5:45.  My dawn alarm clock keeps losing time, and I need to fix it.

Instead of rolling over, I got up and made muffins.  While they were in the oven, I dragged one of my boys out to the little green space two blocks from my house, for company, and ran sprints:  Google maps suggests each is 240 feet; I measure them in lightpoles (and of those, I ran six sets of two lightpoles). It isn't much, but I sweat.  I couldn't do it four months ago.

When I got back, my other boy had taken the muffins out of the oven.  (He had crawled back into bed.  He loves his sleep.)

Muffins. They have blueberries in.

 

 

 

 

Tonight, I re-read The Phantom Tollbooth.  New books still seem too hard, like I'll risk too many emotions.  I take the little victories.

I've been ruled by fear for too long.  I can't say fear won't rule me again, but for now, there are muffins.

My Breasts: Offending Everyone Since 1999

One of the regulars at Zumba pulled me aside yesterday.

"What's your name?" she asked, which was friendly, so I told her.

"You seem nice," she said.  "So don't take this the wrong way."

It never goes well when someone says this.

"I've heard other people talking about you," she continued.  "About your breasts."

Why yes, my breasts are nice.  I like them quite a lot, actually.

"They move a lot," she said.  "And I understand because I have large breasts too."

Oh my goodness.  It is like I exercise at exercise class, and my breasts obey the laws of fluid dynamics!

"So you need to wear two bras," she finished blithely.  "Not just one.  You're really all over the place."

She stopped then, waiting for a response.

"Understood," I said curtly, because I did understand.  I understood that I was not conforming, that I was being judged for having the wrong body. I understood that the "other people" believed that their right to not be confronted with my breasts, clad in only a single sports bra and a tank top, superseded my right to exercise in only one bra and a tank top.

I don't buy it.  My breasts are part of my body, and I am not ashamed of them.  They move when I exercise because I exercise for me, not for society's approval.  I'm sorry that they're offended, and I'm sorry that they can't see that mine is another body that is a good body to have.

It's not the first time someone has complained about my breasts.  Perhaps I should buy or make a witty t-shirt about it, as it appears that I am doomed to offend people with my unacceptable breasts.


And I don't even have a child to breastfeed.

Emotional Sleeping vs. Emotional Eating

I have a couple of unhealthy coping mechanisms. For example, I'm prone to emotional eating (along with a lot of people).  Similarly, when I feel upset and don't have a lot to do, I sleep for hours.  I don't know how common this is: people don't talk about their sleep patterns the same way they talk about their diets.

According to the CDC, adults need seven to nine hours of sleep. It goes on to provide troubleshooting for falling asleep, but never challenges the assumption that the sleep should happen in a single block at night. (Woe to the poor souls doing third-shift work, apparently.) There's no discussion of what sleep patterns work better, just adherence to "normal" sleep and advice for insomnia.

Perhaps this stems from a lack of knowledge about sleep. We know that light, stimulants, and physical exertion can play roles, but the roles these things play vary wildly from person to person. There are no sleep hygiene plans, no discussion about what sleep components best support healthy sleep, and no discussions about what sleep styles work for us. We don't even really know why we sleep-- we just know that it's miserable to go without it.

We know lots of things about the inputs to the nutrition process: macronutrients, fiber, vitamins and minerals, level of processing, and so forth. We know that a weight loss program should involve burning more calories than consumed and, similarly, that a weight gain program involves consuming more calories than burned.  We know that some foods feel more "filling" than others.

Everyone has an opinion to share about food. For example, my brother will talk for hours about the benefits of his diet, and I tease him mercilessly about how various foods I find particularly delicious will, in his words, "kill him".*  In another case, my mother got into a heated argument with a woman at a church dinner about the merits of vegan diets and the acceptability of honey.  Still, with religion, sex, and politics off the table and so much social activity centered around mealtimes, food commonly enters discussions.

I've worked in two predominately-female workplaces, a preschool for developmentally-challenged three- and four-year-olds and a customer service department in a large company.  In these settings, food played an even larger role in discussion. We traded recipes and diet tips regularly. In some ways, I find it irksome that I regularly trade the conversations I'd like to have about rapid prototyping  and identity security for bland ones about buffalo chicken wing dip and pepper plants, but mostly, I like talking about food.  It provides a platform of commonality: I, too, cook and care about nutrition. Plus, as the experts can't agree on a set of recommendations, there's room for endless discussion: if at a loss for conversation, I can almost always safely discuss nutrition.

Maybe this leads us, as a society, to have a healthy dialogue about food. Whether or not we actually follow any healthy eating guidelines at all, we have a good idea of what constitutes health foods, and we usually respect other people's food choices.

Meanwhile, we don't have a very good dialogue about sleep. Even when sleeping monophasically, friends and family would interrupt my sleep rhythm-- "it's past my bedtime" rarely excuses me from a social obligation. Work and sleep schedules don't take sleep schedules into account: if you have to wake up early to get to a meeting or work late to finish a project, no one cares that it may cause sleep deprivation. It's often acceptable to bring a small snack, but it's almost never acceptable to bring a pillow and grab a quick nap.

Perhaps this further impedes discussion of how to handle emotional sleeping: sleeping that's unhealthy. If we can't discuss healthy sleep, how can we distinguish it from unhealthy sleep? In particular, if we consider sleep some sort of optional extra that only the lazy indulge in, how can we keep ourselves healthy and productive?
______
*I consider poking fun at my younger sibling my sworn duty as an older sibling.

Spinach Sponge

Most store-bought sliced bread doesn't do a lot for me.  I can't eat it alone: the texture leaves me wishing I had something to chew, the flavor bores me, and it tends to include sugars I would rather get from eating fresh, whole fruit. I still eat it, primarily as a vehicle for other food, but I wanted to improve this solution.


I started looking up homemade bread recipes with the idea that I could make a bread over the weekend and use it during the week.  I decided to add spinach as well because I'm trying to add more vegetables to my diet.


I came up with something that hits most of the nutrition goals, some of the flavor goals, and completely lacks visual appeal. I started with this recipe for low-carb bread and made some modifications.

• 1 cup flax seed meal
• 1 cup oatmeal flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 cup water
• 1/3 cup oil
• 3/4 cups egg whites
• 1 whole egg
• 1 10-ounce package of frozen spinach, thawed and drained
• Spices to taste. I used, per the suggestion, onion powder, basil, and rosemary. I also used some salt.

Mixing in the spinach.

I mixed the dry ingredients together, followed by the wet ingredients, a bit a a time. Then, I mixed in the spinach and baked at 350°F for 25 minutes in a greased 9x13 pan.  It made 12 servings.

When I brought one in to work, a co-worker wanted to know why I was eating a sponge.

You can pick up and eat the squares like a brownie, but they aren't stiff enough to use as a bread. The texture makes it clear that it contains whole grains and spinach, and it tastes overwhelmingly of rosemary (oops). Still, they're easy to transport and they contain a nice balance of healthy fats, complex carbohydrates, and protein. 

I definitely like the concept, but they could use some improvement.  I meant to put in garlic, but I forgot, and I think it would have improved the flavor. I put in salt, and I shouldn't have: they came out a little too salty.   Serves me right for not researching the flavor of flax seed meal better, I suppose. I'd also like to try replacing the water with crushed tomatoes or tomato paste to create a lasagna-inspired flavor.

For a variation that might adhere better to the original purpose, I might cut the baking powder in half and divide the batter between two 9x13 pans to try for a more cracker-like baked good.

The Purpose of Affirmations

About a month ago, I read an article about how written affirmations can help you achieve your fitness goals.  I figured, hey, it can't hurt, right? So I took five minutes and scribbled some things down, stuff like "I weigh 150 pounds" and "I have the energy to accomplish everything I want to do every day".

I taped it to the wall, so I glance at it every day. Theoretically, it works best if you recite them out loud to yourself in the mirror, but that feels too hokey to me.  I haven't gained any weight since (though the scale fluctuates too much for me to positively state that I've lost weight. The wedding road trip didn't help, either), so I know my no-harm judgement was correct.

Well, I figured out how to use them properly when I walked into a grocery store hungry after a Zumba class. Grocery shopping while hungry never works out well, and the first temptation appeared as soon as I walked through the door.

"Buy one box of chocolate chip cookies, get two free!" said a sign next to a display.  For this particular brand, two cookies are 140 calories, and there are approximately 14 servings per box. That adds up to 1,960 calories per box, which would be less of a problem if it weren't so easy to accidentally eat all the cookies once you open the box.  You can eat a cookie in about a bite and a half, so they just kind of disappear. They're soft, yummy, and the only store-bought cookie I want to eat-- and I shouldn't eat them, either.

"I weigh 150 pounds," I told the display.  "I can do a split on both sides. I have lots of energy."

The display looked at me, disbelieving: I weigh quite a bit more than 150 pounds at the moment.

"I weigh 150 pounds," I told the display again, more emphatically. Then, I walked away from the cookies and purchased egg whites, spinach, and unsweetened cocoa powder, all on my list.* I did not purchase any cookies, chips, or fish-shaped crackers.

I guess the affirmations work-- for some things-- after all.

________
*After which I went home and ate a healthy dinner, thereby preventing further hunger-inspired conversations with inanimate objects, at least for the foreseeable future.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Mug Cake

I want cake more often than I should eat cake. So, when a blog with various single-serving mug cake recipes popped up on Pinterest, I got really excited.  Brilliant! I thought.  I can make a small single-serve cake, and I won't eat "accidental" second helpings or let the leftovers go bad!


Then, I entered some of the recipes into a calorie calculator. One serving of any of a couple varieties of mug cake, it turns out, totals on the order of 800 calories. (Oof.) Worse, the bulk of the ingredients were low-nutrition or high-calorie (or both): processed flour, granulated sugar, oil, peanut butter, and so forth. I decided that there had to be a better way, and so I teamed up with my brother* to create a less-awful recipe.

I started with this recipe for Nutella mug cake and made some modifications to the ingredients, using

• 4 tablespoons raw oatmeal, blenderized until similar to flour
• 1 cup applesauce to replace most of the sugar and some of the oil
• 1 tablespoon oil
• 1 egg
• 3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
• 3 tablespoons chocolate peanut butter**
• 1/4 teaspoon baking powder

The eating is the best part.

I mixed everything up per the directions and divided the recipe between two mugs, which I had Ard spritz with cooking spray while I was measuring.  I popped them one at a time into the microwave, starting with a minute with the intention of adding time in thirty-second increments if needed.  My microwave didn't need the extra time, though, so they came out of the microwave gratifyingly quickly.

The texture came out well but I found the flavor lacking a bit: they were surprisingly bland. The peanut butter taste got lost under the chocolate taste, and it wasn't very sweet at all (kind of like dark chocolate, though, so this wasn't a huge problem).  Ard's immediate solution involved slathering his with peanut butter, as his nutrition plan doesn't involve a reduction in calories.  As my nutrition plan does involve a reduction in calories (at least until I reach a healthier weight), I think there should be a better way.

Ard and I brainstormed some solutions while we ate our cakes.

1. Use sweeter mashed banana instead of less-sweet applesauce.
2. Replace the rest of the oil with chocolate peanut butter.
3. Add a little bit of extra salt, as the chocolate peanut butter apparently contains a sixth of the sodium of the non-chocolate variety of peanut butter we have.

Does anyone have any other suggestions for improvement?

__________
*Ard had the very important job of eating the other mug cake, as I decided that instead of halving the recipe and needing to find weird measuring spoons, I'd just change the spec from "serves one" to "serves two".
**The first ingredient in Nutella (and its clones) is sugar.  The chocolate peanut butter I picked has "peanuts" as its first ingredient and omits hydrogenated oil and high fructose corn syrup.

Biphasic Sleep: Day 25

Now that I've been on a biphasic sleep schedule for a few weeks now (and have had some sleep mishaps and challenges), I have some additional thoughts about it.  The most annoying thing I found was that I could have controlled some of the dumb oversleeping things I did, particularly during my recent spree of traveling. It is entirely my own fault: I didn't want to get out of the comfortable bed, and neither did K, so we reinforced each other's bad behavior.  Since we're four hours apart again, I find it easier to get out of bed.  (More on my relationship with getting out of bed tomorrow, hopefully.)

1. Nutrition plays a larger role in my energy level than I thought.
   
   I always knew I had more energy on days that I'd taken a multivitamin, but I didn't connect that to overall nutrition.  No one should be shocked to hear that fruits and veggies are good for them, but the extent to which eating fruits and veggies made me feel good surprised me. Cutting down on processed sugars and grains has also helped me feel more awake and energetic.
   
   
2. I wish stuff wouldn't conflict with my nap.
   
   I don't have a lot going on right now, fortunately, so this doesn't impact me too heavily. However, my father rigidly prefers that dinner occur at 5:30-- shortly after he arrives home from work. He has good reason: he wants to get the clean-up done.  However, I nap from 5:00 to 6:30, which means I can't eat with my family. In some ways, because I rarely feel hungry at 5:30, I like having an excuse to eat later, but I still miss the structured time with my family.
3. 90 minutes takes up a longer-than-expected block of the day.
   
   For one thing, it's FAR too long to slip away and sleep.  I can pull over and take a twenty-minute side-of-the-road safety nap (if there's a rest stop or place to pull over), but ninety minutes is out of the question.  Over the past few weeks, during my nap, I found myself falling asleep for twenty minutes, waking at 5:30, and then struggling to fall back asleep for another twenty minutes before waking again at 6:30.
4. Afternoon sleep differs from night sleep.
   
   Perhaps this stems more from the heat and lack of air conditioning than the time of day or type of sleep, but I find that my nap requires a different configuration than my core sleep. I use a different blanket (that doesn't cover my feet) and I sleep in a different position.  Also, for my core sleep, I've been playing MP3s my brother got from his installation of Pzizz (as I can't figure out how to purchase the Android app, which supposedly exists. A Linux version would be fine too). They help delineate a cooling-down period at night, which means I fall asleep much more quickly, and Ard says they improve his sleep quality.  However, during the nap, I find that the same MP3s wake me up after twenty minutes.  (A theme emerges, perhaps.)
5. When establishing a routine, I need to stick with it.
   
   While traveling with K for the wedding we recently attended, there were a couple of instances where we couldn't nap when we wanted to because we were driving or otherwise engaged and couldn't slip away.  This upset our sleep schedule-- but in much the same way that a couple of particularly late nights upset my sleep schedule while I had a healthy sleep routine.  To cope with it, we ended up sleeping a lot when we had the time, and now we're pretty much back to normal, starting to feel sleepy at around 4:00PM and 2:00AM.  (We're still adjusting a bit, and we really should have been more careful so close to the beginning of the adjustment period.)

Luckily, the disruptions haven't been too toxic to the routine, and we've gotten back on the schedule.  Still, the Everyman schedule gets more tempting every day: the naps are shorter, they have more flexibility when you get adjusted*, and you sleep for fewer total hours with shorter waking periods.

I don't want to change things up again before we've adjusted a bit more, though, and I haven't yet figured out how to make it work with our responsibilities. (I have a five- to six-hour block that requires sustained attention and alertness as I start a part-time temporary job at a preschool tomorrow, and K doesn't want to sleep in odd places if he can possibly avoid it.)

I won't worry about it, though: for now, the biphasic sleep works for us. (Note: it also works better if you don't miss naps, as we have.)
_________
*Because there's only so far you can move a 90-minute nap without seriously disturbing your sleep or the event. If there's an event that starts near the beginning of it, you're stuck.

I Don't Like Microwaved Spinach

I've been delinquent at posting.  Scold me if you must, but please note that I've been busy (and very excited about) starting up our wedding website! K tells me that my excitement is disproportionate but cute. I've never had a particularly good sense of proportion, so he has probably made a fair assessment*. But we have a pretty domain name and I made an image thing for it that reminds me a bit of Cinderella's pumpkin coach. No one shall dissuade me from my joy over this small triumph!

So, I've been busy over there.  I have also been trying to figure out how I'm going to sneak more vegetables into my diet, because they take work to prepare and eat and because, while they make me feel temporarily full, an hour later I'm ravenous again if I don't eat anything else.


Yesterday, I tried to make egg white muffins to sneak some vegetables in to my breakfast. It mostly worked, but took too long to make (20-30 minutes baking plus prep) and the muffins didn't come out of the ramekins I used for the test batch even remotely as well as I had hoped (so it was obnoxious to clean up).  So, today, I tried a variation, and this happened:

Poor soggy spinach.

Basically, I took 1/2 cup of egg whites and poured it over roughly a cup of chopped spinach and then microwaved it for two minutes while the bread was toasting.

I've never been much of a fan of cooked spinach**, and while the baked spinach yesterday was fine in terms of taste, the microwaved spinach became unpleasantly soggy. Far from inedible, in my opinion, but also far from "something I'll make again".  As with yesterday's experiment, my opinion is still "better to just make an omelet".

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could either fix the sad, soggy spinach or prevent the caked-on crumbles clean-up chore?
_______
*For example, I heard an ice cream truck go by yesterday. We never had ice cream trucks in our neighborhood when I was small: apparently, an ice cream truck had hit a child a few years before we moved here, and the local government banned them in response.  I ran to the window to watch it go by. K, watching me through the miracle of webcam technology, remarked, "I thought you were going to run out of the room and chase it down." I promised him that, in the interest of avoiding unhealthy foods like ice cream, I only considered it for thirty seconds or so.
**Except in lasagna. Because lasagna.

Muffins: Cupcakes in Disguise

A friend messaged me at 3:30AM to warn me that the slowly-blooming bruise where I scraped my leg yesterday meant that the bruise ran deep and would hurt for a long time.  When I saw the message after I woke up at 7:30, I thanked him for the warning and excused myself so that I could hunt up some coffee.

Coffee in hand, I returned and found that my friend had shared his own breakfast plans with me: a muffin and a glass of milk.

"For me, muffins are like pasta," I wrote to him.  "I like them, but in terms of nutritional value, I don't like them enough to eat them very often."  (They're both heavy on processed carbohydrates-- not very filling, and I love the nutritionally-similar breads, biscuits, and bagels so much more. Also, desserts.)

"This is why I seldom purchase muffins," he replied.

This didn't satisfy me. "I just don't understand why, if you are going to eat something that is in all respects like cake, you do not actually eat cake."

The question became: what is the difference between a chocolate muffin with chocolate chips and a chocolate cupcake?  In an effort to demonstrate the essential similarities between the former (a breakfast dessert) and the latter (a dessert breakfast when eaten before 11:00AM), I made some cupcakes.  Because I didn't want leftovers, I made a recipe of two cupcakes, adapted from this recipe.

• Ingredients:

• 1/8 c. whole wheat flour
  1/16 c. white flour1/8 c. granulated sugar1/8 tsp. salt1/8 tsp. baking soda1/16 c. cocoa powder (and a bit)1/16 c. oil1/8 c. leftover coffee1/8 tsp. vanilla3/8 tsp. vinegar

• Mix all the ingredients up together.

No eggs in this, so you can eat the batter if you like.

Pour into custard ramekins and bake at 350° for about 20 minutes, or until you jab it and the jabbing implement comes out clean.

Two cupcakes and a bowl of frosting.

While they're in the oven, make frosting.  When they're cool, frost and eat immediately. I used a spoon, but your mileage may vary.

Finished cupcakes!

Yield: Two cupcakes.

They came out a little dry for me, actually-- I might have cooked them for too long.  Still, I enjoyed my cupcake and heard no complaints from my mother about the one I gave her. Definitely better than a muffin, in my opinion.

So, how do these cupcakes stack up against the muffins you've eaten?

David Bowie, Hair, Summer, and Bicycle Mishaps

The person who proliferated the idea that hair doesn't effectively insulate your head was full of poo sadly mistaken. I can tell because, thanks to my long hair, the nape of my neck retains as much heat during the summer as other heat-retaining areas of the body (like the armpits). 


I've been growing my hair out since K found out I had never watched Labyrinth and immediately pulled me over to the couch to change that.  "It has David Bowie in it," K explained in an attempt to entice me.


"Who's David Bowie?" I asked.  (I spent the bulk of my childhood with my nose buried in one variety of book or another, so I don't recognize a lot of commonly-known figures in movies and music.)


"Never mind.  It also has Muppets, and it's not as dark as The Dark Crystal. You'll like it."


I remained skeptical right up until a song-and-dance number broke out, complete with Muppets and disturbingly tight pants.

"That's David Bowie," K explained as the song concluded.  Amused, I set my skepticism aside and proceeded to enjoy the movie.


After it was over, I turned to K.  "I want that hair for our wedding."  


"What hair? David Bowie's?" K asked, clearly confused.  We hadn't even begun discussing the wedding, other than the basics (as in: yes, we're getting married, no, we don't know when, maybe sometime after we graduate).


"No, Sarah's hair, from the masquerade scene," I explained.


K made a face. "Don't you think it's a bit... eighties?"


"I like the sparkly bits and the way it's down but not in her face," I said.  "Maybe a less fluffy version?"


"OK," said K.


So I started growing my hair, and a few months later, we began talking in vague terms about what we wanted.  Positive progress, with a single side effect: the nape of my neck gets uncomfortably warm during unpleasantly hot weather.


Today, however, looked promising in terms of avoiding the stickiness and excessive neck-nape heat.  My alarm rang at 7:30 this morning with the sun streaming, but the breeze from the window remained cool.  I'm still adjusting to a biphasic sleep schedule, so the wake-up call failed to thrill me in spite of the gorgeous weather.  In an effort to wake up properly, I dragged myself out of bed, ate a banana, and hopped on my bicycle for the first time in a few years.

Almost immediately, my legs began to sting and the nape of my neck began to heat.  The halter tie of the dress I'd chosen tried very hard to unknot itself, and the leggings rode down.  (If you need another reason to avoid weight gain in college, please note that if you do, none of your clothes will fit, and you probably won't have the money to replace them with clothes that do.)  I made it 25 minutes before stopping, including a brief pause to prevent a wardrobe malfunction.  When I dismounted, I raked my right knee over the cargo rack on the back of the bike, leaving a slightly-red tender spot that hasn't visibly bruised (but still hurts when you poke it).

Ouch.

Still, I claim victory for the day so far: I didn't oversleep, as I did yesterday (when I blinked during the process of getting up and found that 45 minutes had mysteriously disappeared).  I got some physical activity in, and I know I can do better the next time I go out.  I have energy to do things, and in another few moments, I will have finished a blog post.  Not a bad day at all.

Biphasic Sleep: Day Two

Light post today.  I spent most of the day pretty sleepy.  K and I are trying out biphasic sleep: he wants more time to work on his video game projects, and I wanted an excuse to establish a sleep routine. If I don't have something to do, I find the prospect of sleeping in tempting, and I function most effectively with a routine.  So, I put together a graphic that adds some structure to my day.  It will be easier again to maintain this kind of schedule when I'm working part-time later this summer*.

4.5 hours of core sleep, a 90-minute nap, and six light meals.

I've always been curious about polyphasic sleeping, and I don't have a ton of formal responsibilities right now, so it seems like an ideal time to try it out. To make it easier, Ard is also trying polyphasic sleep: he recently switched from the Uberman to the Dymaxion schedules in order to make his sleep mesh appropriately with his summer job.  While many don't consider the schedule I'm trying to be "real" polyphasic sleep (I'm still getting six total hours a day, instead of the two that Ard gets), I think it has the greatest likelihood of meshing harmoniously with a job.  It also closely resembles a schedule I adopted more-or-less naturally one semester at college, where I slept from approximately four to seven twice a day.

I'm also trying to eat better as part of my weight-loss/health-gain effort.  I hear intermittently about the wonderful health benefits of eating six small meals per day, but the real reason that I hope it will work for me is that I don't function particularly well without regular food.  Lots of people can skip meals and calmly power through it, but I'm not one of them**.  I hate feeling hungry. I get grouchy and stay that way until I've had a snack.

So far, I like the six-meal strategy.  I still need to avoid missing meals, but I don't feel hungry in the periods between them (as I have before when I've attempted to reduce calories). I'm also finding it easier to eat more fruits and vegetables.  The sleep schedule has been more challenging so far, but I'm optimistic-- and if it doesn't work, I can easily revert to typical sleep.

________

*For those curious: I'll be working as a TA for the six-week summer program at a non-profit preschool for developmentally-challenged three- and four-year-olds. It's not the perfect stopgap job-- it's not in my field and it doesn't pay particularly well-- but it gives me time to apply to other jobs, helps me establish a routine, and the work is very fulfilling (though I don't believe I could do it over the long term).
**On the flip side, I power through a lack of sleep fairly well. K is the opposite way: he regularly forgets meals, but hates anything that gets between him and his sleep. When he brought up trying polyphasic sleep to me, I was (pleasantly) surprised.

Three Reasons My Weight is Seasonal

For the past several years, I've been away at university, a place I found full of stress and erratic schedules. I've talked about how I gained a bunch of weight there.  Worse, as I gained weight, the less energy I had.  Once I ran out of energy, I ended up regularly making choices between finishing an assignment or cooking a nutritious dinner, or between studying and exercising.  Since the assignments and studying were the whole reason I paid obscene sums of money to attend an institute of higher education, I almost always chose them-- to the detriment of my health. (Yes, I know better, but I could never seem to get far enough ahead to break the cycle.)



The past two summers, however, I've been away from home on internships.  These involved working nice, regular 40-hour weeks far away from most of the social pressures of going out with friends for eating and drinking.  I lost weight each time.

So, here's my speculation about why I think it has been easier to lose weight in the summer.

1. The sun comes out during the summer, so it's a pleasure to go outside and do active things.  When it's cold and snowy outside, staying indoors wrapped in a warm, cozy blanket with a book and a mug of cocoa is a much stronger temptations.
   
2. Summers bring a variety of fresh local produce. There are four farmer's markets every week near my current area.  For example, check out these gorgeous local strawberries. They will go in my mouth the next chance I get. 
   



Gnrf gnrf nom nom nom.

Now, compare them with the anemic green-pink winter strawberries that you see in grocery stores during the winter. Not appetizing, right?  So, I find it far easier to eat well in the summer (when all the produce looks yummy) than in the winter (when all the produce looks like it's something that I should probably eat because it's healthy, but isn't something I actually want to eat at all).


3. During my summers, I've been able to establish a routine. I love routines: when I have a routine, I get more done and feel considerably less stressed. I attribute this to removing some of the constant decision-making from my life.  Contrast this with university life, which threw projects, assignments, and exams at any attempt I made at establishing a routine.  I got through it, but one of my methods for getting through it was "let's order a pizza as a reward for me getting this horrible assignment done"*, which didn't help the health issue.

Now that I'm out of school, I hope that I can find a job, establish a routine, and have a better chance at obtaining and then maintaining a healthy weight and activity level.  So, I'm curious: do you find it easier to lose weight (or maintain a healthy weight) in the summer?  Why or why not?

In the meantime, it's a gorgeous day here.  I'm going to take a walk, and then I think I'm going to eat some strawberries.

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* Food rewards impede maintenance of a healthy weight, but that's another piece of college: what other rewards can a college student afford in terms of time and money?  Certainly, it would have been nice to make an fun outing or a new piece of clothing a reward, but even if I had had the money for those kinds of rewards, I didn't have the time, and often, they weren't even available in my small college town.  Pizza, on the other hand, had the unique characteristic of feeling like a reward while both feeding me and allowing me to move on to the next task as I ate.

Food, Health, Weight, and the Freedom to Make Your Own Choices

I went shopping the other day, and it felt like freedom.  It is really, really nice to have the food I like to eat available in the house.

And this is what freedom looks like.

"I found a neat recipe on Pinterest," I told my mom last night.  "But it takes a whole cup of sugar."  

"That is a lot of sugar," said my dad.  "You should use high fructose corn syrup instead."

My mother and I both want to lose weight.  I want to lose weight because I want to feel better, have more energy, and I know it will get harder when I get older.  I gained thirty pounds over the school from stress, eating too much, and not having the time to cook right or exercise.  They say it's important to be a healthy weight before you get pregnant, too, and I want that in my future. I think my mom wants to be healthier too.  We don't talk much about it.


"We should join Weight Watchers together!" says my mom regularly.  She is trying to be supportive.  It feels, sometimes, like she wants to let me know that my weight isn't healthy.  I already know my weight isn't healthy*.  I maintain that university is not a healthy environment: you don't have time to cook healthy food (or exercise), and you don't have money to buy healthy food (or, worse, you're locked into a meal plan.).  It's full of stress, and you don't have financial resources to offset the stress, because you've already paid the university all your financial resources (and then some).


My weight bothers me in part because worrying about weight is such a gendered phenomenon.  You don't hear vitriol spewed toward men with beer bellies, but if a woman is overweight, everyone seems to feel entitled to comment. I don't want people to comment: it isn't my job to look pretty for them, and it isn't their job to care about my appearance or my health**.

I hear it around the holidays, too, from other parts of my family.  "Oh, you look so good-- did you lose weight?" (Sometimes I get this even if I have gained weight.)  Or: "You know, you gained some weight-- that isn't very healthy."  I know when I gain weight, thank you very much, you didn't need to point it out.

And so I do not want to join Weight Watchers. I don't want to hold myself up to an outside standard, even a kindly one.  I know it works for a lot of people, but I have a nifty app on my phone that tracks my calories and my current weight, and that works for me***.  If you want to bond with me on a weight-loss quest, we can exercise together or trade recipes.

I want to feel good, and I don't want to worry about people commenting on how I look.  I want my clothes to fit, and I want to be able to shop for clothes that are not labeled as "plus" sizes.  (I'm medium-tall and I have hips-- anything smaller than a ten is never going to happen for me.)  I want to be healthy, and I want "healthy" to happen on my own terms.


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*My parents are both physical therapists, so they care a lot about being healthy.
**Unless you are my physician.  Then, you may comment on my weight if you would like.
***I know it works for me, because I was able to lose significant chunks of weight when I was away from school on internships.  They key element to the weight loss, in my opinion, was having the time and money to establish a routine.