pour some...

I hope you took some time out of your busy day of turkey-brining or suitcase-packing or office-clock-watching (or whatever you usually do the day before Thanksgiving) to actually watch a little of that video. Ah, the 80s. The mullets, the jeans, the men in "muscle" shirts totally devoid of muscles. It was a special time. Ahem.

But we're not here to discuss my misspent youth. We're here to discuss SUGAR.  Which is totally on topic at my house since I just made (and ate) poppin' fresh cinnamon buns at 5 am, plus put some non-sugar free pumpkin syrup in my coffee. It's almost a holiday. Shut up.  Also?  This post is illuminating to me as it has brought to my attention that I cannot spell cinnamon without help. I seriously tried three different wrong combinations of vowels before I gave up and let spellcheck do it.

So here is my question for you.  (No, it's NOT "why can I not spell simple words?" Pretty sure that's 'cause my mom smoked when she was pregnant. Or something. God.)  My question is, do YOU care how many grams of sugar a day you ingest?

Some of my friends and co-workers will scrutinize a nutrition label and accept or reject a food based on how many grams of sugar are in it.  It's totally foreign to me.  I read nutrition labels to see how much protein and/or how many calories are in something. I used to check out how many carbs, or carbs minus fiber, were in something, back when I used to care about that. But I have never counted my sugar grams. (Something I've never been crazy about??? Huh. Well, there had to be one thing.)  I don't even know what's good, bad, or mediocre when it comes to grams of sugar. How many grams of sugar are you supposed to eat if you're on the healthy eating train? Pretty sure the answer is NOT zero, because fruit.  But I see hyperventilating on the interwebs because some blogger or other dared call a recipe "healthy" when it contains xyz grams of sugar, so I know there are people who take this shit uber seriously.  I'm not sure why, but then again, I tend to reject out of hand any scientific research that suggests I should give up cookies.

Those are really good, btw.

Another thing that bewilders me is how there are people who will avoid sugar-sugar, but will substitute for it in recipes with maple syrup or agave or molasses in the name of "health."  I mean, you know I will substitute the evil splenda for sugar in recipes which I will then call "healthy" but what I really mean is low calorie and full of protein. Since I'm pretty aware that the probable cancer I'll get from the splenda twenty years from now negates any health claims.  But maple syrup/agave/molasses aren't even low calorie and I'm pretty sure they spike your blood sugar as much as sugar-sugar. So where's the healthifying?  Disclosure in the name of total transparency: I do have agave in my kitchen for making things for a couple friends who don't use artificial sweeteners but yet would feel psychologically better eating something "healthier" than sugar. I don't wanna rain on their parade even if I don't quite get the floats. (Humorous Thanksgiving analogy there? YOU be the judge.)


And to show you how hopped up on sugar I was this morning, here are some pictures of me from the mid 80s that I decided to share. Just to, y'know, illustrate the bad hair and clothes and makeup, in case you didn't watch that video I picked out just for you.  (Also probably because my mom smoked when she was pregnant) I couldn't figure out how to make my scanner work correctly. So after five tries, I gave up and took pictures of the pictures with my phone and emailed them to myself. Such a technical genius.

1.) That's my mom's navy blue pleather sofa and maroon carpet, not mine.  My taste may have been tragic, but not THAT tragic.

2.) I think these photos prove without any doubt that NO ONE in my family could ever shoot a decent picture.  Unless you consider the off-centeredness and the cutting off of half a person's head to be valid artistic choices. In which case...did you own a navy pleather sofa too?

xoxo

Happy Thanksgiving!

more citations from the food police

Saw some shade being cast towards a (female, of course) health and fitness blogger today for "eating 865 calories...before noon" and running so she can "eat 2500 calories of shit everyday" and "eat(ing) more than most men in a single day."  This was after she made her food diary public.  She was also roundly criticized for the amount of processed food, restaurant food, cheese, and other sins against clean eating she consumes. Meh. The criticism of her food choices annoyed me, but the OMG SHE EATS MORE THAN A DUDE just about gave me rage stroke.  Now I realize all this criticism is partially predicated on the fact that the woman is a big-time blogger who a bunch of people apparently find insufferable and I also realize that if you make your food diaries public you probably can expect this crap, but man. I am so frigging sick of women implying there's something wrong with other women if they eat anything other than tiny portions of salad and yogurt and egg whites.  I am so sick of the cultural bias that there's something wrong with a woman having a hearty appetite.

And for what it's worth, I don't think a 165-ish pound woman who's training for a half-marathon is overeating on 2500 calories a day. At all.

In the interest of fairness and solidarity with someone I don't know and have no real personal opinion on,  I thought I'd tell you all what I have had to eat today since I got up at 1pm.  (Everything I ate on 9/26 before I went to bed at 7:30am counts as yesterday's food. It's the only way tracking makes sense working nights.)

I had a mug of coffee with half-and-half and Splenda while getting dressed.  Then on my way to my acupuncture appointment I had a cheddar cheese bagel twist from Dunkin Donuts.  Then after my appointment while I was doing errands, I had a veggie melt sandwich from Cheeseboy. With about 2/3rds of a bottle of Coke Zero.  Before I hopped on the train to go home, I got one of those giant Reeses peanut butter cup cookies from Starbucks because I was a little peckish.  I'm gonna eat my actual dinner soon (rage stroke makes me hungry), but I think that's about 1500 calories right there.

Despite my massive indulgence*** in cheese, restaurant food, and artificial sweeteners and my man-like appetite, I am neither obese nor unhealthy.  (My cholesterol count is documented in this very blog. LOOK IT UP.)  So, in conclusion, stfu, anonymous chicks on the interwebs, and stop policing other people's food intake.

xoxo

***so, okay, no, I don't eat those Starbucks cookies on the regular, and I'm not usually buying lunch at Cheeseboy, but cheddar cheese bagel twists ARE a diet staple. Sadly, they only sell them at Dunkin Donuts locations that have ovens which is definitely not all of them.

there's a thesis in here somewhere

I swear to god.  I have a shitload of seemingly only tangentially related thoughts and anecdotes which I can just feel could and should come together to make a sweepingly brilliant point if only...  I dunno. It's tantalizingly there in my brain, like a sneeze that just won't happen.***  Nevertheless, since I can't leave the house till my laundry is ready to come out of the dryer due to my extremely rational fear that said dryer might burst into flames at any minute, I will now spew those thoughts and anecdotes in your direction, then tie them up in the sloppiest metaphorical bow you ever saw. You're welcome!

This train of thoughts began as my dear wish that I could write an entire blog post about how much I hate and despise Fitness magazine. I refrained from writing that post because three paragraphs of my ranting and seething, while undoubtedly therapeutic for me, would probably just make you all yell at your computer screens, Well, just don't read it, Andrea, DUH. In my defense, I got a year subscription for my Kindle almost free and one needs something to stare at on the train or bus when one has run out of lives in Candy Crush and one is too brain dead from work to read, like, an actual book. (Particularly since the primacy of text messaging has led to the demise of hilarious overheard cell phone conversations on public transportation, which is what *used* to keep me amused during my commute circa 2008.) Anyway. I have this Kindle subscription to Fitness. It's probably actively bad for my health, considering every article I read therein tends to elevate my blood pressure. The cutsey-poo language is like a million (French-manicured) nails on a million blackboards.  In the eyes of the editors, Fitness readers don't have workouts or gym visits. They have "sweat sessions."  Gag.me.  I'm not sure why this annoys me quite as much as it does, but it ties in somewhat to the idea that sweating more means you've accomplished more and, especially, that the main purpose of exercise is to burn or (in the words of Fitness!) "torch" calories. I know I've probably frothed at the mouth about this before on here, but the media and the fitness industry pushes this idea, especially to women, that we should be exercising to burn calories! So we won't be fatty fat fat! So we'll have "bikini bodies"!

Well. Not only is exercise probably the least efficient way to lose weight (I'd link to the studies for y'all, but I'm a lazy lazy blogger), this ignores all the other wonderful benefits exercise has, benefits far more important than (kill.me.) torching calories.  It's good for your heart. It's good for your bones.  Being fit increases your quality of life, especially as you get to be a sad, decrepit middle aged person like myself.  And maybe better than all that, exercise is fun. Or should be. There is no healthy toddler alive for whom running around in circles, attempting to climb on or jump off shit they shouldn't, dancing around crazily, or dragging things too big for them to pick up isn't The Funnest Day Evah. Exercise, done right, is what allows us all to get in touch with our Inner Toddlers.**** (Naps, too. Exercise and naps. Also, probably, boobs, our own or others'. I'm convinced.)

Even more important than good cardiac health, bones that don't snap like dry twigs, or FUN, there's the fact that exercise makes us feel better mentally. Segue into next anecdote...

I have a close (male) friend who's been overweight the entire 11 years I've known him, while being at varying levels of fitness during that time. There were a couple summers he was biking a lot and got into really good shape, though he only lost maybe ten pounds. (See above!) Then he had a bike accident which, while fairly minor, brought up some latent issues relating to an old friend who had actually died biking in traffic, and he didn't bike for a couple years in a sorta phobic reaction. Because biking was the only exercise he found fun, other than walking which he does partly for transportation (lives in the city and it's actually less of a pain in the ass for him to walk to work than drive) and partly for fun when the weather's nice, he gained the ten pounds back and lost a lot of his cardio fitness. Meanwhile, his on again-off again girlfriend, who knew he was overweight when she started dating him, was bitching at him that he needed to lose weight and get in better shape. He grudgingly went to the gym for awhile, even had a trainer, but because he wasn't doing it for fun or really even willingly, he didn't stay on the wagon. Meanwhile his girlfriend poo-pooed anything he did anyways as not enough, since to her the only thing that really counts as exercise is running. (Wut?)  Cut to this winter when girlfriend broke up with him suddenly (after only weeks before professing her love and how much she wanted to marry him, but that's a whole nother soap opera), partly because he hadn't lost the weight. (Again, wut?)  My friend started going to the gym again and doing indoor biking. Not because anyone was nagging at him, not because of any feeling that it was something he *should* do, but because he wanted honestly to get back into the shape he was in those summers he was biking so much. He was also pretty bereft about the sudden break up, depressed, not sleeping. To his absolute shock, he found himself enjoying going to the gym, because when he did, he felt BETTER. Less anxious, less depressed, just in a better mood. (He's also been going to this nutritionist who's telling him doing intervals are going to burn a shit ton of calories, but maybe she's read too many issues of Fitness. Whatever.)

Now, if you'll excuse me, my laundry is almost done and I need to get ready for my sweat session. See you later.

xoxo

***the first analogy that came to mind was that it's like when you're just on the brink of an orgasm. Be thankful I didn't use it. Also? I know that sneezes don't happen in your brain. Just to be clear.

****My powerlifting friend Auntie Hammie once told this story about how when she was a little kid her dad would take her for walks in the woods by their house and she'd do the usual little-kids-in-the-woods things like find frogs and dig in the mud with sticks, but she'd also usually find the biggest rock that she could lift overhead and bet her dad she could carry it all the way home like that. And usually she could.  Not only was this sweet and amusing in how it foreshadowed her adult interests, it also made me heart her dad, whom I've never met. That's good parenting right there.

smuggy mcsmuggerson, party of...

Now that we've discussed what a bad, horrible person I am, let's segue into how awful other people are. Because there's nothing better for one's self image than realizing that no matter how much of an a-hole you are, those jerks you have to deal with on a daily basis are much worse, amirite?

I've made mention before that I hang around on an online forum full of chicks who lift. I need an outlet for posting about my PRs or lack thereof, a place to post douchey flexing pictures without shame, and the camaraderie of other people for whom DLB or Klokov are actual celebs, y'know?  It keeps me from boring my real life friends (or my patient, saintly blog readers) TOO much. And for the most part, it's been a wellspring of support, lulz, and yeah, actual friendships. But as with any community of any kind anywhere, there are those people. The ones who set your teeth on edge and make you want to choke them with one of their own dirty sweat socks. (What? You don't get those impulses? Really?) My least favorite are the regular (and somehow well-respected?) posters who are bitchy, humorless, and smug, and who have canned, snotty one-size-fits-all responses to all the newbie posts. There's this one woman who regular spouts off that if you don't weigh every morsel of food that goes into your mouth, including prepackaged foods, on a digital kitchen scale, in grams, "you have *no* idea how much you're eating." Oh, bitch, please. As an experiment, I just went into my kitchen and weighed four slices of Stop & Shop whole wheat bread (which the nutrition label helpfully told me weigh 28g each) and found them to weigh 26, 28, 30, and 30g respectively. Then I made myself an almond butter sandwich because I was hungry and that bread smelled good. But, um, never mind that.  The point is, those slices of bread deviating a couple of grams of weight in either direction is hardly likely to be the tipping point in anyone's dieting success or failure and to smugly suggest otherwise is crazypants.  But time and again I see this advice delivered in a superior tone. Those extra twenty calories you didn't account for this week because you refused to weigh your prepackaged bread is obviously why you're fatty fat fat, you stupid cow.

Okay, maybe I'm just cranky about this because one of the things I'm procrastinating on doing today is a crapload of bulk cooking and baking for future work lunches and the part of that which is most odious is figuring out the calories and macros for the entire recipe and then how much is in each serving I portion out into my (fake) tupperware.

No, seriously, even without the 50 key calculator, it's a pain in my butt.

No, seriously, I'm not even bad at math, but it's just tedious.  If I could just cook up a bunch of food without worrying about how many calories and grams of protein were in each serving and whether my servings were more or less equal and blah blah, it would make the whole production less frustrating. And I'd be halfway done with it right now instead of not done at all and giggling over math memes on the internet.

Obviously it's all that fault of that smug bitch I can't stand, not the failure of my own self discipline, that I'm posting cat stripper pictures while my ground turkey sits neglected in the fridge. Obviously.

xoxo

twenty from the back...

Wow. Two blog titles involving ellipses out of the last three.  That's some damn lazy writing right there.

Blog readers, this is one of those posts I owe you from like six weeks ago that I'm just getting around to now.  Any day now we'll be all caught up. Maybe. I'm just saying, if I wrote and published this six weeks ago when it first started germinating in my brain, the too many ellipses in too few days problem would have been null, okay?

So.  Six or seven weeks ago, right before the birthday on which I turned 51, I was at my friend M2's house, and talk turned to aging blah blah. M2 is approximately 18 years older than I am but she is not an Old Person.  Not saying that anyone would look at M2 and say "OMG! I thought she was 40!"  I mean M2 is thin and perky, but she's also wrinkled and gray-haired.  What makes her not an Old Person is her mind and her attitude. To illustrate, the reason that we know each other is that we went to massage school together. Since we started that endeavor in 2005, if you do the math you'll see that she started massage school after the age of sixty. Anyone who goes back to school at the age of 60 to learn a whole new line of work is not someone who is, or ever will be, an Old Person.  M2 has friends of many different ages. M2 has varied interests and is in tune with the cultural zeitgeist.  M2's grandchildren are happy to hang out with her and she didn't even flip out when her eldest granddaughter went to live in India.  (I'd kinda flip out if a child or grandchild of mine went to live in India. That episode of Seinfeld is burnt into my brain, yo.)

I told M2 she is in fact one of my aging role models.  If she's almost twenty years older than I am and she's not an Old Person, then I have hope for myself. Because I don't want to be an Old Person.  I don't want to be stodgy, stuck in my ways, conservative, and disapproving. (Failing on that last one already. You should have heard the rant I went on after I was stuck on the commuter rail with a bunch of drunken 20-somethings coming back from the Kanye West show. OMG, all those girls in skirts that barely cover their asses and 5 inch heels they can't walk in.  No, honey, you do NOT look sexeh and klassy, you look like a streetwalker. Just stop.  See?  That's an Old Person rant right there.)

M2 was flattered and tickled that I consider her a role model.  And somewhere in that conversation she said something about how you just didn't want to be one of those women who look good from the back but cause you to cringe in surprise and semi-horror when they turn around. "OMG! OMG!" I said. "I have a name for that phenomenon: twenty from the back, sixty from the front!"  You see it not-totally-infrequently in the oh-so-very-klassy environs where I live.  A skinny woman in very tight jeans from the juniors department, usually sporting long bleached blond hair and accessorized with a Dunkin Donuts coffee cup and a cigarette, who looks like she just might be a hottie until she turns around and...oh. She's 30 years older than you thought she was and those thirty years have not been particularly kind.

I worry about reaching that corner. Well, without the shopping at Forever 21, the cigs, and the blond hair. I'm standing at the precipice and looking down.  I wear jeans and hoodies. My hair is below my shoulders and three weeks outta any given month, you can't see my grays.  And because I work out a lot, my body doesn't look like what most people assume a 50 year old woman's body is going to look like.  But if some 25 year old guy is checking out my butt in the Dunkin Donuts line, unless he's got a serious GILF fetish boy's gonna be pretty damn disappointed when I turn around.  I hate the thought of that happening. I mean, not that I'm interested in picking up children.  See: drunken-Kanye-fans rant.  I just hate the thought that someone would think I'm trying to look 20 and failing horribly.  I keep feeling like I need to telegraph my middle-agedness (haha) more obviously.  The last time I talked about that in here (the George Thorogood post) someone who has a stake in it told me vehemently that NO, I should not cut my hair, that it's pretty. And I'm kinda not ready to go gray until it's all gray.

So I should probably change how I dress.  Sadly, M2 cannot be my role model in this.  She dresses in a very casual, outdoorsy style, all fleeces and cargo pants or jeans with, like, Keens. Picture a perky 60-something year old in a Patagonia catalog. Totally appropriate, right? Not too stodgy, not matronly, but not too young.  But not me. At least, not me all the time, or me head-to-toe.  Sometimes I can and will do what I think of as "massage therapist drag" but sometimes I have the need to tuck my jeans into boots and wear some kind of Anthropologie boho nutjob top.  Sometimes I leave the house in yoga pants and UGGs. Sometimes I wear tight little cardigans with my jeans.  And sometimes I wear a fake leopard fuzzy coat that makes me look like someone's crazy Aunt Matilda.  M2 may have varied interests, but I have varied sartorial tastes and they're not all sane or probably, strictly speaking, appropriate.  It's times like these that I need a teenaged daughter to tell me when I really look like a douchebag.

Though I have to say, the other day a young woman in the CVS parking lot opened her car door to tell me how cute my UGG cardy boots are, so maybe a teenaged daughter would just encourage my worst instincts. I dunno.

Being the dear friend that she is, after that conversation M2 sent me a birthday card saying that I'm still twenty from the back, twenty from the front.  Your friends will lie to you, y'know?

Readers: tell me. What should a woman in her 50s be wearing if she can't carry off Full Patagonia Catalog

xoxo

...and your food looks like chit...

Feliz Navidad, kids! Hope whatever holidays you do or do not celebrate, the end of December is treating you well.

Now that the seasonal pleasantries are out of the way, let me ask all y'all a question.  Did you know there are entire forums on the internet devoted to mocking, snarking on, and generally critiquing other people's blogs?  I was sorta, kinda vaguely aware of this in the way I'm aware there are Christian dating sites or places on the interwebs where you can* go to hire a hitman.  I'd heard of it but never really felt compelled to visit, y'know?  

But fairly recently, I rectified that lapse in internet completism. Well, as far as the blog-snarking boards, not the Christian personals.  (And as far as the hitman-hiring goes, I'm staying mum. That doesn't mean some people shouldn't watch their backs. Ahem.)  Do you know what is prime capital for internet blog-snarking? "Healthy Living"/fitness blogs.  Like this one, I guess, though I have never ever claimed to have good health habits or to be some kind of model of clean living.  Having to regularly use the Fourth Macro (alcohol, duh) when logging one's food kinda craps all over that possible claim, amirite?  But if you were going to slot MMINAE into a category, that's where you'd probably stick it, the category of mildly-amusing-sarcasm-and-mouth-frothing-rants-with-sucky-underwear-pics-of-old-women being a little too overly specific.

I won't even tell you what the google image search was that returned that^^^ but I had to use it even though it's completely irrelevant to anything in this blog post.  Cat in a babushka, c'mon now.  

Where was I? Oh, yeah.  Healthy Living blogs=endless source of mockery fodder.  And one of the greatest generators of lulz is what healthy living bloggers eat and, oh yeah, post recipes for and pictures of.  Any of y'all who've been around the block a few times will recognize the clean eating staples. Kale, oats, quinoa, egg whites, chicken breast.  Cauliflower "pasta".  Protein powder and Quest bars.  (Shut up.)  Bloggers who eat these things are routinely accused of having eating disorders (and to be fair if that's *all* you eat, yeah, you may have, at best, orthorexia) and their pictures of the above are often responded to with a cute little vomiting emoticon and comments that their food looks like shit.

Oh, so many feels.  You guys know that along with the wine and the fudge-covered Ritz crackers, I have been known to eat--frequently--concoctions fondly referred to as proats and sludge, even though I rarely subject you to photos of the same.  Yes, mixing protein powder into other foods or using it to bake with may sound gross. It may well be gross. I don't do it for the taste, that's for sure.  But what the people mocking it may not understand is that if you lift weights semi-seriously to seriously, you need more protein than the average person (.8-1g/lb of bodyweight or, for me personally at least 92g protein a day) and unless you're willing to eat way more chicken breast and egg whites than I am plus forego the wine and beer calories, it's hard to meet that macro and stay at maintenance or below calories without resorting to adding protein to other non-protein foods.  When I'm bulking, yeah, I can eat waffles for breakfast knowing I have plenty of calories left to fit all my protein in later in the day.  When I'm dieting, not so much.  I gotta eat those proats for breakfast instead. If I'm gonna "waste" 300 calories by 9am, they've gotta have the 25-30g of protein in 'em. Is that disordered?  I dunno.  I kinda think it's eating for your sport, much in the same way endurance athletes need to eat lots and lots of carbs.  But no one's gonna mock them for eating waffles for breakfast on a day they run because...waffles!  Believe me, I wish simple carbs were all I needed to eat to build muscle but sadly that's not how the human body works.

Now, saying that proats look vomit-worthy? Well, um, yeah. Is there any way to photograph any kind of oatmeal and make it look delish? I mean, I personally think oatmeal *is* delish, but it's gruel. It looks like gruel no matter what you do to it.  Just because it doesn't look pretty doesn't mean it's not awesome. It's got a great personality, all y'all.  I mean, yes, I guess I understand mocking the posting of pictures of gruel and/or mocking fawning blog commenters who say ZOMG, that looks mouthwatering! to pictures of said gruel.  But just because food isn't gorgeous-looking doesn't mean it doesn't taste good or isn't nutritionally worthwhile.  

Does this all sound crazily defensive?  I'm not saying that there are not a lot of people in the fitness blogosphere who are disordered as hell.  I'm not saying there isn't a crapload of mock-worthy behavior out there, my own included. (The fact that I go months weighing and logging just about every morsel of food that goes in my mouth? Totally mock-worthy and borderline disordered.  The only thing that makes it not completely disordered in my opinion is that, sweet baby Jesus, I can and do take a break from it periodically and I'm rolling my eyes at myself every time I put something on that goddamn food scale.)  I'm just saying that there are good reasons some people eat shiz that may look and sound to you like it's OMG groce. WILL NO ONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN MY MUSCLES????????  

You think that shiz^^^ grows itself? God.

xoxo

*allegedly, allegedly

donut? blunt object or not?

Oh, hi. Still alive.  Have had things to say but no time to say them, and then when I do have time, I've forgotten what I was all excited and/or irritated about. Today, however, my irritation is fresh in mind and thanks to the miracle of free wifi on the MBTA commuter rail, you get to hear about it.  Say "thank you, MBTA!"  Note: if you live in Boston, that will probably be the first, last, and only time you utter that sentence. Ahem.

I'm kind of stumped on a title here. I'd like to go with Oh, Fuck You, but y'know, I hate to show up with blatant profanity when nice people have me in their blog rolls. So we'll see what shows up up top by the time I press "publish."

What's got you pissed off THIS time, Andrea? you ask. Well, kids, here's the thing.  In the last couple days I've read more than one person saying, either of their own volition, or in repeating what their coach or trainer has told them, or what some well known fitness model/figure competitor has said in an interview that "a bulk is no excuse to get fat or eat whatever crap you want."  My gut reaction to that? See profanity above. But, no. To put a finer point on it, my reaction is no one needs an excuse to get fat.  Getting fat is not a crime, a faux pas, a lapse in etiquette or judgment, a moral failing, whatever. It doesn't need to be excused. One doesn't need forgiveness or permission.  Having more adipose on one's body than these fitness models, trainers, or gym rats think is acceptable is not your problem.  You wanna gain 25lbs on your bulk, that's your business, kids. And whether you choose to take off some of that adipose with a diet afterwards or not, and how aggressively you do or do not do that, well, that's your business too, kids.

We won't even go into what I think about people deciding what you have their permission to eat or not?  Hint: if you're not my mother and I'm not under the age of 12, shut the fuck up about it.  Or I'll throw a donut at you.   A stale one, so it hurts.

Those don't look stale, they look effin' awesome.  Just saying.

xoxo

let's talk about old people!

Oh, age. One of my favorite topics to rant about discuss.  I saw a birthday card yesterday (did not buy, because all the birthday cards I buy have either wiseass jokes or cute animals [or both] on them) that posited the question "How old would you be if you didn't know how old you are?"  Oooo, deep.  See why I didn't purchase it?  Where's the sarcasm value in that?  N E Way, the answer in my case would be, like, 33.  I sorta kinda refuse to believe that I am any older than my mid-30s, all evidence to the contrary.  It's a mild shock every time I look in the mirror and see a tired old lady looking back at me or put my old-lady hands on a younger person's skin and observe the difference.

Mired in self-deception as I am, I am also brought up short when same-age friends actually think of themselves as old. A very good friend recently had to buy a new washer and dryer. The decision was fraught with drama for her because a.) money is tight and b.) she's not good with big purchases anyway. So she was asking me all kinds of questions about whether I was happy with the washer and dryer I bought back in, oh, 2006.  She was particularly interested in whether I liked my front loading washer.  She was a little leery of them...because, maybe, it would be hard to bend over to load and unload as she got older. Wut?  Luckily, she's a very good friend so I didn't have to pull any punches.  Dude, WTF? I asked.  You're buying this washer/dryer in 2013, so that sucker is not gonna last 30 years, and if you're worrying about being able to bend over to unload it ten years from now when you're 61, maybe your efforts would be better expended making sure you stay in shape enough to bend over to unload a washing machine rather than buying appliances that will be easier to use when you're decrepit.  I felt the same way I feel when I see people in their 50s or 60s in online home improvement forums (shut up, it's a vice) who refuse to buy houses or condos with two floors because they don't want to have to go up and down stairs as they get older.  Fuck that.  If I move out of this house, which has three floors including the unfinished basement, I swear I will buy a condo that has more than one story, just so I make sure I'm going up and down flights of stairs every single day of my life till I'm 95 or dead.  Use it or lose it! What do people not understand about that?

You'll be happy to know my friend saw my POV. She admitted that maybe she was overly influenced by all her elderly neighbors in her condo complex and that she probably ought to talk to younger people more often, hahaha.

^^^ That's the face I see when I look in the mirror these days, but damn, I can unload my washing machine and run up the freaking stairs.

Meanwhile in another online forum, someone made a tangential remark that BMI was actually well-correlated with health in younger women but not older women.  Tell me more! I said. But the commenter did not come back. Another poster took it upon herself to look it up for us, and apparently, in women over 60, BMIs over 25 are actually recommended.  Further research seemed to indicate that fatter old women are less likely to break a hip.  BRB, I said, on ten year bulk...  But it led to an interesting discussion.  Okay, maybe you're less likely to break a hip if you're overweight, but what about the health consequences of abdominal fat, which post-menopausal women are more likely to have?  And can it possibly be good to suddenly put on a bunch of weight in your late 50s/early 60s just to get over that BMI 25 mark, if you've been sitting at 20 or 22 before that?  And how does having more muscle mass and a superior body composition to the average over-60 sedentary person effect any of this?  That last question seems crucial to me.  What is the population of the women in these studies?  I'm betting they draw more from the pool who are afraid to bend over to get their pants out of the laundry than the minority who are still running up the stairs.

In summary, blah blah blah.  Wear your sunscreen and use eye cream every day, kids, or you'll look like me and lolcat.  And remember to keep the door of your front loader open so it doesn't get stinky in there.

xoxo

randomosity

As longtime readers and friends know, sometimes your blog hostess doesn't have (and cannot successfully fake) enough coherent thoughts about one topic to fill up an entire post, so she is forced to throw together a bunch of unrelated crap and pretend it kinda goes together.

Admit it. Deep in your heart, you look forward to this.

By the way? Before we move on from that Game of Thrones meme, how awesome/disgusting/awesome are these?  If I had any baking talent whatsoever, I'd make some.

Courtesy of Not Your Momma's Cookie

Where was I? Oh yeah.

First order of business, only very very loosely related to this blog's topic: the royal OB/GYNs.  Read a little blurb this morning that the two gentlemen who delivered the heir to the throne of Great Britain yesterday consisted of a.) the Queen's gynecologist and b.) the doc who did Camilla's hysterectomy.  How weird would it be to be the Queen's gynecologist?  Does she have to change into a drafty paper gown like the rest of us? Do you think she is still holding onto her little purse when she's in the stirrups?  (Did I just make you picture the Queen in stirrups? Did it then make you imagine your own little old grandmother in stirrups? I've got some brain bleach I can sell you...***)  Secondly, I dunno, but the knowledge that Camilla had her lady parts yanked out makes me feel a weird sense of solidarity with her I never thought I'd have.

Secondly, this post was linked to on Already Pretty yesterday.  I hadn't particularly heard of the Fuck Flattering movement/project/whatever before, but I will say that being 5'2, I have always had a fairly jaundiced attitude towards fashion articles suggesting I wear x to look taller and avoid y so as not to appear stumpy.  Who says I want to look taller?  I have never had any problem with being, like a candy bar, "fun size."  (Well, okay, I do bitch about not being able to reach the top cabinet shelves and, before the T was uniformly air conditioned, having my nose at other people's pit level during summer rush hours was fairly unpleasant, but those are practical, not aesthetic, concerns.)  Furthermore, ain't none of those styling tricks fooling anyone anyways.  Put me in 4 inch heels and I don't look 5'6, I look like a short woman in big shoes. Sometimes I wanna look like a short woman in big shoes, but that doesn't mean I think I look tall.  So I'm pretty simpatico with the "fuck flattery" thing. Wear what you like because dressing to camouflage what your body actually looks like is fruitless and silly.

However. That linked post made me sad.  Those of you who are regular readers will know this, but let me restate it to be plain: unlike a lot of "fitness" people, I do not demonize overweight people.  I don't think being fat is a sin.  I don't think being fat equates, necessarily, to being unhealthy.  I think there are some extremely attractive fat people, just as there are some extremely attractive muscular people, and extremely attractive skinny people, and extremely attractive average-sized people.  I push back hard against the idea that there's such a thing as a bikini body, that anyone should have to look a certain way in order to be entitled to wear a bathing suit at the pool, a shmexy dress at the club, or a pair of tight yoga pants in the gym. Fuck all that. Nevertheless that post made me sad, because it was plain as day to me that that young woman, despite her bravado, really does not feel positive about her body and appearance.  For god's sake, she calls herself ugly.  Now maybe she's reacting to other people having called her ugly at some point in her life. Maybe she's taking back the word.  I dunno. I do know that the whole tone of that blog post reeks of deep insecurity. The subtext is not that she's wearing a crop top because, shit, she thinks crop tops are so cute and fun and she thinks she looks adorable in it.  She's wearing it to say "I know you think I'm ugly, so I'ma wear what's gonna accentuate that *to you*, to look even uglier in your eyes, just to prove I don't give a fuck." Which proves she does give a fuck.  I can't see it as truly holding up a positive body image.  And I say that with great empathy as someone who's struggled with her own body image at many points in her life.

Finally, and we won't even pretend this is on topic (except that it is for people who like to run, walk, or bike outdoors!) meet my latest favorite thing:  wundermap.  OMG, you guys, I can look at real time radar down to the street level.  This just saved me from heading out for a walk to the CVS an hour ago when, though it wasn't raining and it actually looked like the sun was poking through, there was a huge patch of heavy rain heading right for me.  I do this all the time now.  If the weather says scattered thunderstorms or 50% chance of rain or whatever and I want to take a walk, I pull up wundermaps and see if there is in fact any rain coming towards me and how far away it is. Brilliant!  Stops me from inadvertently getting soaked and/or deciding to stay home when in fact it *isn't* gonna rain in my vicinity any time soon.

That's all I got!

xoxo

***actually, I saw my own grandmother's hooha quite a bit during her last year of life. Didn't really require brain bleach, 'cause face it, without it, I wouldn't be here, capice?

cults and lifestyles and w.o.e.s, oh my!

Because there haven't been enough cat pictures in here lately or I think it's still 2008.  One of the two.

Oh, hi, kids.  Here's a question for you: do you have a lifestyle?  Or should I say, A Lifestyle?  Because apparently some people think that because they work out and pay attention to their nutrition, they do.  And ZOMG, not only are they living the Fitness Lifestyle, they're being persecuted for it!  People try to force them to eat cookies!  Their friends tell them they're boring!  When they bring a tupperware of chicken breast and broccoli to the movies (so they can eat during their anabolic window or some such shit), they don't get a second date!  No, seriously, that last one? My favorite internet message board thread of all time.  I think it's an example of Darwin's Law in action. If you think bringing a bro-meal in tupperware to a theater is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, it's probably best for the gene pool if you don't form a sexual/romantic partnership and, y'know, possibly breed.

So, yeah.  Every couple months or so, some super-enthusiastic newbie (usually) posts a whiny thread in one of the corners of the internet I hang around on*** about how they are so misunderstood and persecuted and how all their friends and family mock them for, or pressure them about, their eating and exercise habits.  To which the more experienced (or jaded, pick your term) among us usually respond, "Huh. Doesn't happen to me.  Maybe because I know to shut the fuck up about it when people's eyes start glazing over and I don't act like a weirdo in public."  My own response to a similar conversation this morning was that, um, I don't have a lifestyle and I don't remember joining a cult.  I'm just like all my other friends.  I just, y'know, spend more time at the Y. And look better in a tank top.  (Ha!)

I guess this sorta dovetails with the previous post. If you start bringing salads and lean meat to work instead of ordering out lunch with the gang, yeah, people will probably notice and maybe they might possibly make a stupid remark or three. But, honestly, they're not gonna make a big deal about it unless you make a big deal about it.  They're certainly not going to "persecute" you about it, unless you are so preachy and evangelical that you make people want to stuff cookies into your mouth just to make you shut up.

Okay, we're done with cat pictures now. I've got that out of my system.

xoxo

***I have this weird version of synaesthesia in which internet locations feel like physical places to me.  Many many years ago there were two boards on AOL (hahaha) that I read and when I left one to go to the one that was below it in the list of boards, I always thought of it/felt like I was going downstairs.  

Stop looking at me like that.

a b c d e chromium

My history with taking vitamins and/or minerals is checkered.  Whatever they use to coat vitamin pills with generally makes me nauseated.  Taking them even on a full stomach has, historically, made me pukey.  I swear that a good 50% of my "morning sickness" was in fact a reaction to faithfully choking down those horrible horse-pill prenatals.  And then all those years that I was anemic or borderline anemic--long before my uterus actually tried to kill me, it was doing its best to cripple me, yo--and I was supposed to be taking iron supplements, I hardly ever did for more than a month or two running, because the nausea and world-class constipation they caused seemed actually worse than the weakness and dizziness and compulsion to chew ice (look it up!) that having no freaking red blood cells engendered.

Somewhere in my 40s, I discovered adult chewable vitamins and then adult gummies. For the first time in my life I could take a daily multivitamin without adverse effects. And they were yummy too.  Okay, it's a well known fact that I sorta have the palate of an 8 year old, other than the fact that 8 year olds don't like beer or Irish whiskey, but seriously. Gummy vitamins are delish. I am partial to these of late:

They're readably available at CVS and reasonably cheap, especially since they're frequently on sale and I always have xtrabucks.

Now, I know there have been studies recently suggesting that even taking vitamins is unhealthy and liable to lead to an early death.  I dunno.  I prefer the results of the recent study that said three cups of coffee a day are awesome for your health. I've got that one covered.  (Oh, hush, I never said this was a health blog. I drink alcohol, mainline caffeine, eat cake, am addicted to Quest bars, and still agree that kale tastes like "dirt and sadness". I just go to the gym and lift heavy shit a lot. It's a fitness blog. Also, a digression blog. Deal.) ANYWAY. Maybe I shouldn't even be taking vitamins, but I seriously am not convinced that they're doing me any harm and I feel marginally better when I think I'm making up for whatever's in kale that I'm missing out on.

To get to the point of this post, and there is one I swear to you, recently there was a thread on a message board I frequent asking what multivit everyone takes. A few of us were spreading the gummy vitamin luv.  I just checked back into the thread this evening after a few days to find there were a bunch of posts saying that gummy vitamins were crap and that you don't absorb the nutrients in them. (Which, if they're gonna kill me, that would be a good thing anyway, right?)  Furthermore, cheap vitamins are crap and you need to buy the expensive "quality" ones.  Further investigation proved this advice to come from, oh yeah, mainly supplement company reps whose employers sell expensive-ass "quality" multivitamins. Go figure.

But since I never let my natural cynicism get in the way of actually looking shit up, I googled "gummy vitamins inferior."  I got three pertinent results. One from what appeared to be a supplement company selling expensive vitamins.  One from a healthy living blog probably written by the sort of person who thinks kale tastes better than ice cream. And the third from a message board for people who've had weight loss surgery. Apparently these bariatric patients are at risk for malnutrition and thus must both take vitamin supplements every day and be frequently tested for vitamin deficiencies. All the people in that thread who took gummy vitamins testified that their blood test results were fine and that, no, they were not having any problems from taking gummy vitamins rather than pills.

Maybe it's just because they're telling me what I want to hear (coffee's better for you than kale even!) but I'm choosing to believe the bariatric patients over the supplement company shills.  Besides, I can't afford 45 dollar vitamins, I've got Quest bars to buy. God.

xoxo

me n' the Glute Guy have words

I've read a lot of critiques of famous trainers' new books lately.  Having high profile fitness experts suggest that an 800 calorie a day diet is a reasonable way to lose weight for one's wedding or that us ladiez pick a kettlebell that weighs "as much as our purse" is certainly discouraging.  I can't say for certain that if I were offered a bunch o' money to write a book that sells out like that I wouldn't do it, but I'd like to think I wouldn't.  I'd like to think I'd stick to my own message, the one that says no matter how small or overweight or old or out-of-shape or weak you start out and no matter the fact that you possess a vagina, you CAN, with work, lift heavy-ass shit and lifting that heavy-ass shit will change your body in ways that you will most probably like and, more importantly, it will make you feel like a superhero.

It is with sadness that I must then take huge issue with some things in the fitness book I am currently reading, Strong Curves by Bret Contreras and Kellie Davis.  Mr Contreras is well known in the weightlifting/fitness community as The Glute Guy.  I don't know how one sets out on the path to become the world's most renowned expert on, y'know, asses--even after reading Mr Contreras' explanation in the book, I'm still kinda bemused--but, hey, someone's gotta do it. And I'm sure if she's alive, his mom is very proud. Anyway, I'm reading along and while I have my disagreements with some of what the book is selling me--it's a little tilted towards the "clean eating" philosophy that's so trendy and popular and it claims repeatedly that following the book's program will cause you to lose fat and build muscle at the same time which, no--I am mostly enjoying it. If anything, at least it has caused me to go around flexing my glutes during all my ADLs for two days in an attempt to keep them activated. I'm sure that's worth the $9.99 I paid.  (If only for the entertainment value I'm sure it affords anyone who notices me doing it.)

Sadly, I then happen across this little gem: "A woman with a slender upper body and shapely legs may never be able to do a chin-up no matter how lean and strong she gets."

Excuse me, but BULLSHIT.

There is no excuse for a normal-weight woman who strength trains (and has no orthopedic issues that make the movement impossible or unwise, of course) to be unable to do *one* chin-up. Note: we are not talking about an overweight person for whom bodyweight exercises are naturally much harder. Note: we are not talking about your average woman who does not lift weights. We are not talking about 25 chin-ups in a row or 5 sets of 10 or even one wide grip pull-up (which is much harder). We are talking about *one* chin-up, done by a lean woman who has purportedly been working on her strength. To tell that woman that, oh, it's okay, she may never do that one chin-up no matter how much she works is ridiculous. Ridiculous and patronizing. Ridiculous, patronizing, and UNTRUE.

This whole thing makes me capsy.

I prefer Nia Shanks' view that, hell, you can work your way up to handstand pushups and other crazy hard things and here's how... Because you may be a woman, but you're also a badass. Imagine my surprise when Mr Contreras refers to Ms Shanks in his book and calls her his dear friend.

I think she oughta have a talk with him.

Gah.

xoxo

confessions from the land of yoga pants

Perhaps you've read this article about men, women, and yoga pants or any of the responses to it floating about the interwebs the last few days. It's created a lil kerfluffle, as you might ascertain from the fact that the original has over 350 comments posted if nothing else.  Well. I have things to say. But if you haven't read anything about this and you do not wish to tax your brain and/or hand clicking on my link, let me first summarize the gist of the original.  Dude cannot stop himself from looking at attractive chicks in yoga pants, dude feels at least mildly ashamed of this, dude thinks women cannot possibly be wearing yoga pants only for comfort as they claim but must instead be wearing them to make dudes like him look.

First, a confession.  I don't know if I've mentioned this on here before, but between recuperating from my surgery and then being laid off, I haven't worked at a "real" job since the beginning of October. This has led to, um, kinda giving up on dressing like an actual grownup person most of the time.  I had dinner with my former co-workers last month and one of the first things I asked a colleague who'd also been made redundant was, "Hey, Chrissie, have you totally stopped wearing real pants yet?"  Oh, we laughed. Yup, yoga pants err'day.  Fifteen or twenty or twenty five years of getting up every morning and forcing oneself into some iteration of acceptable business casual means when the blissful day comes that a girl doesn't have to, can you blame her for wanting to jettison the pants with zippers? Really?  Article Writing Dude may not believe it, but yoga pants are indeed the most comfortable garment the human race has of yet invented.

Second, yet another confession.  Despite the fact that I objectively know they are tight, form-fitting spandex, I don't feel particularly alluring in yoga pants.  I think I look good, nice, presentable, whatever, but not "oh mama."  In fact, I recently had a...let's call it a date...yeah, date...with an ex at which I showed up in yoga pants ('cause see above: real pants boycott) and I felt compelled to apologize that I hadn't made any effort to look shmexy.  Shmexy to me is dressy tight jeans, boots with a heel, a shirt or sweater that shows a smidge of cleavage.  That's what I'd wear when I purposely want someone to look, whether a specific someone or a general someone.  Yoga pants are what I wear to lift heavy shit or stretch or do housework or run to the store or give a massage or otherwise want to be able to move in comfort and forget about my clothes altogether while also looking presentable and, y'know, just fine.

Now, to my point, my rebuttal.  Article Writing Dude says that women MUST be wearing yoga pants to be looked at since if they only wanted comfort, they'd wear baggy sweats instead.  Oh, AWG, you are making one of the crucial mistakes that oh so many men make when they think they're understanding anything about why a woman does anything. (I've had this actual argument discussion with male friends in real life, male friends who are neither morons nor any more chauvinistic than the average bear.) Men seem to think that anything a woman does is related to guys. When it comes to what we wear, gentlemen, that is a very, very false assumption. Most women dress for themselves first and other women second, with men a distant third (unless of course they are specifically trying to seduce a certain someone, please a beloved partner, or just pull at da club.) So, in the case of yoga pants, I wear them for myself because they allow me to be comfortable while not feeling unattractive or sloppy; I don't hardly ever wear pj pants or baggy sweats for myself because, while comfortable, they do make me feel sloppy. Secondarily, I don't wear those pj pants or baggy sweats in public because of other women: I'm aware that looking like a complete slob instead of at least a little cute is the kind of thing that can draw negative judgment. I'd be embarrassed to run into a client, an acquaintance, a non-immediate relative while wearing baggy ass sweats in a way I wouldn't be if I were wearing yoga pants and cute sneakers.  Nothing to do with wanting menfolk to look at my crotch or my ass, thanks. Sorry, guys. It's NOT all about you all the time.

That has nothing to do with anything. Other than it's hilarious. And true.

Perhaps I should think about looking shmexy more often. Or start wearing pj pants to WalMart.  Apparently success (in loooovvvvve) requires one of those two strategies.

xoxo

in which i torture you with more nostalgia

Apparently February is trip-down-memory-lane month here at MMiNaE.  (We the management do NOT plan these themes, they just happen. Like surprise pregnancies or toenail fungus. Something like that.) Anyway! Today's post is going to travel even further back in time, back back back to the late '70s, when your humble correspondent was in high school.

I've mentioned before that I was a small, clutzy, not particularly fast child*** and that thus while I was not picked last in gym class or on the playground, I definitely was picked in the lower third. And I've mentioned that I therefore grew up not thinking of myself as an athlete in any way, shape, or form and was surprised to find in my middle age that, hey, I'm kinda good at lifting weights and sorta strong for my size.  Since realizing this, I've lamented that I didn't find this out earlier, like, say, in high school or college. It would have made my emotional relationship with my own body for the next 30+ years different, I think, and definitely would have increased my self confidence.  Nowadays when I'm in the gym I (improbably) think of myself as a little badass and that affects**** me outside the gym as well. The funny thing, though, is that I also realize that even 35 years ago, that's what I wanted to be.  I just had no way, and no encouragement, to make that a reality, at least in healthy ways.*****

During my recent closet/drawer cleaning binge, it came to my attention that I only still own three things from my high school days.  A big white piggy bank with red hearts on it that my future ex-husband bought for me for Valentine's Day 1979 at Quincy Market, back when Quincy Market was an awesome cool place to go on a date. (Ha!)  A gold and onyx ring that was not new when it was given to me and that, after many years of being worn on and off, has worn so thin in the band that I would fear to wear it now.  And a pair of 5 lb plastic weights filled with sand I bought my freshman year (?) of high school and that has survived many moves with me, living on a basement shelf unused for the almost 18 years I've lived in this house. Like the piggy bank and the ring, I've never quite been able to bring myself to get rid of them. It's strange.

I always say that my genesis for wanting muscles was Terminator 2, but obviously the existence of those 5 lb weights proves that's not strictly true. I remember buying them at the army/navy/sporting goods store where we all bought our Levis, convinced that if I just did every arm exercise I knew a hundred times every day, I would have beautiful "toned" (gag) arms. Obviously no one had told me (in gym class or in the many many articles in Seventeen or Glamour magazine that promised I would be skinny if I only did the proscribed exercises 20 minutes a day) about crucial concepts like rep schemes, progression, or rest days, and me n' my lil plastic weights were doomed to failure.

Is it time for this picture? Sure. It's never not time for this picture.

Later, the summer before junior year, I have my second distinct memory of wanting a muscular body.  I was in my boyfriend's car, stopped at a light, and a girl/young woman crossed the street in front of us.  She was wearing a racer back tank top and she had what I would now refer to as a V shape as well as beautiful shoulders.  I remember being acutely jealous that her back and shoulders looked like that, as well as thinking that you had to be born with that shape or you'd never have it. See: misinformed again.

Finally, junior year we got a Nautilus machine for the girls' locker room. In 1978, this was fancy shmancy and newfangled and no one was sniffing about how free weights were far superior, yo. No, this was cutting edge. And the reason we got it was--according to our gym teachers anyway--that seeing as the boys had gotten one for the football team to use, they had to provide one for us or someone could sue their asses because of Title IX. (I am woman, hear me roar.  The '70s were basically awesome.)  No one taught us to use it or cared whether we did, but some of the gym teachers would let us stay down in the locker room to purportedly use it instead of playing volleyball or some such shit.  In reality this meant we mostly sat around on it and chatted. But I did love to use the leg press section. Many many many light weight reps of course. Sigh.

So, yeah. If I carefully look back, I always did want to lift weights. I always was drawn to it. I just was never encouraged or taught anything useful about it. That's a pity. What gym class could have been, if only...

The reason I even started thinking about all this today is this article about being picked last in gym class.  In particular, one comment was from someone who said she was indeed always picked last in gym class but that it didn't bother her. She knew she was good at other things and felt it was almost fair for the kids who weren't good at scholastics to have something to shine at. I can see that, actually. I mean, do we rail against the cruelty of spelling bees because of how humiliating they must be for the dyslexic or poor-of-rote-memory? On the other hand, because of my own experience, I really wish gym class was about everyone finding a physical activity that they really like and are potentially good at. That's the kind of thing that will carry through a person's whole life, you know?

xoxo

***who grew up to be a small, clutzy, not particularly fast adult, go figure

****or effects, possibly. I dunno, I always get that wrong.

*****I mean, learning to pee standing up between two parked cars the summer I graduated high school made me feel like a little badass too and proved useful in the years of drunken shenanigans that followed, but do we REALLY want to encourage that type of behavior?

Footnotes! Out of control since 2011!

healthy, wut?

Now that January is over, I'm gonna write the post I've been meaning to write about what (besides organizing yo shit) random blogs I read have emphasizing in the new year. Timely, that's me!

I read a few cooking related sites and sometimes I'll click on a link from one of those and end up reading another cooking blog I've never seen before, etc etc.  I'm not exactly sure why I do this. I never make 98.7% of the recipes I see on them and a lot of them are about things I don't have the skill to do or the inclination to learn. But I guess it's better than porn or internet gambling, so basically, shut up. Anyway, in January after 3 months of telling us how to bake 453 different types of cookies, make homemade liqueurs to gift, assemble a turducken to impress the folks at Christmas, and all other manner of excess, the food sites turn instead to the "lighter, healthier" food we're all either supposed to be craving in January or are just eating because we're pissed off our pants don't button anymore.

Reading these "healthier" recipes makes a person realize one crucial piece of information: no one in 2013 North America can possibly agree on what healthier food *is*.  Oh, I guess no one is against green leafy vegetables (even if, as one brilliant internet commenter maintained, kale tastes like "dirt and unhappiness".)  But for every other food group or macronutrient, there's someone out there maintaining it's healthy while someone else is trying to cut it out of their diet. For example, a lot of the purported healthier recipes involved cutting out dairy, which makes me (of course) go wtf? Unless you're lactose intolerant and have never heard of Lactaid pills, WHY? Are you still operating under the faulty assumption that saturated fat is bad for you? Go read a book. Also? Cheese tastes like the inverse of kale. Sunshine and joy! I dunno, something like that anyway.  Likewise, a lot of the healthier suggestions involved pushing your recipes to the vegan side.  As a weightlifter, you know that makes me clutch my pearlsVersagripps.  Proteinz! Where's the proteinz?!!??

And then there's the question of what's a healthier sweetener.  Molasses and maple syrup seem to be trumpeted as somehow better for you than sugar.  Because they're less processed. Or something. Molasses especially is supposed to be full of micronutrients. Listen, I will take a multivitamin every day for the rest of my life if it means I never ever have to consume molasses. But, parenthetically, I will consume molasses above attending the "conquer your sweet tooth" hypnosis workshop at the yoga studio I sometimes go to.  What's next? A hypnosis workshop on how not to have orgasms?  Some people want your entire life to taste like dirt and unhappiness. God.

Listen, I understand the impulse to eat something other than cookies after all the holiday food comas are done. I've been craving and eating salad. My salads involves goat cheese and craisins and homemade balsamic vinaigrette, yes, but also lots and lots of dark leafy greens. Moderation, people!

And if you've read this far, here's a reward for you.

That song's been stuck in my head for two weeks. Hopefully I've now ear-wormed you too. Full service blog!

I bet Adam Levine eats kale.  I hear he does yoga.

xoxo

hot or not?

I recently witnessed a rather heated online argument about whether or not it was unthinkable for a personal trainer to be overweight. (Started, as you might possibly imagine, by a personal trainer who was built more like Mr Blue Shorts above than Mr Green Shorts.) Plenty of people said they didn't care what their trainer looked like as much as what their trainer's clients looked like in their "after" shots.  Other people said they didn't care what their trainer looked like as much as they cared what he or she knew. Some people said it would depend on their goal. If they were aiming to lose weight, they'd prefer to train with someone who had been overweight themselves and had managed to change their body rather than someone who'd always been effortlessly thin. If they were aiming for maximal strength, they'd prefer an experienced powerlifter, whether said trainer were the stereotypical beefy, big-bellied powerlifter or a twig who didn't actually looked like she or he lifted when in normal clothes. And a minority of people agreed with the author of the original post: they thought a trainer should look like a fitness model, more or less, and they wouldn't hire someone who didn't.

So, what do you think? Does a trainer need to have a typical "hot" athletic-looking body*** for you to hire them?

I am perhaps biased in this, in that my beloved former trainer, the woman that turned me on to lifting heavy shit, was not particularly thin.  But holy crap, was she strong.  And she was encouraging and personable and enthusiastic about exercise.  She didn't need to look like Jamie Eason for me to trust what she told me and to look forward to working out with her. In fact, her looking like an average woman was probably even more encouraging.  It made me believe that I, also an average woman, could get strong too (well, maybe not as strong as her) if only I put the work in.

My old trainer doesn't train people any more, having taken a promotion in her other job, but the other trainers at my gym don't exactly fit the fitness model mode either.  One's a skinny middle-aged endurance athlete.  I wouldn't personally care to look like her, though many many women would, but if I wanted to eventually run a half-marathon or something, I'd be pleased to learn from her expertise.  One's a somewhat chunky young woman with a degree in exercise science. I don't know for sure, but I wonder whether she was a college athlete in one of those sports where having a bit of extra weight on you is to your advantage.  If I were an overweight person who wanted to become more fit, I'd be really comfortable training with her, someone who isn't thin but is very fit.  There's an older male trainer who looks utterly average in every way and a younger male trainer who looks relatively athletic but isn't overly ripped or muscular.  I see no reason I wouldn't train with either of them provided they could help me with my goals and our personalities clicked.

So, yeah, I guess I am firmly on the my-trainer's-looks-don't-much-matter side.  Which I suppose is fortunate, since I'd like to get into training people and I am in no danger of looking like Jamie Eason myself any time soon. Or, y'know, ever.

xoxo

***let me make clear that I don't think looking like a fitness model is necessary for actually being hot. In fact Mr Blue Shorts there has a little too much pec and visible abs for my own personal preference.

busybodies, the earnestly helpful, and the food police

On one of my favorite cooking websites they have a feature highlighting readers' questions. Yesterday's was from a woman whose spouse was just diagnosed with diabetes and who was thus wanting to bake sugar-free Christmas cookies this year. Her question, which seemed rather basic and on-topic for a cooking forum, was whether it was truly correct to replace the sugar in baking with artificial sweetener (i.e. Splenda, stevia) one to one, or whether that ratio needed tweaking.

The first seven--that's right, seven--responses, however, did not even attempt to answer. They instead took her to task for baking cookies in the first place, since white flour was gonna kill her husband as surely as sugar, and/or sniffed at her to take a diabetes education class, or informed her that the proper way for a diabetic to eat cookies was to eat a tiny portion of a real sugar-filled treat after carefully checking one's insulin levels and screw the Splenda.  Then one person took a stab at answering the actual query before more people dropped by to yell at her. The final response (as of this writing) informed her that her (presumably) fatass hubby should step away from the cookies and get to the gym, 'cause obviously that's what brought him to this impasse in the first place. Oooo.

While any or all of this advice may or may not be true: who THE FUCK asked you, snippy self-righteous internet commenters? And if you feel the need to lecture, either because you really really care about the health of someone you have never met or, y'know, because you like to be right, how about attempting to answer what was asked before (or at least after) you launch into your sermon/verbal instructional manual?

In summary--I hate people.  Merry Christmas, etc.

xoxo

boo boos

Oh, hai. Long time no write. Been busy getting ready for surgery, having surgery, and now recovering from surgery.  Down to one percocet a day, so I suppose I'm alright to get some coherent thoughts down on electronic paper. NOT PROMISING ANYTHING. Ahem.

And if you think I'm about to post up pictures of my boo boos, um I mean incisions, sorry but no. Don't think I didn't consider it, but my attention-whore tendencies only go so far.  Let me just say, you can't even really see the one that's inside my bellybutton. Props to whatever ob/gyn gave me this super-deep innie forty-nine years ago, thereby making my gyn's cosmetic job easier in 2012!

No, the Boo Boos I actually am here to write about is the "Honey Boo Boo" family.  If you just genuinely went "wut?", my hat is off to you.  I too was blissfully unaware of this little piece of pop culture effluvia until, in my convalescence, I saw someone online jokingly*** say to a friend, "You're fat, but not Honey Boo Boo fat."  Having sorta kinda vaguely heard that this was some sort of reality show but unclear on the details, I was prompted by this comment (and the boredom that comes from being more or less glued to one's couch for days) to explore further.  Where did I go but that bastion of nasty snark that is the TWoP reality show forums?  (I know, I know.)

There I found out that Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is a spinoff from Toddlers and Tiaras (which, the title is self-explanatory, no?) and follows a little girl from Georgia who participates in child pageants. The "joke" that  the audience is supposed to be in on is that the little girl is chubby, not particularly pretty and not particularly talented, and thus unlikely to win even the low-rent competitions she participates in. Oh, not to mention that she has an enormously redneck/white trash family, with a dad in whose face there is never not a hunk of dip, a pregnant 17 year old sister who doesn't know what the word "abdomen" means when she goes for an ultrasound, and, most prominently, a morbidly obese, very loud, crass mom, June, for whom farting on camera is the height of hilarity.  Here's an unflattering and then a relatively flattering shot of June, just so you know the size of the lady in question.

I read the first twenty or thirty pages of commentary on this show (shut up, I'm practically a shut-in, yo) and then decided I had to see for myself whether this shiz was as horrifying as all the pearl-clutching internet commenters claimed.  So *I paid* $1.95 for two episodes on Amazon instant watch.  If only I made money from writing, I coulda claimed that ::cough:: "research" ::cough:: as a business expense on my taxes.  Sigh.

Well, I gotta tell you, I was not as horrified by these people as I went in there expecting to be.  First of all, it was pretty obvious to me that, as we all know, reality television is "reality" television and a lot of the crassness, etc, was playing a role for the cameras.  June, in particular, may be uneducated and white trash, but the woman isn't stupid.  She appears to have a good amount of self-awareness and know exactly what she's doing. Hell, she was smart enough to get her kid a TV show. (We'll leave the morality of pimping your family life out for television dollars out of this. Poor people have done worse shit for money.)  And I was charmed that this family seems to actually, you know, all like and care about each other.  That's as rare on TV as it is in, y'know, real life.  Little Alana, if not Shirley Temple II, is actually a very sweet kid when not being prompted to act obnoxious for the cameras.

With my opinion now unbiased, I went back to read more internet commentary on these people, and what struck me the most was the judgy judging and, yeah, pearl-clutching about their weight problems and purported eating habits.  People were, apparently seriously, suggesting that June have her children removed from her for eating junk food.  Other people, also in apparent sincerity, suggested that all their health/weight problems would be solved if they just used their backyard to grow a vegetable garden.  The silliness and self-righteousness was amazing.  First of all, as someone who has occasionally tried this "gardening" business, let me say that a.) if you have a non-green thumb, it ain't as easy as the green-thumbed among us might suggest and b.) every tomato I finally managed to harvest probably ended up costing me twice what I would have paid for it in the supermarket or even the farm stand.  But secondly, what I think a lot of people who actually have relatively "healthy" eating habits don't realize is that if you've grown up on a diet of nothing but processed food not only do you not see anything wrong with eating that way, but you probably don't think unprocessed healthy food tastes good.  It's not as simple as "give those people some salad and lean protein" and they'll be thin, it's "salad and lean protein is gonna taste like crap to them."

I myself, living in a decidedly non-klassy area, have frequently seen such relative horrors as young (and sometimes not-so-young) moms putting soda in baby bottles or sippy cups, feeding young toddlers Cheetos and donuts to keep them quiet, and carefully tearing takeout fried chicken into pieces a 9 month old can eat without choking.  I don't think this means these women don't love their children. I don't think this means these women want their kids to be part of the OMG! obesity epidemic! or to get the di-a-bee-tus.  I think these moms are feeding their kids what they themselves have always eaten, what tastes good to them, what they think of as normal food.  And I'm willing to bet a whole shitload of them don't know how to cook anything that doesn't come out of a box.

It's not so simple as "food deserts" or "junk food is cheaper than healthy food" though those things play a part.  It's not so simple as educating people about nutrition or even teaching them how to cook good, cheap things at home. It's that we have a whole couple generations of people who've never eaten anything but processed food and to whom that's all that tastes good.  I don't know what the answer to this is, though I think exposing all children to *good tasting* fruit and vegetables and real cheese and yogurt and whole grain bread and decent non-battered meat in school, starting in preschool and up, would be a start. But no one wants to pay for decent food in the public schools, do they?  That costs $$$.

I do know that shaming and pearl-clutching about those fat fat poor people and their horrible eating and parenting habits doesn't do bupkis.

xoxo

***joke being that the person in question isn't fat at all and both people and everyone else knows it