I found the key to weight loss and healthy eating.
 I Heart These Journals Write down everything you eat. You’ve heard that advice many times. You’ve started a food diary how many times now?
I had the same problem. My food diaries lasted only a day or two at best. Later, I would come across these sad, short-lived attempts and shake my head at my lack of discipline. Why can’t I do this one thing that sounds so EASY?
Two years ago, I tried again and to my amazement, it worked and I haven’t stopped. This food journal didn’t start any differently than earlier ones. I made a rule: I can eat anything I want as long as I write it down. No self-judgment; just honesty. No one sees this but me.
May 2010 had skipped days and half-hearted entries. By June 1, I realized I had something going. I started writing neater and developed a consistent entry style:
Food, comma, description, comma, quantity. Estimated calories to the left. For example:
110 Yogurt, plain, non-fat, 1 cup
Organic food gets an asterisk.
My OCD started playing the game with me. I challenged myself by adding the calories in my head and subtotaling by meal.
Once I filled the first spiral bound purse-size book, I bought a long, slim hard-bound book with a placeholder ribbon. Each page was the perfect length for a daily food list. After filling two of those, now I am working through my third Rhinestone Heart Journal.
 Great EatSmart Kitchen Scale Instead of just eyeballing food quantities, I began measuring food in earnest. I bought a food scale, an EatSmart Digital Kitchen Scale. The scale measures food in ounces, grams, kilograms and pounds. The scale comes with a booklet that gives you the calories per gram of common foods.
The food scale was a turning point.
My entries became more precise once I started using grams. Not sure who I was trying to impress. Me, I guess.
Restaurants meals are tricky and are often the reason dieters abandon their diaries. After measuring and calculating food at home, your eye learns to measure with reasonable accuracy. When you go out to eat, remember what you ate and how much. Remember the rule: you can eat anything you want as long as you write it down AND estimate the calories.
Restaurant calorie estimates are ballpark at best, but I try to estimate high and not worry about it.
I have been food journaling for exactly two years now. I have lost fifteen pounds. I keep at it because each day that I feel too lazy to log the meals, I ask myself, do I really want TODAY to be the reason I end your streak?
As in life, every day is a new page.
 A Page From the Book
Why Limiting Soft Drink Serving Size is Justified
 New Yorkers are grumbling that Mayor Bloomberg can’t tell them how much soda they can drink. The people have it wrong; the soda manufacturers and restaurants are telling us how much we should drink.
The proposed ban makes perfect sense if you think about if from the motives of the sellers. By increasing the default size served, the beverage industry is making money—a lot of money—and keeping us fat to boot. Customers are passive receptacles, drinking many more calories than they otherwise would have.
If you want more soda, buy two. Why are people reluctant to embrace that easy workaround? Because people want to be passive victims; they consume what they are served; ALL of it. If 20 ounces are served, then 20 ounces is a serving.
When you pour yourself a glass of soda from a 2-liter bottle, do you pour 20 ounces?
The first time a pimply popcorn seller asked me if I wanted a gallon of Coke for a quarter more than the cost of that puny cup I ordered, I was incredulous. It was illogical. It was crazy. After I recovered, I figured out that the extra soda cost them much less than a quarter. The concession stand pockets a whole lot of quarters that add up to a whole lot of dollars.
Order an omelet at iHop, and the waitress will offer a side of toast or pancakes. Toast or pancakes? How is that an even choice?
I hear the argument that the proposed soda size ban is unfair because 7-11 can still serve a Big Gulp and Carnegie Deli can serve a pastrami sandwich the size of a “cow with a rye yarmulke,” according to Jon Stewart. Normal serving sizes have to start somewhere.
Bloomberg is starting with the worst offender, a category with no nutritional value, just hollow, empty calories. Don’t argue that the initiative shouldn’t happen just because it isn’t going to happen everywhere at once.
Despite my backing of the mayor’s plan, I won’t stop calling the beverages “soft drinks” and rename them “sugary beverages.” It’s odd to me the entire media has adopted the new word choice, even the commentators who are against the ban.
 The Classic Downward Dog Returning to Yoga Class
Being neither athletic nor thin, I suck at sports. I always have. And being a tad lazy, no exercise plan ever stuck.
As an adult, I practiced Yoga in spurts. Sporadically enough that I never got beyond Beginner, yet I knew I would never embarrass myself. I am fairly flexible and my balance is not bad. Yoga is the only physical activity where I ever felt on an even playing mat. Why did I ever stop doing it?
I keep meaning to find a class, but nothing is ever convenient and I always get sidetracked. I’ve been losing weight slowly, but to get off this plateau I need to exercise. Besides, the world knows every ailment in life is cured by exercise.
Day of Reckoning
A company email announces that Yoga is coming to my workplace. It doesn’t get more convenient; I don’t even want to make excuses. Six Wednesdays, eight bucks a class if you pay for all six upfront. I am the first one to sign up. I am psyched.
But Yoga Day One dawns and now I am terrified. Is this my first Yoga class in three years? More? More, I’m sure. Oh my god, I am fifty-one. I don’t look it, but I often feel it. This is going to be a class of Millennials and I am going to embarrass myself badly. What if I can’t hold my Downward Dog anymore?
But the class is small and only one person looks like a serious practitioner.
The teacher speaks calmly and tells the class to only go as far as their bodies are comfortable going. She basically gives us permission to stand there and watch if it suits us. And it’s like she means it. The class starts off slowly and I am keeping up fine. But I know enough not to be fooled by the first ten minutes.
This class is different. The teacher places more emphasis on breath awareness and mindfulness than any class I’ve been in before. She speaks of being present in the moment. We close our eyes often. We start with Sun Salutations. Even holding the Downward Dogs seems easy.
We end the class in the Corpse Pose and the teacher goes around to touch each person. When she gets to me, she presses down on my shoulders and I smell a burst of lavender oil.
The first class is over and I feel great. I go up two flights in my socks to my desk and I feel kind of high and spacey. People stream into my cubicle with their problems yet I am smiling at them.
Namaste.
 I have waited five years to return to Burke Williams, the sumptuous California spa chain. Five years ago on my birthday, I scheduled a basic $99 facial at Burke Williams on Sunset.
The experience was finer than any facial I’ve had at Bliss or anywhere. On the bed with a cooling mask on my face and my parrafim-waxed hands inside terry oven mitts, I thought I must be getting the deluxe package. Whatever this cost, I would pay it. It was my birthday, after all. But the mind-blowing pampering was the $99 facial after all.
Today I make an appointment for a basic facial (now $105) and a half-hour Japanese Shiatzu massage. Only my second massage, I’m not sure the difference between Shiatzu and the massage I got at Milk and Honey in Austin.
I am led down the carpeted corridor and into the lush spa area. I am given a robe and slippers and I consider a dunk in the Jacuzzi, but a nude woman leans against the wall with her feet in the water. I can’t see what she is doing with her hands.
I opt for a few minutes in the Quiet Room instead. The long, narrow Quiet Room holds a row of pods with plush seats the size of a first-class airline seat with rounded seclusion barriers. I sink into the end pod and start writing in my journal. The stillness reminds me how infrequently I experience true quiet and I am able to write quickly. But too soon, it is time to go into the main lounge and meet my facial technician.
The main lounge is like a dark, cozy living room with plush couches and a fireplace. Melka, my technician, retrieves me after only a minute or two. She examines my skin and notices a little dryness, a few broken capillaries, a little sun damage on the sides, but overall I get a favorable review. She talks me into a peel ($20). Under the warm blanket and hearing her expert, soothing voice, she can talk me into anything at this moment.
She advises a separate moisturizer with an overlay of sunscreen no less than SPF 30. She also suggests a Vitamin C serum. After the pampering (I am blocking the few extractions she did), I go to my massage.
The masseuse, a small Japanese man gives me a choice of pressure. Like picking the heat of your salsa, medium always seems a safe choice. The Shiatsu feels good, a lot of pressing on a single point. After the service, I shower and step into one of the Jacuzzis since the busy nude woman and everyone else is gone.
After another great spa experience, the California sunshine feels like it is warming a worthy being. Leaving Bliss in New York and hitting the crowded noisy sidewalk, some of the newly purchased bliss gets left behind.
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I carry a torch for Milwaukee, the city I adopted not once, but twice: Once as a starry-eyed Marquette freshman and again, in October 2012 after a twenty-year stint in New York City.
I love to travel and I keep handwritten journals of my trips. A few of these diaries live on the Moon Fun City blog, a chronicle of my travels and of city life.
I am dedicated to animal rescue. I volunteered at Animal Haven in SoHo and for the Mayor’s Alliance for Animals in New York. My husband Gene have adopted two dogs and a cat.
Kunichika woodblock print
silkscreen by Nigel Robson
Flamingos, Baltimore Zoo
photo by Kate Mortell
Ruahine Mountains, New Zealand |
