Just ideas- Let’s Move Forward

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Organic fuel systems are by far the most efficient and powerful. A bowl of oatmeal, a glass of OJ, and a tuna sandwich are enough to fuel an organic system which can then, in turn, invent a rocket or an i-phone, or build a skyscraper, or perform a complex surgery.  So, when you inventors and innovators can design a cell phone that can be recharged from the energy currents and heat that surges through my hands alone, I will be impressed. Make it happen. 

Save paper and time, people! Forget all the paper signs and stickers all over a retail space.  For large stores, use digital read out pricing information in shelf channel fixtures or even in digital signs. No more sticker issues, central downloads from main office, all computerized. What’s the hold up? Why the stickers? Cheaper? Not in the long run. Any idea how much ink and paper we waste EVERY day on signs and paper for places like WalMart and other large retailers? Any idea? Also, the employee time needed to create, maintain, change, update, cancel, and hang signs and stickers is about 3-10 full time jobs. Hey, I like being employed, don’t get me wrong, but we can be smarter about this. 

What’s your BIG idea?

 

 

 

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Low-Carb Weight Maintenance Stats – Induction Notes

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Beginning Induction Weight- ( 1/2012) 142-145

Lowest Weight ( 2/2013, approx) 123

Current Weight- 126-128

Exercise: Running about 2-3 days per week, inconsistent at times. Strength about 2 times per week, plus very active job – 8 hrs daily of speed- walking, bending, stooping, climbing, stretching. pushing a heavy cart around corners. (core work :) )

So, induction was the hardest. It requires strict diligence and adherence to the plan- staying at 20 grams of carbohydrate intake per 24- hour period, and this needs to come mostly from salad and other vegetables. So, there pokes a hole in the myth that Atkin’s is all about bacon and steak. I’ll tell you that in those early days, you do eat a goodly amount of meat, eggs, and cheese, because there’s only so far salad greens will go in fueling the body. And, it’s almost free food, because you are getting almost no carb content in those items.

Somewhere around week two, you might cave-in, gorge on pizza and ice cream, and never go back.

But if you’re one of the determined few, who have decided that if you’ve committed to something, you will stick it out until you see results, by the middle of the third week, and especially if you’re new to Atkins’s  the weight seems to just fall off. Pants are looser, your face looks thinner. True, some of it is water. Your body simply becomes more efficient and less bloated at this stage.

By now, temptation may really hit hard. You’ve been so good, you’re losing weight- how about a night off of the old diet? You could take a free day at this point, but it will either stall your weight loss, or make it just that much harder to ‘get back on the horse’, but assuming you are very strong, you could have your night, and get back on the plan, none the worse for wear. It’s just that the night off needs to be very rare. Better to keep on with the plan, slowly increasing the amount of carb content by a mere five grams of carbs; assuming you are still losing weight. My body was tough this time around! It took me three MONTHS of induction to get to the point where I had lost just seven pounds. The first time I seriously did induction, it took only ten or twelve days.

The next stage is almost as hard. You’re allowed some of the phase 1-2 bars, shakes and meals now, but there’s still a huge emphasis on eggs, cheese, meats, and salads, veggies, and just berries. All other fruit is too full of sugars- and while they are natural, they are still sugars.

At this point, at about two to three months in, a lot of people just can’t take the lack of bagels and pasta anymore. They get tired of their normal weight friends and family who are scarfing pizza and bread sticks and who are eating ice cream looking at them like they are crazy. “Look at me. I’m not overweight. I eat what I want. Why are you doing this?” “What, you’re not eating whole wheat bread but you eat extra bacon?? What kind of diet is this? Your heart is going to clog up and fall out!” So, you try not to roll your eyes, sigh, and try to explain the science. Their eyes glaze over as they chew the pizza crust, and smirk at you.

“Just eat less of everything, and don’t stuff yourself. You’ll be fine”. I’m sure there is a lot of truth to that. But what if sugar and carbs act like a drug to some of us? What if not overeating these kinds of foods is harder for me then giving up smoking was? What if staying away completely until I beat this ‘addiction’, both chemical and psychological, is the most effective thing for me right now? what if I told you that I eat more vegetables and fiber now than I ever did when I ate smaller portions of only what I wanted?

My previous life of ‘eat what you want, just less…maybe”

Breakfast: Leftover huge hunk of carrot cake, or huge bowl of cereal. Neither stick with you long, so I was starving way before lunch

Lunch: Big sandwich, maybe even a sub, and all that bread. Chips, diet pop- ha ha, and two big cookies, or a similar treat. Always had dessert after lunch. If not, then a one-two hour later ‘treat’, like a candy bar. Invariably. Also, if there were any other dessert type foods offered in the break room at work, I would eat that, too.

Dinner: Huge rib-eye, side salad, two crescent rolls.

Dessert- big bowl of ice cream with Hershey’s on top.

Now, no- I didn’t eat like this every day. But way too often, it was something very similar to this. Any time I would look at what I’d eaten that day, I would be disgusted with how many calories I’d racked up, and moreover, I’d be amazed at the fact that I always still felt I could eat more!

Bio chemistry, blood sugar balance, and habit:

Perhaps there is a test that could tell us that some of us are more sensitive to the effects of high glycemic foods than other people are. Perhaps there is a test already. Maybe it’s the same test used to test diabetics. How soon after subject A eats this glazed doughnut ( or icky cup of orange syrup at the doctor’s office) on an empty stomach does the blood sugar level peak? How high is that peak? How long does it last? When it comes down, how quickly and to what level does it adjust to?

I can tell you that a breakfast of coffee and doughnuts is a disaster. Maybe not for most people, but for me, yes. I suffered tremendously with low-blood sugar- hypoglycemia, any time I lived on my carrot cake or cereal breakfasts. Why? After the rise, there is always a fall. Why doesn’t that happen to everyone? I don’t know. Why do only certain people get diabetes, or Parkinson’s, or Alzheimer’s? Everyone is different, with a realm of expected possibilities. Parkinson’s is possible, growing a third eye, not so much.

If you find that eating a high carb diet; that is- one with a lot of refined flour product, bread, sweets, chips, french fries, battered and fried foods, sugars and syrups, and you always feel hungry, you sometimes get light headed and clammy/sweaty between meals, and you can’t seem to turn down a junky snack, you’re a junkie. You’re hooked, and your body is running on cheap, adulterated food. It’s not good for you for many reasons.

When I was a sugar junkie, I had horrible mood swings, manic highs and low lows, skin troubles, scalp issues, anger management issues, and more. Besides that, I was overweight and miserable. I couldn’t seem to figure out why I was always ready for candies, cakes, and ice cream, no matter how much I’d eaten. Turning it down was torture. If I said no to dessert, I’d scarf a quick breakfast just to feel better about eating the ice cream at ten a.m. The next morning! Does this not sound like an addiction? Insert the words “Martini” wherever I used “dessert”, “junk food” , ‘candy’ or ‘ice cream”, and you might see my point.

“But food is just food. It can’t be addiction. It’s all in your mind”. Sure, addiction is largely in the mind. This is why taking the physical chemical imbalance out of the equation is only half the battle. But, it’s very helpful and important. Drug addiction is largely psychological, too, but we have to give up the drug, not just talk to our minds about it. If it helps, think of it not so much as addiction, but rather habituation. We are creatures of habit. We tend to want what we are used to . This is both a blessing and a curse, depending on what we are feeding ourselves. The physical aspect of this manifests itself, in terms of sugar and carbs, in a spike in our blood sugar levels when we eat the offending foods. We feel satisfied. It’s only a matter of time, though, before the blood sugar level crashes and we want to poke it back up to where it was. So we eat the Little Debbie snack cakes or grandma’s fudge, or a can of Pringles. We feel better, but maybe guilty, and like crap again when the crash comes, and so the cycle starts again. The body doesn’t get what it actually needs, good nutrition, and we’ve basically put sugar in our gas tanks.

I believe that people who have maintained a balanced diet over their lifetimes and who do not have a weight problem, intuitively know what their bodies need and listen to that rather than their cravings. They don’t get up in the morning and become tempted by carrot cake. They eat eggs or cereal, and they’re perfectly fine, running smoothly until lunch, which they eat in balanced fashion, probably not caring one way or another about a cookie or two, or a candy bar. I never see my husband go out of his way for a snack after lunch, nor does he usually consume cookies with it. On the other hand, he can eat a giant poppyseed muffin for breakfast and not go mad with hunger prior to lunch. I would. Why?

Insulin resistance: Here’s a great post by Suzanne Robin:http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/can-produce-much-insulin-2833.html

Hypogycemia? All About it: http://www.naturalways.com/sugar.htm

I am not a scientist, so best to get the facts here. Again, balance is an ideal. A great concept, and eventually able to be maintained. If you have had success with  balancing your diet and maintaining your weight without removing certain foods from your diet, why are you reading this post?

Yes, it can be done, but if you are way out of balance, you may need to take serious steps to get back into it.

Best Health and Wishes,

Lee

Dream States

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Three separate and distinctly different jets flew by overhead this morning at precisely two a.m. I am not sure if that is the noise that originally woke me up, or if it was the fairies playing tiny harps. I live an hour north of Portland, and wonder who needs to travel so early in the day, anyway?

It was not a dream. I do sometimes dream in music and sound, even composing my own tunes and lyrics, none of which I can remember when waking for long enough to write down. Some of them have had chart-topper potential, mind you.

This morning was different. I was clearly awake. I looked at the clock. During the dying rumble and schwoop of the last jet to go by, I began to hear this tiny, pleasant sound. It was as if leaves blowing in the wind were strumming the top of the strings on my guitar, up by the tuner knobs. Or, as I stated, fairies were playing tiny harps.

I reasoned that my husband’s i-phone alarm was going off, set to harps, on low volume. No. He doesn’t use the harp alarm anyway. And if he did, he surely wouldn’t have it going off at 2 a.m. No lights from his side of the bed were lit, either. So, what then? I was too sleepy to get up and investigate further, but it stirred my imagination.

I like to believe there is another world that remains mostly unseen, but is no less real than the one we cling to. I fancied that an angel was coming to say “Hi”. I wondered if my grandmother was tripping through the cosmos, or maybe my dad, and just wanted to be a presence in my room, at that moment. I worried briefly that my mom just passed on. She is quite ill of health, having suffered with COPD for many years. Wait- I haven’t called her today! What’s wrong with me?!

Ultimately, I didn’t truly believe any of my theories to the degree to act upon them- yet. But it’s been on my mind all day. Some things that others see as coincidence, I take a different approach to.

Yesterday morning, I was singing “This Little Light of Mine” to cheer myself up, as I realized I’ve been more grumpy and low-energy lately, and for much longer than I like. When I got to work, I was working in the solar lighting department, changing shelf price tags. The store is lit with fluorescent lighting, set to dim when the store is not open. Even at full bright, that light is not  enough to turn on  any of our solar globes. Then I just noticed that the one closest to me was softly but consistently lit. I chuckled out loud with a bit of delight. I mean, it cheered me up!

The cheer was short-lived, sadly. Too much work to do, too little time. I had to focus on the task at hand. But do you ever wonder about the small, seemingly insignificant , often symbolic occurrences that would mean very little to anyone but ourselves?

I’ve heard stories all my life about signs like this. The yellow rose that blooms mid-winter just under a  recently deceased loved-one’s window – when everyone thought the rose bush had died?

The bouquet of balloons that float by seemingly out of nowhere just when you were missing your   child the most- and balloons were his favorite thing?

Do the departed reach out with quiet messages to let us know there is life after life? Does God send messages our way, in hope that our inner spirit will see and understand, even as our eyes and mind doubt or miss them altogether?

Many people would say that they have had at least one unexplained ‘message’ like this, some people claim to have  had many more bizarre and stronger signals than these come through. But from where, exactly? And, as with most matters like this, is it only our faith that enables us to receive these messages, or can it all be summed up by mere coincidence and imagination?

I am not sure, but I will tell you that I enjoyed a sense of magic, and awe when I heard the music this morning.

Listia, my new hobby …

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So, I’ve been two-timing. I’ve neglected writing in pursuit of points-based swapping at Listia. It’s fun, I get things I want in exchange for getting things out of the house that others want, and I haven’t been writing.

 

My new position at work involves leaving the house at three- thirty in the morning, and once I get there, it’s just GO TIME the entire shift. I’ve been tired and not feeling like writing. The good news is that I’ve been doing more reading, and that is vital to keeping me fueled and inspired.

So, while I am not ready to write any more of Run, Nicky Run tonight, and don’t really feel like listing everything I’ve been eating and not eating, I thought I would check in and make myself feel better.

 

Now, back to the auction house! ;)

Run, Nicky, Run! Part #3. Fine, Red Thread of Evidence

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“No, Nicky. That’s bullshit. The problem is not that you don’t know what you want, The problem is that you don’t think you need to choose. You want it all, and you don’t appreciate anybody telling you that you can’t have it.

But I am a particular person, Nicky, and I am  asking you to.  You see nothing wrong with doing what you’re doing. I do. So, since we’ve had this discussion so many times in the past, and you know how I feel, let’s just cut to the chase. You can choose, or I will choose for you. We’re not playing this game anymore. “

Those were pretty much the last words he said to me. Ever. Turns out I chose to stay in school, work full-time at the nursing home, and spend time with my mother. She’s been ill for quite a long time, and I’d rather help her with what she needs than to have her spending  money on a nurse to come in, or to- God forbid- be in a nursing home. She gets lonely. Her other daughters live far away. They do what they can and keep in touch, but I am the only one nearby to go get the groceries and keep up with some light housekeeping. This was just too much for Hugh. I understand, I was gone a lot. I guess he couldn’t understand that I still loved him very much, even if I needed to have a life outside the home. He looked at it differently. He said things to me like , “Love? Love is spelled T-I-M-E, Nicky”.  And every time I would stifle my urge to say, “Yeah? And insecurity is spelled H-U-G-H.”

In the end, though, he was right. No matter how valid my reasons were for being away, it’s hard to make a marriage work when you’re absent from it so much. Our marriage needed to be the priority, not just another nice thing in life. He had to be number one. No, we had to be number one. I blew it.

I remember sitting at the dining room table one early morning, sipping darjeeling tea and poring over medication dosage formulas. He just walked over to me, kissed my cheek, picked up the cap he’d left on the table, and slowly walked to the door.

“I’ll have all my stuff out of here by the end of the week. I’ll send you my new address in case I get mail, or if you have an emergency. I’ll be filing,  so expect to be served. I’m really, truly sorry. “

He shut the door soundly. I spent the rest of morning sobbing. Every photograph of us together mocked me. Our wedding mementos- worthless. Memories of how we met and fell in love cascaded over me and I simply collapsed and wailed.

We were both so young. We thought things would stay the same forever, just lazy summer days sipping cold root beer out of brown bottles and soaking up the sun on the roof of his duplex.  We grew-up, the duplex was remodeled. He got his job, and wanted to support us both. I still wanted to chase my dreams.  The happiness started to fade, and like a photograph, after a while you couldn’t even make out who those two young kids were, or who they had become.

I sold the place once Lawson and I got serious. He asked me to move in, and I really couldn’t wait to be out of that house, with all its sad memories and shit-canned dreams.

Hugh got married a year later to a beautiful lady, five years younger than me, and eager to start a family. Hugh and I weren’t ever ready to take that leap, but the new happy couple was expecting six months later. I had finished up my nursing studies by then and got hired by Canterbury Place as a nurse’s aid. I had become interested in nutritional studies  and had decided to go back to school to become a licensed nutritionist, so the busy pace of full-time work and school was still making me ragged.

One afternoon and incredibly kind , tall man with the most delicious smile I’d ever seen walked up to me in the hallway. He explained he was there to see his granddad and wanted me to help him find him.

We sauntered down the hall slowly, just hitting it off from the beginning. I learned more about him and his amazing family in those five minutes than I knew about friend’s families I’d known forever. I liked everything about him. We began a whirlwind romance, he became my everything.  We had a simple but wonderful wedding and were married two years later. Meanwhile, though, I was putting in my time at the nursing home, and studying nutrition.

There were deaths fairly often at the facility. It was a fact of working there. It was the final retirement home .It was never easy to deal with , though. When you take care of people, you begin to care for them. If you don’t, you’re in the wrong line of work.

One particularly sad case happened during the end of my first year there. It was more than sad. It almost shut the nursing home down. Allegations of negligence arose because Rose Aarons, a lovely sweetheart of a ninety-three year old, was found deceased in her room at 6:17 a.m. on June 8. The last time someone signed off on reports was at 12:10 in the morning. Rose was supposed to be checked on every two hours, but somehow she got missed during the two-o’clock rotation, and the four-o’clock. While she had no medications scheduled for overnight, and rarely needed help with toileting, someone got lazy and decided she wasn’t a priority case that needed to be tended to. It was wrong, against all policy, and may have cost Rose her life. Nevertheless, that’s what happened. The guilty nurse’s aid was held accountable, and her case was taken to court. Meanwhile, the place was crawling with ombudsmen, concerned families, and the media. It was horrible, the entire thing. I fielded angry questions from family members and residents alike, and I was not allowed to say anything about the situation. One afternoon, a news crew swarmed me and put cameras and mics in my face as I headed to my car. I felt like a guilty dodger, but I couldn’t say anything. I was a person of slight interest because Rose was on my current rotation. I had last taken care of her that afternoon, at around 4:00, and did all the required charting. More than that, I had loved Rose, and my heart was broken, too. I was disgusted that my co-worker had just completely skipped over the basic two-hour checks and reporting for her. Rose had a couple of grandson’s, and one granddaughter, but her daughter and husband had died in a car crash ten years ago. It took everything out of Rose, especially since her husband passed not a year later. She was a tiny lady, always very neatly dressed, in color-coordinated pants suits, and she always had on knee high hose and tasteful, black flats. I told her those knee highs weren’t good for her circulation, but she just laughed and pulled up her pant’s leg to show me how her knee- highs were simply bagged in nylon pools near her ankles.

She has sparkling blue eyes and lots of photos in old frames all over her room. She loved roses, cats, kids, and Golden Retrievers. Once upon a time, she was an avid runner, school principal, and in her early days, a “Rosie the Riveter” in the WW2 effort. She would tell me the stories whenever I came to her room, and told them well. I would end up spending more time with her than I could afford to, but she would sweep me away in her stories. I could just picture this white-haired little lady as a young, gorgeous blonde, just smiling coyly at the boys and getting her job done. I was going to miss her like crazy, and I wasn’t the only one.

Rose’s stepson Miles kept coming to the home, and I’d met him before. As he was related to Rosie, I gave him the utmost respect and courtesy. It didn’t help him warm up to me, though. He was tall, but loosely built, as if he might be a contortionist in his spare time. He had dishwater blond hair, a bit too long and too greasy. Not that I cared about that. It was his personality, or presence, that  made the greasy hair and slinky build bother me. He was intense, and creepy. Grief I understand, anger I get. But this guy had something else entirely going on in his mind. He kept asking me over and over for the names of everyone who took care of his grandma. I told him he needed to contact the Nursing Director to get all the details. This all had to go through proper channels. He got upset and accused me of trying to “protect the murderers”, and then pointed at my chest and said “You, included”. Then he practically snarled, his emotions leaking out with some spittle and revealing a very venomous persona. His stare practically bore a hole through my face. I was shaking worse than he was when he walked out. I called the Nursing Director, who basically told me not to worry so much- that  this was a normal stage of grief. That was right before he banged on her door and she had to hang-up. Now she was going to get an earful, no doubt. I hoped he didn’t scare her like he had me. I didn’t hear back from her that afternoon, because I was out the door by five- o’ nine. Norma, our nursing director, never came back to work. She was found beside her car- at home- keys in hand, her head bleeding out all over the concrete. Foul play was suspected but they didn’t have any leads or evidence.

I think I had a clue…

The Joy of Routine

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I like to think of myself as someone who hates routine. It’s a stifling rut that makes each day seem the same, and I strain against it like a mad dog fights a choke collar.

And yet, the importance of the routine I had created prior to starting my new position at work has clearly been missed on me. Since my schedule was  part-time, I failed to recognize and appreciate the ability I had to sit down and blog, or to work- out whenever I wanted. And while I am sure I will work a new routine out, I will actually have to work at planning and scheduling my free time a bit, as confining as it may seem, in order to continue to reach my goals and have a life outside of work. It’s just all too easy to fall into a pattern of sleep, work, eat, sleep- and that’s the most restrictive routine of them all.

This is just the second week now that I’ve had to get up and come to work at 4:00 a.m., and  one night a week at 12:01 for a graveyard shift . Typically,  when I come home, I want a light snack, and at least an hour of sleep, sometimes two or three. Then I generally have a normal evening, but go to bed at 8:00 or 9:00. I’ve had a nasty cold since I started training in my new position, which has not helped at all. My energy has been drained, my feet are sore, my chest aches from coughing. I think the important thing to remember is that only I can set up a better plan to get the most out of my off time. I also need to cut myself some slack for not wanting to run this week, nor having the energy to write. I need to adjust, and then begin to add back in the routines that allow me to live a full life, not a one-dimensional one.

According to Marcy Farrey in an article at careergirlnetwork.com, , (Dec., 2012) it is true that routine has been given a bad rap, but it’s also vital to being able to accomplish our goals. Your routine may include making sure to write something every day, or to make sure you get to the gym or take a run at least three times per week. Making those goals become reality requires pushing away excuses and pulling out the calendar or day planner.

Reality insists on derailing our routines. We lead busy lives and nobody in their right mind will stay on the treadmill when an urgent call comes in from our child’s school, asking us to pick up our sick kid. Blown tires, dental appointments , and the impromptu lunch invite on our one day off from someone very dear to us are all valid reasons to not be able to stick to routine. Those are the times to take a deep breath, take care of business, and get back in the saddle as soon as we can. Part of what makes life fun and stable is having a good mix of flexible time and routine.

So that’s what I aim to do.

What are your routines that keep you sane? Which routines do you hang onto that are not serving you at all? ( nightly ice cream in front of the TV, for example)