68 points

Here are the two salient points in today's post:

1. I've lost weight. (YAYYYYY!!!!!)

2. I've lowered my cholesterol—by 68 points. (In this case, "yay" in all caps with five exclamation points may not suffice to express my elation.)

If you read the blog on a regular basis, you may recall being vaguely annoyed by my post of January 3 wherein I discussed my weight gain over the holidays and my strategy for fitting more comfortably in my clothes again. So here's the update on that:

I stopped eating sweets. No homemade oatmeal cookies or lemon-lavender muffins through the winter. No more agave nectar (or half & half) in my morning tea. (Whew, that was hard. Like, really, really hard.) That's all. Well, I mean, I tried not to overeat or snack out of boredom or whatever but mostly, I curtailed sweets. I've lost eight pounds. Yep. Sloooooowly, a couple ounces at a time, the weight came off. I feel better. I move more fluidly. My clothes fit better. Yoga is... still hard but slightly less hard and worth every bit of the workout every time. Namaste.

In November, my new-really-horrible-doctor had me do blood work and my cholesterol level was 278. She sent me an email saying she'd enrolled me in Kaiser's here's-how-to-eat-better class—even though I'd already told her I do eat healthy and I've been a vegetable vegetarian for fifteen years. I didn't attend the class. I did ask Kaiser nicely for another new doctor. I was then assigned my new-really-wonderful-doctor (Dr. Vendiola in the Redlands facility, and she's awesome). She asked me to do blood work. I said, "Of course. I came in fasting for that very purpose." Three days later I got the result: My cholesterol level is now at 208.

Seriously?!? This is good news. I haven't had a number below 240 in twenty years.

How did I do it? I retired.

You're laughing. I'm serious. That's all I've done differently. I'm not exercising any more than I did before. I'm not eating differently (other than these past couple of months without cupcakes—sob).

I was so fascinated by this number, I spent a bit of time researching the correlation between stress and high cholesterol, and then it made sense. Want me to explain it? You can read a fascinating abstract by clicking here, but this is the bottom line of the study:

Stress produces elevations in serum cholesterol concentrations.

Know what else does? Standing. In the same study, the cholesterol concentrations in test subjects rose when they were tested while standing. Yeah. What did I do all day long five days a week for twenty-seven years? I engaged in a highly stressful activity (teaching teenagers in a public school setting—damned bell to damned bell) while standing. No wonder my cholesterol kept going up and up and up no matter what I did. When the stress ended, my cholesterol level plummeted. Just. like. that. Booyah.

So once again, I highly recommend retirement (unless you can sit while performing the very relaxing tasks required for your job). Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going out to work in the garden. Then maybe I'll play my guitar for awhile.

Treasures

In our quest to lose weight (well, my quest; Thomas is pretty darn fit for a nine-year-old dog), Thom and I have been taking long walks out in the country. Truth be known, we could hang around here at our senior community; there is plenty of level walking space and the views are spectacular:

But we like to get out and walk a lonely road where Thomas can sniff some wild animals and I can lose myself in further plot points for the book project I'm working on. Last weekend we walked three miles down a dirt road that took us past meadows and tall old oak trees. I stopped to take this photo after we saw a large animal—a coyote or bobcat—make for the trees when it heard us coming:

Today we went exploring, finding a new trail that begins in the hills above my little town. I'd taken Thomas up there on a drive, just looking for fireroads and other places to walk. What we saw was an old jeep trail that eventually became a single track, it appeared, so we came back today to walk down it and find out.

Usually what I discover when I find a spot where I can park the truck near a trailhead is that other folks have been happy to find such a place as well—so they can dump their old mattresses, furniture, TV sets and whatnot without having to go to the landfill and pay a fee. Sigh. So I always put mental blinders on for the first hundred yards or so, just chatting with Thom and overlooking the fact that some folks are just bound to pollute where they live.

I think of Robert Frost nearly every time we venture out this way. There's always more than one way to go, and I'm always struck by the lines "Oh, I kept the first for another day!/Yet knowing how way leads on to way/I doubted if I should ever come back." I find myself telling Thomas aloud, "We'll come back here. We'll come back here so we can go that way next time." That's the cool thing about living here and being retired; it's going to take me quite a long time to discover all the possible hiking trails.

So today the first trail we followed led us only up a hill—the steepest hill I've been up in a long, long time, so steep that we had to descend with great care and caution. And I was ever so grateful for how far Sgt. Thomas Tibbs has come in his training and adjustment to life as a writer's dog. "Walk slow, Thom," I told him, a command I began teaching him from the time I brought him home. Most of the time, we both want to walk briskly down the trail, to see how much we can discover and how many calories we can burn. But sometimes we need to go at a snail's pace, and I wanted him to understand that. So he led me slowly and carefully back down the dead-end hill, and just as we neared the bottom, I discovered the biggest piece of malachite I've ever found.

Malachite is a green stone found around the world and in the Southwest United States, especially in Arizona. I've found small pieces on my hikes before, but this one was much bigger. And there it was right smack dab in the middle of the road, glistening in the new morning sun as the frost from the previous night began to evaporate. I whisked it into my pocket. Here it is on a green plate (for comparison):

I keep saying I'm going to get a rock polisher so I can pretty up my stones. They look pretty fabulous when they're gussied up. If you click here, you can see some Google images of them.

For the quad workout and the discovery of the malachite, I felt our walk had been productive after we'd only been out a half hour. But on the way back to the truck, we discovered another road, one that looked... less traveled by. We walked down it about a hundred yards, just far enough for me to snap the photo below. Then we headed back. We'll keep that one for another day.

Pound for pound

In the five weeks since Thanksgiving, I’ve gained five pounds. It started with this:

For those of you who slept through math class, that’s a pound a week. A pound. If it doesn’t seem like much, imagine hefting a one-pound package of ground beef in your hand. Then imagine finding a spot on my mid-section in which to stick it. Do that four more times. (No, the weight is not evenly distributed throughout my body; it’s all right there around my middle.) If that still doesn’t seem like a lot to you, consider the fact that, by Thanksgiving, I had already gained five pounds in the previous five weeks after hurting/probably breaking (we’ll know when the MRI results are in) my foot, which meant my two-to-three-mile daily walks were limited to a very slow stroll around the block.

If you know me well enough to have seen me in person, and you’re thinking to yourself right now something along the lines of “Oh, you could put on five pounds and no one would notice” or “Well, you’ll easily lose the weight after the holidays,” please humor me by reading the remainder of this post. Because you’re wrong inaccurate on both counts.

I would notice. I do notice, I mean. I know I’ve gained weight by the way my clothes feel and by the way movement feels. When I say “movement,” I mean the way it feels to trudge up a steep hill in hiking boots or to attempt the “forward fold” position in yoga. There is a certain freedom of movement that comes with a lean body weight, and it’s a feeling I learned to love as a kid, when I could still swing my leg easily over a bike seat or the saddle on my horse. Now, when my body is round, I feel every step on a long hike, especially when trying to push myself up a hill. Hell, I already struggle with malformed lungs. It’s just adding pain to punishment when you put an extra ten pounds in my backpack, so to speak.

Also, I don’t own two separate wardrobes, one for when I am round and one for when I am not. Thus, I am uncomfortable in my clothing until I take off the weight.

Which leads me to the second often heard remark—that I can “easily” lose the weight. Really? “Easily”? No. Never. (Well, once, actually, a year and a half ago when I had C. Diff after I had taken antibiotics for pneumonia and I ate approximately zero calories over the course of two weeks. And with the effects of the C. Diff, that was almost like negative numbers in terms of the calorie totals. So I guess, yeah, that was “easy;” I just had to literally starve myself while experiencing please-kill-me-now pain. Pretty sure I don’t want to do that again, even if it means rapid weight loss.)

Losing weight is hard. I don’t care who you are. Chris Christie. Oprah. Adam Driver (aka Kylo Ren; Driver recently lost 40 pounds from his already skinny-ass frame in preparation for his role in the movie Silence).

My mama’s genetics have given me longevity, great skin, an analytical mind—and a predisposition to obesity (all of which I have passed on to my daughter and she has passed on to hers). Of course, I really won the DNA jackpot in this regard because my proud Irish pa also carried the same predisposition. So boom—once I crested the hill of 30, I began to pack on weight—easily—and struggle determinedly to take it off again. Just. like. Oprah. (Well, except without all the life coaches and therapists and Dr. Phils. Man, I could’ve used Dr. Phil a few times.) Like Oprah, I “love bread.” I love it so much I bake my own. And I eat it. Nearly every day. Which is fine when I’m at my target weight and I’m following my normal routine of walking/hiking/biking/yoga/weight training. It’s a caloric seductress when I’m also eating Christmas cookies and fudge and See’s chocolates and candy canes and pecan pie and (cheese) tamales and one or two or sixteen other treats I only eat at this time of year. And yes, it’s only once a year, and I’m pretty good at clearing it all out by January 1 by giving it to my grandkids. Then someone says, “Oh, I didn’t see you at Christmas so I’m giving this to you now. Happy New Year!” and hands me this:

So what do I do? How do I get back to the weight that lets me swing my leg over my bike or bend at the waist and touch the floor? What IS the secret to weight loss? It’s this: ELEM. Eat Less Exercise More. That’s it. That’s how you lose weight. Period.

Now, I know there’s other stuff to know. Like how BAD it is for you to binge diet or eat only watermelon for a week or drink only green smoothies for ten days (which, in real life, almost killed my brother, like, for real and actually dead—almost). And that your body has a “set point” at which it would love to stay (mine is 135), so you have to be patient when it seems like you’ve been going without fresh, homemade bread for two weeks AND HAVEN’T LOST A SINGLE POUND. And yeah, sugar is addictive. So are salty-crunchy snacks. (No kidding—look it up.)

All of that is great to keep in the back of your mind (and I know Oprah’s trainers and counselors are reminding her of those things on a daily basis). But on Weight Watchers (bless them; it’s really a good program), here’s what she’s practicing: ELEM. Yep. One of the most powerful women in America is doing exactly what I’ll be doing to lose the weight. She’s eating less (smaller portions of what she loves to eat, and probably better choices, so yes, bread, but maybe not the tiramisu) and she’s exercising a bit more. Or a lot more. I don’t know, Oprah and I haven’t chatted lately.

So after I clear the house of all the incredible stuff I get to eat from November through December (including the chocolates packed in ice and sent to me from France, so fancy they have their own drawstring bag—yes, I do have nice friends), I will study my portions for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and I’ll cut back for a while. And, I’m happy to say, I’ve already started back into my walking/hiking regimen. Three days ago, Thomas and I walked a mile and a half. Yesterday we walked a mile down a country road and a mile back in bright sun with a view of snow on three separate mountain ranges surrounding us. (Getting outside to exercise is the best way for me. It’s just depressing to walk, walk, walk on a treadmill indoors, though I’ll do it if I have to.) The weight will come off—slowly, as it should. By spring I should be much closer to my ideal weight.

By the way, if you’re thinking it might be easier or better to simply forego all the sweet stuff during the holidays, let me just add this tiny bit of full disclosure… and I’m only telling you this because we’re friends, dear reader, and I feel safe with you. I wouldn’t share it with just anyone:

The Dark Days are really difficult for me both emotionally and psychologically. As we move toward the winter solstice, I often find myself becoming deeply sad, in some years, clinically depressed. It’s not important why. It just… is. Treating myself makes me feel better. Am I ‘eating my emotions’? You betcha. And that’s ok. Certain types of cookies and candies are reminiscent of holiday times with my family, with my grandma who was a round jolly woman (except on those times when she did some binge diet and got skinny and snapped a photo and then started eating again--see photo below). I may get sad because it’s too dark or too cold to sit on the patio in the swing and read books or write stuff, but then I remind myself that there’s a chunk of homemade fudge with my name on it sent all the way from Ohio from friends who love me, and I rally. I eat the fudge, and I think fondly and lovingly of Bill and Stephanie (or Bob, if I’m eating the Z chocolats), and I chuckle. Because I know that I’m setting myself up for some really long walks in the country with my dog. But really, is that such a bad thing?

This is how I remember my Grandma Lila--round and sassy and always with a pet parakeet.

Same Grandma, now rockin' the weight loss.

Good job, Grandma! You're beautiful (round or lean)! Love you!