Jo's Boys

An Embarrassment of Riches

Today is (was?) Halloween.

We LOVE Halloween.

I have loved Halloween All. My. Life.

In fact, true story, the last time I trick-or-treated I was PREGNANT with my oldest SON.  Can you just imagine?  Married, pregnant, dressed as Little Red Riding Hood and trick or treating.  Which just goes to show you what a total nutjob I am.  But you knew that.

So anyway, the apples didn't fall far from the tree.  My sons LOVE Halloween and LOVE trick or treating.  And we have a subdivision full of generous souls who give lots of candy.  So tonight's haul was OBSCENE.

First of all, this year was the first year (since I was a pregnant Little Red Riding Hood) that I have gotten into the Halloween spirit.  But we ended up with an extra black costumey dress thing and I was able to buy a $1.99 witch hat and turn the whole thing into a witch costume, which I was able to wear very convincingly (according to my children).  :)

Oldest was some sort of ninja-ey kind of thing and Youngest was some sort of Grim Reaper sort of thing and between all of us we match quite nicely.

It was very windy and my witch hat was blowing all over the place, but these were the best pictures of all of us that came out so there you have it.

These were taken BEFORE.  You will recognize that the next pictures were AFTER:

Youngest was exhausted but had QUITE the haul.  And it needs to be said that we went to a normal amount of houses- they're just generous. 

Oldest was much more athletic in his candy search; he tackled his Trick or Treating evening with much vim and vigor.  He made it (with his friends with him) to many more houses than Youngest and I were able to hit, and his obscenely large stash proves this.  My goodness.

Actually, it needs to be said right here and now that ALL of the hard candy (non-chocolate and non-melting) in their haul is immediately sorted out (by them) and set aside for our yearly Operation Christmas Child box(es) that we give to Samaritan's Purse.

Have you ever heard of Operation Christmas Child?  It's so wonderful.  We do it every year.

Anyway...

Just look at them. 

Happy, triumphant little gluttons.   Just look at those happy, content little faces.  It's amazing the joy that candy can bring.  And it's FREE!  Free candy!  What can be better than free candy????

Just look at the contentment... Here's Youngest lovingly cradling his two huge ziploc bags full of candy.

 

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!!  :)

Beauty

Initially, when I walked outside my front door, I saw her laying on a milkweed plant.

Now, she was a Monarch butterfly and the milkweed plant had no flowers.  Which meant that she would only have been on it to lay eggs (as opposed to being on there to eat from the flowers). 

But the way that she was positioned on the milkweed was just bizarre.  Instead of clasping on with her insectile legs and positioning herself so that she could lay eggs under the leaves, she was literally laying, like on her side, on a large leaf.  Motionless.

Uh-oh I said to myself.  She's dead.

Crouching down, I saw that she was not moving and was on her side (as though taking a nap?).  And I also saw that her wings were ripped ragged, her colors were faded - she was old.  Very old, for a butterfly, and tattered by her age and the elements.  So I sat, looking at her for a while, reflecting how sad it is for the world to lose a butterfly, and then I wandered off to do my daily thing.

A while later, I came back outside again and she was still laying there, but this time I saw that she was moving a bit.  I watched, fascinated, as she pulled herself up from laying sideways and struggled - yes, struggled like it was the hardest thing she had EVER DONE, to try to get her abdomen up high enough to lay an egg on the underside of the milkweed plant's fat leaves.

Oh my soul, I thought.  She's so old and frail that she can't even lift her abdomen high enough to lay what must be her final eggs.  I was riveted and saddened, but also incredibly awed and amazed. 

After watching her struggle for quite a while - struggle to hold on to the leaf, for her legs weren't working well - struggle to lift her abdomen and get it to the underside of the leaf, for her body wouldn't obey her - struggle to climb back up after she slipped because her body wasn't working quite right - I knew that she was going to be a blog entry for me.  I haven't blogged about butterflies for at least a year.

But she is beautiful.

 

The wind, which was VERY slight, was more than powerful enough to sweep her off of the milkweed plant she was trying to lay her eggs on and carry her off in the air.  She made the best of it, though, and maneuvered so that she would land on this pink Lantana bush.  Not what she normally would have done - for whatever reasons, the butterflies never visit the pink Lantana, only the red, but since she was there, she had a snack.

Which, to me, showed that she was hungry indeed.

See her wings? See the tears on her right wing and the scrapes and scratches on her left wing?

But then the cruel wind picked her up again, and even though she wanted to be on the milkweed laying her eggs, she ended up:

Stuck in a tree. 

She held on for dear life. 

See the hole in her wing?  Heartbreaking.

She stayed there for quite a while, probably gathering strength, even though the milkweed she was trying to get to was not but a foot or two below her. 

But then the wind ripped her off the tree again and sent her spiraling across my yard and onto my lawn, where she sat for quite a while.  Poor butterfly.

It took her a long time, but she finally got back onto the milkweed (via many circuitous routes), and she finally was able to force her body to lay eggs.  I was just so amazed by her sheer determination and desperate struggle.  These must have been her last few eggs to lay on this earth.  And as this happened a day or two ago, I'm thinking that she is probably dead by now. 

This picture really shows how scratched, banged and dented she was.

I am sorely tempted to anthropomorphasize (or whatever) here, especially since I am a mother giving what I feel like is Every. Single. Ounce. Of.  Strength. that I have to ensure that my children are well.  She was hungry and exhausted and near death - she had to battle cruel winds and slippery plants and her own body, which wasn't working at all or obeying her orders to move in certain ways - and yet, through it all, she tried over and over and over again until she was able to lay her final eggs on my milkweed, ensuring that she had done her motherly duty. 

For what else is there for a mother to do?

And that, to me, is the absolute picture of sheer beauty.

Eat Those Beans!

Sometimes I come across neat nutrition/journal articles and this one was so interesting that I wanted to share it.

Apparently, eating legumes (beans, lentils, soy, tofu, miso, natto, peans, chickpeas, etc.) are so healthful for us that a study of long-lived individuals showed that the more legumes consumed, the better your health:

___________________________________________________________

Legumes: the most important dietary predictor of survival in older people of different ethnicities.

Asia Pac J Clin Nutr. 2004;13(2):217-20.

PMID: 15228991

To identify protective dietary predictors amongst long-lived elderly people

(N= 785), the "Food Habits in Later Life "(FHILL) study was undertaken among

five cohorts in Japan, Sweden, Greece and Australia. Between 1988 and 1991,

baseline data on food intakes were collected. There were 785 participants

aged 70 and over that were followed up to seven years. Based on an

alternative Cox Proportional Hazard model adjusted to age at enrollment (in

5-year intervals), gender and smoking, the legume food group showed 7-8%

reduction in mortality hazard ratio for every 20g increase in daily intake

with or without controlling for ethnicity (RR 0.92; 95% CI 0.85-0.99 and RR

0.93; 95% CI 0.87-0.99, respectively). Other food groups were not found to

be consistently significant in predicting survival amongst the FHILL

cohorts.

(Full text of the article can be found here, although it is in pdf form)
________________________________________________________________________

Later in the article, there was another quote I found interesting:

"The significance of legumes persisted even after controlling for age, gender and smoking.  Legumes have been associated with long-lived food cultures such as the Japanese (soy, tofu, miso, natto), the Swedes (brown beans, peas) and the Mediterranean people (lentils, chickpeas, white beans)."

Translated, that means that an increased intake of legumes was shown to be statistically beneficial EVEN IF the people eating them were older than the others in the study, males instead of females, and smokers instead of non-smokers.  That's a big deal!

I've been trying to learn different ways to eat beans and legume products.  Right now, since I've been eating Eat to Live for so long, my tried-and-true method is to put generous amounts of canned beans (straight from the can, because I like the way it tastes on salad) on my salads, along with my tomatoes, etc.  Dr. Fuhrman (of Eat to Live) asks that we eat a cup of legumes/beans per day.  I haven't been eating that much, but as I transition out of weight-loss into weight-maintenance, I will have more daily calories with which to play, and that will free me up to boost my legume consumption!

I Love Comments!

Hey there, Kris and MamaLynx!*

I love comments!

Both comments were basically dealing with Eat to Live and eating in order to regain health. I went to Kris' blog and talked a little in her comments there, since she'd sort of started a conversation about it, but I wanted to talk about Mama's comment a bit:

"So, what if you were interested in eating this way, but were unable to eat mushrooms, pinto beans, black beans because of IgG allergies, and unable to eat nuts because of a potentially anaphylactic nut allergy?

Still possible? Or no?

Through my own health saga this year, I've already eliminated all dairy and eggs, as well as wheat (and nuts, mushrooms, and the appropriate beans). Still not healthy, though."

First of all, honey, I've been following your saga about the foods you've eliminated and some you found to try to replace what you've eliminated.  I'm so sorry you're going through this.

But the answer is YES. YES, a thousand times yes.  You can certainly eat the Eat to Live way (or a hybrid - I'm pretty much doing Eat to Live but adding in some whole grains like brown rice and corn and eating more starchy vegetables than Eat to Live advocates, but, then again, I'm at the end of my weight loss journey and so those added calories are okay now.  When I was trying to lose weight I didn't eat those extra things.) if you are avoiding those things.

First of all, think in terms of this:

• You can still eat a pound of raw vegetables a day. A pound of raw vegetables is 454 grams of raw vegetables.  I bought a food scale and I am SO glad I did because I really have no way of eyeballing what I eat during the day and figuring out how much it is.  But now that I have a food scale, I have gotten much better at measuring and/or estimating.  I eat HUGE salads with lots of raw vegetables in them or on the side (tomatoes/carrots/cucumbers/celery/peppers, etc.) and I do my best to minimize added calories/fat through salad dressings.

• You can still eat a pound of cooked vegetables each day.  Once again, this is where having a food scale comes in handy.  But I steam tons of vegetables (or otherwise cook them, such as soups/stews and such) and put lemon/lime juice or seasonings on them, etc. 

• You can still eat legumes every day (right?  I'm assuming that there are some left over that you can have).  Make a lentil stew or put canned lentils or beans on your salad.  Beans/legumes are wonderful.  Have some soy, perhaps ~ some tofu in your soup or baked or such.  These are all plant-based protein sources, which means that they come with protein but also with fiber and other wonderful nutrients, which is more than can be said for meat and animal products.

• You can still eat fruit!  Have lots of it.  It tastes good and is good for you.

So yes, you can still Eat to Live, because the bedrock of ETL is cooked vegetables, raw vegetables and fruits.

In fact, I don't eat nuts either.  But if you can't eat anything on your list, just think of all that is left over!  My favorits beans are cannellini beans (out of the can because I'm lazy)... I eat them almost daily on my salads (I buy them from Whole Foods).  Maybe try kidney beans? I love lentils, also... there are so many different kinds... but if you cannot tolerate them, then eat the pound of raw vegetables, the pound of cooked vegetables, and the fruit.  Vegetables have a ton of protein!  I would hope that you could find some vegetable-based proteins also in the bean/legume/soy family to add in with them.  Maybe soy protein powder and soymilk in a yummy frozen fruit smoothie?

Blessings to you both on your health journey.

 

* (I didn't use your real name because I wasn't sure you want it used online? And I miss talking to you every once in a blue moon.  You're a neat gal!  And I'm trying to self-teach Henle Latin!  But that's a different post for a different day!)

Halloween

I absolutely cannot tell you how funny this Halloween book is by Jerry Seinfeld:

Oh. My. Goodness. 

My sons just ROLL with laughter.  Who knew that Jerry Seinfeld ever wrote a childrens' book??  Well, he did and it is hysterical. 

And this is a good time to remind all you Halloween-celebrating homeschooling moms that it's time to put your Halloween picture books on hold at the library or they will all be gone!  And in a week or so it's time to put the Thanksgiving books on hold, as well.  :)

Eat to Live

You know, I've done an awful lot of talking about the wonderful, fabulous book

Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, but I haven't really directed you to many places about the book.

So I found some informative sites, and this one does a good job of summing up the book's eating advice: 

Furhrman summarizes his diet by providing "Ten Easy Tips for Living with the Six-Week Plan"

 

1. Remember, the salad is the main dish; eat it first at lunch and dinner.
2. Eat as much fruit as you want, but at least four fresh fruits daily.
3. Variety is the spice of life, particularly when it comes to greens.
4. Beware of the starchy vegetable.
5. Eat beans or legumes every day.
6. Eliminate animal and dairy products.
7. Have a tablespoon of ground flaxseed every day.
8. Consume nuts and seeds in limited amounts, not more than one ounce per day.
9. Eat lots of mushrooms all the time.
10. Keep it simple.

"Beware the starchy vegetable" means to limit starchy vegetables, but not avoid them, as they are high in calories.  But Eat to Live is truly wonderful in that you never, ever have to be hungry.  You can, and should, stuff yourself full of vegetables (both cooked and raw) and fruits and you will still lose weight - but without hunger- and with excellent nutrition.  Also, Dr. Fuhrman wants you to eat at least a cup of beans/legumes every day.

And I read Eat to Live WAY before I found this excellent website that takes you through the way to understand how how much you eat and how tall you are and how much you weigh at any given time can be used together with what you are eating and then you can understand how your food choices will effect your weight.  And I never really understood just how amazingly nutritious mushrooms are until I downloaded this incredible nutrition software and bought a food scale and started really keeping an informed watch on what I was eating and what nutrients the food gave me and what I was missing.  Dude, you eat mushrooms and those bad boys give tyou SO MUCH NUTRITON for almost no calories at all.  It's incredible.  No WONDER Dr. Fuhrman pushes mushroom eating in abundance.

So here is another website discussing this book  and then I found a website that has a very large excerpt from the book itself. 

It Truly Is a Miracle

Very few (if any) of you know the story behind my husband's health in the last few years. 

In 2004, my husband went to our insurance company and applied for life insurance.  We'd only ever had the normal life insurance through his employer before that time and so we had NO IDEA what we were in for. 

The insurance company (State Farm) came out to our home (in the form of a nurse) and took weight/blood/vitals.  Then we got a phone call two weeks later.  Or, at least, I picked up the phone two weeks later and had to talk to a State Farm person who was not allowed to talk to me due to "privacy concerns" (he's my HUSBAND!!!!).  The State Farm person informed me that she couldn't tell me anything about it, but that my husband's insurance application wasn't just being DENIED, but that we needed to take him to a doctor.  Like, NOW.

Um, okay. 

So I yelled and screamed at anyone I could in State Farm in order to have them fax whatever the hell it was that was so incredibly awful to a doctor that we knew so that SOMEONE SOMEWHERE could tell us what was going on. 

Long and short of it:  he had shockingly high blood test results that indicated that his liver was in trouble. 

But we didn't drink.  And he'd been vaccinated against everything in the world (aka: every Hepatitis he could).  So we started down the path of trying to find out what was wrong with him and what could be done about it.

Our journey took us through a few specialists in the Orlando area (where we live) and when it became obvious that they all wanted to do surgery (a liver biopsy) I didn't even hesitate:  we took him to the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida.

This was all three years ago, in 2004.

So we were accepted by the Liver Transplant Center at the Mayo Clinic and he went through rigorous diagnostic testing (and a liver biopsy) and at the end of it all he was diagnosed with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease  that had actually gone even further and turned into what is called NASH or non-alcoholic steatohepatitis. 

In translation, his liver was sick and not functioning well.  My husband had acquired nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, which means that a layer of fat had attached itself in and around the liver.  His liver wasn't working well and his disease had progressed an extra step to being nonalcoholic steatohepatitis.  His liver was inflamed and he was beginning to form scar tissue. 

His doctor, as all doctors are at Mayo, was wonderful and kind and helpful.  He basically told my husband, look.  You're 34 years old.  Your liver is unhappy.  This won't kill you immediately but it will play a role in killing you in early middle life.  You need to lose weight and try to keep this from getting worse.  Your liver is already inflamed and gathering scar tissue.  This is serious.

But the doctor didn't have much ability to tell us HOW my husband should lose weight.  The doctor, I would like to point out, was quite trim himself and didn't look like anyone who struggles to maintain a healthy weight. 

Telling someone randomly that there's something wrong with them and that they need to lose weight is just so.... vague.  Lose weight?  How? 

So my husband and I sort of wandered around in a fog for a while.  The only way I'd ever lost weight in my life was with Atkins and it would be just as helpful to cure my husband's liver disease as it would be to cure my high cholesterol!!  But it was the only way I'd ever lost weight!  What to do??

Well, we slowly made changes.  We started eating more fruits and vegetables and started losing weight.  It' s been a real journey, trying to figure out what will work for us.  I've tried to talk about it in different places on my blog and I'm not done yet, but since this is a new post I'll try to sum up what my husband did, because it was different from what I did.

But first, let's talk about the results.

Above, you see the liver value bloodwork function markers, which are the AST, ALT and GGT.  Three years ago, when we learned that my husband's liver was in trouble, you can see that his values were WAY above normal.

Last week he had to go to a physical for his job, and they took his blood, which will have been the first time since his liver diagnosis that we've checked to see where he is health-wise.  (Why did we wait so long?  I don't know and can't answer that.  I suppose it's because we were scared?  But there was no need to be!)  And look at what God and his diet have done! 

This shows that his liver is now functioning BEAUTIFULLY.  Isn't that a miracle?  And, just as an added bonus, I threw in his cholesterol (which had been elevated but not too high) and his Triglycerides, both of which have changed significantly for the better.

I just cannot even tell you how happy we are that my husband's liver is healthy again.  And it's all, and I mean ALL due to lifestyle changes.

It was very and I mean VERY slow-going.  I would say that we didn't change much of anything the first few months - at least- after his diagnosis.  It was too overwhelming.  We ate like normal Americans who eat the SAD (Standard American Diet).  We LOVED barbecue and Mexican food.  We LOVED meat/potatoes/bread/desserts.  My husband's favorite meal, that I fixed all the time, was roast and mashed potatoes and homemade yeast rolls from scratch.  With gravy from scratch.  I cooked like that Every. Single. Night.   In fact, my husband was almost addicted to ice cream.  Ice cream was his major weakness and now he does his absolute best to stay away from dairy, and I'm thinking that staying away from dairy probably was half the battle of bringing down his liver disease!

We were both overweight.  As I've written before, my BMI was 32.7 and his was 37.5!  At this point, he has lost 77 pounds since his 2004 liver diagnosis, and his BMI is now 26.8 while mine is 18.5. 

So, anyway, initially we just started trying to incorporate more fruits and vegetables into our diets.  He didn't care as much for steamed vegetables, though he would eat them, but he would eat salads in abundance and he would eat fruits.  We started trying to cut back on meat, which we basically ate for three meals a day, and we did all of this slowly. 

Now he and I, even though we live 4,000 miles away from each other, have transitioned into basically a no-fat vegan diet (him less strict in this than I have been).  It's been during this transition and weight loss that my husband's body has healed itself, which our bodies desperately want to do if we will just let them.  He actually has eaten eggs for breakfast some mornings (so while my diet is almost 100% vegan his has been vegan but with eggs in the morning and the occasional meat dish but not very often). 

So- his diet has been raw and cooked vegetables, salads, fruits, sometimes eggs, never dairy, maybe once a month meat, oatmeal, soy products (like soymilk and soy protein powder for fruit smoothies in the blender) beans (lots of beans and bean products like refried beans and beans on his salad) and brown rice.  It's pretty much what you'll find in:

Eat to Live by Joel Fuhrman.  This book sets forth the way to recover from nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and steatohepatitis (as well as obesity and high cholesterol and Triglyceride levels) as evidenced by me and my husband.

 

You can read more about Dr. Furhman's way of eating here  and Dr. Fuhrman also has a website. I got his book out of the library, together with other books about holistic dieting by maximizing fruit and vegetable intake:  dieting and healing for wellness.  Other forms of this kind of diet are discussed in books by Dr. McDougall  and a diet by Dr. Dean Ornish. But, in the end, our weight loss and health gain journey is ours and ours alone.  Each of us must walk that journey for ourselves and figure out, along the way, what will and will not work for us. 

It truly is a miracle.  My husband's health has been restored by walking away from how we used to eat and embracing a new way of eating.  Praise God! 

And here's a picture of my husband, me and Youngest taken a few months ago:

Yummy Vegetables! (The Weight Loss Saga, Part II)

So a while ago I posted that I've lost a lot of weight  and I posted a little bit of the beginning of that journey... my journey... for of course, anyone who loses weight will do it in different ways.  Like I said before, initially (at the beginning of my weight loss journey) I lost weight while juicing fruits and vegetables in a juicer machine dealie. 

After a while of this, I found that I had lost weight (I don't specifically recall how much, but it was probably 10 pounds or so) but was easily hungered (juice, while fresh and extremely good for you, didn't fill me up or make me feel full). 

At that point, I had lost probably 15-20 pounds (of the 85 that I have now lost) and I went and had my blood work redone.  I found that my cholesterol/triglycerides had improved somewhat and I could tell that I was getting healthier. 

Before I had begun dieting, I hadn't had much love (or any, pretty much) for fruits or vegetables, unless, like most America, you counted french fries and ketchup.  Veggies and fruits did nothing for me.  I didn't know how to fix them, I didn't really want to eat them... I had some fruit around for my youngest son to eat, but I certainly wasn't a fruit or vegetable eating kind of person.

All this changed when I began to juice.  So when I began to juice, I began to fall in love with fresh produce.  It was YUMMY!  And Good For You!

So, I knew that as I was transitioning out of juicing that I wanted to keep a diet incredibly rich with fruits and vegetables (in fact, almost exclusively fruits and vegetables because not only was I trying to lose weight, I was also trying to reign in my out-of-control cholesterol)... so, basically, instead of juicing my fresh fruits and vegetables, I began to just eat them raw.

Ah, raw foodism.  I merrily slid into it for quite a while.  Throughout the day, I would eat raw fruits, raw vegetables and salads like you would NOT BELIEVE.  Now, I wasn't die-hard enough to not use dressings or anything (there are, actually, raw foodist people who won't even use normal salad dressings because they aren't raw/ have processed junk, etc., but I can't force down a salad without dressing.  In fact, my favorite dressing right now is balsamic vinegar.  Oh my goodness, it makes an amazing salad dressing and even if you DRENCH the salad in it it's something like 25 calories, total.  But the balsamic vinegar I'm talking about is insanely expensive, not the type you buy in the grocery store for $2 a bottle.  But I digress.), but I would say that for a nice clip of time (a few months?) my diet was almost exclusively raw fruits and vegetables... with some cooked veggies thrown in, like baked sweet potatoes or steamed broccoli.   

And man!  If you vary your intake, you can eat as super-varied and incredibly yummy (and insanely healthful) diet of raw foods.   It's pretty impressive.  In fact, I would say that at least 60% of the weight I've lost I lost eating a diet almost entirely of raw foods... perhaps 70% raw and 30% cooked vegetables.  Tons of variety and almost strictly vegan (no animal products/milk products as those are the cholesterol problem foods). 

What can you eat on a raw foods diet?!? 

I'm glad you asked.

All morning I would eat fruit.  Fruit, fruit, fruit.  Oh!  How I fell in love with fruit!  Apples, pineapple, honeydew, cantaloupe, grapes, bananas (easy on them, though)... and then, there's CITRUS!  Be still my heart- I would do almost anything for a good navel orange. 

And salads!  Oh my goodness, I just experimented and learned what, to me, made a good salad.  I always start with raw spinach (usually baby spinach) because you just can't imagine how incredibly jam-packed with nutrients raw spinach is.  I do probably 70% raw spinach leaves to 30% other lettuce leaves and then the sky is the limit! 

I always include a lot of mushrooms because, believe it or not, mushrooms (and spinach!) have a TON of nutrients (did you know that vegetables have tons and tons of protein but it's protein that doesn't also come with cholesterol like you get from animal products?) and protein and almost no calories at all.  I also load tomatoes on my salads, for they have very few calories and are oh-so-tasty. 

Oh!  And I forgot to mention beans.  Usually on each salad I pile on some beans (canned, no-sodium-added... I like the cannellini beans and my husband likes black beans) because beans are incredibly good for you and have tons of protein. 

Just writing this is making me hungry.

Anyway, then during the day I would always have some cooked vegetable, like broccoli, cauliflower, sweet potato, cabbage- you name it- but you have to be very careful here.  The butter or butter-replacement you would want to put on these carry just as much calories as the veggie you're about to eat.  BEWARE!  It's the same with salad dressings.  You can't BELIEVE how many calories salad dressings pack.  So if you're having your veggies for weight loss, do NOT add calories.

With broccoli, cover the broccoli (after you steam it) with the juice from half a lemon and then with Mrs. Dash non-salt seasoning.  With cauliflower, cover with some salt and lots of pepper.  Find salad dressings that are incredibly low in calories.  Be smart about your calorie intake in the form of dressings and vegetable toppings.

Adhering to this form of way of eating (with a few departures here and there but this is pretty much it) is how I dropped the weight.  This way of eating, like I said earlier, is discussed in Dr. Joel Fuhrman's book Eat to Live:

This is an absolutely excellent book. 

I actually found it while I was probably 60% done with my weight loss journey, but it helped cement in my mind what I was trying to do and why (and that what I was doing was, in fact, healthful and beneficial).   When I found this book, I actually added the beans to my salads (Dr. Fuhrman wants you to eat lots of beans- upwards of a cup of them a day - but watch out!  Most canned beans include a horrific amount of added sodium so either find no-sodium-added beans or try to find beans that have less sodium than others or make your own).

_________________________________________________

Now that I am basically done with losing weight, I am finding that I am at a point where I never even imagined, and that is the point of trying to learn (or teach myself) how to neither lose weight or gain weight, but how to maintain my weight.

This is tricky.

All my life, I've either gained weight or lost weight.  I've never, ever maintained.  And since, for the last two years, I've been gung-ho (especially the last year) with losing weight, slowly easing up on the weight loss and trying to transition into the weight maintenance phase is intimidating (scary, actually) because know the statistics: 

Everyone Who Loses Weight Gains It All Back, And Then Some.

I'm sure you've read those articles, right?  Cheery little articles about how you might as well not even try to lose weight because three years from now you'll just end up fatter than you were before you started dieting.  Grand.

So, the question for me becomes, now what?  What modifications will I be making in order to stop losing but not gain??

Well, at this point I'm just starting this new phase of my journey, so I'll have to get back to you on that.  I can speak intelligently and with authority on losing large amounts of weight; now I'll just have to find my own way and report back as I go with my progress. 

In the meantime, I made veggie soup tonight and it will be breakfast or lunch or dinner or whatever throughout the week for me (and my oldest son, who will eat it). 

I cannot tell you how comforting it is to have this HUGE, GIGANTIC container of vegetable soup in my fridge.  This means that, when I'm hungry, I can dip in a get a bowlful and eat it with a salad on the side and some fruit for dessert.   To me, that is one of the most perfect meals.

I'll have to post another day on what I use and how I use it, for this is a no fat vegetable soup with Eastern overtones (I use wakame (sea vegetables) and miso, which are just soooooooo yummy in soup!).   But right now my youngest son is waiting to be read to.  Cute little cutiepie that he is, I cannot ignore him.

Could YOU say no to this begging, pleading little face?

 

Update

In the post below, last night I told you the story of a 16 year old neighbor boy who waited in line for FIVE HOURS - until even after midnight - on a school night because a brand new video game (Halo 3) was coming out - and then was allowed to stay up ALL NIGHT LONG on a SCHOOL NIGHT to play it and was allowed to stay home from school the next day in order to play it... well...

... I have and Update on the situation.

Turns out:  late yesterday morning, his Xbox

BROKE.

And so he has to send it back to the company to have it repaired. 

It will be gone, for repairs, for a month.

Question:  is it wrong of me to think this is poetic justice??

You have GOT to be kidding me

We interrupt this new and improved attitude on my blog in order to bring you up to speed on the latest happenings in my neighborhood.

Two houses down from us, there is a 16 year old high school boy that my 13 year old frequently plays with.

Last night, HALO 3 (if you're fortunate enough to not know what this is, it's a video game) came out on sale at midnight.

This 16 year old boy was out, on a school night, at midnight and beyond, buying HALO 3 and now he's home, during the day, during school hours, playing the game.  Which is all completely and totally fine with his parents (!!!!!!!).

What kind of a world IS THIS???  When parents allow their children to stay up all night on a streetcorner in front of Best Buy or wherever (and since this guy isn't 17 yet, he had to have a 17 year old friend with him last night in order to show ID to buy the game) on a SCHOOL NIGHT and then skip school the next day in order to play the new video game?!?!?!

GAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!