Duncan's Blog

"You eat dinner for breakfast? Now that's plain weird."
The first time I had heard this from someone, I wanted to jump through the telephone wire, land in her kitchen, and give her a good ZsaZsa Gabor smack (the kind that is heard AROUND THE WORLD).
So, why all the fuss over a stupid comment made by someone who has diarrhea of the mouth?
Glad you asked!
This is from the type of person who likes the listeners to know how educated and well-read she is. I infrequently will call her on her blah-blah-blah. I'll ask questions or make statements such as, "I don't know where that came from. The literature is not robust on that subject matter," or "What was your primary source and when were these findings published? Also, was it done by a blind study and were confounding variables included?"
Most of the time, however, I simply let her be. She is retired and she has scant others outside her Yahoo! usergroups who give the proverbial rat's ass.
I take it somewhat personally because at this time in my life I am actually focusing on body image. Over the past year and a half, I have lost somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-55 pounds. It's been slow and there have been times when the weight bounces up and down within a five-pound range making the chart look like an infinite expression of a sine wave.
The CDC calls me overweight and I don't like it. Yes, I DO care what the CDC's non-sentient reports think of me. I present myself as a healthcare worker and should be an example for others.
So, I have told Miss Know-it-All, that the meals I prepare are quite common in the Americas. While mind contain little to no meat, I manage to get the needed protein with beans and vegetables. I also remind her that she's not being invited to the table and also that this is MY story and that she should save her questions for the end.
Oddly enough, she has been called boring based on her repeated diet of toast, two eggs, and flavored coffee with 2% milk. Shrug. She, by contrast, is not interested in body image and is of the mind that anyone who is is either narcissistic or a sufferer of some obsessive compulsive disorder. I have also reminded her that she has not been educated as a diagnostician and should keep her unprofessional comments to herself. But... I've known her for a long time and she has become like that annoying family member whom one cannot not invite to the function.

No, not English Football League. For me it's English as a First Language.
This past weekend I was on the phone for well over 3/4-hour with the cable company clerks. I had told them for months that the bills are outrageous and that they needed to do something about it. They countered with, "You are already getting the lowest possible package that includes discounts that will soon expire."
"Fine then," I said. "Cancel my TV. Just give me cable."
She went into a panic.
She told me that she needed to confer with her colleagues.
(PUT ON MAKE-BELIEVE HOLD)
She came back with another package of 15 TV channels plus the standard non-cable ones.
I told her that my television viewing is spontaneous and that I didn't know the channels by name or by number anymore. She didn't understand what I meant. Again, she repeated the 15 channel option.
AGAIN I told her that I would not be put on the spot to make a decision of such magnitude based on options that I did not or could not understand since I don't know what programming belongs to which stations.
Again, she went was overcome by a wave of dumb-a** and said she didn't understand.
I told her that it would be easier to disconnect the television. Stop transmitting. Stop charging. Make sure you still continue to provide me with your crappy Internet service.
She reminded me of the 15 channels that could be mind with a simple selection.
I gave her a frustrated, ¡Ave María purísima!, ¿de qué clase de estupidez vienes? She finally got the hint. I was told that the change would be reflected on the online bill in 48-72 hours.
The anticipation is killing me.

I don't drink. I don't smoke. I take pharmaceuticals to combat hypercholesterolemia, to act as an antihypertensive, as well as to reduce the signs and symptoms of psoriasis. There! You've got my medical history.
My two main focuses throughout the waking hours of the day include watching my food intake and recording my money outlay. This is accomplished by maintaining a day journal for expenses and recording a food diary for daily nutrition. Most Americans I know don't do either. Measuring or weighing food seems abhorrent to the folks I know who are not concerned with their personal nutrition or caloric intake. (I get a good laugh when those who are mortified claim to be members of the science community... as if they had never seen a beaker or graduated cylinder in their vocation!).
I don't generally ask for affirmation of this activity. I also don't share it much because I am not interested in being the spokesperson for something I consider to be moderately virtuous and I also don't EVER want to be the victim of someone else's nay-saying or poo-pooing something that is part of my life or lifestyle.
The calorie counting is based on looking at a set number of calories one needs to live and thrive throughout the day. It's pretty light-weight math. Say one considers a 1,200 KCal diet per day. If that same one eats three meals per day, then each meal would average 400 KCals each. If one were to eat four meals per day, then each meal would average 300 KCals each. Of course, there are some who eat smaller amounts and spread it out throughout the day... In those instances, the same formula would apply:

TOTAL DAILY CALORIE ALLOWANCE ÷ NUMBER OF DAILY MEALS = CALORIE ALLOWANCE PER MEAL​

It has been useful and seems to work well for me. I have lost somewhere between 50 and 55 pounds over one and a half years. I'm in a period of maintenance now. Maybe I am not at the goal, but I just am not losing more right now. So I am looking at other things that might be assistive in the equation such as higher levels of physical activity within my means or a possible change in the actual food choices so that micro-nutrients could work more effectively in the weight loss process. Fortunately, I am not diagnosed with any other health issues other than those I had mentioned and those two can be treated with small, daily doses of medicines.
Yesterday I was invited to socialize with friends over meals. I went to the Farmers' Market and did some mild grazing (tasting the pink lady apples and the cara cara oranges).
Later I had lunch at a neighborhood café with a friend. The lightest item on the menu (except for Romaine lettuce salad) was a turkey sandwich. It was on a baguette and it pushed the calorie count up. Could I have split the sandwich in half and taken the other half home? Yes. That would have been sensible. But I didn't. Oh, and before I forget, I wanted to know what the soup du jour was and--when I was told that they had not made any soup on that jour--I opted to exchange the non-existent soup for a toasted bagel with cream cheese. (The bagel, sadly, was not toasted, but that is small fry and not something worthy of complaint).
The meal was 530 calories. That's a guess. And I guess on the low side. I feel helpless when I eat out since most restaurants and cafés opt not to offer the calorie count of their meals. I don't hold that against them.
That evening I went to a friend's home for ossobuco made in an electric slow cooker. I brought a baguette from the Farmers' Market and a bottle of red from Cost Plus/World Market (n.b. the boy don't drink). That meal of ossobuco, pasta, asparagus, and baguette was followed by fat-free vanilla ice cream, Cool Whip, and blueberries. In my estimation/guesstimation, it rang up as 1,380 calories. Assuming, arguendo, a daily intake of 1,200 calories, this one meal would add to the sum of the day with a 115% increase of caloric intake.
Why all the fuss? What's the big deal? No harm done, right?
What bothers me so is that the 'damage' is done during times when I am socializing with others. It is as if I were allowing myself to go off the deep end in order to enjoy the moment with my friends/acquaintances. And then I have to deal with the struggle of getting myself back on track, pulling myself of by my bootstraps, or some other trite, hackneyed cliché that falls on the ear with a dull, sickening thud.
SIGH. So, at the end of the horrific over-indulgence in a Thanksgiving-like food frenzy, I am left saying the words of Scarlet O'Hara, "Tomorrow IS another day!"

In my village there is a cooperative of local farmers that meets on Saturday morning for about 4-5 hours. They sell their produce, eggs, honey, bread, condiments, plants and the like. There are food vendors there as well and often times folks turn it into a social event. Shoppers might come in contact with something they had read about but never seen and then would ask how it is used or prepared.
Organic produce is an occasional treat for me even though I wish I could say it were more of a mainstay in the larder. Truth is, it tends to be more on the pricey side and I am at a point in life when counting pennies is essential. When I DO have organic produce, however, I make a point of saving the shavings and the skin and the cut off tops and bottoms for future stock. There is nothing quite like putting together a plant-based stock when making a dish that requires a little more liquid.
This is also the time of year when I think of eating beets and cabbage. Borscht is a winter delight even if it does get a bit messy to make. My heart goes out to people who do not or cannot eat onions or are phobic that the cruciferous vegetable will make them flatulent. It's a small price to pay for superior roughage!
Saturdays are also days when i do large cooking for the week. I have no problem eating the same foods for meals day after day. Breakfast is normally rice and beans with an egg (poached, fried, soft cooked) and dinner is generally pasta with tomato gravy. Today I made Costa Rican style macaroni which is made with fresh tomatoes, garlic, onion, cilantro, and a cup of the pasta water. It's a simple dish and today's creation was made with fusili.
Going to the farmers' market connects me with a(n) hipper side of myself. It reminds me that fresh is generally the preferred way to go when consuming food. It reminds me that plant-based living should be a greater part of the diet. Following a meatless regimen doesn't mean that everything is going to be raw. One of the dishes from my younger days that should be made more frequently is TVP balls. Texturized vegetable protein has fallen the wayside over the years. It recent times I've noted that soy and soy products are being demonized for their running interference with reproduction. Hmmm.... the Asians seem to be able to produce children with little to no difficulty.
Well, time's a wasting. I have to jump in the douche as my daily ablution, comb and brush my coif, select an ensemble in which to present in the word, and choose my recyclable bags wisely.
Take care the next time you need to do produce shopping and consider a trip to a farmers' market if there is one in your neck of the woods.

"Then, when the meal is over and the last dish eaten, there will be no trace of the ugly occasion."

'The meal is over' is a phrase that i had learned from a dearly departed friend of mine. She, as I, had struggled with a love of food. We loved every kind of carbohydrate under the sun... bread, rice, potatoes, and some of the less popular grains such as barley, farro, oats, and wheat. We also liked the starchy vegetables such as peas and corn.
We were gluttons. The meals that we ate in the 80s and 90s were enough to feed two (or possibly three) people. So how did we ever survive? I brought with me some tools of the weight reduction trade; measuring spoons, measuring cups, and a kitchen scale. Even during the ancient times of the disco and post-disco era, food nutrition was made available. It wasn't mandatory until about 1990, but nutrition could certainly be found in most of the common foods of the time.
So we became conscious of what we ate. We had salads with two meals a day and we included ingredients such as watercress, cabbage, and spinach as well as the usual carrots, celery, tomatoes and mushrooms. We ate steamed fish such as orange roughy, red snapper, Dover sole, halibut, or sea bass. Our chicken choices were breasts with the skins removed. We ate foods in the dairy groups; cheeses and yogurt and we looked at beans, legumes, and pulses.
The foods were measured and by doing this we were able to determine how much protein we were taking in. We could also count the carbohydrates. This wasn't done with high level calculations and the numbers were added daily.
These days we have a MyFitnessPal application that lets you scan food labels or that has an enormous data base of most foods on the planet. The micro-nutrients are tabulated and presented based on the percentage of their consumption. Fancy-schmancy.
But one of the key elements of the food consumption was not so much the grace before meals (neither of us had that practice), but rather the end of the meal. We would conclude by stating, "The meal is over," in case anyone was thinking that there might be room for pie. And then we would say a word or two of thanksgiving. Even though we had disposable income back then, we were always thankful for being able to eat well.
I continue this to this day.