No more diet drinks for me

I’ve never gotten into the habit of drinking Coke or other carbonated beverages (aka pop, soft drinks, etc.) the way some people do - as if they were water. I might have one a week, sometimes more, sometimes less. But I’ve always known there was nothing good about it. With a chocolate bar, you can at least claim the benefits of the peanuts or almonds, maybe even the chocolate. With drinks that are basically sugar and chemicals, not so much.

So when I decided I needed to lose weight, it wasn’t a huge deal to switch to the diet variety. Yeah, it took a while to get used to the taste difference. But I added some lime  to my Coke or Pepsi and things weren’t too bad, although I knew inside I was just substituting one bad thing for another. It was even better when I discovered diet A & W root beer, my drink of choice.

And then the news. Diet drinks are actually worse than sugar drinks. And they may make losing weight more difficult. What to do?

As I said, I’d known all along that every drink of pop I took was like putting garbage in my body instead of nutrients. So, what to do? Stick to tea, my usual drink (green, black, or herbal)? But now and then I like something cold, especially when I go out for lunch or dinner. Water? Fruit juice? Iced tea? Water?

Water can get a bit boring, even with lemon or lime. And I don’t like the carbonated water stuff. Fruit juice has too many calories. Iced tea? I live in a country where there is no such thing as unsweetened iced tea. Well, unless you make it yourself. So I never order iced tea or buy the bottled variety. Sugar water here we come. (I do drink unsweetened iced tea as soon as I get into a state where they serve it.)

So, my solution? Tomato juice. No, not very original. But when you add a slice of lemon and sip it slowly, it’s actually not bad at all. And the best thing is, despite adding virtually no calories, it’s actually good for you!

Last week I went out for dinner, and while the other ladies ordered iced tea and put down all that sugar, I drank two glasses of tomato juice with lemon and felt not only virtuous but satisfied.

Diet beverages? You can keep them. Sugar syrup? Not me. I’m sipping healthy these days.

Frank Thomas released by Blue Jays

I’m sorry that Frank had to go. I really like the idea having a team that sticks together and wins. And I hate the idea of people being moved around the way they are - not only the players, but their families. However, keeping players together on one team just doesn’t seem to be very realistic these days. Sports such as baseball, hockey, basketball seem to be about the strategy of getting the right mix of players and coaches as much as anything else.

However, I was astonished and very unhappy by the way that Frank Thomas reacted to the initial benching by John Gibbons.  Maybe he knew more that was said to the public, but what happened to acting for the good of the team? John Macdonald seems to understand that. Jose Calderon understands it to the max! All I heard from Thomas was me, me, me. So I’m not upset about seeing him go. If he can’t handle being benched for a while to see if that shakes things up and gets the team winning without spouting off to the media and refusing to sit with the team, then, in my books as well as Riccardi’s, he’s out of here.

Bonds - I hope not. We don’t need that circus coming to town. Let’s just focus on baseball for a while and see what the players we have in the organization can do. So far, I’m liking a lot of what I’m seeing. They’re playing a bit of small ball, trying to mix it up and see what they can generate without waiting for the home run. I like that. A lot.  Go Jays

Whose responsibility is the obesity epidemic?

Years ago, a wonderful new commodity was born. White bread. And the housewives thought it was so light and such a wonderful appealing colour that they flocked to the stores to buy it. And then Kraft developed a pasta dinner that only took minutes to prepare. And so on and so forth. It wasn’t until years later that people began to wonder if maybe the white bread and the packaged meals weren’t as good as the original ones. But by then it was too late: the idea of fast foods, packaged foods, and giving the public whatever it will buy was already entrenched in the North American market.

I grew up eating white bread. My mother had no idea that it wasn’t as good for me as whole wheat bread would have been. I also grew up on iceberg lettuce, because, again, she had no idea it wasn’t as good as Romaine or other darker varieties. We had Kraft dinner as a main meal, a special meal, a treat. Now and again, we had canned Chinese with the small friend noodles, also in a can, also as a treat. She didn’t need it as a timesaver because she was a homemaker who only worked a few hours a week, usually on Saturdays, in the store my dad owned. Her focus in life at that time was making a home for my dad and me. She would have been horrified if she’d known the food she gave me wasn’t good for me. (She also let me eat handfuls of raisins, which resulted in my having to have numerous fillings in my teeth before I was six years old. Of course, no one realized that it was the raisins causing the decay.)

What am I trying to say here? Just that I am certain there are many people in our current society just like my mother, trusting the people who manufacture the products, and whoever regulates what is sold, to guard their health and care for them. Naive? Maybe. Foolish? Definitely. But, I believe, real.

How many of us realize that when we walk into a department store, drug store, convenience store, restaurant, grocery store - in short, virtually any place where food of some sort is sold - we are going into a zone where our health is at the very bottom of the priority list?

What’s at the top of the list? “What will they buy?” Next is, “What can we do to make them buy more of it?”

The phrase “Consumer Beware” very definitely applies. Somebody out there will sell you anything - and I mean ANYTHING - they think they can get away with. They’re not thinking about your health or what’s good for you. They’re not thinking about the problems obesity is creating for the next generation. They’re thinking, “How can we make more money next quarter?”

Sure, I know not everyone in the food industry is a bad person. Some of them actually care and are trying to come up with healthier foods and ways to create a market for them. But as long as are stores are flooded with “garbage” - and I use this word intentionally - made of sugar and fat and various artificial products and chemicals - and we allow them to push it down our throats by leaving it at the cash registers in easy reach of our children, and offer it on the menus in seductive forms, then we as a society are the ones to blame.

We aren’t uninformed any more. We have information now that tells us what is and isn’t good for our health. We don’t have to accept what we know is wrong. We need to act while there is still a chance to turn things around for the coming generation, like the four-year-old girl I saw yesterday who became nearly hysterical when her dad told her she couldn’t have the package of candy that she was grabbing for with all her might. But don’t worry. The problem wasn’t that he wouldn’t get her the candy; it was merely that she didn’t realize her package was already paid for and in the bag, while the one she was reaching for as if her life depended on it belonged to the next little girl in the lineup, who had also picked hers up on the shelf beside the checkout counter, and managed to cajole her grandmother into buying it for her.

Glitter of Diamonds review

I’m happy this morning because I just found out about a new review of Glitter of Diamonds on The Suspense Zone. I love the last paragraph of the review, because it sums up what my goal in writing the Manziuk and Ryan books is - to mimic, in a good way, and in today’s world, the style of my favorite author, Georgette Heyer.

“Glitter of Diamonds, second in the Manziuk and Ryan mystery series by award-winning Canadian journalist, author and speaker, N. J. Lindquist, continues with a finely drawn police procedural written in the style of Georgette Heyer, long considered queen of the British mystery genre.’ Just as her character Rico is a fierce competitor, Lindquist’s appealing characters, creative plot and classic Agatha Christie style writing make her a fierce contender for Heyer’s reputation.”

You can read if the review at The Suspense Zone

Or you can read the first chapter of Glitter of Diamonds.

Fat vs Thin

After watching “I Can Make You Thin” with Paul McKenna, I found myself thinking about words and their meanings, and I suddenly realized that we don’t actually have a word for “just right.”

“Fat” is never a positive word when used in North America to describe a human being. The word for “too fat” is “obese,” but being “fat” in any way is never perceived as a good condition. And doctors will say it’s isn’t healthy for individuals to be “fat.”

Since “thin” is theoretically the opposite of “fat,” in my mind, “thin” should also be a negative word. Yes, we might say “too thin” or maybe “anorexic” or “malnourished” to describe someone who is underweight. But the reality is that in our context, we tend to think of “thin” as a good thing. Ergo, the title of the TV show, “I Can Make you Thin.”

Who decides where fat ends and thin begins, or vice versa? And where do you draw the line between “thin” and “too thin”?

I don’t want to be thin. And I don’t want to be fat. What i want is to be healthy and just right for my height and age.

I propose we need another word that describes that middle ground between “thin” and “fat” - because in reality, the human body should be neither “fat” nor “thin,” but somewhere in the middle - in that area where the the BMI tells me I should be. “Fit?” “Healthy?”

Stopping Cravings by Negative Association

I’ve been thinking more about what Paul McKenna said last week about losing weight by taking control of your cravings through associating a very negative taste (rotten, with worms, etc.) with whatever it is you crave. (I wrote about that in my last blog.)

I was struck by a memory from long ago. It’s not about eating, but it is about a similar craving.

I was in my early teens when my father stopped smoking. To his disgust, neither my mother nor I noticed for two weeks. He finally had to tell us. Shows you how observant we were, because he’d been smoking at least a pack a day for his entire adult life.

The youngest of 13, his older brothers had initiated him in the manly rite out behind the barn when he was seven or eight. And he likely would have kept on smoking a pack a day except that someone put together a documentary that he watched on television one night. The documentary basically showed pictures of what smoking did to your lungs.

As my dad watched it, all desire to continue smoking died. Every time he thought about picking up a cigarette, he had a vivid mental image of those pictures of what smoking would do to his lungs, and he refused. To my knowledge, he never smoked another cigarette.

I know this wouldn’t work for everyone, but it certainly worked for him.

Hmm. I don’t have pictures, but ‘m thinking about what eating lots of sugary and other high calorie food will do to my body. Not a good picture. Enough to keep me from eating the wrong foods, or more than I need to be healthy? We’ll see.

Thoughts on TLC’s “I Can Make You Thin”

I started watching this program last week, kind of by accident.

Along with millions of other people, I hit a certain poundage at few years ago, and said, “this far and no further!” Since then, I’ve been trying to get to what I believe is a healthy weight.  Not so much that i want to be thin as I want to be fit.

Consequently, over the last few years, starting at 175, I’ve lost 35 pounds, gained back 10, then another 5, lost it, gained it back, etc. I’ve never hit my goal weight which is somewhere in the 125 to 135 range - I believe I’ll know I’m there when I hit it.

Last night’s show was on cravings, and host Paul McKenna tried to have us associate something negative and yucky with the foods we most crave, while balancing that with thoughts about something that made us feel good but didn’t involve eating. The idea being that when one has a craving, one brings in the negative thoughts and then follows that with the positive ones, and the craving will simply fade away.

The most interesting thing Paul said on this week’s show was that the imagination is more powerful than the will. We want the food not because we need it, but because we are imagining how wonderful it will taste or how happy it will make us feel. When we can break that thought - for example, by having us think, even for a moment, that maybe it won’t taste all that great - we have a chance at controlling the desire.

That exercise brought to my mind the time I ate some dates that had gone bad. I’ve always loved dates (along with pretty well anything with lots of sugar and sweetness). And I don’t think I ever checked to see they were fresh - I just popped a couple them into my mouth.

It took only seconds to realize that the dates tasted absolutely horrible. I started gagging and quickly spit them out. But the taste remained in my mouth. I drank some water and then found something else to eat just to try to take the taste away.

I didn’t eat dates again for at least three months. And then I was very cautious. The funny thing is that even though that happened over 40 years ago, to this day, I never have dates without remembering that one time they tasted so terrible, and I always kind of prepare myself for the worst before I eat one.

So, now I have to convince my mind that eating what I crave (usually chocolate or other sugary things) isn’t all my imagination tells me it will be. Intellectually, I know that. I’ve had times where I ate something thinking it would make me feel better and it didn’t. But for now, I’m going to use my imagination to help my willpower, every time I crave something my body doesn’t need, I’m going to remember how those dates tasted, and then I’m going to remember how great I feel when I can put on a smashing new outfit that’s a single digit size.

More on the TLC program, I Can Make You Thin.

2 Simple Rules for Getting in Shape

1. Eat only what your body actually needs. Would you stuff sugar in your car’s gasoline tank? Give a bowl of it to your cat or dog? No? Then why put it inside your mouth? Sure it tastes good. Kind of. But it isn’t doing you a bit of good. We need to forget about all the external reasons for eating (taste, appearance, smell, texture) and focus on what our bodies actually require to work properly. No, we don’t have to turn into Seven of Nine; but we can learn to like things that are actually good for us.

2. Move. If you sit all day, you’re doing yourself a huge disservice. Bodies weren’t meant to stay in one place all day. You have to move. There is a dynamite article in the April, 2008 edition of Nutrition Action called “Chair Today, Gone Tomorrow,” that I urge everyone to read. The bottom-line is that you don’t have to run marathons or sweat a lot. You just need to move. Walk on your treadmill at 1.5 miles an hour while you read or talk on the phone. take the stairs. Go window shopping. The bottom line is that any kind of movement is better than no movement at all.

And yes, I’m doing it. Got plans to make my whole house more suited to my body’s needs.

Eating Ourselves to Death - Kaching!

What’s on my mind right now is getting my physical body in shape to do the things I still want to do. In other words, I want to be as fit and healthy as possible.

So - what to do?

I think I’ve read enough books and magazines on the subject to write my own book. However, I’m no expert and don’t claim to be. I just know that common sense helps. Well, in a culture where being out of shape has become the norm, a little common sense certainly can’t hurt.

So, all my processing of information has come to this:

1. The majority of food manufactures are out to make money. In other words, if we will eat it, they will make it. Who cares if we’re feeding ourselves and our children garbage as long as we keep putting our money in their safes?

2. If people will buy it, the stores will sell it. Why else do we find acres of junk food in department stores and pharmacies and grocery stores? Especially right at the counter where small children can access it and beg their mothers for it? Again, the bottom line is the money going into the cash registers.

3. Restaurants are also in the business of making money. And people come back for what they like, no matter how healthy (or unhealthy) it is. So who cares that the sauce is mostly butter and that many entrees and desserts have more calories, saturated fats and sugar than anyone needs in a day?

4. It’s up to us, as individuals, parents, and citizens, to navigate this minefield of food that isn’t food and somehow find a way to eat healthy and keep fit.

How can we do that? I’m planning to post some of my thoughts in the next few weeks.

Stop the world, I want to get off!

Do you ever have a feeling that things are closing in on you? That you just can’t keep up? That you really need the world to just stop for a day or two so you can catch up?

I’ve been getting that feeling way too often lately. There seems to be too much technology I don’t even begin to understand. Too many opportunities - how do I choose? Too many things I should read. Too much music for me to ever listen to. More television channels than I could ever check out. More movies than I could ever watch. So much information about events and politics and accidents and crime and wars and… I am overwhelmed. I just want to put my hands over my ears and hide under a blanket until it all goes away.

Except it doesn’t go away. Rather, each passing minute adds more and more things to the onslaught, and I am adrift in an ocean of words and pictures and feelings and details - so many details. I am dizzy and bewildered.

What can I do? I can’t jump off - become a hermit and hide away. letting the world pass me by.

I can’t keep using all my energy to try to keep up, knowing I will surely fail, and becoming more and more tired.

Maybe I can just take a few minutes to calm down and remember that God is still in control, and that, despite the multitude of things  coming at me at an increasingly fast pace, he not only knows everything there is to know about all of them, but he knows everything from the past, present and future. And if I ask him to help me discern his will and guide me, I’ll be able to choose to keep up with only those things which  are necessary for me to carry out his will for my life. And all the rest will eventually fade away into the background where it belongs.