It looks like we’re in for a long, hot summer. For the last few years we’ve had a week of hot weather sometime in May, and then it’s usually just “nice” until the middle to end of June. This year the hot weather started early and stayed. If you’re anything like me, this is the time you really wish you had stuck to all those weightloss goals you set earlier in the year. Those summer fashions and a bathing suit doesn’t look nearly so good hanging off a body that’s almost 200lbs. as it did when I was 145. I also don’t take the heat as well. Being heavier I guess I carry my own internal furnace with me. I’m always surprised when a larger person gets cold easily, as this usually isn’t the norm. Then I look at their lifestyle, and like me they’re pretty sedentary so circulation isn’t all that good. Like I tell my mother “If you’d get up and do something, you wouldn’t be so cold.”

Along with the summer heat comes all the good-for-us food. The berries are in season. The melons are coming in. I love it and have gotten really good at reaching for healthier snacks. (Smashed strawberries over Fatfree ice cream or frozen yogurt and a small slice of angelfood cake is pure heaven and doesn’t set the diet into a tailspin). I add fresh fruit to my yogurt and add more fiber. It’s all good! Unfortunately, it’s also time when you don’t want to cook because of the heat, and potato salad and macaroni salads make the best side dishes.

I am not going to give you a bunch of tips here on how to avoid those things, because I can’t. What I can do is give you a couple of tips to make eating them not so bad.

1) If you find any you like in the supermarkets you can buy just what you need for a meal and then you don’t have a bunch left over that you feel you have to eat. Personally I do this on occasion but I like to have control over my ingredients. When I make it at home not only do I like it better, but I use less fattening ingredients to make it.

Which brings me to tip #2.

I don’t care for the taste of light mayo. All I can taste is the vinegar. Everyone talks about Best Foods or Hellman’s being the best tasting Mayo, but when it comes to the light stuff I have to go with Kraft. What I do is mix half light mayo and half regular mayo in my salads. While they’re still definitely not fatfree, it does shave off quite a few calories and fat grams. If you scramble eggbeaters instead of using real egg, you can shave off even more.

What I’m truly looking for is a “pasta” diet. I’m afraid it wouldn’t get promoted very much as I can already see how unhealthy it would be. The diet would consist of all things pasta, and fruits and veggies, and a guarantee that even with alfredo sauce, I could still lose weight.LOL.

I was going to write about something else today, but came across this in my inbox. I don’t know who wrote it, I wish I did. I would gladly give her credit for expressing so well how I feel.

When I was a child in the 1960s the bathing suit for the mature figure was boned, trussed and reinforced, not so much sewn as engineered. They were built to hold back and uplift and they did a good job.

Today’s stretch fabrics are designed for the prepubescent girl with a figure carved from a potato chip.

The mature woman has a choice-she can either go up front to the maternity department and try on a floral suit with a skirt, coming away looking like a hippopotamus who escaped from Disney’s Fantasia or she can wander around every run of the mill department store trying to make a sensible choice from what amounts to a designer range of florescent rubber bands.

What choice did I have? I wandered around, made my sensible choice and entered the chamber of horrors known as the fitting room.

The first thing I noticed was the extraordinary tensile strength of the stretch material. The Lycra used in bathing costumes was developed, I believe, by NASA to launch small rockets from a slingshot, which give the added bonus that if you manage to actually lever yourself into one, you are protected from shark attacks as any shark taking a swipe at your passing midriff would immediately suffer whiplash. I fought my way into the bathing suit, but as I twanged the shoulder strap in place, I gasped in horror - my boobs had disappeared!

Eventually, I found one boob cowering under my left armpit. It took a while to find the other. At last I located it flattened beside my seventh rib.

The problem is that modern bathing suits have no bra cups. The mature woman is meant to wear her boobs spread across her chest like a speed bump. I realigned my speed bump and lurched toward the mirror to take a full view assessment.

The bathing suit fit all right, but unfortunately it only fit those bits of me willing to stay inside it. The rest of me oozed out rebelliously from top, bottom, and sides. I looked like a lump of play dough wearing undersized cling wrap.

As I tried to work out where all those extra bits had come from, the prepubescent sales girl popped her head through the curtain, ‘Oh, there you are,’ she said, admiring the bathing suit.

I replied that I wasn’t so sure and asked what else she had to show me. I tried on a cream crinkled one that made me look like a lump of masking tape, and a floral two piece which gave the appearance of an over sized napkin in a serving ring.

I struggled into a pair of leopard skin bathers with ragged frills and came out looking like Tarzan’s Jane, pregnant with triplets and having a rough day.

I tried on a black number with a midriff and looked like a jellyfish in mourning.

I tried on a bright pink pair with such a high cut leg I thought I would have to wax my eyebrows to wear them.

Finally, I found a suit that fit…a two-piece affair with a shorts style bottom and a loose blouse-type top.

It was cheap, comfortable, and bulge-friendly, so I bought it. My ridiculous search had a successful outcome, I figured. When I got home, I found a label which read — ‘Material might become transparent in water.’

So, if you happen to be on the beach or near any other body of water this year and I’m there too I’ll be the one in cut off jeans and a t-shirt!

I got a little sidetracked yesterday, but here’s the rest of what I learned about dieting and osteoporosis that I was going to share.

First of all, if you are on any of the drugs that are supposed to help build bone mass, please do your research or talk to your doctor. My mother was on Fosomax and it turns out it was a good thing we kept forgetting to give it to her. I have taken her off it completely and her doctor when I spoke to him about it, wasn’t at all surprised nor did he argue with me about it. Many of these drugs are being found to just make the bone harder, not actually help rebuild, causing complications with women’s jaw bones when they go to the dentist, etc. For more info see my blog at http://www.lauriannsnewlife.blogspot.com

Now for the other stuff. I don’t know how many of you have heard high homo-cysteine levels are the true predictor of strokes vs. cholesterol levels, but it turns out high levels aren’t good for your bones either. Both men and women are twice as likely to suffer from hip fractures when their homo-cysteine levels are elevated. Supplements of folic acid, vitamin B-6, vitamin B-12 and either choline and/or betaine can lower elevated homocysteine levels. By contrast diets high in fatty meats and particularly processed meats like hot dogs, sausages, bologna and pepperoni markedly increase the level of homo-cysteine in the blood for several hours after every high protein meal. Fasting homo-cysteine levels and LDL levels are also elevated in people who eat more fatty animal products and fewer whole grains, fruits, vegetables and nonfat dairy products.

This one’s a tough one for me. Caffeine, especially in women who don’t get the recommended daily allowance of calcium, is a culprit in the loss of bone mass density. I drink a pot before anyone in the house is even awake, which is probably one of the reasons my BMD is already in trouble. The lifetime intake of the amount of caffeine in as little as 2 cups of coffee per day is associated with decreased BMD in older women. It’s also important to make teenagers aware of their dietary choices to protect them in the future. A diet high in meat, with the regular use soft drinks instead of nonfat milk as a beverage, will likely reduce peak bone mass in the young and increase the risk of developing osteoporosis in later years.

A diet of potassium rich fruits and vegetables is also reported to help reduce bone loss. For many this isn’t really an option as some of the prescription drugs for high blood pressure warn against extra potassium. The drug itself causes your body to collect potassium in your system, so be sure to read the warnings on the labels.

Many trace minerals are essential for maintaining bone density. The American diet is so full of white flour, sugar, refined carbohydrates, and refined fats and oils, that we generally don’t get the amount of trace minerals necessary. Here again are where more fruits and vegetables help fill the bill. Whole grains, legumes and dark green vegetables are the best dietary sources of magnesium and supply trace minerals and other factors that may improve bone health.

We all try to switch to more fruits and vegetables when we decide it’s time to lose weight, but there are so many other reasons to do it, the weight really is more of the “icing on the cake” and should happen as a natural side effect. Right now is the season to take advantage of so many wonderful fruits and vegetables that are fresh and make such great snacks. Have you tried getting in your “9 fruits and vegetables” (it used to be 5) a day? There’s hardly room or time to be eating all the “wrong” stuff. LOL.

For more info on magnesium of vitamin D deficeincies, see my blog at http://www.lauriannsnewlife.blogspot.com

Disclaimer: I am in no way a healthcare provider of any  kind and the stuff I pass on here is only from my own research. You should always consider consulting your physician if you plan on making dietary changes.

I try to pay attention. I know that with dieting you have to be careful about losing muscle instead of fat. I’ve heard about that forever! I know that as we get older we lose bone mass which can lead to osteoporosis. I didn’t realize that dieting could slow closely also result in bone loss. Where the heck was I during that class?

I also didn’t realize what an astounding effect a sedentary lifestyle has on bone mass density (BMD). As I read more, the opposite is also true. Excessive exercise also can lead to a lower BMD. I’m sure I won’t have to worry about that being a problem in my case. What I do need to worry about is making sure I do some sort of weight bearing exercise and strength training, as definite results were shown in greater BMD after just one year.

My mother has osteoporosis. One year she fractured her back 3 times and spent most of that year in the hospital. I don’t want to go there.

Other things we were not made aware of, and I still don’t hear about and I have 2 daughters, is how teenage girls involved in athletics and also frequently diet, are at high risk for osteopenia (low bone mineral content), stress fractures and broken bones. It also puts them at risk for early osteoporosis. This isn’t only common in teenage girls, but men and boys as well who frequently diet.

These are things that seem to help prevent or help cause osteoporosis. First let me say, with all the hype about soy products, there doesn’t seem to be enough evidence of it really doing any good to warrant using soy for treating osteoporosis. There is the suggestion that vegans, etc. use soy milk as a substitute for cow’s milk for calcium and vitamin D.

We all know how important calcium is. That is a given. Luckily there are many ways to get the calcium we need, but remember that vitamin D is necessary for absorption. If you’re getting your calcium from sources other than milk fortified with vitamin D, it’s probably essential to be taking a vitamin D supplement. We should be getting between 1300 and 1500mg. of calcium per day.

Too much Vitamin A may contribute to Osteoporosis. In Norway and Sweden they fortify low fat milk and margarine with retinol. They have seemed to find that the added retinol is at least partly responsible for osteoporosis in these two countries, along with cod liver oil. They advise people at risk of osteoporosis to limit their intake of pre-formed vitamin A (retinol) to the RDA level of 800 RE or 0.8 mg of retinol per day. This means food supplements with retinol should be avoided, as should supplements of cod liver oil. Now there is a slight conflict here in the way that most dairy products also contain retinol. A better way of getting your vitamin D is to go get some sunshine every day. 10-15 min. should be enough and not to much to harm you.

One I was surprised to hear about that isn’t widely publicized is Vitamin K, or the lack there of contributing to bone loss. Unfortunately if you’re on blood thinners, this is probably not a good solution for you. A recent meta-analysis examined 7 studies in which elderly subjects were given either 15 (one study) or 45mg of vitamin K2 or a placebo. Remarkably those taking the supplements of vitamin K had reductions in hip fractures of 77% compared to those given a placebo. Fractures of the vertebrae were cut by 60% and all other fractures were reduced by 81%. If you’re following a good healthy diet, you should be getting vitamin K from all those green leafy veggies you’re eating.

Tomorrow I’ll go into the minerals etc. for preventing osteoporosis. It’s amazing to me how young I should have been paying attention and what I’ll be telling my daughters now that I know.

Disclaimer: I am in no way a healthcare provider of any kind and the stuff I pass on here is only from my own research. You should always consider consulting your physician if you plan on making dietary changes.

The health article that caught my attention today was from issue 2658 of New Scientist magazine, 29 May 2008, page 12. It was all about how “thoughts of death make us eat cookies.” I’m serious. There is a study about how people who wrote essays on death vs. dentists ate more cookies and had lower self-esteem. “The authors believe people with low self-esteem use consuming as a way of subconsciously escaping self-awareness, which is heightened by thoughts of dying.”

I found this fascinating in the way that I always thought thoughts of dying would help you control your eating and make you exercise. You want to have a healthier lifestyle. You want to live longer. Instead, they are saying that eating is a possible mechanism for dealing with “death anxiety”.

I would say that my self-esteem probably isn’t what it should be, especially since I’m home so much more now and socialize so much less. Also the fact that I have gained a lot of weight hasn’t exactly lifted my self-esteem to new heights. I also worry a lot about dying (before I’m ready) because I know I don’t lead a healthy lifestyle. It seems to me, the fear of dying too soon would cause you to quit eating cookies instead of making you eat worse.

Maybe it’s time for yet another “paradigm shift”!

At our house 3-day weekends are cause for BBQ’s and/or picnics. When my sister and I were kids, it was usually a day of some big picnic for some organization my folks belonged to. When my sister and I got out on our own and had kids, we used to get Ma and all get together at the local park.  Then for the last  almost 10 yrs. I owned a bar, so we would throw a big bbq and potluck for everybody. Always a ton of fattening food, booze, and fun.

The kids are grown now. I’ve closed the bar, and I rarely see my sister. Today I miss the chaos, the fun, the people. It’s going to be a much quieter celebration of those who died for our freedom. In away, it almost seems appropriate with our troops still at war and given the reason for the day.

I have since made choices I wouldn’t have made back then. Today I decided to have eggs at home vs. a “Macho Combo Burrito” (25pts.) at Del Taco. I have turned in the burgers (80/20) and potato salad for lean steak and baked potato. This way I won’t be eating potato salad, which of course goes with macaroni salad, for days after the bbq is over. Instead of snacking on chips, we’ll be snacking on fresh veggies and strawberries. While it’s hard sometimes to forget the traditions of the past, many times the new traditions are just as delicious, and without the guilt! LOL

I get  a lot of health newsletters. Every thing from the Mayo Clinic to Health Alerts by email to health newsletters for women, etc. One of the latest things I’ve seen is a doctor suggests Resveritrol and Soy as the magic combination to aid in weight loss.

Resveritrol is like a super antioxidant. If you don’t know what antioxidants are, they are the super nutrients that help fight the toxins that enter your body (free radicals) and destroy your cells. This is a really simplistic definition, as I am no doctor. Given my bad habits, I am into anything that will fight the bad guys in my body, but supposedly according to this doctor, when you go heavy in antioxidants, you go “light” on weight. Sounds good to me, so I talked to the lady at my health food store, and bought a bottle (second bottle 50% off. LOL.).

I have a problem with the “soy” part of this “prescription”. I am not a big advocate of soy to start with and I hate tofu. I have read a lot about studies showing if you have cancer cells in your body, soy may help them grow. I don’t know if I have anything like that in my body, but I’m old enough and it’s common enough, I’m not willing to take a chance.

We’re all so willing to try anything to help us lose weight, sometimes to the expense of our own health (fedra, etc). It’s okay to use supplements that enhance our health, diet and fitness, but make sure you know what you are taking, and from whom. Not all vitamins and supplements are equal, just like not every diet plan and fitness plan is perfect for you, me, Tom, Dick and Harry.

Nothing makes a fat girl say “shoulda, woulda, coulda” like really hot weather.

I “shoulda” stuck to eating right and exercising.

I “woulda” been small enough to fit into some bitchin’ summer clothes.

I “coulda” been there by now.

I had pretty much forgotten how much I hate hot (90 to 100 degrees) weather when I’m overweight. I’ve gotten old enough that I tend to run on the “cooler” side most of the time, so the hot weather when I’m thinner, doesn’t seem so bad. This year I remembered when the temps reached 102, why I usually diet in the fall or winter to be thinner by spring and summer.

One thing the hot weather has done for me is make my attraction to the fruits and vegetables in season much stronger. It must be working, because I’ve actually lost about 5 lbs. in the last week or so. Cookies, etc. just don’t have the same appeal when I’m sweating to death, looking for a way to cool off.  So it’s obviously not due to being post-menopausal, but my crummy eating habits that are keeping me fat. Hate facing that one! LOL

The strawberries have been just beautiful by me this year. They’re huge and so sweet and juicy. Usually at least one store by me (I’m lucky enough to have about 5 different grocery stores all in a circle close to where I live) has a 4lb. clamshell on sale at a really reasonable price. The blueberries not such a great bargain, but I love them in my yogurt and even tho the containers are small, I can still usually find them on sale. I bought a beautiful pineapple the other day, and I’ll probably cut that up for snacking today. To me, the can will never have anything on fresh when it comes to pineapple. When I went to Hawaii, my late husband couldn’t sit me at the bar next to a waitress station because I couldn’t keep my hands out of the pineapple. LOL.

The truly great thing about all this is that it is such a healthy way to eat. I’ve always said “if I truly ate everything they want you to eat when you’re on WeightWatchers, I would never be able to snack on anything else!”

Thank goodness for the hot weather to reteach me how to eat right. I’m drinking a lot more water also, of course, which I’m sure has helped with dropping a little of this excess weight. See, you just never know where help is going to come from. LOL 

is now only 2 months away vs. 10 months like it was when I first started this blog. Evidently my reason wasn’t motivation enough. I just got the dates yesterday for the reunion and here I am, the same size if not a pound or two more than I was 8mos. ago. So now I will be walking etc. like crazy, cussing myself out for not getting serious sooner, and still stuffing something into my face that probably doesn’t belong there! No matter what I do, I still am no magician with the magic formula.

I have known about this for a yr. I actually thought it was in April. Thank God it wasn’t! But why have I been so self-sabbotoging? Or why I haven’t I been stronger? Or if my health and this reunion aren’t important enough, what in the hell would be?

I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. I better do myself a little sole searching and find out what’s going on in there. Looking over past posts, I thought I had the answer a few times. NOT. Guess again. I know when I truly make up my mind I can do it, so why not now? Am I using it as a crutch while I’m working on my new life? I know I should be doing better than ever now that my schedule, etc. is completely in my hands. Instead I am so stressed and focusing on the new business, I’m not getting anything else done, including stuff with deadlines. Have I just become self-destructive to a certain point? I mean, I’m not going to jump the bridge or anything, but something definitely isn’t right.

Any insights would be appreciated. LOL. My weight is actually a symbol I think of all the kaos in my life right now. One step at a time I guess. It just would be good if I would actually take the steps.

Yep. I finally joined a challenge on one of the diet sites. I thought “okay. 30 days. I can do this.”

There’s a new workout routine every day. It’s all laid out for me. No boredom. The “exercise queen” that did the workout videos was actually quite good. They’re considered “medium impact”. Little did I know at the time I definitely should have started in the “low impact” department. The very first day I threw myself into the routine. A little marching in place, a little big marching in place, a little side to side marching in place. All that was good. Then came the jumping jacks.

I knew my left arm was sore and I did not have the range of motion I should have. Due to some “sleep” issues with the BF, I’ve been sleeping for extended periods on my left arm and feeling it slowly get worse. (Read the article “Is Sleeping With Your Spouse Killing You?”) LOL. I did my jumping jacks. I did the “punch to the front”. By Wednesday morning I could not move my left arm. By Wed. afternoon I was in tears and looking for drugs. I evidently tore or damaged my rotator cuff. It is so friggin’ painful! I am starting to do a little better as of today. In the mean time I don’t have the patience to type one handed, so I didn’t do much of anything. Now I am doing range of motion exercises, and as it starts to feel better, I will start working out with a resistance band to get my arm back where it should be.

The moral of the story: Keep moving. I’ve known for a year I was falling out of shape sitting in front of the computer day in and day out. I kept saying “tomorrow”. Well I’m here to tell you, tomorrow came and went, and it was painful. I should have been doing a little something every day. No matter what size you are, what you do for a living, you must make time for your body in there somewhere. I’ve spent the last few days finding out how many things are either excessively hard one handed, or I can’t do at all. I’m really lucky if this doesn’t end up permanent.