Claire's 1! And, Yum in a Cup

Yesterday, Princess Claire turned 1 year old. That means I’ve been a grandma for a whole year! And I’ll be Grammy Lynn squared when baby Claire gets a new brother or sister at the end of May. Double the fun! I’m pretty sure being a grandparent is as close to heaven on earth as we mortals get.

My daughter and son-in-law threw Claire a family party. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Matt’s family so it was fun to catch up, at least a little. Claire got most of the attention. So did my chicken barbecue sandwiches. It’s a simple recipe that’s been in my family for many years. It can be used on ribs and whole chicken breasts for dinner, or you can shred chicken or beef and use it in sandwiches. And…it’s fat free and low cal. Here’s the recipe:

Lynn’s Barbecue Sauce
Serves 4-6

1 C chili sauce (or ketchup if you don’t have chili sauce or want something a little less zippy)
1 C water
½ - 1 C finely chopped onions (or use 2-3 T of dried minced onions – that’s what I do when I make this recipe for sandwiches)
2 T Worcestershire sauce
¼ C vinegar
¼ C brown sugar
2 t dry mustard
1 t paprika

Whisk all the ingredients together and throw over a couple pounds of chicken breasts in a roasting pan. Cover and cook at 350 degrees for 2 hours. You can also put it all in a crock pot and cook on low for 6-8 hours. Shred the chicken (or beef if that’s what you used) and remix with the sauce and serve.

I’ve made this ahead of time and frozen it until I needed it. Just add a little chili sauce or ketchup to it because the meat absorbs much of the sauce if it’s not used right away.

Claire got a little taste of the chicken and she liked it. She seemed to like her cake, too, but mostly because it was fun to play in. I can’t be trusted to just play with cake. Cake finds its way into my mouth quickly if I’m not careful. And yesterday, I was very careful. One bite is all I had. One very small bite. But before you think I’m a woman of iron will, I didn’t eat more than one bite mostly because the frosting had way too much fat in it. It lined the roof of my mouth like a film. If I’m going to indulge, I want it to be something I find palatable and not something that sticks to my palate.

And speaking of palatable, I found another something at Starbucks yesterday that will become a permanent part of my food repertoire. I’m probably the last person on earth to discover this, but I love, and I mean seriously love, their Skinny Caramel Latte. I’ve never had a shot of syrup in my coffee before and I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. People blog about how they love sugar-free syrup, they post on message boards how much they love sugar-free syrup. Now I know why they love sugar-free syrup. It’s blog worthy and post worthy. It’s a very yummy way to get a dairy serving in, too. And you all know how much I hate skim milk.

So Claire’s first birthday will go down in my dietary history as the day I discovered syrup shots. Not a bad way to end my first year anniversary as Grammy Lynn.

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Meditate Your Way To A Healthy Body

I’m a realist. But in the last few years, I’ve become a “kinder, gentler” realist.

I used to beat the crap out of myself when I was obese. I lived on the negative end of life’s battery, spending all my positive energy on other people.

As many of you know, before I started this journey in January 2005, I took a long hard look at the way I treated myself physically and emotionally. As I wrote in a blog for CNN last January, “I had so many feelings floating around in my head when I weighed 300 pounds – inadequacy, anger, and overall helplessness. I vacillated for months between accepting my body as it was and choosing to lose weight. I journaled tough questions: How did I feel about my body. How much did I love myself? Was I worth changing for? It was difficult and often uncomfortable work, I won’t lie, but once I was honest with myself and became better acquainted with the emotions that bothered me most, I was ready to lose weight.”

The reason I know this last time is the last time I’ll lose weight, particularly more than 100 pounds, is because I know who I am now and am my own best friend. This was never the case in my previous attempts at weight loss.

The emotional journey I was on at the time of my weight loss journey got a little more focused when I was introduced to mindful meditation via Jon Kabat-Zinn. Then earlier this year, I took my practice even further after discovering Pema Chodron. I implement her teachings as a way to develop more compassion toward myself and others.

You might think that meditation and Buddhist teachings and Zen are all ethereal and maybe even mumbo-jumbo, but take it from me, a true realist, there is nothing more real and grounding than learning to love yourself.

I often get emails asking me to review books and other “diet” programs. Most of these requests end up in my junk mail, but a few books caught my attention and I thought I’d pass on the name of one of them today (the other will be in a future blog).

It is through my (still small) understanding of Buddhist teachings that I can recommend “Wake Up To Your Weight Loss” by Alyson Mead. Mead’s approach to weight loss combines writing and meditation to help readers cultivate loving kindness toward themselves and their bodies. I like how she sums up what meditation is: “The mistaken belief about meditation is that it is somehow magical, bestowing peace and light on whomever it touches. But meditation is simply a tool, to help you focus in on and, more importantly, learn to cope with the stuff your mind may fling at you.” And if your mind is anything like mine, what it flings is often a lot of s*it.

Along with writing and meditation, Mead offers helpful “off the mat” exercises to take into real-life situations throughout the day.

I truly believe that knowing ourselves, becoming our own best friend, being compassionate toward ourselves, is the real key to weight loss and maintenance. As Mead writes in chapter seven, “Losing weight is, in a sense, losing part of yourself. The closer you get to learning who you are on a very intimate level, the more power you will have when emotional issues arrive.”

“Wake Up To Your Weight Loss” is a good companion piece to diet and exercise. It’s better than pills and there are no side effects except feeling more at peace and at home in your own body.

And I didn’t get paid to say that :) I’m just keeping it real.

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The Hiatus is Over!

To celebrate the fall season, I decided it was time to dust some things off.

First, this blog. I’m back from hiatus, not because I’m done with the book (I’ll let you know when that not-so-small feat is complete), but because I’ve missed Lynn’s Weigh and you and I keep writing blogs in my head and it’s getting really annoying not having a place to write them all down.

I also dusted off an old nemesis-turned-friend in the garage: my stationary bike. I bought the bike used seven or eight years ago when I thought I was ready to exercise and lose weight, but all it did was serve as a clothes rack. The few times I tried it when I weighed 300 pounds, I could barely do two minutes on low without feeling like my lungs and thighs would break. Of course, rather than keep at it and get progressively stronger, I called myself “fat” and “useless” and gave up. Even when I got serious about losing weight in 2005 I didn’t ride the bike because I didn’t want to get frustrated and give up. My psyche was still that fragile. Losing weight was all I could do at the time. Adding exercise could have hampered my efforts because I was afraid to know just how much riding I still couldn’t do even after losing 50 or 100 pounds.

I realize now how sad that is and I don’t advocate not exercising because of fear of failure, no matter how much you have to lose, but that was my reality. The good news is that I feel empathy for the 300-, the 250-, and the 200-pound me who was afraid. I don’t beat myself up for being afraid of failure. I chose, instead, to learn from it.

This lesson came in real handy last Sunday.

I do my strength training at home three days a week. On those days, I do 15-20 minutes of cardio to warm up and then 45 minutes of lifting dumbbells and the barbell while mixing in a few ab/core exercises. I usually warm up on the elliptical since it used to be the only piece of cardio equipment I had in the house. Then I remembered my bike in the garage. On Sunday, my husband and I hauled it to the porch where I dusted it off before hauling it into my “gym.”

I was feeling really confidant. After all, I ride my real bike for 60-90 minutes and work out on cardio equipment at the gym for 40-60. What was 15-20 minutes on a stationary bike? Piece of cake, right?

Um…that would be the big NO.

My thighs were yodeling – I mean they were SCREAMING – by minute 15. Granted, I didn’t have it on low. I had it cranked pretty high. But still, my thighs were saying, “What the…? Remember what we told you back in 2001 when you tried this?” I lowered the resistance for the next four minutes, but cranked it up really high for the last minute just so I, not my thighs, could get in the last word.

That bike kicked my ass! That I could do two minutes when I was 300 pounds is amazing to me now and I wish I hadn’t given up. Of course, if I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have been 300 pounds in the first place, but we can’t live our lives looking back, now can we?

I have some “new friends” on order that I hope will shake up my body a little more, too. I love Perform Better. They have the best variety of exercise equipment I’ve seen on the Internet, and their prices on hand weights are very reasonable. It’s time to up the weights I use for the triceps kick-backs, but no retail outlet I’ve been to has 6-pound dumbbells. Perform Better does, so I ordered a pair yesterday. They have all those odd sizes. I’ll probably get the 7-pound weights next year when I’m ready to up the pounds again. I have to stay ahead of my batwings!

I also put a bid on eBay for an aerobics stepper, you know the kind with a platform and two risers that will take the step from 4 to 6 to 8 inches high? I don’t plan to do step aerobics (that kills my knees), but I want to use the platform for calf raises and for some low-impact lower body work. I’ll know tonight if I won the auction. If not, I’m sure there will be others listed.

So how have you all been? Have you made any new exercise “friends?” Tell us about them. What do you do to switch things up from time to time? You ARE switching things up once in awhile, right?

It’s good to be back! I’ll be in touch very soon.

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When My Stomach's THIS Happy, I Have To Share

I need several breaks during these long days of writing. I stand up every hour or so and do the dishes or water the plants or make up a grocery list or just go sit outside in the sun. I decided this weekend I'd cook between chapters to stock the freezer with some homemade foods. Cleaning, paring, chopping and slicing give me ample time to think about my life outside the book. (I have to remind myself sometimes that I still have one. A life, that is.)


I love fall for a lot of reasons, namely apples, pears, plums, pumpkins, tomatoes, zucchini and onions. On my way home from Pittsburgh yesterday, I stopped at my favorite farmer's market along Route 66 in a small, small town aptly named Orchardville. I like it because the family raises fabulous produce, they're nice folks and they take checks. (Does anyone carry cash anymore?) I picked up a half peck of Empire apples, five pounds of Roma tomatoes, three large zucchinis, some onions and a large bulb of garlic.


I had an additional five pounds of tomatoes here at home (gifts from gardening friends) and decided to make double batches of spaghetti sauce and roasted vegetable chili. I also wanted to make applesauce, something I hadn't done in...wow...four years, maybe? It's been a long time and I really don't know why other than I used to make it for my kids and they're grown and out of the house now. Come to think of it, I stopped making several things because the kids are gone, things I like to eat. So with this batch of applesauce, that crazy thinking is over with.


I forgot how much I love homemade applesauce. I poured a half cup (direct from the saucepan) in a small bowl and topped it with a quarter cup of Breyer's Double Churn fat-free vanilla yogurt and stood in the kitchen and ate it. Oh my, dare I say it was better than sex? I hope no one heard me :)


I'm ready to write again. Hope you're all enjoying the fine foods of fall as well. Be good to yourselves. Eat an apple or a pear or a plum or some pumpkin. It's good for you!


And because I know a few of you will ask, here are the recipes for the spaghetti sauce, the applesauce and the chili:


Lynn's Roasted Tomato and Garlic Pasta (and Pizza) Sauce
Serves 6-10, depending on what you're using it for

2 pounds Roma or plum tomatoes, halved lengthwise
1 medium onion, peeled and quartered
6 peeled garlic cloves
1 T fresh rosemary leaves (or 1 tsp dried)
1 T fresh thyme leaves (or 1 tsp dried)
1 T balsamic vinegar
1 6-ounce can tomato paste
½ tsp salt
1 tsp dried basil

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Place the tomatoes, onion, garlic, rosemary and thyme on a baking sheet sprayed with non-stick spray. Spray veggies lightly with non-stick spray. Roast for 20 minutes. Flip the vegetables and roast for another 20-25 minutes or until they start to brown.

Scrape everything into a food processor fitted with the chopping blade or a blender and process until pureed. Pour contents into a large saucepan. Add vinegar, tomato paste, salt and basil. Simmer for at least 30 minutes. I sometimes go an hour for richer flavor.

This sauce keeps well for a three to four days. In fact, I think it tastes even better the next day. It’s great on pasta, squash and homemade pizza.

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Lynn’s Roasted Veggie Chili
6-8 servings

4-5 cups total of veggies of your choice: carrots, zucchini, mushrooms, sweet red pepper and/or butternut squash
1 C chopped onion
4 cloves garlic, minced
1½ to 2 T chili powder (use more or less depending on how spicy you like it)
1 t sugar (may need to add a bit more later in the cooking process)
1 t salt
1/2 - 1 t cumin
1 t dried oregano leaves
1 t cocoa
½ t red pepper sauce
28 ounces canned diced tomatoes, undrained (or 5 -6 medium sized fresh tomatoes, skin removed, seeded and diced)
2-4 C vegetable or chicken broth (You probably won't need this if you use fresh tomatoes. It also depends on if you like your chili more like a stew or more like a soup)
2 cans (15 ½ ounces) red or white kidney beans or black beans or a combination of the two

Cut up the veggies into bite-sized pieces, put them on a baking sheet coated with cooking spray, sprinkle with garlic powder, cumin, and black pepper, and roast in a 400-degree oven for 30 minutes or until brown, flipping once after 15 minutes.

In a Dutch oven, spray the bottom with cooking spray and cook onions and garlic until tender, about 1-2 minutes. Add remaining ingredients except for the beans and bring to boil. Reduce heat to simmer and cook for at least an hour (I usually cook it for three hours). Add beans and heat through or cook an additional hour if you'd like.

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Lynn's Favorite Applesauce ala an old Betty Crocker cookbook

4 medium tart apples, peeled, cored and quartered (about 4 cups)
1/2 c water
1/3 - 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 t cinnamon
1/8 t nutmeg

Cook apples in water on medium heat until soft, 10-15 minutes, breaking them up with a spoon. Add rest of the ingredients and boil and stir for one minute. You can mash it with a potato masher for a smoother consistency, or leave in chunks.

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A Sobering Email

Good morning, friends! It was so good to hear from all of you the last time I posted. The book proposal is coming along (with the help of a good coach who helps keep me on task), but I wanted to share some info I got from my friend Rhonda, a radiologist in Florida. Rhonda and I went to grade school and junior high together and I just saw her when I was in Minnesota in August.

Anyway, she sent me an email in response to a blog I wrote over on Refuse to Regain and I wanted to post her observations here as well as RTR. I was completely unaware of how being overweight or obese can interfere with what we might think of as the most simple medical procedure: an x-ray.

Here's what Rhonda wrote:

“I am reading this blog on a short break at work, where I am reading CT (CAT) scans, MRI's and Ultrasound exams, and it struck me to let you all know one of the health benefits that your weight affords you.

“We all know and think about the decreased risk of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, etc., from weight loss, but one of the things that I see in my daily practice is how much harder it is to image someone who is significantly overweight. The bigger you are, the more x-rays it takes to penetrate your body and the fuzzier the pictures are (even a plain old chest x-ray can be suboptimal). The bigger you are, the more your own body fat throws artifact on a CT scan, making it difficult to see. Ultrasound is not good at penetrating fat, so there are a lot of things we can't see with it in large people.

“If you are big enough, you may not even physically fit into an MRI scanner and for many, important applications, the open configuration magnets (which are often a lower magnetic field strength) are not adequate. All of our CT tables and tables where we do angiograms have weight limits above which we can't move the table with the patient on it or risk the table collapsing. Never mind the risk to hurting the patient, the repair bills for those tables can run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range, so we end up having to literally not perform studies on patients who are over the weight limit. Even mammograms, in very large patients, I have seen us have to take four overlapping images for just one view of one breast in order to be able to cover the tissue adequately (a standard mammo consists of a total of 4 films, 2 views each breast).

“Some would say that by not having tables large enough to accommodate the bigger patients (there are a few manufactures out there who offer them), we are being discriminatory to the obese. The problem is that these machines cost upwards of $1 million for MRI and CT scanners and the larger format scanners often times give markedly suboptimal exams for people with more normal body habitus.

“My point is that not only are you decreasing your risk of significant health problems by losing weight, if you do become ill (brain aneurysm, appendicitis, etc. -- things that don't care how much you weigh), the chances of us being able to use our high-tech gadgets to diagnose and treat you are markedly improved by your weight loss.”

I wrote back and asked her, “If you were to find a lump and doctors performed surgery, is the actual surgery more difficult through layers of fat and is recovery more difficult?”

She wrote back:

“Since I am not a surgeon, I don't have 100 percent knowledge of surgical complications, but I can tell you about my experience with angiograms.

“When we get someone who is significantly overweight (but not over the table limits), they are prone to an increase in several complications. First of all, they may be so big that we can't feel the femoral pulse in order to do the puncture. That means we may need to use ultrasound to identify the artery and guide puncture. The gel from the US MAY slightly increase the risk of getting an infection at the puncture site.

“Secondly, we may need to use a longer need to hit our target.

“Thirdly, once we get in the vessel, we then put a guide wire ( a wire that looks like a guitar string with a floppy end at the front and a stiff part in the middle and end) so that we can take the needle out and put our catheter (tube with holes in it) over the guide wire into the vessel. Much harder to get a catheter to follow a guide wire through several centimeters of layers of fat, rather than just a couple for normal sized people.

“When we are finished with the procedure, we remove the catheter and hold pressure on the artery to stop the bleeding: harder to hold in big people and this increases the risk of getting a hematoma (a big blood clot in the tissues). Even if you don't get a hematoma during the hold, one can develop in the hours following the procedure and is harder to diagnoses if it is buried amongst the fat. Also, our bigger patients tend to also have back pain, which makes it harder for them to lie flat in bed (which we require them to do post procedure in order to heal the site). So if they are squirming around because they are uncomfortable from their back, this increases the risk of them getting a hematoma.

“Regular surgery can be technically more difficult in big patients. I still remember a lecture from one of the teachers in med. school. The lecture was ostensibly about ovarian cancer (which affects the 4 "F's": female, forty, fertile, fat). Most of what I remember was slide after slide of the retractor devices this particular doc had designed to hold back the pannus of the patient to adequately access the surgical site. It can be harder to keep the surgical site clean, post-op, increasing the rates of infection.”

Thanks, Rhonda, for the great info.

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Hello from the Crazy Abyss

Arghhh! I can’t stand it! I’ve missed this blog so much and it’s only been, what? A week?

I’m roasting veggies, I’m making soups, I’m cleaning out the freezer, and yes, I’m writing the book, but it feels like forever since I’ve written something other than emails and the book. So allow me to bore you a bit with my recent observances.

I was all prepared today to step on the scale and see a number over 130. As you know, I’ve had a crazy schedule since late July and so my workout schedule has been sketchy at best. However, I’ve eaten well, stayed true to my stomach, and when I got on the scale this morning, I was 129.9. Point nine! Not 130. Point nine and still in the 120s. Yes, I know it’s a mind game. I know that on my doctor’s scale I’d have been 133 or something, but still, it got me through the day. With that number in my head, I was better able to complete a 60-minute cardio workout plus some strength training and abs and stretching. Sometimes you have to fake yourself out, you know?

What wasn’t crazy this weekend was the time spent with my granddaughter and my kids and my sister. Right now I’m home and alone on my back deck, absorbing the last of the summer heat, but I’m very sad to have said goodbye to them all yesterday. What’s different now is that I don’t eat my way through the sadness. Not that I binged before, but a little extra cheese here, some Tricuits there. Heck, light ice cream couldn’t hurt, right? Maybe not if I’d limited myself to a half cup.

Food challenges still abound. I’m glad I can navigate them easier now. But it doesn’t mean they don’t still exist. Why are they such a first line of defense (or offense, depending on the feeling of the mood)?

My brain is on overload, my friends, so I hope this blog entry makes some kind of sense. I just want you to know that I’ve missed this and will post again soon. I miss hearing from all of you.

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This Isn't Goodbye...

I wrote a blog today over at ZenBagLady bidding readers a temporary farewell as I put the blog on hiatus to pursue the book proposal I've committed to writing. I must also do the same thing with Lynn's Weigh, although unlike ZBL, I'll write here once every few weeks because I don't want to lose touch with all of you. And as I said on ZBL, I'll still be posting once or twice a week at Refuse to Regain, so it's not like I'll be completely holed up in my office writing a book.

I feel like I just put my kindergartener on the bus for the first day of school. I know it's necessary to let go of some things for the greater good of another thing, but it's still sad nonetheless. I promise to stay in touch and hope you will do the same.

Below is today's blog over on ZBL:

English can be such a dull language. It’s so practical in terms of pronunciation – mostly clean and repressed – and it often relies on phrases rather than one single word to communicate an idea or action. Not like German where you get to spit and gargle when you talk, and where several words are pasted together into one word to relay meaning.

Today, though, I’m meditating on one English word that is not only fun to say, but holds great meaning for what I’m about to do to ZenBagLady. The word “hiatus” is one of those English words that creates a stop in your jaw, makes you think for a split second about how it feels coming out. Hiatus. If you look at it long enough, it begins to look like a foreign word, from some Pacific island, meaning a flower, maybe. Or a bug.

But what it really means is to take a break. And that’s what I must do. I’ve committed to writing a book proposal and I’m afraid I’ve not given it the time and energy it needs to be the best book proposal I can write. As much as I hate to do it, ZenBagLady will go into hiatus, like a mediocre sitcom, beginning today. However, I reserve the right to publish a blog on occasion, so ZBL won’t be completely gone. It’s a break. An “interruption in space,” according the dictionary.

Thank you for reading the Lady. It’s been a lot of fun writing it these last two years. I’ll still be blogging once a week over on Refuse To Regain with my friend Barbara, and I promise to return ZBL after I get this proposal written.

‘Til next time….auf Wiedersehen, my friends.

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