Mary Lou's Weigh Product Review AND A Lefse Update

I want to send a big thank you out to the folks at Mary Lou’s Weigh for asking me to try out their new “weigh platform” scale. Actually, it’s not really a scale. It’s a kind of motivating keeper of secrets.

First, you step on the platform and it records your starting weight, only it doesn’t tell you what it is. Then you step on it again in a day or two and it will tell you if you are higher or lower than you’re starting weight. If you’re lower, music starts playing and the blue and green colored buttons light up. I admit I was a little startled the first day that happened. I mean, I’m half awake, naked and cold in my bathroom at 6 a.m. – hardly the moment I’m expecting to hear Mary Lou Retton’s voice congratulating me on losing a half a pound! It made me laugh, though, and even happier to know that I’d lost a half pound. If you gain weight, it will tell you how much and Mary Lou offers you some helpful tips in her trademark peppy voice.

The platform is spot-on accurate because I’d weigh myself on my actual scale before getting on Mary Lou’s Weigh. I’d gained a few pounds during November (a tale I’ll tell after the holidays) and so I’d been working to lose that weight. Lose them I did and I was glad to have Mary Lou cheering me on.

I admit, though, that I’m a numbers girl. Have been for nearly four years. Having said that, I would probably have opted for this platform type of weighing in when I started losing weight because seeing numbers on a regular basis kind of messed with my head after awhile. The platform is in keeping with my philosophy of “10 pounds at a a time,” meaning I concentrated on losing 10 pounds and then the next 10 pounds and so on.

For anyone who wants to get out of the “numbers game,” I highly recommend this product. It comes with a good “how-to” book packed with solid nutritional advice. The Mary Lou’s Weigh website is very helpful, too. Check it out if you’re in the market for a new “scale.”

Roni over at Roni’s Weigh also received a Mary Lou platform and thought it was “GENIUS!” Roni is in maintenance and isn’t looking to lose 10 pounds, so she decided to give hers away to someone who’d benefit more from the “scale’s” approach to weight loss than she would. I agreed and offered mine for giveaway, too. Congrats to Deidre from Clever, Missouri (what a great name for a town!) for winning my platform! I hope it reflects great success for you.

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Well, my girls and I made lefse yesterday. And what a day it was! Carlene and Cassie had never made lefse before so watching them perfect their rolling skills was quite amusing.

Here’s Cassie’s first attempt:

And Carlene rolled a round that looked like Jay Leno. We thought about selling it on eBay.

Here’s a comparison shot from the first time I made lefse (nearly 300 pounds) and yesterday (128.3 pounds). I think I notice a bit of difference in the face, don’t you? LOL Actually, the biggest difference for me personally was that I stood for nearly three hours without back pain. The first time I made lefse, I had to sit frequently.

And of course, the highlight of my day was seeing g-baby Claire. Here we are, with my hands covered in flour and getting it all over Claire, but she doesn’t care. She kept Carlene, Cassie and me amused all afternoon. Amazing the fun she has with Tupperware and wooden spoons.

Happy 24th birthday to my own baby girl (and mother of Claire and g-baby #2 on the way), Cassie! You make me so happy, honey. You were, and remain, the best surprise ever.

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Sometimes Food = Love

Food gets a bad wrap this time of year. While we worry about how we’ll say no to or refrain from eating too much dessert and stuffing and duck and turkey and potatoes and everything else that’s put out, served, given, and offered us between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, it’s easy to forget the rich traditions engrained in many of the holiday foods we make and offer others. I’d hate to see us lose perspective.

Yes, food can be a head game, but food can also be a manifestation of love and tradition. It can bring stories to the table of, “I remember Grandma always making…” or “Tasting that reminds me of…”

For Christmas, my Grandma Signe always made Aunt Sally cookies (with an empty Spam can, just like this recipe link calls for) and Norwegian flatbread, which never came out flat. My mom made date nut squares and Russian teacakes. And Grandma Katinka made the goddess of all holiday food: lefse.

At holiday family dinners, lefse was the main course, or at least it was to me. Lefse is rolled out very thinly and put on a griddle to produce large rounds. My mother always cut the rounds in half before serving and we kids were only allowed to take a half and no more until everyone at the table got some. There was usually enough for seconds, but rarely ever thirds. I would spread a thin layer of butter and sprinkle a little sugar on it before rolling it into a tube. The small dark bubbles formed by the griddle opened up under my tongue, the sugar ground softly then dissolved between my teeth, and the taste of potatoes and butter and sugar brought me to what I can only describe as a food orgasm.

Lefse was our ambrosia, a family tradition brought here from Norway. The women in our church (which was known as the Norwegian Lutheran Church even though it wasn’t formally called that, but it made the distinction between us and the German Lutheran Church, which wasn’t really named that either) used to spend an entire day making hundreds of lefse to sell at the annual church bazaar. Like customers camping outside Best Buy to purchase the latest Wii, people lined up outside our church well before the bazaar started just to buy lefse. It always sold out within minutes.

While my mother never learned to make it, I never worried about having lefse at Thanksgiving and Christmas because Grandma always came through. But when grandma got too old to make lefse, we had to rely on the generosity of one of my aunts to provide our fix. We were often reduced to buying lefse at the store, which, no matter how “hand-rolled” it was, tasted only faintly of the potatoey goodness my grandma produced. It was never “Plenty good” as my great-uncle George would say.

This went on for years. After I moved to Pennsylvania in the early 90s, Dad would ship me lutefisk from from Minnesota and I’d order lefse from a bakery in Wisconsin. (Lutefisk is one food that didn’t take a back seat to lefse, but is one that, alas, I won’t be consuming this year due to my vegetarianism; for more info, read last year’s blog, “The Lutefisk is Here! The Lutefisk is Here!”) The lutefisk was good, but it would have been better with Grandma’s lefse. Then in 2004, Aunt Shirley came to the rescue. No, she didn’t give me lefse. She taught me how to make it.

Give a woman lefse and she eats for a day. Teach her how to make lefse, and she’s the most popular member of her immediate family.

I remember that day well, particularly since I use the photo of me making lefse as my representative “before” photo on my original website, Lynn’s Journey. I had to stand to roll out the dough and I remember my back hurting me so much that I had to take frequent breaks. I denied that it hurt because I was morbidly obese. I blamed it on heredity – Dad has a bad back so naturally I did, too.

Anyway, I can stand for what feels like forever now which is good because tomorrow, my daughters and granddaughter are coming to Clarion and we’re making 100 lefse which will be distributed to my four siblings, my parents and kids.

I make lefse with pride and love. I am happiest when I can give my family the gift of memories of our holiday dinners, and if its via food, so be it. While we’re all scattered across the country and often see things from varying points of view, lefse is one of our familial binders, that something we all have stories about, a common denominator, so to speak.

To me, lefse embodies love. Most foods don’t. But at this time of year, I hope you’ll think about how food and love intersect in your life. Yes, there’s a lot of food out there right now, but which ones mean more to you than empty calories and heartburn?

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A Little of a Lot Goes a Long Way

Which do you prefer: eating a full portion of one thing or eating small portions of several things? Or are you like me and it depends on what day it is, how creative you’re feeling, and what foods you must use up in the fridge before they grow legs and walk away?

This morning for breakfast, in keeping with my “veggies for breakfast” pledge, I “fried” up the last of my shredded butternut squash (ala Hungry Girl’s recipe, sans the cumin and with minced garlic and a side of ketchup and mustard – you know me and my condiment love), threw the remaining half-cup of strawberries with the remaining half a small container of Greek yogurt, and sliced half a small banana into ¼ cup light vanilla soy milk and 20 grams of Shredded Wheat n’ Bran.

Looking back at my food journals, I see this as a growing pattern. Except for my big salad, I eat several little things all day. (And really, isn’t a salad just a conglomeration of a bunch of little things?) When I learn a serving of something has in excess of three Points, I get a little nervous. Four or more Points is a lot to spend on one thing. I mean, I like spinach manicotti very much, but one tube is four Points. One little tube! And it’s made with fat-free ricotta and everything! It’s not much food for the Points.

When I think of food I think of time. I like to eat slowly and in volume. How long will it take me to eat that soup or salad or to drink that latte? It takes me two minutes at most to eat a tube of manicotti, and that’s savoring it. It takes me 15 to 20 minutes to eat my big salad. Same number of Points and much more time playing Scrabble with the computer (I confess, I like to play when I eat).

When people ask why I became a vegetarian, I tell them it’s because I get to eat more. I’ve also cut way back on my starch consumption lately, which I did for several reasons. But near the top of the reasons list is because I don’t get as much food/Points time with an English muffin as I do with a big ass bowl of fruit and yogurt and a side of zucchini. And at the end of the day, by eating more I’ve eaten less and I feel better.

After four years of weight loss and maintenance, you’d think I’d have this food thing down to a science. But yet, I’m still a newbie, still learning, still messing around to see what works. It sometimes depends on what’s in the fridge, but if it doesn’t have staying power, it’s not making its way on to my plate these days. I prefer a little of a lot to a lot of a little. Say that three times real fast.

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Just a Steel Town Girl on a Saturday Night

Oh yes, oh yes, it’s the return of the leg warmers. Wind-chill factors in the single digits returned to western PA in earnest this weekend and I’m bundling up. I’m 45 and I don’t care what I look like. Well, at least when it comes to staying warm.

When I bought my leg warmers last year (I found them in Macy’s of all places), I was teased mercilessly last year by a certain Californian as well as a hearty Minnesotan, who I thought would understand. But I stood my ground and wore my leg warmers on every frigid day and my body thanked me.

And it’s thanking me again right now as I sit typing in my living room, just as it thanked me this morning on a quick trip to the post office when I wore a hat, a fleece, a coat, a big white scarf, sweat pants over workout pants, and thick gloves. I looked a fright, but I was warm.

I’m hate being cold. It makes me cranky. But I’m thankful I have a coat and a scarf and gloves and leg warmers. So many people don’t, or what they have is inadequate. I’m sure as you’ve lost weight or once you got to goal, you had lots of clothes you donated to charity or gifted to someone in your family who needed them. But it’s easy to forget the seasonal clothes that you store in other closets, those places you don’t into very often. I forgot about a coat I had in the back of my closet last year. I saw it by chance and dug it out to give to our local coat drive. Do you maybe have an extra coat you forgot you had lurking in the back of your closet? An extra pair of mittens, perhaps? Just wondering. There are a lot of folks out there who’d be happy to take it off your hands.

Just a little PSA from your humble Steel Town Girl. Hope you are all warm and happy this Saturday night. Or maybe you’re out dancing in your leg warmers. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.

“She’s a maniac, maniac on the floor…” That song’s been in my head all day. Did I successfully lodge it into your head, too? hehe Sorry about that.

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Stuff That Won't Be In The Book - Part 7

OK, this is it, the last of the Stuff That Won’t…posts. Thanks for reading them and sharing your own stories of grief and loss. While we process it in our own unique ways, grief is a universal feeling. A woman mourning the death of her child or husband is not very different than a grieving woman in Ethiopia or Canada or Costa Rica. In coming to terms with my own grief, I realized how much more difficult it was for me to lose weight, let alone maintain what weight I had lost. I’d like to think that if, god forbid, I’m faced with another difficult loss that I would maintain the weight I’ve lost, but I don’t know that for sure. I hope I never have to know.

Part 7:

Along with prescribing Paxil, my doctor insisted I see a therapist and I didn’t resist. Slowly, as the medication took hold and I was able to think without smacking my head into a brick wall, I accepted grief for what it is: a malleable presence that never goes away, but can become a teacher. I was able to work through my feelings rather than dance around them, to stop demanding I “get over it.” Everything I knew about Bruce – his life and his death – would forever be a part of my life.

True to my life pattern, I was still unable to work on tough emotional issues and my weight issues at the same time. In the last few months of Carlene’s project, I’d put my body on the back burner as the antidepressant made me numb to the scale. Food became a comfort, both eating it and cooking it. I still bought water-packed tuna, but I ate the whole can with mayonnaise, dill pickles and hearty bread. Macaroni and cheese and au gratin potatoes found their way back into my diet. I scoured cookbooks and learned to make pot pie and homemade bread and my own chicken and turkey broth. I became a very good cook.

By April 2000, I was back over 200 and stayed there through June, when the world lost another Bruce.

Cassie was in California visiting my sister Emily and Carlene was sleeping in her room in the basement on that sunny June morning. The phone rang. It was Carlene’s friend Cheryl.
Without saying hello, she asked if she could talk to Carlene.

“She’s sleeping,” I said. “Can I have her call you back when she wakes up?”

“It’s really important, Lynn,” Cheryl pleaded. “Can you wake her up?”

Important to a 17-year-old girl is different than important to a 36-year-old woman, but I figured I’d let Carlene chew out Cheryl for waking her up. I went downstairs, woke up Carlene and handed her the phone.

A few minutes later, Carlene came upstairs, pale as a sheet, and asked if I’d heard the sirens earlier that morning. I had, but that wasn’t anything new in our town. We were immune to the sirens. They wailed for the volunteer fire department any time a traveler on I-80 went off the road or there was a fender bender along the curve on 5th Avenue by the grocery store.

“Cheryl heard Tony was in an accident and was killed,” she said.

My heart sank. Rumors like this were almost always true, especially in small towns.

Tony was Cassie’s and Carlene’s and everyone’s best friend. He graduated from high school a few weeks earlier and had been accepted to Penn State for the fall. He’d been in my kitchen a few days earlier, eating my food and calling me “Mom,” like he always did.

“I’ll call the paper and see what they know,” I said. My hands shook as I dialed the phone.

“Hey, Tom, it’s Lynn. I heard there was an accident this morning. Do you know anything?”

Carlene watched me nod my head.

“So it was Tony.”

More nodding.

“Thanks, Tom.”

“Oh my God,” said Carlene. “Mommy…”

After learning more details of the accident over the next few hours, my next step was to call California. Just as my mother had to tell me my husband was dead, I had to tell my 15-year-old daughter, on the phone and 2,000 miles away, that her best friend was dead. If there’s a feeling more helpless or more heart-wrenching than hearing your daughter sob on the phone and there’s not a damn thing you can do to comfort her, I don’t ever want to know it.

In the days and months that followed, Carlene realized she was no longer on the outside looking in at her senior project. She understood first hand what James, Darcy, Mary, Rick, David, Mr. Jones, Mrs. Anderson and everyone else tried to tell her in their letters and emails and pieces of Bruce. When someone you love dies, you feel unimaginable things and you can never be the same person you were the minute before.

“When my father died, the whole town went into mourning,” Carlene wrote in her project essay. “That wasn’t hard for me to imagine, because the day Tony died, I fully understood the devastation of losing someone close to you. Something clicked in my head and it all made sense. Tony was so dear to me. He knew everything about me, inside and out. Tony was a friend to everyone. There wasn’t anyone who didn’t love him. His accident shook the whole community and his memory still makes me cry. I get so sad some days and wonder why something so horrible had to happen. In so many ways, Tony’s death was like my father’s.”

Life at 200 pounds turned into the same turbulent place it had been all the times before, and I did nothing to stop the numbers rising on the scale. Not a damn thing.

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Poverty and Exercise

I watched an eye-opening segment on NBC Nightly News about Latino women in Phoenix who joined a local fitness program. It covered, briefly, several aspects of why Latino women have a higher-than-average obesity rate in this country, including their traditional roles as caregivers and their traditional diets. But what struck me most was the part about exercise. The women interviewed lived in poor neighborhoods and didn’t feel safe walking for exercise. Instead, they went to places like Big Lots or WalMart and walked around the store’s parking lots.

Wow. Slap me in the face.

I didn’t realize until that moment how much I take exercise for granted. And shame on me. Shame, shame on me. I pissed and moaned this morning – in my office which doubles as my exercise room – that I didn’t have the energy to work out. I was “tired.” I didn’t “feel like it.” I was behaving like a spoiled brat. My desk sits next to an elliptical machine and stationary bike. My hand weights are stacked against the wall, as is my barbell. But still….wahhh! Big baby me didn’t “feel” like exercising.

Poverty and obesity are separate subjects and yet interconnected. Obesity rates among the those living in poverty is substantially higher than middle- and upper-class families. Eating right and exercise is the least of their concerns, and yet the women in Phoenix were changing their way of thinking and behaving. It’s just that the odds were stacked against them. The things I take for granted are beyond their reach and yet, they persevere.

I found Poverty News Blog tonight as I searched for more information on this phenomenon. The statistics regarding statewide childhood obesity rates was particularly alarming in the blog entry “Poverty Fuels Obesity Rates.” Children and adults need access to affordable and safe exercise opportunities. We can’t solve our country’s obesity problem, particularly in light of this economic crisis, if the poorest among us don’t have the opportunity to move, to feel not only the physical but the psychological affects of exercise.

As more fast food restaurants and fewer grocery stores invade the poorest of neighborhoods, how do we stem the tide of obesity? This is all off the top of my head, a reaction to a news story, so I don’t have any answers, only questions, and I’m asking you for your input. In this season of giving, we might not have a lot to give, but where can our resources best be utilized, those of us who believe fitness should be accessible to everyone? I’d appreciate any feedback you have.

As for me and my whining about exercising…I’m still ashamed, but I’ll use the energy of it to spur me into action and a new way of thinking.

Your thoughts?

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B is For Beets…and Breakfast

I had strawberries and Greek yogurt and beets for breakfast this morning. Don’t worry, they weren’t all in one bowl.

I woke up this morning thinking about the beets I made last night. I had every intention of eating them for dinner, but after my soy crumbles/pasta sauce/sautéed mushrooms/butternut squashgasm, I was satisfied and didn’t want to eat any more. OK, maybe “didn’t want to eat” isn’t true, but I chose not to eat them because my stomach said I didn’t need to. And my stomach is much smarter than my brain.

I think I’ll start more mornings with beets. I was awake at 4:15 for no reason and finally dragged my butt out of bed at 6:15. I thought for sure I’d be dragging by 8 and want to take a quick nap, but no. My body was full of energy and I completed a full workout. Could it have been the beets? Hmmm…

I went in search of information about this yummy root vegetable and found The World’s Healthiest Foods website. What a gem! It features a food of the week, cooking tips, in-depth nutritional information and even healthy menus. I also signed up for their free newsletter. By the way, today’s food of the week is crimini mushrooms. Where has this website been all my life?
Anyway, back to beets. According to WHF, “Beets are an excellent source of the B vitamin, folate, and a very good source of manganese and potassium. Beets are a good source of dietary fiber, vitamin C, magnesium, iron, copper and phosphorus.” Eating them can help prevent colon cancer, birth defects and inflammation. One cup of beets is only 74 calories. I never thought to grate raw beets into salads before or to roast them. So many options! I’ve also never eaten beet greens before, but I will try them now that I know what to do with them.

Tonight I’m cooking up Brussels sprouts and will make enough to have for breakfast tomorrow. I’ve decided to incorporate a veggie into every breakfast, even on non-omelet days. I know it wasn’t simply eating beets that kept my energy level high this morning (although I know beets have a high sugar content, I’m pretty sure my energy came from my scale number which was down and that made me very happy and when I’m happy, I’m energized), but eating veggies at every meal is my new goal. I’ll just have to be very careful not to confuse them for the fruit I put in my yogurt or on oatmeal or Shredded Wheat ‘n Bran. I’m pretty sure asparagus in light vanilla soy milk wouldn’t be very appetizing. Although, green beans in warm milk was a staple while I was growing up. Mmmmm…now I want green beans.

My mind is a scary place sometimes.

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