But pass the butter

So yesterday I referenced a NYTimes article about sugar and fatty liver disease.

Our copy of Time magazine came in the mail yesterday afternoon, and if you haven't seen news stories about the cover story yet, you must be one of those weird hippies who doesn't watch television.

Because it's been all over the news.

Pop down to your local library to read it, if you don't subscribe. Or heck, go out and buy a copy. Basically it says fat doesn't make you fat.

But it also says that our collective psyche is ingrained with the message that fat is the enemy, and it's going to take a lot of 'splainin' to convince some folks that eating cholesterol doesn't raise cholesterol.

1992: The initial USDA nutrition guidelines graphic.

That food pyramid from the early '90s is toast. Literally! The supporting plank was grains and more grains. And for 20 years prior to that we'd been advised, sans graphics, to avoid fats and oils and red meat, oh my.

The thinking at the time was that folks would replace fatty foods with broccoli and strawberries. Says Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, "Well, that was naive."

Perhaps. Food manufacturers came to the rescue in the early '80s with an arsenal of low-fat or fat-free cookies, crackers and packaged snacks. And we were reeled in, hook, line and sinker, by the idea that if we just cut out the fat, we'd lose weight and reduce the incidence of heart disease and all would be well. Or, perhaps, Snackwell.

But the replacement for fat was high-fructose corn syrup. Because you can't make fat-free food taste good without some kind of sweetening agent, and HFCS is cheap. Food manufacturers took out fat, but added sugar. And we bought it.

The current USDA recommendations don't even have a spot for fat on the plate. Gingerzingi modified the official graphic from 2011, but I can't find it on her blog. [Update: She has reposted it today. Thanks!] I think I remember that she replaced Dairy with Water, took out the Grains and made Vegetables much larger. Help me out, buddy! I think it must have been from a previous iteration of your blog.

ANYWAY, her revised version is closer to the primal/paleo template I've been eating for more than a year now. I stray from time to time, but the general plan is meat, vegetables, fat and fruit. A little dairy once in a while doesn't seem to affect me. And pasture butter (either made from Amish cream or bought at Tiny Kroger) is definitely part of my diet.

The most powerful quote from the Time article for me is this:

"The argument against fat was totally and completely flawed," says Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, and the president of the Institute for Responsible Nutrition. "We traded one disease for another."

Read the article. Make up your own mind. The jury's still out, but as I've said before, we are each our own science experiment. And for me, fat is clearly not the enemy.

What was I thinking?

Planning to do a second Whole 30 in November wasn't, probably, the wisest decision I've made this year. Then again, when I planned it I didn't know I'd be traveling to a neighboring state to wait for a family friend's brain aneurysm to be surgically repaired!

In fact, I thought this same friend would be coming to visit me for a few days. Instead, she was admitted to the hospital the day before her trip to West Virginia. She's been in ICU ever since, and will be there a couple more days before spending even more time in inpatient rehab.

Her recovery since the initial incident has been remarkable, and no one was more surprised than my husband and I to be able to talk and laugh with her the same night she'd spent hours and hours and hours in surgery. We're so grateful, and so glad we made the trip.

I did okay with food while I was gone. Waiting while a friend goes through life-saving surgery puts things in perspective. The good thing is I didn't cave in to emotional eating. Removing inflammatory foods – and, I think, especially sugar – has brought some sanity to my eating patterns.

No longer do I stand in front of the pantry or refrigerator looking for something, anything to eat. If I'm hungry between meals, I'll have fruit or nuts* or a hard-boiled egg. I'm mostly not hungry unless I haven't eaten for a few hours. (Although I was hungry a lot while I was gone; that could have been an emotional response.)

I remembered to do my bodyweight routine in the hotel, but we only had time for one short walk, on  Tuesday. The scale reflected my lack of exercise this morning, sadly, but since the official weigh day isn't until Monday, I have some time to get back the loss I had last week.

I'm happy where I am. As I've written before, it's kind of hard to keep on keeping on when I feel as good as I do at this weight. However, even knowing the BMI benchmark is flawed, I still want to be at a normal number.

The best way to get there is to follow this advice:

If you keep on doing what you've always done, you'll keep on getting what you've always got.                                                         ~ W. L. Bateman

*The link is to an NBC piece referencing a Harvard University study suggesting eating nuts can help you live longer. The study included peanuts, which are technically a legume and not on the paleo plan. That said, the common denominator in all varieties of nuts is FAT. I will say again, NO ONE is more surprised than I that I've lost more than 50 pounds while consuming about 50 percent of my daily calories from fat (not all nuts, of course). Fat is not my enemy. Sugar and grains clearly are.

Wise words

I was struck by a sentence Jen wrote yesterday:

"… exercise is about self-care,

not about proving myself."

I don't consider myself particularly competitive. In fact, I might do better with the whole weight-loss effort if I were more into winning and rewards and beating my time/reps/miles. But it's the first part of her sentence that really got to me.

I guess I don't think of exercise as self-care at all. Brushing my teeth and hair is self-care. Showering and eating fresh, healthful foods falls into the self-care category. But exercise? That's something I feel like I have to do and I never feel like it's doing any good. Theoretically, exercise is taking care of oneself. I certainly urged my father to walk a little bit every day in order to take care of himself.

To no avail, I might add. When you live with pain and it hurts to walk, well, it's easier to let your wife take that 20-step walk to the mailbox. My mother's mother did the same thing – when her osteoporosis and osteoarthritis became too painful for her to walk across the road to the grocery, my mother and, later, my sister and I shopped for her. She stopped getting her hair done once a week. She sat in her chair and let life happen around her as she watched.

They are my fitness legacy, my father and grandmother, and each of them spent the last 10 years of their lives in pain, immobile, my grandmother on oxygen all that time and my dad using it for part of his final years. Dad began his decline when he was 70, Grandma was 80.

They ended up that way because they didn't take care of themselves.

I don't know many 60-year-old women who can walk three or four or five miles daily. And since I can and do, I guess I think I am taking care of myself. But the other legacy my father and grandmother have passed down is the propensity to gain weight. They both fought that battle most of their lives, as have I. As long as I continue to accept that this is the way it is, I'm clearly NOT taking the best care of myself that I can.

I would love for today to be the last New Year's Day I wake up, weigh myself, gasp at the number and say "NEVER AGAIN." I've said it every year for too many years. I would love for today's motivation and inspiration and drive to be as strong a month from now as it is today.

Because – no doubt about it – I'm motivated. But I need to reframe my purpose from one of LOSING THIS WEIGHT ONCE AND FOR ALL to simply caring about my health.

My children don't live close by. They're not going to do my shopping for me, or fetch my mail, or take me to the doctor.

If it is to be, it is up to me.

~ William H. Johnsen

I made some delicious little nibbles for my husband and me to enjoy last night as we watched football and then rang in the new year. (I didn't make it – it was lights out by 10:30. Again.) I took photos as I was making them and I edited those photos this morning and I had a whole post planned around bacon and cheese.

But it just didn't seem appropriate after I read Jen's wise words and started thinking about what that would say about me. Writing about mini-quiches and stuffed dates might be entertaining – and let's face it, lots of food is all about the entertainment value. But it's not quite in line with how I feel now, this morning, this first day of a brand-new year following a year I'd rather forget and seeing a number on the scale I never want to see again.

All of my efforts to lose weight have gotten me here – fat, uncomfortable, depressed, desperate. What more can I do? I guess that's what I need to figure out, right? And the sooner the better.

And so I raise a tall glass of water spiked with lime juice to you, and wish you a happy new year. May all your wishes for this year come true. Speaking strictly for me, I hope 2012 KICKS ASS!