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Hey! I got a perfect compliance score yesterday! I ate right, I exercised, I drank plenty of water, got plenty of sleep, brushed four times, flossed, wore sunblock and washed my face before bed. It was a perfect healthy behavior day! And I was pretty happy all too. Maybe there is something to this theory after all. I probably won't be able to have another perfect score day today, because we are going to have supper at a friends house. But I will try.

I really thought I'd write about more interesting things than this. When I started this project I had a whole list of topics to cover. I thought I could actually make a book out of my journal entries. Maybe I still can, but not if they are all like this one. So far, I mostly write what I would call "blah, blah, blah."

Here are all the things I thought I might write about at the beginning:

Micheal Pollens rules on how to eat.
Methods of calculating daily caloric needs
Why vegetarianism is a good choice
Using meat as an "accent" food
Growing up vegetarian
Why it's okay to eat fish
Meat brownies
Visiting friends who promised not to tell
White flour is not a food
Kingsolver's book
Desire does not lead to happiness
Ani Difranco says happiness is a goal
We're fat because we're hungry
We can't rely on food advertizers to guide our food choices
We can't rely on gov. to guide our food choices
What is a serving
Food Pyramind vs bowl vs my pie
Ani D's aisles of future trash and why to avoid processed food
my hpyno therapy session
exercise
what are the reasons for losing weight
what are the reasons for eating right and exercising
The Blaise Pascal god proof related to the eat right or dont proof
telling strangers in the grocery store I'm not buying chocolate (and writing this blog)
the skinny girl's cookbook
The food chart
decision making: planning ahead, trial and error, gut instinct by Max Plank inst. guy
Binge eating and the craving brain
staying with Gma and Gpa getting skinny w/out losing weight
binge eating to escape, like throwing bricks into a well, but there's a roof on the well
yoga
dairy free diet and sinus clearing. "greek" yogurt
I can say whatever I want on this blog, name the best yogurt, say I don't like pork.
The steps of transfering a typical U.S. diet to a thinking woman's diet.
First add fruits, beggies, whole grains, lean meats, fat free dairy, vegetarian proteins.
Then reduce white flours, sugar, fried things, processed foods, fatty meats and fatty dairy.
Replacing food treats with non-food treats
Ice cream sunday: new make up
french fries: salt and oil body scrub
chocolate: pedicure
wine: massage
donuts: aromatherapy
candy: shopping
soda pop: music

oral hygiene
finding the time to prep and plan
fitness is the REAL luxury
soup and salad tricks for routine and fullness
Nutrient dense, high volume food is satisfying. no hunger even on 1200 cal day.
eating chicken in AFrica
Neurotransmitter balance booster journal
health benefits of wine and my theories re: stress and meditation or yoga
too tight a budget is hard to follwo-time, money, food, all need some slack built in
tony needed to look "hungry" for sales management
corn chips are dead to him. what foods are dead to me?
conversation with Ellen about letting skinny police win and my asking "do you really want to wage that war with your own body?" I wish I'd compared it to writing and math.
Letting skinny police win vs letting food producers and advertizers win
food subsidies and small farmers
trips to the farmer's market (photo essays)
vs. trips to the grocery store (photo essays)
yoga cards
free yoga classes
guilty about the dog and so I don't go out at all
how to handle eating out, potlucks and parties
how to handle dinner at your own house for others (parties and guests)
every day recipes and meals
owning chickens
growing own food
weighing 150 in Mr. Bockle's class soph. year and feeling fat as a teen
body image group
If you're thin and white and blond you'd have everything, if you weren't you'd have nothing.
Variety-beyond wheat corn and rice
focus on what you CAN eat, rther than on what you can't
cheap food vs good food
why our italian restaurants are not like those in italy.
Why the poor are fat
what is real luxury in eating
what can you buy with food stamps?
Treating oneself like a beloved child, or an expensive racehorse or a show dog.
Food and food style substitutes for snacks: ice water, lemon, bubbles, chewing gum, real licorice sticks, celery, mouth wash.
Seasonally appropriate eating
cost!
fasting
foods I missed from Colorado: triangle sopapillas, popovers, chey thuy soup.
Sunblock, seat-belts and cell phones
really indulging
antioxidants, free radicals and vitamins
swisher sweets advertisement

Well. That's a lot. That's just what I came up with in the first few minutes after thinking up this idea. I think there's a big opportunity to write with substance. But I think I'll call that a good enough start today.

Oh, one more thing I want to mention. So far, out of the almost 20 days I've been experimenting, I've spend three afternoons with bad tummy aches. I think it's related to eating large amounts of raw vegetables. That sure would be a shame. But, I'm going to stop doing that for a while and see if the tummy aches go away. Yesterday was really bad.

80/20

The relationship between my moods and my behavior is getting less and less obvious. The reason for doing this experiment, and keeping this journal is getting less and less clear. I had this idea when I started that I would write this really great thing, that would proof the worth-whileness of doing all the thing our momma's told us to do: play out side, go to bed, brush your teeth.

But it turns out all I write is whiney drivel. And it turns out maybe there isn't as strong a correlation as I thought.

But I'm going to keep doing it for a while. Whether or not the day to day ups and downs mirror each other, there is this fact to keep me going. On almost any day of this program...whether I am doing well or not...I am doing and feeling better than I was before I started this program.

So how could I stop?

Yesterday I, once again, planned to get a perfect score. But Sweetie and I decided to have lunch together and we ended up going to an Indian place with an all you can eat lunch buffet. I love Indian food. I won't go back to this place again. It really wasn't very good. Somehow the food tasted "trashy." I can't say what I mean when I say that, but I kept thinking it while I was eating it. Usually, that is the word that comes to mind when I taste papaya.

I can't eat papaya because one time when I was in Africa and fresh food that was safe to eat was scarce, except for papaya. So I ate a lot of it. I didn't know that it is a mild laxative. You wouldn't even notice if you just at a serving or two once in a while. But I was eating big amounts regularly, and my insides just sort of gave up on working properly for awhile.

Now just a hint of papaya taste in a juice or fruit salad kind of makes me cringe. I had that same cringey feeling eating this Indian food. But it wasn't such a cringey feeling that I didn't eat it. I cleaned my plate. But I didn't go back for a second helping of saag, which is my absolute favorite Indian dish. That's unheard of. I always go back for more saag.

I did go back for a second samosa. And I ate some funny little things that I can only describe as deep-fried mashed potatoes. And some chicken, and a dish with mushrooms peppers and cheese, and naan, and curried vegetables. All together I ate way too much and lost all three of my food points before 1:00 pm. So of course, the rest of the day I just ate whatever I felt like eating, since I'd lost my points already.

I feel discouraged this morning because I weighed myself. I'm not supposed to weigh myself as part of this plan, but I can't help doing it once in a while. It seems like if I'm making such efforts to eat well and not eat junk food and eat the right mix of foods and blah blah blah...then I should loose some weight!

But tomorrow is day 20. Twenty days is plenty of time to lose 5 pounds, if a person is focused on it. Of course, I'm not focused on it. But I am making some effort in the eating healthier and eating less direction, so I expect to at least have dropped a pound or two. Actually, I had dropped two pounds at some point, but now I've gained them back. I'm not supposed to care. Being thinner is not the goal here. But I do kind of feel like, "what's the point?"

I am tempted to just eat whatever I want again today. I could still get a pretty good score. I could get 12 if I did everything just right. But the fact is I haven't yet gotten a 15. Not one perfect score in almost 20 days. I have to wonder if I'm really serious about this project, with no perfect scores. It seems like the real test would come when I had a week or more of perfect scores. How would I feel then?

According to my chart, the points I miss most often are the ones for eating only approved foods, and the one for drinking a 3rd bottle of water.

I guess I'll try for a perfect score today. I'll try to eat right and not worry about being fat.

I was talking to Sweetie last night about the 80/20 rule. That's something we learn about in sales training. In any situation, the theory goes, most of your results come from a small amount of the total energy you put getting those results. If you can identify that 20 percent of effort that results in 80 percent of your results, you can let all the other stuff go.

I guess in sales the idea is that instead of all the other stuff, you could just do more of that 20 percent, and increase your results without working yourself to death. But I like the underachiever implication of just finding that 20 percent, and being happy with that.

And I think that's what I'm doing with my body and my fitness level most of the time. On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being my perfect dream body and 1 being as bad a shape as I could possibly be in, I think I'm about an 8. That is, I'm at 80% out of 100%. And out of all the effort I could possibly put into being in shape and fit and trim and thin and beautiful, I probably only put in about 20%.

And maybe I'm just going to be happy with that.

blah blah blah

I learned how to make a really nice chart using Excel. It shows the ups and downs of my daily happiness, next to the ups and downs of my adherence to the healthy behavior plan. It's beautiful and fascinating, I think. But I can't figure out how to add it to one of my posts here. Maybe I should have stuck with the on-line programs.

I rated my mood at a 6 this morning. I feel kind of miserable, but also kind of resigned and content with being miserable. We find out in two weeks if Sweetie got this latest job in California. If she did, we'll be moving soon.

It seems like I'd be so happy out there that even job hunting couldn't get me down. I feel like I'd be content just working at Starbucks or Safeway, if it meant I got to live where I love. I wonder if that's true? I wonder if I'll get out there and have the same problems I have here. I doubt it.

And anyway, I'm not there yet. We don't know who they're going to offer this job to. They're not going to offer it to me, that's for sure. Thank goodness Sweetie has more marketable skills than I do.

This project is starting to seem kind of pointless. I don't have much to write about. The recipes I thought would be interesting turn out to be kind of boring. I don't really stick to the plan, and I don't know why. But I'm going to keep up with it anyway. Just one look at my beautiful chart is very convincing. Do this makes me feel better. Doing it well actually seems to make me happy. I got up at 5:55 this morning, so I still have a chance at a perfect score. I haven't gotten a perfect score these whole two plus weeks. In the beginning I was almost perfect, but I kept forgetting to brush my teeth after lunch and my afternoon snack. I've gotten better at that.

I've lost a pound and a half in seventeen days, which is so little as to feel negligible. Maybe I should just face the fact that my weight is in the low 170's and toss out all the clothes I have that only fit in the low 150's. But I just can't do it. I love those clothes too much. And even a pound in a half in 17 days is still losing weight. It's almost a tenth of a pound a day. At this rate, I will be back down to my ideal weight of 154 in 190 days.

Of course, the whole goal of this program is not to loose weight. I'm not even supposed to be keeping track. And I give myself my food points even if I eat 2000 calories a day, which is pretty much maintenance for me. And, of course, I don't get my food points everyday.

Actually, I just went and fooled around on my excel spreadsheet, and it's easy to see that I loose food points the most often. Food and sleep are the most difficult things to stick to. Exercise and water have identical scores. Hygiene is the easiest one, especially now that I've started to remember to brush my teeth after meals and snacks.

I don't have anything interesting to write today. It's all blah blah blah, poor me, I struggle so to be happy! Ugh. I'm glad no one reads this. I wonder if this is helpful. I should be tracking whether I write about this in the morning as part of the experiment. I suspect I am happier when I take time to write in the morning, even is all I write is drivel.

I'm going to start writing shorter entries here, and maybe tackling more concrete topics than just whatever I feel like writing. And if I can spend less time writing this crap, maybe I can actually find a little time each morning to work on other things that do seem worthwhile to me. Maybe.

I'm pretty sure that would make me happy.

I'd start right now, but it's time for me to go jogging. It's not quite light out right now, dim. I love that. I'd better get out there soon before the sun really gets out of bed.

Nurture

I was so low yesterday. It was morning...which is usually a good time for me. I just felt useless. I felt trapped. I felt like no one is ever going to give me a job that I like, and it's ridiculous to think I could create some kind of career for myself out side of the standard job market.

I gave in and gave up. I stopped trying to do anything useful. I wrapped a blanket around myself and watched every episode of the BBC miniseries version of Sense and Sensibility. Afterward, I felt better. I guess sometimes I just need to nurture myself.

No wonder I'm sad, I'm job hunting. It's just challenging and depressing work. I read over all the want ads, and mostly they are just horrible sounding. Then, once in a great while I find something exciting...something I really think I could do day after day for years. I write a resume and a letter in a cloud of hope. And then that cloud slowly turns to rain as nothing happens over the next couple of weeks. And that's about how long it take to find another something exciting that seems worth applying for, a couple of weeks.

Sweetie says it's not me, it's the economy. I know I write a good resume, and a decent cover letter. It occurred to me this morning that I actually have done the best possible job on my resume. The problem is just that I have a crummy work history and no amount of clever writing is going to cover that up.

It's no wonder I feel low. I'm really not doing a good job of sticking to the health plan I set down for myself two weeks ago. Everyday seems like a new challenge. I had hoped by this time it would just seem like an easy routine, and I would be getting perfect scores every day.

Each day I wake up with the intention of getting a perfect score. Actually today I woke up with the intention of getting a near perfect score, because I'd already let myself sleep in until 7:00 am, losing my "early riser" point.

Yesterday I was going to make a list of qualities that describe my perfect job. I don't know why I didn't do it. I'm going to do it now.

Part time. 20-30 hours a week. Starts between 10am and noon. Ends between two and six. Hours are somewhat flexible and somewhat fixed. Meaning, I can set my hours ahead of time according to my schedule...but that I expected to arrive at the agreed upon time and stay until I said I would each day.

Local. I can ride my bike there in 20 minutes or less. The bus that drives past my house also gets me there. The building I work in is either attractive or interesting. I feel happy being there.

I work to support something I believe in. It could be art, or education, or health, or community. I work with people I like and feel like I can learn from. I do work that I enjoy and either feel like I'm good at doing, or feel like I have a lot to learn and will be very good at it someday.

I get paid regularly. $15/hour would be nice. My work makes a clear and positive difference on our domestic finances. My work also makes a clear and positive difference in either the functioning or the finances of the organization I am working for.

Most importantly, this job is the stepping stone to my future of lucrative, meaningful, enjoyable work. This is the place I make connections with people who can help me build a future of good deeds, personal successes and financial stability.

I'm going to write these things down on paper now.

I feel okay right now.

Basic Breakfast

I think it's funny that we have certain foods associated exclusively with breakfast. Some of my favorite suppers are these kinds of foods: scrambled eggs with potatoes and broccoli, french toast with asparagus. Of course, I would never have cold cereal for supper...but I would have it for dessert!

There is one food that I really save only for the mornings and that's hot porridge. It is the perfect morning meal. Here's the breakdown:

1/3 cup raw oats
200g plain fat free yogurt
20g slivered almonds
200g apple, chopped
cinnamon
powdered ginger

Serves one.

Cook the oats and the apple in 2/3 cup water. Top with yogurt and almonds. Dust lightly with cinnamon and heavily with powdered ginger.

That's the basic recipe. It provides a perfect balance of fat, protein, grain and fruit/veg. And there's a million substitutions that can make it more interesting.

Substitute a cup of cooked grains for the 1/3 cup of oats can be interesting. If you replace the yogurt with almond or hazelnut milk (my favorite) and use it for cooking, the result is a kind of rice pudding (if you used rice), if you simmer it gently for long enough.

Or, if you're lucky enough to live near a health food store, you can find all kinds of other grains including barley, rye, wheat, and triticale, in a rolled and flaked form that can be cooked and eaten like oats.

And of course, you can replace the almonds with any calorically equivalent amount of other nuts or seeds. I've really been into sunflower seeds lately.

But the real place to play around is with the fruit. I usually cook the fruit with the cereal if I am using apples or raisins. But fresh berries are wonderful just piled on top of the yogurt at the end. Peaches, nectarines, plums and bananas are also fabulous. I keep bags of frozen strawberries and cherries in the freezer, for days when I am all out of fresh fruit. You can just dump the frozen stuff in right with the oatmeal at the beginning of cooking. It will turn the cereal pink or purple...but I don't mind that. It's still the perfect way to start the day.

Looking Forward

The weekend was lovely. Relaxed. Beautiful weather. We stayed home. We read. We played with the dog. We watched movies. We ate simple meals.

Weekends are nice because, even though I don't have a job, I feel like it's a break. There's no pressure on me to do anything meaningful or useful all day long. I can pretend to be like normal people, like people with jobs.

Today is Monday. I feel completely ugh. I woke up this morning and I thought, no wonder I feel this way...I don't have anything to look forward to. On top of that, I have a few unpleasant things to face. I have to call the car dealership again and try to squeeze some money out of them because they told me my car had never been in an accident and, according to my recent bill for $700, it had. I have to look for jobs, which is disheartening and demoralizing. Then, if I find one that might be okay, I have to apply for it, which takes a lot of effort and concentration and usually doesn't result in anything. As always, I need to do dishes and laundry and keep the house looking nice in case someone wants to look at it. Actually showing the house might be fun, except that I have given up on hoping that anyone will ever buy it.

I miss California. I miss the fog and the ocean air. I miss the palm trees and the golden poppies. I miss the rolling hills and the ocean views. I miss the dolphins and the otters. I miss my sailboat. I miss absolutely everything about it.

I'm not going to fight that missing feeling anymore. I wont try to assuage it with the hope that we'll move there soon. I've just got to face the fact that we are here, not there, and we may never ever be there again. That is so sad. But, it's certainly not the worst thing that could happen to a person. I just finished reading a book about the holocaust. Before that, I was reading a book a bout slavery. So, it's really clear there's nothing too bad going on in my life. I can bear the sadness of never living where I feel at home again.

So I'm looking this town square in the face, and I've got to find a way to make peace with it and learn to be happy here. I have spent the last two years refusing to be happy here. I guess I felt like if I got happy here, we would never leave. But now I know we may never leave anyway, and even if we do leave, we may not go there. So now I'm going to refuse to be sad here. I've got to learn to be happy.

This healthy behavior experiment seems to be helping. At least, it's interesting. But, of course, it's not enough. I need something to look forward to today.

I'm going to make a dream list for the perfect job. Just making the list should be fun, and maybe it will actually help me find what I want. It's worked before.

Also, I will continue to pursue the folks at the Spanish and English non-profit. I want to make a connection there that might pay off in several ways.

I need things to look forward to. Right now, all I really look forward to is meals. That's kind of sad. It's really true. I can't think of a single other thing I look forward to. Well, I guess I look forward to Sweetie coming home at the end of the work day. And, I look forward to reading, when I have a good book going. While I don't exactly look forward to sleeping, I do enjoy it. Actually, I'm still kind of groggy right now, and even though I've been up for 45 minutes, I am looking forward to the next time I get to lie down and sleep.

I really need something else in my life that I can look forward to. I guess that's what my challenge will be today with the list. I need to be able to describe a job that I would actually look forward to every day. Right now, I'm looking forward to that.

Low Points, High Score

Yesterday was Saturday. I took a break. I slept in late, I didn't write or run or even look at my yoga mat. I ate healthy well-balanced meals, with movie house popcorn, peanut m&m's, Kaluha and Bailey's Irish Liquor afterwards. I felt bold enough to do this, to risk unhappiness in this way, because Sweetie was home with me, and there was nothing much we had to do. We both spent the whole day lazing around the house, reading books, enjoying the perfect early-fall weather. I just knew that no matter what happened that whole day, I was going to feel pretty happy. So I ate whatever appealed to me and pretended I didn't own work-out shoes.

My compliance score was only 36.66. That's equal to the lowest scores I've gotten since my baseline day. But, my happiness score was 70! That's just a few points short of my all time high.

To do the same today, even though it's Sunday and Sweetie and I have a similar day ahead of us, would be too much like taunting. Whatever devil brings my depression to me, I'd rather not demand his attention.

The line chart I'm making on Excel shows my Happiness points and my Compliance scores right next to each other, day by day. The Happiness points, in blue, make me think of a lazy little brother, chasing his elder sibling down the length of a soccer field. The older boy is energetic. He darts and feints from side to side, running wide to cover as much ground as possible. The other one, on shorter legs, can't keep up, so he cuts the corners and just barely manages to follow in the same general direction.

There are some days, of course, where the compliance score lurches up or down, and the happiness rating continues gently in the same opposing direction it was going the day before. You can still easily see, however, without calculating the official correlation value, that the two variables are somehow connected. I can't help but wonder, if I could find a way to shift the chart over, if the relationship would be even stronger. My guess is that if I matched each day's happiness score with the compliance of, not that actual day...but the day before, that the relationship would show up even stronger.

So I'm a little wary today. I scared that yesterdays disregard for all the things that have shown to be influential on my happiness, will hit me hard to day. I don't want to go through the day in a grey fog of hopelessness. Ugh. If I'm lucky, Sweetie's presence throughout the day, and our free passes to the batting cages and go cart track, will keep me buoyed up.