{"id":1332,"date":"2017-01-20T06:01:03","date_gmt":"2017-01-20T14:01:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=1332"},"modified":"2017-01-19T19:32:31","modified_gmt":"2017-01-20T03:32:31","slug":"step-by-step-putting-it-together","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2017\/01\/20\/step-by-step-putting-it-together\/","title":{"rendered":"Step By Step, Putting it Together"},"content":{"rendered":"

Each year, as the holidays come to an end, the after-holiday commercials start in earnest– end-to-end coverage, as it were, of ads promoting Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers. In my opinion, if you lose twenty pounds for twenty bucks, you\u2019re liable to find those twenty pounds again, along with plenty more to go with them, but don\u2019t expect anybody to refund that $20. \u00a0Do I sound like a veteran of one of those wars? Check. Mark me down as a Weight Watcher Failure as opposed to a Weight Watcher Loser. The weight I watched went away, all right, but it came right back. In spades!<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m returning to this topic because this morning at my cost-free weigh-in, I clocked in at 189, down a full 75 pounds from where I started in April of 2015. Maybe part of the reason it\u2019s still working is that we didn\u2019t start in the middle of a post-holiday guilt trip. We started when we were ready to start and not a moment before.<\/span><\/p>\n

Going on two years later, I\u2019m still walking 10,000 steps a day. \u00a0Still. \u00a0Every single day. \u00a0Rain or shine. \u00a0Sometimes I walk outside. \u00a0The desert after a rainstorm is wonderful, but walking outdoors in icy cold weather makes no sense. \u00a0One of my friends in central Oregon, who has been snowbound for weeks, has been doing her steps up and down her indoor staircase\u2014without having to cough up money for a gym membership or a Stairmaster or even one of those stand-on rocking boards they were advertising earlier this week<\/span><\/p>\n

When our doctor suggested we go to a gym, our response was a heartfelt, \u201cNo way Jos\u00e9!\u201d \u00a0Three months into our walking, that same doctor found us a personal trainer named Dan Kritsonis, someone who actually likes working with OLD people. \u00a0When we started with Dan, he saw to it that we began very gently with stretching exercises while he assessed our general lack of physical fitness. When we\u2019re in Seattle, Dan comes to our house twice a week. At first we exercised when Dan was at the house. \u00a0Now we do a twenty-minute workout together each day. \u00a0Balance exercises. Stretching exercise. Wall push-ups. Chair dips. Sits-to-stands. (In July of 2015 I couldn\u2019t do one. \u00a0Now I can do twenty.) \u00a0For curls, I\u2019m using an eight-pound weight\u2014a gallon milk jug filled with water. (As far as weight lifting equipment is concerned, that\u2019s pretty cost effective. \u00a0We have a well, so the water\u2019s free, and the milk jug came with last week’s milk.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Before meeting Dan, I had encountered situations where I had fallen and had to use my cell phone in order to call for help in order to be dragged to my feet. Now I can get up off the floor all by myself\u2014without even having to crawl over to a nearby chair. \u00a0Yes, you read that right. At age 72 I can now get up in the MIDDLE of the room. And this week, while I was practicing getting up by myself, I did something else besides\u2014something I have never done before in my whole life\u2014ten pushups. \u00a0Ten floor pushups! \u00a0Hey, Dan, what do you think about that?<\/span><\/p>\n

But walking and working out isn\u2019t the whole story. \u00a0One of Dan\u2019s favorite sayings is this: \u00a0You can\u2019t out run your fork. \u00a0And we have definitely changed the way we eat. \u00a0We don\u2019t keep bread in the house. \u00a0Or potatoes. Or potato chips. \u00a0Or tortilla chips. \u00a0We\u2019re not purists. \u00a0If we go to a restaurant and bread is offered, we have it\u2014but we don\u2019t take it home. \u00a0Ditto for chips and salsa at Tres Hermanos in Kirkland. And if there\u2019s a summer swimming party at our house, and chips and dip show up? \u00a0We probably eat those, too, but whatever is left over goes away. For late night snacks, we keep peanuts on hand and almonds, and those work.<\/span><\/p>\n

Not having bread or potatoes in the house has come with a learning curve. Giving up bread means giving up toast, which in terms of breakfast, seems almost un-American. There are, however, some alternatives. \u00a0Rather than using whole wheat toast, I\u2019m perfectly capable of dipping a hunk of avocado in my over-easy egg yolks. (I admit, however that there is no workable substitute for a grilled cheese sandwich, and when it\u2019s time for Thanksgiving, I\u2019m making pumpkin pie and mashed potatoes\u2014NO EXCEPTIONS!)<\/span><\/p>\n

We\u2019re retired. \u00a0We don\u2019t have to keep work hours or school hours. \u00a0We get up. \u00a0We have coffee. \u00a0We have a late morning breakfast and then an early dinner. Breakfast is an egg or two eggs and fruit\u2014raspberries and cream in Seattle or grapefruit in Tucson. (By the way, what we\u2019ve learned in the past almost two years is this: Fat is not the enemy. Carbs are the enemy.)<\/span><\/p>\n

For dinner in Seattle, we may have beef stew or Senate bean soup\u2014one bowl only. No bread. I\u2019ve learned that drinking a glass of milk with dinner helps keep me from being hungry later. In Tucson for dinner we usually have salad. Believe me, it\u2019s definitely not my mother\u2019s salad.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bisbee in the Fifties was the end of the road as far as grocery produce was concerned. \u00a0I grew up thinking my mother\u2019s version of salad was all there was, which is to say, shredded iceberg lettuce slathered with a dose of Miracle Whip. \u00a0(It has taken me decades to recover from my history of growing up in a dead lettuce society!) <\/span><\/p>\n

These days our salads are a wonder to behold. We may have slices of protein\u2014five or six ounces of steak or pork chop on the side, or \u00a0cut up Safeway Rotissierie chicken added to the salad plate itself. (We have a postage meter on the kitchen counter. Bill weighs the protein.) But the salad itself is the center of the piece. \u00a0Lettuce? Yes, a fistful of lettuce is required. Without it I\u2019m not sure you can call it a salad. As for the other things that are tossed into the bowl? Here they are, in no particular order: riced raw cauliflower; sliced radishes; shredded onions; chopped scallions; sliced cherry tomatoes; Bread and Butter pickles; sliced bell peppers; sliced cucumbers; and grapes. \u00a0(Wait, did she just say grapes? \u00a0In salad? It took someone from South Africa to teach us that grapes work in salad\u2014black seedless grapes. \u00a0Try it; you\u2019ll like it)<\/span><\/p>\n

If you look at that list, you\u2019ll discover that, other than grains, we\u2019ve just covered all those food groups we\u2019re supposed to eat on a daily basis which is to say, some protein, some fruits, and a whole variety of veggies. <\/span><\/p>\n

You may be wondering why I\u2019ve written this all down and put it out there. It turns out I read the comments on my blog, and someone months ago, one of the commenters asked me to outline in detail what we\u2019re doing as far as eating is concerned. Someone asked for it, and now you\u2019ve got it. \u00a0And in case you\u2019re wondering, we do not consider adult beverages to be off limits.<\/span><\/p>\n

What we\u2019ve learned on this journey is that we are not on a diet. \u00a0The word diet assumes that there\u2019s a start time and an end time, a point when you can go back to doing exactly what you did before. \u00a0Guess what? That won\u2019t work. What we\u2019ve had to do is \u00a0change the way live. Permanently.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why? Because, if we stop, we won\u2019t have any clothes to wear, and having people our age going around stark naked wouldn\u2019t be good for ANYBODY!<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Each year, as the holidays come to an end, the after-holiday commercials start in earnest– end-to-end coverage, as it were, of ads promoting Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers. In my opinion, if you lose twenty pounds for twenty bucks, you\u2019re liable to find those twenty pounds again, along with plenty more to go with them, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[133],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-lu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1332"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1333,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1332\/revisions\/1333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}