No topic.

[Trinity]

My 9-year-old got her 2nd dose of the Covid vaccine today. She was dreading it and I don’t blame her. I dreaded getting my booster last month. Worse, my 12-year-old had a bizarre reaction to his 2nd dose which hit him about 17 hours after the shot and we ended up in the ER though he was totally fine the next day. She is petite for her age but definitely bigger than any 5-year-old so I’m glad we didn’t have to wait until she was 12. I’m looking forward to a weekend of chilling at home (just in case) but I’ll also be glad when it’s Monday morning and (presumably, I guess) she’ll be feeling back to normal.

I wish I could stick with MWL long-term. It is the healthiest according to Jeff Novick’s Healthy Eating Placemat and he is the best doctor’s nutritionist. The reasons why I give up are: it seems unnecessarily expensive because of all the vegetables; after the elaborate pre-load plus actual meal it doesn’t seem fair to be hungry again so soon afterwards; all the vegetables give me embarrassing amounts of gas; I feel like I am always peeing due to all the water content from the soup and/or vegetables.

Now, that said: I spend money on way dumber stuff than vegetables; who cares, just eat again; I need to commit to avoiding beans (and lentils, etc.) and cruciferous vegetables though they’re my favorite; I also drink 1 cup of coffee (I know it’s bad) per day as well as some alcohol in the evenings (which I know is also bad, I’m constantly working on getting it down to 4 or less drinks a week) so no wonder right?

The lowest I ever got was to about a BMI of 17.3 when I was vainly trying to get as thin as possible before my wedding. Following a book I refuse to name I ate 3 pieces of fruit for breakfast, a salad with nothing starchy in it for lunch, and then something good for dinner like a potato or Ezekiel bread but always keeping the day under 1200 calories and erring on the side of caution, meaning that if I wasn’t sure if a banana had 150 or 200 calories (or something) I would assume it had the higher number. As this was before marriage and kids so I had plenty of self-control and was hungry all the time and stopped getting a period. I was also jogging 3 miles twice a day (before and after work) and taking a 30-min walk twice a day (at lunch and after dinner). Really the only good part was being outside so much and walking and running. I would run outside if it was going to be at least 25 degrees. As if all that could last!

[Trinity]

12 hours after the shot all of a sudden she had a terrible headache for about an hour but then it thankfully subsided. No ER trip. And more good news, my wintertime-Sunday-Mass pants fit just a little less snugly this week, yay! I am even more lazy about clothes than I am about food so I pretty much wear the same pants to Mass every Sunday when it’s cold, so it’s a good way to confirm that I’m going to right direction. Lindsey, I almost couldn’t believe you lost 8 pounds your first week because you’re so small. But I went down 7.8 pounds! Technically it’s not a week until tomorrow, and I know most of it is glycogen + water (and something else which is TMI that I was having an issue with—sorry, gross), but, still exciting.

Does anyone have the link to that video in which Doug Lisle explains that exercise doesn’t really actually burn calories? I think it’s from 2017. I was going on and on in a previous post and then I had to leave and do something but that was going to be my eventual conclusion.

[JeffN]

What Doug is discussing is called the Exercise Paradox and is covered here.

https://www.drmcdougallforums.com/viewt ... 22&t=57403

It is not that exercise doesn’t burn calories. It does. You can’t exercise (or expend energy) without burning calories.

What the Exercise Paradox is saying is that after a certain point of exercise, the body begins to conserve some of the energy spent exercising by lowering expenditure in other areas and so the end result is the total energy burned is not as great as thought.

Remember, we do encourage daily activity and moderate exercise and is taught as part of the 12-Day McDougall Program as it has many benefits above and beyond burning calories.

In Health
Jeff

[Trinity]

Wow! Jeff! What an honor! And thank you for the link. Yes, I exercise, but as a result of what I now know from that video, I don’t feel lame if all I do is a 30-minute walk on my treadmill. I used to (long ago—again, in my single days) eat something for breakfast that was (supposedly) 300 calories, then go for a 6-mile run and think I was at -300 calories for the day. For weight training I lift my 4-year old into and out of the grocery cart when we go to the store, ha.

Another question that Google has not answered for me sufficiently: I know that weight-bearing exercise helps keep your bones strong and less likely to get osteoporosis but can it be low-impact like a mini-stair-stepper? Or is high impact like jogging better? I should note that whenever I write “run” in this journal you should interpret it as “jog.”

[Trinity]

Jeff, thanks again for the link, I have actually read that thread more than once. I noticed that you purposely did not include Doug Lisle’s video which is fine. I’ll definitely watch the original Dr. Ponzer video this week but I haven’t had time yet. Here’s what stuck in my head from watching Doug Lisle’s video (which wasn’t much, as in 2017 I was literally pregnant almost the entire year):

The average woman burns about 1900 calories per day. The average woman who runs a marathon might burn 2000 calories that day (!!!). The average woman who is a complete couch potato could even burn less than 1900 calories a day. Conclusion: you have no excuse to NOT exercise when all you have to do is go for a “brisk” 30-minute walk to make sure you’re at least burning your 1900 calories.

Eating a bunch of crap, then spending a bunch of extra time at the gym doesn’t cancel it out. Even if you’re eating great, exercise always has a benefit. For example, our treadmill is in the garage so it means I can escape my family But in all seriousness it will at the very least improve your mood.

Days when I am absolutely busy I still make a point to at least walk around my house for 30 minutes or really slowly on the treadmill so I don’t sweat too much, haha. And I only sit when I’m eating, driving, or for maybe an hour or so at night before I go to bed, as it’s boring. I realized that as soon as I had some kids, when they see you sitting it means (to them) that you are completely free to give your 100% undivided attention to them. Moving around doing laundry/dishes/cooking/cleaning/any of the gajillion tasks that are involved in keeping your house from looking like a bomb went off teach your kids to play independently by themselves or with each other. Or else attempt to give them part of one of your tasks and they’ll quickly find something different to do!

[Trinity]

I watched it! While doing my mini stair-stepper instead of the treadmill so I could have the big screen even though it’s harder (husband is on a work trip for a couple days so I get the TV all to myself). Jeff, thanks again, because as all we former AP students know, you should always go to the primary source. Dr. Ponzer is adorable. I also started reading his book Burn which I got on e-book from the library. After his talk I watched part of something else he was in and it looks like he may not know the difference between frozen/“processed” and fresh vegetables, and he might think lean meat is still ok, but I guess I can’t blame someone who actually lived with a real-life hunter-gatherer tribe for awhile. I’ll see what he says in the book.

One issue I had is that he mentioned that if we’re exercising, our body has fewer calories to devote to inflammation. If we’re sitting, some of those calories that may have been burned while exercising now go to increasing inflammation. But as we know, it’s the food, and if the food is right then even sitting around we won’t be dealing with any inflammation, will we? But as I said before, now I’ve got to read his book to make sure I’ve got this right.

I had a desk job for 13 months once while I was single (hated it). But one my coworkers and I would bemoan the fact that we sat at a desk and didn’t have a job like a walking mailman where activity is built into your job. And holy moly, who wouldn’t want to (be able to successfully) gather wild sweet potatoes all day and cook them in the bonfire with your village at night? I think the best message is that you can be a regular modern human, eat the McDougall diet, and move around a bit and have all the same health benefits. Switching from desk job to mom gives me an active lifestyle because if I sit too long I’ll fall asleep, haha. However, jogging 3 miles twice a day and taking a 30-minute walk twice a day (all 4 of these things every day, no wonder I didn’t have a life) is a colossal waste of time (and did NOT burn 800 calories which of course was the main goal). Except for being outside.

[Trinity]

Already losing interest in Burn and here is how. First I was happy to read:

“In fact, despite the recent popularity of low-carb diets, humans across cultures and around the globe, including hunter-gatherers like the Hadza, typically get more calories from carbohydrates than from fats or proteins… Carbohydrates are our main source of fuel, and we have a 65-million-year history of relying on them.”

Great. But then I started feeling worried when I read:

“Sugars and starches are digested and either used to build glycogen stores or burned for energy…They can also be converted into fat...”

Yes, they can be in extreme circumstances. Fine. Also he explains how a certain amount gets stored in the muscles and liver as glycogen. But THEN he goes on to say:

“Humans, like other animals, have evolved hard limits on the amount of glycogen our bodies can hold. Once those buckets are full, blood sugar has to go somewhere else. And the only place left to go is fat.”

I’m no scientist but as a McDougaller I don’t agree. Both he and T. Colin Campbell agree that extra carbohydrates are burned off as heat rather than be stored as fat, except for those studies where the subjects were way overfed sugars. He also mentions later that we crave fat. I’m not sure about that. It’s different from saying we crave chocolate cake. Also this guy uses a lot of swear words for someone in his forties who’s trying to dumb down science for the layperson, I guess he’s just trying to be funny?

To be continued. This week was busy and different as I finally put my 4-year-old in preschool that meets 3 days a week which she needs (and likes so far) but means more driving around in the car for me. Oh well, we’ll see how it goes.

[Trinity]

Quick visit to my parents’ this weekend. My mom has to get some sort of shot to improve her bone density. Hope I can avoid stuff like that by following this lifestyle.

[Trinity]

I’m not a big fan of either Sing movie but I do love the part in the first one, when the pig mom is exhausted, at the grocery store 15 minutes before it closes, but an awesome song comes on and she’s the only one in the store, and she just totally rocks out and some other animal is watching the security cameras, I think it’s a monkey and he comes over the loudspeaker clapping and says, “That was awesome!”

[VegSeekingFit]

Hi Trinity,

Want to send strength and good vibes... Hoping all works out fine for your mom...

We are all with you!! (most not on the Boards...)

Best,
Stephanie

[Trinity]

Thank you, Stephanie! I hope so too. Actually, she didn’t end up getting the shot yesterday because my parents both have cold (and therefore, Covid) symptoms but she probably will next week. Can I just say I am extremely impressed with your 286 days of doing MWL, even imperfectly. I remain MWL-curious. I’ve never been able to stick with it consistently but hopefully can recommit soon, for March maybe. I just found out my mother-in-law is coming to visit the entire week my kids are on spring break in April and I’m not exactly thrilled. I guess we’re not going camping after all.

Burn continues. It’s ok. The main point is still that exercise is essential, but we’re only going to burn a certain amount of calories per day no matter how much we exercise. One interesting study he (Dr. Pontzer, I think I’ve been spelling his name wrong up until just now and I blame YouTube) looks at is the weights of a bunch of men who worked at a factory. Some had more active jobs, some had less active jobs, some absolutely sat all day 6 days a week. And all the men had similar healthy weights EXCEPT the all-day sitters who were fifty pounds overweight (!). Exercise is so essential to the human body that when we do absolutely nothing, our brain gets so confused that it can’t regulate appetite correctly. I’ve heard something like this before but this made it really clear. Specifically it was a study of the Ludlow Jute factory in Chengail, India in 1956. He also makes a special effort to debunk Paleo/keto proponents which I appreciate.

Some good quotes:

“If carbs—especially sugar—were particularly bad for you, these high-carb cultures should all have diabetes and heart disease. Instead, they have exceptionally healthy hearts and virtually no cardiometabolic disease.”

“But there’s simply no way that anyone is losing weight without consuming fewer calories than they expend, regardless of what those calories are made of. Those are the laws of physics.”

Most of his analogies are awful but I liked this one:

“Wandering the aisles of processed foods at your local supermarket with your Paleolithic food reward system and hypothalamus is like bringing a stone hand axe to a gunfight.”

It’s a mix of calorie density/Pleasure Trap/all that stuff we already know.

“If you’ve ever opened your grill the day after a big barbecue to find a cold, forgotten drumstick and a lonely potato blackened on the grate, you’ve encountered Hadza cuisine.” (The Hazda are the modern-day hunter-gatherers that he has lived with.) In comparison with the Hazda, “In short, our modern diets are too delicious.”

Along with that: “There is always food available on the landscape (tubers are always in season), but they have to work to get it.” Yay for potatoes (and other tubers, probably yams or something in this case).

He’s now talking about the hazards of too much intense exercise which is so irrelevant I’m basically skimming it. To be continued.

[Trinity]

This was not a great week. And long. On Thursday I thought Valentine’s Day had been the previous week but no it was only 3 days beforehand. My 4-year-old, who only goes to “school” T-Th had her valentine exchange on the 10th so it felt like Valentine’s Day lasted forever. She is in a class of 5 girls total (no boys) and brought home enough crap for a class of 20. She gave out a card with a single jolly rancher in it, which were leftover from what my older daughter wanted to give out. I hate Valentine’s Day. I had actually assumed she’d miss out because it was on a Monday this year but no luck. It’s so dumb and just makes lonely people feel lonelier. And of course with the onslaught of chocolate I had to have just a few (3).

I finished Burn. I would only recommend it if you have nothing else to read and you are very confident in your knowledge and understanding of the McDougall program. My high school biochemistry teacher was similar in that sometimes things sound good on a cellular level but aren’t actually healthy on the person level. He also repeats himself a lot. Like I’ve said before the main line is that some exercise is essential, but if you do more, you don’t burn more calories. Instead your body just uses the calories it was going to use for something else. And if you work out way, way too much, your body will actually stop doing some essential functions to divert the calories toward your extreme exercise so that’s dangerous. The end.

Ugh, I totally got hit by some crazy (hopefully cold) virus yesterday afternoon. All of a sudden headache/congestion/exhaustion. I still don’t feel very well but I took a bunch of ibuprofens this morning and that helped.

I’m still basing what I eat on potatoes. I buy them in a 10-lb. bag, peel about 10 to leave in a bowl of water in the fridge, and then when I get hungry microwave 3 at a time. I eat some fruit and non-starchy vegetables here and there too and then some of whatever I made for dinner. I hate wasting food so I also eat kid leftovers as long as they’re McDougall approved. Last night I felt so bad I didn’t even drink any alcohol, and the night before I only had 1 glass of wine (instead of 2) so I’m glad to be tapering down. Every year I give up alcohol for Lent, which starts on March 2 this year which is pretty late, usually it’s February. The first few days are tough as transitions always are. But then once I get over that hump I really love it and want to continue it even after Lent is over. But slowly it turns from “I’ll only drink x days per week” to “I won’t drink x days per week” to back to drinking every day. Maybe this year will be different.

[Trinity]

I’ve unfortunately been eating a lot of chocolate. It started this weekend when I was going through the stash and throwing away the stuff that clearly no one is going to eat. I managed to not eat any that day, but seeing it was enough to break my resolve the next day. The day after I managed to avoid it but then after some issues with my oldest this morning I came home to my empty house and ate a bunch without anybody seeing me. I am absolutely done now, though. Pretty soon my face will start breaking out like a teenager.

I am so happy I put my youngest in preschool this month. It was something I’ve been going back-and-forth about for months. But now there are 12 hours a week where I am absolutely alone. My oldest typically has baseball the same three days, so I can ease back into having all three of them with me again. The youngest I pick up at one, the middle at three, and my oldest at five or 5:30. Also, I can dictate this with nobody hearing and copy and paste it later!

I hope anyone reading this is doing all right, and if not, feel free to leave a rant.

[Trinity]

I’m glad this week is over. Three late nights: one as usual for gymnastics but two for baseball. Last night it was 9:15 before we got home and all 3 fell asleep in the car but now there are only 2 more games that are out of town. I’m tired of blowing my nose and wiping my daughter’s. She can do it herself but then sometimes misses the trash can.

I was going to start eating freezer leftovers but I think I’ll leave them in there and stick to potatoes and fruit and vegetables. Haha, I’m dictating this as I drive to get my kids from school and it wrote down “potatoes in mystical spirit” instead. I realized I follow a cycle of (1) freezing leftovers, (2) not liking how they taste reheated out of the freezer, (3) eating all the leftovers in the freezer because I hate wasting food, and then (4) starting all over again thinking, “I’ll just stick these leftovers in the freezer for dinner another night.” My pantry is the same way. I’ll (1) think, “Why do I buy all this stuff?” because there’s too much in there, then (2) I’ll work on eating it, then (3) the pantry will be empty but when I’m at the store I’ll get all this new stuff to try. I refuse to eat crackers/pretzels/chips (oil) so that stuff just sits in the pantry still someone else eats it.

My weight is up today but I think it’s mostly salt. My mom and I had lunch at Panera yesterday and I always get the 10-vegetable soup in a bread bowl. (Panera finally posted bread ingredients and the sourdough is not whole-grain but otherwise technically compliant.) I know the soup has some oil in it but I feel like it’s my best option as opposed to getting a vegetable-only salad and leaving hungry. Like I used to do at all restaurants, because you can never be sure something is oil-free, and finally got really tired of. This was before having a 3rd child.

I can’t wait for it to be March. Ash Wednesday is March 2. My last delicious drink will be on Mardi Gras. I may have a glass of wine on Sundays. Since I’m hoping that one of the effects of not drinking will be less grogginess in the morning, I’m also thinking of switching from coffee to tea. I have never liked coffee, being a tea drinker, and didn’t start drinking it daily until after my third child was born. I can’t drink black tea on an empty stomach, and was always hesitant to make soy milk (high fat) a daily addition to my menu, but maybe I could try it. Right now I just drink 1 cup of coffee a day that I water down: the 6-oz. button on the Keurig then the rest of the 12-oz. mug water.

[Trinity]

The weekends are so fleeting. This one was nice because we didn’t really have anything that busy to do. I tried one of the new Girl Scout cookies and they’re not even very good. I made BBQ jackfruit. I couldn’t find the canned jackfruit in stores around here so I got a 6-pack on Amazon and wanted to use up the last 2. No one will really eat it except me. They’re crazy! It’s so delicious. But since I use a bottled (oil-free) BBQ sauce, it’s so salty that I’m thirsty the rest of the day. Today I ate it with some “dip chip” cut carrots I found at Publix so that was better than eating it with bread (which is also dry and salty). I’ve been reading some other journals here which inspired me to get some Thai green curry paste and (unrelated) make a creamy bean-based sauce/dressing. It was terrible at first because I couldn’t find the nutritional yeast but my 9-year-old saved the day and found it in the pantry for me. I felt like a grandma. But after dumping a ton into the blended white beans (plus spices) it made it much better. My fridge and pantry are in decent shape and I’m looking forward to getting back to my modified/permanent potato-Mary’s Mini. I also rediscovered a bunch of oolong and green tea I have so it solves the Silk-in-tea problem.