I Prefer to Chew My Food

Today's blog is a bitter rant.  And it's directed at a particular weight loss shake, who shall remain nameless.  It's not their fault that so many people are drawn to their claims of rapid, long-lasting results.  It's ours for being so quick to believe them.  I loathe these products.  They foolishly spit on my profession as if our recommendations for moderation are unnecessary and unsubstantiated.  They make you believe that consuming real food is passe, and the new era of slim bodies start with a blender and a few carefully chosen chemicals.

Each shake provides 90 calories.  If you mix it with skim milk that brings you up to 170.  So lets pretend that you only drank two shakes per day and then had an average dinner of 600 calories.  That's not even 1000 calories for the day!!  There's no miracle potion in the shake mix, it's just simple math.  If you are consuming less than you are expending in energy, then you will lose weight.  Now I will say that if someone handed me a meal to eat for breakfast and lunch and then told me I was on my own for dinner, I imagine having the plan and those particular guidelines would help me to stick to it.  But where does personal responsibility enter the equation?  They aren't teaching you how to eat healthy.  They aren't even teaching you to eat!  They encourage liquid meals!!  Don't we have teeth for a reason?  Are you aware that part of how our brain senses satiety is by how much it smells and chews a food?  So with this in mind, is that shake appeasing the brain when you don't chew the shake nor does the coldness of the shake encourage a lot of aroma?  Not so much.  What about nutrients?  The shake is sweetened with sucralose (Splenda) and has a few select vitamins, minerals and antioxidants.  So if we drink the shake and it contains beta-carotene, then it's the same as eating a carrot (or other Vitamin A rich vegetable) right?  Well what about the other 500+ carotenoids that the carrot contains?  Aren't these important too?  Can't get that in the shake. 

Hmmmm, "great tasting variety for just $2 a meal".  Well I'm pretty sure that doesn't include all the items you might want to add to your shake.  If you plan on concocting one of the recipes, it's going to run you more than $2 and it's also going to raise that calorie level.  I do like how the youtube video for this product runs through a dozen or so different foods, claiming you would have to eat a 3-15 of each of these to get the same nutritional value of a shake.  Last time I checked a lot of foods have a large variety of important nutrients, not just one as this video would have you believe.  For example cheese is not just a good source of Zinc, but it also has calcium so why are they suggesting that you also need to eat frozen yogurt to cover the calcium?  They showed bran cereal and bread for different nutrients, then later indicate all the prunes you need for fiber - but show no indication that you got fiber from the cereal and the 15 slices of bread.  How are people supposed to learn to eat a healthy variety when they are purposefully misinforming consumers so they can sell their product?  It actually made me think of an old Saturday Night Live commercial from back in the Phil Hartman era, for "Colon Blow" and "Super Colon Blow" where they were showing the number of bowls of fiber cereal you would have to eat to get the fiber benefit of theirs.  If a product was truly impressive, then it wouldn't need to over-sell itself like this.

What are you going to do when you stop?  Are you going to drink these shakes indefinitely?  Now, yes, I have not signed up so I cannot see behind the curtain to see what fabulous exercise and diet tips they are providing.  I just cannot stand to see so many people getting caught up in this sort of multi-level-marketing product.  I mean honestly, if they really just wanted to help people with weight loss and healthy changes, they wouldn't be encouraging rapid weight loss like this with the added appeal that you can get your program for free if you sign up your friends.

Simply about Survival

So here I sit at my first craft fair of the holiday season.  Business is a little slow, but it’s giving me a chance to fully analyze the brick wall across from me, and to remember that I have to bring some busy work to do tomorrow when it gets stagnant.  So as I sit here, I’m thinking back on my week of preparing for the show and I honestly can’t believe I made it here, with my goods to sell, and a voice (since I thought for sure I was going to lose it from the constant scolding).  How is it that when you are at your busiest moment, little boys seem to know you can’t be on top of them, and take full advantage?  Is it a sixth sense they possess?  Can they smell the sweat on my brow from a moment of preoccupied work?  Whatever it is in their being that alerts them, I want it removed.  I honestly thought I was going to lose my mind, when one bad day turned into two and three.

The first day started off with a phone call from my husband regarding unfortunate news about his mawmaw.  I was knee deep in products I needed to make, but now I was extra stressed because I wanted to hug my husband, but couldn’t (he was away on a military trip) and I had to figure out how to get him from his location to Texas for the services.  The boys sensed something was up, or actually they sensed that I was on the phone and proceeded to tear their rooms apart.  They emptied their entire dressers all over the floor.  As if that mess wasn’t bad enough, they started throwing the clothes into each other’s rooms and down the stairs (so it not only had to be put away, but sorted too).  Mind you this was Tuesday, and it is now Friday and I still have not found a spare moment to reorganize all of those garments.  When the clothes are a mess it makes it hard to get dressed, so I spent the next hour trying to convince my 3-year-old that he needed to find something to wear so we could get out the door to get to a meeting regarding Daddy’s emergency leave and plane ticket.  We made it to the meeting, fully dressed (I still don’t know how) – where both boys proceeded to play in the office like it was a jungle gym and at one moment I found them licking the desk!!  I seriously thought my eye was going to pop out of my head it was twitching so badly.

Day 2 was a little better to start as I had my 5-year-old off to kindergarten and my 3-year-old being babysat while I had a tooth filling replaced (believe it or not this was the most relaxing part of my whole week).  The afternoon proved to be horrific as soon as school let out.  The 5-year-old was properly wound up from being over-stimulated all day and would not stop making his brother cry.  I was supposed to be listening to a live lecture for my class, but I think I could only hear about 50% of it.

 
Day 3 was when I finally started to think that I was losing my grasp of control on the household.  The boys had decided to brush their teeth after breakfast.  I came around the corner and found toothpaste smeared across the floor and apparently my 3-year-old thought it would make really good hair gel too.  He certainly was right, that hair didn’t move one bit once the paste got into it.  My frustration with their mess sent them both to their rooms.  A bit later I heard running between the upstairs bathroom and their bedrooms.  I ventured upstairs to find them saturating wash cloths in the sink and then running them into the 3-year-old’s room where they would squeeze them out into one of their empty dresser tubs (empty because their clothes are still all over the floor).  I still can’t figure out what they were setting up to do, and I honestly don’t want to know.  The scolding began.  They were sent back to their respective rooms and told not to come out.  Moments later my 5-year-old appeared downstairs wearing my winter boots (which he had to go into my closet to get)!!  AND SMILING!!  I could have thrown fire balls out of my eyes, I was so pissed.  I got down at his level and said “what is it going to take for you to start listening and acting like a kindergartener at home??”  That little smart ass actually started to answer!  AHHH! Sent back to his room.  Mind you, the whole time this is going on, I’m trying to pour and label candles and body products for the show because we had to be ready to drive 45 minutes to set up that night.  I spoke to my husband.  I was losing it.  I didn’t know what to do.  As I figured, neither did he.  After talking to our 5-year-old, he [my husband] informed me that he [my 5-year-old] should behave because “I told him if he doesn’t then he’ll be in trouble when I get home.”  Bahahahaha - silly Daddy, that threat was about as effective as wet toilet paper.  Somehow I managed to finish up and load everything in the car for the trip to the show site.  My 3-year-old still had his “hair gel” in and had layered on some facial dirt so it now looked like he also had a goatee.  And they both slept like little angels the whole way – probably tired out from their devil-ish activities.
 
And what have I decided?  Well, sometimes you just have to sit back and realize that there are going to be days… maybe even a few in a row… that are simply about survival.  When all I need to do is make it from sunrise to sunset, with a few meals in between, and be happy that we didn’t have any trips to the Emergency Room. 

Pffffft. Yes, that's the sound my brain just made.

I'm pretty sure my brain has turned to absolute mush.  When I began my Master's program I was so excited and could hardly wait to dig into the material.  That really hasn't changed.  Every morsel I read seems to get stowed away in my now carefully categorized brain.  What has changed is the amount of detail I'm putting into all of my work.  And wow, the level of work that's coming out of me.  In my undergrad years I thought I was working hard.  I would be presented a case study in one of my nutrition classes, and I thought I was rocking the assignment if I managed to point out what deficiency the patient had.  At the level I'm at right now, case studies like that look absolutely ridiculous.  Over the past few weeks I created a case study.  And when I say "created", I mean from the bottom up.  I crafted the entire patient!  Pulled him out of thin air, developed his identity, drew a time-line of the evolution of his problem, and in the end I offered solutions that I crafted from reading the current research literature on his health care conundrum.  Over the weekend I became insanely jealous of others in my class who might be working in a hospital right now.  They didn't need to go to such lengths... they had a pool of sick individuals right in front of them, and only had to pick out the most interesting one and discuss nutrition interventions to help the patient.

Does it bother me that I probably put twice as much work into my study as some others?  Nope!  Every moment of the 15 hours I devoted to that project was worth it.  I learned a lot.  For example, did you know that if you want to convert mmol/L to mg/dL in regards to LDL cholesterol, you would divide the mmol/L by 0.0259?  Did you know you divide it by something else if you're dealing with Triglycerides since the molecular weight is different?  Was is 0.0113?  The real question is do you really need to use valuable brain space to remember this?  And how do I get my eye to stop twitching from the lengths I had to go to in order to find these conversion calculations???  But honestly, I really did learn a ton, especially about my innate desire to take that mediocre undergrad mindset and stomp it out of existence in this body.