Goals

More Thoughts on Respect–and Some New Year’s Goals

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Image by Jèwon Bong from Pixabay

I spent some time in my previous post talking about what it really means to respect food and its role in our lives. The topic of respect for people is much broader and somewhat beyond the scope of this blog, but since I plan to work on the concept for the year I’ll make a stab at it. Here are some brief thoughts:

  • You can respect the person without agreeing with his/her ideas.
  • You can’t show respect for a person without listening to and responding to what he/she has to say. My biggest challenge here: interrupting. I want to jump in the second, the nanosecond, that the other person pauses, even if he’she isn’t finished. It’s very hard for me to refrain from doing this! But interrupting is a sure sign of disrespect.
  • You can engage thoughtfully and respectfully in a disagreement by sticking to impersonal statements of fact. (This style of communication is sometimes called “computer mode.” I don’t remember where I read this phrase, but it’s a good one.) In any contentious exchange I try to make one factual statement and then stop. No personal remarks, no long explanations. If it’s an e-mail exchange, no links.
  • You can judge how an interaction is going by imagining how you will feel the next time you talk to the person. Will you feel obligated to apologize for your words? Will there be constraint between the two of you because of how things went this time? I have found this concept to be particularly helpful when I find myself in some type of political discussion. If you follow me on my personal Facebook page you know what my opinions are in that regard; I try to keep that subject off of this blog. Suffice it to say that I belong to a very small camp and therefore find myself in disagreement with just about everybody around me. But I don’t want disrespectful, angry relationships with those people. So I have to exercise a fair amount of self-control, something that’s very hard to do.

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And My Word of the Year for 2020 Is . . . Respect.

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Image by John Hain from Pixabay

Of course, I’m poaching unashamedly from Gretchen Rubin and Liz Craft, as they discussed their words for the year on yesterday’s “Happier podcast. Gretchen’s word is “infrastructure;” Although it’s kind of a boring word in and of itself, perhaps, she’s using it in the sense of “support systems,” as she’s very bad at delegating and she needs to do less work that others can do. Liz’s is “lighter,” and she’s taking that word in both of its meanings: her weight and her attitude. Liz’s word leads Gretchen to quote once again G. K. Chesterton’s aphorism “It is easy to be heavy, hard to be light.” (One of my 2020 reading goals has to do with Chesterton; more on that in a later post.)

As I listened to the two sisters I realized that I had a word right there, ready for use, as I’ve been interested in the concept of respect for a long time. Indeed, the word shows up in the title of this blog, and when I give talks about the proper place of food in our lives I spend some time talking about what I mean by it in that context.

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My Personal New Year’s Resolutions

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Image by Mary Pahlke from Pixabay

I have a dear friend who said that she always looked at her birthday as the start of her own personal New Year. I feel the same way. Sunday was my 67th, and I had promised myself that I’d take an A1C test then, which I did yesterday. After a glitch with the first test, I got a result with the second. (Don’t worry—I’m going to get my money back.) It was (ta-da-da-da-a-a-a-h!) 5.3. If the test is correct, then I’ve managed to get down to well below the new, lowered threshold for pre-diabetes of 5.7. (There’s some controversy over whether or not this stricter definition is warranted, as people are being put on

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A Keto Case Study, Part Three

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A reminder if you’re just coming across this series of posts: I am taking some material from the website Addicted2Decorating which I follow faithfully and enjoy tremendously. Ordinarily it’s a DIY home improvement site, but the author sometimes includes a personal post—what music she’s listening to, how the new dog is doing, and, for my purposes, what new diet plan she and her husband are following. I want to emphasize again that I am in no way trying to badmouth Kristi, the website author. I am simply using what she says herself as a means of examining the mistakes people make when they adopt some type of extreme fad diet, in this case the so-called “ketogenic” diet. I’m putting the name of the diet in quotation marks because it’s actually very difficult to get your body into the state of ketosis, a condition in which your body has switched from burning glucose, its preferred fuel, to “ketone bodies,” which is fuel made from fat. This switch in fuels is supposed to “trick” your body into dipping into its fat stores, thus helping you lose weight. I’d encourage you to go back and read parts one and two of this series if you haven’t already done so. You’ll note below that I’m still mining the ideas contained in the original quotations I used, as there’s so much to say about just this short section.

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Three Human Drives that Feed (!) into Fad Diets.

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I’ve already talked about the human taste for drama, a characteristic that draws us into all sorts of extravagant and unsustainable announcements and commitments. The inherent weakness of drama as a long-term tool for change is this:

We think that the dramatic and public announcement (“I’m going keto!” “I’m joining a gym!”) will do the work for us. Now, to be clear, we don’t necessarily believe this consciously. If someone asked us, “Do you honestly think that saying you’re going to lose 50 pounds will somehow make you lose 50 pounds?” you’d say, “Of course not! What kind of nitwit do you take me for?” But we’ve all done it, haven’t we? We say, or think, “I have to do something about this! I’m going to . . . “ And the momentum carries us along, for a little while. Once that initial excitement wears off, though, so does our motivation. And what is motivation, anyway? Gretchen Rubin has a great article on her blog about this whole question. Sometimes when people use that word they really mean “desire”–”I want to do so-and-so.” Sometimes it means “reasons why”–”I know why I need to quit staying up late to play video games.” Sometimes it’s a statement of some kind of vague moral impulse–”I should spend less money on impulse buys.” As she puts it, people aren’t really motivated by motivation. That’s a tautology, in which you just go around in circles: “I’m going to do something because I’m motivated to do it and so I will do it because I’m motivated.” As I’ve said myself before, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” That’s what a lot of so-called “motivation” is—a wish. As the estimable Gretchen points out, you need a clear aim and and plan of action, not some vague motivation.

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My Weight History–What’s Yours?

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Well, the post that was going to be written on Christmas Eve is being written today. What with cooking, and running around madly, and game playing, and movie watching, all with our guests in the house, my beloved sister-in-law and her husband (my brother-in-law-in-law), not a whole lot of blog posting has taken place. I have some time this morning, though, and want to get some more material down before the start of the new year.

I may be re-plowing old ground here, but I’m not going to go back through all 500+ articles on this site to find out. My point here is to encourage you to do what I’m doing today: go back and look at your weight history. Let me emphasize again: this blog has not transitioned into some rivulet of Weight Watchers. But your weight is an indicator of how you’re eating, and I am obsessed with the subject of eating well and healthfully. The more we can see our weight as an end result of behavior that can be changed, the better off we’ll be.

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In Which I Disagree with the New York Times and the Medical Establishment—Part One

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Oh my goodness! I don’t know that I’ve ever seen as much nonsense packed into two sentences as with these:

Only bariatric surgery reliably leads to long-term weight loss. Now scientists hope to duplicate the effects with a pill.

I mean to say, have you ever in your life read something so silly? I’m sure I haven’t, and that’s taking in a lot of territory. I have a New York Times subscription, mainly so I can watch Melissa Clark’s food videos, but I do take a look at their front page fairly regularly, and this little gem was lurking there:

“Why Are We Still So Fat?”

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Thanksgiving Menu for 2018

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Everyone reading this probably has TG dinner all planned out, but just in case you don’t, here’s what I’m planning to do right now. We’re up to 15 for the count, with possibly more to come. I’m so thrilled! Back in our old house I always wanted to have 20, but the most we ever had was 13. Which was WONDERFUL, of course. But to me this holiday should be completely and utterly over the top. It’s my favorite holiday of the year. So here goes:

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A Stunning Not-So-New Insight into my Personality

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Maybe you can relate to this scenario:

You’re ready to start on a rather tedious job, such as sanding the trim around a patio door. This trim had to be added on the spot by the installer because the door ended up being the wrong size and he had to fill in the sides with whatever wood was at hand, which was some extremely rough and knotty stuff. It’s not that big of a job, and you know in your heart of hearts that you just

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I Am Eating an Elephant!

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Isn’t that a lovely picture? Nothing like dirt clods to get the old heart racing, I always say. It’s part of a big gardening project I’ve undertaken while my husband is off on a trip to Central Asia. He’ll get back on Sept. 30th, and I thought it would be a good idea for me to have some challenges of my own while he’s gone. This dirt pile represents one of those.

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