I’m doing something a little self-indulgent today, writing a post that explains how I got into the three fields of writing I focus on:
1) food/nutrition/diets/hospitality
2) literary and historical backgrounds about composers and their works, with an emphasis on the texts
Year of No Sugar: A Memoir by Eve Schaub, first published 2014. 
Then somehow last week I ran across the book again and checked out the Kindle version. This time I enjoyed it thoroughly, laughing out loud several times a chapter. Eve Schaub is a very, very funny woman with a gift for ridiculous similes. I have no idea why I didn’t care for the book the first time around. Maybe I’m just more attuned now to this whole idea of severely limiting sugar in our diet than I was back then. Who knows?
What I’m going to do in this post and at least a second one is what is called a “case study.” I’ll divide up the material because I want my readers to be willing to consume all of it. Sometimes I read others’ posts that are pages long, and if it’s a subject in which I’m interested I’ll probably at least skim it all. But I think it’s far better to write material that can be read in 5-10 minutes and then follow up with later posts. You don’t read blog posts the way you read a book, coming back to the place you left off. Instead, you usually just go on to the next post when it comes up. I want you to get the whole enchilada here and so always try to limit my individual posts to 1,000 words or less.
First, some catch-up info: For some reason, several of my recent posts did not get sent out by MailChimp, my e-mail service. So you probably missed out on my review of Michelle Obama’s memoir, my fascinating story about my own weight history, and two posts (parts one and two) in which I take issue with an article in the New York Times. So take a look if you’re interested.
Now for today’s post:
I follow someone named Tom Nichols on Twitter, mainly for his political opinions, but last night as I was doing a quick scroll-through before bedtime I saw this article in his feed:
“I am proof that you CAN reach your New Year’s weight loss resolution — here’s how I did it.”
So, last week I was in Parachute, Colorado, a little town about halfway between Grand Junction and Glenwood Springs, as part of our big celebration of my in-laws’ 25th wedding anniversary. It’s always hard for me to find coffee that I like on the road. (I wasn’t even very impressed with the coffee I got in France!) I was pleased to see that there was something called “The Little Coffee Shack” a couple of blocks from our hotel and decided to go over there, since I was sure that the coffee provided as part of our free hotel breakfast would be terrible. My big beef with coffee made by anyone but me is that it’s too weak. Someone several years ago suggested that I start ordering what’s called a “shot in the dark,” which is regular brewed coffee with an added shot of espresso. I’ve done that several times and had fairly good results. Okay. I went over there and ordered. I even said, “Just to be sure, a ‘shot in the dark’ is . . .” and the girl on duty said, “Sure—I know what that is.” Well, folks, she must not have. What I got was basically colored water, for which I was charged $3.75.
I was struck with this thought while working on the material I presented a couple of weekends ago at a Christian women’s retreat. My actual topic was about the different choices we make about the food we eat, which I placed in the following hierarchy:
| Level 1: Choices controlled by actual health conditions: true food allergies, celiac disease, diabetes, etc. |
| Level 2: Choices controlled by conscience or conviction: vegetarianism because of discomfort with the suffering of the animals killed for meat, keeping kosher either because of personal religious beliefs or because of a desire to maintain connections with family members who hold those beliefs, etc. |
| Level 3: Choices controlled by preference or by belief in the efficacy of a certain diet or lifestyle, often based on faulty information and often harking back to an idealized vision of the past. |
Oh man! What a morning we’ve just had! Have to mention this before I get into the meat of this post. So . . . we’ve had some plumbing issues sporadically since moving into this house, and the general opinion of the people who’ve looked at things was that the sewer pipe that goes out to the street was blocked with tree roots and also that a piece of the pipe (one of those old clay ones) had broken off and fallen down into the inside. It was therefore going to be necessary to dig a trench and replace that section of pipe.
I’m poaching from a podcast again today, this time from “A Slob Comes Clean” by Dana White. Now I’ll be honest (as I’ve said before): she does rather tend to go on and on. I don’t always listen closely, but I find her to be a comforting presence in my ear as I do some uninspiring chore. Every now and then, though, I’d say at least once per podcast, she comes out with a true gem. Watch for a further gem, this time from her blog, later on this week. But for now I’m emphasizing something she said in her recent podcast #166: “The Fine Line between Challenges and Excuses.” Really, honestly and truly, you should listen to this episode. I’m not even dealing with how helpful her designations of “challenges” and “excuses” are, except to say that you rise to a challenge and sink with an excuse. She goes into great detail giving examples of how that difference plays out.
I have posted about Mireille Giuliano before, notably in reviewing her first book, French Women Don’t Get Fat. I truly love that book and re-read it periodically. To me, it’s a sound, common-sense set of principles for getting and staying slim no matter what your nationality, and I ignore the ideas that are just kind of silly. Sorry, Mireille, but very few people who live in America visit France often enough to buy their prunes there. (Of course, that’s assuming that you buy them at all . . . ) And we don’t go mushroom hunting much around here. Nor do we have blueberry bushes in the back yard to supply us with those little nutritional powerhouses. Nor do we divide our time between New York City and Provence, where there are excellent farmers’ markets year-round. (I always wonder whether or not Mireille ever goes into a regular supermarket. Probably not!) I ran into an interesting article in the UK newspaper The Guardian (but now I can’t find it) in which some Frenchwomen were interviewed about how they view their weight, and they said that Mireille’s book was a big, fat (sorry) pain in the neck because it perpetrated the myth of always-thin French women. But, and this is a very important but, those interviewees weren’t really following the FWDGF principles. Instead, they were making a practice of overindulging at restaurants, because it’s supposedly frowned upon not to eat a lot when you’re out on the town, and then starving themselves the rest of the time. Not, not, not what Mireille says to do! She would say, in her charming French accent, “Who cares what’s considered cool or not cool? You eat the way you want to, and if people don’t like it, tant pis!” (Or, as my mother used to say, “If they don’t like it, they can lump it!”) So there it is.
A couple of years ago I wrote a post titled “Loving the Mozart Requiem Isn’t the Same as Singing It.” My beloved Cherry Creek Chorale was performing the entire work, with orchestra, in the original Latin, and I was so excited about it. But when we actually started working on the piece I was pretty lost. I ended up investing in a professional recording with the tenor part being sung over the top of an actual performance, a move that helped tremendously. That performance was such a joy, on many levels. But boy, did I work! In the end, though, to stand up there and be so sure of my part was an experience I’ll never forget. I said in that post, “If I really love it, I’ll be willing to do the work. But the love isn’t a substitute for the work but the inspiration for it.”