self-knowledge Archives - Respect Food Roles

Food Thoughts . . .

March 16, 2020 by Debi Simons

during this time. I have no great insights, and there are tons of food blogs out there. Just a few things that have occurred to me:

Don’t waste food. I have a container of ricotta cheese that I bought for something–can’t quite remember what–and didn’t use up completely. Friday morning I decided to make Jim and me a ricotta, pesto and Parmesan omelet with tomato sauce, with the ricotta dolloped over the top. I opened the container. It looked a little pink, which is how such items start looking before they get actually, like, moldy. But the stuff underneath the top layer was perfectly fine. (Note that if it had actually been green I would have thrown it out. As I’ve said to Jim on any number of occasions, “It isn’t worth getting sick just to use up a dollar’s worth of food.” So I am pretty cautious. But in this case it seemed fine, and it was going to be heated.) There was some left after the omelet and I was tempted just to toss the container, but then I thought, ‘No, wait–I can make those ricotta-black pepper rolls with this.” Which I will probably do for this evening. They’ll be baked in a 350-degree+ oven, so any microbes will meet their deaths. It’s a small issue, as it’s a small amount of food, but it doesn’t hurt to have a frugal mindset even in the most robust of times.
Take an inventory. Probably everyone reading this has already taken stock, but I haven’t as yet. Especially if you have one of those pantries with deep shelves, or a backup pantry somewhere, it’s all too easy to lose sight of what’s in there. In our old house I had two pantries for our little three-person household, one in the kitchen and one in the laundry room. I was always saying that I ought to have some kind of running list on the doors so I could cross items off as I used them and add what I bought. But I need to pull everything out and just see what’s there.
Buy wisely. Don’t get items with short shelf life. So I bought Napa cabbage this past weekend but not lettuce. We can have some nice fresh greens that won’t have quite the tendency to wilt away. The freezer is stuffed. I have lots of packages of pasta and dried beans as well as cans of beans and coconut milk. I have somewhere around ten pounds of unbleached all-purpose flour, plus maybe 25 pounds of wheat that I can grind in my grain mill. There’s a full, unopened bag of yeast in the pantry. Did you know that, at least according to Michael Pollan, a person can indeed “live on bread alone”? (Humanly, practically speaking, that is.) If you give someone a bag of flour and some water, and that’s all he has to eat, he’ll die of malnutrition. But if that person makes bread out of the flour and water, which wouldn’t require buying yeast but just leaving the flour-and-water mixture sitting out long enough to ferment and then baking it, he/she could live perfectly well. So interesting! (I’ve felt at times that I had too much flour/wheat on hand, but now I’m glad to have it. I can’t claim any particular wisdom in buying these items in bulk–it just sort of happened that way. I even bought a big mega-pack of toilet paper at Costco last Wednesday, not because I thought there would be a shortage but because we were out. If I’d waited one more day to go shopping . . . well, I wouldn’t be feeling so safe and secure in that department as I sit here.)

How to Handle Slumps

March 20, 2020March 12, 2020 by Debi Simons

Here’s my problem: I need to be BOTH people in this image.
Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

As I’ve said lo these many times on this blog (both before and after re-naming it to reflect my major new emphasis on food), I’m a personality type called an Obliger, part of a four-part personality framework that Gretchen Rubin created. (Take the quiz here to find out your type.) It’s a framework that’s very helpful—I think, anyway—because it doesn’t try to explain everything about a person. Instead, it focuses on one narrow part of personality: how you respond to expectations, either inner or outer. Obligers, who make up the largest group (about 40%, according to a study that Gretchen commissioned), respond very readily to outer expectations—that is, what others expect of them—but don’t do well with the expectations they have for themselves. In other words, they don’t tend to be great self-starters. I had always recognized this lack in myself but thought of it as a character flaw. I was lazy. I was unmotivated. I was a procrastinator. Then I realized that this was simply the way I am, and that I needed to deal with my personality type in a productive and positive way. There was no sense in berating myself, but neither was there any sense in just excusing myself. ‘Oh well, that’s just me,’ wasn’t going to cut it.

Once Again, with Feeling: The Small Things You Do Every Day Matter More than the Big Things You Do Once In Awhile

February 14, 2020February 14, 2020 by Debi Simons

Image by Emilian Robert Vicol from Pixabay

The above is from Gretchen Rubin and tweaked by me. I’ve made this point many times, most recently in the area of healthy eating: What counts are the consistent, day-to-day choices that we make, not the big, dramatic flourishes that we perform periodically. Remember my theory of inverse drama:

There’s an inverse relationship between the drama of a process and the magnitude of its results. (from the post “Lessons from the Dentist’s Chair”)

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

January 3, 2020 by Debi Simons

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.

Why All Fad Diets “Work,” at Least Temporarily

November 23, 2019November 20, 2019 by Debi Simons

My husband listens to a podcast called “The Art of Manliness,” but it should really be called “The Art of Living Well.” They’re up to well over 500 episodes, with different guests and topics. A recent one featured Dr. Dr. John Berardi, who earned a PhD in exercise physiology and nutrient biochemistry, and is a writer, athlete, coach, and professor, as well as the co-founder of Precision Nutrition and the founder of the Change Maker Academy. So this is a guy who actually has scientific chops. He’s not peddling some nutty theory and trying to make money off of it. I found this podcast episode to be so packed with good information that I had to listen to it in chunks, then stop and absorb what I’d heard before going on to the next section.

Thoughts on Keeping Up With Exercise Routines and Other Good Habits

October 30, 2019 by Debi Simons

I wrote last week about my accidental weight loss of 2-3 pounds and how I’m trying to hang onto it. So far, so good. Yesterday was 115.5. I have my A1C reading on Friday, so we’ll hope that’s okay, too. But, just to show that life is always throwing a curve ball, that very same Wednesday I started getting sick, which doesn’t happen too often. Once in a while, though, maybe every other year or so, my chronic allergies and my chronic sinus problems combine to give me an actual infection. Nothing serious, and I’m not going to share any gross details about nose blowing or anything, but I was laid low through Monday after caving in and going to a doctor last Friday. Once I started in on antibiotics there was a definite improvement, but the process took several days. No floor exercises or walks took place during that time, and then we started in with snow and cold as of Tuesday. I wasn’t going to get out on the trail with those conditions, so the dreaded treadmill was in the cards. I wimped out yesterday but finally got myself upstairs today, putting in 45 minutes at a fairly slow pace and also doing a full round of the floor thingies. (I should do a post sometime about what I do, but it would have to involve a video. Have to think about that one. Let me just say here that I’m a firm believer in doing something simple and short, qualities that make the routine much easier to stick with.) In theory I’m back in the saddle.

A Shocking Statistic, and Holding onto Accidental Weight Loss

October 23, 2019 by Debi Simons

This morning on the “Happier” podcast Gretchen Rubin gave a truly shocking statistic:

“Research suggests that Americans consume an astonishing 30% of their daily calories in the evening, after 8:00 p.m., and as the day wears on, we tend to choose increasingly unhealthy options.” (from the show notes for the 10/23/19 episode)

There’s some controversy about whether or not this evening snacking causes actual weight gain in and of itself; in other words, are calories consumed in the evening more likely to be stored as fat than those consumed during the day? According to Healthline, which I’ve found to be a pretty good online resource: “You won’t gain weight by merely eating later if you eat within your daily calorie needs. Still, studies show that nighttime eaters typically make poorer food choices and eat more calories, which can lead to weight gain.” As Gretch and Liz say in the podcast, you aren’t going to be eating celery sticks or scrambled eggs at 10:00 PM; you’ll be eating junk/snack/convenience food. (Liz mentions Cheez-Its.) Of course, one way to keep yourself from eating junk food at 10:00 PM is to not have the junk food in the house.

The Falsity of “Don’t Allow Yourself to Get Hungry”

September 5, 2019 by Debi Simons

Just back on Monday from a lightning-like trip to North Carolina to celebrate the 80^th birthday of a family member. Such a nice time! Once again, as I mentioned back in May, much of that time was spent eating in restaurants—or at the party itself, of course. I tried to be very conscious of the time between meals, as no sooner had we finished one session than we started talking about the next: “Where are we going for dinner?” “What are we doing for lunch?” Also, the inevitable “Are we going to Goodberry’s?”

What You Say to Yourself Matters!

August 20, 2019August 19, 2019 by Debi Simons

There have been quite a few temptations around here lately, especially the leftover lemon bars from the wedding. I love lemon bars! I’ve kept them in the upstairs garage freezer, but they’re still there. I’ve eaten some that were still frozen, and they’re not even very good that way. My brownies have only four grams of sugar in them, and I’m not all that into the butterscotch ones so their sugar content isn’t too relevant to me, but the lemon bars are 12-13 grams per tiny little tart. That’s not too bad, but only if I eat just one. Which is pretty well impossible.

Would Daniel Recognize the “21-Day Challenge” Named for Him? No.

August 8, 2019 by Debi Simons

Yesterday I looked at the actual story in the Old Testament book of Daniel chapter one, in which the Israelite Daniel and his three friends refused to eat the food offered to them at the Babylonian court, not for health reasons but because of their determination to adhere to Jewish ceremonial law even in a pagan culture. But there’s a further passage in this book that’s being used as the basis for several diet plans, and it comes in chapter ten, verses two and three:

At that time I, Daniel, mourned for three weeks. I ate no choice food; no meat or wine touched my lips; and I used no lotions at all until the three weeks were over. (NIV)

Other translations say that Daniel neither bathed nor shaved during the 21 days; it’s fair to say that none of the modern versions of this short-term diet plan includes that idea!