Posted by Jill Whalen | Posted in Food, Hiking, Running, Things I've Learned | Posted on 01-05-2014
By Jill Whalen
What I Learned This Week – (Dec. 30, 2013 – Jan. 5, 2014)
Monday, Dec. 30, 2013
- That I can go a whole week without any alcohol. (Although this may be the first time I have in many, many years.)
Tuesday, Dec. 31, 2013
- Being downwind from a Chinese Food restaurant’s fried food smell when you’re running can cause you to almost barf at the side of the road.
Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2014
In 1973, the FDA repealed the “Imitation Rule” which had said that all food which was an imitation of a real food, had to be labeled as such. The interesting thing is that while the congress who wrote the law in the first place (in 1938), the FDA simply got rid of the rule on their own. Even worse, they claimed this was for the better! The new rule said that as long as the food was not nutritionally inferior to the food it purported to imitate, it didn’t have to use the word imitation. All of this opened the door to fake, processed crap replacing real food. 🙁 (From “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” by Michael Pollan.)
- From the same book, I learned that you’d have to eat 3 apples to get the same amount of iron as you would have gotten from a single 1940 apple. Wow.
- Pages like this are like food porn to me these days!
Thursday, Jan. 2, 2014
- My brother (a few years older than I am) sprints 4 miles home from work every day with a backpack. (Looks like I’ve got some catching up to do!)
- Oklahoma City made a concerted effort as a city to get healthy and lost a million pounds!
Friday, Jan. 3, 2014
Siracha sauce is good in anything (I sort of already knew that)…even squash!- Walking in the woods with fresh fallen snow that nobody else has walked in yet is pretty awesome.
- When you breathe into your scarf it fogs up your sunglasses, making you have to either take them off or not breathe into your scarf.
- I wish I had some way to easily take photos when outside in the cold without having to take my mittens off. (Google Glass would probably work, but they’d probably have the fogging up problem previously mentioned.)
- As much as I try, it’s still hard to be mindful and at one with nature even when I’m not listening to something on my phone while I’m out there. (I have had a few walks home after yoga where I’ve started to notice all sorts of things I’ve never noticed before, so I guess that’s a good start.)
- I need cross country skis (and perhaps even downhill ones).
- I need to figure out a way to start making some money again so I can buy said skis guilt-free.
- It drives me batty how WordPress inserts unwanted code. I thought for sure this would be a non-issue by now. (I hadn’t used it much in years.) I don’t know how people who don’t know HTML can deal with it!
Saturday, Jan. 4, 2014
- According to cardiologist James O’Keefe, running is good for you, but only in moderation. A ten minute mile is a good speed and running 1-3 miles appears to be a good amount in terms of longevity of life.
- According Christina Warinner, an expert on ancient diets, what people think of as a “Paleo Diet” is likely not really what people during paleolithic times ate.
- And this bonus information from Lissa Rankin, an MD who learned and explains the truth behind sickness and disease and how to heal at your core:
Sunday, Jan. 4, 2014
- Google is now showing my authorship photo in the search results for posts in this blog:
–Jill
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Hi Jill,
If you want to take pictures without taking off your mittens. Look into a go pro. http://gopro.com/
Its what all the extreme athletes and pros use to take pictures. If you saw any the the victory celebration footage by the red sox players you will see many of them were using these cameras.
Take care. Mary Kay
Funny you should say that, Mary Kay. I just saw a friend of mine post some vids using that or something similar and was thinking it was exactly what I would need to solve my problem! Thanks for your input!
Yes ma’am. A friend of mine put it well. She said, “I try not to get too excited about food.” 🙂 I try not to get too excited about sweets. I’m a junk food junkie at heart and I have a VERY carb-centered palette.
If all foods were created equal, I would pretty much eat carbs and fats. I could go the rest of my life without hardly any meats or veggies. I have to make myself eat those.
Being conscious about what I eat is the only way I can keep myself from weighing 500 pounds and being sick. It’s not really much of a struggle, but does require that I think meals through and pay attention to what and how much of various stuff I’ve eaten.
How many times do we need to hear Dr. Rankin’s message (and others like her’s) before we listen? I agree with her video 100%. I’ve heard so many stories that are just like hers… people that tried to fake it and do it all, put up with a bunch of crud in their lives and it was just tearing them apart.
Once they got rid of all the mess, their bodies healed from some very serious stuff (MS, cancer, etc.). Great video!
In re to your comment about no alcohol, I have gone as long as 6 weeks without processed sugar (still ate honey, fresh juice, etc.) and didn’t miss it. It’s hard for me to balance sugar. Once I get started on chocolate, candy, etc., I don’t want to stop.
Yep, agree, Karon!
The alcohol part is hardest for me. With fruit available I can fairly easily give up processed sugar. I don’t eat very much of it at all anymore, but haven’t tried to completely give it up. But I do like a nice glass of wine with dinner. Being as that’s supposed to be fairly healthy for you as well, I will continue to do that every now and then. I just need to avoid most other alcohols and TOO MANY glasses of wine at once! 🙂
Whoops! I replied to the wrong comment. Please see above 🙂
Well here’s the thing. Perhaps you believe that you are not much of a veggie eater, but perhaps you just haven’t found ones that you really love? Or maybe you haven’t tried cooking them in a way that you might like.
God knows I never met a vegetable that I actually liked just less than a year ago. But not only do tastes change, I tried different ones. I’m still not a huge fan of broccoli, although I can eat it in a pinch or if it’s mixed up with other things. And green beans are certainly not on my list of veggies I find yummy, but I can stomach them if they’re fresh and just barely cooked and perhaps mixed in with a nice chicken dish.
On the other hand, there were many veggies I never tried before, either because I didn’t like their name, e.g., brussels sprouts! Or they smelled gross to me, e.g., asparagus. And yet now, both of those are like candy to me. In fact, I’d prefer a humongous plateful of either of those over any plate of candy, any time.
Of course we all have different tastes and I lost my sweet tooth for some reason quite a few years ago. I like just a little bit of sweetness after a good meal, but that’s about it. Anything more than that I can’t tolerate the taste. A friend gave me a slice of bday cake the other night and I ate the cake part okay (tasted a bit too sweet but I was in the mood for some sweet), but the frosting made my whole mouth pucker up from the sweetness, almost like what most people would do from sourness or bitterness!
On this same note, I have a draft post of what I did to lose my 25 lbs. which I’m hoping to finish up this week if I can find the time in between reading, hiking, and watching Ted Talks 😉
Well, true. I thought I hated all beans (except green beans), but I had to taste some butter beans I was cooking for a friend to check the seasoning. They weren’t awful. I wouldn’t call them “good” but I probably could have eaten a few.
Maybe I’ll have to be brave enough to experiment with some veggies and see if I can add a few to my lineup.
I bet you’d like some veggies if I made ’em for you!
I am accepting recipes for yummy ideas.
Karon check out my healthy recipes Pinterest Board:
http://www.pinterest.com/highrankings/healthy-recipes/