In which I basically just link to a bunch of research.
At the Peony the other day, I was discussing my weight loss with a couple of women who were asking me how I’d done it. I gave them my blood sugar/insulin/refined carbs spiel, during which I said, “Honestly, dietary fat needn’t be avoided. You can eat brie all you want, you just can’t eat the baguette.”
One of the women I was talking to said, “Oh, we can’t eat fat at my house. My husband has been diagnosed with heart disease, so we’ve seen a nutritionist and aren’t allowed to eat any fat.”
And I thought, That can’t be right. They can’t possibly still be telling people that, with all the research to the contrary. But they are. Every day. I have an uncle with high cholesterol who eats very little fat.
Here’s just some of the research:
Effects of a Plant-Based High-Carbohydrate/High-Fiber Diet Versus High–Monounsaturated Fat/Low-Carbohydrate Diet on Postprandial Lipids in Type 2 Diabetic Patients
A diet rich in carbohydrate and fiber, essentially based on legumes, vegetables, fruits, and whole cereals, may be particularly useful for treating diabetic patients because of its multiple effects on different cardiovascular risk factors, including postprandial lipids abnormalities.
Randomized comparison of reduced fat and reduced carbohydrate hypocaloric diets on intrahepatic fat in overweight and obese human subjects.
A prolonged hypocaloric diet low in carbohydrates and high in fat has the same beneficial effects on intrahepatic lipid accumulation as the traditional low-fat hypocaloric diet.
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In which it still fucking hurts and I sorta feel like I should be over it, but I’m not.
I had Bindu put down a year ago today.
She’d had about a dozen painful heart attacks. She had advanced heart, liver, and Cushing’s diseases. She was going deaf and didn’t seem to see very well. She was maybe 13 or 14 years old.
Deciding to have a creature killed broke both my heart and my brain. I will probably never own another pet, just so I can avoid having to do it again. I still miss that blue dog more than I can express.
I still miss her. Every. Single. Day.
RIP, Bindu, my sweet girl.
In which I tell you a secret.
Every time I enter a restroom — public, private, whatever — I tidy it up. I pick up the paper from the floor, dry off the counters, wipe up the soap, flush the toilets in need of flushing, and tamp down the trash so it’s not overflowing.
I’ve been doing this for years now.
It started as a way to break myself of the habit of thinking, “It’s not my job.” I was constantly irritated at work because I kept having to do things that I wasn’t supposed to have to do, and I was constantly irritated at being constantly irritated. I felt helpless and enraged. I didn’t like it. I finally realized that the work itself wasn’t really the problem: the problem was my attitude toward the work. So what if your title is Office Manager but you’re running a vacuum cleaner and doing the filing? What difference does it make?
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In which there’s a picture.
This is where I work now. Dual monitors!
In which I rejoin the workforce!
Last night I took myself out for dinner and drank a lot of wine (because that’s what you do when you’re damn near broke and the check you’ve been expecting for weeks still hasn’t shown up, right? RIGHT?), which means I was still in bed at 10:30 this morning when G’ma called up the stairs, “Shelly! There’s a man from BMI here to see you!”
A what from what? Did she say BMI? “Um, okay. I’m not dressed! Tell him I’ll be down in a minute!”
I grabbed some clothes from the floor and put them on, found my glasses, put my messy hair up in a pony tail and stumbled downstairs.
The man turned out to be RB, my old boss from BMI… with a job offer! Their network engineer has taken a position elsewhere, and since they really weren’t excited at the prospect of running ads and doing interviews and background checks and calling references and finding someone with the right personality for their small office, they thought of me! (I left because I wanted more responsibility and there was, at the time, no room for growth.) Then they checked my blog and saw the job hunting post, realized I was still available, and started trying to hunt me down. Since I hadn’t answered my phone, RB decided to jump in his car and come find me.
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In which I apply for jobs.
So I’ve been more-unemployed-than-less now since December 2009. That’s nearly two years, if you do the math. Sure, I spent nine months of that time in school taking CCNA classes, but I didn’t really enjoy it because I perpetually felt like I was way far behind and I got a shit grade I may never get over in one of my courses the last trimester.
Today I applied for a retail job at a Halloween store. (Yes, I just wrote both RETAIL JOB and AT A HALLOWEEN STORE. I will only stab myself in the eye socket with a broken chopstick if they call me for an interview.) Tomorrow I’m going to apply for a clerk’s position at the liquor store next to the Hasting’s over on 9th.
I’ve gotten one callback from all the applications I’ve submitted, at a rate of no less than three per week, since I got out of school in June. It was for a part-time, minimum-wage, first tier tech support position in a suburb of Portland. I accidentally deleted the number.
If it weren’t for gigs and the few hours I get from that remote QA testing job, I wouldn’t have been able to buy a four dollar bottle of wine today. (YES, I AM DRINKING FOUR DOLLAR WINE. THAT’S FOUR DOLLARS I DIDN’T SPEND ON CRACK.)
In which I tell you all about my avoidance of refined carbohydrates.
As you may remember, I went on a traditional low-calorie, low-fat, semi-starvation diet on January 5th. I did this because I was so fat I could barely cut my own toenails and I felt uncomfortable in my own body. I was twenty pounds shy of obesity, and at the rate I was gaining I’d have been clinically obese in a year or two.
I lost both weight – mostly water, at first – and inches for about five weeks. The experience, after the third or fourth week, was nothing short of miserable (save the pride I felt in my accomplishment): near the end of the diet I was obsessed with food and calories, and I literally spent most of my time planning my next meal.
By the end of the diet, my body was buying and consuming entire bags of potato chips without my consent. I was hungry all the time.
Then I read Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease, more or less by accident (someone must have recommended it to me, because I found the sample on my Kindle). It was astonishing, this book. Game-changing. Mind-blowing. It challenged every single thing I knew about diet and weight loss, and it did it with actual science. I decided that although a lot of the author’s conclusions were, by his own admission, anecdotal or theoretical at best, and needed more studies, I could do some experiments in my own lab: my body.
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In which I HAZ A MAD.
Dear cell phone carrier,
JUST FUCKING TELL ME HOW MUCH IT COSTS WHEN I ASK. I’m going to sign up anyway, and your stupid contract will ensure I can’t go anywhere.
Do not tell me “it’s sixty-nine ninety-five a month,” when that number is as related to how much the service actually costs as peanut butter is to parallelograms: which is to say, NOT AT ALL.
My $70 plan now mysteriously costs nearly $100 a month; that’s an extra $360 a year. Why not just tell me what the fees add up to in the first place? I mean, I asked you right to your goddamned face, and you decided to lie to me.
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4 random books from my Library!
