• Tag Archives weight

  • Weighty

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                            Waning Harvest Moon

    It took me 3 tries to give up smoking after 13 years, and I was able to do it then only after I’d quit drinking.  Neither was easy, but they pale in comparison to the next, similar challenge.  Over the last few years I’ve gradually added a pound here, a pound there, until all of a sudden, to paraphrase Everett Dirksen, I’m talking about real weight.

    Now, I’m not obese, but I have passed certain personal barriers and seem headed further south.  This means I have to deal with this somehow.

    A while back I wrote about the simple method of losing weight.  Eat less food.  I did it. Lost 6 pounds and felt great.  Problem is, I found them.  Then added a couple more.

    That out of control feeling has begun to sneak up on me.  Not a personal favorite.  At some point here a hook, a handle on eating has to be found; but, right now I’m not seeing it and we’re headed for a cruise, which means 24/7 food available.

    My personal creed has always been not to die of something preventable.  So far, so good.

     


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Health 📎and tagged

  • Bee Diary: Honey Harvest By The Numbers

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                                   Waxing Harvest Moon

    Kate handed me a note with the honey harvest for this year:

     

     

     

    Peanut butter jars (large):  7.5  x 3 lbs each for 22.5#

    Pint jars:  17 x 1 lb                                                      17.5#

    1/2 pint  37 X 11 0z.                                                    32#

    1/4 pint  13 jars @ 5 oz.                                               4#

    total                                                                             75.5#

    This is not a large harvest as honey harvests go, but it more than meets our needs and offers us many opportunities to make gifts and to barter.

    Kate’s the precise type, which is a good thing in a physician.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees 📎and tagged

  • On Weight

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                                       New (Bridgit) Moon

    While at the Northern Clay Center yesterday, I had a conversation about weight loss.  Weight loss can prove difficult for those of us in recovery since we often replace alcohol with calories.  The obsessive nature of the alcoholic personality tends to keep us coming back for more, of no matter what.  If we can’t have beer, we can at least have the weinerschnitzel.  Many Americans, not only those in recovery, struggle with weight gain.

    My own weight gain crept up on me over a period of years until I was ten to fifteen pounds overweight.  I’ve tried weight-watchers, nutri-system, exercise all to no avail, at least eventually, though I lost weight with the first two each time I tried them.

    Oddly, only a couple of weeks before the new national guidelines hit the newspapers, I decided to finally make up my own approach.  Eat half of what I would ordinarily.  Add fruits and vegetables to each meal.  Don’t eat in front of the TV.  That’s it.

    The key to my approach is, I think, that it is my approach.  I identified three troublesome areas:  too much on my plate each meal, inadequate fruit and vegetables during the non-growing season months and mindless eating while I watched mindless TV.  I figured I could make these modification without feeling deprived and without giving up my favorite foods.  So far, so good.  I’m back in my old pants, using my old belts.  My energy level is up and the amount of work I can do on the treadmill has advanced impressively for me.

    So, if my example amounts to anything, it’s this:  identify some dietary problem areas.  Decide on simple, manageable solutions.  Apply them consistently.  Most of all, be kind to yourself.  We all die of something.  We all have times when we look great and when we look terrible.  Befriend the part of you that wants to get real about weight.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Cooking Health 📎and tagged

  • Bee Diary: July 24, 2010

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer                                                 Waxing Grandchildren Moon

    Tried out my new Alexander bee veil.  It ties across the thorax with a string and has only covering for face and neck, preventing bees from crawling under the veil and from scrambling for a hit to the face.  Having suffered one of those I’m glad to have my face protected.

    The virtue of the Alexander is that it is much, much cooler than the bee suit, requiring no heavy upper body jacket.  The disadvantage, that I discovered today, is that bees can sneak in under the sweat shirt and sting  your wrist.  Next time I’m going to wear a long-sleeved t-shirt and maybe rubber bands at the wrists.

    Today, like last week, involved checking honey supers.  The package hive has begun to fill up the single honey super I added to it last week, so I added another super to it today and put on the queen excluder, which I forgot last week.  The parent colony has two supers pretty full, perhaps all the way, but the other three supers have little weight.  I don’t candlemoldwhether this is normal or light, though some folks seem to have several honey supers filled on older colonies.  I guess you get what you get.

    The divide, too, has made little headway into the honey supers.  The divide has already filled its top hive box with honey and could be “honey-plugged.”  Maybe I’ll have to reverse the hive boxes.

    Dave convinced me to start gathering bees wax, so I’ve begun scraping it off where it’s in excess, balling it up and bringing it inside.  I forget whether I mentioned getting a candle mold and candle-making accessories, but they came with the Alexander veil.  A late fall project.  I want to make enough candles to burn during the long night of the winter solstice.

    This is a bit easier stretch with the colonies.  It will be followed by a lot of extracting work.


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  • Belt Up

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    69  bar steady 30.10  0mph  E  dew-point 58   Sunrise 8:58  Sunset 7:23   Summer

    Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

    Follow up on the yak dumplings.  More and more my mouth likes things against which my lower digestive system rebels.  Yak meat roiled my stomach.  A familiar feeling these days, days in which I have fallen far from the grace of the nutrisystem weight loss this winter and subsequently have created various insults to my stomach and intestines:  fatty food, not enough fiber, too much food.  Like that.  Makes me feel yucky.

    As I said yesterday, I don’t like victim status, but I am increasingly aware that my body is the victim of internecine warfare in my mind.  One part of me, the earthy bodily part, sends a sensation signal to the brain, “Boy, wouldn’t X be good right now?”  Another part of me, sometimes the Superego/father and sometimes Healthy Man, says, “No.  Not right now.  Too much.  Bad for the heart, blood vessels, stomach wall.  No.”  Then, too often, earthy body picks itself up and goes to the refrigerator.

    I experience this, sometimes, as an actual dialogue in which one part of my mind shushes the other.  My hunch is that consistent eating habits lie in empowering the Healthy Man, but I need to figure out how to do that.  This feels like an old struggle to me, one I have played out in relation to alcohol and tobacco, but girding my loins for battle has, so far, not proved powerful enough against my appetites.  What is girding the loins anyhow?  What is a gird?

    According to  Princeton Word Net,  gird is to put on arms or to put on a girdle.   Girdle meant, one source says, belt originally. OK.  So I put my belt on do battle with weight. Gotta admit that sounds logical.

    This whole process literally drives me nuts.  In spite of all the good stuff I do, if I see myself as losing this struggle, I get down on myself.  Not a positive place to be.

    On a brighter note Home Depot beckons.  The stump grinder.


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