Trillium Woods

Saturday, May 14, 2011

The sugar bush canopy is almost completely sketched in with bright acid green. This morning it was raining a warm misty rain, releasing a gloriously green and earthy fragrance. The birds' songs were constant, interwoven: robins, song sparrows, chickadees, warblers.

And at this moment of maximum light, just before the forest becomes its cool and shadowed summer self, the spring wildflowers have peaked. Hepaticas, spring beauties, dogtooth violets are gone. Now it's swaths of yellow large flowered bellwort. Bright yellow marsh marigolds in the swampy places. Violets -- yellow, white and purple, a purple-pink -- spangling the forest floor. Trilliums, trilliums, trilliums -- bright white, some segueing to soft pink, with intermittent dark red "wake robins". In a far corner of the woods, I found an enclave of smaller trilliums with copper green leaves and white flowers with a red heart. Checking out the Ontario Wildflowers site, I discovered these are called "painted trillium" and they do look as if each one had been delicately handpainted on porcelain.

If you'd like to see any of the wildflowers, here's a link:

www.ontariowildflowers.com/


These particular woods are layered with memories for me: all the seasons (spring, summer, fall and winter) from over 30 years of walking the paths with my children, and with all of the beloved dogs I've owned in that time. I remember the spring of the swallowtail butterflies. I know just when and where to look for the bright pink waterlilies in mid summer, the fringed blue gentians in fall. There's the bench where the kids and enjoyed so many winter picnics of peanut butter and jam sandwiches with a thermos of hot chocolate.

But as familiar and dear as they are, these woods are still full of surprises, new discoveries, new joys.

Painted trilliums!

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Virtual pals, real value

Thursday, May 12, 2011

That was the headline on a tiny article in the Toronto Globe and Mail earlier this week. It outlined UK research indicating that the typical user of a "social networking site" (such as Facebook, or I presume SparkPeople) has 121 online friends, in comparison with 55 physical friends. It also found that 1 in 10 people found their "best" friend online and that people tend to be more honest with friends online than with their physical friends.

No question: I have made some wonderful friends here.

No question: there are people here with whom I share very important values that are not so much a focus among many of those I encounter in my day-to-day life.

No question: there is a degree of honesty here which is huge. For one thing, most of us post our current weight on those weight tickers!! How many people in "realtime" know your actual weight? And how funny is that, when presumably those realtime friends can make a pretty educated guess just by looking at us??

Thanks so much to all those who congratulated me on my Second Sparkiversary and left such kind comments! Friends indeed!!

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Second Sparkiversary!!

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

It's been two years!

I weigh a solid 30 pounds less than when I found Spark People May 10 2009, down from 172 to 142 (or 141, with occasionally a glimmer of a "middle 3"!!). Still working on determining lowest sustainable weight . . .

That was recapturing and then sustaining an original loss from 230 pounds in 2001 to 150 pounds in 2002.

My new stability of weight maintenance in the low 14os resulted from my introduction to the Judith S. Beck 42 day program in cognitive psychology techniques for Thinking Like a Thin Person: thanks SLENDERELLA61 and the Beck Diet Solution team for support with this project, which I began earlier this year, blogging my way through the 42 days! It works!! And I was able to sustain it through a serious "cancer recurrence" scare in March.

I'm continuing to pretrack nutrition on the Spark Nutrition tracker: I'm continuing to sit down to eat, manage my environment, recognize that hunger is not an emergency, cope with sabotaging thoughts (including the primary sabotaging thought that pretracking takes too much time and is OCD!!).

Right now everything in my wardrobe fits (or is too big). Love that!! And after a winter of cross country skiing and regular gym attendance, I feel fit and strong.

Nothing feels better than feeling healthy.

Thanks, Spark People. Included in that thanks: Chris Downie and staff, the site itself (free, free, free!!), all the resources and links and articles, and most especially all of the wonderful Spark friends I've made right here.

This is an absolutely amazing community and I continue to be grateful for all of the support and good ideas and shared values I've found right here, every day.

Thank you, all!!

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Counting Every Calorie: Obsessive? Future Eating Disorder?

Thursday, May 05, 2011

I've been counting calories -- using the nutrition tracker, pre-planning my meals, following the Beck cognitive strategies to "learn to think like a thin person". I've got Beck cards to review which remind me to arrange my environment to eliminate temptations: that hunger is not an emergency; that I should sit down to eat; and that I can identify and cope with "sabotaging thoughts" -- including, that the process of tracking nutrition so closely is anal retentive and takes way too much time!!

And for me: it's been working.

Instead of yo-yoing 10 pounds up and down, I've been pretty stable.

And: I've been stable at a lower weight than I'd achieved before. I seem to be at a lower sustainable weight. So of course, I like that.

I particularly like it because staying lean reduces my chance of breast cancer recurrence significantly.

But today in the Toronto Globe and Mail on line edition there is a discussion with a psychologist who suggests that tracking calories can be the precursor of an eating disorder.

My family gets it. Nobody at home is pressuring me to eat more, or to stop tracking my food. They do understand. Completely.

But I certainly know that I've got social friends and acquaintances who would like to pressure me to eat more like they do -- more spontaneously, and more "binge" type high calorie foods on "celebratory" occasions. Whereas I'm trying to think of other ways to be social, and other ways to celebrate that don't involve overeating. Because life is to be celebrated much more often than I can "afford" the calories to overeat!!

I don't believe that I have any of the indicators of a future eating disorder, and I do believe that the Beck method is superb. It reduces the need to make eating decisions every day: NO CHOICE (or, I already made that choice, and it was MY CHOICE to do so. Yesterday. When I pre-planned.)

Whaddya think for your own selves: if you're tracking, do you think you're getting obsessive? Are you worried you may trigger an eating disorder??

Here's the link:

www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/
ask-a-health-expert/ask-a-psychologist
/i-count-every-calorie-i-consume-is-th
ere-anything-wrong-with-that/article2008282/

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Liposuction: The Fat Comes Back!

Wednesday, May 04, 2011

An article in the Toronto Globe and Mail says that liposuction isn't permanent. The fat comes back -- just not necessarily in the same place. So if you have fat liposuctioned off your tummy, it's back within a year but maybe in your upper abdomen, or back, or even your triceps.

Here's the link: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/the-ho
t-button/the-fat-came-back-belly-bulge
-returns-after-liposuction/article2007502/

Yikes!!

And the interesting thing is . . .even when people were informed about this research, many still opted to have the liposuction done!!

OK, I've fantasized about liposuction from time to time but . . . really? Worth the discomfort? The cost? And the wondering: where's it gonna reappear??

Whaddya think??

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