Unsafe at Any Size

Secret Pumpkin Stash

Pumpkin shortage?  Hah!  Not at my house!

I don’t know if the news is true.  I don’t want to know.  Sure. there may be enough pumpkin to get us through Thanksgiving, but what about Groundhog’s day?  Or Fourth of July?

This pumpkin fan is taking no chances.  Yes, I’m a pumpkin hoarder.  And at Thanksgiving sale prices, how could I resist stocking up?

I’m thinking I should buy more now, and then sell it at twice the price on the black pumpkin market that is inevitable  (And no, that doesn’t mean people will be selling black pumpkin.  Though I wonder what black pumpkin would taste like…).  My pumpkin is now in a secret location (we’ll call it the “marage”) so don’t think you can just break in and take it.

PLUS, now we finally have some earthquake supplies.  It would probably take The Big One to make the rest of my family eat pumpkin.

Which means, YOU GUESSED IT!  More for me!

Mwaa ha ha! World pumpkin domination!  All your pies are belong to us!

Not my feet, not my scale, not my weight

Whaddya know!  Tracking works.  You know that, and I knew that.  I know it again, too.  I lost 2 lbs this week, for a total of 113 lost.

I know that tracking works, so why did I stop?  Because it was all too much.  When I was originally tracking, I was doing flore- eating core foods but tracking points.  I wouldn’t eat my weekly points or my activity points.  Not surprisingly, it was very effective, but also hard to maintain.

When I got down to 22 daily points, I panicked.  This isn’t the way I wanted to live my life!  So I stopped tracking.  For the most part, my diet has changed enough so that worked well.  But after the Halloween debacle, it was time to get serious again.  Not too serious, though–I’m going over my daily allotment of points by a few each day.  And that is ok!

I’m hoping Thanksgiving won’t be very challenging this year, even though I’m not doing the cooking.  We are traveling to LA, and my sister and mother in law are both doing Weight Watchers.  We’ll have pumpkin pie for the kids, but we’re going to try Hungry Girl’s Pumpkin Smash.

Speaking of pumpkin, I now do a variation on the Hungry Girl pumpkin pudding, but instead of using premade pudding I use an immersion blender and blend in a can of pumpkin into 2 cups of milk, vanilla or butterscotch pudding mix, and some pumpkin pie spice.  Add a little lite Cool Whip, and you’ve got a fantastic dessert.  No, it’s not pumpkin pie, but it’s great for every day.

But oh no! Apparently, we are looking at a pumpkin shortage this year! Ohhhhhhhhh noooooooo!  Should I go and buy a crate of pumpkin now?  Screw the Eggo waffle shortage people; this is serious.  (Serious=it affects me.)

At least half of the Hungry Girl recipes feature pumpkin; why, I’m eying a chocolate and peanut butter fudge recipe on her site right now that uses a can!

I AM going to clear out the local Lucky.  If you can’t find pumpkin to make your pie, you can blame me and my pumpkin hoarding.

Talk about weird: according to this MSNBC article, a gang in Peru was arrested for killing fat people and, get this, taking their fat.  The fat was to be used in cosmetics, and according to the gang members is worth $60,000 a gallon.  They said they killed “only” five people, but police suspect they may have killed many more.

The article then trots out a bunch of experts to say they don’t think human fat would do you any good cosmetically, and there might be issues with tissue rejection, etc.  No, really?  Good thing we have these experts on hand to tell us this doesn’t work so people around the world don’t go crazy and start pitching fat people into renderers.

What’s extra crazy is that these gang members could have made money on both sides!  Instead of having to go to the trouble of killing people, they could have had people pay them to remove their fat, and then turned around and sold it for $60,000 a gallon!

Needless to say, I’ll be extra careful around any dark jungles.  But I’m feeling extra special knowing that that there’s gold in that junk in my trunk.

The underlying assumption in the national debate on health care is that everyone needs health insurance because sooner or later, everyone needs health care.  Even if we personally don’t need health care, we are supporting those who do.

But what of those people who don’t believe they need health insurance because they don’t need health care?  In a recent article in the Contra Costa Times, a Danville couple maintains they don’t need insurance because hey, they’re healthy.  In the past five years, Lori and Gordon Townsend haven’t seen a doctor, and they see no reason why they should support people who do:

Gordon says he lost 30 pounds and brought down his blood pressure by using the nutritional supplements he now sells. Lori says she lost 25 pounds and solved her thyroid problems.

The couple said they see no reason why they should have to subsidize people who are obese, are chain smokers or who make other bad health decisions.

“People expect that they have a right to health care in the form of subsidized medical services, but they need to perceive that they have a personal responsibility to control their own portion of that cost,” Gordon said.

What about those people who make the bad health decisions to get injured or get cancer?  What if that happens to them?  “We’re going to play the odds and not focus on that,” he said. “We’ve simply decided to accept that risk, because it’s minor.”

So there you go.  Health insurance, and by extension health care, is for the fatties and the smokers.  By losing weight, they’ve inoculated themselves against injury and disease.  And the risk of cancer or other chronic illness?  By accepting the risk, do they also plan to go bankrupt to provide their own care?  Do they plan to forgo health care if they can’t afford it?  Or will they ask all of the irresponsible fatties and smokers and others who make bad health decisions to help them when times are tough?  Maybe they’ll just take more of those nutritional supplements that they sell.

Losing weight can improve many people’s health.

But weight loss is not a magic bullet.  Yes, fat people will get sick and die.  But so will thin people.  More smokers get lung cancer than non-smokers, but non-smokers get lung cancer, too.  Certainly, we should do everything we can to be and stay healthy.  But let’s not delude ourselves that misfortune is reserved for those who make “bad health decisions.” 

And let’s not blame people who get sick or develop chronic conditions.  We are all fallible humans and we will all die one day.  And as human beings, we should support one another, if for no other reason than because we’ll need that support, too.

Not my feet, not my scale, not my weight

I knew the news wouldn’t be good today, and sure enough, it wasn’t: gained 2.2 lbs.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t eat that much Halloween candy; it must magically multiply in my thighs.

But the good news is, I do know what works, and that is tracking.  I haven’t done it consistently for about a year (?!? could it be that long?), and my weight has more or less drifted downward.  But now it’s drifting upwards.  I threw out all the clothes that don’t fit me, so that’s not a direction I want to go.

So thanks to DH Joel who hit me with the “Duh” stick.  Sometimes, it takes the obvious to get unstuck.  I’m back to tracking.

I realized I’m going to have to be a little less hard core when it comes to tracking.  When I was making good progress, I was doing something I called “flore”: eating mostly core foods (now filling foods on Weight Watchers) but counting points, using just my daily points and not eating any activity points or weekly points.

That worked great when I had 28 or 30 daily points, but now that I’m down to 22 daily points, it’s no wonder I found it too restrictive.  The solution is not to give it up altogether, but to do it the way it’s supposed to be: with room for life.  No program that is inflexible is something you can live with.