My Plan For Health

Reader and FSFP water aerobics compatriot Susan just posted a comment on my review of the Healthy Grocery Lunch & Learn asking for recipes. You can scroll down here to read my reply to her for some suggested resources, but below is a list of recipes that I happened to put together for a friend recently. These are favorites around the Gorder household. If you try them, let me know how they turn out.

1. Tex-Mex Lasagna (could be vegan if you use soy cheese). Really easy to make. I like to put it together the night before we have guests, and then cook it right before they arrive. It stores very well.

2. Orange rice (recipe calls for cooking the rice in chicken stock, but you can use vegetable stock with no problem). I’ve played around with this recipe a bit by using pineapple instead of mandarin oranges, and it turned out tasty! I just cook it in the rice machine (without the pork chops, of course).

3. Pasta with Szechwan Peanut Dressing. Highly addictive! If you are interested in vegetarian cooking in general, I highly recommend the book this comes from: The 15-Minute Vegetarian Gourmet by Paulette Mitchell. It’s the first cookbook I ever owned, and the most loved. It describes all the different grains, and different kinds of tofu, and how to make sure you get enough protein, etc. Technically, it’s a lacto-ovo vegetarian book, meaning that some of the recipes use real milk and eggs. I substitute “fake” peanut butter made from yogurt to reduce the fat in this one.

4. Quinoa Pie with Butternut Squash. Insanely complicated recipe, ’cause it’s from Martha Stewart. But tasty.

5. Smoky White Bean Soup

6. Creamy Porcini Barley Soup

7. Ginger sauce

A few comments:

• One of the things that the dietitian stressed during the Lunch & Learn is that spicing food is a good way to add flavor without adding fat and calories. The orange rice recipe above is from Penzeys Spices, and I can’t tell you how lucky I feel to live in a city with an actual Penzeys store. You should go there. It’s like an amusement park for your nose.
• Cooking healthy does not necessarily mean cooking vegetarian. This is just the route that I have elected to follow, and I don’t even follow it religiously. I still eat meat once in a while, usually at restaurants. I just can’t remember the last time I cooked meat at home.
• I describe the quinoa recipe above as “insanely complicated,” and it is by my standards, since I tend to cook dishes where you just throw everything in a pot, and this recipe has multiple steps. But even if you don’t want to make it, it does give you one example of foods/flavors that work well with quinoa.

Have any recipes to share with me? Send them along, or leave them in the comments below.

After several weeks away from yoga, I returned to class with Holly Wagner, RN,  and got a bit of a surprise.

She asked us to sit straight up, legs crossed — a typical beginning posture. She reminded us to reach around and pull the fleshy parts of our backsides out to the sides, so that we could plant our sitz bones (the bones on the base of the pelvis) directly on the mat.

This is a standard yoga move not just for plus-sized people, but for anyone who… well, anyone who has a backside. And I’ve been doing it for so long now that it’s second nature.

What I noticed that day was that I seemed to have a little less backside to move out of the way than I’d remembered. That was a nice, positive thing to think about as I started class!

One of the most valuable parts of the book MegaYoga comes near the beginning, when author Megan Garcia explains how to manipulate a curvy body for certain yoga postures such as bends and twists. She advises that we take a moment to smooth the fleshy parts of the body out of the way — for instance, moving the buttocks out of the way as I just described, or smoothing the belly up and away from the hip joint during a bend. After reading the book, I tried out some of these techniques in Holly’s class, and they worked.

Garcia offers advice on how to safely attain poses, and how to adjust using props such as yoga blocks and yoga straps. I was glad to see that she explained how to safely stand up from the mat, a procedure she calls “mindful standing.” I tend to get dizzy sometimes when I stand up, so her instructions on when to pause and breathe during standing were particularly useful to me.

There are a wide variety of poses in the book, from beginning level to advanced, including handstands and shoulder stands. Garcia definitely proves that plus-sized people can perform any pose with the proper adjustments — and lots of practice, of course. She explains each move step by step with photographs.

At the end of the book, she offers a 30-minute routine for beginners, a 60-minute routine for intermediate students, and a 90-minute routine for advanced students. These are good for practice outside of class — something that I aspire to.

Read about Garcia’s yoga studio and classes.

Bonus: Long before I heard of MegaYoga, I found the video Yoga for Round Bodies, which encourages the use of props and lots of self-acceptance. Read about the making of the video here.

In Rethinking Thin, New York Times reporter Gina Kolata follows a two-year diet study that compares the low-carboydrate Atkins diet with the low-calorie, low-fat LEARN diet.

Rethinking Thin was published in 2007, and when I set out to review it, I was hoping that the results of this multi-institution diet study would have been published by now. They haven’t. Kolata ends the book just as the study is ending, and we are left wondering what the researchers ever concluded.

But we don’t have to wonder what Kolata concluded: weight loss is hard, and it may not be possible.

While the diet study provides the backbone for the book — Kolata clearly spent a great deal of time getting to know both the researchers and the test subjects, and she gives us a book full of rich detail — the real message of the book is best supported by the historical background that she provides. She chronicles dieting throughout history, and we discover that all the fad diets of today have actually been fad diets many times over. In fact, some have been around for centuries. We discover that whenever a culture has valued thinness, people have been trying to lose weight — unsuccessfully.

We also learn that genetics plays a important role in our ability to gain and lose weight. Overweight people have more fat cells than thin people, and they have bigger fat cells. Their bodies tend to convert food to fat. The only way for such people to become thin, the book suggests, is to make diet and exercise a full time job.

The book also delves into the psychological ramifications of dieting. Overweight people must eat less than their thin friends do, and exercise more than their thin friends do. And they still might never be thin. And they will be forever misjudged by their thin friends, who will accuse them of not trying hard enough.

Kolata is calling for us to focus not on being thin — because most of us simply can’t — but on being healthy. We must find other measures by which to judge ourselves.

To learn more about the book, check out the New York Times book review, or this review in Salon.