Love Goggles

The other day, on a whim, I asked Chad if he ever looked at girls to see if they were pretty.  I'm sure at this point he panicked, as any sensible man would if their wife asked them that question.  After a few seconds hesitation, I told him that I wanted to know because it had to do with another question I had, and that it wasn't a trap question.

When he answered that he does sometimes look at other girls to see if they're pretty, I asked him what shape he preferred on a girl.  If he liked rounder, curvier girls, or skinny flat-tummied girls.  To my surprise, he said he liked the rounder girls better.  That the longer he's with me, the more he likes round, curvy girls, because that's what I am.

I'm pretty sure that's what they call love goggles.  I'm sure there might be a girl somewhere that would have been offended by what he said, but I found it to be incredibly sweet.  And it got me to thinking about society and our standards of beauty.

The media, with a few exceptions, glorifies women who are thin, tall, and very beautiful.  If they don't have a lot of natural beauty, they get heavy doses of makeup and professionally created hair-dos to make up for their plainness.  Women everywhere have to see beautiful, perfect celebrities staring back at them from the cover of magazines, on tv, in the movies, in ads.  Their perfect beauty is almost inescapable. 

I began to wonder if having those women as standards of beauty has changed what we as a society think of as beautiful.  Like Chad's love goggles, perhaps we've developed love goggles for thin, tall, perfect women.

Then this weekend, I clicked on a link over at Weighty Matters.  It was a page full of Photoshopped celebrities, and it made me realize that, not only are we basing our ideas of beauty on perfect people loaded down with makeup and hair extensions, but then the photos of them are completely overhauled.  Check it out.  And if that's not enough, this page has some extras.

There's one that made me really stop and think.

 

If that's too fast for you, here's a side-by-side:

What were the folks photoshopping this picture of Jennifer Lawrence thinking?  The before shot is beautiful.  She's well toned, curvy, smooth, and genuinely lovely.  But they didn't want curvy and well toned; no, what they want us to see, what they want us to see as beauty, is a woman that looks emaciated.  They want us to see her ribs sticking out, and her hips poking through her skin.  They want her face to look gaunt.  They want her arms to look skinny and weak.

You know what the phohoshopped version reminds me of?  A picture I saw recently of Portia de Rossi, an actress who has written a book about the struggles she's had with anorexia. 

Portia is the one on the right.

At her lowest, she said she was 82 pounds. For a woman that's 5'7, that made her BMI 12.8.  Here's another terrifying picture of Portia at her worst:

So here we are, in the middle of an obesity epidemic (or so the authorities tell us), and the media is showing us almost nothing but tall, beautiful, perfect, nearly anorexic women.  It's all we see, on tv, movies, magazines, ads.  And then real women look in the mirror and see non-perfection, wrinkles, a little arm jiggle, maybe cellulite or stretch marks, and they begin to hate themselves.

Our ideas of beauty are skewed.  And I believe our ideas of "ideal weight" are also skewed.  Who decided what ideal weight is?  BMI has serious flaws, including the fact that it doesn't distinguish between fat and muscle, and it doesn't care if you have petite or thick bones.  It also doesn't care if your genes tells your body to store extra fat in certain parts of your body, like your butt or your breasts.  Does a woman with large breasts have a higher BMI than a woman with small breasts?  Of course she does, because she weighs more.  And that's ridiculous. 

Last August, Discover magazine had an article about BMI in it, and how researchers have decided that BMI is a bad way to measure obesity.  So you know what they suggested?  They suggest lowering the BMI obesity threshold from 30 to 24 for women and 28 for men.  Great.  Now almost everyone will be obese.

I think over the years, ideal weight has gotten lower and lower.  And our love goggles has made it so we as a society only see tall, rail thin women as beautiful.  I don't think most people can even recognize normal, healthy weight anymore.  Look at this before-and-after picture of actress Mischa Barton and tell me which one you think is normal and healthy.

Now check out these actresses from the early part of the 20th century.

Gloria Swanson

Anita Page

Anne Baxter

Lucile Ball

Marilyn Monroe

Betty Grable

They're beautiful.  They're curvy.  Some of them are well toned (look at Lucy's arms).  But they're not exactly skinny by today's standards, are they?  They're almost...  normal.  The kind of  beauty that doesn't threaten average women.  Yes, they're beautiful, but it's a more natural kind of beauty, where there are flaws and imperfections, but those only add character. 

I think we've been lead astray by the media into believing that skinny equals beauty, and that you have to have perfectly smooth skin and a flawless face.  But it's all an illusion.  Celebrities are real people, under the makeup, hair products, and photoshopping.  Just for fun, google your favorite actress's name with "without makeup".  Here's a couple of  mine.

Penelope Cruz

Now here's a real girl without makeup, without fancy hair products, just trying to live a normal healthy natural life.

This is me!  Wearing a dress I made!  And holding a cucumber I grew!

I know I'm not in the same league as any of those celebrities up there, especially not when they're all made up to look perfect.  But just because I don't fit into society's idea of beauty....  does that make me ugly?  Or does true beauty allow for natural differences and individual uniqueness? 

Fresh Picked

You know what my favorite time of the year is?

Strawberry season!!!  Yes, my friends, it's that lovely time of year when the strawberries decide to bless us with their bright red deliciousness. 

I'm lucky enough to have two sources of strawberries.  The first is my 2x4 raised strawberry bed.  It managed to produce almost two gallons of strawberries last year, which was enough to make Chad sick of strawberries by the end of the season.  The second source I have is one that I was blessed with.  We have lots of wild alpine strawberries growing all throughout our yard, and one spot, in the small side yard next to the chives, is so well suited to them that there's dozens of plants, and the berries get very big (for wild berries).  I love them not only because they're free, but because they have a flavor that's unmatched by any cultivated berry.  They take the flavor of a regular berry, and condense it down to fit into a tiny package.  It's like eating candy. 

I plan on going to a large field this weekend where I know a lot of wild strawberries grow.  Hopefully I'll have timed this right.  Usually I'm too early or too late, which is easy to do because wild strawberries only have about a two week season. 

Nature is awesome!

The Return of Jam

Ever since I was a teenager, I've loved the art of caring for a home.  I know that seems weird.  I had other aspirations, of course; what teenager doesn't?  I wanted to become a famous artist, do video game art, illustrate best selling novels.  The passion I had for art was like a steamy affair, though.  It came on quickly, burned brightly for a while, and then faded gently into the night. 

My love of home caring has been more like the slow easy love of married people.  It may not burn as brightly, but it burns forever.  That's why, when I had to make the choice between art school and getting married and moving in with Chad, I chose the home life. 

One of my all time favorite home caring crafts is food canning.  Now I bet you're wondering exactly how strange I could be; who likes canning?  I'll admit that I'm an oddity.  My sister used to call me a grandma because I liked doing all these old fashioned things like canning, knitting, sewing, cooking. There's just something so empowering about knowing how to provide for yourself, whether it's preserving food or making your own clothes.  I think I was a homesteader in a past life.

I've been canning for several years now, and I've gotten pretty good at it.  I tend to only can high acidity foods (like fruit and pickles) in a water bath canner though, because I feel like it's easier and more nutritious to freeze vegetables rather than process them in a pressure canner for long periods.  So I do a lot of pickles, canned fruit, and jam.

Jam was always my favorite.  It's so easy, and so very delicious.  However, if you're not a canner, it may surprise you that, when you make jam, you usually put in more sugar than you do fruit.  Every time I tell someone that, they're usually pretty shocked.  My mother-in-law told me that the next time I make her jam, to just not put in so much sugar.  It's not that easy, though.  With traditional pectin, you have to have a large quantity of sugar for it to properly jell.  There's no way around it, or at least that's how it seemed.

Recently, I found a kind of pectin that doesn't require any sugar.   There's a few different brands out there, but the kind I've been using is Ball RealFruit Low or No Sugar Needed Pectin. 

However, once I finish this jar of pectin, I plan on buying Pomona's Universal Pectin, which I hear is far superior. 

Whichever kind of pectin you choose, the cool thing about them is that they'll jell without any added sugar at all.  You can add artificial sweeteners if you want (I hear Splenda is the only kind that will hold up under the canning process though), and stevia and xylitol both work well, too. 

So once I got the pectin, I knew I had to try it.  I went straight out and bought four pounds of strawberries.  I had planned on adding a little xylitol to cut the acidity of the strawberries, but unfortunately, my local Wegmans was out at the time.  Instead, I decided just to use a little sugar, since I knew it wouldn't be very much.

The recipe on the pectin jar is very simple.  For the no sugar needed jam, it states:

For 2 (8 oz) half pints of jam, you will need:

2 cups prepared fruit (usually crushed or finely chopped)
1/3 cup unsweetened fruit juice, thawed fruit juice concentrate, or water (I used water)
3 tsp bottled lemon juice (use only with blueberries, peaches, and sweet cherries)
1-1/2 tbsp Ball No Sugar Needed Pectin

The instructions said you can increase the quantities to make your desired amount of jam, but not to exceed 10 jars.  I ended up making 6 jars with the strawberries.  There's also a recipe for low sugar jam that calls for up to 1/2 cup sugar for the two half pint jars.  I figured even that was too much.  So for my jam, I had 6 cups of fruit, and I added about 1/2 cup of sugar to the whole recipe. 

It's different than regular jam.  The consistency is a little thicker, less jelly-like.  The color is a little duller, and of course the flavor isn't as in-your-face-sweet.  However, just because it's different doesn't mean it's bad.  I find this jam heavenly.  It's very fruity.  Regular jam is almost candy-like, but this one, amazingly, tastes like real fruit. 

I tried it on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (with coconut bread), and it was wonderful.

 

Now that I know I can make jam again, I can't wait to actually start producing it!  I have a box full of peaches and nectarines ripening in my dining room.  As soon as they're all soft enough, I plan on doing a detailed walk-through of low sugar/no sugar jam making!  

Until then, you'll just have to be envious of my delicious strawberry jam.

The Amazing Shrinking Man

Chad's brother comes to visit once a year.  On last years' visit, Chad and I had just found out about the science behind low carb eating, and were both fascinated by it.  We were at that stage where we wanted to go out and tell everyone about it, even though most people quickly dismissed what we said.  We had read both Good Calories Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat on my kindle, but decided to buy a paper copy of Why We Get Fat as well so we could loan it out to friends and family.

Last June, Chad's brother (who I'm going to call Fred from now on) was a pretty hefty guy.  He's a moderately tall fellow, and he had a lot of muscle, but when you looked at him then, you just saw a fat guy.  He had a couple of double chins, and a pretty big beer belly.  We shared a room at a hotel with him a couple of years ago, and I swear, neither of us got much sleep because he snored so loudly all night long. 

So when he came to visit last year, we decided that was a good time to have him read Why We Get Fat, which is a condensed version of Good Calories Bad Calories by Gary Taubes.  Even so, it's still a pretty hefty book and can be a little hard to get through.  Fred's a smart guy, but he said he skipped through most of the book and just read the conclusion.  I was a little disappointed when he said that, but I figured, hey, not everyone is going to be open to the idea that everything they know about nutrition is wrong. 

In November of last year, Chad and I drove down to spend a few days with Fred.  We were pretty amazed when we saw him, because he'd lost about 20 pounds since we'd seen him in June.  Apparently, he'd taken the conclusion of Why We Get Fat (which includes a meal plan), and just ran with it.  I was pretty happy that he was doing so well, and although I was excited to see if he'd lose any more weight, part of me was worried that he'd stall out and revert to his old ways.

It's June again, and Fred made his yearly visit.  Actually, we all decided to meet up in Cleveland so we could go to an Indians game.  We stayed in a nice motel downtown.  We were all waiting in the lobby of the hotel for Fred, watching out the window for his car.  When it pulled up, Chad went out to help him with his bags, and his mom and I stayed inside and watched.  Then all of a sudden, this tall skinny guy stepped out of the car.  Chad said he was worried for a minute that he was unloading luggage from some stranger's car.  Fred was almost literally unrecognizable.  He was practically a different person! 

At dinner that night, I had to ask (because I'm the only one who's forward enough to ask direct questions) how much weight he had lost.  He said he started at 255 and was currently 190, which is a 65 pound weight loss!  I was pretty stunned.  It was a few days before I could look at him and actually recognize him as Fred. 

I actually just looked at some pictures of him from last year, and now it's hard for me to see that big round guy as my brother-in-law.  Isn't that funny? 

Both he and Chad are pretty private people, so I would never put his picture up on my blog.  So instead, I had an amazing artist make a rendition of the changes Fred has gone through over the last year.

Chad had to borrow a pair of pants from Fred while we were in Cleveland (chad only brought shorts, and one day ended up being in the 50s with Cleveland-strength winds).  Now keep in mind that my husband is a bean pole, and Fred has always been a very hefty man.  Although Chad had to wear a belt and his butt looked a bit like a balloon, Fred's pants fit him pretty well. 

So there you go, friends.  Even though it may not seem like people are actually listening to you when you yammer on about low carb, maybe they really are, and maybe it will change their lives.  So don't stop yammering.

I Survived!

It's been about a week since my last post, and I have to apologize for taking so long to update.  Spending so much time with Chad's family was exhausting, partially because we were doing so much, and partially because I was eating so badly.  There was at least one day where I had a sugar buzz all day long, which leaves you feeling pretty grouchy the next day, by the way.

By Saturday, the last day his brother was in town, I was pretty much done with it.  I told Chad that I had to avoid sugar at all costs, because it was making me feel terrible.  I was also done with bread and potatoes.  Bleck!

So Sunday, Chad and I returned to our regularly scheduled eating plan.  Eggs and bacon for breakfast, lunch meat and cheese for lunch, and some locally raised goat kabobs for dinner (which were surprisingly good), with lots of veggies and some fruit thrown in.

I have lots to write about, but it's 7:30 and I need to get downstairs and pack Chad his lunch.

Calorie Silliness

After reading Good Calorie, Bad Calorie by Gary Taubes, I couldn't understand why people were still convinced that the calories in-calories out idea was important.  It's especially surprising when I hear low-carb folks urging us that calories still count.

I have personal experience that says calories aren't really that important.  When I was a low calorie vegetarian, I was eating about 1700 calories a day, and gaining weight.  Once I switched over to being a low carb meat eater, my calories went up to 2300 or so a day, and I lost weight!

The same is true for Chad.  He used to eat about 2100 calories a day, and was slowly gaining weight.  But after switching to about 2500 low carb calories, he's lost about 20 pounds while also putting on muscle.  Are you sure calories count?

A new and really fun example of how silly the calories in-calories out idea is, is Sam Feltham, from Smash the Fat.  He's in the middle of a 21 day experiment where he's purposely eating 5000 calories a day (a 2000 calorie a day surplus for him) to see exactly what it will do to his body. It's important to note that the food he's eating is low-carb, paleo fare.

Since I'm on vacation, gallivanting across the countryside with Chad and his family, I'm writing this about a week before it posts.  But so far (day 9), Sam has actually lost two centimeters around his waist, and hasn't gained a thing.  This might change by the time he's finished, but something tells me he won't come even close to the weight CICA says he should gain.  A quick calculation shows me that CICA says he should gain about 12 pounds by the end of the experiment.  But he's half way through, and he hasn't gained anything! 

Maybe it's true that some people need to cut their calories in order to lose weight.  After all, everyone is different.  But to say that everyone needs to cut calories is, I believe, harmful to most people.  You shouldn't feel hungry, even if you're trying to lose weight.  A little hunger before a meal is alright, but constant hunger is a sign of problems.  And unfortunately, for most people, cutting calories makes you pretty hungry.  So then your body, being smarter than you, turns your metabolism down a notch, and it becomes harder to lose the weight.  I've been there.  I also know what it's like to be exhausted all the time while cutting calories. 

If you want to watch Sam Feltham's experiment, he has daily youtube videos, and also posts updates on twitter frequently. 

Week of Weakness

Every year, Chad's brother comes home for a week-long visit.  It's something I always look forward to.  Chad, along with his dad and mom, take time off from work, and the whole gang goes gallivanting across the countryside, enjoying all the local sights.

Mostly, though, we do a lot of eating.  That's what his brother does.  When he takes a vacation, it's all about the food (and also the local beer).  I swear, I must eat out more in the week he's home than I do all the rest of the year. 

The worst part is, every year I tell myself I'm going to behave and eat healthfully even if we're eating out.  That only lasts until I get a menu in front of my, and before long I'm eating french fries, drinking pop, and scarfing down desserts. 

However, this is the very first year I'll be low carb.  The cool thing is, his brother is also low carb (and has managed to lose about 20 pounds), so with a majority of low carb people, we might be able to actually eat in a way that doesn't make us all gain ten pounds in a week. 

On the other hand, I think it's ok to indulge once in a while.  If you're always denying yourself, there's a good chance you'll find yourself binging and then feeling really guilty about it. 

But on yet another hand, we're talking about a whole week here.  It's not indulging when you eat badly for a whole week.  That's more like falling off the wagon. 

Oh, decisions decisions...