Tag Archives: health

Letting Things Go

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I think about my inability to “let things go” and realize, with the help of a friend, that it might not be such a bad thing.

The Atheist's Guide to ChristmasYears ago, I went to a Solstice party at a friend’s house near my home in Washington state. This was back when I tried to spend the entire winter at home — maybe 2013? — before I realized that I needed more sun in my life than that latitude would ever offer in December and January.

The party was well attended by the “freethinkers” group I was a member of. We didn’t celebrate Christmas, but we celebrated the Solstice. I celebrated it as the end of the ever-shortening days and the return of the sun.

We had a bonfire (of course) and we gathered around it. There was snow on the ground and we’d spent some time sledding down a hill nearby before it got dark (at around 4:30 PM). One of the partiers handed out slips of paper and pens. We each wrote down something we wanted to let go of forever on that slip of paper. I’m pretty sure I wrote down something to do with my wasband or divorce or the dull, dead-end life I’d had with him. Then we each burned our slip of paper, symbolically destroying these things to remove them from our lives forever.

Ah, if only it were that easy!

As they say, time marches on. I’ve changed a lot since that winter night spent gathered around a fire with friends. I’ve achieved amazing things: building a new home on an amazing piece of land, growing my helicopter business far beyond what it could have been in Arizona, starting a successful jewelry-making business, exploring new hobbies like beekeeping and watercolor painting, and, more recently retiring from my work as helicopter pilot, selling the assets, and diving head first into a life cruising along the east coast in my own boat as a US Coast Guard-certified boat Captain.

Maria and Pups
Me and my pups during a recent stay at the dock in my dad’s backyard. While I’m not convinced that he fully understands what makes me tick, at least he has a clue, accepts the way I am, and doesn’t try to tell me how to manage my life. I appreciate that.

I’ve also resolved to keep toxic people out of my life, a decision that has cut me off from a handful of friends and most family members. After being in a mentally abusive relationship for so long — and not even realizing how it was affecting me until long after it was over — I simply decided I didn’t want to take shit from anyone ever again. Life is too short to let other people get in your head and mess you up emotionally. Why should I be laden with the baggage heaped on me by other people? Best to let them go and move on.

And that’s what I’ve done. Or at least tried to do.

Understand that I’m very happy in my life right now. I have the freedom that I need to do the things I want to make myself whole, to feel fulfilled. For a very long time, I didn’t have that. There’s so much in life that I wanted to do but was held back by people who either didn’t understand what made me tick or were actively trying to prevent me from achieving my own goals because of their own personal failures or jealousies. While I’m not by any means “rich,” I have enough retirement money socked away to do the things I want to before I get too old to do them. (As I’ve said elsewhere, I named my boat Do It Now for a reason.)

Jupiter Island Beach
Dawn at the beach near here the other day. Today’s sky isn’t quite dramatic, but I’m hoping for more sun when I do today’s walk.

As I type this, I’m sitting on my boat at an anchorage along Florida’s Intracoastal Waterway, feeling it rock in the wind. Later this morning, I’ll take my dinghy ashore, cross the little island there, and take a good, long walk on a deserted beach, picking up shells along the way and feeling the warm wet sand on my bare feet. Sometime before New Year’s Eve, I’ll travel down the ICW past Fort Lauderdale and Miami, and cruise down the Florida Keys to Key West. Along the way, I’ll anchor out and snorkel in aqua blue waters from the swim platform of my boat, along reefs full of coral and tropical fish. I’ll do this on my terms, on my schedule. And if I want or need to change my plans, I’ll do it without pushback from anyone else.

How can I feel anything other than joy?

But lurking behind the daily joy I experience in life is sadness. It comes mostly from the betrayal of someone I loved and trusted and it has been made worse by the knowledge that people in my family don’t understand or care about me. They say that blood is thicker than water, but in my life, most blood is like a poison acid that burns. Casting these people from my life stops the pain they were causing and helps me move on with the life I want, but I retain the sorrow of lost relationships that once meant a lot to me.

Simply said, I can’t let go of my past and memories that haunt me. So here I am.

I related all this to my friend Jason just this morning as I was preparing to write this blog post. Jason is a very smart, thoughtful, and intuitive guy. His response via text was extremely helpful and worth sharing (with his permission, of course):

Part of being alive might be living through pain. As in … while it doesn’t feel good, it may be an essential part of the human experience.

I’ve also heard that pain can be a messenger. And sometimes we learn more about ourselves by sitting with and reflecting on our pain.

I always love this chapter on joy and sorrow from The Prophet. It helps me think of pain in a positive way:

The Prophet Book Cover

I won’t share the whole quote here; you can read it for yourself. But here’s the meat of it (for me):

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

– Kahlil Gibran

What does this mean to me? I think it explains why I feel so much joy in my everyday life — it’s because I’ve had so much pain in the past. The pain dug a hole that the joy can fill.

So maybe it isn’t necessary to let things go completely to move forward. Maybe having some pain is necessary to have an equal amount of joy. Maybe I should stop thinking about letting things go and just keep moving forward. I’ve been doing pretty well so far.

How about you? How are you doing? What do you think of all this? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments on this post so we can all get something from what you have to add.

And, by the way, Joyous Solstice to everyone!

It Really IS All about Calories

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Stop with the fad diets already! The only ones that really work are the ones that reduce calorie intake.

As mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I’m dieting. I’m doing it for my physical and mental health. I think those are the two best reasons to get back in shape, no matter what that entails.

I started the diet on May 1 of this year and have lost, as of this morning, 19.6 pounds. I want to lose a lot more. I’ve done it before and I felt great. But then I just got back into my old overeating habits and, over the course of 10 years or so, gained it all back. So now I’m dieting again, taking my body back to 2012. I have about 40 pounds to go, so I’m nearly 1/3 there.

And yes, I did weigh “that much.” I’m 5’8″ tall and I can hide those pounds. But I still have to carry them.

Don’t Be Dumb about Dieting

When I mention to folks that I’m dieting, they immediately respond with recommendations for the various fad diets or techniques they use. It happened just this morning when I went to the clinic to have blood drawn for bloodwork on my annual physical. I had to fast so I was there when they opened at 7:00 AM. I was back home with my first cup of coffee 30 minutes later.

The phlebotomist — that’s the woman in her 30s who drew my blood — said that the only way she can lose weight is to cut out carbs. And because she’s allergic to dairy like milk and cheese, she has trouble getting enough protein.

“Are you a vegetarian?” I asked, not quite understanding.

“No,” she said, “but there are only so many kinds of meat out there.”

I was flabbergasted. This was coming from a medical professional who was certainly young enough to understand how to use Google — just in case the dozens of doctors and nurses around her all day long couldn’t provide advice. (The medical center she works for also has dietitians on staff and I suspect it would cost a lot less for her to talk to them than for me, provided I wanted to wait four months for an appointment.)

I was going to remind her it was all about calories, but then she was done taking blood and wrapping my arm with a gauze pad and what I’ll always think of as vet wrap. I was done and people were waiting. I left.

But it really and truly is all about calories. We eat food that provides energy, which is quantified as calories, to our bodies. Throughout the day, we move, sit, walk, nap, lift heavy things, climb stairs, and maybe even jog or bike or do something really active. All those activities — yes, even napping or vegging out in front of the TV — burn calories. If we eat more energy than we need, our bodies store it as fat. If we use more energy than we eat, our bodies should tap into those fat reserves and burn fat.

I will put myself out there and say this, which I am 100% convinced of: it is not possible to lose weight without reducing calorie intake or increasing activity levels to burn more calories or both. Ask your doctor. I cannot imagine her disagreeing.

Doing the Math

So every day your body is doing math for you. Well, it’s not actually doing the math. It’s just doing what it does. But you can do the math yourself if you keep track of the calories in what you eat and have some way of calculating the calories you burn — like maybe a smart watch or FitBit?


Here’s Sunday in a nutshell: calories consumed, calories burned, and basic nutritional information.

I use a calorie tracker app that’s really easy to use, mostly because it has just about all packaged and chain restaurant food programmed into it. I’m on a diet, so I’m not eating out much. I’m eating food that’s on my diet plan, mostly because its easy and its nutritionally balanced. But I’m also making my own meal once a day and I’m weighing everything that goes into it. I’d say that my daily calorie count is about 90% accurate; that means I’m only off by about 10% if at all. I’m comfortable with the margin of error.

My Apple Watch (series 3, folks; I don’t need more) keeps track of my activity levels — although I honestly think it doesn’t count flights of stairs right. (I definitely climb the stairs more in my home than my watch says I do.) It automatically imports my activity, included my estimated calorie burn, to my phone, which is where my calorie counter app lives. The app gets the data and displays it on my Food page for the day, as you can see in the screen grab here for Sunday, when I was pretty active. I’m not sure how accurate this count is, but I’d say it’s within 25% of what it reports. So if it says I burned 2000 calories, I feel pretty confident that the real number is between 1500 and 2500 calories. I know that’s a big spread, but it’s close enough for me. My goal is for my watch and health app to report a calorie burn of at least 1800 calories a day.

I’m restricting my calorie intake to about 1000 calories. I’m not kidding around here, folks. I want to lose all the weight this summer, before I go back to the boat. For those of you who think this isn’t healthy, understand that the diet plan food is nutritionally balanced — as I said above — and, just in case, I take a quality daily vitamin/mineral supplement for women aged 50+. During the first two weeks, I had occasional days where I felt a bit out-of-sorts, but I’ve been fine since then. Certainly enough energy to get my work done, including more than a few strenuous chores.

The math is pretty simple. According to many reputable sources, 1 pound of weight equals 3500 calories. (And yes, I’m aware that this “rule of thumb” isn’t a foolproof formula for losing weight. If you research this, be sure to focus on what’s said by reputable sources and not the top Google hits, which are sponsored and not reliable.) So using Sunday as an example, I took in 1014 calories and burned 2423 calories. That’s a net of 1409 — I burned 1409 more calories than I took in.

I need to add a few things about this diet that I think are important. The diet plan wants me to eat six times a day. Most meals — the packaged bars and microwavable “hearty” foods — are 90 to 110 calories each. So that’s 500 calories for 5 meals eaten 2 to 3 hours apart. The small portions are hard to keep you feeling satisfied when you first start, but within a week or two, they become enough to keep you from getting hungry until next mealtime. I really believe that spreading the calorie intake over the entire day — rather than “fasting” (which so many people are pushing these days) — prevents your body from going into a sort of “starvation mode” where it might start burning muscle instead of fat.

The final meal — which I usually have midday — is “lean and green”: real food that includes a lean protein like just about any meat in the right portion size and a salad or green vegetable. I do salad and I buy boxes of baby mixed greens and other salad veggies to make it interesting. Low calorie or “lite” dressing. The other day, I had a grilled 4-ounce ribeye steak and a bowl of salad with lettuces, cabbage, cucumber, tomato, raw mushrooms, and a nice balsamic vinaigrette dressing. So I’m not exactly suffering here.

The other ingredient to this diet is water. Drinking lots and lots of water. My “diet coach” claims that the water makes me burn fat, but I’m not 100% convinced it’s as easy as that. I do know that on days when I drink more water, my weigh-ins have bigger ticks down. I drink a lot of plain water and water flavored with Gatorade Zero, which adds electrolytes I might need from working in the heat of summer. No diet soda or juice.

This is basically the same diet I used in 2012 to lose 45 pounds in 4 months. Back then, I didn’t count calories or have a watch that monitored my activity, but I still lost weight. When I was off the diet, my stomach wasn’t expecting those big meals, so it took a few years for me to go back to my nasty, stupid overeating habits and start gaining it all back. I still can’t believe I let that happen; I won’t let it happen again.

And one more thing: could I do this without the diet plan food? Yes, but it would be a lot more difficult. I’d have to come up with five food portions a day that were right around 100 calories each. I’d have to make sure they were nutritious. I’d have to count every calorie for every ingredient in every meal to make sure I wasn’t going over the allowed amount. That would be a lot more difficult than just buying the damn food and eating that.

Weighing In


Yes, I cropped out the numbers. But you can see the trend and that’s all that really matters.

My daily weigh-in, which is also on that calorie counter app, tracks my progress and gives me a space to write notes every day. I report when I “cheat” — for example, having street tacos for lunch instead of my “lean and green” meal.

A lot of folks say you shouldn’t weigh in daily, but I don’t care. I do. It keeps me motivated. Watching the scale tick down daily — with the occasional tick back up a tad — helps me monitor my process and see that I’m moving forward.

Why Those Fad Diets “Work”

You might be wondering why the fad diets you’ve tried have worked for you. I can attest to the fact that the Atkins diet worked for me back in 2004; I lost 20 pounds back then and felt pretty darn good. Until I went off it, of course.

Did you ever think about how cutting carbs out of your diet, for example, actually affects calorie intake? Or how fasting twice a week affects the total number of calories you take in for the week? Or how the Atkins diet or Paleo diet or Whole 30 diet fill-in-the-blank diet really affect calorie intake?

And how many of those diets are actually healthy? I think the Mediterranean diet is, but it’s definitely not the kind of diet you’d use to lose a lot of weight quickly. It’s more like the kind of diet you’d switch to when you were at or near your ideal weight to stay healthy and eat right. It seems smart, to me, and, to be honest, it’s kind of how I eat anyway. (I just eat too much!)

And yes, I’ve gotten lots of recommendations about Weight Watchers. I cannot comment on it because I’ve never tried it. But I have to think that any diet that promotes healthy eating in moderation is a good diet. And if it helps you lose weight when you need to, even better.

Going Forward after Meeting My Goal

In my world, it’s all about portion control. I like to eat good food. I don’t eat junk food or fast food, but I’ll have huge portions of an excellent stew (with noodles!) or fresh baked bread or just about anything tasty. I need to eat less of what I do eat. That’s my go-forward once I’m down to my ideal weight.

I never want to do this diet again. I just want to eat smart in moderation. If I do that and stay active, I shouldn’t be in this mess again.

And don’t fool yourself — losing weight and staying fit isn’t about making yourself look good for other people. It isn’t about rail thin supermodels or societal norms. It’s about your health.

Sure, there are plenty of fat people who live long lives, but are they physically able to make the most of those lives? Do they have nagging health issues that hold them back? Bad knees, shortness of breath, stomach issues? Who wants to be like that?

I don’t.

Dr. Bronners is Not the Answer

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I discover that a “do it all” biodegradable soap is not the answer to my on-the-water cleaning needs.

One of the things that bothers me about living on a boat is gray water — the water that drains away from sinks and showers. In the RV world, gray water is collected in its own separate waste tank. Although it can be dumped separately from black water (toilet waste), both tanks are often dumped together in a facility designed to receive it. But on a boat, gray water is drained directly into the body of water the boat is floating on. (Don’t worry; black water on a boat is contained in a tank and cannot be dumped anywhere on inland waterways or near shore.)

I remember the first time I realized this. It was in the 1980s and I was on a houseboating trip with some friends. One of us was washing dishes and I happened to look overboard and see soap suds on the surface of what I’d always thought was pristine Lake Powell. I was kind of horrified.

Lots of folks will argue that it’s “just a little soap” in a big body of water. And they would be right. But I tend to think on the macro level at times and thought: what if everyone just dumped their gray water into the nearest river, stream, or lake? Wouldn’t that hurt the fish and water birds?

So, like the environmentally conscious person I try to be, I thought I’d find a more environmentally friendly soap to use aboard my new boat, which I expect to be living on for months at a time.

Choosing Dr Bronners


Here’s what the Tea Tree scented Dr. Bronners bottle looks like.

Dr Bronner’s All-One Soap came to mind first. If you’ve ever been in a health food store or walked through the natural foods section of your supermarket, I’m sure you’ve seen it. It comes in plastic bottles absolutely covered in crazy fine print text. It’s supposed to be pure-castle soap and its website says its good for “Face, body, hair—food, dishes laundry, mopping, pets—the best for human, home, and Earth!” (I think someone in their marketing department needs a lesson in punctuation, although I am a fan of the Oxford comma.)

I think Peppermint may have been the original scent because that’s what I first used on camping trips years ago. It made my skin tingle. Later, I bought the Eucalyptus scent, which I preferred, for my campers. I used it in the bathroom for washing up, including showering. When I had really short hair, I used it for shampoo.

I figured that it would be convenient to have one soap I could use for everything, so I bought a large bottle and a small one — one for the galley and one for the head. I chose the Tea Tree scent because I wanted to associate a new smell with my new boat — I didn’t want it to smell like my RVs. And when I went out on my recent 10-day cruise around Puget Sound, that’s the only soap I brought along.

The Experiment

During the ten days I was away, I used Dr Bronners for washing anything that needed washing: my face, hands, body, and hair; dishes, pots, and pans; and laundry. And it didn’t take long to realize that Dr Bronners simply wasn’t doing it all, as its marketing materials claimed. Specifically:

  • As a body soap, it’s an astringent that sucks the oils out of your skin. While I like that in summer time when I’m sweaty and stinky, I don’t think it would be good in the winter. (I will likely continue to use it, however.
  • As a shampoo, it stripped all of the natural oils out of my hair, leaving it in a severely tangled mess. If I didn’t have the foresight to bring along some leave-in conditioner, I would have had to have my hair shaved off to remove the knots. (Knowing in advance how it was on skin gave me insight about how it might be on hair.)
  • As a dish soap, it could not sufficiently cut through grease, no matter how much I used or how hot the water was. No matter how many times I washed something greasy, there was always a thin, slick film left behind.
  • As a laundry soap, I just don’t feel sure that it really cleaned my clothes. I didn’t see any suds in the water, but since none of my clothes were really grimy, I have no way to judge how well it worked.

Before the end of my trip, I went out and bought a small bottle of Dawn dish detergent. It was pointed out to me that environmentalists use Dawn to clean oil off wildlife after spills, so there must be something environmentally friendly about it. (Or maybe it’s just more environmentally friendly than crude oil?) I just couldn’t deal with that layer of grease on my “clean” pots and pans.

Conclusion

As far as I’m concerned, the experiment is over. I’ll use up the rest of the Dr Bronners I have on board for washing my hands and face and showering. I’ll use my regular shampoo on my hair — heck, I take most showers at marina facilities anyway. I’ll use the same laundry detergent pods I use at home for my laundry, which is always done in a laundromat. And I’ll use Dawn (sparingly) for washing my dishes.

In the meantime, if you have any suggestions for more environmentally friendly cleaning products that actually work, please let me know. I want to do the right thing, but I also want clean things to be clean.