Posts by coreyander

Original Post by angie1004:

Your weight loss graph really impressed me.  Hope you don't mind one more question.  What kind of exercise did you do?  Because I am a lot shorter than you (I am 5'15 but I always round up and say I am 5'2 ), I am sure that you and I would need different food intake.  However, I would love to know your exercise routine.  Thanks!!

To be honest, my exercise routine is not especially intensive.  I live in a very pedestrian friendly area and just make an effort to walk at a brisk clip when I have errands around the neighborhood.  Between errands and other excuses, I probably 'speed walk' 5-10 miles a week.

As others suggested, I think you may be binging because you are undereating.  I eat 1350 (at 5'6" 135) to lose, so I think trying to maintain on 1400 might be too taxing, especially given your exercise routine.

Original Post by angie1004:

Congrats!!  Your hard work over 1 year is paid off so nicely!!  I want to have the same experience someday (although it won't happen while I shop since I have all sizes from size 4 to size 12).  I think it would be a really nice surprise to find out I am down not just one size but three sizes!!  So from size 10 to size 4, how much did you lose and how tall are you? (only if you don't mind sharing; ignore this question if you are not comfortable)

Thanks!  I'm 5' 6" and bought the size 10s in July when I was around 165.  Since I'm at 135 now, those three sizes correspond to about 30 pounds lost.

Seriously, if I can do it, so can you!!

I got a deep gash between my fingers from broken glass once and flushed it with antibacterial liquid (Bactine) and bandaged it with a non-stick pad and some paper tape.  It did heal, but, in retrospect, I do wish I had gone to a doctor because the scar wound up pretty bad.  If you can find some way to see the doctor, I would highly recommend it.

Count me in!

I'm at 136 right now (down from an all-time high of 230!) and might go for 120 (I'm 5' 6" with a small frame).  By Christmas, though, my goal is to be at or below 130.

The U.S. medical system is really quite simple: you and/or your employer pay a major corporation to ration your health care in a way that maximizes profits.  Really a perfect system; I can't imagine why you'd think it might incite a debate.

A couple of pieces of cake that are within your calorie goal are probably not going to prevent you from losing weight.  Is it the healthiest way to go?  Probably not.  But, if having a bit of cake every now and then helps keep you from wanting to go crazy on the kitchen, then I don't think it is a major problem. 

Personally, I made a pumpkin cake last week and factored a piece in to my diet for a few days.  Still lost weight; world didn't come crashing down!

I'm not quite sure what gijane is trying to suggest here, as a healthy diet is absolutely about nutrients (both macro and micro).  Indeed, the very definition of proper diet is maintaining the appropriate balance of the essential nutrients.   Further, very few foods actually provide nutrients in the proportions that are preferred by our bodies, which is why a varied diet is important.  The 'challenge' is making sure that the variety in your diet actually corresponds, at least approximately, with the distribution of nutrients needed by your body.  

So, given that your body needs nutrients, of which food is the only source, and foods do not all have the same balance of nutrients, maintaining an overall balanced diet can very plausibly entail attention to which nutrients are found in which foods.  I kind of assume that gijane knows this and simply does it intuitively and assumes that others can, too.  This is probably true for a lot of people.  However, I can also see the value of a tool that helps educate people on the relative concentrations of various essential nutrients in various whole foods.

Nutritiondata.com has a couple features that you might like:

Nutrient search: http://www.nutritiondata.com/tools/nutrient-s earch

Caloric ratio search: http://www.nutritiondata.com/tools/caloric-ra tio-search

Oh yeah, that was me last week -- I ate two high sodium meals in a row on an unusually humid day while taking a prescription drug that is known for causing fluid retention.  My weight was high for a week -- at worst, four pounds higher than my previous weight.  I could literally feel the excess fluid in my abdomen, face, and extremities. 

I wound up going low on sodium (<1000 mg) for a couple of days to help encourage my body to just let it go and I think that helped, but it still took about a week to get completely back to normal.  Just let your body do its thing and chances are things will be fine.

With only a one pound 'gain', though, it could well be gone by tomorrow!

I think you have some good ideas already!

The interaction between health and social class is an interesting one for sure.  There are definitely studies on differential access to healthy foods, a lot of them from public health journals.  Here are a few cites from articles I happen to have lying around:

Hendrickson, Smith, and Eikenberry (2006) Fruit and vegetable access in four low-income food deserts communities in Minnesota. Agriculture and Human Values 23.

Moore and Roux (2005) Associations of Neighborhood Characteristics With
the Location and Type of Food Stores. American Journal of Public Health. 96(2).

Wiig and Smith (2008) The art of grocery shopping on a food stamp budget: factors influencing the food choices of low-income women as they try to make ends meet. Public Health Nutrition.

Zenk et al. (2005) Fruit and Vegetable Intake in African Americans: Income and Store Characteristics. American Journal of Preventive Medicine. 29(1)

Zenk et al. (2005) Neighborhood Racial Composition, Neighborhood Poverty,
and the Spatial Accessibility of Supermarkets in Metropolitan Detroit. American Journal of Public Health. 95(4)

Wang et al. (2009) Socioeconomic and food-related physical characteristics of the neighbourhood environment are associated with body mass index. Journal of Epidemiological Community Health. 61.

Another angle on the health/class relationship is how health impacts social class, rather than the reverse.  See, for example:

Blane, Smith, and Bartley (2008) Social selection: what does it contribute to social class differences in health? Sociology of Health & Illness. 15(1)

Some of the articles I cited above might also be helpful for making a case about the relationship between class and weight discrimination, and this book chapter might be helpful for that topic as well:

Brown and Bentley-Condit (1998) Culture, Evolution, and Obesity: Higher Weights Inversely Correlated with Social Class in Heterogeneous and Affluent Societies like the United States. In Handbook of Obesity, ed. George Bray, Claude Bouchard, and W. P. T. James

How companies make food seemingly addictive sounds intriguing and Marion Nestle's book would be a great resource, but you should just be sure you have a clear sociological spin on the topic.  Could you perhaps provide a sociological explanation of why food companies do what they do, what social institutions are used to assist in this process, etc? 

Other topics I can think of would be the relationship between gender norms and the discourse on obesity and health, the framing of obesity as a moral panic or public crisis (see the Saguy and Riley cite below), the medicalization of obesity (I think Jeffery Sobal has written on this)

Saguy and Riley (2005) Weighing Both Sides: Morality, Mortality, and Framing Contests over Obesity. Journal of Health, Politics, and Law. 30(5).

I live in balmy Los Angeles and, as a consequence, have an overly romanticized and totally unrealistic view of snow.  ("Ooooh pretty!  Now I don't have to go to work, right?")

From experience, though, I know that I only really enjoy snow for about a week before I'm ready to retire my sweater (yes, singular) for the year.  I guess this is partially because the places I've lived all devolve into chaos after the tenth snowflake hits the ground, meaning the rare six inches are far more than enough for civilization come to a complete standstill (i.e. Seattle in December 2008).

There is a difference, but it involves the method used and not the calorie count.

Cupcakes are just miniature cakes, meaning they are baked from a cake batter.  There are many types of cakes (chiffon, sponge, pound, etc.) and therefore many different types of cupcakes in the world.

Muffins, on the other hand, are miniature quick breads.  Quick breads often have the same ingredients as cakes, but they are put together in a way that is simpler and faster.  In most cake recipes, butter/shortening and sugar must be creamed, eggs (sometimes separated) are added to this mixture, and eventually dry ingredients are incorporated.  In a quick bread, you just throw together all the wet ingredients (eggs, oil, milk etc.) in one bowl, throw together all the dry ingredients in another, pour the former into the latter and mix briefly.

I seem to remember Alton Brown doing an episode of Good Eats on this topic, but don't remember if it was a muffin episode, a cake episode, or something else.

I have the same problem, but I don't think it is just a matter of whether or not you eat clean or use packaged foods.  Plenty of whole foods are not in the CC database (rambutan, kombu, mangosteen, water spinach, mirabelles, longan) or are entered in such a way that they can't be used in recipes (basically, any item that can't be added in custom units). 

Put simply, CC database doesn't have all of the foods that people around the world eat, healthy or not.  Of course no one could expect a single database to have that capacity anyway, hence the ability to input our own custom foods.  That we might want to use these custom foods in recipes is just common sense.  I think this would be a great feature to add to CC, even if not everyone feels that they need it.

This is probably a dorkier response than you are looking for, but even more curious is that the term 'salad' originally meant 'salted'.  Presumably, the "original" salads were pretty simple affairs: vegetables in a briny "dressing".  I suppose whomever ate them would probably consider almost anything resembling a modern American or European salad to be quite far from the mark.

More to the point: I consider a salad to be a mixture of things that is unified by some kind of dressing.  Hot or cold qualifies, imho.  Spinach salad with warm bacon dressing is common enough (not that it sounds appealing to me...) and I knew a woman whose family recipe for potato salad was served warm.  To each his or her own, I suppose.

I was involved in a similar mix-up long ago.  A data entry error on somebody else's hospital bill resulted in our entire credit histories (including the originating [delinquent] account) being merged.  I initally submitted a dispute to the credit reporting agencies but it was rejected because the (erroneous) data they received from the creditor matched what their credit reports had reported.  I realized then that I had a better shot by trying to fix the bad information at its source and contacted the hospital that claimed I had been treated by them.  Once I explained the error to them, they fixed their records and updated the info with the credit reporting agencies.

If they had stonewalled me, though, I definitely would have found a lawyer specializing in FCRA, as lysistrata suggests.