Just a quick update tonight. I haven’t read anything interesting to post about recently regarding food security, but I am waiting on tenterhooks to see the new film Food, Inc. I thought it was opening in Canada tomorrow, but it isn’t listed as opening in Vancouver in our street paper, so I guess I’ll have to wait a little longer.

I read a really interesting article today on Salon, an interview with Dr. David Kessler, former head of the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S., about the science of overeating, and why it’s so hard to eat just one french fry, or cookie, or whatever. Basically the anticipation of eating is extremely seductive. Kessler’s perspective accords with one of Judith Beck’s suggestions, which is not to allow yourself to consider or deliberate over the first cookie — once you start deliberating, you’ve basically lost the argument with yourself… at least most of the time. That’s definitely true for me. The first time I went off sugar, flour, dairy around 2003 I didn’t allow myself to contemplate whether to eat a given cookie or bread roll or ice cream — I just knew they were off limits and didn’t even consider them. I wasn’t doing it strategically; I just adopted that approach without thinking about it, and it worked really well for about 18 months… until I started deliberating, “Well, maybe just one bite…” Anyhow, I recommend the Salon piece; it’s pretty interesting.

I am pleased that I didn’t eat sugar today, besides a touch of maple syrup in my oatmeal at breakfast. I also brought lunch to work — thanks to B. for sharing her leftovers with me from her dinner at a friend’s house; they were very tasty. Intentions for today: met!

J. and I checked in briefly in the late morning, and then we did our more structured check-in just now. We both were able to follow our plan for today, and we set our new plans for tomorrow.

My intention for tomorrow: No sugar, again. And as I’m working at home tomorrow — on my own writing and projects, for the first time in ages — I won’t intend to bring a lunch to work, but I will intend to eat veggie matter at both lunch and dinner. It is way too easy for me to be a slug and eat buttered toast and rice crackers with nut butter, and though not sugar, that doesn’t really meet my desire to eat high-nutrient food.

If I did it today, I know I can do it tomorrow.

Just in case it hasn’t been plainly apparent, I’m only somewhat succeeding in my healthy living/weight loss goals at this point. I’ve been running, and I’m still running — actually, I ran 21 kilometers last Sunday, and survived! So I know that I can run a half-marathon in distance, and I will be running one as a race on June 28th. Which reminds me that I’d better register for it. Yikes.

But other than running, I’m not doing much. Eating lots of sugar. Eating lots of baked goods. Eating few vegetables. Neither healthy, nor in line with my ethical ideals, and definitely not with my personal goals.

My friend J. and I got to talking over dinner tonight (dinner = pad thai and eggplant/broccoli dish and white rice, so good on the veggies but less so on the large quantity of starches). We were commiserating about our health goals and self-imposed obstacles to meeting them. She has recently started exercising with a personal trainer, just for a month, to help her get into a strength training habit, and her next frontier is to work on making healthier food choices. After some mutual sympathy on the challenges of developing — and sustaining — the habit of eating more veggies and less sugar, we agreed to start a new pact together, and really hold each other accountable for healthy eating.

We’re still evolving our plan, but it involves a) setting an intention every evening for the next day, and communicating that by phone, chat or email, b) checking in every day to see if we’ve succeeding in living up to the intention we set, and c) serving as an emergency back-up to talk each other off the metaphorical ledge of breaking our intention. Even though I don’t have a cell phone, I’m have a funny laptop-shaped growth on my lap most of the time, so I’m pretty easy to reach if she has an emergency moment and needs to be talked down. And I’m lucky: she has a cell phone that she almost always answers.

After 10 days — when I am back from a week of workshops in Port Townsend, WA and after my half-marathon — we’re going to embark on two weeks of  a sort of ‘cleanse,’ though we each will follow slightly different plans. My plan involves cutting all sugars, including fruit, as well as foods that quickly convert to sugars like refined grains, potatoes, etc. Just for the two weeks, just to kill the sugar addiction and re-set my taste buds to like other foods. Her plan is similar, but not completely vegetarian, and based on a plan she was given by a naturopath. We also want to start following the cognitive-behavioral techniques of Dr. Judith Beck, but have yet to set a date to begin working through Beck’s book.

So there it is, a new approach. And my intention for tomorrow is not to eat refined sugar.

Want to help? Up the motivation by:

1. Posting comments so I know you’re following! Sometimes it feels mighty quiet around here, and it would be so exciting for me to feel that I’m actually communicating, rather than writing a private diary out in the big bad interwebs.
2. Pledge $1 or $2 to go to Oxfam for every pound I lose! To understand more about that aspect of this project, read this.

I just watched a movie, The Price of Sugar (2007), about the human trafficking of Haitians into the Dominican Republic to harvest sugar cane; the deplorable conditions and dire poverty in which the Haitians live, trapped without legal papers or status in the shantytowns known as bateys; and the priest, Father Christopher Hartley, who is not only advocating for but also organizing the Haitian cane field workers. There’s a short review of the movie here (scroll halfway down the page to find it).

It has been a while since I’ve wanted to learn more about the modern sugar industry, sparked by my watching the movie Amazing Grace, about the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire. I was interested in the links between sugar and slavery then and now, and Kevin Bale, the author of Disposable People, a book about contemporary slavery, recommended The Price of Sugar. Tonight it was in my video rental store’s ‘new releases’ display, and I grabbed it. So now I know that indeed modern slavery is implicated in the sugar trade today. The United States (and I’m guessing Canada as well) gets a large percentage of the raw materials for its sugar from the Dominican Republic.

A postscript at the end of the film tells us that the Dominican Republic claims to have shut down the trafficking of Haitians across the border, but that the Haitians that are already in the country and work in the cane fields are still trapped without legal status — they were enticed to come to D.R. with promises of jobs and a better life, and once they arrived their Haitian identity documents were destroyed — and if they leave the bateys they can be arrested because of their illegal status in the country. Sounds like enslavement to me.

Another reason not to eat sugar. Funny how our North American nutritionist, medical associations, media speak out against sugar as a ‘bad’ food: bad for our health, yes, but I have never heard anyone really talk about the way sugar gets to our supermarket shelves.

What can you do? The website for the film has links to some organizations. You can also:

• talk about it with people you know;
• avoid products that might be made with the labour of enslaved people (including trafficked people and people enticed away from their homelands with promises of a better world only to be forced into indentured servitude, etc);
• check out Free the Slaves, an organization that works to end modern slavery;
• buy your sugar fair trade. It’s more expensive, but the cheap white stuff comes with hidden costs

I’m going to re-mount my personal campaign to avoid sugar. Good for my physical health, but also good for my spirit.

I’m having a sleepy afternoon and thinking about how busy I’ve been over the past few weeks. I’ve almost forgotten (on a day-to-day sort of basis) that I am paid to work three days a week; it feels like I’m working all the time, every day! I am going to take a serious vacation this summer, and hardly work at all. Yeah! Please remember to hold me to it.

Last night was my Wednesday night running group, and we did speed work. We ran a mile or so over to the high school track, and then did a one-mile fast-as-you-can-sustain-it run. We took a bit of a break, and then did it again. I ran my second mile in 9 minutes, 33 seconds. It’s nothing like our coach’s 6 minutes-something time, but I’m just happy to be under 10 minutes. F., the coach, pointed out that running for speed is nothing like running for distance; it is basically a different sport. It feels pretty different to me, and not in a good way! But I took it like medicine and ran. Then we walked home with some jogging interspersed along the way.

I weigh almost 2 pounds less today after that run. Just have to keep the workouts coming! I’m making slow progress — I still haven’t hit 10 pounds lost for this project since I gained back some weight on my vacation — but whatever. I’m still heading in the direction I want. And I even chose salad for lunch today. Because I knew I wanted a slice of pound cake afterwards.

Time to get some more work done… and I haven’t forgotten about blogging about global food security and hunger. I just haven’t had time to read anything lately. I’ll get back to it soon! Life will get slower and easier once June is over.

I was terribly sore yesterday in my left knee and hip flexor from the long run, but I woke up this morning with just regular old muscle soreness. No strains, nothing. Cause to celebrate! And the only thing that puts a dent in my party is the unbelievable blister on the side of my right big toe. A blister under my long-time callus. I don’t know quite what to do about it, so I guess I’ll do nothing. OK, OK, I lie: I tried draining it, and it sort of worked, on the non-callused side of the blister, but the callused part just burns to the touch. Ouch.

That said, I like running 18k! I want to do it again!

The reason I am not a great blogger: when things don’t go my way, I don’t blog about them. I squirrel myself away with my sudoku addiction instead of baring my soul.

I’m not sure there’s gonna be much soul baring tonight — it’s almost 11pm and I still have some work to do to prepare for a full day of training that I’m facilitating tomorrow — but I want to reconnect with my project and get rolling again.

The short story: two things conspired to kick me off the wagon:

I had a long discussion about the 31pounds.com project with a friend — not in the comments section (that would have been interesting!) but on facebook. She’s connected with the fat-positive movement and was angered by my website. Interestingly, she has also lost a lot of weight over the past year or two — and as we were talking (and other friends of hers were chiming in as well) I realized how close some of our struggles are: to remain authentic to ourselves — so challenging, because that means acknowledging that we — or I’ll say “I,” so as to speak for myself — I want to look a certain way because society says that’s what’s beautiful, even though I don’t want to contribute to that sick aspect of my society. I want to be involved in challenging it, but I don’t want to sacrifice myself to do that. Hypocritical, yes. Real, that too, yes. So maybe instead of a weight loss project I need a radical self-acceptance project.

And with that thought, and my conflict-aversive feelings of discomfort from the interaction, I totally stopped blogging. I also stopped eating healthfully, which is connected to the second reason I’ve disappeared: I went traveling to visit family and friends, and even though everyone was super-supportive, there were lots of baked goodies and snacks around, and what’s worse: when they weren’t readily available I sought them out. I’ve been on a 3-week baked-good bonanza. It’s ridiculous. And I’ve gained back six pounds, boo.

I’m having a hard time getting back to eating lots of veggies and fruit, and no (or little) sugar. I’m working on it. But one thing I am proud of today: I ran 18 kilometers this morning (that’s 11.2 miles). I did run while I was on my trip — not as much as I was intending, but I still squeezed in a 10-k with three of my best friends from college, which was the most feel-good run I’ve ever done — but since I’ve been back (1o days or so) I hadn’t run at all. Work has been really busy, and besides, I’m a slug.

This photo is creative commons-licensed by Lorri.
The original, plus more photos of this slug, among other things,  can be found here.

So, despite my aching left knee and hip flexor, I’m pleased with myself today. Pleased enough to keep typing. (Not pleased enough to pass by ice cream without eating it, though!).

One last quick thing: I went to a Buddhist meditation session this evening, and after the hour of meditation the group had a chat. One woman, R., commented that she finds herself noticing the presence of the Buddhist concept of suffering, dukha, in her day to day life, and she used the example of wanting something — I think it was some food item, or at least, that’s what I thought of right away — and that the wanting, the grasping for something she doesn’t have: there’s the suffering.

From a Buddhism perspective (and I’m really not a Buddhist, so I may explain this very poorly), life is full of suffering, and enlightenment is to not be attached to the things that create suffering (and those are: the self/ego; wanting stuff; striving for permanence/stability/constancy). The discussion we had after R. made her point is that you WANT something, and then you have it (maybe), but ultimately you’re dissatisfied anyhow because then it is gone (in the case of food, anyhow — and in other cases, it breaks, or it isn’t trendy anymore, or you just get bored of it and start wanting something else). The conversation really made me think that when I have the impulse to buy ice cream — especially if it is a crappy ice cream bar! — to think about the wanting that is causing my suffering, like, I’m going to DIE if I don’t have it. And to think about how after I’ve had it, I’ll still be suffering because now it’s gone. And tonight I have the extra suffering of a slight bellyache, for that matter.

Yes, ice cream is suffering. Tasty, tasty suffering.

It has been so embarrassingly long since I’ve posted! Not only that, I haven’t been reading much about global food systems, hunger or poverty — I’ve been saving posts that I see; there are things I want to read; but I have been so busy. Last week was crazy at work as I was preparing to go on vacation. Now I’m in Toronto, visiting with my mother and brothers, and my goodness, it is hard to go running and eat healthy. We eat out almost every meal, and I am making semi-good choices. I’m working on it! I went on a 5k tempo run on Saturday, but then yesterday I missed my long run. I balked at the thought of attempting 16k alone. I was planning to run 10k alone this morning but I was awakened too late to run that long before we need to get going with the day’s plans.

Yesterday we went to the textile museum, where there is a really amazing exhibit of artist Judy Chicago’s work called What if women ruled the world. When you walk into the first room of the 3rd floor exhibit, you see a massive black crocheted tapestry of a woman lying on her back, legs splayed open, a placenta or womb emerging from her body and floating next to her. The whole thing is one large crochet, that’s all, in black thread.

Chicago has a series of textile based work called Resolutions: A stitch in time which includes pieces based on common sayings or resolutions. One of the things I found interesting is that by moving to textile art, Chicago has developed collaborative relationships with many women artists who have textile skills: Chicago designs and her collaborators weave, sew, stitch, crochet, quilt her designs. My favorite resolutions piece is this one:

Here I am in front of the textile museum:

Besides looking at textiles, the most exciting part of the trip so far was a brunch at raw, organic restaurant Live. The food was so great! I sampled my brother’s tempe ‘bacon’ which was so delicious. I’m becoming a tempe lover — it’s a slow process — and this ‘bacon’ (which really didn’t taste like bacon — which is good — I’m not particularly a fan of mock meat) was a lovely step towards tempe-love. I also had almond-based raw crepe with pear slices, berries and cashew cream. I love Gorilla Food in Vancouver, but it would be great to have something like Live — with its greater selection of meal options — at home. They also sell a few raw food products, including a spiralizer, which is a kitchen gadget that creates long thin strands of vegetables, so you can make things like zucchini ‘pasta.’ I’ve been looking for one for a while, and haven’t found it in Vancouver. I might go back to Live and buy the spiralizer, if I can get over how much counter space it will take up.

Today we’re off to the circus arts festival (free! downtown!) and then, who knows. I’m hoping to persuade everyone to go back to Live for dinner.

A quick last note: Last I weighed myself in Vancouver I was 151.4 lbs. My mother’s scale weighed me at 154 lbs the next day, which seems unlikely — but who knows? So I’m not attached to that. But if you’re new to the site, make sure to check out “About” and learn about the fundraising project — and contribute if you feel moved to be a part of the project!

The past few days have been a swamp of procrastination and overwhelm garnished with some self-pity. I have some expectations of myself at work that I’m having trouble meeting — not entirely my fault, but I just have to say that I wish we hired someone to focus on the marketing/promotion aspect of my work because I suck at it. Then on top of that I haven’t been running or exercising at all, partly because of my weird ankle injury which doesn’t exactly hurt at this point but still twinges when I step on it, and partly because I’m a slug. And then I haven’t been making the greatest eating choices over the past few days (which I have cleverly hidden from you — but it is more about hiding from myself — by not logging my food diary).

So now it is a warm, sunny, beautiful Saturday and I think I’m ready to stop sulking and get on with my life. I have loads of work tasks to do, but I’m feeling optimistic about them because ti is only 9:30am and I’ve already cleaned the kitchen and moved long-standing piles of books from the office to the shelf in my bedroom. I’m slightly embarrassed to say that I have 26 books here that I haven’t read yet. And a few more still downstairs. Maybe I should aim to get through all of these by the end of the year (and not buy any more books? My partner would be pleased about that!). Anyhow, I’ve done all that, plus swept the bathroom floor, and although I want to go out and play, I have no one to play with today and lots to do. I will plan to do my tasks (revise a short piece of writing; review a research ethics proposal and press the submit button; send a few emails to recruit participants for my program) and then go out to do some errands (cancel scooter insurance since we sold our scooter; pick up a library book waiting for me). And THEN, play.

I’ve been on a stubborn streak, which has started every morning with a refusal to have a smoothie for breakfast (”I’m sick of smoothie breakfasts!”) — which is fine, but I haven’t wanted to eat fruit either, so yesterday, for example, I had two bowls of muesli and then some white rice with milk and sugar. Followed by no food for hours, and then more rice with milk and sugar, and crackers with hummus, and white bread with butter… Nary a vegetable, though our fridge is a cornucopia of freshness! Finally yesterday evening I decided I’m done with my spree of unhealthy self-indulgence, and I started my healthy eating by having a smoothie for dinner. I still had the taste for sweet, and at least this way I was getting two cups of spinach in and some nutrients from the fruit.

And today, I’m back in it. Gonna eat some veggies, yeah, yeah. Veggies, veggies, yeah, yeah.

Today’s weight: 154.4. Pounds lost: 7.2 in 1 month + 9 days. Money raised: $122.40 (projected to goal: $527).

Starting weight: 161.6. Today’s weight: 154.6. Pounds lost: 7 in 1 month + 6 days.

Today is International No Diet Day, and although I wasn’t really intending to celebrate it by straying off my healthy eating plan, I, uh, ended up commemerating the day by eating all sorts of things I don’t often eat, as you can see here.

But besides that, I have so much to write about! So I hope you’re reading! (And if you are, go get a few more people and tell them to read, too! And then also get them to pledge money for every pound I lose by August 31, here! As of today I have raised $112 — which extrapolates to almost $500 by the time I reach my 31 pound weight loss goal — so I have a little ways to go before reaching $10,000 for Oxfam).

First, I want to write about a great dialogue I attended tonight called Growing Citizens: Gardening as a Catalyst for Civic Engagement. I was supposed to be running seven hills, but because I injured a tendon (I think) on Sunday, I’m resting (and happily, it is almost better), and so I went to the dialogue. There were three featured speakers — two different sorts of guerrilla gardeners and an urban farmer — all based in East Vancouver, and in addition the round dialogue room was opened up to participants to contribute their thoughts in between each speaker.

David Tracey is involved in the Strathcona Community Garden, which started over 20 years ago as the relatively low-income Strathcona community reclaiming city land that was slated for renewal as a park, but which somehow never seemed to become a city priority. Tracey wrote a book called Guerrilla Gardening, which is about becoming ecologically engaged and an active citizen by getting involved in growing stuff. The great thing about guerilla gardening, Tracey said, is that you don’t need permission from any authorities, you don’t need to ask anyone to do it, you can just go out and do it. He also showed a five-minute documentary about guerilla gardening, which was exciting because a) it showed lots of images of places I think of as “my neighborhood” and b) it showed people making little seed-carrying water balloons and little seed-and-compost balls and tossing them out in abandoned strips of earth on the edges of roads and alleyways with the hope that some of the seeds will take root and grow. So cool!

Ward Teulon is City Farm Boy, an urban farmer who has 16 gardens in the Mount Pleasant area of Vancouver (my neighborhood!), each no less than 1,000 square feet. He said that in 1,000 sqft he can grow $3,000-5,000 worth of produce in a season if he crop-rotates and the weather is favorable. That’s pretty great. He has a CSA (community-supported agriculture), which means that 30 people buy shares of his yield ahead of the growing season, and then they get a weekly bin of  produce for the season. On a side note, my household is part of a CSA this year — not Teulon’s, but that of a farmer who works land in Langley. I can’t wait for the veggies to start pouring in!

I was most inspired tonight by Sylvia Holland’s ten minutes of presentation time, in part because Sylvia is  vibrant and passionate, but also because her ideas are so engaging. She spoke about ‘working the edges’: community-building through linking green spaces into eco-corridors — a guerrilla gardening intended not for food production, but for cultivating the commons and creating community. Vancouver has 8,087 square kilometers of street, she told us, which is 22% of the city’s land mass: why not make it greener and more refreshing and restful? Sylvia’s area of focus really is right by my neighborhood; I think my street is just at the edge of her catchment, but it was thrilling to see the map of the areas she and her partner-in-guerrilla-crime work to green, and see that we’re basically right there on it! And right away I started thinking about how managable it would be to take ownership of just one tiny little patch of dirt at the corner of a street and plant some ferns and flowers or something. I know nothing about gardening, frankly, not even whether this is a weed or that is a plant we want to keep, but reclaiming a little scrap of earth seems possible even to me.

The last thing I’ll say about the dialogue tonight is that the last question we explored as a group (following on the heels of “What is a citizen?”) is “Can gardeners save the world?” One response that stuck with me: Yes, gardeners can save the world, because gardening requires a real commitment to be able to grow something — it isn’t something you can do just once — and a citizen is someone who takes the time and makes a commitment to grow something: being a citizen is not a one-shot act. Another response that resonated with me is that just like every seed has the potentiality of a plant, every seed ‘knows’ how to grow if it has favorable conditions, every person is a seed of a citizen, knows how to grow, and just needs a space to do it.

And I have more to say, specifically about this, but I will hold my thoughts and blog about it tomorrow, because it is late and I need to get to bed!

Starting weight: 161.6. Today’s weight: 153.2. Pounds lost: 8.4 in 1 month + 5 days.

I realize that I should also be sharing with you how the fundraising for Oxfam is going: I’m very pleased with the progress so far, but we need MORE. So far, 8 people have committed $1 each per pound lost. I’ve lost 8.4lbs so far, which means we’ve raised $67.20 — a great start, but a long way to go to reach my $10,000 goal! By the end, if I lose the 31lbs, I will need 323 people to contribute $1 per pound lost to reach the financial goal. That shouldn’t be too hard: I know hundreds of people who can afford to part with $31 for a good cause… so where are you? Surf over here and commit $1 per pound — or even more — to the 31pound project!

Yesterday I was immobilized, more or less, with my ankle injury. The upside is that I got very productive and finished an outline for a book I’m writing (work-related), revised and formatted a whole slew of consent forms and interview protocols for a research project I’m beginning, and even wrote some poems. By the late afternoon my head was throbbing but after a whole day of rest my ankle felt a whole lot better and I didn’t even have to hobble from home to bus to building when I went to my evening class (The Art of the Short Narrative, in case you were wondering).

I’m happy this morning: weight down to 153.2lbs — I’m hoping to dip under 150 by the time I leave for Toronto and Boston on May 15th; my jeans are feeling loose; my breakfast smoothie is delicious and I have a greens-and-tempe lunchbox; I’m looking forward to getting some interesting work done today; and I have no obligations tonight: I can scurry home to write or read or sleep or whatever.

Me this morning, jeans feeling loose. You can tell it is the beginning of
summer weather around here: my face has color and the rest of me is pale!

Now for some fun foodie tidbits:

• Sugar stacks piles up sugar cubes next to common, mostly processed food items to demonstrate how much sugar the “food” in question contains. Check out how a bowl of cheerios stacks up to some baby carrots (both 1 sugar cube), or even better, compare Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia to Haagen-Dazs sorbet (21 to 27!). (via Treehugger)
• I’ve been reading about the Brooklyn Food Conference and I wish I could have been there! Paula Crossfield of the Civil Eats blog writes a great overview review, and you can also read transcripts of a few of the talks. I was particularly taken by Raj Patel’s speech, which I just noticed has been temporarily removed so that Patel can review it. In his talk, he linked swine flu with global food systems (a discussion I have seen a few times on different blogs), but then he takes it a step further and links it to the World Bank and other global bully organizations. I’ll keep checking back and let you know when the transcript is up again; well worth the quick read!
• The great blog La Vida Locavore has a review up of the movie Food, Inc.:

This review, in short, can be summed up with two simple words - see it.  The best part of the film, for me, was being able to actually see the things I had already read about and heard of.  Immobile cows being pushed and rolled towards slaughter by forklift, hundreds of baby chicks rolled and knocked around down conveyor belts while tumbling every which way including off the belts altogether, hamburger filler being run through industrial-strength ammonia washes to kill off any potential e. coli bacteria.

Hmm, I don’t know if that description really motivates me to see the movie! But I’ll plan to see it when I have the chance.

• Finally, Kate Harding’s new fat-positive book is out! Lessons from the fat-o-sphere. I’m looking forward to reading it…