Another Miracle Diet! Who Cares?

Just how hard is it to lose weight after the age of fifty? Really hard. The magazines in my online account are all blasting the same message right now - how to lose weight quick and get in shape for that beach body we are all looking for this summer. Low carb, Paleo, vegan,  liquid meal replacements, low calorie, no white food, "clean" food. It's a steady stream of what and what not to put in our mouths to get the desired result which is less fat on our bodies.  At my age it seems that you have to run harder just to stay in the same place with things like weight control and fitness. Results are hard to come by due to changing hormone levels and slower metabolisms.  My husband is a huge believer in the low carb diet and it has worked very well for him in the past but lately the results are not as impressive. I favour the low calorie, high fibre kind of diet. Again, results are not as impressive as they once were. What to do now?

I can barely remember a time when I was not concerned with my weight. That is a sad thought but true.  I was my mother's plumpest baby, with adorable, squeezable, chubby legs and arms. I grew into a normal sized child until about ten years old when the chubby reappeared. I preferred reading over running and loved potato chips and cookies so the weight stuck around. I wouldn't have made it onto the Maury Povich Show as a freakishly obese child but I did get some teasing and knew that I was not like my skinny sisters who bookended me in the family. Puberty struck and with it a huge surge in height which achieved a much desired result- I slimmed down. That stage was short lived. After high school, began a forty year period of ups and downs in my weight which continues till today.  The fat ever so slowly creeps onto my body and once I awaken to its stealth attack I ever so slowly wrestle it off. It is a slow motion battle between exhausted adversaries who will not give up the fight. No magic diets, no fast and amazing weight drops. Just a grind.

When I was chasing after my own two small children every day I could eat what I wanted and not gain weight, but otherwise I have pretty much mentally tallied every calorie that has gone in my mouth as an adult. That is a tiresome job, people.  A good friend and I have a deep bond over this issue as she, too has "dieted" most of her life.  We are living calorie counters, no app required.  The good news for us is that almost all of our slimmer peers have gone on to gain as much or more weight than we have. Age - its a great leveller. The pretty grow plain, the slim get heavy.

So now instead of being the "big girl" as I felt I was in the skinny era of the seventies, I sit in the middle of the pack even though I am over twenty pounds heavier then when I was in my twenties. My two sisters have suffered a similar fate and I'm betting it's even harder for them to deal with as their inner vision of themselves is probably much slimmer than mine is of me. Once chubby you are always chubby in your head. I can feel you "inner fatties" nodding. I understand.

Me at 18 years old,
Oh, to be so "big" again!

Weight loss is not out of my reach, its just an equation, calories in, calories burned. Simple. But here's where I see the real change for those of us over fifty, beyond metabolic rates and loss of muscle...we just don't care as much.  The media finally has less effect on us and our self worth as determined by our thigh gap (I've never had one - see picture). We want to enjoy life and what we have worked hard for and sometimes that includes a piece of chocolate, an extra glass of wine or some of the demon white flour in the form of pasta or a baguette. No young man with the body of a Greek god is breaking down my door, promising me love if I would just lose those extra ten pounds and then we could run away and make the world envious with our physical beauty. No, that is not happening. I am invisible to young Greek gods now but I am healthy, reasonably fit, not on any medications.  That is what I care about now.

I just read an article in Prevention Magazine about health and fitness expectations for every decade in a woman's life. After sixty, it said, don't worry about those few extra pounds. They are needed to protect you if you fall (padding!) and will come in handy if you get seriously ill. Now that is the best news I've read all year. I will no longer consider myself overweight but rather I am in self protection mode.

Do You Believe in Miracles?

My mother once told me that every marriage was a little miracle. Quite a statement. She was married for almost sixty years so she witnessed her own little miracle. Any marriage of that length has its ups and downs and to be able to ride them out and have a happy enough final decade of marriage that you are bereaved when it's over, well, that's a miracle in my books. Unlike many widowed women, my mother was anxious to get right back into another relationship, she missed her marriage. I know of other older women who were griefstricken at the loss of their husbands but when that passed they had no desire for another one.  None. Life was much easier with only one person's needs to take of and no one trying to control you. I can see that but it does not mean their marriage wasn't a miracle while it lasted. It was.

I was at a celebration of life for my dear uncle on the weekend and he had had a long and happy marriage to my aunt. She predeceased him by more than a year and a half and he longed to be reunited with her even if it meant death. That's a commitment to your marriage! While at the gathering I chatted a bit with my cousins children who are at the beginning of their adventures in miracles. One is married, two are engaged and one lives common law. My niece and nephew recently had marriages of their own. It comes with the age bracket I am in now, children of friends and relatives are getting married for the first time. It starts one to pondering.

I believe that living together and marriage are not the same thing. I have done both so I know what it feels like, and that being said, I admit that living together for a long time with someone with or without the label of marriage is quite a feat. I don't know of as many lengthy common law relationships as I do marriages but that is changing and I will be interested to see if common law marriages last as long as often as the old fashioned kind. We humans can go through some pretty profound changes as we mature and keeping a relationship humming along through all that is challenging. Throw in the destabilizing factor of children and career changes and well, it really is a miracle that the divorce rate is only about 50%.  Are you the same person you were ten, twenty or thirty years ago? Some parts of ourselves never change but our opinions, tastes, interests and health certainly can. The challenge is to keep subtly reinventing a relationship as each party in it morphs and becomes more who they really are. Age strips away some of the willingness to please, to accommodate, to make the glass slipper fit by cutting off a toe. We just want to be ourselves and be accepted as such. Many, if not all couples see rocky patches in their marriages and often it is that fragile but binding thing called "marriage" that keeps them together until they can find their balance again. Sometimes it works and the marriage continues, often it doesn't. When a marriage falls apart it doesn't mean that marriage was a failure, it just ran its course and ceased to be a miracle. For some the marriage was never a little miracle in the making, it was just never going to work.

Watching the young couples around me marry and start down the road of trying to create their lasting miracle makes me think what an optimistic lot we are, us human beings. I mean, really, the divorce rate has hovered around the 50% mark for decades now, higher for second and third marriages. Some of this young love is doomed to fail when it comes to adapting to living with another person and yet the institution of marriage is still there and a whole segment of people are clamouring to get in on it. Gay marriage is a growing market showing again that marriage and living together are different animals. For some people living together is just not enough. And just as surely as the horse gets followed by the carriage, gay divorce will follow gay marriage for many couples. Divorce lawyers are thrilled as a whole new demographic is being added to their practice. Miracles are hard to create, gay or straight.

Marriage is so full of compromise. And what is compromise but a state in which neither party gets exactly what they want. Sort of a fine/fine rather than a win/win or win/lose. And yet we continue to marry and to stay married, and to remarry after divorce. But then people keep opening new restaurants on the site where others have failed so there is that unbridled optimism again. You have to hand to us, it takes a lot to keep us down sometimes.  I am traversing my thirty fourth year of marriage and at this point feel I will stay married until the "death do us part" thing happens but it's not totally up to me, it takes two people to make each little miracle happen. In these times where miracles feel far and few between I will take what I have, consider it miraculous and wish the same for those just saying their vows. Good luck to you,  and believe in miracles.

Finally Surfacing From Moving Madness

Hello again to my few and faithful followers. I have not disappeared, merely been sidetracked by a more difficult settling in period to our new apartment than expected and an unusually prolonged and painful bout of back pain. The two things go hand and hand of course, the moving process aggravates my back and the ensuing pain limits what I can do with the unpacking and setting up of our home. Such is life. Sometimes it hands you an enforced slow down and I am in such a moment right now.

Thankfully, my husband has a good strong back to do the heavy lifting when he is around and the large jobs have for the most part been done.  My initial "to do" lists have been ticked off, chores and errands completed, only to be replaced by new lists. The apartment we rented has not been that well maintained as will happen with rental properties and that has caused me some headaches. The rental manager receives almost daily emails from me about problems and I'm sure she is enjoying receiving them as much as I enjoy sending them. Not very much.

Another nasty leak discovered.

She is doing her best to work through the issues but the whole thing leaves me braindead and tired at the end of the day, popping Advil and laying on heating pads. Not a situation conducive to thinking up witty, creative ideas for blog posts. I'm obviously not as good a multitasker as I thought I was.

On the bright side, literally, the sun has finally come out. It pours through the many windows in my new home and cheers me up as I struggle to get upright some days. I'm exploring my neighbourhood on foot with short walks when I can get breaks from the visits of appliance repairmen and other service people. This last sunny weekend was such a gift, I felt summer had moved in. Ted and I walked to Granville Island and enjoyed a lunch on the deck at Bridges, putting our "to do" list on hold for a while and just relaxing together. Then it was back home to get things done but the pause was rejuvenating.

The birds welcomed us to the neigh-
bourhood with a spray of poop. Yup,
that's how its going.

As I said in a previous post it is not the packing and actually moving of our stuff that is the hard part of a move, it's making a place a home. Making our square pegs fit into round holes takes some effort. It's not rocket science, it just takes time and energy and many trips to Home Depot. Some moves are easier than others in this arena.... furniture fits, electronics work, appliances do what they are supposed to and other times....well, let's just say we are in one of those other times.
These are all First World problems, I am well aware of that, they are nothing to lose sleep over merely details to be dealt with. And they will be dealt with and my back will continue to improve and all will be right as rain soon enough. Oops, didn't mean to mention rain.

If you have opened this post and read to this point, thanks for sticking with me. It has been a year now of blogging for me and I have taken time to assess and review the whole venture while lying on my back in the floor letting my muscles relax.  I have considered stopping blogging at this time and that is still on the table but for right now I will continue and see where it leads me.
Post a comment, send me an email at whatfayesaid@gmail.com  or forward this post to someone who might read it. I appreciate all of it.

It's Just Allergies....

The gentlemen standing behind me in the cashier line at TJ Maxx is gripping a mittful of cleaning aids - a broom, a mop, several different dusters. I comment to him that he looks like he has a big job ahead of him.  That is all that's required to launch him into a tale of his battle against the dust of Palm Springs. His frustration pours out of him as he tells me of wearing out the bristles on his broom from so much sweeping, his embarrassment at telling anyone how many different allergy meds he is on, how his mother's trip here from Ireland is being ruined by her congestion due to allergic reactions to the desert dust. He grew up on a hay farm in Ireland and never suffered a day of allergies from either the hay, the other vegetation on the farm or the animals. It wasn't until he moved to the paradise of Palm Springs that he experienced the torment of seasonal allergies.  

Cactus flowers

The desert in bloom.

Due to the higher than normal rainfall in Southern California this winter the desert is in a "superbloom" year. Everything that can bloom IS blooming. Very pretty but more pollen than normal. Couple that with more wind than usual and you have a recipe for rhinitis.  Being an allergy sufferer myself and someone who has experienced the losing battle of keeping out the dust of  the desert I nod in solidarity and let him express his irritation. I understand. 

People that don't have allergies don't want to hear about yours. In fact, some of you will quit reading right now so as not to hear from us whiners.  Go on then, stop reading.  I'll wait for you to go..... ok. Many people have no patience for what is perceived as the minor problem of a runny nose in spring but to those of us that suffer there is more to the picture. Here is a direct quote from a US government website for the National Centre for Biotechnology Information. (Http//www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov):
"The rates of depression, anxiety, and sleep disturbance (suicide risk factors) are greater in patients with allergic rhinitis than in the general population." But it's just allergies, right? If you ask the average person which time of the year they think has the highest rate of suicide most people will tell you the winter, or more specifically Christmas time, the holiday season.  In actuality spring, specifically May has the highest rate of suicide across all different nations and cultures. There are many, many theories as to why that would be. It seems to run counter to what we want to agree upon anecdotally.  Winter makes us miserable, we say,  we feel lonelier at the holidays if we are alone, not enough sunlight makes us cranky.  Springtime is rebirth, longer days, warmer days, more beauty and possibility in our life, why would more people kill themselves or at least try to kill themselves then?  I have a one word answer...allergies.  See quote above. It is as good a theory as any and has had much investigation about it. Allergies make you feel crappy, they give you itchy eyes, a runny nose, a mucus clogged throat, headaches or else the dopiness that comes with the stronger antihistamines. The feeling of having a cold that never goes away. New medicines are better at keeping you alert but not as effective at keeping down the symptoms.  A constant trade off. They may also be a symptom of other chemical imbalances going on in the brain. 

They bloom everywhere! 

Pretty and pollinating

My siblings all suffer from allergies to different degrees, as do my sons, one particularly badly so I've had a lot 
discussion and trial and error about coping with allergies, both seasonal and food related. Antihistamines, cortisone nasal sprays, the traditional neti pot, vitamin supplements, acupuncture, air cleaners...they have all been tried. Canadians suffer from one of the highest rates of allergies in the world, thanks in part to our abundant supply of trees and plants but probably as well from some of our ethnic backgrounds. Light haired, light eyed people suffer more from allergies of all kinds. Thanks, Ove and Dagmar, my Scandinavian grandparents. 

As I listened to my red haired, Irish friend in the TJ Maxx line up I sympathized.  The dusty desert winds of places like Phoenix and Palm Springs are not kind to me either. The only place I have found so far where I am allergy free is Hawaii, perhaps a less obvious reason why I enjoy Hawaii so much but just as important as the sun and sand. When I'm there I can leave the house without a couple of emergency tissues in my pocket, I don't startle people with my trios of sneezes, I can sleep without waking from mucus choking me in the middle of the night. Let me tell you, that can endear you to a place! The different vegetation and the constant blowing trade winds work together to bring me relief no antihistamine can match. 
So with this in mind, when someone sneezes next to you in a line up and they rush to assure you "it's JUST allergies", instead of rolling your eyes, send them a little loving thought and tell them you hope they feel better soon. 

It Never Rains in Southern California

I have the great fortune to be spending some time in Palm Springs right now. And it's true, when you are here in the desert it does feel as if it never rains in Southern California as Albert Hammond tried to tell us. Although he did go on to sing that it "pours, man, it pours". And so it does some years. It has been a rainy and snowy year for California and they are about to experience the flooding that comes with the snow melt but here on the desert side of the San Jacinto mountains it feels like another world. I have included a picture of the blue sky so that those remaining in Vancouver can have a reference point.

Before you get hating on me I will let you know that I did my time in Vancouver this year. I was there for it all, the month of snow, then more snow, the unending rain in March. This was the first winter in many that I did not get an opportunity to escape to somewhere warm and sunny, warm enough to be in a bathing suit for part of the day. So I had to scrape the mould from behind my ears as I boarded the plane for California and the greenish, algae-like tint is slowly leaving my skin the more time I spend in the sun here. I feel your pain.
I am a born and bred Wet Coaster. Lived all my life in BC, most of it in the lower mainland. I know rain. My parents were born and raised in the area, rain is mixed in with my blood. I am used to it. But this winter has tried the spirit and soul of even those of us born to the wet weather.

When climate change was first discussed it was all about the idea of global warming, we would be growing lemons and oranges in our back yards, no more skiing in the snow-less mountains. Palm trees would abound, why, Vancouver was to become the new Los Angeles as Los Angeles withered up and blew away or sank into the sea.  Now the buzzwords are global climate change. Ah, that is a bit different. That leaves things open to all kinds of interpretations, expect anything! Los Angeles and Southern California were deluged with moisture this winter as were we in the Vancouver area. And still are according to reports I'm getting from friends at home. There won't be any orange groves in Vancouver surviving the snow we saw or flourishing in the few hours of tepid sunshine this spring has had to offer. Even our native gardens didn't survive the weather we had. Lawns turned to mush and then froze. Thawed and got rained on again and are now mostly moss. Trees that were never meant to carry eight inches of wet heavy snow were snapping their branches off in desperation to be free of the weight. Hedges splayed outwards, long branches escaping their tidy boundaries, requiring amputation.  In my neighbourhood the city workers were still cleaning the fall leaves off the streets in February, leaves that had been caught under the snow and ice and could finally be swept away.

Easterners laugh at our bitching and moaning and tell stories of snow so high they have to shovel out of their front door in the morning. That is precisely why I don't live in eastern Canada, or central
Canada, or northern Canada. I live as far south and almost as far west as I can get to escape Canadian weather. If Canada, instead of the U.S. had managed to strike a deal with Hawaii, or we had annexed  the Turks and Caicos like it had been discussed in 1974 then I would be living in one of those two places right now, I'm betting. I went to Hawaii for the first time at the age of eighteen and fell in love. Not with a person but with the islands. I had no idea such a paradise existed so close to home and so accesssible and I  tried to figure out how as a teenager with few skills I could wrangle a green card and stay there. It was not to be. But if I had had the Turks and Caicos to go to at eighteen....

  Don't you want to be here right now?

Courtesy of Turks and Caicos Tourism

Americans really have the choice to live in any kind of weather they want while staying in America. The U.S. has it all covered, weatherwise. Dry, wet, cold, steamy, arid, scorchingly hot. I envy them that.  The plan to make the Turks and Caicos our eleventh province was floated around again in 2013 and I'm hoping one day the Queen will give it up to us Canadians. Let us have our version of Puerto Rico or Hawaii, a tropical  dream with Canadian currency, the English language, a Caribbean flair,  and lots of room for our damp and chilled populace to to flake out on the beaches. It would be nice if it happened before global climate change melts the glaciers, raises the sea levels and sinks the Turks and Caicos. Fingers crossed.

Moved!

My move is done, just the aftermath to deal with. Everyone thinks the hard part is the packing and the actual moving. It's not. That's the easy... well, easier part. Taping together boxes and filling them is rote and mindless work, physically tiring and endless but it's just repetitive grunt work.  For the

Unpacking

move, we use a major moving company and they are great. They send two trucks, five guys and everyone is polite, respectful of our home and our stuff and know what they are doing. The moves usually go seamlessly as far as getting all our stuff from one place and into another.  It's all the rest of the moving details that make me crazy. Even the transfer of utilities is pretty painless now. I do as much online as a I can and we had our phone, internet, cable and utilities all set up the day after the move. Its the things you can't foresee that knock you sideways, as with life in general. And there are always things you can't foresee, even after as many moves as I have handled.

This move started with a mix up over keys. Due to issues with the rental agency we could only have one garage/elevator key fob. A bit of a problem when the fob is needed for everything and my husband and I had to be in two different places. I am still waiting for the extra fobs four days later. Then there was the leak. This is the second move we have had where a water leak was found on move in day, and leaks are problems, BIG problems, my friend. The previous leak required a refinishing of all the wood floors in the main floor of the home we had just moved into. All our furniture, carpets, artwork etc had to be moved out again for the floors to be redone. This time the leak is in the ceiling of our laundry room and will require the removal of drywall, etc, etc. It is starting to smell already. Welcome to your new home, Faye!

Ted having his non-Zen moment.

This is what a room full of paper looks
like when tamed.

Having boxes and packing paper delivered to your house is a breeze, one phone call and there they are. I also get used boxes off of Craigslist so they come into the house in small amounts. After a move there is a huge mound of flattened boxes to get rid of and enough crumpled packing paper to fill a room. Ted took on the most-dreaded job of flattening the paper and the boxes. The boxes were no challenge, a good knife, a few slits through the tape and a big space-gobbling box is flat against the wall. Very satisfying.  But the paper proved to be another thing altogether. I have friends who won't come near my house now until after the paper has been flattened. Everyone has been called in to help with it at one time or another and if you can get into the Zen moment of it the act can be relatively painless but if you don't it becomes the most disliked job in a move.  Ted rose to the challenge and smoothed out paper for hours but by the end he was ranting and raving, swearing to NEVER, EVER flatten a piece of moving paper again! Not too Zen. It's not rocket science but believe me, its a challenge. If you don't flatten it out you will be hauling garbage bags of crumpled paper out of your home for days.

Ted has left on a trip and I will be joining him in a couple of days. Till then I am, arranging for repairs, waiting for key fobs, slowly emptying boxes and stowing things away, all the while knowing I will most likely have to rearrange it all again. And maybe once more after that. No two houses have the same storage or closets and where you keep things is always going to be different. Moving is easy compared to settling in and making a home. And therein lies the most difficult part of the move, making someone else's home feel like yours. I'm pretty good at that part but it takes time. Check back with me in a couple of months and I'll let you know how its going but for now I'm still trying to find that damn wine opener!

Ted's office awaits him.

On The Move Again

I am moving at the end of this month.  This will be the fifth move in less than eight years for my husband and me.  It seems even worse when I see it written down. We are not young adults in our twenties with some clothes, a computer and a bed.  We are grown-ups with lots of stuff.  Lots and lots of stuff. About 13,000 pounds actually despite my many donations to the thrift store. I know what that amount of stuff feels like because I have packed and unpacked every item, each move, with my own hands.  When my husband brought up the idea of moving last month, the thought was unbearable to me, the memory of the last move was still fresh in my mind. The muscle memory was still there, all that bending, lifting, and the screeching of the tape gun, the stacks and stacks of packing paper. Ugh. But life wasn't always like this.

We lived in the first house we purchased for three years, then came a baby and the move to a larger house where we stayed five years and had another child.  The universe aligned and we had a chance to buy a view home and turn it into our dream home and spend fifteen happy years there. This was the longest period that either my husband or myself had spent anywhere. When our youngest son entered his final year of high school we were ready to move on from the suburbs and head back to the city.  The only problem with that was the difference in house values. For what we sold our large view home for in the 'burbs we could purchase a two bed, two bath apartment in Vancouver. So we decided to rent. That's where the trouble began. Selling a large home can be difficult, it took us six months, but giving your notice on a rental is easy. Thirty days and you are gone.

ah, the smell of new
boxes!

We stayed almost two and a half years in the first rental before Ted found a view home for rent he had to have. We moved. The kids were both gone so we had gotten rid of what felt like pounds and pounds of belongings when they went but it still felt like I was packing up a three ring circus.
The new home was lovely, the view stupendous, so nice in fact that after ten months we were given an eviction notice by the owner who wanted to move back in.  She couldn't find any where else to live that she liked as well. Our first eviction notice. We had to be out by the end of January, a terrible time to be looking for a place and an even more terrible time to actually be moving. Happy New Year everyone, pass the packing boxes.

Therein lies one of the downsides to renting, you are at the mercy of the owner. Our next move proved that out as well. We found a home with a more modest view and many, many stairs. Living there was like living on a Stairmaster. I developed buns of steel and after two and a half years grew weary of hauling my groceries up two long flights of stairs to the kitchen, steel buns or not.  I told our rental manager that we would not be renewing our lease and she said, "that's great, because the owners are moving back in!" They were supposed to have moved permanently to China but "surprise!" So we couldn't have stayed even if we had wanted to. Out came the boxes I had stored in the crawlspace. I never give away boxes, you can appreciate why.
This takes us to our current home which we have lived in for 18 months. I could happily stay here another year, not because I love the house so much but because I am so tired of moving. Really, really tired of moving.  My husband is unhappy in our current place and will not stop looking for another rental so he has agreed to help more with the move and I have very reluctantly agreed to go.

On top of my own moves I have helped my mother with her seven moves in the last seven and a half years. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, apparently. In the last decade there has been around 25 moves between my siblings, my two children and my mother, add our five and we are at 30 or more as a family not counting nieces and nephews. That's insanity. And a lot of boxes and tape.

My siblings seem to be staying put for now, I'm hoping my mother does, too but I'm not counting on it. My children don't require my physical help with their moves so that just leaves us. My husband thinks he will love our new place for years to come but I am too jaded now to believe that. Plus we are still at the mercy of the owner who can chose to evict us.  I am thrilled by the recent drop in home prices in Vancouver, (sorry, to those that own one) and am dreaming one day of a place of my own that doesn't have a stack of folded boxes in the basement waiting to be refilled. Someone once commented to me that I must really enjoy moving since I do it so often. I don't but I AM getting good at it. Gotta go, the tape gun is calling me.