Stag Silence... months later

The habit of waking up on a leisurely Saturday morning and turning the TV on to anything that is on is not that easy to break.  I found myself one morning (a month after turning off cable TV) staring into the dark screen of the TV with a yearning for something that no TV could give me.  Was it companionship?  Was it a yearning for conversation or a need for meditation? Whatever it was I needed, it could not be satisfied with the TV.  As I mentioned in an older post, my family still watches TV from time to time, but because we have no cable anymore, we need to know what we want to watch on Hulu or Netflix before we turn the TV on.  It's a new and refreshing experience... to think about what you want before turning on the TV.

As I stared at the dark screen of the TV that morning, I knew I did not want to turn it on.  I needed something else.  This is what we did instead....



Going on 6 months of no cable, I haven't regretted the decision.  I think John misses "The Mentalist" and "Weeds", but he seems to find his shows eventually online or on the network's website.  We have been fine without cable.  Even Lucas watches less TV.  If he does watch, he chooses a show like his favorite "Johnny Test" and plays it over and over again.  But what 7-year-old doesn't do that?

Stag Juice

Since eating seemingly smaller portions did not make an impact on our weight loss goal, we thought we would try something else. Around this time, we watched a documentary called Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead. Sounds cheerful, right? I was inexplicably captivated by the idea of consuming green juice just like I was inexplicably drawn to reading all the Twilight books. It sounds weird and almost unhealthy to just drink green juice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Joe Cross narrated his journey across America meeting and talking to people about health and fitness while doing a juice fast (living solely on vegetable juice). He drove from state to state with his Breville Juice Fountain in his trunk. When Joe got hungry, he would purchase some vegetables like kale, sweet potato and carrots from a store and juice them our of his trunk. Then he and his film crew would go out and interview people for the rest of the day.

Here are some statistics that stuck with me:
After 60 days of consuming massive amounts of kale, cucumbers, pears, apples, onions, spinach, parsley and tomatoes in juice form, he’d lost 80 pounds and was taking 2.5 milligrams of Prednisone, down from the original 15 he’d been prescribed. (The Prednisone was for a painful auto-immune disease he had been diagnosed with a few years back.) After an additional 70 days of eating only fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts and seeds, he was back in Sydney, 100 pounds lighter and off the drug completely.

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/movies/super_slenderize_me_5pjnsV6Qk2GcznwAL2gttI#ixzz1rEQz8n2P

For a few days after the documentary, John and I joked about drinking green juice. "If it's green going in, would it be green coming out?" he asked. "Would it even taste good?" I wondered.

Kale juice? Spinach in liquid form? Ugh!
But still I was intrigued. I thought John had dismissed the whole thing as silly.

The funny think is John was shopping for juicers on Amazon the whole time we were making sarcastic jokes about drinking your salad. The combination of John's constant curiosity and constantly being on the internet led him to research and price-check high quality centrifuge juicers. He found a good brand that was refurbished. And it was being sold at a great discount. Lo and behold, on Valentine's Day, instead of a box of chocolates, I received a box with a juicer inside.

Our juicing story began.
No, we did not go on a 60-day juice fast like Joe Cross. We weren't sure we could drink green juice for one day let alone 60 days. The day we unpacked the juicer, we had some carrots and apples in the fridge so we thought, "Why not?"

Surprise! It was not gross. It was actually good. Of course apple juice is naturally sweet and carrots are root vegetables that contain a bit of carbs. But this was a great start. The next day, I went to the grocery store and got broccoli and cucumber to add to the mix.

To be continued....

Stags and smaller portions

Stags out in the wild are herbivores. They only eat plants. They can graze on shrubs or grasses. They can also munch on foliage or berries.

The stags that I live with eat everything. They are omnivores. We humans possess the ability to digest almost anything:

Besides being 98% water, human saliva also starts the digestion process:
Amylase is secreted from the parotid glands and breaks down carbohydrates. Protease is secreted from the submandibular glands and begins protein digestion. Lipase is secreted from the sublingual (under the tongue) glands to initiate fat digestion. click here for more

That has always convinced me that humans are designed to eat whatever they can get their hands on. This made sense during caveman days when humans spent hours and sometimes days hunting animals, gathering berries or grain or nuts, just to stay alive. If a caveman happened upon a wild boar and killed it, then those humans were carnivores that day. The next day, if they could only find wild grains, acorns, and a few berries, then they were herbivores.

I have been thinking a lot about this because John and I started making significant changes to our food choices in the last few months. Those of you following this blog may have read about our switch to brown rice... I say food choices, because our society is bombarded with health advice and food suggestions from low-fat, low-carb diets... to high-protein, no-carb diets.... to vegan diets... to counting Weight Watcher points every day. Part of the food-related problems of our modern society is that we have many, many choices. And often, we choose the wrong foods to put in our bodies. John and I were no exception.

Our trials and tribulations regarding eating healthier started when I bought a new set of dishes. They were meant to be dessert plates, about 8 inches in diameter. I bought them because they were very cute, but realizing that we could only put a small amount of food on them, I thought it might help us decrease our food portions. When I first used these dishes to serve dinner, John looked at me kinda funny but didn't say anything.

We ate smaller portions but nothing happened to the scale when we got on it. Was it because our little dessert plates were piled high? Was it the second helpings we felt we needed since our plates were so tiny? This strategy did not seem to work...

To be continued

Stag Silence

I walked around the apartment aimlessly. Do you know the feeling when you walked into a room not remembering why you headed over there in the first place? I do that every once in a while. But I did it a LOT today. I walked into the kitchen and stopped to think why I was there. Not hungry... not thirsty... dishes done (Thanks John)... Hmmm.

I left the kitchen and sat at the dining table and looked over at the TV. It was off. I looked around, distracted, at the table top with and papers strew about. Did I sit here to clean up? No.

I see the basket of freshly washed laundry. Well, since I'm sitting here having forgotten why I came here... I fold the clothes slowly, paying attention to the developing holes in Lucas' sweatpants. Boy, he has really gotten longer in the last year. Think of Lucas, my mind wanders to the silence ... eerie silence of the downstairs of the apartment. It's been so silent all morning. But I was not alone! John and Lucas were in the same room! No Lucas-animal noises, no commercial music, no voices competing with gaming sounds. What's going on?

To see what they were doing (that was SO VERY quiet), I passed the dark screen of the TV to sit on the couch. I reach for the TV remote, ready to get a dose of QVC... Then it hits me....

I just remembered we disconnected our Cable box yesterday. It's been more than 24 hours without cable TV. Lucas has not noticed yet, but I feel like I'm going insane walking around my apartment like a lost puppy. I thought maybe I needed another (a third) cup of coffee, or something!

I think it's cable TV withdrawal. I thought Lucas was the addict, but maybe it's me. I keep the TV on as "background noise." Why anyone would need background noise is beyond me. I am always complaining of the noise in this place (see my very first post on Stag Nation), so to add something to the background was probably crazy.

I am not saying we will stop watching TV. We like TV. We like our shows: The Walking Dead, The Mentalist, Royal Pains... but we also know that when the TV is just on in the background, we tend to just mindlessly plop on the couch and find some suitable, non-irritating thing to pass the time until some other show comes along. Next thing you know, it's dinner time and I haven't thawed out the meat yet.

Thanks to Hulu, Netflix streaming, and the internet, we can purposefully find and watch shows we love. Lucas can look through the menu of available kids shows or movies. And we watch (most of the time commercial-free) for a finite amount of time. When the show ends, we turn off the TV (in theory).

A CBS News article points out that this idea of ditching the cable box is becoming popular: "Pay TV subscribers are declining, and according to a new survey by Forrester Research, people now use the Web more than their televisions." See the full article here.

This will be a good way for Lucas to learn to be a more active viewer of whatever he wants to view. This might be a good lesson in time-management for him... and for us.

Happy (Healthy) Valentine's Day, Stags

I remember when I was in elementary school. Valentine's day would come around and that would mean Valentine cards made of red paper and doilies, glitter, store-bought valentines (with envelope included), and CANDY! Just this year, Bloomberg Business Week predicted that over 140 million pounds of candy will be sold for Valentine's day... 60 percent of it is chocolate. Nothing wrong with that. I certainly looked forward to and got a good share of candy from friends and classmates on Valentine's day. One of the iconic symbol of Valentine's day continues to be the candy hearts with romantic sayings like "BE MINE" or "KISS ME."

Fast forward 2 decades: Over the years, several school districts have banned Valentine candy. Now, when kids exchange Valentines on Feb. 14, they give out cards, pencils, stickers, or other small, non-sweet treats to show their friendship and affection for each other.

Lucas' school was on-board with the idea. His teacher sent home a letter asking parents to bring a valentine for every child in the class IF they bring valentines at all. So it's an all-or- nothing policy. I imagine that this there to avoid hurt feelings if someone does not get a valentine. The teacher also politely encouraged us to keep the valentines candy-free. So Lucas and I went to the dollar store to look for cards, stickers, pencils, erasers, and .... and... boy there was a lot of enticing red, pink, and purple CANDY! But we were good and we stuck to our sweets-free shopping list for Lucas' class

... with a few Goo Goo bars for Mommy.

Old habits die hard!

Stags Eating Healthy

We have had a new wave of healthy eating in our household lately. We started implementing little changes a couple of years ago:

• cooking at home more
• encouraging Lucas to "just try" something new
  
• eating less meat (not applicable to Lucas)
• making veggies a larger percent on the plate
• keeping "healthier" snacks at home
• drinking less soda (John hardly drinks it now!)
  

The most painless and least noticable change was converting from white rice to brown rice. When John and I ate brown rice for the first time, we just kind of looked at each other with scrunched-up expressions on our faces as if we just put saw dust into our mouths. Brown rice is really quite good. Plus, the health benefits made it worth a try. White rice causes a rapid spike in blood sugar. Also, when brown rice is milled and polished to make white rice, a lot of the magnesium and the cholesterol-lowering LDL fats in the bran are also removed. That leaves only the white fluffy grain we all know and love!

But switching overnight from fluffy, creamy, slightly sweet white rice to the hearty, nutty- tasting, fiber-rich texture of brown rice was probably a bad idea. Ian seemed open to it right away, but not Lucas!

So we started by combining the two rices and cooking them together (1/4 brown to 3/4 white). It was a bit noticeable but not enough to bother me. Time went by and we ate the odd rice combo with little interruption. Lucas was on board. After a few weeks, we make the proportions 50/50 brown to white. That stayed that way for a few months because the holidays were upon us and neither John nor I thought about the rice for a while.

Last week, we make the transition to 80% brown rice.... no complaints from anyone! Now adobo and stir-fry doesn't taste any different to us with brown rice. I look forward to buying just brown rice soon... it's a pain keeping both kinds in my small, small pantry. As a mom, I feel good making this change in my family's diet, especially with picky eaters (ahem, John is one of them).

Quiet Stags

"What game do you want to play tonight?" John asked.

"Ummm, UNO or Lego Heroica or Operation..." replied Lucas.

Around 8 pm at our little apartment, the TV is turned off, the computer monitors are dimmed, and all electronic games are paused. It marks the beginning of "Quiet time" in our household. I came up with the concept a while ago out of frustration with all the noise and stimulation from the TV and computers. It was not allowing Lucas to settle down and prepare for bed. But it was John who decided that we would definitely start the nightly routine of "Quiet Time."

Studies show that bright lights directly into our eyes from the TV, computer monitor, iPad, etc. can affect sleep patterns. These devices can "fool our brains into thinking its daylight" even if it's not, and our bodies respond accordingly (click here for news article). But who doesn't love to surf the net, check their facebook, or watch a documentary before bed? GUILTY!

So, even though the habit was hard to break for us adults, we thought we should give it a try to get Lucas to sleep earlier and get a good nights rest. The first night, we expected a protest from Lucas... "No! I don't want Quiet Time! It's boring! You cheaters (his favorite thing to say)"

The first night we tried it, Lucas was freshly showered and dressed in his pajamas. We decided to play Lego Heroica. It's a game board made of Lego pieces, Lego characters, and even a Lego dice. It was really fun! Lucas loved it. No complaints, no whining, and no crying. The next night, we played Operation. The following night, Lucas learned how to play UNO. He is starting to think strategically!

I have to admit that turning off the electronic devices was harder for John and me. I had to turn off the TV in the middle of my Rachel Maddow Show. John had to stop defending the republic in his Star Wars game. John and I joke (quietly to ourselves) that "Quiet Time" is "suffering time" for us.... No, not really. It's very good for us as well.

Sometimes it takes a 7 year old to change the bad habits of his parents.