jameswharris

Designing My Own Restaurant Style Menu for Healthy Eating

The other day I wrote, “Simplifying an Overloaded Life” which has inspired me to work on a single goal developing a healthy diet. This morning, in the predawn darkness of being neither awake or asleep, a good idea came to me. I imagined creating a menu, like the kind we use in restaurants, that would have all the healthy foods and dishes I could eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks, listed in an attractive way, that will remind me of what I might want to eat, or should eat. If it’s not on the menu, then I don’t eat it.

[click on photo for larger image]

I even imagined using Microsoft Publisher to lay out this menu with attractive lettering and appetizing photos, printing it on card stock, and even having it laminated. I pictured myself pulling out this menu whenever I got hungry so it would remind me just what I could eat, knowing that if I ordered from this Healthy Living Home Menu, I’d be eating just what I need to feel better and lose weight.

Of course, in the light of day, this appears to be quite an ambitious project. What if my menu offers twelve different dishes for breakfast, lunch and supper? That’s learning how to cook 36 meals. Damn, that sounds like a lot. 28 has always been my favorite number, so let’s go with eight items for breakfast, and ten for lunch and supper. Even that sounds too ambitious.

Of course I know myself. I cook one thing and eat on it three days, and freeze any leftovers. I tend to eat the same breakfast every day. Right now I live off of about six different meals I know how to prepare, but what I need to do is eat more variety of vegetables and fruits, so I need to expand that repertoire of items on my menu.

I’ve decided that December is the month I’ll totally focus on learning to eat healthy as my one and only goal. Here’s what I plan to do:

Gather all my diet/health/cook books into one place for study (see photo).
Read and compare these books for their best recommendations.
Write down the best advice and tips I read in Evernote.
Learn how to shop for the best foods I should eat – how to tell when fruits and vegetables are in season, at their best to buy, etc.
Learn how to store food for optimal quality – fruits, veggies, spices, condiments, dairy, eggs, nuts, etc.
Learn how to chop and cook food properly.
Select 20-30 recipes to master and start learning to cook them – save them in Evernote.
Create and print my menu of approved foods.
When at home, only eat from that menu.
Research menus at local restaurants for their most healthy meals and make a list of approved away from home menu items.
Make a list of all foods and ingredients I want eat and know about, and why they are good for me, and if they have any curative powers.

One problem I’ve always had when I’m at the store, especially a healthy one like Whole Foods or Fresh Market, is seeing all the fruits and vegetables and not knowing how to select and prepare most of them. Recently I’ve been adventurous and started buying avocados after some training with my friend Janis. I’m still never sure how to pick out a good one, but I’ve learn how to cut them open, even though I make a mess, but all I do is put a few slices on my salad and then I have half an avocado that I don’t know what do with. I really need to get to know fruits and vegetables.

I also need to learn how to use spices. I can cook by a recipe, but crudely. What I like to do is think of a selection of tasty veggies and make a stir fry or soup, but I’m never sure how to season my concoctions. So in studying my cookbook, I need to select a range of recipes that will educate myself about spices.

I assume my menu will be a good place to save all the recipes I want to master, so it might end up like a small book.

My ultimate goal is to simplify my life. I want to get past thinking about what I should eat. I want to get past thinking about how to live healthy. I want to learn what’s in my diet/health/cook books and then give them away. I want to stop worrying about what I should eat. I want to stop worrying about eating an unhealthy diet.

I want to start the new year without having to make any resolutions about dieting.

JWH – 12/4/13

Please Recommend SF Books for a Course on Technology and Culture

A friend of mine has a friend that wants to create a course on the impact of technology on culture as seen through science fiction. Since she knows I’m a Sci-Fi nut, she asked me for author and book recommendations. This sounded like a fun challenge until I started thinking about concrete examples. I wondered if most classic science fiction books and authors from the past still count? When does science fiction go stale?

Does Neuromancer still work to show off the effect of a wired world? Or would Little Brother by Cory Doctorow be more relevant now? What’s a good book about robots? Everyone immediately thinks of Asimov, but his stories are so quaint now that we have real robots. Would Robert Sawyer’s Wake, Watch, Wonder Trilogy be a better story about intelligent machines and what they would mean to society?

What would be a good book for genetics and longevity? I could recommend the movie Gattaca, but what book? What about Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling?

For the impact of technology to deal with global warming and running out of oil, I’d highly recommend The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.

There’s zillions of space travel books but do any of them explore the impact of space travel on world culture? Quite often science fiction is about a technology without being about its impact on society. Think of all the stories about SETI. Contact by Carl Sagan is the most famous, but does it really say much about what it would mean to the people of Earth if we started getting messages from the stars?

How would our lives on Earth be different if humans colonized Mars?

If you think about it, our current society is far more tech driven than any science fiction book I’ve ever read. What novel captures us now? I thought about Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.

And should we list books where technology destroys civilization like The Road by Cormac McCarthy? Or what about books that want to rebuild technology after our culture collapses like Earth Abides by George R. Stewart, The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett and A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.?

Are there any technological utopias portrayed in recent science fiction books? 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson is very hopeful I’d say.

I’m sure I’m missing the obvious, but I also believe there are many great books written in the last twenty years that are excellent but I haven’t read them. Tell me about them.

JWH – 12/3/13

Simplifying an Overloaded Life

I found a web site today that inspires me, Zen Habits by Leo Babauta. Babauta claims to have found a key to successful living by making one small change at a time, and over time these small changes have led to major changes in his life. Since he is succeeding at things I have longed to attain, his web site made me sit up and take notice.

I have been trying to make dozens of changes in my life for years, and although I succeed in small ways, it’s always with one step forward and two steps back inefficiency. Babauta’s breakthrough insight is to pick one goal, focus on it exclusively, and stick to it until it becomes a habit before attempting any other changes. He even created The Sea Change Program that focused on 12 monthly goals, many of which matched mine. Unfortunately, his study group seems to have been designed for 2013, so I’m 12 months late. His goals were: stop procrastinating, eat healthier, meditate, exercise, write daily, simplify your day, get organized, declutter, be grateful, reduce/eliminate debt, read more and let go – are almost a perfect fit to my goals, if I had the sense to organize my thoughts, which is why they resonate so strongly.

Procrastination

My life has been one long act of procrastination. I have so many things that I try to do, that I want to do, that I feel required to do, that I do very little at all. Also my sense of decisiveness makes Hamlet look like General Douglas MacArthur. Babauta’s idea of picking one goal and sticking to it exclusively until it’s attain scares me on many levels. First, I have to pick the one and only goal, two I have to ignore all the others, and three I have to act. That requires both decisiveness and commitment, two traits that aren’t in my genetic makeup.

Health

Interestingly, Babauta’s second goal is to eat healthier. Because my arteries got clogged enough to require getting a heart stent this year, plus discovering that I’m gluten intolerant, and finally having my GP and cardiologist both freak out over my cholesterol just weeks apart causes outside forces to make a decisive decision for me – eat healthier. So my goal for December 2013 is to studying my diet and health books and solve once and for all what my eating habits should be. I have books by five different doctors each claiming their diet will restore my health – unfortunately they don’t completely agree. Strangely enough, they do agree on enough to make certain eating decisions obvious – eat more vegetables and fruits, and stop eating junk food, that I can commit to the basics right away.

My goal for December will be to study all my health and diet books, decide what is good to eat, to stop eating what is bad, to develop a repertoire of meals to regularly cook, research menus at local restaurants that will support my healthy diet, study how to buy and store fresh healthy produce, learn techniques to cook all the meals I need to eat, and then stick to my diet so I can give away all my health and diet books and stop thinking about food.

Discovering that I’m gluten intolerant has been interesting. I’ve had stomach problems for years which I’ve attributed to many causes, but now that I’ve gone several weeks without Pepcid and Tums, and my stomach is quiet, the chest pains have faded away, the pains in my knee have disappeared, and my hip pain has been reduced so much that on some days I don’t even notice it, I’ve come to believe that what I eat does affect my health. Now I just need to learn what to eat or not eat to reduce the clogging in my arteries. My cardiologist doesn’t seem to believe that diet can reverse plague in arteries, but I have books by other doctors who claim it can. I need to follow what they say to test their theory.

Meditate

Mediating has always been a mystery to me, but I keep coming across people who claim it works. It shall be a future goal. I wonder why Babauta ranks it third though. Obviously he considers it very important.

Exercise

I already routinely do physical therapy exercises for my spinal stenosis related back problems. My next goal is to commit to additional daily exercises that are more aerobic, strength and stamina building. I don’t see why I can’t combine this with my December health goal, but I’ll follow Babauta’s advice and make it a separate goal for January.

Write Daily

I already write daily, but it’s blogging. My ultimate goal once I get my health related goals accomplished is to write fiction daily.

Simplify

Now this goal is one I ache to achieve. Years ago when I got my debt under control it was by focusing on paying off one debt at a time until I had only one credit card which I charged everything and paid off each month. This mirrors Babauta’s ideas about goals. I haven’t worried about paying bills since. My daily life is so full of distractions that I feel like I have a thousand bill collectors after me. The major cause of this is I want to do too many things. I need to simplify my goals and ambitions. I’d like to get up in the morning and only think about writing my novel.

Organize

Three of Babauta’s goals simplify, organize and declutter seem to be closely related. Maybe as I work on them their individual distinctiveness will emerge.

Declutter

I’m constantly trying to declutter. I’ve been doing this my whole life. But fighting the battle of endless crap accumulation is an endless war. I would think decluttering would come before simplify and organize. I could write a million words about mental and physical clutter. I don’t know how I’m ever going to accomplish this goal. For example, I have over 1,000 books, audiobooks and ebooks that I own hoping to read. I have a book shopping habit where I buy more books to read in one year than I could read in ten. And I figure there’s easily 10,000 books I would love to read. I think I already own more unread books than I have time to read for the rest of my life. Reading is my life – so how could I possibly declutter all the books in my life? How do I organize my reading when I want to master all the major literature of history. When you add music, movies and television shows, you can imagine how cluttered my mind is when it comes my pop culture addiction.

Gratefulness

I’ve always been grateful my whole life. One of my core hopes is that I have a moment before I die where I can contemplate how grateful I am for this chance to exist before I cease to exist. This is one goal I have down. All the time I spend with my friends and family, all books I read, the songs I hear, the shows I watch on television, all remind me how grateful I am to be here.

Eliminate Debt

I’ve already conquered this goal too except for my mortgage. Now that I’ve retired I’ve got to learn to spend less, and on that too.

Read More

Another goal I don’t have to worry about. I should probably study how to read less, but I won’t. My life is reading. With audio books, ebooks, tablet computers, the world wide web, I’ve become more and more efficient at reading.

Letting Go

Now this one is complex. I’m not sure what Babauta plans to say, but I went through a Buddhist phase in my early twenties and it has stuck to me my whole life. Mentally, I’ve let go of so much over the decades that even though my mind is starting to fail, I like my headspace so much now that I never wish to be younger. Oh sure, I’d love a younger, healthier body, but I would never trade if it meant I had to go back to a younger mental self. I’m like a Hindu who has done a lot of work to get off the wheel of life and death, and I wouldn’t want to undo all that effort. That’s how I define letting go. But I’m an atheist, so I don’t believe we get multiple lifetimes to work on letting go. We have to do it all in this lifetime.

But what are we letting go of? Now that’s the interesting part. If you’re Buddhist or Hindu, then it’s desire. If you are Zen Buddhist its illusions. But if you’re a westerner with heavy Christian heritage, it’s sin. If you’re an atheist, it’s all three and more. It’s a complete deprogramming of the past, and the twelve goals Babauta has selected is great start.

JWH – 12/2/13

Who Knows Where The Time Goes?

A very long time ago, Judy Collins sang a song called “Who Knows Where The Times Goes?” that is very relevant to me now. Play this video to hear the song, and to have a soundtrack for this essay. Play the other two if you have the time, and especially if you don’t, and you’ll know which by the end of this story.

I’ve been retired five weeks now, and I’m constantly asking myself, where does the time go? For my entire work life I dreamed of having more time by not having to work, and now that I don’t have to work, I’m not finding that abundance of time for which I wished so hard. What’s happened? I should have a third more time – where did it go?

Before I retired I read about a book a week. I thought after retiring I’d have so much more time that I might get to read two books a week. I’m not even reading as much as when I worked full time. Does anyone really knows where their time goes?

I’m not watching more TV, or even doing more housework. I’m certainly not writing more. Days have gone into hyperdrive, and time has just disappeared – going who knows where. I no longer think about tomorrow, and everyday is Saturday, and it’s very pleasant indeed, but I keep asking myself, who knows where the time goes?

Was time ever a commodity?

Just because we can count the hours and minutes doesn’t mean we have them to spend and save.

“Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” is a folk song written by Sandy Denny in 1967, and here’s a tribute to her, which ends with a photo of her headstone. She didn’t live long, and her grave marker is a very sad way we all ask where does the time go?

I’m watching a television series called Lark Rise to Candleford about life in England in the 1880s. In one episode a craftsman comes to Candleford to build the town a clock and he warns the folk their old life will disappear when they live by the clock. After retiring I’m living in a different dimension, without a clock, where time is disappearing. I’m already forgetting the days of the weeks, and it’s hard to remember the days of the month, and now, even the hours of the day seem unimportant.

Time is something we have when we live by the clock. I no longer look at the time to see that I have three more hours till lunch, or two more hours until I need to do something else. It only intrudes when the outside world asks me to do something at a specific time. I get up when I feel like it, I eat when I’m hungry. I watch television when I want, from streaming or DVD, not a schedule. I read when the urge strikes, and nap when I’m drowsy. Sometimes it’s light outside, sometimes it’s not, and that doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

Yesterday I turned 62. If I stopped following the calendar I wouldn’t even feel the time of getting older. Maybe it doesn’t even matter where the time goes. Can time be an illusion? Maybe time only exists if we count minutes, and it ceases to exist when we don’t. What if I was brave enough to throw away my clocks, watch and calendars? Would time disappear completely? Would living become timeless?

I really love this song. Here’s another version, a more recent version. Does it matter that there’s been 43 years since the first version? It doesn’t feel like it, not if you’ve stopped counting the minutes.

I know how to find the time again – if I wanted to. All I have to do is live by the clock. If I want my 8:30 am to 5:00 pm hours again all I have to do is live by numbers. Require myself start writing at 8:30, and take lunch at 12, and to read between 1 and 3, and work at hobbies between 3 and 5, and I’ll find my lost time. I don’t know if I will though. Living without time is a different state of mind, and I’m digging my new kind of consciousness. I just hope it’s not the land of the Lotus eaters.

JWH 11/26/13

I Had a Dream–But Was it Mine?

Are dreams a form of communication from our subconscious? That sounds much too mystical for an atheist like myself. Last night I awoke from a dream with a strong sense of message. Essentially my dream was telling me that the important things we do in life are those we do with other people. That two or more heads are better than one. I can barely remember the dream now, but I know I was trying to do something in the dream, accomplish some goal, but it might have been as trivial as playing a game, and a woman told me we can only get ahead by working together. That struck me as profound – at least in the context of the dream. I have a vague memory in the dream that everyone was competing against each other and getting nowhere. But I have no idea at what.

Now I’m not going to start a religion of cooperation, but instead I’m going to ask: who is the author of my dreams. Quite often I wake up and feel like I’ve been jerked out of a complexly plotted story. I don’t feel “I” was writing the story. I haven’t read Freud or Jung, but I get the feeling that my subconscious is more thoughtful than I’ve ever given it credit for before. Now I don’t feel possessed, or think I have multiple personalities, but I feel there’s an unconscious thinking machine in my head processing data while I’m not paying attention. In recent years, I feel it’s doing far more than processing random data, but is the novelist of my dreams, making sense of a random series of scenes?

Reality doesn’t come with a story. It happens. If a dog chases a chipmunk it’s not a scene in a story, it’s just another event in reality. Humans want to make everything into a story. The reason why there are so many JFK conspiracy theories is because people can’t just accept that Lee Harvey Oswald just happen to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right experience, to kill the president. They want more, they want it to fit a story.

I need to read up on recent research into the subconscious. I’m wondering if decades of reading and thinking about writing hasn’t affected my subconscious. I can’t help but believe that it’s getting better at plotting. In recent decades I feel my dreams are shaped more like stories, with good plotting.

But was my dreaming subconscious sending the conscious me a message last night? It’s obvious that cooperation produces more success than lone wolf endeavors. I wonder if my dream is commenting on my retired life, where I spend a lot of time alone. I don’t know. It could be my story telling mechanism is reading the dream that way. It could be I was only competing in some kind of game in the dream and the woman was trying to convince me to work together to win.

JWH – 11/22/13