Archive for April, 2010

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Brute Forcing the Pain In My Ass

Posted in Fitness with tags , on April 29, 2010 by Karmela

Hallelujah! The tear to my outer left hamstring seems to have healed. No more shooting pain when I bend forward. But I now seemed to have developed a chronic soreness on my glutes. And while it doesn’t hurt too much when I’m bending forward (and not at all when I’m standing/walking), it really hurts when I’m sitting. Which is a problem because sitting on my ass (and staring at the computer/mealtimes/reading a book/watching TV/driving/waiting for kids as they finish their activities/etc.) constitutes about half of what I do in a 24-hour period.

Fitball® Inflatable Disc

My chiropractor (a.k.a. “He Who Made The Shooting Pain To My Hamstring Go Away”) is hard at work trying to eliminate this new pain, but what he’s doing doesn’t seem to be helping; or at least it’s taking an awful long time for the therapy to kick in. At his recommendation, I’ve bought a Fitball® Inflatable Disc, which is supposed to help cushion the muscle and provide a more even support while I sit at my desk. In the meantime, since waiting is something I’m terrible at, I’ve also tried to kick-start the healing process by taking allopathic anti-inflammatories (Aleve, ibuprofen, acetaminophen) and homeopathic remedies (arnica montana both swallowed and rubbed). Unfortunately none of these have worked either. Aging sucks, doesn’t it? In my younger days, if I developed a sore muscle, the ache would last three, maybe four days tops. Now, the healing process is either (a) taking longer, or (b) not jump-starting at all. Annoying. And the pain can potentially become acute if I don’t take care of it now.

So at this point I’m considering broadening my self-treatment options. I’ve made an appointment with an acupuncturist. And if that doesn’t work, I might try a physical therapist and/or a massage therapist. I’ve decided to brute-force this pain away by bombarding it with every non-narcotic modality I can think of. Moxibustion? Chinese herbs? Witch hazel? Bring it. I’ll do it all.

Just don’t tell me to quit doing any of my activities.

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The flavors of my life…

Posted in Musings on April 26, 2010 by Karmela

In no particular order, here are the things that add color to my life:

  • Taking trips with my kids. It doesn’t really matter if I’m going with them to a local park or if we’re jetting off to Cancun. I love going places with them.
  • Dance class. Nothing makes me happier or feel more alive than doing a turning waltz across the dance floor.
  • Performing in front of an audience. Adrenaline rush.
  • Sweating in yoga class. Holding a particularly difficult pose. Satisfying.
  • Watching NDH play his guitar. Sexy.
  • Choreography. Be it Filipino folk dance or a hip hop number, creating movement and working with dancers stretches my creativity like no other.
  • Teaching fitness classes. My students, from all ages and walks of life, humble me. I am deeply honored that they choose to come to my class out of everything else they could be doing.
  • Reading a particularly good book. Eating at a particularly excellent restaurant, especially if I’ve never been there before. Sampling strange foods. Getting lost in a great movie. Writing all night without realizing how much time has flown.
  • And loving the people around me.

Obvious things that are missing? Money. Work. Politics. They matter, sure,, but they certainly don’t add color to my life. What about you? What adds spice to your life? Do you have something more than the usual work life/home life thing going on? What adds flavor to YOUR life?

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At the Bookstore: All These Books and Nothing to Read

Posted in Books with tags on April 23, 2010 by Karmela

I usually love going to the bookstore and rarely leave without buying at least two books. I haven’t been in a while and was itching to go. So after dinner, I ushered the kids in the car and off we went.

I was on the hunt for two books in particular, Gayle Lynds’ Book of Spies and Joel Salatin’s Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal. Great titles for both. When I reached the gardening section where Salatin’s book was supposed to be, I couldn’t find it anywhere. Disappointed, I headed over to the Mystery/Thriller section to look for Lynds’ book. I must confess to being somewhat excited at having found a female espionage writer. According to a quick read of her book’s blurb before going to the bookstore, it has international intrigue AND the CIA. I almost couldn’t find it again (there were only two copies left tucked on the bottom shelf) and snatched one as soon as I stumbled across it. But before I trotted over to the cashier to pay, I paused to read the jacket blurb first.

To my disappointment, it was a James Bond-meets-Indiana Jones type book, as in spies looking for lost artifacts that might or might not have some mystical, rule-the-world type powers associated with them.  What’s wrong with that, you ask? Bond? Hawt. Indy? Hawter. But when I read a CIA novel, I actually want some realism, as in spies in real spying missions. Not digging around the Sahara in desert camo as an undercover archeologist. And because I’ve done quite a bit of research on The Agency, I actually know what the CIA does and doesn’t do. And they don’t do artifacts.

Doubly disappointed, I left the book behind and drove home with Ballerina Girl and Science Boy (who each scored one Junie B. Jones and one Percy Jackson book respectively). When I got home, my eyes wandered over to my bookshelf, and that’s where it hit me. I have, in my own bookshelf, tons of these geopolitical thrillers I haven’t even read yet. And a bunch more stuff that looks really good. So I spent a good hour-and-a-half after BG and SB went to bed and poured through the books on my shelves in search of the most interesting reads. And I came up with a nice, long list. Wanna see?

Here’s my non-fiction pile:

My non-fiction TBR pile. Bottom row, L-R: Baer's "Sleeping With The Devil," Nasiri's "Inside the Jihad," Pollan's "In Defense of Food." Top row, L-R: Baer's "See No Evil," Gonzalves' "The Day the Dancers Stayed," and Katz's "Terrorist Hunter."

And my fiction pile, considerably larger than the nonfiction pile and heavy on the spy genre:

The fiction pile.

Oh wait, I think “Reading Lolita in Tehran” is non-fiction. But the rest of the books are most definitely fiction. And Robert Littell’s The Company is missing. I added that onto the pile too. What else is in there? Two books in the “literature” category and everything else a thrill-ride material. Love me, love my spy novels.

  • GOAL: to read all these books in 2010.
  • SECONDARY GOAL: NOT to buy any books until all these are read.
  • EXCEPTION: Authors on the Autobuy list, e.g., Berenson, Cumming, Eisler and Ignatius (and yep, I know Barry has a book coming out in the summer).

In the meantime, I shall enjoy the books that are already on my bookshelf.

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Eating Right Made Easy

Posted in Food with tags , , , , , , , , , on April 21, 2010 by Karmela

Been doing quite a bit of research lately on the “whole foods” movement. Pretty fascinating stuff. In a nutshell, it takes healthy eating a step further by promoting the consumption of whole, nutrient-dense foods untouched by chemicals, factories and processing plants. This means organically grown produce picked fresh from the earth, milk straight from the cow, and animals fed their natural diet, allowed to roam free and have not been given antibiotics or growth hormones.  In addition to consuming whole foods, advocates of this movement also promote organic foods, locally grown foods, and foods that are produced in an environmentally sustainable way. They are usually disciples of Weston A. Price, Sally Fallon and Michael Pollan.

Sounds like hard work trying to find foods like this? To my surprise, it’s actually pretty darned easy. It’s probably a product of where I live and, more importantly, WHEN I live, but these days shopping for organically grown whole foods and drinks can be almost as easy as taking a trip to your local Giant.

A few examples:

  • The Washington, DC area has an abundance of farmers’ markets sponsored by different localities. Fairfax county in N. Virginia alone has twelve. Vendors are all local, and for the most part, practice sustainable and eco-friendly farm practices. The bad thing about farmers’ markets is that they usually close up shop in the late fall/early winter. But, if you live in the DC area, that’s not a problem for you because this area has…
  • Online farmers’ markets. Farmer Girls (no, this is NOT a porn site like NDH thought) operates a year-round online market that functions as the Amazon.com to local farmers. Sign up to become a member, shop online and pick up from the nearest spot to you. Convenient! If you want to buy fresh from one farm, you can become a member of the Community Alliance for Responsible Eco-farming (CARE) and get your food directly from Meadowbreeze, an Amish farm in Pennsylvania who sells a slew of intervention-free foods (including raw milk). They deliver to the DC area every two weeks and you can pick up your food at one of various stops in DC, Maryland and Virginia. But what if picking up food is too inconvenient?  No problem, the DC area also has…
  • Delivery services that source their products from local farms. My family has bought from Holy Cow Delivery who get their milk and dairy from South Mountain Creamery and their various meat products from other nearby farms. In the summer, they will also sell produce.

See how easy it is? I haven’t done any kind of price comparisons of shopping this way vs. going the grocery store route, but I can tell you that the quality of the food is infinitely better. The quality of the milk from South Mountain Creamery alone is worth the added cost ($4 per half gallon through Holy Cow). But if you are still skeptical of shopping this way, or if you just don’t want to devote the time, there’s still the Whole Foods/Trader Joe’s option. We’re lucky enough in this area to have not just one of these stores but BOTH. Everyone knows what WF sells, but it might come as a surprise to you to find out that TJ’s also sells tons of organically-grown and gluten-free products at lower the cost of WF.

Even if you don’t convert wholesale to this type of eating, I bet eliminating some of the processed products in your pantry/fridge and replacing them with the whole, fresh and locally grown foods will not only be good for your body, but for you palate too. Not only that, but you’ll stop giving money to these large agricorporations and their dirty farming habits (antibiotics, fertilizers) and instead will be supporting your local growers and their efforts at humane, ecologically thoughtful and sustainable farming practices. A win-win for all, no?

See you at the farmers’ market this weekend!

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So how was the show?

Posted in Performances with tags , , , on April 20, 2010 by Karmela

A lot of friends and family knew that the Big Show was this past weekend, the one I’ve been working on at GWU since February. And a lot of them were kind enough to ask about it. So how did I answer them when they asked?

I’m not going to sugarcoat this. There was a lot of good, and yes, quite a bit of bad too.

First, the good:  the concept, the script, the commercials and the dance numbers, taken as separate entities, were mostly good.  Standouts included all numbers choreographed by local choreographer Marc dela Peña (the powerful “Malakas at Maganda,” the wonderfully acted Paseo de Iloilo, the very graceful Mantones de Seda, and the fun Maglalatik), the Subli (choreographed by student Jamie Garcia) and “Fire,” excerpted from Jason Garcia Ignacio’s “The Mountain.” The commercials were funny and fresh (personal favorites: “How to Speak Tagalog” and “Top 10 Things That Didn’t Work at Culture Show”), as were all the outtakes. The scriptwriting was campy-fun (another personal favorite: Justin Cheng as the datu’s scout come to meet Magellan), and there was even a choreographed fight scene that was well done (props to Chris Cordero and Josh Santosa for their superb turn as Aliguyon and Pumbakyahon).

The beautiful, powerful "Fire" by Jason Garcia Ignacio, danced by Jamie Garcia, Kristine Cruz, Cynthia Ma, Kaye Ablen and one other dancer I cannot remember. Hmmm...will get her name soon. Photo by Khaninja Suvarnasuddhi.

Jamie Garcia (as the Sarimanok), and L-R: Justin Wong, Andrew Liu, Steve Li and Benjamin Ro (as the bamboo) in "Alamat ng Sarimanok." Photo by Khaninja Suvarnasuddhi.

Now, for the bad: As I said before, taken as separate entities, most of the numbers were good. But this wasn’t a show of separate pieces. This was a full-length production where the elements were supposed to seamlessly flow from one to the other, telling one large overarching story. Granted it was a pretty complex undertaking as complicated as any show on Broadway. In addition to the dancing, acting and fighting, there was a large multimedia component—music, video and lights. Unfortunately, none of THAT worked right during the first 3/4 of the show. The pace slowed down when it should have been fast, choppy when it should have been smooth. I won’t go into the details or causes of these errors but suffice it to say that the performers onstage, and the audience offstage, were frequently left hanging as we waited for the lights and music to start before each number. The stage was also dark between numbers when it shouldn’t have been. As a result, the audience as a whole was taken out of the moment many times over, and I was left in a furious rage as the major malfunction of the evening unfolded right before the Muslim Suite, the set of three dances I choreographed. As a result of THAT particular error on the part of the A/V technician, there were two false starts,  and on the real start, the dancing starting a measure too late, messing up the first 90 seconds of the dance.

Luckily, according to NDH, the actual dancing errors were not noticeable. I got the whole suite on video but I can’t get myself to watch it yet. Too painful. Maybe next week. After I’ve had more wine.

As for the show as a whole, everything thankfully picked up after the intermission and it ended with the right notes—a measure of triumph, a large dose of relief, plenty of poignancy and a whole lot of cultural pride. Overall, the show succeeded in its goal to showcase Filipino culture. Yes, it could have been better. I think the kids would be the first to admit that. But I also can’t ignore the fact that this was an ENORMOUS undertaking, by students who also have to cram in studies and jobs and sleep into their schedule, and they largely pulled it off.

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Top 10 Bad Things About Yoga

Posted in Yoga with tags on April 18, 2010 by Karmela

My first formal yoga class ever was nine years ago when I decided to take a prenatal class while pregnant with my firstborn. I don’t really know why I decided to take the class. I do remember being taken aback when I saw all these pregnant women walking in wearing flip flops and toting giant pillows under their arms. I was like, whoa, are we taking a nap in this class? At the time, and even though I’d grown up with yoga (my dad was a daily practitioner), I’d completely forgotten that (a) yoga is a barefoot activity and that (b) you get to lie on the floor. It was also the first time I went through Pranayama and guided meditation. Oh, and I remember getting my ass kicked and thinking, “Man, this is actually HARDER than prenatal aerobics! How can that be?” After giving birth I transitioned into a mom-and-baby yoga class and have been taking classes on-and-off ever since, mostly at the gym where I teach.

Then this past February, said gym upped the yoga ante (yogante?) when they unveiled a whole new program that essentially aims to compete with traditional yoga studios. So I started going 3-4 times a week, to classes that were harder and harder. And you know what? I’m loving every second of it. Can’t get enough of all that flow, all that heat, all that cardio-and-muscle resistance-and-core work all rolled into a 75-minute class.

But there are a few teensy things about yoga I’m not too crazy about. Yep, I’m picking nits. And so long as we’re being nitpicky here, let’s go ahead and compile the list:

The Top 10 Worst Things About Yoga

10. The way the upward-facing dog wreaks havoc on my pedicure.

9.  The way I have to have flawless, pedicured toenails before I can even enter yoga class (see previous, “Barefoot Yoga”)

8.  The way I need to wear form-fitting clothes, not because of alignment, but because I spend a goodly amount of time upside down and I don’t want my shirt to slide up (or down) when in downward-facing dog, thus exposing my midsection.

7. The way my ponytail interferes with Shavasana.

6. The way every pose name ends in “asana.” Seriously, am I the only one bugged about this? They couldn’t ‘t come up with a better, less-confusing naming convention?

5. The way we’re supposed to have Barbie feet during any post where our legs are up in the air. What’s Barbie feet? It’s basically demipoint in the air, feet pointed but toes flexed. Actually it’s even worse than that. We’re supposed to have our feet pointed, toes flexed, AND spread wide.

Barbie feet, anyone?

4. The way nothing really works unless you tighten up the bandhas. Throughout the WHOLE THING. That is hard stuff!

3. They background music. Must Indian music be played week after week, class after class? Or the endless spa-type music? There are tons of equally cool music out there. How about some Trip Hop instead? Or some rap beats?

2. The way newbie men don’t realize how upside downy yoga is and fail to wear proper undergarments for that first class. So they show up in basketball shorts and regular undies, thereby flashing everyone during three-legged dog.

1. And the number one bad thing about yoga is:

The way the upward facing dog ruins my pedicures.

And there you have it, ladies and gents, 10 (okay, fine, NINE) nitpicky things about yoga I know you’re suffering from. Certainly I am too. Let’s reach out to the powers-that-be (who is that? Baptiste? Friend? Jois?) and make them change these things about yoga, esp. the one about the pedicure. I bet more guys (and drag queens) would come to class if these ten (okay already, NINE) things were eliminated or changed or, in the case of the pedicure, a free one was raffled off after class. Just sayin.

Namaste, dudes.

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BREAKING NEWS: Dancers Achieve Perfection

Posted in Choreography, Dancers, Performances, The Dancing Life with tags , , on April 16, 2010 by Karmela

UPDATE FROM THIS POST: Just a quick newsflash on how rehearsals went down last night. In a word: PERFECTION.

To start with, all thirteen of my dancers were in the hizzouse . I walked in, wrote “GOAL: PERFECTION” on the whiteboard, and damned if they didn’t deliver exactly that. So much so that my Sarimanok Jamie even pulled a muscle trying to do a trick I asked her to do. Get better James! Remember to ice and rest! On the final run-throughs of all three dances, I shut up and just filmed. And know what? My anxiety was assuaged. Everyone knew their parts, the timing, the steps, their positions. Everyone knew the counts. Everyone heard the two bells. And all my clappers felt the music. I want to extend a special thanks to Liz Finnegan, Benjamin Ro, and all the ladies and gentlemen of GW’s Chinese-American Student Association—Stacy Lin, Andrew Liu, Cynthia Ma, Jean Qiao, Justin Wong, and Steve Li. (Hmmm…just noticed that if Stacy and Steve got married, Stacy would only have to remove one letter of her last name. Convenient. Or is it fate? Actually, if Stacy married Andrew, she’d have to change just one letter. Love triangle!) Anyway, you are all rock stars. You all can dance for me any day.

And last but not least, my beautiful dancers from PCS—badass Kaye Ablen, gorgeous Kristine Cruz, heroic Jon Congmon, sexy Alyssa Prieto, and fearless Jamie Garcia who is doing moves and wearing outfits she otherwise never would have if I hadn’t asked her to do so.

Tomorrow will be amazing. Will have footage for yall soon.

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Impending Disaster

Posted in Choreography, Performances, The Dancing Life with tags , on April 14, 2010 by Karmela

The Filipino group at my alma mater is neck-deep in rehearsals right now. Show’s this Saturday. Yep, I said Saturday. And for the pieces I’ve created for them, I’m scared that they won’t be ready.

Problems with this suite of three dances erupted from day one: rehearsals started later in the season, I didn’t have enough dancers, and when I did, I couldn’t get them all to show up at the same time. Some would show up late, then the people who showed up on time would leave early. I’ve never had a rehearsal with 100% attendance. Consequently, the dances, except for the one number that’s a solo, are extremely rough, to put it mildly. The two other dances are teetering on the edge of disaster, one more so than the other. Problems abound: All three dances are supposed to flow from one right to another right to another and yet we’ve never practiced the transitions. We’ve never blocked the dances on the actual performance stage, we’re not having a tech rehearsal, and they’ve never practiced any of the dances without me counting out loud and cuing them.

I normally wouldn’t be THIS worried. The kids have always managed to pull it off year after year. But this year, one of the dances, the Alamat ng Sarimanok, is a brand-new number that’s quite vigorous and athletic, with leaps across the stage and lots of formation changes. This number needs some serious blocking. And don’t even get me started on the Singkil. On our last rehearsal of this number, if you could even call it that, we were missing the female lead and one of the bamboo clappers. Total washout. We couldn’t do it at all.

Sigh. The kids have two more chances to get it right–tonight and tomorrow night. I’m praying for an all-hands-on-deck situation because I can just see myself on performance night sinking deeper and deeper into my seat in horror and mortification as the pieces are performed in the condition they’re in now. Which is to say in utter and complete catastrophe. I’ve toyed with the idea of pulling the numbers from the show altogether if I don’t see a vast, that’s to say millenial improvement by tomorrow night. But that would be so hurtful and cruel to the dancers who have showed up week after week. I honestly don’t know what to do. I have some notes for next year to prevent this looming catastrophe from happening again, but in the meantime, I guess I just have to suck it up and have faith that everything will work out. I am Filipino after all. Maybe it’s time to pull out the Bahala na! attitude, grit my teeth, and just have them go for it, rain or shine, disaster or success.

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Girl Yoga vs. Boy Yoga

Posted in Motherhood and Dancing, Yoga with tags , , on April 12, 2010 by Karmela

Check this out:

Presenting the two newest yogis—Ballerina Girl and Science Boy! I took them to a free sample kids’ yoga class at a local yoga center yesterday. BG was raring to go—she loves doing anything I do and couldn’t wait for class to begin. SB was a little more circumspect but he too was all for it. I think it helped that he had his own cool mat (you can’t see it on the picture but it has turtles on it; BG’s mat has butterflies).

So we got there and the place was quiet seeing as how it was a Sunday afternoon and no other classes were going on (smart of them not to schedule anything concurrent with the kids’ yoga class). Three other students showed up—an older girl of about nine who had done quite a bit of home yoga with her mom, and a five- and seven-year old couple of brothers.

As soon as we entered the Green Room (named because of the color of the carpet), I immediately knew SB would get into trouble somehow because he started doing flips, running around with the two younger boys and doing headstands. Big open space + young boys, wouldn’t you know it. And his teacher, a gentle woman named Mary, did admonish them for all the running around.

Then it was time for class. I stayed to watch because I didn’t know exactly how my kids would do and I was curious. I also wanted to know what poses they’d learn so maybe we could practice them at home. Mary began by asking the class about yoga, what it is and where it came from. Right away, it was quite obvious that the two younger boys would have a hard time.  They couldn’t sit still and interrupted the teacher frequently—par for the course for their age, but not at all helpful during yoga class for 7-11 year olds. And all three boys experienced varying degrees of difficulty following the verbal and physical cues of their teacher. The girls? No problem at all. Even though the class is for 7-11 year olds and BG is only 6 ½, she listened attentively, focused well and wasn’t distracted by all the boys’ fidgeting. To his credit, SB did manage to settle down when they started moving and he did relatively well in following directions. But there was quite a bit of clowning around and fidgeting between poses.

I tried my very best to control my mounting irritation, which happens every single time I watch SB in one of his extra-curricular classes. Doesn’t matter what it is—soccer, gymnastics, breakdancing, ballet, yoga. He always, ALWAYS (a) finds a partner in crime in class, and then (b) proceeds to chatter away and clown around and goof off with said partner. What boils my blood is when the class stands in some kind of line (which they inevitably do, in every single class), and SB proceeds to turn around and yak it up with the person behind him. Every. Single. Time.

NDH and I actually consulted with a child psychologist to figure out what to do about SB’s seeming lack of focus. You know what she said? “Bring a book.” I was like, “Uh huh, okay, and do what with it, hit him over the head?” She laughed and said, “Read it.” At first I was like, “Huh?” She basically explained that, “For that hour or hour-and-a-half, SB’s lack of focus ain’t your problem. It’s his teacher’s. You? Sit down, shut up and read your book.”

Evidently this lack-of-focus thing is pretty common among boys, which I saw displayed in all it’s glory during Kids’ Yoga yesterday. Which lead me to think, maybe they should separate the girls from the boys? I can’t help but think that the girls are getting short-changed by all this boy fidgeting and interruptions and Tourette’s-like yelling. If the boys are in a class by themselves, maybe the teacher can do something that specifically burns off all this excess energy by, I dunno, making them do laps around the yoga room for the first five minutes of class. And then making them do push-ups and jumping jacks between poses. I know in SB’s all-boy ballet class, their teacher includes larger movement that takes up more space across the floor, more athletic conditioning stuff and more strength training. He tells the boys that it’s because they need the power to jump high and the strength to lift the ballerinas, but us parents know it’s to burn off the excess energy.

I’m going to wait until after soccer season to sign up BG and SB in Kids Yoga even though BG really took to it and loved every second of it and begged to be enrolled NOW. With her dance and gymnastics, I think introducing yoga at this young age will help with injury prevention. With SB, it will certainly help in that area too, plus with focus and concentration and listening, plus core strength which right now isn’t as good as his younger sister’s.  He’s on the fence about taking class (he claims he didn’t like the story that Ms. Mary read), but I think the real reason is because he knows his younger sis is better at it than him. But I know he thoroughly enjoyed himself while in class because, well, I saw it with my own eyes. We’ll see how he feels a couple of months from now.

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Goodbye rice…forever?

Posted in Food with tags , , on April 10, 2010 by Karmela

So for Lent, I decided to give up an entire food group I loved: starches. This meant no pasta, no bread, no potatoes, and worst of all…no rice. Y’all know I’m Filipino, right? I grew up eating fried rice for breakfast, cold rice for lunch, and two cupfuls of rice for dinner. In between meals we had some kind of bready snack, and for dessert we had sweets made out of sticky rice. So for the love of Jesus, I really was giving up something significant.

The upside: it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Strange, I know. Maybe it’s because rice really does go perfectly with Asian foods, and my family’s daily nutritional intake consists mostly of pre-seasoned meats from Trader Joe’s, organic veggies, salad-in-a-bag, and various and sundry fresh fruits. Dinner rolls and rice and sweet potato fries don’t play an integral part, which just kind of evolved over the years. My kids aren’t big starch eaters anyway. It was me and my brown/white rice fetish that demanded the starches on the dinner table. Had to have it.

So for Lent, I kind of just ate the same way my kids ate. The second and surprising upside? Poundage dropped off. We’re talking ten whole pounds since Ash Wednesday. And on my 4’10″ frame, that’s pretty significant, especially since I haven’t weighed a buck since I was 12 or so. Whoa. I just read what I wrote. Since I was freaking TWELVE. We immigrated to the U.S. when I was 14 and I was around 105 even then.

This has caused me to want to stick to this diet even though Easter has come and gone. But I’ve also decided I’m not gonna sweat the no-rice/no-bread thing. If I’m out at say, a fancy French restaurant, and they present me with just-out-of-the-oven dinner rolls, I’m going to partake. During the mid-month PMS crisis when my body is craving Ramen noodles, I shall indulge. But I’m kind of liking this clean-eating thing. Now before you say, “good for you but there’s no way I can give all that up,” remember who you’re talking to and what kind of food I grew up eating. Maybe this little fact will also help: I’ve done a bit of research on the subject and found out that one cup of white rice has the exact same nutritional equivalent of one cup of white sugar. You wouldn’t voluntarily mainline one whole cup of sugar, would you?

We’ll see how I do this time next year. I’m hoping to reach the sub-hundred mark but I’m not trying too hard. I’m focusing more on the clean-eating, clean-living aspect of things.

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