Forgot a book in the January roundup

The Glycemic Load Diet by Rob Thompson
Or perhaps a better title, Low Carb Diets for Wusses. This book makes the excellent point that most low-carb diets are based on the glycemic index, which measures how much blood sugar rises after eating 50 grams of available carbohydrates (fiber would be an example of unavailable carbohydrates). However, this can result in absurd results because testing based on an arbitrary amount often has no relation to how much people typically eat in a serving. For instance, carrots are often forbidden on low-carb diets. But the amount of water and fiber in carrots meant that to get 50 available grams of carbohydrates, they had to feed the test subjects eight pounds of carrot. Glycemic load takes portion size into account, so carrots come out much more reasonably, unless you want to eat twenty pounds at one sitting (and at that point, I think you'll have bigger problems than just blood sugar spikes).

This certainly seems like a much more reasonable diet than your average low-carb diet. There's nothing really specifically forbidden. There isn't any nonsense of forbidding perfectly healthy foods like fruits and vegetables. You can even have a spoondful of sugar in your tea or coffee, since he points out that the glycemic load of a small amount of sugar isn't that high. The big boogeyman in this diet isn't all carbohydrates, but starch, as found in potatoes, rice and wheat. But even those aren't completely forbidden. His general rule of thumb is that you save them for after you've eaten other foods so a full stomach slows the metabolism of the starch, and that you eat about 1/4 as much. Also, do exercise like walking or biking 20-30 minutes every other day to activate the slow twitch muscles that help reduce insulin resistance. As diets go, particularly the kind that singles out particular foods as evil, that's pretty darn reasonable. It's still a diet, with all of the issues those entail (deprivation, assigning moral values to foods, etc.), but at least it's not the kind where all is lost if you dare let a morsel of bread pass your lips because you'll no longer be in ketosis.

Lent

longstrider works on Wednesday nights, so I hemmed and hawed for a while, then decided to take K with me to the Ash Wendesday service at church last night. It wasn't ideal, since our church doesn't offer a nursery, but I finally came to the conclusion that if our church is truly open and affirming, they should be welcoming to their fellow child of God, even at an evening service, and if it really bothers them, maybe they should pony up with the child care.

K did as well as you can hope from a two-year-old at bedtime at a Taize-style service with lots of periods of silence. I did have to take her shoes off so she wouldn't make noise when she kicked and things got a little dicey when she insisted on taking a cup of communion grape juice and I wouldn't let her get any more. But I saved the day by pulling out the bottle of milk we had with us and serving her shots of milk in the tiny communion cup. I also had to whisk her to the narthex a couple times, but at least I didn't have to do the red-faced parental march of humiliation, hauling of a screaming child out of the church. More importantly, she was quiet enough that I was able to get something out of the service.

We had the choice of being anointed with healing oil or given the burden of ashes. I chose the oil and decided that it would be my mission for Lent: healing myself, mentally and physically. Obviously that's not something that can happen fully in seven weeks, but I can take the opportunity of a season of discipline and reflection to try to break some of the bad patterns I tend to fall into. So my two goals for Lent are to go to church every Sunday I'm not working to try to reconnect spiritually and to work on my diet to help myself physically. Since most of how I eat isn't that different than the low glycemic load diet, dieting will largely mean trying to give up the twin monkeys of Cherry Coke and Wawa chai that have taken up permanent residence on my back. I can't count the number of times I've tried to give up Coke, so we'll see if I have any success this time.

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We saw my cousin and her five-week-old baby today. Oh goodness, newborn babies don't weight anything, at least when you've been toting a 30 pound toddler around. The baby was just about the same size K was when she was born. Oh, how I want a baby again.