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I started taking swimming lessons a few weeks ago. I do know how to swim (I feel compelled to tell you that), but I hardly ever swim except when I'm on vacation. So I signed up at Pasadena City College.
My swim instructors are college students, back home in Pasadena for the summer. I've been improving on all my strokes. I've even learned the butterfly, a real thrill. I love swimming. It's now my favorite part of the week.
Class will be over soon and I'm thinking about joining the Rose Bowl Aquatic Center to keep it up. I stopped by last weekend to check out the facilities. Two very clean, very nice Olympic size pools. I asked my teacher what she thought of the Rose Bowl. Here's our exchange:
Me: I took a look at the Rose Bowl and it looks really nice.
Her: Yea, it's great. I lifeguard there. They maintain it really well. It was built for like the '94 LA Summer Olympics.
Me: You mean '84.
A few months ago I decided to cut back on alcohol. Now I have just a glass or two of wine a month. I also cut back on coffee, to about a cup a day. And most importantly, I'm eating less meat-- only four meat meals a week. The meat thing has been the hardest. I never thought I ate much meat, until I realized that cutting back required a conscious effort (as opposed to not drinking, which hasn't been that hard for me). Limiting to four meals (and not five or three) was pretty arbitrary. Four seemed like a challenging, but doable, number. It's like I'm on a meat budget.
I'm not making grand plans to cut out alcohol or meat completely, although the idea of becoming a teetotaller is appealing. I think I'm just trying to be healthier. So far it seems to be working. I sleep better, I feel better overall. I think I've even lost some weight. And of course not drinking saves a lot of money. So all in all it's good.
I don't watch the new episodes, just the reruns on USA. Octopus is having a guys night out at the ballpark tonight, so I will occupy myself with reruns of SVU. And some Basa white wine.
Last night I took a spinning class and almost passed out. I pushed myself harder than usual and by the end of class I felt awful. So awful that I had to jump off my bike during cool down and book it to the bathroom. On the way I was afraid I would faint, slip on the bathroom floor and hit my head. Thankfully, none of that happened. I made it to the bathroom stall and must've sat on the john, head in hands, for like five minutes. Maybe more. I think my blood sugar was really low. It was scary. Now I have a good reason for not working out too hard.
By golly I got it! That weight I've put on over the last year is because I haven't been walking as much (ahem, at all) since moving out of NYC. It's not the food or the gym or my age-- it's that sitting on my ass in my car has replaced walking and standing on those hot subway platforms. Duh!
This crystal clear moment came to me as we were walking along Smith St in Brooklyn yesterday. It was a warm and sorta muggy day in the city and the roughly 10 block walk from the Carroll St station to Atlantic Ave had me feeling tired and gross. This was really pathetic because I used to power walk down this stretch without thinking anything of it.
Now that I've figured out the problem, I need a solution. LA isn't so walkable, so maybe I need to hit the treadmill most days after work...
I'm about 1/3 of the way through Michael Pollan's The Ominivore's Dilemma. Pollan is a journalism professor at Cal and writes on food and the food industry.
You may have seen his cover article Unhappy Meals in the NYT magazine a couple months ago in which he argued that America's obsession with nutrition and convenience foods has made us fatter and more unhealthy, and that we should return to eating traditional food-- fruits, veggies, meats. No more vitamin water, power bars or other highly processed foods that are fortified with vitamins and nutrients. In short, he advocates for eating stuff our great, great grandparents would recognize.
I liked the article, so Mr. Octopus picked up The Ominivore's Dilemma for me. I've been reading it most nights before I go to bed. The first part of the book focuses on corn. Apparently corn is in everything. This I did not know. Here's what I learned (and can remember offhand).
Prior to WWII, farmers used to grow corn the way they grew everything else-- they would rotate it with other crops so as not to deplete the soil. So we had corn, but not tons of it. After WWII, we had a surplus of ammonium nitrate from munitions and had to find something to do with it. Scientists found a way to use ammonium nitrate/nitrogen to make chemical fertilizer and the industrialization of corn was born. As a result, farmers were able to grow corn year after year without ruining the soil. Suddenly we had more corn than we knew what to do with.
Today corn is in coke, ketchup, mustard, cereal and a gazillion other things-- thanks to high fructose corn syrup. It's in those strange ingredients on food labels-- fructose, dextrose, sucrose, xanthan gum. It's even used in the beef we eat. Cows have evolved to eat grass, but because corn is more plentiful we've started forcing it on cows, which in turn means we have to give cows antibiotics to process the corn. It just ain't natural.
According to Pollan, this surplus of corn has led to an overall increase in the amount of food available. And because corn is so cheap, consumers are able to get much more food for not much more money (this is why the supersize at McD's isn't much more expensive than regular). So we're taking in more calories without getting much more nutritional value. The result: a lot of overweight and obese people.
So that's corn, according to Michael Pollan. The second part of the book is about organic food, which (as far as I've read) is also a huge industry not without its faults. Supposedly he rips on Whole Foods. I'm curious about that.
Sidenote: Recently the CEO of Whole Foods came to Cal to speak with Pollan and defend his company's practices. I'm sure it was a lively discussion. It must be on the web somewhere. For a short article by Pollan, click here.
