Party Food and Getting Caught in the Act

Parties are usually the place where you catch up with people you haven’t seen in a while.

It’s the “So, what have you been up to?” conversations that permeate over little cubes of cheese and a sugary beverage.

Usually, somewhere in the conversation, it comes up that I went to a holistic health school and do some health counseling now and again…as I polish off my second piece of cake.

I am always slightly embarassed and suddenly self-conscious – the way I used to check my grammar after telling people I taught high school English. I’m sure preachers feel this way, too, and certainly professional counselors. But all of us have taken off our guard, just like you, when we come to a party – or that is what I tell myself as I sip my coffee and plunge another handful of M & Ms into my mouth.

As a health counselor, I know better than to sabotage myself by eating all the party food – and that is exactly what is so embarrassing in these moments. But as a holistic health counselor, I also know the importance of relationships and parties and being able to make my own decisions about food – even if I regret that 10th meatball tomorrow.

How do I explain this in a short catch-up conversation? This is usually something I dive into after the third or fourth session with my clients…you really have to warm up to the idea that food isn’t the enemy – even chocolate truffles.

This Friday I was at a party and was fully engaged in a few conversations about health and balance, all the while completely aware of the mound of chocolate I had piled on my plate and the fact that I hadn’t had a glass of water in a few hours. One friend even told me of her interest in attending the same holistic health school where I studied. As I told her how much it changed my life, I wondered if she was glancing down at my plate thinking, “Reeeeallly??”

I left those two conversations at the party wondering if my friends thought a) I am a hypocrite or b) I am transparent and real and not even health counselors eat healthy food all the time and that’s okay.

I hope it’s the latter, but honestly, it’s hard to show balance in one evening at a party. Or maybe I just regret all the junkfood I ate.

A Free Day

About two weeks ago, just as the weather was getting nice, I started to wean myself off coffee. It is my biggest comfort food, and I love to have a warm drink to get me through the cold mornings of winter.

But now that the weather is starting to warm up and I am beginning to crave fresh foods again, I decided to work my way out of my coffee fix. So I started by drinking more water during the times I craved coffee, and I began adding decaf slowly into my morning brew.

Within a few days, I was weaned entirely, and one Friday, I went the entire day without any sort of caffeine – and it dawned on me that it was the first day in 5 months that I had been caffeine free.

I didn’t drink much caffeine when I was pregnant because it messed up my stomach, so I couldn’t wait for the first cup of coffee the morning after Z was born. Take the fact that coffee is my comfort food compounded with the tiredness of a newborn and recovering from major surgery in the middle of Michigan winter, and I had a recipe for addiction.

I started drinking coffee regularly – one, two cups a day, depending on my mood or my level of fatigue. From November 4 on, coffee was a regular part of my day.

I was okay with this for a while – if that was all that was keeping me sane on some days, then bring on the pot of coffee. But as I started to find more balance in my life – getting the hang of taking care of a baby, Zora sleeping more, hormones subsiding from the pregnancy, and warmer weather – I decided it was time to put away this crutch.

So I did it. I weaned myself, and my first caffeine-free day, I realized it had been 5 months almost to the day since I started drinking coffee regularly.

Now, I have to admit, with the weather and my mood fluctuations, I haven’t managed to continue to avoid coffee every day, but I definitely have a different pace to my walk to the pot in the morning.

What struck me most about all this is that I knew exactly how long it had been since my body was free of caffeine – 5 months. This seems like a long time to have caffeine every single day, but then I think about the amounts of caffeine I used to put in my body for years at a time without a break, and 5 months seems pretty mild.

This is the beauty of fasting, dieting, and a little introspection from time to time – it allows your body to rest from regular patterns, some of them damaging.

How long has it been since you’ve had a caffeine-free day? Or a sugar-free day?

Is it time to do a little spring cleaning?

Hair Help

I am in a love/hate relationship with my hair. It has been naturally curly since I hit puberty, but it has only been in the last few years that I have learned to work with the curls. This is where my love for my hair comes in. I honestly love having curly hair, and I used to say that I couldn’t get a bad haircut because the curls cover over a multitude of wrongs.

But I am constantly changing my mind about my hair. I am mostly a short-hair girl, but then I see pictures of myself when it was long (on some rare occasions in my past), and I want it long. Then it’s long and I get frustrated with it, and I cut it off – only to realize that I want it long again.

It is in the in-between stages right now – it hit my shoulders a week ago, and now it’s driving me absolutely batty. Now, throw in the post-pregnancy hormones that are making my hair thin and flat, and it mounts up to a daily frustration for me.

Seriously, I think about my hair all.the.time. Because my hair is curly, it’s my most noticable feature, and one that I am proud of. Through all the years of growing up and staring at parts of myself in the mirror identifying what I would change, my hair has remained my one, steadfastly good quality.

Until I had a baby. Now it’s full of grey and I can’t keep the curl past 3 o’clock for any amount of product in my cabinet. And suddenly, my one good quality is just out of reach. Not to mention the fact that I’m supposedly growing it out and it’s in the worst stage possible.

And I take back not getting a bad hair cut. I have had plenty of bad hair cuts – and right now I can’t afford to have one. So I am sucking it up, and I’ve booked an appointment with my all-time favorite stylist (who incidentally costs the most – hey, you get what you pay for, right?) and asking for help.

The thing that makes her so great – besides her awesome cuts and magical head massages – is her ideas. When I go in to get my hair cut, I want the stylist to help me, well, with style. I don’t want to bring in a photo for her to copy in a cut for me, I want her to use her expertise, look at me, and give me solid advice about what I should do.

And this is exactly what Sarah will do on May 1 at 11:15am (she’s popular and it’s hard to get an appointment) – she’ll pick through my hair in front of the mirror and I will bombard her with questions: Should I grow it out? Do you think my curls will come back? Why is my hair so thin? Am I really ruining my hair with the $5 bottles of color I buy from Target? How can you make me look and feel fabulous?

Because she can – she can make me feel fabulous, and that is why I keep going back to her. With a little care and creativity, she ushers me out of her chair and back into my real life feeling like a million bucks – and sometimes, post-pregnancy, that’s all I need to boost my spirits and keep people looking at my hair.

Good Karma Schawarma

Most weekday afternoons, my living room is filled with the sounds of chopping, mincing, baking, mixing. It’s all coming from my TV set and the not-so-clear picture I get of the Food Network.

I love watching the Food Network. I’ve learned a lot about food preperation, and I always get good ideas of meals to make. I am a fan of simple, wholesome foods, but sometimes it’s fun to spend the afternoon making something particularly yummy for dinner.

Today, I am doing just that. I have 4 lbs of chicken marinating in the fridge for Guy’s Good Karma Schawarma. I can’t wait to see how it turns out. I’m cheating on a few things – I’m not making my own pitas or cucumber dip. But, I am making my own hummus and adding chopped veggies to the plate for serving.

My parents spent the better part of the winter in Southern Florida, and now they are back in Michigan for good. So, to celebrate, they’re coming over for some Middle Eastern food – but we really know they’re coming over to see Zora. I love a good meal, and having family over to share it makes it even better.

Welcome home, mom and dad – get ready for a fresh serving of good karma!

Leaving and Being Left

Being settled to me means security. And security to me means living in a bubble where I believe that everything will stay just as perfectly in place while I am contentedly living in that space.

So when my friend-of-10-years Brooke hinted that she may be moving to Madison, I chose not to believe it.

I knew it, but I never believed it – I never let it sink in that she was actually leaving.

A few times through the weeks between her telling and leaving, thoughts would creep up that included a sick feeling of missing, but I pushed it aside quickly.

Then the day came. It was my Easter – Saturday night after church the day before Easter. While the congregation was singing Christ arisen, I found myself stuck in the burial. After church, I stayed around home to cook dinner and help put Zora to bed, trying desperately to make the evening seem normal, and knowing there was no sense of normalcy in the hole that would be left in Brooke’s leaving.

There are friends and there are people you swear you’ve known for lifetimes. Brooke and I met on “accident” our freshman year in college; we were “randomly” assigned as roommates. We always believed that God was behind the orchestration of our meeting and saw no chance in any of it.

And we’ve stayed together through the better part of the quarter-life crisis. We’ve sat over bottles of wine talking about the men we loved, and then another bottle followed closely behind talking about the men we lost. We each had our own bottle of wine one night at book club when we were the only ones to show – we may or may not have talked about the assigned book.

We’ve shared warm cups of coffee and talked about grad school and broken families and how hard it is to know when you’re falling out of love. We’ve shared green tea late into the night at a café talking for hours and not talking at all.

When I drove across town to say good-by to Brooke on Saturday night, I passed places that held our memories: the street where our atheist tattoo artist and scientist friends lived in college, the wine bar where we met soon-to-be long-time friends on a blind friend date, the farmer’s market, her old apartment full of dark wood trim.

Brooke’s moving for love, as she says. There’s no better reason to move, and I could not be happier that she has found that gushing, googly-eyed, beaming love for a man called Tim.

But her leaving is leaving holes in my life and in my city.

In the years of our friendship, I have left. I moved to Virginia for a few years, and our friendship managed to survive. But I’m not the one leaving this time, and I find that it’s harder to be the one left than the one leaving. The one leaving has adventure and unknown ahead. I’m not going anywhere, and I can see in front of me, after she leaves, a whole lot of the same beautiful life, with Swiss holes spread about sections, places, hours, conversations, grief, and celebration.  I will miss her being present in my life.

I am happy for the adventure and the blossoming of a Love for my friend – happy enough to crack open another bottle of wine. But being the one left behind, I will miss her in the free-flowing way the tears appeared on my cheeks all through Easter Sunday worship.

Second Breakfast

I am nursing. (How’s that for a first sentence on a new blog!) So, this means I need to eat more food. Usually, I eat two breakfasts. My first one is a full breakfast, and my second breakfast is just a snack – a piece of toast, some yogurt, a handful of chocolate. My preference for this second breakfast would be a cinnimon roll or a donut. And it’s a daily struggle ot know what to eat – that stuggle of what I want to eat and what I know would nourish me.

Today I made a good choice – I ate an organic banana for my second breakfast. I felt great – nourished and thoroughly proud of myself for such a good choice.

But I should note that the banana was preceeded by a chocolate-covered, orange marmelade-and-nut-smoothered cookie that I washed down with a cup of coffee.