Skip to main content

I Needed New Pants after Thanksgiving

When you have steak, salad, fermented apple/cranberry treat and keto brownies for Thanksgiving, your pants aren't uncomfortable later...unless you've been losing weight and they're starting to fall off. After several months of lifting weights a couple of times a week, I've had to start wearing a belt and cinch it two or three notches to keep some of my pants on. My other pants are just wearing out. 

Lettuce and arugula in my garden in late November--can you believe it?

So I made a rare Black Friday shopping trip this year. I couldn't just order my old pants in smaller size since my shape had changed--my waist got smaller but my hips stayed about the same. A nearby Ross didn't have any jeans that fit; everything at the Salvation Army store had more wear than what I was wearing. A young woman who seemed to be having a conversation with herself followed me around the racks. I left and headed for the outlet mall in Edinburgh 36 miles away. 

If the crowds there were any indication, reports about dying brick and mortar stores are exaggerated. Max & Erma's next door was busy from 1-2 while I was having a grilled chicken salad. Police officers directed long lines of cars into and out of the mall parking lot. It took ten or fifteen minutes to creep through the traffic from the restaurant to a parking spot next door at the mall, where customers were waiting out in the cold to get into Coach and Michael Kors. 

Last summer when I made a pair of pants, I learned I had an unusual shape. The "amazing fit" pants pattern I bought had instructions to take waist, hip and crotch measurements to find your size. My three measurements were three very different pants sizes--and for all the "amazing fit" hype, they fit so badly I threw them away. I knew from watching What Not to Wear that I'd just have to try on a lot of pants. 

A little frazzled from trying on clothes. 

It paid off: I found corduroys, jeggings, and bootcut jeans that I didn't even have to hem. 

Back home with Biggs.

For benefit of anyone with a figure like mine (short-waisted, rectangle shape), I got mid-rise leggings and straight mid-rise corduroys from LOFT outlet and high rise skinny flare jeans in a short size from White House Black Market outlet. (I'm not an affiliate.) 

I'd thought about going to a restaurant on Thanksgiving, but decided to stay the course eating healthy food. (Full disclosure--I'm not crazy about restaurant food.) It meant I was alone with Biggs that day, but being alone seems to get easier with age. I may do the same for Christmas. Even if I indulge in a special Christmas dinner, I'm not going to let myself go for the holidays. Looking and feeling good is more important.

Comments

That's a great picture of you with Biggs.
Belated good wishes for Thanksgiving.

All the best Jan
Lori Miller said…
Thanks, Jan!

Popular posts from this blog

Not Only Cheaper, But Easier

A while back, I wrote about saving money on break time coffee and snacks. I haven't done very well putting it into practice. But a post by James Clear today got me thinking about it again: Warren Buffett uses a two-list system to prioritize things. Check it out --and follow the instructions. Using Buffett's two-list system, two of the goals I ended up with were taking care of myself and saving $400 more per month than I already am. As I said, I've been wanting to save money, and the system made me really focus on this. I came up with 11 money-saving ideas, six of which had to do with food. Buying hamburger in bulk. Ranch Foods Direct sells one-pound packages of 80% lean pastured ground beef in bundles of 20 for a lot less than Whole Foods. Sprouts only carries super-lean beef that's grass-fed, and it's more expensive, too.  Not driving to Whole Foods. Whole Foods is out of my way, and saving a weekly trip saves gas. Coffee at home, tea at work. Tea is fr...

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm...

Palpitations Gone with Iron

Thanks to my internet friend Larcana, who alerted me to the connection between iron deficiency and palpitations, I doubled down on my iron supplements and, for good measure, washed them down with Emergen-C. It's a cold medicine with a mega-dose of vitamin C, plus B vitamins and minerals. I don't think vitamin C does anything for a cold (a friend bought the stuff and left it at my house the last time she visited), but vitamin C does help iron absorption. After doubling up on iron in the last three days, I feel back to normal. (I'd already been taking quite a bit of magnesium and potassium, so I probably had sufficient levels of those.) How did I get so low on iron? Maybe it was too many Quest bars instead of red meat when I had odd cravings during my dental infection recently. Maybe because it's too hard to find liver at the grocery store and I haven't eaten much of it lately. Maybe the antibiotics damaged my intestines . And apparently, I'm a heavy bleeder . ...

Getting Over Palpitations

Note to new readers: please note I'm not a health care provider and have no medical training. If you have heart palpitations, I have no idea whether the following will work for you. Over the past several days, I've had a rough time with heart palpitations and feeling physically jittery. I was wondering if I was going to turn into one of those people who can't sit still. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it would be a major lifestyle change. Kidding aside, something wasn't right and I really needed to get back to normal. I tried popping potassium pills like candy. I ate more. I doubled up on my iron dose. I went to yoga and even got on the treadmill at 6 AM yesterday. I tried the nuclear option of eating more carbs to stop peeing away minerals. Most of these things helped, but the problem kept coming back. A comment from Galina made me look up epinephrine, one of the drugs my surgeon used to anesthetize me Friday. First, the assistant at the surge...

My Long-Term Experience Eating Safe (and Other) Starches

Years ago, before the Perfect Health Diet came out, I followed a program that involved eating quite a bit "safe starch." It was called Body for Life. It involved eating six small servings of carbohydrate along with six small servings of protein, plus two servings of fibrous vegetables per day. (A serving was the size of your fist or the palm of your hand.) There were six workouts a week (three weightlifting, three cardio) and one free day every week where you ate whatever you wanted and didn't exercise. In all fairness, these two programs are different: BFL allows certain grains, legumes and low-fat dairy and discourages fat. It doesn't call for a wheelbarrow full of vegetation. Nevertheless, my experience eating lots of fruit and lots of starch is relevant to the PHD because the amount and type of digestible carbohydrates are similar, and for the first few years, I didn't eat wheat except on free days. At first on BFL, I felt great. Before, I was continually...