The Whoosh Effect

I keep getting attacked by coinminer.com. I don't know why since I have nothing of value to steal or use for gain. I was informed last night by Messenger that I needn't worry about relatives since I have been once again disowned. No problem. I realize that is what I should have said to my mom when she threatened to disown me if I accepted the offer, joined the Air Force, and went to the Academy to become a fighter pilot.

"Only tramps and whores get accepted to the military," Mom said.

I thought my life would be over and I would be cast adrift if I had accepted and gone to the Academy.

It has happened as I found out when I signed onto my tablet last night. I have been ousted from the family. I am out and without so much as a phone call or face-to-face confrontation. Mom seems to have been alone in the confrontation department. Of all the things Mom gave us, she didn't give any of her chutzpah to her children. Since I have been informed many times, I am not one of her children. I was adopted and therefore came from a different gene pool, the male side of the gene pool. I share many of Dad's traits--patience, bad blood since I don't come from an old, established eastern European family, and confrontational skills, not that Dad had a lot of confrontational skills. He didn't punish us unless Mom gave the okay or anybody got in between him and the TV when it was on and he was watching. No one got between Dad and the TV. Since I often watched with him (I prefer old movies and westerns like he did--and I still do) I never suffered the ignominy of getting in the way between Dad and the TV.

Since I've moved into this senior community, one that was found for me by a relative, I have spent time working puzzles, the 1000-piece variety. I have finished them all and been complimented on my work. I had a lot of time putting together puzzles since Mom and Dad worked puzzles which they framed and hung on the walls. Seems I have a gift for recognizing colors and patterns that holds up when doing jigsaw puzzles, even with their strange configuration in puzzle pieces. When you're forcibly retired (and without wheels) you have plenty of time to focus on puzzles.

At any rate, my Meals On Wheels delivery will hopefully arrive today having been informed that it is to be a vegetarian meal at last. I hope so. I can't stomach another senior meal with dry breast meat, desiccated beyond belief when all they need to do is cook the breast meat with the skin on and the bones intact to retain flavor and juiciness. Maybe I will call them and suggest it. No sense keeping the skin and bones to myself. Everyone who cooks can benefit from the knowledge.

Knowledge is wasted when it isn't shared, so I'm sharing. If you buy antibiotic infused, hormone riddled chicken keep that in mine. Skin on and bones intact. You can relieve the meat of both after you've cooked it. That goes even for mass produced meals for MOW (Meals On Wheels). I'm sure the recipients would be grateful. I sure will be if they take my advice.

Have to call shortly since I can only call before 8:30 AM in order to change my meal.

BRB.

Good thing I called. They still did not have it changed . . . until now. Bureaucracy! More problems and hoops to jump through, never ending, until you talk to someone. Leaving messages doesn't work, nor does talking to people until you get their name and spell out your own. At last.

Yes, it does matter when food is delivered, especially when it's not what you ordered, left a message about, and finally reached someone YOU could talk to.

We'll see when it gets here.

Yes, it matters how it is cooked. Not only delivered, but cooked. No more desiccated chicken breast, only vegetarian. I'll eschew the desiccated chicken breast and the peas with a single piece of mushroom, for a full vegetarian meal.

Surprised?

You shouldn't be. That's how I began to lose weight and change my dietary habits, thru vegetarianism.

Don't get me wrong. I still like meat, but I prefer meat that isn't full of hormones, antibiotics, and genetic manipulation. Just plain vegetables If you cannot ensure your meat is cage-free and can roam around at will eating bugs and such, opt for the vegetarian option. Vegetables are best -- when they are clean and organic. That is when veggies are healthiest and best to eat, clean and organic just like I used to get when I went out into my uncle's back yard where the garden was to pick and eat tomatoes still warm from the sun. I didn't do like Katharine Hepburn and eat corn right off the cob just after it was picked. In fact, as much as I love popcorn, I won't eat corn in any form. I can pick it out of the veggies being served and thrown down the garbage disposal as waste. Corn is not as benign as I once thought growing up. It is as full of GMOs and genetic manipulation as most of the food is today, which is also why I don't eat soy -- GMO all the way, not to mention girly hormones.

Soy is a plant that can be made into many things, like plastic and cloth as well as food, but unless you have been reared and raised on soy, it won't provide much nutritional benefit, except to hike your estrogen and I have been through menopause and have put estrogen behind me -- far behind me. Boys don't need the estrogen since they cannot mimic frogs and change genders with the addition of girly hormones. I have plenty of girly hormones growing up and am quite girly enough, but without the attention to dress, shoes, and purses. I prefer a more understated
appearance, although I went through a brief phase as a teen when I bought clothes, up-to-date clothes, not the middle-aged clothes my mother bought for me. It was either girly girlish or middle-aged style, never in between. Her choices for me were god awful or babified, neither of which was acceptable to me, so I smiled, said thank you, and accepted. I preferred the hand-me-downs from my cousins. They were better than store bought (if bought by my mother).

She had style and taste, but for my money it was all in her mouth. A case of eyes bigger than stomach so to speak. Her eyes were out of this world when it came to choosing clothes for me. I preferred it when she made my clothes and insisted on dressing me like my sister. We weren't twins and we weren't even close to the same size and appearance. I was nearly twice as tall as my sister. Dad dabbled and made us purses out of banana leaves. He was very creative. Mom? Not so much.

The banana leaf purses didn't hold up long, but they were stitched on the Singer sewing machine, the same sewing machine I was forbidden to touch. As if I could get my fingers beneath the footplate to get stabbed by the needle. I could stab myself, as I often did when using a sewing needle. I didn't have to get stabbed by a sewing needle on the Singer sewing machine.

I had to teach Mom how to sew a blind hem stitch and do invisible repairs. Good thing I used a hand sewing needle and could stab myself repeatedly by myself. Mom had trouble with zippers too. She often had me sit down and do a lapped zipper and then get up and away from the machine after I had demonstrated the technique when I was a teenager, and as an adult.

Mom couldn't cook, so Dad cooked the Thanksgiving turkey. Mom was better when it came to candied yams. She excelled with desserts, or side dishes that could double as desserts, like candied yams. Her potato and macaroni salad were great. Her scalloped corn and baked beans were either water or nearly burnt up. She had had her good days -- and her bad. But we ate them anyway. It was food come to that, and we seldom ignored food.

I had to learn not to ask for seconds, not even with salad and meat, or suffer the shame of "You don't really need more. You're fat enough already." Her words sent me crying from the room -- out of shame and public exposure.

Mom's way was the caress, followed by the swift, sharp shame attack.

"You would look better if you weren't so ______?"

During family dinners, my uncle came to my rescue. He saw me as beautiful and acceptable. Mom saw me as fat and grossly inappropriate, like asking for seconds of salad or vegetables or meat.

I even liked her baked beans whether they were runny or over cooked, not because they were well prepared, but because soupy meant the bacon was cooked enough to show the fat and overcooked because the bacon was crispy. You'd get used to the burned parts of the bacon. Good thing I was catholic in my enjoyment.

She would have been horrified if I had asked for meat with the fat still on it, lots of fat. I loved -- and still love -- fat; glistening when cooked and crispy around the edges when really cooked. Luscious! Good thing I'm fat adapted now after having gone keto for so long, although I discovered recently that I was eating too much watermelon. Oh, well. It's behind me now -- and not behind me, but fat in the past. My behind has been lost with the general weight loss that keto has provided me-- along with the constant urination that forces me to wear a diaper.

Yes, I wear a diaper. I have a full capacity bladder constantly filling with water from the fat cells breaking down. Fat cells are composed of water anyway, so all that guff about your weight loss being temporary since is water weight is crap. All fat loss is composed of water, which is what drives weight loss, and my incontinence of late, The weight loss that Bang and Crystal commented on when they visited yesterday was visible fat loss.

All that hype about water weight is just hype. What do you think fat is mn ade of? Water. So if a dietary advertiser touts users are losing fat not water, they're full of it. Fat is composed of water, which is why dieters are always going to the bathroom, to void, evacuate their fat cells. It's also what is behind that orange peel effect you get with excessive weight. That orange peel effect of cellulite is mostly water. That's what cellulite is composed of -- fat cells full of water. Yes, you will lose water weight AND you will lose fat because fat cells are full of water. That what you get when the "whoosh effect" kicks in and you really begin to look like you're losing weight, so much that friends and acquaintances notice. It is the WHOOSH effect that keto people talk about. Rapid weight loss through the whoosh effect -- when you have crested the plateau and the weight comes off. Water leaving the fat cells and being processed by your kidneys. It is also why there is no ammonia smell from your urine -- because it is water from the fat cells. So keep drinking water while you eat keto or while you diet. You have to keep the urine flowing -- the water leaving the fat cells.

At any rate, I am losing weight (water AND fat) and it shows. Ask Crystal and Bang. It may be why Tien, their son, kept hiding behind his hand -- because I didn't look like I did when I lived there in Columbus. Oh, well, he will get used to me again if his parents move out here to Urbana and away from the Somali influx where they live now. C'est la vie. Such is life.

Or it might be better to say c'est la guerre -- such is war, as in the war with fat and loss of water from the fat.

No worries. I will have to continue to wear the diaper as long as I keep losing weight, even when I'm on a vegetarian diet. I like veggies and veggies are good on a diet. Mom should have stopped worrying that I was asking for seconds on salad. Salads are made of veggies and I liked and still like veggies. The more the merrier.

If you add fat, more is better.

Heed the Urge

Free advice, it's the one thing that most people rarely fear to give and balk at accepting for free, the idea that something you've done is wrong or inappropriate, or worse, that you need help, especially with writing. That's what I'm offering this morning, a little free advice.

I've been writing most of my life and have been published for more than a few years. I've learned a thing or two, although it seems they are mostly bad habits. Writing is a lot like dieting or, in my case, ignoring the body's needs. In this case, it's the mind's needs, although the body works into the mix anyway.

When I was younger, I thought I could lose weight by starving myself. I didn't count on the bred in the genes part that thought I was starving. Well, I was starving, but there was plenty of food around. I chose not to eat it because I wanted to lose that extra 10 or 15 pounds. What I didn't count on was how my body would rebel against my rebelling against food. My body clamored for food and I ignored the signs, the empty stomach, the cramps, the desire to chew on anything, even cardboard, if it would fill me up. All I thought about was the way I'd look when I lost the extra pounds. I was ignorant. I didn't realize that while I was virtuously denying myself food, eating only 2 ounces of cheese and drinking lots of water (which did nothing to curb my cravings), I was damaging myself.

The starvation gene had kicked in after the first week and was storing up every calorie it could find, lying in wait for an influx of food to store more against future famines. I lost 10 pounds and celebrated with a normal sized portion of dinner. Breakfast followed the next morning and I followed that with lunch and dinner, eating small portions, but eating at last. The taste was so good I wanted to lick the plate or bowl or glass clean. I held myself back in deference to the way I was brought up, but the urge was strong . . . and the scales crept up to replace the 10 pounds I'd lost and pack on a few more, so I starved again, eating after I lost the weight, and gaining even more weight every time I went back to eating normally. I finally cut out breakfast and tried every diet fad coming down the pike, but the results were the same: brief weight loss followed by increased weight gain.

It took me years to figure out what I was doing to myself, years and a lot of reading. Losing weight is even harder because of the damage I did to myself all those years, and I refuse to consider weight loss surgery to correct the issue, so I plod along, eat as healthy as possible and give my body what it needs. I learned too late.

Writing is similar to losing weight in some ways. Ignoring the urge to write for a day or a week or even a year does have an effect. Writing becomes more difficult. It is harder to sit in the chair every day, or on the couch or in the bath with a table across the sides, or wherever you feel most comfortable writing, when you ignore the urge to write. Unlike dieting, you don't end up with more words than when you started, but a habit of quitting early, taking notes and doing endless research and balking when it comes to sitting down and beginning a story or book. You've replaced the urge to write with an urge to write when you get around to it. You can always write after you do the laundry or the dishes, after this show is over, or when you get back from vacation, never realizing that you are hurting yourself and your dreams of publication. Without the words and the filled pages, there will be no books, no stories, and no publication, unless you hurry up and throw words onto a page without worrying about plot, characterization, or even whether the words are spelled correctly and the sentences aren't a mishmash of whatever came to mind.

Having words down on the page is not enough. It might be all right for a blog or a quick article, but what you put on the page is as important as what you put in your body when you eat. It does matter if the grammar is barely there and the details right. It matters.

I should know. I have a good case of putting it off until the last moment because I have a job that sucks the energy and creativity out of me every day. I muddle through, make notes, write down snatches of dialogue, description, and background, but it's not like writing every day. I've lost the fire to write, the fire that kept me writing all night long, going to work tired and empty of words and energy. I've come to the point where I have great books brewing in my head and ignore the urges to put it on paper. Not scribbling it down, but actually forming sentences, paragraphs, and pages full of well crafted words. I mean to do it, but I just can't get myself to the computer and get it done. I've fiddled with my time, filling it with nonsense and work that could wait, and made excuses.

I remember a time when I would wander off during a family gathering, pull a notebook or journal from my purse, and write, rushing to the computer the moment I got home or the guests left, so I could write. I wrote every day, and sometimes all day, finishing a 100,000+ word book in a week, revising it and fleshing it out until it was done. I've had my share of books that failed in the middle and had nowhere else to go, but I learned and kept writing. I never stopped writing -- until recently. I kept telling myself I'd get to it. I don't even blog every day the way I used to do, but I'm not a complete dilettante. I do journal nearly every day, even when I'm ill. The urge to get up and fill the pages so I can open a new journal and begin again is too strong. At least there I haven't failed. I can't completely ignore the urge to write because it has been such a part of me for decades.

In a way, this is not only free advice, but a declaration for myself, a promise that I will write, mostly because I am writing now. The need to write is not yet sated and I don't think it will be any time soon. Oh, I prefer to be comfortable when I write, but most of the time I don't notice my surroundings when I'm writing. I'm in the zone where hours pass without comment and day turns to night and turns back to day while I pound out another story, a book, a blog post because I do love the words and the way they come together. I'll miss a few grammar points, but that is what my editor is for; she keeps me honest and puts me back on track.

I have one piece of advice for every writer. Do it every day without fail. Don't ignore the urge or you will one day stop feeling it. I have to remind myself to eat regularly, especially when I'm writing, because of all the years I ignored my body's demands and urges. It is much harder for me to hear them now. The urge to write is still strong and it clamors for my attention nearly every hour, invading my dreams when I ignore it when I'm awake. The urge hounds and nags and makes itself known in every way possible. I'm glad for that because without it, I'd be fat and an automaton going through the motions of living, doing the laundry and dishes, running the errands, working my scheduled hours, and devoid of any sign of life, caroming from one chore to the next, piling up money to spend without having anything I really want to buy. That's no life for a writer.

Okay, I have 2 pieces of advice besides "write every day without fail" and that is read voraciously. A writer should read and read widely. Venture into new territory and it will show up in the writing, not only in better construction but more mature and well rounded stories.

Writing is a process, a discipline, a calling, and a gift. Don't ignore it. Heed the urges and put your backside in the chair and write. Even if you don't think you have anything to say, just the act of writing is enough to stimulate the little grey cells and words will come. You can throw them out later, but write them down. Every day, write them down. Carve out some time. Make writing a habit. Words will come and with them will come paragraphs and pages and stories and books. Heed the urge.