We've all heard the warning that people gain a ton of weight during the holidays. I remember reading somewhere that it's closer to 1 or 2 pounds than the oft-cited 10 pounds, but still: as someone who has lost weight and managed to keep (most of) it off, I can tell you that 1 or 2 pounds is nothing to sneeze at.

So I found this article on how to save some serious calories at holiday gatherings practical and realistic. A few of the tips:

Eat this
12 Large Cocktail Shrimp w/ Cocktail Sauce
165 calories
1 g fat

Not that!
1 Crab Cake
290 calories
19 g fat

When it comes to cocktail parties, it's important to know your crustaceans. In this case, you can have a dozen huge shrimp and 125 calories to save for a rainy day, or you can have one measly crab cake. Not such a tough choice once you know the facts.

Seems reasonable to me. I also learned that yummy pecan pie is basically extra pounds on a plate:

Eat this
Chocolate Fondue With Angel Food Cake
340 calories
10g fat

Not that!
One Medium Slice Pecan Pie
610 calories
45g fat

In the wide world of holiday pies, nothing is worse than a slice of pecan. True, some of the fat is healthy, from the nuts themselves. Most of these calories, though, come from the filling, which is a sickly sweet sludge of corn syrup and sugar.

Sigh. Why must all the stuff that's awful for you taste so darn good?

I am guilty of slacking in the exercise department this holiday season, and I haven't given much thought to how many tamales and cookies I have eaten. But I like being armed with this info on how to make healthier choices while not depriving yourself of holiday treats. I'm a firm believer that everything in moderation is OK. It keeps me from fixating on what I can't have and then losing all control later on.

What about you ladies? Do you remain conscious of your diet and exercise during the holiday season, or do you let loose and enjoy? What about the kids? Do you limit their candy cane consumption or let them stuff themselves with Christmas cookies? Maya is eating more sweets than she usually does, but not an unreasonable amount. and it turns out she doesn't care for candy canes.

We're heading to brunch at my brother-in-law's, followed by dinner at my MILs...and there will be a fair amount of munching involved. :-)

Merry Christmas, all!

The end of October is always a perfect storm of business for me.  Just as 1st quarter grades are coming due, and I have 118 essays to read and 30 make-up assignments to grade, and the school computers go down making uploading grades into the district's database impossible, Halloween rears its spooky head and costumes must be found, candy must be purchased, and Halloween activities must be completed.  

In the midst of all this I must attend a Parent-Teacher conference with my 1st grader's teacher, cheer on same son at soccer, get a very necessary haircut, consider a summons to jury duty, and write several teacher recommendations for very deserving seniors who are all lovely young women who would be assets to any college or university that deigned to accept them into their student bodies.

It's National School Lunch Week, and I'm glad President Bush has proclaimed it—part of his ongoing commitment to our children's health. (Yeah, right.) How to celebrate such an occasion? Whip up a batch of "American Chop Suey," a meat, tomatoes, and macaroni mixture I remember from my own tray-carrying days? Throw some canned fruit into orange Jello and have a party?

I think a better way is to share the advice of Chef Ann Cooper, the "renegade lunch lady" with a mission to improve the quality of school food in our nation and instill our children with healthy habits for life. In honor of this week, she suggests in her podcast, "I think every single parent in America should go and eat lunch with children at their schools and really see if the food they're eating in their schools is delicious and nutritious."

Her current podcast is also a good introduction to her ideas on how schools can find money to serve fresh foods, things parents can do to build healthy habits in their kids, and why we need to make childhood food and nutrition a priority in the U.S. In fact, she wants to make the issue of school-lunch funding "part of the 2008 presidential debate," as she told me last December when I spoke with her and reviewed her book Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children. Below are a few of the sobering statistics from that post; here's the full original.

• Children born in the year 2000 will be the first in our country's history to die at a younger age than their parents.
• More than 35 percent of our nation's children are overweight, 25 percent are obese, and 14 percent have type 2 diabetes, a condition previously seen primarily in adults.
• Current research shows that 40 percent of all cancers are attributable to diet.
• 78 percent of the schools in America do not actually meet the USDA's nutritional guidelines.

Are you happy with the lunch options in your school district? Discuss, or take the poll.

Okay, here it is, 2:00 in the afternoon and suddenly, as if this has never happened before, I am wondering what to fix for dinner. You would think with two 10 year olds in the house, I would have figured this out a long time ago. Surely it's not that hard? Dinner comes around every day, so it certainly shouldn't be a surprise to me that it's here again, and that as the SAHM I am the one responsible for preparing something.

And, yet, here I am again.

I thought I would share an interesting article I just read in Ode Magazine called "Feed your brain" (http://www.odemagazine.com/...). The article talks about how there is a strong relationship between nutrition and aggression.

They did this one study in Britain with kids who had the common symptoms associated with ADHD. Half the kids received a daily omega-3 supplement and the other got plain olive oil. They found that the kids that took the omega-3 supplement did substantially better at school than those in the control group. When it came to spelling, for example, the omega-3 group performed twice as well as expected, whereas the control group continued to fall behind.

With all of the processed foods that are out there today, I can understand  why our kids aren't getting the right nutrients. I wonder if that really is the reason of why so many kids today are being diagnosed with ADHD.

We know the benefits of Breastfeeding and we are all aware of the current ongoing debate about its propriety in public.  Ultimately it's about wanting the best for our children without having to tie ourselves to a nursing chair in our homes.  Mothers want the freedom to do what they please, when they please.  Oh, like everyone else.

But I haven't seen much debate about the choices that are available for young children at Restaurants.  They're appalling.  Fried chicken?  French fries?  Pizza?  Hotdogs?

I ate the last apricot while my son was napping. All of the sweet and none of the mess. The iconic, sensual fruit experience of "juice dripping down the chin" is overrated; now that I'm a mom I spend entirely too much time cleaning sticky trails from chins, chests, legs, arms, tables, and floors. The soft little fruit felt like Jude's head when he was a baby.

When he awoke from his nap and discovered the last apricot gone, he was pissed. He stormed around, cursing me. So when I went to the farmers' market yesterday, a big bag of Blenheims topped my list. But they were gone! The apricot season blows by faster than my desire for them, which lingers. But the peaches were out in full force. I filled my pack and pedaled home.

I'm trying to change, trying to integrate some new habits. I'm trying to eat seasonally (and to ween my lazy ass from the car). Of course, this can be pretty limiting; that's why people don't do it! On the flip side, the pleasure can be intense when the flavors are peaking. Food that is grown closer to home is picked riper. And of course, you value a thing more when you don't have constant access to it. Absence does makes the heart grow fonder.

My first step was to cut out a chart from the food section of the paper that lists seasonal food. (Scroll down to the bottom of the article for the chart.) I've taped it to my kitchen wall and glance at it before grocery shopping or figuring out menu items for the week. Here's what it says for the current season:

SUMMER
(June or July): Honey, sweet corn, tomatoes, fresh lavender, green beans, apricots, salmon, buffalo, beef, homemade ice cream.

HEIGHT OF SUMMER
(July and August): Basil and other fresh herbs, eggplant, peppers, heirloom tomatoes, peaches and nectarines galore, salmon, cucumbers, melons, grapes

Last week I attended a presentation and booksigning by Barbara Kingsolver, whose newest book -- Animal, Vegetable, Miracle –- is a nonfiction account of her family's adventure growing and raising their own food supply for a full year. She read essays from the book, and in between narrated a slide show of their endeavors: planning, planting, canning, fixing up the farmhouse, and raising poultry. She ended the presentation with a story about the turkeys Americans are accustomed to eating: a specific variety that has been bred to be dumb as a stick and as stacked as Dolly Parton. This deformity has rendered the breed unable to naturally reproduce, (it topples and crushes its mate if it attempts fertilization).

For decades, most Americans' Thanksgiving turkeys have been bred by hand--a man's hand that extracts the sperm from the tom and inserts it in the hen. Kingsolver and her family bought some heirloom turkeys--Bourbon Reds--and had some trouble getting them to mate because they had imprinted on humans. When a hen was ready to mate, she performed her daffy fertility dance for the author's husband. It took a bit of intervention and staging to get the turkeys to consider each other. I had never before attended a literary event that culminated with a triumphant video of all natural turkey fuckin', let alone one where the audience was cheering.

So what does this have to do with freebirth? Give yourself over to my tortured analogy. A few days ago, I read this article about the budding freebirth movement. These women are eschewing even the company of a midwife in order to give birth at home totally unassisted. Why? Because women have been birthing babies for eons without the assistance of "professionals." Kinda like turkeys, before they were bred for industrialization.

As a community, freebirthers are generally distrustful of formality and standardization, attributes they associate with the cold, assembly-line drive of corporate hospitals.

Laura Shanley is the reining authority on the subject, having freebirthed five children, written Unassisted Birth, and launched a busy website on the topic.

"When you're afraid and you turn white, it's because you're telling your body 'danger,' and your body is taking your blood and oxygen and diverting it into your arms and legs to fight or run," Laura says, adding that the same thing can occur to a woman during birth. "So what happens to a frightened woman in labor is that her uterus is literally white, and it doesn't have the fuel it needs." This fear can be triggered by an unfamiliar maternity ward, or doctors or nurses performing uncomfortable procedures.

It's like you're having sex and someone knocks on the door, she explains, "or comes in and says, 'What's your Social Security number?'" It's a moment-killer, as they say, and blood flows away from the organs.

Last week I was milling around a bookstore, slowly sampling the wares, and I came upon Courtney Love's book Dirty Blonde. It's more a diary or scrapbook than an autobiography – a messy collage of posters, photos, and scraps of paper she has scrawled her thoughts upon. One page featured a list of truths/ideas/recommendations that she wanted to teach her child. The list was long, bizarre, and fascinating in how vastly different it was from any list I'd create.

One of bits of wisdom that she included was this:

Food is for peasants. But don't get too 'rexy.

"Rexy" presumably meaning anorexic. I know that Love has always excelled at shock factor and shamelessness, so I was surprised to find that she could still shock me, and in so many ways at once! One, that she considers herself aristocracy, two, that she doesn't recognize this relationship to food as problematic, and three, that she would want to pass this dangerous belief on to her daughter.

I inherited some of my core beliefs about food from my parents. They are:

• Eating and sharing food is a great pleasure.
• Preparing something extra scrumptious for others is very gratifying.
• Cooking, eating, and sharing food outdoors or in wilderness is an extra pleasure.
• Cooking is not a gendered activity, and neither is clean-up.
• Experiencing the pleasure that food offers is a form of gratitude.

I don't disagree with Love's underlying premise that socio-economic class can play a role in one's relationship to food. Perhaps the very rich have access to all kinds of pleasures, so they can turn their nose up at one source or another, knowing that they can get their endorphins a million other ways.

Part II: Outside Influences

I first started this article series when I realized how many other influences there are on my child’s diet. I was trying to buy plastic food and a grocery cart for my child. The amount of branded fast food "toys" and junk food options were astounding.

Up to this point, I had had the illusion of control. What hit me like a ton of bricks, as I stood in that toy kitchen and food aisle, was how brief that period of control really was.

Part I of II: Parents' Influence on Diet

There are several sources of influence on our children’s eating behaviors. Genetics play a small role, parent and family influence, social relationships, neighborhood, community, institutional (schools), as well as large-scale influences like culture, food systems, economics and marketing.

Let’s start with the same source of primary influence that a child’s experience begins with: the parents.