Book Review: Notes from the Underwire

Title: Notes from the Underwire. Adventures from My Awkward and Lovely Life
Author: Quinn Cummings
Rating: 4 (out of 4) stars
Reason for reading: Title and cover caught my eye at a sale at a local independent bookstore. Recommendation by Jen Lancaster on the front cover sealed the deal.

Apparently, I picked this book up about the time it was published. And I'm glad I did.

It's a series of essays by a woman who is more or less my age. We have had very different lives, but her life is endlessly amusing to me.

I started laughing in the first essay, where she describes her daughter's artwork as "Meditations on Pink Tissue, Elmer's Glue, and Glitter, #186" and I didn't stop until the book ended. She refers to her Baby Daddy as "Consort," and she tells us in the introduction that her daughter is not really named "Alice" even though she is referred to as Alice through all 254 pages.

The author is a former child actor, although she hates that label. She doesn't write much about the acting days, which is fine because what she does write is hilarious. Her adventures with a child, a consort, and assorted pets is mighty amusing.

Check out her blog here.

Friday is supposed to be a good day

Change from beginning of program: -5.2 LBs
Goal: 39 LBs to go

Activity: shopping

Temptation: beer and fried food
Fruit and veg: sadly, only 2

Bigfoot had a medical procedure today and needed a driver, so I made arrangements to work from home. Generally, working from home is really "working" from home. Not today. It was way too hectic for me.

Breakfast: Multi-grain bread with hummus and a plumot, aka pluot (cross between a plum and an apricot).

Morning: Working and managing work email at the doctor's office.

Lunch: As Bigfoot had not eaten in almost 48 hours, he was starved. He wanted chicken and pancakes. We could have gone to this wonderful soul food place to get chicken and waffles, but no...that's not what he wanted. We drove through the drive-through at Church's and then went to Denny's. I had a veggie burger (with cheese) and spicy fries. Ate too much.

Afternoon: Continuous stream of email, instant messages, and phone calls. And Bigfoot interrupting me with requests for help. Each interruption was preceded by "This is the last time I'm gonna ask for your help, and then I'll leave you alone." Yeah, right. And the contractor came over to take measurements for the windows I'm getting replaced. And the travel website that I am forced to use to book my flight to Rome (!) was not working yesterday or today and I spent 20 minutes on the phone with tech support and they said they need to send it to level 2 support. ARGH!

Dinner: Fried food at our favorite seafood restaurant: stuffed shrimp (1) and stuffed crab (1) and fries. Brought 2 stuffed shrimp and fries home.

Evening: Shopping at Marshall's and Ross. Spent $100+ on stuff I didn't know I needed until I saw it there. Then beer. Ah, sweet beer. I should have started you earlier.

All in all, not a great day for food. But I will do better tomorrow.

Losing weight: this time, I'm serious

Weight change from beginning of program: -5.2 LBs
Goal: 39 LBs to go

Activity: grocery shopping

Temptation: wine
Fruit and veg: 4 (goal is to have 5 0r more every day)

It's time to get serious and get these 40+ pounds off of me. In mid-May, I started trying to seriously take control of my eating issues. I read Geneen Roth's book Breaking Free of Compulsive Eating, and it made a huge impact on me. I'm trying to eat only when I'm hungry. That sounds easy enough, but when I focused on it I realized that I am rarely hungry. I eat because it's time to eat, I'm stressed, I'm happy, I'm mad, and mainly because I want it.

For the first few weeks, I couldn't tell when I was hungry. It had been so long since I felt hunger I didn't recognize the signs. That alone proved to me that I have a real issue with food.

The book pointed out that there are very few times when I'm eating something that I will never eat again. If I'm at a restaurant, I can eat a few bites and take the rest home. If I'm somewhere out of town, I can get a recipe and duplicate it (or at least come very close to it) at home. Since reading the book two months ago, I have not eaten everything on my plate at a restaurant.

The styrofoam containers I have brought home with restaurant leftovers in the past two months will probably be the straw that broke the camel's back for eating through the ozone layer.

This blog will document my daily successes and failures. I didn't get this overweight overnight, and I won't lose the pounds overnight. Mid-life issues make things even more difficult. But my plan is to get to my goal weight by October 2010 because I'll be celebrating a milestone then.

Here we go...

Healthy breakfast (yeah, right) : leftover baked potato

Lunch: A thin 30 year-old coworker suggested Caribbean Cuisine, a hole in the wall that serves authentic Caribbean cuisine (surprise, surprise). I had a patty, which is apparently a traditional Jamaican street food. I got the vegetarian patty (they also offered beef, pork, and chicken), and it was similar to an empanada made with cornmeal and stuffed with sauerkraut and diced carrots. That was interesting. My entree was curried shrimp with rice and peas (some kind of brown legumes mixed into rice) with a small salad and cooked plantains. It was good, albeit super spicy. I craved a Dairy Queen Blizzard all afternoon because I thought the milk would cancel out the spicy shrimp and the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups would satisfy my sweet craving, but I held out and made it home without eating any sugar.

Dinner: Gazpacho over Doritos (2 servings).

Activity: Went to Costco and Kroger for weekly shopping. Managed to bypass the individually wrapped pieces of German chocolate cake at Kroger. Instead, I got some freshly baked multigrain bread to eat with vat of hummus I got at Costco.

Polished off a bottle of wine when I got home. I'm testing varieties for our next batch of vino. The Riesling I had tonight was quite sweet, which means that it went down WAY too easily.

Good deed for the day: A few days ago, I talked to my 80 year old friend from Dallas. During the conversation, I told her that I had harvested too many cucumbers to eat. She told me how much she liked cucumbers. So I wrapped up a few cucumbers and sent them to her. She got them today, and she left a voice mail that said, "You beg and you beg, then all your cucumber dreams come true."

The new foundation garments

Body shaping slip? More like sausage casing.

It smashed my bosoms and accentuated my stomach.

If the manufacturers made clothing that was thicker and more opaque than cheesecloth, I wouldn't need a slip in the first place.

And this is false advertising - I didn't look anything like this when I wore the slip.

State Fair, here I come!

Today was my cooking day for the State Fair. I got up early to go to the farmer's market for tomatoes, onions, and peppers. I spent the bulk of the day making my award-winning salsa, then I tried to take a nap. When I couldn't sleep, I read Tom Robbins' book "B is for Beer" and then tinkered with my brownie recipe for the Ghirardelli baking contest, which I intend to win. (Was that a run-on sentence or what?)

Wine is a good thing. I have had a lot of it tonight.

In late August, I will know whether I got any kind of recognition for the salsa. I won't know anything about the baking contest until I take my treats to the State Fair on the last Saturday in September.

I'll keep you posted.