Monthly Archives: February 2012

The 17-Day Diet

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Remember this post, where I lamented all the weight I’d gained? Since New Year’s Day, I have lost fifteen pounds. Ten of those were lost in the first two weeks of the year.

I’m doing my best not to sound like an advertisement (so we’re clear, I don’t do promotions, giveaways, or paid entries on this blog), but seriously? The 17-Day Diet really works!

Before you buy the book, just know this: while the diet developed by Dr. Mike Moreno is great, his writing style is kind of obnoxious and condescending. So you’ll have to try to ignore that when you read the book.

But here’s what you’ll find in there. The name is somewhat misleading, since it’s actually three cycles that each consist of seventeen days. In Cycle 1, you can eat as much lean protein (chicken, turkey, some types of fish) and certain vegetables as you want, plus two servings of certain fruits, two probiotics such as yogurt, one to two servings of “friendly fats” such as olive oil, and condiments in moderation. You also drink lots of water and green tea. You drop weight rapidly in this stage, which encourages you to keep going, but you do it healthily—no starving yourself, no following rules that are contrary to common sense.

In Cycle 2, you alternate days that follow the Cycle 1 rules with days where you can add in some more foods—shellfish, lean cuts of beef and pork, and certain starches. In Cycle 3, you can add more foods—more dairy, whole-grain breads, one serving of alcohol a day, and certain healthy snacks—and also kick the exercise up a notch.

If you’ve lost all the weight after those three cycles, you then follow one of the three cycles during the week and strategically indulge on the weekends. If you haven’t, you start again at Cycle 1 and continue until you’ve lost the weight.

I managed to stick to the diet pretty well in Cycle 1, although I admit to a bit of cheating in Cycles 2 and 3. I also could have exercised a bit more (lately, I have been so exhausted from work that I have not been doing much exercising), so honestly, I think I could have lost even more weight. Some additional thoughts:

  • Cycle 2 was by far the hardest. In Cycle 1 I kept telling myself, “Seventeen days, you can do it!” but Cycle 2 is not much different.
  • It was also hard trying to tell people why I wasn’t eating certain things. “Diet” has a negative connotation, so I was reluctant to tell too many people that I was on one.
  • What was not hard at all, surprisingly, was not drinking alcohol for thirty-four days. While I’ve never been a big drinker, I was expecting alcohol to be hard to avoid in social situations. But whenever I found myself at a birthday party or at a bar with coworkers, I just drank water and diet soda and not very many people noticed. I was dry for most of college, even living in substance-free housing for my first two years, and this experience reminded me how much I actually do like not drinking.
  • I recommend locating recipes that work for each cycle before you start them. I went through my Weight Watchers cookbook before I started the diet, so I ended up cooking a lot more.

I am lucky that I’ve never been very overweight and staying in the healthy range has never been too difficult for me, but this helped me get back on the right track. In December, I spent too much time eating crap and not exercising, so I needed something to help me stop. And this isn’t a gimmicky diet—it just takes things that you know are common sense (i.e. eat lots of vegetables, whole grains, and lean protein) and gives you a practical way of applying it.

In conclusion: I absolutely recommend this diet to anyone trying to lose weight. If you have any questions for me, ask away!

Katie Recommends: Downton Abbey

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Right before the second season premiered in the US last month, I started hearing about Downton Abbey everywhere, kind of the way Mad Men was suddenly everywhere before its second season. So I decided to check it out.

I learned my lesson about blogging about shows before the season finale—The Killing’s season finale was so bad it soured me on the whole show and I probably won’t watch Season 2. Happily, I can’t say the same of Downton Abbey, whose second season finished just as I got caught up with the show.

If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s a quick crash course. Downton Abbey is a large estate in England inhabited by Robert Crawley, the Earl of Grantham; his American wife Cora; their three young adult daughters, Mary, Edith, and Sybil; Robert’s mother Violet; a cute yellow Lab named Isis; and a whole army of servants. The first season starts out in the spring of 1912 as the Titanic has just sunk. Unfortunately, the heir to the estate, their cousin Patrick, is killed in the shipwreck. Patrick was unofficially engaged to the eldest daughter Mary, therefore ensuring that she would inherit the estate despite an entail prohibiting her from doing so because she is a woman. With Patrick dead, they have to track down the new heir—a distant cousin named Matthew who works as a lawyer. That would be nothing to sneeze at for most of us, but for English aristocrats one hundred years ago, even an upper middle class working man is light years away from what they’re used to.

Nevertheless, Matthew and his widowed, former nurse mother, Isobel, move onto the property at Downton. While there are some clashes initially, and while Matthew and Mary get off on the wrong foot, Matthew becomes a part of the family. Matthew and Mary eventually develop a friendship that may become more, and may save Mary from a scandal she has found herself in.

By Season 2, however, World War I has rolled around and things have changed. The old societal order seems less important, and barriers are being broken down. What it will mean when the war is over is less clear.

That was all purposely vague to avoid spoilers, but trust me, there is a LOT to love about this show. The characters, for one, are wonderfully interesting and sympathetic. Maggie Smith as Violet, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, steals every scene she’s in. She’s such a snob, but you know that she loves her family beneath it all, and she comes up with such brilliant one-liners. When a character she doesn’t like tells her that she won’t be seeing him again, she replies, “Do you promise?” When Sybil starts getting involved in politics, Mary comments that Sybil is entitled to her opinion, to which the Countess retorts, “No, she is not entitled to her opinion until she gets married, and then her husband will tell her what her opinion is!” When she and Isobel quarrel over something Isobel thinks she has done, the Countess defends herself, ending with, “Put that in your pipe and smoke it!”

Despite him being way too old for me, I have a bit of a crush on the Earl. He’s warm and gentle and very proud of his family and his estate, taking his role as caretaker of Downton Abbey seriously. He treats his family and his servants with kindness, often reserving judgment on people who have made mistakes, and despite the concern for rank that permeates the world he lives in, he wants above all for those he loves to be happy. He’s certainly not perfect—he can be stubborn and set in his ways and towards the end of Season 2 he does something that made me yell at the TV, but whenever he messes up, he immediately feels guilty and tries to right his wrong as soon as possible. He is a gentleman in every sense of the word.

It has been a long time since I have shipped a couple as much as I have shipped Matthew and Mary. Mary is terrified of what she does not know, and her decisions concerning relationships always revolve around this uncertainty. But she does love Matthew, and their scenes together are wonderfully romantic and sweet. Also, Matthew is quite attractive.

While Mary is afraid of change, the youngest daughter, Sybil, wholeheartedly embraces it. She gets involved with women’s rights in the first season, and when World War I rolls around, not content to sit idly by, she becomes a nurse to take care of wounded soldiers. In Season 2, she begins a romance widely considered taboo. She’s a beautiful, kind, wealthy young woman who could have anyone she wanted, but she is willing to give up the life she’s always known for love.

The middle daughter, Edith, is kind of a bitch but is starting to grow on me. She has a contentious relationship with her older sister Mary, and she does something so awful to Mary in Season 1 that it’s impossible to sympathize with her. But it’s easy to feel bad for her for other reasons. While Mary was engaged to Patrick, it was Edith who loved him and mourned his death the most. I think she has a bit of middle-child syndrome, and as the least attractive of the sisters, no one expects much from her. Her parents even comment at one point that she’ll probably not marry and instead take care of them in their old age.

The narrative focuses about equally on the aristocrats upstairs and the servants downstairs. The mild-mannered valet, John Bates, can’t seem to catch a break, as his past misfortunes keep coming back to haunt him. His ongoing relationship with a maid named Anna is so sweet, and you keep rooting for them despite all the obstacles they face.

There are all kinds of interesting characters among the servants, too: Carson, the professional and fiercely devoted butler; Thomas, the evil gay footman who is always causing trouble somewhere; O’Brien, the lady’s maid who is usually plotting along with Thomas; Daisy, the honest-to-a-fault and easily frightened kitchen maid; and Branson, the highly political chauffeur who strongly influences Sybil. These are just some of the servants we meet, and the personal, romantic, and family issues they all face often parallel what is going on with the family they serve.

The 1910s and 1920s are such an interesting period in history that I’m surprised there isn’t more historical fiction about that time. As the study of modernism in eleventh-grade English class taught me, it was an era where the world was changing in so many ways—women’s rights, socialism, a changing map of Europe. One theme we see gradually emerging over the course of the show is the breakdown of the traditional class structure and people looking to break out of the boxes they’ve been born into. In the first season, it’s a bit more subtle—an upper middle-class lawyer potentially inheriting a large estate, a maid dreaming of getting a job as a secretary instead—but after the war, it is visible on a larger scale. Servants try out alternate roles as many of the men go off to war, Sybil works as a nurse, Edith learns to drive a tractor in the absence of men to do that work, and romances that once seemed forbidden are suddenly possible. As the soldiers in the war find out, bullets and bombs aren’t concerned with social class out on the battlefield.

And on a shallow note? THE CLOTHES. Oh, my God, the clothes.

I covet these women’s wardrobes. If I’ll never be able to spend my days traipsing around a beautiful estate, reading, spending time with friends, and meeting attractive men, as these women do before the war, can I at least get to wear beautiful dresses like these?

The show certainly isn’t perfect. It’s a soap opera, plain and simple, and occasionally the plots get a bit ridiculous or predictable. There are also times when one storyline gets too much attention or when we should see more of another story to be able to understand it better, and one character introduced in the second season is so one-dimensional that her motivations are difficult to understand. But the acting is universally wonderful and, above all, at the end of each episode you truly feel that you have traveled to another world. What more could you want out of a TV show?

What I Want the Most

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A year ago, I blogged about how I moved past hating Valentine’s Day. At this point, I actually kind of like it because it gives me an excuse to spoil myself—and as an introvert, I have always enjoyed the pleasure of my own company, so I take whatever excuses I can. But as I’m another year older and single for another year, I have to admit that I’m reflecting on some things.

Now, before I say anything more, I want to note that this is not a woe-is-me-I’m-single post. It’s not an OMG-my-significant-other-RAWKS! post, either. (By the way, those two things are equally annoying, so basically, everyone should just shut up about their relationship statuses.) But it is a musing on getting older and how I find myself looking at the future differently in my late twenties than I did in my early twenties.

You notice my bucket list here? Lots of fun stuff on it—skydiving, mountain climbing, and some stuff that isn’t in a Tim McGraw song, like owning a boat, recording a song, and being a bestselling author. I also have my list of travel goals that I hope to make some progress on over the next couple of years.

But the truth is, I would give up every other item on both of those lists if it meant that I could have only these three:

  • Fall in love with an awesome guy who loves me back, have a wonderful wedding, and stay happily married for the rest of our lives
  • Have at least two kids
  • Own a house in the Boston suburbs

That’s it. Those are the things I want the most out of life. They are not extraordinary things. They’re things that millions of people manage to do without much trouble. And yet, for me, they might be the hardest items on my bucket list to accomplish. Let’s take a look at them.

Not only have I never been in a relationship, I have never been in love. So my heart has never been broken, but I also do not know what romantic love feels like. And as easy as it is to get cynical and think that real love doesn’t exist or that all relationships will end, I know that’s not true. I know people who are really, truly in love and will be together for the rest of their lives. And I always think of my paternal grandparents, who lived through the Great Depression and World War II and who were happily married for sixty-six years until my grandfather’s death. Real love happens, but it has never happened to me, and more than anything, I want to find someone with whom to spend every day for the rest of my life.

I also want at least two kids. The challenge here is accomplishing the part before that, love and marriage, in time to make that happen. It’s very hard to get pregnant without fertility treatments after age thirty-five or so. If I met a guy tomorrow, I’d have to date him for at least two years before I’d consider getting engaged. Then we’d be engaged for about another year and have at least a year or two of being married and childless before having our first kid, which would make me a first-time mother at about age thirty-two. Which is fine, but remember, this would be the absolute earliest. I’d consider adoption in the future as well, but even if I were to adopt, I wouldn’t want to be too old when becoming a parent.

The side effect of wanting kids so badly is that it has made me pickier about whom I’m attracted to. When I look at dating sites, I end up thinking things like, “Is his career stable? Does he seem mature enough to be a good father? Does he value the same kinds of things that I do?” I just feel like I can’t waste time with someone if I can’t see a long-term future with him.

The other reason I want to find someone who is mature and financially stable is because of the third thing I want: owning a house in the Boston suburbs. Specifically, a house that is on enough land to be more private than living in the city and has at least three bedrooms and a backyard. And a house that is located in a Boston suburb that is on the commuter rail and has a good school system. And, the hardest part, a house that my hypothetical future husband and I can afford.

Now, I am pretty good at saving money. Despite paying a lot in rent and earning the first word of my blog title by working in a not-so-lucrative industry, I have managed to save a decent amount. And one of the reasons I was so excited to become a sales rep was because if I make my number, I get a much bigger bonus than I used to get. But even so, the Boston suburbs are ridiculously expensive, even if you’re just looking for a modest three-bedroom house, and it will take me a long time to save enough money for a down payment. What if I can’t meet a guy who can afford to help me buy a house?

What do you guys think? Have you found your priorities changing as you get older? What do you want the most out of life, and do you worry about how you may never achieve it?

Song of the Moment: “Beige Curtains”

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Riki Lindhome is the blonde one from Garfunkel and Oates (I can never remember which one is Garfunkel and which one is Oates), and both she and Kate Micucci have done some solo work as well. My friend Jenny introduced me to this Riki Lindhome song, “Beige Curtains,” which makes me smile every time I hear it. Even if you don’t have an ex as douchey as the guy in the song, I think every girl can relate to these lyrics.

Valentine’s Day is coming up, and whether you’re single, taken, or somewhere in between…be grateful this year that you’re nothing like a pair of beige curtains. You’re not a simple girl—you’re a Katie girl.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U5n_Q6JnRE]