Obrigado! How I Passed the Pencil Test

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After I did Yogalosophy for twenty-seven days, I realized that a set exercise routine is really good for keeping you motivated and exercising at a higher level. I decided that I’d go with another  fitness kit after the show was recorded (it’s one of the reasons I want my next Where Is My Guru book to be a fun, trashy read) and ordered it while I was working on the last stages of Yogalosophy, which I’ll probably be sending off to Jenn Cusano soon. What kit did I go with? Only the most hilarious “As Seen on TV” kit ever made, Brazil Butt Lift:

Did you hear that, folks? “The butt is very complex.” This cracks me up.  When the Basic kit arrived, it came with three DVDs, booklets, a tape measure, a card for writing down your original measurements, a resistance band, and a pencil for “The Pencil Test.” The Pencil Test is like something out of Mr. Blackwell’s era. I can imagine a Hollywood mogul snarking, “Did you hear that Joan failed the Pencil Test?” over a gin and tonic. I’d recommend taking your test “results” with a heavy grain of salt. Essentially, you use a pencil to see if your bum sags where it meets your thighs. You use those results, plus a picture of 4 types of booty concerns, to help determine what program you do–there are month-long DVD rotations designed to target your primary issue, whether that is lifting a flat butt or slimming your butt and thighs. I passed the pencil test, but I think that is due to my natural shape, rather than the workouts I’ve been doing. Most of the women in my mom’s side of the family have larger, rounder butts. The joke is that J. Lo finally made our body types popular. So, I imagine that some people’s Pencil Test results might freak them out and there’s a strong possibility that you can’t change your genetic inheritance entirely. I wouldn’t worry about doing the dreaded test, if the idea bugs you.

I’m on Day 4 of the Classic routine now. The music and beach scenery is energetic and fun, but the routine is still very challenging for me. There’s some dance cardio, lots of tough compound movements, like squats and lunges, plus some mat work that is similar to pilates and yoga. It really hits all the bases of exercise movement and so far, it’s not boring, because the DVD order changes every day. I’ll update periodically over the month to let y’all know how it turns out.

My Calamitous Attempt at Squash and Sun Dried Tomato Risotto

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Have I mentioned that my nickname is “Calamity Jane”? Strange things happen to me that don’t happen to other people, I swear. Even in my kitchen.

I’ve been cooking a lot lately and looking for good, yet easy recipes. Preferably with few dirty dishes, too! So, risotto is one of my favorite things to make. I’ve written before about my experiment with Matt Bittman’s brown rice risotto, which substitutes parboiled brown rice in the standard arborio risotto recipe. Well, I tried a variation on that again for dinner tonight–with a small snafu! I boiled the brown rice for twenty minutes, while I sauteed cubed squash, a little red onion, a handful of spinach, and some slightly drained sun dried tomatoes. My sun dried tomatoes come in their own oil, so I left a little oil on them to impart the other vegetables with that great flavor. I love these tomatoes–they’re sweet and slightly smoky (I really want to make this smoky tomato risotto next). After twenty minutes on high, the rice was ready to be drained and put in the pan with the vegetables and a little white wine. All good. But what about the snafu?

I added in the rice and toasted it for a few minutes, adding white wine and a squeeze of lemon. But when I went to retrieve the one remaining container of chicken broth from the pantry, I realized it wasn’t chicken broth, but beef broth! And I was completely out of any alternative broth. I had to go with the beef, even though I only use it for recipes for my dogs (I don’t really eat beef, but they love it), not for me. Whoops!

Fortunately, it turned out to be delicious. More like a jambalaya, I think, than your usual risotto. Hearty and flavorful. Yum! I can’t decide what movie goes well with this, but I’ve been meaning to Netflix that John Cusack movie where he plays Edgar Allen Poe, The Raven. It looks so ridiculous that it might be fun.

The Calamity Jane Risotto

Cook brown rice, per package directions. Then in a wide pan, drizzle a small amount of olive oil and saute the following ingredients:

Two medium-sized squash, cubed

1-2 cups of spinach, stems removed

Red onion, to taste (I used a handful, sliced into thin strips like you would to caramelize them, rather than cubing them)

Two heaping tablespoons of sun dried tomatoes, lightly drained of oil (if yours are dry packed, add a little olive oil to the pan)

Salt and pepper to taste

When your rice is done cooking, drain it of excess water, then add it to the pan of vegetables. Mix and toast for a few minutes. Add in a splash of dry white wine and a little bit of lemon juice. Then get a 14.5 oz. can of beef broth and add it to the pan, in 1/2 cup increments, stirring the mixture on medium-high heat until all the liquid is absorbed. Since the brown rice is tougher, you want it to be very hot and bubbly. When all the liquid is absorbed, add grated parmesan and fontina cheese. I used about a 1/4 cup of each cheese. Then, you can add more pepper and even a little butter, if you want.

The Yogalosophy Project: Day 27 The Last Days of Yogalosophy!

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This is part of a 28-Day Yoga Challenge to follow the guidelines of Mandy Ingber’s new book, Yogalosophy, before I review the book on the Where Is My Guru radio show on May 17th.whereismyguru

Hey, guys, I just finished recording the WIMG show LIVE for the first time, talking about Yogalosophy! Come listen to Jess, Jenn, and the other fabulous guests here. The theme for today’s show was showing up for yourself, which I think is wonderful. I loved the 5 As that Jess mentioned today from listener Josh Becker, including attention, acceptance, and affection, appreciation, and allowance. This whole project has been a month-long exercise in showing up through those principles in various ways and I’m really stoked that you’ve all expressed such enthusiasm for the book. It’s been fun! Today and tomorrow are my last official Yogalosophy days, so this is my sum-it-all-up post.

Yogalosophy by the numbers:

Starting weight: 144 lbs.
Final weigh-in: 138 lbs.

I just whipped out a tape measure to get my body measurements, too, which confirmed my “Yogalosophy leg lifts will work your butt like crazy” theory. The last time I did this, months ago, I could have sworn that my measurements were 38-31-42, but I didn’t write them down. I had no idea I’d be blogging about this stuff! Post-Yogalosophy measurements: 37-30-39.  Mandy wasn’t kidding when she jokes in her DVD that her mantra is “I have a great butt.”

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The Yogalosophy Project: Day 25 Meditate!

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This is part of a 28-Day Yoga Challenge to follow the guidelines of Mandy Ingber’s new book, Yogalosophy, before I review the book on the Where Is My Guru radio show on May 17th.

whereismyguruI love today’s Yogalosophy prompt–to work on meditation during your day and add meditation to your regular yoga poses.

“Most of our thoughts tend to be repetitive and can be categorized as follows: worrying about the past, planning for the future, listing, and worrying. A very basic form of meditation is to notice what type of thinking you are doing and simply label it…Watch the thoughts float by like clouds.”-Mandy Ingber

 

 

The Yogalosophy Project: Day 24 Before & After Photos.

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This is part of a 28-Day Yoga Challenge to follow the guidelines of Mandy Ingber’s new book, Yogalosophy, before I review the book on the Where Is My Guru radio show on May 17th.

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I can’t believe my Yogalosophy Project will be over on Friday at 11am! Go on over to Where Is My Guru to read my pre-show blog post here. Since Jess asked about it, I thought I would post some before and after photos on the blog, too. My before photos are a little fuzzy, sorry! I’m cropping people out for their privacy. This is a little nerve-wracking, honestly! I don’t usually post photos of myself on the blog.

Before Yogalosophy

Before Yogalosophy

Before Yogalosophy

Before Yogalosophy

After YogalosophyAfter Yogalosophy

After Yogalosophy

After Yogalosophy

The Yogalosophy Project: Day 22 & 23 New Steps! New Steps!

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This is part of a 28-Day Yoga Challenge to follow the guidelines of Mandy Ingber’s new book, Yogalosophy, before I review the book on the Where Is My Guru radio show on May 17th.
whereismyguru

Have you ever seen the movie Strictly Ballroom? It’s the debut film of one of my favorite directors, Baz Luhrmann, who also directed Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge! I love his films because they are so unabashedly fun and over-the-top. Gorgeous costumes, fabulous soundtracks, swooning romance.  I’m looking forward to seeing his new film, The Great Gatsby, soon. Having re-watched Strictly Ballroom last night, I realized there were some funny parallels between the film’s plot and my Yogalosophy prompts for yesterday and today. You see, the film’s protagonist, Scott, is a young Australian ballroom dancer desperate to dance his own “non-federation” steps. His inventiveness gets him in trouble with the ballroom dancing federation–they declare that there will be no “new steps” added to a big competition. Meanwhile, my Yogalosophy prompt for Day 22 involved the exact opposite. Yesterday’s theme was invention and the daily plan involved creating your own pose sequence. How cool is that? Very new steps. It got me thinking about some other serious issues that are relevant to my Yogalosophy project.

Paradoxically, the great and sometimes unfortunate thing about yoga is that there is no “federation approved” version of yoga. Carol Horton’s Yoga PhD is all about the incongruities of modern yoga culture. What do I mean by incongruities? People can invent all kinds of yoga, which makes the practice open and innovative in certain interesting ways, but also potentially contributes to some  valid criticisms of yoga as too commercial, exploitative, or overly focused on the physical body or getting a “yoga butt,” rather than emotional growth. I feel rather torn about this issue. On one hand, I hate the idea that yoga could be used to make people feel bad about their bodies. That’s just wrong, in my opinion.  Yoga should challenge you without tearing you apart or making you feel terrible. And God knows, we have enough of that in life off the mat.

But, perhaps paradoxically, I do support people using yoga as a tool, if it helps them to be healthier and stronger. That’s part of the reason I decided to do this project, truthfully. I thought it might make me healthier and stronger, without neglecting my emotional growth. Has it worked? I certainly feel physically more stable and stronger and I enjoy many of the benefits of daily exercise and many of the prompts and activities within the book. However, I’m still working on determining my personal boundary line for healthy eating behaviors and overly restrictive ones, post-project. How do I want to eat after Friday’s show? I don’t miss Diet Coke and French fries, honestly, but I do want to be able to go to restaurants without worrying about (cue ominous music) guerilla butter sneaking into my food.

So much of modern culture deals with food using moral language that it complicates eating, I think. In what other culture is there “Death by Chocolate Cake,” to cite one just example? I want to find some moderate middle-zone on diet that I can follow reasonably and avoid slipping into the “good vs. bad” thinking on food that permeates most of our culture, which is perhaps the most difficult challenge of all. For example, I’ve talked about overly restrictive behavior before in this post on orthorexia from last year. Is it smart to worry about additives in our food or eat more vegetables? I think the answer is a clear yes. But can a focus on “clean” food get a little obsessive? Again, a clear yes.  It’s one of those incongruities I’ve yet to resolve personally. I am looking forward to a new book from Melanie Klein and Anna Guest-Jelley on yoga and body image next year. I’m hoping that will prompt a wider discussion of these issues in yoga culture. In the meantime, it’s my job to figure out what my new steps will be.

The Yogalosophy Project: Day 20 & 21 The Final Stretch!

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This is part of a 28-Day Yoga Challenge to follow the guidelines of Mandy Ingber’s new book, Yogalosophy, before I review the book on the Where Is My Guru radio show on May 17th.

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So, the Where is My Guru review of Yogalosophy will happen on Friday. So excited to get to talk to everyone about the book. I’ve already earmarked a journaling exercise as one of my favorites. I’ll definitely be talking about that and other cool Yogalosophy activities with Jess next week.

Yesterday was a rest day, so I did some of Mandy’s recommended back stretches, plus the home practice sequence in my new issue of Yoga Journal. All good stuff. Then, I made a mistake that I’m paying for today. My friend Becky over at 450 Good Choices posted a hilarious arm exercise video from another celeb trainer famous for her work with celebrities and joked about doing them in public (you should really be reading their website, if you’re not!). So, I decided I would try out those easy-yet-crazy looking arm exercises. Possibly I was inspired by reading a funny NYMag article that described them this way:

“It’s difficult, actually. Essentially you hold tiny weights in your hand and then flap your arms wildly like a person in a Victorian insane asylum having an epileptic fit. You do this for an hour. At the end, I was so tired I lay on the floor.”

Well, I flapped my arms about, sans weights, like a resident of Bellevue last night (for much less than an hour, too) and woke up feeling all wrong in the morning. My shoulders hurt today, and not in that wow, tough workout way, but more in a that arm-flapping is bad for your shoulders style. I feel like such a goober. So, I am sticking with my Yogalosophy routine, y’all. It seems much safer, based entirely on using myself as an experimental celebrity workout guinea pig. Your mileage may vary, but I have to say that I’ve been doing tons of yoga poses and elliptical work and this is the first day that my shoulders felt tweaky in a not-good way. Ouch!

Today, I am going with the Yogalosophy prompt of setting your own intentions by being more careful. It was an excellent lesson to learn! It cements my feelings about modifying exercises as needed, like Mandy is doing below with Boat pose.

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The Yogalosophy Project: Day 19 When You Can’t See, It’s Tough to Do Tree Pose

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This is part of a 28-Day Yoga Challenge to follow the guidelines of Mandy Ingber’s new book, Yogalosophy, before I review the book on the Where Is My Guru radio show on May 17th.

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 Today has been kind of wild! I had an early vet appointment with one of my dogs, then an afternoon eye doctor appointment for me. Since it was my first eye check-up in over a year, they wanted to dilate my eyes. Do they do this everywhere? If you are unfamiliar, it is so not fun. Basically, they put drops in your eyes to make your pupils larger for the eye exam. When it’s over, you stagger out into the sunshine wincing like Dracula at daybreak. Bright lights hurt and you can’t see small print to read enjoyably, so you end up curling up in a little ball and going to sleep because everything else is out of the question. Not unlike Dracula, again. For about a second, I contemplated working out as usual when I got home, but the effort of trying to focus my eyes left me feeling motion sick, like I’d been reading in a moving car. I realized exercise was a no-go. Instead, I went to sleep for an absurd amount of time. I’d had a salad for lunch in between appointments and a few bites of a cheese sandwich which had turned out to be too salty for me to finish–processed food strikes again! When I woke up, I was hungry.

Since I couldn’t read anything in print, I’d been thumbing through cookbooks with photos before I fell asleep, and stumbled across this delicious-looking recipe for a vegetarian Salad Nicoise* from Melissa Lanz’s new book, The Fresh 20. It’s a really good cookbook; I mentioned it in my last Daily Muse column. Instead of tuna and capers, she adds boiled potatoes to a salad of romaine, tomatoes, green beans, and red onions. Because I had all that, save the green beans, I decided to make my own, subbing in mushrooms for the green beans. It was amazing. This is the first time I’ve had potatoes during my Yogalosophy project, since I was generally avoiding starchy vegetables, but they were the perfect addition to this salad. You just boil them, drain them, and run cool water over them. I added a little pepper to them and tossed them in the salad because I love pepper, but you don’t have to do that. I made own dressing, which I’ve learned to do well now. And it tastes so much better! I’m convinced that the secret to home cooking is good olive oil, vinegar, and fresh pepper. Those three ingredients amp up all kinds of things.

Lanz includes several homemade dressing recipes. I used her Italian dressing as an idea, but substituted a champagne vinegar for balsamic and skipped adding honey. My version was more tart and lemony, which I liked against the sweetness of the onions and tomatoes.
My take on her Italian dressing:
  • fresh ground pepper
  • oregano (I used dried, but I bet fresh would be even better)
  • lemon juice
  • extra virgin olive oil
  • champagne vinegar

Lanz’s cookbook is full of gorgeous photos, but my version turned out so pretty that I took a photo of the leftovers, which I never do.

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*I have no idea how to do proper French accents in WordPress. Je suis desolee.

Summer Manifesto

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Over at Elephant Journal, Kate Bartolotta wrote this fabulous Summer Manifesto. Great, right? It got me thinking about what I wanted to do this summer. Here’s my shortlist. What’s your list?

1. Write more.

2. Read more books. Re-read some old favorites. I have two cool books on my desk right now. A novel someone sent me called The Ghost Bride and a favorite I read a few years ago, Joshua Zeitz’s Flapper. Zeitz writes about all these fabulous people in 1920s New York: Dorothy Parker, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Clara Bow. The Ghost Bride, on the other hand, is a fictional take on a real-life Chinese phenomenon. In the past, if a man died suddenly, his family might arrange a “ghost” marriage with a living person. Sounds intriguing, right?

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3. Get outside! It’s gorgeous today.

4. Take a nap in my hammock.

5. Go back to Airlie Gardens, which is this fabulous local garden that the county owns, that is particularly pretty in spring. We saw a fox on my last day trip, which I thought was a loose dog at first. Surprise wildlife! Here’s me. It’s so lush it looks like an Olan Mils backdrop, right?
Airlie

 

The Yogalosophy Project: Day 17 & 18 How Yogalosophy Killed the Frappuccino

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This is part of a 28-Day Yoga Challenge to follow the guidelines of Mandy Ingber’s new book, Yogalosophy, before I review the book on the Where Is My Guru radio show on May 17th.

whereismyguru

 No major updates for Day 17 so I didn’t post yesterday, except that I have a story to tell y’all.  You know how Starbucks has those frappuccino specials in the spring? Normally, I’m all over that. Well, this week I decided I could swing by and get myself one. I took a look at the calories in my longtime favorite–the light caramel one–which is truly a scary act for latte lovers (don’t look up anything venti, if you love your white mocha lattes) and realized it wasn’t so rich that I couldn’t have one. I haven’t had anything from Starbucks recently either, because I got a milk frother for the holidays and have been making my own coffees at home. So, I stopped by Starbucks and ordered one, sans whipped cream and those “crunchy” sprinkles they’re doing now. There was that little green straw, the familiar caramel swirl. This is going to be yummy, I thought. I picked up my cute little cup and sipped. Then, a terrible thing occurred.

It was too sweet. I couldn’t finish it. Yogalosophy has killed my love of caramel frappuccinos. 

I could not believe this was happening. To me. Now, I have never been one of those women who says things are “too sweet.” Ever.When I hear someone say that cake is too sweet or chocolate is too sweet, I generally think, haha, I will eat that cake, sucker. But here’s the thing I’ve learned over the last two and a half weeks: cutting out processed foods really does change your taste buds. Reset them. Things that used to taste normal to you will suddenly seem overly sweet or salty if you try them again. That salad dressing you liked before? It’ll taste like a cube of salt. And you won’t really want to finish that  sweet treat. Even if you’re not a perfect dieter like me, the change will still take place. Your taste buds will have become used to lower levels of saltiness and sweetness from the fruits and vegetables you’re eating. Anything more will seem wrong. Which is weirdly refreshing.  The secret to eating less junk food is apparently just to eat less junk food. 
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Funnily enough, today’s Yogalosophy routine is about staying positive and getting your groove on. Mandy includes some of my favorite exercise music on her playlist–a little Bob Marley & Michael Franti–so, for Day 18, I’m going to hop on the elliptical and then do a little yoga.