The Rabid Grammarian

It's Marriage Equality week at the Supreme Court. The Justices will decide the fate of Marriage equality twice this week. People have been camped out at the Court for 5 days (despite snow) in hopes to to hear the arguments today and tomorrow.

Here's hoping that the Court will do the right thing and decide in favor of equality, especially striking down DOMA, which if anyone had read the Act (and I have) you know it's unconstitutional.

Today, March 26, 2013, the Court will determine the legality of California Prop 8, that limits marriage to opposite sex couples.
Tomorrow, March 27, 2013, the Court will address DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton (aw Bubba, how could you?) that he now says was a mistake to have ever signed. DOMA limits the definition of marriage to opposite-sex couples (and yet in something like 20+ states you can marry your 13 year old first cousin.)

Although I'm pretty sure we don't have a chance with Scalia or Thomas, here's hoping the rest of the judges aren't so addled they do the right thing and uphold Marriage Equality on both fronts.

Today, I've been trying to call the White House since the lines opened at 9 AM EST. I'm trying to let President Obama know that I want him to veto  HR 933, the short term spending bill due to the inclusion of a dangerous rider by Congress, The Monsanto Protection Act,that is harmful to our environment, family farmers and citizens.
I have yet to get through, but I'll continue to call until the lines close at 5PM EST.

Because I wanted to get my opinion to the White House, I also filled out a contact the White House form. Contrary to some "news" outlets, the Obama Administration is the most transparent and most available administration ever. I'm grateful that this administration provides multiple methods for Americans to express their opinions.

I'm getting my voice heard. You should as well!

You can use the form above or try calling the White House at 202-456-1111.

Sexy People Reading-Raquel Welch.

Ever since the birth of our child, I've been focused on making improvements. Improvements in myself, our home, our lifestyle. It's totally normal to want to make such improvements to provide a better life for your child.
One of my biggest bugaboos is a healthy eating lifestyle. More than 50% of the US population is considered obese, and I'm pretty sure that despite BMI being an absolute junk measure of overall health, that statistic would still be accurate without using BMI as a measure. This generation of children will be the first who will not live longer than their parents due to health related conditions such as diabetes, coronary artery disease and cancer. Many researchers believe that this is directly related to the Standard American Diet (which ironically abbreviates to "SAD.") I want my kid to have a long, healthy life. I don't want my kid to suffer physically or emotionally (because fat kids are targeted for ridicule and usually have low self esteem) because of a completely preventable condition.  So I decided now, while he's young, before it becomes an issue, to be proactive and change the way my family eats.

Thankfully, my husband is not a meat & potatoes only kind of guy, he'll eat pretty much anything I put in front of him, so making these changes are fairly easy as I'm not met with much resistance. First, we cut out nearly all processed products. We still have a few items, DH seems resistant to give up cereal and tortilla chips, but we buy organic, non-GMO ones that have less than 5 ingredients. I also still purchase canned beans and tomatoes, tofu and such. Technically, anything in the grocery store that isn't fresh produce has been processed, even minimally, but the aim is to eat as close to whole foods as possible.
The next step was to buy all only organic (except when utterly unavailable.) We're lucky we can do this, because our grocery bill did jump quite a bit. We also decided to eat only pasture raised, grass-fed meat (beef/chicken) and only wild-caught fish. This is probably the priciest item, so because of the increase in price, we matched it to a decrease in consumption. Americans eat far too much meat in general. It used to be a treat, or used only for flavor, rather as the main event.  Our consumption of meat averages to about once a week.  So, we're mostly lacto-ovo vegetarian/plant based at this point.

This is great, it's better for our health (I've lost about 20 pounds just from diet change, even without exercise) and better for the environment (commercial meat production is one of the most destructive elements on the environment) and my kid is growing up with healthy views of food as fuel. But, I want to go further. I want to go mostly vegan.

And there's the rub "mostly" vegan. I have issues with veganism in specific. First, I truly believe that to be 100% vegan or vegetarian you really do need a lot of knowledge, practically a degree in nutrition to do it right. I was vegetarian in the past. Except I didn't really eat vegetables. I ate a lot of cheese, pasta, bread, beans, rice and meat substitutes. I wasn't a vegetarian, I just didn't eat meat. I was a carbotarian. I was probably pretty nutrient deficient in some areas. So, even though I'm much more versed in nutrition now, I'm still not confident about going 100% vegan.
Second, I hate the term "vegan." It brings to mind all the raging vegans who would judge me for my food choices and who would spring graphic images of animal cruelty on me while I was eating a cheeseburger. They are the dietary equivalent of pro-lifers who force images of fetuses on people against their will. Hey Vegenazis, people don't like preachy and invasive. It does your cause no service. Subtle revolution will work better for you to earn the hearts and minds of the populace. Cows are bred for food. They are 100% domesticated animals. There is no such thing as a wild cow (to my knowledge) roaming the wild lands. However, we are eating too much meat and in that process, we are falling into inhumane practices to support consumption.
Third, many of the vegan recipes I find are reliant on heavily processed vegan "butter" and "cheese." My family tries to eat a whole food diet and these just don't really fit. Organic butter from pasture raised cows is a better choice in my opinion. It's closer to a whole food and yet consciously obtained.

I have no issues with an omnivorous diet, provided it's done consciously. Our society does consume too much dairy and meat, which leads to poor human and poor environmental health. We need to reduce consumption, focus on a plant based diet using meat and dairy as a flavoring rather than a main event, and make sure that the meat and dairy we do use are sustainably and pasture raised, fed on a natural diet (which is grass for cows, not grain) and free of antibiotics and other unhealthy additives. Our society is overfed and yet starving (nutritionally) to death.

And don't give me that "but without Big Ag/Big Food we can't feed the world" sh*t. The truth is we aren't feeding the world. People are starving despite all these so called innovations in food production. Cattle & commercially raised chickens get more than 50% of the antibiotics made, and now we have antibiotic resistant super bugs and people are dying of disease that could be cured with those drugs. Feedlot cattle eat something like 5 pounds of grain (corn) to produce one pound of meat (which in the US may turn into one person's meat consumption for one meal). If that grain were given to people instead, it could solve the hunger crisis in this world.

So there it is, the lifestyle change tangent (which will probably be one of many.) For my and my family's health and to reduce environmental impact we're trying to be weekday vegans and omnivore weekenders (though still mostly vegetarian.)

If this lifestyle change is something you have been interested in pursuing, I encourage you to watch the following films: Hungry For Change (also a great book), Forks Over Knives (also a book and cookbook) Food, Inc, and Vegucated. Good books are Fast Food Nation, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and In Defense of Food.

I'll be cobbling together a cookbook & plant-based blogs post soon.

Today is the official first day of Spring. I have a love-hate relationship with Spring. I love that Spring beings with it the promise of warmer weather and life in bloom. I hate that Spring beings with it pollen and differing air pressure. I personally have no issue with pollen. My husband, on the other hand makes all sorts of fun loud sounds at all hours which is not so fun for either of us. In addition, this Spring has brought in a pressure system that has been interfering with my system, resulting in chronic vertigo for quite some time now.
If I thought getting anything done with a small child was difficult before, it is now combined with the feeling like I am always spinning. Add to this that my child is now increasingly mobile and it's a recipe for disaster.
Basically, I have been utterly useless for most things with the exception of getting dinner on the table most nights and watching the entirety of Battlestar Gallactica on Netflix. But I wanted to pop in and make a post, hopefully I'll get back to posting regularly soon.

In my pursuit of healthier living I've come across many many ideas. Since I have a pretty well developed bullsh!t detector I have a fairly easy time at negotiating the miasma of theories about health and weight loss. Through all of my research I've come to the conclusion that trying to lose weight generally ends in failure while adapting to a healthier lifestyle is generally successful and often does result in a loss of weight.
Often though, a healthier lifestyle (and I define this as adopting a whole-foods diet filled with plants-based nutrition and little or no processed foods and moderate daily exercise) doesn't result in that much weight loss and people feel that the whole process was unsuccessful. That's where the concept of Health at Every Size (HAES) comes into play.
We are a very image-dependent culture. Our media has generally shaped societies view of what is considered attractive. We've become a society where healthy people are considered overweight and near emaciated people have become an image of health. We've come to rely on image as a measure of health rather than actual health as a measure of health. Even the medical community has been tainted to a degree.
People can be healthy or unhealthy at a range of sizes. We are individuals and health is a very individual process. I have been overweight (or even obese) much of my life. I was generally very healthy considering. I was very active comparably and I had better blood work than people half my size. At one point a doctor I was seeing told me that she had to re-run my blood work because she didn't believe that it was correct. My blood work was comparable to a professional athlete's. I weighed 230ish pounds and was categorized as obese by BMI statistics. She was the first doctor who ever told me the results of my tests said I was healthy and didn't go on to tell me that I needed to lose weight. One doctor had actually said he was "positive" I would have diabetes, based only on my size and wanted to give me a pill before testing me.  After he read my stunningly healthy results (I had better labs than my very trim father) he still wanted me to diet.
I have always been moderately healthy. I say moderately because I didn't feel as healthy as my blood work had shown. Health is a complicated issue. It's not just how you feel, but also how you look (I think we can agree that someone with dull skin or such can look unhealthy) and there is also underlying health or unhealth you may not even know is happening. Health can be physical, emotional or both.
I truly believe in Health at Every Size, but with caveats. It's true you can be healthy at a range of sizes, but that doesn't mean that you will always be healthy and even if you are healthy now, it doesn't mean that you always will be or that you have a free pass to immerse yourself in unhealthy behaviors. I also believe that it really isn't healthy to carry significant weight on your frame, even if you exercise regularly, even if you're currently regarded as "healthy" medically. The human skeletal system is not evolutionarily prepared to carry such weight. Over time even a healthy person of generous size will start to have ill effects on their joints and in their skeletal structure. I'm not saying everyone is supposed to be skinny, I still think that there is a range of healthy size, but there is an upper limit of Health at Every Size. In effect, it's not Health at EVERY Size, it's Health at a damn bit larger range of sizes than the medical community and the media accepts, but there is a danger zone depending on your skeletal frame.
I've known far too many who use the Health at Every Size as an excuse to not change, demanding that everyone should just accept them for who they are. While that's true, it's not HAES, that is "Fat Acceptance," and it's abusing the HAES movement. Most of my experience with the Fat Acceptance movement doesn't focus on health at all. I'm also not suggesting that people of size shouldn't be accepted in society. If you eat a healthy diet and do regular movement/exercise and your medical tests show that you are healthy, fine, you can claim HAES. If you're eating junk food and the only movement you do with excitement is from couch to fridge and you're relying on pills to make you healthy, I don't care what you weigh or what you look like, you're just not allowed to hide behind HAES, in my opinion.
I live in a community where there is a lot of shaming if you want to lose weight, no matter the reason. Many of the people I know are Goddess sized and when I mention that I'm trying to lose some weight and return to my body's happy size/weight, I get "but you're perfect and beautiful the way you are" or "skinny women aren't attractive" or "bone is for the dog, meat is for the man" and other similar jests trying to dissuade me from pursuing what I consider a healthier lifestyle.

So the breakdown I guess is that not all thin people are healthy, not all larger people are unhealthy. There is a wider range of size at which people can be healthy and society and the medical community need to get a clue. While there are larger people who are healthy there are far more who aren't (but that doesn't mean a doctor should automatically think heavier = unhealthy) but even healthy larger people run a risk of musculo-skeletal issues in the future no matter how healthy or active they are because the human body does have a load limit, there is an upper cap that depends on your individual skeletal system and over time the circulatory system may suffer from needing to pump to a larger frame. Everyone should strive to be healthier, and some should strive to be healthier and thinner, though not everyone needs to weigh 115 pounds. Also, I guarantee if you switch to a whole-foods, 70%+ plant-based (and preferably organic) diet, tossing out all those processed products and non-food items (remember, food comes from farms, products come from factories) you will feel, look and be healthier. There's a reason the Standard American Diet abbreviates to "SAD."

Question of The Week: Does the Internet really make us more informed?

I've often found myself asking "in an an age with so much information available, how is it that so many continue to be so ignorant of basic facts?" This is a greater issue than simple access to information. Even with adequate access, people choose to remain ignorant or simply do not know the facts on basic issues.

In this day of information it is far easier to suffer from information overload than to be well-informed. There is still the bias that if it is accessible on the Internet that it is true when in fact most of the easily accessible information isn't accurate or isn't information. It's often opinion, rhetoric, propaganda or advertisement. Unfortunately, because our educational system has suffered such deep cuts in quality, many are unable to discern the difference between the truth and other forms of media.

The inability to think critically and analyze to discern the difference between true information and the rest is crippling us in the information age. The Internet certainly gives us access to information but like any resource it is up to the user to wade through the mire to the verified truth.

The Internet age also makes it all too easy for people to trust one source as truth without confirmation from a separate independent source. Even more challenging is finding sources that don't refer back to each other. The Internet is a very incestuous source of information.
So does the Internet make us more informed? Only in the hands of an intelligent and adept user. In the hands of the uneducated, voluntarily ignorant, or lazy the Internet only serves to perpetuate whatever the user chooses to believe rather than what is actually and demonstrably true.

Once again I find myself on a soapbox calling for more effective education and comprehensive education reform. It is only when we give people the power to access and analyze information that it is truly useful.