Heart Health

Thomas Rude is my very favorite artist. I was fortunate enough to meet him once, while I was visiting Portland. You can check out some of his prints here. I have the one of the American flag and the one of a heart. It’s the one of the heart that I’ve been meditating on a bit today.

I’ve been thinking about the phrase “good hearted” a lot  lately. To have a good heart is to be kind, decent, compassionate. It is to be emotionally generous and benevolent. I want to have a good heart, in every one of these ways, but I also want to have a strong heart – the kind that keeps pumping, well into my eighties. Maybe even my nineties. It’s why I spent the month of January trying out a whole-foods, plant based diet (which I loved, and promptly abandoned – it’s been ice cream and cheddar cheese at Casa Minify of late!)

Enough. I turn thirty one years old on Sunday. The love of my life is now thirty, with a family history of high cholesterol. It’s time we made a more permanent change. January went far better than I expected, but I don’t think I can commit to being a permanent vegan. Mostly vegan, yes, but not entirely. It’s not that I missed specific foods – I expected to miss them dearly, but cheese and ice cream weren’t even that desirable, within about a week of giving them up. The challenge for me is that a vegan diet requires a lot of thoughtful commitment to things like Vitamins D and B12, and in a household where one member can’t have tree nuts or soy, it was a bit complicated to plan balanced meals that met all of our nutritional needs.

I did a lot of reading, and the scientific evidence is piling up in support of the mediterranean diet.  (Side note: have we talked about my obsession with the Nurses Health Study? No? It’s the greatest long term observational research design OF ALL TIME. Let’s nerd out over research methods some other time, though.) Today I’m interested in one of the many findings that have come out of the Nurses Health Study – what you eat now matters later. And a diet high in polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats, and low in saturated fats and transfats, predicts better long term health outcomes. The mediterranean diet is still mostly plant based, and focuses not on reducing total fat, but on eating better quality fats (olive oil in place of butter, for example, or more nuts and less red meat). I’m thinking seriously about committing to following a more mediterranean diet at our house. I was drawn to it because it’s evidence based, mostly plant based, favors whole foods, and is good for us and the planet. Also – who are we kidding – because it still allows a glass of wine with dinner, which frankly makes the whole thing about ten times more appealing. I’m not interested in dieting for my looks, or lists of forbidden foods, or temporary change. I’m interested in changing my long term habits so that we can live a longer, healthier, more sustainable life.

If you’d like to follow along or read more about the mediterranean diet, you can read more from the Mayo Clinic here.

30×30

Next week, I turn 30.

Have you dear readers seen those “30 before 30” lists that people make, with 30 resolutions to accomplish before their 30th birthday? I made one of those, and now I’m afraid to even look at it, because it went sort of like this:

Resolution: learn to play a stringed instrument.

Progress: I bought a ukulele. At Christmas. I’ve practiced 3 or 4 times…

I’m not sure I’d call myself someone who actually plays the ukulele, so much as someone who spent fifty bucks on one. Sigh. Resolution fail. I’ve been doing this with New Year’s Resolutions for my entire life. So, in the spirit of beating myself up less (I think that was number 13 on the original list…), I’m just going to call it 30×30ish, and put my resolutions on the internet so that maybe I’ll feel obliged to honor some more of them. Here we go!

1. Learn a stringed instrument. For real this time.
2. Learn more Spanish. (I’d like to be conversationally fluent)
3. Go snorkeling in Belize (this one is happening, on a trip with my awesome mom and sister and Aunt Maurie, and it’s going to be EPIC).
4. Get in the habit of wearing sunscreen and sunglasses every day.
5. Exercise every day. Cultivate the habit. (So far my longest streak is four days…ha! So I’ll settle for four days a week. I’d call that effective habit change.)
6. Finish my PhD coursework (Two. More. Weeks.!!!)
7. Stop complaining. And nagging, which is complaining’s bossy cousin.
8. Talk less impulsively? I need some sort of filter between the thoughts in my head and the words I say out loud.
9. Start remembering the laundry in the washing machine, instead of forgetting it for three days at a time.
10. Eat better. More plants. Less sugar.
11. Cultivate the habit of keeping my car clean so I won’t be so embarrassed to let someone ride in it (I actually did this one! Hooray! Sheila the Civic is generally spotless on the inside – although the outside, it being pollen season, is bright bright yellow at the moment, but so is everyone else’s car – that’s life in springtime)
12. Be better about keeping regular doctor’s appointments (done! I’ve been to see my everyday doctor, my lady doctor, my optometrist…and the dentist is next week! They were all quite polite about how long it had been since my last visit. Sorry, Mom. But look how much better I’m doing!)
13. Go to more live concerts, because they make me happy.
14. Start contra dancing again, for the same reason
15. Find some balance. (I thought this would be the hardest one, but actually, it’s one I’ve done well with. I think it was all about realizing that I really do care more about life with Josh and family and friends, and about living a healthy balanced life, than I do about anything else, so I stopped putting other things like work and school and busy-ness before those two most important things. School matters, of course, but family matters so much more).
16. Get on a real sleep schedule. (I did it! It’s about consistency, and avoiding caffeine at night, and I think exercise and eating right and managing stress are important too…but mostly it’s just deciding to go to bed and get up at a reasonable hour. And avoiding sugar. I swear, sugar is no good. But so tempting…)
17. Join a CSA (done! We joined the one at Coon Rock Farm, and we’re looking forward to deliveries starting in a week or two!)
18. Start keeping a planner, faithfully (done! Mine is the Life Planner from Erin Condren, by the excellent recommendation of my friend/boss Stephanie, and I live and die by it. It’s made life a lot better, because I no longer forget the important stuff).
19. Spend more time outside (easy this time of year!)
20. Ride my bike more
21. Reconnect with my best friend (Done! Sarah Daye, be we in different towns or different planets, let’s never drift apart again. Ever).
22. Make more art.
23. Give up diet soda (I know. This one again? But I’m just no good at honoring it. It’s a problem).
24. Finish an academic paper, and send it to a journal (I’m trying to go easy on the academic goals, because this blog is all about having a life outside of school).
25. Go on vacation with our dear friends Zack and Amanda again this year! And every year. They’re our perfect pair to vacation with.
26. Keep in better touch with my sister, who is one of my favorite people on earth. She came up with this one. It was a good one. We e-mail every day now, which is quick and easy and now we’re turning into one of those pairs of sisters who communicate about all life events major and minor in real time. I love it. If we start dressing all creepy like the Olson twins, someone stage an intervention, but until then, I think it’s awesome.
27. Visit New York. (Confession: I have never explored America’s most famous city. Not ever. This is the year I really do it.)
28. Keep minifying (it’s an ongoing resolution).
29. Be a better pet owner (Take the dog to some training classes, and more walks, and more adventures. And take better care of the fish tank. I love my fish tank. But I could do a better job as its sovereign protector. Like changing the filter on an actual schedule…)
30. Have more adventures with Josh. We’ve had such a fun ten years(!) since we met – here’s to making the next ten even more of an adventure.
31. The end goal, so to speak – I just want to keep working more on being the kind of person I can really like. There are a lot of things I like about myself. There’s a lot of room for improvement. All things in time…but I think part of growing up is learning to treat other people well, to think before you speak, to take things in stride…and those are all things I’m still working on. I probably always will be! Maybe we all are.

So. I’m not going to stress out over how few of these I’ve accomplished yet. I’m just going to write them all down, take a deep breath, and remember that I have the rest of my life. 30 is just another year, and I have the feeling it’s going to be a great one!

At sunrise

Sunrise photo by the very talented Tammy Strobel, of the blog rowdykittens – she takes the loveliest photos of early morning on the California ranch where she and her husband have been living in their tiny house.

Several of my favorite blogs about simple reading or minimalism include gorgeous photos of sunrise, and musings on the early mornings, and every time I read them, I think about how I would love to be the kind of person who rises early, cheerful and energetic. That only happens when I’m camping. Early or late, when I sleep indoors I wake up slowly, throw on a bathrobe, and slouch downstairs toward the french press. I stay in the bathrobe as late in the day as possible. I don’t think I’ve ever taken a photo of a sunrise in my life.

I have these really clear childhood memories of waking up in my big warm bed and lying there as late as possible, until my parents would practically drag me downstairs for breakfast. We would eat, I’d get dressed in a hurry, and then I’d wait outside for the bus. I had this awesome purple puffy coat that my mom got at a consignment store, and I’d wait outside in the dark, snug in my coat, until the bus rounded the corner. In middle and high school, I had a parrot named Charlie. He spent all morning every morning yelling “Caroline!” and waiting for me to say “what?” so that he could yell “Time to get up!”, and then laugh at me as I pulled the covers up over my head. This may have been how he learned the expressions “shut up!” and “stupid bird,” because 15 year olds aren’t polite to anyone, even parrots.

I thought it would always be this way – I am a girl who really likes to sleep in. Here lately, though, I’m up before dawn most mornings, and I think I’m starting to like it. This is no small thing. Historically, dawn has been my never hour – as in, the hour I never want to see, because I don’t want to be awake that early or still up from the night before. Who knew that dawn would grow on me? In particular, I’ve come to appreciate the way the light shifts across the woods behind our house, lighting up different trees in succession, while I sit and read for class and drink my coffee and eat my sugar free cereal (I’m back on the sugar free bandwagon again…le sigh). I had this idea that I was going to take early morning walks with the dog and enjoy the sunrise, but that hasn’t happened at all. The dog sleeps in even when I don’t, and neither of us relish the cold, so we stay inside and snuggle on the sofa while I read as late into the morning as possible, until it warms up a bit outside. How funny, to finally become an early riser, only to discover that the thing I wanted to actually do with this hour of my day doesn’t appeal to me at all. I open up all of the downstairs curtains so that the house is flooded with light, and I just sit and read and soak in the sunrise while the house is suffused with the smell of coffee.

I still sleep in on the weekends, though. Baby steps, people. Baby steps. In (almost) exactly two months, I will turn 30, and one of my goals before then is to take a single lovely photo of a sunrise.