My dad was a wonderful man, but he really wasn’t much of a grownup. I think that was a lot of his appeal to so many people – especially children. My mom always was the grownup – she was the one who made sure that everything that needed to get done got done. This doesn’t mean that my dad was a deadbeat. He wasn’t at all. He worked hard and supported our family financially. He did all of the “man” things around the house and he did them with pride.

By not being a grownup I mean that my dad was the person who had creative ambitions and a very silly sense of humor. He was the person who followed his passions wherever they led him. Like a child, he was filled with wonder – even when he was an old man. He delighted in nature. He spent most of his free time behind a camera lens. When he wasn’t behind the lens he we sitting in front of an editing machine. When he wasn’t sitting in front of an editing machine, he was taking 100 mi Saturday morning bike rides. My mom on the other hand made sure the bills were paid, the savings were squirreled away, the pantry was stocked and the house was clean. She took a lot of pride in all of these things. She was a homebody and that made her very happy. Personally, I don’t think that was a great trade-off in a relationship, but I think they both were very happy to have their own separate passions.

For the last 9 years since my mom passed away I have taken care of my father. For the first 4 years, it wasn’t much more than providing moral support and financial advice. Frankly, during this period I sort of covered my eyes and pretended not to see the warning signs of someone who was struggling with managing his day to day life. During the last 5 years it was so much more. After his stroke, I took over all of his finances. My husband and I cleaned out his house and sold it before the housing market crashed. I made sure he had the best physical therapy and rehab after his stroke. We moved him close to us into an assisted living community that really grew to love him. I did my best, even though I dealt with people who sometimes told me that I didn’t do enough. According to some of his friends I should have had him move into my own home. I think that they were in denial about how ill he really was. My home had stairs and steep hills. My father had enough problems negotiating getting out of bed in the morning. I just wanted him to be safe. I wanted people who were capable of taking care of him to do so.

I have to admit, in some ways I am a lot like my father. I have my passions, and I follow them, consequences be damned. I’m not a good nurturer. I’m not patient. There’s a reason I don’t have my own children, it’s because my lifestyle and my personality aren’t compatible with that kind of responsibility. I feel like I introduce enough chaos into my life all by myself, I don’t need any more.

Dad, even though you were only a fraction of former yourself near the end of your life, I will miss having you as part of my life. You had a smile for everyone. You enjoyed all of the simple things in life. You delighted in the outdoors and in wildlife. You weren’t the perfect father, but you were the perfect father to raise someone like me. Rest in peace. I love you.

I remember being in college. I remember all the bad things we ate and drank. I also remember how skinny we all were back then. I was a Math & Computer Science major…. you know the people who sit in front of video games and other flickering screens for hours on end. We were still slender. Most of the guys I went to school with didn’t have a 6 pack, but at least they didn’t have a thick cushion of fat on their bellies. As for me – people still call me thin (which I disagree with, but more on that later) now – but back then I weighed a good 20lbs less than I do today. There was nothing to me, neither muscle nor fat. I was skinny. I don’t consider that term to be complimentary.

What I’m seeing today is light years away from what I saw in 1986. College students have changed a lot in under 30 years. Now it is surprising to see someone who is slender or fit. Even most “thin” kids have a good layer of fat on them. They are the size of the folks that we considered “chubby” back when I was in school. The heavier kids now have rolls of fat. When you put on a bathing suit, the beach does not lie. There’s a lot more to those puffy faces than “baby fat”. Most young men have beer bellies fit for 40 year olds, and double chins. Young women have saddle bags, paunches and serious muffin tops. They all look like if you’d poke them with a finger that it would sink right in – a couple of knuckles deep in many instances. What gives? With all of this talk about obesity in America, you would think that the the more educated contingent of our young folks would at least make an attempt at being healthy and fit.

I’ll say it again. What gives?

I keep hearing that skinny is the new rich. Maybe it really is that elusive to most people. I’d argue that most people shouldn’t be striving for skinny or even thin. One of the best quotes that I’ve heard (I wish I could remember the source) is that skinny people look good in clothes, lean people look good in bathing suits (ok it was naked). I have to agree.

Lean DOES NOT equal thin. Thin is what you see in Paris and in a lot of other major cities around the globe where being thin is part of being fashionable. Thin is what you see on fashion runways. Thin is typically what you get when you do a lot of endurance athletics. Think about what your average marathon runner looks like. Some of those people have a surprising amount of fat on them percentage wise. To get thin, you need to exercise a LOT more and/or eat a lot less. You can get skinny on a diet of Twinkies if you don’t eat a lot of them. That experiment has already been done. See the Twinkie Diet Professor. To get lean, you need to eat an appropriate amount of calories for the weight you want to maintain, and you also need to eat “clean”. Lots of veggies, some fruits, plus fatty fish and lean grass fed meats.

Lean can be thin – but that depends entirely on your body type. Lean also can be considered grossly overweight if you’re using the BMI chart and you have a stocky build and you are a muscular person.

As for me, give me muscles. I want Michele Obama arms and a sprinter’s legs. I’d rather be lean than thin. I definitely don’t want to be considered skinny again. And… I definitely don’t want to be soft.

I have successfully copied ALL business related posts to my consulting company’s blog – Two Kayaks Blog. Going forward, all topics related to management, running a business etc. will be posted on that site. If you want to see travel pictures, garden pictures and learn more about the research that I have done on diet, exercise, and household renovations you will want to keep reading here.

Thank you all for sticking with me for all these years!

Stay tuned.

1. Spent a long weekend in New Orleans. Basically ate and drank my way all over town. I’ve been good, don’t I deserve a cheat weekend (um… how did that turn into 5 days of gluttony, I even ate bread and a biscuit!)? Came home at 137lbs – that sucked.
2. Promptly got sick for a week and a half once I got home. Bad diet? Too many cocktails? Air travel? Lots of strangers? Check, Check, Check and Check. Couch, chair, bed… repeat. Ate lots of homemade vegetable soups that I froze earlier in the winter.
3. Two day whirlwind trip to Atlanta to help out my dad with some paperwork. Car wreck on the way home – while still 7 hours from home.
4. Three days of going to the doctor and sitting around at home recovering from muscle soreness from said wreck. Nothing serious, just some muscular issues inflaming my sciatic nerve.
5. Ate half of a large cheese and pepperoni pizza with red wine. I can’t even begin to justify this extravaganza except to say that I survived a scary accident. Yes, I paid for the wheat and cheese and processed meat in triplicate over the next few days.

Now, saying all of that… how did I fare? I’d say not bad, but not what I wanted to see.

Recall from the beginning of the month – 135lbs / 20.9% fat

Now at the end of the month – 130.5lbs / 21.2% fat
Between my waist, hips, and thighs I lost about 4″.

This is a great example of why diet alone won’t work, you need some weight training to maintain muscle mass. I lost more muscle/lean mass than fat over the month. In fact, I lost nearly FIVE times more muscle than fat. 0.758lbs fat vs 3.732lbs muscle. My diet also wasn’t quite as clean as it could have been. I ate out a lot more than usual, my alcohol consumption was up, and I wasn’t eating my vegetables. I did a reasonable job of staying away from processed foods.

I’ve always heard that a good diet is 80% of getting lean, and I agree. Even with my transgressions I managed to lose 4.5lbs. I would say that I ate “clean” about 75% of the time. I need to do a little better; and get some exercise to get the results I want.

Later that day I noticed this:

Now, that’s kind of odd. Where did that big rip in the screen porch come from? It wasn’t there this morning… Well, what do we have here?

That’s one big fat clam. How did it get 3 stories in the air? I’ll tell you. A seagull picked it up and was looking for a hard place to drop it to crack it open. We see them doing it on the beach all the time. Sometimes you think you need a helmet out there. I don’t think he was anticipating it going into our screen porch. Damn seagull, now we have to do a repair.

Our house is an easy 20 minute walk to Tubb’s Inlet at the West End of Ocean Isle Beach. One nice thing about living on the West End is the really pretty sunset walk after dinner most times of the year. All of the beach pictures that I typically post are from the West End.

I have been wanting to take a walk to the East End for a while now. We rarely get down there, except when we ride our bicycles. When we do that we don’t really get to take a good look at the erosion on the beach near Shallotte Inlet because it isn’t accessible by road anymore.

We knew it was going to be a long walk. We figured that it would take about 3 or 4 hours round trip, depending on how often we stopped to pull out the camera or the binoculars. The island itself is about 7 miles long. By bike from our house to the East End it is a 10 mile round trip, but we figured it would be a little shorter walking on the beach.

Yesterday the weather was sunny and in the low 60′s so it was going to be a perfect day for a long walk. The tides also lined up nicely for taking a walk all the way to the other end of the island and back. High tide was at 11:09am. We decided to leave around 1pm when the tide was just low enough for us to avoid walking on soft sand. It also assured that we’d be arriving at the East End while the tide was still going out. This is important as you’ll see by the pictures.

Here’s a picture of the far East End past all of the houses. Shallotte Inlet is filling in with sand and this picture faces the inlet.

The houses in the distance are on Holden Beach. As usual, click on the picture if you want to see a larger image.

This view looks back at the last set of houses on Ocean Isle Beach. This picture is taken from the far end of the island. As you can see, it is quite a ways to the houses. The very tip of the East End has a lot of sand and a lot of sand dunes. Unfortunately, the island is slowly shifting to the North here.

These houses used to be a few rows back from ocean front. They are on Fourth Street. On most of the island First Street has houses that back up directly to the sand. That tells quite a story, there are a lot of “missing” houses down here. These guys are hoping that the sand bags will save them until the proposed terminal groin gets approved and installed.

I really feel for the people who own this house. It is the last one left on the row of houses that most recently surrendered to the sea. Take a close look at the pilings. They have been extended to keep the house level. Also notice the water level. This is about 4 hours after high tide. You know where the water goes when the tide is high, right? I’m not sure if they will be able to save this one, but they are still enjoying it. I saw someone on the deck with their little dog enjoying the sun.

I had to include this house more from the curiosity factor than anything else. Excuse the finger in the shot, I was too lazy to crop it out. This house is surrounded by telephone poles. What else can those supports be? They are ROUND. Most houses are situated on 8″x8″ square posts at the beach. This is just plain weird. It almost looks like they were an afterthought. I think that they might have been added later to keep the house from leaning over because it was sitting on shifting sand. Very strange.

I hope that you can learn from my experience without having to live through it.

Since 2000 I have been almost exclusively working for startup high tech companies with tight deadlines, venture capital funding, and tough market competition. I’ve wondered at times if I would see my next paycheck because funds were getting so low. I’ve had to lay off 2/3s of my team on one day. I’ve been let go after my team made important deliverables so that a company could save a buck and continue to limp along. To put it mildly, I’ve seen some pretty severe job stress that would make a lot of people nuts. I thought I thrived on it. Mentally I liked the change and I loved the fast paced challenges. Physically, over the years it has been taking its toll. The funny part is that when I took a low stress job with a very successful company it stressed me out even more than the old “high stress” jobs did. I learned a lot about myself. I was not adapted to being a cog in the machine. I wanted to make a difference, I wanted to change how things were done for the better – and frankly in a lot of environments like the one I was in, that wasn’t about to happen. As I’ve said before, I felt like I was wearing a jacket 4 sizes too small when I walked into my office.

On the whole, I feel blessed because I was so healthy through the years. I maintained an appropriate weight, I stayed active, my blood pressure was low and all the various blood tests I’ve ever had were “perfect”. I always thought I had a cast iron stomach because I never caught stomach flus or ended up with food poisoning. I believed that I could eat just about anything. I was wrong. Oh boy was I ever.

I’ve always had some issues with acid reflux. You know – heartburn – that burpy, bad taste in your mouth after eating too much or too fast. That didn’t slow me down. I figured it was normal. I think most people think that it is normal – all those Tums and Rolaids commercials make you think everyone gets it. No it is not normal. Not when it happens to you every day and you’re eating Tums like candy. There is something wrong – you need to see a doctor. I didn’t, not at first.

What finally got me to a doctor was two courses of antibiotic treatment that I needed one summer: first for a localized staph infection and then for a root canal that punctured my sinus. The extremely strong antibiotics setoff a chain reaction in my stomach that was beyond terrible. I was miserable. My heartburn was awful and to make matters much worse my stomach was incredibly sensitive when touched. I also had a lump in my throat that would not go away. Off I went with a referral to a gastroenterologist and that started the long journey to where I am today. I am not exaggerating when I say that this completely changed my life.

The pathologist report after an endoscopy came back with two diagnoses. I had gastritis (which explained why my stomach hurt so much), and I had Barrett’s Esophagus. That stopped me dead in my tracks. This couldn’t be! That is an affliction for overweight middle aged men – not slim (ahem… middle aged) women. Barrett’s is a pre-cancerous condition that is manifested by the presence of stomach lining cells (goblet cells) in the esophagus. It is caused by chronic long term acid reflux. My body was trying to protect itself from the acid that was splashing around where it didn’t belong. Not everyone with Barrett’s gets cancer, but it definitely can increase your risk.

As always, the medical profession prescribes meds to fix problems. I’ve been through 4 different kinds of protein pump inhibitors. At one point I was taking 3 pills a day and I continued to feel terrible. Next I was sent to an ear nose and throat specialist who took a look around to see if the lump in my throat was caused by anything physically wrong aside from the acid reflux. The answer there was no. My larynx was red and swollen because even a little bit of acid applied to an open wound will prevent it from healing. Meds alone were not working, and some of them even made me feel worse.

Back to the gastroenterologist. This time for breath tests for food intolerances. Yay! Fructose, lactose, and bacterial overgrowth. I already knew I didn’t have celiac disease (gluten) from my biopsies. I was lactose intolerant. Well, there went the milk in my coffee, my daily yogurt and all non-aged cheeses. That made an immediate difference, but it didn’t fix everything. At least it was a start. Symptoms of lactose intolerance include coughing up mucous after having dairy foods and having IBS. I learned that a high percentage of adults actually are lactose intolerant to some degree, but most people don’t know it and they suffer for it.

The nerd that I am, I started reading. What could I do to lower my chances of developing any cancer? Eat more fruits and vegetables. What could I do to lower my chances of developing esophageal cancer? Stop eating acid producing foods. Thus began my journey into dietary experimentation, but that is for another post on another day.

The message I have for you today is: burpy, gassy, heartburny is NOT normal. Go to a doctor and get yourself checked for food intolerances and acid reflux problems before it is too late. Your body will thank you for it.

As a footnote – my most recent endoscopy shows no signs of active gastritis nor Barrett’s Esophagus. <GRIN> I am proof that it is possible to reverse a diagnosis just by taking better care of yourself.

• Fruit (botany): the ovary of a flowering plant (sometimes including accessory structures)
• Fruit (culinary): any edible part of a plant with a sweet flavor
• Vegetable (culinary): any edible part of a plant with a savory flavor
• Vegetable (legal): commodities that are taxed as vegetables in a particular jurisdiction

Maybe I am just too (rhymes with) banally attentive because this ambiguity drives me CRAZY! I especially hate it when diets tell you to eat limited amounts of fruits and lots of vegetables.

Quick pop quiz, are these vegetables?

• Eggplant
• Tomato
• Butternut Squash
• Bell Pepper
• String Bean
• Avocado

Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope and NOPE!
They are all fruits!

Why can’t our culinary definition of these things be the same as the botanical one? Why does a fruit have to be sweet?

Now, do you want to get even weirder? Did you know that a strawberry isn’t technically a fruit? For that matter, neither is an apple or a pear. They are “accessory fruits”. Is that like a handbag, or maybe a scarf? The things we call the seeds of those “fruits”(?!?!) are actually the fruit in a botanical sense.

What about nuts and seeds. Well, technically they are all fruit.

Hmmm.
Ok.
What about legumes?
You know, beans and peas.
Duh.
Fruit.

Yep
.
.
.
Clearly a fruit.

So then, what is a vegetable? Leafy greens. Celery. Roots like potatoes and carrots. Asparagus. Bean sprouts. etc.

But wait. Isn’t a regular potato a bad “white” “processed” starch? Argh.

I leave you with this. Eat your fruits and accessory fruits and some of those greens and roots too. Don’t obsess too much over what’s a fruit or a vegetable or you’ll just drive yourself a little bit crazy. If it’s a plant part that you can recognize it has to be 100% better than anything that comes processed in a box.