205.8 and the tea house where Japan spied on Pearl Harbor

It's called Natsunoya, the last remaining Japanese tea house banquet restaurant in Hawaii, and it IS in fact the building in which a Japanese Consulate worker drank beer and sipped tea and--using the owners' own telescope--spied on ship movements in Pearl Harbor in preparation for "the day that will live in infamy," when Imperial Japan launched its attack on America.

And that, while the most notorious, was probably the least important fact about Natsunoya (it means "summer house") yesterday when John and Jayna Spahn held a baby luau there for their one-year-old son, Brady.

Most important is the luau itself, the celebration of the first anniversary of the baby's birth, one of the most pervasive and authentic cultural traditions in the modern history of Hawaii.

There were about 500 of the Spahns' closest friends in attendance in a totally family affair, all bringing gifts or envelopes of checks or cash to help send young Brady on his way in life.

I was born in Hawaii, in a plantation hospital on the Big Island no less, but I was raised and worked in California, and then Washington State, before moving back in 1976, so I am irretrievably a "coast haole."

As a result, I don't go to as many baby luau as kama'aina do, and I regret it. There is graduation from high school, there are weddings, but the baby luau is as local as local can be, and it's always a privilege to be included.

So much for culcha! How about da grinds?

Well, it is important to know that when Natsunoya Tea House set up a gallery of photos in their website, the gallery consisted of FOOD.

The servings yesterday included agedashi tofu with Shiitake mushrooms, pork tonkatsu, miso salmon, shrimp and vegetable tempura, potato salad, white rice, noodles, baked chicken, tossed salad, and then Brady's banana cake with frosting to top it off.

I skipped the rice, went light on the noodles, avoided the banana splits and ice cream sundaes being whipped up in a corner, but fell hard for the pork tonkatsu with its tangy brown sauce. Hard as in six pieces, breaded and usually cut with a big dollop of fat still attached to the meat.

If you can face this sort of temptation, and still take off two-tenths of a pound from your weight, there is hope.

206, after a perfect day

!

At 206 pounds this morning, I have shed 14 pounds in a little over a month (which shows how imperfect my weight had been) and am well on my way to the 185 pounds my body and I at this moment agree is perfection for both of us.

So this is a very good day, and it's only 6:22 a.m.

Years ago, in a visualization exercise, I imagined my perfect day. In that perfect day, I was living in a sun-filled house by the sea on the Italian Riviera. I woke early, did a little writing, then had breakfast with coffee, and read the newspapers. (Ah--how long ago that was!)

In mid-morning, I strolled out through the village to the market and bought some fresh things for the day's meals, and came home.

At noon, friends stopped by for lunch, small talk, big talk, sharing.

In the afternoon I did a little more writing. I had to answer an invitation from the Italian government to come to Rome to accept an award, complete with a small tasteful medal, for my contributions to the preservation of culture in Italy: I had discovered a method of protecting statues and historic stone work like cathedrals and towers from the effects of acid rain. (Hey, I said it was a perfect day, and I get to choose what happens in it. So, a little adulation, it goes a long way.)

Then time for a nap, and anticipating the arrival of family--my daughter and son, my sister, my mother, still alive at that time, and their families, for cocktails, reading some poetry, listening to music played for us alone, and a lovely dinner.

Well, yesterday, my actual perfect day had a slightly different shape and size. Up in the morning, seeing my wife off to her work of preparing a client's house for sale, taking a small breakfast of hot cereal and a papaya, and then talking with my friend Urban about the location of a new soaking bathtub upstairs in the villa here in Kahalu'u, Hawaii.

The location, the Kaneohe Bay Riviera.

Later, when I called my sister in California, I told her how well the day was going. "First of all," I said, "I am on my way to Home Depot."

We both laughed.

"Depot" has become a second home of sorts for each of us as I have worked on the villa, and she has renovated her home in California.

After buying lumber for a new window wall, I returned and Urban and I conferred on the installation of new kitchen cabinets.

Later, my wife and I took an old friend to the airport for her flight to Vancouver, and went to see an Argentinian film about love and murder.

But at the very center of the entire day was just this: sliced tomatoes and slices of a soft cheese, bathed in a lime-flavored extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar (aceto balsamico as we say here in Italy and in Kahalu'u). Then a small sandwich of sliced chicken on thin pieces of a bread into which bits of Calamata olives were baked. On the bread, a dab of mayonnaise, a dollop of mustard, and over all, fresh ground pepper.

All of this prepared by me from fresh ingredients, for myself and my friend Urban. We might have had a small glass of wine, but there were power tools awaiting us, so we confined ourselves to fresh cool water from the tap, water from the vast artesian lens of fresh water deep below Oahu that has trickled down through the lava rock mountains to wait hundreds of years for us to summon it back to the surface.

It may not get any better than this--and so I will choose to regard each moment as the best available to me.

The lunch was part of the new life style of seeking my perfect weight as part of my perfect days to come.

Fresh tomatoes. Not canned, because of the salt packed into the can. Not in a sauce, because of the 9 grams of sugar in a can of Del Monte Spaghetti sauce, enough sugar (from corn syrup) to constitute fully two-thirds of the calories in the sauce.

I look at labels now, but it is all so confusing. Which fat is good, which is bad? How much sodium today? Is the sugar fructose?

The great food manufacturers of America acknowledge that they jam all sorts of fat and salt and sugar into the foods they package for sale, because those ingredients supposedly help keep the food at least looking and tasting somewhat fresh, preserved, flavorful, for a long shelf life.

But it's hard to keep up with what is good and what is bad.

And it dawned on me, appropriately at dawn today, that so many of those dietary questions can be finessed by simply choosing fresh food. It's my shelf life that is important here, not that of the food factories.

The endless harvest is rushed to my neighborhood market, Strada Sicura (which non-Italian speakers may recognize as "Safeway.")

And so even now, the "diet" and "weight loss program" have become, instead, good food and allowing my body to find its perfect weight.

But the weight, and so many other health issues, will go where they want and need to go not because of a numerical target, but because of living a good life. Not THE good life, mind you, because so often it is not the good life, but just a good life.

Good enough to be perfect, however imperfect it may be.

207.5--Saturday, June 12, 2010

Once more, dear friends, into the breach!

We've hit this weight before, several days ago, on our journey from 220 pounds to 185 pounds.

So why give up the ground gained? Stay focused. Pay attention to what you eat, and how much of it you eat.

This is not an excuse to have a creampuff or two and bounce back to 208.

This is an opportunity to move forward, and set the bar lower once again.

This is the way you get there.

Aloha,

Walter the Lesser

What's Truman Capote Got To Do With It?

On the road again....

Starting at 220 pounds in mid May, with a goal of reaching 185 pounds, this morning I find myself at 208.5, close to the best weight I have achieved (207.5) on this journey to date.


Dr. Mehmet Oz says your body WANTS to reach it's ideal weight.

But I've seen paintings of fat burghers in Germany whose ideal apparently was to be fat--as a sign of prosperity.

Civilization (or at least the Euro-American part of it) turned a very strange corner when someone said, and most agreed, that you can't be too rich or too thin.

Apparently no one checked with the starving children about that--you know, the starving children, usually in China, of whom you were constantly reminded by your mother if you didn't finish the food on your plate.

This is not a joke, of course. For one thing, it encouraged you to eat more than you needed to eat.

And there WERE millions of starving children, and there still are.

It is obscene that millions of starving children today could be saved by:

1. Using the money Americans spend on weight loss programs,

2. Using the value of the food Americans (and other rich people) throw away or otherwise waste,

3. Using the money that would be saved by millions of people if they simply ate only the amount and kinds of food they truly need,

4. Using the money that would be saved if it were not spent on medical care for illnesses caused or exacerbated by overeating, or

5. Using the value of the productivity and quaiity of the years of additional life fat people would have if they were not fat.


The best story I have heard about the origin of the "can't be too rich/thin" saying is reported by Ralph Keyes in his 2006 book, "The Quote Verifier," in which he says Truman Capote said HE made the observation on the David Susskind Show in the late 1950s, probably 1959. Capote was close to Babe Paley, and may have fed her the line; she and the Duchess of Windsor are the persons most often said to have uttered it first.

I like the Capote account because I can just HEAR him saying it, he was bright enough to think it, he observed many very wealthy women who doubtless believed it and lived it, and, perhaps most important, in this account Capote CLAIMED to have said it, which also is internally consistent.

It's almost like those sayings attributed to Oscar Wilde: if he didn't say them all, he should have.

Remember, less is more...

(More or less)

Small(er) is beautiful....

In the beginning...

I weighed 220 pounds. Here are a few of the notes along the way in recent days, from emails I have sent to a large group of people, or a group of large people, also interested in matters avoirdupois.

May 19--God, I love that sugar rush....

Damn--just bit into a Snicker's bar. 1.75 ounces. About 250 calories.

Had another good number, though, at the doc's office: blood pressure--103 over 67. It's all hereditary, I am sure. Or maybe I was about to faint for lack of nourishment.

Can....I....PLEASE...have a drink...of water..........now?

May 20-- 212.6 pounds, and counting (down)......

May 21: It had to happen, or did it:

214.1 pounds this morning.

A weight gain of 1.5 pounds in 24 hours after a week of steady losses.

Could it have been the half order of beef fajitas? The half bottle of beer? The refried beans? The tortilla chips?

Well--duh!

But it's okay. Actions have consequences. And this is a life-style change, not a 100 yard dash.

I hope you see less of me tomorrow.

I'm on the path.

The dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on.



May 21-- at 12:03 PM, Tom Kaser wrote:

Throw away your scales, Walter. Use a tape measure instead, as recommended by Covert Bailey in his book, "Fit or Fat." Lots of slender people are not fit.

And I respond:

I just took the oily left overs from last night's restaurant fajita, put them into a collander, and washed steaming hot water over them to remove the oil. Still tasty, now healthy.

Agreed--eat less, and eat well. No excuse for nutrition problems in this country, or for me.

Where do you measure? Besides THERE.

Do you do any weight work? I just read an article that suggests its probably too late for us septuagenarians. (Hey, like the sound of THAT?)

Geezerly yours,

Walter


Then, at 12:14 PM, Tom Kaser wrote:

I just called Covert and ask for his permission. He said yes.

The main thing you--and I--have to do is eat less. Hard to do, sometimes, since as we get older we want, need--nay, deserve--at least some comfort food.

May 29--208.5 pounds.

This means I've lost 11.5 pounds so far.

This despite watching two-and-a-half hours of Sex and the City Part Deux movie last night--which required me to eat half a big bag of dangerously overfattened movie popcorn.

Gee--do I have to go see THAT again?

One thing that has helped me, despite all the conventional wisdom, is weighing the night before. When I see the weight down, or close to down, I realize I have a shot at bringing in a new low number at my regular morning "weigh-in." This makes it easier to avoid the late night snacks in favor of water, et cetera.

I'm proud of my progress, AND I acknowledge it also shows how very overweight I have been--borderline obese, along with half the rest of the country.

But the Lose It app on my iPhone, and being able to share with you, is helping me make not just a weight reduction but a lifestyle change.

This has been done with no increase in exercise, which means when or if it begins to get tougher, I can crank in some walking, small weights, et cetera, to keep going.

Now, because pride goeth before a fall, I'm going to shut up and watch my step this whole bleedin' BBQ weekend.

May 30--209.7 pounds

Ouch--that's up 1.2 pounds, and no matter how much I pee or how often I take off my underwear before I weigh in, I can't get it lower than that.

I had a damnburger, chips, salsa, smoked salmon with cream cheese and capers, more chips, guacamole. The calories were okay, but the salt intake was off the charts--and I think my 208.5 of the day before involved considerable dehydration.

But onward and downward....

Today is another day (and more barbecue.....)

June 1--Weight this a.m. is 209.

I made a fantastic salad from scratch yesterday and it was my first meal, around 1 p.m. An ounce of so of tiny bits of BBQ chicken, a head of romaine lettuce, two tablespoons of capers, a can of diced tomatoes, five sliced strawberries,and a sprinkling of sliced dates.

Tasted great, filled me up, and overall pretty darn healthy.

BUT I discovered later that the can of diced tomatoes contained like 70 percent of my recommended intake of our old friend SODIUM. I think I will try fresh or at least low sodium tomatoes going forward.

AND Dr. Mehmet Oz reminded me on my new set of CDs of his "You on a Diet" book, starving myself in the morning probably triggered my starvation alarms: Ooogah, ooogah! Starving! Get fat! Get fat!

Live and learn....

Aloha,

Walt

(I yearn for the day when my nickname will be "Slats." Or "Slim," as in "Jerusalem Slim," the nickname given to Jesus Christ by our father who art in heaven, Walter Wright Jr.)

Bound for glorious health

With the support of my psychiatrist and personal trainer Kea (left) I have embarked on a journey back to a healthy weight, and I invite you to come along and even participate if you like.

The key for me, this time, has been the iPhone application "Lose It," that you can download for free if you choose.

Lose It on your iPhone is like having Weight Watchers in your pocket: there's a daily log of food consumed and exercise accomplished, with a data bank of calorie values for thousands of foods and meals, and a goals page where you can post your weight as you head toward your goal.

I started at 220 pounds around May 15, 2010, and logged 207.5 pounds today, moving steadily and quickly toward my goal of 185 pounds. I'll keep you posted on my daily dining and readings from the scale and possibly the tape measure. Dr. Mehmet Oz, in his book You--On a Diet, has become my secondary consultant, telling me it is not enough to eat less food and lose pounds. Instead, Dr. Oz says, I must eat the right foods, and lose inches, especially around my waist, where the deadly and debilitating belly fat resides.