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>There are people who enjoy making charts, counting calories, and weighing and measuring, and generally tracking everything they are going to eat.

It doesn’t work for me. It doesn’t work at potlucks, at other people’s houses, or in most restaurants. It doesn’t work because I don’t like a way of eating that makes a fuss or calls attention to me.

To my way of thinking, the American way of eating (out) is so far removed from what’s good or recommended that it feels almost ludicrous to count and measure and nickle-and-dime it (“Let’s see, I can have one-fourth of the bacon cheeseburger, with three french fries…”). So I’ve found that I need whole new strategies to deal with eating out.

Currently, I’m playing around with these three:

1. The 1-in-9 strategy. Eat eight healthy, low-fat, high-fiber, yada-yada, meals at home or at your desk and get one meal out in High-calorie Land. And enjoy it.

2. The half-of-what’s-on-the-plate strategy. This works particularly well with American breakfasts. Order the standard bacon-eggs-toast breakfast and eat half of it. This also works well with “one-dish” types of meals such as pasta dinners and sandwich lunches, where you can get a doggy bag and take the rest home. And it’s also a life-saver when you’re on vacation and none of the menus are within your control so the 1-in-9 strategy can’t be applied.

3. The two-appetizer dinner plan. This is for elaborate multi-course meals in special restaurants where everything looks delicious and, of course, you aren’t going to sit there and nibble the boring Caesar salad while everyone else vacuums up the trout meuniere or fettucine quattro formaggio. Quite often much of what appears on the dinner menu, surrounded by potatoes, rice, sauces, etc., is available in a smaller, less starchy, version as an appetizer. So when everyone else orders an appetizer and a main course, you can order two appetizers, having the second as your main course.

>Turns out that not all “comment spam” is bad.

This blog got a “comment” from C2 Clothes that was all about them…but when I went to moderate it I looked at their site and realized I like the look of their workout clothes and was impressed by the information the website had on the high-tech elements used to achieve comfort and durability.

Has any one tried out any of their products?

>If you’re intrigued by exercise, and what different types of exercise do and don’t do, Bill Hartman’s blog is a good read. I liked this piece, which includes a hierarchy of effective exercises for fat loss.

>I just checked my RSS newsreader and saw about 100 posts on exercise and dieting—some from blogs about health and fitness, but plenty from personal and professional blogs.

So, I’m going to blog about what works for me. And why it might not work for you. (And why what works for you might not work for me.)

Confused? OK, let’s back up. When I was in college, studying for a degree in psychology, I came across a study that compared three types of therapy: traditional psychoanalysis, cognitive therapy, and behavioral (reward/punishment) therapy. Participants were asked which therapy they believed was most effective, but were then assigned randomly to a course of treatment with a therapist. Which therapy was most effective? It turned out that all three therapies were most effective—with those individuals who believed in advance that that therapy would work for them.

Now, extrapolate that to exercise and dieting. The reason most people fail with exercise programs and diets is because they don’t enjoy their workouts and they don’t enjoy what they’re eating. Our lives are busy and stressful enough that there are just too many reasons to give up on something you don’t enjoy.

(Can you imaging meeting someone, falling madly in love with them, and then saying you weren’t seeing them very often because the person didn’t fit into your schedule? Or because you spend all your evenings with your friends, and your friends didn’t like the person? Substitute “diet” or “workout” for “person” and you’ll see why these are pretty feeble excuses. If you love your workout, or you love what you’re eating, you’ll change your life to stick with it.)

So the challenge is to find the workout, or the diet, that you love.

In my case, the workout I love is 5 hours a week of yoga classes (or, substitute in belly dance classes if there aren’t enough yoga classes available). I haven’t found a diet I love, so dieting doesn’t work for me.

But it might be different for you. You might decide you love the South Beach Diet. Or running. Or eating primarily organic vegetables and whole grains.

I’ve found myself rolling my eyes at people who ask, about my workout schedule, “So, how much longer are you going to do that?”

Er, for the rest of my life.

>Today’s workout with Susan Powter.

Put down the mat.

• Breathing
• Step back, reach up.

http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/showplayer.swf?enablejs=true&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fsusanpowterblog%2Eblip%2Etv%2Frss&file=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Frss%2Fflash%2F577571&showplayerpath=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Fscripts%2Fflash%2Fshowplayer%2Eswf

Now…a little more detail. Susan covers extensions, bends, hangs, sinks, rotations, and all sorts of yoga-derived moves that will strengthen your core and warm you up:

http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/showplayer.swf?enablejs=true&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fsusanpowterblog%2Eblip%2Etv%2Frss&file=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Frss%2Fflash%2F577618&showplayerpath=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Fscripts%2Fflash%2Fshowplayer%2Eswf

>I came across a clever quotation today for which I’m seeking attribution. It was:

“People are so worried about what they eat between Christmas and the New Year, but they really should be worried about what they eat between the New Year and Christmas.”
— Author Unknown

This amused me because I don’t worry particularly about what I eat at holiday parties, but I do get rather disgusted by all the sugary stuff and high-fat dips that end up hanging around after Christmas. So today was “throw out the sugar” day, and I tossed all sorts of candies and cookies (having already cleverly eaten the chocolate-covered cherries!). It wasn’t nearly as easy as it sounds, because many of the items were once-a-year treats, and a few were homemade. But I did eventually manage to toss everything — except for 10 of my mother’s spritz cookies.

>Having lost the detailed instructions from last year’s Sur la Table cookie-decorating class, I was forced to start from scratch this year. This caused a lot of anxiety because I felt as though I didn’t have any spare time to test new recipes — and cookies are particularly nerve wracking because they not only have to taste good, they have to be sturdy enough to withstand decorating. Fortunately, I came across a great book, Cookie Craft, by Valerie Peterson & Janice Fryer, that solved most of my problems.

The two recipes I tested today were gingerbread from Great Gingerbread by Sara Perry and a basic sugar cookie from Cookie Craft. The cookie the picture, in which the gingerbread is baked on top of the sugar cookie, is a good example of the ideas in Cookie Craft — very easy to do, but unusual and attractive.

The gingerbread cookie recipe turns out to be absolutely stunning — a “grownups’ cookie” with loads of ginger and other spices, dark brown sugar, and heady molasses flavor. I’m less excited about the sugar cookie — the rich, buttery sugary taste is almost like a shortbread and I’m concerned that once I start applying royal icing in the decorating stage it will be overwhelmingly rich.

I whipped up the gingerbread dough yesterday and the sugar cookie dough today, and was freaking out a bit because the gingerbread dough was very sticky, while the sugar cookie was stiff and rather dry, making it a challenge to roll out. That’s where the Cookie Craft advice came in handy. They favor rolling everything out on parchment paper to prevent sticking. You can even peel the extra dough away and transfer the entire sheet of cookies on parchment directly to the cookie pan, so you don’t damage the tender cookies moving them around with a spatula. I modified this by simply trimming the parchment with the cut cookie on it, using a kitchen scissors and putting each cookie (they are large ones) on the baking sheet on its own little scrap of parchment. This kept the cookie sheets clean and easy to use, and it was very easy to just peel the parchment off the back of the baked cookie when you set it on the wire rack to dry.

After the cookies cooled, I stored them in layers, separated by parchment, in clear plastic salad containers I’d been saving up.

I’l be back later in the week with the full report on decorating the 100 or so cookies. Wait’ll you see the moose!

>Venture capitalist Heidi Rozen, 49, threw herself into an exercise regime, lost 30 pounds, and has now written an album of pop tunes (recorded, thankfully, by professional recording artists) about the experience called Skinny Songs. Check out “I’m a Hottie Now.”

>After being beaten over the head by advertisers and marketers for the past month, I thought this, from United, was a pleasantly understated surprise.

>Last weekend at the Ballard arts fair Seattle Sampling I saw amazing fabric bags by the Woodway artist Constance Lee. They are far sturdier than most designer handbags, though just a little bit too fancy to be everyday bags. I guess the best way to describe them is to say that they make you wish you lived the kind of life in which one of them could be your everyday bag. Lee had also created a few very elegant smaller bags for holiday parties, one of which you see pictured here.

She doesn’t have a website, but I did find websites that mention her work and have contact information.