Week 47
135.5

Efficiency is the enemy of weight loss
or
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree

Though Thanksgiving is a holiday that is built almost entirely around food, and though I love to eat, somehow Thanksgiving food has always been less than thrilling for me.
Turkey? I’ll pass, thank you.
Dressing/stuffing? What’s the point?
Pumpkin pie? Just the filling please.
Mushy sweet potatoes? Okay. I’ll concede that’s pretty good.
Green bean casserole? Don’t ever feed an Indian blandly cooked vegetables.

Actually food flavors are always taken up a notch in our family (and that includes my in-laws), so I can’t really complain. We always have fun pushing ourselves to make the food taste more interesting.  My mother-in-law makes a great dressing, but we hadn’t had it in a couple years, so this year I decided I would try my hand at it.

One of the ingredients of dressing is dry (but not stale!) bread. So on the assumption that lightly toasted bread would be a good option, off to work I went using the toaster-oven to dry out some bread.

I was getting the next batch of bread ready for the oven, when I heard my daughter ask incredulously, “Do you have the bread on top of the oven?”

“Well it’s really hot on the top and I thought it would save time” I mumbled. (And more importantly, “Why waste the heat?” I said in my head.)

“We do have a toaster also, you know,” pointed out my ever practical daughter.

Very true. I moved across the kitchen and tried to fit three slices of toast into the one (large) slice toaster slot.

And suddenly, the realization. I am turning into my father!

Breakfast in our house while growing up almost always included toast. And my father was always in charge of the toast. My father, who never met a broken toaster he couldn’t fix with a bit of wire or piece of scrap metal. No neighbor or relative was ever allowed to throw away a broken toaster. Give him a few hours and my father would have it working like new. And at breakfast time my father would have our toaster humming and popping out toast at a rate worthy of a Guinness Record.

At breakfast time my mother was in charge of the porridge, the half-boiled eggs, the sliced fruit and cheese, and buttering the toast. My father made the toast. He cut up the slices of bread so the slot that was supposed to accommodate one (large) slice of bread would be filled with one and a half slices next to each other, and additional half slices balanced on top so no heat was wasted and so that the largest number of pieces of toast were delivered warm to the table at the same time. A pretty good system actually.

When I was in the 5th grade my father went out of town for a work study course. “Work study” nowadays refers to a semester of practical work related to your college major. In those days, it was the expression used for efficiency.

Back in the sixties, India was still recovering from colonial rule and there was much effort to prove Indians could do just as well as, or better than, the British. All kinds of innovative programs were being tried out. The training program my father was attending was a military program, and being the military, they didn’t do anything in half measures. It was a three-month course! Who on earth does a three-month course in efficiency?

Maybe it was just an opportunity for a wonderful holiday getaway for the bright stars of the Indian civil service. Or, more likely, for the organizers, since the class was held in the beautiful Himalayan foothills in a town called Mussourie. (Only near the Himalayas would you say that a place at an altitude of over 6,000 feet is in the “foothills”. But I digress.)

The Indian government was working hard to improve standards all around and my father left my mom in charge of the household, the four girls, the dog, the cows, the chickens, the garden, and the household help, and went off for this work study/efficiency class. The course was followed by a practicum at a munitions factory in Dehradun, another gorgeous resort town in the foothills. He came home three months later with three beautiful traditional dancing dolls for my sisters, and a cute wooden bobble headed doll for me that I immediately named Little Eva. He also brought home a whole set of newfangled ideas.

Suddenly, my father,  who in the past had spent almost every minute at home with his nose in a book (he rereads Moby Dick about once every other year), was keeping a close eye on what we were doing at home with the exacting fastidiousness of the nuns in my school.

Clearing the table after dinner? Make sure you pile as much as you can together so you don’t have to make three trips. Waiting for the water to boil for a cup of tea? Do something while you are waiting. Always use the shortest route and most productive path! Minimize the effort required to do a job.  Park as close as you can to your destination. Don’t ever go from one spot to the next empty handed. And so it went. To this day, almost 50 years later, my father will catch one of us doing something inefficiently and say, “Work study, my dear. Work study.”

Perhaps these exhortations struck a chord with me more than anyone else at home, but I took them to heart. This efficiency goal got pretty well ingrained into me. Maybe it appealed to my innate laziness, or my ADD which my daughter often points out, but I became an expert at minimizing the energy used for any job. I am completely adept at picking things up with my toes so I don’t have to bend. A pencil, a book, dirty laundry.  I can slip my shoes off, pick them both up and place them on the top shelf of the shoe rack in one fluid motion using just my toes with monkey-like grace.

I also find it almost impossible to sit still and wait. Waiting for food to warm up in the microwave, even for a minute or two can be agony. At work, I always time my coffee cup refills with the need to go to the bathroom so I don’t have to wait and watch the water drip into my mug. Before a party, I will pop something under the broiler to brown, and rather than just stand there for just the 3 minutes it takes, I feel obliged to run and check my e-mail, or start unloading the dishwasher. Often with very bad results.

 

As a new immigrant early in the 1980s, I was struck by how devoid the streets and roads in the US were of people walking. Every once in a while, I would see someone running, seemingly aimlessly. I asked my more seasoned immigrant husband why they were running. “They’re jogging,” he said. “”Where to?” I asked in all my irritating innocence.

I soon came to understand that jogging was a form of exercise. I understood, but didn’t quite understand it. In India, sometimes you ran on the playing field. But generally when you ran, you were trying to catch a bus or escaped poultry. When you ran, you were running from an angry dog or a charging bull.  When you ran, you were trying to escape a sudden cloudburst of pouring rain. Why would anyone need to just run for exercise, and then jump in the car to go 5 blocks to go to the store to pick up some eggs?

But I when in Rome….

Soon, I was walking nowhere if I could drive. I took the elevator when there were perfectly good stairs around. While I can’t normally stand still, I would get on an escalator and just stand there instead of continuing to climb them while moving. This worked well for the first 25 years. But suddenly menopause and cellulite began to creep into my life. I watched the needle climb on the bathroom scale. I had been a steady 100 lbs. from my teenage years through my children’s teenage years, with a couple of swings upwards during my two pregnancies.

Now suddenly my weight was no longer my weight, but that of some chubby visitor to my house. But I still am not about to take up some aimless jogging. I have decided to use the opportunities that daily life presents; with the exception of vacuuming — because I am culturally unable to vacuum. Feminist or no, in our house vacuuming is a man’s job. Or rather, the job of the person who grew up with vacuum cleaners around him from his childhood.

But truly. As someone serious about losing weight, I have missed some great opportunities to keep moving and exercising in the house.

At some point, I had become 150% of my earlier weight. I was a woman and a half! Expressed like that, it gave me some real incentive to try to improve.

With a little conscious effort, I can walk 2-3 miles a day just doing my everyday work So here are some tips to myself:

– Stop trying to park in the spot closest to the store. The problem is, I can hardly help myself. If I park far away from the entrance at the grocery store, I find myself strategically parking the car near the cart return. But that’s okay I suppose – because I always make a point of returning carts to the cart corral. No free range carts in parking lots because of me, ever.

– Use the networked printer at work, so I have to walk to retrieve my printouts.

– At home, I remind myself that it is a good thing to bring the fresh laundry up the stairs in two or three trips, instead of piling the clean clothes and linen so high that I can’t see where I am going.

– And stop berating myself for somethings I will never be able to change. It will always be hard to sit still and watch TV or a movie at home. I feel obliged to be doing something while I watch – ironing, cutting vegetables, cooking, sorting through junk mail. Anything. But that’s okay. It fits neatly with my health-without-too-much-effort plan.

– And best of all, I make a point of always bending down to pick up my shoes when putting them away. This may mean distancing myself from my simian ancestors and a certain loss of prehensile skills with my toes, but it is helping with the weight loss goal.

So.  Sorry, dad. There are some times, when I am going to occasionally be inefficient and ignore that childhood mantra that pops up in my head every so often, “Work study, my dear. Work study.”

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