My Yoga Baseline

Let’s be clear. I ain’t skinny. At 5’8”, 185 pounds, all the charts say I’m overweight. And, though I’ve got a fair amount of muscle from years of bike riding and cutting and hauling firewood in my younger days, and though I lost 25 pounds (well, 30, but got 5 back, read back over the last year of posts to read about losing the weight), I’m carrying at least 30 pounds of extra fat around the middle. At 62 years old, it’s unlikely I’m going to become a yogi, a person who is proficient in yoga. And by proficient, I guess in my mind, I would have to be able to do a full lotus and maybe some other complicated, twisty poses.

Of course, by some definitions, a Yogi is simply someone “on the journey,” which reminds me very much of psychotherapy, Zen Buddhism, or nearly any “discipline.” At any rate, let me tell you some of the things I can’t do, so that, if over time I can do them, we can agree that Yoga has had an effect on my body. The possible mental/spiritual benefits I may report on, but I don’t know how I can objectively report a baseline short of asking people to write down their impressions of my personality now and some time in the future to see if it’s changed.

I cannot do a full or even a half lotus. In those poses you start cross-legged, bring one foot on top of the other thigh for half lotus and the other foot on top for full. Your knees should be touching or almost touching the floor. When I bring either foot on top of my thigh my knee sticks almost straight up in the air. And with one foot on a thigh the other won’t come anywhere near the other.

I cannot hang one arm behind my head, put the other behind my waist, and grasp hands, in fact my arms stay at least 6 inches apart (I’ll have my wife measure the gap before my next post).

I cannot do a full squat where my butt touches the back of my calves. I can almost get there, but my knees or thigh muscles protest. Same thing when I’m kneeling: can't sit on my heels.

I can touch my toes, hold my ankles, but can’t put my put my hands flat on the floor with my knees locked. I’ve got about 4 inches to go. I can’t come near folding my body in half and putting my head on the floor when I’m sitting on my butt no matter where my legs are. When doing “the clam” I get the closest. That’s where your legs are out in front of you with the soles of your feet together, you hold your feet and pull yourself forward and drop your head. Honestly, I can’t begin to do it. Maybe I’ll have Rita take a picture.

There are a million other things I probably can’t do or do right, but these are some of the important ones. So I have a long way to go. If you read my post last week, you know that one of the issues I have is a history of back pain. I’ve been pushing myself pretty hard this week, practicing yoga at least an hour each day using “Priscilla’s Yoga Stretches” a series of 15 minute programs which shows on WVPBS-2 in the Charleston, WV and online at http://video.scetv.org/video/1832171696/. She runs through her lessons pretty fast, so I take at least 30 minutes to complete a fifteen program because I’ll pause it to spend more time doing what I can do to approximate what she’d doing and maintaining and stretch more deeply into my facsimile of the pose.

In the course of my stretching, I have had cause to well remember back problems which plagued me between the ages of 25 and 45. I’ve come to realize that I never fully healed, or perhaps more accurately never fully strengthened myself after those episodes of severe back spasms and pain. And that is one of the reasons I am so tight.

The physical therapist who worked with me taught me that it was not really through stretching that I would heal my back, but through strengthening exercises. She taught me some, but after the pain receded I stopped doing them. The bike riding I do works some of those muscles as do a couple of the machines I use sometimes at the YWCA Nautilus, but I have to confess that actually strengthening my back and stomach muscles more than has been needed to keep pain at bay has not been something I’ve felt motivated to do…until now.

As I do the yoga stretches I feel the old ball of tightness down in my lower back on the left side and know that is what is keeping that left knee high in the air when I attempt half lotus and what is stopping me from bending far at the waist.

So, while I say I’ve been practicing yoga an hour or so a day, I’ve also been spending additional time as I sit and watch TV or even use the computer working those back and stomach muscles, stretching this way and that, tensing my “core”, even getting down on the floor sometimes to work on something. And as I walk around the house or take a walk outside, I’m trying to keep my stomach and lower back muscles tightened, which results in what I think of as the Denzel Washington walk (or the George W. Bush walk, but I really don’t want to compare myself to him)—a military walk: stomach in, back straight, butt tucked.

Okay, enough about me. How about posting your story about your back or your experience with back pain, yoga, or exercise? 

Death Trumps All

*2 Day Diet Progress at end of post

Death trumps all. With many topics in mind as I sit down to write today, the funeral I attended yesterday has to come first. For seventeen years, from 1975-1992, I lived on 17 acres in Roane County, WV, between two Moores: Daryl and Nina (pronounced nine' ah -- she was her mother's ninth child, and I suppose she'd run out of names) Moore and Frazier and Bernice (pronounced Ber’ nis ). I built a house there, and it’s where, with my ex-wife, Pat, we raised our daughter, Hannah (thirty-seven this week), who now lives in Albuquerque, NM. Daryl was Frazier’s uncle, and when I first moved there, they were friends who helped each other out, plowing a garden with a pony, getting a chain to pull a stuck vehicle out of the ditch on the steep, muddy road we shared with two hairpin switchbacks (that’s redundant, but maybe everyone will understand one or the other).

Frazier worked for Pennzoil in the local oil and gas fields and Daryl drove a water truck delivering water to schools (hmm, correlation? I don’t think so; just a lack of a water system and dependence on wells) Sometime in the eighties Pennzoil went on strike and Daryl’s son-in-law took a temporary job as what was euphemistically called a “replacement worker”, known among union guys as a scab. Frazier held Daryl responsible for his son-in-law’s choice, and they never spoke again, that is, Frazier never spoke to Daryl, and he also did some unkind things I won’t go into. Not quite a feud, but definitely a falling out. Daryl was a very laid back country boy at heart, he loved to farm and he had, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful, well kept, “head of the holler” properties you’ll ever see. He died a few years ago of complications from diabetes, and Nina, now 84, still lives in the house alone, her daughter and son-in-law who live on the paved road at the top of the property her only lifeline. She never learned to drive.

Frazier, who had moved to South Carolina to be near children and grandchildren, died in a car accident last week at the age of seventy-six. His children brought him back to West Virginia to be buried on the homeplace, just down the holler from my (former) property. I’d watched the kids grow up, and two of three of them are parents now. Ginny (Virginia), told me that Frazier used to stay up late into the night sitting on their porch to listen to the fiddle music drifting down the creek from my house.

Ginny asked me to sing Country Roads (aka Almost Heaven, West Virginia) at the gravesite ceremony. He was to be buried across the small creek from his house in an area he had used as a garden that would now become a family cemetery. Kenny asked me to sing Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven.” I spent the last few days learning and practicing it.

The funeral itself was in a little country church, one room and some picnic tables outside. A woman who sounded a lot like Hazel Dickens sang a couple hymns, including Will the Circle Be Broken. A soft spoken man Ginny had asked to lead the bulk of the service talked about Frazier, read some handwritten tributes in a hesitant and stumbling way, and spoke confidently about the need for all of the forty or so people, local folks who have no doubt been hearing this message all their lives, to understand that death is only temporary if they just give themselves over to Jesus to be saved. The regular preacher took up that message a little later in the Evangelistic preaching style full of praise Gods, dear Lords, shortness of breath and exclamatory explosive Hut’s and such. It was somewhat hypnotic, but thank goodness he did not actually do an alter call and ask people to join him, and no one offered to.

I don’t think Frazier was that much of a churchgoer, and I don’t think his kids are either. He struck me as the type who might stand in the back of the room with some of his buddies. If Tears in Heaven as a choice is any indication of belief, it reflects a bit less certainty, “Would you know my name if I saw you in Heaven?” And the youngest, around thirty, spent some time in front of the open casket speaking to his father, begging him tearfully to open his eyes, “just open your eyes, just come back to us, it’s easy,” and assuring him when he didn’t respond that he would see him again someday, and reassuring himself that even though they disagreed about a lot of things, that they always talked later and forgave each other.

I also took the opportunity on that beautiful cool spring day to sit on the porch with Nina, who, perhaps reflecting on Frazier’s passing, showed me a quilt she was working on. She has always made quilts. She does the embroidery by hand, but the actual quilting on a machine; I’m not sure if among aficionados that counts as hand-made. She told me a story about a grandson who had asked for a quilt to put in Daryl’s casket, and when he’d come down from the upstairs room where she keeps them with one he said Daryl had always claimed as his own, she decided she ought to have one for her own casket. As I left her, I said, “Don’t be in a hurry to finish that quilt.”

I love the tilt of Daryl's cap. They were married in 1947.

Nina's making this for her casket....

6 Months into a Life of Healthier Eating

My 2-Day Diet Progress Week 26, May 4, 2014 

Beginning weight 11/3/13: 209 lbs.

Height 5'8" Age: 62

Goal weight: 165 lbs.

Total loss goal: 44 lbs.

Beginning waist size: 43 in.

Current waist size: 38 in.

Weight end of this week:  178 lbs.

Gain/Loss this week:  -2 lbs.

Total Gain/Loss:  -31 lbs.

Twenty-six weeks, 6 months, ½ a year. When you hear someone say, or you say yourself, “I’m going on a diet,” how long do you think that will last and what is the goal? In most cases, there’s a goal: ten, twenty, fifty pounds. Sometimes it’s for a health reason, but the words often used in that case are, “My doctor put me on a diet or I learned I have x, and now I have to change my diet." When I began thinking about doing this, literally just a few days before I started, I was just thinking about the weight loss, not the other benefits I might experience. After reading more from the 2 Day Diet book, I began to realize that it was long term commitment to healthier eating that was called for, not a quick loss plan. And my life has changed because I've taken that approach. I believed I was eating a pretty healthy diet before, but despite the fact that I ate a lot fresh fruits and vegetables, fish and poultry rather than red meat mostly, and very few sweets, I was piling on too many carbs--even though many were whole grain. 

Changing my way of eating and getting control of hunger has empowered me, not just in relation to food, but it’s had some impact on my confidence. It’s not that I’m thinner, so I know I look better and have better “self image.” I never had a negative self image. Not really. When I looked in a mirror, I usually thought I looked pretty good, or at least I’d become pretty good at convincing myself I did—and many people have told me they never thought of me as fat, just big or overweight. I have broad shoulders, a big chest (and I had about 50 pounds of extra fat). “You carry it well,” people say. Boy, the euphemisms we use. I was obese. Strong and fit—I could ride my bike up the steepest hills in Charleston, but obese.

So it wasn’t self-image. No, there’s just something about not being addicted to carbs that has helped me think more clearly I believe. Over the decades, especially as a classroom teacher, I learned to be decisive, but I’m feeling even more so—not because I feel a need to take control of situations, but because I feel I’m seeing the intricacies in a situation more clearly and therefore able to see the solution. It is possible, I think, that a healthier diet has balanced my body chemistry.

This is going to have to be another short post, but things should slow down for me soon. Though I must say, the short post format is probably better (for the reader, too), and maybe I'll just begin making more of them. After all, I haven't managed to post my weekly post on Sunday for the past three weeks. 

I’m coming to my second retirement. When I retired from full time teaching almost two years ago, I had a part time job directing Central WV Writing Project, a teacher professional development initiative. It was a 1/3 to ½ time job, and this time of year it’s full time as I get ready for WV Young Writers Day. CWVWP runs West Virginia’s Young Writers Contest, and on Friday I’ll be running a program for over 600 students, their families and teachers with writing workshops by authors, a keynote presentation by Goldenseal editor and songwriter John Lilly, and of course an awards ceremony.

I had taken over in January of 2012 from the previous director, who had gotten ill. The Graduate College of Education and Professional Development at Marshall University South Charleston, where we have our office, wanted to shut the program down, but I volunteered to take it on. I kept it strong, wrote grants, ran summer institutes, professional development programs for teacher, young writer's camps, and the WV Young Writers contest, and now I’m turning it over Dr. Barbara O’Byrne (she’s actually been directing since January—it’s been a pretty smooth transition). I’m hopefully going to have more time for writing, singing, and the job I recently gave myself: running AWARE – Artists Working in Alliance to Restore the Environment, a project of WV Citizen Action Group to organize events to raise money for environmental orgs in WV. Hope you’ll join me in that effort, come out to hear my music with the Contrarians, the Gypsy Stars, or when I’m performing my original songs, or at least keep reading my blog (and leave a comment sometimes? J ). And if you decide to change your eating habits and need some encouragement, give me a shout. Here are a few links where you can check out the other things I do:

www.marshall.edu/cwvwp

www.paulepstein.net

www.contrarianswv.com

www.awarew.org

A Setback or a Respite? Disappointed, but Far from Giving Up!

My 2-Day Diet Progress Week 20, March 23, 2014 

Beginning weight 11/3/13: 209 lbs.

Height 5'8" Age: 61

Goal weight: 165 lbs.

Total loss goal: 44 lbs.

Beginning waist size: 43 in.

Current waist size: 39 in.

Weight end of week 20:  183 lbs.

Gain/Loss this week:  +3 lbs.

Total Gain/Loss:  -26 lbs.

A bit of a setback this week, but in fact, I see it more like I’ve lost three pounds so far this month. Last week I reported a loss of three pounds, which followed a loss of three pounds the week before. Six pounds in two weeks turned out to be an anomaly. So maybe I truly ate less those weeks and made up for it a bit this week, maybe I had a metabolic hiccup, or was dehydrated last Sunday morning when I weighed in.

At any rate, this week’s momentary gain of three pounds is not troubling to me, and unlike other times I’ve dieted, this time my diet has truly changed…permanently. I will continue to eat less than I used to, smaller portions of everything except green vegetables, a higher proportion of vegetables and protein to carbohydrates, more fish than fatty meats, snacks of vegetables with salsa or hummus, or low-glycemic fruits (apples, pears rather than grapes, strawberries) with dairy: yogurt, cottage cheese, or a small amount of hard cheese, and of course avoid any high carb/high glycemic index foods such as sweets, pastries, potatoes, beer and wine. In short, a Mediterranean diet as recommended in the book I’ve used as a guide: Howell The 2-Day Diet: Diet Two Days a Week, Eat Normally for Five .

I have faced the fact that losing weight is difficult. There’s definitely a part of me that says, “Hey, why not just call 25 pounds enough? You look better, you feel better, why not just take a break from the discipline it takes to actually shed pounds, to force your body, in one way or another to make do with less nutrition than it needs to maintain your current weight?” And perhaps that’s some of the thinking that allowed me to regress a few pounds this week. One late night snack that amounted to a small meal, and one steak dinner in which I allowed myself probably about six ounces of meat instead of the recommended portion of 3 or 4 ounces, and, truth to tell, two, yes two glasses of red wine.

But it was worth it. I am not in a hurry to lose the forty-four pounds I’ve established as a healthy goal weight. I lived with those extra pounds for many, many years. I am down to a weight I have not seen since I’m not sure when, probably thirty years, half a lifetime ago. So today, I’m simply determined to make this a losing week or at least a week in which I maintain my current weight. I’ll cut back on that impulse to put something in my mouth every time I enter the kitchen (a couple walnuts, a couple grapes, a prune or an apricot…it all adds up), and I’ll keep in mind a new paradigm I’m trying to develop for mealtimes: eat as little as possible to reach a state of non-hunger.

In other words, before my new eating regimen began almost 5 months ago, I ate until full and then ate again as soon as I was no longer full, interpreting lack of fullness as hunger. After I learned to distinguish being not full from being empty I waited until I was empty and then had a snack because the feeling of emptiness was unfamiliar and somewhat uncomfortable. Now that I am beginning to be able to distinguish feeling empty from true hunger and getting more comfortable with emptiness, I sometimes wait until I’m actually hungry to eat rather than snacking to keep from feeling empty. The next step, eating only enough to keep from feeling hungry, which though leaving me not feeling empty as well, doesn’t come close to making me feel full, is the line I am now exploring.

I know that if you are reading this and are currently eating a fairly normal American diet these distinctions sound loony, but ask a skinny person, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they can make those distinctions. Meanwhile, I attribute the ability to even begin to having these understandings to first cutting back on carbohydrate intake far enough to break the carb addiction most Americans live with and consider normal. It is that addiction, in my experience, that makes people feel as if they are hungry when they really don’t need the sustenance, much like a nicotine addict craves a cigarette or a heroin addict craves a fix. Will power alone is rarely enough to break those addictions. Something to ease the cravings is usually needed as a transition. In the case of carbs, however, it’s much easier to find substitutes than to the falsely calming effects of nicotine or the euphoria of an opiate high. And it doesn’t require a complete end of consuming carbohydrates to break the addiction, just a drastic reduction through smaller portions, whole grains, and low or no calorie sugar substitutes if sweets are important.

So give it some thought, read about it and when you’re ready, give it a shot.

Learning the Meaning of Hunger

My 2-Day Diet Progress Week 19, March 16, 2014 

Beginning weight 11/3/13: 209 lbs.

Height 5'8" Age: 61

Goal weight: 165 lbs.

Total loss goal: 44 lbs.

Beginning waist size: 43 in.

Current waist size: 39 in.

Weight end of week 19:  180 lbs.

Gain/Loss this week:  -3 lbs.

Total Gain/Loss:  -29 lbs.

This week my euphemism for diet is a paradigm shift toward food. After many weeks of loss of a pound or having no loss, in the past two weeks I have lost a total of six pounds according to my Sunday weigh-ins. Am I doing something different? I don't think so, but maybe, in fact, I guess I have to say yes (how's that for an example of squishy thinking out loud?). Here was my thought process: Generally, weight loss has a direct correlation between calories in and calories expended, so maybe I was eating less these last two weeks. But in the 2-Day Diet I am using as a guide, the 2 days of highly restricted carb intake changes that equation so that your body can't utilize some of the protein and fats you take in. So maybe I was stricter about the carb restrictions these last two weeks. I think it's probably a little of both.

I have not been keeping track of how much I eat as I did in the first month or two of my new way of eating because I don't have to. I'm eating food in the amounts the book recommends, in part because I've learned what the recommended portion sizes are, but mostly for another reason, which is why, I think, I've lost more these last two weeks. I've turned some kind of corner, or at least gone around a slow curve. Now, I don't eat when I'm not hungry, and I'm comfortable being….empty for long periods of time. I've written about this before, this distinction between empty and hungry, and how when I was addicted to carbs (I do think that carbs are the key here), I felt compelled to eat as soon as I was no longer full, and I often felt desperate about needing to eat in ways I remember from when I was a smoker and needed a cigarette (not wanted, needed). I also used to eat faster, continued to eat after I no longer felt hungry, and often felt over full after eating. I binged at times, though I never purged. Now I'm beginning to learn to distinguish between an empty stomach and actual hunger.

It's sad that if a hundred random Americans read this, only about 1/3 or so are likely to think, "duh." That's because about 2/3 of us are overweight or obese. I'm hoping that if you're one of them, you will think hard about my words and try to imagine what it would it would be like to be free of the slavery of your food needs. And I don't mean by never being allowed to eat another dessert (OMG, I sound like a damn late night TV ad or an evangelist). What can I say, I'm newly converted and I want to share the Good News.  

As usual, as I write, I learn something new, or at least tease out my feelings to create coherance: the reason I've probably lost more weight the last two weeks is that now, instead of thinking of emptiness as hunger (as before I equated not fullness with hunger), now that I snack less  and allow myself to experience emptiness for longer periods of time, I've come to the realization that there is a distinction between emptiness and actual hunger. One can be empty (not a comfortable feeling at first, but one I'm learning to appreciate), for a few hours between meals or even between dinner and the next morning without experiencing hunger. Once again, my wife (those of you who've been reading this blog or know Rita know that she's petite) has told me this before, that is, she's described herself as empty and noted sometimes that she just experienced a hunger pang after she hadn't eaten in what, to me, in the past, would have seemed an impossibly long time. 

I know that reading this won't make you a believer. I heard a scientist on NPR this morning who  had first worked out the computations that challenged accepted theories of astrophysics concerning the age of the universe. In response to a question about why other scientists, who are supposed to be such rational thinkers, had so much trouble with this challenge, even though the equations do not lie, he said something to the effect that even scientists, who are trained to be objective, have "enormous biases," especially for theories they have worked on, supported and believed for a long time, and it is only with the help of the collective scientific community that big changes in our understandings take place over time. All this to say that as human beings, it's hard for us to accept truths that are counter to our current beliefs, such as, "I can learn to control my appetite," or "one bite of a dessert could satisfy me," or "I could have a late dinner without something to tide me over." But, you could. I can, and had you told me just a few months ago I could do those things, I would have laughed (or cried) as you may be doing now.

Healthy Eating, But What About Healthy Drinking Water?

My 2-Day Diet Progress Week 18, March 9, 2014 

Beginning weight 11/3/13: 209 lbs.

Height 5'8" Age: 61

Goal weight: 165 lbs.

Total loss goal: 44 lbs.

Beginning waist size: 43 in.

Current waist size: 39 in.

Weight end of week 18:  183 lbs.

Gain/Loss this week:  3 lbs.

Total Gain/Loss:  -26 lbs.

I continue to lose weight, 26 pounds since November 3rd. Three pounds since last Sunday (though I had not shown loss for two weeks before and attribute some of today's weigh in to gradual loss that just didn't register last Sunday morning because I'd had a large meal and snacks the night before). I rarely snack anymore, and when I do, I don’t have much. I just don’t need to eat nearly as much as I used to for a feeling of fullness, and I also don’t feel it necessary to eat until I feel full, so meals have been shrinking without measuring portions or keeping track of how many carbs, proteins, fats or fruits I’ve eaten (I’ve always figured green vege portions didn’t need counting—they’re healthy; graze as much as you want). It would be interesting to know how many calories I’m consuming. I don’t know how many I was consuming before I made my radical shift in gastronomical philosophy, but I’ll bet it was at least three times what I’m eating now. And I was able to maintain my weight fairly well, fluctuating within a range of about 10 pounds but not exceeding it for the past 10 years. News Flash #2: I’m losing weight primarily because I’m eating a whole lot less than I used to, and the fat in my body is packed with energy which as it burns, sustains my daily activity quite well.

And a quick Google search and calculation later, I have a better understanding of why losing a pound is so hard to achieve. There are 9 calories in a gram of fat, and about 450 grams in a pound, so one pound of fat has about 4,000 calories in it. Since a healthy number of calories a day to maintain weight for someone my age and level of activity is somewhere around 2,000 or so calories, I’d have to eat nothing at all for two days to burn off a pound of fat! Well, I think I’m going to stop obsessing over my weight every day from now on. With that science literally under my belt, it seems unreasonable, doesn’t it, that I’d lose a pound (or more) every week, which I’d come to hope for, if not expect.

However, that is what the 2 Day Diet book told me I might expect. The reasons they give are that by consuming proportionately more protein than carbs you’re preserving more muscle, and if you’re also exercising, you build muscle, and muscle they say, citing research, burns 7 times more calories than fat even when resting. Further, it seems to me that IF one is very strict about avoiding foods with carbohydrates for two days a week, you have a chance of achieving what’s called “ketosis”, or fat burning, that is the 'secret' to low carb diets like the Atkins Diet. The body needs carbs to metabolize the proteins and fats, and lacking them, passes them through. Lacking energy from the food one eats, the body turns to stored body fat for sustenance and produces keytones, a byproduct of the burning fat. 

********************************

The weather has finally taken a turn towards Spring the last couple days, and I’ve ridden my bike more. I usually ride in my Charleston, WV neighborhood, called Fort Hill. It’s an old neighborhood of a couple hundred modest homes and few upscale ones. A solidly middle to upper middle class neighborhood. By West Virginia standards, most of us are probably in the top five percent of earners, however. Despite the number of snowy and cold days this winter, I’ve  had about 7 rides in February and March so far. And on these rides I’ve been asking people out walking their dogs or getting their exercise whether they drink the water. The answer is no. I would guess I’ve talked to almost thirty people who probably represent at least twice that many, since when I ask if their whole family does the same thing, they usually say yes. They often say about drinking the water, "not yet," or "I’m getting close." 

When I follow up with, "When, if ever, will you drink it?" I get strange, illogical answers. 

"Soon," or "I’m just not ready," or "When I run out of the bottled water I have left." Only two have said never, and one of those wasn’t drinking it before, only drinking distilled water because she and her husband believed fluoridation and chlorination were dangerous to health. The other said it was basically because she just couldn’t ever again believe public officials or the water company, she thought they may have been involved in conspiratorial cover-up or were just incompetent and that we’d likely been exposed to MCHM for a long time already from the tank leaking into the river over time. 

Almost everybody uses city water to shower, wash dishes, and wash clothes. One single woman, probably in her late forties, said she used it to make coffee, but drank bottled water.

And that’s, I think, one of the most interesting aspects of the aftermath of Aquageddon (I think it’s a terrible name that over-aggrandizes the seriousness of this event, but at least it’s short). It has undermined people’s sense of trust in our local and state government officials, and certainly in the water company. And while a few weeks ago I argued it was a form of post-traumatic stress causing people to be afraid of the water, now I just see it as revealing quite starkly just how irrational people are in making judgments. Because for most of them, when they will drink the water has nothing to do with waiting for a final report from a study being conducted or confirmation that the chemical has reached a certain level or can’t be detected, or a water test in their own home, or when they no longer smell licorice in the hot water, or when hum sees the governor drink it with hum’s own eyes (those were some answers I collected). 

What it usually boiled down to when I pressed the issue was they would begin drinking the water when they feel emotionally secure enough to do so, when some internal switch goes off, or some outside force like running out of bottled water makes it less convenient not to. News flash: most people are not rational decision makers.