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 Cut that Hurts

Recent cuts to the 2011 federal budget have ended funding for the National Writing Project (NWP), an organization I care about deeply (full disclosure: for several years it has provided me a part-time job, something most teachers need). NWP received $27 million in 2010 and distributed much of it to over 200 writing project sites around the country in operating grants of under $50,000.

When I was in my third year of teaching, I participated in the West Virginia Writing Project’s “Invitational Summer Institute,” an intense program of writing, of reading research and teachers’ stories of teaching writing, and of designing and presenting demonstration lessons. This experience, as it is for many of the thousands of teachers each year who participate in NWP programs around the country, was career changing. Life changing, in some ways.

Before that, in my education classes and in professional development offerings by my school and district, I had understood that someone else had the answers and becoming a teacher, a good teacher, was a matter of doing what I was told in ways that I was told research said would work. Unfortunately, research could be found that said just about anything would work. In practice, I, like most beginning teachers, found the actual classroom experience daunting, challenging, exhausting, and often filled with failure by students who seemed to lack the skills and motivation to achieve, especially when asked to set pencil to paper.

Dr. Fran Simone, who served as director of West Virginia Writing Project at that time, created an atmosphere in which each teacher felt valued as a member of a professional community searching for the best possible answers to the questions and challenges the classroom experience presented. We became better writers and created a caring community by sharing our stories, which were often personal in nature. Over a few weeks of full day workshops and evenings working on our own writing, we learned more from each other than from any article or book that we read, though we learned from them as well, especially the ones written by other classroom teachers whose writing was more accessible than university based researchers, and whose classroom experiences rang true. Through this transformative experience, I became a better teacher, a better person—one who began learning to nurture the voices of students, to encourage their self-expression and through that to impact their skills and their motivation to learn.

In the years that followed that experience, I implemented many of the practices and lessons I had observed—not all at once, but as I was ready and able. Eventually, I became a leader and innovator, and have been recognized by NWP and the College Board for the work I’ve done at Ruffner Elementary School. In a perfect world, the type of professional learning community created through the NWP model would be re-created in every school and district in the country. However, it rarely occurs in schools.

Perhaps it is too much to expect teachers to share their successes and failures, frustrations, their personal stories with those who evaluate them and pay their salaries. Perhaps only an outside player like NWP, a university/district collaboration, can fill that role.

During my twenty-four year teaching career, I have had the opportunity to do for others what Dr. Simone did for me: facilitate professional learning communities with teachers who come voluntarily during the summer to improve their classroom practice involving writing. Now this program may come to an end. It will not cause closures of schools or layoffs of large numbers of teachers. It will not immediately impact student achievement throughout the country. However, multiple studies have found that students of teachers who have been through NWP programs on average write significantly better than students of teachers who don’t.

In a time when the challenges teachers face and the expectations the public has for them continue to mount, we should be putting more funding into cost effective programs such as NWP, which leverages support at three dollars for each federal dollar.

Some argue that the role of the federal government should be limited to defense, enforcing laws, and providing (as little as possible) for the neediest among us. Education, they insist, is only a local concern. But it takes more than a village to raise a nation of children who will be able to compete in this global economy, and we should not be throwing out any effective programs that are improving their chances of doing so.