Category Archives: Health and Fitness

Organic Produce Co-op-ish Thing

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Earlier this month I told you about a fruit and vegetable service we’ve been trying called Bountiful Baskets. We have enjoyed it, but for us it presented two drawbacks:

  • In our area, it doesn’t offer any organic produce.
  • The pickup time is 7:00-7:30am on Saturday morning. I’m normally coming home from work at that time and might not be able to get there by 7:30, so Jenny had to wake the kids up early and drive up to Grapevine to get our goodies.

So we’re switching to another co-op-style service that our friends Sarah and Chris use called Your Health Source. It offers all-organic produce that’s as local as possible. Plus the pickup time for the Bedford location is 10:00-12:00 on every other Tuesday, which works much better for Jenny. The price is higher, but since we’re trying to get our whole family to eat healthier, we’re willing to pay more for produce that’s free of pesticides and other weird stuff. Our first pickup is March 1.

Partner Yoga

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For Valentine’s Day, Jenny and I took a partner yoga class at her gym on Sunday. We both enjoy yoga and do it together at home sometimes, so we thought this class would be fun. I was expecting a traditional yoga class with some extra partner-assisted stretches, which would have been great. But what we got was different and even better. The class was mostly partner-oriented balance poses in which one partner supports the other in various ways. We had a blast! Afterward we enjoyed cheese, wine, and chocolate-covered strawberries.

Our instructor took this picture of us doing one of the poses. Do not try this at home, folks. We are professionals.

Fruits and Veggies

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Jenny and I are trying out a new service called Bountiful Baskets. It lets you purchase fruits and veggies co-op style, giving you large amounts of produce at a low cost. Twice a month, we pay the organization $15 plus a service charge early in the week. Then on Saturday morning, Jenny goes to Grapevine and picks up a huge basket of produce. Each time the mix is a little different based on what the organization can find that week. Our most recent basket included oranges, apples, tomatoes, grapefruits, mushrooms, red bell peppers, kale, lettuce, onions, lemons, and mangoes. It’s somewhere between 15 and 30 pounds of fruits and vegetables for under $20, which sounds like a good deal to me. Since our basket normally includes items that we don’t normally buy, it helps us to vary our diet and eat better.

There are other organizations that do pretty much the same thing, such as Urban Acres and Your Health Source. Both of them charge more but offer organic produce. We haven’t decided whether to stick with Bountiful Backets or try one of the other ones.

If you live near a pickup site for one of these organizations, I recommend giving it a try.

Convenience Care Clinics are Convenient

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After enduring a couple of weeks of being sick with a mild sinus infection that refused to go away on its own, I finally waved the white flag on Wednesday and sought professional help. Losing most of my voice finally pushed me over the edge. I knew it was a sinus infection and knew the solution was antibiotics. Instead of calling my primary care physician (PCP), who I assumed was booked solid with sick patients just like me, I tried something new: the MinuteClinic at CVS.

So-called convenience care clinics (CCCs) like MinuteClinic are a new trend in medicine. They offer a limited menu of services in exchange for the convenience of coming in without an appointment and, in many cases, lower costs. Staffed mostly by nurse practitioners or physician’s assistants, they are available in retail stores such as CVS or Wal-Mart and keep much longer hours than those of a typical PCP office. They can’t treat your brain tumor or deliver your baby, but they can be a great option for simple illnesses like sinus infections or UTIs, vaccinations, or routine physicals. Our insurance company is creating a special reduced copay of $15 for CCC visits starting in 2011.

Jenny and I both went separately to MinuteClinic on Wednesday. One person was ahead of me. After entering some basic new-patient information (into a real computer instead of an archaic paper form), I waited for maybe five minutes before seeing the PA. She entered all my symptoms into a computer, checked my vitals, and gave me a prescription plus some printed info about my condition. From arrival to completion took maybe 20 minutes. She sent my prescription to the in-store pharmacy, and I walked out with my amoxicillin.

The whole experience was very fast, relatively cheap, and extremely convenient. For minor illnesses in the future, I plan to return to MinuteClinic. My only complaint was a lack of warmth and friendliness by the PA. She was very businesslike and spent most of her time looking at her computer. But maybe she was just shy, or her native culture (she sounded African, but I’m not sure about the specific country) doesn’t include friendliness toward patients. But to me, that’s a pretty minor thing. I walked in with an illness and no appointment, and maybe half an hour later, I walked out with the medicine I needed. That’s hard to beat.

Have any of you tried a convenience care clinic? If so, how was your experience?

Calories

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All the running I’m doing and the various forms of exercise that Jenny is doing at the gym got me thinking about calories. Despite the hundreds of different (and often contradictory) diets out there, I still haven’t found any reason to doubt the basic calorie equation: Calories Eaten – Calories Burned = Change in Weight. Burn more than you eat to lose weight. Eat more than you burn to gain weight. Not easy, but at least it’s simple.

MayoClinic.com provides a nice calorie calculator that can tell you roughly how many calories you burn per day based on your gender, age, weight, and activity level.

I burn 2600 calories per day on average. I don’t count calories, but I try to eat fairly healthy meals most of the time. Jenny and I have both cut back on our sugar, largely in the form of sugary soda and dessert. We mainly accomplish this by keeping them out of the house. If I see them, I will consume them. (Jenny horrified me this week by bringing home not one, but two bags of delicious Oreos for Brenden’s party. I told her to hide them from me. I wasn’t kidding.) With less sugar and more running, I’ve lost about five pounds over the last few months. Although I’m not focusing on weight loss, losing a bit of belly fat is a nice side benefit.

RunnersWorld.com says that going one mile burns about 100 calories, whether walking or running. That fact makes it easy to convert foods and drinks into miles. For example, consider the following common foods and drinks that I enjoy (or would, if I tried them):

Drinks

  • 12oz Coke: 140 calories = 1.4 miles
  • 1 cup whole milk: 175 calories = 1.8 miles
  • 12oz Sam Adams Boston Lager: 180 calories = 1.8 miles
  • 5oz glass of white wine: 125 calories = 1.3 miles

Foods

  • Large bagel: 283 calories = 2.8 miles
  • Large banana: 121 calories = 1.2 miles
  • 8oz steak: 406 calories = 4.1 miles
  • Large Oreo Cheesequake Dairy Queen Blizzard: 1140 calories = 11.4 miles
  • Chipotle burrito, my style: 920 calories = 9.2 miles
  • Lasagna at Romano’s Macaroni Grill: 760 calories = 7.6 miles

Obviously, I don’t run 9 miles after returning from Chipotle full of a tasty burrito. Two reasons: 1) I would puke, which is extremely wasteful, and 2) I can’t run that far yet. My point is to illustrate the difficulty of burning off extra calories when you eat more than you burn, as most Americans do. Let’s say I’m currently maintaining a steady weight. If I decide to start drinking a Coke every day but don’t want it to affect my weight, I need to walk or run an extra 1.4 miles to offset it.

Jenny’s trainer at Life Time Fitness gave her a very important tip, one that I didn’t expect to hear from a gym employee who presumably wants her members to think the gym is indispensable:

If you want to lose weight, exercise alone isn’t enough.

If you do the math, it’s easy to see why. A pound of fat contains about 3500 calories. To lose a pound a week, you must create a daily deficit of 500 calories per day. Unless you plan to burn 500 calories in the gym seven days a week (five miles on a treadmill, an hour-long cardio class, etc.), you won’t notice much weight loss, if any. If seven hours a week in the gym isn’t practical (it’s not for me), cutting out a habit of drinking three Cokes a day (or just one Sonic Route-44 Coke) is like running over four miles in terms of calories. Obviously, if you can both eat better and exercise more, that’s ideal, but if you must choose, improving your diet is easier and more effective.

ER Adventure

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Brenden had a rough night Saturday night, waking up repeatedly, crying for no apparent reason, asking Jenny to hold him but squirming around when she did. Finally, she decided he might have an ear infection or some other problem and took him to the doctor. Since it was Sunday morning, his pediatrician’s office was closed, so they made their first visit to CareNow, an urgent care center. The folks there decided that yes, he probably had an ear infection, but the more serious problem was that Brenden was having trouble breathing. Along with a chest x-ray, they administered a couple of breathing treatments and a steroid shot. They helped, but his oxygen levels wouldn’t stay high enough, so they suspected an asthma attack and referred us to the emergency room. We chose Cook Children’s in Fort Worth.

I figured an emergency room visit for one of our boys was inevitable, but I figured it would happen after Brenden broke an arm, not for a breathing problem. Since B seemed fairly happy despite his difficulty, I definitely preferred this reason for our first visit. CareNow called ahead, and we were taken back within five minutes. Toddlers who can’t breathe make healthcare people nervous.

If you have kids and need to put them in a hospital, I recommend a children’s one. A trusted source told me that regular hospitals are afraid of children, especially young ones. Cook was full of nice people who understood that kids need love, patience, and entertainment, people who understand that toddlers squirm a lot and pull off their blood oxygen monitors. They provided stickers, children’s books, and a variety of movies in the exam room. Since we spent nearly five hours in that room, those were welcome distractions. We watched part of Finding Nemo and most of Cars.

Brenden handled the whole experience pretty well. The hardest part was keeping him fairly still so that the monitor would stay on his big toe. He got one more breathing treatment and a dose of liquid prednisone. By evening, his blood oxygen levels were pretty good, and he had returned to his happy, active self. The ER doctor diagnosed him not with asthma, because his lungs didn’t sound asthmatic, but with bronchiolitis, a viral infection of the bronchial tubes. He prescribed an inhaler and a round of prednisone and finally let us go home.

My sister and I both grew up with asthma, so breathing difficulties don’t scare me as much as they scare most people. When I heard that CareNow suspected asthma, my heart sunk. Since asthma runs in my family, I fear that my sons will develop it, too. I was diagnosed at age 3. Either of them could still develop it, but I was happy to hear the final verdict that this particular incident resulted from a short-term infection rather than a lifelong condition.