#unco12: Health, Food, Boundaries Break-Out Resources

Here are list of resources I mentioned and/or remember from our awesome break-out discussion at #unco12. Hope they're helpful.

"Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes: http://goo.gl/fbSi7

"Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It" by Gary Taubes http://goo.gl/AIU7N - A distillation of "Good Calories, Bad Calories" - much shorter, with more accessible language. It reads less like a dense book of scientific research than the first book, but still contains all of the same, important information. 

Gary Taubes at the Walnut Creek Library on 04.02.11 http://youtu.be/MyXa39ICIrk - If you don't have time to read the books right now, watch this 10 part YouTube video series, where Gary Taubes outlines the bulk of his research through PowerPoint and lecture.

From Newsweek Online/The Daily Beast: "Why the Campaign to Stop America's Obesity Crisis Keeps Failing." http://goo.gl/RqKDs

"A Glimpse of Jesus: The Stranger to Self-Hatred" by Brennan Manning - http://goo.gl/vOLoe I don't know that I had the opportunity to mention this book, but I meant to. I really enjoyed reading it and thought others might be able to take something from a part of it, even if not all of it.

"The Fat Jesus: Christianity and Body Image" by Lisa Isherwood. http://goo.gl/zUPJW - Someone else mentioned this book. I thought I'd include it in the list, as it was mentioned in passing and I didn't know if it made it into our curated list of resources. :)

"The War on Insulin" blog by Peter Attia, M.D. http://goo.gl/ZdekQ - A great resource for alternative ways of thinking about nutrition, written by a doctor, based on much of his own personal experiences and engagement with the medial community. 

two weeks without social media? - part 2.

things i hope this hiatus will bring/allow/work in my life... 

*finish my finals in a timely manner. This is more than a ploy to get through the work I have left for the end of the semester. One less Trifecta of Distraction will be a nice byproduct, though. 

*slow down and re-connect with the embodied life happening around me. At any given time, if my phone is out, I am probably checking Twitter replies, sifting through e-mail, getting pertinent information from someone via text, searching Facebook for the address of an upcoming event, only to be distracted by photos of someone's cute baby, planning that next masterful Words with Friends move, reading an article from Good or Slate that came through my Twitter feed, and looking for a recipe I KNOW I pinned yesterday, all while trying to have a conversation with my husband about how our respective days were [a bit of exaggeration & hyperbole, but you get the point]. This is grotesque. He is so patient with me, despite my having been sucked into this vortex. This hiatus will force me to slow down and re-connect with him in a more meaningful way, than I am able to, when all of these other things are moving around. 

*re-gain focus. If I am living my life less in time-compressed communication, maybe I can start to re-learn how to read a NYT article without getting antsy, or read more than a chapter of a textbook at a time, without stopping to check out what's going on in the Twitterverse. I realize Rome wasn't built in a day, but one has to (re-)start somewhere.  

*embrace quality time. maybe I'll start to read books more, generally speaking. Or maybe I'll take up some hobbies that I have been neglecting for far too long. maybe all of these things will give me more time to have embodied experiences over coffee with those whom I care about. 

*remember. if nothing else, maybe I'll remember a little of what my life was like before it was consumed with social media. 

*be still and know. Psalm 46:10. This is one of my favorite verses in the entire canon. It is always so comforting, but also challenging. It is probably both, because I really struggle to sit still, in body and in spirit. 

I think that's it for now. I'll update the list in future posts, if any other hopes for this time occur to me. 

two weeks without social media? - part 1.

I have been thinking about this for several weeks, since I first read this article from Mashable, which I no doubt came across in my Twitter feed. While reading about these folks who willfully disconnected for two weeks, I found myself thinking, "Wow, that would be really nice," while I was simultaneously horrified at the idea of being/feeling so disconnected for two weeks. In our age of compressed time, two weeks feels like an eternity.


A trip to the grocery store on Sunday afternoon confirmed my need for this hiatus. While I was gone, my husband needed to use my iPhone (he calls it my "super phone") to access a web-based tutorial, in order to do some work on one of our vehicles. He gave me his phone, should I need it for anything like, say, making a phone call. I wrote out my short grocery list with pen on notebook paper and headed out to the store. There were many moments where I felt compelled to check my piece of paper against information located within my web of social media: a recipe I'd saved to Pinterest or a basic Google search to confirm how many ounces of shredded cheese are in a cup, or...the list goes on.  I even went to two different grocery stores and I couldn't check-in to either of them on Foursquare. That's two points lost, never to be recovered. :P His phone was too so simple, that I couldn't figure out how to lock it, after I used it to make a phone call. I had to wait a few minutes for it to lock itself.


I may in fact be an iPhone user for life. I've heard once you cross over, it's hard to "go back" to using anything else. This sadly might be true for me. The time spent without my phone, makes me think that if my life were a TV sitcom/dramedy, my iPhone, with its handheld window into an abundance of social media, might actually be an unspoken "character,"in my narrative, similar to the way that "the city" is a character in Sex in the City. This is clearly not good.


While social media (specifically Twitter and Facebook) help me to stay connected with those in my life, and those with whom I enjoy engaging in conversation around ministry-centric issues, it is clear that social media consumes many aspects of my life. Not only am I constantly multi-tasking with it, I'm finding it hard to concentrate long enough to read anything longer than 500 words. Anything. Books for class. Books for fun. This great, courageous, and important article from Desmond Tutu. Plus, in the face of end of the semester deadlines, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest undoubtedly become the Trifecta of Procrastination and All Things Timesuck. The end of the semester is near. I don't have that much to do to finish, but I already feel myself getting sucked into this Trifecta.


I will still use my phone, just not those apps pertaining to social media. I'll still text and e-mail and make phone calls. I'm just turning down the noise a bit. I plan to blog honestly about my experience. While blogs clearly fall into the category of social media, no one can accuse me of using this thing too much. I think any attempt at blogging has suffered at the prevalence of other social media in my life. I'd like for writing about things that matter to me, those which I can discuss with others, to be a creative discipline, one that I engage with some regularity. Maybe this time of disconnection will allow me to cultivate such a mentality and a discipline, as I reconnect with my soul.


Please see my part two of this post, wherein I list what else I hope these two weeks will bring. Assuming I can make it.

authenticity required.

It seems that older you get, the more difficult it is to encapsulate your life story into just a few pages. I’m still working on my CPE residency application essays. 5 major questions: one about my life in general, including major events/milestones, current family dynamics and other social supportive relationships; one about my faith journey, another recounting an incident where I’ve helped someone and my evaluation of it, a chronology of work/vocational history topped off with a statement about current work relationships, and lastly one covering my expectations of CPE/what I hope to gain from it. It’s a lot to fit in a small amount of space. I’ve heard the supervisors/application readers get bored and/or stop reading after about 10 pages of essay-writing. So, that is my goal. It is daunting, to say the least.

I have been thinking about what I will say for months. Still, every time I try to compress my life into so few pages, the judgmental, blinking cursor at the top of an entirely-too-blank page stares back at me.  I wasn’t concerned about including everything, but certainly the important things. I was concerned with including the right things. The things that exemplify who I am and why CPE is a good fit for me. It has been overwhelming.            

I then decided to try a more surgical, straightforward, logical approach. I attempt to divide the appropriate number of pages over each question. This too proved difficult. I began to answer the first question, knowing I only had 2.5 pages to do so. I wrote and wrote with honesty. When I arrived at the end of my page quota, I realized I’d only said a third of what I’d hoped to say. Yet another failed approach.

It occurred to me that I was being entirely too chronological and not nearly relational enough. While I am still young, there is no way I will be able to fit all of the major events from my most recent, formative years (everything since college?) into the aforementioned page confines. While there are many important chronological mile markers that have influenced my life in the past five to ten years and continue to influence who I am today (graduating from college, getting married, moving to Austin, starting seminary), for the purposes of these essays, which reflect WHY I’m applying in the first place, I decided to limit my responses to the things which have been the most formative to who I am today, sitting here, attempting to tell my story. While there are many important events worth mentioning, for the most part, that which has been the most meaningful are the people in my life. Those who continue to impact my development. Those who support and challenge me in both positive and difficult ways. 

Perhaps this is an obvious conclusion. I think it is one I needed to draw in order to write all that I have to say for my essays, in a way that is authentic. I think realizing this is the only way I could say what I need to about myself, who I am, who and what I love, where I have been, and where I hope to end up in ten pages or less.