Buh-bye hair!

In celebration of summer and heat waves, I decided to get my hair chopped off. Pictures are included below, for your viewing pleasure.

Amy and Mira's Quarter of a Century Fiesta!

Since Mira's birthday was on April 8th and mine was on the 30th, we thought that having a combined birthday celebration would make a lot of sense. So on Friday the 23rd we had a gathering of people at our apartment to celebrate the two of us turning 25 years old. It was a classy event, as our parties usually are, with guests requested to come in their party dresses and ties. We had a lovely spread of treats and wine, champagne, and more. Some of you may have already seen pictures on Facebook, but for the many of you who are not social networkers, I thought I'd post some select photos here as well!

The apartment, pre-party:

Birthday girls!

With my three favorite Twin Cities girls: Maria, Mira and Ellie.

Me and my friend Nilofar:

Me and my friend Emily:

Me and Melody (yes, I did change dresses... It was my birthday!):

Cupcakes!

This may very well be my most random blog entry yet, but it should be a fun one nonetheless! I have decided that cupcakes are just about the most fantastic baked good ever. They are fun and delicious and there's so much you can do with one. While I was home in March, I came across a fantastic cupcake recipe book at Goodwill for about $2. It is called Cupcakes! From the Cake Mix Doctor by Anne Byrn. All of the recipes use cake mix as their base. I have been having non-stop fun with this book ever since. My first experiment was the Peanut Butter Surprise cupcakes that I made for my mom's birthday. With a delicious peanut butter-y cake, chocolate buttercream frosting, and chopped up Reese's peanut butter cups on the top, these were a huge hit. The surprise? A Hershey's kiss baked into the center of each cupcake.

My next venture was into the muffin section of the book. I was signed up to bring snack to my Thursday morning class during the same week that Wellstone was on spring break. Since I knew I'd have Wednesday off, I thought "Why not use some of that free time baking something special for my fellow MSW students?" So I busted out the Cupcake book and tried out two muffin recipes. The Banana Butter Pecan was moist and delicious, with fresh banana, butterscotch pudding and chopped pecans sprinkled on the bottom and top of each muffin. The Pumpkin Chocolate Chip muffins used real canned pumpkin (not the pumpkin pie stuff), and were dense, yummy and chocolate-y.

The second Monday in April was our monthly book club gathering, and Mira would be hosting. It was also book club member Chelsea's birthday. To celebrate, Mira and I both made cupcakes from the book. Mira made the healthier option, the Lemon Curd Cupcakes with Whipped Lemon Cream Frosting and Raspberries and I made the more decadent option, the Cookies and Cream Cupcakes. The batter for my cupcakes was the most incredible thing in the world. I had to beat a cup of sour cream into the batter, which gave it this very marshmallow-y like texture. Then it had crushed oreos mixed in and half of an oreo cookie baked into the bottom of each one.

My next occasion for cupcake-baking came when I volunteered to bring some baked goods for the School of Social Work bake sale. So I made Pineapple Banana Smoothie cupcakes with Pineapple Buttercream frosting. They were so yummy! But as I was in the process of making them, I had the strangest feeling about the bake sale. I went to check on the date again, and realized that I was making the cupcakes a week ahead of time. Oops! So I ended up bringing the 2 dozen cupcakes to my Wednesday night class. They were a big hit.

Even though the Pineapple Banana Smoothie cupcakes were very delicious, I wanted to try something new the next week, when it came time to make something for the actual bake sale. So I tried out the Malted Milk Cupcakes. These were pretty incredible. It used a yellow cake mix as the base, with chocolate pudding and chocolate chips mixed in (among other ingredients). The frosting was a buttercream, with a couple tablespoons of malted milk power added in. Then they were topped off with crushed malted milk balls. I'm told that they were quite popular at the bake sale. In my opinion, they might have been the most delicious ones yet. Although the Peanut Butter Surprise may come in a very close second.

And that is all of the cupcake baking that I have done up until now! There are still many, many recipes in the book that I want to try out. But I won't be making any until another occasion comes up. Otherwise we just have a bunch of cupcakes sitting around the house, and that is NEVER a good thing!!

Minnesota Education Job Fair

Two days ago, I attended the Minnesota Education Job Fair in downtown Minneapolis. There were school districts from all over the Metro area, Minnesota and the rest of the country (even some international schools). My interest was obviously in positions for school social workers, which I was told schools would be hiring for. Before going, I had looked at all of the school districts attending, done research on certain ones, and printed off several copies of my resume.

When I got there on Monday morning it became quickly apparent to me that there weren't many schools with vacancies for school social workers. Most districts didn't yet know whether they would have any openings, and told me to keep checking online or submit my application to the pool for if any positions opened up. I was frustrated because all of that is stuff that I could have figured out on my own. Nevertheless, I got to have some nice conversations with a couple of different school districts. I stopped by the Minneapolis Public Schools table, the St. Paul Public Schools, and Bloomington Public Schools. At Bloomington I got to have a great talk with one of their recruiters, Raymond Yu, who is a principal at an elementary school in Bloomington. Soon into our conversation I discovered that he was the former principal here at Wellstone Elementary! We had a nice chat about Wellstone, and who was still working there, etc.

Two districts did actually have vacancies for school social workers. The Northeast Metro Intermediate School District had openings for two different positions, and I had a chat with their recruiter, leaving her a copy of my resume. Then I headed over the Wayzata Public Schools table and spoke with their director of Special Education services. They are hiring a Middle School social worker. We had a good conversation and she seemed really excited about all of my experience working with diverse and low-income student populations. She gave me her card and told me to apply online and then e-mail her after I had submitted the application. Wayzata is in Hennepin County and is one of Minneapolis's western suburbs, about a 30 minute drive. It wouldn't be ideal, but I could manage it.

Once I got back home from the fair, I spent a significant amount of time beginning online applications for various school districts. So far I've submitted my application to St. Paul Public Schools, Bloomington Public Schools, NE Metro Intermediate District, and I'm working on my application for a number of others. The Wayzata position hadn't been posted yet, so I e-mailed the recruiter last night and she told me that it had gotten held up but should be posted soon, and that I should make sure to keep checking.

So hopefully something will have come out of this experience. At the very least, I got some practice in speaking with potential employers and learning a little more about different districts. With a any luck, I'll be back in the schools next fall!

Two good reads

Usually I don't have much time for pleasure reading during the semester. However, this semester I've managed to read two really good books that weren't part of my assigned coursework but were still related to my field of study. Both are books that I would highly recommend.

The first book I was easily able to reconcile taking the time to read because for my mood disorders class we have an assignment to read either a memoir or self-help book on the subject of mood disorders. As it turned out, a book that I had been wanting to read fit right into that category. The

book is called An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison. Ms. Jamison is a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and also one of the foremost authorities on manic-depressive illness. She also happens to have strugg

led with this illness for the better part of her life. I've read various accounts of manic-depression (more commonly referred to as bipolar disorder these days), often in the form of a memoir written by a child of someone who had suffered. This book was unlike any I had read before because not only was it from the perspective of the patient, it was also from the perspective of a clinician and expert on the disease. She writes about it with a clarity and understanding unlike anything I've read before, while at the same time describing t

he stunning depths of her cycles of depression and mania. It's a wonderful book for anyone interested in really learning about man

ic-depression, and it's also just a good read in general.

The second book that I have been working on whenever I get a little time for extra reading is called The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing by Bruce Perry. I had read some articles written by Dr. Perry last semester and always appreciated the way that he wrote about complex issues in a readable way. This book is no different. Dr. Perry is a long-time child psychiatrist, former Chief of Psychiatry at Texas Children's Hospital and currently Senior Fellow of The ChildTrauma Academy. This book chronicles some of the stories of the children he has worked with, children who have experienced profound traumas such as genocide, witness to murder, and extreme neglect. He was brought in to work with the Branch Davidian children in Waco during and after the whole stand-off. What's so interesting and unique about Dr. Perry's work is that he is very concerned with the neurobiology behind trauma. He explains in very user-friendly language about how the brain is affected by early traumas, and he discusses his methods for helping children to overcome this developmental damage. It's a topic that I'm very interested in, and it's great to read about his methods. Some of the accounts are very difficult to read because they're just so traumatic, but it's worth it for anyone interested in this subject.

Papers, papers, papers...

This past week has been very writing intensive. Social work classes have always been more paper heavy than exam focused, but besides finals week I usually don't have a lot due all at once. Last week though... First, I had a paper due on Sunday by noon. Technically I didn't have to turn it in until a couple of weeks later, but it's the first part of a two-part paper and if I wait to turn it in later then the entire thing is due at one time. If we turn the first part in early, our instructor said that she would give us feedback on it so we can make possible revisions. This paper was for my advanced policy class on family and child welfare policy. For the first part of the paper we have to pick a problem statement related to children or families and write a review on the literature. Basically, what is the problem, why is it a problem?, what social, environmental and biological factors influence the problem? The second part of the paper, due later in March, will be exploring two different programs/policies that address the problem and evaluating them.

The problem statement that I chose was on childhood obesity. With the rates having more or less tripled over the past 30 years and Michelle Obama starting her first big initiative on the issue, it's definitely something that I knew I'd be able to find a lot of research on. However, I wasn't thinking about the fact that many of the consequences of childhood obesity are health-related. So to review the literature on the medical consequences of childhood obesity, I had to read all kinds of articles from medical journals that took me quite a bit of time to get through, mostly because I had to look up a lot of words. I'm a social worker -- I have no idea what C-reactive protein is or what "biliary excretion of cholesterol" means! However, once I learned a lot of the most common conditions and terms, I was able to get through things much quicker, and also became a pro at reading abstracts, introductions and then skimming down to the results and discussion parts of research articles. Because I'm big on corroborating -- I'm not going to write that childhood obesity can cause precocious puberty unless I can cite more than one piece of literature -- I had to read a lot of what was basically the same thing over and over. However, now I feel a whole lot smarter. I wanted to tell my instructor that she's lucky she now has a very comprehensive overview of the consequences of childhood obesity that has been translated into understandable language! I also looked at the social and economic costs as well as the different possible causes or influences. It was quite the paper and I was up until 3:30 AM last Saturday finishing it. Haven't been up that late finishing a paper since undergrad.

I felt like I had barely finished that paper when it was time for me to write the next one. I had another paper due on Wednesday for my working with immigrants class. This paper was very similar to the other one, in that it was meant to be a lit review on a problem statement. Only this problem statement had to do with a problem in the delivery process of social services to one or more immigrants/refugee groups, and unlike the 10-15 pages that my last paper was, this only had to be 5-6 pages. I had gathered my research already, but hadn't read through any of it yet and hadn't started writing. Tuesdays are my days off, so I had planned to spend all day working on it. My initial plan was to write about the lack of cultural competency in completing mental health screenings with immigrants and refugees. I read a few articles Tuesday morning, went to the gym, ate lunch, then settled myself into my favorite neighborhood coffee shop.

I started to get increasingly frustrated with the lack of research and finally realized that my problem statement was much, much too broad. So I decided to narrow it down, but this meant that I had to do all new research. Since I already have quite a bit of knowledge on the Somali community thanks to my diversity project from last semester, I decided to make my problem statement on the under-identification of mental health needs among Somali children. I was surprisingly able to find quite a bit of research on Somali mental health, and many of the research articles actually focused on the Somali community in Minnesota. I found some fascinating articles, but unfortunately once the time came for me to go home and get ready to leave for tutoring, I had just finished reading and hadn't even begun writing.

I got home from tutoring around 7:20 and immediately got to work, finishing the paper at just about 11:30. In the paper I reviewed the history of the Somali community, explored the mental health concerns and cultural considerations relating to the population, and explained the need for more accurate mental health screenings of Somali youth. I think it turned out to be a very interesting paper, and I got to write about one of my main areas of interest, which is treatment of trauma and intergenerational trauma transmission. Perhaps I'll even post the paper on here, if people are interested.

So finally I got to have a break from papers, although then it was time for me to study for a quiz in my Friday mood disorders class. There's never a break in the life of a student! At least this semester, the papers that I'm writing actually make me feel as though I'm learning something. That always makes for a nice change!

My Weight-Loss Journey

For the most part I've kept my posts pretty much confined to issues of school and work, and nothing much from my personal life. Plus, it makes me a little uncomfortable to talk about losing weight. Mira and I were discussing this issue and how it feels weird when people talk about how good you look now, sort of indirectly saying that before you looked like a fat cow. I know that's not what most people mean, but it still feels a little uncomfortable. However, tonight I just ran 4 miles for the first time, and really feel like sharing my little story of the past several months. Although 4 miles may not seem like a whole lot, believe me, it's about 5x more than I could do when I was first starting!

My weight has really fluctuated a lot over the years. Between 8th and 9th grade I went from about 110 pounds to close to 130, something which I attributed to going on the pill. When I started college I was down to about 120 and feeling pretty good about my body. Over the next 5 years I really put on the weight. Due in part to poor eating habits and not being particularly active, among other things. At my lowest point (or I guess, highest) I hit 150. Then I moved to Minnesota and in a few months time I dropped about 10 pounds without even trying, just from having a more regular schedule, eating better and getting out more. I remember when I went to have my annual exam and the nurse read my weight -- 137 -- and I was shocked. I felt good, but I knew that I wasn't yet where I wanted to be.

For me it was never really about losing the weight, although being thinner is of course nice. It was more about feeling good and being healthy. I just didn't feel so good, my energy was low, I didn't have a good control over my diet, and I knew that I was terribly out of shape. I was eager to make a change, and Mira and I decided to join a fitness center last summer. The best part of this was that the gym is just around the corner from our house, which made it much easier to motivate myself to go. I started going a couple days a week. I was feeling good and enjoying that endorphin rush that I would get after a workout. Working for a week at Camp Sunrise and doing that canoe trip really inspired me to keep it up. For some reason the girls in my crew really saw me as this strong woman, and I thought, "Yes. That's what I want to be." It was slow going, but by Christmas I was down to 130 and felt amazing. I had more energy than I had ever had before, which is partly attributable to some other things, but I know a lot has to do with the exercise.

There was still something else though... I still knew that I needed to make some serious changes in my diet. It wasn't a problem of eating too much, it was more an issue of not eating the right things. Mira, who has slimmed down significantly over the past several months, had been using a website called SparkPeople.com and really liked it. So I decided to give it a try. SparkPeople is a free website that creates personalized fitness and "diet" programs and allows you to track goals and other things. Apparently it's super popular, although I had never heard of it until Mira started. I put "diet" in quotes because really the focus is on creating healthy eating patterns and a healthy lifestyle -- something that is sustainable. So when you first join you have to enter in information about yourself, height, weight, etc. including goal weight and when you want to reach it. It then generates you a nutrition and fitness plan. It does require you to restrict and count calories. You have to enter in all of the food that you eat each day, although their database has nearly everything in it already. So if I have a 1/2 cup of Preferida refried beans I just type that into the search and it pops up with all the nutritional info and I can add it to my meal plan. They also give you meal plans that you can follow.

Although it requires calorie restriction, I actually feel like I'm eating more than I ever have before. I eat five or six times a day to meet my goals. The goals that they automatically give you are for calories, carbohydrates, fat and protein and then you can add other nutrients to track as well. So for me, I am supposed to consume 1200-1550 calories, 163-236g carbs, 32-56g fat, and 60-127g protein. I also have slowly added other nutrients to track so that now my goals are also to consume 25-35g fiber, 0-250g cholesterol and 500-2300g sodium. You also track how many cups of water you drink each day with a goal of drinking 8. In terms of my fitness routine, I am supposed to do 160 minutes of cardio, burning 1000 calories. I'm also supposed to be doing strength training, but I haven't added that on yet. I'm a little intimidated by all of the weight machines to be honest!

I've been doing this for about two months now, and it has honestly changed the way that I eat and think about food. First of all, I have to pay attention the serving sizes and measure out what I eat. It's very interesting when you realize what the actual serving sizes of things are, and really helps with portion control. Tracking my nutrients was also a big wake up call for me as to what exactly it was that I was consuming each day. Restricting the calories wasn't that hard, but I realized that I was getting nowhere near enough protein or fiber in my diet. I've really had to work to up my protein intake, but now I'm typically consuming close to 90g of protein a day and meeting my goals for fiber almost every day as well. I pay attention to what's in things now, and am actually consuming milk again! I've never been a huge milk fan, but I make sure to have at least 8oz each day in my morning cereal. Archer Farms (Target Brand) Cinnamon Start with Protein is currently my breakfast of choice -- one serving (3/4C) has 15g of protein in it. So along with the milk, I get 24g at the start of the day. Finally, this really forces me to plan out my meals in advance. I've made a few batch items, including delicious Vegan Lentil Burgers (taste really yummy with cheese and avocado) and Spicy Chicken Peanut Soup. Typically I plan out my days meals at the beginning of the day.

The other thing that I really like about SparkPeople is that it has tons of really informative and helpful articles on health, nutrition, fitness and even motivation. As an example, some of the articles that I've saved are "How to Meet My Protein Needs Without Meat", "Easy Ways to Boost Fiber Intake", "Daily Stretching Routine", and "De-Stress in 3 Minutes or Less." The other thing is that you can create your own goals to track besides just the fitness and nutrition. So I've added in getting 8 hours of sleep, journal 5 minutes per day and 10 minutes of deep breathing before bed.

It's not just a healthy lifestyle that I've been developing here, there have also been results! It's been slow going, with just about a pound lost each week but as of this past Tuesday I was down to 122! I've also lost inches everywhere. They have you weigh yourself just once a week (my day is Tuesday) and measure yourself once a month. The goal weight that I made was 115, but honestly I would be happy right here as well. I feel fantastic, I'm eating great, and those chocolate and junk food cravings have miraculously gone away! I still get them now and again, but there's always a little room for "splurging." I really enjoy the Sugar-free Jell-o pudding packs because they have only 60 calories and 2g of fat while still allowing the occasional chocolate indulgence! Also good are the Skinny Cow ice cream products. The ice cream sandwiches are delicious and have 140 calories, 2g of fat and 4g of protein.

So all in all I'm very satisfied with how things have been going. Obviously it's not something that I plan to do forever -- tracking my calories and nutrients. The goal is to eventually be able to develop eating habits that are naturally going to keep me in good ranges. I will also definitely be maintaining the work-out routine because I really enjoy it, and hopefully I will add strength training eventually :) It's amazing to me how much I've progressed since I started last summer. When I first started I would use the elliptical trainer and go for about 25-30 minutes at about 4.5 mph with no incline and would be exhausted by the end. Now I do it in the hill mode for 35 minutes and am going 8+ mph. I've also added on the treadmill, which at first I was intimidated by. I could only do about 10 minutes at 5mph and I would be ready to collapse. Tonight I did it for 45 min (with 5 min cool down), ran 4 miles and probably could have kept right on running! Mira's really gotten into the running since the summer and ran a 5K over Thanksgiving and is now planning to do a half marathon this summer. I'm definitely not ready for something like that, but I just might consider doing a 5K sometime! I can tell that my legs have gotten so much stronger and I actually can see muscles when I flex! The only downside to all of this has been that most of my clothes are too big, even stuff that I bought in the late fall/early winter is loose. I can't really afford to get a new wardrobe, and I'm not looking forward to when summer comes, when pretty much nothing that I own will fit. I'm going to have to hit up the thrift stores big time! Oh and this might be oversharing, but I also had to get all new bras because I've gone down an entire cup size :(

Well, I realize that this was incredibly long. So thanks for reading if you made it all the way through. I promise that I haven't become some kind of crazed nutrition or exercise nut. I'm just really happy and proud of myself and wanted to share, especially since I've gotten so many questions and comments regarding my weight loss. Love to you all XOXOXO

Amy, August 2009

Amy, February 2010

Okay, they're not super obvious, but you can sort of see some muscle there!