Rick Warner’s turning point came in March 2008 during an anticipated highlight of his immersion learning trip to Mexico with the College’s Archeo-Astronomy course. Warner had integrated a service project into the itinerary and was looking forward to working side by side with students and Professors Dan Rogers and Jim Brown.
Instead he sat and took pictures, barely able to walk, his knee
throbbing from a sudden flare-up of osteo-arthritis.
When he returned to Crawfordsville, Warner made an appointment with family physician Dr. Scott Douglas ’84, expecting to be referred for knee surgery.
“That’s not what you need,” Douglas told the Wabash history professor and former professional chef whose scholarship includes the history of food. “The only thing you can really do is to take off some weight.”
Almost two years later and 70 pounds lighter, Warner is growing more of his own food at his home at 308 S. Wabash while cooking (as students and faculty will attest) better than ever. He offers these 10 reflections on his “new way of eating and living.”
1. Record what you eat
I see a nutritionist every six weeks, and one of the first things she taught me was to record what I eat.
There’s a computer program on the web (
www.sparkspeople.com) where you can have your food analyzed in terms of its nutrition. But just writing down what you eat and putting it in your pocket has been shown to help people reduce their weight. It’s important to reflect about what you’re doing.
2. Keep a positive spirit with food
Food has been very important to my life, so I did not want to develop a negative attitude toward it. I didn’t want to lose my interest in its history, in cooking. Food isn’t bad—it just needs to be used in the right proportion.
So I still enjoy food. I’m not throwing the baby out with the bath water. Having a positive spirit toward food has always been critical to me.
I’ve never left my love of cooking, either. I do it because it’s fun.
3. Don’t diet
It’s not a diet, and you can’t think of it that way. You’re older now and you can’t eat the way you did when you were a student. It’s time to come to grips with the fact that your metabolism slows down.
Everyone wants a quick fix, and there isn’t one. It’s a new way of eating and living, and it’s a positive thing.
4. Identify your issues
One of the advantages of tracking what you eat is that you discover what your issues are. For instance, saturated fats tend to stick to me more than calories. If I watch my fats, I do better.
5. Watch for those early rewards
If you have lots of weight to lose, the numbers come off quicker at first, and that’s encouraging.
After six months I stopped feeling the pain in my knees.
And I snored less. I’d been diagnosed with sleep apnea and was on a CPAP, that machine that blows air into you. As I had gained weight, my soft pallet had sagged. I could feel it at the back of my throat. But it retracted after six months, and now I snore very rarely, and the apnea is gone.
6. Take time for meals
We eat while we drive, while we walk, while we work. The idea of the commonality of a meal has lost its place in our culture. It’s lost its magic because we’re so focused on doing it quickly. And fewer people know how to cook. Look at what people buy in the supermarket—sometimes its frightening to me.
I’ve always thought of a meal as something more than just nutrition, as a cultural space that’s important.
7. Exercise for well-being, not weight loss
As a recent study suggested, you don’t exercise to lose weight. But I’m going to the gym now to round out my health. I do feel better. And if you do it early in the day, it’ll give you an intellectual energy boost. It’s good for writer’s block, too!
8. Avoid danger zones
For me buffets, faculty wine and cheese gatherings, or any “all you can eat” restaurant is a danger zone. Same with tortilla chips in a Mexican restaurant—there’s a globule of fat there; you might as well be eating french fries.
9. Eat early, not late
I can eat almost any- thing for breakfast and, to some degree, lunch, but if I have a low intake at night, the scale will be lower in the morning.
Think about it—after 7 p.m. we tend not to do anything active. Yet in our culture, this
is when the big meal is.
In our family, we try to eat by 5:30, and even that’s kind of late considering the number of calories you’re going to burn.
And the late night snack is the worst thing you can do.
10. A Taoist circle
I’d like to do something of service to the world, and taking care of the world and taking care of my own body may be of a piece.
First, I can do that work longer and better if I am more ambulatory and feel better. Second, caring for the earth, learning how to grow food, and the physical act of cooking it is a spiritual piece with learning to take care of each other.
In the end, it all comes together in a sort of Taoist circle of balance.
Read more about Professor Warner and his celebration of the history of food in the “Our Mutual Life” issue of WM Spring 2010.
