When Lucie Arnaz gives the keynote speech at the 2013 Go Red for Women luncheon in Lafayette Thursday, she’ll be frank about her family’s experience with heart disease. Her mother, Lucille Ball, and father, Desi Arnaz, both died from heart disease-related illnesses. Now she’s working the Go Red circuit, encouraging women to take charge of their lives and improve their health.
“It’s about making time to take care of yourself and taking advantage of all the knowledge we have now that our parents just did not have. Frankly, my parents were very unaware of what smoking did to them and they both smoked,” says Arnaz in a phone interview this week. “We didn’t understand really what exercise and taking care, getting that blood pumping, even just walking or staying active or doing core exercises. My mother was skinny her whole life, she worked, she was busy, she was active — who would think that she needed to exercise? Women have the hardest part of all because we’re trained to take care of everyone around us. That’s a hard thing to break. We want to be moms, we want to be wives — I love cooking and decorating and building the nest, but I very rarely build in time for Lucie, and that’s something I have to work on.”
Arnaz says she has worked to transform her own life, but not give up on her favorite foods. A large part of maintaining her health, she says, is constant movement.
“Go out and take a walk! A lot of us are very sedentary,” she says. “There are more gyms than there ever were in the nation, and we’re a fatter nation than we’ve ever been. I can’t figure out that part, myself, at all. I think people just get so involved in their texting and their emails and their Facebook and whatever that they forget to go out and enjoy the universe.”
Arnaz also says she recognizes that food is so intertwined with the social experience in many parts of the country, especially Lafayette, and it’s not necessary to give up the goodies all together. Instead, she recommends moderation — indulge two days a week, like Friday and Saturday night for her, to “cook like crazy” and embrace the culture.
“I spend a lot of time trying not to bore my life with healthy habits,” says Arnaz. “You want to be healthy and have fun. I don’t want to be in a box where I have to do this and that so I look a certain way and be a certain weight — but there are ways to eat what you want to eat sometimes. You know, you don’t have to eat it every damn day, and the rest of the week, eat collard greens and spinach and kale and salads and lots of fruits and berries and onions and mushrooms and all those things that save you from disease and keep you thin and keep your blood pumping.
“You want to just stay ahead of it, have the fun you want to have — you are a part of your culture, you’ll never not be a part of your culture, but be one of the forerunners who lead the pack on how to do that ... Don’t give up your whole life.”
Above all, Arnaz stresses leading by example, especially for your children: “Kids watch and they learn from what you do. They’ll do what you do — I smoked because my parents smoked. If my mother exercises or eats a lot of salads, I’ll probably eat a lot of salads.
“I’ve gotta walk the walk. I want to be a light for other people.”
MAY 24 Blogger Robert Mann posts this entry about the Baton Rouge Chamber's recent report on Louisiana's higher education system. It's critical to economic development, and yet our system is facing a "funding crisis" with no way to resolve it, the report says. The Chamber says control of tuition and fees must be returned to the higher ed governing boards.
MAY 24 Here's a NBC33 story about Tyrann Mathieu. He has signed with the Arizona Cardinals, inking a $3 million, four-year deal. He gets a signing bonus of $265K, but gets another, larger bonus if he doesn't get cut from the team for doing drugs. The deal reportedly includes mandatory tests and meetings for the player.
MAY 24 Jarvis DeBerry posts here about the redonkulus rhetoric that would have us believe NOLA is a safe city with a murder problem. Maybe the city's crime stats don't compare with its murder stats because you can't manipulate a murder, he says: a dead body's a dead body. It just doesn't make sense, he says, and his readers agree: a poll asks if they believe the city is safe, and more than 90 percent say no.
MAY 24 Jindal administration officials announced Thursday that the privatization of public health care is going to cost a lot more than they budgeted for, the Advocate reports here. "I'm so surprised," said no one. Anywhere. The cost they're projecting now is more than $1 billion - a lot more than the $626 million budgeted for it. And, it's more than it cost the state to operate those hospitals. So why are we doing this again?
MAY 24 Blogger CB Forgotston ridicules the recent PR campaign by the state GOP in the wake of a legislative auditor's request to both major parties. The GOP (apparently unaware that the Dems got the same request) started yammering about being targeted because it had "killed" a tax increase. CB finds that laughable, but it's also pretty funny that the GOP was comparing this episode to the IRS scandal (Because the President has so much to do with our state auditor. Right?).
MAY 24 Politico details some recent fund-raising efforts by Sen. David Vitter, which have raised the question of his future political plans. This time, it is a $5,000 per head "bayou weekend" that includes "Cajun cooking" and an all-caps "alligator hunt," the story reports. Funds raised go to a super PAC that can spend money to support Vitter in federal or state races, the story points out.
MAY 24 The pink building on Royal in the quarter was sold at a sheriff's sale Thursday, this Picayune story reports. An injunction that would have halted the sale wasn't enforced because the family failed to post a $150,000 bond, the story reports. So the owner of the mortgages on the building bought it, for nearly $7 million. Now the feuding family will have to negotiate with that company to get a lease on the building that has housed their business for close to 60 years.
MAY 23 This post in Louisiana Voice tells us about a bill by a Winnsboro lege that would require all public high school students to take at least one Course Choice online class in order to graduate. (What?) Blogger Tom Aswell says it's a monument to "waste and corruption," especially in light of the problems he's exposed with the program in recent weeks. Idaho had a similar program, but voters removed it by a 2-1 margin, Aswell says.
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