A reason why it’s hard to eat well…..

A friend of mine sent me this article from the New York Times: Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind.

I think that this can also explain why eating well can be so frustrating. Have you just eaten that donut because you’ve read about all the other foods that are “bad for you” and, feeling overwhelmed, you decide that since we’re all going to go at one time or another you might as well enjoy that donut? I know that’s happened to me — at least it did before I found out I was gluten intolerant!

There is a lot of nutritional information out there, much of it conflicting, and it can be overwhelming. You shouldn’t need to cart around a guidebook the size of the dictionary in order to be healthy.

That’s why I think it’s much better to focus on doing positive things for yourself and to spend less time resisting things. Instead of wrestling over whether or not you should have those fries, why don’t you just spend the extra few bucks and order a salad or some other vegetable to go with them? According to the article,we have a limited amount of willpower, and so it might be better used to focus on doing something that you know will benefit you (like taking a twenty minute walk a day) instead of depriving yourself.

Effortless Oats

I love having steel-cut oats for breakfast but could never seem to get my act together to cook them.

And then I learned about the quick-soak method on McCann’s Web site.

All you have to do is bring four cups of water to a boil in a pot. Once it is boiling, add 1 cup of steel-cut oats to the water, cover, and turn off the stove. You leave the oats soaking in the pot on the stove overnight. In the morning, they are almost done. All you have to do is bring them to a boil, and cook them for a few minutes until just tender. You can store the leftovers in the fridge for up to 4-5 days.

This was the best oatmeal I’ve ever made — it came out perfectly and was so easy that any stressed out person can manage it.

It all starts with breakfast…

Since the beginning of February, I’ve been having an interesting experience with breakfast.

First, though, a confession: somehow, in the process of starting my own business as a health coach, I fell into the habit of eating gluten-free toast almost every morning for about six months. I used to have it on Saturday as a treat, and, since it never caused me any problems, I didn’t really think about the toast when I wondered why I suddenly gained a few pounds and felt a bit bloated. I thought it was the winter and stress!

And then I had a conversation with a colleague in my BNI group and a light-bulb went off in my head! Could it be the toast?

I’m a great believer in experimenting, and I decided that I would do an experiment: I’d eliminate the toast as a breakfast food and try switching to a whole grain cereal (oatmeal), yogurt, or a smoothie. I realized then how much I had come to depend on my little treat to ease into my day. It was a good thing that I told myself it was only an experiment or I never would have parted with it!

I tried oatmeal for a couple of days, and then I switched to yogurt with nuts, raisins, and coconut. From there I made the plunge to a smoothie.

It was then that interesting things started to happen:

1. My mood lightened.
2. I actually became a little lighter physically – and the bloating went away.
3. I started craving more fruits and vegetables.
4. I felt in touch with my body and what it needed for the first time in months.
5. I had greater mental clarity.

Could all this be from cutting out the toast? I think so. There’s more and more research on how refined carbohydrates* and sugar are linked to inflammation & the diseases of civilization, and, although I liked to rationalize that my China Black Rice Bread was not truly refined (see, even health coaches have their little stories), it is. So that could explain a few pounds and some bloating. How to explain the energetic component? Intuitively, it makes sense to me. My smoothie, that contained fruit, is inherently closer to life than a processed, frozen piece of toast. What I realized from this experiment is that somehow, eating fresh and wholesome foods makes us want more, just as eating more processed food (like toast) can lead us to wanting more processed foods. It explains to me why it can be so hard to break out of a food-rut — our bodies get accustomed to the food we’re eating and we get stuck.

If you want to try a breakfast experiment of your own, here’s a basic smoothie recipe:

• 1 cup frozen berries
• 1/2 frozen banana (optional)
• 1 scoop protein powder (I like Designer Whey, Vanilla)
• 1/2 cup water
• 1/2 cup almond, rice, or oat milk (unsweetened)

Combine in a blender and mix until smooth.

Enjoy! It’s a nice way to start the spring.

*Note: The carbohydrates referenced here are refined carbohydrates (processed flour (usually white), sugar, high fructose corn syrup, etc.) not whole grains like oatmeal, buckwheat, millet, brown rice, and quinoa.

NY Times: The Fat Pack Wonders if the Party’s Over

Funny coincidence — the food of the month in my newsletter is fats and oils. It’s going out tomorrow, and today, on the front page of the NYTimes Dining Section was The Fat Pack Wonders if the Party’s Over.

This article was interesting. I suspect a little hidden glee among the fat-phobic that the day of reckoning has arrived for those who have been happily feasting on pork butt and other fatty delights. But there’s also some healthy skepticism on the ever-changing nutritional advice (although, unfortunately, the skepticism seems to be used to justify a “anything goes” approach to diet, despite physical and personal evidence to the contrary). There’s also a lesson on weight-loss here.

Here are my thoughts:

1) “Fat is bad” and “Fat is good” are both overly simplistic statements. We all need fat in our diet. We should be more concerned with what kinds of fat we should be eating.

2) While it’s tempting to use the latest nutritional information to justify our over-consumption of anything – I’ll confess, every time I read the latest industry-sponsored research on coffee, I think about getting an espresso – at the end of the day you need to pay attention to your body. For the men in the article, the weight that they were gaining was a warning sign that something was wrong.

3) If you decide to lose weight, it is possible to do it and still LOVE what you eat. Just see those stories of the restaurateurs and foodies in the article.

Why we over-schedule

I’ve been meaning to post this for ages, but perhaps it is a fitting post from my return from a brief vacation/conference in South Beach, Miami….

At last, proof that we don’t really understand why we over-schedule/overbook ourselves (and some of us, our children) — it doesn’t make us happier or healthier, but it does help us avoid the pain of loss. It seems that we will bear almost anything – stress, fatigue, no time for ourselves – if it means that a door doesn’t have to close.

Here’s the New York Times Article, “The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors.”

It’s inspired me to think about my own life in a different way — and also is helping me get through the pain of decision-making as I build a new Web site for my business…

Julia Cameron’s The Writing Diet

I had several reactions when I saw Julia Cameron’s The Writing Diet.

First — not another diet book! Second — another diet book! True confession: reading diet books is a hobby of mine that never grows old because there is always another one. Hint: there is something wrong with this picture, and it’s not that I like reading diet books.

Although at first I thought that Julia Cameron was just spinning off her patented Artist’s Way techniques to take advantage of America’s unquenchable thirst for diets, it turns out that she used some of these techniques herself to lose weight that she gained as a side effect of a medication she was taking. The best part of the book is that it gives readers a way to develop a mindfulness practice that is essential when trying to deal with the emotional aspects of eating and our relationship with food. You can certainly develop this practice in other ways — any kind of spiritual practice will do — but, if you don’t have one, this book is a great place to start. Some of the exercises are terrific — I plan on trying some of them and reporting back on them here.

It was the part of the book that veered into nutrition that I had a problem with.

First of all, she makes many, many references to Splenda and artificially sweetened products like diet Jello as ways to satisfy cravings for sweet foods. Artificial sweeteners are not healthy foods, and, in my opinion, don’t belong as a daily part of a healthy diet. I’ll write more about that later, but if you’d like to learn more about some of the issues around Splenda please check out Mercola.com. There are many better ways to deal with a sweet-tooth than resorting to a product that, molecularly, looks more like a cyanide molecule than a sucrose molecule.

Secondly, at more than one point, the book alludes to satisfying a craving for a food that might not be allowed on your diet (ice cream, mac & cheese) and then “making up” for it with more exercise or some other kind of atonement. I just hate that kind of thinking, and I hate to see it perpetuated. One of my favorite new food stories is that when you show the French a picture of a luscious chocolate cake, they think “celebrate.” The word that comes to mind for most Americans upon seeing the same picture is “guilt.” What I believe is that when you get your body into balance, your body is able to handle that cake and ice cream at your child’s birthday party without your tacking on an extra hour on the treadmill. In other words, you can have your cake and the celebration – it is possible.

Wish I’d Thought of This: Build your own bar…

This is one of these neat ideas that I as soon as I saw it I wished  that I had thought of it.

www.youbars.com is a company that builds customized nutrition bars.  You make your own combination (out of real foods, thank you very much, none of those weird, polysyllabic ingredients), they build it, put it in a customized wrapper, and send it off to you.

Here’s the link the New York Time’s article: With these nutrition bars, every order is special

If $40 per baker’s dozen is more than you want to spend for a nutrition bar, I highly recommend Lara Bars — they are made from whole foods, and a great way to wean yourself off the afternoon brownie.

Mind Food

I was preparing an entry about nuts for today (yes, they are great for you!) when a friend sent me this article from The New York Times – Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?.

I’m sure the above doesn’t apply to anyone reading this blog, but one of the article’s featured authors Susan Jacoby (“The Age of American Unreason”) mentions how she tried to turn off the TV for a week and how difficult it was for her to do so.

Food is more than just what we put in our mouths to nourish our bodies. It can also be what we put in our minds and hearts. Spring is coming up, and so there will be lots of chatting about “spring cleanses” in the nutrition world, but a “media” cleanse can be a good thing to do for a week.

A media cleanse can be mild or more strict, whatever you feel up to tackling. You could simply take a week off from the morning paper, internet news surfing, and the nightly news. Observe yourself. How do you feel after a week of no disasters, disease, body counts, etc. Or you can go wild and try a week without TV. For those of you who like to live life on the edge, push the envelope a little bit further and see what life is like without TV, books, newspapers, and internet surfing. The important part of the process is to notice what happens and how you feel. Perhaps you will feel more energetic and creative after a rest from all the bad news of the world, or perhaps you never really understood the role that entertainment plays in your life.

If at some point you feel that you are ready to start peeling paint off the walls, remind yourself that this is an experiment and that it is temporary. In our modern world, it isn’t as easy to go off into the wilderness as it used to be, and a “media” cleanse can be a way to explore our inner wilderness for a brief period of time. When you come back to civilization, you’ll see it with new eyes — and won’t that be interesting?

What’s with all the E.Coli????

I seem to be on a “beef” theme this week. I thought it was interesting that there’s been an increase in E. coli contaminated beef recently (25 million pounds in 2007 vs. less than 200,000 pounds in 2006). According to Consumer Reports (March 2008), it may be because:

1) We’re growing more corn for ethanol, and what’s left over is being used to feed cows. I wrote earlier this week that I would talk more about what happens when you feed cows grain. Basically, a cow isn’t meant to eat grain, and when they do, it disrupts their digestive system and makes it possible for the toxic strain of E. coli to flourish. They also get sick and have to be given antibiotics, which then end up in the meat and our water supply (more about that in some other post).

2) Then, the cows are taken to a slaughterhouse that processes too many cows too quickly (up to 390 per hour, more than 50 per minute!), which means, inevitably, errors occur. That’s my polite euphemism for saying that “shit gets in the meat.” I stole that line from the film adaptation of Fast Food Nation, a movie that I highly recommend for its depiction of what the meat-packing industry is like today. Not only is its treatment of animals suspect, it isn’t particularly humane towards people, either.

3) Nonetheless, the article concludes, “the main obstacles to preventing the spread of E. coli are inadequate government inspection and meat-handling practices, particularly in slaughterhouses, where contamination is most likely to occur.”

4) There’s also a couple of other problems. Most disturbingly for me, is that if meat tests positive for E. coli, it can still cooked and sold for use in products like tacos and pizza. I didn’t know this, and my gut reactions is “Yuck!” Of course, the cooking is supposed to kill E. coli, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that this might be a potential source of cross-contamination.

What stands out for me, though, is again — sounding like a broken record here — cows are not meant to eat grain and we should be thinking more about how we raise and slaughter our animals. If cows were eating grass, there wouldn’t be enough E. coli to contaminate the meat. And if were treating the animals and the people who work in the slaughterhouses humanely, shit, contaminated by E. coli or not, would be much less likely to end up in the meat.

I’m not trying to convert anyone to veganism. Believe me, I still am known to eat a cheeseburger, and I made beef chili on SuperBowl Sunday. When I can, though, I try to buy grass-fed beef. It tastes better, is better for me, the environment, the farmer/rancher, the land, and the cow. I know it is more expensive, but I remind myself that 1) a portion of meat should only be the size and thickness of your palm and 2) quality, with animal protein, is more important than quantity.

Something New: Stone Ground Chocolate Bar by Taza

Happy Valentines Day!

In the spirit of the holiday, I thought I’d share my experience with a delicious new chocolate bar made by Taza Chocolate.

I needed some dark chocolate to clean my palate after lunch last Friday, and when I went to the store, my eye was struck by a display of Stone Ground Chocolate Bars (organic, too!). Being a health counselor and generally a fan of stone ground things, I needed to try stone ground chocolate. (Also, to be honest, there was something about the size and heft of the bar that reminded me of Willy Wonka and the golden ticket.)

I loved it! The texture of it is different than the chocolate that I’m used to in that it has a texture. It was luscious and deeply satisfying. I think I may be spoiled forever now when it comes to chocolate bars.

The 80% cacao bar that I had was gluten-free, dairy-free and soy-free — a nice touch for the those of us who are intolerant among us. I also loved the fact that the cacao beans are organic and purchased directly from small, organic cooperatives who receive greater than fair-trade prices for their high quality beans.

You can learn more about Taza Chocolate here.