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.

Grass-Fed Beef Hits the Mainstream….

Well, not quite. But when the March 2008 edition of Consumer Reports had a small article acknowledging that the possible validity of the many health claims surrounding grass-fed beef, I felt hopeful that it will now be something a greater number of consumers demands.

Here’s the deal. When cows eat grass instead of grain (as they were doing for thousands and thousands of years before the advent of industrial farming), the meat from those cows is leaner. According to Dr. Mark Hyman in Ultrametabolism, grain-fed cattle have 500% more saturated fat than grass-fed cows. Grass-fed beef also has higher level of omega-3 fatty acids, which have been shown to help prevent heart disease and stroke. Other conditions that may be helped by omega-3 fatty acids include lupus, eczema, and rheumatoid arthritis. Grass-fed beef also has more conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) which may enhance the immune system, reduce abdominal fat, increase the metabolic rate, and make it easier to maintain weight. For an interesting article on this: http://www.mercola.com/beef/cla.htm

The health perks are exciting, but to me eating grass-fed beef makes sense from both a humane and environmental perspective. Cows aren’t meant to eat grain, and when they do, they tend to get sick. That sickness has other implications for us eaters, including antibiotic resistance and E. coli contaminated meat, but I’m focusing on the cows for now. Also, cows that eat grain are housed in factory-farm feedlots that are not only horrible for the cows (a picture is worth a thousand words — to see more, watch this http://www.themeatrix1.com/ ) but horrible for the environment; the waste & run-off from these farms contaminate our water supply and are implicated in global warming.

Call me old-fashioned, but when I do eat a burger I would rather that it came from an animal that lived as it was meant to live — outside, grazing in a pasture, instead of penned up with thousands of other animals for all of its life without space to move or appropriate food to eat. And it’s nice to know that when I make the better choice, it’s better for me, too.

Sore Throat Home Remedy

Given the cold that seems to be going around these days (I’ve nicknamed it The Throat), I thought that this home remedy might be of interest. Note: I haven’t tried it because I only heard of after The Throat had come and gone.

It’s a remedy from The Wilen Sisters’ (Lydia Wilen & Joan Wilen).

As soon as you notice that your throat is becoming sore or scratchy, whip up the following concoction:

2 teaspoons of apple cider vinegar

6 to 8 ounces of warm water

First, take a mouthful, gargle with it, and spit it out. Then, swallow a mouthful. Continue with the gargling/swallowing routine until the glass is gone, and repeat the whole process every hour until the sore throat is gone. The Wilen Sisters say that they usually feel better within two to three hours.

Since I no longer have a sore throat, I’m curious to see if this will work. So if anyone gives this a try please write in and let me know.

The only thing that I would like to add is that I would recommend doing this with Bragg’s Organic Raw Apple Cider Vinegar – very healing stuff.

Freaky Fast Food Facts

There’s a big fight going on now between the restaurant industry and public health officials about whether or not the caloric content of foods should be listed on menus. Of course, restaurants are reluctant to do this.

One of the best arguments that I’ve seen for doing this can be found in a little item in BusinessWeek (February 11, 2008). In an article on this very topic, the magazine featured a picture of a Quiznos Tuna Melt sandwich (12 inches long, 1.3 lb.). Guess how many calories? A whopping 2,090!!!! Although I am not a proponent of calorie counting, 2,090 calories is an absolutely ridiculous amount of calories for something that is 1) just a sandwich and 2) just one meal in an entire day. If the restaurant industry insists on tempting Americans with huge quantities of cheap, caloric-excessive food, I think that they should have to put that information where it is easy to read. I am sure that they would find a decreased demand for their large tuna melt at Quiznos. Here’s the link to the article: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_06/b4070036764931.htm?chan=search

If this information were to appear on menus, what would Americans do? For one thing, I bet more people would buy donuts than muffins at Dunkin’ Donuts and feel virtuous for doing so. In the March issue of Consumer Reports, there is a delightful little quiz about which of two items has fewer calories and less fat. It turns out that a Dunkin’ Donuts French Cruller has 180 calories and 13 grams of fat while a Dunkin’ Donuts corn muffin has 510 calories and 18 grams of fat! In another person favorite, a Ruby Tuesday Triple Prime Burger has 883 calories and 56 grams of fat while the Ruby Tuesday Parmesan Shrimp Pasta has 1,221 calories and 64 grams of fat. And did you know that 3 Big Macs have fewer calories and less fat than one individual Uno deep-dish Schroom pizza? How is that possible? It makes you wonder about what, exactly, is in that Schroom pizza.

I’m not advocating any of these choices, but I do think it would interesting to see what Americans would do if the caloric information were readily available to them. Perhaps restaurants would discover that there was more of an appetite out there for healthy choices and reasonable portions than they imagined.