This was my table pretty much Friday – Sunday, and sometimes it was worse. That is just the nature of being a student: balancing teaching, research endeavors, having a life, classes, oh, and then there is the studying……. for those who care I was knee deep in Vitamins this weekend. Good times.
So, if I’m going to take care of myself I’ve got to find ways to maximize cooking time. We do really simple meals when life gets busy: quinoa/rice blends in the rice cooker, frozen turkey burger patties, hardboiled eggs, spinach salads, etc.
For those of you who think you don’t have time to cook healthy, I want to challenge that belief. You may not have time right now, but somewhere in the week you have a few minutes to devote to your wellness, if you are willing to get creative and try something.
Batch cooking is your tool of insuring healthy food is around when you need it. Basically I figure out what foods needed to be cooked soon to avoid spoilining and I whipped up enough foods to last a few meals. My approach is that if I’m turning on the oven, I’m going to make it worth my while, so on Saturday I baked sweet potatoes, roasted garlic and green peppers, and cooked some phyllo encrusted tilapia for dinner that night. The whole process took me about 30 minutes (including making a big green salad to last that night and the next day), and I had meal components for 3 days.
Check it out: a view of the oven (you can’t see the fish) I cooked it all @ 350 for various lengths of time. I was willing to sacrifice precision for diversity in options:
The sweet potatoes lasted 3 meals, and one was used to make some tasty oatmeal for B-fast one day. The fish served as the basis for dinner, and the roasted veggies were nice additions to a salad for 2 lunches. Easy, peasy…..
Happy off white eating!
Oh, to be a kid again.
I got a lot of great toys as a kid: Cabbage Patch kids, Barbies galore, and even a pound puppy. After years of begging I finally even got a Charlie McCarthy doll, which I ended up thinking was really creepy and never once played with it. Mom still has it, and apparently I’m not the only one who thinks it’s creepy because my cat, Madeline, won’t go on the bed when Charlie’s on it. Ha!
But one thing I always wanted and NEVER got was an Easy Bake Oven. Oh, how I fantisied about having control over baking my own treats, in my own room and eating them at my own pace (read: as fast as I could). Maybe mom and dad had the insight that this was NOT the ideal toy for a girl who spent all over her allowence on candy ($3/week and it all went to Skittles, York Peppermint Patties and Brach’s Candy in bulk).
I can recall the commercials – happy, thin girls playing with the oven, baking, laughing smelling delicious aromas of tasty treats….a sugar junkie’s fantasy.
Today I came across this interesting article about food marketing to kids: not just direct marketing from food companies, but toy companies as well. Turns out most companies get a big fat “F” for their efforts to promote healthy behaviors with kids. It saddens me that one company isn’t stepping up to the plate and creating a brand promise around healthy foods. I know its all about the almighty dollar, but there has got to be one company with money in the bank who is willing to just do the right thing and not worrk about making so much cash. Just one…. It might even turn out to be the cash cow of the century as moms and dads struggle to find creative ways to get junior fired up about healthy eats without sounding like a naggy parent.
Now that I think even deeper another toy fav of mine was my Barbie McDonald’s. I loved putting Barbie’s trays to gether with fries, a Big Mac, and a coke (or in my mind a milkshake, of course). It never occurred to me that Barbie couldn’t possibly maintain her impossible figure by eating at Micky D’s everyday, so she never cooked at home in my Barbieland – she put on a hot outfit, picked up Ken and the girls and headed to the Golden Arches. Well, that is one creative marketing scheme by Matel. Too bad I didn’t like McDonalds – they did not gain a valuable customer from my Barbie adventures, but I’m sure they gained some kind of brand identity or maybe my friends who came over to play in Barbieland were reminded of their McDonald’s love and asked their mom’s to go there at the next outing into town…who knows..
…and that is the issue. Who know’s what the long term exposure to junk food marketing, direct or indirect, does to our moldable young minds. What happens to us later in life? How does making Chuck-E-Cheeze pizza at home in your plastic oven influence your relationship to Pizza? I could totally see a perfect storm brewing from this combination: kids eager to be ‘cool’, to have fun and to fit in making associations between ‘junk food’ toys and the good life. Translation later: they find themselves drawn to certain foods/brands because those neural pathways that gave them the ‘feel good’ response to these toys as kids, still gives them a little kick as an adult. Maybe they don’t even know why, or that it’s happening.
Hmm….this one certainly gives me some good food for thought!
This is a question with potentially loaded answers, depending on who you ask? For me, one cookie is usually synonymous with the term “gateway”…gateway to more cookies, that is. The ‘just one’ policy doesn’t always work for me.
But let’s say it did. What about the advice we (I), sometimes give about making small dietary changes, such as not eating one cookie?
Well, look at what was written about it recently in the NY times, as a response to a recent set of statements made by Michelle Obama about encouraging adolescents to make small changes, like walking to school and giving up one cookie, for instance.
I agree with the experts in that our bodies do adapt to small fluctuations in caloric intake, both less and more calories. That is clever adaptation. So, sometimes small changes DON’T mean big results, but I think there is more to that story too…
There are two issues her: What size is the cookie we are talking about? And what kind of power can can exist underneath the decision to make a small change.
First the cookie:
If we’re talking about 1 small oreo or one girl scout cookie, that’s only about 70 calories, and proabably NOT going to make much difference in your weight any time soon. But if not eating one cookie stops you from spiralling into a cookie/carb binge, that cookie is worth a helluva lot more than just its own calories.
But let’s be real, many of us either eat more than one ore we get a “giant cookie”, which has a heck of a lot more calories than just a run of the meal cookie. For instance, look at this blog to see how many befuddled gals were shocked and surprsied to see that their cookies contained between 500-700 calories. For funzies I check the caloric content of a large cookie at an AM/PM mini-mart when getting gas. 500 calories. Naturally the serving size was 1/2 a cookie, but again, let’s be real!
So, in that case, refraining from one cookie, or one latte (saw an article stating that in 1989 our coffe drinks had 120 Kcal and now its about 350 calories…..whoa mamma!), or one supersized whatever, then we might actually see a difference. My secret: I do notice a difference when I lay off the store bought hot chocolate drinks . Not just in my weight, but my digestion which helps my body feel leaner all around.
Okay, now the real issue: the power of change. Did you know there are 5 stages of change? We don’t go from idea to action overnight, and that is a natural course of change (so quite beating yourself up if you wake up every Monday saying ‘today’s the day to start the diet’ and then are back to your old habits by Tuesday). So when a person decides they are going to experience whatever discomfort and effort needed to reduce their habit by one cookie, that has powerful impacts on the brain! You just developed a new neural connection in your brain that says you no longer eat a cookie after dinner (or whenever). You just told yourself you can do something new and it’s okay. You lived through not having that cookie. What other changes can this bring about? As the original article stated, this is the power of small changes – they lead to BIG changes and the confidence that once can change at all.
Recently I became ready to make a change in my diet too: no more tea with honey/half and half at my breaks. Frankly, pre and post vegan clease I’d been abusing the habit. I was trying to trick myself that half and half, not having any casein (presumably), would be okay, but I didn’t feel good and I was kind of obsessing on it. IT became my new version of hot chocolate. I’m sensing a theme here: warm sweetened drinks are kind of like cookies for me, I just can’t have one…… It felt good to make that change, and since then I’ve also developed a mindful eating practice and have reduced 1-2 meals/day by about 15%, realizing that I was simply eating too much. I am trying to enjoy the feeling of hunger when I approach a meal, and learning that it’s okay to be hungry for a little while – I don’t need to feed every physical urge.
So see, small changes can be very powerful!!!!
Empty yourself of everything.
Let the mind become still.
The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches their return.
They grow and flourish and then return to the source.
- Lao Tzu
This week I experienced emptiness. True, physical emptiness. It was grand (well, it was grand after it was miserable). My emptiness occurred out of pure accident. Food poisoning (PC term: Food born pathogen), left my husband and I in, eerr… a rather precarious state for about 36 hours. I’ll spare you the details, except for the glorious feeling that I had once the trauma was over.
Physical emptiness feels enlightening to me. In part, this is because I really rarely allow myself to feel it. Hunger is uncomfortable for me, so I’m always rushing to fill its need. Yet here I was, able to survive on little but tropical fruit (the only thing I wanted) and bubbly orange water and ice for nearly 2 days. Once I felt better, I felt truly refreshed – like I’d been ‘reset’ by some divine force of nature. It was refershing to allow my body to NOT have food it it and to allow my mind to NOT think about food.
Physical emptiness is also enlightening because it creates internal space. Not just physical space, but emotional space. Lying on my back, with little energy to do more than watch HBO movies and sleep, I could think in a way I’ve not given myself permission to do in a long time. I could think without boundaries, expectations, deadlines or pressure. I allowed my mind to be idle. I wish that I could tell you I devoted some of my illness time to deep meditation or even journaling, but I didn’t. In a way, this is my journal entry of all those feeling that fed my spiring during my hiaitus from life.
You all have heard me say, in one form or another, that my relationship with food often mirrors my relationship with life. Of late, I’ve been cramming it in – food and life. Going too fast, expecting too much. Not allowing space for emptiness or freedom from the ties that bind. So nature found its own way to set me right again. It dawned on me that it had been a long time since I simply thought about doing creative things just for the sake of them, or since I just took a walk for a reason other than to boost my cardiovascular health or that I allowed myself to rest, to just be. Why do I forget how essential these elements to life really are?
So, I’m going to thank my period of emptiness for helping me resent my mind and body, and for reminding me of how far off the mark I tend to get. Happily, I found myself eating much less today and appreciating what I did eat for what it was -a nourishment to my body and spirit instead of something to soothe my worrisome soul that has been overworked and under played for the last 8 weeks (School!).
We live in a time where emptiness only comes when we get ill or we deliberately seek it out through fasts or cleanses. How lucky are we? Fortunate yes, but also I think we miss out on something really powerful that only happens when we do go without, even for a short while.
Yesterday I came home dog tired, wet and cold. The rain hit me unexpectedly so I was soaked when I walked through the door after a long day. I wanted comfort food and I wanted something warm. Something that would help me relax, but I didn’t have a ton of time. I could have fired up some pasta but most of you know I’m not a big pasta eater (too much carb, and even the off-white pasta’s are a calorie dense option that I rarely choose).
Soup. Yes, that is what I wanted. Warm, creamy, dreamy soup……..
Being the on the fly cook that I am, a quick survey of available ingredients helped me land on a butternut squash white bean soup chock full o-veggies. The squash helps give a creamy texture sans actual cream, and the beans add protein, texture and density.
Here’s what I did:
First, I chopped an onion, 1/2 bunch of celery and mandolined a carrot. If you chop a lot , spend the $15 to get a mandolin. Saves your time, but watch your knucles!
Next, I added these veggies to a medium stock pan with 2 tbsp EVOO, and sauteed for 5 min on med heat. For a no-brainer flavor I added salt, an organic veggie spice mix, and 1 veggie boullion cube. Stir it all in for about 3 min. Let the moisture from the veggies dissolve the boullion.
Now you’re ready for the main event: one can of white beans + 1 can organic butternut squash. Pumpkin works too, as does fresh squash, pureed.
Add about 2 cups water, and chop up 2 cups of either beet greens (What I used - got them off the beets I popped in the oven at the same time), spinach, or kale.
Serve warm. I added in about 4 oz shredded chicken and enjoyed thoroughly. Mmmm….
“Once there was a young warrior. Her teacher told her that she had to do battle with fear. She didn’t want to do that. It seemed too aggressive; it was scary; it seemed unfriendly. But the teacher said she had to do it and gave her the instructions for the battle. The day arrived. The student warrior stood on one side, and fear stood on the other. The warrior was feeling very small, and fear was looking big and wrathful. They both had their weapons. The young warrior roused herself and went toward fear, prostrated three times, and asked, “May I have permission to go into battle with you?” Fear said, “Thank you for showing me so much respect that you ask my permission.” Then the young warrior said, “How can I defeat you?” Fear replied, “My weapons are that I talk fast, and I get very close to your face. Then you get completely unnerved, and you do whatever I say. If you don’t do what I tell you, I have no power. You can listen to me, and you can have respect for me. You can even be convinced by me. But if you don’t do what I say, I have no power.” In this way, the student warrior learned how to defeat fear.”
Pema Chodron in “When Things Fall Apart”
This short parable sums up a lot for me about fear and how I’ve been dragged into battle with it and used food to overcome that battle. Sometimes this is so subtle, and I think it stared so very long ago that I can’t even remember the first time I ate to soothe an internal fear.
This also reminds me that I need to share with you what I learned at the food addiction syposium. I’m going to post several times about what I learned because it touched me at many levels.
First, there is STRONG evidence that certain food substances (ie palatable foods, like sweets and high fat/high sugar foods) are addictive in certain individuals. More on that later.
Philosophically this whole symposium really got down to the essence of addiction to me, which is fear. Fear usually means a concern that something is going to be taken away, or taken out of our control. We learn at a young age sometimes that food will soothe this very base emotion. I’ve often heard that the opposite of love is fear. Love is harminious and self-love is usually associated with good boundary setting, self-care, self respect and awareness. It’s hard to feel a deep/strong self love and give into fear at the same time (in my experience).
I think culturally we too use food to mask our fears. Commercials tell us to savor the flavor of some product and we’ll be sexy, wealthy, our celebrating with friends. So we keep buying in (literally) and replacing our intrinsic coping mechanisms with this false promise. They play to our fear of being alone or unwanted in a subtle way. We feel food insecurities even when there are none, and we feel culturally entitled to having the same freedomes with food that we have with life – we should be able to have access to what we want, when we want. But, what does that do to us? It makes me personally reliant on that external substance (sugar) as my coping tool, as my reassurance that life is okay. It means the voice of fear is larger than the voice of inner trust. I can recall a moment of awareness when I moved to San Diego and, having taken a job that paid 50% less than my previous job, I was obsessed with grocery shopping. Groceries were my new form of abundance because I needed to feel that I was okay and life was okay even with less income. It go worse when I started my own business (very shaky ground, in my mind) and my sugar addiction EXPLODED!
During the symposium, what was interesting is that the most successful “treatments” for food compuslions, binge eating or chronic overeating revolve around mindfulness, spirituality and attitude changes. Not once did we talk about nutritional changes to get people to kick the habit. Sure, nutrition is really important and cravings can be instigated by chemical imbalances perpetuated by poor nutrition. I think that is 50% of the story, but not necessarily the most powerful, or the origin of the problem.
But I thought the juciest messages were in the power of our minds, or spirits and our need for community support to get us beyond the fear of letting go. What would happen if you didn’t say ‘yes’ to that piece of cake, extra handful of chips, or large coffee drink? I’ve seriously felt physical fear when imagining never having a certain food again (hot chocolate for me – that is my big attachment). Physical fear, people. Crazy. It’s just a substance but I’ve projected onto it a false sense of security that I think gives me extra ‘power’ to deal with life’s demands. But it doesn’t. It creates more demands instead of less. It distracts me but I’m caught up with the distraction because it’s familiar.
I was very excited and reaffirmed by the symposium because there are people in this world other than me who want to understand food behaviors and want to help others and themselves change for the better. It’s certainly new frontier in the science world and that is exciting. It’s also a new frontier when for most of us when we, for the very first time, dive into our inner landscape and have to tell that fear, to it’s face that we don’t have to listen to it. Can you do it?
Would love to hear your ideas about fear and food. Agree? Disagree? Somewhere in the middle? Do tell!!
I’m so excited. I got into the COAST (obesity treatment/research center at UCSF) symposium on obesity this coming Friday.
Imagine…I get to rub elbows and listen intentily to the leaders in food addiction/binge eating and behavioral approaches to obesity. We even have a segment on mindful eating (hopefully just before lunch).
What this symposium makes me feel is an affirmation that my passion for looking at the behaviors it takes for people to change their relationship to food is a GOOD and WORTHY cause. Sometimes at Davis I wonder if I’m just crazy because I’m not fired up about mechanisms and cellular signaling (snore). But the fact that a major university is putting on this conference and PhD/MD type folks are going to be speaking is affirmation to me that I’m not alone.
It inspires me more to work on the vision I have for off-white living – to be a community hub (Virtual) for people to feel supported, share ideas, and get relevant, helpful information that can acutaly empower them. I believe it takes a community to substantiate change in our food lifestyles and our committment to wellness, so I’m eager to see what comes out of this.
Okay just had to share my good news!
Sometimes I love my biochem class… (and then sometimes it’s the bane of my existence).
Recently I’m in the love phase b/c I’m learning about cholesterol metabolism. Guess what causes high body cholesterol……(drum roll) – HIGH CARB DIETS! Yes, it’s true, there are several mechanisms that result in body having lots of fats called triglycerides and the production of cholesterol in the liver.
So why were animal products given the scarlet letter for cholesterol? First, it wasn’t know that some people have defiencies in their LDL receptors (that is what takes cholesterol from blood to tissue for use), so there are populations of folks w/naturally elevated cholesterol. These folks need to watch it in the diet… but that is not everybody’s condition with elevated cholesterol. Several other genetic factors exist, but to give a ‘one size fits all’ diet to people w/high cholesterol is being way to broad.
Now the science folks know that high cholestrol isn’t all about the diet, but it IS all about the high carb diet. So, gang – looks like you are doing a body good by eating those healthy fats, lean meats (grass fed for better fat profiles), and whole grains that are digested slowly.
What I find fascinating is that several heart disease reversal programs are based on a VERY high carb/LOW fat diet….work for some (probably those w/the genetic issue) but can exascerbate the problem for others.
Do you have high cholesterol or Triglycerides? Start w/removing the junky carbs (which usually also takes care of the trans fats too!) and see what happens……
Funny how life always seems to come full circle. Yesterday I found myself in the Nutrition 10 office grading undergraduate diet projects. The full circle aspect of this is that when I was 18 I took Nutrition 10 (Same professor even!) and I too did my diet projects.
Looking at the dietary habits of 18-20 yr olds really got me thinking back to what I was like at an 18 yr old. Ha! I was nothing close to an off white eater, though my belief was that my diet was rather healthy because it contained mostly fat-free foods (remember the fat-free craze of the 1990’s??)
Here’s a little glimpse into my THEN and NOW dietary habits
THEN (living at UC Davis dorms, eating dorm food, rarely eating out)
Age: 18 Height: 5′3″ Weight: 128-132 (from teens to twenties)
Dislikes: celery, potatoes,spices, sauces, anything creamy/fatty, red meat, ethinic food, except chinese, avocado, large meals, hot melty cheese
Likes: plain noodles, pasta, bread, bagels, salad, any fruit, chicken, anything low fat and high sugar, chinese food, quesadillas, pretzels, yogurts
Major Weakness: sugar in any form, including sugar cubes, which I would eat at work while making copies.
Breakfast
cold cereal: Golden Grahams/Captain Crunch/Raisin Bran/Corn bran combo + 1% or nofat milk and a banana. I probably ate 2-3 servings of cereal in 1 bowl
Lunch (Hungry by 10 am, so my lunch got portioned out all day)
Apple, bagel w/nonfat cream cheese OR fat free yogurt, carrot sticks, water, turkey sandwhich on bread w/no mayo and maybe 1 slice of cheese (sometimes in place of the bagel, sometime I had both)
Dinner (almost always between 5-5:30pm)
1 bowl of salad: lettuce, corn, carrots, red beans, croutons, maybe some cucumber and nonfat vinegareette, veggie burger, turkey burger (both with bun) or pasta with red sauce. Maybe some pizza every now and again. Usually topped it off with the frosting from a piece of cake or a small vanilla soft serve cone.
Snacks: Candy, Candy, Candy! We could buy little pieces of candy for 2-5 cents, so I’d get Laffy Taffy, mini-Junior mints, Blow pops, etc. Never chocolate. I also supplemented my candy consumption with regular slurpee consumption and frozen yogurt as much as possible (I had a snack card that gave me $$ for snacks every quarter. I spent most of it at TCBY yogurt. Every now and again I’d switch it up and get some pretzels because they are low fat)
Activity level: moderate – I worked out about 3-4 days/week: running, weights, step aerobics. I biked and walks most places.
NOW (cook at home, eat out 1x/week)
Age: 33 Height: 5′3″ Weight: 132 – 134 (same for about 6 yrs)
Dislikes: creamy sauces,mayo/cream dressings, potato chips, extemely salty foods, celery (except soup), hot melty cheese, crappy, processed foods, food that makes me crave sugar
Likes: just about everything else. Still like the sweet things, just don’t eat them as much. Haven’t had a piece of candy since 2004 and no gum since 2005
Major weakness: SWEET, CREAMY BEVERAGES: hot chocoate, tea with half/half, even decaf coffee w/almond milk and honey…..oh goodness……
Breakfast: Usually 1 of three meals: 2 eggs + fruit, protein smoothie + fruit/veggies, or oatmeal or quinoa with nuts/fruit and maybe protein powders.
Lunch (Not hungry for approx 3-4 hrs): at least 1 full cup of veggies (mostly salad, which is like 2-3 cups), sweet potatoes, beans, leftover chicken or fish, or burger patty, hummus, avocado, oil based dressing. 70% plants at least!
Dinner: much like lunch, usually add fruit at the end for a dessert. Often have lean protein in larger serving. Likely to skip the grain if I had grain with breakfast, for a total of 2 grains/day. Rare occasions (1-2x/yr): Pizza. If I go out, its Chipotle, mexican, or maybe thai or Pluto’s salad bar. I eat all meats and love sauces, spices, etc.
Snacks: not a snacker, try to eat in a way to sustain energy better. I do drink tea and hot almond milk and hot chocolate, which is a between meal occurrence. 1 of the 3 is likely on a daily basis. Also LOTS of water.
Veg and hummus or 1 hardboiled egg are favorite snacks. I also love chips/guac but can’t put the breaks on w/that dish!
Activity level: moderate to high. Exercising 1 hr x 5-6 days/week, mix of running, spin, yoga, cycing, climbing, weights, plyometrics, and walking. Whatever sounds fun.
In some ways my food has gotten better, but the mental obsession with sugar/emotional eating has gotten worse since I was 18. While I was obsessed with thinness, I just figured my diet was great back then so I didn’t associate eating sugar with any feeling state. Now that I do, the struggle to relinquish that urge to eat under stress has gotten more of my attention. I’ve grown a lot as a person, having to look inward and what role sugar plays in my life, but it’s also consumed a lot of my mental energy. However, the journey I’ve been on has been the catalyst for this blog, and most of what I do, so I’d not change it for anything..well, maybe I’d change it for a dozen donuts but we won’t talk about that 
Dips don’t have to be calorie traps or even unhealthy. check out this recipe which is yet ANOTHER way that you can fit kale into your life…how great is that:
1 pkg frozen spinach, thawed
1 cup each: chopped fresh spinach and fresh kale
1/2 white onion, finely chopped
1/2 cup greek yogurt
1/4 cup sour cream
juice of 1/2 meyer lemon
salt, pepper to taste
2 tbsp french onion soup mix, or dried onion/garlic/parsley
Real simple folks: mix all ingredients in a bowl. Chill and serve with your favorite accoutrement, such as Rye crackers from this company
