Points to Ponder

Great plates

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While prepping for my coaching session today I came across this handy-dandy picture that I think all of us could use as a reminder -especially right now when holiday treats are everywhere.  I like this pic because it reminds me to eat in BALANCE.  I tend to over-do it on one thing (carbs) and then want to restrict the next day to ‘make up for it’.  Ha!  When will I learn….

The more I eat in balance, the less I crave, and the better my digestion is.  For me, this time of year is a great time to sub out breads and use root veggies, like sweet potatoes and also squashes as my ‘carb’.  Gotta love that fiber.

Anyway bloggies, just a little reminder about balance on this sunny Tuesday in Davis.  I couldn’t help but notice that nowhere on this plate is the “hot chocolate” portion..hmmm…..guess I’m in denial that a daily serving of Swiss Miss isn’t good nutrition.  But hey, the box says it’s full of calcium and antioxidants, so how bad can it be 😉

If at first you don’t succeed…

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This is me trying to Wake board….

Not exactly my best work, but I didn’t give up.

Then just this morning I was reminded in my yoga class that today is a day of transition.  It’s the Vernal Equinox. Change time.  The fleeting of one season as the other rises.

During change things are awkward.  We don’t know what is going to happen next.  One day we wake up and it’s 90 degrees, the next day the leaves are turning and rain is pending.  One minute the Wake Board is right underneath my feet, the next minute it’s GONE!  It can feel pretty out of control, especially in our worlds which have been mostly created to give us control over everything from our climate (AC and heaters) to being able to buy every item, food, song, or whatever from the tips of our fingers.  We forget that the natural process of life is change.  We are not meant to control everything, but rather to harness the energy of change and guide to toward our personal growth.

Personal change has been a lot like this for me too.  It’s not always graceful, pretty, or comfortable (okay it is NEVER these  things), but the beauty is in the fact that it’s new – it’s evolving – it’s creation in motion.

And at the end, you might get something more like this:

now she has it!

If you are in the midst of change – changing your diet, your life, your mind or your body…remember that you are EXACTLY where you need to be.  You can’t have  the butterfly without the cocoon, you can’t have the first snow of Winter without the transitional season of Autumn.   You simply must go with the process – dance with it, embrace it and one day you will get it !  I promise!

Yeast challenge part 2

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homemade burger on a homemade bun

Recently I posted the first half of my “Kitchen Bootcamp Challenge”, by Jen Schall, to make a yeasted bread.

Well, I ‘rose’ to the challenge, so to speak, but my bread did not.  Here’s why:  I was using an enriched starter, meaning that is has milk, sugar, and flour added to grow the yeast.  A baguette style bread is just flour and water.  Hmm…. made me think about how my starter was (or was not) aligning with my eating values.

I really have no business feeding my bread sugar and milk when I try to minimize those in my own diet.  So, I’m putting my starter on a diet and ‘leaning’ it out, based on what I learned in the Professional Chef cookbook.  Let’s see what happens.

One good result was that I added an egg wash to the bread, which made for a nice shiny finish.  We ate the buns with turkey burgers instead of steak becasue I frankly don’t like steak sanwiches that much.

an egg wash makes for a shiny finish

Enriched buns are quite tasty, but a little too cakey to be a good sandwich or baguette bread.  Next time…..

It’s so hard to say goodbye to yesterday…

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Today, while motoring down the I-80, the Boyz 2 men song “Its so hard to say goodbye to yesterday” came on the radio.  The station was asking for songs about your high school graduation, and some guy requested it as a memory to the Class of ’94, which is also my year.

Funny timing, because it was such a day of reflection for me. I  attended my Nephew’s Kindergarten graduation at Pleasant Ridge Elementary, where I had gone to school.   As I sat in the auditorium, 33 yrs old – a ‘grown up’, I rememberd what it was like to be a kid again. This tiny auditorium once seemed so big, and teachers seemed so powerful.  School was a sanctuary for me as a child.  My home life was littered with mixed messages, secrets, and confusion.  School made sense to me.  Friends made sense.  Academics made sense. Sometimes it was the only place where the world seemed safe.  Seeing those sweet faces walk up to the podiums today, proud and excited, made me just want to reach out and hug them and  tell them that no matter what they are beautiful, loveable, and smart, especially my nephew (which I did, much to his chigrin).

I guess the reason I’m blogging this because today I got to go back to the place where Off-White really had it’s origins: My  childhood.  Just as school was a friendly escape from the things in life I couldn’t control, so was sugar.  It started young for me: obsession on easter candy, spending my $3 allowance on candy, and just wanting to avoid my feelings, unless they were happy.  It wasn’t until I was older that my emotional eating really took hold, but I know it all started with fears and unexpressed feelings I had as a kid.  I guess that is why I latched on to academics so much and made that, along with my friends, my entire universe.

So today when I stood there as my 33-yr old self, I felt some sense of peace.   I am not a scared child anymore.  I have tools to help me cope and language to express what I tried to tuck away for so long.  I felt like I’m actually OKAY.  I am beautiful, loveable and smart.

And guess what, I was even able to pass up the COSTCO white frosting cake (those who know me know this is BIG).  I simply felt okay in my own skin – the child and the woman in me all at once!

Thanks for listening bloggies!

“I can’t eat it, it’s fattening”

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Yesterday, when I was stocking up on produces at the Yolo Fruit Stand, I reached across my cart and grabbed an 85% dark chocolate Lindt bar off the shelf.  Last minute splurge?  Yes – I am going camping this week and ‘must’ make dark chocolate smores (this will be the second attempt at this.  The first time I was in Washington and some renegade mice lifted my Dagoba bar – no kidding!).

Okay, back to the story.  As I snagged my goodie, the woman behind me shouted “you can’t eat that…it’s fattening!!”.  She sounded very convicted, and almost scared.  I replied “I know, isn’t it great…..?”.

But it got me thinking: is chocolate intrinsically ‘fattening’?  To be fattening means that the substance will actually make you fat, like it has the ability to do that regardless of how much you eat, what else you eat, or how often you eat it.  It’s true that chocolate has calories, but are they any more fat-provoking than the calories in a salad?

My year of study tells me that nothing (except maybe HFCS because it may slow down the ability to burn fat – more research being done) intrinsically is fattening.  It’s all about how you eat it.  PLUS, I would argue that if anything is fattening, it’s something loaded with sugar because you’re more likely to overeat it, and large volumes of fast acting carbs make your body produce a lot of insulin, which goes right to the fat cells if not needed for immediate energy.

We have such a skewed view of food.  I am in this boat too.  I think a lot of women live in fear of getting fat just from taking a bit of something wonderful like dark chocolate (which by the way has 210 kcal/oz), but may generously sip low fat beverages or eat excessive fruit or fat-free yogurt…or whatever.  Food is “good” or “bad”.  Some foods make us skinny, some don’t – or so we think.

Dark chocolate, with 3g fiber, antioxidants, 5g sugar, 4g protein per serving, is not inheirently fattening.  It’s the over consumption of this food, and others, that is fattening.  Yes, if I eat 1 bar (2.5 servings)/day and don’t account for that by balancing my other calories, I will likely gain weight.  And it is true that an ounce of chocolate is not a lot of volume, so it could be easy to overconsume.

However, when you allow yourself to eat high quality, low sugar, chocolate, you might be less likely to overeat it because it’s so dang rich.  Even me, lover of all things chocolate, can only have a small piece a day, if any at all.

And no, I’m not worried it will make me fat 🙂

bloggies, you need to see this!

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Just read an article listing the 20 most sugar beverages in the USA right now.  Pretty s scary because we see them everyday at the store, in schools, at work, and maybe in our houses (gulp…hey, not shame here, I’m right there with you on the sweet warm beverage front).

I like how this article put the beverages neck and neck with some sugar foods, so you can see how the sugar content measures up.  There is this weird misnomer about beverages ‘not counting’ but really in a lot of ways they can be worse becuase  we don’t ‘count’ them as much, tend to over consume them because they don’t make us full, and they are a cheap form of lots of sugar!

I’m proud to say I’ve drastically cut my sugar sweetened beverage intake (aka, hot chocolate and sweetened decaf coffee drinks)  in the past month.  It was getting out of hand, and getting spendy.  Now I only have them on occasion, which I think is how they are supposed to be enjoyed.  What changed for me?  I guess you could say I was just willing and ready.  It had been far too long and it was getting far too ridiculous.  Almond milk, at $6/gallon, is too expensive to be guzzling a 16 oz hot chocolate everyday, and the other drinks are LOADED with sugar and who knows what else…and I get addicted.  So there it is.

now read this!

making friends with the enemy

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my first sourdough loaf

Healing comes in all shapes and sizes.  If you would have asked me a year ago if I thought that bread would offer me some kind of therapy I would have laughed at you!  I would have said  “no way, bread is what drives me to NEED therapy”.

But oh, how this universe likes to surprise us.  It all started when a classmate offered up some Amish friendship bread starter casually in class one day.  Intrigued by the idea of anything fermented and edible, I gladly accepted.  Now I’m hooked.

I’ve baking bread every 10 days since!  I discovered something magical about the process of baking bread.  It’s slow.  It requires patience.  Like a fine wine, the starter gets better with age, so every turn of the dough (10 days) offers up something new.  It’s kind of like creating a culinarly legacy.  I hope that over time I can create my own unique flavor of homemade breads.

The process of making bread is therapeutic in itself.  Diving my hands into the dough, feeling it run through my fingers is extremely liberating and just plain fun.  Working with my hands soothes me and it’s a great compliment to my studies, which get me caught up in my head way too often!

aah, the joys of kneading

And oh, how the house smells so warm and comforting when fresh bread is baking.  I love the responses I get from my hubby and landlord.  It’s like the pied piper calling when that bread comes out of the oven.

The best discovery of all is how good I feel when I share this bread.  I’ve given start to some friends and classmates…now we have fun chatting about it, swapping ideas, and going off on tangents about other edible creatings.  I’ve even sent some in the mail to distant friends and it warms my heart to think that they are keeping the process going.

Bread is one of the most fundamental foods of life.  We break bread together to nourish our bodies, but also our spirits.  I’ve realized that I was missing a deep sense of connection to people.  I’m around people all day, but that is not the same as being connected.  By making bread and sharing it, I feel like I’m doing some sort of kindness to people I care about, and in return getting kindness back.  Everybody loves homemade bread.  It’s something we can all relate to and to receive something hand made is a treat in this modern world.

So, me, the offwhite girl, must pay homage to the thing I’d gone without for so long.  Funny thing, the more I make it for others, the less I want to eat it in excess.  It’s too special to abuse with mindless eating or binging.

So, if any of you want some start, let me know.  It’s my own little brand of offwhite sourdough and it’s delcious!

The Good Life

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Recently I had a chance to reflect upon how the Davis Good Life Garden impacts me.   It’s a garden on campus that allows it’s ‘members’ to come and pick the bounty, while also being a vehicle for teaching, learning, and an event venue.  So cool, and it’s right on campus.   It got me thinking about the pieces in my life that really support me living an Off- White lifestyle.  This garden is more than just an inspiration to eat veggies, its a place that I find comfort and peace when I’m on campus.  School and life can cause me great anxiety, which causes me to want to turn to my vices like sugar to escape or numb out.

I really can’t maintain a balanced relationship with food unless my relationship with my life is in balance.  I am a high maintenance person that way and need multiple avenues for stress relief, inclulding being in beautiful outdoor environments, even if just for a short period of time.  I’m learning this about myself – this aspect in me that needs to be regularly grounded and calmed in order to manage the rest of my life.  It’s a good awareness, for sure!

If you’d like to read the article, click here.  While you’re at it, check out the Good Life Garden website in general, as it’s really well done.

Happy Off White Living,

Rebecca

move and learn at the same time

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I’m just popping in to share a random but interesting musing I came across recently.  I It’s an observation about the benefits of moving and learning at the same time.  I relate – I prefer to walk and talk things out to learn and prefer walking with friends to chat versus sitting…and it’s not just an exercise thing, it simply ‘feels’ good to my brain.

What do you think?

Click here to learn more