meetups and thoughts

My two nutritarian friends came into town on Friday and we had quite the feast:

I made sweet potatoes topped with black beans and greens etc and a dollop of soy yogurt (a recipe from the Fuhrman site).  We made salad from Holly's lettuce and pear, my red pepper and a yummy salad dressing from the Fuhrman site.  Holly made delicious stuffed mushrooms.   Suz brought curried squash on brown rice.   I got full eating all this great food.   After our feast, we went on a walk at Olbrich community gardens, and then went, where else, to the co-op.  That was interesting as we shared many food tips about all our favorite foods, as well as the ones we have to avoid (the cowgirl cookies are sometimes a challenge for me).  I got a lot of new ideas from our discussions as we strolled through the store.

Some quotable quotes were "I'm an unethical vegan" and "I'm a vegan on weekdays."

Today I heard a great quote:  "The best way to bring someone over to your cause is to have more fun than them."   For me, the biggest difficulty about eating healthy is sometimes thinking that I'm missing out on what everyone else is eating.  It's all in how you look at it.  I just need to think of it as I'm the lucky one, having the most fun eating the best food.   Along those lines, last weekend I was out on a walk at a conservancy and a group was roasting marshmallows over a fire and making s'mores.  Well, you know how those nostalgic feelings can make you wish you were joining them.   Today I was meditating in front of my fireplace (wow, is that ever easy to meditate in front of a fire!) and I was thinking about our ancestors roasting winter squash in their fire.  Then I realized, our difficulties in eating healthy usually arise from nostalgia for eating the things we used to eat and drink with our family and friends.   Maybe we just need to go back further in time.  The last 50 years are a blip on the history of our people.  Go back further, and we are talking sweets only on very special occasions.   So just let your nostalgia go a little further back in time and you can imagine roasting squash instead of marshmallows, and relishing a good fruit instead of ice cream.

weekend cooking

It's fall and my food choices are changing with the season.  It's winter squash time!   Here's what I'm planning to try this week:

And that's just for lunch and dinner.  I'm thinking sweet potatoes for breakfast.  I made a huge pot of soup using veggies from the garden mostly.  This has white lima beans, purple barley, onion, eggplant, collard greens, leeks, mushrooms, 2 cans of garden tomatoes, broccoli, and italian spices.  I froze it into several containers to eat during the week.  I still have some containers from my last batch of soup so I can have some variation.  Here's my plan for the week--don't know if I will like it, I'll know tomorrow--brekky will be sweet potato topped with bean soup--I'm usually hungry after exercise class.   Here's an example from today's lunch:

This also has banana, fresh ginger and cilantro.  It tasted quite good.  

Lunch and dinner will be salad (cabbage, spinach, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, seed mixture, vinegar) topped with squash, soup, apple, and pomegranate seeds, and probably some fresh ginger.  The squash I'm hoping will be easy to prepare, just baking in the oven.  I'll microwave it to heat it up.  I have no idea what this will taste like, but I expect it will be pretty good.  I mean, almost any mixture of veggies and fruit and greens tastes good.

Here's a quickie large salad I made tonight:  cabbage, spinach, romaine, broccoli, then some pomegranate seeds, seed mixture, and fruit-infused vinegar.

Here's one of my most favorite treats.  I ate this yesterday while making house mate's smoothies.  It's just frozen mango, frozen blueberries, and a little d'angou pear vinegar (optional).  I love this.  It's easy to make thoroughly enjoyable food out of simple ingredients.

Blogs and meetups

This blog has very appetizing-looking and healthy recipes!

http://www.straightupfood.com/blog/

Yesterday I attended an excellent talk by John Allen Mollenhauer, a lifestyle coach.  Wow, I'm tempted to hire him!  His website is called Nutrient Rich.  He has a free ebook called "Break Free of the Diet Traps!".  I downloaded it and looked it over and found some helpful things in it.  

Tomorrow I'm going to meet up with some nutritarian friends, yea!

And if I have time I'll attend the Whole Foods supper club on Thursday.  

That's a lot of nutritarian socializing.  Hopefully that will become the norm!

Checking in

I'm back to a busy busy schedule at work so it's hard to post on week days.  How are you doing on the Pre-Thanksgiving Challenge?   I overate 3 days on fruit and nuts, which is not good, but...I'm just observing it for now and letting myself learn the lessons I need to learn.   I want healthy eating to be a choice, not an exercise in willpower. I usually feel like eating the most healthy foods in proper quantities.  I guess I'm just letting myself be reminded of that through experience.

As I mentioned before, one of my goals for the challenge is to optimize my protein intake.  I'm trying to get stronger at the gym and want to help that with my food intake.  I'm monitoring my food intake with cronometer.  Now this is just something fun I'm doing so don't feel you should have to do this also:  Following Dr. Fuhrman's food plan will provide you with plenty of all your necessary nutrients.  But it is instructive to see what foods have the highest protein.  I can see where I can tweak to get more protein.  For example, I can cut back my raw carrots a bit and replace them with sweet peas.  I love peas so that's easy to do. The other thing that's very noticeable is that fruit has a lot less protein per calorie than green veggies (leafy or otherwise).  But fruit has a lot of other healthy nutrients so it should be part of the diet.  I find 1-1.5 lbs per day of fruit is a good amount for me.  I've been eating veggie bean soup and also putting edamame in my salads every day.    The combination of the soup, edamame, and lots of green veggies in the salads gives me about 14% protein which is good for building muscles.  I could optimize it more but I love me carrots.  Today I got some mediterranean pine nuts from Dr. Fuhrman.  He recommends these and pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds for optimal protein after a workout (along with beans and veggies).  I'll add those in to next week's salads.

More success stories

Laurenstyle lost 5.6 lbs, reached her exercise goal of working out 5x/week, even in the pouring rain!  And she reached her third goal of Learning to appreciate the journey of ETL.  I thought here wording of the last goal was inspiring:

I am appreciating and so GRATEFUL for the journey. It’s truly become a way of life.  It’s hard to document all that’s happened in this area, but it’s definitely powering a shift in all areas of my life. I have a whole new work ethic and am accomplishing things as never before. Not only my ability to focus and concentrate, but my ability to be more efficient, compassionate, a good listener, develop creative solutions and just enjoy my fellow coworkers has just skyrocketed.

Suzette lost 17 lbs!   Here goal was 20.  That's great!  She also is helping family members adopt this eating style.

tejasjjain struggled at first (how many of us have been there?!) but got on track and her habit of late night snacking is almost gone!   She "only" lost 4 lbs.  Hello, that's great!

Lois made substantial gains:  giving up her regular glass of wine, and working on her overating tendencies.  She has the same problem as me, getting too thin when 100% compliant, and then over-reacting by over-eating, sometimes off plan.  Someone else on this challenge has this problem too.  Interesting, huh?

Linda did a lot of successful detective work with her auto-immune food triggers.  As she said, she knocked this one out of the park!  A combination of fasting and various food selections refined her food choices.   Her second goal was to expand her repertoire of recipes that her son can enjoy.  She accomplished this one too.  Finally, she wanted to get more exercise.   She still has work to do on this one--hopefully in our next challenge!

Dru conquered her date overeating tendencies and can now have them in the house again.  And she bought a new wardrobe.  She definitely wants to stay on plan so she can continue to wear her new smaller clothes!

Thanks everyone for participating.  We're doing a new challenge (no vitamix award, sorry!).  Here's the post on that.

The Runner-Up(s)

Jan and Jerry.  Here is their report:

A funny thing happened when I took my brother Jerry under my wing to help him lose weight...I lost weight too! He ended up losing more than 40 pounds on the "greens and beans" diet. And he got off his diabetic medications! I lost only a few pounds but I reached a milestone weight that has been eluding me for a good long while.

Jerry dutifully texted me his weight and his blood sugar reading every morning. That gesture, I believe, helped him to keep his weight and health goals first and foremost in his mind. Those daily texts also provided him with accountability.  I taught Jerry the acronym G-BOMBS (aka GOMBBS) to remind him what foods to eat every day. It is such a simple but powerful and effective concept...eat these six foods and regain your health. It's all about greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries, and seeds!  And teaching Jerry about healthy eating helped to reinforce the information for me.

This is not to say that it was all easy...there were temptations and slip-ups and other obstacles along the way.  Accountability and keeping it simple....that's the combination that led to a successful outcome. 

We both have more weight to lose and this six-week challenge was a great start. Thanks, Barb!

And the winner is...

Diane Watkins!  

Oh, this was soooooo hard!  I don't like being a judge and selecting a single winner.   So many people did really well.  Congratulations to all of you.   Here is Diane's final report:

I discovered the Eat to Live program in June and immediately embraced it. I did extremely well the first 3 weeks, then found it difficult to continue. We were traveling a lot with my husband’s work and I found it difficult to find the foods that I needed in restaurants, which was our usual way to eat on the road. So, I was looking for help staying on the diet when I found your challenge. This was exactly what I needed to help me adjust to the ETL lifestyle. I chose to set my goals as learning to organize my food and life to fit the Eat to Live program and staying on the program throughout the 6 weeks, specifically healthy eating at every meal and every snack.
 I feel that I have met these goals, although I am still learning and evolving. I found it easiest to get into a pattern of eating that supports these healthy eating goals. While the foods eaten change, the pattern has stayed the same. I eat a fruit salad and fruit juice for breakfast, a large green salad for lunch, and a homemade bean or lentil and vegetable soup or steamed vegetables for dinner. I sometimes add beans or a sweet potato to the lunch salad to keep me from getting hungry again before dinner, but I usually eat my beans in the dinner soup. I also have a green juice in the afternoon, when I have time to make it in the morning, and green tea or water during the day. I will occasionally snack on some homemade low-fat hummus with snow peas, nappa cabbage or other vegetables. I’ve discovered a few excellent no-oil salad dressing recipes. My favorite is tangerine juice, lemon or lime, and vinegar. The hardest part of the challenge is to not eat late at night, when my husband has his late night snack.
 I wake up each morning hungry, for the first time in my life. I was never much of a breakfast eater in the past. And I am usually ravenous by dinner time. But I can honestly say that I have not had any problems with cravings, which is also unusual. The fruit satisfies my sweet tooth; but I am used to eating a lot of salt. I will admit that I cheated a few times in the beginning, adding salt to my soup, but I have gradually adjusted my salt addiction and am doing better now. I am slowly getting healthy. Although I have a long way to go to truly regain my health, I can honestly say that I am a lot better off now than I was only 6 weeks ago. I have a heart arrhythmia and an autoimmune disease that have severely limited my movement and energy levels in the past. Getting my health back is my priority right now, because I had truly lost it. I need to turn that around quickly. I believe that the Eat to Live program is my best chance of regaining a healthy body. The autoimmune disease manifests itself in very painful skin lesions that make my life difficult. The Eat to Live program these past 6 weeks has helped, I have only had one new lesion in the last 6 weeks, and the old lesions seem to be improving, although not fast enough to suit me. It seems to me that improvement is directly related to my consumption of green juice. The more I drink, the better they get. I also had a bad episode of A Fib during the challenge. This is not unusual, actually only having one is probably a great improvement. In the past, I have had bad episodes regularly, sometimes weekly, so one in 6 weeks is an improvement. I have increased my nut and seed consumption and that seems to have helped. My blood pressure is good, without medication and I have more energy than before, with the exception of the week of the A Fib episode. I have also lost some weight, although I promised myself I wasn’t going to concentrate on my weight during this challenge. I wanted good health to be my goal.
 I have made quite an improvement, although I still have a ways to go. I will be joining you on your next challenge and look forward to a lifetime of healthy eating. I appreciate your running this challenge and supporting us. The Vitamix has been a nice incentive, and I do need one; but I know that I am a winner either way. I really feel that a Vitamix would help me drink more vegetable juices and this challenge has only intensified my longing for one. I have been making juice in my regular blender, but I have to strain it. The entire process takes a lot of time that I don’t really have in the mornings. The fruit juice is easier, since I can drink it without straining, and it seems to blend a lot faster. I have been struggling to figure out how to afford a Vitamix, we are very strained financially and It doesn’t fit into our budget. I am putting it on my Christmas list, however, in the hope that we might manage it. My husband and I talked about getting one for my birthday, which is only a few days away, but decided that we just couldn’t make it happen right now. Thank you for this challenge and your support.