Float Daily!
I am feeling the effects of a fiber deprived diet. It has been only 3 days and I feel just as bad as I did before I started this journey. I am looking forward to a raw meal n the ship. A huge salad, with lots of vegetables! Well, we will see you in a week, good luck and heat good.
Float Daily!
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So we went and had a great family style dinner.
Did it meet our nutritional guidelines? not really. You cannot be good 100% off the time. Started off with a couple servings of spinach salad with prosciutto, pine nuts and gorgonzola. Had some friex calamari and fried zucchini. Was able to scrape the breading off the zucchini. The calamari I just sucked it up and ate. Entrees included chicken parmesan, skipped, grilled salmon, yummy, chicken saltimbucco, which Kristin was told wasn't breaded but was, and linguine with white clam sauce, for the girls. OMG! delicious! quite salty though. They brought a couple pieces of kristin's chicken without breading. tried some of that and had two pieces of salmon. Dessert? cheesecake and profiterols. I tried to stay away but everyone was drooling so I splurged on a creme puff that was filled with vanilla bean ice cream.Sorry to say that I am an impulse eater and cannot ignore that pile of food in front of me.Well I will make up for it with lots of walking ;)The good news, stuck to some deli meat and fruit for breakfast with a dash of egg and bacon.Skipped lunch and we ate leftovers from the restaurant. We could make yet another meal out of it if we were going to be here tomorrow. So I have to say it ended up being an exceptional value!Feast daily Traveling is part of all our lives, but what do we do about our new eating lifestyle? We found an awesome cousin to stay at the house while we are away, that way our furbabies are well taken care of and the house can be watched, so the homestead is accounted for, but you cannot pack a trips worth of meals no matter what you try. What will work for me and hopefully you? CAUTION!! Read what you are about to eat and dont be afraid not to eat something if it does not meet your expectations. Remember to ask, is it breaded? is it fresh? is it cooked beyond recognition? First part of the trip is the easiest, packed the outer leave from our butter lettuce we received in our CSA basket. The leaves were beautiful and large and made perfect sandwich wraps. mix some tuna with a little mayo and pickle and we are ready to go for lunch. Chopped up a couple carrotzillas and some radishes, and brought a bag of raw cashews for snacking. Water is a must, we don't like to (okay I don't like to) stay overly hydrated as you cannot be sure where the next bathroom is, but I am believing this is vital and you can probably find a restroom off most exits. Airport food sucks! I don't care how hard you try. We ate at this diner, had local vegetables and grass raised beef and bison, How could this place not be great? well, the food was pretty good, I got the bison, it was dry and gamy, which is probably just the way it is, but in not reading the menu properly it ended up being a "chopped steak" otherwise know as a hamburger, or in this case a bison burger, patty. As I have mentioned before processed foods are digested faster losing the longer lasting effects of a nice protein in your meal. Besides the protein my dish came with three vegetables: corn, broccoli and mashed potatoes which would be covered in brown gravy, also known as liquid death :) Substituted a salad for the potatoes, which was a nice variety of mixed greens with a few vegetable slices, and of course croutons, solid death, which I had forgotten to ask them to hold, I never remember to ask them to hold and I have never eaten croutons. Anyways, the bison tasted good, it had roasted peppers and onions on top. The vegetables came drowning in butter, seriously? You go through all that effort of letting us know they are local and fresh and then you cannot even taste the vegetable, just butter. The salad was sadly the highlight, the greens were nice and fresh and varied, they didn't have oil and vinegar so went with the balsamic which was potent. Dessert, no way? I look back and wonder how I used to eat all that food, I would plow through an appetizer a large entree and then dessert without thinking. If you look at appetizers a lot are fat, sugar, wheat loaded, they increase your appetite rather than satisfying it. Sad news? I was hungry less than an hour later. Guess all that processing depleted the wholesomeness of that great food. Plane ride was interesting, we all get on and are settled then we have to all get off because they didn't do the international security sweep. Drink? Coffee? Cream and sugar? Black. Pretzels? God NO!!!!! Oh well, we arrived and were alive, cannot say my family were enjoying my radish burps. OMG those radishes were spicy, whew!!!! Breakfast was okay, need to watch myself tomorrow, I was hungry so I inhaled a plate of greasy bacon and sausage, some flavorless eggs. At least I wised up and had some fruit and deli meat, probably not nitrate free but at least it wasn't slimy with grease. Unless I find some paper towels or paper napkins tomorrow will probably be deli and fruit. The only positive of that breakfast is I will not end up eating lunch. Found a scale after breakfast so I will have to see if I have recovered from travelling tomorrow morning. Maggiano's for dinner, this will be a challenge above all others, a family style Italian restaurant that continuously brings food to you. Have to please everyone when you vacation with others :) We will find at least one non pasta entree and their salad is phenomenal so maybe I will eat that and just try a little of the entrees. Starting Saturday we won't have internet for a week, but I will track what is going on nutrition wise and hopefully can set a good example. The scale after breakfast did not make me happy. Breakfast I ate my leftover egg on the island, avocado style. It reheated alright, there was a crunchy egg coating, I peeled this off and ate it separately as i couldn't eat it with a spoon very well. Small scoop of organic yogurt with flax and chia seeds. Lunch consisted of a nice big salad with mixed greens, kohlrabi (improperly peeled :D), bok choi and the last of the broccoli. So plenty of fiber today. Plenty of water and some good proteins. I'm content and still st We are busy preparing for vacation and especially the cruise. Bringing our own chia seeds since they won't have them. Such barbarians :D Snacks for the road? Raw cashews, I did get some beef jerky and I haven't found a nitrate free source, but it give me something I can gnaw on for a while. I will be tracking my food intake on the cruise, as well as taking my weight each morning. I will eat healthily and try and behave as much as possible, I don't think the sweets will be an issue, but when I get a veggie dish I love or some meat I can overeat :P The good news is while Kristin sits by the pool I wander the ship looking for demonstrations, displays, entertainment and will put on a whole bunch of miles. The second good news is that as long as the veggies aren't soaking in butter they are pretty low cal. Fruit may be the dessert of choice. I will let you know. I have a feeling it can be done and not feel like I am "missing out". Exciting news, I just weighed myself and it is usually what I weigh in the morning. Must be the sweating I did disassembling the bed. Went for bloodwork today, that will be another interesting thing, to see what this has done to my blood chemistry. Well I just wanted to at least let you know what is being chomped on. Eat fresh daily. Friends mentioned the Plan-D diet and the Blood Type diet, so I feel I need to look at them :D
Plan-D. Well have to get some books apparently, not much detail on the internet. Sounds like anti-processed foods, which is good. High fruit and veggies and realizing you have been eating too much instead of specifying portion controls. All great ideas! Blood type diet is exactly what it sounds like, The premise is the reason you can't interchange blood types is because they are not of oneself and therefore are rejected, same with foods. O:high protein (hopefully you dont have gout) A:veggies, no red meat B:flexible digestive system, only one that can thrive on dairy AB:recently evolved, moderate between A and B diet Have to get a book out and dig into that one more, seems strange especially the AB blow off. As I have said don't diet, change your nutritional behaviors. If you find you have to force yourself to eat a certain way you will not be able to sustain the eating plan and even if you lose weight ofr feel better you will eventually fall off the wagon and go back to the way you used to eat. Went for my annual physical, talked to Doogie about the splotches that had appeared and couldn't be gotten rid of that ended up being psoriasis. Talked about inflammation and how the food causes it and the problems it creates. Talked about the flaxseed oil, i switched to get the 1gram of omega3s and in a few weeks my leg started having more jerking issues and cramping at night. So I went back to fish oil, first because the ala omega3 you get from flaxseed is not as good as the eph and dha you get from fish oil and second to see if the anti-inflammatory effects of the fish oil would help the leg. It seems to be bouncing a lot less, still get some cramping but not as much. I will have to monitor this as time goes on. So in the end he talked about this prescription fish oil that reduces triglycerides drastically and also decreases the ldl, the kicker is it cannot be prescribed unless you have history of triglyrecides over 500. I reminded him of my week long stay in the hospital for levels over 2500. He said he would look back over my results and would check the current one after I go back Monday since I forgot to skip breakfast. So anyways still losing weight, still having regular sleep cycles and better digestive functions. CSA boxes started coming in so we are loving the fresh vegetables we are getting. Don't even need salads for dinner with the amount of vegetables we have been eating. So how is my stability, well today was pretty hectic at work. I ended up going through lunch and all the way to quitting time. No hunger pains, no feeling like I needed to eat and no lightheadedness. I call this a great thing, didn't snack didn't eat, whereas I used to get famished by noon and lightheaded if i skipped meals. Should you intentionally skip meals? Well sure, go ahead. The Paleo diet or the caveman diet recommend feast and famine. Like our ancestors, they ate a lot when the food was plentiful and didn't eat when there was no food available. I have a funny that a Ft. Collins friend sent me, funny as heck and is an issue near and dear to me. I believe poop is the window into your digestive system. Poopie-police article, it is really entertaining. Alright, so it was a somewhat okay day, rained and crappy weather which broke long enough for the grill to get turned on and steaks sizzled.
So what do you make to go with a steak for father's day? Well we had all those CSA vegetables we haven't used yet, so we had: Creamed beet salad (beets, yogurt, dill, red onion, cucumber, dijon mustard, horseradish) Roasted sunchokes (olive oil, thyme, garlic) Sauteed kale (olive oil, garlic) Rhubarb crumble (sugar, brown sugar, oats, cinnamon) We all enjoyed and had a great meal, no missing the potatoes and bread and pasta and whatever. So what have we been doing these past couple days? We've been watching a lot of youtube stuff and doing some reading. I am just going to list a few things that anyone that eats food should watch. William Davis - Wheat: The UNhealthy Whole Grain It is not your grandparent's wheat!!!! Joel Salatin - Folks, This Ain't Normal What is modernization doing to us? The Men Who Made Us Fat "Episode 1/3" 3 parts to watch, but opens our eyes to why we are addicted to junk. Read this and was interested because of my MS and other various autoimmune disorders. Scientist Officially Link Processed Foods To Autoimmune Disease Enjoy your family daily. Okay, now that I got your attention. :D
I really want to talk about the other bedtime activity, sleep. I used to be wired, couldn't sleep, would be up to 12, 1 whatever, until I passed out. Now, I get tired at a reasonable time, usually around 10 or 11 and I sleep until 6 as long as the cats and dogs leave me alone. Why, well it is not giving up caffeine, because I stopped giving it up and am drinking it again. I think it is my body getting into a balance, a balance that I have never known before. When I wake up I am awake, I don't feel a desire to go back to sleep, not saying that some weekends I don't walk the dogs and crawl back into bed to warm up. I read up on a MS diet and it has the same basic pretenses of what I have been doing, except it also restricts red meat and food allergens, which can tack some time to figure out. Do I believe I will be dancing the mamba because of my lifestyle change? No. Do I hope I will lead a longer life and be functional when my daughters decide to get married, have children? I hope so. More and more I am seeing things in print and on TV and in movies that indicate that Americans are starting to wake up to the fact that we are poisoning ourselves. We need to get back to food being something to live for, be proud of what you put in your body and the effort it took you to make it. TV dinners were no meant to be a lifestyle and fast food has become a daily habit. Lets not forget the beverages, monster, now, rockstar, 24 oz mocha caramel frappacinos with extra sugar. OMG! what are we doing? Do you really need all that caffeine and sugar? I hope not. Lets remember too that we are role models, our children see you doing this on a daily basis, you can bet they will be too. You cannot be shocked if you smoke and your kid smokes, if you drink soda all day your kid will too, if you eat crap your kid will too. The good new is if you eat well, they will too. Well, I am ready to start slowing down for bed, get my 7 hours in so I can function well tomorrow. Not only is the daily trip to starbucks causing you health issues, it is costing you a butt load of money that you could be spending on organic veggies or things to bring you and the family togeth Sleep daily. Hidey ho!! as Mr. Hankey would say.
Who is Mr. Hankey? Well if I have to answer that then you might have been living in a cave :D Anywho.... It occurred to me today as I was chomping my way through my pile of veggies I call a lunch salad, could I be getting too much fiber? Did I go from no fiber to good fiber levels too fast? Why am I asking these questions? Well, I had some bloating my first week out of the gate, but remember I went from minimal vegges to a solid vegetable lunch, mostly veggie dinner and veggie snacks. So, either be ready for the bloating and gas or enter into the fiber gradually, the living bacteria in your intestine will balance themselves out to digest the food properly soon enough. Then I had a good four months stretch where I had minimal gas and was like, cool this is great, eating all this good stuff and no gas. Then boom, back to the bloating. Could be from the few MS dinners we slipped in there, had breaded eggplant parm last night. Could just be the way my intestines are going to function. So anyways, too much fiber, is it possible? Yes, yes it is. You can end up constipated, or malnourished. The constipation will come in if you are not taking in enough water. You NEED WATER, not soda, not milk, WATER! The insoluble fiber will soak up and store the water in your stomach, it carries it to your intestine where it is used to provide water to the bacteria. In fact, without enough water you could actually get an intestinal blockage which will required medical intervention most likely. I can get malnourished? Well, not really, too much fiber and it will bind to the vitamins and minerals you want to absorb, but it will not prevent it, and the impact is minimal. So how much fiber is too much? It is recommended that you take less than 40g of fiber, and should get 30 g for a healthy lifestyle. What kinds of fiber? your best best is to mix it up, vegetables, fruit, supplements, quinoa is a great grain fiber, or amaranth. Both cereal grains are alkaline, buckwheat and millet are excellent sources, but they are acid forming, so it depends on if you are trying to maintain an alkaline system. Studies have shown cancer lives in a more acidic balance. So the end result for me? I think I am going to try just flax and chia seeds and skip the psyllium husks for a while and see what happens. Make sure I drink enough after I eat. Flaxseed Oil: I've been hoodwinked, bamboozled, flimflamed, hornswaggled, befuddled...swindled even!6/9/2013 So I have been looking for an effective source of Omega 3s. I found the flaxseed oil and people have talked about it and yeah it is high in Omega 3s, so I switched to it, heck 2 flaxseed caps as opposed to 6 fish oil caps sound good right? Plus no fish burps,right? WRONG! So I was reading another book on nutrition, do you believe it, I know you are all astonished, and they were talking about the low efficacy of the Omega 3 you get from flax. So I did some digging around and here is what I found out: Omega 3s come from plants and seeds and provides you mainly with Alph-Linolenic Acid which while the human digestive system will donvert this into the needed EPA (Eicosapentaenoic acid) and DHA (Docosahexaenoic acid) varieties it does it very inefficiently. EPA and DHA are essential for proper brain function and are anti-inflammatory. The process of converting ALA into EPA and DHA causes inflammation so it is negatively impacting what you are trying to treat. So off I will go again to find a fish oil with a decent output of EPA and DHA. The recommended intake is 1g of these and to help reduce inflammation and triglyceride levels is 2-4 g. I will let you know what I find out, I was so excited about getting the flaxseed oil and maybe I will take 1 of those a day to get the Omega 6 & 9 but need to find a way to get 1g without taking 2 caps with every meal. Learn Daily Alright, so I reviewed the DASH diet.
It is an extremely high carbohydrate diet, with reduced sodium, low red meat intake and average vegetable and fruit intake. I don't know if I could eat the 11 servings of carbs they suggest each day. On to the fiber. The recommended daily intake of fiber is 30g, the average western diet includes less than 15g. Can you see where this is going, more sugar, less fiber. Sugar has replaced everything in processed foods. They remove the fiber because it spoils faster, changes color and so is less desirable in a product that is going to be hanging around for weeks or even months. A high fiber diet can lower blood pressure, sure the average a high fiber diet reduced BP is ~1.5, but it is better than nothing. A high fiber diet reduces CRP, elevation of the C-reactive protein (CRP) level, a key inflammatory marker, has been linked to insulin resistance, hypertension, the development of diabetes mellitus, and the metabolic syndrome and other risk factors for cardiovascular diseases. http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=769647 There is that insulin resistance that is plaguing the nation, so increasing the fiber will help your insulin resistance, so will the elimination of some of the sugar from your diet. While I was on jamanet i found this article: http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=216689 This does show that detary fiber may reduce the risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) through a variety of mechanisms, such as improving blood lipid profiles, lowering blood pressure, and improving insulin sensitivity and fibrinolytic activity. The interesting component of this research was they separated the subjects into 3 groups, high cereal fiber, high fruit fiber and high vegetable fiber. I will also admit that the research indicated the cereal (whole grain) and fruit fiber reduced the risks much better than the vegetable fiber. Any way you look at it fiber is good. Fiber fills you up and keeps you feeling full. Fiber is nature's broom, it will increase regularity and comfort in BMs. The range an average person has for BM is 3 a day to 3 a week, I meanwhat the heck kind of a range is that. The sad news? I wouldn't even hit in that range before the diet change. Once or twice a week, and I had constant lower back pains. On this diet, I am proud to say I am a member of the once a day and depending on the food I've enjoyed many days with 3, I know people don't like to talk about it, but I feel great, my back has never felt so good. I have my magic shaker. I do a 1:1:1 of psyllium husks, chia seeds and ground flax seeds. This goes in my yogurt in the morning almost 1:1 with the yogurt and on my salads. 1 Tb serving size: Psyllium husks have been shown to reduce the LDL counts and is almost all soluble and insoluble fiber. 3.5 g soluble and 1g insoluble and also carries 43mg of potassium. Flax seed: 1g soluble 3g insoluble fiber, 1.75 g omega3 3 g protein Chia seeds: 2g protein 2.1 omega 3 .5 soluble fiber 3.5 insoluble L |
AuthorJust a simple person living his life with his beautiful wife, two daughters , three cats and the dog. Archives
September 2015
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