Category: diet

Here we go again

There comes a time when the diet no longer works
We then – at a given moment – if we are aware – look at ourselves and notice we are not holding onto any kind of diet.
We are not paying any attention at all to what we eat.
We also become annoyingly aware that we have not taken any real exercise for quite some time
and we notice we cannot quite pin down when and how this happened.

This happens to all of us – if we still care about ourselves we immediately pick up on it and start taking care of this again. It always starts with awareness and goes into action – we must act!
Things must change – the panic sets in – when you ask yourself – ‘what have I been eating’ and the answer is ‘I don’t really know’

I’ve been stuffing my face with all kinds of things, some of which I cannot really call ‘food’ I have been swallowing it in vast quantities and in continual snacks – which I cannot call ‘meals’ – and in such amounts the idea of ‘portions’ has escaped to another planet. The shame of it! How could I treat myself this way? What happened to my great resolve, my expert planning my brilliant research? I flounder around wondering what to do to gain control – again, to become aware – again. How do I take stock and manage my health better, like I used to – or like I think I used to.

We all hit this wall, and we never know what happened.
The thing is – we need these moments to bring us up short and help us align with our ‘preferred lifestyle’
The one containing healthy food and healthy exercise – as being unhealthy is not a price we want to pay.

Is it?

 

 

Supplements

I take many supplements

As we all know, or should know – the only supplement we all need is B12 – and we ALL need b12 even dedicated carnivores, also vegetarians, and specially us – going to be vegans.

Everything is a matter of choice – what you eat is certainly a matter of choice
Unless you feel you cannot get the right nutrients from your diet in the food desert where you live.
Or more to the point are not getting it from your really bad unhealthy diet that you know you should and could change.

A good multivitamin is always worth having in the cabinet and taking from time to time.
Especially if you hate vegetables, any green stuff or don’t eat fresh fruit.
If so, take one every day.
Even if you do eat fresh veg and fruit

These days the vitamins that used to be in fresh food are no longer there
due to the way they’re grown – so – the amount of food you need to eat to get the same value is so huge it’s practically impossible to consume it all in a day.
Bio – organic – fresh – locally grown foods are the most nutrient dense
So get that, eat that if you can – better than any supplement

And get out into the sun for your D3 every day
you don’t need to roast on the beach
just warm your face as you sit in the park
or garden in your shorts
roll up your sleeves on your bike ride

It’s also very popular to supplement for longevity
taurine, berberine, resveratrol, among others are popular
also supplements for muscle growth and bone mass
calcium, iron, magnesium.
If you take all the supplements recommended you’d rattle!

Weight loss supplements and fat burners are all the rage
But these are the most dangerous as they lull you into thinking you don’t need to make an effort to improve – or completely overhaul your diet and lifestyle to be healthy.
They cannot be taken long term – think of your kidneys, your liver –

And be kind to your guts – that’s another one
The pre and pro biotics – amazing as they are as supplements will not surpass getting this from your diet
get if from you diet – it is better for you
Just add pickles and kimchi or sauerkraut or atjar to your diet.
Even a splash of cloudy apple cider vinegar will do it.

Supplement heaven – choose your own pharmacy!
but always and forever – the good diet wins out.

White bread

I just ate the last one

A Kaiser roll – the hell of white bread – probably the unhealthiest thing I eat.

I shall have to quit all bread – especially the Kaiser roll
Ooh and my other favourite the croissant
Ooh! And there is the chocolate croissant too – I also love that – and French bread delicious!
And I like those little whole-wheat crackers you can put anything on
melba toast they are called – yes I love them too

I also love sesame seed knakerbrood. (crispbread or cracker to you)

In fact I am a total knakerbrood fan
I have ta least five varieties in my knakerbrood tin on the kitchen counter where I can easily get at them.

These are foods I will have to drop for the duration
perhaps forever
I know that as I go on with this diet I will loose the taste for them
as I did when I was backpacking around Southeast Asia
where you only get rice and there is no bread.

It worked

But it also worked because I was carrying an 11 kilo backpack and walking everywhere.

So this is how it’s going to be, the crackers can wait, they keep forever.
The bread is all now gone – there is none in the house and no more is entering the house.

I just hope my husband doesn’t start baking his glorious whole-wheat loaves again
they are irresistible.

Damage control

What happens when you let yourself freewheel through one of the greatest gastronomies on the planet?

The weight plies on

I ate what I liked – and what’s not to like about French cuisine?
Those delicious dishes at great restaurants with excellent chefs and lovely service

After the holiday dining there is this unhealthy weight gain
The overeating – for just one more mouthful has to stop

Now I have to do some damage control
The diet has to start
The control has to start – I have to watch it
Self discipline has to be enabled
before it goes so far that nothing in my wardrobe fits anymore.

training has to start
I am lucky there because I do like training, working out, walking and cycling
So I am ahead of the game there –

But it still needs to be done
Damage control days have arrived.

The third diet

The third diet is the one that is going to work.

The third diet is the one that is right for you.

The third diet is the one that will last you the rest of your life.

Provided you have your head screwed on right, the third diet is the one you get to when you start thinking about diet, stop panicking, and start, finally, listening to your body.

Let me explain.

The first diet.

The first diet is the one you grew up with. It’s what you have always eaten. It is the diet you know, and what you have grown used to eating. This diet is what your family ate, or at least gave to you to eat as a baby, as a small child, though you may have thrown tantrums about what you were given, you will have eaten and liked most of it. Or you mistrusted all food given to you and developed absolute hatred for certain foods. As you grew up you started choosing within the allowable and available foods, if there was any choice at all, luckily for most people there is choice.

Since you started choosing your own food, your diet has shaped you. The first diet has two stages, the second stage is when you become capable of buying your own food, making your own food choices, cooking your own meals. Eating just exactly what you like all the time. now for most people, this leads to healthy sustainable food choices.

Or it used to.

Nowadays it doesn’t always lead to a good healthy diet, and we know it. We are led astray by food marketing, advertising and promotions. Whether we know, or care about it, or not – we choose from the food marketed to us, and this becomes our daily diet. This is the first diet – most of us do well, some of us do very badly, we develop illnesses caused by bad food choices, diabetes or heart problems, we become overweight or have deficiencies which lead to disease. The first diet may not be healthy, but it is what we know, what our families know, what our culture knows. If we are lucky, it is a great diet, most of us are not so lucky and most of us do not make good choices.

So now we get.

The second diet

The second diet is what happens when we become aware of what we are eating and start thinking about it. The second diet happens when we try to change our diet, when we discover how sick we are making ourselves, when we are unhappy with our appearance our health, our longevity.

This is the mad panic reaction, the shock reaction to our bodily state. We start dieting. The yo-yo dieting reaction starts up. The fad dieting, there are so many restrictive diets of all varieties, some good, some not so good, some so unhealthy they are downright dangerous. The GI diet, the keto diet, the south beach diet, the Aitken diet, the apple diet, the 5-8 diet, the fasting diet, I could go on and on there are so many. The restrictive and often unhealthy way we use the same food products and marketing and dieter restriction to try to change how we eat is truly concerning. We rapidly try to change how we look and how we feel about ourselves. This can lead to all kinds of other problems, bulimia, anorexia, diabetes, deficiencies of all kinds. So, we aren’t doing ourselves any good. The second diet takes us to the other extreme of trying to control every little thing about our food intake. The point is not to be extreme but look at yourself, your life, your lifetime habits, the diet of your family, your culture and your country. It is not to force change on the body and hate yourself while doing it. Most people live inside of the second diet all their lives without ever discovering there is another choice. But sooner or later we do start to think again.

And this leads to

the third diet.

The third diet is when you start being sensible about it. The third diet is when you start asking and answering the right questions, without demanding that the answers be what you want. It is when you allow science to answer the questions accurately. We hope that we can rely on the media to provide independently researched good quality science with no money, backing, promotion or government subsidy to screw up the answers. Believe me the answers can be totally screwed.
It happens! It happens so much you wouldn’t believe it. Always check and double check that what you are reading or prepared to try out is accurate. On the diet front, follow the money, if it is not good independently funded research it’s probably promoting a diet that may make you seriously ill.

So, what do you seek in the third diet?

When you finally make your way to the third diet, you will be eating for you and your body at last. You will be taking care of your health and be alright with what you personally can and can’t achieve. You’ll ease up on things and have what is workable in your life, with, what is available in your area, your climate, your culture. You will be able to change any part of it for yourself, whenever you need to, so you’ll feel good about yourself at all times. You will be able to ignore the advertising, the lies, the sickening foods.

This is where health starts.

The third diet.

It’s what you choose to eat once you take stock of where you are and what you know. When you understand the food fads and advertising, when you are no longer swayed by programming even by your own government or culture. They may not have your health at heart but be more interested in, say, the meat marketing board, or the dairy industry than they are in your health.

The third diet is where you learn to make the choices best for you. So thought you are in the same environment you can, for instance, say no not the hamburger but I do want the  side salad or say not the milkshake but I’ll have the juice – see for yourself, make the choices that are right for you.

The third diet is when you ask, how poisonous is this, exactly? And you are prepared to look it up. But you allow yourself, just sometimes that mouthful of chocolate, which is fine, a little bit of what you fancy does you good.

Just occasionally that is the right thing to do, not all the time.

The third diet is when you are prepared to teach your body what to eat, what to like. It’s when you teach it to metabolise foods that are better for it. It is when you listen to what your body really wants and likes, all the way to your microbiome. When you consider more than the mouthfeel or taste, the balance and texture of a food or dish. It is when you are prepared to look at what your food actually consists of, and what it does to your body.

The third diet isn’t just a change of perspective, it isn’t for ‘getting thin’ it isn’t even just for health.

The third diet is a personal revolution.

addictive food

let’s start with cheese

Cheese is highly addictive due to the casein, salt and fat in it.
The producers of cheese products know this, they have known this for quite some time, they prepare the cheese they sell to you specially to make it as addictive as possible so you will be forced to buy and eat more and more of it

They do not care what it does to your health and your mind, except to condition you into buying and eating more cheesy things. The problem is, how do you stop eating something you like to eat which is in or on just about everything we eat?
Once you know it is addictive and is so very unhealthy, how do you stop?

Despite the fact that you believe you like it.

We’ll work on this together

I had some trouble stopping myself eating cheese, it was exactly the same trouble I had when I quit smoking. Not only is it fattening and unhealthy, it is also addictive, just like sugar and salt which are also added to just about everything we eat.

Cheese is everywhere, on your Pizza, in your sandwich, in lasagne, in your macaroni, on your spaghetti, It is really hard to think of a meal that does NOT have cheese in it when you first start out NOT eating cheese. It is also, so moreish, we all love to eat lots of it. The advertisers tell us we love it and we readily and happily agree with them.

Melting gooey sticky stringy oily yellow cheese
On everything

So it’s even harder to quit that smoking, because at least these days we are not bombarded with smoking messages saying how cool it is and great it is and good for us it is. The food marketing industry is now using the exact same strategies the tobacco industry used to make us eat more cheese, like more cheese and defend our sacred cheese.

It’s such clever brainwashing we don’t even know we are brainwashed
Just look at advertising
Or rather, don’t

We have come a long way from the delightful brie made by Mr. local farmer, or the real traditional stilton. The cheese being sold to us now is not really cheese at all, certainly not in the traditional artisan sense. What we get now is a poor reflection of the old local cheese makers varieties, so much so it’s impossible to name any but the most well known mass produced ones. Think about it, what locally produced cheese can you name, or better yet, do you eat?

If we can get ourselves to the point that we stop eating this mass produced muck and go back to occasionally treating ourselves to a local handmade speciality, we are already ahead.
Try not to eat anything with cheese on it for a few days at a time. Say ‘hold the cheese’ and find out how dishes taste without it. It worked for me, it can work for you. Try it and think about how you feel.

As you start paying attention to how you feel and what you think it will become easier to stop eating cheese altogether.
Only when you have reached this stage will you realise how prevalent cheese is in your life and your diet. You will also notice you feel a lot lighter and have less trouble with your knees.

Look what I found

I love to forage.

today I found morels, some of the most delicious mushrooms on the planet, they are really hard to find.
They grow in April and May and love sandy soil

Today I shall eat them lightly fried in a little olive oil. Chefs also sauté them in butter, they can also be preserved by canning, bottling or drying. But this is just a nice little portion for one person, laid across a slice of home baked whole grain bread, with the tiniest smattering of salt.

Always check all your mushrooms for worms and bugs and brush them clean with a small soft mushroom brush. Some mushrooms will be covered in sand or other debris. What I do if it is really bad is wash them under cold running water and then leave them to dry separately for several hours or even overnight so they do not become soggy.

Please never ever pick any wild mushrooms unless you have learned personally from an expert in the field.

There are, for instance, mushrooms that are often mistaken for morelles  which are poisonous and will make you really quite ill, so unless there is someone with you who is an expert in the field, do not pick.
If you are not sure of what it is, do not pick, if it is not in the best condition, do not pick, if it has been half eaten by slugs or is very damaged, do not pick.
Do not pick if it is very young and do not pick if it is very old.

If you are serious about learning to forage mushrooms, learn when they are not in the right condition to pick.
This is not something you can learn from a book or a few videos. You need to learn from an expert in the field, personally. Some experts run workshops during the relative mushroom seasons and it is possible to apply for these where you are.

I was lucky, my mother picked and so did my grandmother and my aunts and great aunts, so I learned from  childhood which mushroom is which, what is edible, what will make me ill, what is medicine and what will give me (bad) dreams, and, of course which ones are delicious and where to find them, which trees they prefer to be near or grow on, as well as all the places they knew where their favourite mushrooms grew.

I never tell anyone where these mushroom patches are, some are very rare, some are very common, some are very hard to spot, others are extremely easy. I know over fifty varieties, but I only pick some of them. I pick depending on seasonal availability, which can vary greatly from year to year.

If you do come across a mushroom patch never ever pick them all, leave one third – always, – don’t be greedy.
Let some grow up and spore, if you see someone else also knows this mushroom patch and has already picked them, leave what is left. and go your way.

I will not pass my expertise on to anyone, I have no one I want to pass it on to and do not give workshops. We have so little forest left and it is still being cut down at an astonishing rate. There are few wild meadows left and little duneland. Many of the varieties I used to pick are now rare or even endangered. If I do come across a patch of rare mushrooms I leave them alone, even hiding the patches of the rarest ones so no one else can stumble across them.

Morelles can be bought already dried, or in jars or tins, preserved for your recipes and dishes if you really want to try them, very rarely you can get them fresh. There are now growers who specialize in morles too, that would be the best bet.

Better yet find a restaurant where the chef has them on the menu and try them cooked by an expert.

 

 

A mixed bean salad

Vegan, oil free, gluten free, delicious.

This oil free recipe gets its creaminess from the Violife ‘white’ and the borlotti beans. red beans will also work. Carrot adds sweetness and cucumber a delicious coolness. The rucola is used as a herb as it is strong and peppery in flavour, all offsetting the slight bitterness from the chicory. Thus giving a wonderful easy to eat oil free salad containing all the nutrients needed.

For gallbladder and liver health it is also possible to add dandelion leaf finely chopped, it goes well in this dish adding it’s own flavour in-between the chicory and rucola. It is possible to forage dandelion almost anywhere, be careful to choose clean plants not near busy roads but in meadows or parks where the air is cleaner. Or like I do simply grow it in your garden as it is a healthy nutritious plant.

The lemon juice and salt bring out all the natural flavours of the fresh ingredients and with the rucola and the dandelion leaf you don’t need pepper.

red chicory, finely chopped
spring onion thinly sliced
grated carrot
dandelion leaf finely chopped
a small tin of green borlotti beans (red kidney beans are also good)
greek white ‘goats cheese’ Violife, in small chunks
rucola, very finely chopped (arugula)
red cayenne chilli very finely chopped
cucumber in small chunks
paprika, orange, sliced and chopped (bell pepper)
lemon juice to taste
salt  to taste

 

So lets go

Let’s take a good long look at how and what and when and especially why we eat.
Because we all know it’s not just about hunger and nutrition.

If you are or ever have been ‘serious’ about dieting you have this picture in your mind of what your preferred ‘thin’ is like. You have this idea that somewhere in the future you can be different. You want to change into that perfect person you think you are not.

You want to be this other person, this thin person.
You want to be this totally different being who is slim and energetic, beautiful and healthy and loved
Loved even by you yourself.
So who is this person you can see in the future? This person who is all these things you want to be and feel you are not right now?

We don’t really need to take a long look in the mirror to see what we really look like now, as we know what we look like now, and don’t like what we look like now, this is why we avoid looking at ourselves.
We carefully avoid the mirror, sometimes we won’t even have mirrors in the house and some of us wince when we catch sight of ourselves accidentally.

How bad is that as a body image? Is this how you really feel about yourself? I’ve noticed it about me, my body image is very negative. Do you never wear anything tight or fitted, do you also buy those roomy clothes that cover your body and hide all the lumps and bumps and fat bits? Are you afraid to be seen in public, in the gym? Will everyone who sees you notice all the fat bits wobbling on the fatter bits which you are so unhappy about? I never go to the beach in a bikini anymore because I’m afraid someone might see that I have fat bits.

It’s no way to live. I feel sad and I am angry and puzzled and by my own reactions to what my body looks like now. I do not have a good relationship with my body.
Instead I have a deep meaningful relationship with my fridge, my cookie jar, this bag of crisps and the bar of chocolate, specially the bar of chocolate.
And it is all funny, It’s hilarious, I laugh, we laugh we are all funny, because if it wasn’t funny we would be crying, so I’m snarky and sarky instead and that makes me angry too because it’s not really a joke, mainly because I have begun to worry about my health.
And still I eat
Specially the very things I know I should not be eating at all.

Let’s face it we are unhappy, have a terrible body image and don’t like who we are.

What we need to do is engage our brains, we need to think about this carefully, we need to use the mirror in a completely different way
We need to look at ourselves from the inside out, use our internal mirror
We need to look at our feelings instead of eating something

Avoiding  how we feel is what got us here in the first place, we need to look at ourselves inside out, honestly
It’s just us in here, so it’s safe here, as for everyone else – it’s none of their business, they can stop judging us right now – if they ever did.
We have to let the internal judge sail too and stop judging ourselves, look at ourselves dispassionately, calmly and kindly, without judgment.

Let’s get real inside our own heads, inside our own feelings first. Take look at what moves us to eat the way we eat, so we get to the point where we can do something about it for good, for the long term.
We need to take control.

It’s like finally quitting smoking, at first it’s impossible to do, we can’t even think about it so we don’t. Then it’s maybe something that might happen in the distant future, then it becomes possible to cut down, after that the idea of quitting becomes something that could happen someday, then one day it is possible and you find you can stop.
After that on the day you quit, not smoking is hard as it nails you down twenty times a day as you slog through the force of habit, but it is possible to continue quitting twenty times a day and not reach for that cigarette twenty times a day. Then you notice you can breathe deeply again, this is it’s own reward, your sense of smell returns, this has it’s own reward too. The smokers cough finally goes away and that feels really good, then movement, walking, running becomes easier, you’re not so knackered all the time and that is really great.

So bit by bit, not smoking becomes normal and easier till you cannot even imagine how you mindlessly smoked all those years.
But it was difficult to put that last one down, and it was very tricky to avoid the next one.
That takes control.
(if you never started smoking, really well done! That’s the best way, never start)

The point is that we can also do this with food. We can be in control of ourselves here too.
It becomes easier, and easier for us to do the right thing as we go along. In a years time, two years time – when you look back at yourself you will smile. You will have become the person you can only dream about now. The healthy active one.

The one you know you are.

So the exercise today is look at your body image clearly and kindly, notice the difference between the one you think you are and the one you think you want to be, that’s it, that’s all there is to it, get these images right in you mind. What are you now? What do you imagine yourself to be? How far apart are these two images, how different do they look to you? Remember though, neither of these images is real – neither of them.

Now, how do you feel?

Fix it

So how do you fix your diet, fix your life, get healthy and be your ideal weight?
Tall order for any diet
But this is it

The thing you gotta do is get your head round it, once you have your head in the right place anything is possible. Like not eating cheese.

Even if you like cheese, I can hear you saying, ‘but I like cheese!’
I know
I used to like cheese, at least I used to think I liked cheese.

There’s the rub

But let’s take a good look at all of it as it’s not just about the cheese
I like to eat, I have to eat
We all have to eat.

And the trouble with most of us is we like, no we love to eat a lot, and mostly we love to eat a lot of unhealthy things, let’s face it food is beautiful, and delicious and filling and good for us.

Most of the time anyway.

It’s when we lose control of our eating that the trouble starts and this is true for most of us, at least it’s true for me. I lost track of where in the distance past my dietary habits and eating patterns changed from normal to this serious weight and health problem. I don’t know what happened and I can’t see when. There seems to be no point in time, when I look back; where I can then pinpoint a moment and say ‘here is where it all went wrong’ – ‘here is where eating became a problem.’

We all look at our weight in Puzzlement and confusion ask ‘What the fuck happened?’

Where did I go wrong? I blame cheese.

So what in the hell did happen? It’s like the very thing we need to do to stay alive was hijacked somewhere along the way and turned into something that’s killing us. Laugh all you like, but that is exactly what happened. We all became addicts to the very thing that sustains our lives.

The cruellest addiction is food addiction because we really cannot live without food

We can’t just drop it forever and do a detox and never look back

If we don’t eat, we die.

So we cannot break out of it, we have to eat to live.
Like breathing,

Which is why smoking was and remains so popular despite what we know about smoking now, people still smoke, it is intricately involved in our breathing and we can’t just stop breathing and say fine see I’m all better

If we don’t breathe, we die

Alcohol and soda addiction or even energy drink addiction is just as hard to stop, we need to drink

We cannot say see I don’t drink anymore, We cannot not drink

If we don’t drink, we die

The thing about nicotine and alcohol is we can stop smoking and drinking that particular thing and still breathe air and still drink water. Can this also be done with food? These addictions and choices we make are intimately and intricately interwoven with the very impulses that keep us alive.

We need to do something, but we can’t not eat at all we can’t stop drinking altogether, we can’t not breathe the air, and we can’t not move. (I’ll get into that last one later.)

Like with drinking and smoking you have to break your addiction to the foods that are killing you.

Specially cheese,

But not only cheese, this is a challenge we need to take, a race we need to win as it is ‘win or die’. And since I aim to live long and prosper I need to win this challenge. I do not want to die, not yet anyway, I want to live to a ripe old age, laughing all the way and a bloody good diet is what’s going to get me there,

This sluggish poisonous unhealthy body I am now living in will become a healthy sleek one, and I will become more energetic and happier. I will become less grumpy less aggressive, less neurotic and less depressed as I fix all the food problems I have. I’m taking you with me, whether you like it or not.

And it is not JUST about the food, it’s a bout me and you, and our personal long term survival.

I will repeat a lot of stuff, it’ll get it into your head, so you remember, so you know. So I remember, so I know.

Also we will try to drown out the advertisers and the government propaganda. Some of you will be able to listen, some will not due to the weight of subliminal messaging and life long bombardment with misinformation, but my hope is once this thought is in your head it will stay there a and help you do something long term about the terrible eating habits and unhealthy food addictions that got you and me here I the first place.