Eat the Cheese

Not long ago, I was on an online forum where someone who had given up dairy products was talking about the fact that she was craving cheese.  But what struck me about this was that she was feeling bad about it. I very seldom eat dairy either and about a month ago, I had a craving for cheese.  So what did I do?  I bought a chunk of sheep’s milk Manchego (my favorite cheese ever) and enjoyed it.  I would shred a bit in my frittata, or add a bit to a salad, or use it to garnish a soup.   

We all have cravings at one time or another and cravings are something I work with my clients to eliminate.  But let’s face it, there are times when you need to satisfy a craving with what you’re craving.  Why am I OK with this?  Because if you’re craving a ‘forbidden’ food, there’s usually a very good reason for it.  For myself, many of my cravings are seasonal.  I naturally crave heavier foods when it’s cold and cheese fits that bill.  In addition, I didn’t satisfy my craving with just any cheese.  I chose a good quality cheese that I love and I thoroughly enjoyed it without guilt. 

Something else I’ve noticed with clients, is that as their diets improve, their cravings will change to healthier foods.   For example, one client that used to crave fast food was at one point craving seafood.   If you are craving something you’re trying to avoid though, here are a few strategies for satisfying the craving without derailing your healthy eating:

Choose a healthier version of the food.  For example, rather than the local fast food burger, bring home some good quality, grass-fed beef and make your own burger.  Put it on your favorite bun, or, if it’s simply the burger you’re craving, have it without the bread with a big salad on the side.  

Eat one serving out.  Have you been craving ice cream?  Rather than bring home a half-gallon that you know you’ll eventually polish off, go out to a local ice cream shop and have a cone or a cup of your favorite flavor.  Sit and relax and eat it slowly, savoring every bite.   Even if you splurge on a hot fudge sundae, accept that you had it and move on.

Integrate your craving into your healthy diet.  With my cheese craving, I bought a block of it and included a little bit in my healthy meals and when the cheese was gone, I was so over it.  This also works for some people who crave chocolate.  A small piece of good-quality, dark chocolate after lunch is enough to satisfy their chocolate fix.  I probably wouldn’t recommend integrating double pepperoni pizza into your everyday diet, though!

The good news is, often most cravings can be satisfied after having one serving of a food, but if cravings persist, then there may be a significant underlying cause that needs to be further addressed.  This is where someone like me comes in.  I can help clients deconstruct and get to the root cause of cravings and establish alternative methods for satisfying them. 

Image courtesy of Suat Eman

Eating While Under the Influence

No doubt you’re heard of driving while ‘under the influence’.  Well, as dangerous as this can be, because it implies that you’re driving while physically and mentally impaired, I would like to suggest that eating while under the influence is equally as detrimental.  However, the influence I refer to here has nothing to do with alcohol or drugs, but involves mental or emotional states that often require our attention and awareness, not food.  

Bestselling author Geneen Roth says “anytime we eat when we’re not hungry or continue to eat when we’re full, the food we’re putting into our mouth has no connection to the body.”  When we eat in response to situations other than hunger, we’re actually trying to feed an emotional hunger that will not be satisfied with a full belly, but if done habitually, could negatively impact our health.  

What are some of the situations I’m talking about?  Here are a few and how they usually play out:

Eating after a long day - You’re sitting in front of the television to numb out, inserting one potato chip after another or spoonful after spoonful of ice cream into your mouth.  You barely see what’s going in or taste what’s going down and you usually stop when your favorite show is over, or the container or bag is empty.

Not only are you not paying attention to what you’re eating when you eat while mesmerized on something else, like the TV or computer, you’re more likely to eat unhealthy foods that can pack on the pounds.  How often do we make ourselves a nice tossed salad and sit down to watch a movie? In addition, a long-term study that tracked over seventeen thousand Canadians ages 18-90 found a positive correlation between regular length of sitting time and mortality due to cardiovascular disease and cancers.  Combine extended bouts of sitting with eating unhealthy foods and you can understand how the risk for disease can increase.

Eating in response to stress, boredom, or sadness - The healthiest and most effective way to deal with our emotions is to bring them up to the surface and feel them.  Yet, many of us have are uncomfortable either expressing our emotions, or spending time with them so we’ll find ways to divert them.  Eating in response to our emotions enables us to suppress them - we stuff them further down as we fill ourselves with food.  I understand this all too well because I’ve been there many times.  The obvious consequences are that we don’t heal from the emotional trauma and we add potential physical stress to the body with excess food.   As Robert Frost said, “The best way out is always through.”  When we experience our emotions head on rather than numbing or packing them away, we’ll emerge stronger and wiser.

Eating for hunger, but not paying attention - Okay, this one involves hunger and I am absolutely guilty of doing this.  Many days after my yoga class, I will eat an apple or drink a smoothie on the drive home.  Am I paying attention to the apple?  Not completely because I have to focus on driving, which means I’m missing out on the juiciness, sweetness, crispness, beauty, and smell of the apple.   Even though I may be hungry, I’m not receiving the full benefit from the food I’m eating and I may later forget that I even ate it.

If you frequently eat your meals while surfing the net or reading the newspaper, you may also lose track of what you’ve eaten and miss out on the enjoyment. What’s interesting is that when I’m home and I cut up an apple into wedges and eat it that way, I often don’t even need to eat the entire apple.   The few pieces that I do eat are enough.   To me, this says that when you’re more in tune with what you’re eating, you instinctively know when enough is enough.

If you treat eating as an event in and of itself, eat when hungry, eat slowly, and follow the cues of your body, you’re less likely to use food as something other than the pleasure and nourishment it’s meant to be.

Image courtesy of Ambro

Farm-fresh Cooking

This week I’ve been talking about local farms/fisheries and how we can take advantage of their bounties. When I was growing up, local farms in this area would allow berry picking, or set up roadside stands where they would offer their fresh produce or freshly-prepared products, and that was about as far as I got to learning about what these farms had to offer. Today, they are at farmer’s markets, providing CSAs, allowing picking of much more variety (maybe this is not so new, but it’s relatively new to me!), and blogging to educate us about what it takes for our farmers to grow us food and what farms have to offer.

And that’s not all. I also recently discovered that some farms here in Connecticut offer cooking classes under a variety of settings. For example, Jones Family Farm in Shelton, CT, offers a number of different classes designed to guide the student through cooking an entire meal, many of them theme dinners; for example comfort foods or a Mother’s Day brunch, etc. Their 2011 schedule is going to be posted soon.

And although not technically a farm, as I was searching for farm cooking classes, I discovered The Silo Cooking School at Hunt Hill Farm in New Milford, CT. The school offers an impressive lineup of chefs and in the past has had Jacques Pepin, Rachel Ray, and Martha Stewart teaching classes. They offer a number of unique cooking classes on grilling, summer foods, Indian cuisine, etc. But what most interested me is their full-participation cooking classes designed for groups within organizations to foster team building. What better way to inspire an attitude and philosophy of working together than in the kitchen preparing a meal!

If there is one thing that we all can relate to, it’s food and something magical happens when a group of people join and contribute their energy to the preparation of a meal and then sit down and enjoy it together. At the deepest levels, energetically and spiritually, it becomes a part of everyone involved. I thought this was a brilliant and insightful concept.

Have a wonderful day!!

DIY - Salad Dressings

Two of the biggest motivators for choosing something prepared are convenience and taste. But if saving time means compromising our health, is it still a convenience? If it eventually contributes to disease, reduces our energy, negatively influences our mood, or promotes weight gain, has the time savings been a benefit? I would argue no.

This week’s posts have been about do-it-yourself foods that although they may take a little more time to prepare, will provide much greater benefits than a few minutes. In fact, the time spent preparing these foods may actually save time by keeping you healthier, happier, and more energetic – three very important factors that influence productivity.

We eat salad to get our vegetables and stay healthy, but depending on what we top our salads with, we can be undoing the goodness of the raw vegetables on our plates. For example, I checked three bottles of store-bought salad dressings and found that they contained on average, 30 ingredients, including those listed below. Some overlapped between bottles and some did not. I’ve described a few of them.

Soybean oil - This oil is high in omega -6 fatty acids that when are in excess in the diet, can lead to inflammation I the body. All three bottles listed soybean as their oil source.

Corn syrup - The bottle of salad dressing that had this had a banner above the Nutrition Facts that said “No High Fructose Corn Syrup”, yet listed corn syrup as the second ingredient after water. This means that besides water, corn syrup (i.e., sugar) is the most abundant ingredient in this salad dressing.

Monosodium glutamate - A flavor enhancer that has been linked to food allergies, migraine headaches, asthma, obesity and hyperactivity in children. It is considered an excitotoxin.

Disodium inositate - A flavor enhancer that works with MSG.

Caramel color - The Center for Science in the Public Interest filed a petition against the use of this compound because it contains two cancer-causing chemicals, 2-methylimidazole and 4-methylimidazole which cause lung, liver, thyroid cancer, or leukemia in mice or rats.

Modified corn starch

Sugar

Salt

Cellulose gum

Cellulose gel

Propylene glycol alginate

Polysorbate 60

“Color added”

Phosphoric acid

Sorbic acid

Sodium benzoate

Maltodextrin

Lactic acid

Disodium guanylate

Autolyzed yeast extract

Calcium disodium EDTA

For a few extra minutes, you can make your own, fresh salad dressing free from the ingredients listed above and with only a handful of real-food ingredients. I've listed a few below. And by the way, you will save some time with the do-it-yourself method of preparing food. Trying to decipher the ingredient list on the back of the salad dressing bottle takes time! By using simple, real ingredients, you won’t have to read so many labels!

One of my favorite dressings:

One part lemon or lime juice

One part real maple syrup

Two parts olive oil

A quick savory option:

1 part balsamic vinegar

2 parts olive oil

a few drops of tamari or soy sauce

Here are three recipes from AllRecipes.com:

A Citrus-basil Vinaigrette

A No Mayonnaise Ranch Dressing - I would try to replace the sour cream with plain yogurt.

A Honey Mustard Dressing - Try using plain yogurt in place of the mayonnaise here too.

What are your favorite dressings to make? Please share them here!!

Un-process This...

I am a big proponent of eating a whole foods diet for maintaining optimum health. What exactly does that mean? It means eating foods that are as close to their natural state as possible.

For example, eat an apple instead of drinking apple juice or eating a store-bought pastry filled with apples. Eat whole grains like oatmeal or quinoa instead of a box of cereal made from oats or crackers made from grain flours. Eat a tomato in a salad instead of a frozen pizza.

Here a few reasons to adopt this way of eating:

It helps us to eat the freshest foods possible. A fresh, ripe apple is very high in nutrients, but we know that it has a very limited shelf-life that is easy to determine by the overall condition of the apple. Processed foods on the shelves are produced so that their shelf-life is extended, often way beyond what would be considered normal.

It allows us to get the full nutritional benefit from the food. For example, whole grains like wheat have an outer bran that’s loaded with fiber and nutrients that are often stripped away when it’s made into flour for cereals, breads, cakes, cookies. If the box says “enriched”, it means that important components have been removed.

Eating whole grains like oats, barley, quinoa, and buckwheat give us the full spectrum of nutrients in their natural state. This is important since these beneficial compounds are often part of a complex of nutrients that may get processed and absorbed by the digestive system more efficiently than isolated vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients. The same goes for fruits and vegetables.

It ensures that we’re not getting additional ingredients that our bodies don’t want. Most processed foods contain added sugars, salts, unhealthy fats, and chemicals that stabilize the food or make it taste great (often making them addictive!). By eating whole foods, we can give our bodies exactly what it needs and prevent it from getting things that it not only doesn’t need, but it doesn’t know what to do with, that can build up, and that can be harmful.

Today, pick one processed food product in your diet (if there is one) and replace it with a whole foods alternative.

Paper or Plastic?

Anyone that knows me well knows how I feel about plastic and food. The more we can keep the two away from one another, the better. To never buy anything in plastic has become almost unrealistic because these days, just about everything gets wrapped in plastic. Even some relatively whole foods like tempeh, cheeses, yogurts and kefir, grains, beans, water, vegetables and fruit, too, become intimate with plastic at some point.

Still, I would love to see everyone reduce the amount of plastic they are exposed to for so many reasons, including BPA. Here are my tips on how to make this happen:

1. Filter your own drinking water from the tap. You’re probably already paying for it and it’s just as good if not better than most bottled waters. Take it with you in a stainless steel or glass water bottle. I just got the cute one above from lifefactory. They even make glass baby bottles. Or, if you’re a real renegade, visit a nearby spring and get your own, fresh, clean, and often free, spring water. Check out www.findaspring.com to look for springs near your home.

2. Bring reusable shopping bags to the grocery store and non-plastic bags to hold your produce. Reuse plastic bags for bulk items like whole grains, beans, and legumes that can be later stored in glass jars.

3. Use glass or ceramic cookware or storage containers, especially if you use a microwave. Or, line your plastic with wax or parchment paper when storing solid foods like baked goods in airtight plastic containers. Here are some dishes made from tempered glass that are safe for kids too.

What one thing can you begin to do today that will lessen your plastic load and that of the planet? I’d love to hear from you!!