Posted on

Get Off the Diet Roller Coaster: Ten Tips for Achieving Your Ideal Weight

Roller CoasterAfter just two weeks the diet roller coaster has already ejected a good number of its riders.

Some of those didn’t even get on. The pull of holiday goodies was simply too strong.

Besides the festivities really weren’t over until seven days into the year. Well, that wrecks it for the whole year, so why bother?

Others jump on with great enthusiasm, strapping themselves in and throwing their arms up in the air with abandon. Many of these fall off rather early too: their arms quickly tire and they can only handle so much of the stress of the ups and downs.

Some make it through numerous hills and valleys, but find themselves frequently dizzy and nauseous.

And by mid January, most people have already lost their grip and tumbled to the ground.

Here’s a radical idea. Let’s get off the diet roller coaster forever. In fact, I propose we skip that area of the amusement park altogether.

Let’s not give our money to the hucksters selling us the illusion that this ride is taking us somewhere. The facts are:

FACT 1: Diets don’t work.  Once you get off the diet all the problems return. Diets often distract us from dealing with the real problems.

Fact 2: Follow the money. Diets have never worked but the diet industry (including physicians and pharmaceutical companies) makes billions of dollars every year perpetuating the myth. We foolishly keep getting back onto the ride that takes our money and makes us sick.

Fact 3: Governments, Big Agriculture, Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Health Care and Big Health Insurance industries DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOU! I am saddened by the blind trust the average person has in the “system”.

Fact 4: You must take responsibility for yourself, for your own health and education.

Fact 5: Food does not have to be complicated. We simply need to reconnect to it.

So what can you do? How do you relinquish your lifetime pass on the diet roller coaster?

Here are just ten examples:

1. Learn more about food. Why is broccoli good for you?  Why should you be suspicious of GMOs?

2. Cook more of your own food. Food made with hands is better for us than factory food. By preparing your own food you can avoid the chemical poisons of food additives.

3. Grow some of your own food. Some herbs and a tomato in a pot on the patio. Turn a patch of lawn into a salad garden. Plant berry bushes that grow well in your area. (Turn children loose in a raspberry patch for a soul-filling event.)

4. Shop the periphery of the supermarket. The fresh real food is usually found around the outside and the junk is usually on the middle shelves, especially at the ends of the aisles. Even better, forego the supermarket for the farmer’s market.

5. Get to know your grower. When you learn about the inputs required for successful organic farming, you won’t mind paying a bit more at all. You will gain an appreciation for the resources required to feed you and perhaps you’ll stop taking the earth for granted.

6. Buy colourful foods. Fruits, vegetables, and berries come in a rainbow of colours. We are genetically programmed to associate bright colours with good nutrition. It’s no mistake that junk food is marketed with brightly coloured packaging and messaging (but the food itself is often bland and colourless). We are being misled.

7. Stop poisoning yourself. Avoid “unfoods”.  You know, they come in a colorful bag inside a colourful box wrapped in plastic, with a shelf-life of decades and a list of ingredients that sound like they could power a space station, er, I mean “look”, because they are invariably unpronounceable! Avoid factory food. Eat whole real food.

8. Stop counting calories. Yes, they matter to some degree but focusing solely on calories is dangerous. (That is how fats became villains, even though many are actually heroes). Nutrient density, the total nutrients per calorie, is what really matters. Micronutrients are probably more important than macronutrients (fat, protein, carbs). Choose foods that give you the most nutrient bang for the buck/calorie. Go for quality, not quantity.

9. Start paying attention to your body. My great-grandfather said your body will tell you whether you should eat it. I’m often chided for avoiding bread but it bloats me and adds up to eight pounds to my weight in one day. My body is telling me bread isn’t serving it. If you have inexplicable health problems try eliminating some of the worst offenders from your diet for a while. Wheat, soy and dairy are some of the common foods that cause mystery illnesses.

  1. Drink water. This one step, if practiced many times each day, can revolutionize your health.

Finally, remember this. There is evidence that we are not sick because we’re fat, we’re fat because we’re sick. Fat is a symptom. Treating symptoms doesn’t work. It only masks the problems.

The accumulation of fat can be the body’s way of defending itself from toxins. Those toxins can be emotional, from food or from industrial chemicals.

Therefore the goal to “lose weight” is off track. When we strive for optimum health the body will detoxify itself, heal itself and we achieve our goals.

We’ve been riding the wrong ride!

I am happy to point you in the direction of many good resources if you decide to stay off the diet roller coaster forever. Feel free to contact me.

Posted on

Confessions of a Lazy Gardener: Or Reasons to Grow Your Own Food

Growing food is a skill I think every human being should have.

Many people know nothing about growing food and don’t want to know because they perceive that it’s hard.

They’re wrong.

Growing food is easy. Case in point:

At the end of May when I should have been planting my garden, I was travelling. Upon my return we had a solid month of rain. I finally planted potatoes July 10, six weeks later than tradition dictates (last week of May in Calgary).

I hand watered my potatoes a couple times, basically tossing a few gallons of rainwater at them when it was really hot and dry. I handpicked a few weeds twice, spending a total of maybe 20 minutes on the entire patch all summer. I didn’t even get around to hilling* them. In essence I could not have done less to propagate potatoes. Plain lazy!

Our first killing frost arrived October 13. (A killing frost sets the potato skins so they’ll keep longer). A few days later I dug my potatoes. From one kilo of seed potatoes I harvested all the potatoes in this picture, about 12 kilos.

Lazy Gardener's 2013 Potato Crop
Lazy Gardener’s 2013 Potato Crop

There were dozens of marble-sized potatoes under each plant indicating that if the season were longer, they would have produced more. (They made perfect, melt-in-your-mouth roasted potatoes).

My potatoes are crisp and flavourful, despite a summer of neglect. They grew without the “benefit” of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and other noxious substances.

A friend of mine grew potatoes in PEI for a major food processing company. Following the company spray schedule was a condition of supplying them with potatoes. The farmer sprayed her potato crop for something every other day! Potatoes routinely appear on the Environmental Working Group’s Dirty DozenTM list of the foods most likely contaminated with chemicals.

Why are those potatoes so heavily sprayed when potatoes grow almost wild, without care at all, as my humble potato patch proved?

Michael Pollan, in his book, Botany of Desire tells us it’s because of our demand for the perfect long French fry. At least that’s what Big Food attributes to us.

Monocultures contribute to the problem. Huge tracts of one-species are like a TV commercial for a free buffet, attracting every bug and blight to which that plant is vulnerable. The modern solution is spraying.

Eventually the land is addicted to its drugs.  Just like pharmaceuticals, once you take one agricultural chemical, then you need another to combat the effects of the first chemical.

Chemicals wipe out all life around the intended crop including beneficial organisms like soil bacteria, earthworms, insects (good and bad), bees, birds, bats and other natural predators, not to mention, contaminating groundwater, lakes and streams.

There is no proof any of these chemicals is safe for human consumption, never mind the cumulative toxic effect they have on the body. Then add the chemical assaults from our homes, our cars, our clothes, our cosmetics; the list goes on. No wonder rates of cancer continue to skyrocket.

Food that is grown in living soil, rife with minerals and beneficial bacteria, food that isn’t sprayed with toxins (sometimes called organic food) benefits our health in many ways:

  1. It contains more nutrients, including vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients and antioxidants. Recent research shows plants produce antioxidants and other beneficial chemicals to repel insects and other marauders unless they’re doped up on agri-chemicals. This partially explains the nutritional differences between plants grown with chemical versus organic growing practices.
  2. Fewer toxins mean lower toxic load for the body to process, resulting in less “dis-ease”.
  3. We even benefit from exercise and sunshine we get from growing food, however minimal it is.  Gardening is the only exercise besides weightlifting recommended for the prevention of osteoporosis in women.
  4. Growing our own food helps heal the earth. Less fuel is used in production and transport, reducing pollution and other costs. Grass gobbles up a huge portion of synthetic fertilizers and fresh water in North America. Growing food instead is a better use of our resources.
  5. Growing our own food reconnects us to food and each other. Food made with human hands is often made with love. Factory food doesn’t contain love; usually you can’t pronounce what IS in it. Digging around in our own gardens spawns interest in others’ garden. Soon you have a community sharing resources.

I urge you to grow even a small portion of your own food.  It doesn’t require much space or a great deal of effort or knowledge, as I have confessed. Usually, all you need to know appears on the seed packet.

Potatoes aren’t the only easy to grow food plant. Lettuce, spinach, carrots, beets, squash, and onions require little care and attention. Start a strawberry or raspberry patch with donated plants and eat fruit from them almost forever.  Rhubarb and asparagus are perennial too. Perfect for lazy gardeners like me.

Baked Fries recipe

                   

 

*Hilling potatoes is a “best practice” when it comes to growing potatoes. Soil is scraped into little mounds or hills at the base of the plants when the potato tops are six to twelve inches tall. http://www.wholerealfood.com/baked-fries/ prevents the tubers from peeking out of the ground and turning green, which renders them toxic. It also helps maintain moisture and coolness.

Posted on

The Dirty Dozen 2013 Edition

DirtyDozenHave you heard of the Dirty Dozen? It’s the 1967 movie starring Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, and Charles Bronson, where a World War II US Army Major is assigned a dozen convicted murderers to train and lead into a mass assassination mission of German officers.

The modern mass assassination is even more insidious than in that old film, largely because the target is the most innocent among us: people who eat whole, real food in the form of fruits and vegetables. We know they’re good for us. Our grandmothers told us they were and the produce our grandmothers fed us WAS good for us. Usually it was grown in soils teeming with life and vital nutrients and bereft of toxic substances.

Modern agriculture has changed all that and rendered many of our most nutritious foods into enemies, largely through the application of chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. Unfortunately not all the pesticides used to kill bugs, grubs, or fungus on the factory farm wash off under the tap at home. Government tests show that many fruits and vegetables have a pesticide residue, even after washing.

Some pesticides are bred into the plant. An example is the insecticide Bt, which works by irritating insects’ stomachs. Bt is now bred into corn and there is evidence that humans may suffer from stomach ailments after eating Bt corn. A study of pigs fed GMO corn found they all suffered excess inflammation in their stomachs.

One alternative is to seek and eat organic foods but they are often appreciably more expensive than conventional produce. A good solution is to avoid the worst offenders or select organic and then buy regular versions of other produce.

Exposure to pesticides can be reduced by as much as 80% by avoiding the most contaminated foods in the grocery store, the modern Dirty Dozen, as revealed by the Environmental Working Group. Since 1995, the organization has identified which produce items have the most chemicals.

The EWG couldn’t pick just 12 so the Dirty “Dozen” is 14 for 2013.

1. Apples: In 2013, apples take the number one spot. In Michael Pollan’s book, The Botany of Desire, he explains that because we’ve lost much of the genetic diversity of apples they are disease and pest prone so the use of chemicals on them is deemed necessary. Up to 42 different chemicals are found in apples.

2. Celery: with up to 64 chemicals. Organic celery is often no more expensive than conventionally grown celery and in my experience it is far more flavourful. When I can get it on sale, I buy extra, chop it up and store it in bags in the freezer and use it in recipes where I would cook it anyway, like soups and casseroles.

3. Cherry Tomatoes: these are new on the list. It’s so unnecessary to spray tomatoes. They are among the easiest crops to grow in most climates.

4. Cucumbers: also new on the list. Also easy to grow without chemicals.

5. Grapes: 
Imported grapes (grown outside USA and Canada) make the 2013 Dirty Dozen list. Vineyards can be sprayed with pesticides during different growth periods and no amount of washing or peeling will eliminate contamination. Remember, wine is made from grapes, which testing shows can harbor as many as 34 different pesticides.

6. Hot peppers: Peppers have thin skins that don’t offer much of a barrier to pesticides.

7. Nectarines (imported): Up to 33 different chemicals are found on soft-skinned nectarines, making them among the dirtiest tree fruit.

8. Peaches: up to 62 chemicals. Their soft skins make them susceptible to chemical penetration.

9. Potatoes: The Botany of Desire exposes the growing methods of potatoes and reveals that our demand for the perfectly elongated French fry is largely responsible for the monoculture that leads to the poisonous growing condition of potatoes.  Potatoes can easily be grown in your home garden without chemicals.

10. Spinach: Spinach can be laced with as many as 48 different pesticides, making it one of the most contaminated green leafy vegetables.

11. Strawberries: up to 59 chemicals, especially out of season, when they’re most likely imported from countries that have less-stringent regulations for pesticide use. When organic strawberries are in season, they are often as cheap as the chemical-laden ones and their flavour is far superior.

12: Sweet Bell Peppers: May contain up to 49 different chemicals. Also thin-skinned and susceptible to absorbing chemicals.

+ Kale /collard Greens: Traditionally, kale is known as a hardier vegetable that rarely suffers from pests and disease, but it was found to have residues of organophosphates and other risky pesticides. That’s why they are on the Plus list for 2013.

+ Summer squash, domestically grown: tests found that some domestically-grown summer squash – zucchini and yellow crookneck squash — contained residues of harmful organochlorine pesticides that were phased out of agriculture in the 1970s and 1980s but that linger on some farm fields.

Incidentally, the Clean 15TM, according to the Environmental Working Group, the least contaminated produce items are Asparagus, Avocado, Cabbage, Cantaloupe, Sweet Corn, eggplant, grapefruit, Kiwi Fruit, Mango, Mushrooms, Onions, Papaya, Pineapples, Sweet Peas (Frozen), sweet potatoes.

 

Sources for this article include:

Environmental Working Group: http://www.ewg.org

Dirty Dozen Methodology: http://www.ewg.org/foodnews/methodology.php

http://www.NaturalNews.com

http://www.Organic.org

The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan

Posted on

Eggs: Eggscelent or Evil?

chickens

Photo from ShelleyGoldbeck.com

Are you confused about whether you should eat eggs?

Your confusion is justified.

Eggs have been called ‘the perfect food”. Although, so has milk.

When Ancel Keyes’ flawed hypothesis that cholesterol causes heart disease became “common knowledge” in the medical community, eggs became villains.  Too much cholesterol.

Doctors warned their patients off eggs, despite their having other essential nutrients like protein, omega 3 fats, and various vitamins and minerals. To learn more about egg nutrients see: http://www.eggs.ca/eggs101/view/22/egg-nutrition and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_(food)

It was a sad time when the doctor insisted my grandma eat no more than three eggs each week. She had eaten a boiled egg nearly every day of her life, at that point, over eight decades.

I told her that eggs have components to help the body metabolize cholesterol. They have other beneficial nutrients. There was as much reason to eat them as not.

But who was I? The doctor surely knew better than I did.

Recently I found out she didn’t even have a cholesterol problem. It turns out she never fasted before her lipids blood test. To Grandma, skipping breakfast was intolerable. She needed to eat!

And of course eating an egg an hour before the test will skew the results.

When the lodge withheld her breakfast before the tests, all was normal.

She deprived herself of her morning egg for many years for nothing!

That’s not the end of the egg debate.

You see, the egg you eat today is not the same egg she ate.

Hers came from a family farm, where the chickens have access to grass everyday. They have fresh air and sunshine.

They exercise, poking around looking for insects. They fly up in terror when a fox strolls by their secure enclosure.

They have nest boxes so they can lay their eggs in privacy; (they seem to like that).

They aren’t confined to a space smaller than a sheet of paper, with their coop mates in their faces 24 hours a day.

Their feed consists of grain, lots of green grass and weeds, the odd insect, and plenty of assorted kitchen scraps.

My grandma would say that they are happy chickens. She believed happiness was a vital condition for healthy chickens.

The egg she ate was fresh, perhaps two days old. It had a golden yolk with a firm, jelly-like white that didn’t cover the entire frying pan when cracked. The egg she ate may have been fertile. It most certainly had more nutrients than the anemic orbs in the grocery stores today.

The eggs we buy in supermarkets are up to two months old before we buy them.  The Egg Marketing Board says it’s okay. The egg white is almost liquid, the yolk is anemic, and it just doesn’t taste fresh.

The conditions in which factory farm hens live are appalling. Their diets are garbage: waste from food processors, the carcasses of their colleagues, antibiotics, arsenic, and other unnatural substances. There is no happiness. There is much illness and despair.

Lately I’ve noticed commercials on TV for egg farmers. They have a catchy tune, “I’m an egg-man….” And they show pictures: a farming family, bucolic pastures, red barns, soft morning light dancing through the leaves.

Not once do they show a chicken.

They know we wouldn’t be singing the happy tune if we saw the chickens.

It’s like almost everything else on TV. It’s not real.

The reality is the commercial egg business has such slim margins that farmers are cornered into factory farming and its accompanying tortures.

Besides being cruel, the end product is inferior. Sick animals produce sick food. It’s that simple.

Even so-called Omega 3 or Organic eggs are suspicious products. I recently helped an elderly friend with her grocery shopping. She wanted organic eggs. I opened the carton to check them for cracks. They looked like they had been dyed. The shells were an unnatural, almost glowing orange. I would be leery of eating those eggs, despite their organic label.

Ideally, you have a few chickens in your backyard coop. It’s legal in some jurisdictions.  Before Calgary changed their by-laws I had a backyard coop with three little red hens.

We had the freshest eggs possible plus the enjoyment of caring for other creatures, observing their habits, and being connected to our food. My hens composted my kitchen scraps faster than any compost system. They provided hours of entertainment for the dog, the grandchildren, and even the grandpa to those children. He loved checking for eggs as much as they did.

If you can’t manage having your own chickens, find a neighbour or a farmer with a few.

If you have access to healthy eggs from happy chickens, I recommend you eat eggs. In moderation, like everything.

If you can’t get real eggs, I suggest you eat them sparingly or not at all.

 

Breaking news: The US FDA is campaigning to outlaw organic eggs. See:

http://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/no-more-organic-eggs-zw0z1309ztri.aspx#axzz2epVodpjP

Another article to read here