The Journey Still Continues

Hello it is me! I am still around and still wrestling with achieving health, wellbeing, and finding a sustainable method of feeding and nourishing myself for the long haul.

I'm doing a few things towards these goals:

1. I've joined Noom to work on the psychological side of my food demons. I'm only a week in but I already am liking the program. I've lost 4lbs this week - which is awesome, however I am trying not to focus on the scale but instead on sustainable life changes.
2. I've been subscribed to Beach Body on Demand for just over a year. BOD provides access to workouts, nutrition, recipes, etc. 
3. I'm avoiding dairy as much as I can. This is tough and involves a lot of label reading and investigation as I travel for work and end up eating a restaurants a lot. However it's been going well. 

I'm hoping that by combining all these aspects and focusing on the other dietary restrictions/concerns we have in our house (gluten intolerance, vegetarian, and working through a low FODmap experiment) I will be able to find harmony with food and stop seeing it as such an integral part of everything in life. 

Think about it, have you ever noticed that nearly everything links back to food? 

Bad day? Treat yourself with a nice dinner, cookies, or ice cream. 

Good day? Celebrate with a meal!

Seeing friends you haven't caught up with in a long time? Go to dinner! Everyone has to eat. 

Somehow food has ingrained its' way into every single social undertaking of the day. Now don't get me wrong, I understand where this comes from. The origin of our species and how we have adapted to survive made food some of the earliest glue that held groups together. 

I think really what we are facing is an incredible trial of evolution versus human ingenuity. We've overcome so much of what our base needs are as a creature to survive that we've gone right passed equilibrium to the opposite end of the spectrum. 

So, for my accountability and to perhaps help someone else out there in the world, I will be updating this blog at least weekly with my progress. 

I'll also be posting recipes of new dishes I've been making. 

Today's recipe doesn't have a picture but is for Steel Cut Oat Coconut Porridge. 

Steel Cut Oat Coconut Porridge

1 cup quick cook steel cut oats

1 can full fat coconut milk combined with water to make 3 cups total liquid

2 tsp cinnamon

2 tsp vanilla extract

1.       Place the coconut milk, cinnamon, and vanilla in a heavy bottomed pot. Bring to a boil over medium heat. Stir frequently to prevent the milk from scalding.

2.       Add the oats and whisk together to break up any clumps. Reduce the heat to medium and cover. Cook for seven minutes stirring frequently.

3.       Top with nuts, chopped ginger, or other toppings as desired.

This will keep in the fridge for a day or two.

Here's to another week! 

Real Food is Awesome

So it's been an interesting bit of time dealing with the fallout of the surgery but I can happily say I am eating normally (well, not old normally - but normal food normally) and digestion seems to be going well. I've even been able to start adding back in Greek Yogurt and Sheep and Goat Milk Cheeses without too much effect. I cannot begin to tell you how amazingly happy this makes me.

I also cannot tell you what an eye opener this has been. I had my follow up with the surgeon today and he informed me that I actually had Necrotizing Cholecystitis (on it's way to gangrene). Which basically boils down to my gallbladder was dying and beginning to become toxic to my body. Which may explain a lot of the food issues I have been having. It also makes me feel really lucky to be here, because of the research I could find it suggested that what I had was mere steps away from becoming sepsis - which and often does kill.

So I have two options now - go back to the way things were and basically have IBS type symptoms my whole life or completely shift my eating paradigm and really heal. I (We really) have chosen the latter. To do what we've been trying to do all along. So far we've done really well. The most important steps I am taking are the following:

• Step 1 - Adjust Overall Diet
• Adjust portions - Smaller meals when I feel hungry and eating less at each meal. I feel like I am a bit more intune with my body now and can more adequately understand my full signals but I want to stick with it.
• Food Diary - I am going to make an effort for the next month or two to keep a food diary, starting today. This should allow me to monitor how my body seems to be responding to certain foods both at the time of eating them and over the course of the day. This is also how I plan to become more aware of my digestion as unpleasant a subject as it can sometimes be.
• Rethink my food pyramid - This one is going to take careful thought and planning. I know now that 'fad' diets and multiple juicing fasts aren't going to help my body truly heal. Instead I need to adjust the entire picture. 
• COOK! - This one is the most important both to changing and to this lovely blog. I'm also hoping it will help me increase my posting rate here. Cooking at home is the only way I am going to know exactly what is in my food, so it just needs to happen. Plain and simple.
• Increase Water - This one is by far one of the most important to me. I deluded myself into thinking I was okay drinking clear sodas, iced tea, and the like. They're fine but I need to be sure I am taking in water also. So I'm working on toting around a 3L bottle of water with me and it is my eventual goal to drink one full bottle (or more) a day.
• Step 2 - Adjust Meat Intake:
• No Beef - I have been cutting down on red meat intake anyway due to eating far more than I would/should ever have needed to in the first twenty nine years of my life.
• Little to no pork - I really shouldn't have pork but we have a local farmer who humanely raises and kills his animals with the help of a local butcher. So I will allow myself to occasionally (really, really occasionally) have leaner cuts.
• Fish - to be enjoyed abundantly but with caution of the overly oily varieties
• Chicken - boneless, skinless only - with preference to leaner cuts.
• Decrease total consumption - I have had nothing better to do than watch several (about five) food documentaries, read several nutritional related blogs, websites, and books since the surgery and have decided that instead of following the Standard American Diet (SAD) I am going to adjust and have meat be an addition instead of the main focus.
• Step 3 - Paying more attention to grains - 
• Wheat - I am aiming for gluten free, but if I have wheat it will be whole grain with as few additives as possible.
• Rice - I have been told it is better to do brown over white, so we have been cooking more brown rice. But I know white rice is still going to always be my favorite. Especially in sushi.
• Corn - This one is tough as it is in absolutely everything! But I plan to really ingredient watch and remove corn syrups from my diet.
• Baking - make homemade treats as often as possible using allergy free recipes. 
• Step 4 - The ongoing war with dairy - This one is by far the most exciting and tricky for me. I intend to continue towards a more vegetarian/vegan style of baking and cooking but some of the research suggests I need to include some items in to help my body process food.
• Yogurt - Begin eating Greek Style yogurt (one containing as few additives as possible and if possible also organic or at least stating no growth hormones or antibiotics were used). So far this has worked out well and I need the probiotics and live cultures to help my body break down foods. I have tried Goat's milk yogurt and could not eat it, but enjoyed baking with it. I also did not like soy yogurt. I will still be experimenting with Vegan alternatives.
• Cheese - Sheeps and Goats milk are preferred, especially aged cheeses. I will eventually try eating some Cow's milk cheese but I want to be a bit further down the road before I potentially tax my system so much. Still to be consumed in low amounts and avoided if possible. I plan on purchasing some Nutritional Yeast to use in place of cheese in most instances and experimenting with making Vegan Cheeses in the future.
• Milk - I have found I prefer Almond Milk to almost anything else these days, so I intend to stick with it. I also prefer Coconut Whipped Cream. I am however trying to avoid Soy as it can be bad for me so I will be working on alternatives for that as well.
• Step 5 - Super charge Vegetable and Fruit intake - 
• Vegetables - It is my intention to move towards making vegetables the majority of my meals rather than a minority. I also want to work towards consuming more raw vegetables and more dark leafy greens. In fact we made an amazing salad with kale and arugula last night. A Kale salad, who knew?! I have heard so many statistics and numbers about how much of your diet should be raw, and yet I have also seen so many areas that suggest you can't eat too much raw without your gallbladder. So I'm just going to increase my veggies (via raw, lightly cooked, and juiced varieties) and see how my body handles it.
• Fruit - I have to water down apple and pear juice. It blows my mind. The juice is delicious to me but is far too sweet so I am forced to water it down. A very good problem to have! Apple and pear juices seem to come recommended for gallbladder issues so I have no problem continuing to include them (both homemade and not from concentrate, additive free store bought). 

So take all of that, add in that I will be watching what fats I consume (as in oil based) and trying to keep to a homemade agenda and things should go pretty amazingly. Already I have been feeling amazing with the meals Logician made me and the ones we worked together on. My first temptation since surgery was sugar. I craved sugary things. He had bought regular cookies for a study session and almost all of them came home. We ate them, but I felt bad about the additives and sugars in them. So when the craving came back I made homemade allergy free treats to help. 

The first were these Sugar Cookies. I tempted fate by making substitutions - Trader Joe's Gluten Free Flour Blend, Coconut Sugar, and almond milk - but they came out okay. Not great, but okay. I'm not sure if I made them too small or if I missed a step but they came out very flat and super grainy in the middle. Though once we dolloped on some coconut whipped cream they were just dandy.

The second turned out better - Vegan Blackberry Lemon Ginger Muffins, and by better I mean amazing. I did make a few substitutions here as well, again almond milk instead of rice; golden flaxseed meal instead of regular ground flaxseeds. They were still pretty incredible.

So everything was prepared and ready to go pretty easily. We were out of coconut sugar so I used regular white refined sugar (grumpy faces were made) but I am glad I did. If I had used a liquid sweetener (maple, honey, or agave) I think they would have been too moist. I used homemade young crystalized ginger that had been hanging out in the fridge for awhile, next time I might try fresh (in a smaller amount).

 I also chose to bake them in cupcake liners just to see what would happen. The result was they stuck just as much in the wrapper as they would have in the pan. You live and learn! I also used regular white confectioners sugar for the lemon glaze. However I look at it this way - we bought it and our pantry is full of stuff. We should use what we have instead of just tossing it because it doesn't 'fit the bill' as it were. These were not only amazing looking but they tasted great too. They were a little moist (I could have probably cooked them the extra few minutes) but I took them out as soon as the toothpick came out clean. With a little SF Earth Balance and the glaze they are one of my new favorite treats!

So far our other meals haven't been too exciting a lot of chicken, brown rice, and veggies. Though Logician did make a tasty curry soup, we had turkey tacos, and a few other fairly normal but more healthy version meals the last few weeks. Now to find more awesome things to cook!

Be well!

Little did I know...

I started off my last post discussing how I was having a food crisis. Little did I know, I truly was. I woke the next morning with terrible pain that I associated with bad dinner choices and a milk allergy. However that pain grew progressively worse within a short few hours and I ended up at our nearest Urgent Care clinic. I was sure I had food poisoning but Logician had none of the symptoms. Since we'd shared a pizza, it wouldn't fit that I would be sick and he wasn't.

So off I went to get an ultrasound and I learned that I had gallstones. This in an of itself is not a particularly frightening thing. According to most of the research I have done since something like 80% of people have these little buggers but only a smaller percentage (I think I read 20%) actually have what are called gallbladder 'attacks.' Lucky me....

I was told to I would have to have surgery and left the clinic awaiting a surgeon referral and staunchly saying I was going to try anything else (Acupuncture, Chinese Herbs, dietary changes, supplements, anything). I reread the report from the ultrasound technician and saw that a stone was overlying the opening to my gallbladder - I was concerned but certainly if it was a situation the doctor would have said... Or so I thought.

Now don't get me wrong here - I'm not bashing doctors of any form. They have reasons I will never know for what they tell me and don't tell me. I'm only saying that I likely should have asked more questions.

So Friday I developed a fever of 100.5. Now in my little brain I never before believed in going to the doctor unless you were dying (as I thought I was Wednesday) so a little fever was nothing to me. Thankfully Logician thinks differently and encouraged me to call the Urgent Care clinic for advice. The advice was to go to the ER. Hooray....

I was admitted to the hospital straight from the ER Friday evening and told I was going to have gallbladder surgery the next morning. The stone that was overlying the duct from my gallbladder was actually completely blocking the way and my gallbladder was working itself overtime to try to push passed the obstacle it faced (Sounds a lot like something I would do...). So it had to come out.

The surgery itself was short, sweet, and according to plan. I have four little holes (not really sure how else to describe them) with three around my gallbladder's former home and one in my belly button. I was released from the hospital the same night (partially I think due to the fact I desperately wanted to be home) and am now home. I can't work for two weeks and then I have to start back on light duty to see how that goes - the last thing I need to be doing is pushing my poor little abdomen around massaging people when it's been so traumatized! I can't lift over ten pounds and I am exhausted - all the time.

But this has given me so much time to consider how things were and a sort of fresh place to start from the change them. Having surgery on your 30th birthday is a hell of a way to break in a new decade if I say so myself. So now's the time to make changes, especially since my poor digestive system can't tolerate some of the abuses I used to throw at it! And I can promise that pizza Wednesday night will be the last chain restaurant pizza I ever eat! No more cravings there and if I do get some I'll find a way to make at home GF/DF/SF pizza that will be delicious!

Though this also poses a harder problem for me as I cannot quickly fix this. There is no magical quick diet that's going to help my body recover from what has been done. Instead now is the time I HAVE to make dietary changes.

The main changes I will be focusing on are:

- Going completely Gluten Free (GF): Logician can't have it and I have seen in my recent research that going GF can help with digestive issues moving forward from surgery. So this is a happy direction to go.

- Going completely Dairy Free (DF): I know, I already was supposed to be here. But I wasn't. I cheated (sometimes a little, sometimes a lot) and my body suffered for it. But I CAN'T have anything full fat dairy since surgery anyway. The only exception here would be if my body can tolerate some sort of low fat, possibly Greek style yogurt. I have not been able to find a non-dairy yogurt that I like to eat on its' own. So for baking definitely sticking with DF/Soy Free options but eating will be a trial and error experiment in a few months.

- Going completely Soy Free (SF): This one is going to be the biggest challenge. We are already avoiding it as much as possible but we love Asian food and one of the staples of many recipes is Tofu. Tofu will likely be the only exception I will make but with limits. I will only buy organic (to ensure it is not genetically modified) and I will not eat it frequently. However soy milk, soy protein shakes, soy creamers, etc - out!

I'm going to have to relearn my body now. I almost feel like a child learning what is good and what is horrible. It's an interesting place to be sitting at thirty, that is for sure!

I can't do any sort of decent cooking for the short term future - but rest assured I will be trying new products and as soon as I can be back in the kitchen I will bring you more GF/DF/SF goodness!

Be well!