Single Girl Snippet: Sprouts on a Bus

Excerpt from a conversation between me (M) and my mother (O):

O: You're not taking them with you?!
M: I have to.
O: No, seriously.
M: There's no one else to take care of them.
O: It's just a couple days.
M: They'll die. Look at them. They need some love. I can't abandon them now.

The 'they' we were talking about were the two little pots of seeds I had been given at my sprouting class. That morning, the seeds had just begun to sprout. My teacher had stressed the importance of TLC during this window. My mom had spent the week at my apartment, and I was heading back to her house for the weekend.

O: What are you going to do with them?
M: Carry them. I don't see what the big deal is. I'm just taking some sprouts on a bus.
O: I'll get you a twin stroller.
M: Are you laughing at me? It's not funny. I don't need a twin stroller; they're not babies. However, I am going to bring my misting bottle. They're too delicate to pour water on them at this stage.Why are you still laughing? It's not that funny. Seriously, Mom, it's just sprouts.

Baby sprouts ready to board the bus.

Nutrition Challenge #2: Hydration

According to the Mayo Clinic, the recommended daily intake of water is 2.2L for women and 3L for men. These values do not include adjustments for hot weather or exercise, but the article did indicate that up to ~20% of the daily water intake can be from food (ie. your fruits and veggies).

More often than not, I am running a net water deficit. I don't really drink more water than usual when it is hot out. And, the days I actually drink the requisite 2.2L are the days I do an hour or more of cardio.

So, I tried to trick myself into meeting the 1.76L target (I gave myself the 20% from food credit):

1. Starting the day with 2 cups of water
I tried Danielle's suggestion of starting the day with 2 cups (~500 mL) water. This is a great tip. I found I didn't get as thirsty during the day, and generally just felt better. After a couple weeks, my bad hydration habits got the best of me and I fell off the bandwagon.

2. Keeping a waterbottle filled
My hope was that by making the water more accessible, I would drink more. Then I noticed my waterbottle had remained untouched for two days.

3. Herbal tea
The idea of herbal tea seemed like a really clever way to mask the water. I made big batches, drank some hot and refrigerated the rest to use as iced tea (unsweetened). This seemed to work well. Then, I discovered that the tea I was using included a plant that is a diuretic -- so essentially I was just digging the trench of my dehydration deeper.

4. Desperate times, desperate measures
I'm a little embarrased that this is what it took to finally get me to drink more water consistently:

	Cups of water								Workout/Heat Extra
	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	1	2	3
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

 Yup, taped to my kitchen cupboard. I even put smiling shooting star clipart in "8" column in the original version -- sadly the shooting stars could not be pasted into this post (the program translated the images as being the word "bitmap"). They really do make the table more jazzy.

Anyhow, I soon realized I was grossly overestimating how much water I drink. Being a bit of a Type-A personality, the empty checkboxes annoyed me enough that I broke down and just drank the water.
That's how I noticed my fully hydrated brain is better focused. And, I have more energy when I am not volume depleted. Hopefully, this checklist motivation lasts. Maybe I'll have to step it up with a bribe eventually: If I drink 8 cups of water daily for two months, then I get a day at the spa...

WISH Summit

There is currently a Women's International Summit for Health (WISH) taking place online. I just came across it yesterday, and have spent the evening enjoying the talks. Signing up is free, and you can download audio files to put on your iPod to listen to at a later time.
The link is : http://www.wishsummit.com/speakers The topics are quite diverse and include health, fitness, wellness, inspiration for women.

I hope you enjoy the talks as much as I do!

Mystery Ingredient #2: Kale

It feels like everyone is talking about kale lately. Major newspapers like The Vancouver Sun and The Detroit News have both featured kale in recent months. I've seen mountains of kale in mainstream grocery stores. Kale chips seem to be everywhere I look. Hopefully, this is a reflection of a widespread shift toward healthier nutrition. And as far as healthy choices go, kale is hard to beat.

Kale belongs to the brassica family -- meaning it is related to broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, and collard greens. The brassicas are nutritional powerhouses, loaded with vitamins and antioxidants. Some of the phytochemicals present in kale are thought to promote immune system wellness and play a role in the prevention of certain cancers including ovarian, bladder, and breast.
More nutritional information: Whole Foods has created an extensive, referenced write-up on the benefits of kale.
Diet as it relates to cancer: I recommend the work of Rebecca Katz. Chef Katz is one of my culinary heroes. She trained at The Natural Gourmet Institute and then went on to complete her master's degree in nutrition. Her approach is one of science-based tastiness.

Alright, back to the kale. Kale is not an ingredient that I am experienced in preparing. I mentioned this to a friend who was staying with me at the time. Oh, you HAVE to try kale chips! was her immediate reply. She even bought kale for me at a farmer's market.



Kale Chips
The basic principle of kale chips is pretty simple:
1. Wash kale and remove stems.
2. Mist with oil and sprinkle with salt.
3. Bake until crispy but not burnt.

I've included before and after pictures. The plant comprises mostly of water, so it shrinks down to a fraction of its original size during baking.
  

As you can also see from the pictures, I skipped the 'remove stems' part. Big mistake. The stems are edible, but they get really chewy. It's worth the extra few minutes to take out the stems.

The kale chips tasted something like a cross between roasted pumpkin seeds and seaweed.

All in all, I would try these again. I also saw lots of recipes for more adventurous kale chips -- interesting flavours, using a dehydrator. I may try out some of the variations for comparison.

Orthorexia & My Nutrition Philosophy

Excerpt from a conversation between a raw food preparation instructor (R) and one of my classmates (C) at the end of the 7-hour class.I'm behind my classmate in line at the cash waiting to pay for my goji berries.

C: Wow, that lunch was so filling!

I, on the other hand, had just been thinking how this little omnivore burned through her five bites of zucchini with a side of salad long, long ago. 

This is the lunch in question.

R: I know! I ate only a third of what you guys ate, and I am stuffed!

My classmate briefly looks stunned then just smiles awkwardly and thanks the instructor for an enjoyable day.
The instructor looks pleased with herself.
I am debating whether eating chicken for dinner after spending the day at a raw food class is somehow sacrilegious. My belly is grumbling.


The whole conversation stuck with me because it is so typical of the way women interact when food is involved. What made this conversation especially ridiculous is that despite very different approaches to diet, my classmate (vegetarian), my instructor (raw vegan), and I (loosely paleo) all have a BMI very squarely in the healthy range. The instructor had already shared with us earlier in the day how stuffed she is after eating two almonds and that she just can't swallow any non-vegan foods. I don't really understand why nutrition has to be some sort of competition - whether qualitative or quantitative.

This brings us to the concept of orthorexia. When I first heard about orthorexia, I was at a nutrition conference. The term was defined as an unhealthy obsession with what you eat - a great fear of eating the wrong thing. With all the conflicting information about nutrition out there, I'm sure I met criteria for orthorexia on a number of occasions over the last few years. In recent months, I have finally settled on a set of guidelines that seem to be working well for me:

1. Eat an abundance of things that look the way Mother Nature made them. Choose organic and/or local when possible.
2. Fill at least three quarters of my plate with vegetables. Eat veggies and greens raw when possible.
3. Variety is a good thing. So is moderation. If I don't buy it, I'm not going to eat it.
4. Try to minimize and/or eliminate from my diet things that do not occur in nature. These things are not food (ie. food dyes, preservatives, artificial colourings, artificial sweeteners).
5. No gluten. Minimal dairy and grain consumption. Note: #5 has nothing to do with my opinion on nutritional ideology in general, but more with how strongly my body reacts to these things. I actually love bread and yoghourt. A lot.

That's about it. I don't count calories or fat grams. I eat when I am hungry, and stop when I am full. It's a pretty simple system.

Raw Food Culinary Adventure

While researching things to do in my new city, I came across an advetisement for a raw food preparation course. This seemed like a fun thing to do, so I signed up. Tons of fun.

I really appreciated that the introduction at the beginning of the day included a disclaimer that the raw food diet is not for everyone. My experience has been that many adherents to more extreme diets (e.g. paleo, veganism, etc) treat it like a religion -- that anyone who doesn't subscribe to their dietary worldview is somehow an unlenlightened terrible person. This, however, was a raw food course that was carnivore-friendly (or carnivore-tolerant, at least outwardly).

The course covered all the weird and wonderful things you hear about when raw food comes up: nut milks, green smoothies, dehydrating, spiral vegetable preparation, juicing.

Lunch looked like this:

The 'noodles' are cut up zucchini with blended raw marinara sauce. Just above that, the blob of white stuff is a cashew-based 'rawmesan.' The yellow blob is a sunflower seed curry pâté. The alfalfa sprouts where the main component of a light veggie salad. There is also some sauerkraut hiding somewhere on the plate. Everything was really tasty. The pâté was probably my favourite.

The course made me pine for all the raw food fancy toys: the Excalibur dehydrator, the VitaMix blender, the Omega juicer, and the food processor. I don't think I will be able to fit any of these into my budget anytime soon, but I really loved how these tools multiplied the number of ways fruits, veggies, and nuts can be prepared. The VitaMix especially is quite the machine. I never quite understood how a blender could have such a cult-like following. After seeing two tomatoes, three celery stalks, and an onion (all whole) tossed in and pureed silky smooth within seconds, I get it. It's beautiful.
  What I most loved about this course is that it made raw preparation seem like something even an omnivore like me could pull off at home. I was always so intimidated by raw food prep, even though I am very comfortable in the kitchen. It just seemed so tedious and time-consuming. However, I was so pumped after my workshop that I purchased a raw food un-cookbook called Crudessence that had been recommended to me. It's gorgeous (I'm all about the pictures when it comes to cookbooks), and I love the idea of supporting Canadian authors. I can't wait to uncook at home!

Nutrition Challenge #1: 30 Days of Green Smoothies

I have been getting in touch with my inner hippie lately by reading books like Victoria Boutenko's Green Smoothie Revolution and Natasha Kyssa's The Simply Raw Living Foods Detox Manual.

I find the idea of a raw food diet intriguing, but it doesn't really seem conducive to living in an environment where there is snow on the ground up to six months of the year. That said, my diet could certainly stand to have the fruit and veggie components increased. For this reason, I decided to give the "30 Day Green Smoothie Challenge" a try. It promised all kinds of wonderful things like more energy, weight loss, and immune system support.

The challenge is essentially that: one green smoothie every day for 30 consecutive days. A green smoothie is essentially any combination of greens (e.g. spinach, kale, mesclum mix) and fruit blended together. A purist would insist on organic ingredients only. The produce can be blended together with a suitable liquid such as water, coconut water, or a nut milk.

My experiment started 30 days ago with a parsley pear combo. It took me three hours to get through it. All I could think was this tastes like earthy garden. Not a winner. I would have given up on the whole project except that the next morning I woke up craving green smoothie. Weird, I know. So, I persisted. The smoothies eventually started tasting better. Stranger, as I increased my greens intake in the mornings, I craved even more greens during the day. Less healthy food choices became unappealing.

For the first few weeks, I thought maybe I had a bit more energy but wasn't sure if it was just a placebo effect. However, it just happened that I had a 10K race both at the beginning of the smoothie challenge and at the end. I ran the first race rested and feeling good -- chip time: 58:55. The second race, I was tired and would have been happy to just break an hour -- chip time 55:51. That's a full 3 minutes faster, and a new personal best (previous PB 57:30, which was the week before running a half marathon a couple years ago). The race itself felt easier than usual, and I recovered much faster after the race than I normally do. Maybe it's all a coincidence, but I think I'm going to continue with my green smoothie morning routine - at least for the rest of the summer/fall running season.

Anyone have any experience with green smoothies? Was it a good thing, a bad thing, or neither?

Single Girl Snippet: Running

Previously, I mentioned that visiting a new city while on foot can give you an experience that you might miss out on while in a car. Friends, I offer you my 8K run today as an example:

1. Carlashes

Not the actual carlashes I saw, but these are the same lashes on a different car. If you go to www.carlashes.com you can order your very own pair including diamond crystal eyeliner (!!!) for $59.95.

I had never seen carlashes before. Perhaps you have. I found them immensely amusing and really regretted not having my camera with me to capture the moment.

2. Very friendly smiles
If ever you are in need of a genuine very friendly smile, go running in the rain. As you cross paths with people, make eye contact and greet them. The smiles you exchange will convey a heartfelt "Oh, you are stupid dedicated enough to be out here in this weather, too. Clearly, we have something pretty cool in common.You must be wonderful."

3. Proof positive it's a small world after all.
I live in a big city. And yet, I very nearly collided with the mattress salesman at an intersection. He looked away and didn't acknowledge me. It would appear our therapeutic alliance has come to an end.

4. To someone out there, you're something special.
As I approached a scruffy, older panhandler in an area with dense pedestrian traffic, he lept up from his sitting position and morphed into a dancing machine. Waving his cup above his head, he loudly sang "There goes a fit woman! There gooooooooooes a fit wooooman!"

Mystery Ingredient #1: Garlic Scapes

While exploring the topic of nutrition, it seemed appropriate to expand my horizons a little and try some new things. This post is the first of a series I will title Mystery Ingredients where I choose an ingredient I have never eaten before and then figure out what to do with it.

While at a local farmer's market, I spotted baskets with long curly green things in them that were labeled garlic scapes. They were, in my opinion, the weirdest looking things I had seen all day. I had to buy them.

Excerpt from conversation between me (M) and the farmer (F):

M: So, uh, what exactly do people do with these?
F: What? Oh, is this your first time?
(Clearly, these garlic scapes were serious stuff.)
M: Yup.
F: Ok, well you need to cut the end off - the flower - because it's bitter. Like this (he demonstrated). Then, chop it up. You can either use them in a salad just like that, or toss some into an omelette. Delicious! Just toss the paper bag in the fridge, and it'll keep for a couple weeks. Enjoy!

I took his advice.

However, I felt like just making an omelette and a plain salad was getting of the hook easy for a Mystery Ingredient post, so I also prepared a garlic soup. Original recipe can be found here.
I made the following modifications (based on what was in my kitchen and my dairy intolerance):
-regular organic garlic instead of the green garlic in the recipe (I don't even know what green garlic is)
-coconut oil instead of butter
-dry instead of fresh thyme
-water with celery seed, marjoram, oregano, sage, and a bay leaf instead of broth
-coconut milk instead of dairy milk

The farmer was right - delicious!

Guest Post from Simple and Tasty Nutrition

A big thank you to Danielle from Simple and Tasty Nutrition for her guest post today!



Although I have been a Registered Dietitian for over 10 years I feel as though my diet has room for improvement. There are many different and conflicting so-called healthy diets. One constant though is to eat your vegetables and sometimes to a lesser extent fruit. I have tried various methods over the years to increase my vegetable and fruit intake; planning meals around vegetables, making them accessible on the counter etc. However my latest experiment to eat the colors of the rainbow everyday appears to be my most successful, boosting my intake to the recommended 8 servings per day. (A serving is generally 1/2 cup and with raw greens 1 cup)



So what is the benefit of eating different colored vegetables and fruits? There is a multitude of naturally occurring organic compounds in plant foods known as phytochemicals. A subset of these phytochemicals are antioxidants that play an important role in protecting our body from oxidative stress, which can contribute to heart disease, cancer, degenerative eye disease and dementia. The individual chemical structures of antioxidants are what give these plant-based foods their colors. For instance lycopene, an antioxidant in tomatoes and watermelon reflects the color red and beta-carotene provides carrots with their orange color. Rather than remembering their complicated names and combinations, eat a variety of colors and you're covered.



Below is an incomplete list of the colors and foods associated with them.



Red: beets, red onions, red potatoes, tomatoes, radicchio, radishes, red bell peppers, pink or red grapefruit, blood oranges, rhubarb, strawberries, cherries, red plums, raspberries, watermelon, red apples, cranberries, red grapes, red pears, pomegranates, red chili pepper



Orange: carrots, sweet potatoes, orange bell peppers, orange squash (butternut, acorn), mango, navel and mandarin oranges, papayas, apricots, canteloupe (orange melons), nectarines, peaches, pumpkins



Yellow: yellow bell peppers, corn, yellow squash (spaghetti), yellow tomatoes, golden beets, rutabagas, grapefruit, lemons, pineapples, yellow apples, yellow pears



Green: artichokes, asparagus, green bell peppers, endive, green beans, lettuce, peas, spinach, watercress, arugula, cucumbers, okra, zucchini, bok choy, broccoli, broccoli rabe, brussel sprouts, green cabbage, endive, kale, leeks, swiss chard, celery, kiwi, limes, green pears, avocados, green grapes, honeydew melon, green chilies, parsley, cilantro, other green herbs



Blue: blueberries, blue plums, blue grapes



Purple: eggplant, purple-tipped Belgian endive, purple cabbage, purple carrots, prunes, black currants, figs, plums, figs, grapes, raisins, blackberries, dates



White/Tan: cauliflower, onions, mushrooms, jicama, parsnips, potatoes, shallots, turnips, white corn, kohlrabi, garlic, ginger, bananas



How about you? Have you ever tried eating 4-5 different colored vegetables or fruit in a day? Do you have a strategy that helps you eat your 8-10 servings of vegetables and fruit a day?