Health and Wellness

The past few weeks I’ve been buried under design work.  Which is a good thing; it helps pay the bills, you know?  But now I’ve caught up on most of my projects, and I feel like I’m finally surfacing to take a breath.  Of course, that happened right about the same time I came down with this nightmare of a head cold, so I’m not being as productive as I should be, but I’ve been using the last few days to catch up on Wardeh’s eCourse on cooking traditional foods.

I took the course mainly because I wanted instruction on soaking grains and nuts and seeds, and that’s what the first few weeks are about.  Given my digestive issues along with my fondness for carbs, it seems like it might be wise to learn to prepare them in the most easily digestible way, which seems to be soaking and/or sprouting the grains before cooking.

Here’s the thing.  Soaking your grains requires forethought, preparation, planning. You see my quandary?  I am so NOT a planner.  I am a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pantser.  When I decide to make bread, I want to make it right away.  I do not want to soak the flour and wait 7 hours to put it together.  Besides being spontaneous, I’m a procrastinator.  I often wait until we’re down to one slice of bread and the granola container is crumbs to make more.

So I’m going to have to learn to think ahead.  Tonight, for instance, I’m already thinking about breakfast in the morning, which is the last thing on my mind when I’m still digesting my spaghetti and meatballs.  But before I go to bed I plan to set some grains to soaking so we can have homemade soaked pancakes in the morning.

The really nice thing about soaking your grains — other than the fact that it’s kinder to your digestive system — is that it makes things made with whole wheat flour taste a lot lighter and a lot more like things made with white flour, which makes the kids a whole lot friendlier to whole grains.  I highly recommend it for that reason alone.

You may be wondering why soaked grains are easier to digest. (What, didn’t I tell you that mind-reading was one of my many talents?)  This morning, I just so happened to come across this post by Shannon at Nourishing Days called What is Phytic Acid? where she researches the topic.  I’ll just let you read that instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.

Here are some soaked grain recipes for your convenience:

Soaked Waffles/Pancakes

Baked Soaked Oatmeal

Soaked Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread

Soaked Granola

Granola with Soaked Oats

Oh and hey!  Please check out my two new pages — Whole Foods (it is the story of my whole foods conversion) and Resources (basically this is where to start if you are new to the whole foods thing.)  Both can be accessed at any time via the Nav Bar at the top of my blog.

And one more thing.  I’ve added the Print Friendly plugin to my blog, so at the bottom of every post is a little Print Friendly button. If you ever want to print one of my more informative posts or recipes, it’s easy to do that.  Once you click the button and it brings up a printer friendly version of the post, you can easily delete any superfluous information before you print, in case you don’t want to save every charming word I utter for posterity.

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I’ve spent my entire adult life battling my addiction to food, and finally, at 37-and-a-half years of age, I have a taste of freedom.  I don’t want to say I’m there yet, because I still backslide from time to time, but as soon as I overdo it, I feel so gross that I am instantly reminded of why I no longer live that way.

My slavery to food started, I believe, in college when I suddenly found myself putting on the pounds due to the impressive amounts of pizza and Coke I consumed.  I tried to lose weight by cutting back, but I didn’t have much success so I sought out a popular diet plan that provided me with prepackaged food for almost every meal.  It worked at first, but eventually I tired of the bland, processed foods and found myself cheating, which usually ended up in a junk food binge.  One afternoon, for example, I ate an entire box of Girl Scout Cookies in about two hours.  I cycled between dieting and binging and eventually lost 20 pounds, but it was a constant battle to keep it off.  For years my mood was entirely dictated by the number on the scale every morning and night.

After I had my first child, I turned to counting points to lose the last 10 pounds and to try to keep my weight where I liked it.  Counting points appealed to my obsessive nature and my need for a formula, but I still found myself practicing the binge-and-starve approach to managing my weight that had served me well for so long.  Or so I thought.

Two more children later, an aging metabolism, and years of destructive eating habits finally began to take a toll on my weight management abilities as well as my health.  Riddled with stomach ailments and extra pounds that I could not seem to budge, I discovered the real food movement last summer.  And Dinneen.  And that’s when everything changed.

I used to say that my problem is that I just love food, but Dinneen taught me that it’s much more than that. Plenty of people love food and are not slave to its wiles.  With Dinneen’s help, I learned that it’s not my love of food that has kept me on a dieting roller coaster for the past 20 years, but it’s my emotional attachment to food and the bad habits I’ve developed since becoming a busy mom.

Turns out, the low-fat diets that I relied on to keep my weight in check were sabotaging my ability to make lifestyle changes that were effective and sustainable because they did not satisfy my cravings and ultimately left me feeling deprived and frustrated.  Counting points caused me to think about food all. the. time.  And while those neat packages of pre-packaged meals freed me from the food obsession, they left me feeling dissatisfied and deprived because they lacked the taste and the nutrients that we naturally desire.  I always ended up “cheating” — a word that I now believe never should be applied to our diets.

Anyone can lose weight by counting points or cutting fat and calories, but only the most self disciplined can sustain it for the long haul because low-fat diets do not satisfy, nor do they properly nourish the body. I like a formula as much as the next guy, but it’s such a restrictive way to live, and besides that, it isn’t as fool-proof as we’ve been led to believe.  This article by Tom Naughton is worth a read.

I always watched people eat intuitively — stopping when they were full, only eating if they were hungry, choosing an apple over a bag of Doritos because they honestly felt like it — and I thought that I could never have that.  I thought I would always be slave to diet plans and my “love for food.”  We all hear that healthy eating “can’t be a diet; it has to be a lifestyle,” but I thought I was incapable of making that lifestyle a reality.  I figured that I would live the rest of my life on the diet roller coaster, and that I was doomed to a love-hate relationship with food.

But today I am here to tell you that I AM FREE.  I have learned how to eat intuitively, how to choose my foods wisely, stop when I’m satisfied, and eat only when I am hungry.  It’s not to say that I never over eat, but I never binge anymore.  I eat food that I like, and I am satisfied because it is wholesome and full of good fats and nutrients that my body craves.  I’ve learned to focus more on how I will feel when I’m done than how it will taste going down, and I’ve learned to eat a better balance of foods, which helps me maintain my weight easier.  I’ve also learned how to interpret my cravings correctly.  For example, when I crave something sweet, eating a cookie just leaves me feeling icky and wanting more, but eating an apple satisfies my sweet tooth and leaves me feeling satisfied and full without that nasty bloated feeling you get when you eat too much carbs and sugar.

I would still love to lose five pounds and keep it off, but as I hone in on 40, I am willing to accept the number I see on the scale and be satisfied with the fact that I am healthy and fit (or getting there) and enjoy my new-found healthy relationship with food.

If I can do it, you can do it too. TRUST ME.  Don’t let the skinny fool ya.  It wasn’t a healthy thin.

You may be thinking, Yeah, that all sounds great, but she had help.

Yes, I did.  And that is the reason I am writing this post today.  I couldn’t have done this alone.  Even though it sounds simple, I needed someone to look at what I eat and listen to me talk about how I eat and how I think about food and give me advice and counsel to get to where I am today.  I am so thankful I found Dinneen.  Which brings me to the second reason I am telling you all this.

Next Tuesday, March 9th, Dinneen is holding a FREE call titled “5 Simple Secrets to Eating Intuitively:  How to Create a Healthy Relationship with Food, Mind and Body and Make it Work for You.”

You can register right now by going here.

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