05.02.07
Slinks
WebMD has a list of the 15 Best Diet Tips Ever. I thought they were right on the money.
Cate found this resource through the Ideal Bite Newsletter which reports on the safety of popular health and beauty items. I haven’t had a chance to peruse it yet, and frankly, I’m a little scared of what I might find! Yikes!
The Good Human talks about 10 tips to keep a healthy home. Also check out David’s series about spring cleaning the eco way.
And Treehugger has a good list of resources for growing your own food.
Speaking of which, our little garden is plugging along. We got a new digital camera this weekend, so I will post some photos soon!
04.23.07
Choices
There’s an interesting interview with money guru Suzie Orman on the Weight Watchers website (of all places) about the connection between poor money choices and poor food choices.
From the article:
But you’ve got to decide: Are you going to have potato chips or the orange, apple or carrot? Are you going to put the money in the savings account or are you going to spend it? They’re identical. So when you don’t have money in your life, you’re the reason why. When you have weight on your body—in most cases, not always if there’s medical reasons—you are not a victim of circumstances, you have chosen to do that to yourself. They are absolutely identical in nature. Identical.
It took me a long time to figure that out, and a lot of days, I’m still figuring it out. I never consciously realized that I was blaming my weight –– or anything else –– on anyone but me, but I was. I used to think up all the reasons I was fat, and a lot had to do with the way my family ate when I was a kid. But that was still my choice. I could have chosen to eat differently, even as a kid. It wasn’t that we didn’t have healthy options at my house, or that my parents wouldn’t have bought me just about anything I asked for; it was that I liked eating the high-fat, high-calorie foods and I chose to eat them.
I really think the parallels between being in debt and being overweight –– two major problems in American society –– are fascinating and teribly apt. We live in a society where taking responsibility (not blame) for our own actions is frequently the last thing on someone’s mind, and if we want to change the size of our waist lines and our wallets (hopefully in opposite directions), we have to learn to take personal responsibility for the problems we have created.
04.18.07
“The Fats”
Had my picture made today at work. And not just a simple passport-photo-type picture, either. No no. They told us to “get our sexy on” for the cute cube signs that everybody has.
Naturally, this led to a case of the fats.
Yup! Suddenly, nothing I own fit correctly or looked good on my body. Suddenly I had lumps where no lumps had previously been evident. Suddenly — I was staring in the mirror at the almost-200-pound girl I was eight years ago.
It’s so easy for me to slip back into that mindset. When I have a case of the fats, I can look into the mirror and see a twisted, distorted, exaggerated view of myself that would put a funhouse mirror to shame.
When I sit down and separate out the distortions from the true underlying feelings, I realize that, although I have made enormous progress toward never ever seeing that fat girl in the mirror for real again, I am still not entirely comfortable with the way I’m taking care of my body. I’ve regained some of the weight it took me so long to take off, and that’s not being fair to myself.
So, as of today, I have recommitted myself toward a mindfulness toward my body, my eating habits, and my physical activity that I have been sorely lacking of late. I have come to terms (mostly) with the fact that I will never be one of those girls who can eat whatever, whenever, and still be slim. To reach a balance with myself, I will have to pay attention every step of the way.
And really, is that such a bad thing?
03.12.07
little bits of green
Hi all – I’m Lacy’s friend, Cate, the minx who sent her a copy of The Omnivore’s Dilemma in order to have some company, raging at the world. A couple of weeks ago, Lacy and I had the following conversation:
Lacy: You should guest blog!
Cate: . . . about what?
Lacy: I dunno! . . . stuff!
Cate: . . . uh . . . .
And here I am!
Since I, like Lacy, am trying to go green(er) and to think more constructively about what I eat, I thought I’d keep a photo log of little things I’ve been doing to be more green:
Green Thing #1: Supplies! I bought green supplies at the store this morning – washable dishcloths so that I can stop using paper towels, and clothes pegs so that I can hang my laundry outside. Today was the first warm day we’ve had in forever in my corner of the midwest, so I was crazy excited to hang laundry. I know, I know, the things that amuse . . .
Green Thing #2: Biodegradable laundry detergent. Not only are there fewer bad chemicals in Method products, the detergent is concentrated, so this one bottle has lasted me three months. It’s still going strong. (Please ignore the fact that my washer is in the basement and apparently quite mucky when exposed to the light of my camera’s flash. *scrubs with all new dishcloth*)
Green Thing #3: Air-dried laundry! As a kid I loved the smell of sheets dried in the open air, but then I grew up and discovered dryers and thought they were the greatest invention known to humankind. Now I’ve come full circle, with my washing line, my cooperative midwestern spring, and my brand new clothes pegs.
Green Thing #4: Organic, unprocessed food, like this tasty pear and handful of walnuts . . .
. . . eaten with plain, unsweetened yogurt. By eating organic I avoid supporting the pollution of the environment with fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, and by eating unprocessed food, I avoid supporting industry that uses massive amounts of fossil fuel to make my snack food of choice.
For the same reasons, I’ve taken to making a lot more of my own food. These are the raw ingredients for the muffin of the day – apple raisin. I’m slowly replacing my old groceries with organic versions, and I’m nearly all the way there – only the butter and raisins aren’t organic in this set up. Wanna see me make muffins?
Here are all my ingredients, ready to be mixed up into:
. . . this. Yeah, it looks a little suspect, huh? But! . . .
. . . in the muffin cups it looks far tastier.
And they’re tastier still when they come out of the oven. These whole twelve muffins only use 1 cup of sugar and 1 stick of butter. Compare that to how much fat and sugar you’ll find in the muffins at a chain coffeeshop – these are WAY better.
And the last Green Thing of the Day: refilling water bottles. I used to buy water bottles by the crate (quite literally) but then realized I was being horrible wasteful, even when I recycled. So now, I refill one of my old bottles with water that’s gone through my Brita filter. Less wasteful, and a lot cheaper than buying bottles at the store.
02.10.07
Why NOT to Eat a Twinkie: Reason No. 32
From Twinkie, Deconstructed by Steve Ettlinger (via body+soul magazine):
Ethylene oxide [part of Polysorbate 60, a Twinkie ingredient] is an excellent but entirely unlikely food chemical, seeing as it is highly explosive (it was used in tunnel-busting shells during the Vietnam War), a known human carcinogen, and a respiratory, skin, and eye irritant.
~*~
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I’m apalled and astounded at how little I know about the food that’s been going into my body for the last 25 years. Do you know what goes into a chicken McNugget? A plethora of ingredients, most of which are NOT chicken.
And do you know that they spray butane (or a form of butane, anyway) on the nuggets and/or box for freshness? As little as a gram of this stuff can kill you, but they spray it on the faux chicken bits so they don’t go off.
I think E. coli is the least of our worries when eating at fast food restaurants.
02.07.07
The Grocery Game
So, over the weekend, the Husband and I made a trip to Wild Oats for our weekly groceries. Our goal was two-fold. First, as I’ve mentioned, we are operating on limited funds, so we’ve switched over to the envelope method of budgeting for things like groceries; we pulled out $300 at the beginning of the month for groceries, and we’ll only be using that cash to pay for our groceries.
Second, we wanted to shop at Wild Oats because, after both reading Pollan’s article, we were ready to take the plunge into buying more healthful, organic foods.
It was an interesting experience to say the least. My husband had a piece of paper and a pen and kept a running tally of everything we put in the cart. The hardest part was figuring out fractions of a pound in the produce section — next time we’re bringing a calculator! (Oh, rusty math skills! How you haunt me!) We made it through the store and realized we’d forgotten the turkey for a stew we were planning to make — but we were already at our weekly budget. It was a really interesting exercise, going through the cart and putting back some of the things we’d picked up that weren’t on the list, like ranch dressing, ready-made soup, sour cream.
It was also really challenging to only pick out foods that had only five ingredients or fewer. I found an organic raspberry jam with only five ingredients, and though the ranch dressing (that we eventually put back) had more than five ingredients, they were mostly spices. But that rule definitely ruled out a lot of things for us.
Overall, we spent just over $60 for a week’s worth of food for two people, and I would estimate that 90% of it was organic whole foods: fruits, vegetables, meat, and milk.
This is actually a food revolution for me in and of itself. As soon as I start thinking about being frugal and keeping to a budget, my mind immediately turns to coupons and cheaper foodstuffs, but the whole idea of our new ethical eating is to eat better foods, and in this society, better means more expensive. It seems counterintuitive that we should be trying this now, at face value.
On the other hand, how long can we afford to eat the way we have been eating? Maybe the costs of that won’t catch up to us for ten or even twenty years, but they will catch up.
We managed just fine on our self-imposed budget, and we got much better quality for our money. Better food, better health, better life. On a budget!
01.29.07
Unhappy Meals
I think this article from The New York Times may change my life. It’s all about the pseudo-science of nutritionism and the many and varied reasons why the Western diet is making us all fat and unhealthy.
The article is long, but well worth it. I’m sure I will have more to say about it soon, but I may need to re-read and (pardon the pun) digest.
