One Small Change at a Time

Went to Nashville, and it turns out that for us this place is far off the sugar-free reservation. We ate what we wanted, and paid attention to the reasonable choices that were available to us. We had beans and rice at a Mexican restaurant, we had desert after our anniversary dinner. I ate potatoes of every kind, but mostly the french fried kind. We ate like we used to with two big exceptions. We never had a soda of any kind, and we ate no breads.

It is important when you are just changing your eating habits that you are not hard on yourself when you decide to have a sweet treat. It is no failure to decide that after your anniversary dinner you can have a sweet dish with candles, chocolate mousse, crunched up heath bars and a brownie. Then, when it’s too sweet to finish, you are free to think that some sweet deserts are only for the sweet-addicted. Our palate has now shifted to more asian semi-sweet deserts, or something lightly sweetened like a tiramisu.

Personally, I do not feel as though I have suffered a setback of any kind. Far from home and not able to cook for yourself is a serious limit on changing habits. We didn’t want to spend any time looking for special menu restaurants, we wanted to see the sights. It was easy to have water with every meal, and that was how I stayed on my plan. My one small thing is really no sweetened sodas, and I was true to that.

It was a little bit harder to walk past all of the honky-tonks and pass up all the great parties that were going on than it was to not drink a coke with every meal. Nashville is a great place to visit, and the choices that you make are all in the moment. As you walk on the street it would be an easy thing to decide to do something you wouldn’t normally do. Making that decision is not any kind of defeat, but it is something that you will feel. Having that desert will make you a little bit uncomfortable, physically. You might sweat a little bit. You might feel a little bit of inflammation. The nice thing is that as a non-sugar addict, you can take refuge in the knowledge that what you are feeling is fleeting. In just a day your chemistry will be back in balance, your gastric system is not reset to expect the flood of sugar at every meal.

If your life were lived on the road, say you drive for a living, it may be very difficult to live sugar and starch free. In that case you might have to find ways to eat that are a little bit more work. For a vacationer, since the change is short-lived, it is simpler to just stick to the reservation for the easy things like drinks, and to go ahead and eat the foods that are readily available. I made no deals with myself to allow the excesses. I just rested easy in the knowledge that what I was doing WAS part of the plan. Eating well every day gives me the cushion to eat what I have to when I have to. NO HARM NO FOUL.

I am glad to be back, I missed writing, too.

Professional people that compile the science of our lives are in the end just people like we are. As people they tend to maintain their biases and prejudices. They like their work and they grow attached to the things they have created. Nobody likes to be wrong.

When writing about scientific progress, one of the greatest physicists, Max Planck wrote in 1950, “An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning.” If you consider the history that you know, this sentence rings with truth. The FACT that you know the Earth to be round and that it orbits the sun is due in large part to two things. A brave scientist spread the idea, and the powerful detractors of that idea eventually died off. The new people in the world, having no existing bias against the truth were free to embrace that and move on.

We live in such a time with regards to dietary science. In the late 1950’s there grew up a body of work suggesting that diets that contained fats and cholesterols would lead to a body loaded with fat and cholesterol. Heart attack and stroke were blamed on the ‘fact’ that if you ate fat you got fat. In your veins the fat would plate out, on your hips the fat would build up. I was born in this time period, when the scientific world was just getting warmed up to this notion. To me it always seemed too simple.

Years later I was watching the movie “Lorenzo’s Oil“, a true story, and the protagonist, Augusto Odone, was a diplomat in the US when his son was struck ill by a disease that was causing him to become paralyzed. Odone researched the illness himself when western medicine would not. His doctors had him cut all oils out of Lorenzo’s diet, to keep his body from manufacturing too much of a certain type of cholesterol. Odone found out that actually Lorenzo needed to eat more oil in his diet, his body was CREATING oils that it needed, and denying oil actually made this process worse. I write all of this because it pointed out to me that science is the accumulation of knowledge, and answers are suggested by facts and study. The idea of cutting fats from the diet to control body fat sounds simple. That conclusion seems natural. Its just wrong.

In my world there was increasing activity at the grocery store to capitalize on the low fat science. Low fat milk took a product that has been safely consumed for as many years as the cow has been domesticated and removed some fat, replacing it with sugar. Just about every product where fat is removed, the fat is replaced with sugar. For decades now we Americans are consumed with the idea that eating less fat would reduce our body fat, not realizing that we are eating more sugar in the process. It comes as no surprise to me that by now two out of three of us is overweight, and that the epidemic has spread to our children in grade school. Knowing that a serving of low fat chocolate milk contains the same amount of sugar as three Snickers bars should be an eye opener. Here is a case study by two British twins, one living in the US and one the UK. Any healthy food, like yogurt, can be turned into poison if you put enough sugar in it, like GoGurt.

Yet, despite the facts and dangers caused by our previous science, there are scientists willing to argue that the ‘new’ ideas about fats and carbohydrates are coming from incomplete data or flawed science. This will continue until these scientists are all dead, if history is any guide. They will continue to support the ideas that they are credited with. They will continue to skew arguments and data toward low fat and low cholesterol. History will wait them out. In time it won’t matter if their beliefs are theirs or due to where their funding comes from.

We need not wait for the science to come in. Right now we can stop eating anything in a box. We can stop eating anything that has a health claim on it’s label. We can prove to ourselves by losing weight while eating lard and butter that the idea that eating fat makes fat is to easy to be true. Your diet is yours. Your habits are yours.

What is life without a sweet treat at the end of a dinner gathering? I, for one would not relish the idea of living life confined to savory dishes. It would be unnatural, too, since we live in a world where we are encouraged by the plant to eat the sweets she provides, if only to carry the seeds within to new locations thus spreading the species.

The good news is that even if you are cutting artificial sweeteners and processed starches and sugars out of your life, there is no reason to cross the treat at the end of the day off of your menu. Plus, unless you tell them, your guests will never guess that what they are eating is ‘less than’ a dessert they would purchase that is fully loaded with sugars at their favorite dinner time eatery down the street. We smart eaters can easily find things that both reward us by being delectable and that reward us by being good for us and just plain good.

Last night here at the Cafe De Carmack we had just such a treat. Frozen fresh fruit, natural ingredients, and power tools combined to bring us this no-cook bit of heavenly flavor. “Chunky Monkey Ice Cream” contains no monkey, and no cream, but for the ability to make one think that they are having ice cream with enormous icebergs of nutty chocolate there is nothing else quite like it.

The site, Raw Guru, that it came from is worth bookmarking as well. We have mined this treasure trove of great ‘paleo’ recipes for things like this many times. It is especially good at finding and publishing no sugar desserts. We have had some terrific fruit based, easy to prepare foods that will go a long way to satisfy your cravings for sugar. I, like you, am not on a quest to live a monk-like sequestration from the joys of food. I am on a quest to recreate life before refined sugar became the end of thinking when one considered how to make a food sweet. It turns out to not be hard to do, but we have to BREAK THE HABIT of grabbing for the syrup or sugar bowls when we are thinking about sweetening our lives up. We have to create new habits, and a new source of inspiration, if we want to reach our goal of living life differently, healthily, without fear of increased risk of disease and debilitation.

It has been incredibly fun to share our journey these past weeks. I seriously enjoy the comments that I have gotten, because writing is a craft that usually gets no feedback to let you know that you are meeting the intellectual needs of the anonymous and diverse readership that is out there. If you want to leave comments, there is a comment box at the bottom of every post. I can’t tell you right where it is, due to not having access to just your brand of computer or browser to see, but I assure you it is there. If you think of it, leave links to sites you have found that share recipes and advice for the newly health-conscious diners like we are. Do drop me a note, close the feedback loop and it will be appreciated by all of our readers, it may even inspire the next blog post!

Here is a perfectly good no sugar, all natural meal you can serve a crowd and everyone gets what they want. You don’t have to eat the potatoes, and they don’t know just how healthy they are eating. Feeds about eight people if you add more shrimp.

If you asked me on March 31 what I thought would be the biggest stumbling block to giving up sugar, I would not have told you the right thing, because I would not have guessed back then what it was. My thought was that to change my eating habits would involve mostly willpower, and the strength to resist the sweets that were available. I have posted on just about every occasion that I was tempted like that, look through the archives. Sometimes I made it, sometimes I succumbed, and it turns out that these events aren’t that frequent, or that important in the overall life change.

Actually, the biggest deterrent to consistently eating healthy day in and day out is my limited imagination. Cooking used to be, “what’s for dinner” meaning what meat do we thaw out. You know, meats and fats aren’t the problem, so we haven’t had to change the process at all as far as the main entree goes. No, the problem is that now we have to think “What goes with that, that we want to eat.” In the past we could just cook potatoes in one of their many forms, fried, mashed, boiled, baked, broiled…that was the go-to ‘I’m too lazy to give it more thought’ side dish. Meat, potatoes, and cottage cheese–if you ate with us, you had that very meal, probably 75% of the time.

Perhaps in your house it is “let’s see whats in the freezer” where there might be some Tater Tots, maybe some frozen fries. Maybe you would go to the pantry and break out the Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Maybe you would make a Hamburger Helper. Opening a can of green beans or corn, put some butter in it (or -gack- margarine) and a little salt. Dinner. If you have to give it much thought, well, why give it much thought! The kids will eat this, it’s filling, and before we cared about sugar and starches, at least it’s not fast food.

So, now that kind of thinking is out the door. We have to think about side dishes that don’t hurt us with easy starch or sugar, because we really don’t need them at all. It turns out that side dishes can be just as quick the new way as the old way, but we just need new arrows in our quiver, new go-to’s that come immediately to mind.  I am here to help. Today’s post will be all about the fast, healthy side dish, things that go with anything, are filling, and take just minutes to get ready–if you are ready with the supplies in your cupboard. No pastas, no sweets, no breads, no starches in this list.  Here we go.

The first and best of the bunch vegetable for side dishes is cabbage. There are several kinds of cabbage you can get for this job, napa, bok choy, green, red…it doesnt matter at all, you should get whatever is least expensive the day you are at the market. Any of the following cabbage dishes will be WONDERFUL with whatever cabbage you have. You just have to have a head or bunch of cabbage in your fridge so that you can make it quickly.

One thing to try very soon is buttery dressed cabbage. The best way to make it is to cut the cabbage into ribbons.  How much to make? Realize that it will look like a whole bunch of cabbage until it wilts, then it wont look like enough. A little bit goes a long way, but for each couple of diners you probably need to make a quarter of a head of green cabbage. Put your biggest pot on the stove and get the water boiling, put a tablespoon of salt and sugar in the water, boil the cabbage for about two minutes. If you over cook it it’s ruined, so just two minutes then strain it out and cool it off in the sink. Two tablespoons of butter in a skillet, a teaspoon of caraway seeds, and about a half cup of seasoned croutons, pulverized, and brown that until you can smell the caraway warming up. Mix in the cabbage.  This is your side dish.  Here is the recipe.

Cabbage also works really well if you put some salt and olive oil on big slices of it and broil them in the oven until they begin to burn on top.  That burned part adds a lot of flavor, and you can spice them any way you like.  Super quick and super good to have in your plans. Also you can try chopping cabbage up and frying it with some garlic and other spices, use a flavorful oil like bacon grease or lard, olive oil works too, and you won’t need to throw any meat into this side dish.  Literally ten minutes, tops.

Fresh green beans are also a terrific go to if you are short on ideas. Try just melting some butter or ghee in a skillet, and cleaning up some whole green beans (stems off) and toss them in.  Move them around every so often, when they start to leave brown stuff in the bottom of the pan, deglaze the pan with some chicken stock, put some sesame oil in there and some sesame seeds. You will not have leftovers of this side dish. Here is one way to do this…

You can essentially do the same thing with asparagus, but it works best if you blanch these in boiling water like you did the cabbage, because the tips will burn before the stems are fully cooked if you aren’t very careful.  Just don’t overboil because they are not very easy to fry if they are falling apart mushy.

You might look up some other vegetables that we are just now beginning to experiment with. Fennel is very good, looks like a cross between a green onion and a celery. Root vegetables are really good, like parsnips, and turnips. You have to get past those nasty names, but the vegetables themselves have been around for thousands of years for a good reason. Probably the only reason you haven’t eaten them more often is that Del Monte doesn’t put them in a can.

Salads have got to be mentioned here. If the dressings that you put on yours come out of a bottle, they are about half the quality of what you could, in seconds, produce for yourself. Who knows how to make Buttermilk Ranch dressing at home? I will tell you…it’s essentially two ingredients…Mayonnaise and buttermilk. Equal parts of mayo and buttermilk, season with salt and pepper. Every time I see a bottle of ‘buttermilk ranch’ dressing it makes me laugh. There is no way to make it without the buttermilk. Why not call it ‘Mayo Ranch’.  Just sayin’. How about Russian dressing? It’s Mayo and Ketchup. Equal parts. No added ingredients to make it last a million years in your fridge. No bottle to throw away half used months from now.

Maybe in another post I will show you how to make your own mayonnaise at home.  Come back later on and see.