Bear With Me, Gentle Reader

Posted on May 10, 2014 by dcarmack

Today’s post will be long, because I have two post ideas that I am going to combine magically into one post. The transition will be so smooth you will think you are listening to a Dave Rawlings Machine medley.

As frequent readers of this blog will remember, last weekend was a weekend off of the straight and narrow path of sugar-free eating. Reread it here, if you need to, but suddenly increasing my sugar intake had immediate physical effects that I could feel. It seemed to me that my hands grew hot and swollen, I sweated slightly until the sugars had made their way out of my system, I had difficulty sleeping due to increased body warmth and sweating. Last weekend I wondered if perhaps when I was continuously eating processed sugars and starches if this same physical reaction was continuously occurring, but that I was so accustomed to it that it went unnoticed by me. Thinking about it further, it occurs to me that the puffy hands and rise in body temperature were most likely from an inflammation reaction. I was suffering a reaction in my entire system to the infusion of processed sugar.

Now, in conversation with my wife, it is her impression that my mood is not subject to the spikes that it previously was. I am a political reader and writer. I pay attention to all things with regard to the national and state political issues, and in times past it is true that I would react very passionately to political news. I tended to worry and become stressed at the contentious issues of the day, I would write about it, read it all, discuss it with any available audience. My stress levels would jump immediately when I found someone that felt sympathetic to the other side of the issue. Two small changes in my habits seem to have turned this around. First when I gave up drinking, sold my beer refrigerator and switched over to candy and soda pop instead. I seemed to level out, to not fly off the handle when provoked. Now I have also given up candy and soda pop and the change is even more striking. Now my temper stays even, my old stressors do not have anywhere near the power to make my adrenaline shoot up. Karen noticed it in relation to national events.

At work, I noticed it in my ability to do detail work without any hand tremors. I can drop a part or fumble a tool and it does not cause me to go immediately into a fight or flight burst of emotion. It seems like I was in the past always fighting time, even when there was no external time pressure I was always under my own internal time pressure. If I was starting a program up in a Windows PC and it took a very long time to start, I would actually be stressed by this, might curse and drum my fingers, might pick up my phone and blast through a magazine article–showing my general impatience with having to wait.  I could not be tranquil.

Additionally, I never could really take the time to set down and write. My ideas would not wait for me to get them down. There were too many sidings on my train of thought, any delay would cause the thread to slip away. I cannot begin to tell you how many poetry ideas I have had that were lost to a moment of distraction. I could not stand to edit my own work.

These problems seem to be greatly reduced now that I am not permanently inflamed by eating sugar in every bite of food I take or every drink that I have. There is some scientific research to back up this theory and I am going to link to an article touting the addition of Omega 3 fats into your diet. It is NOT that I think we should add an artificial ingredient into our diets, it is to make the point that adding pounds of sugar into our weekly nutrition is having a real physical AND psychological effect on our lives. Here is the page. Perhaps if we banned sugary drinks, alcohol and processed starchy foods from Washington DC a great deal more would get done. Who can say for sure?

Think about your own life. Isn’t it possible that all of the excessive energy that you are pumping into your bloodstream in blood sugars that you don’t need, are in fact causing changes in your psychology and physiology? The only reason the sugars are there is because they were added to compensate for the fats that were removed. The only reason to remove fats was so that the maker could put ‘Low Fat’ on the label. It makes perfect sense to me. It is obvious to almost everyone now that trying to eat artificially reduced fat food was a bad idea. Dietary fats have gotten a bum rap.

Your body only gets energy from three possible nutrients–carbohydrates (starch and sugar), proteins from meats and beans, or fats. These are the only things you eat that can be converted into your blood sugars. Living off of just one of those kinds, or too much of one of those kinds, causes changes in you that you may have gotten so used to that you don’t realize what normal feels like, or how unsweetened people think and react. Not only are you feeding your body, but you are also feeding all of the microbes in your body, each with it’s own evolutionary role to play in keeping you healthy. Over hundreds of thousands of years (sorry creationists) you and your microbes have discovered ways to support one another. By eating foods that did not exist one hundred years ago, you are promoting microbes that may be having undesirable effects both on your body and the beneficial microbes. The experiment you are living, the results you are getting from you diet, are showing you what not treating your gut microbes will do to you. Two thirds of us are overweight. One in four women between 40 and 50 are on an antidepressant. Could it be related?

This week I have added my muesli cereal of rolled oats, chopped nuts, raisins and coconut back into the breakfast rotation. Comparing the effect it has on my morning to that of my egg or two with breakfast meats is enlightening.  A two egg omelet will sustain me without hunger pains until lunch.  That would be from 6 AM to Noon. My muesli breakfast can only stave off hunger until about ten. I love my muesli, it is my favorite breakfast, but that two hour difference is very important. I have since read that just eating one egg with any breakfast has the ability to do this trick. Next week I intend to cook one egg to go with my cereal and prove it to myself. I will report back to you. It’s 9:37 AM and I am getting hungry.

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Guess What’s for Breakfast

Posted on May 9, 2014 by dcarmack

If you look in the cupboard tomorrow morning and select a box with food in it, shake some into a bowl and set down to eat, don’t put the box away. Hang onto it for a minute or two, and as you eat, do a little reading. To understand what in the world the label is trying to tell you, will require just a little bit of math, but not hard math.

Labels in the US have to state lots of scientific facts about the food, but the law doesn’t say it has to be in a language that you understand, or that the claims on the label have to be unambiguous. For instance, all of the weights are in grams. If we were in any other country, grams would be acceptable, but in the US, just about the only place in the country you run into things measured in grams is in the grocery store, on these labels.

Health Food Nutrition Label

Health food in a box. Convenient, inexpensive and healthy. What is not to love, right? Well, first let’s do the math. Who knows how much sugar is contained in one of these granola bars? 14 grams of sugar doesn’t sound like much, a gram is a little bitty amount right? Turns out there are 4.2 grams of sugar in a teaspoon of sugar.  4.2 makes the math hard and it makes the number hard to remember.  Forget the point 2 and just call it 4. So to put this number into something that means something to us Americans, there are three teaspoons of sugar in every one of these granola bars. Imagine making them yourself if you were wanting to eat healthy and counting those teaspoons into your food.

Health claims on a box are a legitimate reason to not purchase the box, in my honest opinion, but if you do make the purchase, read the claim with the eye of a criminal attorney. All too common is a label that makes health or nutrition claims that while technically true, are either irrelevant or deceptive. Also, there are plenty of times when a company lets you think something is still healthy after they have loaded it up with unhealthy additions. This contains yogurt. Yogurt is good for you, right?

Yogurt label

Health claims all over this one, plus it has that “yogurt is healthy for you” reputation. Lets start by doing the math on the sugar.  26 divided by 4 is 6 and a half. Six and a half teaspoons of added sugar in your health food. If you make yogurt yourself would you add six or seven teaspoons of sugar to it?  Bear in mind, this serving isn’t even a cup, but only 3/4 of a cup. See that it has no fat (practically) but also it has no protein, which means that with added sugar being the only useful ingredient, you may as well have a snickers bar.  Let’s compare labels! Turns out that a regular size Snickers bar has 27 grams of sugar in it. Hey, this math is easy, we can just cut and paste.  Your Yoplait yogurt has as much sugar in it as my snickers bar, but it also contains some fats and proteins, so all of the calories are not empty, and there is a little something nutritional for you in the candy bar.  It’s actually healthier than the health food!!!  See what I mean, if it has a health claim on the box, it’s probably not healthy.

Want to be surprised at some healthy sounding foods that are little more than candy in a health-claiming box?  Go to this WebMD page and do the math, since all of the measurements are in that crazy French unit, the Gram…

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What’s Stopping You from Starting?

Posted on May 8, 2014 by dcarmack

Change is hard, because you are used to doing things the old way. Some of those old things are habits, you get up, stumble into the kitchen and put on coffee. After you are ready for work you read the news, play some Candy Crush and …oops, no time for cooking breakfast, got to just eat a couple of pop tarts (like I used to do). This isn’t what you want to do, it is what you are used to doing. Changing that pattern requires you to find something to make that doesn’t take as long as you think it does. For this to work, you have to be ready for it…get a dozen eggs at the store on your way home and a pint of heavy cream, make sure you can find your little omelet pan, find your cooked ham or Canadian bacon and put it where you can find it.

My own egg frying pan is a little Calphalon non stick omelet pan. Yours can be anything from a nonstick skillet to a cast iron skillet, it has to be something the eggs wont stick to. In my kitchen eggs are the only reason I have a nonstick pan in the house. We always have cream in the house ever since we discovered that Coffee Mate has added sugar in it. I make my own Canadian Bacon (Peameal Bacon if you are Canadian) from a recipe I found in the book Charcuterie, which takes seven days to do. We have ham usually left over from ham dinners, and bacon is there if I have more time.

Ok, here is a morning routine that works for me…post shower, stumble into the kitchen and put the coffee on, it takes four minutes with the Keurig machine. Put the Calphalon on the little burner and put the burner on ‘2’ so that the heat is very gentle. Get out 2 eggs, break them into a breakfast bowl, add two teaspoons of cream and whisk. Add salt and pepper, pour this mix into the skillet. Get out a small piece of Canadian bacon, cut it into thin slices (1/8 inch maybe) and then into 1/8 inch cubes. Put the ham in the eggs, and as soon as the eggs curdle a little bit, start the scrambling process by just digging them up and turning them over with your fork. Cook them slowly until they are almost firm.  They keep cooking after you plate them and best a tiny bit under cooked than over cooked. Get your  coffee, since it just now finished and eat breakfast. I literally never don’t have time to make that breakfast. Here is what breakfast looks like after a morning like that which I just described.

Image

To do the same thing using bacon requires you to cook the bacon first, and that may double the time that breakfast takes to make, but of course the kitchen will smell much better cooking that breakfast than the ham version…if you have the time, GO FOR IT.

The point that I am making is that changing this one little thing makes an enormous difference in your life. The best way to change for the better is to change One Little Thing. If you normally skip breakfast, eat on the run from a fast food or coffee store, or eat processed ‘food’ out of a box, then this one little thing is enormous. Only quitting sweet drinks would make a bigger difference in your life than changing this.

If you eat breakfast you will not be tempted by the pastry tray in the office, you will not be tempted by the candy machine at your first coffee break. Your body will not begin it’s day burning stores of energy from yesterday, but it will begin by warming up the machinery of digestion instead. For you that means that you will not commence the day from the short term starvation mode, where new energy is stored as fats first in your liver, you will be burning current food and any deficit will come from liver fat. This begins the daily process of reducing your weight in a slow, sustainable way, and the science (which I have terribly paraphrased and mangled) is well established and uncontroversial.

By all means, incorporate breakfast into your life at your own speed, when you are ready. Nobody is forcing you to change for the better, but take my word for it, this change is so easy you will be astounded and puzzled that it took you so long to figure it out.  It’s just that easy!

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And, On a Related Note…

Posted on May 7, 2014 by dcarmack

Pardon the intrusion, but today just must be a two-post (at least) day.  Just got done reading an article in the New York Times by Mark Bittman, a long-time favorite mentor of mine. Today Bittman was saying that as we advocate for better eating habits, often times we run afoul of people’s preconceptions of buzz words like ‘organic’ and ‘non-gmo’.

I think we — forward-thinking media, progressives in general, activist farmers, think-tank types, nonprofiteers, everyone who’s battling to create a better food system — often send the wrong message on both of these. If we understand and explain them better it’ll be more difficult for us to be discredited (or, worse, dismissed out of hand), and we’ll have more success moving intelligent comments on these important issues into the mainstream.

Readers of this weblog may have gotten the idea that I am promoting that we eat healthier foods, and it honestly had not occurred to me that you might be putting the thought of organic food in where I was saying healthy food.  We run into this a great deal in our lives, where the listener is mis-hearing what we are saying, and since we don’t have a feedback mechanism in the blog-world it is hard for me to realize that I am being misunderstood. Just in case, we must clear that up, for the record, at this time.

When I say that I must eat healthier foods, I do not mean that I must eat organic foods, or foods that are certified in some way as not Genetically Modified foods. It is VASTLY better for you to eat cauliflower than Snackables, and the incremental difference in nutritional value that you might get from eating organic cauliflower than the non-organic variety is not worth calculating until you have gotten Snackables out of your lifestyle. I can’t really say it any better than Bittman…

… there’s a very real difference between eating better and growing better. I can eat better starting right now, and it has nothing — zero — to do with shopping at Whole Foods or eating organically. It has to do with eating less junk, hyperprocessed food and industrially raised animal products. The word “organic” need not cross my lips.

But…how do I stop a person from hearing ‘organic’ or ‘difficult’ when I am discussing healthy.?

Finally, for a conclusion, there is not really a better way to say it that this…

Maybe all I’m saying here is this: There are two important struggles in food: One is for sustainable agriculture and all that it implies — more respect for the earth and those who live on it (including workers), more care in the use of natural resources in general, more consideration for future generations. The other is for healthier eating: a limit to outright lies in marketing “food” to children, a limit on the sales of foodlike substances, a general encouragement for the eating of real food.

We, you and I, must just eat foods that we prepare, not trusting that the people who put it in a box for your ‘convenience’ did not remove the only thing of value that the food contains, nutrition.

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Writing a Novel

Posted on May 7, 2014 by dcarmack

If I decided to write a novel I could work on it, basically one of two ways. I could drop everything, work exclusively on the novel to the detriment of every other thing in my life, or I could work on it a little bit every day, time permitting. One way might get me a finished product in a very short period of time, but would probably cost the finished work in terms of quality and artistic merit. The other way may get done some day, but it would be something created thoughtfully, and completed completely. The art that is produced in record time cannot fairly be compared to that which is produced in the fullness of thought, without regard to time.

Why do I bring this up? Creating a new way of life is best done in the same way as the best works of art. You change your life, you change your eating habits, by changing them thoughtfully, in a way that you can safely maintain for the long haul (the rest of your life). Who has read a book or watched an infomercial where the proposition is that you stop doing this part or that part of your eating habits, for a short while. You measure your progress daily and you look forward to the day you can be done with it. In a short period you have dropped the weight, as though the weight were the point.

We gain weight very gradually. At 20 I weight 125 pounds, and at 66 inches tall I was so thin I had to walk past a place twice to cast a shadow. At 30 I weighed 135, and still was so thin you would think I was malnourished. At 40 I had gotten up to 155 and decided that I had a problem. I went on a DIET. I went on the Atkins diet and cut all carbs and anything sweet from my diet. For six weeks it was with a religious fervor that I would only eat the topping on a pizza, no breading on my meats, no flours in my chowders. In two weeks I dropped off eight pounds, by the sixth week I had lost fifteen. Then the diet was over. In short order I was eating fries and drinking Cokes again. I did not gain the weight back quickly. I did gain it back though, and when I recently decided to make ONE SMALL CHANGE, I weighed almost 150 again.

This time it is different. The point this time is not to lose POUNDS, it is to lose HABITS. I do not think at all about whether or not I have lost any weight or inches today. My struggle now is only to eat foods that do not have any added sugar to them, to eat only the starches that it takes to put a meal together. I have not sworn off of anything at all, and I will not swear off of anything in the future. Swearing is a sin. My goal is to mindfully consume the things that I need to eat, and be aware of the consequences.

Already I have learned that there is a feeling you get when you eat a massive dose of sugar in a short period of time, and that there will be a physical reaction and a certain period of time required to recover from that. If I had never changed the way that I live I would still not realize that I had constantly been in that mode of reaction to sugar, so much so that I didn’t really notice the physical reaction after eating a bowl of ice cream, for instance.

The beauty of making a lifestyle change is that my results will be slow, but the change will be permanent. The results will constantly be changing, the physical results constantly improving. When I make a decision to allow a dessert into the menu, it will be a conscious decision, made in the full awareness of the effects and repercussions of doing so, without guilt or remorse. We don’t need to add the stress of guilt to the stress of dessert. We know that eating one meal does not a lifestyle change make, and that only if we let it, will one meal cause us harm.

Next change…exercise.

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First Meeting of “One Small Change”

Posted on May 7, 2014 by trodriguez54

During the beginning of the meeting we had two of Karen’s Friday yoga girls show up, Ramon and Kathleen. While Dan was not present, we did Face Time him in so that he could meet them and talk about his recent experience of eating sugary sweets on an empty stomach while attending a child’s birthday party with an incredible spread of fancy inviting treats. We were able to share that we are all human and will back slide every once in a while and it is ok.

Later Merry and Katya joined us. When we asked why they interested in learning more about 21 day detox program, all agreed because they want to feel better. It seems like for two individuals their schedules get in the way of them eating a more balance nutrition diet. For Kathleen and Ramona, they have purchased the book and are definitely looking into the program further.

Jose, our guest speaker, did a fine job sharing why the program was important for him to follow. In his typical way of not speaking much he was able to convey his symptoms of depression and how he did not realize how the candida overgrowth was wrecking his well being.

Karen had everyone take the mini quiz to see which level of the program would be best for them to follow. After this, most of our time we sat around talking about the program and reviewing the 3 different levels along with the food guide and shopping list.

So our first meeting is done. The take away, if you can do one small change leaving sugar out of your daily consumption of calories, you can have a positive effect on your health.  Stay tune for more to come.

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First Meeting

Posted on May 6, 2014 by dcarmack

Our new Support Group, which we call “One Small Change” met yesterday evening.  As one co-host I felt bad that I could not attend, but life happens, and we must adapt. It was decided at the meeting that future meetings would be every Monday at 6:30, so that people can feel free to come when they can. I intend to invite another contributor to help us keep this blog jumping with new experiences and new insights. As soon as we can get her up to speed on WordPress she will post a meeting update.

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To Backslide is Human

Posted on May 5, 2014 by dcarmack

After Saturday’s trespass back into the world of sugar-eating I took a nap and went to work. My work is sometimes at long, odd hours. This time I went in at midnight and worked until eight AM on Sunday. I took a lunch to eat during the night but I ended up only eating one banana and one orange. I left my lunch at work for Monday. When I got home I didn’t eat and went to bed just a touch hungry. Some time mid-morning I woke up tired, and starving, so I got into our candy drawer (doesn’t everyone have a candy drawer in the bedroom) and got out two little Hershey treasures. Chocolate, mostly sugar. When I woke up at noon I was starving and I ate a small bowl of sweet potato and sausage soup. Then we went to a children’s birthday party. There were treats. Do you remember the scene in the movie Amadeus where, during a reception at the house of the arch-bishop, Herr Salieri wanders into the room where the sweets are ready for the party? These treats were like that, fancy, inviting, sweet and plentiful. I tried one of each. It started out innocent enough. I got myself some snacks that were not sugar-based. Fruits, meats, and a bread with a brown schmere topped by a banana slice. Turns out the brown was Nutella. I ate it. The granddaughter didn’t like hers, or her chocolate covered strawberry. Waste not, want not. The baby only ate the banana on hers. I’ll take care of the rest grandma. Granddaughter only ate a bite of her Rice Krispy treat, but we didn’t throw any away. Wonder where the rest went? The flood gates were open. I tried one of everything available.

Sigh

Well. All I can say is that i could feel the effects. I sweated in bed that night as I metabolized the sugar. This morning my hands felt hot and thick. I was irritable and felt as though I did not sleep well. I can’t say that it is a mystery why I dont feel in top form today. I could blame the long hours. If I was looking for some way to keep eating something that makes me feel bad, I could.

Never give up the struggle though. I did not lose anything by backsliding and I don’t think it will make it any easier or harder to not eat sweets today. Today is no different than it would be if yesterday were perfect like all the ones before it. I learned another lesson, namely, don’t let yourself starve, because that makes it that much harder to convince yourself to do what you should.

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Sugar High–A Real Phenomenon

Posted on May 4, 2014 by dcarmack

Last night, after eating a sugar free dinner of bratwurst, sauteed onions and peppers, cottage cheese and corn on the cob we had desert. Lately that desert would have been something sweetish and natural. Dates, fruits, no sugar added. The desert last night was one ice cream sandwich. Grandma had went to the store with our granddaughter and bought her her choice of ice cream for after dinner. The sweetness of it was overbearing. It was ‘Birthday Cake’ flavored ice cream with a vanilla cookie, and there were colored sweetened sprinkles in the ice cream.  Right after finishing it my heart began to beat harder, I sweated a little bit.  I could actually feel the chemical of it spreading throughout me, making me uncomfortable. To think that just over a month ago I would have eaten this sweet treat and not had any significant reaction to it makes me wonder. Is it possible that when you are under the influence of sugar that your system is always in a state of reaction to it, so that you don’t notice at all when you eat it? That must be the case with me. In my case that reaction has made me not look forward to the next time that I eat an ice cream sandwich.

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Government Will Help, Eventually

Posted on May 4, 2014 by dcarmack

Our Federal government has it’s critics on both sides of the spectrum, and it has problems for which the criticism is warranted.  One area that is constantly both praised and ridiculed is it’s oversight of foods and drugs. The FDA is a hero and villain in equal parts, and is in the news constantly as it pulls drugs off the shelf today and gets grief for not pulling drugs off the shelf tomorrow.

The New York Times highlights the news that sometimes when dietary supplements, herbal medicines that are unregulated and untested for efficacy, cause medical problems like psychiatric effects or kidney or liver problems, the FDA in combination with the emergency rooms and doctors across the nation, are slow to get the products off of the shelves.

It is improper, however, to hold only the government to blame in this when we all know, or should know, that just because something has a health claim attached to it’s reputation or on it’s box, that that does not make what is inside the box pure or even what it claims to be. Products that are produced overseas are sometimes made in ancient methods. Herbs are fertilized with the real thing, manure, sometimes human. Drying is done on mats under the sun, with the herbs being contaminated by the waste of the neighborhood being blown in on the breeze. If there is a leaf that is the right color, sometimes it is cut into your supplement to cut the cost and increase the profit for the maker.

A recent Canadian study found a significant problem of fraudulent labeling, unsafe or diluted products claiming to be this or that beneficial plant, and sometimes toxic ornamental weeds instead. While I wish that this study had originated in the US, I feel that there is enough evidence that the supplement industry is unreliable to warrant not using them until such time as the industry voluntarily submits to rigorous quality controls and oversight.

When the government does not pull a product from the shelf, we must stop thinking that it means the products are therefore safe.  It does not mean this at all. Chicken, beef and pork steeped in hormones, antibiotics and other chemicals whose only duty is to keep livestock from dying off en mass in their hellish living conditions remains on the shelf, but it’s being on the shelf does not make it safe or healthy to consume. To name just one food-borne illness, E. Coli infected people at the rate of 1.15 per hundred thousand people, or 3450 cases reported last year. CDC estimates that 26 times more people than that were infected but went unreported. That is close to 90,000 people infected. While that proves our food system is imperfect, it also proves that we must guard our own interests without assuming that the FDA or CDC is going to protect us from harm. After you get sick, they will pull the food or drugs off of the shelf. They are not making sure that the food or drugs won’t make you sick in the first place.

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