One Small Change is Coming

Posted on May 2, 2014 by dcarmack

Life continues, and we drift along in it’s currents. If we are going to change our course, we have to dip a hand into the stream, kick a little bit, do something to resist the pull of life’s events. We must not be afraid to be unhappy with our path, with our surroundings, because unhappiness is the fuel of change.

At our house we hardly ever see a food commercial.  We’ve replaced cable and satellite TV with the AppleTV, and Hulu Plus or Netflix –they don’t have a great deal of commercial interruptions in the program.  Very few of those ads that are on Hulu are for foods.  I can imagine how tempting the commercials are for us to continue to live our lives like it seems that everyone on TV is living their lives. For some reason, the people on the ads and sitcoms never seem to have the problems with their food choices that we in the real world do. Being constantly reminded that you are denying yourself something that everyone else seems to get when they want feels like punishment. If you talk to the real people in your real world, though, you are very likely to find out that few of them are satisfied with the food choices they are making, with the physical results that their food is causing them. That dissatisfaction with their outcomes, our dissatisfaction with our outcomes, is the fuel for change that we need to get us to kick a little bit.

My Monday event “One Small Change” is a free get-together of people who have been, are, or want to start cutting starches and sugars out of their lives. We will be sharing our experience, sharing your experience and supporting one another in all possible ways. This meeting will help us get organized and find friends on this journey. Lots of the information I plan on sharing will be from the same sources as many of the link that I have shared on this blog over the last month.  We will share dinner, breakfast and lunch ideas from our work on the MyFitnessPal app. We will discuss and maybe watch some of the HBO documentary, “Weight of the Nation”, but probably not the first meeting due to time constraints.

As you are out and about on your daily journey, be mindful today of the people around you. Do these folks look like they should be kicking a little bit?  Should you just be floating along on the same currents that they are, or should you be changing your course, headed someplace better?

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Gigantic Finish

Posted on May 1, 2014 by dcarmack

Fast all day and finish with a colossal calorie dinner.

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This recipe is super easy to make, pretty much cooks itself, but turns in a whopping 437 calories per serving. We pared ours down somewhat from this ingredient list, no carrots, no tomato paste, etc.  Also added in a pound of Grass Fed Tonganoxie Organic Ground Beef, from Seetin Ranch.  I had two servings–budget busted!

If you are going to live off of the calories you get from small portions of meat and lots of herbs and vegetables, then you have to find a way to get the calories you need to take care of your fundamental human needs.  By fundamental I mean, those necessary to sustain life and your sedentary lifestyle.  There is lots of protein in this soup, the sodium level is not too bad, and the calories (from fats) get you into the range that works.

This was enough food that I was not hungry when I woke up, like I have been.  Went without breakfast, which is bad, I know.  I can’t bring myself to cook an egg if I don’t feel like eating it, though.  Seems wasteful. Now, I am finally hungry at 9 AM the following day.  Good work, Kale or sausage, whichever one filled me up so well.

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One Small Change inaugural meeting

Posted on April 30, 2014 by dcarmack

One Small Change inaugural meeting

This is a link to my Facebook event for the kickoff meeting for our support group.

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I Should Be Dead

Posted on April 30, 2014 by dcarmack

Catchy headline, yes?  If my actually caloric intake equaled what my calorie counting program says it is, then I should be dead by now.  Yesterday I ate leftovers (pork chops, fried sweet potatoes and a portion of salad) for lunch. It was good, I was satisfied, couldn’t even eat every single bite, so some went to waste.  367 Calories.  Had water with it, no calories there. Dinner was about two cups of spaghetti squash with three meatballs and some marinara sauce. Had a salad, with a nice creamy sauce. Threw in a little Asiago cheese.  379 calories.  Didn’t eat breakfast just had coffee.  Total for the day, 875 calories.

Am I just used to starving now?  In weeks past I would be hungry every moment of the day after taking in so few calories.  Maybe the people starving around the world are not suffering that much, once they get used to it.  Or–maybe my calorie counting program isn’t that good at figuring out what I am eating, maybe I am inputting the numbers or portions wrong. The software complains any time I don’t get 1200 calories and if it is to be believed, I am a good 30% short of that number.

There is a feature where I can add my own recipes to the day’s food.  I used it to calculate what my Steak Au Poivre was worth, for instance. If I go to a nutrition site and search for it I get a calorie count of 497, and when I put it in the software I get 415.  That’s a pretty big difference.  I suppose I shouldn’t worry because my body has been good at telling me that i need more, just like it was good at telling me I needed less.

Dinner yesterday was a half a spaghetti squash smothered in marinara sauce and three Italian meatballs.  In times past I have had this and I hated the squash as a replacement for the pasta.  I think I had been cooking the squash improperly, because this time, it was a very good replacement for the pasta.  I could hardly tell the difference, the texture was right, and the flavor, well, neither quash or pasta really adds too much flavor to spaghetti dinner, you have to admit. Maybe it was the addition of asiago cheese to the dish, in place of the normal Parmesan cheese. Asiago cheese smells like it’s namesake ass, so there is a lot of flavor when you add it to your dinner.

Had a great desert, it was a pecan half smashed into a flavored butter, smashed into a half a date, and slightly frozen to firm up the butter.  Tasted like a caramel. I will try and get the recipe for it, because it was something you will want to eat if you are giving up table sugar.

If I am getting used to less–less sugar, less food–then this life change has truly been life-changing.  Not three weeks ago I was dragging around like I had a boat anchor on my shoulders, and now I don’t feel run down or hungry, but I have not started eating more or doing less.  We are working ten hour days, Karen is working more than ever, but our output or emotions have not suffered, we don’t pine for the day when we can start putting sugar in our morning coffees.  Time will tell but it is going to be easier and easier, which will let us change something else for the better.

One little thing at a time is the best method of making everything better.

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Birthday Celebration

Posted on April 29, 2014 by dcarmack

Eating healthy (my definition of healthy) is really easy to do, no matter what kind of special day it might be.  The wife celebrated a birthday with me last night after work and the special event was dinner, prepared at home, fully in compliance with our ‘eat no added sugar’ mentality.  Years ago on the cooking show “Good Eats”, Alton Brown introduced us to the wonderfully decadent dish Steak Au Poivre.

Steak Au Poivre literally means steak with pepper–lots of pepper. The cut of steak is the filet. Amazingly, all of the pepper that you encrust your filet mignon with does not make this a spicy dish. You salt the meat, dredge it in cracked black peppercorns, fry it in butter, deglaze the pan with cognac, then make a heavy cream reduction sauce.  To finish you rewarm the steaks in the cream sauce.  Right after tasting this dish for the first time, some French chef dreamed up the word ‘decadent’.

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Since at our dinner table we can’t just eat meat, I also made a cooked puree’d salad, with a beef broth dressing.  Actually it is listed in the soups section of the food website at WWW.cooking.com, but the recipe for leek, asparagus and herb soup was every bit of a salad that you could eat without teeth.  It should probably have “Cream Of” in the name, because there is two cups of whole milk in my version, and this soup actually held its own against the desert-like main entree in our dinner.

You start the soup ahead of the steak if you want to eat your steak hot, it takes a while to make, but doesn’t take any kind of special skill or tools in the kitchen.  It did come in handy that we have a vita-mix now to do the pureeing, but it could have been done in two batches in a regular strength blender. After dinner i bottled a full quart of leftover soup.  I don’t know why I didn’t bring any of that to work today for lunch….hmmm.

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There was just no sense in having a desert last night.  The richness of those two dishes made for a very full belly, although it was the kind of dinner that you really wish didn’t fill you up at all.  I can say that it put the birthday girl to sleep very soon after dinner, and that is high praise for food that does not include lots of sugar or starches. An after dinner coma usually comes from whatever that turkey-chemical is or the blood sugar crash, but without either of those things when it happens it is from pure satiation.  Decadent!

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Ahhh, The Weekend

Posted on April 28, 2014 by dcarmack

This was the first weekend this month that we were not on dietary restrictions. The sugar detox is in the rear-view mirror and with the speed limit signs covered how did we do? On Sunday afternoon we got some potato chips and had a snack tray with sliced cheeses, chips and potato chips. We ate french onion dip, we split a home made ginger ale. As far as blowouts go this one was nothing to worry about.

We continue to eat our meals sugar-free, and we have let the potato and sweet potato back on the menu. Corn nor rice have been back yet, but we have only had just a weeks worth of meals since we could, and lots of those days I found myself cooking for myself. On those days I went to the grocery store and bought myself a rotisserie chicken–the sugar free kind.

Now that I have been four weeks eating without sugar, I can safely say that it is gone from the normal diet and is now firmly on the ‘special’ section of the menu. If I eat sugar now, it will be in a desert, presented in the best possible way. Sugary foods now will be eaten mindfully and treated with the caution that they deserve. There are people that believe that sugar is toxic and deadly when abused, just like any other drug. I am slowly converting to that camp.

May 5 we are going to host an inaugural meeting of people that have or are giving up sugar in their normal diets. Contact us by phone, email or fill out the contact form using the link at the top of the blog. We have room for about ten comfortably, but no more than 20.  See you there!

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Evangelism’s Upside

Posted on April 25, 2014 by dcarmack

Writing, casting your thoughts to the universe, thinking out loud with no obvious audience is a lonely endeavor. The rewards are generally unknown to the author, the work is obvious to him. The effort must be consciously made or it is easy to let the friction of life bring the grindstone of creativity to a halt.

Writing is somewhat like what the sun does–burning, shining sending it’s energy into space in a three hundred sixty degree sphere, being absorbed in only tiny far away points. A tiny fraction of the energy is used at those faraway places and the sun gets no feedback from them, and that is how writing is different–if lucky, you get to learn that it is being heard at the other end.

If we had chosen only to write about the sugar detox on April the first, and then to write about the effects on day 22, the effects would have been very meager, compared to writing every day, several times a day about it. All of the extra energy radiated has exponentially increased the amount of energy available to be captured by our readers. Like a star, the work remains available from now on, available to be absorbed by minds that happen along perhaps years later.

Now, nearly at the end of the month, I am beginning to detect the stirrings of changes in the lives and interest level from the readers. The reflected energy warms my heart and mind greatly. I wouldn’t say that the only reason to evangelize is for the changes you get to observe in the audience you can see, but it is certainly a wonderful thing to have happen.

I know that it is not just the writing, because we are also exhibiting the change that we want to see by living that change. You might say a shining example. Sometimes though, you know it was the writing and not the example that reached out. If it happens once a blue moon it is enough to overcome the friction against the effort.

It is just so easy to sit back in life and observe only, to worry about your companions on life’s journey, to never say what you are concerned about in your life and in what you see in their lives. It is easy to talk about change, how wonderful change would be for someone’s life. If you really want to have an effect though–change yourself. Share it constantly. Support one another by living your beliefs. It’s not hard to do if you just do this one little thing consistently for 21 days. Just change ONE LITTLE THING.

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Less Teaching, More Testifying

Posted on April 24, 2014 by dcarmack

My significant other tells me that she prefers posts that say how it is, how I feel, more than the posts which are designed to share things I have learned, things I have found online. Hmmm. Well, as I read back through the days worth of pages it does seem that I have begun to do the lazy man’s blog method of generating content, but, darn it, that stuff is all so interesting to me.

This lifestyle change is really starting to take hold now. I automatically get up and throw my little non stick frying pan on the stove to warm up, getting it ready to warm up a couple of eggs. I throw a piece of fruit into my lunch sack without having to think about it. Dinner is always planned with the thought of how well it will carry into the next day’s lunch sack.

I wake up hungry. That is a good thing. That is something I never used to do, and I don’t think it’s because I am not eating enough food, I think it has more to do with my body now planning it’s energy day, and letting me know that I shouldn’t forget breakfast. Even a small breakfast gets me all the way until noon before I get hungry again, unless I starved myself a little bit the day before. If that happened then I am hungry after breakfast and all the way to lunch, lunch wont fill satisfy that hunger and I am slightly hungry all the way to dinner. That is the experience that I had until I got my food journal program, and discovered that I wasn’t getting enough calories into me to take care of my basic needs. If you don’t get enough, then your body chemistry shifts over to other places to find the energy your heart and brain need, it causes discomfort in other ways besides just hunger. I could post a link here, but…

Now that we are not on our detox diet any more we can once again eat starches and sugars. So far I have had potatoes and some corn tortillas with several meals. I know that if you add those things into your meal, it is a whole lot easier to eat enough calories to not be in starvation mode. I read in an 1896 cookbook, which I will not link to here, that a person should eat 20% of their food by weight in starches. Calorie-wise, that would add a bunch of calories to the day. I don’t think that I have even once ate 20% of my food in the form of starches since the 21st. I think that the mix I am having is just about right, right now. I love the texture and flavor of the starches, potato, corn, hominy and the rest. No need to go crazy eating them up. Still mostly vegetables in my meals.  According to the old cookbook, the active adult should eat four and a half ounces of meat per day. That’s right, the equivalent of the patty on a quarter-pounder. One a day. I saw once, on a show where a family lived for six months in a museum in England as though it were 1900 that instead of meats people mostly got their proteins through eating eggs.  Makes sense then that you could just eat 4 ounces a day.

Yesterday we had dinner at Red Robin. The salad that I got was actually listed by name in MyFitnessPal. That was handy. I ate about half of this salad, and all of the chicken breast that was in it. According to my calorie source the entire salad only had 379 calories. I literally could not eat the whole thing, it was pretty big. If you were to try and eat mostly vegetables in your diet, there is just no physical way you could be overweight or get too much to eat in a day. I was packing it in and just ran out of room. I told the wife that I thought maybe my stomach had shrunk some, because I couldn’t get it all in there. Maybe I got 325 calories into me out of that 379. I could have easily added 50% more calories to this meal if I had eaten crackers with it. My daily calorie minimum is 1200 and if I had eaten crackers with my salad it would have consumed almost half of my daily food budget. Amazing to me.

As usual, I will close with a recommendation that you look to the top menu of this Blog and take the survey and fill in the contact form, so that we can invite you to the meetings we are going to start having. The first meeting will be a screening of episode one of “Weight of the Nation”, and a little bit of organization, if there are enough of us there to do that kind of thing.

UPDATE:  My Calorie counting program led me astray.  I actually ate a salad that was 950 calories, instead of 379.  I only ate about 3/4 of it so I didn’t exceed my calorie budget for the day by much.  The salad I picked in MyFitnessPal was the right salad, but it had been modified and a lot of the higher carb things in it were left out (obviously).  Also, I still stand by the notion that eating crackers with it would have made it even more ‘energetic’ of a salad.

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Consciousness & Your Gut by Jeff Masters | Sedona Yoga Festival

Posted on April 24, 2014 by dcarmack

Consciousness & Your Gut by Jeff Masters | Sedona Yoga Festival.

And yet another article about your ‘lower brain’. Seems these things always come in batches. Someday maybe we will go to Sedona, there seems to be some kind of a Smart People magnet down there that somehow I have resisted the pull until now.

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Fanny Farmer Dietary advice from 1896

Posted on April 23, 2014 by dcarmack

Some ideas that were taught in cooking colleges over 100 years ago are coming back into fashion in the 21st century…I love the way that they say you can start feeding your baby meat in the third or fourth YEAR.  Who knew that?

CORRECT PROPORTIONS OF FOOD
Age, weight, sex, occupation, climate, and season must determine the diet of a person in normal condition.   10
  Liquid food (milk or milk in preparation with the various prepared foods on the market) should constitute the diet of a child for the first eighteen months. After the teeth appear, by which time ferments have been developed for the digestion of starchy foods, entire wheat bread, baked potatoes, cereals, meat broths, and occasionally boiled eggs may be given. If mothers would use Dr. Johnson’s Educators in place of the various sweet crackers, children would be as well pleased and better nourished; with a glass of milk they form a supper suited to the needs of little ones, and experience has shown that children seldom tire of them. The diet should be gradually increased by the addition of cooked fruits, vegetables, and simple desserts; the third or fourth year fish and meat may be introduced, if given sparingly. Always avoid salted meats, coarse vegetables (beets, carrots, and turnips), cheese, fried food, pastry, rich desserts, confections, condiments, tea, coffee, and iced water. For school children the diet should be varied and abundant, constantly bearing in mind that this is a period of great mental and physical growth. Where children have broken down, supposedly from over-work, the cause has often been traced to impoverished diet. It must not be forgotten that digestive processes go on so rapidly that the stomach is soon emptied. Thanks to the institutor of the school luncheon-counter!   11
  The daily average ration of an adult requires

41/2 oz. protein 18 oz. starch
2 oz. fat 5 pints water
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  About one-third of the water is taken in our food, the remainder as a beverage. To keep in health and do the best mental and physical work, authorities agree that a mixed diet is suited for temperate climates, although sound arguments appear from the vegetarian. Women, even though they do the same amount of work as men, as a rule require less food. Brain workers should take their protein in a form easily digested. In consideration of this fact, fish and eggs form desirable substitutes for meat. The working man needs quantity as well as quality, that the stomach may have something to act upon. Corned beef, cabbage, brown-bread, and pastry, will not overtax his digestion. In old age the digestive organs lessen in activity, and the diet should be almost as simple as that of a child, increasing the amount of carbohydrates and decreasing the amount of proteins and fat. Many diseases which occur after middle life are due to eating and drinking such foods as were indulged in during vigorous manhood.
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