On Hold

I know it's been ages since I last posted ....and I may have been neglecting the blog, but not the pursuit of a healthy lifestyle! Eating healthy and exercising is just a part of my daily routine. I feel great, full of energy and filled with lots of new pursuits and new ideas.
So, while I won't be on Hold, the blog will be....for a while anyway. I found that I was spending way too much time doing research and writing for the blog. And while I found it all very valuable and interesting and learned a lot, it was taking too much time away from other pursuits.

For now, I'm going to spend time working on my painting...(see my painting blog), practicing all the new methods I learned at a recent workshop. I find that I can easily spend all day at my easel and not tire of it! I also need to find other employment...the kind you leave the house for that hopefully has health insurance benefits.
So, I'm leaving the blog up for people who use the links (like me) and I'll be posting new links and occasionally will write a new post when I want to share some helpful info.
So, keep living healthy and check back occasionally!

I'm off to a workshop!

Today I'm heading up to Gloucester, MA for a 3 day painting workshop with Charlotte Wharton and I'm pretty sure I won't have access to a computer.....so you won't hear from me till next week!
It's supposed to be a glorious weekend, so I hope I'll have a chance to get out for some nice walks around Rockport and Gloucester.

The Food Experience

The conclusion of Michael Pollan's book, "In Defense of Food" is that we should "Eat Real food, Mostly Plants, Not too Much" He says that we should eat like the French.
They enjoy their food, don't diet and never snack! They take a long time to eat, enjoying the company as well as the food. They drink wine, eat butter and pastries...what is their secret?

Below are some excerpts from an article about why the French seem to eat more but stay slim"

Despite a diet stuffed with cream, butter, cheese and meat, just 10 per cent of French adults are obese, compared America's colossal 33 per cent. The French live longer too, and have lower death rates from coronary heart disease - in spite of those artery-clogging feasts of cholesterol and saturated fat. This curious observation, dubbed 'the French paradox', has baffled scientists for more than a decade. And it leaves us diet-obsessed Americans baffled.
Instead of an addiction to 'invented foods' full of hydrogenated oils, E numbers and preservatives, the French way, even today, focuses on the careful preparation of unprocessed foods. It's why French women ration themselves to one rich, dark square of real chocolate rather than hogging-out on a preservative-laden, pre-frozen, half-chemical wedge of pseudo-foodo. Snobbery, alongside vanity, is an asset in the war against weight. (Consider, by contrast, the disheartening fact that the market for ready meals in the US grew by 39 per cent from 1999 to 2003; the $3 billion market for 'food bars' is expected to more than double by 2009.)
Eating in France is a social activity. There are several ,but small courses, with plenty of time between courses for the physiological feedback to kick in. In America we eat more pre-prepared foods and ready-meals; we eat fast food both in and outside the home. We have single, large meals, and family members will eat different foods at different times... Fast food is, by definition, eaten fast, so there's no time for that physiological feedback.'

French people, it seems, naturally exercise strict portion control. In their study of why the French remain so much slimmer than Americans, the researchers from the University of Pennsylvania came to the remarkable conclusion that it was because the French ate less. 'Based on observation in Paris and Philadelphia,' they wrote, 'we document that the French portion sizes are smaller in comparable restaurants, in the sizes of individual portions in supermarkets, individual portions specified in cookbooks, and in the prominence of "all-you-can-eat" restaurants in dining guides.'

So actually French people don't eat more and stay slim....they eat less.....but they definitely ENJOY the "food experience" much more.

That is what the book "In Defense of Food" is about.....enjoying the "food experience" again....real food, that is.
So, inspired by his book, I'm going to follow Mr. Pollan's advice. I am going to enjoy my food...my real food...mostly plants!

Food Industry Reform!!!!

Folowing up on the previous post about being more aware of the food we put in our mouths....
Michael Pollan had a great op-ed in the NY Times today.. Here is an excerpt....but go read the whole thing!

TO listen to President Obama’s speech on Wednesday night, or to just about anyone else in the health care debate, you would think that the biggest problem with health care in America is the system itself — perverse incentives, inefficiencies, unnecessary tests and procedures, lack of competition, and greed.

No one disputes that the $2.3 trillion we devote to the health care industry is often spent unwisely, but the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the administration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of chronic disease linked to diet.

That’s why our success in bringing health care costs under control ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three-quarters of health care spending now goes to treat “preventable chronic diseases.” Not all of these diseases are linked to diet — there’s smoking, for instance — but many, if not most, of them are.

We’re spending $147 billion to treat obesity, $116 billion to treat diabetes, and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the so-called Western diet. One recent study estimated that 30 percent of the increase in health care spending over the past 20 years could be attributed to the soaring rate of obesity, a condition that now accounts for nearly a tenth of all spending on health care.

The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the debate over health care. The president has made a few notable allusions to it, and, by planting her vegetable garden on the South Lawn, Michelle Obama has tried to focus our attention on it. Just last month, Mr. Obama talked about putting a farmers’ market in front of the White House, and building new distribution networks to connect local farmers to public schools so that student lunches might offer more fresh produce and fewer Tater Tots. He’s even floated the idea of taxing soda.

But so far, food system reform has not figured in the national conversation about health care reform. And so the government is poised to go on encouraging America’s fast-food diet with its farm policies even as it takes on added responsibilities for covering the medical costs of that diet. To put it more bluntly, the government is putting itself in the uncomfortable position of subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2 diabetes and the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.

He makes a good point...that under the President's health insurance reform, insurance companies can no longer deny or drop someone with a chronic, expensive disease, like type 2 diabetes....so it will be in their best interest ( and their best interest is making a profit) to help fund nutrition education, healthy school lunches and marketing programs to convince kids not to drink soda.....kind of like they did for the anti-smoking campaign.

That’s why it’s easy to imagine the industry throwing its weight behind a soda tax. School lunch reform would become its cause, too, and in time the industry would come to see that the development of regional food systems, which make fresh produce more available and reduce dependence on heavily processed food from far away, could help prevent chronic disease and reduce their costs.

Recently a team of designers from M.I.T. and Columbia was asked by the foundation of the insurer UnitedHealthcare to develop an innovative systems approach to tackling childhood obesity in America. Their conclusion surprised the designers as much as their sponsor: they determined that promoting the concept of a “foodshed” — a diversified, regional food economy — could be the key to improving the American diet.

All of which suggests that passing a health care reform bill, no matter how ambitious, is only the first step in solving our health care crisis. To keep from bankrupting ourselves, we will then have to get to work on improving our health — which means going to work on the American way of eating.

Get this book!!!

We have to be smarter about what we put in our mouths. We have to realize that what we choose to eat has a direct effect on our health. I want to live a long healthy life. If you do too, get this book...today!
The information in here should be enough to convince you to start eating the way we did in Great Grandma's day. Or, go see the movie "Food,Inc."....you'll be running to your nearest farmer's market as you leave the theater.

From a book reviewer:

Food. There's plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it?

Because most of what we're consuming today is not food, and how we're consuming it -- in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone -- is not really eating. Instead of food, we're consuming "edible foodlike substances" -- no longer the products of nature but of food science. Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.

But if real food -- the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food -- stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help. Yet the professionalization of eating has failed to make Americans healthier. Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter while ruining countless numbers of meals.

What's better for you --- whole milk, 2% milk or skim? Is a chicken labeled "free range" good enough to reassure you of its purity? How about "grass fed" beef? About milk: I'll bet most of you voted for reduced or non-fat. But if you'll turn to page 153 of "In Defense of Food," you'll read that processors don't make low-fat dairy products just by removing the fat. To restore the texture --- to make the drink "milky" --- they must add stuff, usually powdered milk. Did you know powdered milk contains oxidized cholesterol, said to be worse for your arteries than plain old cholesterol? And that removing the fat makes it harder for your body to absorb the fat-soluble vitamins that make milk a valuable food in the first place? About chicken and beef: Readers of Pollan's previous book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma", know that "free range" refers to the chicken's access to grass, not whether it actually ventures out of its coop. And all cattle are "grass fed" until they get to the feedlot. The magic words for delightful beef are "grass finished" or "100% grass fed".

I have decided to try to go completely organic in what I eat. I'll have to talk to the spouse about it, and I may need to make separate food, but I am really committed to it. This blog, my project, is not just about losing weight, it is about taking care of my body and my health. The paperback version of this book is $9.00 on Amazon...go there now.

Tip of the Day

The best way to start, after reading the book, is to go to these two sites:

101 cookbooks on facebook...and her blog. Heidi is reknowned for her blog as a great place to learn to cook fresh, healthy food! Her recipes are easy to follow and use ingredients you may not have ever tried before....but the one thing they all have in common is that they are so darn tasty! You'll be eating vegetarian in no time...and you'll be enjoying it!

The double broccolli quinoa is a great way to introduce yourself to this marvelous little grain....try it!!