Day 16 – 85 days to go
When I met my husband it was love at first sight! Little did I know that I had fallen in love with the man who would become my greatest teacher in matters of self-discipline. For Nico, adopting good habits comes natural. Take exercise for instance. Going to gym is not an existentialist question for him. For me it used to be.
To gym or not to gym? That was a question that I seemed to agonize over for years. It wasn’t that I needed to lose weight, but I just knew that sitting the whole day in front of a computer, in meetings, on highways, in airplanes, in front of the tv and in coffee shops wasn’t going to give me the energy and body shape I wanted! But avoiding going to gym seemed to bring out my most creative side.
This had been going on for years. Nico would pick up his little ‘hippy-looking’ patchwork backpack, put on his faded red cotton shorts, grab two towels and head out to the gym. Unlike me, he was never one to worry about appearances. Also, he had long since given up to invite me to come along. He knew the whole list of excuses already: too much work, too tired, not having the right shoes, not having the right colour towels to match my tracksuit, not having a proper swimsuit…
After I finally once joined him, I complained the whole way home about the change rooms. How they were cold and uncomfortable (they weren’t), how I didn’t like to see all those other fat, naked women (they were actually in pretty good shape, but reminded me of my own shortcomings), how I was worried that the air-conditioning would give me a nose infection (like the horrible ones I tend to get in airplanes)…
The fact that Nico never shouted at me:”Enough, already!” is truly a miracle. Instead, he simply stopped asking me to go with him. I was a hopeless case!
The benefits of fitness are extremely well known: we look and feel more glamorous, we have higher energy levels, better fitting clothing, a more dynamic personality and a fit body seems to be a greater attraction to members of the opposite sex. Exercise is also an excellent stress management tool, creates a healthy heart and lungs and builds higher self-confidence. We’ve all heard how a ‘healthy body houses a healthy mind’. This is because physical exercise can help us to cultivate a happier disposition. On top of all that, imagine how good you would feel if you had smoother thighs, stronger calves and could graciously climb all and any stairs and mountains. Best of all, we have no more embarrassing short-breath-moments when trying to catch up with someone else… But none of these excellent arguments seemed to have any impact on my willingness or ability to take up regular physical exercise.
So, understandably, Nico was not only surprised, but also sceptical, when about a year ago I insisted to go with him to gym. “But I thought you don’t like gym?” he asked. It was true: I had never liked going to gym. But something had changed.
Actually, I had changed something. I had changed my mind.
I had decided to ‘choose’ a healthy body. And I just knew from everything I had read and from all the people I’d met, that in order to be really at the peak of your energy or health, you need to work out. And if I wanted to reach my goals I simply had to be fit and healthy.
I had also realized, that there was really no excuse not to take up regular exercise. All excuses were simply in my mind. And once I made up my mind to take up exercise regularly, the excuses simply disappeared! It is true, that a modern gym environment is not my ‘ideal’ space for exercising. I’m more of a ‘yoga girl’. (I don’t like any exercises that make any parts of my body bounce). But I knew that by hitching my exercise programme to that of my man’s, the chances would be so much greater that I actually stuck to it. Simply because for him it is not a question of ‘whether’. He started his regular exercise programme while still in his twenties, and knows that he has back problems when he stops, so all he is interested in is ‘when’ and ‘how often’. Also, he holds me accountable: if I said I would do something, he won’t allow me to back out!
Because of our responsibilities in both the city and a farm, where we assist a charity, it is not always possible to stick to a routine. But then I found another opportunity to make sure that I do exercise: I included an exercise class into the daily routine during the youth workshops that I would lead at the rural development project. In this way, I would be the yoga teacher and this would also ensure that I did not ‘skip’ my training. So this is my next suggestion to you: if you’ve enjoyed a particular type of exercise, try to start a class or form a group in which you are the leader. In this way, your conscience will help you to get going, because you cannot let your students down. By being a rolemodel to others, we are really able to be on ‘best behaviour’ ourselves.
The other opportunity for exercise I use is in my daily life. When I walk, I walk fast. When I climb the stairs in our home, I try to do this as fast as I can. When I do housework, I make a special effort to stretch and bend, while breathing consciously. When I go to meetings, I choose the stairs instead of the lift. When I park my car to go to the shops, I no longer wait until I can get the only parking right next to the door! All these little habits have helped to get my energy and fitness levels up.
Now, if you don’t have a man in your life that you can convince to go to gym or join a tennis club with, and you have no idea how to find a class to teach, then mobilize one or two of your friends with similar schedules to you, and make a point of getting fit together, at least three times each week. Why three times? I’ve found that if I only go two times, my muscles are constantly in ‘beginner’s mode’, so it becomes much more difficult to stay motivated. However, if you do exercise three times each week, you start seeing a difference and this encourages you to even try doing physical exercise more often. And if you don’t have any friends, see taking up a form of sport or exercise as an opportunity to make some friends again!
There are so many different exercise options to choose from. One will definitely suit you best. But to get started, the only ‘muscle’ that you need to move is inside your brain: change your mind and choose to become physically fit!
Ok – got to go – am off to yoga class!
PS: By working from home you can really plan to fit your exercise schedule into your program, instead of trying to make it fit around your employer’s program. For an excellent Internet Business opportunity, visit http://www.reinedelarose.com
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Day 15 - Take control of your Energy - A Fat Surprise!
Day 15 – 86 days to go
Health is Wealth. Anyone who has nursed a cancer patient or who has suffered from a debilitating illness themselves will wholeheartedly agree. Over the years I’ve had many opportunities to observe the behaviour of very successful people, when they became ill. I also know my own behaviour when a migraine strikes! When we’re sick, nothing much else matters any more. This is why I encourage everyone to better understand how the food that we fuel our body with influences our wellbeing. In doing so, it may come as a surprise to many that there are, in fact, good fats that we need to stay healthy.
I can’t remember ever being told as a child that there was ‘good fat’ and ‘bad fat’. In fact, I can’t remember being told ever anything about ‘healthy food’ or ‘unhealthy food’. This is probably because, growing up on a farm where practically everything we ate was ‘home grown’ and sweets and white bread were small luxuries for special occasions, this was not at all a topic that ever came up for discussion.
It is only when I started becoming responsible for my own meals as a student that I realized the incredible impact that food was having on my mind, my body, because of that, even on my relationships and ultimately, on my spirit. Instead of knowing that I needed to look at food as a fuel and not as an emotional crutch, I found emotional comfort in sweet and fatty foods in times when I was generally feeling uncomfortable in my skin.
I did not understand that sugar is addictive or that fat can have a good or bad impact on your body. Sure, I knew eating too much fatty foods resulted in skin outbreaks and overweight, but for the rest I simply did not have the facts about fat, because no one spoke about them.
I do remember that the word ‘cholesterol’ suddenly became fashionable in the 70’s. And that, in addition to the home-made butter that my mom made as a matter of course, a pretty looking plastic container of soft margarine made its regular appearance on our table. Because it was good for the heart, as the many advertisements on television were quick to explain.
It was only in the 80’s when I discovered the book that has since become my ‘guideline’ on eating, ‘Fit for Life’, by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond. I followed the advice given in the book and have benefitted ever since. At the time when I found the book, I was in my early 20’s and had increased by three dress sizes from my normal size 10 to a size 16. Also, my skin was a constant source of embarrassment to me, because it was never without a spot or three. This, and some other emotional issues, had resulted in me withdrawing from my usual circle of friends, who at the time were all showing off engagement rings and planning lavish weddings. This was a time during which I felt very lonely. And I felt that being fat was really the main culprit for my sudden lack of confidence.
My personal experience in finding the ‘Fit for Life’ book, then actually seriously following the advice because it made so much sense to me, really emphasized for me the fact that we human beings can take knowledge we read about it and apply it to our lives successfully! When I left school, I started studying medicine, because since I was a toddler I had wanted to ‘help people’ and being a doctor seemed like the ‘ultimate’ way of helping people. But during my time as a student I became so disillusioned because of the arrogant and materialistic attitude of so many of my lecturers and fellow-students towards patients, that I lost all interest in pursuing this field of study. While initially, I was rather confused about which path my life should take instead, I have never regretted this, because I instinctively felt that much of what I was being taught at medical school was very biased towards the ‘material’ and ‘physical’, while I knew that there was so much more to human wellbeing.
Don’t understand me wrongly: I am sincerely grateful for every medical doctor and every progress made by the pharmaceutical industry, to help minimize so many of the diseases that used to kill or deform millions of human beings over the ages, especially children and for life-saving surgery. But for me personally, I was keen to take a ‘broader view’ of helping people in a more holistic manner. So when I found myself at a loss in having become a victim of over-eating, especially unhealthy foods, it was an incredible relief to be empowered through the knowledge offered by the book ‘Fit for Life’. Obesity is simply not a problem you can fix with a pill, no matter how many claims are made to the contrary. The only thing that really works, is changing our eating habits. Following the advice in ‘Fit for Life’, I lost 8 of the 13kgs of pure fat that had bulged my body out of shape and the remaining 5kgs I lost slowly over a longer period. For the last 20 years since then my weight has been stable, more or less, and best of all, my skin just went back to ‘normal’.
One of the things that this way of eating taught me was to discern between ‘good fat’ and ‘bad fat’. While it is practically impossible to avoid ‘bad fat’ completely, because so much of it is hidden in processed foods, a great rule of thumb is to cook or bake ‘from scratch’ at home, instead of relying on ‘convenience’ foods, so that you are the one that chooses which fat to add to your food. But when you visit people or go out to eat in a restaurant, don’t bore everyone around you with tales of ‘good fats’ and ‘bad fats’. Just enjoy whatever you’ve chosen from the menu. Our bodies are able to deal with lots of bad food, as long as we eat it in moderation.
What I also learnt is that ‘good fat’ is actually critically important in your diet, because our bodies need this and cannot produce it on its own. In ‘good fat’ you find essential fatty acids (EFAs), namely linoleic acid and alpha-linoleic acid, which your body needs. Also, fat carries vitamins A, D, E, and K - known as the fat-soluble vitamins - into and around the body. Fat is necessary for keeping your skin healthy, making sure babies and kids develop proper eyesight and brain development. A layer of fat is also positioned around all our nerves in the body, keeping us calm and better able to handle stressful situations. This is why skinny people with exceptionally low body fat are often perceived as ‘nervous’.
So why is fat seen as ‘Public Enemy Nr. 1’ when it comes to obesity? Because it has more than twice the energy (calories or kilojoules) per gram than either carbohydrate or protein. So even a small amount of fat can cause you to gain weight, especially if you’re not used to moving a lot. But similarly, eating too much protein and carbohydrates can cause too much body fat, even if you cut out dietary fat completely!
Over-eating anything is what makes us fat, not any particular food. Stuffing ourselves with too much food will always have an impact on the scale.
However, in looking at ‘bad fat’, there is a well-documented link between fat intake and heart disease and stroke risk. If you eat a lot of saturated fat (animal fat) and trans fat (processed fat - hydrogenised) this may increase the amount of cholesterol in your blood, which in turn causes your arteries to clog. Cholesterol sits like a layer on the inside of our arteries, narrowing the opening through which oxygen-rich blood can flow to the heart, muscles, organs and brain. As a result, the body becomes sluggish and the brain also struggles to function at ‘full power’. This is why it is important to reduce fat that causes cholesterol levels to rise, but continue to use ‘good fats’ that are necessary for the body.
This means that when it comes to the fat we eat, quantity and quality count. So avoid the following fats as much as possible:
• Saturated fat found in meats, butter, cream, or ice cream, and other foods with animal fat. Highly saturated vegetable fats include coconut oil, palm, palm kernel oil, and cocoa butter are also unhealthy. They're widely used in packaged foods including milk chocolate, cookies, crackers, and snack chips.
We don’t need to eat saturated fat because our bodies make everything that it needs. But you don’t have to avoid them completely, just make sure it is a fraction of all the fat you eat.
• Trans fat, a man-made fat found in some margarines or packaged baked.
Similar to saturated fat, trans fat can cause your arteries to get clogged up. But what makes it worse, is that it has been linked to certain cancers, including breast and colorectal. Most of the trans fat we eat is as a result of a process called ‘hydrogenation’. Sadly, hydrogenation – meaning adding hydrogen to oil resulting in some of the unsaturated fat in the oil to becomes saturated. While this process converts oil into a firmer, tastier product with a longer shelf life, partially hydrogenated fat -- trans fat – is harmful to humans. As a result it is gradually being removed from most packaged foods. But it's still found in some stick margarine, shortening, fast food, cookies, crackers, granola bars, and microwave popcorn. So check those labels!
All this really means is that try to avoid saturated and trans-fats, and instead, include so-called ‘unsaturated’ fats in your diet, because they can reduce the risk of clogged arteries.
While foods tend to contain a mixture of fats, monounsaturated fat is the primary fat found in:
• olive, canola, and sesame oils
• avocado
• nuts, such as almonds, cashews, and pistachios; peanuts and peanut butter
Polyunsaturated fat is prevalent in:
• corn, cottonseed, and safflower oils
• sunflower seeds and sunflower oil
• flaxseed and flaxseed oil
• soybeans and soybean oil
• certain types of tub margarine
• seafood
There is one type of fat that is really good for you. This is called omega-3 fat. This fat is found only in seafood and is apparently very important for a child’s brain development, eyesight and heart health. Human bodies can make this type of fat from alpha-linolenic acid, found in foods such as walnuts and flax, but research seems to prove that less than 10% is actually converted. As a result, it is a good idea to eat fatty, cold-water fish, such as salmon, sardines, and tuna, all of which are rich in omega-3 fats.
Overall, there are three easy ways to avoid bad fats, including trans fat:
1. Avoid ‘convenience’ or processed foods when possible. Keep them in stock for an emergency, but as a rule, cook and bake ‘from scratch’.
2. Eat sources of protein that are ‘lean’, such as, low-fat dairy foods, whole grains, legumes -- such as garbanzo beans and black beans -- and fruits and vegetables.
3. Use healthy oils such as olive, canola, and sunflower oil, and small amounts of tub margarine for cooking and flavoring foods.
Also, keep an eye open for unusual oils like sesame, grapeseed and avocado and start experimenting with them. Usually, you will use much less of these oils, while still getting fantastic taste results.
PS: Most of the facts in this article I found validated by the informative website http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/nutrition-labels-9/good-fats-bad-fats?page=3.
PS: This section on fat is the last one about food in the 100-Day Action Plan series. The next section is all about keeping fit!
PS: By becoming more conscious of what you eat, you can really release the energy to fulfil your dreams. By starting an online business, you can get better control over your time. With these two critical steps you can start shaping your life towards more love, greater beauty and increasing abundance. For a highly professional ‘virtual franchise’ opportunity for an Internet Business, visit http://www.reinedelarose.com.
Health is Wealth. Anyone who has nursed a cancer patient or who has suffered from a debilitating illness themselves will wholeheartedly agree. Over the years I’ve had many opportunities to observe the behaviour of very successful people, when they became ill. I also know my own behaviour when a migraine strikes! When we’re sick, nothing much else matters any more. This is why I encourage everyone to better understand how the food that we fuel our body with influences our wellbeing. In doing so, it may come as a surprise to many that there are, in fact, good fats that we need to stay healthy.
I can’t remember ever being told as a child that there was ‘good fat’ and ‘bad fat’. In fact, I can’t remember being told ever anything about ‘healthy food’ or ‘unhealthy food’. This is probably because, growing up on a farm where practically everything we ate was ‘home grown’ and sweets and white bread were small luxuries for special occasions, this was not at all a topic that ever came up for discussion.
It is only when I started becoming responsible for my own meals as a student that I realized the incredible impact that food was having on my mind, my body, because of that, even on my relationships and ultimately, on my spirit. Instead of knowing that I needed to look at food as a fuel and not as an emotional crutch, I found emotional comfort in sweet and fatty foods in times when I was generally feeling uncomfortable in my skin.
I did not understand that sugar is addictive or that fat can have a good or bad impact on your body. Sure, I knew eating too much fatty foods resulted in skin outbreaks and overweight, but for the rest I simply did not have the facts about fat, because no one spoke about them.
I do remember that the word ‘cholesterol’ suddenly became fashionable in the 70’s. And that, in addition to the home-made butter that my mom made as a matter of course, a pretty looking plastic container of soft margarine made its regular appearance on our table. Because it was good for the heart, as the many advertisements on television were quick to explain.
It was only in the 80’s when I discovered the book that has since become my ‘guideline’ on eating, ‘Fit for Life’, by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond. I followed the advice given in the book and have benefitted ever since. At the time when I found the book, I was in my early 20’s and had increased by three dress sizes from my normal size 10 to a size 16. Also, my skin was a constant source of embarrassment to me, because it was never without a spot or three. This, and some other emotional issues, had resulted in me withdrawing from my usual circle of friends, who at the time were all showing off engagement rings and planning lavish weddings. This was a time during which I felt very lonely. And I felt that being fat was really the main culprit for my sudden lack of confidence.
My personal experience in finding the ‘Fit for Life’ book, then actually seriously following the advice because it made so much sense to me, really emphasized for me the fact that we human beings can take knowledge we read about it and apply it to our lives successfully! When I left school, I started studying medicine, because since I was a toddler I had wanted to ‘help people’ and being a doctor seemed like the ‘ultimate’ way of helping people. But during my time as a student I became so disillusioned because of the arrogant and materialistic attitude of so many of my lecturers and fellow-students towards patients, that I lost all interest in pursuing this field of study. While initially, I was rather confused about which path my life should take instead, I have never regretted this, because I instinctively felt that much of what I was being taught at medical school was very biased towards the ‘material’ and ‘physical’, while I knew that there was so much more to human wellbeing.
Don’t understand me wrongly: I am sincerely grateful for every medical doctor and every progress made by the pharmaceutical industry, to help minimize so many of the diseases that used to kill or deform millions of human beings over the ages, especially children and for life-saving surgery. But for me personally, I was keen to take a ‘broader view’ of helping people in a more holistic manner. So when I found myself at a loss in having become a victim of over-eating, especially unhealthy foods, it was an incredible relief to be empowered through the knowledge offered by the book ‘Fit for Life’. Obesity is simply not a problem you can fix with a pill, no matter how many claims are made to the contrary. The only thing that really works, is changing our eating habits. Following the advice in ‘Fit for Life’, I lost 8 of the 13kgs of pure fat that had bulged my body out of shape and the remaining 5kgs I lost slowly over a longer period. For the last 20 years since then my weight has been stable, more or less, and best of all, my skin just went back to ‘normal’.
One of the things that this way of eating taught me was to discern between ‘good fat’ and ‘bad fat’. While it is practically impossible to avoid ‘bad fat’ completely, because so much of it is hidden in processed foods, a great rule of thumb is to cook or bake ‘from scratch’ at home, instead of relying on ‘convenience’ foods, so that you are the one that chooses which fat to add to your food. But when you visit people or go out to eat in a restaurant, don’t bore everyone around you with tales of ‘good fats’ and ‘bad fats’. Just enjoy whatever you’ve chosen from the menu. Our bodies are able to deal with lots of bad food, as long as we eat it in moderation.
What I also learnt is that ‘good fat’ is actually critically important in your diet, because our bodies need this and cannot produce it on its own. In ‘good fat’ you find essential fatty acids (EFAs), namely linoleic acid and alpha-linoleic acid, which your body needs. Also, fat carries vitamins A, D, E, and K - known as the fat-soluble vitamins - into and around the body. Fat is necessary for keeping your skin healthy, making sure babies and kids develop proper eyesight and brain development. A layer of fat is also positioned around all our nerves in the body, keeping us calm and better able to handle stressful situations. This is why skinny people with exceptionally low body fat are often perceived as ‘nervous’.
So why is fat seen as ‘Public Enemy Nr. 1’ when it comes to obesity? Because it has more than twice the energy (calories or kilojoules) per gram than either carbohydrate or protein. So even a small amount of fat can cause you to gain weight, especially if you’re not used to moving a lot. But similarly, eating too much protein and carbohydrates can cause too much body fat, even if you cut out dietary fat completely!
Over-eating anything is what makes us fat, not any particular food. Stuffing ourselves with too much food will always have an impact on the scale.
However, in looking at ‘bad fat’, there is a well-documented link between fat intake and heart disease and stroke risk. If you eat a lot of saturated fat (animal fat) and trans fat (processed fat - hydrogenised) this may increase the amount of cholesterol in your blood, which in turn causes your arteries to clog. Cholesterol sits like a layer on the inside of our arteries, narrowing the opening through which oxygen-rich blood can flow to the heart, muscles, organs and brain. As a result, the body becomes sluggish and the brain also struggles to function at ‘full power’. This is why it is important to reduce fat that causes cholesterol levels to rise, but continue to use ‘good fats’ that are necessary for the body.
This means that when it comes to the fat we eat, quantity and quality count. So avoid the following fats as much as possible:
• Saturated fat found in meats, butter, cream, or ice cream, and other foods with animal fat. Highly saturated vegetable fats include coconut oil, palm, palm kernel oil, and cocoa butter are also unhealthy. They're widely used in packaged foods including milk chocolate, cookies, crackers, and snack chips.
We don’t need to eat saturated fat because our bodies make everything that it needs. But you don’t have to avoid them completely, just make sure it is a fraction of all the fat you eat.
• Trans fat, a man-made fat found in some margarines or packaged baked.
Similar to saturated fat, trans fat can cause your arteries to get clogged up. But what makes it worse, is that it has been linked to certain cancers, including breast and colorectal. Most of the trans fat we eat is as a result of a process called ‘hydrogenation’. Sadly, hydrogenation – meaning adding hydrogen to oil resulting in some of the unsaturated fat in the oil to becomes saturated. While this process converts oil into a firmer, tastier product with a longer shelf life, partially hydrogenated fat -- trans fat – is harmful to humans. As a result it is gradually being removed from most packaged foods. But it's still found in some stick margarine, shortening, fast food, cookies, crackers, granola bars, and microwave popcorn. So check those labels!
All this really means is that try to avoid saturated and trans-fats, and instead, include so-called ‘unsaturated’ fats in your diet, because they can reduce the risk of clogged arteries.
While foods tend to contain a mixture of fats, monounsaturated fat is the primary fat found in:
• olive, canola, and sesame oils
• avocado
• nuts, such as almonds, cashews, and pistachios; peanuts and peanut butter
Polyunsaturated fat is prevalent in:
• corn, cottonseed, and safflower oils
• sunflower seeds and sunflower oil
• flaxseed and flaxseed oil
• soybeans and soybean oil
• certain types of tub margarine
• seafood
There is one type of fat that is really good for you. This is called omega-3 fat. This fat is found only in seafood and is apparently very important for a child’s brain development, eyesight and heart health. Human bodies can make this type of fat from alpha-linolenic acid, found in foods such as walnuts and flax, but research seems to prove that less than 10% is actually converted. As a result, it is a good idea to eat fatty, cold-water fish, such as salmon, sardines, and tuna, all of which are rich in omega-3 fats.
Overall, there are three easy ways to avoid bad fats, including trans fat:
1. Avoid ‘convenience’ or processed foods when possible. Keep them in stock for an emergency, but as a rule, cook and bake ‘from scratch’.
2. Eat sources of protein that are ‘lean’, such as, low-fat dairy foods, whole grains, legumes -- such as garbanzo beans and black beans -- and fruits and vegetables.
3. Use healthy oils such as olive, canola, and sunflower oil, and small amounts of tub margarine for cooking and flavoring foods.
Also, keep an eye open for unusual oils like sesame, grapeseed and avocado and start experimenting with them. Usually, you will use much less of these oils, while still getting fantastic taste results.
PS: Most of the facts in this article I found validated by the informative website http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/nutrition-labels-9/good-fats-bad-fats?page=3.
PS: This section on fat is the last one about food in the 100-Day Action Plan series. The next section is all about keeping fit!
PS: By becoming more conscious of what you eat, you can really release the energy to fulfil your dreams. By starting an online business, you can get better control over your time. With these two critical steps you can start shaping your life towards more love, greater beauty and increasing abundance. For a highly professional ‘virtual franchise’ opportunity for an Internet Business, visit http://www.reinedelarose.com.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Day 14 - Take control of your Energy - Change your diet, change your life!
Day 14 – 87 days left
It’s a pity that human babies don’t arrive with a ‘user manual’ in this world! Every piece of equipment we buy comes with a ‘user manual’, so that it may be cared for appropriately. But babies don’t: they are completely at the mercy of whoever God sent them to. Or are we overlooking something? Read on to follow me on a ‘mind-race’ from breastfeeding, to the time when women were considered part of the ‘spoils of war’ to right across the vegetable garden!
Looking at technical equipment, the more sophisticated it gets, the more ‘intuitive’ it is and the less you need a user manual. Since human beings are the ‘crown of creation’ they are obviously the most sophisticated piece of ‘equipment’ ever created by anyone. So maybe it makes sense that they are handled intuitively, and not with a user manual. The Afrikaans language which is a European language, grown on African soil, has a way of describing things in very down-to-earth idioms. So the question of how to care for a human baby, is answered with: ’Keep wet at the top and dry at the bottom’…
While, in principle, this is true, in practice the ‘what to feed a human’ is a critical part of the equation. ‘Nature’s way’ is really ‘God’s Way’. Just looking at mother’s milk and reading at how carefully this has been formulated, makes me stand in awe of God’s incredible wisdom. So, in principle, feeding the human baby is not the challenge: God generally delivers the food together with each baby. Even more fascinating: because mother’s milk feeds the baby in a different manner than formula does, babies feeding from the breast need milk more often than those feeding from the bottle – so in this way God is ensuring that human babies get a lot of intimate attention from their moms, which in turn helps develop their brains too!
But what about grown up humans? What were we designed to eat?
I only realized later in life that the Bible is really God’s ‘User Manual’ for human beings and that, if we refer to it often, it actually gives us an incredible amount of information on how to lead healthy and successful lives. Just looking at the story about when human beings were created, after telling them what is expected from them, in Genesis 1 verse 29 God explains what they should eat: seed-bearing plants and fruit with seed or in modern shorthand ‘grains, nuts, fruit and veggies.’ I had never taken the Old Testament of the Bible with its many laws very seriously, since as a Lutheran Christian my focus has always been on the New Testament, on the ‘summary’ of all God’s Laws – love God above all, love your neighbour as you love yourself – and the gospel of salvation through grace. But as I have learnt to better understand how to read the Bible, I realize that in the Old Testament there is so much wise and wonderful knowledge that can be applied to our benefit, even in this modern day and age. I’ve also learnt that the various translations of the Bible are always ‘coloured’ by the culture and times for which they were intended, and that often this ‘cultural bias’ results in some misinterpretation, which becomes clearer when one starts comparing different translations.
‘What on earth does this have to do with learning to master your energy?’ you may ask!
Everything, really.
Because in focusing our attention on the ‘ideal’ menu for human beings, God is pointing us right in the very first chapter of the Bible to the foods that scientifically have been proven to have the most easily digestible vitamins, minerals and other nutrients for the human body. He knew that having food is one of the most important things in a human beings life.
Since that time, human nutrition has always been of main concern throughout the ages. In times of hunger and war, just about anything would go. In times of peace and abundance, the focus would be on weight-loss and the negative impact of food on health. With mass media shaping our opinions of beauty since the advent of the 20th Century, and industrialization focusing on processing and producing ‘fast-food’ food for the masses, the focus during the previous century was more on either marketing highly processed or ‘fast’ foods, or on remedying the ill effects of this type of diet through ‘scientifically researched’ chemicals sold as ‘diet meals’ or ‘meal replacements’. To counter the effect of this artificial diet, vitamin and mineral supplements have hit the supermarket shelves in a big way. While this certainly makes sense if our diet consists mainly of artificial and processed foods, these pills are a sign that we are moving further and further away from ‘nature’s way’.
As in all the ages before our own, war had a most devastating impact on human behaviour. After millions of men were forced into war and too often lost their lives in the two World Wars in the first half of the 20th Century, women were drawn into the workplace, producing army supplies. Once the wars were over, these women were instrumental in rebuilding their countries, because their husbands, fathers, brothers and lovers had fallen in the wars. Compared to the centuries past, where women were generally considered ‘loot’ by the victors of war and often dragged off into faraway lands by their conquerors, this mass modern exodus of women away from their households and families into paid employment has certainly brought more power and independence to women. But when we look at the statistics of broken homes, ‘fatherless’ children, dysfunctional families, deserted elderly in old-age homes, increasingly obese kids, teenagers that ‘escape their life’ into media and drugs, and other issues our modern society is faced with, it is easy to see that throughout the 20th Century Western society was still recovering from the ill effects of those two terrible wars.
But now we are in a new era. We women can raise our heads from our working desks or factory production lines and ask ourselves the question: ‘Quo vadis?’ (Where to from here?).
And that is why I started writing this series on ‘Taking control of your life’ for women. And it is the reason why I am starting this series by focusing on the first basic human need: food.
The impact of our food on our wellbeing is immense!
By committing to eating as many fresh fruit and vegetables as we can, we are able to start turning the wheel away from the self-destructive and environmentally destructive habits of the 20th Century towards a more conscious lifestyle to create more love, greater beauty and abundance in the 21st Century.
I am just comparing my lifestyle with that of my mother’s, my grandmothers’ and my one great-grandmother that I still had the privilege to encounter as a small girl. They were ‘20th Century’ women who had managed to avoid the ‘draft’ into the workplace and were proud managers of large farm-based households.
I certainly have a life which has given me fantastic opportunities for self-development, but while I was travelling the world through lucrative consulting assignments, I increasingly felt that there is a missing piece: the homemaker piece. I associate ‘abundance’ with the extensive vegetable gardens, fruit orchards and home-baked bread and cakes that I remember from these women’s lives. No visitor would leave their homes empty-handed: fresh vegetables or fruit in season, plant seedlings, freshly cut flowers, a loaf of home-baked bread, a bottle of home-made jam…
And then I ask myself the question: why can’t I have both – the fascinating, successful career AND create the abundance these amazing homemakers did?
Someone once said:”To change a person, change their diet.” We all have the ability to ‘shift our shape’ towards a new way of being. Changing our diets to replace some of the stodgy carbohydrates and meat overload to more fresh vegetables – raw or lightly cooked –gives a huge boost to our energy levels! Reminding our minds that veggies are chock-full of vitamins and minerals that help to maintain our organs, brain and muscles, is a good way of convincing ourselves to take this step. Teaching our tongues to loooove vegetables is a great way of waking up our consciousness in general. And by ‘waking up’ in this way, we may just see the door open to a new lifestyle which includes everything we have ever dreamt about…
I’m not saying that we all need to go back to rural lifestyles and plant our own vegetables. No, if we would just put more of those fresh veggies into our supermarket trolleys and walk past the canned and processed food sections, that already would be a huge improvement on our lifestyles, because it forces us to focus on the food we put into our bodies, since we have to prepare it personally.
So in starting to take control of your life, start to take control of your diet. Make sure that as fruit forms your breakfast, vegetables form the largest part of your other two main meals every day. You’ll be surprised at the snowball effect this will have on the other areas of your life!
PS: Release yourself from the bondage of commuting to work on congested high-ways, which simply is a waste of your precious time and energy! Instead, use the Internet to start a business which you can do from home, thereby having more time to care for your loved ones, your home and your garden. Thousands of people worldwide are waking up to this new possibility, starting an Internet Business on a part-time basis, while still working, until they earn enough to say ‘goodbye’ to their boss. Listen to some of their stories on http://www.reinedelarose.com.
It’s a pity that human babies don’t arrive with a ‘user manual’ in this world! Every piece of equipment we buy comes with a ‘user manual’, so that it may be cared for appropriately. But babies don’t: they are completely at the mercy of whoever God sent them to. Or are we overlooking something? Read on to follow me on a ‘mind-race’ from breastfeeding, to the time when women were considered part of the ‘spoils of war’ to right across the vegetable garden!
Looking at technical equipment, the more sophisticated it gets, the more ‘intuitive’ it is and the less you need a user manual. Since human beings are the ‘crown of creation’ they are obviously the most sophisticated piece of ‘equipment’ ever created by anyone. So maybe it makes sense that they are handled intuitively, and not with a user manual. The Afrikaans language which is a European language, grown on African soil, has a way of describing things in very down-to-earth idioms. So the question of how to care for a human baby, is answered with: ’Keep wet at the top and dry at the bottom’…
While, in principle, this is true, in practice the ‘what to feed a human’ is a critical part of the equation. ‘Nature’s way’ is really ‘God’s Way’. Just looking at mother’s milk and reading at how carefully this has been formulated, makes me stand in awe of God’s incredible wisdom. So, in principle, feeding the human baby is not the challenge: God generally delivers the food together with each baby. Even more fascinating: because mother’s milk feeds the baby in a different manner than formula does, babies feeding from the breast need milk more often than those feeding from the bottle – so in this way God is ensuring that human babies get a lot of intimate attention from their moms, which in turn helps develop their brains too!
But what about grown up humans? What were we designed to eat?
I only realized later in life that the Bible is really God’s ‘User Manual’ for human beings and that, if we refer to it often, it actually gives us an incredible amount of information on how to lead healthy and successful lives. Just looking at the story about when human beings were created, after telling them what is expected from them, in Genesis 1 verse 29 God explains what they should eat: seed-bearing plants and fruit with seed or in modern shorthand ‘grains, nuts, fruit and veggies.’ I had never taken the Old Testament of the Bible with its many laws very seriously, since as a Lutheran Christian my focus has always been on the New Testament, on the ‘summary’ of all God’s Laws – love God above all, love your neighbour as you love yourself – and the gospel of salvation through grace. But as I have learnt to better understand how to read the Bible, I realize that in the Old Testament there is so much wise and wonderful knowledge that can be applied to our benefit, even in this modern day and age. I’ve also learnt that the various translations of the Bible are always ‘coloured’ by the culture and times for which they were intended, and that often this ‘cultural bias’ results in some misinterpretation, which becomes clearer when one starts comparing different translations.
‘What on earth does this have to do with learning to master your energy?’ you may ask!
Everything, really.
Because in focusing our attention on the ‘ideal’ menu for human beings, God is pointing us right in the very first chapter of the Bible to the foods that scientifically have been proven to have the most easily digestible vitamins, minerals and other nutrients for the human body. He knew that having food is one of the most important things in a human beings life.
Since that time, human nutrition has always been of main concern throughout the ages. In times of hunger and war, just about anything would go. In times of peace and abundance, the focus would be on weight-loss and the negative impact of food on health. With mass media shaping our opinions of beauty since the advent of the 20th Century, and industrialization focusing on processing and producing ‘fast-food’ food for the masses, the focus during the previous century was more on either marketing highly processed or ‘fast’ foods, or on remedying the ill effects of this type of diet through ‘scientifically researched’ chemicals sold as ‘diet meals’ or ‘meal replacements’. To counter the effect of this artificial diet, vitamin and mineral supplements have hit the supermarket shelves in a big way. While this certainly makes sense if our diet consists mainly of artificial and processed foods, these pills are a sign that we are moving further and further away from ‘nature’s way’.
As in all the ages before our own, war had a most devastating impact on human behaviour. After millions of men were forced into war and too often lost their lives in the two World Wars in the first half of the 20th Century, women were drawn into the workplace, producing army supplies. Once the wars were over, these women were instrumental in rebuilding their countries, because their husbands, fathers, brothers and lovers had fallen in the wars. Compared to the centuries past, where women were generally considered ‘loot’ by the victors of war and often dragged off into faraway lands by their conquerors, this mass modern exodus of women away from their households and families into paid employment has certainly brought more power and independence to women. But when we look at the statistics of broken homes, ‘fatherless’ children, dysfunctional families, deserted elderly in old-age homes, increasingly obese kids, teenagers that ‘escape their life’ into media and drugs, and other issues our modern society is faced with, it is easy to see that throughout the 20th Century Western society was still recovering from the ill effects of those two terrible wars.
But now we are in a new era. We women can raise our heads from our working desks or factory production lines and ask ourselves the question: ‘Quo vadis?’ (Where to from here?).
And that is why I started writing this series on ‘Taking control of your life’ for women. And it is the reason why I am starting this series by focusing on the first basic human need: food.
The impact of our food on our wellbeing is immense!
By committing to eating as many fresh fruit and vegetables as we can, we are able to start turning the wheel away from the self-destructive and environmentally destructive habits of the 20th Century towards a more conscious lifestyle to create more love, greater beauty and abundance in the 21st Century.
I am just comparing my lifestyle with that of my mother’s, my grandmothers’ and my one great-grandmother that I still had the privilege to encounter as a small girl. They were ‘20th Century’ women who had managed to avoid the ‘draft’ into the workplace and were proud managers of large farm-based households.
I certainly have a life which has given me fantastic opportunities for self-development, but while I was travelling the world through lucrative consulting assignments, I increasingly felt that there is a missing piece: the homemaker piece. I associate ‘abundance’ with the extensive vegetable gardens, fruit orchards and home-baked bread and cakes that I remember from these women’s lives. No visitor would leave their homes empty-handed: fresh vegetables or fruit in season, plant seedlings, freshly cut flowers, a loaf of home-baked bread, a bottle of home-made jam…
And then I ask myself the question: why can’t I have both – the fascinating, successful career AND create the abundance these amazing homemakers did?
Someone once said:”To change a person, change their diet.” We all have the ability to ‘shift our shape’ towards a new way of being. Changing our diets to replace some of the stodgy carbohydrates and meat overload to more fresh vegetables – raw or lightly cooked –gives a huge boost to our energy levels! Reminding our minds that veggies are chock-full of vitamins and minerals that help to maintain our organs, brain and muscles, is a good way of convincing ourselves to take this step. Teaching our tongues to loooove vegetables is a great way of waking up our consciousness in general. And by ‘waking up’ in this way, we may just see the door open to a new lifestyle which includes everything we have ever dreamt about…
I’m not saying that we all need to go back to rural lifestyles and plant our own vegetables. No, if we would just put more of those fresh veggies into our supermarket trolleys and walk past the canned and processed food sections, that already would be a huge improvement on our lifestyles, because it forces us to focus on the food we put into our bodies, since we have to prepare it personally.
So in starting to take control of your life, start to take control of your diet. Make sure that as fruit forms your breakfast, vegetables form the largest part of your other two main meals every day. You’ll be surprised at the snowball effect this will have on the other areas of your life!
PS: Release yourself from the bondage of commuting to work on congested high-ways, which simply is a waste of your precious time and energy! Instead, use the Internet to start a business which you can do from home, thereby having more time to care for your loved ones, your home and your garden. Thousands of people worldwide are waking up to this new possibility, starting an Internet Business on a part-time basis, while still working, until they earn enough to say ‘goodbye’ to their boss. Listen to some of their stories on http://www.reinedelarose.com.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Day 13 - Take control of your Energy - The Better Protein
Day 13 – 88 Days left
When someone says ‘Protein’ chances are that you are thinking ‘meat’. And yes, meat has become the main source of protein in diets influenced by Western culture. But at what cost? And why? There are some fascinating findings about the impact that high meat consumption has on our society and on our earth. Fortunately, there are lots of other sources of protein. The challenge is simply to start introducing them into your diet for variety. You don’t have to give up meat. Just eat less of it and substitute it with other protein, coming from plants.
According to some of the latest research available, livestock production (cattle, sheep, chickens, pigs, etc.) contributes to the world’s most pressing environmental problems, including global warming, land degradation, air and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity. In fact, it is estimated that livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a bigger share than that of transport. Apparently, expanding population and incomes worldwide, along with changing food choices, are causing a fast increase in demand for meat, milk and eggs. Now already, grazing for cattle uses a quarter (26%) of the land surface of the Earth easily accessible by humans ! Think about what that means as populations increase. Existing land available for human settlements is not enough. So then more forests are cut down, which in turn affects our environment negatively as well. While this problem may not be visible to us, because we’re living in cities, it is important for all of us because it affects our environment. In addition, about one third of all land used for agriculture is used to grow feed crops for livestock. On top of everything, about 70% of land in dry areas of the world which is used by cattle, goats or other livestock has become degraded because of overgrazing, which results in soil erosion. This means that even the land that used to be good for grazing or planting, is slowly becoming desert.
Scientists estimate that livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a bigger share than that of all transport (cars, SUVs, buses, trains, ships) combined. For those of you who don’t know this: greenhouse gas is the type of gas that is heating up the atmosphere of the world and changes our climate. Also, the sheer quantity of animals being raised for us humans to eat also poses a threat of the Earth’s biodiversity. About 20% of all animals alive are already livestock, and the land area they now occupy was once habitat for wildlife. By increasing livestock, to meet our human demand for meat, we are reducing the land available to wild animals.
Another environmental reason why we need to increase the amount of plant protein we use, compared to animal protein, is that livestock uses so much more water to produce the same amount of protein, than plants like soya and beans, that are high in protein, do.
I thought I’d add this information to this piece on protein, just to give everyone a bigger picture! Also, I want you to understand that – apart from the negative effect that too much animal protein has on our health – this is the reason why I encourage everyone to shift slowly to using more and more plant protein.
I’m not saying that you must stop eating meat. All I am saying is that we women have a huge impact on the food choices of our families. So we can reverse the negative impact of a diet high in animal proteins over the next couple of years, to help Earth and our bodies recover.
The meat industry is currently under a lot of pressure, because of the criticism against it, both because of the impact of cattle on increasing greenhouse gases, as well as because of the killer-diseases afflicting people living the ‘MacDonald’ lifestyle. Plant and animal protein are both made of essential amino acids, but diets high in animal proteins have been linked to an increase in cancer, cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis. However, you don’t need animals to get plenty of protein in your diet. There are plenty of plants that can be eaten to ensure you get ample amounts of protein each day.
As women who want to create a world where there is more love, greater beauty and more abundance, it should not be our intention to cause strain on anyone. However, if we slowly but surely change our shopping habits to include one portion of animal protein less and instead add one portion of plant protein into our shopping baskets every week, we are informing the market to change. In this way, cattle and other livestock farmers will have time to shift their production to include other products over time, without causing them economic distress.
I’m not going to talk about the forms of animal protein available in detail. You know them all: meat, chicken, fish, eggs and dairy products like cheese. Instead, I’m going to focus on talking about plant protein, because this is an exciting new discovery for many of us!
Soybeans
Soya is known to have the highest content of protein per 100g, even more than any source of animal protein! I saw soya for the first time about 20 years ago. At that time it had been introduced as a ‘cheap-and-nasty’ meat substitute. I ate it once or twice, when my mom tried cooking it, but didn’t like the taste or the texture. Now I know that the brand that was available then was adding a lot of artificial flavouring to the soya to make it taste ‘like meat’. The next time I ate soya was in a vegan restaurant, while I was a student. There was tofu in my salad. I didn’t know that this was soya and had never tasted anything so tasteless and rubbery! Needless to say, the word ‘tofu’ filled me with apprehension ever since that experience.
But things have come a long way since then!
In China, the soya bean has been cultivated and used in different ways for thousands of years. Soya beans are very versatile: soya beans can be used as whole soya beans, soya sprouts, or processed as soya milk, tofu, tempeh, soya sauce, miso (soup condiment). You can read more about this online at www.soya.be.
The soybean is quite amazing: Soya is also used as ingredient for non-food products, such as candle wax and biodiesel! Soy candles are becoming more popular because they burn longer and healthier.
I started seriously using soya as a protein in our diet about a year ago. Before then, it had been difficult for me to find it or use it. But then I had the amazing opportunity to visit a vegan community in Israel, that had started using soya as the base of their diet about 40 years ago. I’ve never seen such healthy, energetic and beautiful people! Their medical records have been carefully kept ever since they changed to a vegan diet and there is not a single case of cancer or high blood pressure among the community members that have been living on soya for almost 40 years now, despite the fact that those members are now in their 70’s. The children that have never eaten any meat are absolutely gorgeously healthy. This really convinced me to move from a vegetarian towards a vegan lifestyle over the next couple of years. What was also highly inspirational was the incredibly creative approach to using soya to create all kinds of delicious dishes, including soya ice-cream! Through trial and error, the women in this community especially have now invented ways of spicing soya and presenting it in such a way that they create any substitute for animal protein that you can think of… chicken casserole, roast beef, scrambled eggs… you name it, they’ve got it.
It had not been easy until last year to find soya products in mainstream supermarkets in South Africa, but just as I returned from Israel, products from a South African producer of soya products showed up on the supermarket shelves across the country. During my recent visits to the USA I’ve been on the look-out for soya products and was absolutely stunned by the variety that is already available, although mainly in shops specializing in organic and health foods. But overall, there is really no excuse in many parts of our beautiful world, not to switch to a meat-substitute made from soya at least once a week. You’ll find these products easy to use: just cook them as you would normally do the type of meat they are substituting. I do suggest, however, that you carefully read the labels on the packaging. Avoid anything with artificial colouring and flavouring or preservatives!
Lentils
Lentils have been around since Biblical times and earlier. It was apparently one of the earliest plants that was domesticated in the Near East. Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, tells us that a variety of lentils exists, with colors that range from yellow to red-orange to green, brown and black. Red, white and yellow lentils have their skins removed. There are large and small varieties of many lentils (e.g. Masoor Lentils). Lentils are sold in many forms, with or without the skins, whole or split.
Learning to cook more with beans and other pulses like lentils does mean getting into a ‘rhythm’ and planning ahead. These foods sometimes need to be soaked overnight or cooked for quite a long time. But the fact that they cost relatively less than the same weight of meat and don’t have a negative impact on our health, bring other important benefits.
In the age we live in, we are truly privileged to have so much information at our fingertips through the Internet! I searched the ‘net to confirm some facts I had, and also found lots of interesting recipes for all the plant proteins I am suggesting here. So, if you’ve never cooked lentils, just google ‘lentil recipes’ and you’ll see what I mean.
Peanuts
Most of us eat peanuts as peanut butter or as salty snacks, sometimes combined with raisins. Using peanuts in cooking is really not common in homes with a Western culture. Southern cooking in the USA features a lot of peanuts, however, as do oriental recipes. Peanuts can be used in many different ways, although they are mainly used for peanut butter in the USA. Peanut oil can be used in cooking, lighting, fuel and as a food constituent. Peanut oil has a better keeping quality than soybean, corn, and safflower oils and is a good source of Vitamin E. Peanut oil is the most popular use of the ‘groundnut’, as it is also known, in other parts of the world, outside of the USA.
Beans (Broad, Kidney, Red, Chickpeas, etc.)
All beans are an interesting mix of plant protein and carbohydrates. This is why it makes sense to eat beans together with carbohydrates, even though they are a protein: they can be digested by the same stomach juices as carbohydrates are. In fact, beans alone are not complete proteins, but combined with a grain are complete as a meal. So it is important to eat beans with other grain products.
In switching away from a diet dominated by meat, beans are our best friends! They are hugely versatile and can be prepared in many different tasty ways. The Internet is full of delicious recipes, many being traditional recipes from across the world, which adds some excitement to your kitchen!
I found a suggestion that, as you eat more beans, you need to increase your water-intake, in order to properly handle the higher fiber content in your diet. So there is another added benefit of beans: they will encourage you to drink more water. And water, as we know, is the ‘elixir of life’.
Seeds (including pumpkin and squash)
Seeds are generally not a main meal, but can be added to practically every dish, salad or baked item we make. Seeds are a rich store of energy, some have good protein levels, vitamins (especially vitamin E), minerals, and protective phytochemicals. Apparently, our ancestors who were ‘hunter-gatherers’ would follow seeds according to the seasons and ate every seed that was worth collecting, grass seed, legume (bean-like, pea -like, peanut and others), and any other seeds that were sustaining and productive, or big enough to be worth bothering with.
Thousands of years later, I am thrilled to see an ever-increasing selection of seeds on our supermarket shelves! Seeds are highly concentrated foods, so we need very few of them to add some taste to our other meals. Follow the example of our ancient ancestors and add seeds to your cooking, changing with the seasons to keep things interesting!
Nuts
Nuts, together with fruit and salads, are my favourite foods! Why? Because I don’t have to cook them. I just love the fact that these foods can be eaten ‘live’ – no fuel used on cooking them, all the natural nutrients ready for the taking, no vitamins or minerals lost. A handful of nuts, together with raisins, is my favourite (non-chocolate) snack. I know the protein and oils in the nuts are good for my muscles, organs and nervous system, while the iron in raisins helps to keep my blood healthy to take up oxygen.
Did you know that, biologically, nuts are a fruit-and-seed in one? And that some types of ‘nuts’ are really seed, because they have to be extracted from the fruit, like cashews?
I could spend hours on the Internet learning more about the foods we eat so thoughtlessly… It really is important to know where our food comes from! This makes me think of a television programme I once watched in Germany, about ‘Spaghetti Trees’. It was a documentary, showing the ‘Spaghetti Plantations’ in Italy, where women painstakingly had to pick the ‘ripe’ spaghetti strips from the trees and lay them out in the sun to dry…. The programme was shown on April 1. April’s Fools’ Day! Of course all of us know that spaghetti doesn’t come from trees – or do we??!
As a human race we have become so far removed from the source of our food, that we really need to get in touch with the ‘food cycle’ again: seed, plant, fruit, harvest, compost, and so on. Make an effort to learn about where food comes from and teaching the members of your family the same. Understanding the value of food hopefully will help us to again respect food in the way it used to be respected by our ancestors, who had to spend hours looking for seeds and nuts to eat…
Mushrooms
I think edible mushrooms are God’s secret for meat-lovers, who need to stay away from meat for health reasons. Large, juicy brown portobello mushrooms can be ‘spiked’ with garlic sticks cut from fresh garlic and grilled on the fire just like meat. Or under the grill in the oven. Fried white mushrooms can be treated with the same spices one would use for chicken livers and enjoyed as such. Sliced mushrooms can be used together with onions and cream or soy milk to create a creamy sauce for pasta. Sprinkled with black pepper they are certain to satisfy any gourmet’s taste.
Besides being a rich source of protein, mushrooms are the only natural fresh vegetable or fruit with vitamin D. New research suggests that the ultraviolet light found in sunlight may boost levels of vitamin D in mushrooms. Apparently, we can boost the natural process of “enriching” mushrooms with more vitamin D by briefly exposing mushrooms grown in the dark to sunlight for 5 minutes before cooking or using in salads!
Often grouped with vegetables, mushrooms provide many of the nutritional value of fruit and vegetables, as well as nutritional elements more commonly found in meat, beans or grains. Mushrooms are low in calories, fat-free, cholesterol-free and very low in sodium (salt). Still, they give us different nutrients, such as riboflavin, niacin and selenium, which are typically found in animal foods or grains.
For thousands of years, Eastern cultures have recognized mushrooms’ health benefits. Studies conducted over the past two decades—mostly in Asia—have suggested mushrooms or substances in mushrooms may support the immune system. Traditionally, most of this science has focused on shiitake and maitake mushrooms, but this seems to be a common characteristic for all mushrooms.
Take some time to search and find all these interesting facts and delicious recipes for mushrooms on the Internet. A whole new world will open to you, as it did for me!
Just on a closing note, some of the fascinating facts I found while researching this article today, is that oats and sun-dried tomatoes both are high in vegetable proteien. On the other hand, human milk – God’s food for babies – has very little protein! In fact, the protein found in human milk is equal per 100g as that found in bananas and carrots. So maybe we don’t need so much protein after all… Makes you think, doesn’t it?
PS: Much of the useful info I found came from www.wikipedia.com. But just using Yahoo or Google to search each of the plant proteins mentioned and adding ‘nutrition’ or ‘recipes’ will unlock an amazing world of knowledge for you. Have fun!
PS PS: Managing your energy by eating the right food in the right quantities and prepared correctly is critical if you want to achieve your dream! However, managing your time also is. And being your own boss, while working from home on the Internet can really help you take control of your own life. I found a great opportunity to do just that. You can too. Just click on http://www.reinedelarose.com and keep on reading.
When someone says ‘Protein’ chances are that you are thinking ‘meat’. And yes, meat has become the main source of protein in diets influenced by Western culture. But at what cost? And why? There are some fascinating findings about the impact that high meat consumption has on our society and on our earth. Fortunately, there are lots of other sources of protein. The challenge is simply to start introducing them into your diet for variety. You don’t have to give up meat. Just eat less of it and substitute it with other protein, coming from plants.
According to some of the latest research available, livestock production (cattle, sheep, chickens, pigs, etc.) contributes to the world’s most pressing environmental problems, including global warming, land degradation, air and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity. In fact, it is estimated that livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a bigger share than that of transport. Apparently, expanding population and incomes worldwide, along with changing food choices, are causing a fast increase in demand for meat, milk and eggs. Now already, grazing for cattle uses a quarter (26%) of the land surface of the Earth easily accessible by humans ! Think about what that means as populations increase. Existing land available for human settlements is not enough. So then more forests are cut down, which in turn affects our environment negatively as well. While this problem may not be visible to us, because we’re living in cities, it is important for all of us because it affects our environment. In addition, about one third of all land used for agriculture is used to grow feed crops for livestock. On top of everything, about 70% of land in dry areas of the world which is used by cattle, goats or other livestock has become degraded because of overgrazing, which results in soil erosion. This means that even the land that used to be good for grazing or planting, is slowly becoming desert.
Scientists estimate that livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a bigger share than that of all transport (cars, SUVs, buses, trains, ships) combined. For those of you who don’t know this: greenhouse gas is the type of gas that is heating up the atmosphere of the world and changes our climate. Also, the sheer quantity of animals being raised for us humans to eat also poses a threat of the Earth’s biodiversity. About 20% of all animals alive are already livestock, and the land area they now occupy was once habitat for wildlife. By increasing livestock, to meet our human demand for meat, we are reducing the land available to wild animals.
Another environmental reason why we need to increase the amount of plant protein we use, compared to animal protein, is that livestock uses so much more water to produce the same amount of protein, than plants like soya and beans, that are high in protein, do.
I thought I’d add this information to this piece on protein, just to give everyone a bigger picture! Also, I want you to understand that – apart from the negative effect that too much animal protein has on our health – this is the reason why I encourage everyone to shift slowly to using more and more plant protein.
I’m not saying that you must stop eating meat. All I am saying is that we women have a huge impact on the food choices of our families. So we can reverse the negative impact of a diet high in animal proteins over the next couple of years, to help Earth and our bodies recover.
The meat industry is currently under a lot of pressure, because of the criticism against it, both because of the impact of cattle on increasing greenhouse gases, as well as because of the killer-diseases afflicting people living the ‘MacDonald’ lifestyle. Plant and animal protein are both made of essential amino acids, but diets high in animal proteins have been linked to an increase in cancer, cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis. However, you don’t need animals to get plenty of protein in your diet. There are plenty of plants that can be eaten to ensure you get ample amounts of protein each day.
As women who want to create a world where there is more love, greater beauty and more abundance, it should not be our intention to cause strain on anyone. However, if we slowly but surely change our shopping habits to include one portion of animal protein less and instead add one portion of plant protein into our shopping baskets every week, we are informing the market to change. In this way, cattle and other livestock farmers will have time to shift their production to include other products over time, without causing them economic distress.
I’m not going to talk about the forms of animal protein available in detail. You know them all: meat, chicken, fish, eggs and dairy products like cheese. Instead, I’m going to focus on talking about plant protein, because this is an exciting new discovery for many of us!
Soybeans
Soya is known to have the highest content of protein per 100g, even more than any source of animal protein! I saw soya for the first time about 20 years ago. At that time it had been introduced as a ‘cheap-and-nasty’ meat substitute. I ate it once or twice, when my mom tried cooking it, but didn’t like the taste or the texture. Now I know that the brand that was available then was adding a lot of artificial flavouring to the soya to make it taste ‘like meat’. The next time I ate soya was in a vegan restaurant, while I was a student. There was tofu in my salad. I didn’t know that this was soya and had never tasted anything so tasteless and rubbery! Needless to say, the word ‘tofu’ filled me with apprehension ever since that experience.
But things have come a long way since then!
In China, the soya bean has been cultivated and used in different ways for thousands of years. Soya beans are very versatile: soya beans can be used as whole soya beans, soya sprouts, or processed as soya milk, tofu, tempeh, soya sauce, miso (soup condiment). You can read more about this online at www.soya.be.
The soybean is quite amazing: Soya is also used as ingredient for non-food products, such as candle wax and biodiesel! Soy candles are becoming more popular because they burn longer and healthier.
I started seriously using soya as a protein in our diet about a year ago. Before then, it had been difficult for me to find it or use it. But then I had the amazing opportunity to visit a vegan community in Israel, that had started using soya as the base of their diet about 40 years ago. I’ve never seen such healthy, energetic and beautiful people! Their medical records have been carefully kept ever since they changed to a vegan diet and there is not a single case of cancer or high blood pressure among the community members that have been living on soya for almost 40 years now, despite the fact that those members are now in their 70’s. The children that have never eaten any meat are absolutely gorgeously healthy. This really convinced me to move from a vegetarian towards a vegan lifestyle over the next couple of years. What was also highly inspirational was the incredibly creative approach to using soya to create all kinds of delicious dishes, including soya ice-cream! Through trial and error, the women in this community especially have now invented ways of spicing soya and presenting it in such a way that they create any substitute for animal protein that you can think of… chicken casserole, roast beef, scrambled eggs… you name it, they’ve got it.
It had not been easy until last year to find soya products in mainstream supermarkets in South Africa, but just as I returned from Israel, products from a South African producer of soya products showed up on the supermarket shelves across the country. During my recent visits to the USA I’ve been on the look-out for soya products and was absolutely stunned by the variety that is already available, although mainly in shops specializing in organic and health foods. But overall, there is really no excuse in many parts of our beautiful world, not to switch to a meat-substitute made from soya at least once a week. You’ll find these products easy to use: just cook them as you would normally do the type of meat they are substituting. I do suggest, however, that you carefully read the labels on the packaging. Avoid anything with artificial colouring and flavouring or preservatives!
Lentils
Lentils have been around since Biblical times and earlier. It was apparently one of the earliest plants that was domesticated in the Near East. Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, tells us that a variety of lentils exists, with colors that range from yellow to red-orange to green, brown and black. Red, white and yellow lentils have their skins removed. There are large and small varieties of many lentils (e.g. Masoor Lentils). Lentils are sold in many forms, with or without the skins, whole or split.
Learning to cook more with beans and other pulses like lentils does mean getting into a ‘rhythm’ and planning ahead. These foods sometimes need to be soaked overnight or cooked for quite a long time. But the fact that they cost relatively less than the same weight of meat and don’t have a negative impact on our health, bring other important benefits.
In the age we live in, we are truly privileged to have so much information at our fingertips through the Internet! I searched the ‘net to confirm some facts I had, and also found lots of interesting recipes for all the plant proteins I am suggesting here. So, if you’ve never cooked lentils, just google ‘lentil recipes’ and you’ll see what I mean.
Peanuts
Most of us eat peanuts as peanut butter or as salty snacks, sometimes combined with raisins. Using peanuts in cooking is really not common in homes with a Western culture. Southern cooking in the USA features a lot of peanuts, however, as do oriental recipes. Peanuts can be used in many different ways, although they are mainly used for peanut butter in the USA. Peanut oil can be used in cooking, lighting, fuel and as a food constituent. Peanut oil has a better keeping quality than soybean, corn, and safflower oils and is a good source of Vitamin E. Peanut oil is the most popular use of the ‘groundnut’, as it is also known, in other parts of the world, outside of the USA.
Beans (Broad, Kidney, Red, Chickpeas, etc.)
All beans are an interesting mix of plant protein and carbohydrates. This is why it makes sense to eat beans together with carbohydrates, even though they are a protein: they can be digested by the same stomach juices as carbohydrates are. In fact, beans alone are not complete proteins, but combined with a grain are complete as a meal. So it is important to eat beans with other grain products.
In switching away from a diet dominated by meat, beans are our best friends! They are hugely versatile and can be prepared in many different tasty ways. The Internet is full of delicious recipes, many being traditional recipes from across the world, which adds some excitement to your kitchen!
I found a suggestion that, as you eat more beans, you need to increase your water-intake, in order to properly handle the higher fiber content in your diet. So there is another added benefit of beans: they will encourage you to drink more water. And water, as we know, is the ‘elixir of life’.
Seeds (including pumpkin and squash)
Seeds are generally not a main meal, but can be added to practically every dish, salad or baked item we make. Seeds are a rich store of energy, some have good protein levels, vitamins (especially vitamin E), minerals, and protective phytochemicals. Apparently, our ancestors who were ‘hunter-gatherers’ would follow seeds according to the seasons and ate every seed that was worth collecting, grass seed, legume (bean-like, pea -like, peanut and others), and any other seeds that were sustaining and productive, or big enough to be worth bothering with.
Thousands of years later, I am thrilled to see an ever-increasing selection of seeds on our supermarket shelves! Seeds are highly concentrated foods, so we need very few of them to add some taste to our other meals. Follow the example of our ancient ancestors and add seeds to your cooking, changing with the seasons to keep things interesting!
Nuts
Nuts, together with fruit and salads, are my favourite foods! Why? Because I don’t have to cook them. I just love the fact that these foods can be eaten ‘live’ – no fuel used on cooking them, all the natural nutrients ready for the taking, no vitamins or minerals lost. A handful of nuts, together with raisins, is my favourite (non-chocolate) snack. I know the protein and oils in the nuts are good for my muscles, organs and nervous system, while the iron in raisins helps to keep my blood healthy to take up oxygen.
Did you know that, biologically, nuts are a fruit-and-seed in one? And that some types of ‘nuts’ are really seed, because they have to be extracted from the fruit, like cashews?
I could spend hours on the Internet learning more about the foods we eat so thoughtlessly… It really is important to know where our food comes from! This makes me think of a television programme I once watched in Germany, about ‘Spaghetti Trees’. It was a documentary, showing the ‘Spaghetti Plantations’ in Italy, where women painstakingly had to pick the ‘ripe’ spaghetti strips from the trees and lay them out in the sun to dry…. The programme was shown on April 1. April’s Fools’ Day! Of course all of us know that spaghetti doesn’t come from trees – or do we??!
As a human race we have become so far removed from the source of our food, that we really need to get in touch with the ‘food cycle’ again: seed, plant, fruit, harvest, compost, and so on. Make an effort to learn about where food comes from and teaching the members of your family the same. Understanding the value of food hopefully will help us to again respect food in the way it used to be respected by our ancestors, who had to spend hours looking for seeds and nuts to eat…
Mushrooms
I think edible mushrooms are God’s secret for meat-lovers, who need to stay away from meat for health reasons. Large, juicy brown portobello mushrooms can be ‘spiked’ with garlic sticks cut from fresh garlic and grilled on the fire just like meat. Or under the grill in the oven. Fried white mushrooms can be treated with the same spices one would use for chicken livers and enjoyed as such. Sliced mushrooms can be used together with onions and cream or soy milk to create a creamy sauce for pasta. Sprinkled with black pepper they are certain to satisfy any gourmet’s taste.
Besides being a rich source of protein, mushrooms are the only natural fresh vegetable or fruit with vitamin D. New research suggests that the ultraviolet light found in sunlight may boost levels of vitamin D in mushrooms. Apparently, we can boost the natural process of “enriching” mushrooms with more vitamin D by briefly exposing mushrooms grown in the dark to sunlight for 5 minutes before cooking or using in salads!
Often grouped with vegetables, mushrooms provide many of the nutritional value of fruit and vegetables, as well as nutritional elements more commonly found in meat, beans or grains. Mushrooms are low in calories, fat-free, cholesterol-free and very low in sodium (salt). Still, they give us different nutrients, such as riboflavin, niacin and selenium, which are typically found in animal foods or grains.
For thousands of years, Eastern cultures have recognized mushrooms’ health benefits. Studies conducted over the past two decades—mostly in Asia—have suggested mushrooms or substances in mushrooms may support the immune system. Traditionally, most of this science has focused on shiitake and maitake mushrooms, but this seems to be a common characteristic for all mushrooms.
Take some time to search and find all these interesting facts and delicious recipes for mushrooms on the Internet. A whole new world will open to you, as it did for me!
Just on a closing note, some of the fascinating facts I found while researching this article today, is that oats and sun-dried tomatoes both are high in vegetable proteien. On the other hand, human milk – God’s food for babies – has very little protein! In fact, the protein found in human milk is equal per 100g as that found in bananas and carrots. So maybe we don’t need so much protein after all… Makes you think, doesn’t it?
PS: Much of the useful info I found came from www.wikipedia.com. But just using Yahoo or Google to search each of the plant proteins mentioned and adding ‘nutrition’ or ‘recipes’ will unlock an amazing world of knowledge for you. Have fun!
PS PS: Managing your energy by eating the right food in the right quantities and prepared correctly is critical if you want to achieve your dream! However, managing your time also is. And being your own boss, while working from home on the Internet can really help you take control of your own life. I found a great opportunity to do just that. You can too. Just click on http://www.reinedelarose.com and keep on reading.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Day 12 - Take control of your Energy - Know your Daily Bread!
Day 12: 89 Days left
Isn’t it amazing how little interest we show into the food we eat? Except that we care how it tastes like. Having our daily bread is a privilege most of us take for granted. But how much do we know about carbohydrates or ‘starches’ and how they affect our bodies? For those of us who have heard the Bible story, food was the Devil’s first weapon to tempt us into self-destruction. And if we don’t learn to understand carbohydrates, this staple food can be deadly for your figure. Handle with care!
I love bread. I always have. Especially the fragrant, home-baked, whole-wheat bread with a golden crust that my mom would bake. When I lived in Germany, first as an Au Pair and again later as a trainee journalist, the bakers on every main street would tempt me with a huge variety of rolls, each with a different name: Lausbub, Milchbrötle, Vollkorn, Dreikorn, Roggenbrötchen, Salzpretzel. Absolutely delicious. But I soon paid the price: my normally slender body started picking up weight at the speed of bite!
When I came back home, no one recognized me. And I had nothing to wear! This is when my quest for knowledge about food started. Now I am a fervent proponent of teaching nutrition in Kindergarten. Because it looks like modern mom’s don’t really have the knowledge they need to teach good eating habits to their babies and toddlers – especially not the most modern, scientific information. This is such a pity: every human child should know what food is good for its body and which food isn’t – regardless of taste.
How much our culture influences our choice of food is something I learnt especially since I’ve become involved in a charity that operates two boarding schools for teenagers, mainly from deep rural South Africa. The kids that attend these schools – one for boys, one for girls – come from homes where they have been taught that a meal without meat is no meal, just a ‘snack’. And that you have to stuff yourself with maize porridge (known here as ‘phutu’) in order to say that you are ‘full’, before you stop eating!
If I look at the rest of the parts of the world where I have been travelling to – the cultural paradigms are different, but the end result is the same: far too much carbohydrates and fat! In the USA, kids grow up on cereal with milk and MacDonald Burgers. In Europe, far too many are now also resorting to similar eating habits. Just a few weeks ago, in July, when I visited my godchild in Germany, his father was lamenting the fact that mothers in his daughter’s swimming class would come to him and sternly admonish him that his daughter was too skinny! He remembers from his childhood that all kids were wiry and athletic. Now the majority of primary school children is already showing signs of obesity!
Yes, we certainly need carbohydrates in our diet. This is the fuel for our muscles. So, especially if we are highly active, physically, we do need a lot of this type of food, in all its different forms: bread, cereals, pasta, and so on.
Children have much more energy than we do, because their bodies are not yet burdened with the bad eating habits that we as adults have adopted, usually from our own parents. Looking at the history of food, and just understanding my own ancestor’s eating habits, over-eating was simply not on the order of the day. Something happened after World War II, when it comes to our diets. Suddenly, all kinds of new artificial foodstuffs entered the mainstream: colouring, flavouring, preservatives. And television brought all of this ‘wonderful’ new food and these new tastes into our homes. So, of course, our diets changed!
Having white bread from the bakery in town became a special treat for us farm kids, who were used to the whole wheat bread baked by mom at home. If it had stayed a special treat, that would have been OK. But with urbanization and becoming further and further removed from the source of our food, white bread – wheat – has become the staple food of far too many human beings across the world.
There is nothing wrong with wheat – if you eat it in moderation. Like with most other things: if you don’t overeat, you’re generally fine, health- and weight-wise.
But when it comes to wheat, especially white wheat flour, there is a BIG ‘However’.
White wheat flour – like any other type of ‘refined’ grain where the healthy fibre, vitamins and minerals has been practically ‘surgically removed’ – is actually nothing but a slightly different form of sugar. Now imagine eating solid pieces of sugar, like we eat slices of white bread or rolls…
I didn’t know this, until I started researching the impact of the different food types on our bodies, mind and emotions. And yes, even on our spirit. Drugs affect our spirit. But that is a story for another day…
Today I just want you to become very aware of the fact that ‘refined’ wheat has the same effect of ‘refined’ sugar, if not treated in moderation. It makes the blood sugar levels shoot up high, resulting in more and more Insulin being released from our Pancreas (remember this organ from Biology class?) and in this way over time affects our bodies ability to regulate its sugar levels, too often resulting in adult-onset diabetes!
If you are a labourer who needs to do heavy manual labour, or if you are an athlete or go to gym every day, you can eat quite a lot of carbohydrates each day, because your body burns this ‘sugar’ as fuel to keep your muscles going.
However, if you are someone who spends much of your time sitting or just do moderate physical activity, you need to be careful with the amount of fuel you put in your body. Because every little gram of carbohydrates that you do not use on that day is turned by your body into sugar and from there into fat. Fat on our bodies is nothing but a ‘storage area’ – a ‘larder’ – for those days when we may need to fall back on this reserve. However, with our current blessed lifestyles, the chances that we will not have food tomorrow, has really shrunk to a minimum, so we also don’t need to store huge reserves of fat on our bodies. The problem with fat is that it causes excessive weight on our bone structure, pulling us down even further than gravity normally would, and also placing a lot of strain on the heart, which now suddenly has to feed a whole new layer of bodymass (pure fat) with blood. Fat sits directly below our skin, so if the heart is not able to work properly any longer, the blood struggles to reach our skin, and this has all kinds of effects on the well-being of our bodies. Just do some of your own research on this on the Internet and you will be amazed at how important it is to keep the fat layer under our skin at a lower range.
The other thing that we should become aware of is that wheat contains a material called ‘gluten’. Gluten is a form of proteien, that is easily digestible for most people, but over the last couple of years – probably because of humans over-eating wheat – an increasing number of people are becoming intolerant to this food, with a variety of symptoms ranging from chronic diarhoeaa and ongoing tiredness. The biggest problem is that in these instances, the gluten prevents the digestive system from properly absorbing nutrients, like vitamins and minerals, resulting in malnutrition.
I’m not suggesting that you rush off to get a Gluten allergy test. I am, however, encouraging you to learn more about carbohydrates and how you can ensure that you and the people you prepare food for, can enjoy the benefits of carbohydrates, without suffering from the disaster of over-eating them.
Also, I am recommending that we all shift away from a wheat-dominated carbohydrate diet to including more different types of carbohydrates, because in this way we can have the benefit of different types of minerals and vitamins.
Let carbohydrates form the ‘backbone’ of your weekly menu for your family, then choose suitable vegetables and proteins to serve together with carbohydrates at lunch and dinner.
Here is my suggested ‘Menu Plan’. Except for sticking to the ‘Fruit First’ rule, you can change the order as you wish. I am just adding a few ‘variations’ for each type of carbohydrate, so that you can start thinking about this. The basic menu plan is always the same:
- Breakfast – Fruit only until 12h00
- Lunch – Preferably 12h00. Ideally, eat only the daily carbohydrate with vegetables or vegetable protein. Soups in winter with bread and salad in summer, using bread or grains in the soup. If you’re not working from home, make something the night before, pack it for all your family members and take it with to work. Lunch packs for kids can always include sandwiches and cut vegetable slices, like tomatoes, celery, carrots, etc.
- Late afternoon – Around 15h00. Any form of carbohydrate (e.g. cookie or biscuit) with any type of caffeine-free hot drink or water.
- Dinner – Around 18h00. Preferably protein with vegetables or a vegetable protein with a carbohydrate. Eat protein in moderation and a large portion of salad with your dinner, to fill you up. Over time, you will notice that you need less and less food.
- Late evening snack – Around 20h00, not later than 21h00. Any type of snack – e.g. nuts or cookies, but just a tiny portion to satisfy your tastebuds. Even better is to just drink your favourite herbal tea at this time, before you go to sleep.
Now you can make your life a lot easier and healthier by choosing your daily carbohydrate for lunch from among the following:
Mondays – Wheat
This includes any type of wheat bread, pastry, pasta, and couscous.
Tuesdays – Sorghum/Spelt or any other ‘exotic’ grain
Visit your local health-store section in the supermarket to see what’s available and try out new recipes.
Thursdays – Potatoes
This is such a versatile food: mashed, boiled then fried, boiled, baked, chips, potato soup, croquettes
Wednesdays – Oats
Porridge, muffins, crunchy granola biscuits, sautéed oat flakes in salad or as a topping on soup
Fridays – Rye
Rye is known best as bread, but look for recipes for other interesting things to do with rye. There are different types of rye bread too!
Saturday – Corn/Maize
This is ideal for family gatherings. Corn-on-the-cob, nachos, maize bread and other traditional ways of using maize. Combine with beans, like the Mexicans do, avoid meat.
Sunday – Rice
There are lots of different types of rice, so there is already some variety. But then, of course, you can use rice as is, rice cakes, rice dishes, rice-and-soy milk soup with cinnamon and steamed dried fruit. Let your imagination fly!
The main secret that all of us living in the 21st Century need to know is that it is very easy to over-eat on carbohydrates, because they are a form of sugar and sugar is addictive. So learn more about how you can rid yourself of this addiction and start on a fresh page. Your body will be grateful!
PS: If you’re really keen to pay more attention to the food you are giving your family or for your own body, but your career prevents you from doing so, consider a career switch. Become a business owner of an online, Internet-based business that you can run from home. Have a look at www.reinedelarose.com. This is a great business opportunity that will allow you to do just that!
Isn’t it amazing how little interest we show into the food we eat? Except that we care how it tastes like. Having our daily bread is a privilege most of us take for granted. But how much do we know about carbohydrates or ‘starches’ and how they affect our bodies? For those of us who have heard the Bible story, food was the Devil’s first weapon to tempt us into self-destruction. And if we don’t learn to understand carbohydrates, this staple food can be deadly for your figure. Handle with care!
I love bread. I always have. Especially the fragrant, home-baked, whole-wheat bread with a golden crust that my mom would bake. When I lived in Germany, first as an Au Pair and again later as a trainee journalist, the bakers on every main street would tempt me with a huge variety of rolls, each with a different name: Lausbub, Milchbrötle, Vollkorn, Dreikorn, Roggenbrötchen, Salzpretzel. Absolutely delicious. But I soon paid the price: my normally slender body started picking up weight at the speed of bite!
When I came back home, no one recognized me. And I had nothing to wear! This is when my quest for knowledge about food started. Now I am a fervent proponent of teaching nutrition in Kindergarten. Because it looks like modern mom’s don’t really have the knowledge they need to teach good eating habits to their babies and toddlers – especially not the most modern, scientific information. This is such a pity: every human child should know what food is good for its body and which food isn’t – regardless of taste.
How much our culture influences our choice of food is something I learnt especially since I’ve become involved in a charity that operates two boarding schools for teenagers, mainly from deep rural South Africa. The kids that attend these schools – one for boys, one for girls – come from homes where they have been taught that a meal without meat is no meal, just a ‘snack’. And that you have to stuff yourself with maize porridge (known here as ‘phutu’) in order to say that you are ‘full’, before you stop eating!
If I look at the rest of the parts of the world where I have been travelling to – the cultural paradigms are different, but the end result is the same: far too much carbohydrates and fat! In the USA, kids grow up on cereal with milk and MacDonald Burgers. In Europe, far too many are now also resorting to similar eating habits. Just a few weeks ago, in July, when I visited my godchild in Germany, his father was lamenting the fact that mothers in his daughter’s swimming class would come to him and sternly admonish him that his daughter was too skinny! He remembers from his childhood that all kids were wiry and athletic. Now the majority of primary school children is already showing signs of obesity!
Yes, we certainly need carbohydrates in our diet. This is the fuel for our muscles. So, especially if we are highly active, physically, we do need a lot of this type of food, in all its different forms: bread, cereals, pasta, and so on.
Children have much more energy than we do, because their bodies are not yet burdened with the bad eating habits that we as adults have adopted, usually from our own parents. Looking at the history of food, and just understanding my own ancestor’s eating habits, over-eating was simply not on the order of the day. Something happened after World War II, when it comes to our diets. Suddenly, all kinds of new artificial foodstuffs entered the mainstream: colouring, flavouring, preservatives. And television brought all of this ‘wonderful’ new food and these new tastes into our homes. So, of course, our diets changed!
Having white bread from the bakery in town became a special treat for us farm kids, who were used to the whole wheat bread baked by mom at home. If it had stayed a special treat, that would have been OK. But with urbanization and becoming further and further removed from the source of our food, white bread – wheat – has become the staple food of far too many human beings across the world.
There is nothing wrong with wheat – if you eat it in moderation. Like with most other things: if you don’t overeat, you’re generally fine, health- and weight-wise.
But when it comes to wheat, especially white wheat flour, there is a BIG ‘However’.
White wheat flour – like any other type of ‘refined’ grain where the healthy fibre, vitamins and minerals has been practically ‘surgically removed’ – is actually nothing but a slightly different form of sugar. Now imagine eating solid pieces of sugar, like we eat slices of white bread or rolls…
I didn’t know this, until I started researching the impact of the different food types on our bodies, mind and emotions. And yes, even on our spirit. Drugs affect our spirit. But that is a story for another day…
Today I just want you to become very aware of the fact that ‘refined’ wheat has the same effect of ‘refined’ sugar, if not treated in moderation. It makes the blood sugar levels shoot up high, resulting in more and more Insulin being released from our Pancreas (remember this organ from Biology class?) and in this way over time affects our bodies ability to regulate its sugar levels, too often resulting in adult-onset diabetes!
If you are a labourer who needs to do heavy manual labour, or if you are an athlete or go to gym every day, you can eat quite a lot of carbohydrates each day, because your body burns this ‘sugar’ as fuel to keep your muscles going.
However, if you are someone who spends much of your time sitting or just do moderate physical activity, you need to be careful with the amount of fuel you put in your body. Because every little gram of carbohydrates that you do not use on that day is turned by your body into sugar and from there into fat. Fat on our bodies is nothing but a ‘storage area’ – a ‘larder’ – for those days when we may need to fall back on this reserve. However, with our current blessed lifestyles, the chances that we will not have food tomorrow, has really shrunk to a minimum, so we also don’t need to store huge reserves of fat on our bodies. The problem with fat is that it causes excessive weight on our bone structure, pulling us down even further than gravity normally would, and also placing a lot of strain on the heart, which now suddenly has to feed a whole new layer of bodymass (pure fat) with blood. Fat sits directly below our skin, so if the heart is not able to work properly any longer, the blood struggles to reach our skin, and this has all kinds of effects on the well-being of our bodies. Just do some of your own research on this on the Internet and you will be amazed at how important it is to keep the fat layer under our skin at a lower range.
The other thing that we should become aware of is that wheat contains a material called ‘gluten’. Gluten is a form of proteien, that is easily digestible for most people, but over the last couple of years – probably because of humans over-eating wheat – an increasing number of people are becoming intolerant to this food, with a variety of symptoms ranging from chronic diarhoeaa and ongoing tiredness. The biggest problem is that in these instances, the gluten prevents the digestive system from properly absorbing nutrients, like vitamins and minerals, resulting in malnutrition.
I’m not suggesting that you rush off to get a Gluten allergy test. I am, however, encouraging you to learn more about carbohydrates and how you can ensure that you and the people you prepare food for, can enjoy the benefits of carbohydrates, without suffering from the disaster of over-eating them.
Also, I am recommending that we all shift away from a wheat-dominated carbohydrate diet to including more different types of carbohydrates, because in this way we can have the benefit of different types of minerals and vitamins.
Let carbohydrates form the ‘backbone’ of your weekly menu for your family, then choose suitable vegetables and proteins to serve together with carbohydrates at lunch and dinner.
Here is my suggested ‘Menu Plan’. Except for sticking to the ‘Fruit First’ rule, you can change the order as you wish. I am just adding a few ‘variations’ for each type of carbohydrate, so that you can start thinking about this. The basic menu plan is always the same:
- Breakfast – Fruit only until 12h00
- Lunch – Preferably 12h00. Ideally, eat only the daily carbohydrate with vegetables or vegetable protein. Soups in winter with bread and salad in summer, using bread or grains in the soup. If you’re not working from home, make something the night before, pack it for all your family members and take it with to work. Lunch packs for kids can always include sandwiches and cut vegetable slices, like tomatoes, celery, carrots, etc.
- Late afternoon – Around 15h00. Any form of carbohydrate (e.g. cookie or biscuit) with any type of caffeine-free hot drink or water.
- Dinner – Around 18h00. Preferably protein with vegetables or a vegetable protein with a carbohydrate. Eat protein in moderation and a large portion of salad with your dinner, to fill you up. Over time, you will notice that you need less and less food.
- Late evening snack – Around 20h00, not later than 21h00. Any type of snack – e.g. nuts or cookies, but just a tiny portion to satisfy your tastebuds. Even better is to just drink your favourite herbal tea at this time, before you go to sleep.
Now you can make your life a lot easier and healthier by choosing your daily carbohydrate for lunch from among the following:
Mondays – Wheat
This includes any type of wheat bread, pastry, pasta, and couscous.
Tuesdays – Sorghum/Spelt or any other ‘exotic’ grain
Visit your local health-store section in the supermarket to see what’s available and try out new recipes.
Thursdays – Potatoes
This is such a versatile food: mashed, boiled then fried, boiled, baked, chips, potato soup, croquettes
Wednesdays – Oats
Porridge, muffins, crunchy granola biscuits, sautéed oat flakes in salad or as a topping on soup
Fridays – Rye
Rye is known best as bread, but look for recipes for other interesting things to do with rye. There are different types of rye bread too!
Saturday – Corn/Maize
This is ideal for family gatherings. Corn-on-the-cob, nachos, maize bread and other traditional ways of using maize. Combine with beans, like the Mexicans do, avoid meat.
Sunday – Rice
There are lots of different types of rice, so there is already some variety. But then, of course, you can use rice as is, rice cakes, rice dishes, rice-and-soy milk soup with cinnamon and steamed dried fruit. Let your imagination fly!
The main secret that all of us living in the 21st Century need to know is that it is very easy to over-eat on carbohydrates, because they are a form of sugar and sugar is addictive. So learn more about how you can rid yourself of this addiction and start on a fresh page. Your body will be grateful!
PS: If you’re really keen to pay more attention to the food you are giving your family or for your own body, but your career prevents you from doing so, consider a career switch. Become a business owner of an online, Internet-based business that you can run from home. Have a look at www.reinedelarose.com. This is a great business opportunity that will allow you to do just that!
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Take control of your Energy – Choose the Perfect Food!
Day 11: 90 Days left
“Isn’t this just the most incredible invention?” asked Hanno Tauschwitz, a senior journalist at the newspaper in Germany where I was completing my internship. “You can just pop it into your bag in the morning, go to work, pull it out, eat it, know that it is a fantastic food for your body, and then get rid of the packaging which decomposes, leaving no rubbish behind. No mess, no fuss – and it’s simply delicious!”
Hanno was talking about a banana, which he had just taken out of his bag and started to peel while praising its virtues. This was 1988 and bananas were a hot topic in Germany: the two halves of the country were being united and people from East Germany were experiencing the taste of bananas for the first time in their lives. Unlike Harro. He was born and raised in the Western part and was something of a health ‘nut’. But he was really good looking and an excellent writer, so everyone forgave him.
For me, listening to Harro rave about a banana was an eye-opening moment. I’d never thought of fruit that way, specifically not bananas, which – having grown up in South Africa – I’d always taken for granted. But he was right: fruit really is the perfect food! You don’t have to cook it, which saves energy. You can eat it ‘straight’, so it’s really nature’s own ‘fast food’ or you can cube it, slice it or juice it. Eat it separately to truly taste each individual type of fruit or tantalize your tastebuds with an endless variety of fragrances and flavours by mixing different fruit together. And, when you’re done, you can throw it away mindlessly, knowing that it will decompose and return any left-over nutrients into the soil.
The thought of anyone never having eaten a banana really did come as something of a surprise to me. But I think that in this world of global trade, we do take so many things for granted! While I had been used to having all types of fruit ‘Made in South Africa’ because of the amazingly varied climate zones in this country, walking through the supermarkets in Europe is for me still a lesson in Geography: oranges from Israel, apples from Poland, grapes from the Cape, bananas from Brazil. The choice facing us nowadays is truly endless. Apricots. Litchis. Tangerines. Kiwis. Guavas. Watermelon. Raspberries. And have you ever heard of Persimmon or Custard Apples?
The colours! The shapes! The textures! Fruit is certainly ‘designer food’.
And what have we done? Gotten ourselves addicted to chips-cookies-candies: all high-sugar and high-fat content foods, that attack both our teeth and bones and result in acidic levels that keep us open to infectious diseases. Of course we’ve all been taught that fruit is healthy, but somehow this message gets overpowered by all the media with its glamorous or funky ads tempting us to sink out teeth into sugary treats and soda drinks.
Just because I’ve been interested in nutrition ever since I had my own ‘fat scare’ in my early twenties, I found a lot of information about food in general and fruit in particular. And I’ve started wondering why we humans are not taught about the effects of food on our bodies, minds, emotions and energy levels even when we are still small! Instead, we’re kept quiet (initially) with a piece of candy and then have to go through the terrible ordeal of getting our teeth fixed later. Also, the wave of ‘attention deficit disorder (ADD)’ kids that suddenly appeared on schoolbenches across the world strangely coincided with high sugar intake diets, causing hyper-activity and concentration issues. And then we feed these poor kids drugs to get them back to normal.
What is happening? Are we insane?
We are living in a time when never before, in the history of humankind, there been more knowledge available to help us make good choices and develop towards the next level. But instead of using this knowledge and applying it to improve our lives, we choose to ‘dumb down’, watching fictitious people’s lives on television, who have problems we certainly do not want to have! We feed our minds with this ‘junk’, we feed our bodies with ‘junk’, we fill our homes with ‘junk’ and then we wonder why we’re tired all the time…
Conscious living. I wish there were a simpler word to explain ‘conscious’. Aware. Awake. Alive! Ever noticed that ‘live’ spelled backwards is ‘evil’? Whatever doesn’t bring more life, more love, more beauty and more abundance into our lives, is not good for us. We’ve been living unconsciously for so long, that we really need to take stock of our lives, here and now. And answer the simple questions: What works? What doesn’t work?
Let me quote* a few reasons why fruit work as food, while many other types of food don’t:
• For the largest part fruit consists of water just like the human body does;
• Fruit is 100% bad-cholesterol free. Cholesterol acts like padding to the inside of your veins and then other waste material gets stuck into this padding. The padding means that your veins have less space on the inside for pumping blood, which increases your blood-pressure and makes your heart work too hard. Then enter a blood clot that can’t get past a cholesterol-waste obstacle in the vein and … lights out! Don’t let this happen to you or your loved ones.;
• Fruit stimulates the memory – the sugar in fruit is quickly absorbed into the bloodstream and goes to fire up your brain. But there are other reasons too, which are still being scientifically researched. Bottom line is: your brain votes for fruit!
• Fruit is relatively cheap food – you get much better nutrition for every dollar you spend on fruit, than on any other type of food;
• The miraculous healing effects of fruit – silly enough, we all love to read books about people who became ill with cancer and then started eating white grapes and got better! Why not just eat the white grapes and avoid the cancer in the first place?;
• Fibers: I think you’ve all seen enough bran cereal advertisements to know why this is critical for your health!;
• Fruit makes you feel better: Don’t take my word for it. Try it! You’ll see for yourself.;
• There are ethical reasons to eat fruit: they use less energy and water to produce than other foods and because you can enjoy them raw, you can save electricity or gas because you don’t need to cook them. So overall you’re acting responsibly towards the environment, when you choose food above other fruit;
• Fruit is the most natural food – no preservatives, coloring or fake flavouring needed!;
• Fruit juices – squeeze those fruits! The taste comes through and it’s a way to get in more fruit, instead of eating it piece by piece.
Fruit simply is the perfect food for human beings: A healthy diet should consist for a great deal of freshly squeezed fruit juices, raw fruits and vegetables. Some tips:
- A good start is to eat and drink more fresh fruits; it’s as simple as that. Before you know it you will feel much better;
- Don’t forget to eat fruit on an empty stomach, not after other meals and;
- Inform yourself about the stuff that goes into processed foods and non-organic farming methods and you’ll soon be convinced that fresh fruit, ideally from an organic farm, is the best food ever!
If you want to change your world to create more love, greater beauty and increase abundance for all, you’ll need a lot of energy. Fruit is the food that will fuel you to achieve your dreams.
* Read more about fruit on http://www.thefruitpages.com/
PS: Choose a 21st Century Lifestyle – be informed, be aware and use the knowledge and systems available to you. Choose to use your time wisely and effectively. Don’t waste precious life time and pollute the environment by commuting to a job that does not allow you to fulfill your personal goals. The Internet is a new tool that you can use to earn your income. For more info click on http://www.reinedelarose.com
“Isn’t this just the most incredible invention?” asked Hanno Tauschwitz, a senior journalist at the newspaper in Germany where I was completing my internship. “You can just pop it into your bag in the morning, go to work, pull it out, eat it, know that it is a fantastic food for your body, and then get rid of the packaging which decomposes, leaving no rubbish behind. No mess, no fuss – and it’s simply delicious!”
Hanno was talking about a banana, which he had just taken out of his bag and started to peel while praising its virtues. This was 1988 and bananas were a hot topic in Germany: the two halves of the country were being united and people from East Germany were experiencing the taste of bananas for the first time in their lives. Unlike Harro. He was born and raised in the Western part and was something of a health ‘nut’. But he was really good looking and an excellent writer, so everyone forgave him.
For me, listening to Harro rave about a banana was an eye-opening moment. I’d never thought of fruit that way, specifically not bananas, which – having grown up in South Africa – I’d always taken for granted. But he was right: fruit really is the perfect food! You don’t have to cook it, which saves energy. You can eat it ‘straight’, so it’s really nature’s own ‘fast food’ or you can cube it, slice it or juice it. Eat it separately to truly taste each individual type of fruit or tantalize your tastebuds with an endless variety of fragrances and flavours by mixing different fruit together. And, when you’re done, you can throw it away mindlessly, knowing that it will decompose and return any left-over nutrients into the soil.
The thought of anyone never having eaten a banana really did come as something of a surprise to me. But I think that in this world of global trade, we do take so many things for granted! While I had been used to having all types of fruit ‘Made in South Africa’ because of the amazingly varied climate zones in this country, walking through the supermarkets in Europe is for me still a lesson in Geography: oranges from Israel, apples from Poland, grapes from the Cape, bananas from Brazil. The choice facing us nowadays is truly endless. Apricots. Litchis. Tangerines. Kiwis. Guavas. Watermelon. Raspberries. And have you ever heard of Persimmon or Custard Apples?
The colours! The shapes! The textures! Fruit is certainly ‘designer food’.
And what have we done? Gotten ourselves addicted to chips-cookies-candies: all high-sugar and high-fat content foods, that attack both our teeth and bones and result in acidic levels that keep us open to infectious diseases. Of course we’ve all been taught that fruit is healthy, but somehow this message gets overpowered by all the media with its glamorous or funky ads tempting us to sink out teeth into sugary treats and soda drinks.
Just because I’ve been interested in nutrition ever since I had my own ‘fat scare’ in my early twenties, I found a lot of information about food in general and fruit in particular. And I’ve started wondering why we humans are not taught about the effects of food on our bodies, minds, emotions and energy levels even when we are still small! Instead, we’re kept quiet (initially) with a piece of candy and then have to go through the terrible ordeal of getting our teeth fixed later. Also, the wave of ‘attention deficit disorder (ADD)’ kids that suddenly appeared on schoolbenches across the world strangely coincided with high sugar intake diets, causing hyper-activity and concentration issues. And then we feed these poor kids drugs to get them back to normal.
What is happening? Are we insane?
We are living in a time when never before, in the history of humankind, there been more knowledge available to help us make good choices and develop towards the next level. But instead of using this knowledge and applying it to improve our lives, we choose to ‘dumb down’, watching fictitious people’s lives on television, who have problems we certainly do not want to have! We feed our minds with this ‘junk’, we feed our bodies with ‘junk’, we fill our homes with ‘junk’ and then we wonder why we’re tired all the time…
Conscious living. I wish there were a simpler word to explain ‘conscious’. Aware. Awake. Alive! Ever noticed that ‘live’ spelled backwards is ‘evil’? Whatever doesn’t bring more life, more love, more beauty and more abundance into our lives, is not good for us. We’ve been living unconsciously for so long, that we really need to take stock of our lives, here and now. And answer the simple questions: What works? What doesn’t work?
Let me quote* a few reasons why fruit work as food, while many other types of food don’t:
• For the largest part fruit consists of water just like the human body does;
• Fruit is 100% bad-cholesterol free. Cholesterol acts like padding to the inside of your veins and then other waste material gets stuck into this padding. The padding means that your veins have less space on the inside for pumping blood, which increases your blood-pressure and makes your heart work too hard. Then enter a blood clot that can’t get past a cholesterol-waste obstacle in the vein and … lights out! Don’t let this happen to you or your loved ones.;
• Fruit stimulates the memory – the sugar in fruit is quickly absorbed into the bloodstream and goes to fire up your brain. But there are other reasons too, which are still being scientifically researched. Bottom line is: your brain votes for fruit!
• Fruit is relatively cheap food – you get much better nutrition for every dollar you spend on fruit, than on any other type of food;
• The miraculous healing effects of fruit – silly enough, we all love to read books about people who became ill with cancer and then started eating white grapes and got better! Why not just eat the white grapes and avoid the cancer in the first place?;
• Fibers: I think you’ve all seen enough bran cereal advertisements to know why this is critical for your health!;
• Fruit makes you feel better: Don’t take my word for it. Try it! You’ll see for yourself.;
• There are ethical reasons to eat fruit: they use less energy and water to produce than other foods and because you can enjoy them raw, you can save electricity or gas because you don’t need to cook them. So overall you’re acting responsibly towards the environment, when you choose food above other fruit;
• Fruit is the most natural food – no preservatives, coloring or fake flavouring needed!;
• Fruit juices – squeeze those fruits! The taste comes through and it’s a way to get in more fruit, instead of eating it piece by piece.
Fruit simply is the perfect food for human beings: A healthy diet should consist for a great deal of freshly squeezed fruit juices, raw fruits and vegetables. Some tips:
- A good start is to eat and drink more fresh fruits; it’s as simple as that. Before you know it you will feel much better;
- Don’t forget to eat fruit on an empty stomach, not after other meals and;
- Inform yourself about the stuff that goes into processed foods and non-organic farming methods and you’ll soon be convinced that fresh fruit, ideally from an organic farm, is the best food ever!
If you want to change your world to create more love, greater beauty and increase abundance for all, you’ll need a lot of energy. Fruit is the food that will fuel you to achieve your dreams.
* Read more about fruit on http://www.thefruitpages.com/
PS: Choose a 21st Century Lifestyle – be informed, be aware and use the knowledge and systems available to you. Choose to use your time wisely and effectively. Don’t waste precious life time and pollute the environment by commuting to a job that does not allow you to fulfill your personal goals. The Internet is a new tool that you can use to earn your income. For more info click on http://www.reinedelarose.com
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Take control of your Energy – Cleverly combine your Food!
Day 10: 91 Days to go
The old way of planning a meal was to start with the meat, then add potato or rice and three veggies. And of course, to start the day with cereal and milk and fill the gaps with fruit and bread. Well, it’s time for a mindset change! Enter the 21st Century and new knowledge: the way you put your meals together and what you eat when makes a huge difference to your energy levels, health and weight.
Funny thing is, the new way of eating has been introduced into health spas all over the world more than 50 years ago already. Now what’s the point of filling up with food the wrong way and growing extra layers of fat, and then spending tons of money at a health spa on getting rid of that fat by doing things the right way? Why not simply do things the right way from the start? Indigestion, overweight, cholesterol, heart attacks, sugar diabetes, cancer: this is the price we pay for ignoring the very simple principles of a modern, healthy diet.
The irony of the matter is that the modern, healthy diet is probably very similar to the way in which the original human beings managed to survive thousands of years. The meat-potato-and-three-veg and the cereal-and-milk menus are very much a product of the past 100 years only. Ever heard the saying: “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day”? Of course you have! And it is true – if you were a factory worker in the early 1920s that had to get to work early and not have a lunch break. If you hadn’t filled up with some carbohydrates (porridge or cereal) before you started work, chances were that you might faint on the job and get your hand chopped off! So, definitely, breakfast in that time was the most important meal of the day.
But think about the traditional, rural lifestyle that most of our ancestors lived: you got up early in the morning and started working, while the sun was still in hiding or not yet so hot. Then you went back to the house at noon for a break, some food and a nap. You certainly didn’t fill up with a huge ‘farm breakfast’ before then: digesting all that scrambled egg and bacon or sausage would sap your valuable energy right away, making it really difficult to attend to the labour-intensive early-morning chores. Maybe you had some coffee or a cup of tea and a slice of bread, but certainly not more than that.
The problem is that since most of us nowadays live urban lifestyles, we get completely out of touch with both nature’s and our bodies’ rhythm. I first was made aware of the importance of this through a diary published by a small independent ‘green’ publisher years ago, which sadly was a once-off effort. In this diary two very useful pieces of knowledge were pointed out to me:
- Obey nature’s rhythm – learn to listen to your body again. And adapt your lifestyle, including your food, every year to the seasons.
- Build your daily menu around grains, not meat.
The issue about rhythm is something that is quite a challenge in a time when our body has been out-of-rhythm for so long and in fact our tastebuds and blood-sugar levels have been ‘perverted’ and confused through our eating habits for years. This is really the main reason why a week at a health spa is a very good idea: through fasting under medical supervision you allow your body to find its own rhythm again and get rid of so many of the toxins that cause it to act in an ‘unnatural’ way, for instance craving for sugar. So if you’re serious about reaching your dream, start with four days of fasting. I won’t go into details here, but there is so much information available about the benefits of fasting. You can do it from home if you’re generally healthy, but do follow the medical advice on fasting before you start!
The second point about using grains as the basis for meal planning was a very novel and welcome idea for me, especially since I had chosen to become vegetarian. But even for people who love meat, shifting away from ‘meat’ as the basis for menu planning at least during weekday meals is a first step into a healthier way of eating. The other thing about shifting to grains as the ‘core’ of our main daily meal is that we suddenly rediscover that there is life beyond wheat! Wheat has become the dominating grain in Western diets and this is not a good thing at all. Wheat has a high sugar content and especially white flour has hardly any fibre or vitamins or other nutrients left! Making sure that you include a variety of grains in your family’s diet is a way to ensure that meals stay interesting and that a range of vitamins and minerals are included in the diet. I won’t mention other forms of grain here, just because I want you to brainstorm them! I bet you’ve forgotten most of them… Fortunately, there is the Internet to help you with your research on grains!
Just to show you how easy life becomes, when you build your daily menu in this way:
Breakfast: Pure fruit juice, salad or pieces of fruit. For kids mid-morning snacks pack carbohydrates: sandwiches, biscuits or granola bars.
Lunch: Choose any proteien with salad or starch with fresh vegetables. In winter, choose soup & bread. Try to eat lunch at 12h00 if you’re working from home or can adjust your working hours in the office. If you wait until 13h00, your blood sugar levels may trick you into storming the buffet or chomping away on a chocolate bar.
Late afternoon: Eat a carbohydrate with your herbal tea – wholewheat biscuit or similar.
Dinner: Choose a grain as your main meal, then add vegetables and salad to it. Pasta and mushroom sauce, with a salad is a good example. Or, on some evenings, use meat as your core, but again serve it with veggies and salad, not starch!
If you follow this pattern, and keep your portions reasonable, even having a late night chocolate won’t cause an earthquake on your scale!
But the secret is the correct combination of food. Modern science – and this may not be what your doctor has learnt! – teaches us the following rules about how to best combine our food:
1. Fresh fruit – eat them on their own! Don’t mix with anything, not even yoghurt. Why? Because as soon as the sugar in fruit gets into contact with any other food it starts fermenting in your stomach! This means ‘blowing up’ your tummy, causing discomfort. It also means that it takes longer to digest, diverting precious energy away from your brain to your digestive system. Finally, the fermentation process affects some of the vitamins and minerals in fruit, meaning that you do not get the full benefit of these nutrients once they enter the blood stream. This is why eating all your fruit for the day – at least 3 pieces – makes more sense in the morning. The sugar in fruit is very easy to digest for your body and will directly feed your brain’s needs when you have to concentrate at work or studies in the morning. In fact, it takes only 30 minutes to digest fruit, if you keep it ‘pure’. If eating only fruit seems to leave a ‘hole’ in your tummy, because you’re used to feeling full after a bowl of cereal and milk, then have a grainy snack like wholewheat biscuits in mid-morning with your (preferably herbal) tea. Just by following this one step you will already notice benefits to your health and weight.
2. Starch and Animal Protein – keep them apart! Why? The answer is quite simple science: because to digest starch, your body needs alkaline digestive juices and to digest animal protein, it needs acid. If you mix them, these digestive juices compete with one another, trying to neutralize each other. This causes bloodflow away from the brain and muscles to the digestive system to provide the oxygen for this internal ‘tug-of-war’. As a result, digesting your food takes a very long time and keeps your energy and concentration levels continuously low, making you feel exhausted, even early in the morning!
But how to make the switch? Firstly, start making it a habit to think about food in the form it comes in: is it a starch? Is it a protein? I remember a comic strip with Hägar the Horrible, after he had been admonished by his doctor to lose weight. The cartoon showed him picking up a wild-boar’s leg, asking whistfully: “Is pork a fruit?” So make sure that you know the difference between a protein and a starch. Also, don’t think ‘meat’, think ‘protein’ and a whole new world will open up to you! The question I’m asked most when people find out that I’m vegetarian is: ‘But what do you eat instead of meat, is it cheese?” Well, there’s a whole selection of proteins, even if you exclude dairy products from animals. The whole gorgeous selection of beans; soya – which can be textured into most animal products; mushrooms and nuts.
The joy is that vegetarian proteien can be digested by alkaline stomach juices too, so you can use these proteins like you would have used meat, normally. But when you do serve meat, focus on preparing a really tasty piece of meat or meat dish and serving it together with non-starch vegetables and salads, which get digested by either alkaline or acid digestive juices. In this way, you are giving your body a chance to easily digest the meat, since there is no competition! Keep the potato-and-meat dishes for family reunions, when everyone expects a ‘traditional’ meal and no one has to hold highly intelligent conversation during the post-lunch afternoon slump.
3. Learn to looooove vegetables – we teach our tongues to like what they taste. Teach your tastebuds to love vegetables, especially fresh ones. And teach your family to do the same. Learn to eat with your ‘mind’: see food as fuel, don’t build a relationship to it! You are, after all, what you eat. I must confess, at some points in my life I was pure chocolate! But, once I learnt how food affects my energy levels, my emotions, my brainpower and my health, I always managed to get back on track and let good fresh food take over again.
Remember what Gandhi said: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” If you want to change the world, change yourself.
PS: If you’re ready for a change away from your current job, so that you have more control over your own time, or if you want to increase your opportunities working from home, do visit my business website http://reinedelarose.blogspot.com
The old way of planning a meal was to start with the meat, then add potato or rice and three veggies. And of course, to start the day with cereal and milk and fill the gaps with fruit and bread. Well, it’s time for a mindset change! Enter the 21st Century and new knowledge: the way you put your meals together and what you eat when makes a huge difference to your energy levels, health and weight.
Funny thing is, the new way of eating has been introduced into health spas all over the world more than 50 years ago already. Now what’s the point of filling up with food the wrong way and growing extra layers of fat, and then spending tons of money at a health spa on getting rid of that fat by doing things the right way? Why not simply do things the right way from the start? Indigestion, overweight, cholesterol, heart attacks, sugar diabetes, cancer: this is the price we pay for ignoring the very simple principles of a modern, healthy diet.
The irony of the matter is that the modern, healthy diet is probably very similar to the way in which the original human beings managed to survive thousands of years. The meat-potato-and-three-veg and the cereal-and-milk menus are very much a product of the past 100 years only. Ever heard the saying: “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day”? Of course you have! And it is true – if you were a factory worker in the early 1920s that had to get to work early and not have a lunch break. If you hadn’t filled up with some carbohydrates (porridge or cereal) before you started work, chances were that you might faint on the job and get your hand chopped off! So, definitely, breakfast in that time was the most important meal of the day.
But think about the traditional, rural lifestyle that most of our ancestors lived: you got up early in the morning and started working, while the sun was still in hiding or not yet so hot. Then you went back to the house at noon for a break, some food and a nap. You certainly didn’t fill up with a huge ‘farm breakfast’ before then: digesting all that scrambled egg and bacon or sausage would sap your valuable energy right away, making it really difficult to attend to the labour-intensive early-morning chores. Maybe you had some coffee or a cup of tea and a slice of bread, but certainly not more than that.
The problem is that since most of us nowadays live urban lifestyles, we get completely out of touch with both nature’s and our bodies’ rhythm. I first was made aware of the importance of this through a diary published by a small independent ‘green’ publisher years ago, which sadly was a once-off effort. In this diary two very useful pieces of knowledge were pointed out to me:
- Obey nature’s rhythm – learn to listen to your body again. And adapt your lifestyle, including your food, every year to the seasons.
- Build your daily menu around grains, not meat.
The issue about rhythm is something that is quite a challenge in a time when our body has been out-of-rhythm for so long and in fact our tastebuds and blood-sugar levels have been ‘perverted’ and confused through our eating habits for years. This is really the main reason why a week at a health spa is a very good idea: through fasting under medical supervision you allow your body to find its own rhythm again and get rid of so many of the toxins that cause it to act in an ‘unnatural’ way, for instance craving for sugar. So if you’re serious about reaching your dream, start with four days of fasting. I won’t go into details here, but there is so much information available about the benefits of fasting. You can do it from home if you’re generally healthy, but do follow the medical advice on fasting before you start!
The second point about using grains as the basis for meal planning was a very novel and welcome idea for me, especially since I had chosen to become vegetarian. But even for people who love meat, shifting away from ‘meat’ as the basis for menu planning at least during weekday meals is a first step into a healthier way of eating. The other thing about shifting to grains as the ‘core’ of our main daily meal is that we suddenly rediscover that there is life beyond wheat! Wheat has become the dominating grain in Western diets and this is not a good thing at all. Wheat has a high sugar content and especially white flour has hardly any fibre or vitamins or other nutrients left! Making sure that you include a variety of grains in your family’s diet is a way to ensure that meals stay interesting and that a range of vitamins and minerals are included in the diet. I won’t mention other forms of grain here, just because I want you to brainstorm them! I bet you’ve forgotten most of them… Fortunately, there is the Internet to help you with your research on grains!
Just to show you how easy life becomes, when you build your daily menu in this way:
Breakfast: Pure fruit juice, salad or pieces of fruit. For kids mid-morning snacks pack carbohydrates: sandwiches, biscuits or granola bars.
Lunch: Choose any proteien with salad or starch with fresh vegetables. In winter, choose soup & bread. Try to eat lunch at 12h00 if you’re working from home or can adjust your working hours in the office. If you wait until 13h00, your blood sugar levels may trick you into storming the buffet or chomping away on a chocolate bar.
Late afternoon: Eat a carbohydrate with your herbal tea – wholewheat biscuit or similar.
Dinner: Choose a grain as your main meal, then add vegetables and salad to it. Pasta and mushroom sauce, with a salad is a good example. Or, on some evenings, use meat as your core, but again serve it with veggies and salad, not starch!
If you follow this pattern, and keep your portions reasonable, even having a late night chocolate won’t cause an earthquake on your scale!
But the secret is the correct combination of food. Modern science – and this may not be what your doctor has learnt! – teaches us the following rules about how to best combine our food:
1. Fresh fruit – eat them on their own! Don’t mix with anything, not even yoghurt. Why? Because as soon as the sugar in fruit gets into contact with any other food it starts fermenting in your stomach! This means ‘blowing up’ your tummy, causing discomfort. It also means that it takes longer to digest, diverting precious energy away from your brain to your digestive system. Finally, the fermentation process affects some of the vitamins and minerals in fruit, meaning that you do not get the full benefit of these nutrients once they enter the blood stream. This is why eating all your fruit for the day – at least 3 pieces – makes more sense in the morning. The sugar in fruit is very easy to digest for your body and will directly feed your brain’s needs when you have to concentrate at work or studies in the morning. In fact, it takes only 30 minutes to digest fruit, if you keep it ‘pure’. If eating only fruit seems to leave a ‘hole’ in your tummy, because you’re used to feeling full after a bowl of cereal and milk, then have a grainy snack like wholewheat biscuits in mid-morning with your (preferably herbal) tea. Just by following this one step you will already notice benefits to your health and weight.
2. Starch and Animal Protein – keep them apart! Why? The answer is quite simple science: because to digest starch, your body needs alkaline digestive juices and to digest animal protein, it needs acid. If you mix them, these digestive juices compete with one another, trying to neutralize each other. This causes bloodflow away from the brain and muscles to the digestive system to provide the oxygen for this internal ‘tug-of-war’. As a result, digesting your food takes a very long time and keeps your energy and concentration levels continuously low, making you feel exhausted, even early in the morning!
But how to make the switch? Firstly, start making it a habit to think about food in the form it comes in: is it a starch? Is it a protein? I remember a comic strip with Hägar the Horrible, after he had been admonished by his doctor to lose weight. The cartoon showed him picking up a wild-boar’s leg, asking whistfully: “Is pork a fruit?” So make sure that you know the difference between a protein and a starch. Also, don’t think ‘meat’, think ‘protein’ and a whole new world will open up to you! The question I’m asked most when people find out that I’m vegetarian is: ‘But what do you eat instead of meat, is it cheese?” Well, there’s a whole selection of proteins, even if you exclude dairy products from animals. The whole gorgeous selection of beans; soya – which can be textured into most animal products; mushrooms and nuts.
The joy is that vegetarian proteien can be digested by alkaline stomach juices too, so you can use these proteins like you would have used meat, normally. But when you do serve meat, focus on preparing a really tasty piece of meat or meat dish and serving it together with non-starch vegetables and salads, which get digested by either alkaline or acid digestive juices. In this way, you are giving your body a chance to easily digest the meat, since there is no competition! Keep the potato-and-meat dishes for family reunions, when everyone expects a ‘traditional’ meal and no one has to hold highly intelligent conversation during the post-lunch afternoon slump.
3. Learn to looooove vegetables – we teach our tongues to like what they taste. Teach your tastebuds to love vegetables, especially fresh ones. And teach your family to do the same. Learn to eat with your ‘mind’: see food as fuel, don’t build a relationship to it! You are, after all, what you eat. I must confess, at some points in my life I was pure chocolate! But, once I learnt how food affects my energy levels, my emotions, my brainpower and my health, I always managed to get back on track and let good fresh food take over again.
Remember what Gandhi said: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” If you want to change the world, change yourself.
PS: If you’re ready for a change away from your current job, so that you have more control over your own time, or if you want to increase your opportunities working from home, do visit my business website http://reinedelarose.blogspot.com
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