No honey in the house means it’s time to cut back on even natural sugars

In the last few years my family has never gone long without honey, and usually lots of honey. This fall we bought a gallon of honey from the farmers market thinking it would see us through the winter. It’s mid-January and even with honey gifted from a family member now keeping bees we are out of honey.

To say we go through a lot of honey in this house seems to be an understatement. On the other side of that statement is the realization that we had gone to using honey almost exclusively as our sweetener of choice for baking. This means if I was doing a lot of baking for my family, we would go through a lot of honey.

But we also used it daily in tea, coffee and other goodies.

I think I need to use this time of not having honey in the house to just go with it and do a cleanse of all sweeteners, even natural ones for awhile. I’m not going to set a certain amount of time right now but just see how it goes.

Already I seem to notice the natural sweetness of foods coming out more and more, and that is a good thing. I will continue to take advantage of the sweetness found naturally in foods as I explore this time of not adding concentrated sweeteners to my food.

What have your experiences with honey and other sweeteners been?

Reconnecting with this blog and with raw food (& What I ate Thursday)

1/17/13
So my Blendtec blender is being sent in for repair and *now* is the time I am feeling the urge to reconnect to the raw food world a bit??? It will be like starting over brand new in trying to eat raw food with only the most basic of appliances.

I hope to update what has happened along this journey more in the midst of some simple “what I ate” posts along w/ reflection on how I am feeling as well as how fitness now fits into this wellness approach.

NOTE — if you happen to be reading this blog and know me in real life — I am intentionally not posting these posts to Facebook for the moment… I need a separate space to continue this learning journey while still in a public sharing forum

So first what I ate Thursday
(my first post on this was somehow deleted from my ipad so no fancy formatting 2nd time around!)

Breakfast was a bowl of smashed up banana, apple, orange, blueberries, chopped pumpkin seeds, ground chia seeds –> yum! I ate it at about 8 a.m. (after a cup of green and tulsi tea) and was truly filled until nearly noon when I was able to come home and start working on lunch

yerba mate tea w/ lemon and honey throughout morning

Lunch –> huge chopped salad of beet, zucchini, summer squash, lots and lots of spinach, sunflower seeds, raisins, sesame seeds, olive oil, coconut vinegar, dijon mustard,

Afternoon snacks/drinks: chamomile tulsi tea and other herbal tea & raw carrot cake bites (carrot, walnuts, raisins, coconut, date) –> would try to post recipe link but to me they didn’t turn out great but that could be poor quality carrots possibly; also had a few cashews while cooking, etc.

Dark chocolate coconut drops (made during the holiday season)

Supper –> “Fruit Ice Cake”!!! Nessa asked for this recipe so it was our supper! — unfortunately this is not on a blog but was send in a newsletter (http://www.facebook.com/rawfunfamily is their FB page). The “cake” includes a crust of banana chips and dates, a layer of mango puree (I used frozen mango) and a layer of blended frozen bananas) and some frozen raspberries! … Basically this ends up like a frozen pie as it is layers of blended frozen fruit on top of a crust of banana chips and dates blended/chopped together

Most interesting thing so far about this is that Nessa wanting to make this recipe is part of what is pulling me to pay more attention to eating raw … that, and coming off of travel where I ate out way more than usual I think 🙂

It’s not that I wasn’t eating green smoothies that last few years — I was. Also salads (large and filled with veggies) were very frequent on the list! But there had been a shift, several actually back and forth and now this is part of it … learning to eat is certainly a process!

Vanilla Shake/Smoothie Recipes (green smoothies/shakes)

Anyone watching my Facebook profile has seen me enjoying these lately…my family enjoye them too, so here are a few recipes:

Hemp Vanilla Shake with Power Greens*

• 2-4 T. Hemp seeds (experiment with your taste preferences)
• Approximately 3 cups of water (if you like really thick shakes/smoothies, you can do less)
• 3 to 6 figs, depending on sweetness preference and size of figs (for the kids I do very sweet). If dried, soak in the water a bit first and chop (remove stems) for easier blending
• 3 Romaine leaves, stems removed and torn in pieces
• 1 tsp or more of vanilla extract
• Dash or more of cinnamon
• 2 cups frozen grapes (I used a mix of red and green; can use all of one kind or mix it up)

Blend all except grapes first, then add frozen grapes and blend until it’s the texture you want it to be for your shake. If you don’t want to freeze the grapes first, then use less water and add ice at the end so it is still cold and icy as I think it tastes much better really cold. You can also use less or no greens if that is your preference, or you are new to including greens in your smoothies. Another mild green may be substituted for the romaine (I recommend spinach, chard or romaine, but if you want to throw in just a bit of kale, you can).

*This makes a large amount, so cut down amounts for a smaller serving and/or single serving. You should be able to find Hemp seeds at a health food store. I used Nutiva packaged Hemp seeds (http://nutiva.com/products/7_hempseeds.php) that I bought at La Crosse’s People’s Food Co-op. My figs were from the co-op  as well, but I have seen them at other local grocery stores too.

Almond Mylkshake

You can make this using already made almond mylk/milk or by using fresh raw almonds in your smoothie.

• 2 cups almond milk (or water plus ½ cup or so of soaked nuts)
• 4 figs (or to taste), soaked a bit ahead of time if they were dried figs, and chopped to ease blending.
• 1-2 tsp vanilla
• Large dash cinnamon or to taste
• 2 cups frozen or fresh grapes
• Ice, optional
• Spinach or other greens, optional (with this sweet shake though even Megan doesn’t complain about a little spinach in it!) If you put greens in blend them before adding the grapes and any ice, so that they blend very well. (For those of you nervous about your blender’s ability to blend greens, you could strain a bit and then add fruits, etc. in this recipe and many other ones).

Blend everything but the grapes and/or ice first, add grapes  and blend well, and then if adding ice, add it and pulse until the ice is the consistency you want it to be. Enjoy!

How I make my Almond Mylk:

• Soak raw almonds for 12 hours or more and rinse well (I order these here: http://www.almonds-from-california.com/ )
• Put them in my blendtec blender (think even a regular blender will work) with 3-4 cups of water depending on my mood
• Add just a bit of vanilla and optionally some sweetener (stevia, dates, figs, agava nectar are all options I’ve used)
• Blend, blend, blend (I use the “whole juice” button and then blend a bit longer on speed 2).
• Strain! I use a “paint straining bag” that I bought at Ace Hardware, but you can buy nice Nut Mylk bags, or use any fine strainer (cheesecloth and nylons are reported to work well too … I have even used a metal mesh strainer but it doesn’t catch as much pulp as a bag does).
• Set aside pulp to use in a recipe if you have a dehydrator; otherwise discard.
• Use the Mylk as you would any milk. J It will keep a few days in the fridge and is full of fresh nutty goodness!
• The same process can be used with many other nuts and seeds, and unlike almonds, many of those seeds are available in high quality in stores. Each nut or seed has its own unique flavor as well as nutritional benefits.

It all started with this one:

http://tinyurl.com/c9qvof — that is a link to a great “Holiday Smoothie” recipe shared by Tracy on the Green Smoothie blog. As you can see from there, you do not any nuts or seeds to get that great sweet vanilla flavor. I think the nuts or seeds just add another dimension to it. If you search the web, I’m sure you’ll find many other varieties of raw/living food vanilla shakes and smoothies that are nutrient dense – now that is indulgence without guilt!

Let me know what your favorite version of a vanilla smoothie is!

An watch for me posting about how I like this shake with coconut instead … with and without figs and grapes likely. J

Quick Food Diary Stats: Thursday 2.12.09

What I ate Today:

• Millet Square (cooked millet (like oatmeal) and then backed into squares … my favorite recipe yet from my McDougal diet days … and the kids love it too!) with strawberry preservers on it
• Green Smoothie: 2 bananas, handfuls of spinach, frozen banana, celery
• coconut oil/garlic/lemon juice broth (teaspoon of coconut oil)
• Big ole salad: 2 handfuls spinach, 1 zucchini (? not quite cup diced), 1 cucumber (about cup), few carrots, 1/2 orange bell pepper, few slices of onion, 1/2 avocado and lime juice w/ bit sea salt and aprox 2 T. sunflower seeds
• Green Smoothie: 1 grapefruit with 1/2 bunch parsely (yum!)
• one gluten free bread stick dipped in tomato sauce
• Soup: cup raw cauliflower, one yellow bell pepper, 3 cups sesame seed milk (cup seeds blended w/ 3 to 5 cups water depending on preference), bit hot pepper, 3 cloves garlic, bit sea salt, bit dulse  — ate one bowl serving of this and there is another large serving left over
• Green juice of — one large cucumber, 3 stalks celery, 2 kale leaves and bunch of kale and chard stalks, and lime juice — drank half of this and rest is in fridge for tomorrow … it’s OK but was thinking fennel would be good in it.

Nutritional breakdown according to nutridiary.com:

• 57% carbs, 32% fat, 11% protein
• 1340 total calories (and I am SO not hungry nor was I at any point … almost felt like I was over eating!), but a whopping 427 of those from fat — healthy fats though (seeds, coconut oil, avocado, and some naturally in the veggies — it’s amazing to see that actually when analyzing them — I never thought celery had any fat at all, but it does!) That is an estimate on calories though because I’m not measuring every food exact and some things aren’t in the database exactly.
• WAY exceeded all my nutrient needs that it tracks — including way over 100% on calcium and iron! And of course I’m practically mega dosing on vitamin A and C

Fitness:

• 25 minutes on the cross trainer at the gym along w/ 15 minutes on the rebounder this morning … and as soon as I publish this I’ll stretch some … but I need a full hour stretching work out yet this week!

Notes:

It has been interesting to track the foods, but if I keep it up I’ll have to give in and buy the pro version (or track another place?) as entering the info in two places is time consuming! I’m glad I’m doing it for awhile to get an idea about the different foods and how I feel, but I’ve very uncertain about how useful it will be for me long term to focus this much on the numbers so to speak.

I felt really heavy after eating lunch again today, and the fat content really shouldn’t have been “too high” so I wonder if it was just too much food bulk-wise, of if I didn’t eat it slowly enough and really chew … or something else entirely. Otehrwise, I felt really well today. Even though if you were paying attention you noticed two cooked items on the list — see I’m not a purist … as long as I’m getting my nutrition (12+ fruits/veggies a day!) and not eating foods that make me ill! 🙂

I felt pretty good on my cross-trainer today, but wondered if I would have felt better without eating the breadstick right before going to work out (they were fresh out of the oven, and I decided to not be so uptight about my food, and try one — only regretting it when I learned they had milk/cheese in them which is a trigger food for me).

I can’t make up my mind about the cauliflower soup with the sesame seed milk base — the sesame taste (think tahinni) keeps coming back into my mouth this evening. And I feel pretty “heavy” even though it was a small meal. I might freeze the rest of the seed milk to use sparingly in other soups, dips or smoothies…or at least some of it.

Tomorrow is supposed to be a lower fat day, but we might go out for lunch for valentines day so we’ll see how that works out. My theory though is that I’ll run better Sat. morning if I keep he fat low Friday. Stay tuned …

Quick Food Diary Stats: Tuesday 2.11.09 and Wednesday 2.14.09

Tuesday

What I ate:

• Smoothie: juice of two small oranges, one whole orange, 1/2 bulb and stalk fennel, lots of chard! (yum!)
• Raw juice made from: large bunch kale, juice of one lemon, 2 asian pears (YUM) (also no way to accurately put this in nutridiary so I tried but I know it’s not exactly accurate)
• Entire avocado w/ bit of sea salt
• pomello (entered as grapefruit in nutridiary)
• 2 oranges
• ugli fruit (entered in nutridiary as grapefruit)
• soup made from a teaspoon of garlic infused coconut oil, and LOTS of sweet onions (too many). This tasted really good and satisfied the hunger craving I was having and I stayed full a LONG time … but too full feeling later when running 😦 this was even though it was less coconut oil than the previous day.
• cucumber, lime, romaine green juice

Nutritional analysis for the day (nutridiary):

• 73% carbs, 7% protein, 20% fat
• 1416 calories
• short on my goal for protein of 10% as well as slightly short on my iron goal, but everything else was exceeded as far as what it tracks for

Fitness was a 2.5 mile hard run — hard as in I kept wanting to stop — until I was done and then I felt great! I wonder if it was eating the coconut oil within 2 hours of the run that made it harder? Hmmm… will have to experiement on that one.

Wednesday

What I ate:

• Smoothie: 4 Bananas, 2 cups spinach, 4 celery stalks
• Cup raw carrots
• 2 small zucchini, 400g mixed lettuce and spinach greens, bit raw onion all w/ a creamy dressing of blended cashews, nutritional yeast and mustard seeds , and some sunflower seeds on top
• 1 tomato, 1 orange, 1/2 cucumber, 2 stalks celery smoothie (was supposed to be dressing but when I used the  nut sauce instead, I sipped on the dressing just as I would a green smoothie)
• orange
• supper salad: orange pepper, 1/2 large cucumber, handful greens, half avocado, juice of one lime and bit sea salt
• 1/2 orange
• Also few bottles of water throughout the day

I did only about 5 minutes of rebounding so I didn’t log it; for running I did 25 minutes of speed work — up to 6mph for 2 minutes at a time 3 x and 5.5 a couple of other times while alternating slow jub and fast walk at other times. 🙂

Nutritional analysis as done by nutridiary:

• For the day: 54% Carbs, 11% protein, and 35% fat (nuts, seeds, and avocado — no OIL today)
• 1432 total calories
• 54% of my calories were consumed at lunch (and I could tell — I felt HEAVY afterward – don’t know if it was plain overeating or too much fat/nuts)
• all of the nutrients it tracks (sadly not all I would like to track) showed me exceeding daily limits, including Iron and calcium.

I felt great all day except for the heavy feeling after lunch. I think it helped that I at lunch a bit earlier than the day before and may have been part of why running was easier today (no oil/fat late in afternoon). Otherwise my eyes were itchy in the evnening and I had to blow my nose a few times (including while eating supper) but that’s it. I do wonder soemtimes if I need to cut back on peppers / night shade plants and if they could be bothering me some. I have been eating A LOT of colored peppers so after the ones I have are gone, I’m going to try to cut back for awhile. It can be challennging to keep things simple and easy and yet rotate my food choices.

Quick note for those new to the blog…

Hello and welcome!

I’ve been sending … and seeing more new faces around here … which reminds me I have a lot of blog housekeeping to do around here! Recently this blog has basically been a food journal for me. I hope you can benefit from that, but if you want more, please let me know how I can help! I plan on making this blog much more informational while still keeping it personal. What information can best help you? What can most inspire you? What do you want to know? Need to know? Merely curious about?

To tell you how I got where I am today will take longer than this post, but if you read through the entire blog you’ll get a good idea … in short I started to gain health and in the process started loosing weight … a lot of weight (currently down about 55 pounds … of course due to ill health I was up a lot before I started to loose). I did indeed gain health though — I went from chronically fatigued and chronic IBS, low thyroid, fibromalagia pain and more — to being totally energetic and totally PAIN FREE! And from all my reading I really, really believe nutrition and food is the key and that anyone can improve their health in the same way.

Is is always easy? Well, of course not. But what truly worthwhile thing every is??

Seriously, after gaining my health it’s much easier than most people would imagine though, and very, very doable!

Currently I eat fresh raw fruits and vegetales and LOTS of greens (I’m starting to seen greens as their own category!), and some raw nuts and seeds as well as near daily coconut oil and some high quality olive oil (sparingly) … and when I’m sticking to my target for optimum health — that’s it! In reality I do eat some cooked whole grains or gently steamed/water cooked veggies, and once in awhile during this journey I experiement how a few other items affect me — but NO gluten EVER  (unless it’s by accident or cross contamination) and NO Dairy –  EVER as it’s too addictive and I don’t feel it has any nutritoinal value for me (more on that eventually), and finally no animal flesh ever anymore and that one I have decided is a final decision for me as well. This means I eat mostly vegan, but have occasionally had eggs yet and do eat honey, so I don’t call myself vegan.

I will be posting more each week about my own food goals, but I want to stress that in many ways this continues to evolve as I refine what I eat for optimum health and nutrition (while certainly allowging for lots of enjoyment!). My entire journey to this spot has been such an evolution of myself and my eating … hence I made sure “learning” was part of this blog’s name.

I will also be posting more about all the fantastic little changes that my family is making in their diet, and those posts may be of more interest to those of you not ready to jump to a raw food diet as my family is not limited to raw foods nor are they vegetarians. However, my family has increased thier intake of fruits, veggies, and greens A LOT, and we do keep a gluten free household.

Until then I’ll direct you to just a few great websites and blogs for more info — there are many more than these, but these are a few of my current favorites:

Green Smoothie Girl! (be sure to visit Robyn’s blog too)

Raw Family

Ecopolitan

The Green Smoothie Blog

The Raw Divas!

Raw for Change!

Kristen’s Raw Blog

Fertile Healthy Blog

Raw Mom Blog

Also, network with us on Facebook:

http://profile.to/tamigroth/

http://groups.to/ecopolitan/

http://groups.to/greensmoothie/

Greens — Nature’s Perfect Food … Even for Protein and Calcium

I could go on and on about all the wonderful properties of greens, but many others have said it better than I could at this time and moment — and most recently that includes Hanlie from Fertilehealthy with her post about Greens as Nature’s most perfect food!

Here are a few excerpts from her excellent post as a teaser for you (and I agree with all of them by the way):

The cow didn’t eat another cow to form the protein in its muscles, which we call steak.  The protein comes from grass … In fact, broccoli contains almost twice as much protein per calorie as steak!  (Not that I believe that protein is more important than the other nutrients, but a lot of people worship protein, so I’m just setting their minds at ease.)

…

Ever wonder where cows get their calcium from?  They certainly don’t manufacture it!  Once again, it comes from green leaves.

…

You can really knock yourself out with that!  But I’m going to let you in on the best-kept secret in nutrition – a way to get more green vegetables and more fruit in your diet in one fell swoop:

The Green Smoothie!

Me again —

And by now you should all know where to find out more about Green Smoothies: The Green Smoothie Blog!

Food Journal: Monday February 9th

OK, this will be quicker than usual because I’m up WAY later than I would like to be, and I just spent over an hour (!) entering my meals into Nutridiary (!), but to be fair it was setting up the account that took some time too. Now if I could just port that info from there to here — or at least give you all a link to see it! Until I figure that out, I’ll just let you know what info I find out there.

Breakfast today was a green smoothie of 1/2 a cantaloupe, a cup of blueberries, and 4 large chard leaves.

Lunch today was 2 large mushrooms w/ avocado (an entire one) spread on top and some sweet onion.

2nd lunch / snack: blood orange, ugli fruit, naval orange

afternoon snack: Quick soup (I’ll write this up later) of 1 T. garlic infused coconut oil, and some chopped sweet onion in hot water.

Supper was a LARGE salad (4 oz of mixed baby greens and spinach), red pepper, grape tomatoes, mixed sprouts (and they didn’t have this in the nutridiary database!), sun-dried tomatoes, 1 T. olive oil, sprinkles of balsamic vinegar (need to stop having so much of that!),  and a few pea pods (also not in that database).

Dessert was “banana ice cream” — 2 bananas and 1/2 cup walnuts (was going to leave out nuts this time as just the bananas were SO good … but daughter wanted nuts and then she didn’t even eat hers!)

So the stats on today — a day of eating w/out a whole lot of thought was:

• calories: 1551
• calories from fat: 747 (avocado, coconut oil, olive oil, walnuts were primary source)
• total fat — 91 grams
• saturated fat 21 grams (coconut oil — labled as saturated but still very healthy fat and I eat it on purpose)
• sodium — 677 mg
• carbs — 189 g
• dietary fiber 43 g
• sugars 117 g (all fruit sugars)
• protein 30 g

Calorie distribution was 48% Fat:  7% Protein: 45%  Carbs: (note these were all complex carbs)

I would say that is slightly higher fat than I usually eat due to having both nuts and the olive oil (I do try, but don’t always succeed in having coconut oil). I *think* (remember this is all evolving as I listen to my body and continue to research and experiment what raw foods I perform best on) that I would like to be closer to 30% or less fat, 10% protein, and the rest carbs (complex carbs in fruits, veggies, and greens). It will be interesting to see what plays out as I continue to track this. I think it will be a useful tool so I can look back and see what looked best. I’ll share reports when I have a chance, and hopefully this will satisify those that have been asking me for caloric breakdowns. I had a good guess that I eat close to 1500 calories a day, and I guess I do … or at least today. 🙂

I will be writing more soon about various goals I mine, but one immediate one brought to light by this food analysis is that I want to try to eat my fats earlier in the day, and I think I’ll save olive oil (even high quality cold pressed) for more rare occasions than a fast supper — so it’s time to really start getting familiar with blending fruits and veggies to make dressings (already love cucumber, celery and chive … didn’t have any cucumber tonight). Also, if I keep my total fat low enough, I think cutting my internal coconut oil to 1-2 tsp instead of tablespoons shoudl be sufficient for health (will continue to experiement though). I think from a training standpoint, I’m going to try to make the 2 days before my longest run each week to be even lower fat days and see what difference that makes in my performance — so no avocados on Friday!

On the fitness front — today was my rest day after two great runs in a row over the weekend … tomorrow it will be back to the gym! I meant to do my Praise moves DVD today though, but didnt’ get to it — must do it tomorrow so likely won’t be posting tomorrow. I did of course do my 20 minutes on the rebounder this morning … entered that into the nutridiary as 20 minutes of general arobics because I didnt see anything for rebounding.

Felt great all day … too much energy tonight — must get decent sleep tonight!

Bonus Incentive (Free yoga classes when I meet my weight loss goal)

“Simple Pleasures are the last refuge of the complex” Oscar Wilde

I had my favorite health treatment yesterday — an hour of thai yoga massage and then an hour of regular mesage from Christina and Simple Pleasures.  Christina was full of praise and kudos for what great shape I’m in now versus last summer. She then asked me what my weight loss goal was, so without a missing a beat, I said 130 pounds — after all that is what is on my affirmation on my mirror. (If you have a goal, you need affirmations!) Christina then said that when I reach that, let her know and she’ll give me 8 weeks of free classes! Woo Hoo!

Do you have any extra incentives going for you in your goals? Would it help if you did? What type of incentives can you set up to help you?

Past the 50 pound mark! (Weight loss and measurement chart)

Date	Weight	Body Fat %	Inches Total
May 2008	220
10/16/08	194.0	43.7
10/25/08	191.0	42.9
11/1/08	187.6	41.7	245
11/15/08	184	40.8
11/22/08	181.8	40.8
11/30/08	180.4	39.7	233.25
12/9/09	179.8	39.5
2/1/09	166.8	35.5	222
Loss to Date:	53.2 pounds	8.2%	23 inches

• Waist: 34.25 (-4.75)
• Chest: 38.25 (2.75)
• Hips:41.5 (-4.5)
• Right Thigh: 21.75 (-1.75)
• Left Thigh: 21.5 (-2)
• Right Arm: 11.75 (-1.25)
• Left Arm: 12 (-1.5)
• Belly 41 (-4.5)

I have misplaced a few notes with intermediate weights and inches so maybe I’ll update the chart and make itmore complete when I find them again. I’m so glad I’m keeping track of body fat percentage and inches as well as weight because sometimes the scale does funny tricks of not moving for days or moving back up. Generally my pants fitting or not fitting because they are too loose is enough to reassure me that I haven’t been eating in my processed food in my sleep, but it sure is nice to be able to measure the results in other ways sometimes, and I highly recommend it to anyone that wants to track their weight loss.

I also can’t believe it’s been so long since an official update! Especialy since I was so excited last week to be at the 50 pound mark!

I don’t think I started losing weight at all until August so that makes it 6 months now and just over 50 pound of weight loss. I think that is a reasonable rate of weight loss, and my body seems to think so as well by how it feels most of the time (ALIVE I mean really alive!).

It’s interesting how suddenly everyone seems to be noticing the weight loss … to the point of not recognizing me. That’s kind of cool … and validating. I hope a few people can tell I’m way healthier too, but if not I’ll just have to continue to shout it from the roof tops!

In other news I started the 90 day detox today!!! And so I’ll shift my blogging more toward that although I see no problem in completing a BES program while starting the detox as the programs, at least at this stage, do not conflict at all. I’m so exicted about trying some of the awesoem recipes in the 90 Day Detox menu plan — they look AWESOSME.

~Tami

P.S. If now isn’t the right time for you to join in the 90 Day Detox (although I may be able to twist Tera’s arm if you still want in), then listen to the Q&A anyway so you have the info for when you ARE ready. And then sign up for the FREE 7 day detox … Green Smoothie Challenge … or just join in the blog or twitter chatter! 🙂