Plant! (Eve voice from Wall-E)

There are lots of benefits to growing your own food, most notably the mind altering experience of understanding for the first time what certain foods should actually taste like. I’ve been growing fruits and veggies since I was little with my parents and I put together a list of the the best foods I have grown, evaluated unscientifically with only my taste buds and anecdotal experience.

Mind blowingly delicious, I can’t believe the ones you buy at the store can even be called by the same name:
-acorn squash
-tomatoes (Out of the 40 or so varieties we’ve grown, my favorites are always the Paul Robeson heirloom tomatoes)

Fantastically good, much better than store bought:
-sugar snap peas
-green beans
-carrots
-aneheim peppers
-limes

Tastes pretty much the same as store bought:
-zuchinini
-yellow crookneck squash
-onions
-lettuce
-lemons

Taste may suffer if (like me) you don’t know what you’re doing:
-strawberries
-apples
-cantaloupe

My all time favorite food to grow is acorn squash. The taste is just unbelievable. It’s like it already has the butter and sugar added and none of the bitterness. I planted waaay more this year in the hopes that I would have enough of them that I could bear to part with a few and actually share.

My faves! Bounty from years past:

My newest project is the sprouting and growing of purple Okinawa sweet potaotes. Purple sweet potatoes are one of my favorite foods that we discovered in Hawaii. Imported ones are irradiated to prevent pest migration, which unfortunately also prevents them from sprouting. I found these California grown beauties just an hour away from home at Niyiya Market, a japanese supermarket that has its own organic farm. They are labeled in the store by their japanese name, murasaki imo. According to my farmer friend Evan, you can also eat the leaves. I haven’t been brave enough to try that yet.

My beloved aphid eaters, pollinators, and furry friends. This little guy even has a heart on his back.

 

 

Don’t forget to stop and smell the roses.  

Or the catnip. At the garden store, neighbor kitty knows where to find the good stuff. I stopped and petted him but I don’t think he even knew I was there.

I wish Rhino was my real life friend

I was watching Bolt at the gym the other day and I found the pep talk given by Rhino the hamster to be suprisingly motivational.

This reminds me of Kal Penn, who somehow manages to split his career between acting in stoner movies and working as the Associate Director in the White House Office of Public Engagement. His wikipedia article reads like a work of fiction, but it's not, because he's awesome.

Bring back recess

I hate going to the gym. Hate. It. I have definitely had more than one day where I have broken down into mental patient sobbing tears because I just couldn't stand to go to the gym anymore. How much time do I spend at the gym to maintain my weight you ask? On an average week I do about 6 hours of high intensity cardio, another six hours of walking, and two hours of high intensity weight lifting. Plus it's 20 minutes each way to the gym, so all in all about 16 hours per week of either working out or driving there. So yeah, it gets tiresome. TV on the treadmill and podcasts in the weightroom help a lot, but I'm still looking for more ways to beat the boredom.

Sure, it's possible for me to maintain my weight without working that hard, but that would involve a lot of skipping social events, something I'm just not willing to do. I mostly manage to not eat everything that calls to me at parties, but it's still heavier food than I would be eating at home. Occasionally when I'm out, someone will tell me that I should cut loose and enjoy myself this time. "It's just once in a while," they'll say. Except that two weekends ago was Easter, the one before that was St. Patrick's Day, last weekend was a two day extravaganza for my father-in-law's 65th birthday, and next weekend I'm going to a bridal shower. There's just not nearly enough time in between events to recover, so party eating has to be close to normal eating, or it doesn't work.

Since I'm not willing to stop going places, I have to make up the difference with activity. I'm a smallish female with low lean body mass, so my metabolism is slow. But if I build more muscle I can make it faster, which is what I'm working on now. (Muscle burns more calories when our bodies are at rest than fat does, this is why men generally lose weight faster.) A friend of mine in San Diego takes and loves aereal acrobatics classes, and another friend said she looks forward to her belly dancing class every week. "Look forward to it?" I thought. Cue jealousy like I have never known before.

I want that. I want it to be fun so badly. That's what I have with snowboarding, but I can only do that about 5 days a year. And I've tried many other activities like zumba and yoga without any improvement in enjoyment, I'm always looking at the clock. But, when you don't succeed, try again! So after failing to find local aereal acrobatics classes, and seeing Parkour featured on The Biggest Loser, I found a Parkour gym near us! They just opened a few months ago. Parkour is all about moving over obstacles efficiently and with style, kinda like gymnastics for grown ups. And it really is fun! My disclaimer is this: As with any new exercise, showing up on day two will be the hardest thing you have to do. Do it anyway. Exercise can be fun but it's still a workout. Muscles you didn't know you had will be crazy sore, your confidence will be low because as a begginer you will not be good at it. Embrace the suckiness, accept that some things take time. Parkour has only gotten more fun with every class. And the staff down at Apex Movement NorCal in Concord are fantastic. Alan, the owner, is really supportive, patient, and knowledgeable about how to use good form to improve your body. In fact, he's also a chiropractor.

Here's a cool video that shows off some awesome videography of Parkour and Freerunning. And don't you dare think, "That won't work for me, I can't do that!" Of couse you can't! Yet! Beginner classes don't look like this at all. Beginner classes start by teaching you how to roll without hitting your spine on the ground, and how to modify pull ups (and everything else) so that even if you can't do one today, you can perform a useful exercise that will help you work toward doing one someday. And then we go play in the foam pit. And I'm in heaven because that's what exercise should be, play.

Sugar detox

Well Easter did not go as planned. I started out at brunch pretty well, I filled half my plate with fruit and veggies, and seconds were a mere taste. Then I relaxed a little (too soon!).

This fall I'm making a wedding cake for my friends and I used Easter to test a few flavors on my family. I had one and a half pieces at brunch, not too bad. I gave away a lot of the cake but couldn’t let go of my favorite flavor.  I knew in my brain that It would be a disaster to bring it home but I...wanted...it. When we got back, as soon as no one was watching, I went into vacuum cleaner mode and ate half of the leftover cake in just a few minutes before I managed to save myself by quickly dumping the rest into the garbage. Blarg. I made myself sick with sugar and I still didn't feel right the next day, time for detox mode.

The day after a binge is a pivotal moment. Pulling your body chemistry back into balance so you can enjoy healthy meals again is not an easy thing to do. Sugar overload has real withdrawal symptoms that can lead into a viscous cycle, just like a "real" addiction. The best method I've found for getting back on track, and for controlling cravings in general, comes from a book called Potatoes not Prozac, which is about sugar sensitivity. You can read more about the concept at Radiant Recovery, the website of Dr. Kathleen DesMaisons, Ph.D. in addictive nutrition. There's a lot of "it's not your fault!" rhetoric that I'm not sure about but the nutrition advice is amazing at controlling hunger and cravings.

Here's the short version: Take your body weight, divide it in half. That's how many grams of protein you need in a day. Now divide that by three, that's how many grams of protein you need at each meal. Meat, eggs, cottage cheese, low fat cheese, beans, unsweetened yogurt or veggies like spinach or edamame are all great sources. 

In addition to your protein, have a serving of unprocessed complex carbohydrates, 1/2 cup for smaller people, 1 cup for bigger people. This can be oatmeal, brown rice, sweet potatoes with skin, beans, whole grain crackers like wasa, high fiber tortillas, etc. 

Eat your protein and your complex carb (ideally with some fruit of veggie and a glass of water) within one hour of waking and you've got a meal that will keep you feeling satisfied for four hours or more. This is my best method for breaking out of the sugar craving cycle and truthfully, the best way to reduce my hunger overall. Every meal can be based on these concepts. Here's a day of eating that's based on this formula.

My kitchen still looks like it did in this picture from Monday (the day after Easter), actually it looks worse because I've only added to the dishes since then, but at least my cravings are under control. One thing at a time. Onward!

Food metaphors can explain anything

 

The irony of course is that it's kinda my job to tell people not to eat pancakes for breakfast. :/