It's time to get real...

Dissappointed. That's what I feel.

Dissappointed in myself for straying too often, and too far, from the healthy side of the tracks.

Can you hear me groan? 

That groan is not the dissappointment. That groan is my tiny 5'1" body struggling to carry the extra 20 kilograms I have piled on to it! 

And let's not even start on the heartburn that makes a regular nightly visit or the puffing and panting as I climb the twenty stairs to get into the house. It's a sad and sorry sight indeed, but worse - my body is unwell and I chose by my own behaviour to bring that about. 

I am a person who needs accountability. In order for me to get the job done I like a deadline; I work wonderfully with deadines and rarely fail to achieve them.

However, choosing to eat healthy-on-purpose doesn't give me any accountability to anyone but myself. This is where you come in. I am going to ask you to be my accountability partner for the next month. Why a month? Baby steps. A manageable chunk of time. Enough days to form new habits.

The reason it's so important NOW?

The grandsons are moving to town next week and if they arrive and I have platters of choc-chip biscuits and strawberry cream sponge cakes then that will set the precedent of those little bodies always expecting sweet and unhealthy treats from their nana.

If a precedent is to be set, it will be that nana has different foods, but they sure taste good! 

These are strewn across my dining table for ideas and teaching...

 

 

The Detox dvd has 9 wonderful recipes that I will make for myself and (hopefully) Mr E over the next few weeks. I loved it so much I have ordered the book because it has many more recipes. The author is Jody Vassallo and 'wow' does she make me comfortable! She is relaxed, explains everything, and isn't hung up on being ultra strict but guides you along a detox path that will work because it's so close to normal. 

I realised after I watched the dvd that I own one of her books - "Wheat & Gluten Free". I used it a lot when my 18yo son was off wheat and dairy for a year in 2006. The recipes were simple, tasty, and the book was just like any glossy recipe book with amazing meals to prepare! She is a fabulous cook and I'm excited about trying them all again...

 

 

I am not coeliac, and neither are any of the family members, however we all feel better in our digestive system when we avoid wheat and dairy - in particular, dairy with all 4 of us still living at home, and wheat with my 18yo and myself.

Today I made Sticky Black Rice for breakfast, a recipe from Jody Vassallo's book. Have you used Black Rice? It's lovely and makes a good dessert rice...

I had to soak it in water overnight, but I also added some lemon juice to break down the enzyme inhibitors and aid digestion.

This morning I rinsed the rice, then cooked it in fresh water for around 20 minutes. After draining the cooked rice, in another saucepan I simmered some coconut milk and palm sugar for a few minutes. This was poured over the rice before adding some fresh passionfruit. It was YUM!

This would be a lovely dessert with more fruits.

Last week I made more buckwheat granola and that is my usual breakfast...

...and some snacks made with Sunflower kernels, lemon juice, garlic and Shoyu. These were left in the dehydrator overnight, and taste very much like cheese! I got the recipe from Matt Amsden's "RawVolution" book.

Being limited in what I can buy locally I found a great online health food supplier and my first delivery arrived with a couple of days...

The last step to make this transition permanent was to have all my ingredients where I could see them. I am visual, and my ideas are triggered by what I see. 

We have only one small pantry cupboard where most things are crammed behind each other, so I moved a large bookcase from my sewing room into the kitchen and now I can see everything I want to use!

 

 

So beginning today I am sharing a day by day diary for the next month. I ask you to keep me accountable. Leave comments, share ideas with me, ask questions. 

Every day I'll tell you what I am making, what I'm eating, what I am giving the family, what I am learning.

I'll even share my weight. 

Today I weigh 77.5 kgs - the most I have ever weighed in my life. 

Every Thursday I'll do a weigh in, so let's see if I can reduce that number by making myself accountable to you. But mostly, I pray I can make a difference to my grandsons view of what good food is.

See you tomorrow,

Jenny

xx

Planning ahead for busy times...

I just ordered this...

The author/cook is Heidi Swanson, and this book is a compilation of all the meals she made in a year - the meals she cooked for her family. Heidi is vegetarian, and as I have shared before, there was a two year session of being vegetarian myself during 2006-7, so I am excited about becoming more veggie-meal-minded once more. I'm hoping for simple but tasty everyday fare, and from the reviews this book offers that.

This last month saw me once again drop off in my healthy eating pursuits. I get discouraged when I am time poor and that happened a lot during late February and all through March. 

Today was the 1st day of school holidays and with a two and half week break ahead of me the plan is to clean out the pantry tonight, then draw up a menu list, shop, and spend a couple of days cooking in bulk for freezing ahead to cover the busy weeks I know I'll have in 2nd term.

For now I am going to revisit this book, Nourishing Traditions, for ideas until Heidi's book arrives...

...and go over all the lessons I learnt from the Nourished Kitchen online course last year. 

With the tropical weather finally cooling, and the nights becoming crisp with a slight chill in the air, it is perfect timing for risottos and stews, baked fruit crumbles, and home made soups. I will even pull out the dehydrator to stock up on some treats for the winter using the last of the plums and other stone fruits. 

Zumba is on my 'want to' list of exercise, but as I have two left feet and no co-ordination whatsoever, this may be a challenge I should lay down before I begin. Maybe stick to those ancient Rosemary Conley videos that may have 80's music, but actually do work on my body shape? I'll let you know. 

I hope I can be diligent to update here more often - that would certainly be a personal encouragement and give me some accountability. How have you been going with living a healthy lifestyle? Have you made permanent changes over the last year that you can share with me?

I'd love to hear from you. :-)

Healthy Hugs

Jenny

Seeing results...

I am really proud of how well I have been able to stick to this low-carb/sugar-free diet. I have had a couple of days where the sweet tooth has cried out for a sugar hit, but I fed it with grapes or an orange and it soon settled. 

To date I have lost 2.6kgs (almost 6 pounds), and I am rarely hungry. 

I am careful to add proteins to my daily salads; things like Tofu, chicken breast and nuts...

...as well as lentils, beans or chick peas.

On my doctor's advice I am careful not to eat fruits like melons as they are high GI and give your body a sugar rush. I eat lots of berries, especially in smoothies or with yoghurt, and I like to spoil myself with a passionfruit at breakfast.

The good carbs I eat are things like roasted sweet potato, which I toss through my salad.

Filtered water is a high priority, and apart from one soycinno per day it is all I drink.

Of course, I know that I can't stay this strict for the rest of my life, but after the doctor checked my blood pressure again this week and discovered it was already back to normal (yay!!!!), I am certainly convinced that at least 80% of my diet will need to stay this way.

That's ok. Life is about balance, so if I want to have a slice of sourdough bread once or twice a week, I will. I'll enjoy every crumb, and then settle back to what I know works best for my body. Once I have lost another 13kgs I can live on a maintenance plan, but for now I have that goal in sight - and the most important part of my goal is that a healthier me will result.

Healthy hugs,

Jenny

Changes afoot....

I shocked myself to see that it has been 4 months since I last posted here. Oops. If the truth be told, I fell off the wagon!

Yep, fessin' up.

I got so busy with life that I lost time to prepare good food every day for my family and myself. 

Some pretty scary health issues over the last couple of weeks (and a decision to drop much of my online activity) left me with no excuses for getting back to the kitchen and preparing foods that nourish, heal, and refresh.

I have adrenal fatigue, high cholesterol, borderline high blood pressure, and suspected Meniere's Disease - add to that chronic migraines since I was 12, and the fact that I am hypothyroid, and you can see why I can't play around with my health (and did I mention menopause and the fun it has with my internal temperature gauge??). My husband has the autoimmune disease Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, so getting his health to an optimum level is also my priority.

Firstly I studied adrenal fatigue because it has really been rocking my boat and the symptoms are all stress and diet related. This leads up to the cholesterol and blood pressure, so it had to be my starting point. 

I decided to drop all sugar and most carbohydrates for the time being. Today is day 7 and I am 1.6 kgs lighter, and after barely being able to lift my body off the bed a week ago, today I have felt no fatigue at all, and my main suspected Meniere's symptom (the extreme dizzy spells) have been barely noticeable.

As I have shared before, I love to go raw as much as possible, so that has once again been a big part of each day's diet. Adding in as many different fruits and vegetables as I can gives me an increased 'basket' of vitamins and minerals each day.

Juicing is back on the menu, especially with beetroot, celery and carrot as the base vegetables...

Here is a wonderful way to serve raw broccoli that is gentle on your stomach and digestive tract.

Chop the broccoli florets into small pieces...

Choose a healthy organic salad dressing (or use coconut oil and curry powder for an eastern tang), and add a couple of tablespoons to the broccoli....

Shake up and leave in the fridge for the day (if you make this in the morning) or overnight...

The broccoli will be soft by the time you eat it and so tasty that you'll not want to share any! :-)

Roasting trays of diced pumpkin and sweet potato, then storing in the fridge, allows me to add these wonderful vegetables to my salads each day. 

I have had 1/2 potato twice this week and plan to not stray far from that in the future - pasta, breads and rice are also off my list for the time being. Fruit, vegetables, salmon, legumes, occasional red meat, nuts and seeds, yoghurt, eggs - these make up most of my diet. I drink water all day long, but still allow myself one light soy-decaff-cappuccino per day, with a tiny sprinkle of stevia for sweetness instead of sugar.

Making my own fruit yoghurts helped with the hunger pains for the first few days...

...and for snacks mid-afternoon I had a small handful of these with a piece of fruit. 

My coffee grinder is back in action grinding flaxseeds, almonds and sunflower kernals to sprinkle over my salads and to add to yoghurts. I make enough to last a few days and store it in the fridge. 

~~~~~

7 days with no sugar started off very difficult. I was craving, no, screaming out, for something sweet in the first 3 days, but on day 4 it didn't matter at all. Bread was also difficult to avoid for the first few days, but I did, and now it's not an issue.

Today I feel better, have more energy, and am able to think with greater clarity, than I did 7 days ago. 

How will I feel after 14 days?

I'll tell you next Thursday.

Healthy hugs

Jenny

xx

Lightbulb moments - don't you love them!

Try as I may, I haven't been able to write down a menu plan that I am happy with - or that I can stick to! It's been driving me bonkers and I was almost ready to throw in the towel and declare 'I cannot do this!' when God pushed aside my frustration and popped a very simple answer into my mind.

Let me backtrack just a bit.

All my life I have loved lists, plans, strategies, instructions...when I was 8 I had every article of my clothing itemised on a list inside my wardrobe door and a schedule next to it with what I'd be wearing on each day for the next week.

When I was 9 I organised my own library - cataloging all my books in alphabetical and subject order, adding a library card to the inside sleeve (remember when all libraries did that? Before the techno age?), and making myself a library card book where I would 'make record' of the books I loaned myself each week. I loved the structure of planning, and implementing those plans!

Back to my menu planning. 

Most of my adult life has revolved around a plan of some sort. As a homeschooling parent who gathered together her own curriculum I was daily making plans for each subject for each child, with an overall scope & sequence for each term. Oh, how wonderful that was! I was in my element. :-) 

Added to this I had a 6 week rotating menu plan that kept me on track with meals and shopping, plus a house cleaning planner that had each room attended to on a certain day of the week, with a 'deep' clean list once every school holiday break. 

When the kids finished homeschooling and my design work 'took off', after we'd moved cross country yet 'again', after menopause hit with a vengeance - well, all those plans just dwindled away and my daily menu/cleaning/planning systems all fell apart. 

To be honest, this has its good points as well as the obvious bad ones. The good point is that I am more open to the unexpected and to change...I wake each day wondering 'what today, Lord?', and that makes my time more accessible to Him.

So the other day as I was agonising over a good menu plan, He spoke into my thoughts with this idea.

Instead of making a menu plan as I had done in years past, I should give each day a 'core ingredient' based on who will be having dinner at home that night.

For example, my 17yo has 'pizza and movies' every Tursday night with his best mate. This son doesn't like tuna, but the rest of us do, so Tuesday is now Tuna Night! I have made a list of tuna based meals, and each Tuesday night I choose one of them to cook for the rest of the family. Easy!

Monday is pasta night, so I have a *long* list of pasta meals we all enjoy and I choose one of them to make. 

And so my week continues with 'Rice', 'Potatoes', 'Seafood', and 'Vegetarian' nights. I have one night free - Saturday. That's because my husband has, after 19 years of marriage, decided to learn to cook. We go shopping together on Saturday morning and choose a main ingredient, then we go home and look through all my cook books until we find a simple recipe we can make together. I am loving this!!

Yesterday we chose to purchase green prawns. It was just $7 for 1/2 kilo, and we made a truly delicious dinner from one of my Jamie Oliver cookbooks, plus a carrot and orange salad from another of J.O.'s books.

Marinate the green prawns (hubby peeled them for me) in lime zest, sunflower oil, and grated ginger for a few minutes...

...then stir fry quickly for just 2 minutes. Put aside for 30 seconds to cool a bit.

In a bowl add lime juice, chopped fresh chilli, and freshly chopped coriander leaves.

 Pour this over the prawns and serve with the carrot salad!

Carrot Salad: Grate carrots, add a good lug of olive oil, 1/2 cup orange juice, and a dash of red wine vinegar. Delish!

~~~~~

In the coming weeks I'm going to make myself a good menu folder with 'core' food sheets for ideas and recipes. If you like I'll share them with you. :-)

Now to enjoy some morning tea with my family - Sultana & Orange Muffins.

 

Healthy Hugs

Jenny

xx

Life Expectancy

I've been 4 weeks without caffeine now. 

The first week was torture, but after that I changed my focus from 'desperately missing' my cappuccino to rejoicing in how much better I felt. I was falling asleep easily each night (and staying asleep), my brain wasn't racing on overdrive all day, and the pains in my chest disappeared.

We've had some major stress issues the last month and I am very aware that I handled them with greater peace of mind simply because I had no caffeine in my body. Even though I wasn't eating as healthily as I had been previously, that one simple thing of tossing away the coffee and tea helped me cope.

My hot beverage these days is Dandelion Tea, which is a wonderful liver tonic first thing in the morning...

...and once a day I make myself a Red Clover Tea because it's so helpful in aleviating my menopausal hot flushes.

Cow's milk has also been avoided as much as possible. I changed to soy milk (also to help with the hot flushes) and had a hard time adjusting at first, but now I am hooked. As long as I have one glass morning and night I can keep the flushes down to 5-8 per day - a huge improvement on the 20-30 I had been having previously.

Lots of green salads are back on the daily menu...

...and a fresh vegetable juice is my morning tea. 

In 2006 I spent the entire year as a vegetarian. I can honestly say that was the healthiest I had ever felt, so guess what? I'm going to retrace my vegetarian journey and get this 51 year old body back in good shape again. I also think the vegetable juices are having a definite effect on reducing the flushes. 

I just did a 'biological age' test HERE at Blue Zones. Being that I do not drink, smoke, or have any diseases, walk a fair bit, and normally eat a very healthy diet, the test results gave my biological age as 46 (yay! 5 years younger that my actual age!), and my life expectancy as 90!

My disease free life expectancy was 82. I have to tell you that these results have certainly inspired me to stay the course of a healthy life, but there were some negative issues the test brought to light - my BMI is high, and (usually) I tend to feel anxious or stressed for at least half the month.

For years I have had an ongoing battle to remove the Cortisol Hump at the base of my neck. A friend of mine is a wonderful masseuse and she completely removed the hump in 2007 with a 2 hour 'hot rock' massage just over the neck and shoulder area, but since then it has returned. A Cortisol Hump is caused by too much cortisol in the body which equals too much stress. That same over abundance of stress induced cortisol causes excess tummy fat as well. 
If you cut way down on animal proteins and fats you can reduce cortisol production, so another 'tick' in my plan to go veggie once more.

I just bought a Tai Chi DVD to help with slow movement, stretching, and calming my mind. Prayer is my greatest mental calmer, but I still feel 'stress' in my muscles and neck most of the time, and my mind can wander a lot to 'what ifs'.

I also need to work on the weight loss to lower my BMI. I have about 13 kilos to lose, and once lost that would put me in the upper percentage of 'healthy' weight for my height and age.

Why don't you do the Blue Zones biological age test, too? Sometimes we just need to see where we are with our health to inspire us to change our direction or keep on a healthly path.

Healthy hugs

Jenny

xx

Wow - I really did miss September!!

I can't believe its been so many weeks since I last posted here, but then again, life sure was full of so many things in the background - all those things that just don't get shared on your blog. ;-)

I'm going to make a confession. I am an emotional eater.

When life's boat is tossing wildly on the ocean of my world I tend to turn to food as I ponder the answers that will rescue my mind from it's incessant search for *the* answer to make all things right once more.

Scotch Finger biscuits put their hand up as my September food addiction and after losing 3 kilos in August, I painfully welcomed most of them right back in September!

Fortunately these times of high intensity need do not last forever.

Over-filling my roles of mother, mentor, comforter and encourager last month took a lot of time, prayer, and face-to-face hours. I ached for those who were hurting, and found my love of healthy living just didn't seem to be as important at the time. I think we all have times in life when some things, some people in particular, need so much of us that order diminishes and we just want to *be* there for them. Everything else can wait.

Bit by bit, day by day, my loved ones are healing. They are not there yet, but they are in a better place than they were a month ago. 

Now I am noticing that our bodies are starving for nutrients we've been avoiding - it's time to throw that last Scotch Finger Biscuit wrapper in the bin, clean out the fridge and pantry, and go shopping in the fresh food aisle once more.

Hmmm...a menu plan will be needed too. I'll do that this afternoon. 

See you soon with a replenished arsenal of God's lovely fresh pleasures,

Hugs

Jenny

xxx

PS: If you've fallen off the wagon like me, let me know and we can help each other shake off that extra weight added on by unhealthy eating, and embrace fresh, life-giving goodness once more.