The Goal
What is the goal of eating better?
Is it pride and arrogance?
For some people it is. I’ve met a lot of people who love to rub your nose in how inferior your eating is compared to theirs.
Some other answers might be:
- to get healthier
- to live longer
- to feel better
- to stop the cravings
- to look better
I’m going to suggest that BALANCE is the better answer — it takes in all of the good stuff above.
A balanced person isn’t overweight or underweight, doesn’t act out their anger, doesn’t live in fear, knows what good they can do on this planet, knows what harm they are capable of but they don’t do it, and they don’t focus on what goes into their mouths. They figure out what works, they don’t do what doesn’t work, and they make habits that still include variety.
In other words, a balanced person doesn’t spend a lot of time figuring out the perfect diet because they know the “perfect diet” doesn’t exist.
I’m not saying to avoid cruelty-free or organic foods. I’m all for them. But if you can’t get them, or if they’re still overpriced in your area, go for the better choices (you probably know what those are if you’ve had any contact with LeftLemon.com at all) and stop stressing over it.
To clarify:
a balanced meal has about 30% protein which could already be in your other foods because protein is in everything
a balanced meal has about 30% good oils which could already be in your other foods — like avocados, olives, etc.
a balanced meal has about 40% good quality carbohydrates like leafy greens, fresh veggies, raw fruits, etc.
Try balancing every meal with 30/30/40 for a few days and see if your body doesn’t feel better.
observations
A few things I’ve noticed while grocery shopping lately:
Storage Bags
“Ziploc” brand bags say clearly on the side or bottom: “Product not formulated with BPA” — I’m impressed. None of the other reclosable bags in the stores I frequent say anything about BPA. Makes me wonder…
Mayonnaise
Have you noticed most mayonnaise is now low-fat? The same old brands are now adding olive oil to their less-than-wonderful Canola and soy oil, but the first ingredient is water. They boldly advertise on the label, “New! Lower in fat!” That means they have to add other things, non-mayonnaisey things, to make it act like mayonnaise.
I’ve made mayonnaise for decades and it’s wonderful stuff! But it is a bunch of oil that has been thickened with eggs and lemon. The oil is good, the eggs are good, the lemon is good. The real thing is good. Add a bit of garlic and it’s perfect! But you don’t ever use water.
So if you’re trying to improve your diet, make your own (recipes abound online) using good eggs, freshly squeezed lemon juice, and olive oil. You’ll be amazed at how your body responds. And for what it’s worth, I don’t add mustard to my mayonnaise recipe.
You can still find good mayonnaise in some stores — try health food stores or store brands at your regular grocery store.
Or you can whip up a batch of oil and lemon juice (equal parts) and use that instead. That’s what submarine sandwiches are famous for.
“Ultra-Pasteurized”
Ever wondered what that meant?
Let’s begin with basic cooking 101. The higher the temperature when cooking proteins, the more degraded and toxic it becomes.
From wikipedia (emphasis added):
Pasteurization of milk … is the main reason for milk’s extended shelf life.
High-temperature, short-time (HTST) pasteurized milk typically has a refrigerated shelf life of two to three weeks.
Ultra-pasteurized milk can last much longer, sometimes two to three months….
Pasteurization typically uses temperatures below boiling, since at very high temperatures, casein micelles will irreversibly aggregate, or “curdle“.
In the HTST [normal, pasteurized milk] process, milk is heated to 161°F.
UHT [ultra-pasteurized] processing takes it to 275°F.
A lot of doctors and nutritionists believe the protein in ultra-pasteurized milk has a much higher link to colon cancer than just about anything else. Mercola’s website has this article.
Ultra-pasteurized milk proteins are added to health drinks and powders, and energy bars. Heated cheese is about the worst thing you can give your colon.
South Carolina has very liberal laws on raw milk. Most health food stores, especially the independent ones, carry raw milk. You can call them to find out their delivery schedule. Raw milk cannot be kept next to the regular milk in some counties, ask if you can’t find it. Resources.
And just about any good health food store carries cheese made from raw milk.
Eating Out
I was in Butte, Montana recently, looking for a restaurant. We had just toured the amazing Mineral Museum — a place even normal people might appreciate for the beautiful displays of gems and minerals — and we were hungry. We asked around for a good place to eat and someone mentioned The Hummingbird Cafe, just a few blocks from the museum.
To say we had a pleasurable experience would be an understatement. Great food, great service, and a comfortable place to eat while the weather outside was frightful.
But more than that I was reminded of what makes a great dining experience when you’re trying to improve your health while still enjoying food, friends, and family.
Rule #1: pick a place that knows what “fresh” means
Wilted lettuce or canned guacamole just won’t improve your health like a pile of fresh alfalfa sprouts and a dollop of fresh hummus.
Rule #2: if they won’t work with you, go elsewhere
I don’t eat wheat. Nope, not ever. So when entering a sandwich shop the first thing I want to know is if the chef is having a bad day and can’t handle arranging sandwich ingredients on a plate. By the time you find that out, you already know if your waiter is going to be helpful.
Rule #3: comfort is…, well…, comforting
Is it too crowded? Too noisy? Too dark? Too anything?
A comfortable chair at a table with space to move around, good art on the walls, a bit of tasteful humor in the bathroom — these are all appreciated.
Rule #4: your turn — share your thoughts on finding good food when eating out
Clutter too
I was wondering this morning how I managed to get rid of 56% of the stuff in my house when I’d been through two major (MAJOR!!!) purges in the past 14 months. The conclusion I came to is that I finally figured out a few things:
1) who I am
2) where I’m going
3) what I’ll need along the way
Giving up wheat and removing meat from my home released a lot of unnecessary items from my kitchen. And narrowing down my interests to those I am truly passionate about released items from other rooms. But my desk — where the vast majority of items were removed — found release from knowing who I am.
Finding out who I am came slowly, probably due to the autism thing. But the more I get to know God, the more I see why He made me, and how much better my life will be when my values completely align with His.
I’ve had to fight for health ever since I can remember
And it has eluded me in many ways. I have been told “It’s probably MS.” so many times that I finally forced the issue and demanded an official diagnosis. What I went through with that fiasco would make a great book. Mystery, suspense, near-death experiences, everyone making mistakes, and somehow surviving to tell about it. It turned me off from doctors for a long time.
At some point along this journey I realized vitamin and mineral supplements were doing more harm than good. So I quit.
Health has become a passion of mine
And just finding that passion has released a lot of clutter from my house. I don’t need things that create ill health. I don’t need things to keep me alive while I eat badly. And I no longer need those hundreds of pages of instructions to extract myself from whatever health problem I had gotten into this time.
Emotional baggage is clutter too
Forgiveness is priceless. Knowing that someone refused to forgive me for something I did is one of the worst hurts I’ve ever endured. But I played into that person’s desires to make me squirm until I forgave them for not forgiving me.
Forgiveness leads to less clutter in my head.
Getting rid of the excesses in my life…
Most of my life I’ve eaten excessively – foods or drinks that were bad for me. Those had to be removed from my house until I was strong enough to refuse them. I needed to be able to relax in my own house and not have all those temptations around me. And once I found better health I didn’t want them anymore.
Getting rid of so much stuff from my house means I don’t have to take care of (steward) all the stuff that’s gone, but I also don’t have to clean it or clean around it!
The bottom line
The change I appreciated the most in the Clutterfat Challenge:
The view.
My entire house is pleasant to look at, with only a few exceptions that need more work. I love the look of wood floors with sunlight streaming in. And the thick knotty pine paneling in my den and kitchen.
And now I appreciate the stuff I do have.
(Thanks to D&T for allowing me to photograph the sunlight coming in from their awesome, snowy deck.)
Clutter 1
I recently participated in The Clutterfat Challenge, where I agreed to go through all of my “stuff” over a 30 day period and attempt to get rid of what wasn’t needed or wanted anymore.
William Morris – “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
They expected 50% of everyone’s stuff to accept the label of “clutter” and be moved out.
I, being special, hoped for considerably less.
Why am I so special? Because I’ve worked as a professional organizer for over two decades, because I just went through two major purges of clutter in the last 14 months, and because I like to think I keep a pretty sparse home anyway.
Pride goeth before the fall.
I counted all of my stuff to begin the challenge. I came up with 8748, but I guestimated the contents of my file drawers due to the overwhelming amount of stuff. I figured purging the file drawers would take the most out of my house, but I had no idea as to what awaited me during this thirty day challenge.
What does this have to do with restoring health through understanding — the LeftLemon.com motto — you might ask?
“When you find an excess, something is wrong.”
Trust me, I will tie this together…
I began this journey according to the directions, by downloading the three page worksheet, and walking into the bathroom to begin counting every object in there. I opened the first drawer and realized I wanted to get rid of about half the stuff in that drawer right now! No — I couldn’t! I had to count them.
To say I was angry, depressed, overwhelmed, and maybe even a bit furious during the two days it took me to count all the stuff in my house doesn’t quite describe the emotion I felt. It was horrible. But it was a huge learning experience.
The final statistics
My beginning total: 8748
My ending total: 3841
I got rid of 4907 ite
ms.
Percentage of stuff exited from my house: 56%.
Analysis, in case you’re interested:
Place where the most items were eliminated: my desk at 3580 less items, 71% less stuff.
Place that surprised me the most: kitchen at 621 less items, 43% less stuff.
Place that was the most fun: my closets and drawers — 321 less items, 60% less.
Place with the least clutterfat: the living room.
The hardest part: counting.
How did I get rid of 621 items from my kitchen?
By getting rid of items I would never need now that I’ve committed to a healthy lifestyle.
How about you? Where are the excesses in your life? What could you stand to get rid of? Would it bring you more peace and contentedness? Would it bring you better health?
Breakfast
A lot of people have been asking about breakfast. But here’s the best one: “Do I really have to eat vegetables for breakfast?”
The short answer is “no,” you can eat fruit instead, along with some nuts or seeds for oils and protein.
Most people in Europe and North America eat either a protein or a starch breakfast.
In other words, toast, boxed cereal, muffins, oatmeal, pancakes, grits, potatoes, waffles.
Or eggs, sausage, bacon, ham, or other animal protein.
Or worse, mix proteins and starches together: sausage or egg biscuit, toast and eggs, waffles and sausage, grits and eggs, etc.
Mixing proteins with starches breaks a major rule of food combining and can mess up your day. If you’re going to go with starches, have veggies with them. If you’re going to eat protein, have veggies.
So the typical breakfast isn’t something you’d want to start your day with if your goal is to improve your health.
If you keep marinated greens and sauerkraut in your refrigerator, they can be added to starches or proteins to make the meal balanced.
And a balanced meal feeds your body so you don’t have cravings or hunger until it’s time to eat again — usually four or five hours later. In fact the best way to tell you’re not getting enough good oils is if you get hungry 2 – 3 hours after your last meal.
Look at it this way: Everything that goes into your mouth is going to do one of two things:
A) contribute to a slide into worse health or
B) heal your body so you can climb out of that pit.
It’s your choice. Look at every meal as a chance to heal, instead of making things worse.
A lot of people have turned to green smoothies for breakfast.
There are some problems with that:
- Most recipes make enough for two, and sometimes four servings, encouraging overeating.
- The smoothie isn’t balanced with real food proteins but relies instead on highly processed protein powders.
- Oils are not added, so despite overeating, you get hungry again quickly.
- If you don’t rotate your greens you can build up a resistance and stop digesting them. This is really bad for people with thyroid problems. Using more lemon and vinegar helps predigest them, but also affects the flavor if you drink it right away.
Here are some suggestions for balanced, nourishing breakfasts:
- One grapefruit, segmented, with a small handful of soaked nuts or seeds.
- One apple or other fruit in season, with real yogurt (made with whole milk) with live cultures and not pasteurized.
- A fresh avocado with some dried kale and umeboshi vinegar (cut the avocado in half, remove the pit, put in a spoonful of vinegar, and eat it with a spoon).
- A cooked egg with raw sauerkraut from the fridge, add some olive oil after cooking the egg.
- Half a fresh apple in season cut up, small handful of raspberries, half cup real whole-milk yogurt or milk, a touch of raw honey if needed, 1 tablespoon crunchy seaweed
- Maybe once each week make a smoothie following the recipe below. Please don’t rely on this for breakfast every day.
How about you? What is your favorite balanced breakfast? Put it in the comments section so we can all try it.
LeftLemon Smoothie Recipe
Ingredients
| 1 | c water |
| 1/4 | t cayenne or to taste |
| 2 | tbsp lemon juice or juice of one lemon |
| 1 | large apple |
| 1 | tbsp vinegar |
| 1/3 | c olive oil |
| 1/2 | c berries (fresh or frozen) |
| 1 | tbsp rosemary |
| 2 | tbsp grade B maple syrup (to taste) |
| 2 | oz raw red kale or other red veggie |
| 8 | oz raw hard greens (collards, kale, chard, etc.) |
| 1 | Egg, cooked, or a slice of cheese — don’t put it into the smoothie |
Directions
- Put everything except the leaves into a blender container and blend thoroughly. Add more cayenne until you can feel a bit of heat but it’s not too hot to eat.
- Gradually add the greens, stems and all, blending thoroughly after each addition.
- Eat the egg (or slice of cheese or other protein) with it for a higher protein count to make it a balanced meal.
- This recipe makes two to three servings. Share with a housemate, or cover and refrigerate some for tomorrow. The oil content not only helps your liver function better, but it works as a preservative to keep your smoothie from going bad too quickly.
- Also, the oil content helps you not get hungry between meals.
- Please make sure you rotate your greens — eating the same greens (or reds) all the time can cause problems.
End of the Year (part two)
Last time I reviewed the list of things that didn’t go well this year. Today I’m looking at my list of surprise successes and how they came about, trying to figure out how I can encourage more surprises of that sort to come my way.
Some of the things that worked well for me were relationships. Being packed into your own house with three times the normal amount of people forces you to either blow up or learn the fine art of forgiveness. I chose the latter and surprised myself at how calm I could be amidst the noise and clutter. I think I may have surprised my family as well. It’s something I’d like to continue.
patterns
Two big successes happened in October and November. That’s when a lot of things fell into place and I could see patterns develop into something that actually made sense for the first time in my life.
First was You vs. Debt — a class on financial change. The class was an exploratory journey where we figured out what we believed about money and how to change those beliefs for the better. Everyone had their own journey, and mine was life-altering.
Next came NaNoWriMo, where I learned that even I can write a novel in one month. Not only that, but we spent a week in Kansas for a funeral and my daughter and family moved out during that month. Oh, and the clothes washer had to be replaced. It was a busy month!
These two activities taught me . . .
Deep inside me has always lurked a writer, and I can think of no better way to earn income than by writing. I realized this last year. I knew I was going to write that story down and it was just a matter of when. 2012 will find me editing my first novel that actually made it to paper (or computer).
I know many others have found health by eating the LeftLemon way, but in order for me to write about it I had to experience my own successes. I offered interactive classes to some followers on facebook and have seen many of them come to that “Aha!” moment when they realized this stuff really works.
Balance
The hardest part of eating this way is understanding that balance is not what we think it is. The most crucial element most people lack is adequate oils. The good kind of oils. Like olive oil, and raw milk dairy products, and avocados, and olives, and sesame oil or butter for cooking.
Think of putting your dinner tonight into a two-cup glass measuring cup. To make it 30/30/40, 4/5 of one cup should be carbs — the high quality vegetable kind — represented here by cranberry juice in the middle section. Almost 2/3 of a cup needs to be protein — the ground beef on the bottom. And the remaining almost 2/3 of a cup needs to be good fats and oils.
Now honestly, have you been getting that much oil in your diet?
Maybe it’s time to focus on getting those oils in at every meal. But when you do, you won’t need two cups of food at one sitting!
Have a happy and save New Year!
End of the Year (part one)
Now that the busy-ness of the holiday season is almost behind us, it’s time to relax a bit and think of what we would like to happen next year.
Chris Guillebeau, in his annual week-long review asks two questions:
- What didn’t work well this year?
- What worked well this year?
I love the way Chris looks at things, and I’ve adopted his two questions as the beginning of my own annual review.
I have a long tradition of spending New Year’s Eve, once the rest of the family has gone to bed, sitting on the floor in my living room figuring out stuff.
- Favorite drink: hot raspberry cordial.
- Favorite music: Sarah Brightman singing Pie Jesu with Paul Miles-Kingston.
- Favorite pen: Pilot G2 07, in blue so I can see it better by candle light
- Favorite book to write in: Planner Pad — I write in the “goals/projects/calendar” section in the back, the last four pages.
Because I know the new year is coming, and because I know I’m too sleepy that late at night to remember it all, I usually begin a few weeks earlier and devote two pages to list my answers to Chris’s questions.
This year has been the most unpredictable year ever and had a lot of surprise successes. That page is almost filled.
The other page, the things that didn’t work well, has about half as many listings, but a few of them are significant. Projects I wanted to begin, money I wish I wouldn’t have spent, time I wish I would have put into projects, other ongoing commitments that didn’t get the attention needed. I was as though I was going down the highway but didn’t know where I would end up.
Where are you going?
In looking over all the things that didn’t go well I see a theme:
I was distracted.
My distractions were not bad things. My daughter’s family of four moved in with us last December while they designed and had their new home built. It took eleven months. And during that time they crammed themselves and some of their stuff into our modest home and, well, I was distracted by the pitter patter of little feet, the wonderful companionship of my daughter, and the accompaniment of little girls almost any time I wanted. My focus was on family.
And it was good.
My list of things that didn’t go well has a second theme too:
I made mistakes.
Learning from past mistakes happens better if you examine them.
Most on my list are due to old habit patterns that I didn’t bother to deal with. Like not scheduling things to be done at certain times or on certain days. Or not making a list of breakfast meals that work when I’m in a hurry. Or not planning suggested dinner menus in writing so I can look at them when I need groceries but I’m not feeling creative.
New Year’s Eve will find me forgiving. Forgiving me for the things I didn’t get accomplished this year, forgiving others for whatever offenses I still haven’t forgiven, forgiving everything and anything that might get in the way of pressing on into the new year with a clear idea of where I think I’m going. And forgiving me for the fears that prevented actions I really wanted to take.
Learning.
I’ve run three classes now (one still in progress) with people who frequent the LeftLemon.com page on facebook. I trust they have benefited, but I’ve certainly learned a lot! I’d forgotten how difficult it was to figure out how to balance a meal. It almost comes as second nature to me now, but I’ve been working on it for nearly five years.
LeftLemon.com is about using food and food alone to achieve health. I could have done better this year. The last time I saw Dr. Max he actually handed me an envelope of pills to take to get my kidneys working better. Do I know how to get kidneys working better with food and food alone?!?
This past year I’ve answered a lot of questions from visitors to the website, from friends who know what I do, and from people in Max’s office. But no one else benefited from those answers. This new year will find me focused on answering the many questions that come my way in a form that helps many, instead of just the questioner. Which is what this blog is about.
My goal is to give you at least one tidbit that will help you on your journey toward health. Maybe even two. And if I manage to keep my promises, these missives will arrive on Monday nights and Thursday nights.
Hot Morning Drinks
I know several people who swear their bowels move perfectly when they drink coffee every morning. They pay for that with kidney stones and other health problems, but there is something to their claim. So try one of these instead:
- hot herbal tea with cayenne
- hot lemon water with raw honey and cayenne
- hot chai tea with cayenne
- hot milk with maple syrup and cayenne
Sometimes I add a bit of Real Salt. It helps the fluids get all the way to the colon. If you can taste it, you’ve used too much.
And if you want to know why there is cayenne in all of the above hot morning drinks, it’s because cayenne is well known for stripping excess mucus from your insides.
Here’s hoping your week is filled with the blessings of good health, good friends, and good food choices.
