Playin’ The Edge

I was doing really well.  I was taking the cup half full approach.  I was focused on enjoying my body instead of trying to change it.  My goal was to do something exercise related everyday.  It didn’t have to be a run or an hour of power yoga, it could be 20 minutes of yoga or some push-ups and sit-ups, but something. 

And it didn’t matter what I felt I *should* do, I was going to do exactly what I *felt* like doing.  I’d ponder my energy levels, decide whether i wanted to be outside or in, and then pick something that felt good.  It was working great and then I crashed.

I try to get on the scale only when I know it’s going to be a good story.   Why aske to be bummed out right?  Sometimes I ignore it for a long time and then I’ll look in the mirror and say, hey something good is happening here and I’ll consider The Scale. 

The other morning I thought, things have been going to so well that the scale has *got* to have a good news story for me.  So I got on and I was up a pound.  I was majorly pissed off.  I’ve been doing lots of good stuff on the eating front, exercising daily, you gotta be kidding me! 

And bang, i felt myself fall off the wagon right on my ass.  (big sigh)  I went into who-cares, nothing- makes-a-difference-anyways, i’m-probably-stuck-with-this-extra-weight-forever.  The whole BMW - bitching moaning whining bit.  I hate that.

All over a stupid pound.  It’s likely that i’m retaining water because it’s been hotter than Hades.  Or hormonal stuff is happening.  Or I’m just up a pound.  Whatever it is, it’s time to forgive myself and start again.

I’m not usually this all-or-nothing.  I can’t even completely do an “all”.  If I have ideas of doing a real spartan lifestyle thing it just makes me immediately want to eat a chocolate bar. 

I do detoxes twice yearly to keep myself on the straight and narrow but I’ve been known to sneak a glass of wine or a bit of cream in my coffee on those too.  I’m just convinced that too much asceticism isn’t good for the soul.  Or at least my soul.

I have a friend who’s very all or nothing.   She talked to me about how she completely gets on the wagon whole hog, loses a bunch of weight and the first thing that happens, the first slip and bang she’s off the wagon flat on her ass.  And promptly gains all the weight back.

I asked her what would happen if she didn’t climb completely on the wagon. If she did only one eating related thing and one exercise related thing. 

Easy stuff, like the 20 minute loop around the block twice a week.  Heck she could do that  in her sleep.  And lifestyle stuff.  The things she wants to do as consistently as possible for the rest of her life.  Not the crazy things we might be willing to do to fit into the too-small LBD we bought.

So she tried it.  She stopped her coke drinking and lost 6 pounds.  She tried some yoga and pilates DVDs to find ones she likes because those are easy to fit into her life.  And she’s using them to enjoy her body and not just change it.

So I’m going to do it too.  Tomorrow I’m going to start again.  Enjoy the fruits and veggies I got from the farmers market yesterday.  Ignore the cookies that I made during the hurricane before the power went out.  Do some exercise, anything that might be fun, anything that might help me enjoy my body and get my focus off that one lousy pound.

Lately I’ve been realizing how wussy my workouts have been.  I like to workout.  I like to sweat and love that feeling that my body has *done* something.  I’ve been exercising pretty often lately but I’m holding back.  I read an interview with Jillian Michaels who said she runs stairs holding a 100 bag over her head.  While I don’t want to do that workout it made me think, wow i could push a little harder. 

And at the gym i was stretching and watching what some of the gals were doing in the weight area.  One woman was face down with her middle on the ball and then she lifted both legs, a million times or so. Again, i thought wow, i could be doing a bit more especially if that perky butt is a side benefit. 

A couple of the chicks were setting up a stepper thingy,  making it hip height.  Then they jumped with both feet, bounding up into the air, landing on the step and then they’d step off again  and repeat it a bunch of times.  I’m not sure that’s a workout for me.  I’d catch my knee or foot on my way up and then fall on my head on the other side,  but again i thought, wow i sure could be doing more.

I planned a gym visit yesterday and as I was dressing I made the committment to give it my all, especially with the ol’ glutes.  And my next  thought was, yeah but i don’t want to work out too hard because I don’t want it to impact tomorrow’s run.   And then I stopped myself.  What is this mythical run at some later date?  Why do I need to control the future?  Or sorry, *attempt* to control the future?  

Maybe the run doesn’t happen - i get sick, i lose a pile of sleep tonight, my baby is teething, it’s a monsoon downpour, or heck i get hit by a bus before i get my running sneaks on.  Why am I planning for this run tomorrow instead of focusing on the workout I’m just about to do?

I mean, wouldn’t it be great to be so sore that it impacts my run!  When’s the last time *that* happened?  But really, if my butt was that sore, I could run a flat route, shorten my run, or just walk more - there are a whole bunch of options that could deal with this “problem” that hasn’t even been problematic yet.

It was a total Living In The Moment epiphany, except the workout version.  Because controlling the future is pretty familiar for me which is silly given how useless my attempts are.

So I did a killer workout.  I normally do the machines, so this time i did all free weights and really worked my lower body.  I did squats, 3 kinds of lunges, I laid on the ball and lifted my legs just like the woman with the perky butt. 

And this morning I wasn’t sore.  Sure I felt like i’d done something,  but it was no big deal.  No monsoons or unscheduled buses got in the way so my run happened after all.  I pushed Leo in the stroller for 30 minutes and felt great.

Thank God I didn’t spend a ton of energy thinking and planning and managing for something that didn’t even happen.  I gotta learn to live in the workout moment more often.  Give it all i’ve got - Right Now.  Hmmmm, if soreness is this elusive, maybe I’ll need a 100 pound bag to carry over my head after all.

I finished my detox last month and I’ve been trying to hold to the eating plan in a few key places.  I’ve found my body is much happier avoiding flour foods and processed stuff.  I’ve also been consuming dairy, but not doing the cheese ‘n crackers snacks that have been a go-to snack in the past, actually not doing much cheese at all.   

I’ve also been working my way around a bunch of whole grains, eating way more veggies and playing with the amount of protein that seem to work best for me.  The bonus in all of this is that my cravings are gone.  It’s the most amazing thing.  I’ll think, hmmm it’s 3:00 in the afternoon and a cuppa tea would sure be nice.  Which is way different from before which was more like IT’S 3:00 WHERE’S THE DAMN SUGAR!  In an Incredible Hulk kind of way.  And boy, that’s worth all the brown rice consumption in the world.

The other day I remembered barley, specificially pearl barley which is a nice whole grain low glycemic food.  I hadn’t had it in a long time and thought it was time to try it again.  I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it but went off to Planet Organic and found some organic barley in the bulk food section.  When I got to the check-out, the girl with the german accent picked up my little bag of barley and held it at face level like it was a valuable object she was offering to the gods.  She said, ahhh, barley, my mother used to make this all the time, I’ve forgotten about it! 

I said, yeah me too, i used to eat it and then i stopped but i want to get back on that horse.  And then i asked her how she likes to cook barley.  She said, it’s best as a risotto with lots of butter.  And i thought,  mmmmmmmm.

So when i got home I put a cup of barley in my rice cooker with 3 cups of chicken stock (I used Better Than Boullion which tastes amazing and saves you having to buy all those stupid little cans of stock) and a tablespoon of butter.  It took 40 minutes to cook and tasted great.  The kids loved it to.  I told them it was fat rice.

I have a friend who actually sits down to a bowl of pumpkin.  When I saw her do it I was shocked in an impressed why-didn’t-i-think-of-that kind of way.  I make a pumpkin loaf that i love and of course pie has its honoured place on our table once per year but why just relegate pumpkin to baked things? Pumpkin is supposed to be really good for us and we eat squash which is similiar.   Then I ran across this detox-friendly soup recipe from Oxygen magazine and thought, aha here’s my chance.

Pumpkin Pear Soup

2 T olive oil

1 chopped onion

1/2 c minced fresh ginger (they must mean 1/2 tablespoon)

3 pears, peeled, cored and sliced thin

2 cans pumpkin puree (must be the smaller size cans, they don’t say)

1/4 t nutmeg

1/2 t cinnamon

1/2 t salt

4 c chicken broth

Put the first 4 ingredients in a large soup pot and saute until tender, about 10 minutes.  Stir in the remaining ingredients and bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes.  Puree in batches in a blend or use a stick blender to blend until soup is smooth.

They say the recipe makes 4 servings and that pumpkin and pears are a powerful immune boosting combo.   If you try it leave a comment about whether you liked it or not!

I’ve been loving avocado during my detox.  I’m working on an Avocado Salad Dressing recipe that I’ll including in a Volume 2 recipe book, if I get one done.  It’s such a change to have a detox-friendly *creamy* salad dressing.  I used too much lemon juice though so I’m going to try it again with less but hopefully still enough that the avocado in it doesn’t turn brown before it’s time.  Recipe testing is hard!  But lucky for me, avocado salad dressing is good ;-).

I noticed a detox-friendly avocado recipe in March’s Real Simple magazine that I want to try on fish or chicken.  Here it is:

Avocado Relish

Toss diced avocado and cucumber with lime juice*, chopped cilantro, and crushed red pepper; season with salt and pepper.  Serve over fish, chicken or beef.

*Lime juice isn’t technically on the Wild Rose food lists, just lemon, however I have seen it in recipes in the official Wild Rose cookbook so I use it.  But use lemon juice if you’re going by the book.

When I was doing my gung-ho planning for my detox I bought buckwheat.  I hadn’t tried it in a long time, couldn’t remember what it tasted like but thought, maybe this time I’ll make it work. 

I guess since I’ve been publishing recipes here on this blog and here, I feel a responsibility to get out front and try things that aren’t mainstream instantly likeable foods.  Call me crazy but I’m just not big on basic hippy food and would rather eat yummy things, yes, even with I’m detoxing. 

I really want to like buckwheat because it’s one of the grains you can eat silly on the Wild Rose D-Tox, along with millet and brown rice.  Since I’m not a huge fan of millet  I wanted to see if buckwheat and I could be friends.

So I fried up some onions and garlic  (everything is better with onions and garlic right?), put in the water and buckwheat, let it simmer until the water was gone, took a taste and BLUCK!  The stuff is HORRIBLE! 

And then I took a deep breath.  I thought maybe there was a chance though that I wasn’t seeing it’s positive qualities.  So I gave a taste to HoneyBunny and he said, YUCK, that stuff is HORRIBLE!  Good to know it wasn’t just me.

Later he was still cursing me because he couldn’t get the taste out of his mouth.  I guess I”ll stick with brown rice after all.  (sigh)  So the buckwheat became a contribution to the composter.

Luckily there are yummy detox-friendly things to eat.  I saw this recipe in January’s Shape magazine, and it’s a good one that won’t leave a bad taste in your mouth:

Bean Topping

Saute 1/2 c chopped onion in 2 T oil.  Add 1 t rosemary, 1/2 c broth and 15 oz of white beans.  Cook for 5 minutes until the broth is reduced and/or thickened.  Add salt, pepper, some chopped parsley (I used cilantro) and lemon zest to your taste.

The recipe says to slice some tomatoes, place on top of crostini bread and top with pine nuts.  I don’t see a mention of pine nuts in the official detox cookbook (hazelnuts, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds, walnuts do appear.  Pecans and pistashios are on the 80% food list in the cookbook, but I see they’ve taken those off of the recent food list in my detox box).  So anyhoo, you could use any of those, I didn’t, but I did eat the bean thing on rice cakes and again later on brown rice.  Much tastier than buckwheat.

I’m on day 5 of detoxing with the Wild Rose kit for the first time in two years.  It’s been a while thanks to being busy growing, having and nursing a baby.  Leo’s nine months now.  He can hold his own bottle, say “Mama” at 3:00 a.m. and meanwhile I’m eating a lot of brown rice.

My latest detox news is that I finally self-published a cookbook of recipes that I’ve posted here on my blog as well as new ones.  I’ve been referring to it a lot and am glad to have it in a handy readable format (you can too for the low low price of $4.95, at wildrosecookbook.com - ok that’s it for the plug).  

The crazy thing is that I’m enjoying detoxing so much more than i have before.  Previously, doing a detox was pretty much like being in food purgatory, which is why i started developing and posting recipes in the first place.  If i can keep anyone from what-the-heck-am-i-going-to-eat hell then I’m a happy camper. 

I’m trying some new food this time around.  I figured out a roasted garlic salad dressing that isn’t too bad.  It’s tough to get the right flavouring though when you can’t use stuff like balsamic vinegar, worscheshire sauce, the things that add the depth to the flavour.  I’m still working on it.

I also bought a bunch of kale because I know it’s ridiculously good for you and if Alannis can love kale then dammit so can I.   It’s still sitting in the fridge.

Detoxing is different his time around. Instead of feeling deprived I’m feeling like I’m really taking care of myself with food.  Like all this brown rice is nurturing for me instead of boring me to tears. 

Last evening there was a time somewhere around Angus the five-year old’s second time out that I would have given my left arm for a glass of wine.  But then after the kids were asleep I really grooved on the herbal tea I had while HoneyBunny and I watched a movie.   I’m not sure I’d watched a craving pass with that much clarity before.   I need to try that more often.

And maybe it’s because I’m having a tough time losing the last few pounds after having a baby that my perspective is different.  The pounds slid off after my first pregnancy, but not so much this time around.  And I seem to have even less grace period with the ol’ bod than i did before.  Before I could mess around for a weekend and get back on the wagon before anything dire happened.  On Easter weekend, i should have just schmeared the chocolate and cupcakes on my body in a cellulite pattern rather than bother eating it. 

But I don’t bother feeling bummed out about it.  I’m being a realist.  I pulled out my summer clothes and the bottom line is, if I don’t do something I’ll be wearing a barrel when the weather is warm.  Because I’m sure not buying a new wardrobe in another size.

And it’s made me think about what people are willing to do for their health and their weight and all that.  I have a friend who gets in the habit of not eating all day and sitting at her desk and then she’s brain dead by 3:00 and eats all evening to make up.  So she’s trying to bring food to snack on at work and get out at lunch even if it’s just for 10 minutes to clear her head.  Not hard right?  That’s all good stuff and she’ll probably feel better in lots of ways.

Then I have another friend who’s gone through menopause and it’s supposed to be a major pain trying to lose weight at that stage of life.  She looks awesome to me but she says she’s got a few extra pounds that are driving her nuts.  She’s read the menopause books and is basically living on veggies and protein and fruit.  Her lovely husband has even been making homemade bread and she hasn’t been having any.  How is that humanly possible?  But her comment is, “I really hate being heavy”.  So wow, it makes me ask myself - what are you willing to do to get what you want?

My friend’s Dad weighs around 300 pounds and he made the herculean effort of losing a bunch weight a while back.  Now he loves food and obviously didn’t eat as much of it but he learned to also love that he was more mobile and his joints bugged him less and he was more comfortable.  All that started to become as important as food.   

Because the funny thing about food is that we can’t be all or nothing about it.  We gotta eat to live.  But the good news is that we have 3 meals a day to get it right.  And to manage our cravings and get in lots of fruits and veggies.  And to detox every once in a while to remind ourselves that we don’t need processed foods to be happy.  And that fitting into our jeans and being able to breath while doing it is pretty important to us too.

And with all that in mind, I’m off to my date with a bunch of kale.

I haven’t started my Wild Rose Detox for the year, it’s too early.  I just can’t dig into chilly salads while the temps are low so I’m practicing until March or so when I open the box, dig out the food lists and bottles and start up again.  Last year I was pregnant and I didn’t detox, so this year I’m excited, or at least as excited as you can be about eating a diet of brown rice.   I’m convinced that it really helps my body and re-educates my taste buds.

I know that there is a lot of medical advice out there that says your body doesn’t need to detox, but my gut says that if I eat sugar, junk fats and alcohol, my poor liver is working pretty hard.  I figure bad gunky has got to get stored up in my liver and it makes sense that I need to clean it out. 

But even if that’s not the case (as some experts say) giving my hard-working liver a rest while I eat real single-ingredient foods has got to help it.  Because afterwards I will at times consume food that’s less than ideal for me, as surely as the Wild Rose laxatives will overperform within a dayor two of starting the program. 

What is it with those laxatives?  By day 2 or 3 I feel like a 16 year old bulemic doing penance for a Dream Whip and Count Chocula binge.  I figure the thinking behind it is that there are people doing the program who have never seen a whole grain before.  And when they go from a diet of Wonder Bread to the uber-fiber meals that make up this detox they’re guaranteed to get as locked up as the Hoover Dam.  The laxatives are for them.  But for me the moment they start working their magic I cut the dosage back to half or less.  I figure that living in my bathroom just can’t be good for me. 

But enough about that, let’s talk oatmeal, which may not be an improvement in topic for some, but stick with me.  Breakfasts can be challenging and repetitious on the Wild Rose Detox program.  Eggs are only 20% and you can’t have toast with them anyways.  There just aren’t that many cereal type options and unsweetened soy milk is not that tasty. 

I wanted to try steel cut oats because I heard they have a more rough texture, they’re less like the usual mushy oatmeal.  The challenge is that they take 30-40 minutes to cook on the stove.  While I have that kind of time in the a.m., I don’t have the flexibility to stand over the stove. 

So I thought I would try the rice cooker.  My handy instruction manual said it would do cereals too.  The rice cooker generally takes an hour to do its thing but at least I don’t have to stand over it.  The other bonus is that mine has a timer, so I could conceivably set it up the night before and wake up to a tasty hot belly-filling breakfast.  Here’s the detox friendly recipe, and in brackets are the ingredients I used yesterday since I’m not detoxing:

Steel Cut Oats Breakfast

 1 cup steel cut oats

3 cups water

1 cup unsweetened soy milk (milk if I’m not detoxing)

a sprinkle of cinnamon

3-4 chopped up prunes (raisins if I’m not detoxing)

a handful of coarsely chopped almonds (any nut or seed if I’m not detoxing, I used sunflower seeds)

a sprinkle of salt

I put it all in the rice cooker and simply turned it on, then gave it a stir when it beeped that it was finished.  How does the rice cooker know it’s done?  Those little machines are magic. 

When I served it, I added a bit more milk in my bowl and a sprinkle of brown sugar (again, because I’m *not* detoxing).  It was thick and creamy and tasty.  It also stuck with me all morning which I can’t usually say about my breakfasts.  A winner all around.

 I’m going to work on a few other new detox recipes which I’ll post, as well as try the old standbys while I “practice” for my detox.  There have also been good suggestions in the comments to this post that are worth reviewing.  Hopefully some practice time will make the real thing much easier, and my liver will hardly notice the difference.

I collect old cookbooks.  When my grandmother passed away we were at her house and people were hauling things off.  I have no idea what was so interesting, my grandmother lived pretty simply.  Her idea of jewelry was some old Avon stuff with some of the fake stones missing.  Bling just wasn’t her thing. 

Someone asked me what I’d like and I said, “um, can i have a couple cookbooks?”.  I got a whole box and I just love them.  Her handwritten notes on recipes for casseroles with crushed up potato chips on top?  Priceless.

One of the old-school recipes that my grandmother and mom used to made is Half Hour Pudding.

I’d forgotten about it and then found it again in an Out of Old Nova Scotia Kitchens cookbook I picked up somewhere.  It’s a collection of traditional recipes and it’s fun to look through them.  There are some classics I want to try like ginger snaps and oatcakes.  But some of the recipes are more entertaining. Can you imagine making a cake with pork fat?  Yeah me neither.

Sometimes I read the recipes and think, wow they considered that food back then.  Like the recipe for Spruce Beer literally starts with instructions on boiling 7 pounds of tree until the bark falls off.  I guess if there’s no beer store you’d have to get creative.  It’d probably taste like Buckley’s cough syrup though….whew.

Anyhoo Half Hour Pudding  is “pudding” in the sense that the brits use it - ”dessert”, not chemically sweet drippy goo from plastic containers.   The classic recipe is a cake made with raisins and cinammon baked with a brown sugar sauce but I had an urge for chocolate one day and thought, why couldn’t one make a *Chocolate* Half Hour pudding? 

They’re darn easy to make (I mix mine up in the casserole dish I bake it in), you throw it in the oven as you’re about to eat dinner so that it’s piping hot at dessert time, and it’s not all that bad for you fat and calorie-wise.  My theory is - if you’re mood for dessert go for it, just try not to kill yourself in one sitting.

So I tried the following and thought it was pretty similiar to those nasty molten chocolate cakes I’ve had at restaurants.  I’ve wanted to make them at times, but I look at the recipes and feel my arteries harden as I read about all that grated chocolate and all those eggs going into one dessert.  This one is a lot less rich. 

Chocolate Half Hour Pudding

1 TB Margarine or butter

1/2 cup sugar

1 cup flour

3 Tbsp cocoa

1.5 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 cup milk

1/2 tsp vanilla

3 Tbsp chocolate chips

Mix the ingredients in the order listed.  Put in an 8×8 pan or a 1.5 quart casserole dish.  Then pour the following over:

2/3 cup brown sugar

3 Tbsp cocoa

1 & 1/2 cups boiling water

2 Tbsp butter/marg in 2 dabs (don’t worry it’ll all melt and mix up)

1 tsp vanilla

Bake in a 350 oven for 30-40 minutes.  The cake part will be a little floaty in the sauce, but check that the center has some firmness to it before taking it out.

I like a good bean dip when I’m detoxing because it’s filling and tasty and a detoxer cannot live on carrot sticks alone, as fun as that sounds.  The dip is great on rice cakes and for dipping your carrot sticks, pepper slices and cuke spears into. 

Black Bean Dip

Ingredients:

1 garlic clove squished

1/4 cup chopped cilantro

1/2 cup chopped onion

2 T lime juice

2 T olive oil

1/2 t salt

1/4 t cumin

1/4 jalapeno pepper chopped fine

19 oz can of rinced and drained black beans

Directions:

Have a food processor?  You don’t have to bother chopping as fine as described above, throw it all into your food processor and let ‘er rip.  Scrape down the sides with a spatula and continue until it’s pureed, then put it in a bowl.

Don’t have a food processor?  Or if you like a chunky dip, mash up the beans with a potato masher or fork in a bowl first, and then add all the other ingredients and mix it up well.

Try to give your bean dip some fridge time before eating to let the flavours mingle.