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Hiatus and a new blog

2011-09-07T11:56:00.000-07:00

I am taking a hiatus from this blog. I feel like the main point of a nutrition blog is to write about nutrition and to be honest, food and I are like wary, grudging roommates at this point instead of the good friends we used to be. I eat because I have to, I eat as healthfully as hormones will allow, but really I don't feel like cooking or thinking for long periods of time about food right now-- I can't see that changing until after the baby is born.

However, I do like writing, and so I've started a new blog where I will talk about things in my life besides food, and in perhaps a much more irreverent style than I have allowed myself here.

You can check out my adventures here. Otherwise perhaps I'll see you back here next year, when my body is willing to cooperate with things like protein again :)

It's a BOY!!!

2011-08-26T18:29:00.000-07:00

I was stunned to find out this morning we are having a little boy! I was sure he was going to be a girl. Surprise! That kind of made it sweet though, to have it be so surprising and M. was THRILLED. He really wanted a boy and had convinced himself it would be a girl, so he was over the moon at getting his wish. We are so excited to meet this guy! M and I look alike (brown hair, blue/green eyes, fair skin) so we know kind of ballpark of what he might look like, but the big family question now is whether he'll have red hair, as we have that recessive gene (my brother, M's mom) on both sides. Finding out the gender weirdly made it feel that much more real-- instead of an abstract baby in there, it's a little boy, whom we named months before he was even conceived. (Sorry, not going to tell you what his name is yet but he does have one). As of Sunday we will be 20 weeks-- half way through, though I'm convinced he will be late (best to believe he won't be on time then be stomping my feet when the due date comes and goes, which is what happened to my friend who recently gave birth and was sure her son would be early and was instead a week late!)

I've been having major allergies or maybe a bit of a cold, causing me a runny nose, sore throat and congested lungs, and increasing my nausea-- I threw up this morning making M eggs because I cracked an egg that had gone bad. Just recounting it here makes me gag.

A lot of food things still sound bad-- the "good" kind of sausage from my local co-op is the most palatable protein and I just finished the best batch of nectarines so far this year. Lunch was ground beef and beans in a brown rice tortilla, which did not digest very well-- bread based stuff really sits in my stomach in an acid kind of way. We are having chicken salad for dinner-- hopefully I can get that down as I could definitely use some veggies. I actually keep craving soup, probably because I've fallen off the wagon with my chicken stock consumption (I have some that's been in my fridge for over a week with the bones still in it-- wonder if it's still good?), but it's 80 degrees outside!

Pretzels, Potential and Puking

2011-08-23T15:48:00.000-07:00

We are in a state of controlled chaos around here. Because what else would rational people do at nearly 5 months pregnant, but buy a property that needs a lot of work and try and sell a house? We are currently in an inspection process for a property that has two very small houses on it in Seattle. Both need work to be livable, but the plan being we will live in one and rent out the other once they are finished. We have been running around like mad getting our current house clean and organized to put on the market ASAP, meeting with Real Estate Agents, meeting with architects and inspectors and generally doing 18 things at once. M. says if it all falls through at least we'll have the cleanest house ever! It really never has been this organized-- all but one closet left to do are completely clean. I had a vague plan of getting more organized before the baby comes but this put that plan on fast forward-- my office is now officially a baby room after I spent all weekend cleaning out old school stuff and boxing everything else up.

I've also unfortunately had a resurgence of a lot of foods sounding bad, especially the protein ones. I've tried several times to explain to baby that eggs are good for us and free but he or she is not interested. I also seem to still be averaging once a week of either throwing up or near misses and THAT is getting very old.

Baby seems to have had a growth spurt in the past week or so. After gaining a pound a week for several weeks I suddenly gained 3 practically overnight which was kind of scary, but my bump got a lot bigger in that time too so I think it's all baby. I thought my bump was pretty obvious, but with all these realtors we've been meeting they have either been surprised that I'm pregnant (wearing looser shirts seems to confuse people) or else not quite sure if I'm pregnant or just have a little pot belly. Weird how depending on what I have on it changes completely. But since I lost so much weight in the beginning, technically I've only gained 6 pounds above my pre-pregnancy weight (though I lost and regained another 6 and can't decide how that counts in the total-- it either puts me on the high end or low end of normal--before the 3 pound surge I was hanging out slightly below the charts if you don't include weight re-gain, so maybe we were just catching up). The whole process is very fascinating to me. On Friday we have an ultrasound, and will hopefully find out the gender! I can't wait.

The other annoying thing is I really don't have a lot of stamina. I'm not as constantly tired as I was in the first trimester, but I also get worn out pretty easily. Doing all this massive cleaning in our house has knocked me out-- I tried to work out yesterday but it was kind of half-hearted. Today I went to the mall to buy new towels for staging our house and after an hour or so I just came home empty handed because I was too tired to do any more. I'm also constantly either hungry, too full, or grossed out by food-- sometimes all three at once. Unfortunately I discovered these gluten free pretzels that are really good-- all refined garbage but they go down so nicely. I think I might ask the midwife to check my iron levels-- perhaps I'm becoming anemic.

At any rate big things are happening around here. Cross your fingers for us our house sells quickly... I really hope to move before the baby comes, but it's all very much up in the air.

18 weeks: I'm not sure I know how to do Paleo + Pregnant

2011-08-17T20:17:00.000-07:00

I really have been trying to eat paleo, and I'm definitely eating better than I did during the first trimester, but I can't say it's 100% Paleo, and I am not sure I can get there. One of the reasons that paleo is so great for losing weight is eating vegetables and protein as your primary meal is very self-limiting in terms of calories. Most people can't significantly overeat chicken salad. The problem is that during pregnancy, your body naturally wants less meat-- the kidneys process urea (a by-product of protein breakdown) more slowly, and so excess just is unappealing for most people-- I can eat a smallish portion three meals a day, but I just can't get down more than about a palm sized amount. That leaves vegetables, mainly salad for me at the moment since it's summer and I have more lettuce than I know what to do with in the garden, and tomatoes are in season so I'm taking advantage of that. I do eat fruit, probably 2-3 pieces a day-- peaches, grapes and cherries especially. At dinner most nights we have potatoes or yams. But all of that rarely adds up to more than about 1600 calories a day, which is just not enough and I find myself eating handfuls of chocolate covered almonds or occasionally worse treats instead of more nutrient dense food. Grains really don't agree with me all that well, so I don't want to add those back in-- I really wish I could tolerate dairy as I'd love to eat yogurt, but that's out. It ends up being very limiting and I'm not quite sure what to do about it. I often find myself very tired mid-day and often it is because I haven't eaten enough.

Exercise is not as consistent as I'd hoped either-- I only seem to find the energy a couple times a week, and a workout wipes me out. Today I walked about 2 miles and while it was nice to get outside, I was for one thing very slow (I usually walk the whole 3 miles of this particular trail and I only did about 3/4 and it still took me longer than the whole thing usually does!) I do a bit of weight work when I make it to the gym too, but it's pretty inconsistent.

Besides all that, we are discussing selling our house and moving closer to work. Our original plan was to do that next summer, but it is possible we could do it earlier if a bunch of things fall into place, but it adds a whole other element of stress and complexity to our impending parenthood as we ponder not only moving, but moving to a much smaller house!

A week from Friday we get our first real ultrasound-- I am hoping baby wants to show us whether it's a he or a she-- I have had a very definitive feeling about it since very early on, and I will be really thrown for a loop if my intuition was wrong! But either way I'm looking forward to making sure everything is going well.

16.5 weeks-- update

2011-08-03T11:31:00.000-07:00

This picture is from last Friday, at not quite 16 weeks. I definitely have a bit of a bump going on now, and I swear it popped out there in a matter of days last week! I've regained the 6-7 pounds I lost in the first trimester, and no more yet, so I'm not sure whether to say I've gained 6 pounds or zero. It's definitely distributed differently then it was 16 weeks ago!

I've been trying to eat mostly paleo now that I've been in the second tri-- but I can't say it's going all that well. Last weekend M. and I took a little road trip to Portland and back and I twice, in two separate restaurants ordered cobb salad without cheese (my go-to food choice) and twice had HORRIBLE meals. The first one I got a massive gluten contamination-- I was coughing and wheezing for a half hour afterwards-- I might as well have eaten a sandwich for how bad I felt afterwards (it also wasn't a very good salad). The next day I ordered a cobb salad again at a deli, and despite the 90 degree weather it came with big chunks of hot, unseasoned chicken on it. It was gross. (But as a bonus it didn't make me sick, but I couldn't eat much of it. I think they were relying on the blue cheese to provide all the flavor, but since I got it without, it was pretty bland.).

Yesterday morning I had my usual breakfast of chicken sausages and a peach, but unfortunately, I think the sausages were bad (I had bought them and then did errands in a hot car for 1-2 hours) and back up they came about in a hour later. Oops. The rest of the day was kind of starchy because I couldn't face more meat after the vomit fest. As a result I was exhausted all day.

I did just switch to a more comprehensive supplement routine. Previously the only thing I was taking was my Thorne prenatal vitamin, and for awhile in the first trimester I even gave that up because of the nausea. Now I'm phasing out the Thorne for Innate, which is a food based vitamin and has a few more fun things like probiotics in it (though the Thorne is a perfectly good supplement). Also I am taking a high DHA fish oil supplement, which I bought in strawberry flavored capsules since I can not get down liquid fish oil anymore. DHA is particularly important for baby's brain development, which is why I got the highest DHA per capsule I could find. (These ProDHA supplements from Nordic Naturals have 900 mg in two capsules. I'm taking two for now-- in the third trimester and while breastfeeding I'll probably double that.) I'm still taking 5000 IU of vitamin D most days- I'm working on a whole post on D I'll share soon.

Other than that I'm eating a lot of chicken/chicken sausages, drinking lots of bone broth (I just ran out! I need to make more tomorrow), and having steak or burgers every few days, with mostly salad for veggies, and lots of peaches and cherries. I'm trying to mostly avoid grains- my vices are dark chocolate covered almonds and coconut ice cream, which have a fair amount of sugar, but at least no grain. I'm taking things one day at a time, sometimes, like yesterday and the day before I'm really tired and other days, like today I have energy (I cleaned my whole house top to bottom today!).

At least we are finally getting sunshine and pleasant temperatures most days-- better late then never! (And I infinitely prefer our 75-80 degrees to the rest of the country's 95+ degrees!)

A mountain adventure

2011-07-27T09:53:00.001-07:00

Rocky Mountain State Park

I'm home after a hot weekend in Boulder, CO. I went to see my two good friends from graduate school, Ryah & Laura. It was so much fun to see my friends-- I hadn't seen Laura in two years, and Ryah in one year so it was great to spend some time together instead of a rushed phone call every couple of weeks. Laura and I were virtually inseparable when she lived in Seattle and I miss her all the time. What was also fantastic is that Boulder has some amazing local food, especially meat and my friends cooked for me just about every meal, which was a wonderful break from being the sole cook and food shopper at my house! Both Ryah & Laura are getting into a Paleo-ish slant, partly because of my proselytizing, so we were all on the same page. I didn't do a very good job of taking pictures of our meals, but we had steak, chicken, amazing sausages, eggs, and bacon all at various meals that were all local and fantastic. We added salad or kale, yam or fruit and on a couple of nights a few not so paleo treats of coconut milk ice cream or a few chocolate covered almonds to finish it off. The only 100% not paleo meal I had was the only one I took a picture of! On my last day L and I had brunch at a restaurant called Tangerine that had a gluten free option for almost everything on the menu. I had buttermilk pancakes, gluten free of course, and a side of chicken sausage. L had a sample platter of the different pancakes (hers weren't gf) and also chicken sausage, but it was way too much food, though really yummy.

We drove through Rocky Mountain State Park and saw the beautiful mountains, some elk, many stupid tourists parking their cars in dangerous places to get pictures, and the best part was-- we drove so high we found snow and 65 degree temperatures. Why was this so exciting? Because every day I was there it was between 95-100 degrees. When you are used to less than 70 degrees that is a bit of a shock. Add to that the altitude and pregnancy and I found myself often hot and tired and occasionally (especially on top of the mountain at 12000 feet) headachey. Thank goodness both L's car and her apartment had air conditioning or I might have melted into a puddle. I admit I have never been so glad to see rain and 65 degrees when I got back to Seattle!

The other really fun thing we did was tour the Celestial Seasonings Tea Factory. It is a huge and impressive operation, and while the tea ingredients are sourced from all over the world, they are all processed and packaged in Boulder. The whole place smells amazing, like a big mix of herbs and fruit, though our favorite might have been the mint room, which was a bit like walking into a tub of vic's vaporub or a vat of toothpaste- it was really strong, but also refreshing. (The mint is so strong they have to keep it in a separate, double walled room, or everything in the whole place would be minty!) We also got to taste some teas, and we each bought one of CS's new Kombucha lines-- it was really good, but it has added prebiotics in it and my stomach felt a little funny so I didn't drink it all (plus I had to throw the rest away when I got to the airport anyway).
Here we are with our lovely hairnets. Sorry it's a little blurry....

Lately I've been having vague milk cravings which are surprising since I'm pretty sensitive to dairy and haven't had milk in probably 7 years, though I can get away with a couple bites of cheese or butter in something. This morning I tried a half cup of goat yogurt and it was a no go. I was coughing and wheezing within 5 minutes. So much for that. So instead I made a big cup of chicken stock (figuring what I'm craving is calcium). It's a little bit not paleo because I made it Japanese style, adding Ume Plum Vinegar, based on a suggestion from my friend Katrina (so handy to be friends with so many great nutritionists!) and a spoonful of miso because I love miso soup and because I could use some good friendly bacteria in there (miso is made from fermented soybeans, hence the not so paleo-ness of it). But it is very satisfying on this cool, feels like autumn morning.

I'll try and take a picture of my little bump this weekend-- at 15.5 weeks pregnant I've got a bit of a bump, but still don't really need maternity clothes yet. It's the sort of thing where, depending on what I'm wearing, you might or might not even be able to tell. Apparently after the first time you are pregnant, subsequent pregnancies pop right out there much faster, or so I'm told.

Chipotle Chicken Stew

2011-07-18T19:20:00.000-07:00

I apologize if you are reading this from somewhere other than the Northern West Coast-- I realize that for most of America soup is not exactly something you want to contemplate. To you I say file this away until Fall. Here in Seattle where we are lucky if we top 68 degrees and see the sun at all so far this summer, it feels more like September. I have been thinking about making this soup for a couple of weeks, but didn't have the energy until now (fair warning, there is a lot of chopping involved). This soup is adapted from this recipe at Nourishing Meals. Ali does an amazing job of coming up with delicious recipes with whole food ingredients-- I also have her cookbook and absolutely every recipe I've tried of hers has been delicious. However, while gluten free, her recipes are not at all paleo, in fact this recipe started out as a vegetarian stew-- I started adding chicken and kale to it long ago, but this is the first time I also omitted the beans and it was just as yummy.

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 medium yellow onion, chopped
3 teaspoons ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano (I used 1 Tablespoon of fresh oregano since I had it handy)
3/4 teaspoon chipotle chili powder
1 Tablespoon sea salt
2 medium yams, peeled and diced
4 cloves garlic, crushed
2-3 pounds chicken breasts or thighs, diced into bite sized pieces
1 head kale, de-stemmed and chopped small
other veggies as desired (I used a couple chopped zucchini)
6 cups water or chicken stock
1 medium red bell pepper, diced

Heat a large 6 or 8-quart pot over medium heat. Add olive oil then add onions and saute for 5 to 7 minutes.

Then add the chicken and continue to cook until chicken starts to brown. Add spices, and vegetables and saute a minute or two more. Add the water/chicken stock (I used half and half of each). Simmer covered for 20 to 30 minutes or until yams are tender and chicken is fully cooked.

Top with Cabbage-Slaw (this recipe is fully Ali's except I use parsley instead of cilantro)

Cilantro-Cabbage Slaw

4 to 5 cups thinly sliced Napa cabbage
2 cups chopped cilantro
2 to 3 green onions, sliced into thin rounds
the juice of one lime
1 to 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt

Place all ingredients into a medium-sized mixing bowl and toss together. Be sure to make only what you will eat with you meal. Otherwise it will become soggy and unappealing for your next bowl of stew. (The stew gets better as it ages, this doesn't).

14 weeks: transition

2011-07-17T11:21:00.000-07:00

After an awesome energy day last Sunday, I spent most of the week back on the couch barely able to move (either that or at my desk at work watching the clock until I could go home to the couch). This weekend my energy has returned again-- hopefully for good, as at 14 weeks I am now by all calendars in the second trimester. I am definitely in a transitional period. Food wise, I am doing better eating more protein, but overall still eating too much sugar and processed things I don't need. The problem in part seems to be that I can't eat more than a few bites at a time of real food-- I likely shrunk my stomach during the seven or so weeks I wasn't really eating. Add to that, if I can eat a real meal, it sits in my stomach like a rock for HOURS which is very uncomfortable. I have tried my trusty Super Enzymes, but really all that works is to eat small amounts every few hours which I find annoying. When I was a teenager and in college I was definitely one of those 5-6 meals a day people, but somewhere in the last 4 or 5 years I realized it is much more satisfying and satiating for me to eat until I'm full 3 or 4 times a day. It is unsatisfying to switch back to eating smaller meals and it's been an adjustment-- really processed stuff (we had gluten free cookies around for awhile-- I know! bad) goes down easily and I am not used to being hungry all the time-- I just need to plan better.

Because I'm not eating as well as I should, I found myself in a pregnancy hormone induced panic yesterday. After weeks of my weight dropping, it has been steadily coming back up (as it should-- I'm growing a person!) But my overindulgence in the wrong kind of calories has me a little panicked that I'm gaining the wrong kind of weight (mind you, I'm still down 4 pounds from pre-pregnancy weight so it's a rather irrational concern). The solution is simple-- stop eating the crap! I'm working on that-- if my energy remains it will help a lot with food prep. Also what will help is some exercise, which I haven't had in over two months. Tomorrow my Crossfit trainer extraordinaire, Jesse at Lynnwood Crossfit is going to come up with a pregnancy routine for me because I'm not comfortable attempting even modified WODs given my inexperience and how long I've been away from the gym-- getting into a regular routine of activity will be very important in keeping me to a healthy weight gain and strong enough for what lies ahead. (My friend told me to look at pregnancy as training for the marathon of birth and months of sleepless baby care-- I think that's a good attitude).

I am at that funny stage where I'm getting a bit of a bump, but don't quite look pregnant-- just like I'm gaining weight (though when I gain weight it normally isn't all in my stomach!) I bought some maternity capris on Friday and they are so comfortable! Elastic waist bands are miraculous. Both M. and I are just in awe of this process-- I swear my belly gets bigger every day and it's extraordinary. I'm trying as much as possible to savor these moments-- I only expect to be pregnant two, maybe three times in my life and next time I'm pregnant I'll be busy with a toddler, so it's kind of amazing to just sit back and experience it.

Everyone pretty much knows now as I told my office this week-- it's nice to have it out in the open. My good friend that works with me has a one year old and she's become kind of a mentor to me-- it's nice not to have to sit in the corner and whisper about it at work now.

Meanwhile, Seattle seems to be skipping summer this year. It is currently 57 degrees and pouring down rain at my house. Next weekend I'm escaping to Boulder to see the sun and two dear friends. I can't wait!

Robb Wolf Seminar!

2011-07-10T20:50:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had the great fortune to attend Robb Wolf's second to last paleo solution seminar-- he has one more in Boston and then he's not doing them anymore! The seminar was in Vancouver, BC-- a 3 hour or so drive from where I live, depending on how long you have to sit at the border and Vancouver's epic traffic. M. and I drove up Friday and spent the afternoon wandering around Granville Island and downtown-- it happened to be sunny and beautiful and we had a nice day.

I had two amazing meals at a restaurant downtown called Milestones. One was paleo, one was not. The dinner menu has a small but delicious gluten-free section and they will make any pasta dish with brown rice noodles. Dinner on Saturday night I had a simple but amazing brown rice spaghetti with chicken and goat cheese. It was one of the best things I've eaten in a long time.

I went back there on Sunday for lunch during a break from the seminar and had a much more appropriate chicken salad with strawberries and pecans that was also excellent.

As for the seminar itself: it was a bit like going to a movie based on a book you read and loved. It was surreal to hear the man himself speak after listening to hours and hours of podcasts-- when he came into the room talking to someone when my back was turned I recognized his voice immediately. There weren't really many surprises, but I still enjoyed myself-- Robb is an entertaining and charismatic speaker. He kept apologizing to us during the parts of the seminar that went over biochemical mechanisms, but I found it to be a helpful review-- since most people there had read his book I don't think anyone was too overwhelmed, but then maybe that's just me. Looking over my notes, I don't think I picked up anything new big picture wise, though I took a lot of notes as having visuals helped me understand some mechanistic details better-- it is really hard for me to keep all of the biochemistry details in my brain, so constant review is good.

This seminar came at an ideal time: now that I am at 13 weeks pregnant I am FINALLY feeling better. My appetite has returned and I am no longer grossed out by meat and healthy food. In fact after weeks of barely eating enough, M. was astonished to see me eat almost every bite of my restaurant meals in Vancouver, and go back for seconds tonight on our steak, salad and potato dinner (the first real meal I've cooked in quite some time). I'm hungry without accompanying nausea! Hooray! I even was able to run around doing errands and cleaning house all day without having to spend a good part of the day laying down-- a first in many weeks! Tomorrow I will attempt some kind of formal exercise-- after so long without Crossfit when I was already still so new to it I'm not quite sure if that's the best option or not, but certainly some kind of weights and exercise is needed.

Oh baby!

2011-07-07T18:07:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make: for the past six weeks I haven’t really been eating paleo, but I have a good excuse: I’m pregnant!! I am about 12 and a half weeks pregnant. And ever since about 6 weeks pregnant 90% of the foods I usually eat became absolutely disgusting. Even thinking about yams, most meat, all cooked vegetables and coconut milk made me retch, let alone trying to eat those things! You might have noticed I never did a follow up to my experiment with the Autoimmune protocol—that’s because I found out I was pregnant three days in to that, and I made it two weeks before almost everything sounded disgusting. Eggs are one of the few protein foods I can sometimes get down, so I will have to re-attempt that plan at a later date. It’s pretty hard to blog about food when the thought of most food is completely nauseating! So what have I been eating? Mostly cold, raw food: a lot of salad, often with chicken on it (obviously the chicken is cooked) although I can’t eat more than a few bites of that, lots of fruit, nuts, and unfortunately, gluten-free bread, some rice/beans/corn, (one of my good friends knew something was up when we had lunch recently and I was eating the chips at a Mexican restaurant), and the occasional non-dairy ice cream and worse, which we won’t get into. Unfortunately, I’ve noticed the more processed and nutritionally deficient the food is, the easier it is to eat, though I try not to go too crazy on the junk. Ironically one of the only proteins that I have no trouble with is fish, and it’s the only one I have to limit, because of the mercury issue! It’s not been the greatest, and I would love to be 100% paleo, but my body rejects too many foods and as it is I lost about 7 pounds in the first trimester, because I had such strong aversions it was hard to eat anything, and I’m sure some of it was muscle. I had to put crossfit on hold since I was barely eating enough to get through my day without exercise. My legs have gotten so skinny! At 8 weeks pregnant, M. and I went on a little hike—it wasn’t really epic, there were plenty of families with young kids walking it, but I was so undernourished that I completely ran out of steam about a mile from the top (which was unfortunately the end where the car was) and we had to stop every 20 feet for me to rest. Obese smokers were passing me! If I can’t do that, I definitely would not get through any sort of crossfit workout! I hope to get back to some version of Crossfit soon. I did manage to escape my Midwife’s attempt to make me take an early glucose tolerance test—she wanted to do one at 8 weeks because my Dad is diabetic (though type I) but I told her I didn’t want to and she agreed to do just a regular blood glucose test and only make me do the evil test (which I would have had to do AGAIN at 20 weeks) if my numbers looked bad. Thankfully they were fine, despite the all carb breakfast I had that morning! I’ve been testing my blood sugar at home and I hope to talk her out of the 20 week test as well when it comes up. I’m sorry but drinking 100 grams of straight glucose sounds like my own personal nightmare.

Other thoughts: I haven’t had it too bad in the first trimester. I’ve been somewhat nauseated almost all the time, occasionally VERY nauseated, and with very strong food aversions, but I’ve only thrown up once. I’ve been definitely tired—though that slowly seems to be improving. Where before I could go to the mall for three hours, then the grocery store, then come home and cook dinner, now I can take maybe an hour of errands before I need to rest. I’ve been drinking tons of ice water because for whatever reason it takes the edge of my nausea, which means I’m constantly freezing cold, since Seattle didn’t even sort of start looking like summer until last weekend. The only day I felt really horrible is the day I had my first midwife appointment—my blood pressure was already really low (98/70) and then they took 5 tubes of blood for all the tests. I felt nauseated, dizzy and exhausted for the rest of the day.

I am very excited to share this with all of you, because now hopefully I will be feeling better, and can report on my paleo pregnancy as it progresses!

Paleo-ish Strawberry "Julius" recipe

2011-06-25T10:31:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid I loved getting a strawberry-orange Julius at the mall. I'm sure it was loaded with scary ingredients and I don't think I have had one for at least 15 years. (Is that company even still in business?)

Pre-paleo I was very into green smoothies. I got out of the habit, in part, because in the winter the last thing I want is a cold drink, and partly because Robb Wolf is very anti-liquid food.

But now it's summer (well sort of-- in Seattle summer doesn't really come until July-- it's still rainy and 60 degrees here). I've actually been sick for the past few weeks (more on that in an upcoming post), M had strep throat, and going back to my last post about a Paleo "Template" I enjoy green smoothies, they are easy to digest and so they are coming back into rotation. If what works best for you is a very low fructose/low carb sort of paleo approach, then ignore the following recipe. If a bit more fruit and carbs are your friends then here is my Strawberry julius-esque recipe:

1 cup coconut milk (I used light)
1/2 an orange
1-2 cups kale
1-1/2 cups frozen strawberries (I didn't measure, so I'm guessing)

optional ingredients:
1 tsp sweetner (I used a few drops of stevia, honey would work or you could do without)
a pinch of citric acid-- (I know that sounds bizarre, but another nutritionist told me she adds this to her smoothies to make them a bit sour and I find it delicious. )
protein powder- this is not very paleo, but I like my smoothie to be a meal. If you are not dairy sensitive, whey protein is probably best. I can't tolerate dairy so I use pumpkin seed protein powder-- it's just the protein not the fat from the seeds so I'm not getting a bunch of omega 6s at least.
Cod liver oil/fish oil: the only way I can get this down is to mix it in my smoothie
Vitamin D: if you have a high powered blender or you use liquid vitamin D, might as well throw it in too.

So there's my recipe. It's only sort of paleo, but it works for me and it was delicious so I thought I'd share!

A Paleo "Template"

2011-06-17T13:38:00.000-07:00

I just read and loved this post by Chris Kresser at the Healthy Skeptic. In it he talks about having a "paleo template" rather than a strict diet in which you can have some room to find out what works best for your body. There are a lot of variations out there in paleo-land, and a lot of people insist their way is the only right way. While I read a lot of blogs and other people's books on the topic, what I really appreciate about Robb Wolf is that he tends to be in favor of tweaking the diet to see what works best for the individual, and is willing to admit when new research comes out that he may have been wrong in the past about something.

I have always believed that there is no one perfect diet for everyone-- there are definitely elements of what is healthy and some foods are not good for anyone, but particularly in terms of macronutrient breakdowns, some people do really well on a lot of carbs, like my friend L, who is a distance runner, and has been a size 2 since high school-- clearly, what she is doing works for her. Other people I know really only thrive when they cut out most carbs from their diets. I'm somewhere in between-- I don't feel very good on an extremely low carb diet, but too many carbs is also a recipe for disaster. I do best usually around 100 grams of carbs a day, give or take a few-- assuming they are good carbs and not the high processed ones, which don't make me feel good, but yet sometimes I still eat them because they taste good!

Data Collection

2011-06-12T14:00:00.000-07:00

I don't often talk much about my job here, but this week was a big one for me. I am the Project Director for a study on bone health in active duty soldiers. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday we were scheduled to collect data on 200 Soldiers.

What I mean by data collection is something like this:

Soldiers scheduled to arrive at 6:30 am (which meant I got up at 4am every day-- so much fun).
From 6:30-7:30 I would give a powerpoint presentation outlining what we are studying, what they would have to do, making sure they are eligible (they have to be about to deploy, 30 years old or under, and not have any current bone diseases or fractures-- oh, and if they are female they can't be pregnant, but normally pregnant women don't deploy so that wasn't too much of an issue). They also can just choose not to participate if they don't want to.

After that I spent about 20 minutes going over very basic nutrition information: i.e. soldiers rely on their bodies to perform, and the department of defense is very specific about how much body fat they can have etc. I talk briefly about the healthy plate model, how you can tell if a food is healthy (basically, the closer it is to how it came from the ground, the better. They all laugh when I tell them there's no such thing as a twinkie tree). Then I talk about bone health, how things like smoking, too much alcohol, not exercising and not eating properly is bad for their bones, and talk about both dairy and non-dairy sources of calcium. I wrap that up with some tips on making better choices in a fast food restaurants. It isn't very comprehensive-- just a baseline of tidbits. Fortunately I could talk about whatever I wanted so I didn't have to cover the food pyramid, but I also couldn't really do paleo-- it had to be somewhat mainstream and extremely basic, especially since these guys are really only going to have access to whatever is in the cafeteria when they deploy and most of them eat so much crap anyway that we are starting from an extreme baseline.

Next we collect their blood to measure things like blood calcium, thyroid hormones, vitamin D and a few other markers of bone turnover.

Then in groups of 10 they go through the following stations:
-filling out 2 surveys on exercise and diet, which are extremely long
-getting their height/weight/waist circumference measured
-body fat measurement
-measuring their resting energy expenditure using an indirect calorimeter-- a small device you breathe into for 10 minutes and it uses how much oxygen you expel to estimate how many calories you burn at rest.
-Heel Bone density, which is measured with a machine that takes an ultrasound of the heel (my bone density is not good, by the way! Likely from years of absorption issues. I have mild osteopenia, which is apparently common in people with gluten intolerances/celiac.)

At the end of all this they get a gift card for $25 and are sent on their way. When they return from deployment we will do it all again. Half of them will receive online diet coaching by yours truly for the year they are deployed. The other half will not. At the end of the year we will be able to see if the coaching made any difference in their health.

The first day everything went beautifully. The 50 soldiers we expected showed up, on time, only 4 were ineligible, all of them returned when I told them to (since we could only handle 10 soldiers at a time they were assigned to come back at various points of the day). I had a great team of my boss, two co-workers, four army nurses, four dietetic interns and their instructor helping run all the teams. It went perfectly. Unfortunately the next two days we only had 20 soldiers show up each day, late,-- Thursday we expected 50 and Friday we were supposed to have 100! So that was disappointing-- I thought we would be totally done by now, and instead we have to do another group in a couple of weeks to get enough participants.

It was absolutely exhausting. I didn't really have any way to refrigerate anything and I was staying in a hotel since my house is quite far from base and I had to be there at 5:30 in the morning so my food options were not great. I mostly ate trail mix to keep me from passing out and then after we finished for the day I'd go to Panera or Chipotle and get some kind of chicken salad. I had wished I'd brought beef jerky, but didn't think of it-- next time I definitely will.

Fortunately this week will be much more mellow and I can get back to my normal routine.

The new food "plate"-- not perfect, but much better!

2011-06-03T14:28:00.000-07:00

First of all, I would just like to say a big thank you to Jenn at Girl Heroes, who featured me on her blog this week. I am honored and delighted to be part of her girl hero series!

As for the new food "plate" model:

The good: it is much, much simpler than the food pyramid, which was nearly impossible to understand and was far too heavy on grains. This one takes grains back to a more modest 25% of the plate, leaving 50% of the plate for fruits and vegetables, which is a significant improvement. Also, using a plate is a lot easier to visualize then a pyramid-- Great Britain has used a version of the plate for many years, which I always thought made more sense than the pyramid. I was taught to educate people via the "healthy plate model" which looks very much like this, and I would often draw it for patients during their appointments. It is visually very easy to grasp.

The bad: in trying to make it simple, it leaves a lot of unanswered questions (as my friend asked me when I posted this on facebook-- where's the pie group?) There is no category that discusses sugar or fat, types of fat etc (which is just as well since the current recommendations are backwards anyway). Dairy alternatives aren't suggested, and most of all-- it implies that the only thing that counts as starch is grain, which means conceivably you could have beans, a potato, a cup of white rice, lettuce and a banana, and it would all fit on the "plate", but you would have a huge dose of refined carbohydrates and almost no fat or protein.

What I would change: grains should be changed to "starch" (so grain, or starchy vegetables would fit there) and I'd make that square a little smaller, or even optional. I would change the fruit/vegetable parts to just saying fruit AND vegetables, with an emphasis on green veggies. If you are getting lots of non-starchy veggies, fruit is not as important. And of course, no adult needs dairy-- some people do okay with it, many people don't-- it does not need to be a staple of the food recommendations.

I've seen a lot of paleo people bashing this as being no different then the food pyramid, ("just the food pyramid in a circle!") but I do think it's a step in the right direction. Given the amount of conflicting information in the main-stream and the difficulty in explaining nutrition simply to the general public, this is a great stride in helping people understand what foods are appropriate in what amounts.

Low fat propaganda

2011-05-25T19:33:00.000-07:00

I've been a student member of the American Dietetic Association for three years (last year I was still a student when the new membership was due, even though I became an RD a month later!) This year, I will not be renewing my membership, largely because of things like this:

I get fun little bits of dietetic propaganda or advertising (as the ADA shamelessly shares my contact information with all kinds of food producers) in the mail at least once a week. My favorite one was a couple months ago promoting eating eggs-- little did they know I have an egg factory in my backyard so I get them for free:) Today's fun little number was made available by the sub-group I belong to called SCAN, which stands for Sports, Cardiovascular and Wellness Nutrition, which I thought would be a group to discuss sports nutrition, but doesn't seem to do much at all (as opposed to the Dietitians in Functional Medicine group I belong to which is actually useful-- I will be sorry to see that one go).

First of all, this helpful "resource" was sponsored by Promise/Country Crock/I can't believe it's not butter-- i.e. makers of scary non-food butter substitutes made of refined vegetable oil and tree fiber. Lovely. "Keep the taste, lose the saturated fat! Swap butter for a delicious soft spread!" it claims. 1. Margarine tastes nothing like butter 2. Butter is REAL FOOD your body can recognize as opposed to the scary crap in the margarine and 3. Believing saturated fat causes heart disease is so 1994! Even the ADA national conference made mention that saturated fat isn't as bad as they once thought-- why do they continue to spout this nonsense? Oh right, because they are sponsored by makers of margarine (other sponsors include Diet Coke and Hersheys-- wonderful).

The pamphlet lists 10 simple steps to make the new 2010 Dietary Guidelines work for you and your family:

1. Size your servings right:
While I agree generally that people tend to eat too much, I think the issue has more to do with poor food choices-- are you really going to overeat salmon, salad and fruit? Probably not.

2. Switch out the saturated fat
Come on people! So many other bloggers have covered this well, Gary Taubes has written a two books on the topic-- saturated fat does not cause heart disease. It just doesn't.

3. Make good habits more delicious at home: simple recipes for a healthier lifestyle
This section features a bunch of protein/veggie recipes that would probably be pretty good if you used a good fat instead of scary Country Crock.

4. Fit fruits and vegetables into your diet
No complaints here in general, though the specific recommendations, like to add fruit to pizza was ludicrous. (I'm healthy because my pizza has pineapple on it! Please).

5. Eat less salt
I have mixed feelings on this one. I don't think we need to be getting salt from processed foods-- if you cut out processed crap you will automatically eat less salt. But only a small portion of the population has salt-sensitive high blood pressure. Most people do fine with some sea salt in cooking-- salt brings flavors together in cooking and makes things taste better.

6. Watch out for solid fats (isn't this the same as #2?) and added sugar
First of all, margarine is a solid fat, so there goes that reasoning! But naturally occurring solid fats are very heat stable so they are your friends for cooking! Nasty vegetable oils tend to go rancid and turn to trans fat pretty quickly. I concur on the added sugar though-- keep that to a minimum.

7. Enjoy more seafood and choose a variety of protein foods
The title is fine-- I like fish a lot, and I agree with a variety of protein foods, however on the detail page they go on and on about low-fat, drain off all fat, fat phobia that is ridiculous. They also don't mention that while fish is awesome, you also have to limit consumption due to mercury toxicity.

8. Make half your grains whole
This is just stupid. Let's ignore the fact that many people don't do well with grains at all. If you believe that whole grains are superior as the ADA does, given their lack of processing and fiber content, why would you only push for people to make HALF of them whole grains? Given that the food pyramid wants you eating 6-11 servings of grain a day, that means you could be eating 4-5 servings of white bread a day and be totally within their recommendations. Oh, and you could put margarine on it! SO STUPID.

9. Keep your food safe
Tips on food safety-- no complaints here, lots of people have sinks full of salmonella. I probably do too.

10. Move More!
I think we are all in agreement that more moving, less sitting is good.

Between the inappropriate corporate sponsorships, the endless propaganda like this I get in the mail, and the useless "research" they publish in their journal, I don't seem much point in spending $200 a year for a membership, though I still have to do "approved" continuing education courses. I'm trying to figure out a way to get credit for the Robb Wolf Seminar I'm going to in July!

How does your garden grow?

2011-05-21T12:58:00.000-07:00

After a month of saying every weekend that we really need to get our garden planted, we finally did it today. In the past I've started some or all of my vegetables from seed but this year we just bought starts. We aren't very good gardeners, mainly because after we first get it planted we tend not to be super consistent with maintenance, thus the purchase of starts because it doesn't involve thinning out the plants. (Last year I never got around to thinning out the lettuce and it was a huge mess).

The whole garden-- the stuff on the ground is hay, to try and combat the weed problems we had last year-- it rained all summer and we had out of control weeds!

We started out the day at the best nursery ever: Flowerworld. If you live in the Seattle area I highly recommend Flowerworld, even if you aren't gardening. The store area alone is 3 acres, and they also have chickens, peacocks, geese, swans, goats and sheep you can visit, along with nearly every kind of Northwest growing plant you can think of. It's one of our favorite places.

We just recently put up some heavy duty net fencing to keep the chickens out of the garden-- they dig everything up and love rainbow chard in particular so much that there's never any left for me! They were very frustrated watching M dig in the garden and not able to get in to "help."

We planted a few sweet peas, and corn (though in 4 years we have never had a successful corn harvest-- the squirrels tend to get it all), rainbow chard, several kinds of lettuce, bell peppers, tomatoes, and collard greens. They did not have the kind of kale I like at Flowerworld, probably because it's more of a cool weather crop, so we skipped that. When it gets warmer I want to plant some basil in a pot by the back door-- last year we had a cold summer and all the basil died-- the deck gets warmer so perhaps we'll be more successful with a pot.

A few random updates

2011-05-12T09:19:00.000-07:00

Ack! It's been 10 days since I updated my blog! Terrible. Work has been really busy lately and I'm going through a weird phase of not being able to sleep in when I have time so I've been tired. I wake up at 6am whether I am going to work or not. Maybe because it's getting lighter outside-- I need to look into blackout curtains.

I am still eating the autoimmune protocol for the most part-- I'm definitely avoiding eggs and nightshades-- I admit nuts may have slipped in a couple times.

I'm kind of in a food rut this week-- I've been eating tons of ground beef and canned fish. Today I'm making pulled pork so maybe that will shake things up a little.

Things I'm working on:

I've been slowly making my way through Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes for the past few weeks-- I will attempt to do a full review when I finish. It's an amazing piece of work-- over 400 pages of extremely detailed analysis of how we came to believe some of the things we do as a country about health (fat is bad, high cholesterol = heart disease) and whether those ideas actually have scientific evidence (hint, they don't). It's so dense I can only read a little at a time in order to process the information and I already feel like I need to read it again, and I'm not even finished!

I just listened to this podcast over at the Healthy Skeptic about the intimate neural connections between the brain and the gut and loved it-- I need to contemplate this and listen to it again when I'm not driving in pouring rain to get all the nuances of what Chris is saying but it's so fascinating!

My friend Stevie is helping me out with a webpage for private nutrition practice, but I'm stumped on what to call it. Any ideas? I was considering Paleo RD, but I kind of want something more generic so as not to put off people with predisposed negative ideas about paleo.

My husband has gone off the deep end this week eating almost exclusively gluten and dairy (sandwiches, cake and pizza) and I've been too tired and busy to fix it. Ack! Last night I did get him to eat eggs and yams for dinner at least.

I'm officially now obsessed with this stuff: Kevita is cultured coconut water. I used to be into Kombucha, but ever since they reformulated it after the recall it hasn't been the same. This stuff tastes better to me-- it comes in several flavors but all except original have sugar in them and taste too sweet to me. We did a tasting with some of my nutritionist friends a couple weeks ago and they all preferred the lemon ginger to the original. M thinks they all taste disgusting as he hates anything fermented. They are expensive though, just like kombucha-- over $3 a bottle! I'm going to try and make my own-- I had success in the past with kefir grains in coconut water-- I'm going to give that a try again.

Finally I have a recurring issue with my IT band. In case you didn't take anatomy or it's been awhile, "The iliotibial band is a thick band of fascia that extends along the lateral thigh from the iliac crest to the knee" in otherwords, in runs from the hip to the knee down the outside of your leg in that indent between your quad and your hamstring if you are fortunate enough to have that kind of muscle definition:

My right hip is really tight, or maybe even one leg is longer causing my right hip to get bunched up. At any rate, it's actually very noticable and has been that way for awhile--whenever I get a pair of pants hemmed the tailor comments on it because they are not the same length and when Jesse (awesome trainer at Lynnwood Crossfit) was teaching me to deadlift it was so obvious my right hip was higher he told me not to max deadlift until I get it sorted out and then called another trainer over to look at how messed up I am. Anyway, that wouldn't be a big deal, except that when your hip is tight, it pulls on that fun IT band we just talked about, which pulls the knee out of alignment which hurts. When I hurt my knee a couple weeks ago doing medicine ball squat cleans I thought it was just because I had been sloppy in my form, or that it was combined with running (which often makes my knee hurt). But then on Monday we did a workout with those squats again and I was very cautious, had Jesse show me again how to do it properly and STILL my knee hurt so much the next day I couldn't hardly walk up the stairs in my house and my right hip felt tight while sitting. Using a foam roller along that side helps some, but it's getting really annoying having to miss crossfit for several days after every workout because I keep hurting my knee. So for now, I'm foam rolling the heck out of it, avoiding those specific squat cleans and avoiding running in hopes to sort this out, but I kind of think I might have a structural issue since I remember as far back as 6th grade when they test you for scoliosis being told one hip was higher, which makes me think it's more complicated than a slight muscle imbalance. Of note, however: M. pointed out that I pretty much always sleep on that side, which might be contributing, so I'm trying to sleep on the left to see if that helps.

Paleo for Autoimmune Disorders

2011-05-02T15:00:00.000-07:00

General Paleo is awesome for the majority of people and is a good starting point for getting healthy. For people with autoimmune disorders like Celiac Disease, Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, Fibromyalgia, Rheumatoid Arthritis and others, a slightly more restricted version may be necessary.

First, a little background on autoimmune disease: autoimmune diseases, in a nutshell, are where the body's immune system attacks its own cells, mistaking them for foreign invaders. Which type of disease you get is dependent on which cells get attacked. A number of autoimmune conditions have been linked to gluten intolerance, dairy intolerance and or leaky gut (Rhumatoid arthritis, Celiac and Type I Diabetes have all been linked to one or more of those intolerances). I just read this paper over the weekend which made it pretty clear rheumatoid arthritis and leaky gut caused by lectins have a significant correlation and the paper lays down a number of suggested mechanisms for why this occurs.

A few quotes:

"Approximately 20% of all patients with inflammatory bowel diseases are complicated by joint inflammation" (suggests a link between gut inflammation and joint pain)
"legume and cereal lectins alter the microflora of the gut causing both inflammation and increased intestinal permeability..."
"wheat containing diets can increase intestinal permeability and thereby allow the gut-derived antigens to access to the periphery"

The main point of the article was that in people who are genetically susceptible, these foods pass through the intestine in bigger pieces than they are supposed to, and then some kind of viral or bacterial infection (even the flu) can be the trigger for this chain of events, causing the immune system to overreact and start attacking "self" because the particles bind to proteins that are similar in structure to parts of "self" so the immune system gets confused. (It is even more complicated than this so if you are a biochemist and I am not explaining this well, please correct me-- trying to keep it simple!) So it explains why some people can go their whole lives eating grains and legumes and never have problems, but some are prone to this "leaky gut" and it causes different types of autoimmune diseases depending on which cells are mimicked.

The only way for the gut to fully heal is to remove the offending foods. What I am not clear on, is whether or not you have to remove these foods for life, or only until the gut heals. Matt LaLonde, biochemist extraordinaire, was on Robb Wolf's podcast recently and he said eggs, grains, alcohol, nightshades, nuts and seeds, and NSAIDS (like Advil, which are murder on your gut lining) to be eliminated FOR LIFE. (In a subsequent podcast over at the Healthy Skeptic he went even further saying that basically just grass fed meats and vegetables were all that were appropriate for people with severe autoimmune disorders!) Robb Wolf does not seem to take it so far. He has Celiac Disease, an autoimmune condition, and I know he has said he eats eggs and occasionally gluten free grains. I sent him a question for the podcast to clarify his position on this, but he gets so many questions we may or may not ever get a response. (Incidentally the Mat LaLonde podcast was my favorite ever and I've already listened to it at least twice! Definitely check it out).

As far as I know I don't have an autoimmune disease (I have blood work pending on the state of my thyroid) but I am definitely at genetic risk: my mom and both my grandmothers have Hashimoto's Thyroiditis and Rheumatoid Arthritis, and my dad has late onset type one diabetes, also an autoimmune condition. I also believe that as a nutritionist, I should never recommend something to a client without trying to myself so for the month of May, I'm doing the autoimmune protocol. This means in addition to my paleo diet, no eggs, no nightshades (tomatoes are the only ones I've been eating), no nuts (been eating a few too many of these since we came back from Hawaii with bags of macadamias!). I'm also going to cut WAY back on chocolate and fructose for a month, which is not necessarily part of the autoimmune protocol, I just have been overdoing it on those.

In the mean time I did something bad to my right knee last Thursday at Crossfit so I'm going to have to miss a few days, which doesn't make me very happy! But if I'm having trouble going up and down the stairs in my house, I'm probably not ready for the WOD.

Update

2011-04-29T12:07:00.000-07:00

I've been laying low the last couple of weeks, getting caught up at work after being out of town, trying to get myself back on Seattle time (getting up at 6am in Hawaii is 9am in Seattle) and I admit, eating too many nuts. I got back to Crossfit this week and feel SO weak after being gone almost two weeks. The first day back we did 2000m row. I didn't break any records (our trainer said if you haven't done it before, just "survive it". I could have pushed harder but now I know).

Yesterday I swear the warm up was worse than the workout: run 400m (I'm getting better-- I can run it now without stopping, though my lungs still HATE it), then 3 rounds of 15 pushups and 15 medicine ball squat jerks (I think) and then another 400m run. I could not believe how quickly I lost my push-up strength! Two weeks ago I could have done this much more easily. This activity was in partners and my buddy was a guy who told me he's already lost 40 pounds doing crossfit. Afterwards I wished I had asked him if he changed his diet too. He was helpful, encouraging me to get all the way through that second 400m without stopping, even though I wanted to.

Our regular workout was 5x5 banded deadlifts. Except my form on deadlifts has never been awesome and I was out of practice, so I ended up doing the regular kind (banded deadlifts are where you attach the barbell to the ground with giant rubber bands which gives much more resistance at the top. If I had kept with those I definitely would have hurt my back). I did five sets with pretty low weight-- I could have probably done more weight, especially given that this morning only my quads are sore from the warm up-- no soreness from the deadlifts! But my left knee was kind of hurting and my right hip is chronically tight (I'm working on that) so I'm always scared of getting hurt deadlifting. I also was feeling slightly nauseated because I ate too close to class, and a little dizzy, probably because I think my new contact lenses are too strong, (excuses, excuses) so it probably wasn't the best workout ever, but I don't mind easing back in. I started going to class earlier than the one I used to go to and there were a lot of women there who were all so nice to me! I wish I was better at remembering names, but I felt very welcome, which is what I love about my gym!

I'm working on a post for my plan for May: a new month long experiment to fine tune this paleo-liciousness in my life.

Oh! And I am going to see Robb Wolf LIVE! I am so excited! Mr. Wolf himself is doing a seminar in Vancouver, BC on July 9th, which is a mere 3 hour drive and a border crossing away. I can hardly wait. I will of course give a full accounting here after the fact.

One pan meal

2011-04-24T17:41:00.000-07:00

For dinner this evening I made steak, fried yams and kale all in the same pan that I made bacon in this morning. First of all I love this pan. I have the 5 1/2 quart version and love it so much I may eventually get the smaller one as well. Last year for my birthday I got all new pots and pans after my 10 year old non-stick cheapo set from my wedding registry started to peel teflon at alarming rates. My mom had done a lot of research a couple years ago on pots and pans and the Cuisinart Multiclad Pro had great reviews and she loved the one pot she has of this type, so I bought all new pans of this variety and highly recommend them. This particular skillet is really big-- at least 12 inches (maybe 14) about 2 inches high with a stainless lid making it good for just about anything! When I first got it in the mail I was alarmed at how big it is, but I actually use it more than any other pan.

But back to dinner:

The pan had a little residual bacon fat in it (I poured most of it out into a jar), and I cooked the steaks, which I seasoned with salt and pepper in the pan first. (not pictured)

When those were finished, I set them aside to rest (after you cook meat it's good to let it sit quietly for a few minutes-- it initially loses juices and then will suck them back up again). I added a couple of tablespoons of coconut oil to the pan and when it melted I added thinly sliced yams-- turning them after 3-5 minutes (it's easy to burn them!) both of these were over medium heat. When the yams were finished I added a couple cloves of minced garlic to the pan-- stir fast so the garlic doesn't burn!

And then a whole head of de-stemmed and chopped purple kale to the pan along with about a half cup of water to de-glaze the pan (de-glazing is where you add liquid to a hot pan that has yummy goodness also known as fond stuck to the bottom of the pan. The liquid, combined with a gentle scraping with a spatula helps get the tasty bits to mix in with the food and as a bonus, makes the pan easier to clean later). I added a bit of salt to the kale but I learned the hard way last time to taste it first! Since I salted the meat, last time when I cooked greens in the same pan as the meat with no yams between there was still salt in the pan and I over salted the greens. This time it came out perfectly!
Delicious!
The whole process took maybe 20 minutes and now I only have one pan to clean up!

How to become a Paleo Dietitian (and is it worth it?)

2011-04-22T21:47:00.001-07:00

On Robb Wolf’s podcast I occasionally hear people write in to ask him where they should go to school to become a dietitian that has a paleo slant. Robb tells them there is no such place and that if they want to become an RD they are going to suffer through a lot of food pyramid nonsense and that they might be better off just taking some biochemistry classes to get a better background. He is not wrong. My experience though, was better than it would have been at most places. Now granted, I am new to paleo, but in the late 90s I read the original Zone Diet books and Barry Sears’ detailed explanation of the biochemistry of what food does in the body is what inspired me to study nutrition. It was the first time I had ever had an interest in science—it lit a fire in me like few things ever have (all this from a commercial diet book!). Throughout the early 2000s I experimented with the Zone, Atkins, Fat Flush (which is actually fairly paleo) and eventually the Weston A. Price foundation. I had a few years experimenting with being a vegan, but even then it was the grain-free variety as described in Eat to Live by Joel Fuhrman. Paleo made all of that information make SENSE. It was with this background that I entered Bastyr University, a natural health oriented University that trains Naturopaths, Midwives, Acupuncturists, Herbalists and Nutritionists, located Northeast of Seattle. Obviously the Bastyr curriculum is not teaching a paleo diet--but it does teach a whole food, local food approach that is skeptical of the food pyramid. Bastyr graduates are not afraid of saturated fat or red meat, and even sometimes scan the farmer’s market for lard (my friend spent an entire summer trying to figure out the perfect ratio of lard to butter for a pie crust). It was because of my education at Bastyr that I learned how to do an elimination diet and learned of my allergy to gluten (I already knew about the dairy). I learned about leaky gut (granted, not about Robb Wolf’s assertion that legumes and all grains can lead to it, but I did learn what it is and about the 8 most common food allergies and that I most likely had it). I took whole foods cooking classes, I had four intense quarters of biochemistry, both of the macro and micronutrient variety and maybe even most beneficial—I learned how to read scientific articles critically. This is a skill that is missing from a lot of people in my field—they simply take the conclusions of a scientific article as fact (if they read them at all), without being able to evaluate whether the study was well conducted or biased.

Now for the bad parts: sometimes you have to memorize things you do not believe in and other things that are horrendously boring (I’m sorry but Food Service Management was the bane of my existence). Particularly if you are going to become a Registered Dietitian, there are things you have to do because the American Dietetic Association says so, particularly doing a 1200 hour internship after you get your degree, which is fiercely competitive to even get into, during which time you will learn all about how to be a hospital dietitian and calculate how much corn syrup and soybean oil based liquid food sick people should be administered, you will probably have to teach a class on the food pyramid (that was not fun—the curriculum told me to tell people that soybean oil is good because it lowers cholesterol. I think I said it really fast so no one heard me). You will spend anywhere from 4-8 weeks learning about how hospital kitchens are run and a couple weeks having your heart broken at WIC educating low income young women about how to use government coupons that are mostly for dairy products and juice how to feed their children. It was a rough year and ultimately I use very little of what I experienced in that year in my job. You then have to take an expensive and scary exam on all of the stuff you wish you weren’t required to know in order to get your credential. The only thing that was really great about my internship (through Washington State University) was that our clinical instructor was a whizz in biochemistry and our lecture portion had a good review of those topics. That instructor also ultimately helped get me my current job, which is in research at the hospital where I did my internship and that made it all worth it, but seriously, it was a torturous year.

Then if you do become an RD and what you want to do is help people with paleo you are going to need to go into private practice, which is no guarantee of making any money, at least for the first five years. This is something I would eventually like to do, but right now I need to work and pay off my student loans and anyway I really like my job—but I don’t see patients on a day to day basis so I’m not really spreading the paleo word. If you think you are going to be able to instruct people in paleo at your average hospital outpatient clinic though I would take pause. You *might* be able to get away with some level of that, but I guarantee you if anyone overseeing your work got wind of you telling people not to eat grain or even worse, that saturated fat is not the devil, you will probably get fired. (The outpatient clinic where I did a rotation was still telling people they could have no more than 2 eggs a week and had a whole wall of cholesterol lowering margarine product examples. One of my friends heard a dietitian tell a patient that if a food was fat-free and cholesterol-free it didn’t matter what it was. Yikes!) Your best bet is to partner with a gym, probably of the crossfit variety to get clients.

Have I scared you off this endeavor? I hope not because there aren’t that many of us out there with this slant and I could use some company! (Note: one of my good friends from my internship is a hard core paleo crossfitter, so other RDs out there do exist—and she was into paleo way before I was!).

In some states (Washington is one) you can also practice as a “Certified Nutritionist” with a Master’s Degree in nutrition, without having to do the RD internship process. I have a couple friends who went this route and it was definitely tempting. If you know you will only ever have a private practice and will only ever live in a state where this is allowed do it. (But know that the Washington State Dietetic Association is pushing hard for licensure, not just certification for RDs, which depending on how the legislation ends up being worded, could cause problems for CNs down the road). Many states only allow you to practice as a licensed dietitian. It’s also very hard to get a job as a CN, thus the need for private practice.

I do really recommend the Bastyr Masters Degree program if you are going to take this on (I didn’t do an undergrad degree there so I can’t speak to that program). You will find a more open-minded, whole foods approach there, even if they are pretty enamored with grains, at least they tend to be on the whole grain, gluten free side of things. You can’t have everything!

Nonsense and illogical arguments

2011-04-21T20:01:00.000-07:00

I came across this article in the Chicago Tribune this morning about how "nutritionists" hate the paleo diet and was very irritated. The pediatrician in this article first of all was a very poor source of information-- I hope he was just misquoted because he came across a complete idiot. Why they chose to interview a pediatrician about the paleo diet makes no sense anyway-- the article was not about children's nutrition (though paleo, with plenty of carbs from yams and fruit is perfectly healthy for kids). What made me positively irate was this comment: "people who eat grains enriched with folic acid have reduced risk of neural tube defects, including spina bifida. Fortified grains "are cheap and there's no downside," he said." First of all, the only people who need to worry about spina bifida are women who are pregnant or may become pregnant-- you aren't going to suddenly get spina bifida at age 35 because you stopped eating grains-- it is a birth defect. Secondly, vegetables, particularly leafy green ones have SIGNIFICANTLY more folic acid/folate, which is more bioavailable and comes with way more other vitamins and nutrients than grains to which it is added (the government decided to add it to grains because people weren't eating enough vegetables-- let's cut out the middle man and just eat veg!). Third, fortified grains are REFINED carbohydrates-- whole grains are not required to be fortified. Even if you don't buy into the grain elimination aspect of paleo, most people with a clue about nutrition understand that refined carbohydrates are bad for you, and in excess lead to diabetes and likely heart disease. To say there is no downside is outrageous.

As for his other claims, that a teenage boy would not be able to afford this diet-- how many teenage boys buy their own food? And his insistence that dairy is important for everyone also bugs me-- as much as 75% of the population is lactose intolerant, and again, calcium can be obtained from many other foods.

His contention that most Americans are overweight because they overeat is overly simplistic-- if you look into why most Americans are overeating, it is because excessive amounts of refined carbohydrates cause hormonal changes that cause desire for even more carbohydrates. Numerous studies have shown protein is much more satiating then carbs, as is fat. Think about it-- most people can put away a pretty big plate of pasta or bread (ever eaten a whole loaf of bread while waiting for your dinner in a restaurant? I bet you still ate a good bit of your dinner). Then consider how many eggs or how much chicken you could eat in one sitting. WAY fewer calories because the protein/fat in the meat helps your body know when it's full. While everyone has a different tolerance level for carbs, eating a big plate of mainly refined carbohydrates for a meal is going to cause most people to either overeat, or be hungry again in an hour, if not both. (I know if I eat a mostly carb meal I still feel like eating even when I'm stuffed!) So yes, if you restrict calories you will lose weight, but it is a lot EASIER to restrict calories on a low to moderate carb diet than on a high carb diet because you don't get as hungry.

I don't have much of a problem with the dietitian's point about beans being a good source of fiber and protein, but again you can get plenty of fiber from any other fruit or vegetable and meat is a MUCH more efficient source of protein than beans, which do not contain all of the essential amino acids and for many people are difficult to digest.

Finally, I am irked by the idea that eliminating an entire "food group" is automatically unhealthy. The "food groups" were invented by the USDA, whose primary job is to promote agriculture in the US. Guess what crops we grow a lot of? Grains! Those same dietitians who freak out about eliminating the "grain food group" also tend to applaud people for becoming vegetarians. This seems ironic to me-- we are all going to die if we eliminate grains because they are a food group, but eliminating meat, also a food group, is totally acceptable. Do you know what farmers feed animals when they want to fatten them up quickly? Lots of low fat grains.

There is your rant for the day.

Semi-Paleo Vacation

2011-04-21T19:35:00.000-07:00

I'm back! M and I spent a glorious week getting some much needed sunshine, spending two nights on Oahu and 5 on Kauai. Food in restaurants was hit or miss-- I had some fantastic restaurant meals and some pretty inedible ones, fortunately I also was able to cook in Kauai. I bought a huge pack of ground beef, some chicken, eggs and veggies and we ate those for breakfasts and dinners on Kauai, supplemented with lots of papayas, a few chocolate covered and plain macadamia nuts and a little wine. Lunches we mostly ate out, as well as dinner the last day and a couple of times I definitely got "glutenized"-- the last day in particular and I felt pretty bad all the way home. I was glad for a kitchen, but the oven was pretty old and kind of tippy-- everything in the pan would slide to one side! I was happy to get home to my own kitchen and fancy oven. I ate a bit more sugar, and definitely more carbs and fruit then I had been eating the past month, but overall I'd say it was a 80-85% Paleo vacation and that's good enough for me!

Exercise was mainly of the swimming/hiking variety. We took a red eye home and I got zero sleep (I'm bad at sleeping sitting up and we were in a row that didn't recline) so have been like zombies the last couple days. I'm looking forward to getting back to Crossfit tomorrow!

Hawaiian Purple yams-- pretty, but actually not that tasty.

Standard dinner-- burger no bun, yam fries, salad and pineapple
Best dessert ever-- half a papaya filled with diced banana (mango also good) and topped with mac nuts and chocolate mac nuts.

It's still basically winter in Seattle-- makes me wish I was still here:

Paleo Diet: First 30 days

2011-04-11T17:03:00.000-07:00

In 30 days of Paleo & Crossfit OnRamp I:

Didn't lose any scale weight at all (I found this surprising). I lost two pounds the first week but it eventually returned (probably water weight/muscle gain?)

Lost 1.25 inches off my waist and 1.5 inches off the dreaded lower tummy poochy area and so my jeans fit way better now. My bicep increased by more than half an inch (!) and my chest went down a half inch (not really a goal, but is of note). My butt is 1/4 of an inch smaller too. All my other measurements stayed the same.

The good: my digestion has slowly but steadily been improving and I definitely have gotten better control of my sugar cravings.

The bad: I felt like crap for at least two weeks and my sleep has been horrible.

Where I go from here: I'm going to keep posting food and recipes, but not necessarily every day. I am going to try eating a bit more carbs, and work on improving my sleep. Next week I have an appointment with my ND to try and figure out what's going on with my hormones and I will try and get her to test my cortisol and see if that's part of the issue.

What I may do is 2 weeks of more carbs and see how that goes and then if that doesn't help in May I will do another 30 days, this time being 100% strict (i.e. no chocolate or nut butter, maybe a break from eggs) and see what that does for me.

I've got a TON of stuff going on this week so I'm probably going to take a blogging break until next week but I'll have lots more to say then. I'm not giving up yet on this plan, just continuing to tweak.

Days 28 & 29: Sleep and No Sleep

2011-04-11T16:56:00.000-07:00

So yesterday I was a wreck, having two days in a row of not sleeping well again. Then last night, for whatever reason, I slept 9 hours straight. It's been weeks since I slept through the night without waking up every few hours. Not surprisingly, I feel awesome today!

I made what I thought was an awesome crockpot chicken recipe this weekend, though M. didn't like it-- I think he would have liked it if I had used chicken breasts instead of thighs.

Italian Crockpot Chicken:

3-4 pounds of chicken (breasts/thighs)
1 can diced tomatoes (I used Muir Glen's fire roasted)
1/2 cup kalamata olives plus the liquid
1 T dried oregano
1/2 T dried Thyme
1/2 a lemon (stick the whole thing in there)
2 bay leaves
1/2 cup chicken broth

Put all of this in the crockpot and cook on low for 6-8 hours. The chicken falls apart it's so tender! I served it with sauteed chard.

I had this for lunch yesterday and breakfast this morning, which enough left for breakfast tomorrow.

Last night we had ground beef sauteed with cumin, garlic and chard for dinner, with yam fries. I'm wondering if the carbs in the evening without the hard core workout before it was what helped me sleep. I'm going to try eating more carbs for a couple weeks and see how I do.

No crossfit for a couple days, but I'm doing Pilates this evening since I have a few classes I've already paid for left to use. Tomorrow I'll post a summary of the first 30 days!

Days 26 & 27: Rough Waters

2011-04-09T19:42:00.000-07:00

I haven't been feeling very good the last couple of days. Yesterday it was because I didn't get enough sleep-- I woke up several times in the night (likely due to the crazy intense Crossfit workout, the residual issues with my lungs (two days later and I still am coughing a bit) and the late dinner. I was so wrecked all morning and had a bunch of caffeine and felt a bit better. I went out for drinks last night with some old friends, though I only drank a half a glass of wine and then some club soda, but I was out much later than I usually am and didn't get to bed until 1am (thankfully I slept in until 9:45). But today I woke up with a very angry digestive system. I'll spare you the details but let's just say I usually tend toward constipation and the pendullum has swung way too far in the opposite direction. I'm not sure if I gave myself a little food poisoning, or if it was too much caffeine + alcohol and maybe a little too big a dose of magnesium last night. Or it's just hormones as my period came today quite early. I suspect the new dietary and exercise changes caused me not to ovulate at all this month. I'm not excited about it, but it's fine-- I am planning to go see my ND again soon and have some hormone tests to see where I am with all of this. What did I eat? Yesterday was very beefy:

Breakfast and lunch I had the same thing because it was the end of the week and we were out of almost everything. I made patties out of 1 lb of ground beef and ate them with the leftover mashed cauliflower, leftover bacon, and with breakfast there was some avocado which I left out of lunch. Dinner was steak and kale, which sadly turned out too salty because I made the kale in the same pan as the steak and forgot I had salted the meat and added too much salt to the kale without tasting it. Ooops.

Food today: meat and cauilflower leftovers AGAIN (if this is what made me sick I've definitely been getting a lot of it in!)

Lunch was a yummy salmon salad. I mixed 1 can of salmon with spicy mustard, half an avocado, and some salt and pepper and had it over romaine lettuce and diced carrots with a smidge of olive oil and vinegar.

Dinner: M. wanted Thai food. I usually get Phad Thai, but since I'm avoiding grains I instead opted for a Lemon Coconut chicken dish that was actually just what I needed. It was chicken cooked in coconut milk, I'm guessing with Tumeric due to the color, maybe garlic and probably a bit of sugar or something and served over napa cabbage. It came with rice but I didn't eat it. I can't believe how much more tolerant of coconut I've become-- I never used to like coconut milk based dishes and now I quite like them! I also had a couple squares of 88% dark chocolate. The very low sugar kind leaves me less likely to go crazy on it. Sometimes I even eat the unsweetened kind! Did a few errands today but mostly laying low waiting for my stomach to sort itself out. I took some emergenC with a scoop of L-glutamine and 2 probiotic capsules this afternoon, so hopefully something in that will fix it.

Day 25: Bakin' Bacon, Back on Track

2011-04-07T21:48:00.001-07:00

I feel soooooo much better today. I actually felt really awesome all day. I didn't take the Thyroid supplement-- was that causing my cranky pants attitude? Maybe. I didn't have those sucky sugar cravings all day either-- I think it's possible that starting the day with that soup containing beets and carrots might have been what set me off before-- or maybe the chocolate finally wore off. Today I had the tuna "chowder" I made last night for breakfast, and although my officemates probably did not enjoy the re-heated fish smell this morning, it was a very satisfying breakfast. Lunch was beef stir-fry. Dinner was absolutely DELICIOUS.

Bakin' bacon!

I made: scrambled eggs with red pepper and finely chopped greens, bacon, which I baked on a rack in the oven which worked beautifully, and sweet potato "chips" (or round fries as M. insisted they be called). I took a big sweet potato and cut it into very thin rounds (maybe 2-3 mm thick) and baked them on a cookie sheet with lots of olive oil, garlic powder and salt. I cooked the bacon and the potatoes at the same time since my oven has a handy-dandy convection option. SO YUMMY.

Tonight was my last night of OnRamp. I knew when I was driving to the gym with the sun shining that we were going to have to run tonight. After all, it's "free pain Thursday" as our coach always says. While it was sunny it was really cold and my lungs* did NOT enjoy running in the cold air at all-- they HURT almost the whole time and I've been coughing since the workout, but I actually did pretty well and ran with minimal walking for the whole workout, which was:

10 wall ball shots (throw a medicine ball at the wall, catch and squat, repeat)
200 meter run
9 wall ball shots
200 meter run
8 wall ball shots
(you get the picture-- all the way down to 1)

It sucked and was awesome all at the same time. I was bright red like a tomato when we finished (at least I wasn't purple, which sometimes happens when I run). My two buddies were there tonight but they aren't quite done with OnRamp yet. We exchanged phone numbers and agreed to all start going to the 5:30 class together once they finish up. I left feeling really happy with my workout and my new friends.

*a note about my lungs: in 2007 I had bronchitis + the flu for a month. It was the sickest I have ever been in my life. Ever since then whenever I get any sort of sick, including my food allergy reactions, it happens in my lungs. They are wussy. I've had some mild seasonal allergy stuff happening lately, and that compounded with the cold air made my lungs hurt. Also, they are just deconditioned from not doing enough cardio.

Also, strangely this morning I woke up feeling skinny. The scale was actually UP several pounds (retaining water maybe) but a pair of pants that hasn't fit in awhile fit me easily, which means my lower tummy/hips/butt area has gotten smaller. See? This is why we can not trust the scale.

Day 24: Accidental "Chowder" and I heart Crossfit

2011-04-06T21:05:00.000-07:00

Today was just a weird day. I felt weird-- still had that kind of uncomfortable vaguely sugar cravings-y feeling (though I didn't really want anything in particular, I just wanted that feeling to go away). If I had strips for my blood glucose meter it would be interesting to see where my blood sugar was when I felt like that. (I have one because it was free at a conference, not because I am diabetic).

Breakfast: soup, 2 eggs, was still hungry so had 1 cup berries and coconut cream
snack: decaf coffee and coconut milk
Lunch: ground beef and greens-- seasoning was more "taco" style today-- made enough for M and I to have for lunch tomorrow too.
Snack: just felt so off, and had coconut cream mixed with a couple teaspoons of sunflower seed butter
Dinner: I made the pork roast I bought last weekend-- it didn't come out tender enough for shredded pork-- maybe it was the wrong cut of pork or I'm thinking my oven runs hot. We still ate it and it was good, just not shredded. I thought it would last 2 meals for both of us but it was fairly fatty and I got maybe 1 1/3 meals. Maybe lunch on Friday.

The one thing that made that weird feeling go away was Crossfit, which is why I think maybe my blood sugar was high and I burned some off, but I don't know for sure. I'm also wondering if my adaptogen/iodine supplement might be causing my cranky spells so I'm going to skip that tomorrow and see if it's any better.

I accidentally came up with a recipe for dairy free tuna chowder tonight that is really yummy and easy:

Chop and de-stem two heads of cauliflower
Steam until very soft and crumbly (for me this was around 12 minutes)
Put in blender (I used my vitamix-- I don't have a food processor but that would work too)
Following measurements are approximate as I just threw stuff in:
add around 1/2 cup chicken broth
1/2 cup coconut cream
1/4 tsp? garlic powder
2 tsp? salt

Blend it all up-- for me this came out runny like thick chowder which wasn't what I was going for (I was trying to make more of a mashed potato consistency) but my plan was to mix it with a can of tuna anyway and it tasted like a yummy clam chowder (caveat: given my dairy allergy I haven't actually had clam chowder in probably 5 years or more). Anyway I'm excited to eat that tomorrow. It made a lot of cauliflower-- I mixed a can of tuna with maybe 1/3 of the cauliflower. I think I have some left over kale chips I might top it with.

Snow at Local's Gym!

Now for Crossfit: we had a random snow shower as I was driving to the gym tonight-- highly unusual for April in Seattle. It made a lot of people late for class. At first I was the only one there for OnRamp and J, my trainer said I did not need one on one work and to join the regular WOD class. Fine with me! With only one OnRamp left I'm looking forward to the main class. Our workout was tough but fun: after a warm up we split into teams of three-- I was on a team (team "banana" which was literally the first thing that came to my mind when we had to come up with a team name) with one of the girls I was in onramp with, and another woman who has been doing crossfit for about 6 months but at a different gym. It was her first time at our crossfit-- she looked like I would love to look-- super lean but also with muscle. The workout went something like this:

Person A rows as hard as they can for one minute. They take the number of calories they burned in that minute (generally around 15-20) and subtracts it from 40 to get x. Person B & C do x number of either kettlebell swings or knees to elbows. When they finish, everyone rests one minute and then rotates, so a new person is rowing, swinging, etc. We were done when we got to 100 calories burned on the rower. By the last set when I had to do 30 knees to elbows my hands and forearms were killing-- I've got some good calluses forming though. Then we worked a bit on dips and stretched. It was really fun-- a different dynamic being coached by two women as we were in this class, but it was great having two coaches since in a big class sometimes you don't get much form correction otherwise. I had a really good time.

Days 22 & 23: It's all relative

2011-04-05T19:10:00.001-07:00

No pics today-- blogging from M's work computer.

That chocolate/carb overload last weekend was a bad idea. Since then I've been extra hungry, craving sugar and CRANKY. Time to rein things in-- today I had a really stressful day at work, culminating in getting absolutely drenched in a flash hail storm and I took it out on a whole bar of 72% cocoa chocolate, which has a lot more sugar than the TJ's one. I am not going to beat myself up about it, but I don't like feeling that sugar craving feeling all day so that needs to stop. Compared to the amount of sugar I was eating before this experiment it's not that bad, but I would prefer not to eat so much in one sitting. It is not good for me for a whole bunch of reasons. There might be a PMS component to this sudden need for chocolate too.

Crossfit last night was great, though I'm really feeling it today. It was all about calisthenics again: warm up: 3 x 10: pushups, pullups, situps and squats, then we worked on knees to elbows (I got closer!) and kipping swings.

Full workout: 10 minutes of 40 seconds squats, then 20 seconds "dead bug" (an ab thing where you lay on your back with your feet in the air and reach toward your feet trying to have as little of your back on the floor as possible), 40 seconds push ups and repeat with no breaks. Those pushups killed, as my arms were already spent from all the other hanging stuff we already did, but it's my legs that are really feeling it today from all the squats. Afterwards we reviewed thruster and front squat form. I was sad my buddy S hasn't shown up the last few classes and buddy A has graduated to the big kids class (I have two more onramp to go!)

It was funny-- my first week of Onramp there were a few girls that were WAY better than me and now being the most seasoned girl in the class, they were looking at me like I was so strong (one of the girls said something about me being buff-- I told her it was all relative and pointed out some of the hard core awesome chicks in the real WOD class). Excuse me while I rant for a second: What bugs me about a lot of the women in this class (and I am sure I am guilty of this sometimes too, but I try hard not to) is they don't believe they can do things and or they are nervous to fail and so they try to be cutesy or laugh and give up or complain about how hard it is when we just started. This annoys me. Just TRY. TRY HARD. If you fall down, get back up. If it burns and is super uncomfortable then GOOD you are doing it right. If I wanted it to be easy I would have stuck with walking and pilates. I am here to get my ass kicked so that it looks and performs better. Just because you are a girl doesn't mean you have to be weak. The fact you are overweight means you actually have more muscle than a lot of people because you need it to haul that stuff around. So stop complaining and WORK. Of course I say this having had a very different relationship with weight training then many women my age-- I've lifted weights on and off since I was 15 or 16-- half my life, and I've experimented with a lot of different workouts and even took (though didn't finish) a course to become a personal trainer. But I was never an athelete, I am not particularly well coordinated and while I'm not a weakling, I'm not crazy strong. I just TRY and TRY HARD. (see? I told you I'm cranky!) *steps off soap box*

Food yesterday:
breakfast: 2 hard boiled eggs and the soup I made last weekend
lunch: left over lamb, kale and a bit of beef stir-fry
dinner (post workout): made pot roast, broccoli and yams. I think the yams after the workout made me feel good and helped me sleep, but it might have been too much today, given all the sugar cravings (but maybe that was from the chocolate over the weekend). Tomorrow I'll do yams again but not as much.

Today: had a ridiculous soup-tastrophe this morning. I don't know why I chose a tupperware I know to be leaky for transporting soup other than I was really tired and not thinking. I had soup everywhere in my work bag-- not pretty. I mixed it with some left over pot roast and had some coffee mid morning with coconut milk.
Lunch: leftover potroast and somewhat undercooked broccoli. The combination of a stressful day, trying to finish something on a deadline and being at battle with microsoft word + forgetting to take half my digestive enzymes resulted in very poor digestion.
Dinner: eaten at M's desk, as this is our last super long Tuesday where I wait at his office while he plays basketball (yay! last game of the season! It's hard on both of us to stay so late). Also had a giant chocolate bar and a kombucha.

In tracking my temperatures this month I had a couple days when I took melatonin where my morning temps took a bizzare nosedive for two days. Melatonin is a hormone--maybe it messed with my progesterone. It also gave me a hangover until almost 3pm, so I'm done with that stuff! I'm resigned to the fact that pregnancy is not likely to occur soon. Obsessing over diet modifications and crossfit have been a welcome change from thinking about that. If my temps and cycles don't even out in a few months I'll go get some blood tests done but I've decided not to worry about it for now and focus on healing my gut, getting my blood sugar balanced out, and getting in better shape. Hopefully I can lose the Ms. Crankypants attitude soon too!

Days 20 & 21: Mini Treats, carb increase and sleep

2011-04-03T16:55:00.000-07:00

The end of this week I was tired and and really not very hungry due to poor sleep. Last night I both upped my magnesium and took a little melatonin (.5mg). I slept a lot better, only waking up once instead of 4 or 5 times. Often Melatonin makes me kind of hung over the next day but I woke up feeling like I'd really slept for the first time in awhile. I've still been tired and cranky today though, perhaps from residual fatigue not being totally caught up, but even more than that I woke up STARVING. I haven't been all that hungry this whole time, given how few carbs I've been eating and I kind of like it. I also slept in and didn't get breakfast in until 11am-- today I've been an eating machine! I've had probably twice the carbs I usually do, and a bit of sugar (in the form of dark chocolate as pictured above-- it's pretty low sugar chocolate, but it has some). I've also kind of gone to town on carrots and sunflower seed butter. I figure I was probably behind on calories and needed to catch up. The extra carbs left me feeling less satiety though-- even when I'm full I still kind of feel like eating, a sensation I don't get when I keep the carbs lower, so I don't think I'll make a habit of this.

Yesterday I ate:
B: leftover ground beef stir-fry
L: 2-3 eggs cooked in coconut oil with salsa, coffee with coconut milk, dark chocolate
S: more leftover ground beef stir-fry
D: baked cod, 1/2 a small yam, broccoli with olive oil

Today:

B: Rainbow chicken soup (recipe below), 1 cup frozen berries with coconut milk
S: still hungry, had the last of the ground beef stir-fry and broccoli, then 1 cup carrots and 2 T sunflower seed butter
L: More soup, more carrots and seed butter, dark chocolate
D: planning lamb, which I've never made before-- I don't think I've even ever eaten it before, other than in Indian food with a lot of sauce, with broccoli or greens.

Today worked out to about 100 grams carbs instead of my usual 50 ish. Tomorrow I'm going to try specifically targeting more carbs (yams) after crossfit and see how that goes.

Rainbow Chicken Soup:

8 cups chicken stock + 4 cups water
4 lbs chicken thighs, diced into bite sized pieces
a whole lot of veggies! I used
4 Zucchini, 3 summer squash, 1 head chard, 4 small golden beets (peeled), handful of baby carrots-- all diced (see pic)
1 T Thyme
1/2 T Tarragon
4 cloves garlic, crushed
Salt to taste (probably 3-4 Tablespoons)

I threw all of the above in a giant stockpot and simmered it for an hour or so.

This soup tastes good, but if I made it again I'd alter the ratio of veggies to meat-- there are so many veggies that I'm hungry again an hour after I eat it because I get full on veggies and broth, but only get a couple oz of chicken. I might add extra protein to this as I eat it-- I made a ton of it and was thinking I would eat it for breakfast this week.

I'm trying to shift my perspective to what amount of nutrients makes me FEEL the best and stop thinking so much about losing body fat. I think the body fat thing will happen slowly over time-- I have maybe 10 pounds max to lose, and am likely gaining muscle, so I don't expect to see much scale action. I don't like that hungry/cravings feeling though, so will not continue with the higher carbs all day scenario.

Supplements: What I'm taking and why

2011-04-02T14:54:00.000-07:00

I realized despite a pretty decent handful of pills I swallow a day I haven't really mentioned it here. Since I just revamped this yesterday, now seems a good time to talk about it. Pull up a chair-- this might take awhile!

First of all, I discovered on Friday a number of my supplements had rice or corn flour in them. Given that the whole point of this paleo experiment is to completely eliminate grains, taking even the small amount in a couple capsules seems like not the best plan, so I exchanged a few bottles yesterday for brands without flour (thank goodness for liberal return policies!)

First group:

These two have to be refrigerated, so I admit I am not as consistent with taking them because I forget.

Fish oil: Concentrated of Omega 3s, important to combat inflammation and balance the Omega-6s we get from nuts, grain fed meat and polyunsaturated oils-- all of which are pro-inflammatory. I take a 1/2 tablespoon which has around 3g omega-3. Based on this calculator I probably need more, but not only is it expensive but I HATE swallowing it. It doesn't really taste that bad but the texture of swallowing straight oil is absolutely vile. (This is partly a mental aversion because I once got car sick on a bus right after taking some and threw it back up). I usually chase it with some sparkling water or tea to get it out of my mouth. Why not take capsules you say? Because it would take something like 8 or 10 capsules a day to equal the same amount of omega 3 which is expensive. My parents take 1-2 tablespoons a day of this and put in on their oatmeal and don't find it gross at all; I struggle with getting it down. I use either this Pharmax Finest Pure Fish oil brand or Nordic Natural's Pro line, both of which are very concentrated so I can get the most omega 3s for the least amount of oil, but they are practitioner level brands, meaning you can pretty much only either buy them from an ND/Nutritionist who buys it wholesale, or from a store like Pharmaca. (Incidentally, if you live near a Pharmaca, they are a great resource for supplement questions as they have highly trained staff (NDs, Nutritionists, herbalists). I worked at one last summer and learned a lot about supplements from my co-workers. They also have higher quality brands than some of the other supplement stores.) If you don't have access to this, regular Nordic Naturals or Carlson's are also good brands that are more widely accessible. I don't recommend you take Cod Liver oil in large quantities due to the large amount of vitamin A which can be toxic in excess-- stick with the regular fish oil.

Probiotics: I take Pharmax brand for this also. There are other good brands out there (Jarrow is one). I have to be extremely careful about getting one that is not dairy based since I'm so allergic and I've used this one on and off for a long time. When I'm consistent with it I do notice my digestion is better.

Group two: You'll see the first three are NOW brand, largely because they didn't have any grain based ingredients and were inexpensive.

From the left:
Thyroid Energy (NOW brand): I just started taking this about a week ago. Mainly I was looking to supplement iodine, since in many of the Robb Wolf podcasts he says that women who have mild hypothyroid symptoms (which I have had for years) but normal labs can benefit from a RDA dose iodine supplement, as unless you eat a lot of iodized salt or seaweed even a paleo diet can be a bit deficient. My local supplement store didn't have plain iodine. I originally bought another brand supplement that was almost identical to this except it contained an adaptogenic herb called Rhodiola. It was way too stimulating for me and made me shaky and feel horrible (ginseng does that to me too), even at a half dose. This has a different adaptogen called Ashwaganda that is a more calming herb I've had good luck with in the past, as well as a few B vitamins, zinc, L-tyrosine (an amino acid). This seems to have made a dramatic difference in my energy. So much so that I'm wondering if it might be the cause of my recent sleep issues-- I was taking 2 caps twice a day but today I'm just taking it once to see if I sleep better.

B-6 (NOW brand): Up until yesterday I was talking a B-complex instead of the plain B6. I have been taking a large dose-- 100mg a day for the past three months and then I upped it to 150mg this month. A number of sources I've read (including the absolutely wonderful book Taking Charge of your Fertility which I can't recommend enough) suggest that higher dose B6 can help lengthen the luteal phase (basically the number of days between when you ovulate and when your period starts-- generally a symptom of low progesterone or too much estrogen), which is something I have struggled with. I don't really understand the mechanism of this-- I keep meaning to look into it. You CAN overdose this stuff-- over 200mg a day can lead to nerve damage. When I started taking this my luteal phase went from a solid 7 days to 10-11 days (normal is 12-14 days). I bumped it up this month to see if that helps any more, but given that I'm trying to do more with just food & exercise I'm looking to wean off this soon.

Super Enzymes (NOW brand): I started taking these because Robb Wolf recommends them as an inexpensive supplement for digestion. They contain Betaine HCL (basically, the same acid as in your stomach) and some pancreatic enzymes. He says to start with one and increase with each protein and fat meal until you feel a "warm" feeling, then back off by one. Eventually as your digestive tract heals you should need less and less. I'm taking 2-3 per meal and it really seems to help.

Chaste Tree Berry/Vitex (Vitanica brand): My naturopath recommended this back in December to help with my irregular cycles. For several months I was taking a tincture form (which is a liquid suspended in alcohol) but it tasted horrible and I had to mix it with something sweet to get it down. I recently switched to pills since I'm avoiding sugar and it was too gross to keep swallowing it, and a pain to take on a plane. While this hasn't completely solved my cycle issue, I have noticed I get less PMS for the most part, and my skin stays clear during my period. Apparently it can take 3-6 months to have an effect so I'll keep taking it for the time being.

Prenatal (Thorne brand): I honestly am not sure I really need this, and I wasn't taking it when I was taking the B complex. I eat a lot of leafy greens so I probably am getting the folate I need. The recommended dose is 3 caps and I take 2 (Thorne tends to put a ton of every ingredient in their supplements). I figure better safe than sorry. Thorne is another pro-line brand. I also like the more widely available Rainbow light prenatal. When I worked at Pharmaca a lot of pregnant women told me the Rainbow light (which has a one a day version) was the only one they could keep down during morning sickness.

Vitamin D3 (natural factors brand): I think it's pretty widely known at this point that most people are D deficient, especially if you live North of the 45th parallel (which is around San Francisco). Up here in the Pacific Northwest we don't get enough UV from the sun to make vitamin D 8 months out of the year. M in particular has been pretty deficient-- I haven't had my levels tested in awhile but since I supplement more consistently it hasn't been as bad. We both are taking 5000 IU a day-- if we miss a day I give him two to make up. That's the only supplement he takes right now. I think brands of vitamin D are pretty interchangeable-- this was the best priced one at the time I bought it. In the summer I'll probably cut us back to every few days if we are getting consistent sun exposure.

Magnesium (natural calm): I've used this stuff for years-- I switched briefly to a capsule form of Mg and it just wasn't the same. Magnesium is a mild muscle relaxant, is important for cell signaling, and it can help your bowels move if they are like mine and are sluggish (watch out if you tend in the opposite direction!) This brand is effervescent and either lemon or raspberry flavored. Taking it at bed time is relaxing and yummy. Even my guru of the month Robb Wolf is all over this stuff!

That's it now. I admit I have a full spice rack of other supplements that I've taken on and off. When you are steeped in this stuff it can either turn you totally off of it or make you kind of a supplement junky (I obviously, fall into the latter camp). I feel like this is my bare minimum at the moment-- when I go on vacation or do business travel I tend to not take anything except the vitex and when I remember the digestive enzymes. I think it's good to give your body a break from supplements sometimes.

This was like a novella of information! I'm nothing if not through!

Budget Revised

2011-04-02T13:43:00.000-07:00

After my anxiety and guilt last week over buying so much conventionally grown meat I took a field trip to Puget Consumer Cooperative (known locally as PCC-- in fact I had to look up what PCC stood for just now). There are I think 9 stores, most of them far away in Seattle and on the East side (I live 20 miles North of the city). A couple years ago one finally opened comparatively closer to my house-- it's far enough (about 10 miles) I don't go there very often, though I always enjoy shopping there. I have another health food oriented store (Central Market) within 3 or 4 miles I go to, but that is also super expensive (I swear I can't get out of there without spending at least $50). We don't have a Whole Foods close to us (though we are getting one soon, Lord help us. I lived within walking distance of one in college and I went there every day!) Anyway, in my mind PCC was up there in expense with Whole Foods and Central as far as price, so it's rare I go there-- produce, while pristine is pretty spendy there. But they do have the best selection of local, pasture raised etc. meat around. Imagine my surprise then, to find that grass fed ground beef was $1 cheaper per pound at PCC then at Trader Joe's, and local instead of from New Zealand! I also found some of the more "roast" oriented cuts of meat to be relatively affordable too-- all within the $5-$6 a pound range (other than one pound of better steak I bought for $10 a pound). My favorite coconut milk was also significantly cheaper ($1.79 a can vs. $2.50 at Fred Meyer).

I purchased the following, all of which is local/grass-fed/pastured etc.:
~ 5 pounds ground beef
1.72 lb lamb shoulder roast
2.24 lb pork shoulder roast
1.05 lb Top sirloin steak (that was the only expensive splurge)
3.55 lb Sirloin tip roast
3.4 lb chicken thighs (these were the only sorta pastured Rosie's kind, but that's all they had)
2 cans of wild caught fish (one salmon one tuna)-- these were way cheaper than at Fred Meyer for the same brand!

Also
4 cans of coconut milk
some loose rooibos tea
ginger green tea (in bags)

At Trader Joes and Fred Meyer I bought
Several bags of mixed greens and stir fry greens
mushrooms
broccoli crowns and cauliflower
3 bell peppers
1 dark chocolate lover's bar (85% cocoa)-- treat!
7 organic fuji apples
3 bananas
1 lemon

So how did this work out budget wise? My goal is to stay within $125-$150 a week, hopefully at least some of the time keeping to the lower end to allow for expenses like dish soap, toilet paper etc. So let's compare last week's bargain shopper experience with this week's all grass-fed, mostly organic shopping list. I've noticed I'm saving money from pre-paleo because gluten free bread and treats are very expensive. The gluten and dairy free ice cream I like is usually $5 or $6 a pint!

Last week I spent:
Total: $135 (I wrote in my post it was $125 or so but a mid-week run to Fred Meyer for a few things pushed it to this new total). This includes the $14 turkey that was completely inedible, save for some broth. Even 6 hours of simmering did not lessen the toughness of the meat. Lesson learned there.

Breakdown: Total: $135
Meat: $67.03 (around 15 pounds, plus the turkey)
Fruit: $6? (I can't find the receipt for the mid-week apples I bought)
Veg: $30.34
Other: $17.82

This week I spent: $148.73
Meat: $99.57 (17 pounds + 2 cans of canned fish)
Fruit: $5.79
Veg: $24.66
Other (includes avocadoes): $18.71

(Note: other is generally tea, coconut milk, spices, sometimes bread or peanut butter for M.)

So obviously I spent around 50% more for meat. But last week I over-bought vegetables (I may have done that again today-- a lot left from last week are going into the soup). Really if you take out the turkey, I pretty much doubled my meat budget, but overall I stayed (barely) in budget for the week. It is my hope that the meat I bought will last maybe 10 days, but that remains to be seen. I still have 1 pound of the regular extra lean ground beef I bought last week in the freezer, and I'm defrosting the last of my Costco cod for dinner tonight. If I buy a $63 membership to the co-op I can get 5% off on the 15th & 16th of the month, plus another 10% off one other day of the month. If I can clear some freezer space or get a second freezer maybe I could stock up once or twice a month and save some money.

I would need the overall budget $25 or so lower on alternate weeks-- I bought bread and peanut butter for M. at Costco a couple weeks ago and we will run out this week (he eats apples and peanut butter like they are going out of style, and still has the occasional sandwich. Once I get myself dialed in a little more I'll work on adjusting him closer to paleo too).

Today I tried driving 20 miles to the closest year-round farmer's market in the University District, but they just didn't have much produce, given that it's just barely Spring, so another week of Trader Joe's/Fred Meyer produce. I'm contemplating going back to using the CSA we used in the past (Full Circle Farm) but I'm not sure it's worth it right now, since come summer I do plan to visit more farmers markets. I think the fruit bill in particular will be higher in the summer since we eat tons of berries and peaches when they are in season, but this will be tempered by the fact I usually grow greens, tomatoes, raspberries and some herbs in the backyard (assuming we actually get some sun this year-- last year it was a cold summer and my tomatoes never got ripe)-- which come to think of it is the reason I quit the CSA in the first place. Maybe I'll save that for October.

Overall I am thrilled that I was able to get a week or so's worth of meat that I can feel environmentally, ethically, and healthily good about. I'll let you know how long all that meat lasts. If it doesn't last us the week then we are going to have to cut it down to maybe 75% best, 25% less than awesome.

Day 19: Tired & Rainy

2011-04-01T19:38:00.000-07:00

This will be brief-- I'm not feeling so good today. I already was sleep deprived yesterday and then last night, probably because of too much caffeine + dinner much too late + x fit = I woke up every two hours and had crazy dreams all night. Despite the fact I could have slept until noon if I wanted to, I woke up for the final time around 8 and couldn't sleep anymore. All day I have been walking around in a haze. I did some errands and a couple ladies in Marshall's were looking at me really funny. It also absolutely poured down rain all day-- April showers and all that, but it made driving all over town in my sleepy stupor extra challenging.

On top of that my digestive system has been really off since that salad at Hard Rock-- maybe there was a little gluten in it? I've had gas pains (sorry if TMI) that were the worst for the two days after, but still some residual even today and everything is moving really really slowly. So much for hoping for the best-- next time I'm going to say I have a life threatening allergy to gluten.

I've had the carcass from the turkey disaster simmering since mid-day. I'm hoping maybe the meat still on it will soften up and I can add the super dry meat already cut off to it and salvage a soup-- we'll see. I don't have any room in the freezer for broth, since I just made chicken broth last week so I'm definitely making soup one way or another tomorrow.

I am very excited about how much better the grocery selection is looking this week: I made a revolutionary discovery! More on that tomorrow.

Today I haven't really been very hungry, probably because I'm so tired.

Breakfast: left over super dry ground beef patty (not the best but didn't want to waste it!) with sauteed veggies and I think the last of the avocado. Coffee (half the real kind, half decaf with a little coconut milk)

Lunch: the other half of yesterday's salmon patty + veggie lunch with extra salsa.

Snack: had a few bites of coconut cream which I mixed with lemon juice and basil-- this for some reason made me very nauseated and has lasted a few hours.

Dinner: still facing nausea, ate a very small portion of the recipe below (which was good).

Ground beef & Greens Stir-Fry:
a small onion chopped small and sauteed until browned in coconut oil
gloves crushed garlic
1.25 pounds grass fed (yay!) beef
1 head of swiss chard, chopped to bite sized pieces
1 head of lacinato kale, de-stemmed and chopped to bite sized pieces
and the end of a bag of shredded cabbage
I threw in some wheat free tamari-- not sure how much just poured some on.

I cooked the beef until mostly done and then added the veggies and put a lid on it to steam for 5 minutes or so and then stirred it a few times.

It came out pretty good-- there was lots left so I'll definitely be having leftovers tomorrow.

More on my shopping excitement tomorrow, and maybe a post on supplements.

Day 18: buzzy

2011-03-31T17:49:00.000-07:00

I only got maybe 6.5 hours of sleep last night and I woke up a bunch of times. Strangely though I felt pretty good today. I'm not sure if it's my new supplement (the one that made me feel like crap had Rhodiola in it which is overstimulating for me. New one is just iodine, ashwaganda (a more calming adaptogenic herb, and L-tyrosine which is some how thyroid supportive but I can't remember why), the 1/2 cup of caffeinated coffee I had this morning, or I'm just finally past the initial crap detox feeling but it was a good day-- my energy was so good I was very fidgety at work and had to keep getting up to walk around the hospital so as not to keep sitting. I did have a sleepy hour between work and xfit, but felt great after I worked out.

Food:

Breakfast 1/4 lb ground beef and a sauteed mix of roasted bell peppers (frozen from TJs), and a mix of stir-fry veggies (also from TJs, not frozen) which I cooked with garlic and a little olive oil. I saved breakfast this time until I got to work, but still only felt like eating half. Also had a 1/4 of an avocado in there. Coffee had 1-2 T lite coconut milk.

Lunch: Made a huge container of 3 salmon patties from TJs (which looked absolutely disgusting when I cooked them last night but actually were yummy) which I mixed with some of the same veggie mix from breakfast and a little avocado. Only ate half of this as well.

Afternoon: got really hungry about 2:30 and finished my breakfast, but found while driving home from work was still super hungry, but got home at 5 and didn't want to eat anything heavy before xfit. Had berries and a bit of coconut cream (1/4 c?). Still kind of wanted protein but didn't eat anything else so I didn't puke!

XFit: awesome calisthenics Tabata interval workout. In tabata intervals you do 20 seconds of work with 10 seconds of rest, over and over for 4 minutes. We did push-ups for 4 min, then sit-ups, then jumping pull-ups (that was the hardest) and then 2 min of bear crawl, which is where you walk around with your hands and feet touching the ground (I thought that was kinda fun). It was a great workout and my arms will definitely be sore tomorrow.

Dinner: due to poor planning on my part dinner wasn't until 9pm. I came home from x fit around 8 and decided I really wanted steak and brussels sprouts. The only problem is that roasting brussels sprouts takes 40 minutes and the steak was frozen. Oops. It was yummy though! Now I'm trying to stay awake until 11 so my food has time to digest but I'm getting very sleepy.

Sometime this weekend maybe I'll do a post on supplements and what I'm taking. I'm definitely encouraged by how good I felt today-- I hope it wasn't just adrenaline and cortisol from sleep deprivation!

Day 16 & 17: Hard Rock Sugar

2011-03-30T16:19:00.000-07:00

Yesterday M and I had dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe because that's where his work event was. I ordered a cobb salad with no cheese. Unfortunately the bacon was very sweet and I ended up having sugar cravings all evening-- I gave in when I got home with half an apple with coconut cream, a tsp or so of sunflower seed butter (which unfortunately I discovered also has a bit of sugar in it) and a couple oz of pot roast. I also have had some residual digestive discomfort all day-- not sure if it was because I didn't have any digestive enzymes with me, or because of all the raw lettuce as I have been mostly (purposely) been sticking to mostly cooked veggies because I have trouble digesting a lot of raw stuff. (Hopefully this resolves by the time summer produce comes around!)

Breakfast yesterday & today: chicken thighs I cooked in the crockpot in the leftover sauce from the pot roast, with avocado and napa cabbage. A couple tablespoons of coconut cream.

Lunch: leftover pot roast, collard greens, coconut cream.

Dinner tonight: I roasted that questionable turkey, and as I feared it was not good-- sooooo dry and tough! I ate a few bites mixed with avocado and broccoli and gave up. I will try and make soup out of the rest-- hopefully that will help. I wasn't that hungry I guess because I could have gone looking for something else to eat but didn't.

Crossfit: not very intense tonight. There were only three of us in the class, as the rest of the class went yesterday instead of today. We worked on rowing (coordination is not my strong suit so this was complicated) and then deadlifts. I got the form down okay but J said my right hip (which has been tight/high for years) was noticeably doing all the work and if a max deadlift workout comes up I should stick with lower weight for now because I could hurt myself with that imbalance. We worked on foam rolling those muscles afterward-- I should really keep trying to loosen up that side as often as I can.

I think I'm O'Ding on coconut milk and I'm going to cut back on it-- those extra calories add up and I don't think I really need them. One of these days I'll get back to actually having pictures!

Day 15: Low carb beeotch

2011-03-28T17:58:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if it's the lower carbs, lower calories or what but the last few days I have had SUCH a short fuse, and I can't seem to hang on to things-- I am constantly dropping stuff which pisses me off. Listening to Robb Wolf's podcasts he says it can take 2-4 weeks to adapt to eating lower carbs. I really hope it doesn't take much longer-- I am not fun to be around just now. Strangely, Crossfit last night really helped. I left the house cranky and not in the mood and by the time our workout was over I was feeling great! So maybe it's not the carb thing, since you'd think if I didn't have enough fuel I would be even worse off. But our workout wasn't very aerobic so who knows. Crossfit: we practiced a lot of squat form, first without weight, then with a 45 pound bar. I think I did probably 75 squats during the practice. I have a hard time keeping my knees out- they really want to point in. Next we practiced doing planks which was tough! Our actual workout was 7 minutes of as many thrusters as you can do (thrusters being a squat to an overhead press). My shoulders killed on this, much more than my legs, but my legs are feeling it today. Besides the good endorphins from exercise, Crossfit helped my mood, I think because we have such a good dynamic among the girls in the class-- we tease and cheer for each other and it makes it fun. I was sad I'm not going to make it tonight, but long work day + M's evening "schmoozing" work event he's taking me to for our unofficial date night means getting home too late for class. Gives my legs some time to recover anyway. Food yesterday: B: left over ground beef, broccoli and guacamole L: a can of salmon plus sauteed greens cooked in olive oil and garlic and topped with a few chopped olives-- couple spoonfuls of coconut cream (on the side-- mixed with lemon juice it almost tastes like yogurt!). S: still pretty hungry mid afternoon and trying to get away from fruit as a snack so I had two eggs and some avocado. D: I made pot roast which turned out kind of disappointingly. It was rather dry-- the first time I made that recipe it was unbelievably good and the past few times it comes out dry-- I think it might be my new oven running hotter. Anyway, the wine sauce made it edible but it wasn't the best pot roast ever. Finally, I would like to share this post, by Amy Kubal a Registered Dietitian who is all about Paleo on not letting the number on the scale rule your life-- even though it is completely normal for me to plateau the second (and sometimes third) weeks of trying something new, I still get frustrated at not seeing the numbers move. Her post was very timely for me.

Day 14: Spring in Seattle

2011-03-26T21:15:00.000-07:00

Last night for dinner I made the mustard pork chops from Everyday paleo. They were super yummy, even though I used regular mustard instead of dijon (1/2 a cup is a lot of freaking mustard!) It took way longer than 5-8 minutes in the oven to get them cooked through-- maybe hers were thinner than mine. M. suggested saving half the mustard mixture as a dipping sauce-- since most of it burns off onto the pan when you sear them this is a fantastic idea. Today we spent a pleasant day doing a lot of walking-- we walked all over downtown Seattle and Pike Place Market for about three hours, and I noticed my legs were just a smidge still sore from Thursday! It was one of those Spring days where the weather can't make up it's mind-- back and forth between rain and sun and back again. I felt like crap most of yesterday-- today was better though I'm still kind of dragging and I think it's because I need to eat more carbs. Food today: Breakfast: eggs with salsa and bacon, 1/2 cup or so strawberries snack: decaf coffee with light coconut milk Lunch: leftover pork chop, greens cooked in the leftover bacon fat, a few more strawberries with coconut milk snack: 1/2 apple with 1 tsp sunflower seed butter mixed with coconut cream Dinner: steak, broccoli, a few yam fries, a couple bites of strawberries This was way more carbs than I usually eat but I think I might have needed it. I am continuing to experiment with what makes me feel good. I have been feeling that dragging not enough carbs feeling I was waiting for about a week ago.

Day 13: Anxiety and Compromise

2011-03-26T13:47:00.000-07:00

I added up the cost of all my grocery bills for the past two weeks and the weekly average was a staggering $225. That's about $75-$100 over budget each week. Ack! In this household, when you want to analyze something you make a spreadsheet (M. and I are all about the Excel spreadsheets, though he is much better at the complex ones that I am). I figured out the percentage of budget I was spending in each category (meat, fruit, veg, fat and other) and set a budget. I went to three stores and had mini-anxiety attacks in each one about meat. The problem is this: I believe in grass fed, pastured, organic etc. It's healthier for me, healthier for the environment, better for the animal-- all around a better idea, especially when you are doing Paleo and eating a ton of meat. The problem is it costs THREE TIMES more than the regular kind of meat. Which is where my grocery anxiety sets in because I usually buy 75% of our protein from relatively clean sources-- as free of hormones and antibiotics and stuff as I can get, grass fed when I can, and now and then we eat some steak that's the normal kind. I like that system, but right now, for the next month until I get caught up with the grocery budget, that is not going to happen. I felt guilty and anxious about buying so much regular meat, wondering how much exposure to antibiotics and hormones I'm going to be getting and fretting about it. But I did get my budget down. Here's what I bought: H-Mart: the local Asian grocery store. I don't normally shop there-- I find it overwhelming. It reminded me of being in Japan, except everything had a label that was something like English. The meat section I just gave up on-- none of the cuts of meat were recognizable and it didn't smell very good. I got a shocking deal on strawberries and onions: organic strawberries for 0.99 a pound and a 5 lb bag of onions for $1.89. I also bought some chard, kale, yams, and a 15 lb frozen antibiotic free "natural" turkey for $14: it looks like it's been in the freezer a while (probably since Thanksgiving) so it was a risk but it was a good deal and hopefully it's not too freezer burned! I bought a couple organic apples but they look like the might be a little old. Total: $32.62 Trader Joes: I'm mad at myself for not paying more attention here. I thought the ground beef that wasn't grass fed was $2.25/lb, but when I got home I realized that must not have applied to the extra lean which was $4.49/lb. Still $2 cheaper than the grassfed, but I might have gotten some of each if I knew the real price. Anyway I bought 3 pounds of that, antibiotic free chicken thighs, 2 giant bags of Southern Greens blend, shredded cabbage, zucchini, brussels sprouts, frozen roasted bell peppers, and a can of light coconut milk, which I don't think I'm going to like but it was half the cost of the kind I usually get so I'll try it. Total: $42.49 Fred Meyer: I really want to make pot roast this week and didn't find any at either of the other stores so I stopped in at FM and bought a 4lb one, plus 2 lbs of steak, a can of regular coconut milk (still not my fav brand, but that seems to be only at the health food store), and a jar of salsa that was on sale. Total: $36.55 Sub-total: $111.66 Yesterday I went to our local butcher, which weirdly carries antibiotic/hormone free meat but not grass-fed, and bought 1/2lb of pepper bacon and 4 pork chops for $15 Grand total: $126.66 I also still have some frozen fish, 1/2 a costco sized bag of broccoli, 3 avocados, 5 apples and a few kiwis left from last week. I'm hoping this is more than enough for the week-- I wasn't sure how far that turkey would stretch. Maybe next week there will be more wiggle room for some grass fed stuff. Hopefully we won't keel over and die from so much conventionally grown meat. *sigh* The more I learn about nutrition, the more guilt and anxiety over not eating optimally seems to weigh on me. I'm going to have to just accept that I'm doing the best I can and go from there. As for how I feel-- I started taking a couple herbal supplements to try and support my adrenal glands yesterday and I feel a little buzzy on them-- I don't think I slept very soundly-- I had a lot of strange dreams, and in the midst of my shopping I got really dizzy, which I think might be a not enough carbs with breakfast issue. I have not lost any more weight, but the scale is only one part of the equation. More to come.

Days 11 & 12: tired, hungry and too fishy

2011-03-25T17:13:00.000-07:00

Yesterday and today I've had problems with breakfast, which have resulted in me being hungry all day.

Yesterday I ate left over cod for breakfast-- or at least I tried. Since on days I work from home I don't normally eat until 9:30, fish before 7am was not very appetizing. I ate maybe half of it and packed the rest thinking I might eat it when I got to work, but I really don't like reheating stuff, fish especially so many times-- I'm squeamish about food poisoning after a bad experience I had once with leftover salmon. Thus, I ate lunch early, which was unfortunately tuna-- I'd packed that lunch two days before so I forgot I had a fish lunch and wouldn't have chosen fish again for breakfast. I got home from work, had berries and coconut milk before Crossfit and yummy grassfed steak and zucchini for dinner.

I woke up really hungry and made two hard boiled eggs and bacon. I have some sort of psychological block against eating more than two eggs at at time-- any more than that grosses me out. Unfortunately this was just not enough food. I had lunch a couple hours later-- turkey chorizo sausage with avocado and a bit of asparagus, but by 4pm I was starving again. The berries and coconut milk didn't do anything to fix it. It's only 5pm-- early for dinner but I think I'm going to have to start making it soon.

Crossfit yesterday was fun, though chaotic. Instead of the onramp class doing something separate from the main WOD, everybody in the gym (30+ people?) did the same workout. It's hard to explain but I'll take a stab: We were in teams of 4 (except I was on the one team of 5) and we did the following circuit:

400 m row (we could have run instead but the whole team was on board with rowing)
Step-ups/box jumps
Kettlebell deadlifts
Burpees (evil!)
and our group also did ring rows since we had 5 people

Each person was at one station, and then when the rower finishes their 400m they tap out the step-up person, and the step up person moves to kettlebells etc. You keep going until you get tapped out, and everyone keeps working for 16 minutes. When you are doing burpees 16 minutes is a long freaking time. It was fun though, and a good workout.

Today I'm pretty wiped. I slept 11 hours and am still tired-- it takes me a long time to recover from commuting days, especially back to back ones with crossfit to top it off.

We are out of almost everything-- this weekend I've got to plan food for the week and try and figure out how to do this a little more cheaply. I've been taking tips from Paleo on a Budget and am going to try out some of her ideas.

I had a lovely time over tea with my friend Stevie this afternoon and it was a good test of what I've retained so far about the science of paleo as I tried to explain it to her. She and I have been friends since 7th grade and she's a secret science nerd hiding in makeup like me so it's always fun to chat with her.

One more thing and then I need to shut up and go eat something before I pass out: I haven't really lost much weight so far (maybe 2 pounds of water) but today my favorite jeans that had gotten just tight enough not to be comfortable a couple of weeks ago now fit again (not loose like they once were but they aren't cutting off the circulation) and my digestion seems to be improving everyday-- I can't remember the last time I went this long without the near chronic gas/bloating issues I had before. Good sign!

Day 10: rest day

2011-03-23T19:10:00.000-07:00

With the lack of sleep and all over soreness and tiredness happening today, I decided if I went to Crossfit I'd probably be too wrecked to go Thursday, so I opted to rest today so that the workouts are a little more spread out. I've also been listening to Robb Wolf's podcasts (which are great!) and he talks a lot about how a lot of times people who do Crossfit have a tendency to overtrain and not lose fat because of high cortisol. As I have a tendency toward higher cortisol and adrenal fatigue anyway I want to be careful not to burn myself out too early in the game.

Food today was good-- I brought enough food to work for once:

Breakfast: leftover stuffed pepper from last night with avocado

mid-morning: decaf coffee with a couple tablespoons of coconut milk

Lunch: leftover shredded chicken over mixed greens cooked in bacon fat and olive oil topped with salsa, and another tablespoon or so of coconut cream/milk eaten right off the spoon.

What's funny is I didn't think I liked coconut milk, but the Thai Kitchen kind seems to be 3/4 coconut cream and that stuff is delicious.

Dinner: I kind of invented this recipe on the spot:

4 small pieces of cod, covered in olive oil, lemon juice, pepper and a smidge of sea salt*, then cover all of that in shredded napa cabbage, chopped basil and more lemon juice. Bake at 400 degrees until fish is 145 degrees internally. (The package said it would be 10-12 minutes, but it was more like 20). A little leftover broccoli on the side and a 1/2 cup of frozen berries with a dollup of coconut cream for dessert (fruit is much better tolerated with a meal than on it's own for me, no matter how much fat is on it!)

*A note on salt: this is not strictly paleo, but I don't use a lot of it and as I tend toward low blood pressure, it helps me avoid dizzy spells so I keep using it. As only about 30% of the population is salt sensitive, I don't think this is something that necessarily needs to be avoided, especially when you don't eat processed foods.

No pics today-- too tired. I really am not sleeping well after Crossfit and I think it's just too much stimulation too late in the day. Hopefully once onramp is over moving to the 5:30 class will be a sufficient fix-- I can work out in the morning, but my energy is a lot better in the evening and I like the dynamic of people in the classes better at that time of day.

Day 9: nausea & prep work

2011-03-22T14:47:00.000-07:00

Today I think being behind on calories kind of caught up with me. Plus I was having a frustrating day and so I decided I deserved a treat. But still paleo. So about an hour after lunch I had this:

(sorry, I took the picture with my phone)
It's 1 cup mixed berries (from frozen, I defrosted), with 1/2 cup coconut milk and 1/2 oz unsweetened cacao. It was unbelievably delicious (note: a week ago this would not have tasted good-- it's only because my mouth is no longer used to sweet that it did). Unfortunately I should not have eaten this much-- I was too full and a half hour after I ate it I was really nauseated. That was a lot of fat all at once + a too full tummy.

Breakfast was Trader Joe's chicken sausages and I will not eat these again. I just can't digest the casing-- my tummy did not like this at all. I had them last week and noticed this as well. Had with veggies.

Lunch: the last of the ground-beef stir fry, avocado.

Dinner: Stuffed 3 bell peppers with 1 lb of ground beef (four peppers would have been better but I only had 3)-- I mixed the beef with 1 egg, garlic powder, onion and some fresh chopped basil. I baked it in 350 degree oven for about an hour (I messed up the timer on accident so I'm not sure exactly how long, but until the meat wasn't pink anymore). It was really good, though a little too packed in there-- I think next time I'll add some more veggies in it and not pack them so tight.

Crossfit: was great! I actually considered not going today because I didn't sleep very well last night and I was tired and cranky all day, but Crossfit made me feel really good and chipper again.

First we warmed up pulling the slides again. It was nice out so I was scared we would have to run, but instead we first worked on knees to elbows, which is where you hang from a bar and attempt to get your knees up to your elbows, which is super hard. We did 50 0f those, though I didn't realize we were supposed to be counting at first so I'm not sure if I did that many or not. It mainly hurt my hands to hang there. Next we did a little practice on the back extension machine which looks something like this: it feels scary because you are so far forward and hurts the tops of your quads where all the weight is (also works your lower back)-- I actually discovered later it gave me a small spot with broken blood vessels where the thing pushed into me. Anyway, we just held the position for awhile to get used to it-- no actual extensions today. Finally, we practiced jumping rope, which is something I am decent at (at least compared to running!), but we practiced double unders-- i.e. getting the rope around twice per jump and I could not get that.

Then the real workout was short but intense:
40 single jumps on the jump rope
15 jumping pull-ups

Repeat the above as many times as you can in 10 minutes: I got through 5.5 times. My buddy S was around 6 times-- she is always about 10-15% ahead of me, which is great because we are close enough that I push to catch her, without her being so far ahead I can't feel like I can catch up. She's also funny and a good cheerleader.

I spent a lot of time this afternoon prepping for the next couple of days. Usually when I have long work days they aren't in a row, but this week it's two days in a row of the exhausting 3 hour commute, so food prep was important. I made 2 days of lunches for M. and me, and set cod to defrost in the freezer. My favorite chorizo is also defrosting-- I would have preferred to make that ahead for breakfast but it's rock solid so it will have to be made in the morning.

Last night I also made probably 1.5 gallons of chicken stock by boiling what was left of the whole chicken I made last week in my giant stock pot for 6 hours with a couple tablespoons of vinegar (it helps break down the bones so you get the calcium in the stock). As I do every few months I carefully bagged it in 2 and 4 cup zip lock servings and put them in my freezer. Unfortunately one of them leaked down behind and under the freezer drawer, which does not come out easily is a mess of frozen chicken stock that I'm going to have to deal with next weekend. Not happy about that.

Tomorrow & Thursday are going to be long days, especially because I'm going to get 2-3 hours a sleep less than I need each night so hopefully my prep work will help ease the exhaustion.

Day 8: pushing up

2011-03-21T21:58:00.000-07:00

Today I was so excited to get back to Crossfit! Today's workout was fun: first we worked on form in push-ups and overhead squats. Then, our workout was

4x:

350 meter row
15 pushups (the push up quantity was determined by the trainer)

We were in teams of two, so one person would wait while the other person did their set, and then start after and take turns (this forces you to hurry up since the other person is waiting).

My buddy was S, a girl I've chatted with a few times as we started the same day and are in the same age ballpark (I'm guessing she's a few years younger than me). S is in the army reserves and trying to get better conditioned to meet her PT test requirements before she goes overseas this summer. She is a LOT stronger than me (she can bust out those push-ups and situps!) but we both suck equally at running (actually I think I suck a little more). She's a fun workout buddy-- we cheer each other on and make each other laugh.

So for the pushups, since both S and I are strong enough to do some real pushups, but not the 60+ required by today's workout, our trainer had us doing these funny ones that reminded me of chataranga in yoga-- you go down the real push-up way, and then come back up with your knees down. Each push-up takes twice as long as doing them the regular way with all that leg coordination, which is I think why we were the last ones done by a long ways. By the third set of push-ups I could only get through 7 of them this funny way and then switched to straight knee pushups, and by the last set, my arms were jelly and I literally just about fell on my face a couple times.

So food: I'm still figuring out how I feel about starchy vegetables and fruit. I definitely can not eat fruit away from a meal without a blood sugar spike. A kiwi with a meal seems not to cause a problem. With dinner I had a half a sweet potato and an hour later I'm still hungry, but I'm not sure if this is a blood sugar thing, or real hunger because our workout today took over an hour! What sucks is that it's after 10pm, I've already brushed my teeth, and eating much more before bed will keep me awake. But so will being hungry.

What I ate:

Breakfast: 2 eggs overeasy in coconut oil, I tried to make bacon but I was having a computer crisis with my work computer and I got distracted and burned the hell out of it, so I only ate a couple bites of bacon, and some left over zucchini. Was still hungry after this and had coffee with coconut milk, but I think it was a little much because I had mild stomach acid-y/hard-burn sort of feeling later.

Lunch: left over ground beef and veggies from yesterday-- forgot the avocado! 1 kiwi, green tea.

Snack before crossfit: a big tablespoon of coconut cream/milk

Dinner: chicken breast, 1/2 a small avocado, 1/2 a yam (some weird kind I got at the health food store that was yellow inside instead of orange but super yummy), 1.5-2 cups broccoli with olive oil all over all of it.

Maybe I'll have another spoonful of coconut milk and see if that takes the edge off. Tomorrow I'll skip starch after xfit and see if I get hungry. I want to have enough carbs for recovery, but I also feel like this first month my body needs time to heal from all the sugar crap I've been putting in it.

Day 7: one week in, observations

2011-03-20T18:44:00.000-07:00

In the first week I lost two pounds, some of which was water. While I expected maybe a bit more, I'm not worried. For once, I'm in this for the long haul, not for a quick fix.

I think the reason I was waking up so shaky is because I haven't been eating enough calories and maybe need a few more carbs. I wasn't going to track my calorie intake because I have a tendency to get compulsive and crazy about that, but I decided I should just check in and assess where I was at. On Saturday when I thought I was done eating I had eaten barely over 1200 calories and 60 grams of carbs, 25 of which were fiber. That is awfully low for an active person-- on a Crossfit day eating so few calories I might keel over, and I'm definitely not going to put on any muscle with that. So last night I had an apple and sunflower seed butter in the evening, and had a half of one of those plus lots more coconut milk (more on that in a minute) today, which helped. The pros of the apple + seed butter were that they seemed to help me perk up a bit, and it is easier to get those calories in than from meat/vegetables. I surprisingly, am finding it difficult to eat much more than 1200 calories from just meat/vegetables/fat. I get full from eating my meal and I just don't want to eat anymore-- it's a liberating feeling, and if I weren't also doing Crossfit I would be thrilled that I found a way to eat so few calories and not be hungry. Eating the apple and seed butter (which is not ideal as far as strict Paleo goes due to the excess of omega 6 fats, but I think I'm not ready to obsess over that yet) does help. What I'm less excited about with the apple is it gives me a mild blood sugar spike that makes me more hungry and feel like eating even MORE fruit or whatever for a while after I eat it. It definitely goes away after maybe a half hour or so, but I kind of like the lack of cravings I get with meals. Maybe more fruit (or yams) with my meals is the way to go.

The second way I got more calories in today was coconut milk in (decaf) coffee. I normally don't really like coconut milk but mixing it with the coffee was actually kind of yummy. I ended up having a lot today-- I made a mug of french press this morning with several large tablespoons of it in my coffee, and then M and I went and hung out Barnes and Noble to have coffee and talk about a potential trip reading guidebooks, and I brought my coconut milk with me.

Unfortunately my camera batteries are dead and I haven't gotten around to charging them, so no food pics today, but here's what I ate:

B: left over tilapia, squash and avocado (when I first read Rob Wolf's book fish for breakfast sounded disgusting but it actually was really good)

S: coffee & coconut milk

L: What I call Trader-Joe's stir-fry (because almost everything comes from there already cut up so it's super easy)-- this is also really good with yams, but I didn't have any today: saute an onion, 2 cups or so sliced mushrooms and 3 cloves garlic in 2T olive oil until soft, add two pounds grass-feed beef until mostly brown, and then add tons of greens (I used a bag of trader joes stir-fry which is mostly cabbage, and 3/4 of a bag of their dark leafy greens blend). Mix in, cover and allow greens to steam, about 5 minutes. I threw in a couple tablespoons of Tamari for extra flavor. (I probably had about 1/6 of this) Tomorrow I might try baking some into bell peppers. I also had a kiwi, and probably avocado since I pretty much add that to everything. (Trying to expand into olives, but am obsessed with avocado).

S: coffee & coconut milk, 1/4 apple and ~ 1-1.5T sunflower seed butter

D: Chicken breast cooked in the crockpot with garlic powder, tamari, and turkey stock. Turned out slightly dry-- I think it works better when the cooking liquid has some fat in it. I served it with (surprise!) avocado, which helped-- I considered adding salsa, but thought that might be weird with the tamari. On the side was the ever present broccoli with olive oil and sea salt. I just finished my giant Costco sized broccoli bag-- might need to go get another one.

Today's calories were closer to 1550, which is still on the low side, but much better, and I feel better. I do not want to be tracking my daily calories-- it messes with my head, but it's good to check in now and then and get an idea of where I'm at. Tomorrow it's back to Crossfit and I have a feeling I'm going to need a yam...

Day 6: Sunny Day

2011-03-19T14:37:00.000-07:00

I woke up feeling really tired and weak this morning. Not sure if that's because of the time of the month, because dinner was at 6pm last night and I got up at 9am, or because I finally hit a carb wall or what but when I got out of bed this morning I got a few steps and had to sit down on the ground for a minute-- it was kind of weird.

Breakfast today was scrambled eggs cooked in coconut oil and mixed with veggies and a couple bites of steak left over from dinner last night, with Muir Glen Organic salsa, and of course avocado. (M., who is on board with eating no sugar, but still eating other carbs, had a piece of toast with sunflower seed butter as well).

Lunch: 2 Trader Joes chicken sausages, summer squash/zucchini/broccoli blend (steamed) a few broiled onions, ever-present avocado and green tea.

Dinner: will be Tilapia filets and maybe some sauteed greens with olives.

As I mentioned Crossfit for now is only Mon-Thurs but we had a spectacularly beautiful day, and I took advantage of it to do some walk/running on my favorite trail nearby for around 30 minutes. It was really nice to be outside, but my legs felt tired and it was too soon after lunch, resulting in a side cramp. As much as I dislike it, I need to keep doing that to build up some endurance because right now I have NONE.

The last couple days my back (lats?) were super sore, but I also had kind of a nerve pain down one shoulder blade I've had a couple times in the last few weeks which seems to crop up at bedtime making it hard to sleep. Maybe some time on the foam roller will help.

The chickens, at least are enjoying the sunny day to it's fullest:

Spring & Eggs

2011-03-17T14:51:00.000-07:00

This is Olive-- she's really not a very good egg layer, and the ones she does lay are so delicate and small they usually get broken by the others. Fortunately she makes up for it by being pretty and sweet.

If you have been reading my blog for awhile, you know I have chickens. The ladies are about two years old now and still highly entertaining.

During the winter they don't lay many eggs-- during the darkest, coldest month they don't lay any, and then only Flea seems to power through January and February like a champ (if you want chickens to have a lot of eggs, get a Maran-- she is by far our best layer).

Suddenly it got a bit warmer, the days got a bit lighter and the chickens kicked their egg laying into gear. Unfortunately, the humans in the household are still in hibernation mode and are not in the habit of egg retrieval, so this is what I found today:

M had collected a bunch last weekend, but one side was occupied by Muffin doing her thing, so he wasn't able to get them all (we could reach underneath I suppose, but it seems so rude!).

I know many people say eggs shouldn't be washed because they have a protective outer coating and that's probably true, but would you want to put this basket full of mud and worse in your fridge without at least a wipedown? I sure don't! They aren't as dirty in the summer when it isn't as muddy, but for now, I have some egg cleaning to do.

Incidentally, I LOVE eggs, and still have to restrict myself to eating them only a few days a week. Last summer a food allergy panel came back as being really high for eggs-- it's hard to know whether that was just a reflection of the large quantities I was eating, or a true allergy, but given my propensity for food sensitivities, I cut them out entirely for 6 months (which sucked) and now just try not to have them every single day (because I gladly would!).

Day 4: I feel great! This is weird.

2011-03-17T14:08:00.001-07:00

this is what the sleds look like being done at another Crossfit.

I keep waiting to hit some kind of low-carb wall. It's been years since I have eaten low carbs, having had grain is good overload of my master's degree years preceded by a disastrous attempt at veganism. Since I am purposely not tracking calories or carbs or anything I don't know how many I'm eating, but I do know they are almost all from vegetables (I eat fruit at dinner after Crossfit-- I'll eventually increase the fruit but I'm trying to really control all sugar for a bit first). I remember when I was in college and I tried Atkins. I don't think I really ate any vegetables and I remember going to the track and trying to run and literally feeling like I couldn't move my legs-- I had ZERO energy. I have read things that say that when your body switches from burning carbs to burning fat it can be a rough transition. I know your body can't store more than a couple days of glycogen (I am almost tempted to go look this up in my biochem book but I'll spare you for now) so I should be out by now and I. feel. AWESOME. My period is even about to start (sorry if that's TMI!) and other than some finding myself more easily irritated at things that are frustrating, I really feel good. Weird! Maybe the wall is yet to come. EXCEPT: from about 3-4:30pm I hit a low point in energy. It's not horrible, but I definitely get tired then but it goes away around 5 o'clock. I'm pretty sure that's an adrenal problem. Maybe I should trying giving into it and laying down for an hour at 3.

I have also been trying really hard to sleep as much as possible. This does not work very well on days I go to work (which lucky for me, was only once this week but usually twice). The other days since I work from home I can start whenever. M wakes up around 6 most days so instead of getting up with him, I go back to sleep, usually until 8:30 or 9. This morning I woke up at 5:45 and had to pee really bad so it took me longer to go back to sleep, but I did. I feel really good when I get 9 hours of sleep and like I got hit by a truck when I get less than 7. Between 7-9 is kind of variable depending on my overall sleep deficit. Since this schedule won't last forever, I feel lucky to cash in on it while I can. I do wish I was one of those people that feels amazing on 6 hours of sleep. Maybe once I get a little less inflammation going on I will need less.

Food today:

Breakfast: same as lunch yesterday only with broccoli, but less because it was the end of the chicken-- I didn't quite finish and then ate the last few bites a couple hours later

Lunch: Ravenous because at lunch time I went to the store before making lunch, so I didn't eat until 2. What I made was a variation on the tuna sandwiches I had been eating a lot before I changed my diet.

I mixed 1 can of wild salmon (the kind with the skins and bones-- the bones freak me out a little, but the skin is where all the good fat is, AND it's cheaper), with 2 tsp mustard, 1/2 a mashed avocado, and a couple big handfuls of crushed kale chips, which I made from purple kale.

I did not invent kale chips-- I learned to make them from a classmate at Bastyr, but they are one of my favorite ways to eat kale and I discovered they are especially delicious crushed up on tuna sandwiches-- thus my variation on that today.

Kale chips:

Wash and de-stem one head of kale (any kind of Kale works-- I used the purple kind today), cut or tear into small (1-2") pieces. Toss in olive oil and a pinch of sea salt. Bake at 400 degrees in the oven, stirring occasionally, until crisp.

I discovered the purple kale turns a sort of weird light brown which isn't that appetizing but it was still yummy. I took pictures of this but they all turned out weird.

Pre-crossfit snack: 1 oz (ish) nitrate free-ham with mustard, two olives and a few raw carrots** RAW CARROTS pre running are a BAD IDEA. More on this in a minute.

Dinner: I roasted a whole chicken (pros: economical, can make chicken stock! cons: messy, you have to like dark meat, lots of carving) and added asparagus on the side. I was pleased to see the asparagus now is at least from California-- I prefer locally grown stuff, but by this time of winter I'm so desperate for a new vegetable and I love asparagus SO much, that I extend the short season by buying it before it's ready in Washington-- which is still probably a month away.

Crossfit: running was bound to happen eventually. It was clear and crisp outside so I knew when our trainer mentioned the weather we were doomed to run. Our warm up was actually pretty fun: we put weight plates (70 pounds for girls, 90 for boys) on these flat metal squares that had a post in the middle to hold the weight called sleds. The sleds had long straps on them and you put the strap around your waist and then drag the weight behind you. We walked up and down the parking lot forwards, backwards and side-ways down and back twice for each direction. I liked it a lot.

The real workout was a version of Helen:

3x
400 m run
21 kettlebell swings
12 jumping pull-ups.

The real version involves doing that for time as fast as you can with no rest (I seem to remember doing that once and it sucked). This time, the class had 4 women and 3 men, so we did "men vs. women" which wasn't very effective since we weren't really trying to beat the guys so much as just not die while doing it. The girls did the whole thing, and then got to rest while the guys did a circuit, repeat. So I am not a good runner at all, and since I haven't attempted running or any cardio beyond walking for months, I have zero endurance. So even those 1/4 mile runs sucked. Fortunately, another girl who also started the same day as I hates running too and so we kind of stuck together and walked a little in the middle as needed-- it helped not coming in dead last. After the first round of running when we stupidly tried to keep up with the one girl who clearly IS a runner, I felt those raw carrots threatening to make a come back on me. I don't digest raw stuff all that well anyway and clearly eating those an hour before crossfit was a bad move. I did not throw up, but I also held back slightly in order not to do so, which I was bummed about.

I kind of think I might need to make a point to work on running a couple days a week, whether it's part of our WOD (workout of the day) or not so that when it is, it sucks less. Glad at least Spring is almost here-- although it was a little cold, it was nice to be outside.

Day 3: Light and easy

2011-03-16T19:56:00.000-07:00

I'll make this quick since I don't have a lot of interesting things to report. This morning I was still epic-sore from Monday. It didn't help I sat all day. When I got to Crossfit I saw a couple people running and was fearing the dreaded running workouts (they are inevitable) but instead it turned out to be a very light day, just practicing some of the olympic lifts with little or no weight. I chatted with some of the other ladies in our class (there were 5 men and 5 women tonight) and it helped my soreness just to move around a bit.

Food was the same as yesterday (with homemade pulled pork for dinner instead of the restaurant kind). I had a small plate before Crossfit (it's hard when you workout at dinner time) and I'm going to have another one now.

The above picture is of my lunch-- did a little better putting it in natural light-- I did eat all of that (macademia nuts on the chicken instead of avocado) but I think I ate a little too much. That said, I've been pretty hungry today-- probably my body needing fuel for recovery, plus I think I didn't eat enough yesterday.

Day 2: Stop making me laugh!

2011-03-14T15:22:00.000-07:00

Sorry, no pics today-- Tuesday is a long day for me as I often go to work and then hang out at my husband's office in the evening until his club basketball game is over.

I did not really sleep last night. I'm not sure if it's because I'm not used to working out so late (we finished at 7:30pm-- I usually work out mid-day or morning), or it's the adjustment to less carbs (which I vaguely remember throwing off my sleep in the past) or just being excited about the new direction I'm heading in, but I had a hard time falling asleep and I woke up well before my 6am alarm., despite being very tired when I went to bed and when I woke up. I've been trying to sleep more lately, since I realized on the weekends when I get 9 or 10 hours of sleep I feel amazing, but on days I do the dreaded commute I'm lucky if I can get 6.5 hours and then I'm wrecked for two days. The sleep dep and the after effects of Crossfit combined and I was hurting today!

As Delayed-Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) doesn't usually kick in for 24-48 hours after a workout, I was not surprised to find that my soreness progressed over the course of the day. It is now exactly 24 hours after Crossfit and I hurt! What's funny is after the workout last night, while I couldn't have done much more, I wasn't completely DESTROYED like sometimes after a hard workout-- I was tired and spent. I didn't think my legs would be sore, but I was wrong-- it's hard to get up and down from my chair. My arms hurt, my back is sore, and my abs! My husband keeps trying to tickle me just to watch me wince, and he's funny so he makes me laugh which hurts. It probably would have been better if I had gone back today to work out some of that lactic acid, but it will have to wait until tomorrow.

So food:

Breakfast was the same as yesterday.

For Lunch I had chicken mole, for which I adapted this recipe from 30 days of paleo.

My changes:

1. I used cashew butter instead of almond
2. I left out both kinds of peppers-- the hot ones because I don't like spicy, and both because I didn't have any
3. I used 2T of unsweetened, organic cocoa powder instead of 2 oz cacao
4. I used homemade turkey stock, but I think it may not have been 10 oz-- I boiled the ziplock bag I'd frozen the stock in and it sprung a leak into the water I boiled it into!

I would not recommend leaving out the bell pepper-- the sauce really needed that sweetness to balance some of the more bitter flavors, which probably also would have come from the almond butter had I used it. I added a couple drops of stevia to make it edible. Unfortunately it made M's tummy hurt (I think he might be allergic to one of the spices in it-- he said "Indian" type spices don't like him) so I guess I'll be eating the rest of it. Anyway, I had this with asparagus (which I sort of set on fire broiling last night! oops) and some avocado.

I had a questionable snack in the afternoon. On Tuesdays M. and I usually get dinner someplace near his office before his basketball games. I was only sort of hungry and the place we went to had mainly a happy hour type menu. I ordered shredded pork sliders and just ate the meat-- I should have gotten the burgers though because the pork definitely had some kind of sweet bbq sauce AND gluten (my lungs are a great barometer for gluten and dairy-- they get a little wheezy when I've had it), but I only had a few bites so the damage was minor. Later I had the snack I meant to eat earlier in the afternoon: two hard boiled eggs, nitrate free ham with mustard, and avocado again. (I really need to find something equivalent for the avocado so I don't get burned out on them!)

When I get home I might eat some more chicken if I'm still hungry-- I don't think I brought enough in my lunch today-- I never seem to bring the right amount of food on work days: always way too much or not nearly enough.

Another woman in my office coincidentally also started Paleo this week-- she's doing it to try and reduce inflammation. We are going to compare notes as we go. Might be nice to have a buddy! My boss is starting crossfit in a couple of weeks too-- she's an avid spinner but I'm pretty sure she doesn't do a whole lot of serious weight so I'm interested to see how she likes it.

Maybe tomorrow I will figure out how to take food pictures that are less gross looking!

Day 1: So far so good

2011-03-14T13:44:00.000-07:00

I apologize in advance for the poor quality of my food photography. I'm working on getting a better lighting set up-- until then I hope it doesn't make you too queasy, as bad food photography often does to me!

Breakfast day one: I cooked two pounds of Sheldon's turkey chorizo (it was not in casing- just ground turkey with spices) with two pounds of frozen stir fry veggies in coconut oil. I ate maybe 1/5 of this mixture for breakfast with a cup of green tea.

Lunch: A half cup or so of the breakfast mixture, 2 hard-boiled eggs, grilled asparagus and 1/4 of a large avocado. It was delicious! I didn't think I could finish it but I was hungrier than I thought! I also had nettle infusion, which is tea made of dried nettles (they don't sting once they've been dried or cooked), and I make mine with Red Raspberry leaf (a good herb for women's health), peppermint, Rooibos tea and a smidge of licorice root and then I put it in a coffee press and let it steep overnight. Nettle is very rich in minerals like calcium, magnesium and iron. Not sure if this is strictly paleo, but tea is allowed so I'm going with it.

Pre-Crossfit snack: a little bit of pulled pork (see below) and a few raw baby carrots.

Dinner: I made the Cook's Illustrated recipe for pulled pork, which I made once before except I didn't "crisp" it under the broiler at the end the way the recipe suggests because that made it kind of dry last time I made it. (I'd post the recipe but it is a subscription only service-- I highly recommend it, they really test all of their recipes so they are always fantastic). This I served with broccoli and more avocado and a kiwi. I also through some chicken in the crock pot for tomorrow so it was a busy cooking afternoon. Was too hungry and the kitchen was too dark to take pics so you will just have to use your imagination!

And then there was my first day back at Crossfit: first of all the gym has been remodeled since I was last there and it's double the size it used to be. I'm sure they have way more people too (there are 12 people in the newbie class this month) but since I never went to evening classes before I can't be sure how much more. Our workout was all calisthenics-- after a few practice of each and some other warm up stuff we did:

3 rounds of:
10 pull ups (which those of us not strong enough to really do them do by jumping on a box to get over the bar)
10 push ups
20 sit-ups
20 air squats

I found out if your pilates instructor is impressed at the strength of your abs this does NOT translate to 60 sit-ups-- I struggled through those. The squats weren't too bad as I have been doing squats with somewhat regularity. The pull ups were hard, and the push ups I got through the 10 in the warm up and the first set of 10 doing "real" ones and then I had to switch to my knees, which I felt pretty good about. There was a huge range of abilities-- I was probably in the bottom half to third, but definitely not the worst. One guy puked outside and then came back in to finish! Good for him.

My energy was good all day, I wasn't hungry or craving anything and I really enjoyed my workout-- it was harder than I would have pushed myself, but not so hard that I will be absolutely destroyed tomorrow.

Incidentally, my hubby started trying Crossfit on his own today and did

3x
10 burpees
20 squats
20 situps

with almost no rest. He's in much better shape than me-- I hate burpees! He said the squats killed his quads.

Overall an excellent first day. Tomorrow's a work day-- I have my food all packed up but no crossfit again until Wednesday.

I'm back! With a new Crossfit challenge

2011-03-14T10:36:00.000-07:00

Almost two years ago I started Crossfit and made it about two months before I gave it up, mainly due to life complications: I was starting my dietetic internship and living half the week away from home and I couldn't see how I'd have time. I also was completely exhausted, both physically and emotionally from graduate school. My adrenal glands had nothing left to give and I probably wasn't really ready for the intensity of Crossfitting.

As for blogging, I had to take a break for awhile to re-examine what I wanted to write about, if I wanted to start over with a new blog etc.

My struggles with finding a happy balance with food and exercise have been all over the place the past 6 months: for a while after we got back from Greece I had an easy time eating intuitively, not overeating sugar, and maintaining my weight. I wasn't exercising a ton, but I had an active job all summer (or at least one that required me to be on my feet all day). In the Fall I started my current job, working as a research dietitian for the Army. I love my job and am lucky enough to be able to work from home three days a week, but it is also very sedentary as I spend all day on the computer and my commute on the days I go to work is about 90 minutes each way, and slowly my weight has threatened to creep up. I spent January experimenting with Pilates, which actually was a very good, gentle reintroduction to exercise but I started to miss working out really hard. In February I started trying to get back into heavy lifting again using "The New Rules of Lifting for Women"-- which is a great book, and if you are a self-motivated person I'm sure you would have great results with it. I kind of lost interest and had trouble getting motivated to go to my much hated giant corporate gym. I had just watched my friend do Crossfit all through her pregnancy and get back into her very tiny pre-pregnancy jeans about two weeks after giving birth and was very inspired. This combined with the fact that since I do work from home most of the time I really was looking for a more social workout, I decided to get back to Crossfit-- tonight will be my first class.

Two years ago Lynnwood Crossfit hadn't quite started the beginner's OnRamp course and I just did three individual sessions with trainer before starting group classes. This time there are 12 beginner classes. I'm excited to start off with other new people, although I missed the first week of OnRamp last week because I was out of town for work so hopefully I'm not too far behind. Last time I was always a little scared before a workout, in part because I knew I'd be the worst one!

In addition to starting again with Crossfit, I'm going to do 30 days of Paleo eating. For those not familiar, the premise of Paleo is eating food that neolithic man (i.e. "cavemen") would have eaten-- in other words, no processed foods and mainly meat, vegetables and some fruit. Some of my fellow Registered Dietitians (one of my good friends included) would NOT be very supportive of this dietary choice. Paleo tends to be pretty low carb, and definitely does not include any dairy or grains. I already can not eat dairy or gluten due to known food intolerances, and honestly I don't eat more than a serving or two of grains a day anyway, so it's not that big of a stretch. What is a stretch is that lately I've been eating WAY too much sugar (capped off this weekend with my husband's birthday cake-- gluten free but definitely full of sugar!) I'm looking forward to focusing on protein and vegetables.

As a dietitian, what I do not buy into with Paleo is that EVERYONE needs to do it-- I know some people that do very well on a whole-grain based diet. I think everyone has their own level of carb tolerance and individual nutrient needs. I do believe Paleo is the healthiest lower carbohydrate diet out there-- many of the others have gotten too far off course marketing "products" full of artificial sweetners and soy protein isolates in an attempt to make money, and as a result their diets never help people overcome their food cravings. (I remember in college eating several Zone Perfect bars in a row-- protein or not they are full of sugar and basically candy). I've always done better on a lower carb diet, so I'm going to kick start this first month of Crossfitting with 30 days of perfect paleo, and I will document that here.

I also took detailed measurements of myself and some before pictures. Once I get an "after" perhaps I'll post them for comparison. For now I'm not too excited to post pictures of myself in a swim suit on the internet for the world to see, though my before is really not that bad, as I am not overweight-- just out of shape and with higher bodyfat than I'd care to have.

So let the Crossfit/Paleo challenge begin! I can't wait to see where the next 30 days takes me.

End of a journey

2010-06-15T12:42:00.000-07:00

I promise to finish writing about Greece next week but first I need to write about the most significant event in my life this year, probably in five years: today I passed the RD exam-- I am at last a Registered Dietitian. This is HUGE for me-- let me explain.

In 2002 I was going into my Senior year of college, waiting to hear if I had been accepted into the theater major at UCLA. What I really loved was not so much the acting, but musical theater. I went to see that year's musical and realized that even if I was accepted into the major, I would never be as strong of a singer as the students in the play-- they had studied intensively since they were freshmen, and while I have a perfectly nice voice I do not have that big capacity to "belt" necessary for musical theater. I was unhappy in LA, homesick for Seattle and not excited about the additional year it would take me to finish my already 5 years of undergrad to do the theater major-- I didn't want to audition for a living and the pressure of being judged on my looks was already pushing me toward disordered eating. I was getting pretty interested in nutrition and natural health at that time and I remember one of my acting teachers saying to the class-- if there is ANYTHING you can see yourself happy doing besides acting you should do it because this business is too hard. Before the results were posted for major admissions, I walked into the theater department office and told them I wanted to withdraw from consideration-- it was one of the hardest things I have ever done.

I finished undergrad as a Philosophy major, a major I had chosen merely because it was not impacted so I could increase the likelihood of transfer admission to UCLA. I spent a miserable year taking confusing and sometimes crazy upper division Philosophy classes and then the day after my last final we packed up and moved to Seattle.

I had to wait a year to reestablish residency to start taking prerequisites-- the only year of my life I have not been in school since I started kindergarten. I started taking prerequisite science courses, one at a time at night while working full time. It took me nearly three years to finish all of them and start graduate school full time. I can not tell you how many times I had meltdowns from the stress of studying chemistry in every spare second-- at least once a quarter I completely lost it.

The first two quarters at Bastyr nearly killed me-- not coming from a science background the intensity of having a full-time load of almost all science courses was a lot to deal with. The last quarter at Bastyr and the internship application process wounded my spirit (as I wrote about extensively) so deeply it took months to heal. The internship had it's own challenges, including having to move away from my husband for several months.

I had only one last hurdle, the RD exam. This is the national exam that proves to the American Dietetic Association dietitians are ready to practice-- without this exam no prospective employers would even talk to me.

After I passed the test I cried all the way home-- it is such an unbelievable relief, I almost can't comprehend it-- I don't ever have to take any exams ever again. I am DONE with formal school for the rest of my LIFE (if I want it to be anyway).

I am overwhelmed, and grateful and happy.

Greece: Mykonos

2010-06-07T07:49:00.000-07:00

Sorry I'm not telling this story as fast as I planned-- I am studying for the RD exam and it is taking over my life! Until I take it I'm going to have a hard time getting a job (it actually probably isn't going to be that easy even after I take it) so I've made it a high priority.

Anyway, Mykonos. This ended up being the nicest hotel in some ways, of our entire trip. It was right on the beach, had free internet (important for keeping my mom and Marc updated that we made it and were still alive) and it had breakfast included in the price of the room-- this turned out to be very helpful, especially since the breakfast was amazing! They had pretty much anything you could ever want-- fantastic thick greek yogurt, fruit, eggs, sausages, bacon, many kinds of bread and pastries, coffee tea etc. Food was pretty expensive on Mykonos so we usually tried to eat a big breakfast to make it as long as we could on that-- I had yogurt and fruit, sometimes an egg, a couple bites of something bread, and a lot of coffee both mornings.

As I mentioned our hotel was a ways out of town. Fortunately there was a bus that stopped right outside the hotel to take us into town. Mykonos is famous for it's narrow, white-washed streets, fancy stores and pretty harbor. It wasn't very busy-- between the volcano drama and the national strikes due to the Greek economy crashing a lot of people stayed away, plus it was still the off season-- it gets really busy in July and August apparently.

We spent a ridiculous amount of time looking for a pharmacy to get more contact solution (since the Athens airport confiscated it) and sunscreen, because there was no way we could bring enough given the airline liquid restrictions. When we finally did find one it was closed because of strikes-- apparently they all take turns being open for a couple hours at a time so we had to wander to find the one that was open, and kept getting lost because all those narrow alleys look the same. We got kind of sunburned while we were looking for a place to buy sunscreen (which was ASTRONOMICALLY expensive-- a regular sized bottle cost about 14 Euros which works out to almost $20!)

We wandered in and out of shops, mostly just looking (I didn't want to spend a bunch of money on the very first day!) but Megs bought a pair of sandals and we bought a little jar of honey at an amazing honey store where they had probably 8 or 9 different types of honey which we got to taste and the man in told us all about the different healing qualities of each one.

In the evening, back at the hotel we read at the beach, had a good dinner with wine and we sat there so long the waiter brought us free ouzo (we came to find that most restaurants will eventually bring you a free something at the end of the meal). I don't usually like hard liquor but I actually quite liked ouzo-- Megs liked it too even though she hates licorice and to me it tastes exactly like licorice.

Greece, Day 1: the longest day ever

2010-06-01T08:45:00.000-07:00

Sleeping at Heathrow

Passed out at the beach in Mykonos

On May 5th we were packed and ready, nervous because just days earlier flights from Seattle to Iceland (we were flying Iceland air) were canceled and a Greek strike was looming. Our flight was at 4pm and I was so keyed up that morning I took a drop in Bikram yoga class to calm my brain (and also to limber up before hours and hours of sitting on a plane). It was exactly what i needed-- I can never do much more than focus on yoga when I'm there.

I drove to pick up Megan in Wallingford and then picked up Marc at work, since he was coincidentally going to Montana for work that same day. Marc dropped Megs and I off at the terminal and since we were hours early, we had lunch at Seatac (did you know there is an Anthony's restaurant at Seatac?) The salad I had contained some kind of crunchy noodles most of which I picked off, but still caused me to cough for a couple hours afterward, making the later discovery of gluten eating abilities in Europe that much more strange.

Our first flight was 7 hours from Seattle to Iceland. We both took Homeopathic sleep aids which I combined with a half a dramamine in an attempt to sleep on the flight. Between the loud talking on the flight and the fact that it was only 4pm-10pm at home meant that despite my attempts I did not sleep more than an hour or so on the flight.

We had a quick 50 minute layover in Iceland (the airport looks like an Ikea!) where we got our passports stamped in and out of the country and went through security again -- I was selected for a random search of my person (not my bag just my body) which was hilarious because I was wearing leggings and a fitted t-shirt-- not sure where I could have been hiding something in that outfit but a nice security lady patted me down anyway and then we boarded another plane, this one a 3 hour flight, to London. I did manage to sleep another couple hours on the London leg of the flight as we arrived around 1am Seattle time. It was noon London time and our next flight, to Athens was not until 10pm. I had booked a late flight in case we wanted to actually try and go do something in London, but the lines at Customs were long, the tube takes an hour from the airport into downtown London and we were scared we'd miss our flight, so instead we spent 10 hours in Terminal one at Heathrow, which is one of the smallest and most boring. In a sleepy daze we paced up and down the length of the terminal. We went to the pharmacy 3 or 4 times for various reasons, ate two greasy meals (traditional English breakfast and then some kind of salad I've forgotten now later on). We found an empty corner and sort of slept awhile on hard benches, though every time I fell asleep another announcement over the intercom of flights coming and going woke me up.

We were so lucky we had booked the 10pm flight-- no flights were landing in Greece that day because of a strike-- ours the only flight to take off for Athens because we arrived at 4am-- technically the next day and after the end of the strike.

The flight to Athens was also loud and it was once again difficult to sleep. We arrived in Athens at 4am with another 5 hours to kill before our final flight to Mykonos. On the 4th trip through security that day they confiscated Megan's contact solution because even though it had a TSA approved symbol on it, apparently it was more than 100mL. The woman in charge of putting items through the scanner also yelled at us because apparently she likes to put things in the bin for you. Crazy how every airport and every security checker seems to make their own rules.

I had Greek yogurt with honey from a food cart in the airport-- the girl put almost more honey than yogurt on it but I decided at 4am it could be dessert or breakfast and I was much too tired to care so it didn't matter. There are lots of stores and things in the Athens airport as well as free email access. However, once you get past security there is absolutely nothing to do. It was much too loud, busy and chaotic for sleeping so we spent four hours sitting dazed, too tired to read, but unable to sleep either.

Finally we boarded our 30 minute flight to Mykonos, grabbed a cab and found our lovely hotel which was outside of town on the beach. We were very grateful for showers and then crashed at the beach (I completely passed out for about two hours). We spent a very leisurely day at the beach, ate a good dinner and then slept 11 hours that night. Finally, we had arrived and were ready to begin our vacation!

Re-entry trouble...

2010-05-28T17:55:00.001-07:00

That is not sorbet....

I promise over the next few weeks I'm going to tell you all about my amazing adventure in Greece in great detail. I took notes so I could blog properly about the whole experience when I got back (I didn't have a computer consistently or I would have just done it as I went along-- actually, no I wouldn't have because I didn't want to spend my vacation in front of the computer!).

But first I'm going to tell you that I'm having a hard time adjusting to being home.

For one thing I have a very strange lingering case of jet lag. When we got back on Monday it was 5pm in Seattle and approximately 3am in Greece-- we were exhausted and in bed by 8:30pm, and then not surprisingly, woke up at 4:30 am. Every single day this week my body has decided this is the routine we are going to stick to-- I can't stay awake past about 8:45 and by 4:30am I'm wide awake. It's ridiculous. If I could push it back an hour I wouldn't mind but there is no reason to go to bed before it gets dark in the summer time.

What doesn't help is that I have absolutely no structure in my days now. Marc went back to work immediately. I have no where I have to be-- I am so happy to be finished with my internship (SO HAPPY) but I don't do very well without structured time and I have a feeling it is going to take me a little while to find full time employment. I also need to start studying for the RD exam, which doesn't excite me terribly but my options for jobs are limited without having taken it and I need to hurry up and get it over with.

Today was the first day that I had any energy at all-- Monday through Thursday I pretty much just laid on the couch and caught up on all the TV shows I missed on hulu although almost every show seemed to end the season with violent murders/deaths (Grey's Anatomy, Private Practice, Chuck, Brothers and Sisters)-- the Grey's season finale was so scary to my poor disoriented, jet lagged self that I had to keep taking breaks from watching it and finally went online and found out what happens at the end before I could finish watching it! Thank goodness for the cheerful non-violence of Glee to balance everything out.

Now I have to tell you the weirdest part of my whole trip. In Greece I had ZERO trouble with gluten (as in, I could eat it with no reaction) and very minimal reaction to dairy of any kind-- people, for the first time in three years I had pizza, ice cream and bread and was FINE (okay, the pizza didn't make me feel great, but it wasn't horrible). Now that I'm home both gluten and dairy are again giving me asthma, fatigue and headaches. WHY on Earth would these foods have such a dramatically different effect in Europe? I have no explanation. (BTW it started because the bread that came with dinner looked so good I had 1/4 of a piece. Nothing happened so the next meal I had 1/2, etc until I was easily eating a loaf of bread myself over the course of the day). I am stubbornly continuing to eat gluten even though it is giving me headaches and fatigue because I want to get a Celiac test before I go off it again (the antibodies only show up when you've been eating it) and because even though I feel like crap I'm not looking forward to having to be on a restricted diet again.

So you might think having the door open to any food (I had gelato almost every day!) that I would have had some problems maintaining my weight. At least until I told you that we probably walked 6-10 hours every single day. My feet hurt like hell because I didn't have supportive enough shoes (more on this later) but my legs are in good shape! And I lost 3-4 pounds-- the capri pants I took with me were falling off of me by the time we got home and a lot of jeans I have in my closet at home that were too tight to wear fit perfectly now! I'm holding my breath that I can maintain this now that I'm not walking as a full time job (at some point I'm going to have to get off the couch and get moving again!)

The day before I left for Greece I quit my gym-- they switched management companies right after I joined and I really did not like the changes they were making. So now I get to spend some time seeing how many free 7 day trials I can go through at all the gyms within a 5 mile radius before I join somewhere-- I'm hoping I can figure out where I'm going to be working before I make a commitment. But I'll tell you all about the gyms in Lynnwood/South Everett too in case someone is in the market for a new one.

So much blogging to catch up on-- I'll post again soon!

Skinny jeans

2010-04-28T16:00:00.000-07:00

It is amazing how much self-torture women are able to inflict upon themselves because they feel they don't fit into some sort of "ideal" category. Almost every woman I know has or at least has had, issues with food in their lives. This is one reason I gave up on trying to be an actress-- I saw that to be successful I would have to be at a weight that was not healthy for me-- as it is I have been weight-conscious since the third grade when I remember being mortified when my mom told my friend's mom that I weighed 100 pounds. (Sad that third grade girls even 20 years ago had this issue-- that same friend later became anorexic).

In my early 20s I put on about 12 pounds-- the ironic result, actually, of rebound weight gain from over-exercising and depression. I beat myself up about it, would diet and over-exercise to try and get it down, only to lose 5 or 6 pounds and then regain it and maybe more. I have maintained this same weight, within about a 5 pound range for 6 or 7 years now-- despite the initial gain I am still well within a healthy weight range for my height. I beat myself up about a two pound range-- for some reason when my weight ends in a 2 or lower I'm comfortable, but when it ends in 4 or more I feel very fat. I mostly have recovered from my tendency to extremes with calorie counting and over exercising, but at the beginning of March I unwisely decided to follow the workout and calorie recommendations in Jillian Michael's "Making the Cut" but, being type-A and crazy, I also added extra cardio. And predictably, I had a very dizzy week and a half on 1400 calories before I slowly started overeating when poor body rebelled at being starved. I KNOW that's not enough calories for me. I have a #$*@!#$#*! Master's Degree in Nutrition! But sometimes the psychosis of being an over-achieving, self-judging woman takes over common sense and higher education.

I will say this-- though I haven't been as consistent with JM's workouts as I was last month, I have continued them and I have seen changes in my body, despite not really losing weight and in fact despite eating more sugar than is good for me. The circuits make me feel strong and tighter.

A few other things have happened lately that have changed the way I feel about my body-- the first is that in preparation for my Greece trip I found a swim suit that is flattering and I feel great in and covers my less than ideal areas.

Second, last weekend I attended a workout session sponsored by Dove Deodorant and hosted by my friend Stevie (it was an amazingly intense workout-- I could barely walk for two days afterwards!). There was something that really hit me running around that gym with a bunch of women, all of us about the same age, all different shapes and sizes but all at similar fitness levels when I kind of realized there is nothing wrong with me the way I am. I think particularly working out with my friend E, who has undergone an incredible amount of struggles in her life with her weight and has really beaten the odds and is in fantastic shape now even with a new baby that was powerful for me.

As for the jeans-- I actually hate wearing jeans because I always wear the boot cut, wide leg, Clinton and Stacy approved style which make me feel kind of dowdy. Due to my curvy shape I have never found a pair of skinny jeans or even straight leg that didn't look ridiculous on me or weren't too tight in the rear. But something changed-- I don't know if it's the workouts or just a shift in my own perception of my body, but I was trying on a pair of black leggings the other day intending to wear them under skirts and they actually looked good on their own. Then I was at the mall today and on a whim tried on a pair of skinny jeans at the Gap and they not only fit perfectly, but actually looked good.

I feel like in the aftermath of a self-abuse relapse I've found a place where I am feeling good about myself in the place where I am at. I would like to be in better shape, and losing a jeans size would be nice but I'm finding peace with being the size and shape I am right now, and that's an amazing feeling.

Mental Discipline

2010-03-16T21:27:00.000-07:00

The last couple weeks I've been working out really hard, trying to get in shape a bit before my trip in May. This evening I went to hot yoga for the first time in months. I expected to be pretty dizzy. One of the rules of Bikram yoga is you are not supposed to leave the room for the entire 90 minutes. Partly it's an issue of discipline-- you are getting used to the heat, even if all you do is lay on the floor. The other reason you aren't supposed to leave the room is if you go in the bathroom and pass out the instructor won't know. It was especially hot tonight and there were a lot of new students. I surprised myself by getting through the entire standing series without having to lay down. Usually that's the part of the class where I get dizzy or feel bad. I don't know why, but it seemed to get hotter as the class went on. People kept getting up and leaving the room-- less than half the class actually finished. I was so hot that toward the end I was fighting an anxiety attack-- but I kept breathing and focusing on each pose and made it through the entire class. (No laying around at the end though-- I got out of that room quick!) It was definitely an exercise in mental concentration. I was sitting near a group of teenage girls afterwards who had left the room talking about how they felt like they were going to DIE in there. I think sometimes we give up too soon on things because we think we can't do it. I'm sitting here watching the Biggest loser-- all of these people thought they couldn't do strenuous workouts, and here they are 9 weeks later working out 6 hours a day and having lost as much as 100 pounds already-- they have had to break down their own mental barriers and found that they actually could do more than they ever have before. What if we stopped setting up road blocks for ourselves and worked to our potential instead of to our expectations?

Dairy is a no-go

2010-03-04T14:24:00.000-08:00

Last week I experimented with butter. I first had about a 1/2 tablespoon on a piece of gluten free toast and didn't notice any effect. Excited, I had another tablespoon or so on popcorn and many weird things happened. I was on the phone so I didn't notice at first that I was kind of hyper. My face got really hot (though not red) and I was very aware of my cheeks, as though my face was swollen, though I looked normal. I also had some breathing issues and a general feeling of unease-- all of these symptoms lasted until the next morning, as well as crushing fatigue that lasted a couple days. On Sunday night I had one tiny bite of Marc's pizza and though I'm not positive it's correlated, all day Monday I was absolutely exhausted. This does not bode well.

Phase one of my great adventure is planned: my oldest and dearest friend Megan and I are going to Greece for 10 days in May. Megan and I have been friends for 24 years, since the first grade, and traveled many times together on school trips. In 24 years I only remember us ever even getting mildly annoyed with each other once (during a stressful History Day project in high school). She will be a really fun and easy travel companion.

During phase two of my adventure Marc is meeting me in Europe for another 10 days. We have not decided yet where we will go-- we have been talking about France/Spain/Italy along the Riviera, but we also might stay in Greece, since there are so many islands we could easily do another 10 days without repeating anything Megan and I do.

I am counting the days-- less than 9 weeks! until my internship is finally over and I get to go on this fantastic adventure with two of my favorite people.

Playing with fire

2010-02-23T08:34:00.000-08:00

I have begun a testing period to try and determine a level of dairy exposure that I can live with and to see if perhaps I can develop a little more of a tolerance. The impetus for this is the likely possibility of some travel later this year to places where it would be very difficult and sad to completely avoid. (I promise to tell you all about my travel plans once they are for sure-- I don't want to jinx it!)

I intended to start with small amounts of butter, since butter has relatively less protein (which is usually what people react to when they have allergy) but to which I sadly am still allergic. While I was at the store buying very good butter yesterday I looked longingly at the yogurt and decided to try that too. I bought one single serve container of cream top plain yogurt. I have never liked plain yogurt without honey or fruit or something to make it sweeter, but let me tell you that first bite yesterday was fantastic. I haven't had yogurt in probably five years. I ate a couple bites, then waited a half hour, then a couple bites more. I think my tolerance level was at about half the container-- after I ate the whole thing I didn't have as severe of a reaction as I thought I would but my nose was running and my breathing was not good, due it seemed to a lot of mucus production in my esophagus. I woke up feeling kind of bloaty too. So test one-- 8 oz plain yogurt is too much, but not disastrous (though I imagine repeated exposures to that amount would be). After I get contamination in a restaurant I often develop a cough and I didn't get that so perhaps that's a gluten reaction.

Now I will wait a couple days and try again with small amounts of butter.

The last valentine

2010-02-22T10:05:00.001-08:00

Above, my grandma and my step-grandpa on their wedding day.

Two weeks ago I spent some unexpected down time making a Valentine's day care package for my family in Oregon. I made candy, bought cards and a little pink bear for my cancer stricken grandmother. I mailed it off figuring it would arrive if not by Valentine's day by the following Tuesday. Unfortunately, my grandma never saw that little bear. On February 15th she succumbed to cancer-- her pain, ever constant for several years and agonizing for the last few days is at last over. I went through last week in a weird swing from a crying daze to completely fine and in denial. My brother does not have a phone right now and having to go physically track him down to tell him the news was tough. Even tougher, was when I arrived at her house on Friday after a 6 hour train ride. Something about being there and seeing her things without her there was overwhelming.

In the end, it was an incredibly cathartic weekend. I helped my mom go through grandma's closet-- I get my love of clothes from her. She always looked completely chic and put together. She also was incredibly tiny-- at 5'5, she never weighed more than 115lbs-- usually much less (in her later years she struggled to keep her weight above 90 pounds). Still, she had a strong presence and it wasn't until I held her clothes to me and tried on her rings that I fully understood how small she was. Many of her clothes, size extra-small she had modified to make the waist even smaller. She made many of her own clothes and though I myself am not at all large, most of her pants would only make it half way around me. She had a few shirts that were cut larger (she often wore things on the baggy side, perhaps to make herself appear larger) and those now belong to me, as well as a number of pieces of her jewelry-- I am now wearing her wedding ring from her second marriage on my pinky-- the only finger it fits (and it's snug).

We spent hours going through old photo albums-- at one point grandma must have just decided to put everything in albums quickly-- there were several albums that were a complete mishmash-- a picture of my mom in high school, followed by three pictures of her second husband's family, followed by pictures of me when I was a baby followed by pictures of my grandfather, who died before I was born. My dad made a slide show of pictures from her life for the funeral, from which I learned so much more about who she was when she as young-- she was a baton twirler in high school, very outdoorsy as a young mother (they took lots of backpacking trips) and always, always looked put together. She wore things that would look absolutely ridiculous on someone else but that completely worked on her. She liked large substantial necklaces, asian art and high waisted, wide leg pants with short boxy tops.

The funeral was an exercise in self-restraint-- it wouldn't have been appropriate for me to cry hysterically through it, though I kind of wanted to. It was a little more formal than we're used to, due to the unavailability of the Presbyterian church (all it's staff were on retreat all week) it was held in the Episcopal church. It was a nice service, but what had me in tears was so many of her friends and family telling me how much she had talked about me and what a wonderful lady she was. Grandma loved cats and had tons of kitty trinkets around her house. Mom and I each wore one of her cat pins to the funeral, and I think she would have loved that.

When I came home Marc asked me if I had been close with my grandma. In the last 10 years or so I have only seen her a couple times a year and so perhaps not. But when I was a little girl she lived with us and she read to me every day and took me for walks all over Eugene. We had some kind of connection that I can't quite explain that was different than with anyone else I know-- I loved her very much and I wish she had lived closer so I could have spent more time with her.

So though I will miss her, going to her funeral, seeing that my mom and uncle are going to be okay and being able to say goodbye in that way gave me a sense of closure and peace about her death that I don't think I would have had if I had stayed home. I still get teary if I think about her (like in writing this post) but I truly feel she has gone to a better place.

And today the sun is shining and I feel more at peace than I have in quite a while....

Outside my comfort zone

2010-02-09T16:32:00.000-08:00

I've been in kind of a rut lately. I don't do very well with too much time on my hands-- I need structure and plans-- I've been spending too much unstructured time sitting around doing nothing.

Last week's attempt at going from sedentary to super active backfired the way it always does-- by Thursday I was so exhausted I couldn't move-- partly I think because 7 hours of sleep a night wasn't enough to recover. So other than a walk around Greenlake this weekend I haven't gotten much exercise since last Wednesday. Tonight I return to my beloved kickboxing and will try to combine a more moderate approach with appropriate rest. The problem is that the exercise does my brain a world of good, but my body can't keep up with the amount of exercise my brain needs. (Story of my type A life-- which actually should be the title of this blog, no?)

I also have been losing my sugar battle. The combination of too much unstructured time, fear of unemployment (I don't know where all these rising healthcare jobs are, but they aren't in dietetics in Seattle that's for sure), and sadness over my grandmother's failing health all combined into me once again, turning to my old abusive friend sugar to comfort me. This has only made me more depressed, moody and sad, creating a vicious emotional cycle and tightening pants. So it's time for sugar and I to take a break. The only way it ever works for me to get off it is to go cold turkey and make no excuses, so that's what I'm doing-- starting NOW.

I'm also pushing my own boundaries in other ways-- trying to meet new people and find new projects. Marc and I are tentatively signed up for a co-ed soccer team that starts in March. I have not played soccer since I was 6 years old, I am not a good runner and I have absolutely no coordination, but trying to be more social outside and getting some exercise, plus an activity we can do together all sound like good things. I was inspired by a really weird movie we saw a few weeks ago, where Jennifer Aniston's character's outlet was playing indoor soccer and I thought-- that sounds fun, where can I play soccer?

We are also in the early stages of planning a big trip for May after I finish my internship and I'm starting to get excited about the possibilities.

Spring is coming... thank God for that.

The Refuge

2010-02-03T16:33:00.000-08:00

(The title of this post is a little shout out to fellow newsies fans...)

Despite many resolutions at the beginning of the year I had a really hard time getting motivated to go to the gym. Sometimes I would walk and jog around my neighborhood (not terribly pedestrian friendly) or do exercise videos on demand on cable, but I wasn't really working that hard or often enough but I couldn't get inspired to go-- the gym I was going to was crazy busy after about 3:30 in the afternoon, and I really don't like getting up before 5am to work out (soooo not a morning person!)

I started looking into other options, and found that a new gym opened about four miles away so I went to go check it out. The new gym is the same company as a gym I used to work out at downtown before I started going to 24 hour fitness, and it opened in a building that used to be Marc's favorite 24 hour fitness branch until 24 hour opened another branch that cost extra to use (which is why the Lynnwood branch got so busy, because no one wanted to pay extra to use the new gym!) I always hated the Everett branch because the equipment always seemed to be broken and it was really dark (probably because they knew they were opening a new one and didn't keep it up).

Well the new gym is still kind of dark and has yucky fluorescent lighting, but it is very uncrowded which is great, has good classes and, how to describe this? It has much better energy. Excuse me for getting metaphysical for a moment but my old gym always had a very frantic, loud frenzied sort of energy that I found exhausting. The new gym feels very laid back and community oriented. Plus, I've been going to this class called "Ultimate Kickboxing" and I think I'm addicted. I don't really like aerobics because I'm not coordinated enough, but I used to do tae-bo in college. This new class involves kickboxing with the big heavy punching bags and OH MY do I love it. It's a killer work out-- the first day I nearly vomited, but it is SO FUN!! Other days I do weight circuits and run, and as soon as I post this I'm off to try the yoga class. Instead of dreading the gym I look forward to it-- I've been going two out of every three days. It also helps that my schedule right now allows me to come home, eat something and relax a little before going to the gym. I'm tired and sore a lot as I get used to this routine but I'm enjoying it and hope I can keep it up!

What if your your dietitian is fat?

2010-01-27T17:55:00.000-08:00

About a year ago I was having a conversation with one of my friends, also a nutritionist, about how we both wanted to lose a few pounds and get in better shape before we finished school because we felt that as healthcare professionals it is important for us to practice what we preach and project the right image. Another classmate, trying to be helpful but actually was kind of insulting by telling me that I was better off as I was because overweight people would be less likely to trust someone who was super skinny because they would feel I wouldn't know what they were going through. Just like a hairdresser with bad hair, or a personal trainer who is out of shape, I think people in the health industry should be an advertisement for their services before they ever open their mouths.

Lately I have been noticing a lot of people who are health and fitness professionals who clearly are struggling with their own health. For example, yesterday I went to an all day workshop on Renal dietetics put on by the dietitians at a major dialysis center in Seattle. It was a great workshop and they were all very knowledgeable about what they do, but I couldn't help but notice several of the dietitians were overweight, one of whom was bordering on obese. Last year when my school was reviewed by a committee of dietitians from the ADA the lead dietitian was one of the largest women I've ever seen. Then, today I went and toured a new gym near my house and the very sweet man who showed me around was enormous-- probably 6'6 and over 300lbs.

I have long struggled to keep my weight under control and while there is a bitchy part of my brain that snaps to judgment of these people (I will admit it!) my heart breaks for them-- it is a sign of our broken healthcare and food system that even the people who are highly educated in health can't seem to follow their own advice (myself included sometimes!)

In fact, the reason I went to check out this new gym is that I can't seem to make myself go to the gym lately-- I'm hoping that a change in scenery and a less crowded facility might get me more inspired to show up more regularly-- so maybe I can start following my own advice!

Ode to my Grandma

2010-01-15T12:27:00.000-08:00

I am fortunate at 30 years old to have had both my grandmothers still living. My grandfathers died before I was born, and in fact my mom's stepdad and the only man I knew as grandfather also passed away a few years ago. When I was a baby, until I was three my maternal grandmother Frances lived with us and took care of me. I remember her being a fantastic story reader. She is an avid reader, passionately liberal, and, until recently a wonderful gourmet cook. My brother and I would go spend a week every summer staying with my grandparents and my grandma would make us all this fancy food we wouldn't eat. To grandma, simple mashed potatoes were red potatoes mashed with the skin, cream, green onions and tons of spices. She also was great at sewing and knitting-- until I was about 6 she made all of my clothes and made (and mended repeatedly) the baby blanket I carried everywhere with me as a toddler. She and my grandpa traveled a lot and she brought me dolls from everywhere they went, and then made tons of doll clothes for them all. As her only grandchildren, my brother and I were very spoiled and loved. In college when I was scraping by paying my own way through undergrad, my grandma sent me $100 every month to help pay my rent. She has always supported me in any way she could.

My grandma has unfortunately been in poor health for several years. She has arthritis which has lead to the degradation of cartilage in one of her shoulders-- she literally has none left and has bone on bone causing pain so severe she has been on high dose narcotics for years because she is not strong enough to withstand surgery. Narcotics have severe side-effects including loss of appetite and constipation. For the past few years she has had a hard time keeping her weight above 90 pounds (when she was younger she was 5'5-- despite some height shrinkage and being very small framed 90 pounds is definitely too thin).

After increasing abdominal pain over the past several weeks she had a scan that revealed masses on her pancreas and liver. Though the results are not back from the lab yet, she most likely has pancreatic cancer that is spreading. Her doctor is guessing she has at best maybe six months left to live. Given the grim prognosis of pancreatic cancer, plus her age and her delicate state, there is nothing they can do but keep her comfortable.

I don't really know what to do with this information. She has been so unwell the past couple of years that my parents moved to Oregon to be near her (and my uncle and other grandmother who all have health issues) and my mom has been a nearly full time care taker for a year and a half. Cancer at 84 years old is sad but not the same tragedy as cancer in the young. I am glad that her pain will come to an end and that she will get to be with my grandfather, who I never got to meet but who was the love of her life and her soulmate. On the other hand, I love her so much and I hate that she has to go through this and hate it even more that she is leaving the rest of us behind. I have never been very good at goodbyes.

Holiday Recap

2010-01-04T09:29:00.000-08:00

The delinquent blogger returns! I did find enough Christmas spirit to put up my tree and get my gifts in order. We had a nice quiet Christmas with Marc's family the weekend before Christmas and then we went to Oregon for actual Christmas where I watched my mom get very stressed trying to get a very complicated dinner on the table and vowed that next year I'm either doing the cooking or not going-- no one should be so stressed on Christmas! On our way home we stopped and had dinner with my Aunt, Uncle and Cousins in Portland which was really fun (although bless their hearts they got a birthday cake for my mom and me since we both had big birthdays this year and I didn't have the heart to tell them I couldn't eat it, so I made Marc "share" mine with me and didn't actually eat any.)

Last Wednesday was Marc & my 9th wedding anniversary. I realized yesterday he has now been my husband for three times longer than he was my boyfriend. Craziness. He had to work that day, but we did go out to dinner at a new Indian place in Mill Creek. I told him I didn't feel like we needed to make a big deal out of it-- I am grateful to have him in my life every day. Maybe next year we'll be able to afford to go somewhere to celebrate a decade together.

I didn't really get my energy back until New Year's Day. I'm not sure what possessed me but about 4 in the afternoon I suddenly felt inspired to do all of the cleaning and organizing projects that have been haunting me for weeks and I cleaned like mad for about 9 hours. My house is cleaner than it has been in years-- I only have one last organization task of taking out everything in my kitchen cabinets and the freezer and reorganizing left to do.

I got together with some of my oldest and dearest friends on Saturday-- two of them have children now, one only two months old (born on my birthday!) and the other about 18 months. Both are the cutest little boys you have ever seen. I realized two things: 1. I really really want a baby and 2. It has been a very long time since I actually even held a baby and might need some lessons or something before I have my own because I have no idea what I'm doing!! At any rate career is going to have to take precedence for a bit longer before I go down that road.

My energy has mostly been better the last few days (compared to the first two weeks of break where I couldn't hardly get off the couch) although yesterday Marc and I went shopping for clothes for him (not a fun prospect) and I was overwhelmingly exhausted. I've been trying to figure out if it's just finally getting caught up on sleep, having eaten more iron lately (I seem to have chronic deficiency) or something else that is helping.

I'm lucky that since I'm on semesters I am off for one more week. I have granola bars to hand out at Whole Foods stores later today (my oh so glamorous job) and tomorrow my parents are coming to visit for a few days, since we didn't get much time together in our whirlwind trip to Oregon (between having to sleep on the floor and Marc's cat allergies we really can't stand to stay longer than a couple days).

Marc and I also committed to give up all sugar and processed foods for a month starting next Saturday after my family leaves. We've had a couple holiday months of a bit more sugar and crappy stuff than I care to admit to and we could both use a healthy detox. I'm also trying to get him to eliminate dairy and gluten for that time to test for sensitivity-- I'm almost certain he has lactose intolerance but I want to see if it's more than that. He's not terribly enthusiastic about it, but then I make 90% of his food anyway.

I have been very engrossed in reading a book called "The UltraMind Solution" by Mark Hyman, MD. It is very much a culmination of what I learned in my Functional Medicine class, and though I disagree with Dr. Hyman on a point or two, overall it is exactly what I would write if I were going to write a book. When I finish reading I'll post a summary and tell you all about it-- I'm also in talks to design a nutrition class based on the book for a Wellness Center in Kirkland-- more on that later too.

How school stole christmas...

2009-12-18T13:36:00.001-08:00

I used to really like Christmas. Five years ago when we first bought our house and I wasn't in school I went crazy buying decorations and covering every inch of our house in festiveness. Since then, it's always a struggle. If school got out around the beginning of the month I could rally and it would be fine. Unfortunately, I tend to be done with school around the 18th of the month, at which point I am completely exhausted, my house is a total mess, and I have not done a single thing to get ready for Christmas. I really want to like Christmas, but I liken it to getting invited to Disneyland when you have the stomach flu-- any other time it would be really fun, but it's just hard to enjoy it when you aren't feeling up to it.

This is where I find myself today. I am so tired I can barely move, my house is a mess and I haven't bought a single gift. I did try very hard to go shop for at least Marc's family this morning, since we are celebrating Christmas with them this Sunday. I went to four stores looking for the sweatshirt Marc wants and did not find it, nor did I find the airpopper his sister wants. By that time I was nearly delirious in my exhaustion and came home to lay on the couch and recuperate before I do more errands.

I really want to send Christmas cards, reorganize my entire house, put up the tree, find the perfect gift for everyone and do lots of baking-- but right now I don't have the energy for any of it, which is terribly frustrating. Last year I didn't decorate for Christmas at all-- I was too tired and thought, well we are going to Oregon for Christmas anyway-- but we ended up being home due to the snow with no tree and we felt like we missed Christmas entirely. Somehow I need to find the energy but it's not going to be today.

Not exactly low-maintenance: why I'm not a typical Seattle girl

2009-12-11T11:29:00.000-08:00

I have been pondering lately why it is that Seattle girls are so frequently low-maintenance. The stereotypical Seattle girl wears jeans, super comfy if somewhat ugly shoes, Northface or similar jacket and not a stitch of makeup. In my rotations the past couple of weeks I saw a lot of women wearing very (suprisingly) stylish, work appropriate clothing, had good hair, but still not even a swipe of mascara. This phenomenon fascinates me. One of my friends from grad school (who is originally from the East Coast but has lived a number of years in Seattle) said she thought I was probably from the East Coast when she first met me because I didn't look like a Seattleite.

I was getting into my mom's makeup when I was very little (though she's never worn much makeup either so I don't really get it from her). From the time I was in 6th grade I have worn makeup almost every day of my life. I've gotten better as there was a time I didn't go anywhere except the gym without at least mascara. I admit I have applied makeup in a campground bathroom, worn it hiking, skiing, to the beach etc. now I will often run weekend errands to the grocery store, library etc without it, and skip it for the beach but that's about it. In the summer when I'm a little tan, I do wear significantly less makeup (it melts!) but I still do at least mascara and lip gloss, and most days a lot more. I probably apply 9 or 10 things to my face in the morning. I use mostly natural mineral makeup and except for my mascara I try to avoid parabens and other chemicals (I can't find an acceptable natural substitute for Diorshow mascara, sorry.)

It's not that I think I look horrible without it, but wearing it is so much a part of who I am I feel uncomfortably naked not wearing it. It's like a fun art project every morning I get to wear, and as a bonus it makes me look better. I love hanging around in Sephora playing with all the fun toys they have in there. Now that I think about it other women must be wearing makeup since Sephora hasn't gone out of business, but I don't see these people often. Only one of my childhood girlfriends regularly wears makeup-- everyone else will maybe wear it to a wedding or similar event.

I do feel a little weird sometimes being the only woman in the room with a full face of makeup. I was sitting in rounds at SCCA this week and looking around the room full of doctors, physician assistants, nurses and dietitians and not a one had even mascara on. No one I saw in a full day at UW Medical Center appeared to have any on either. It gets to be like wearing a cocktail dress and finding everyone else at the party is wearing jeans.

This phenomenon is very much a Pacific Northwest thing. When I went to college in Southern California I had the shock of my life when girls in my dorm got up really early to do their hair and put on tiny outfits before their 7am classes. I didn't really fit in there either-- I wore jeans and t-shirts every where instead of short skirts and heels. San Diego was bad enough-- I can't describe to you the extreme grooming practices of women in Los Angeles. The older women get the more they seem to be going for a plastic Barbie appearance, so I know it can go too far.

I'm not judging my fellow Seattle girls-- I know they could no sooner be comfortable wearing makeup every day than I would be not wearing it, I just wonder why we have this cultural phenomemon, and how I missed the memo when I was 12? Is it the rain? The outdoorsy activities? Water proof mascara does exist! Someone explain it to me.

Relax and Reload

2009-11-29T15:27:00.000-08:00

It is SOOOO nice to be home again. Last Friday I packed up my car, washed sheets, cleaned bathrooms and left my temporary home for the last time this year. Over the weekend I worked 16 hours at Ski Fever handing out Larabar samples. It was a pretty boring event-- we were told to expect 30,000 people and there couldn't have been more than 4,000. It turned out to be a great event for me as I got to chatting with the Chiropractor's office that was stationed next to us. As it turns out their office is thinking of bringing on a Nutritionist a couple days a week. Long story short, we hit it off and I went to the office last Wednesday to see the space and to get to know them a little better. Some time next year I may be setting up private practice in Kirkland-- I'll keep you posted!

Almost immediately after my meeting Wednesday I came down with a cold. Amazingly I went about 12 weeks working in medical settings around very sick people and I finally got sick sitting at home by myself (actually, I probably picked it up at Ski Fever). I fortunately did not seem to have the flu, and just spent a few days with a cold. As always when I get sick it started in my lungs-- ever since I had bronchitis a few years ago every illness settles there. We spent Thanksgiving with Marc's family, which was fun, though exhausting for me since I was not feeling well. I had to cancel doing product demos and dinner with an old friend on Saturday. I spent Friday and Saturday laying on the couch in sweatpants watching movies and bad TV (don't the networks know people are at home the day after Thanksgiving?! There was nothing on!) I'm feeling mostly better today and excited for my rotation this week at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. I get to sleep in my own bed, carpool with Marc and learn about oncology-- a perfect two weeks for sure!

Above are my silly girls-- they are difficult as always to capture because they move faster than my camera. I guess I need a high speed lens...

The return of Fatigue

2009-11-13T09:04:00.000-08:00

During grad school, off and on I would be sidled with deep fatigue that felt as if I was exhausted all the way to by bones. It came and went and treatment for both anemia and adrenal fatigue helped to eradicate it. Now it is back. Not all of the time, but some days, especially when I get a minute to hold still it returns. Wednesday I had the day off and had plans to get a great deal of work done on a presentation I have to do next week. I was fairly unproductive and felt like I could barely move much of the day-- yet yesterday I was buzzing around the hospital as if it had never happened. I also had beef for dinner and leftovers for lunch yesterday, making it murky as to whether I'm iron deficient or my adrenals are suffering.

The case for anemia: last year when I was anemic I took iron for two months and when my ferritin got just barely in the normal range (normal is between 15-150 or 200 depending on the lab-- mine started at 7 and went up to 35) my doctor said I should stop taking iron. Taking it made me feel immediately better, which the doctor said couldn't be due to the iron (apparently taking iron doesn't make you feel better right away). I think that when there is a range that is so huge for "normal" that maybe being just barely in the normal range is not going to work for every one. Plus, I have not been eating much iron lately (we have beef maybe once every other week, mainly because it is both expensive and because I don't have time to go to PCC very often and I refuse to eat it if it isn't grass fed), and being a girl, I lose iron.

The case for adrenal fatigue: I am not anywhere near as stressed doing this internship as I was in grad school, except that this fatigue started right after my two weeks in ICU hell, which consisted of very little sleep and a lot of stress. I also have been drinking coffee every day, and now I'm drinking it on the weekends too because avoiding it gives me a terrible headache and I don't have time to detox off it right now. Not so good for the adrenals.

So for now, I'm taking my adrenal support, taking iron and trying not to over do it. The fatigue is annoyingly getting in the way of me being consistent working out-- last week in honor of my birthday I went to the gym 5 days (it helped that my rotation didn't start until 9am so I could go in the morning). This week I've been too tired when I've had time.

The other thing that's weird about this term is I somehow, effortlessly learned portion control. I can not eat more than a small portion at a time, even of sweet things which have always been my achilles heel. The only thing I can think of, is that at the very beginning of the semester and again during ICU I was so stressed I lost my appetite entirely and it shrunk my stomach. At any rate I'm definitely not complaining.

I also have been having flare-ups of my TMJ, which usually rarely bothers me. Last night after a tense drive home I took an aleve and spent the evening holding ice to my face. If I had real health insurance I'd see a doctor, but since I don't I'm going to have to figure something else out. It is definitely tension related though.

I've been home more than away this week, which made for some stressful drives. I had Wednesday off and today class was cancelled, so I drove both ways to the hospital yesterday-- I'm so glad I don't do that every day! Three hours in the car is exhausting! After next week I move home, maybe for good, but at least until January-- I'm still not sure where my rotations will be next semester.

Older and wiser

2009-11-04T20:22:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow is my 30th birthday. I've been trying to pin down for a few weeks now how I feel about this, searching the corners of my psyche for an impending breakdown, but finding...nothing. I am at peace with this transition in my life. I know that birthdays that end in zero are often traumatic for people, reminding them perhaps of their own mortality and of time passing. Besides, as my husband pointed out to me, you either get older or you die, so given the choice, getting older is good!

The year I turned 25 my dad turned 50 and we jokingly agreed that we would stay those respective ages. When I turned 27 I did have a mini freak out, because in my mind I was 25 for two years, so when I hit 27 I felt as though I had missed a year. Though I facetiously invited people to my 5th annual 25th birthday party last year, I learned from that experience to own my age and live in the moment, rather than to try and hold on to time gone by, because you miss things in the moment when you are holding on to the past.

In some ways it is a tremendous relief to enter my thirties. I was never a very typical twenty something-- I have been married since 6 weeks after my 21st birthday. I worked multiple jobs through college, rarely went out, am not much of a drinker and would rather hang out with friends at home than in a crowded bar. I always kind of felt like something was wrong with me and I somehow could not quite identify with my peer group on this level. Now I am entering a decade of my life where many of my friends are in the swing of their careers and starting to have children and I feel like my life goals are more in line with those of my peers. In some ways the struggle of my twenties through college and grad school have all lead up to this moment. In six months I will finally be done with higher education and can at last GET ON WITH IT and get a job, start a career and have babies.

****Yes!!!-- I am looking forward to my 30s. *****

Still here

2009-10-28T21:11:00.000-07:00

I haven't been doing a very good job at keeping up this blog, I think mainly because all the internship stuff goes on my other blog and I don't have much of a life otherwise, so there isn't much to say! I seem to have found some semblance of balance with my eating, though still I'm not getting enough exercise, mainly because I'm way too tired.

During the week I have been eating very well. I stopped bringing anything with sugar in it with me, and since there are no grocery stores near by I really only eat what I bring. I usually eat a hard boiled egg or two, a banana and coffee or tea in the morning-- usually I can't quite manage to get down two eggs but I try. (I used to always be a breakfast person and now I have trouble-- I guess because I used to eat breakfast when I got to class at 9 or 10 and now I'm eating before 8). Lunch for the past several weeks has been chicken chili over spinach. Last week when I was stressed into no appetite from my horrific ICU rotation I was only eating maybe 3/4 of a cup of chili but this week I'm more hungry so a little more. For dinner every day I have chicken salad and half a yam, or occasionally just chicken yam and cooked greens. I eat a ridiculous amount of larabars (3 sometimes 4 of the sample size ones in a day is not uncommon, never less than two) and usually grapes and half an apple during the day. Once or twice a week I get a soymilk latte at Starbucks. That's it-- I have no other options (well, okay, today I did eat popcorn but that's not the norm and it upset my stomach just like it always does).

I am not sure if I am just tired from stress-- which seems unlikely since this week I have nothing to do, or if perhaps my anemia has returned. Maybe a few days of iron would be helpful-- I have been pretty faithfully taking my multivitamin, but it does not contain iron. I'm thinking next week when the time changes I might try to work out in the morning, since it won't seem like I'm getting up earlier, but we'll see how that goes given that I am not really a morning person. Lately I seem to get to the gym once, maybe twice if I'm lucky in a week. I need to do better-- I'm feeling quite out of shape.

Oh, and then there's the weekend food-- after all that ridiculous perfection all week, I go home and eat lots of gluten free pasta, chocolate cake and other not so good things-- but I actually have lost a couple pounds and my clothes fit better so it doesn't seem to be hurting anything. I have been actually doing a very good job of eating just until I'm full and then stopping without over eating. Getting protein at every meal and much less sugar has helped a lot with that.

Emotionally the whole not living at home with my husband situation is getting pretty old. I have less than four weeks to go until I get to move home and it can't come soon enough. I am extremely lucky to get to live so close to my rotations with a very lovely person, but it's still not the same as living in my own house with my best buddy and my chickens. The only thing I will say, is it has definitely reminded us not to take each other for granted, because our time together is precious.

Five out of seven chickens are laying eggs now. Strangely the two younger ones started laying before two of their big sisters. Roxie is such a greedy girl that if you don't have treats for her when you go outside she'll jump up and nip your fingers. She also will come running the minute you get into her sight and will follow you all over the yard until she finally decides you really don't have food. It's very funny and completely exasperating at the same time. I think it is this desperate search for the best food that makes the yolks of her eggs the darkest and richest orange.

Skittles still insists on trying to sleep in the tree every night. Last Saturday it was absolutely pouring outside and pitch dark. I was making dinner when we suddenly realized we hadn't put the chickens away. Marc went out in the rain to find only Skittles in the tree, her friends having deserted her for the dry chicken house. So stubborn! Normally four of the five older chickens end up in the tree at night when they are let out of their pen and we have to retrieve them every time. Olive stays in the house with the younger two because she is too little to fly that far. The youngest two are by far the fattest and biggest now and I doubt they could fly that far if they wanted, but they never seem to want to anyway.

That's about all that's going on with me-- I drive home every Friday, do absolutely nothing except cook and eat until Sunday morning and then frantically do laundry and cook for the following week. Not the most glamorous of lives, but there you have it. A week from tomorrow is my 30th birthday and I have not a clue how to commemorate it. I might very well spend it sitting on my couch eating cake.

Update

2009-10-10T11:58:00.000-07:00

This was a weird week. Last Sunday I stayed home instead of driving down to Dupont, which meant I had to get up at 4:30 in the morning on Monday in order to get to the hospital on time because I had to drop my food and stuff off at the house before I went to work, as well as get dressed since all my work clothes are down there. I was a little brain dead Monday and then it took two more days to get back to normal. It was really nice having Sunday evening at home though.

I was really tired last weekend and couldn't motivate myself to cook, so I had organic chicken chili from a can every day for lunch this week. I am getting tired of eating the same thing every day (some kind of soup for lunch, chicken, salad and a starch for dinner) but my schedule is about to get more crazy, so I definitely am not going to have time for cooking. The next two weeks I'm going to have to be at the hospital at 7am instead of 8 for ICU rounds, and the two weeks after that I'm driving to Chehalis, Aberdeen or Lacey for Renal rotation (depending on the day)-- about an hour each way on average (Lacey's not so far but the other two are).

In chicken news, the "little kids" are now giant chickens much bigger than the other five. We got one mystery egg this week-- it was kind of light tan/pinkish and we aren't sure who laid it. That's the first new egg we've had, despite the fact the three who are laying have been at it for over a month.

The biggest news-- Marc's dad came home at last yesterday. Due to his surgical wounds the doctor did not want him to fly (apparently if the cabin loses pressure that is very bad) so Marc's mom went down and brought him back on the train, and we went to pick them up. We had a flash of what he will look like in 20 years-- he lost so much weight in the hospital the skin on his face looks slack and loose, and he is still very weak from laying in a bed for 5 weeks and needs a cane for support. We took him home and talked about the importance of protein for healing. He is also anemic and the dietitian at the hospital told him to eat red meat (which they haven't eaten for years and years) so I suggested grass fed beef, which I am off to PCC shortly to fetch for them. I calculated his protein needs and made suggestions for ways to meet them. Then I went through all his medications and we discussed whether he should go back on his blood pressure and cholesterol lowering meds, which were not mentioned at the hospital. I encouraged him to see his doctor right away to discuss those, because especially with the blood pressure meds, not knowing where his blood pressure is right now, taking those could cause him to pass out if he doesn't need them, and he does not need that now. We got him as set up as best we could before we left. A home health nurse was due to come this morning and dress his wounds, so he's in good hands. It's comforting to know he's at home in his own bed instead of 1200 miles away in a hospital. *Note-- the hospital sent home copies of his medical chart and I was unpleasantly suprised. It seems they do every thing by hand, which means that 99% of the chart was completely illegible. The RD had neat handwriting so I could read her notes, but they definitely were not as detailed as the ones we write at Madigan. This is reason enough to type chart notes-- I hope they have very good oral communication and never get sued, because I can't see how you would be able to tell what is going on with a patient by looking at these chicken scratches!

I'm two weeks out from my mid-term, with a ton of vocabulary and reading to review before my ICU rotation begins this week, and all I want to do is watch movies and be lazy-- I don't think that's going to happen.

Why Sundays Suck

2009-09-27T22:17:00.000-07:00

Another whirlwind weekend ended too soon. Not even enough time to come up with a decent picture for this post! Friday night I arrived home excited to see Marc-- unfortunately he was absolutely exhausted after a week of long days and early mornings at work and fell asleep very early. I stayed up late catching up on Greys Anatomy and feeling sorry for myself.

Saturday morning I had my first ever facial-- it was amazing and way better than any massage I've ever had. I got a shoulder massage (where 90% of my tension goes) plus glorious hot towels put on my face and lots of lovely moisturizing creams rubbed into my skin, all of which left me soft and glowing. I'm definitely going to be doing that again!

I picked up Marc from playing football with some of his grad-school friends, and we dashed home to change and head back to Seattle for my friend Erik's wedding. I've known Erik since 8th grade, and in fact he was my very first boyfriend when we were both 14. It was wonderful to see him so happy, and great to see old friends. I would have liked to stay longer, but with never enough time in the weekend, Marc and I left the reception not long after the cake was cut and went home to watch movies and have quiet time together.

Too soon Sunday had rolled around again. I am coming to hate Sundays. We spent the morning doing errands, going to the grocery store, buying grass seed to try and keep our hateful lawn from dying completely, the post office and the library. I spent the rest of the afternoon making pea soup and chicken breasts, chopping vegetables and preparing for the week with breaks to to laundry and pick tomatoes from my garden. I planned on leaving at about seven to head back to Dupont, but actually left around eight.

Every Sunday Marc semi-jokingly tries to get me to stay Sunday night and drive down Monday morning. To allow for traffic and to come to the house before I have to be at the hospital in order to drop off my food and other stuff I would have to get up at 4am and I'm simply unwilling to do this. But it still makes me feel guilty for not grabbing hold of every spare second we have together. Every Sunday night that moment when I see his sad eyes as I drive away is the worst part of the week. This was the first time I didn't cry at least. I suppose it's ridiculous given that we get to see each other every weekend and I know people who are forced apart for much longer periods, but I still hate it. (But not so much that I want to drive three hours every day!) I am grateful I am able to stay so close to the hospital and all week long I'm glad I am here-- but Sunday nights are not my favorite part of the week. Sundays in general are stressful and busy and I never get everything done.

Every week I get here and find I've forgotten something. Last week I forgot a number of food items. This week I forgot my headphones which means either a trip to the Best Buy in Lacey or a week of no music at the gym or while I study. And now I need to get to bed, before another week of learning inpatient nutrition and trying to get myself back in shape-- I've only been making it to the gym two or three days a week and this week I'm determined to make that four.

Caffeine Junky?

2009-09-20T09:12:00.000-07:00

I think I'm becoming a caffeine person three weeks into my internship. It was a hard adjustment in the second week when we started having to be there at 8 instead of 10 after a summer of being lazy, and I started drinking green tea every morning. Then I started bringing tea into the hospital with me because I didn't have time to finish it in the morning and gradually that increased to a second giant mug of tea in the day. Then J. (a fellow intern) and I started going to get coffee in the afternoons because we can get it free after lunch but you don't want to venture into the cafeteria alone because the men who work in the kitchen like to tease and it can be overwhelming without backup. At first I got mostly decaf with a splash of caffeinated, but then one day there wasn't any decaf. Fast forward to yesterday when I had no caffeine and had a headache all day. Now two mugs of green tea and half a cup of coffee is hardly breaking any caffeine records, but if you haven't noticed by now, I'm super sensitive to everything. I have also discovered that Marc drinks 32 oz of coffee every day at work, but some how does not suffer headaches on the weekend when he has none. Mysterious.

I have been doing a good job with self care, caffeine not withstanding. Since there are no grocery stores close to where I am staying I make all my food ahead and eat the same thing every day: smoothie for breakfast, chicken salad with some kind of starch (rice, quinoa, potatoes) for lunch and some kind of legume soup for dinner (two weeks ago it was lentil, last week it was split pea, this week I'm making chili). I eat fruit and larabars between, and I admit I have been eating chocolate covered almonds from the bulk bin, but it occurred to me if I don't buy them I'll be forced into sugar-free week days since I don't really have access to anything without a longish drive so this week I'm doing without those. I also got a one week trial to a gym that is very close and went after I got off three days this week-- next week I hope to increase that to four days after I sign up. I'm definitely getting 7 hours of sleep, and often I get 8. With the increase in activity I feel like I need more and I need to try and make myself go to bed sooner.

It's a weird alternate reality I live in five days a week, and then I come crashing back into my life for 48 hours, with barely enough time to catch my breath before I'm off again. Strangely I miss Marc most when I first get home and it all hits me, as if I have been suppressing or ignoring it all week long, only to have it rise up and out when I come home again.

I had a lazy, rainy day yesterday. Marc and I stuck close to each other and did errands and watched movies. I haven't gotten any homework done yet, which means today like most Sundays will be frantic as I try to get work done, make soup and chicken and quinoa to last me the week, do more errands and try to drive back to Dupont before it gets too late.

Yay chickens

2009-09-12T13:34:00.001-07:00

To get this picture I had to eat larabars for breakfast this morning because I was short one green egg and when I went out there Kitty was busy sitting on her egg and I didn't want to bother her. So we had eggs for lunch instead.

This morning we went to the Seattle Tilth Harvest festival where we saw a one year old Speckled Sussex chicken-- the same kind Roxie is, and were a little stunned by how big she is going to get. We are hoping the other chickens don't all get that big or else their house is going to be too small!

This morning we found out Marc's dad could be in the hospital in LA for quite a while longer, so we may be planning a weekend trip to LA soon. It frustrates me because I hear third-hand generalizations about his diagnosis in lay terms, when if I knew the medical diagnosis I could understand what that means a lot better than my family does. I wish he were here where we could go visit him and advocate for him-- I got a little emotional the other day when I watched a patient consultation at Madigan with a man who had had a heart attack and was in the hospital. Even though his situation was different than my father in law's, it reminded me of him and made me sad. I keep demanding Marc ask him about his diet and if they are giving him supplemental nutrition (like Ensure which is absolute crap but he needs protein to heal and that's what hospitals have). He said he's eating but the portions are tiny and he's still hungry. My guess is they are giving him the cardiac diet which is probably designed for people who need to lose weight-- he needs to gain it and he needs enough calories to heal from his wounds. I wish I could read his chart and see what they are doing for him.

This is my first weekend home where I only get two days. It's already near 2pm and I have to get started on my mountain of homework. If I want to have any hope of exercising and getting enough sleep during the week I need to get my homework done now.

Bastyr friends-- I am missing you....

Labor Day Labors

2009-09-08T20:12:00.000-07:00

I had a long, but not terribly relaxing holiday weekend. Things at my weekday house are very simplified—I am here to do my internship and things related to it. There are few distractions. When I got home felt very anxious about all the things I should be doing. I had a TON of homework, but when I was doing it I felt like I should be spending time with Marc. Every break from homework I took there was laundry to do, grocery shopping and preparing for the week, organization I should have done before my internship started etc—more things to do then there was time to do them, which put me on edge. I did manage to get the majority of my homework (which is due Friday) done—I would have had it all done except we had a project comparing the ADA’s Evidence Based Library with the Cochrane database and I couldn’t figure out how to find what I needed in Cochrane without a password—emails from my fellow interns told me I wasn’t the only one having problems. I also have this compulsion to get ahead on my homework because we have so many big things due later on in the quarter that I don’t want things to start piling up—so anxiety reigned all weekend.

As I was getting ready to leave I was very sad to leave Marc and the chix—but as soon as I got here I felt calm and focused again.

Marc did a nice job this weekend building gates so that our yard, which was previously 80% fenced is now completely fenced. Our next door neighbor told us our chickens had been going on adventures through not only his yard, but the next yard over and while he found it amusing, we were worried about a dog getting them. Now they are (hopefully) contained to their own yard.

I did more food preparation this week. On Sunday I made a whole chicken, which I still have meat leftover from. I also made bone broth from the bones and then made a lentil soup out of that today—it made a ton of soup—I brought half with me and the other half went in the freezer at home. I pre-cut raw veggies for Marc and I, as well as melon and strawberries. I also harvested kale and collards from my garden so I can have more greens than just salad this week. I probably brought too much food this time, since once again I am only here four days, but eventually I’ll figure out the system. I felt like I was bringing a ton of luggage again this time, but really half of it was groceries and another quarter was toiletries like shampoo, makeup and a hairdryer that I use both places.

I did manage to get to the gym twice this weekend. I haven’t been doing very high intensity workouts, mostly because I have been out of the habit of going for about a month now and I can’t afford to burn myself out—once I get used to the habit again I’ll increase the intensity. I am looking into a gym down here, but will only sign up if it isn’t expensive and I can do a three month membership since I have no idea where I’ll be next semester.

2009-09-04T08:59:00.001-07:00

I'm happy to be home again for a long weekend after my first week of rotation. In honor of my homecoming one of the aracauna chickens (either Muffin or Kitty) laid her first egg! I can tell because it is green. So we are up to three of the five older chickens laying-- I expect they will all be laying by end of October, and the little kids are due to lay in November, though by then it will be dark and so we might not get much from them.

I was a little worried my chickens with their little pea brains would forget me in four days, but when I came around into the yard last night they all came running. I nearly cried.

Yesterday I left the hospital at 4:45 and arrived home at 6:15. I actually didn't hit much traffic-- fortunately it seemed most of the Seahawks traffic was going South because Southbound traffic was barely moving. If Northbound had been that bad it would have taken me three hours. I am so grateful I don't have to make that drive every day!

I woke up today to find I lost a couple pounds-- while I'm not unhappy to see the scale move in that direction, I know I haven't been eating enough, mainly because the whole week before I left for my internship I was so stressed I couldn't eat much and so I didn't plan my food very well for the week and pretty much ate beans, rice and lettuce for lunch and dinner for several days. (I was snacking on a few chocolate covered almonds, but apparently that didn't matter). I also am not getting enough exercise-- I'm going to look into the local gym when I get back down there on Tuesday, though since I'm expecting to have 10 hour days this week I'm not entirely sure when I'll have time. I need to plan my menus a little more thoughtfully now that my appetite is better.

We still have family medical drama-- Marc's dad is still in the hospital, though they moved him to a different LA hospital so he could get more specialty care. He had a heart attack, flesh eating bacterial infection, and a big absess between his heart and lungs they were afraid was a tumor but fortunately turned out not to be. In order to do a biopsy of the absess they had to collapse one of his lungs. It's scary and hard for all of us, but I am so thankful that he is getting good medical care and that things weren't even worse. Hopefully some time next week Marc will be able to fly down to LA and bring him home.

New Adventure

2009-08-31T18:48:00.001-07:00

Yesterday Marc and I drove (in two cars) down to Dupont with a car load full of stuff. I unloaded all of my boxes and then he and I went to dinner at a nearby pizza restaurant (I had salad). I've been so anxious the past week that I've had very little appetite, but it was a pretty good salad. Then before I knew it he was driving away and I was left to start my new adventure. I will say, living here is not exactly roughing it. I have my own bathroom and bedroom next to the den where there is internet access and all of it overlooks a nice golf course and Mt Rainier. Vicki, my roommate, reminds me of my own mom and is always trying to take care of me, making sure I know where to go, asking if I'm hungry etc. As I relax into this new situation I'm slowly getting my appetite back, but I've shrunk my stomach so that I can't seem to eat very much at one time-- I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing!

I didn't sleep very well last night-- not surprising given a big day today plus an unfamiliar bed, but by the time I went to bed I was no longer anxious and woke up feeling pretty calm-- mainly because I realized we just have class this week and that I'm going to be just fine staying here.

On Saturday Marc and I got new cell phones and unlimited text messaging and it's fantastic-- neither of us necessarily likes to talk on the phone forever, but we always have little updates to share throughout the day and we text each other all evening and whenever I get a break during the day. It makes him seem less far away.

The food situation is interesting because I shopped for groceries when I had zero appetite and most food sounded terrible, so I don't think I quite brought enough of the right things. This morning I had my usual smoothie, for lunch I brought a pinto bean, lettuce, tomato and olive salad (I don't have enough olives to make it through the whole week though). And dinner I made potatoes, chicken sausage and salad, but cooking dinner and cleaning up took way longer than I'm going to have when we get longer shifts. By Thursday I might be eating oatmeal for dinner. The closest grocery store is 8 miles away in Lacey, which means fighting traffic on the freeway to go there, so I'm trying to make it to the weekend without needing to shop. Overall though, I'm settling into things and feeling better.

EDITED (link should work now). For more on my first day at my internship, you can read my new blog here: http://diaryofadieteticintern.blogspot.com/

Moving Day

2009-08-29T14:31:00.000-07:00

Today I'm packing up the most essential of my belongings-- computer, internship wardrobe, a few key textbooks, put them all in my beat up Jeep and drive 90 minutes South to Dupont, because tomorrow is the day when five years of studying culminates and I begin my practical education-- whether I'm ready or not.

My living arrangements came together finally and beautifully. I met my friend Stephanie in seventh grade-- neither of us remembers if we first became friends because our flute teacher put us together to play duets, or because we went to the same church youth group, but either way, we've been friends ever since. It has been my extreme good fortune that Stephanie's mom works as a nurse at Madigan, where I will be doing my internship, and has graciously offered to let me live at her house only a few miles from the base for minimal rent.

I also know I am incredibly lucky to have an internship in-state at all, and it would be much harder if I were packing up and moving to Texas or Idaho or who knows where else. I am very lucky that every weekend I will be able to come home and see Marc and my chickens and come back to my life.

Never-the-less, I am feeling sad. Other than one miserable year in a dorm with a roommate I disliked, I have never even *kind of* been on my own before. Marc and I moved in together 10 years ago, when I was 19. The longest we have ever been apart is 3 weeks, when Marc had to do job training in Texas. He is my support system, my biggest cheerleader and my safety net. While I know he is still here for me, only an hour and change away I am feeling vulnerable not to have him to come home to every night.

Oh the other hand, it will be very good in some ways as I will have fewer distractions in the evening as the inevitable mountains of homework and preparation add up, I will have nothing but dietetics to draw my focus.

On top of this, I am missing my Bastyr friends-- it is scary to go into this new and intense phase of my education without them-- where is Laura to explain the mechanism to me when I forget and Reed to simultaneously know the answer, correct the professor and make me laugh, and Laine to get mad at Reed for all of the above? Who is going to greet me in the mornings drinking murky beverages from jars or get irate about the state of agriculture in America over lunch? The world outside the Bastyr bubble is a bittersweet one-- it is what we all worked so hard to achieve and yet in order to get what we wanted we have to leave behind something equally special.

So it with is this confusing mix of anticipation, gratitude, apprehension and a little bit of sadness that I embark on this new journey. On top of all of this-- my father-in-law is in the hospital in Los Angeles, having had a heart attack while on a business trip and has been diagnosed with a bacterial blood infection. Though his prognosis seems good, it feels wrong to leave my family during this time of crisis, and yet leaving is exactly what I have to do.

I have no doubt this will be a year of great growth, not only professionally but personally, as I learn to navigate the world much more on my own than I ever have been before.

Weird Symptoms

2009-08-28T09:39:00.000-07:00

About a month ago I had several days of dizzy spells and weird headaches. I thought this was due to something I was eating or allergies. Yesterday it came back with a vengeance-- I was racking my brain trying to figure out what I could have eaten (because I'm a nutritionist so of course everything is caused by food in my mind) to have caused this. I had a couple meals out this week and it started not long after having lunch out with friends, but I had chicken salad with raspberry vinagrette, and I didn't have any food allergy symptoms so that seemed unlikely. Finally it clicked-- one month ago I had the first of the Hepatitis B vaccine series, and on Tuesday I had the second dose-- the symptoms are most likely related to the vaccine, especially given my wild over sensitivity to everything. I felt so bad yesterday that I ended up having to miss a friend's bridal shower last night.

Yesterday in trying to figure out what was wrong with me I tested my blood glucose (I have a monitor and a few test strips I got for free at the ADA conference). After eating it was 103, which is completely fine, though a little higher than I like to see. (More on this in a minute). The last couple days I've also had very little appetite- yesterday I had a smoothie for breakfast and a kombucha and about 4 almonds at lunch time and didn't feel like eating again until dinner (which was gluten-free spaghetti with chicken sausage and kale) and a sorbet bar.

This morning I got up around 8:30 and was curious about my fasting blood sugar so I tested again before eating. It took a couple tries (it took so long for me to prick my finger that the tester timed out) but when I finally got a reading it was 113!! Fasting blood glucose between 100-124 is pre-diabetes. I had this test done properly in a lab last November and it was upper 90s I remember. It could be just a fluke-- I will test again tomorrow, and it could be another side effect of my body trying to get rid of the yucky vaccine, but it also serves as a warning that I need to get myself back into a regular exercise routine and eat protein at every meal like a good girl.

Gluten-Free Berry Cobbler

2009-08-20T14:57:00.000-07:00

All summer I have been working on perfecting my berry cobbler. I started with this recipe but it was missing something. After a number of tweaks I think I have it just about perfect. A note: you could probably substitute arrowroot instead of the cornstarch to avoid supporting genetically modified foods (since I've never seen non-GMO cornstarch)-- I just don't have any arrowroot on hand . Sometime I will try making this with all Rapadura (which is minimally processed sugar cane) instead of the brown sugar, but I haven't gotten there yet.

Ingredients

Filling:
4 cups fruit-- I use two or three kinds of berries
1 Tablespoon Florida crystals/evaporated cane juice
1.5 Tablespoons corn starch
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/3 cup water
1 T sweet vinegar (I used fig vinegar)

Mix all the ingredients except the fruit together first, then add to the fruit and mix throughly.

Topping:
3/4 cup Earth Balance, softened (by all means, use real butter if you aren't allergic to it like me)
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup Rapadura
1 cup gluten free oats
1/3 cup gluten free flour blend (I used Bob's Red Mill)
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Mix all of the above and then spread fruit mixture into a 9 x 9 glass pan and spread the topping evenly over the fruit. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes. Serve warm.

Lazy and liking it

2009-08-18T18:02:00.000-07:00

This is the first time in at least two years, maybe longer where I have had enough time to just do nothing, without being so completely exhausted to enjoy it. Since we returned from vacation I have been watching movies, gardening, reading and hanging out with friends. The most surprising thing has been that I have been eating pretty much whatever I feel like. Obviously minus allergens, I have pretty much ignored every self-imposed rule I ever had. I have been eating cold cereal for random meals like a college kid (well, it's organic crispy brown rice with almond milk, so maybe not exactly like a college kid) ever since we got back from Hawaii (it's not the same without the papaya, but berries and bananas in it work too). Almost every night I stay up reading while drinking wine and eating chocolate covered macadamias we brought back from Hawaii (I had a hell of a time finding some that didn't have corn syrup or milk in them). Not to say that it's been all bad-- I made vegan pesto this week and served it on brown rice pasta and chicken. I've been eating a lot of burritos with organic refried beans, tomatoes, salsa and greens. On the days I don't eat cereal in the morning I have a big smoothie with kale and collards from my garden in it. It has been an interesting experiment. What's good: without me constantly trying to eliminate things like starch and sugar from my diet I am less likely to go crazy on them, knowing I can have them when I want. I have not once overeaten or eaten past fullness in three weeks. I eat until I'm full and then I stop. Despite all the sugar and carbs and alcohol my weight has stayed pretty stable or maybe even gone down slightly. What's bad: I have headaches almost every day and I'm not sure what is causing them. When I go too long without food after having had just starch like cereal for breakfast I get shaky and brain dead way faster than if I had eaten a balanced meal. I've had chronic sore throats on and off most of the summer, and my brain isn't working very well. I also don't wake up feeling rested, which I am guessing is due to drinking wine every night. Most of these are signs that I'm not balancing my blood sugar very well and that likely the sugar or some other additive in the processed foods I've been eating is effecting me negatively. Also, other than some gardening I haven't gotten any exercise since we got back from vacation.

Somewhere in the midst of these extremes is a place of balance that I need to find. I can not go into my internship with a carb hangover (or the regular kind of hangover for that matter) but at the same time it's so much healthier for me not to be so compulsive and controlling about what I eat. Some time soon I hope to find where that balance is-- in the mean time it has been a very interesting experiment.

EGGS! And a zoo day

2009-08-16T22:35:00.001-07:00

Last night after dark we were putting our silly chickens to bed (from the tree where they were roosted as usual) when Marc called me over to the back of the chicken house, claiming that Roxie wanted me to say goodnight to her. When I got there he pointed to a row of four, tiny perfect eggs! I was stunned speechless. I wasn't expecting eggs for a good month at least, and these were so small, robin egg sized. This morning I took these pictures, though I should have put them in my hand so you would have some sense of the size. We went back out later in the morning to try and take another picture and were surprised to find their Mommy sitting on them. I was certain the first eggs would come from Liz Lemon or Skittles, as they are the most mature seeming and top of the pecking order. Imagine my surprise to find my little, sweet-natured Phoenix Olive sitting on her eggs! Phoenix chickens, according to my research, aren't very reliable egg layers-- people mostly keep them because they are pretty. I have no idea how often she is laying--we were gone a week and haven't been checking closely in their house so who knows how long they've been there. We were just talking about setting up proper laying boxes, and here we found eggs!

Today Marc and I went to the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma. We had fun visiting all the different animals, and especially enjoyed the aquarium which had a fabulous exhibit of all local fish in a big tank environment. Marc was ravenous so we left the park in search of food and stumbled across a place serving Bison burgers. We each had one, mine was without the bun and I'm sure they probably thought I was on a low-carb diet. It was good, though very hard to eat with only a plastic fork. Afterwards we went to my friend Zanna's birthday party which was in Point Defiance Park. It was really fun to catch up with some of my old friends and I was really glad we had that burger because I ended up only eating a handful of chips and a few cherries (and a glass of wine) at the BBQ. The sun finally came back and we had a really great day.