Is anyone out there? Time for a reboot

I haven't posted to this blog for over a year, mainly because it was a whole foods/primal/paleo/grain-free eating blog and I haven't eaten that way in a long time.  Until now.

I had my second baby (Marshall) three months ago.  I had a difficult pregnancy-- I was exhausted, nauseated, lots of back pain and cranky, while wrangling a not quite two year old and a nearly full time job.  It was a lot and I didn't eat as well as I should have and I definitely didn't get enough exercise.  If we have any more kids I do not want to go through pregnancy so broken.

When my second was about 8 weeks old I started really feeling ready to get my life together, stop languishing in the land of too much sugar and grains and get back on track.  I joined a new gym that does only personal training of the high intensity kind-- I like Cross Fit fine but I needed something a little more one on one given my propensity to injure myself.  And at the end of January, after Max's second birthday  I said good bye to all but a tiny bit of sugar (I still have a few bites of very dark chocolate here and there).  

I had been eating dairy for over a year, but Mars is starting to develop eczema so it's a good excuse to ditch it for awhile and see if he improves.  In the week since I've been off it my digestion has been better, so I suspect I'm better off without it. 

What's working?  Planning and cooking ahead a lot.  I work 2 long days a week, and on the other days it's not practical to cook 3+ meals a day with two little kids underfoot.  I plan our dinners on the weekend, shop for most of it, and cook ahead some stuff.  That combined with making extra every time so I don't have to cook every night is helping.  I am still struggling with how many carbs and how much to eat to slowly get this baby weight off but support breast feeding- more on that later.

So this week, here's what we are eating:

Sunday: we had beef taco salad.  No real recipe, just a bunch of cumin and garlic in ground beef, plus lettuce, avocado, salsa and cheese for the guys. Not going to lie-- we also had Phad Thai today.  Sometimes you just need take out.

Monday: leftover taco salad
Tuesday: Crock pot pot roast, yams, broccoli
Wednesday: zuchini "noodles" and meat balls
Thursday: sausage/yam/apple bake (recipe soon)
Friday: no bun burgers

What I made ahead:
egg casserole-- I throw some kind of meat (sausage, ham, ground turkey etc), some vegetable (kale/broccoli), and a dozen eggs in a 9x13 pan with some salt and pepper and maybe garlic or basil and bake it.  It was better with cheese but it's still good and it saves me time making breakfast.

yams-- between me and the two year old we go through an insane number of these. I also some times do squash but prefer sweet potato.

roasted vegetables-- I am on a brussels sprouts kick, did some broccoli too.

mushrooms-- this is seriously one of my favorite things.  Incredibly delicious on anything savory

I made some bacon too but ended up snacking on half of it.  I think bacon is my new candy.  Oops.

Lunch is always leftover dinner from the day before (or a couple days if I made tons). 

I have lost somewhere between 2-5 pounds so far-- it seems to vary.  At least it's going in the right direction-- I still have around 15-20 pounds of baby weight to go.  It doesn't come off as easily the second time, in case you are wondering. 

Time to feed the baby and think about bedtime.

Getting it together

One of the downsides to being a professional in the world of nutrition is people in your life expect you to have it all together.  They look to you as an example.  Everyone from my family to my babysitter to my coworkers are interested in what I'm eating, and if I have it in my house, or I eat it once it is seen as an endorsement.  That is a lot of pressure.  And now I am feeding an almost 10 month old, who is interested in everything Mommy and Daddy are eating and I feel overwhelmed by all of it because while I have a lot of information, I don't have all the answers, and I don't even follow my own advice sometimes.

Even more than the fact I don't have a ton of time with a full-time job and a baby, that is what has kept me away from this blog.  But at the same time blogs that are bossy and take the tone that they know everything sometimes irritate the crap out of me.  So here it is-- I eat probably 70% whole foods, paleo-ish, with too much gluten-free bread and way too much chocolate.  I have been experimenting with dairy-- I think I am doing better with cultured dairy than I used to-- yogurt seems ok, and cultured butter, small bits of cheese but too much dairy gives me a stomach ache.  My digestion is not all that good.  My energy is up and down, but I also have a child who is a terrible sleeper, which is the other part of the puzzle-- being chronically exhausted doesn't lead to making the best food choices.  I am still breastfeeding so I need a good dose of calories and carbs, and I realized recently I eat meal portions I would have eaten pre-pregnancy and then I'm still starving an hour later and I eat too much sugar or bread.  Eating MORE real food helps.  Planning ahead, cooking ahead, and being best friends with my crockpot helps.

I do need a reset, a chance to give my body a break from sugar and grains again, so after Thanksgiving (which we are celebrating Friday instead of Thursday) I'm going to do the Whole 30/sugar detox deal until Christmas.  It's not going to be low carb.  Low carb does not work for me even when I'm not nursing.  Though I could stand to drop some body fat it isn't actually about that either-- my main concern is that I am the primary food supply for my kid-- I plan to keep breastfeeding until he's 18 months or so.  But getting more nutrients in and not abusing my poor gut would be a good thing.

Max eats 90% food I make with a little bit of Ella's Kitchen stuff thrown in for convenience.  He mostly gets pureed food-- generally a starchy vegetable (sweet potato/carrots/squash) and or fruit (apples/pears mostly), sometimes greens and usually bone broth. He gets cod liver oil maybe every third day when I remember to put it in his food. In the past couple weeks I've started adding chicken and tomorrow he's getting leftover beef stew, pureed.  He does munch on brown rice puffs, but it's more for him to practice eating then substance-- he probably ends up eating a teaspoon of actual rice as mostly they end up on the floor. I don't otherwise give him much in the way of grains.  He does eat chickpeas a few times a week as I discovered at a party that he adores hummus.  He sometimes will feed himself pears or banana, but so far self-feeding is messy and not very nutritive.  He's an enthusiastic eater and likes everything I've made him so far, though not a fan of the majority of commercial baby food for some reason, other than the Ella's kind.

As he approaches a year, I have to make some decisions about if I will introduce dairy, if so when and what kind (goat? cow? raw? organic? only cultured? etc.) and at what point I will give him a bit of gluten to test for a reaction (I don't anticipate gluten being a big part of his diet, but I need to know what if any reaction to expect if he gets it accidentally.

I would love to get more exercise-- I get to the gym 1-2 days a week.  Less if Max is really sleeping poorly, more if he's doing better.  3-4 days a week would be awesome, but sometimes (most times!) I am just too tired.

I would say I'm back to my pre-pregnancy weight, and back to my pre-paleo, pre-crossfit body but I really could do better and want to do better.  Soon.  Crossfit is not in the budget at the moment and doesn't have childcare, so I'm doing a weights program on my own at a gym with daycare.

So there it is-- the ugly truth.  The dietitian is not perfect. But working on getting better for sure.  

Best Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Cookies EVER

I have made a lot of cookies in my life. My mom says I was helping her at age 2 and doing it myself (except for the oven part) by age 6. I probably made cookies on a weekly basis in junior high and high school-- usually some version of chocolate chip. I do not need a recipe as the basic Tollhouse recipe is burned into my permanent memory. When I went off dairy it was a pretty easy transition, as Earth Balance Margerine, while not a whole food, does stand in nicely for butter. Giving up gluten, however, stumped me. No matter which combination of flours I tried they turned out too crumbly and kind of one-note. Last Fall I made dozens and dozens of cookies, inspired by a project in food science where we had to try two different variations on cookies and compare what happened. I used the left-over ingredients to make probably five or six more batches, but I never succeeded in doing what I wanted and was so sick of cookies I hadn't made any since then, until last night. The following recipe was something I literally invented as I went along, and when I tasted the first one I had to run back to the kitchen and stare at the ingredients to try and remember what I did. For the first time they came out soft and chewy and sweet. As with all great-gluten free recipes, the combination of flours is extensive and weird, but you will not get the same results if you substitute other flours. Enjoy!

Ingredients:

3/4 cup quinoa flour
1/4 cup sorghum flour
1 cup brown rice flour
1/4 cup tapioca starch
1 tablespoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon xanthan gum
1 cup Earth balance margarine
3/4 cup evaporated cane juice (aka Florida crystals)
3/4 cup rapadura
2 eggs
1 Tablespoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon molasses
10 oz dark chocolate chips (I used the Whole Foods store brand chocolate chunks)
1 cup chopped walnuts

Mix flours, baking soda and salt in a medium sized bowl with a fork. Set aside.
In a large mixing bowl cream margarine and sugars together. Add eggs, molasses and vanilla and continue mixing. Slowly add flour mixture, incorporating small amounts at a time until all of it is incorporated. Add chocolate chips and walnuts and mix well.

Put large spoonfuls of dough on a cookie sheet at least 2 inches apart. Bake at 375 degrees for approximately 9 minutes-- do NOT over bake-- these are best when they are slightly undercooked.

Makes 2 1/2-3 dozen cookies.

Food Allergies and Me: an asthma odessy (part 2: gluten)

During my second quarter of graduate school we learned about food allergies and sensitivities, and how to do an elimination diet. On an elimination diet, you eliminate a food, or number of foods (the usual list is dairy, gluten, soy, eggs, corn, citrus, and possibly nightshades which are the most common allergens) for two or three weeks and then add them back slowly, one at a time to test for reactions. It was February, I had spent the Christmas holiday in a haze of overeating wheat products. I had discovered an unbelievable pear-walnut bread made my a local bakery and I think I was probably eating 4 or 5 slices a day, on top of other wheat containing products and I felt lousy. I actually thought I might be coming down with bronchitis. Two years before I’d had the flu which turned in to bronchitis and I was sicker than I’ve ever been in my life and coughed all night every night for two months. I was terrified that I was about to repeat that hell. I felt not only some wheezing, but pressure on my chest, as if a very large cat was sitting on my breastbone (I used to have a 20# cat named Socks whose favorite place to sit was right there, so I can assure you I know how this feels). In the back of my mind I had a suspicion that wheat was an issue for me, as I had gone without it for awhile in Eat to Live which is a low grain vegan diet, and noticed a reaction reintroducing wheat, but I have to admit I was in denial. If you thought dairy and I had a love affair, that is nothing compared to the passionate relationship I had with wheat.

I love bread—I really do. I grew up spoiled with wonderful bread from Great Harvest Bakery, a local Seattle institution that makes whole grain delicious breads fresh every day. My best friend and I would walk there from her house because they give free samples—and not just a taste, but huge, warm slabs of bread with plenty of butter to smear into it. My mom also makes amazing bread and around the time of my gluten discovery was going through a phase of bread experimentation—all of which were delicious and wonderful. This does not even begin to cover my love of baking, especially cookies, which I have done almost weekly since I was about 2 years old at my mother’s knee. Gluten was an essential part of who I was. However, when I decided to do an elimination challenge, I did not really comprehend the implications of what a diagnosis would mean.

I decided at this point only to eliminate gluten—we were in the middle of the hardest quarter of our academic careers and a full-elimination diet requires more cooking and preparation than I was prepared to do. If it hadn’t been for the constant near-bronchitis feeling I probably wouldn’t have even done this much.

** I should note here, that what wish I had done at this point was get a blood test for Celiac Disease, prior to eliminating gluten. The test only measures whether you have anti-gluten antibodies in your blood stream. You have to be eating gluten for it to work. To get this test now I would have to start eating gluten again and it could be awhile for those anti-bodies to rebuild if I did have Celiac. Thus, I probably will never know if it is just an allergy or Celiac disease.***

For two weeks I avoided all wheat, rye, barley and spelt. I ate more quinoa and rice, potatoes and squash and said no to bread, cookies, cake and their friends. And my lungs began to clear. By the end of two weeks my congestion had resolved and I was no longer terrified I was about to plunge into serious illness. The time came to test, and I chose 100% Rye bread, so that I could test whether it was gluten or simply wheat causing my symptoms. I sat down and slowly ate one slice of rye toast. Within 10 minutes I was coughing and wheezing. It was rapid, dramatic and unquestionable—I had not just a sensitivity to gluten, but a serious allergy that impacts my ability to breathe.

What I was not prepared for after this discovery was the grief that followed. Wheat was part of my identity—it was present in very important parts of my life. I could no longer just spontaneously go to any restaurant without fear of contamination. I could no longer eat a piece of wedding cake or a cookie from a bake sale unless it was labeled “gluten-free.” Bread became no longer enjoyable, as gluten is an essential part of the rising process and anyone who has had gluten-free bread will tell you it just is not the same. The devastation came in little chunks—small realizations every day of things I could no longer eat, places I could no longer go because of this allergy. I am incredibly lucky to have been a graduate student at Bastyr, with a cafeteria that often has gluten-free options, wonderful friends who understand food allergies and who always make me (and other gluten-free friends along the way) allergen free options whenever we eat together, and who never make me feel like I’m the odd man out.

It has been just over a year since my discovery of my gluten allergy. I have come to terms with it and I have discovered some wonderful products and recipes that have filled that hole in my life. I even went on a gluten-free, dairy-free road trip with my friend Laura. What helped most of all was having a number of patients in the Bastyr clinic whom I was able to help with their food allergies—I became known amongst my friends on my shift as the go-to food allergy expert, which helped me form a new gluten-free identity of sorts. I had no idea that my entire life would change just by giving up bread for two weeks, but it did and I am a healthier happier person because I went through that experience, and a much better nutritionist as well.

Part three will explore my recent attempt at a full-elimination diet, and my discoveries about sugar.

Healthy Easter

I'm famous for my fancy salads in my family. Whenever there is a potluck meal it is just a given that I will bring salad. Today was no exception. Often I make sweet salads with fruit in them, but I was feeling more savory today, so today I focused on asparagus (my favorite Spring treat), olives and avocados.

The recipe below is approximate as I tend to just throw things together and then taste.

Savory Spring Salad

(all ingredients were organic:)
4-6 cups mixed greens
2 small tomatoes, seeded and chopped
8 stalks of asparagus, blanched and chopped
1/2 cup kalamata olives, pitted and halved (reserve juice)
1/4 cup green onions chopped fine
5 medium carrots cut into thin circles
1 medium avocado, diced (do this right before serving so it doesn't turn brown)

Dressing (I did not measure this stuff-- it was just to taste, so amounts are approximate):

1/8 cup olive oil
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
1 T maple syrup
1/8 cup juice from olives
1/4 tsp salt
splash of grapefruit juice
freshly ground black peppper

Toss all ingredients lightly and serve

I noticed that the left over salad was most of the non-lettuce ingredients-- all the heavy stuff sunk to the bottom of the bowl, so don't over toss this!

I also made Elana's gluten and dairy free chocolate pie filling (amazing!). I put it in a gluten free pie crust I had bought, but next time I'll try making her crust too.

We had ham and salmon, rice with mushrooms, rolls (not for me!), and fruit salad too. I was impressed that my in-law's church had gluten-free communion wafers-- I was picturing going up for communion and having to hold the bread for the rest of the service because even a bite of gluten gives me an asthma attack!

I admit normally I wouldn't have bought asparagus, as I like to wait until local asparagus is in season, but this was a treat-- I did make sure to at least get domestic asparagus-- hopefully it was trucked from California rather than flown.

Happy Easter to all who celebrate it-- to those who don't: enjoy the start of Spring and it's new beginnings-- perhaps the new growth of Spring can inspire us all to better ourselves and care for our bodies as we should.

Welcome to Plum!

Welcome to Plum! “Plum” has many definitions. Obviously it is a fruit, but it also means “to examine closely or deeply” and “An especially desirable position, assignment, or reward.” All of these things apply to health and nutrition—a focus on fruit (and vegetables), and a healthy diet is its own reward.

About me: I am a graduate student in nutrition. My nutrition philosophy is whole foods first, preferably local, organic and sustainable whenever possible. Plum will follow my experience in whole foods, including cooking, shopping, and the latest in health research as well as fitness, gardening, herbs and more. Always bringing you the “plum” tidbits to help you on your journey to reaching your health potential.