Hooray for Homemade

Well, it’s been a while. A long while, much too long. I keep thinking of things to update about, but somewhere between being sick, getting my tonsils out, moving, school ending, looking for a job and all kinds of other life-related issues this blog just kind of got pushed back to the end of the list. If anyone has continued looking for updates, I appreciate it and thank you, and I sincerely hope that as things settle down I get back into the habit of updating again.

Summer starting has brought me back to my mother’s house in middle-of-nowhere-land, CO. It’s a nice area because of the farms, open space and small town feel. But, it’s a hard place for me to be because I don’t have a car and don’t know many people here, and I could tell you all kinds of horror stories about riding the bus in small town America! But the most exciting changes, for me anyway, have been the changes in my diet. With no job, I am left with plenty of time to be making nearly all of my own food, and I am finding myself very close to buying no prepackaged foods at all. I am shopping seperately from the rest of my family, who doesn’t care about things like HFCS and related issued.

One of my most interesting experiments so far has been in baking my own bread. Bread has been on the top of my list of things to make myself since… probably August of last year, and not only because it has HFCS in it, but because there is much much stuff that ends up in bread, when it’s just so simple to make oneself. Well, simple in ingredients, simple to make I think depends more on your ability to bake, and my ability is lacking. Not to mention my demand for the bread I want is something slightly unreasonable. I am after a 100% whole wheat bread that is light and fluffy, low in sodium and still tastes great.

My first attempt was a quick yeast bread recipe I found in the King Authur’s Flour Baking book. It was decent, but not exactly what I was looking for, so a little more research lead me to Jean Sutherland’s blog — the New Homemaker — and more specifically, her whole wheat bread recipe. I love this entry for a lot of reasons, one is that it explains bread basics, and people like me definitely need to read about bread basics. But I also love the simple straight forward recipe.

I made this bread for the first time roughly two weeks ago, and was very excited about it. My last attempt at homemade bread resulted in a french bread that would be better served as some kind of police baton. Living in high altitute with no air moisutre can make bread baking tricky, so I kept that in mind as I took a swing at this recipe. I didn’t think to take pictures until I was about elbow deep in flour, but hopefully  during my next run which should be sometime this next week I will remember to bring out the camera for a few shots. To give you a run down, I don’t have a dough hook on my stand mixer, so there was a lot of hand-kneading, some sweat and a few breaks that were longer than I meant for them to be, which gave the bread plenty of time to rise… again, and agan, and again… I also didn’t have the gluten flour, so I ended up kneading for about 45 minutes all told.

The resulting loaves were still dense, and I had a lot of trouble shaping them. One of them came out with spirals running through it from the dough shaping, the other seems okay, but they both had really weird ends. They were also completely flavorless, and really inflexible, not the light, fluffy loaves I was hoping for. But, I still feel really good about this recipe. I am going to try it again with the gluten flour, less breaks so the yeast doesn’t have to work as long, and I am also going to try to incorporate some orange juice and molasses into it to give it a little more flavor.

Also on the note of homemade things, today I made my first batch of homemade deoderant. The recipe called for tea tree oil or lavender oil neither of which I had or can afford right now, so I decided to give it a try with just the baking soda, cornstarch and coconut oil. It is so hot here in the summer that the coconut oil is a liquid, which is making my deoderant very squishy, but I like the light coconut smell, it’s making me feel kind of tropical. I haven’t had a chance to test run it much today, but tomorrow I will be feeding some horses and spending the day in the hot Colorado sun, so I’ll make sure to let you know how it works.

And as a final note, I have been hearing recently about how me talking about my experiences “going green” has started to spread to some of the friends that I have talked to about it. I know someone who has taken up OCM and no ‘poo after I told him about the wonders it has done for me. Another friend started doing navy showers, and another has toying with the idea of doing no ‘poo. I can’t even describe how gratifying it is to me to hear that even just talking to my friends about what I am doing is making a difference for them and the world at large, because even if I never see it, I know that me talking about my experiences can start a chain reaction of people talking about issues like this.

All in all, things are going well on the greenfront.

 

Not Dead Yet

To anyone who may be wondering, I’ve not fallen off the face of the planet, but I have come down with a rather vicious bout of tonsilitius, so the lack of posts has been due to that. I have plenty to write about, I just haven’t been feeling up to it.

Hopefully you will hear from me again soon!

 

Thanks!

I just passed the 100 view mark! Thanks you guys!

 

Lucky Find

Some family friends on the left, my mom and my sister are in red and green.

My brother and a family friend. My brother is in gray.

Happy spring everyone! I hope you all had a great holiday and weekend. I got to go back to my hometown for Saturday night to spend some time with old friends and spend the holiday with my family and family friends. We always have an excellent Easter brunch, and my mom makes an amazing coffee cake that I look forward to every year. I missed it last year because I was working, so it was nice to visit and make it this year. It was actually kind of a gray day, and we got some rain in the afternoon, but all around a good day.

While I was home, my mom sent me out to run some errands, and since I am running low on body soap, and just started taking navy showers, I decided to pick up some bar soap while I was out. I’ve been using liquid body wash for ages, because I love my loofah, but my body isn’t wet enough for it to work when I am doing the navy shower, I figured that bar soap would work better. I was hoping that they might carry Tom’s of Maine or even Dr. Bronner’s, but I was so excited while shopping at the Safeway near my mom’s house (in small-town Colorado) to find pure glycerin soap right in the soap isle, and for only $2.99 for three bars! Wondering what glycerin is? Check it out here.

It was half the price of Dr. Bronner’s and still $2 less than Tom’s of Maine, and I got three bars in a pack instead of one like the other two brands. I’ve never used pure glycerin soap, but I am super excited about it.

I am just starting to get into the natural body care and health care aspect of natural living. It’s something I am becoming more and more interested in, but I was really hesitant at first. My skin has always been kind of up and down, I didn’t get acne or anything like it until I was about 18, and it can get really bad where my hair hits my face because of all of the excess oil in my hair. I started using Proactiv last March, and it did a lot for my skin, as far as clearing it up went. But whenever I stopped using it, even for two days, it would get really bad again, and it was hard to use the whole routine daily, and when I did, it dried my skin out crazy. Ever since trying the no-’poo method I talked about in my last entry and seen the magic it worked on my hair, I am becoming more and more bold in my willingness to try things that may originally seem outlandish to me.

As far as navy showers go, I am actually really enjoying it. I feel like I have more time to just hang out in the shower, do my shaving thoroughly and that kind of thing. Living in a desert, that is going through a dry spell, means that water conservation is at the top of my list as far as environmental priorities go. I think navy showers are a really great, really easy way to do something good for the environment.

I entered a drawing over at Fake Plastic Fish for some soapnuts — a berry that grows on a tree and apparently creates soap when you put it in warm water. If you don’t read her blog, you really ought to check it out, she is a very motivating and inspiring person! So wish me luck! (Or enter the drawing yourself! I am not sure when she is picking winners.)

 

Hair Care Blues

Buds on the trees in front of one of the dorms.

Some blue flowers.

Some more buds on a bush.

All pictures curtesy of my friend Maruth

The first signs of spring are starting to grow in, even as our yearly spring storms are melting away (and taking some of the flowers that had bloomed during March with them). I have to admit that spring is not necessarily my favorite time of the year, but maybe that’s because I’m not a gardener!

One thing spring does make me glad of is the ability to open my windows without freezing. My tiny room can get so cramped and suffocating without the air circulating. It also makes me want to clean, organize and plan things. Maybe I get that from my mom, but it just seems like a good time to get things in order. I’ve been taking the opportunity to more or less plan out my purchases for as soon as I move out of these dorms – where am I going to get raw milk? Does Denver have a food co-op? Where can I buy handcrafted soaps in Denver? I’m really looking forward to the two farmer’s markets in my area opening back up!

Today’s post is something of a lamenting post, as my hair has really been bugging me lately.

I stopped using shampoo in August of last year. I switched to the “no-‘poo” method, using baking soda and apple cider vinegar to clean my hair. This is probably the first of the major “natural living” changes I made in my life, besides buying organic, watching how I use energy and those other sorts of “basic” things.

Even though this method seems extreme to a lot of people, especially those who are more or less convinced that there is no way my hair can possibly be clean if I don’t use shampoo. Maybe this was my first step in becoming a “dirty hippie.” For me, it was actually a really easy step to make. I’ve never really been fond of my hair. It’s kind of an ugly brown, just sort of dull and dusty. But worse than that, I’ve had both bad dandruff and really greasy hair since I was about 14. Like, Severus Snape greasy. I used to have to wash my hair twice a day just to keep it under control. It didn’t really seem like there was an answer, because pretty much any shampoo that was supposed to help with my dandruff made my hair greasier, but anything that cut the grease worsened my dandruff. On top of that, I’d been dying my hair almost monthly since I was about 15, bleaching it and trying every color from purple to almost black, highlights in the summer and lowlights in the winter. Basically, I fried the living daylights out of my hair.

When I came across the no-poo method, I have to admit I was skeptical, but I jumped right into it. Mostly because I figured I had stuck everything this side of the Mississippi river on my head, so something as simple as baking soda was probably not going to hurt it any more. I had to wash it daily for almost two weeks, but I could immediately see a difference. My hair went from a flat, lifeless helmet to something I had never seen before – voluminous, soft, shiny hair without the grease or the dandruff. Maybe this method isn’t for everyone, but it did wonders for my hair.

After my workplace got closed down unexpectedly in December, I’ve been broker than broke, and soon I ran out of baking soda, so I couldn’t wash my hair using it anymore. Reluctantly, I opened my bottle of back-up shampoo that my mom had bought me almost a year ago. I’ve been using it for almost a month now, and my hair is right back to the way it was in high school. Lifeless and greasy.

Call me crazy, but I’m definitely a believer in the power of baking soda. My friend bought me 6lb of baking soda for my birthday, now I just have to get through this bottle of shampoo before I can get back to my baking soda.

If you are interested in the no-‘poo method, you can find out everything you need to know about it here.

 

Green Eateries — Watercourse Foods

I’m hoping to make this a somewhat regular feature on my blog. Eating is a huge part of my life; as a culinarian, a chef, a nutritionist-in-training and just an all around foodie.

I love making my own food; I love the fact that by making my own food I have control over everything that goes into everything that I eat. I can make sure I use whole and natural ingredients, that I don’t pollute my body with unnecessary and unhealthful additives, and make sure that everything that I put into my mouth is not only totally tasty, but also is going to work for me and my health in the long run.

But I love going out to eat. I love the atmosphere and the energy, I love trying new dishes that I wouldn’t have thought of, or experiencing someone else’s cooking style. Going out to eat is one of my favorite ways to spend any extra money I may have, and to spend time with friends. It’s definitely one of my favorite treats. So, when I go out to eat, I want to make sure that the food I am eating is still as healthful and ethical as the food I can make at home. That is why I want to make this a regular blog posting, so I can share some of my favorite spots around town to go for good, healthful and ethical eats. Hope you enjoy!

This week, a few of my friends and I decided to try Watercourse Foods, located on 17th Ave. just between Emerson and Clarkson. This is one of my favorite areas of town; it’s got tons of great restaurants, including D-Bar desserts, owned by Keegan Gerhard, and it has a great energy to it. Watercourse is an all-vegetarian restaurant, with a vegan bakery attached for dessert. Their style is self-defined as “vegetarian comfort food.”

We got there at about 7:30pm on a Thursday night, and the place was packed. We had to wait about 35 minutes for a table. The waiting area was tiny, even though the restaurant itself was rather large, and it was packed tight with tables and even a bar. The concrete floor, unfinished roof and mismatched bold paint on the walls gave the place a modern feel. Sleek black tables and chairs filled the room, with no booths to be seen. The modern décor was offset by tan ink paintings depicting rabbits putting on a play wearing what I can only assume was some kind of grotesque human head. Watercourse is definitely not meat-eater friendly. Speaking of things that are not friendly, the hostess was rather rude when we requested to put our names on the waiting list, which kind of turned us off as soon as we walked in.

After we were seated, our waiter appeared immediately with water. I was somewhat disappointed as the website promised that in an effort to be “green” they only served water on request. Nonetheless, after waiting so long for our table, I was glad for the drink. Watercourse offers a full menu including breakfast, appetizers, salads, sandwiches and wraps, and entrees, all for reasonable prices. Breakfast runs from $4.50 (oatmeal) to $9.50 (banana French toast), and all eggs can be replaced with tofu for no additional charge, salads are $7.95, sandwiches and wraps are $9.25 and entrees are between $9.95 (tempeh chorizo and fried potato taco plate or a burrito) and 13.95 (monti pasta). Their drink menu is equally as varied, including sodas, a wide variety of teas, smoothies, juices, espresso and coffee drinks.

I was on a budget, I had $20 dollars to spend, so the first thing I did was scan the prices. I settled on the Portobello cap – the cap of a Portobello mushroom that had been covered in a polenta batter, shallow fried and lightly covered with a chipotle aioli. It was served with a side of carrots, brown rice, refried beans, some greens, pico de gallo and about a quarter of an avocado. The mushroom was excellent, perfectly crispy and tender, and the chipotle aioli was really what made it stand out to me – bang up job, I say. But the side dishes lacked imagination; as soon as I ran out of the aioli (the dish truly could have used more) it became apparent to me how bland the rest of the dish was. While perfectly cooked (I was actually able to enjoy the carrots instead of lamenting their mushiness, though one of my friends did complain that his rice was crunchy), all of the side dishes needed some kind of flavoring to amp them up, and make the $11.95 I paid for the dish worth my money. The rice was simply steamed, the beans were just beans, and the carrots were blanched, with nothing added to any of them.

I do not ever add salt to anything I eat, but when I took my first bite of just the refried beans I thought for the first time that that was something that needed salt. I added a cup of the tomato coconut curry soup to my dinner for $1.75, and the soup was definitely the best part of my meal, and I don’t even like soup. Sweet and acidic, it married the tomato and coconut perfectly without losing any aspects of either flavor.

My friends ordered the seitan fajitas, the tempeh chorizo and fried potato taco plate, and the blackened tofu, with seitan substituted for the tofu. I loved the fajitas and tacos, they were both bursting with flavor and unexpectedly spicy. The blackened seitan, however, was not blackened; it instead seemed to be smoked in soy sauce, as it was painfully salty. The waiter explained that they could not blacken the seitan, which we assumed was because they do not blacken the tofu or smoke the seitan in-house, another small disappointment.

We ordered a rose-hip vanilla cupcake for desert to split among us. It was shockingly good for a vegan baked good, better than a lot of cupcakes I have had in the past. It was quite moist and dense, a pleasant surprise, and the flavor was not overwhelmingly sweet or rose-y.

With a mandarian-key lime organic soda as my beverage of the night (which was excellent as well) my bill came to $16.75, leaving me just the right amount leftover to tip.

Overall? I would say Watercourse is worth it for the imaginative dishes, health-conscious food and if nothing else it is something out of the ordinary for us meat-eaters. Their Mexican-style dishes pack plenty of flavor without compromising on ingredients, just watch that you pick something with flavorful side dishes. Also, everything on their menu can be made vegan, so you are sure to please even the pickiest in your crowd. It’s definitely possible to get a great, full meal there for a budget price. My recommendation however, is that you go for lunch, get there early for dinner, or make a reservation.

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www.watercoursefoods.com
837 E. 17th Ave., Denver, CO 80218
(303) 832-7313

 

Rethink Your Food Pyramid

Like most people my age, I was raised on the Food Pyramid. This simple shape and symbol to me has long been the basis for most of what I would consider my nutritional knowledge, and I think this holds true for most people in my generation.

USDA Food Pyramid 1992

The USDA’s site for the food pyramid (MyPyramid.gov) can be a very useful tool for anyone who doesn’t know anything about nutrition and is just starting to become concerned with their food choices. But I find that I have outgrown it, and that my personal nutritional needs may have stretched beyond the scope of what this website can offer me.

I think that most people by now are well aware that the typical American diet is not working for us, so I have to wonder how accurate the food Pyramid is? It is based on science conducted here in the US and in Canada, and it’s centered on a traditional American diet. While I can’t deny that I love my American food as much as anyone else, I can’t help but wonder if looking at the eating patterns of our international neighbors might be a little enlightening.

The USDA’s new American Food Pyramid developed in 2005 offers a more personal approach to nutrition. There are different pyramid for people of different ages, or if you are pregnant or nursing and other things that might change your nutritional needs. I am not a fan of this design, however, as I find it a lot more difficult to understand than the model I grew up with, which was developed in 1992.

But it isn’t just the USDA that produces food guidance pyramid or systems, that just happens to be the most well known. There are food pyramids coming out of Harvard, the University of Michigan, private corporations and even some health care professionals take it upon themselves to publish their own recommendations for our daily eating.

More interesting to me, however, are the food pyramid recommendations for other countries, specifically the Japanese and Mediterranean food pyramids.

Mediterranean Food Pyramid

Both of these pyramids focus more heavily on the foods with good fats, omega-3’s and base a larger percentage of our diets in fruits and vegetables than the traditional American diet. Rates of obesity, heart disease, high cholesterol, diabetes and other common diet-related aliments are much lower in these two areas than they are in the US, and I think it would be hard to argue that there isn’t a direct correlation between the standard diet of these locations and the common health problems.

Japenese Food Pyramid

But, as someone trying to watch my weight and radically change my diet, my current favorite is the food pyramid published by MayoClinic, because the base is fruits and vegetables and as a standard American meat eater, I definitely need to learn to eat more vegetables.

MayoClinic Food Pyramid

What is the lesson here? Nutrition isn’t one-size-fit-all, and even the nutritional rules we keep set in stone, aren’t really set in stone.

 

Hastled by the Handler

This past Thursday we had a nice blizzard here in Denver, we got about 14 inches of snow in my area in about 5 hours. School was predictably canceled, and after the white out conditions cleared we were left to enjoy the last of the beautiful winter scenery. And we were left with the urge to do what it seems to me typical Coloradans want to do right after a blizzard – go for a drive, eat ice cream and barbecue.

A few friends who also live in the dorms and I decided that it would be a good day to cook our own dinner, something we rarely do as we pay for meal plans from the school and the kitchens in the dorms are quite small (and always dirty). So, we piled into the car and headed to Whole Foods… only to find out that they had closed a few hours earlier due to the snow.

Since we were already halfway there, we decided to simply keep driving to Sunflower Farmer’s Market. This is a market I love, local foods at reasonable prices, and I was a frequent shopper when I had my own apartment. I almost always went on Wednesdays for actual grocery trips because sales run from Wednesday to Wednesday, so if you go on Wednesday, they have both weeks’ sales happening simultaneously, it’s a great way to save! You can even see the weekly flier online at Sunflower Markets .

Anyway, after a few trips around the store, looking at sales and determining the origins of products we decided to cook a meal that is very traditional for my family – trout with garlic, onions and OJ, with a fresh tomato and mozzarella salad, as well as some rice we had left over from our last cooking adventure. (Trout recipe included below!) Cooking with culinary students is never simple.

I have to say that the chef side of me loves nothing more than being in a market with food I trust abound, it really sparks my inspiration and my love of good, wholesome foods. I love to walk through the produce sections and just smell the wonderful scent of fresh fruits and vegetables.

At the checkout counter, I stood behind one of my friends in line, as I wasn’t paying for this venture. As the man at the checkout pulled out a plastic bag, I quickly realized that I had once again failed to bring my canvas bag with me, and wasn’t wearing my messenger bag which I use as a purse/carry all. Realizing this I made a fast decision and leaned forward asking the man if he could use paper instead. My friends are used to displays such as this, and for once hadn’t even commented as I tossed our produce into the cart without bagging them in the plastic.

The man raised his eyebrows at me, and asked if I was with the friend who was purchasing our food for the night. Slightly irked, I replied that I was and moved to stand next to her as if to prove my point. I assumed that he had asked because it would be rude of some random person in line to demand that the person in front of them get paper if they don’t ask for it.

However, as he pulled out the paper bags, he launched into an explanation of how paper bags do not break down in landfills. I responded that we would recycle them (we are lucky enough to have a school with a decent recycling program), and that even if we didn’t recycle them right away, that I was something of a craftster and could find uses for them, unlike plastic. He continued to more or less give me attitude as he bagged the groceries, saying that if I bagged my garbage in the paper bags, it still wouldn’t degrade, and he even made a snide comment when I stopped him from pulling out another two bags to bag the three items the other friend we were with was purchasing, instead saying he could simply put them in our first bag.

Of course, the easiest solution to all of this would have been to just bring the canvas bag in the first place, and we might have been able to sidestep this form of bickering, but what really got to me was the fact that a cashier at a natural foods store was arguing with me as I was trying to make the best choice that I felt I could.

I am very against plastic, and I am working towards cutting out my plastic waste entirely. As I mentioned before, paper bags can be recycled (so can plastic, of course) but as far as I know, it takes less chemicals and generates less pollution to both produce and recycle paper than it does plastic. On top of that, as I mentioned, I can think of a million uses for paper bags, and very few for plastic bags (none of which involve bagging my garbage; I stopped bagging my garbage a few months ago). What annoyed me about this was this man’s assumption of what I was going to do with the bags, and the attitude he gave me.

So, when you forget your reusable bag, which is better to use? These are some interesting pages I found on the subject:

• TreeHugger.com
• EnviroLiteracy.org
• WashingtonPost.com

I don’t think it is anyone’s right to tell anyone else how to live their life or what choices they ought to make. Educating someone on what some good choices are is a completely different animal than making snarky comments regarding the choice someone has made, especially when they are probably making that choice out of a good conscious. Isn’t a good, but misguided conscious better than none at all? At least that way you can become educated in making the best choices possible.

After looking into this a little more, I may have to rethink my paper choice when necessary, but what will be more important will be remembering to bring my dang canvas bag with me!

As I left the market, I was feeling quite annoyed, but the fresh fish dinner definitely lifted my mood!

Baked Trout
I like to use a whole fish for this, but if that squicks you, then filets will work just fine. I also like to leave the skin on, I think it keeps the fish more moist and enhances the innate flavor of the fish, again, this is optional. Also, I don’t add salt to anything that I cook, but if you can’t help but throw it in there, season very lightly, but I promise you you won’t miss it in this dish! Depending on how fat your fish is, plan ¼ to ½ of the fish per person.

Serves: 4
You’ll need:
2 Whole Trout (or other small, not fatty, white fish), scaled and deboned with the fins removed.
1 small red onion, sliced thinly
2 cloves garlic, minced
½ C Orange Juice
Freshly cracked black pepper
2 tablespoons of unsalted butter
Parchment paper or tin foil
Baking sheet

Do it!
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Place the trout onto either the parchment paper or into the tin foil, if using filets, I like to make a separate pouch for each person. Then either on top of the filets or in the center of the fish, lay down the onion and garlic. Season liberally with pepper, and then break the butter into little pieces, spreading it along the fish evenly. Lastly, pour the orange juice over the top of the meat. Then crimp the parchment paper closed, creating a small package out of the paper. Be sure to crimp tight as you want all of the liquid to stay inside the pack. Bake the fish at 350 for about 20 minutes, if you have an instant read thermometer, you’ll want to take the fish out when it reached 115 degrees.

Don’t open the packages until just before you eat them! The smell is amazing!

 

Mindless Eatting

We have all heard that America is becoming fatter each year, obesity levels increase while simultaneously a mania with being thin and, newly (in my opinion) with being healthy emerges. Miracle diets continue to thrive despite warnings from health professionals that they will only last so long, that there is only so much they can do for you. Nonetheless, promises of losing obscene amounts of weight while having to do no work at all are intoxicating, and it seems to me that the diet foods industry is growing larger and larger every year.

A perhaps recent fad that has constantly bothered me is the idea that “diet,” “low-cal,” “low-carb,” “(fill-in-the-blank)” foods are automatically good for you, or are at least better choices. I really believe that these products do nothing to stop the mindless eating that has become the national standard, if nothing else they reinforce it.

Mindless eating is probably the bigger problem in our nation. It’s mindless because people don’t think about what they eat — it’s the standard to eat what is on your plate, whatever that may be irregardless of portions or thought to nutritional value, even those of us trying to eat more healthfully often fail to do so. In part, I think it is because people are uneducated. We all have heard countless things about counting calories, or drinking water or eating fruits and vegetables, but what percent of the general public actually knows how many calories are good for them? How many glasses of water to drink a day? (If you are saying eight eight ounces glasses, the answer will surprise you — it’s actually different for everyone, just as the number of calories we need to consume in a day is dependent on weight, height, age, gender and activity level, so to does the amount of water we need to drink vary. To find out how many glasses of water you should actually be drinking, check out this website. ) Mindlessly, we pick the things that we think are the better choices — we choose to have a salad every day, or to drink the diet soda — and we assume that because we made these choices, we must be making better choices, and it boggles us why our health isn’t getting any better.

I read an article in a magazine a few years ago that studied women who ate salad from a local make-your-own salad restaurant, and they actually took each of the women in the studies’ salads and calculated the number of calories in each salad. It turns out the average calories per salad was about 700 calories. Now, assuming a normal height woman in her mid-twenties to mid-thirties needs to each about 1600 calories a day, one meal, of the three meals Americans eat a day should be about 533 calories. This doesn’t include drinks, or snacks, it is simply a number for three meals a day. An excess of 167 calories per meal (which is the difference between these salads and the aforementioned number), would equate to 503 extra calories a day, or one pound a week. And that is ONLY eating these salads, this does not include the drinks these women probably had with their salads, or the snacks they may consume between meals. The idea here is that yes, salad is a healthy choice, vegetables are great for you and Americans as a whole really ought to eat more of them, but eating an excess of calories is unhealthy, no matter where the calories come from.

Now, there is something very important to be said for nutrient dense foods. That is, while you could eat a meal for 500 calories that consisted of say, a burger and fries, there is very little nutritional value in those foods. Even if you eat an excess of calories eating a salad composed of spinach, edamame and carrots, you are still getting great sources of proteins, vitamins and minerals. On the other hand, an excess of calories is an excess of calories, your body will still convert it into the sugars that will eventually be stores as fat, no matter where the calories came from.

This is what I mean when I talk about mindless eating. We make “good choices” without thinking any more about it. Instead of choosing to get that salad AND still think about the calories in it, we assume that just choosing the salad is enough. Diet products, I believe, just encourage this sort of zombie-like consumption. Since I chose the diet soda, the low fat crackers and the low calorie cookies, my meal is healthy, and I can eat as much as I want. Conventional wisdom tells us this is not so, nonetheless, this is an example that I think while may not happen in one meal, is very likely to happen in each of our lives daily.

So what does all of this have to do with life unprocessed? Well, another major concern that I have about these foods is the number of additives, artificial ingredients and fillers used in these products that barely even resemble food. Things like aspartame, which can cause side affects as small as headaches to as severe as hypoglycemia and balding. So not only are we not choosing nutrient dense foods, or paying attention to what we eat even when we are trying to eat more healthfully, we are actually putting more harmful chemicals and additives into our bodies in an attempt to make the “right” choices.

The solution? One thing you will hear me talk about a lot is whole foods and the benefits of eating foods in as close to their natural forms as you can, not only is your body better able to absorb all of the nutrients these foods have to offer, but they don’t have any of the additives mentioned above. But eating whole foods, and fruits and veggies is not enough to ensure you have a proper balanced diet, eating nothing but spinach all day is no more healthful than eating beef (although, admittedly, beef has cholesterol while spinach does not), either way your diet is extremely unbalanced.

Eating whole foods is a large part, yes, but what is more important is eating mindfully. Everything you eat has nutritional value (or lack thereof) and the best way to ensure your health and health goals are to pick the foods that are the highest in these values, and eating them in proper proportion. I can’t stress enough how important serving sizes are in this entry, so I will save that for another time, but just remember that the best diet is one that is based on balance — watch your calories and how much you are consuming, even if you are consuming the right foods, make sure to eat a variety of fruits and vegetables daily, all of these things we have been told since childhood.

There is a miracle answer to most Americans dietary problems, no one just seems to want to admit that it is the answer we have known all along.

 

What does it mean?

My first post! So here is the obligation hello and welcome dear readers!

And now for actual subject matter: What does life unprocessed mean?

This question is not an easy one for me to answer, but it is something I am asked nearly every time I try to explain my vision for living my life in the healthiest, safest and greenest way I know how. The first thing that comes to mind when I think of this question in a general sense is that living unprocessed, living green or even just living simply is different for everyone. Like any aspect of today’s society, most aspects of what we consider good, healthy choices are completely up to the individual.

My interpretation is that life unprocessed is living life as close to nature as I can, which is not as close to nature as say, someone living on a farm can. I live in the middle of a big city, Denver, CO to be exact. Simultaneously, I am a college student, living in dorms (currently) which means I don’t have a lot of control over the things that I eat, the way my living space consumes energy, or even the amount of water used. That being said, I think it is important for each of us to remember that even a little bit of change can go a long way, and that doing what you can is better than doing nothing at all.

So, life unprocessed for me starts with food. I am getting my degree in culinary nutrition, with plans to become a registered dietitian and get my masters in nutrition, as well as study holistic nutrition. Food to me is one of the major pillars of good healthy and living well. Everything we take into our bodies affect us one way or another, taking in foods filled with chemicals, preservatives and dyes means all of that is going to be floating around in your system. I don’t think it takes a lot of science to figure out that that probably isn’t very good for you. Simultaneously, eating empty calories means that while your body may be fuelled, it doesn’t have a lot else in it. Our bodies are designed to get all of the phytonutrients (things like protein, carbohydrates, etc. the major groups of nutrients your body needs to survive and thrive), vitamins and minerals from the foods we eat. You might be able to get some of these things from supplements, but nothing can replace the chemical complexities and interplays in our bodies that good old fashioned whole foods can give us.

This is the basis of life unprocessed, this is the pillar by which I plan to live.

I can take these same ideas and apply them to almost every area of my life. Soaps, shampoos, toothpastes and most of our hygiene products also contain harsh chemicals and other artificial ingredients. Our health care system pollutes our bodies with even more artificial chemicals. While I don’t reject modern health care completely, I believe that it is better for our bodies to heal the way that we have been for centuries — using natural remedies. I also think it is important to look at the body as a whole system, no one part of our bodies functions without affecting all of the other parts. If you are suffering from depression, you can take pills, or go to therapy, this may help your depression, but it won’t solve it. Exercising for half an hour a day can drastically reduce your depression, some people even report better results than they got on anti-depressants. This not only treats the symptom — depression, but it can treat the cause by rerouting synapses and helping to balance out the chemicals in your brain. Exercising is also more beneficial to your whole system, as opposed to pills or therapy which only focuses on one aspect.

So what is life unprocessed? It’s the simplest, most natural life any of us are capable of living. It’s good for your mind, body and soul. It’s good for the planet, and good for your wallet.

This blog is about my journey to live my life unprocessed. It will include recipes, trials and tribulations as well as ideas and research. Interested? Keep reading.