Last week I talked about how I completely fell off the wagon in regard to my diet, and since I hate to just complain and leave it at that, I’m going to provide some solutions to the problem. This is both for myself as well as anyone else who finds themselves at a crossroads in the decisions-making process. Please leave your much-appreciated comments and ideas at the end of this post!

Discovering Patterns

We’re all human, and we all have patterns. We’re all subject to little traps that we lay for ourselves, and the sooner we become familiar with those traps, the easier time we’ll have avoiding them. Last week, I mentioned that I’d found one of my self-imposed pitfalls:

I convince myself that since I haven’t had any health problems in a while, my dietary issues have magically gone away and I can eat whatever I want. I absolutely know this isn’t true, but if your resolve has been weakened and you want something bad enough, it’s funny how you can superficially convince yourself that it’s true. Now that I’ve realized this pattern, I have something to work with in the future to avoid another health-related Chernobyl.

This was huge for me. I often think to myself, “I haven’t had a croissant in ages, so how will I know if I can eat them again if I don’t try?” This little delusion causes me a whole lot of heartache. I know that pastry is bad for me, but I feel myself into thinking that *poof* it might be ok all of a sudden.

Before you can counter them, you need to acknowledge your patterns. Look them in the eye, wave hello, and then stick a little post-it on them so that the next time they stop in for a pastry break, you’ll be more aware of their toxic effects. This is a lot like dealing with mean, soul-sucking people – if interacting with them is unavoidable, it helps to acknowledge their problems and then not let them affect you.

Know Your Strengths and Weaknesses (and the Difference Between Them)

I’m really bad about being confronted with something I want but shouldn’t have. If you plunked a cookie down in front of me, I would probably eat it. I might not even know I was eating it until I was done. If there’s a bowl of candy on the table, I’ll scarf down a handful without thinking twice (this is one of the main reasons I spend less time at my grandma’s house!). If it’s in my face, it’s almost like there’s another person inside of pulling the strings. Being mentally prepared for temptation is something I really need to work on.

Thankfully, one thing I’m good at is avoidance. I easily drive by bakeries, fast food joints, and other places that could knock down my resolve, without any inkling to stop. If there’s a cake in one room of the house, I’ll be in another. While I used to count this ability to avoid trouble as a strength, I’ve recently realized that in reality, it’s kept me from dealing with the problem at hand: being able to say no to immediate temptation, which is something I’ll have to deal with everyday.

To add to that, I’m one of those people whose food allergy symptoms don’t pop up at a moment’s notice; rather, it’s an accumulative effect over the span of a few weeks. I used to think this was a blessing, because if I accidentally ate something that was bad for me, I wouldn’t be stricken for days with debilitating symptoms like others I know. Turns out, this became a convenient excuse for making what I thought were tiny bad decisions. Truthfully, there was no “tiny” about those decisions at all.

Now instead of outright avoidance, I try to mindfully accept situations where I can practice being stronger. Some might think this is setting myself up for failure, but in the end, am I stronger if I can avoid something, or stronger because I can look it in the face and say no? Like anything else, it’s an ongoing process of learning to be present and understanding where I need to beef up my defenses.

Fact: You’re Human! Get Used It.

The human brain is funny and amazingly elastic. It stops at nothing to get what it wants, convincing you the whole time that “This is awesome! You want this!” Sometimes, the exact opposite is true.

When you want to change something about yourself, you have to really take a hard look at your behaviors and motivations to realize why you do what you do. Are your actions coming from a place of pain? Are you feeling fear? Anxiety? Boredom? Confused? Unsure? As living, breathing beings, our brains come up with all sorts of coping mechanisms to avoid unpleasantries, often at the expense of creating other, potentially worse situations. Anyone who’s ever yelled at their spouse about something minor because they couldn’t confront a bigger issue knows what I mean. Whether those mechanisms are healthy or not is for you to decide. But first, you need to cut yourself a little slack.

If you eat when you’re depressed, acknowledge that. Pat that behavior on the head and tell it, “I see you there, and I know you’re having a hard time. That’s ok, I understand, but we need to adjust X or things are going to get worse.” This might seem hokey, but it’s amazing how just verbally acknowledging your traps and articulating your needs helps to conquer bad habits in the future.

Most of all, be gentle with yourself. You’re human and that’s not going to change, so get used to the idea of being fallible. You WILL make mistakes. You WILL trip and fall. You WILL drop the ball. And you know what? That’s completely normal. It’s also human to be forgiving, so extend that compassion to yourself. You’ll find that your recovery from mistakes happens that much faster when you’re not beating the crap out of yourself for every little slip-up.

Avoid the “Well Meaning” Enablers

Enablers are not well-meaning, no matter how sweet and doe-eyed they appear at first glance. Whether it’s your coworker or your grandma, anyone offering you something they know is unhealthy for you does not have your best interests at heart. While it’s important to know the difference between “optional” restrictions and those that carry a heavier penalty, if you’ve got a hard goal in front of you, it’s not their place to say that you shouldn’t be restricting yourself.

Fact: if someone really, truly cares about you, they will cultivate your physical and emotional health by supporting healthy decision-making.

Take, for example, my grandma. For my birthday last year, she made me a German chocolate cake. A big, beautiful, gloriously gooey German chocolate cake. And, it was full of white flour.

Did I eat it? Yes. Did I feel guilty afterwards? Of course. I also realized that my grandma, bless her soul, simply didn’t prioritize my health-needs, despite the fact that we’ve talked about them countless times. She just doesn’t get it, probably because she doesn’t have the perspective to acknowledge a different way of eating. That’s fine, I guess, but it’s bad for me. So when I go to my grandma’s house for my birthday, I bring my own cake.

Above All, Support Yourself

You’re the only one you’ve got. Sure, you have family, friends, and potentially an entire external support system, but in the end, you’re the only one who will always, without fail, be there for you. Learn to love yourself, and the tough decision become a little easier to make. The more practice you get at supporting your mind, body and heart, the more you’ll notice that life isn’t so bad. Even when confronted by tough decisions, know that you’ll be there for yourself, no matter what you choose.

Now go give yourself a big hug and sing Kumbaya.

I’ve been struggling with my health lately. Why? The short of it is this: I made a bunch of bad dietary decisions that sparked some pretty serious fallout. I’m writing this post because I know I’m not the only one out there who is confronted daily with decision that could make or break your life for months. I know that everyone out there struggles with something. Or many things.

The first half of the year saw me traveling quite a bit, to a series of conferences and to a handful of other countries. As most of us know, traveling is as stressful as much as it is fun. It’s exciting to see new places, but at the same time, it can be confusing, uncomfortable, and bewildering. Indeed, these are the part of the reasons we travel to begin with: to be removed from our comfort zone and sense of familiarity.

On top of traveling, we had to move. On very short notice. We got the news that our home had been sold and that we had to leave. We were given the requisite 60 days (that’s the law here in California if you’ve been a tenant for over a year), but our landlord incented us to leave earlier – much earlier. To add to that, we found the perfect apartment in a neighborhood both my husband and I love, for a price we were comfortable with. The trade off? We had to start paying rent within ten days to secure it. I learned this just a few days before I headed to Portland for a week, for the IACP conference. This meant that on top of traveling, I had an accumulative four days to pack our entire life and move it across town.

Why am I telling you this? Admittedly, I’m making excuses. The whole point of this post is to talk about making poor diet decisions, and if that’s the case, it’s important to explore how and why those bad decisions were made. I once referred to certain aspects of living healthy as similar to fighting addiction. You’re constantly fraught with attempts to break your resolve, and in the case of a dietary requirement, that onslaught assaults you every day, in any given place you happen to be.

Sure, I might seem like a big old drama queen about this, but when you struggle to live healthy in a world that doesn’t always seem to endorse the ease of doing so, it’s hard. Very hard. Those of us who have to live without something our minds seems to think we need understand how tough it is to walk away. It gets easier with time, but there are still pitfalls that remind you of the constant struggle.

Which [finally] brings me to the topic of this post: I fell off the wagon. And I didn’t just fall, I jumped whole-hog off the train, arms flailing, screaming my ever-loving head off.

While traveling, especially in different countries where you don’t speak the language, it can be difficult to avoid foods that are bad for you. In the case of an allergy, this fact can be downright life-threatening. There are options available to make it easier to avoid foods you can’t eat, but there’s still the matter of culture and human error to contend with, along with the desire to experience another place’s unique cuisine.

While I was in Mexico and Thailand, I tried to avoid gluten. I did the best I could, for the most part, but travel being stressful, I often found myself starving and groping for edible options. Not being fluent in either Spanish or Thai, and often finding myself in situations where no one spoke English (because these are my favorite places to explore!), I had to eat what was available.

And then there were the little street stands I’d run across, tempting me with the most delectably unfamiliar treats that I just couldn’t resist. Having no idea what was in any of these foods, I threw caution to the wind. Being stressed and a little depressed, eating things I thought might be bad for me was thrilling. There was a rush that popped me out of my malaise for a few seconds, and I began to seek that feeling out.

Then there was the move, a situation that plopped a boatload of anxiety (and again, depression) into my lap. More panicked, last minute eating, and more need for that little rush of excitement that only seems to come when you’re doing something you know is bad. A lot of people are familiar with this pattern.

I’m actually shocked that my poor body held out as long as it did. More likely, I completely ignored the warning signs. I can picture myself with my head in the sand, fingers in ears saying, “LA LA LA LA LA LA! I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” But soon enough, my body held up a big STOP sign and there was no averting my attention. I completely fell apart physically – and as a result, emotionally as well.

Health is a very personal thing. Your symptoms are uniquely your own, as is how you deal with them. I my case, the first sign was a mental fog that crept across my intellect, a dense, gray mist that became impossible to see through. That was followed by a drowning fatigue and the inability to drag myself out of bed (or off the couch), which was caused by malnutrition and unchecked internal bleeding in my digestive system.

Next was the obvious digestive fallout: pain, cramping, the inability to digest even the simplest of foods and the feeling that someone was continually running a corkscrew through my abdomen. Add to that joint soreness, horrendous breakouts and the feeling that someone was constantly kicking me in gut, and you’ve got a tiny window into what I’ve been feeling for the past few months. Oh, and don’t forget the bone-crushing self pity.

As I said, the first part of this post was me making excuses for my bad decision-making. And while I acknowledge my human tendency to excuse my own behavior (um, hello! how annoying!) I also need to look at what caused me to make those decisions. There’s no avoiding life stress, but you can try to support yourself in ways that makes you more adept at coping, which is an ever-evolving process.

In my case, I tend to convince myself with the empty excuse that since I haven’t had any health problems in a while, my food problems have passed and I can eat whatever I want. I absolutely know this isn’t true, but if your resolve has been weakened and you want something bad enough, it’s funny how you can superficially convince yourself of outright myths. Now that I’ve realized this tendency, I have something to work with in the future to avoid another health-related Chernobyl.

I’ve got a renewed sense of purpose in regard to my health. Sure, it might not last forever, and who knows what will cause me to throw myself under a bus again in the future. But I truly believe that whenever I fail or falter, it’s a learning experience. I learned a lot about myself this time around, and for that, I’m grateful.

Today’s guest post on healthy eating is compliments of my good friend Kristopher Ide. Kris is a special person in my life for many reasons, only one of which is the fact that he was instrumental in my learning that I have a gluten intolerance. Besides being an all-around lovely foodie, Kris is also super-duper writerly academic: think fiction, social theory and screenwriting. I’m excited to share his boundless talent with you.

I must admit, sometimes reading about all the wonderful food items covered in this blog actually pains me. As an insanely busy student who goes to class in the mornings, works part-time in the afternoons, and splits time between clubs and theatre rehearsals nights and weekends, procuring good food, slow-cooked with care and love, can be an infrequent luxury. Throw any number of dietary intolerances or allergies on top of that, and healthy eating is next to impossible.

While sometimes literally running from one commitment to the next, food choices often become a complex equation of proper nutrients multiplied by budget constraints and divided by the square root of availability, where X is the constantly shifting variable of cancelled meetings, mis-scheduled appointments, paper deadlines, and amount of sleep needed. Much of the time it’s easier to grab some quick, processed, pre-packaged nightmare from a vending machine or fast food outlet and wash it down with an energy drink, rather than to seek out healthier, more nutritionally dense options that will better keep the body going and the mind sharp.

If students have never taken a course in nutrition, they might not realize the positive role quality food choices can have on their educational career. Many eat potato chips and ramen noodles from week to week, and wonder why they’re tired all the time and can’t concentrate in class. Here are some simple ideas to show that, with a little effort and some time management, it is possible to eat well, be involved in everything, and still bring that “A” home.

• Before tests, don’t reach for that sugary fruit juice or caffeine-laden soda. Your brain might quit halfway through when your blood-sugar crashes. Eat an apple, a banana, or some dates instead; the fruit sugars are great carbohydrates that will carry your brain further.
• Make time for one night a week where you cook a feast for yourself. Cook up a huge batch of pasta, a big casserole, pot of soup, or a complex stir fry with a ton of rice. You’ll feel fulfilled for at least one night, and with the right to-go containers, you can eat your masterpiece for lunches through the week. Your friends will be jealous, too.
• Never leave the house without fresh vegetables, fruit, or both in your backpack. It may take some prep time to wash, peel, or slice, but nature’s perfect vitamins can save you in a pinch or be a guilt free supplement to that quickie meal of pizza or nachos they sling in the cafeteria.
• Make sure your schedule enough time to actually eat and enjoy your food. Even a healthy meal scarfed down while sprinting to class won’t make you feel all that great, so sprawl under a tree or on some grassy knoll and take a few deep breaths before you put anything in your mouth. If eating your food is an experience rather than a chore just to stave off collapse, you might find yourself making healthier and tastier choices anyway.
• No matter what you do, make sure you keep reading this blog, because sooner or later you will graduate, and you’re finally going to have more time to make the food that’s best for your life.

Heh, thanks, Kris.

want to know more about healthy eating? See also:

• Healthy Eating for the Weak and Weary: How to Cook Dried Beans
• Healthy Eating for the Weak and Weary: Tips for Cooking with Whole Grains

Social Bookmarking = Good Internet karma!

In last week’s Eating Healthy for the Weak and Weary, we talked about how to get more whole grains into your diet without creating a huge time deficit. This week we’re going to talk about everyone’s favorite musical fruit: BEANS!

Beans are not only a great source of fiber, they’re are a healthy way to add more protein to your diet without adding a ton more fat or carbs. When it comes to beans, you have two options: canned or dried. While there’s nothing wrong with canned beans – they are certainly healthier than a lot of the things you get out of a can – there are few things tastier than fresh beans made over a few hours on the stove.

Just like whole grains, making beans is a time-consuming endeavor since they require a few hours to cook. Thankfully, also like grains, they are easily prepared in large batches so that you can feed yourself for the rest of the week. Here at Chez Wasabimon, I make four to five cups of beans on Sunday night, when I have time to cook, which gives me enough for dinner and quick, healthy lunches throughout the week.

Another plus? The more you eat beans, the less you’ll experience their, um, dolorous effects.

To soak or not to soak?

A note on soaking: many recipes suggest that you soak your beans overnight to get rid of their, um, musical attributes. While you can certainly do this, it really doesn’t make a difference. In fact, I don’t like soaking my beans overnight because I always wake up the next morning to a bowl of weird-looking, half soaked lumps that have stretched out of their skins. Ick. They don’t cook any faster when they’re soaked, and in the end it just adds another step to an already time-consuming process.

How to cook dried beans

What should you cook them in? Personally, I’m a total food nerd so I cook my beans in a terra-cotta olla, which is a traditional Spanish bean pot. By all means, feel free to cook yours in whatever pot or Dutch oven you have handy. Just make sure it has a lid.

What’s the best way to go about cooking beans? These little guys are best prepared simply, with very little seasoning to compete with their natural earthy flavor. I start by heating 3 tablespoons of olive oil over a medium flame in whatever vessel I’m cooking the beans in. Once that’s good and hot, I toss in half an onion, diced, and let that cook until soft, about three minutes. Then I add one clove of garlic, pressed or diced, and cook for another minute. Now I toss in the beans along with enough hot water to cover them by about 3 inches. Give the whole thing a good stir in place the top on the pot, slightly askew to let some of the steam escape.

Now, depending on the kind of beans you’re using, they could take anywhere from an hour to four hours to cook. Check every 20 minutes or so, testing for doneness and to make sure there’s enough water in the pot to keep them moist. Once they’re almost done — say, once you try one and it’s almost tender — add salt to taste. You don’t want to salt your beans early on because this can lead to mushiness (ew).

Once your beans are done, stick them in an airtight container in the fridge for up to a week. They make a great addition to almost any dish you can think of: add them to scrambled eggs, toss a handful into a salad, mash them up on toast, you name it. They’re a great source of fiber and protein, and can turn any lackluster last-minute dish into something you’ll actually be stoked to eat. If you want to get creative, look up a couple of recipes for how to make refried beans, winter bean soups, or some crafty 70s casserole. If all else fails, try taco night!

For best results, buy fresh

Where can you get fresh, dried beans? I’ve recently fallen in love with heirloom beans, which are varieties that have been around for long enough that their genes haven’t been tinkered with in a lab. No sir/ma’am, no Franken-beans for me! These days I either get mine in bulk from the local organic co-op, or I drag my bedraggled self down the Ferry Building farmers market at the ass-crack o’dawn to visit the Rancho Gordo stand (they also have an online shop!). My personal favorites are the borlottis, vallartas and yellow Indian woman varieties. These beans are mighty fresh and tasty, probably due to the fact that they’re guaranteed to be less than a year old – you don’t want to know how long those beans have been sitting on the shelf at your local chain grocery store.

For more information on beans, check out these posts:

• Tasty Things to Do with Beans
• Three Bean Salad
• Sweet Potato and Black bean Enchiladas
• Black Bean Pumpkin Soup
• Amazing Black Bean Brownies

Eating healthy is important, but everyone has days where they’re just too busy or too tired to plan out a balanced meal, let along think about cooking with whole grains. What’s a person with a life to do? Instead of running out to McDonald’s or ordering in pizza for the third night in a row, here’s a tip that can save not only your health, but a few pennies from the coffers of the restaurant gods.

Why Cook with Whole Grains?

Whole grains are super important to your everyday health, since they keep your blood sugar humming along at a happy level and contain enough fiber to prevent your digestive system from getting all wonky. When you’re in a hurry rice can seem like the perfect quick meal, but before you grab that bag of Uncle Ben’s, think about what those whitewashed grains are doing to your body.

For those that don’t know, white grains were once whole grains. They were put through a refining process that removed all of the healthy, fibrous coating from each individual grain. That coating contained all the fiber and nutrients necessary to make the grain itself healthy to eat. Once grains have had that coating removed, they essentially turn into sugars that bomb your endocrine system with unchecked glucose — and in turn, causes a spike in your blood sugar levels.

Eating refined grains, such as white rice, can contribute to a series of health problems such as obesity, insulin resistance, diabetes, polycystic ovarian syndrome and a host of other unsavory conditions. While eating white rice is healthier than chowing down a Snickers, it’s not that much healthier. Why go on a major carb-loading bender if the carbs you’re scarfing don’t have any nutritional value?

On the other hand, whole grains are a total pain in the ass to prepare on-the-fly. They take longer to cook than white grains and when you’re busy, you probably don’t want to wait an hour and a half for dinner. Thankfully, modern electronic science has bestowed upon us the ultimate in kitchen convenience: the rice cooker.

Tips for Cooking with Whole Grains

With a rice cooker you can literally flip the thing on and walk away. But again, it still takes a long time to prepare whole grains, and unless you get home at like 4:30 in the afternoon, you probably won’t have time to get them started in time for dinner. Here at Chez Wasabimon, we have a trick for cooking with whole grains. On Sunday night I stick four cups of brown rice in the rice cooker, and once it’s done I fill up Tupperware containers and store them in the fridge. Now I’ve got brown rice to last me all week and I can literally eat healthy on a moments notice. Toss it into stir-fries, casseroles or just plain eat it on the side.

Your Friend, the Freezer

Here’s another good grain tip — did you know that rice freezes beautifully? If you want to store your rice for longer than a few days, or if you want to make up a ridiculously huge amount to store into perpetuity, add 10% less water when you cook the rice to keep it a little firmer. Once it’s done spread the grains out in a thin layer on a cookie sheet to cool, then stick the rice in a zip-top bags and store in the freezer for up to six months. Voilà! Dinner forever!

What’s your favorite tip for cooking with whole grains?

PS: Did you know that dark chocolate can help reduce your risk of heart attack?

I am very proud of myself. I managed to get through an ENTIRE Halloween season without eating a single piece of candy. For me, that’s really big. What’s huge, though, is the fact that I didn’t even realize it until today. That means I didn’t even think about candy for almost all of October.

Sure, I had a cupcake when I made my Ghoulishly Gluten Free Halloween Cupcakes – only one. I made a dozen of these gorgeous little buggers, and gave them all away. In fact, I think that I may have only eaten half a cupcake, leaving the rest because it was just too much sugar for me in one sitting.

If you follow this blog, you probably know that I battle a refined sugar addiction. I honestly believe that refined sugar is the most insidious of the white powders. It’s so dangerous because it’s seems innocuous to people – it is not nearly as taboo as other addictive substances like cocaine and amphetamines, so people consume it daily without a second thought. This has led to an era of serious, nation-wide health problems.

Now, we’re getting into a really dicey time of year: the holidays. Christmas is notorious for being a sugar-coated holiday, and I’m determined to not feel like crap this year because I fell off the wagon, so to speak. How am I going to make sure I keep an eye on my health and not the platters full of cookies that will inevitably float by? I’ve got a few key tips:

1. Explain to people what you’re doing, and why, early in the game. This way they won’t feel offended when you don’t take their special Christmas cookies, which they are probably proud of and eager to share.
2. Pack healthy snacks. For me, this means Lara Bars, bananas and organic corn chips.
3. Dried fruits, like apple and mango, make great alternate sweets. Just make sure that they’re not artificially sweetened – some varieties, such as cranberries, are often sweetened with sugar.
4. If you’re only cutting out refined sugar, consider natural sweeteners for yogurt, coffee, etc. Great alternatives are stevia, honey and agave nectar.
5. Differentiate between crap and worthwhile indulgences. For me, this means that I keep a really nice bar of chocolate around, and when I just want a piece of chocolate, I take a small square off the good stuff and not a Snickers. I don’t feel deprived, but I’ve also created a boundary between me and the junky candy that’s always within arm’s reach.
6. Avoid fast food joints. Yup, there’s sugar in them thar burgers. If you’re stuck in the mall, famished from Christmas shopping, look for healthier alternatives, like salad or soup.
7. Avoid drinking. Not only is alcohol high is sugar, but one or two cocktails can really, really weaken your resolve. Plus you’ll feel like crap the next day, and isn’t the whole point of this avoiding sugar thing to feel better?
8. If you get a mad sugar craving while you’re around sweets, try drinking a big glass of water. It will fill you up somewhat, and giving your body a megadose of hydration will make you feel stronger and more in the moment.
9. If you’re still new to the low/no-sugar game, pass up making cookies and candies this year. You will probably get to the point that you can make sweets without eating them all, but until then, be kind to yourself and don’t put yourself in temptation’s way.
10. And finally, don’t beat yourself up if you falter. It’s not a failure, and it’s not a “cheat.” You’re an adult and you made a decision. Just try to make a different decision next time.

What are your tips for not succumbing to sugar? Or do you have a story to share about your experiences?