Easy Does It
Things that are making my life easier:
It's not like I haven't had a food processor and slow cooker and fridge for... ages. It's just that I'm now using the tools I have more effectively. As with food, so with life.
Because of making my way through loads of the nutritionfacts.org videos and articles by Dr Greger, I can see where I've been swayed by received wisdom about nutrition, or by canny advertising, and where I've been going right. It's chastening to discover that I'd really bought into the idea that some of the syrups available in health food shops were somehow better than plain sugar (OK, I've mentioned it before, but it hit me hard), and I can hear my mother's voice in my head telling me that dates and peanut butter and nuts are "fatty" and "bad for you", even though the science shows they're really healthy. It's given me a lot to think about, and we've both seen a boost in energy over the past couple of weeks (even though I've had some weird stomach bug, I've been able to cope a bit better). We were eating pretty healthy diets compared to some, but there are ways of nudging the nutritional impact far higher than we'd realised.
I just had a conversation with my mother which emphasised how far out of the mainstream accurate nutritional information really is. One of her friends may have rheumatoid arthritis. My response was that this is the best kind of arthritis to have, because it's so responsive to diet. This was met with the curt response that another friend had used diet to control her rheumatoid arthritis 25 years ago, and ended up being able to eat "hardly anything at all, just a bit of fish and potatoes - all the carbohydrates that are bad for you." My tentative suggestion that the science is a lot more solid now, and that the main thrust is that a vegetarian diet works, was immediately dismissed. She'd had a friend who'd ended up with a severely restricted and bland diet because she'd not had access to the kind of information we have now, and that meant that controlling rheumatoid arthritis with diet in 2012 is clearly out of the question. I shut up.
Food is such a flashpoint for anger. I remember biting sabrinamari's head off years ago because I was absolutely exhausted and feeling rubbish, and had cooked up a greens soup (as nutritionally dense as a veg soup could be, it turns out). We were discussing nutrition, and she mentioned portion control. Tender subject with me at the time: I knew I was eating too much bread and pasta and grains, and instead of doing what I do now (take a deep breath, check the facts, adjust accordingly, sit with the emotions that may be triggered), I treated her as if she'd just told me that a) my soup was unhealthy, and b) having a second helping made me a greedy, hateful monster. No self-image problems there, then. Poor sabrinamari, I wince to think of it. In those days, I was excited about nutrition AND I was not getting treatment for my sleep disorder AND I wasn't as far along in terms of self-acceptance as I am now. So that was fun.
And that is why I backed off from my mother. I remember that fear-based angry reaction. If her mate really does have RA, there will be plenty of time to mention that almost every study of RA and diet shows that a happy, healthy, diverse, plant-based diet really works, and that Other Mate With RA had a bad experience because of lack of information and support... 25 years ago. I can offer resources and not get engaged in arguments. Times have changed.
- Slow cooker chai and cold-steeped tea: I make the chai without the sweetener, soya milk or tea by putting it in the slow cooker on warm overnight. I put black tea bags in a small jug of cold water in the fridge overnight, so in the morning I have ultra-healthy black tea to pour into our mugs, and then add hot chai to it. The chai then gets put in a jug to cool down, and I drink it through the day, either cool or heated with some cocoa powder. This is because:
- cold-steeped tea turns out to be even healthier than hot-brewed tea
- chai is choc-a-bloc with antioxidants
- chocolate = bad; cocoa solids = superfood
- soya milk is as bad as dairy milks for blocking uptake of the phytonutrients in tea (at least in a petri dish), though not in other foods
- Overnight oats: Why have I never done this before? I just chuck the ingredients (oats! shredded coconut! chopped nuts! seeds! dried fruit! resh fruit!) in a bowl in the fridge and decide whether to have it microwaved or cold. Cold is just fine, especially with a cup of warm chai and a smoothie. In fact, with a smoothie, we've discovered that one portion of oatmeal is too much. Halving the portion works
- Breakfast smoothies: Banana, cocoa powder, dates and cranberries, frozen berries, peanut butter or nut/seed butter, amla powder, some white tea leaves... Good gods, we're off the charts, nutritionally speaking, before we're even into the day
It's not like I haven't had a food processor and slow cooker and fridge for... ages. It's just that I'm now using the tools I have more effectively. As with food, so with life.
Because of making my way through loads of the nutritionfacts.org videos and articles by Dr Greger, I can see where I've been swayed by received wisdom about nutrition, or by canny advertising, and where I've been going right. It's chastening to discover that I'd really bought into the idea that some of the syrups available in health food shops were somehow better than plain sugar (OK, I've mentioned it before, but it hit me hard), and I can hear my mother's voice in my head telling me that dates and peanut butter and nuts are "fatty" and "bad for you", even though the science shows they're really healthy. It's given me a lot to think about, and we've both seen a boost in energy over the past couple of weeks (even though I've had some weird stomach bug, I've been able to cope a bit better). We were eating pretty healthy diets compared to some, but there are ways of nudging the nutritional impact far higher than we'd realised.
I just had a conversation with my mother which emphasised how far out of the mainstream accurate nutritional information really is. One of her friends may have rheumatoid arthritis. My response was that this is the best kind of arthritis to have, because it's so responsive to diet. This was met with the curt response that another friend had used diet to control her rheumatoid arthritis 25 years ago, and ended up being able to eat "hardly anything at all, just a bit of fish and potatoes - all the carbohydrates that are bad for you." My tentative suggestion that the science is a lot more solid now, and that the main thrust is that a vegetarian diet works, was immediately dismissed. She'd had a friend who'd ended up with a severely restricted and bland diet because she'd not had access to the kind of information we have now, and that meant that controlling rheumatoid arthritis with diet in 2012 is clearly out of the question. I shut up.
Food is such a flashpoint for anger. I remember biting sabrinamari's head off years ago because I was absolutely exhausted and feeling rubbish, and had cooked up a greens soup (as nutritionally dense as a veg soup could be, it turns out). We were discussing nutrition, and she mentioned portion control. Tender subject with me at the time: I knew I was eating too much bread and pasta and grains, and instead of doing what I do now (take a deep breath, check the facts, adjust accordingly, sit with the emotions that may be triggered), I treated her as if she'd just told me that a) my soup was unhealthy, and b) having a second helping made me a greedy, hateful monster. No self-image problems there, then. Poor sabrinamari, I wince to think of it. In those days, I was excited about nutrition AND I was not getting treatment for my sleep disorder AND I wasn't as far along in terms of self-acceptance as I am now. So that was fun.
And that is why I backed off from my mother. I remember that fear-based angry reaction. If her mate really does have RA, there will be plenty of time to mention that almost every study of RA and diet shows that a happy, healthy, diverse, plant-based diet really works, and that Other Mate With RA had a bad experience because of lack of information and support... 25 years ago. I can offer resources and not get engaged in arguments. Times have changed.