Lost At Meal Time - What's My New Normal?

Every week I sit down to make up a healthy meal plan (and following that, a grocery list for the week) and every single time, I feel SO. LOST.

It's the 'healthy' part that really gets me. Especially when I'm short on time or just not 'feeling' the meal-planning vibe. I'm diabetic, gluten free, and I'd dearly like to cut out all fillers, unpronounceable ingredients, and Monsanto / GMO foods. That is the goal I am for every week.

I have a basic meal 'outline' I follow when trying to put the meal plans together. It goes like this (still a work in progress):

breakfasts:

oatmeal

smoothies

eggs

lunches:

vegetarian ceviche

leftovers

soup

eggs

chips and salsa / nachos

dinners:

meat + two veggies

meat + veggie + starch

GF pasta or casserole

tacos

vegetarian?

snacks:

cashews

dark chocolate

ice cream cups

yogurt

fruit

chips and salsa

applesauce

apple and pb

clementine

banana

cheese stick

laughing cow and rice crackers

larabar

It's a good layout. Snacks are easy. Breakfast is ok. Oatmeal is easy but I miss cereal... but with my "no fillers, no GMO" plan I haven't found a good cereal that really works. I still buy cereals because my kids eat it and it's not a meal I've really managed to sway them over to the 'health' side yet. (I try to pick relatively healthy ones at least.) Lunch I struggle with mightily - I never want to eat it anyway, and nothing ever sounds good. I don't want to put a lot of work into lunch. 

Dinner is... easy in concept, not as easy in theory. The 'meat plus two sides' method is easy but I'd like to start eating less meat. It gets expensive. I'd like to find good vegetarian options that we will all enjoy and that will still be filling. 

The overall general plan is good. I continue to refine it but it mostly works and is mostly healthy. I sit down each week and the first thing I do is look at the sales papers and make a list of everything on sale that I might want to purchase for the week. The second step is SUPPOSED to be, then, to take the list of on-sale foods and make up a meal plan for the week. A SPECIFIC meal plan, with recipes and/or chosen foods - no generic 'meat' or 'fruit' or 'vegetable' items on the list. 

That's where the plan usually falls apart for me. I'm not sure why. I often end up with a half-assed plan and I go out, buy a lot of stuff on sale, and overbuy on snacks and things (making sure we're stocked each week with practically everything on the list above, when we don't NEED that many snacks each week). A lot of food ends up going to waste that way, and it also leads to overspending. Another goal is to eat on a budget because we really don't HAVE a lot of money to spend on food each month... and with us eating a lot of meat, fresher produce, and gluten-free foods (PLUS the other goals), we don't get to take advantage of most of the SUPER CHEAP foods on sale each week. I take comfort by reminding myself that we are increasing our health and it's worth the extra cost, but when money is tight you still feel the pinch and sometimes that 10 cent ramen (no matter how unhealthy) is awfully tempting.

I think I need a better database of recipes and meal plans that fit our health goals, for one. I went through a lot of recipe testing last summer when I was doing The Blood Sugar Solution. I found some foods to add to my staples list but overall I didn't find a lot of 'winner' recipes - quick, easy, delicious and SATISFYING. It's a lot of work to test new recipes, and it's a lot of work to even make a 'potential recipes' database, and it's very disheartening to be out of your element and not have a lot of 'staple' recipes to fall back on when you just need to throw a quick and easy dinner together.

The other thing that holds me back is I'm still fighting a lifetime of bad eating habits. Every time I go to my mom's house I'm reminded of how truly awful my nutritional meals background is. A veritable SEA of white everything. White breads, white pastas, sweets, frozen meals (Stouffers, Hot Pockets). I pretty much can't eat anything at my mom's house anymore. I miss those foods sometimes. My 'easy' meals, even with my own family, were things like: spaghetti with garlic bread. Hot dogs and beans. Macaroni and Cheese (yes, blue box mac and cheese, and I still love that chemically-laden slop).  Hot dogs and chips. Sloppy joes.

I can't eat any of that now, and while most of the time I don't really miss those specific foods... I still feel lost a lot of the time. It's hard to explain. Mostly it's a feeling like I don't really know what I'm doing, and I'm not terribly happy with it. It feels HARD. It still feels like a challenge. I was taught to cook as I grew up, and I've always loved cooking... but there's a part of me now that feels like I never learned how to cook, and I'm trying to learn a new skill while at the same time being limited to incredibly strict parameters. With these food restrictions, you go into the grocery store, and you pretty much have 5-6 aisles / sections in which you can shop. It feels very LIMITING to be surrounded by all that food and not be able to do anything with it, especially when it's food you've spent 30+ years eating.  To have it suddenly taken away - as I said in an earlier post, I've mourned the loss and I don't really feel like I'm still having grief over the foods I CAN'T eat, but I guess maybe I haven't come to terms with the foods I CAN eat. I am still trying new foods periodically... but I don't know what is EASY for me any more in terms of meals. I guess I haven't found my new normal.

What I find most of the time is that trying to do an entire week of meal plans makes me lose my mind. I still have to take it one or two days at a time. I hate this because I'm pretty sure I'm spending more money than I need to be (every time you go into the store you're tempted), and I know I'm spending way more time than I need to by hitting the grocery store multiple times a day.

My health is worth it. My family's health is worth it. I just wish I had figured it out more by now. 30+ years of eating habits being changed won't happen overnight. Just like weight loss won't happen overnight. Sometimes that's not terribly consoling

This post was brought to you by my frustration and anxiety as I try to put together a weekly meal plan yet again. :/

Major Off-Roading

I've kind of got a little bit of this going on right now. Or at least that's how I feel.

I've been pretty off my game the past week. I haven't journaled about my diet since last Thursday, and I've definitely been half-assing the diet in that week as well. Here's what's been going on:

For starters, I have a generalized anxiety disorder. I'm not sure if I've mentioned that in this blog or not. One of the positive things I HAVE noticed is that my anxiety seems much more controlled and lessened since I started this diet. That's pretty awesome. Unfortunately, it's not completely GONE. One of the areas I've always struggled is with achieving balance in life... balance in all my goals, mostly. If I spend too much time focusing on ONE goal I start to get anxious that the others aren't being achieved. In the past I would just get overanxious, shut down, and do NOTHING. I've learned through therapy to roll with the punches (or the mood swings, if you will) a little better though, and when I feel that anxiety start to come up I have gotten much better at shifting gears. That's kind of what happened last Friday. I was starting to get really anxious because I was focusing all my time on my diet and taking care of the family, and my house was falling into massive disarray. So I took Friday to chill out a bit and focus mostly on whipping the house back into shape. I stuck to the diet pretty faithfully, I just didn't blog or journal or make complicated meals (leftovers, yay). Unfortunately this carried over into some of the other days... with not being a HUGE fan of some of the foods I have to eat on this plan, it is hard for me to scrounge up foods on the fly right now. I'm still working on building up that repertoire of easy and satisfying freezer meals, snacks, quick foods, and foods on the go. Without having those resources in place, and with 33 years of bad-food eating habits in place, it's very easy to go backwards and grab things that aren't great for me.

Another challenge: yesterday was my birthday. YAY! We went out all day on Saturday to celebrate... we hit the Bristol Renaissance Faire (one of my favorite places) and then Joe's Crab Shack for dinner. I did OK on the diet but allowed a few small cheats to sneak through the cracks. Tuesday night I had a Partylites show / birthday party at my house, and mostly stuck to the diet but cheated with corn tortilla chips and a little cheese. (I also, in a moment of weakness, bought and ate a cupcake at Jewel when I was shopping for the party.) Yesterday, my actual birthday, a friend took me out to lunch and my family took me out to dinner. I cheated with corn chips again, a little cheese, and some barbecue sauce (mmm ribs). A few cheats here and there are definitely going to add up. Though I think overall I handled the birthday landmine fairly well.

A third challenge: we ran out of food money. Eating fresh, healthy foods IS expensive, and I don't have a good handle yet on some of my money-saving food ideas. I am working on learning:

• how to buy in smaller amounts so less produce goes to waste
• how to plan my recipes (which I'm still building up!) seasonally
• how to plan my meals so that I'm using ALL the ingredients I buy (for example, if I have a recipe that uses two stalks of celery, trying to plan a few more recipes in the next couple days that use the REST of that bunch of celery I bought)

I'm not quite there yet though. It's going to take time, and I recognize that, but in the meantime I am exceeding my food budget by quite a bit. I've been subsisting on $400 a month for our family of four. That's not cutting it anymore.  For processed foods, I could coupon quite a bit and get good deals and sometimes even free food. While fresh food coupons DO exist, they are rare. We already discussed changing the budget next month to allow more food money, but for this month (until the 15th, at least) I'm down to the 'scrounge in your pantry' stage. Which isn't working incredibly well overall. I got rid of most of the bad foods but there's still a few things lurking that I may have to delve into because I just won't have any other options until next payday. I'll do the best I can.

This leads me to another challenge: I do keep some foods in the house for my kids and husband. I am learning that some foods do not tempt me and other foods, unfortunately, DO. Things I have snuck bits of in the past week include ice cream, generic Cheetos, candy, and a Twinkie I filched from my mom's house. It's like logically I know these things are bad for me but before the logic center of my mind can process a strong rebuttal, my body is already going

and then it's too late. So this is another learning process... what treats I can and can't have for them in the house while I'm struggling through this. What I'm going to do about going to my mom's house I just don't know. It's pretty much a known fact that dieting 'willpower' is a myth. 

To attribute dieting success or failure to willpower, researchers say, is to ignore the complex interaction of brain chemicals, behavioral conditioning, hormones, heredity and the powerful influence of habits. Telling an overweight person to use willpower is, in many ways, like telling a clinically depressed person to ''snap out of it.''

 I'll just keep looking for ways to fight this war inside myself until I've managed to change my brain chemicals, conditioning, hormones, etc. as best I can.

So. Anyway. There's been some backsliding. I've noticed some health backsliding as well, some of the old symptoms coming back up, and I DO NOT WANT that. This is real life, and this is a HUGE process; I'm not going to beat myself up over it. I'm just going to pick myself up and get back on track. The Blood Sugar Solution book says:

Getting and staying healthy in our modern world is a heroic feat. It is a subversive and revolutionary act. We have to navigate dangerous food landscapes, resist carefully designed temptations at every turn, fight marketing that goes right after our primitive hard-wired survival impulses, and fend off food pushers, saboteurs, and a thousand distractions online, on television, and in other media.

A HEROIC FEAT. A A revolutionary act! I like that. I enjoy a good challenge. I started journaling again today, and I'm going to count today as the official start of Week Two... which I will blog about next time!

Fast, Cheap, And Easy

Except now I'm complicated, expensive, and full of beans.

Yesterday was one of those "run around all afternoon" days. The kids and I all had dental cleanings in the afternoon, and I had some errands to run. I was making soup for lunch in the Crock Pot and it wasn't ready before I had to leave, so I grabbed some baby carrots and a thing of applesauce and ran out the door. It was a sad lunch. (Oh yeah, I've decided to allow myself one apple or thing of applesauce each day. More on that in a future post.)

The kids and I *love* these GoGo squeeZ applesauces. They're all natural, just apples (and occasionally other fruits or spices depending on the flavor), no additives or sugar or anything. The thing I love is that they taste great! I've tried canned or jarred 'natural' applesauce and it always tastes funky or bitter. They aren't paying me to endorse it, I just love this stuff. My favorite is the apple cinnamon!

 Our dentist is on the north side of the city, an hour away. We loooove them and continue to go even though we moved to the suburbs seven years ago. They're great with us, great with the kids, full of pampering goodness... I'm somewhat dental-phobic; I have a lot of anxiety about having ANY sort of dental work done (not cleanings but anything that involves potential pain or injections in my gums FORGET IT). They're very understanding, give me massages and parrafin hand wax, give me lots of Valium AND let me have happy gas. I still have anxiety but part of me looks forward to those happy-hazy-woozy dental times too! So I'm willing to drive an hour to have great service.

Perfect Smile Dental Spa. They aren't paying me to endorse them either, I just love them that much! Ask for Irma, she's the best! (You can name-drop us if you go though, we do get a gift certificate!)

Another bonus of having a dentist on the north side of the city is that some of my friends live up there. My friend Sarah has people over most Tuesday nights so I took advantage of our dental visit and went to hang out at her place. OJ came up after work, hung out a bit, then took the kids home so they could get to bed on time. Me? I stayed at Sarah's until 2AM - COMPLETELY irresponsible! But fun! Hey, it happens rarely for me. I'll enjoy it when I can.

This meant, however, that I had a piss-poor lunch AND we all needed dinner on the go.
Also, it's the end of August, it was an EXPENSIVE month for us (basically we spent 20 days on vacation), and there's still some month left at the end of our money.
Thus far I've managed to go out and eat on this new diet by picking restaurants that have somewhat higher-quality foods and getting entrees like salmon, chicken, or steak with vegetables. Tasty but pricy. Of course if I'm out with the family, they eat where I eat, so then we're buying restaurant entrees for four. The cost adds up pretty quickly and we just couldn't afford to do it this time. I needed something cheap and easy.

I have no idea how to handle 'fast, cheap, on the go' food on this diet plan. Salads are out of the question for dinner (I can manage them for lunch) because they simply don't satisfy me. Perhaps when I've been eating this way for years instead of mere weeks, I will come to look at a salad as a meal and not something to be tolerated as a preface to a meal. Right now, while I'm working on it, I am nowhere NEAR that point. If I got a chicken salad, I'd eat the chicken, pick at a few of the lettuce leaves, and be unhappy and hungry all night long. And I heard rumors that chocolate cake was going to be visiting the gathering later in the evening. If I ate a grumpy, sad salad, I'm not sure if I'd be able to resist delicious cake later.

If you HAVE to do fast food, and you're extremely limited on food choices, what do you do? You can't eat wheat, sugar, dairy, starchy vegetables, fruit, or any other kind of grain. You're also not supposed to be eating processed food. At the same time, this is real life and not every day is going to be a perfect day. What are the best choices when you can't be 'perfect'?

Here's the choice I made. I decided to make sure I was avoiding gluten since I'm fairly certain I had a reaction to it earlier in this plan. We hit Taco Bell. I obviously skipped out on the 'no processed food' rule last night. I also allowed myself a grain (corn, in the tortilla chips) and dairy (cheese). I got Nachos BellGrande and Pintos N Cheese.

It was waaaaay more delicious than Taco Bell has any right to be.

I feel kind of crappy today but it feels more like the general "you stay up too late every night and then LAST night you didn't get home until 3AM and then you had to be up at 7:30 to get the kids to school so your sleep is ALLLL screwed up" crappy, not like the kinds of "you are sooo unhealthy you done gonna die" crappy I've felt earlier this year. Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying Taco Bell is going to make its way back into my diet with any sort of regularity, but I don't think it was the worst occasional choice I could make either.

Yesterday's Blood Sugar Solution journal.

However, I AM curious as to what healthy options you choose at fast food restaurants when you have to go. What's the best choice you make (or would make), and why? What do you recommend? (At any of them, not just Taco Bell! McDonald's, Subway, Burger King, Long John Silver's... what else?)

Week One, Day Two

It's week one of the preparatory phase for The Blood Sugar Solution and I'm tackling another five items today. Most of them involve getting your kitchen ready for this big lifestyle change. 

Step one: Set a date to officially start the six-week program.

OK. There are two prep weeks to this before we jump into the six week program. I started week one of prep yesterday, so my six week program will officially start on Friday, August 10th.

I will be on North Carolina at that time, at the tail end of a 10 day vacation. I thought long and hard about starting before or after vacation. It's going to be ridiculously difficult to start something like this while on vacation, out of my own kitchen and home element. On the other hand, I'm sick all the time and it won't be much of a vacation if I'm not feeling good. So either stay sick in the cabin all the time, eating 'vacation food', or put in a bunch of extra work and planning to be able to start this new health plan and hopefully feel well enough to get out and enjoy things with my family. We're planning lots of fun activities like hiking and swimming in natural water spots and bonfires and gem mining; it should be a fairly active vacation. I'd like to be WITH my family for those things.

As part of my prep next week I will spend a good deal of time planning out meals as best as possible in advance of the vacation. I'm also bringing my exercise program with me.

Step two: Prepare Your Healthy Kitchen

Well, they have a check box by this but really it's a headliner for steps 3, 4, and 5. So... done! (as soon as I tackle those anyway!)

Step three: Rid your kitchen of disease- and obesity-producing Frankenfoods.

Here he gives you rules on what NOT to eat, to ideally be followed for life. He says "if you read these rules and think there will be nothing left to eat, then you have been eating in exactly the way that will make you sick and will keep you that way." That is certainly a fear of mine! I guess that's saying something. Here's the rules in brief:

• Get rid of most foods with labels - labelled foods you keep should have fewer than five ingredients
• Get rid of all sugar (any form) and any foods with a form of sugar on the label; same goes for white rice and white flour. For me all flour has to go, even whole grain stuff, because I'm in the advanced stage.
• Get rid of anything with high fructose corn syrup.
• Get rid of anything with the word 'hydrogenated' on the label.
• Throw out any highly refined cooking oils such as corn, soy, etc. Also avoid toxic fats and fried foods.
• Throw out any food with ingredients you can't recognize or pronounce, or are in Latin.
• Throw out any foods with preservatives, additives, coloring, or dyes, "natural flavorings", or MSG.
• Toss all artificial sweeteners - ANY of them, or any foods with them. Include sugar alcohols - basically any word that ends in 'ol'. 
• If it was grown on a plant, not made in a plant, then you can keep it in your kitchen.

I'm a little confused because I've looked ahead at some of his recipes and sometimes he uses raw honey. I know I won't be using it because I'm on the advanced plan, so it'll be out for at least six weeks, but it would seem that honey is a sugar? Yet we keep it? Maybe it's not a sugar. Whatever, I'm keeping mine, I just won't eat it for six weeks. 

This is going to be a little rough because my son turns eight tomorrow and we're having his birthday party so I won't be getting rid of everything until after Monday (it's a sleepover of course!). I'm going to go clear out everything I don't need for the party right now though!

...

SEVERAL HOURS LATER...

My husband was a great help with this task. It was pretty overwhelming. I guess I hadn't cleaned up my diet as much as I'd THOUGHT. I know I fall into traps of 'I'll just buy this for the kids' and 'but we need this for a paaaaarty'. We did keep some things for Drake's birthday party tomorrow, and we will do a final kitchen clean out on Monday evening. 

All the opened items that needed to be trashed.

The hardest thing here was tossing the cooking / baking staples I have used my whole life. Flour. Sugar. Panko. Worcestershire sauce. Soy sauce (it has wheat). Powdered sugar. Brown sugar. My entire 'cooking staples' cabinet is almost empty. My anxiety is pretty high over this one. I feel a little nauseous, a little like crying.

All the unopened items that will be donated to the food pantry.

Biggest points of panic: soups. I keep chicken noodle soup on hand for when I'm sick. With all my stomach problems it's become quite a staple. I guess I'll have to plan ahead and make / freeze my own? Also broths. All my chicken broth had undesirable additives. So did my canned tomatoes. Will I have to make *everything* on my own from now on??

And pastas. I've been eating Dreamfields pastas because they have a low amount of digestible carbs. Giving them away makes me really sad. I won't be eating any pastas for at least six weeks though. And they aren't whole wheat anyway.

A bag of stuff my husband couldn't stand to let go. He's taking it to work with him.

A bag of stuff for my mom that I know she'll use.

Overall this was REALLY emotionally draining. I wanted to cry more than a few times. I did a little dance of joy when I found some bags of nuts I didn't know I had because that means there's actually still something in the house I can snack on. We decided to keep a few things for the kids - mac and cheese, yogurt, ice cream, popsicles. I won't be buying more when it's gone, and if it becomes a problem for me I'll toss it, but they should be eased into it a little bit. Largely because there's practically nothing left to eat in the house except nuts and frozen fish, which they really don't like. My son helped me clean out one of the freezers though and was excited that we are getting rid of all the unhealthy stuff. Kids are amazing.

This was confusing at times too. There's a lot of stuff in food! Calcium chloride! Ferrous something or other! Artificial colors! Natural flavors! Sodium benzoate! Carrageenan! Lecithin! And many, many more. Very overwhelming. What's ok, what's not ok? We had to keep asking ourselves 'was it grown on a plant?' 

Finally, this is frightening. We are, like many in these economic times, struggling financially. The cost to replace these foods with healthy items is going to be painful for us. Honestly, I'm not sure how we're going to do it. I've kind of been pantry-eating the past week as it was... now my pantry is almost bare and I feel more than a little panicked at the thought of finding the money to fill it with foods to nourish my family this week. Health is costly. I just keep reminding myself that in the long run, sickness costs more.

I did it. I know I should congratulate myself for it but right now I just feel kind of sick over it.

Step four: Watch the Supermarket Savvy video at his website.

You can find Supermarket Savvy here. It's 11 minutes long. 

Discusses - soda pop, liquid calories, breakfast, oils, proteins, plate proportions.

Step five: Get your essential kitchen tools.

In the book he has included a list of tools he considers necessary to prepare and cook food. He says to make sure you have most of them. I'm not listing them all here. Luckily I enjoy cooking and I already have a well stocked kitchen. The only things I am missing from the list are:

• dutch oven
• an immersion blender
• a coffee grinder for flaxseed or other spices
• a fish spatula

Of those, the only thing I really want is a dutch oven (not the farting kind!). It's actually been on my list for a while. I've been making stocks and things this past year and it would really come in handy. I think, at least for now, I can live without the other three. I've never needed them or noticed their absence in my kitchen before. I'll have to investigate the cost of dutch ovens though and bump that up the list because I have wanted one for a while.

Any recommendations for a good dutch oven?

Anyone else inspired to clean out their pantries after this?