What Do I Eat? - Part 2

There have been some questions about my last post, so here goes:

Yes, I buy organic. Organic everything. It may not seem that a fine residue of pesticide or herbicide spray amounts to much, but consider how it accumulates over a year . . . or a lifetime. I already have a body full of toxins I’m trying to clean out, so adding more to it is counter-productive. So yes, organic as much as possible.

No, I don’t “cheat on my diet.” There is no diet to cheat on. I'm just in the process of changing the way I eat -- figuring out what my body needs and what it really doesn't like. It's a work in progress.  So while I can give you an idea of what I'm eating, it's constantly evolving -- partly because my body is evolving, and partly because I'm experimenting. For instance, I had a focaccia-bread veggie sandwich the other day (focaccia is made with white flour). It's the first white bread I've had in three months, and I was curious to see if it would still put me to sleep. The fact that it didn't make me sleepy means that my body is waaay better off than it used to be, but the fact that I noticed a lag in my energy means I won't do that very often.

Remember, there is no protocol for what I’m doing. From the researching to the planning to the executing . . . I am *it*.  I use other folks' stories for guidelines, but no one is telling me what to do or what not to do. My success . . . or lack thereof . . . is up to me . . . as are the consequences. I like it this way. It's empowering. And it leaves the concept of "cheating" out of the picture . . . I have a completely different mind set.

What about gluten? I’m not cutting out gluten – only wheat.  When I added up all the wheat I had been ingesting (toast, sandwiches, pasta, biscuits and gravy, pancakes, baked goods, cereals, pizza, did I say pasta?), I decided that giving my body a rest from it would be a good idea. I still eat spelt and rye and pretty much everything else.

Juicers:  Most juicers grind up the produce and use centrifugal force (spinning) to "squeeze" the juice out of the pulp. This is fine for those who just like fresh juice occasionally, but for those of us who are needing to get every bit of nutrition out of the produce we buy, we need something better. For one thing, the high rpms spin air into the juice, and oxygen kills the nutrients within 15 or 20 minutes (so juicing in the morning for all day doesn't work). For another thing, the pulp that comes out is still relatively wet -- meaning that some of the juice is wasted. When you're going through five pounds of produce a day, that bit of wasted juice adds up.

My juicer of choice would be a Norwalk because it has a two-step process -- grating the produce into a canvas bag and then squeezing the juice out through the bag. The end-product pulp is completely dry and good for nothing but compost (think sawdust), so it takes less produce to get the same amount of juice. The down side is that Norwalk's cost $2,600 new, and close to $2,000 used on eBay. So #2 on my list is a Champion. They go for about $300 on eBay, but I haven't had time to watch one close enough to win the bidding yet. I bought an Omega Vert from Bed Bath & Beyond, but it left quite a bit of pulp in the juice -- to the point that I couldn't drink it without chewing. Yuck. So I'm back to my $30 Walmart model for now.

Doesn't sound like much variety.
I didn't do a meal-by-meal journal for you because that would be about as interesting to read as a dictionary, so use your imagination a little, I guess. I eat most any kind of vegetable you can call to mind; most fruits (just in small quantities); most grains (including some you may not recognize); and there's a long list of things I eat occasionally.  Here's some of them:
- Snails (in Europe they're prescribed for cancer treatment)
- Fermented veggies (more about this in a later post)
- Meat (probably also a subject for a later post)
- Kombu (Japanese seaweed) mostly in soups and broths
From the beginning, I have been trying to eat intuitively because that's the only way to get precisely what my body needs at the moment. But how to give you that concept in less than 1,000 words . . . It's easier to tell you what I don't eat.

Speaking of 1,000 words or less -- I have exceeded my limit. Chat with you next time.