AND NOW, ABOUT THAT FOOD

January 24, I wrote about my journaling everything I eat on MyPLate.com, explaining exactly how it is done so that anyone of you wanting to do something like that could have a good idea of what is out there for you. That is the site where I can understand what I am eating and the nutrition I am consuming (or not consuming). Tonight, I wrote about the books I am reading that have influenced my choice of those foods that I eat.

I have been reading books about what I should and should not eat for years; and for the most part, I have eaten the things that are good for me. That is beginning to be more and more difficult as they are finding more and more things that I should eat that I simply do not like and more and more things I should not eat that I dearly love. Sad, isn't it? I believe that is probably true about most of us, with the exception of those who simply eat because they should and therefore eat what they should eat and are done with it. No real joy of the food, no great feeling of exhilaration from baking something simply sinfully delicious, no letting their mouths fill with the abundance of tastes in a beautifully prepared roast of beef with the accompanying rich au jus with the vegetables gleaming in their unctuous gorgeousness.

And there I am, watching Dr. Oz teach us not to eat beef, much less with the potatoes that have roasted in the lovely beef fat that roasted out of that piece of meat. Perfectly delicious food; and it is not healthful, it is not good for us to eat. And is there anything more delicious than fresh home baked bread, straight from the oven, sliced and slathered with sweet cream butter? That should be on our do-not-eat list also. What else? If you, as did I, grew up in this part of Texas before fast food took over, good food meant my mother's chicken and dumplings, home made dumplings; or a  supper of real fried chicken; black eyed peas from the back yard garden; along with sliced tomatoes that tasted like real tomatoes; mashed potatoes, mashed with cream, swimming in butter; fresh corn on the cob.

And church suppers with tables filled with those wonderful home baked desserts: tall coconut cakes, lemon meringue pies, fudgy chocolate pies, and cakes covered with seven minute frosting. Oh, yum.  And not one bite of that wonderful food could make the list of things these doctors endorse in their books. Not one of those things is really good for the human body. And that is so sad. Those were wonderfully good things to eat that we now know are NOT good for us. We understand that and we have heard every reason why they aren't. Many people today never ate them and so, do not miss them. I did and I do.

But I am seventy years old and I do not intend to be a sickly old person. I do intend to be healthy; and so I must eat those things that promote good health and not eat those things that destroy good health. Over and again, I have read that I must learn a new way of eating, an eating plan for the rest of my life. I absolutely cannot eat correctly for a while and then return to those foods of my childhood. I must leave them in my memory. And so because I do intend to have a healthy seventh decade, I have devised a plan for eating that allows me to have a few of those things I love while allowing me to continue to lose weight and build a healthy body for my future.

Because I do journal every bite and it is there on the Internet for anyone to see and know what I eat, I shall continue to eat those things that are good for me to eat. To begin, I shall follow Dr. Oz's very good idea that dieters should limit 2 of their 3 daily meals to 2 or 2 choices only, seriously eating the same things over and over and over. That will be my breakfast and lunch every day. He also tells us (all of us, not just dieters) to eat small meals in order to add snacks into our daily meal plan. The idea is not to allow ourselves ever to be hungry, but to eat those things which satisfy and give enough energy to keep going and going. That makes very good sense.

Dinner, which I must begin to eat far earlier than I have since before I married 50 years ago,  will be meatless one or two days a week. That is nothing new. David and I did that for years. When I can afford fish, that will be another night. Beef and chicken I will eat one or two nights a week each. You know, affording beef only four times a month means that I can eat good beef, either better cuts or better beef, beef that hasn't been injected with hormones or antibiotics. That would be very good for me. And that would be delicious as I know how to cook good beef. And since all of the research shows that four ounces of meat is all the protein that one needs at the time, it won't even be that expensive. This is OK.

Of course, as always before, I will eat vegetables and fruit. And because I love both and because one-half cup is a serving, five servings is not that difficult to have in a day. I can do that. Over and over, the doctors tell us to eat those vegetables related to cabbage as they contain all of the good things we need to prevent and to fight cancer, to furnish the necessary vitamins for good skin and good bones and all of those important things. 

And those veggies? Both red and white/green cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts,  and all of those strange cabbages there in the produce aisle. They tell us to have some every day and I don't know anyone who does that; but I do have something from that group several times a week. Of course, I prefer my cabbage and cauliflower raw and that isn't as good for our health as is the lightly cooked; but I get something from all those raw veggies. And you know, I believe that cauliflower may well be the only white food of which those doctors all approve!

And something I have known forever, but now am beginning to understand more about are the colorful foods. I have always known that we should eat colorful vegetables and fruit; but only in the recent years have we understood that those colors are brought about by the different nutrients in each, the antioxidants, the phytochemicals,  the polyphenols, all of those things that we are learning  influence our health. So many of those can be found only in the food that comes in a particular color and if we do not eat that food, we may well miss something which we may not understand, but we still need. And so I am trying to rotate those things I love the most and eat as many different colors a week as I can! Never before thought In would choose food by color.

And now, about those things I mentioned that I love so much that we are not supposed to eat, I have made a decision to eat as correctly as I can most of the time and from time to time to eat one of those things I love and miss. If I constantly aim to eat only those things I should, surely I will be healthy enough that my body can deal with a day of my own home baked sweet rolls or another day that includes fried chicken, real fried chicken and not boneless, skinless chicken breasts oven baked and bland. That is my intent and thus far, I have been somewhat successful. I am still slowly and continually losing weight (I did explain that one in an earlier post about food). And the numbers that come from the medical testing are good ones. 

I do intend for those numbers to be better, but I shall do that while occasionally eating something not so good for me, yet so very good for me. And every bite will be recorded at

http://www.livestrong.com/thedailyplate/users/myplate/      

MORE ABOUT THAT GLORIOUS FOOD

I have not written this month, and that is bad! I have so much to say and so many other people get dumped on with all of those things I have to say. They get long email epistles and I fail to write here where my wonderful words could be way more wide spread. And so, I need to say what it is I have been doing rather than writing. 


And what have I been doing?  Mostly, I have been reading and eating, reading the books of Dr. Oz and Dr. Whitaker and Dr. Amen and Dr. Teitelbaum and several other physicians who have left the straight and narrow path and speak to various ideas from alternative medicine. Yes, even Dr. Oz, "American's most beloved doctor"  as the PR blurbs so often call him, advocates several of the tenets so often attributed to doctors who are derided as quacks and scam artists. Not so. So many of the things that these doctors have written about and said in public for many years are now being accepted as conventional. Once, only the nuts in California took vitamin supplements and ate yogurt; today, you can find both in almost every household and supermarket, drugstore,  mini-mart, and gas station.


That is what I have been reading. Why? Well, for one reason, I live with three syndromes for which modern medicine has no answer:  Chronic Fatigue, Fibromyalgia, and Myofascial Pain. At least, some of those in alternative medicine are actively engaged in trying to find relief for those of us with  these 'orphan" diseases.  Dr. Teitelbaum, who has both Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia, has revised his first book, From Fatigued to Fantastic, and in it, has advocated the use of D-ribose to help the body develop more energy. He wrote, 


For years, I talked about the importance of B vitamins, which are a key component of these molecules. These helped to a degree, but it was clear that a key component was missing. In looking at the biochemistry of these energy molecules, they are also made of 2 other key components-adenine and ribose. Adenine is plentiful in the body and supplementing with adenine did not help CFS. We then turned our attention to Ribose. Ribose is made in your body in a slow, laborious process and cannot be found in food. We knew that CFS/FMS causes your body to dump other key energy molecules like acetyl-l-carnitine. We then found that the body did the same with Ribose, making it hard to get your furnaces working again even after the other problems were treated. 


 Not having Ribose would be like trying to build a fire without kindling—nothing would happen. We wondered if giving Ribose to people with CFS would jump-start their energy furnaces. The answer was a resounding yes! 

http://www.endfatigue.com/tools-support/D-ribose.html

And so, having read his discussion of D-ribose and how it works to fire up the furnace, I am taking it every day. Now, if you all remember, I journal what I eat every day on the MyPLate website, every bite that I eat. And so, I entered the name of the product, Corvalen-M, and lo! there it was, listed as a food  that others using the site must also be using. If it provides the energy that I have not had since 1980, you all will be among the first to hear about it. I am actually looking forward to feeling good enough to do some of the things I have wanted to do for several years.


And, oh yes, all of those doctors are writing about the food I should and should not eat; and I am about to write about what I am eating.