My food life has been interesting lately! I went gluten-free a few months ago, and I feel a whole lot better. Then I went off sugar, and have lost a total of 17 pounds (still seem to be losing slowly). I think all these changes might be worth writing about…..

It felt good to post there, and while I really dislike the idea of letting go of this place, I also relish the idea of putting all the parts of my life in one place. I haven’t decided what I’m doing yet, but I’m sure I’ll post more about food over there in the interim, so feel free to add that blog to your reader.

I don’t plan on going vegan again, anytime soon. I feel badly about this, that it didn’t work for me, but I’ve been trying to go vegan since 1990. That’s 20 very long years of beating myself up because I can’t make a diet work for me that I’m discovering doesn’t work for a lot of other very good and non-evil people either. Thousands of dollars spent on books, magazines, entry into exclusive websites, and a few thousand more hours spent beating myself up when it didn’t work; I’m starting fresh. There will be no more beating myself up about not going vegan. If I end up evolving to a vegan diet over time, than that’s great. But this blog is no longer about “going vegan”. I’m going to change the tagline soon.

So what IS it about? That’s what I’ve been asking myself lately. It’s surprisingly hard for me to cope with the “new reality” of my eating habits not being about eventually going vegan. That’s been the main goal for so many years that it feels like utterly foreign territory to attempt to write without that in mind.

Which is why I’ve been considering the idea of starting an entirely new food blog about sustainable omnivory. I’d probably park it over at food.hollie.us, and call it something craaaazy, like Grass Dirt Beef. Just kidding. My other idea was to just start writing about food over at my personal blog. What do you guys think? Should I scrap this blog and start afresh, or is changing the focus 180 degrees something that you think readers can adjust to?

I’m finding myself overly stressed about the holidays, and I’m going to take care of myself and just start my vacation now. I urge you all to take care of yourselves too, in whatever way you need!

See you after Christmas!

- Hollie

I’ll return on Sunday, and write up some about what I’ve been doing! I’m so excited to get back to this!

I'm taking a break. Like this guy.

And my little kiddo is sick, and last week was a total bust when it comes to tracking or even halfway paying attention to healthy eating or exercise. So I’m going to take a week or two off. I’ll still post, but I’m not going to worry about progress or tracking while I’m figuring some things out.

It’s the little orange scale icon in the lower right corner.

Meg will notice that my Words game has 5 turns waiting for me. FIVE. Every time I look at that home screen I start to feel tense that I’m holding people up because I don’t know enough words with the letter Q in them. Did you know that stress causes us to retain viscera-choking belly fat? I’M FAT BECAUSE OF SCRABBLE! So glad we could clear that up. Hand me that Kit Kat.

We were doing okay until we passed the Cinnabon counter, and then I was puuulllllled in, by alien forces I can’t begin to understand. I could almost see the tracking beam find me, and then, Homer Simpson-like, almost lose me due to my overly large belly. But then it got me again, and then I was standing there, in front of the smiling Cinnabon man, thinking things like:

• My last Cinnabon was three weeks ago. One Cinnabon every three weeks counts as moderation, right?
• This guy has a lot of tattoos for someone working in retail. As a tattooed person myself, should I be happy about that?
• How much dairy is in one of these anyway?
• Just one won’t hurt.
• If I don’t write about it on my blog, it’s like it didn’t happen.

Approximately $4 later, I was going home with a large, doughy, milk-filled pastry that went against my Buddhist vow to not harm any sentient beings, in several interpretations of the phrase.

I’m a little over half-way through it, and I just stopped. I gave the rest to Jason and Greg, who devoured it. It felt really good to stop. I wasn’t inhaling it or anything, but I was having that strange experience where it feels simultaneously good and bad to be eating something. Do only people who struggle with their weight have this sensation?

It’s very hard to catch yourself in the moment that you’re doing something you really, deep down, don’t want to be doing, especially when it offers this kind of delicious food escapism. The Cinnabon helps me forget that my back is hurting, my hair smells like the pool, the regular problems with anxiety, the annoyance at my sports watch breaking, and the grief I felt last night watching Spirit of the Marathon while knowing how unlikely it is that I could ever complete an event like that.

Obviously, eating the Cinnabon contributes to anxiety, and probably back pain, and definitely to my inability to run a marathon (let’s all be glad that it doesn’t make your hair smell like a pool). So why do we do it? It isn’t mysterious. It’s the inability to put aside short term happiness for long term happiness. It’s the tendency that we all have to one degree or another, and it’s a pain in the ass for many of us. Malls are there to exploit it, as are Cinnabons. I was suckered in, and I went down with a smile.

I’m not going to beat myself up about this, in case you’re wondering. I promised moderation, and that’s what I’m doing, and it feels good so far, and beating myself up about a cinnamon roll would have zero positive effect except to make me feel guilty and encourage me to quit, which isn’t something I want. I’m turning over a new leaf.

In the mean time, I suggest you DO NOT subscribe to the “Inner Circle“, unless you’re absolutely sure that you want to give them your money. Their cancellation policy on their website is this:

But to cancel, all you have to do is Just send an email to support@renegadehealth.com with the subject “Inner Circle Cancel” and please include the email address you used to sign up, your nickname here in the inner circle and your full name. This will allow us to easily process your cancellation. We’ll process it right away.

That’s exactly what I did on 9/18/2009, and they charged me anyway on 9/30 (I became a member on 8/31/2009, so my cancellation request was well within the deadline). I’m really disappointed with the site, and the way it’s run. It really feels like a racket instead of a sincere attempt at providing people with good information (I know, many of you are going, DUH, right?).

So you can imagine my surprise when I got email this morning that said I’d been charged $9.99 “per your request”.

I’ve asked them to refund my money, and I sent along my previous email where I’d cancelled. I’ll let you all know what happens.

I got my recipe from  a post on the forum Raw Food Talk, and the original recipe is called Chrissy’s Goddess Chips. Be sure to read her directions too. I didn’t have a few of her ingredients though, so I ended up with a  different, more bare bones version that looks like this: 

Dehydrator Kale Chips

3/4 c sesame tahini 
1/2 c apple cider vinegar
1/2 c water
1/4 cup nama shoyu
1 lemon, juiced

1.) Stick all this in a blender and whip it up until it looks like a dressing you’d put over salad. It should be somewhat runny. If not, if it’s very thick, add a little more water. I haven’t had to add water yet, but other recipes suggest it. 

2.) Prep the kale: rinse it to get any dirt off, and then pat or shake dry. Then what I do is lay a leaf in front of me on the cutting board, fold the leaf over so that the spine is sticking out, and then take a sharp knife and slice that spine right out. I do this for all the leaves, and I’m using the Lacinato Kale*, so it’s pretty easy to do. Then slice the kale crosswise into strips, about the width of bacon. Muhahaahahaha. 

You want to slice the spines out because if you don’t, they dehydrate into LITTLE TWIGS, which aren’t fun to pick out of your teeth. 

3.) Then I put the dressing in a big bowl, and put the kale strips in the big bowl, and use my hands to mix it all up. 

4.) Place the strips on the dehydrator sheets, on the Teflex sheets over the mesh. Don’t pile them up, make sure they’re all separate from each other, although they can be close. The strips will drip a little – try to shake them off a bit before you put them on the sheet, although there will be some drip there too. That’s okay. 

5.) Put the dehydrator on at 110 degrees, and set a timer for 4 hours. 

So far my batches have been going almost exactly 4 hours, which has been great. The exception was when I made the marinade in advance, at night, and then tried to make the kale chips the next morning. The marinade was a lot thicker than I realized (that’s the batch in the photos above and below), and it really stuck to the leaves. It took about 6 hours to get completely crisp, and even then the flavor was more intense than I’d like. Next time I’ll thin it with water if I do that, or whip it up for a few minutes and get it nice and warm. 

These are easy to make and taste fantastic. I eat them right off the trays as they’re coming out. Then I put them in a glass container, sealed, and in the fridge. VERY IMPORTANT TO STORE KALE CHIPS IN THE FRIDGE. If you don’t, they wilt and get moist (ick). If you keep them cold, they stay crisp and delicious. TRUST ME. 

I eat them all the time, whenever I want a snack, but I think they’re especially good to eat for breakfast, with a banana on the side. 

Another recipe for kale chips I haven’t tried is here. 

* The last bunch I got was organic, from  PCC, and just the one bunch was HUGE. It took up the entire 9 trays of the dehydrator.

But my other blog is named for rain, while this blog is named for food, and I admit I’ve been putting off writing because when I did, I knew I’d have to admit it: I’m diving head first into RAW FOODS. I’m not eating a 100% raw food diet, in fact right now I’d say it’s abut a 20% raw food diet, but that’s still fairly impressive for someone like me, who once thought that greens tasted like freshly mown grass. 

My current passion is KALE CHIPS, which are, get this: crispy pieces of kale that have been through a dehydrator. A lot of kale chip recipes will tell you to stick them in the oven, but if you follow the tenants of the raw food doctrine, then you know a 300-degree oven is too hot, and you should dehydrate yours. Thankfully they’re delicious either way, and yesterday for breakfast I ate a small bowl of them for breakfast. I’m pretty sure hell froze over. Anyone feeling cold? 

I’ll post the recipe and directions tonight or tomorrow. Right now I’m going to rest, since I apparently am in the midst of catching my son’s cold. Raw foodists swear up and down they never get sick, and I guess since I’m only 20% raw I’ll only get 80% sick. It’s that kind of gift with statistics that’s why I’m running the world’s largest kale think tank RIGHT NOW.

This has been in the works for awhile, but we expected that it wouldn’t happen until Spring, due to a surprise necessary expense. Then some other stuff happened (isn’t that delightfully vague?), and we decided to go for it this fall. So THEN we were thinking it would happen in September or likely October, and then? THEN?

Then we found an awesome house and the landlord wanted us in by August 14th, and we said, “SURE!”

And that’s a week away. So you’ll understand why right now I’m eating Skittles at 6:54 in the morning.

And you’ll also understand why I won’t be writing for perhaps a week or two. I’ll likely be posting updates over at pluvio.us, so feel free to check in there if you want to watch the moving chaos unfold. But the food talk will likely die down until we get over there.

And when we do, I am looking forward to the following things:

• GREEN ONION PANCAKES! Seriously! Like a half dozen different restaurants! I can have a different pancake every week!
• Costco! Cheap fruit! Cheap veggies! I’m gonna juice my way to a healthy oblivion! (Look for my forthcoming hit song, “Healthy Oblivion”, from my band, The Purple Kale).
• Wacky restaurants I want to try, like some raw food places, and some vegan places (let’s see if we can get the kids and the men to eat somewhere that doesn’t serve bacon).
• FRIENDS TO GO OUT WITH!
• FRIENDS TO COOK WITH!
• Shark movies! (see: Meg)
• Being within walking distance to a park! This will require EXERCISE!
• Being within blocks of a pool, a YMCA, and an ice skating rink!
• Did I mention THE GREEN ONION PANCAKES?
• Professionals who deal with panic disorder! (In our town we have not a single psychiatrist. Not one. I’m totally serious.)
• The Space Needle! Ferries! Fairies! Art galleries that feature no art containing cowboys or rodeos!  Theater! The beach! The accompanying ocean! Being within easy driving distance of family and friends in Portland!

I’m bouncing so hard I might break my chair. Which is okay, because it would be one less thing to pack. Speaking of which, I need to take my Skittles and run. Happy eating ya’ll! I’ll be back in a couple weeks, look for my first in-depth green onion pancake review!

My innards are all confused and messed up, and food is also doing weird things. For example, whole wheat 7-grain toast seems to be pleasing and even soothing, but the Kashi 7-grain cereal I bought gives me headaches, stomach pains, “brain fog”, fatigue, tightness in my chest, anxiety, and bloating. What the heck? It’s happened three different times, consistently. Just to add to the confusion: the gluten-free, wheat-free coffee cake I made from a mix by The Cravings Place, does the same thing the Kashi cereal does (again, I tested a few times – leave it to me to make ABSOLUTELY SURE the coffee cake won’t work, heh).

At this point, I don’t know what to think. The plan of action I like the best is to start working on collecting veggie recipes, so that I can go back to eliminating a few things while not starving.

Tomorrow, on my 35th birthday (hurrah!), I’m off on a visit to Portland to see my bonus sister get married. I admit I’m a little nervous about coping with food, and a lot nervous about coping with anxiety, but I’m trying to keep an optimistic outlook on everything. I’m taking a lot of good snacks with me, and honestly I’m even tempted to take my Vita-Mix down too. I’ve heard a lot of people travel with theirs.

Fever is 100.3, and seems quite intent on going up. You know, when I was a lot younger, I could have a fever of 102 or 103, and I was very unhappy, but I could still walk around and was mostly coherent. Now I have this measly little 100.3 fever, and getting out of bed is like asking me to lift a car. You want me to what? Do you even hear yourself? Stand UP? Are you high? Do I look like I can stand up?

Is that just age? Am I just that out of shape? Has the whininess seeped down INTO MY VERY PHYSICAL BEING?

Also, all that stuff you guys said about dairy being in all baked products: that’s just cruel. I don’t blame you, but could you guys please figure out who I can blame for that? I have a thermometer I want to stick somewhere IN THEIR PERSON.

Dude. I am so tired. My head hurts. My belly is making very threatening noises. The lights are too bright, and they aren’t even on. Will someone please come bake a cake for Greg? With candles? I feel so bad. Happy Birthday! I love you! You’re my soulmate! Now hand me that bucket.

Blargh. This submarine is now submerging.

This morning I found a great post she wrote on March 15th entitled, The Diet Wars: Learning to Listen. It starts out:

Welcome to Dueling Diets! I’m your host, Crazy Charlotte. Today I’ll be pitting the Primal Blueprint a la Mark Sisson against the Engine 2 Diet a la Rip Esselstyn, all as part of my “Striving for Perfection” Experiment this month.

Sound familiar? I was posting about Paleo versus Rip recently myself (part 1 and part 2), although I haven’t done the personal experimentation that Charlotte has (I’m still working on the elimination diet – more on that later).

You should definitely go read her post, because her writing is entertaining and friendly, but I wanted to talk about her conclusions a little bit, because they’re very similar to what several of you guys have been telling me:

A recent study in The New England Journal of Medicine looked at dieters on several different popular diets. Their conclusion – and this will surprise no one – is that despite all the hype, it doesn’t really matter much which diet you pick as long as you cut your calories. I know, the whole “eat less” thing again. The key is to find the diet that helps your body live with the calorie restriction the best. And that apparently can differ from person to person.

Now I know that will sound familiar to some of you, eh? It’s a paraphrase of what you put in comments (and send me in email!), which brings me to….

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM.

Yeah, it’s me. I’m not saying I’m an elephant, I’m saying I’m like that thing that no one talks about. I’m THE THING. Except less swampy. I have been writing about different diets for the last, what, six months? And you guys have patiently listened and commented and encouraged me, and yet the fact of the matter is, six months later, I still:

• …don’t have a regular exercise routine.
• …don’t have a regular diet, meaning a general healthy routine. I still eat willy nilly, even when I’m eliminating things.
• …don’t know how to cook very well.
• …don’t have hardly any recipes on this blog.
• …don’t have any significant weight loss, despite knowing that I need to lose weight to get these hormones in check and my cycle back on track.

I felt such a kinship reading Charlotte’s blog because she struggles with a lot of the same thought patterns I do, even while she’s doing a whole lot more work than I am! She’s brave enough to talk about them, and she’s brave enough to keep going. I talk AROUND my issues, and then I avoid doing a lot of things that might help, because I’m sincerely afraid of it all just failing. I’m afraid I’ll work out every day and nothing will happen. I’m afraid I’ll try to eat right and it will be too hard, or I’ll suck at it, and then I’ll be too afraid to write about it. It’s a lot easier to write about my potential for things than it is to write about struggling through those things.

But I’m going to give it a shot anyway, because this is getting a little ridiculous. I’ve got a perfectly LOVELY little blog here, and it isn’t going anywhere. I’m still sitting on my ass. My ridiculously flat behind, which could use a few squats. As could the rest of me.

I’m still going to write about what I’m eating, but I’m going to try and write less about the theoretics of it all, and instead write more about how I feel, and how my body does, and how I’m learning to cook it all up. I still want to write about diet trends and staying heart healthy, and all the nutrition news I read every day, because I find all that fun. But it has to stop being an excuse to not do any of my own work. On that note: I’m off for a ride on the stationary bike. Wish me luck!

YOUR WELCOME.

I went to the doctor this morning, for my yearly physical. I told him about the elimination diet, and how I’m still having problems with being stiff and sore at night and in the mornings, and all the other symptoms. He spent most of this time looking at his computer, so as usual, I’m not sure what got heard and what got missed. He did palpate my back for the tender spots associated with fibromyalgia, but ruled that out (I wasn’t wincing enough?).

He was intrigued by the celiac idea, however, so several of you will be pleased to know he did draw some blood, for both lipids and a celiac screening. He said it woudn’t show anything if I’d not been eating any wheat, but I told him about how I’d added it back in. Then I told him about the three slices of cinnamon french toast on Sunday, and the two pieces of toast yesterday, and that seemed like enough wheat.

Otherwise, I’m healthy. GO ME.

Enter my programming god of a husband: Greg.

About a week ago, I said something like, “Man, it would be so useful if I could just record what I eat on my iPhone, or when I take a pill, or when I have a panic attack. I’m tired of lugging around this notebook.”

He got that look in his eye, the one that means he’s thinking he can make me really happy (I love this look, it always ends with him inventing something crazy and wonderful), and said, “Like maybe something where you could put in an event and then it would stick it on a calendar? You know, I could do that. I could make something would enter an event on, say, a Google calendar.”

And so he did.

Right now it doesn’t have a name or an icon: we just call it “Event Tracker” – it’s the white icon down at the bottom:

What it does is going to, for lack of a more mature phrase: rock my world.

• I can set up events with any text I want. Right now I’m using an initial system. For example, “A: FB PA”, means, “Anxiety: Full Blown Panic Attack”. I’ve created events for exercise, for example, “E: Stat. Bike (10m)”, means, Exercise: rode stationary bike for 10 minutes.
• Every time an event occurs, I just tap the button, and the information is put on a private Google calendar he set up, called “Hollie’s Events”.
• Greg is also planning on creating an Apple Script that will pull the data off the calendar into a list. By comparing lists, I’ll be able to answer questions like, “Is it true I’m more anxious at different times in my cycle? Is exercise triggering anxiety or is it something I’m eating on the days I’m exercising?”

Over time, I’ll be able to see trends a lot faster, and I’ll have a lot more data, since this is so easy to use and I won’t skip days because I’m tired and forgot to log what I did or what I ate. The data will also be more accurate, since it will have the date and time, and not lame notes by me, like, “I think this is what I ate, I can’t quite remember”. Basically, I’ll get better information while being able to obsess a lot less about tracking. Win-win!