What Are We Eating?

Foods that are listed in the book "The Body Ecology Diet" that I can eat are:

Raw Veggies/ Salads/ Green Veggies

Almonds soaked and sprouted

Red skin potatoes

Ocean Veggies - hijiki, dulse, wakame, arame, agar, nori, kelp, kombu, sea palm (not familiar!)

Winter squash & root vegetables

Quinoa, buckwheat, millet, amaranth (preferrably soaked then cooked)

Fish, fowl, beef, eggs

Celtic Sea Salt or Pink Himalayan (sold at Trader Joes)

Organic unrefined oils - coconut, safflower, hemp, evening primrose, flax seed, pumpkin seed

2 alternative sweeteners - Stevia and Lakanto

Seeds except sesame

Filtered/mineral/distilled water

Lemons, limes, cranberries, black currants (planning to make gluten-free scones!)

Cultured veggies like homemade sauerkraut

Kefir and young coconut kefir

Raw organic apple cider vinegar (a lot of condiments have vinegar, some are made with this)

Butter & Ghee

Follow Your Heart Vegenaise

Quinoa Flakes cereal/ Cream of Buckwheat cereal by Pocono

So with this list, what are we making for our daily meals? One thing is for sure, we aren't beating ourselves over the head with this diet trying to do it perfectly especially since none of us have had tests to find out if we have candidiasis yet. We are shopping for bread that doesn't have sugar in it while adding the other grains to our diet. I purchased buckwheat, ground it in my grain mill, ground up oats in a blender for a coarse oat flour and made delicious, fluffy pancakes for breakfast! The kids are eating their pancakes and french toast with a tiny bit of pure maple syrup (not me) or with almond butter and banana slices. I spread on coconut oil and eat it like a piece of toast. Delicious! We have been starting our day with green smoothie (fruit added for the kids and just veggies for me).

If you cut out the sugar, which means most packaged quick-fix foods, you are eating a lot more vegetables. The hubby made brown rice and stir-fry with snow peas, water chestnuts, onions and carrots that was delicious!

I made the millet porridge recipe from "The Body Ecology Diet" which is basically a cup of millet, 7 cups of water or chicken stock and any chopped veggies you want to add cooked in a pressure cooker for 30 minutes. The next day I reheated it in a skillet and served with sauteed zucchini, red pepper, onion and spinach. It was yummy! Seared Ahi Tuna Salad was one super easy, fast meal that was a family favorite. We purchased marinated ahi tuna steaks from Trader Joes and a bag of baby greens. We put the greens on a plate, pan seared the ahi on all four sides leaving the center rare, sliced it up and placed it on top of the salad. We topped it off with pepper and Pink Himalayan salt. My husband said, "My taste buds are bursting with flavor!" The kids loved it too!

We have really relied on cookbooks to give us ideas of what to eat. We already cooked with a lot of the ingredients on the list but have been experimenting with Stevia, the four grains and cultured milk and fermented veggies. I went to a yogurt and kefir making class and the tasting samples were so good! We had potato salad made with kefir cheese instead of mayonnaise, spelt crackers which were soaked overnight in kefir, ranch dressing made with piima, lemon cheese and 2 kinds of smoothies made with homemade yogurt and kefir! I got the culture for making piima and made it this week! Now I have a very healthy probiotic yogurt to make the dressing for our salads! I have been making about 2 cups of kefir every day and adding it to our green smoothies....more probiotic goodness for our tummies!

Sugar: The Bitter Truth

A friend recommended I include this video on my blog. It took an hour and a half to watch it and it was worth every minute. I even watched it again with my husband! This doctor compares a can of Coke to a can of beer and shows how they do exactly the same thing in your body, everywhere but the brain. When he gets really deep into the biochemical explanations, he quickly explains how my step-daughter developed auto-immune hepatitis. I knew it was food related! She grew up on ramen, velveeta, white bread and meat. She hated every fruit and vegetable (except canned peaches) and only started eating salads at about age 18. It was too late by then. Her liver gave up!

If you are trying to lose weight, you need to watch this. This video (on youtube) is life changing!

It has been just over a month since giving up sugar and my husband has lost 14 pounds and I lost 12. I started at 135 which was my pre-pregnancy weight and I am down to 123! The last time my scale showed that weight was years ago! We gave up sugar for health reasons and didn't expect to lose so much weight. We feel better and look better!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

He tells the truth about high fructose corn syrup and even recommends going to the sweetsurprise website to see how they are trying to push their agenda that it's ok in moderation. I added google ads to my website and they posted that website right on my blog! Just so you know, I do not support the claims made at sweetsurprise.com!

Probiotic Salad

Cutting things out of your diet that feed the yeast is very important but equally important is adding things to your diet that feed the good bacteria in your digestive system. You can purchase expensive probiotics and/or add fermented foods to your diet. Culturing your own veggies is an easy way to start. In Asian culutures they eat a cultured vegetable with every meal to aid in digestion. This was my first attempt and they were delicious, easy and very healthy!

Recipe:
1 med. size head of green cabbage
1/2 bunch of beet greens finely chopped
1 peeled green apple
5 carrots
1 inch piece of ginger finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic minced
3 tbsp. kefir whey
1-2 tbsp. celtic sea salt
1/2 cup filtered or distilled water

I watched a 6 minute video and followed the directions exactly. Then I let it ferment for about 5 days before putting it in my refrigerator. I eat it as a snack after a meal. My family isn't as excited about eating it as I am but the baby loves the taste!

The video is a live presentation by Ellix Katz who is the author of Wild Fermentation a great book with lots of recipes!

Symptoms

In our family, we all had symptoms of unhealthy eating. These symptoms were the motivation behind the change. I want to list them here as a reminder of where we started before giving up sugar and compare the differences in our health along the journey. There are some embarrasing symptoms I want to leave out but I think maybe enough people have similar issues and if this helps them, I am happy to reveal the ugly truth! I am going to list all of our health problems because, even if I can't prove they are directly related to eating sugar, I bet with more research I could easily be convinced. (Read all the way to the bottom to understand why I chose to attach this photo of my boys quietly reading together)



My sugar-filled diet symptoms include:
* metallic taste in mouth
* joint pain - in my knees - just started this year
* headaches
* frequent sinus infections
* cravings - never feeling satisfied - wanting to snack all the time
* eating more even when I'm full
* low back pain, also a very recent development
* belly fat - difficulty losing weight
* dragging myself out of bed feeling unrested
* lack of energy - needing naps
* many hormonal issues - PMS, heavy menstrual bleeding, severe cramps, endometriosis, infertility
* dry skin
* no desire to exercise - exhausted
* brain fog - forgetfulness
* moodiness
* waking with stomach ache in the mornings - stomach churning at night - gas - bloating

That's a lot right there! I could probably come up with more but I had enough aches and pains and was sick and tired enough that I committed to sugar abandonment completely!

My husband's symptoms:
* gray hair
* wrinkles
* frequent sports injuries
* some weight gain around the midriff
* exhaustion
* sugar cravings
* gas - churning stomach

Because of his landscaping business he is much more active than me and maybe has better genetics too! He seems healthier even though he is out all day so he eats out and when the family gave up soda a long time ago, he did not. His main motivation for making this huge dietary change was losing someone he loved just a couple months ago.

My 11 year old son's symptoms:

* He potty trained early and didn't ever wet the bed, but he did have daytime leaky bladder. We tried so many medical solutions but time was the only cure. After what I have read about sugar's connection to urinary system problems, I believe giving it up a long time ago would have solved this issue. Although this problem has been resolved I still wanted to include it for anyone who may have a child dealing with this embarrasing issue.
* cavities
* lots of digestion problems - slow digestion, stomach churning at night, not feeling good after some meals, gas, wondering if he is sensitive to certain foods
* hay fever
* colds

My 8 year old son's symptoms:

This child was born with a complete cleft lip and palate, has congenital heart defects and has had so many surgeries and procedures that his diet has been a factor in our home from the beginning. His sugar was limited so he wouldn't get sick before an upcoming surgery and so his recovery would be much faster. After his last heart surgery I refused all hospital meals and brought whole foods from home. His doctor said his recovery would be 3-4 weeks in the hospital, just like his previous open heart surgeries and he was shocked when our son was well enough to leave in 8 days! In all his years as a cardiologist he had never had a patient recover and leave that quickly. So we have done some things right but with all the social pressure to accept candy at church, eat junk food at birthday parties and every holiday event, we have caved in and been less diligent the last couple of years. Most of his health problems are related to his heart condition but what I am listing, sugar has made a lot worse. For instance, he has been exposed to so much anesthesia which affected his teeth buds as an infant, affecting his tooth enamel and making it that much easier to get cavities. We had to put sealants on most of his teeth when he was a tiny toddler.

* cavities
* beyond cravings for sugar- he showed signs of addiction - he would wake me up every morning
when he was about 4 years old and ask for candy and it was on his mind all day - he would do
anything to be allowed a piece of candy
* screaming, crying, yelling, defiance, anger, hitting - with everyone but mostly aimed at his
older brother - behavioral problems that would frequently bring me to tears not knowing
what to do
* no desire to learn or do any kind of "school" especially reading even though he can read
* extremely tired but would never take naps
* gas, constipation
* colds

Since eliminating every form of sugar from our diets we have seen dramatic changes in our health in such a short amount of time. The most visual change was dropping pounds of fat easily.
* Weight loss: By day 4 I had lost 5 pounds without trying. It has been 3 weeks and I have lost
10 pounds and my husband has lost 11 lbs.
* Cravings for sweets are completely gone for me and my kids. Hubby still wants sweets but he hasn't given up fruit juice and other things that probably stimulate those cravings although he has noticed a big difference.
* more energy
* vaginal dryness is gone and libido is coming back!
* no more gas
* stomach churning has stopped except when we have improperly combined food such as eating
chicken with a grain
* waking up rested (even with a baby waking me up all night)
* joint pain lessened - we'll see how the knees feel when I do some Zumba!
* more peace and less fighting in our home
* My youngest announced he loves reading now and read 3 chapter books the first week!

I was shocked to find my sons on the floor quietly reading together instead of bothering each other and fighting! I have seen behavioral improvements.

No Milk? No Bread? No Fruit? Really?

We all know that sugar eats holes in the hardest part of our bodies, the enamel of our teeth, but do we ever wonder what it is doing to the soft tissues? The lining of the stomach? Intestines? So many people have digestive problems, food allergies and sensitivities but I bet not many people connect it to sugar. Yeast is naturally on the skin, in the intestines and in our mouths but when we eat a poor diet including too much sugar, we feed the yeast and cause an overgrowth or infection in our bodies. When that happens the yeast bore themselves into mucosal linings of our stomachs, nose/sinuses, intestines, etc... Ever heard of "leaky gut syndrome"? This diet is intended to heal the gut. When the gut is leaky, it lets undigested proteins like the casein in milk and gluten from flours into the blood stream before they are fully digested. The blood doesn't like that and can react causing gluten and lactose intolerance, among other things. Parents may be causing their child's food allergies without even knowing it. It's worth investigating further if you have some of those problems. I haven't noticed any issues with intolerance (sometimes churning in my stomach when I eat toast or cereal) so when I am finished with the diet in 3+ months which is intended to kill off the excess yeast, I will reintroduce fruit sugars (yep, I am not eating fruit either), some dairy products and a small amount of wheat flour back into my diet. I haven't completely given up flour products yet because I am no expert at baking with the 4 grains that are allowed on the diet. I am eating one dairy product, kefir cheese, because when it ferments, the lactose in the milk is gone and when the whey separates from the solids, the milk protein does too! In a future post I will add photos and instructions on making kefir cheese. It's delicious!

Cleaning House

Step one of the journey - throw away everything in the cupboards and refrigerator that contain any form of sugar! We already don't buy soda but we realized even potato chips have a really bad form of sugar that tops the charts on the glycemic index at 100...maltodextrin. It is used as a filler in lots of packaged products so, really, we were tossing the packaged products in our home. That alone will improve our health. We threw out a 5 lb. bag of sugar aka "kiddy cocaine", a candy bar, Christmas candy, cookies, butterscotch chips, marshmallows, sweetened coconut, junk cereal (that my kids get once a year for Christmas and they didn't even want to eat it!), graham cracker sticks, hot cocoa mix, sugar-free gum (it's made with a sugar alcohol that feeds the yeast), chicken bouillon, rice wine vinegar and all other vinegars except organic apple cider vinegar for salad dressings. Yep, the yeast feed on vinegar too so even mustard and mayo had to go! When we finished cleaning house we had to ask ourselves, "What can we eat?"! Well, we got 6 books from the library for making desserts with stevia and cooking with quinoa, buckwheat, millet and amaranth. Yes, gluten in flours feeds the yeast and the lactose in milk does too. What that means is that a sugar-free diet that will kill off a yeast overgrowth is really dairy-free and gluten-free too! Sounds too hard to do doesn't it? That's why most people will just keep getting sick so they can eat whatever they want whenever they want. No one wants to make the connection with sugar and all the illnesses in our bodies. When you are 40 with a baby, you'll do whatever you can to have energy and feel good again. The journey begins!