Fundraisers = Food I Can't Eat

I have decided that I am destined to spend the rest of the year buying school fundraiser items in which I will never be able to partake. It is apparently a requirement that all fundraiser food items must be “fake food.”

Today was pick-up day for subs from the PTO sale – pretty sure these are a no-no for me. I had some last year and they were quite good, but they are made at a commercial factory. My parents picked them up for me so once I get them, I’ll have to see if they have an ingredient list on the label. But I’m guessing that my family will be scarfing down Super Bowl subs while I am eating….well, I don’t know what I’ll be eating.

And then there are the Girl Scout cookies. When I got the order form, I thought ‘oh, please for the love of all that is good in the world, please let one of them be all-natural!’ I’d even go for the Shortbread! But alas, no. Every single stinking cookie has artificial flavors in it. Darn them all!

Finally, I picked up a Little Caesar’s order form for the choir trip to Ireland that I am (knock on wood) hoping to join. We’ve bought these pizza kits in the past, and I must admit to a tiny Crazy Bread/Cinnamon Stick obsession. But none for me this year. I don’t even have to read the label to know that. Bummer.

However, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that we did do one food fundraiser earlier this year that I think I could probably eat. A family in our parish owns an orchard and also a pie making fundraiser operation. They bring the apples and ingredients, and your organization brings the labor. It is really quite the operation. You set up one night and then make the pies the next day.

Everything is made from scratch. The crust does use shortening which might be questionable, but otherwise, the pies consist of apples, sugar and cinnamon. The crusts have shortening, flour and vinegar. Fantastic pies! Huge too! Our school does this fundraiser once a year, and it is always a big success. Wish I could find a link to the farm to share but they don’t seem to be online.

Anyways, this is just my small whine for the day. I’ll still buy the subs and the cookies for the rest of the family, and I’ll admit that I feel a bit bummed that these items are off-limits. But I won’t dwell on it too long. Instead, I just need to remember that the headaches are gone, I feel great and I’ve dropped 15 pounds since the beginning of the year. Whoohoo!

Unexpected Trans Fats - Not So Yum

Earlier this week, we had hamburgers for dinner. I had mine sans bun and with cheese and sautéed mushrooms on top. It was quite yummy. However, as we were preparing them, my husband began to sprinkle the usual McCormick’s Montreal Steak seasoning on top. He turned to me and asked if I could have some or if it didn’t meet my new rigorous eating guidelines. I said I didn’t know why not since it was just spices, but I took the container and looked at the ingredients just to be sure.

Imagine my surprise to see partially hydrogenated soybean oil listed above natural flavors and extractives of paprika on the ingredients. The small asterisks next to the oil led me to a note which said “adds an insignificant amount of trans fat.’

Now I can only imagine why oil is included in a spice rub – perhaps to keep the salt and spices from sticking or maybe just to extend the shelf life. Regardless, it would never have occurred to me that trans fats would be found in this innocuous bottle sitting on the pantry shelf.

While the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) does not require trans fat less than 0.5 grams per serving to be listed on nutrition labels, this has caused some controversy among health-conscious folks and organizations. The American Heart Association suggests limiting trans fats to no more than 1% of your daily calories, which for most people would be 2-2.5 grams a day. Since small amounts of naturally occurring trans fats can be found in meat, milk, pomegranates, cabbage and peas, there is little room left over to have the .5 grams that may be lurking undeclared in packaged food.

So although I didn’t specifically rule out partially hydrogenated oils and trans fats as part of my eating criteria, I skipped the Montreal Steak Seasoning and stuck with good old-fashioned salt and pepper for my burgers, thankyouverymuch.

Tummy Troubles

First, I must say that I am super excited to see my first comment on the blog. Yea! Hi Brooken!

Now, the sick fairy has been visiting our house for the last week or so. It’s been a bit of an odd bug. No fever, but our tummies have been queasy and our bodies ache all over. As seems to be the natural progression of illness in our family, it hit the kids first and then moves on to my husband and me. Fortunately, it seems to be a short-lived. I started to feel out of sorts on Saturday, and I am hopeful that I will be back to my old self by tomorrow. For today, I seem to be ok as long as I am sitting, but it all goes bad if I try to get up and do something.

I must say that I am the only one in the family who has not yet lost my lunch as a result of this bug (knock on wood). That may be because I haven’t had much an appetite or because I haven’t been up to actually preparing anything that might upset my stomach. There are not a whole lot of quick whole food options in our household. My diet for the last two days has consisted mainly of apples, 100% apple juice and the occasional spoon of natural peanut butter when I felt the need for something more substantial.

Last night, I thought I was feeling better and made up some Crispy Apricot Pork Chops and Steamed Potatoes with Thyme. Both were quite good, but let me tell you that I regretted it after I finished eating.

For those interested, here are the recipes, compliments of Everyday Food Magazine (http://www.everydayfoodmag.com/) :

Crispy Apricot Pork Chops

Ingredients
Serves 4
1 tablespoon olive oil, plus more for baking sheet
2 multigrain sandwich bread
4 bone-in pork loin chops, (about 8 ounces each, 3/4 to 1 inch thick), patted dry
Coarse salt and ground pepper
4 teaspoons apricot jam

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Lightly brush a rimmed baking sheet with oil; set aside.
2. Tear bread into large pieces; place in food processor. Pulse until large crumbs form. Drizzle with oil; pulse once or twice, just until crumbs are moistened (you should have about 1 1/2 cups crumbs).
3. Season pork chops generously with salt and pepper; spread one side of each chop with 1 teaspoon jam. Dividing evenly, sprinkle breadcrumbs over jam, and pat them on gently.
4. Transfer pork, coated side up, to prepared baking sheet. Bake until crust is golden and pork is opaque throughout (meat should register 150 degrees.on an instant-read thermometer), 14 to 16 minutes. Serve immediately.

Steamed Potatoes with Thyme

Ingredients
Serves 4
2 pounds red new potatoes, halved if small, quartered if large
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves
Coarse salt and ground pepper

Directions
1. Set a steamer basket in a large pot. Fill with enough water to come just below basket; bring to a boil. Place potatoes in basket; reduce heat to a simmer. Cover, and cook until tender, 15 to 20 minutes.
2. Transfer potatoes to a medium bowl. Add oil and thyme; season with salt and pepper, and toss.

Low Carbing It

My whole foods experiment has unintentionally become a type low-carb diet. It seems as though all bread products on the market contain some type of additive, filler or coloring.

I did find some Naan (http://www.fgfbrands.com/flat-breads.php) in the store the other day which was advertised as all natural. I had that for dinner and breakfast, and it was quite yummy. But I later found that the dextrin in it is a filler. Technically, it fits my criteria, but I think I’ll pass on buying it again for now.

Which really leaves me with making my own bread products at home – something I haven’t taken the time to do in the weeks past. As a result, I’ve been eating a lot of cheese, veggies, eggs and meat. Maybe not necessarily a bad thing, but my body is craving carbs. I think I’ll bake a potato for dinner tonight.

The Game Rules

I’ve been mulling this around in my mind for almost two weeks now, and I think I’ve come up with some basic guidelines:

• No High Fructose Corn Syrup

• No Artificial Flavors

• No Food Colorings

• No Chemical Ingredients

• When in doubt about an ingredient, I’ll avoid the food until I’ve figured out what it is.

My only exception to the above guidelines will be if refusing a food might offend or hurt someone’s feelings. In those instances, I’ll limit myself to the smallest serving possible.

I’m feeling pretty good about eating at home and at work. I have veggies, cheese and nuts stocked up for snacks. I do think that I will try to find a more natural cheese option than what’s in the stores though. There is a local organic cheese house nearby that I need to investigate.

My biggest challenge will be when we go out to eat. Our family has a Sunday dinner and a movie tradition in which we each take turns choosing the restaurant and a movie from our home collection. I foresee a lot of dinner salads in my future.

What exactly is a whole food?

When I first decided that I needed to cut all the crud out of my diet, my immediate thought was ‘easy, I’ll just eat whole foods.’ I was a bit surprised to discover that there really is no hard and true definition of what a whole food is.

As of this writing, Wikipedia.org - which seems to encompass the collective wisdom of the internet - defines whole foods as “foods that are unprocessed and unrefined, or processed and of course refined as little as possible before being consumed.” Foods that are unprocessed and unrefined I get. But bread, butter and cheese don’t grow on trees and yet I think most would consider those whole foods as well. So my challenge has been to determine at one point does, say a loaf of bread, cross the line from being raw ingredients refined as little as possible to a processed food. Despite all my reading on the subject of late, I’m not sure I quite know the answer to that yet.

To me, it seems like a no-brainer that any item containing artificial flavors, sweeteners or colors are not whole foods. I also tend to think that items with ingredients I cannot pronounce likely fall outside the whole foods category. And despite 7-Up’s assertion otherwise, I have a hard time thinking of high fructose corn syrup as all-natural goodness.

Where I have trouble is the minor ingredients found in many of the items on the shelf that I would consider to be whole foods. For example, does the vegetable coloring annatto in my cheese turn it from a whole food to a processed item? What is the malt flavoring listed in the ingredients of the “all-natural” bread I purchased at the store? And what about the pyrophosphate in the can of tuna?

I am possibly splitting hairs, but I can see where it might be easier to eat nothing other than fruit (www.fruitarian.com) and eliminate the agonizing over ingredients. While I don’t see a fruit diet in my future, it has become apparent that I need to develop some type of “game rules” for myself to guide my eating decisions.

Why I do What I do

So why am I doing this?

Well, at its most basic level, it’s because I stopped feeling good about myself late last year. I had a bad October – son in the hospital, missing cat and stressful situations at the office. All contributed to my overuse of everyone’s favorite source of comfort: food. Halloween didn’t help either.

So I drowned my sorrows in chips, ice cream and smarties. And while life straightened itself out in November, I kept right on pigging out. I had somehow hit a nice rhythm in my life that included copious amounts of junk food. McDonalds in the morning, McDonalds in the evening – ain’t we got fun!

It wasn’t until I had to retrieve my pair of “fat jeans” from the bag headed to the thrift store that I realized I had a problem. But even more than my weight, I really just felt like crap all the time. My skin, which has never been great, started looking the moon’s surface *all* the time. My hair was oily and stringy no matter what I used on it, and I lost all motivation to do anything productive.

I couldn’t help but notice that a half hour after I sat down with a bowl of smarties that my headache would come back with a vengeance. And less than an hour after a lunch of chips and pop (or soda for those of you partial to the term), I would lose all ability to focus on my work. As I paid closer attention to how my moods changed with the food I ate, I realize that even small amounts of processed foods and candy caused my “brain fog.” Simply put, when I ate crap, I felt like crap.

So here I am eating nothing but natural foods for the next year. I thought about just limiting my intake of processed foods, but I’ve tried that before without success. It’s a bit of a slippery slope for me, and I have no problem justifying a king size Hershey’s as a “small snack.”

While I am hoping the weight will come off too (and I have lost 8 pounds so far), my main concern is my health and my well-being.

The Lion's Den

Today is my first day of work since the new year began. Today is really my first big challenge as to whether I can go a whole year without eating artificial, processed foods.

I work in an office. I sit in front of a computer all day for three days a week from 9AM to 5:30PM. Prior to spending the whole day on my hind end in the office, I spend an hour in the car on my hind end driving to work. Yes, I realize that one hour, one way commute significantly increases my carbon emissions and reduces my enviro cred, but that’s just the way it is for the time being.

Anyway, so not only do I spend more than 10 hours a day doing absolutely nothing, I also have to contend with the deadly candy dish of doom. Like so many other office settings, sitting on our rears all day just isn’t enough. We must also be stuffing our face with Hershey’s Kisses, mini-Reeses and caramel corn. It’s a rough job but someone has to do it.

For whatever reason, sitting in front of a computer doing absolutely nothing even mildly physically strenuous makes me ravenously hungry, and I normally find reasons to check the fax machine just so I can walk by the candy dish. But today, I had my steely resolve that I would not succumb to the chocolaty rich goodness. In fact, when my co-worker tried to share M&M’s with me, I shooed her away {insert my pat on the back here}.

And now that it is quitting time, I sit here proud - albeit still ravenously hungry - that I managed to survive the day. For whatever reason, fruits and cheese don’t seem to fill you up the way that only artificially sweetened candy concoctions can. But on the positive side, I did not seem to lose all brain function at 2pm which often occurs after I’ve indulged in a vending machine provided lunch of champions.

In like a lion.....

Well, this is it. The first day of my year of eating nothing but whole foods – or at least trying to eat only whole foods.

I discovered this morning that it would be easier said than done. While I am trying to change my diet, I am not doing anything radical to change meals for the rest of the family at this time. This morning I made cinnamon rolls and bacon for breakfast. I knew the cinnamon rolls were a lovely concoction of artificial flavors and ingredients, but I thought I could have some bacon with eggs. Wrong! The bacon was maple flavored and contained a handful of items that I could barely pronounce, let alone know what they were. So I skipped the bacon and had eggs and coffee.

Later, I discovered that my store bought bread was less than all natural so I made a couple loaves myself. I was rather pleased with the result.

In the evening, I visited a friend who assured me that it would be virtually impossible to eat any store bought foods without also consuming artificial ingredients or preservatives. We discussed life, love and cats over a light dinner of fruits, veggies and melba bread with cheese spread that was of questionable “naturalness."

More on my eating experiment and what prompted it will come later……