Category Archives: food

Slinks

WebMD has a list of the 15 Best Diet Tips Ever. I thought they were right on the money.

Cate found this resource through the Ideal Bite Newsletter which reports on the safety of popular health and beauty items. I haven’t had a chance to peruse it yet, and frankly, I’m a little scared of what I might find! Yikes!

The Good Human talks about 10 tips to keep a healthy home. Also check out David’s series about spring cleaning the eco way.

And Treehugger has a good list of resources for growing your own food.

Speaking of which, our little garden is plugging along. We got a new digital camera this weekend, so I will post some photos soon!

Un-Happy Hour?

In the world of mindful eating, dining out is my biggest challenge.

I love to eat out. I have always associated eating out with fun, a great date, a night out with friends. If I really wanted to diet big time, I would eschew eating out at all costs.

But honestly, I’m looking for a balance between “diet” and enjoying my lifestyle. That means I have to find a good way to dine out.

Take tonight, for instance. A co-worker of mine is leaving the company, and so the whole department is headed to happy hour tonight to see her off. I really like these people and I want to get to know them better, make friends, etc., so opting out of happy hour doesn’t seem like a good plan, for purely social reasons.

So how do I make sure that I don’t overdo it and wake up with a guilty conscience (and possibly a hangover) tomorrow?

I think the best way to approach these situations is once again, mindfulness. I know I’m going to be tempted by fancy cocktails and heavy food (the place we’re going is also an Italian restaurant), so I just have to prepare myself to make good choices. Scope out the bar’s website before hand, check out the menu, think of low-cal cocktails (like diet coke and bacardi) so I’m not caught by surprise and lured into a poor choice.

That happened to me on Sunday. The husband and I were out shopping for digital cameras and decided to stop at the deli of Wild Oats for lunch. Caught unawares, I picked the first sandwich off the deli menu that looked interesting. BAD idea. The sandwich ended up having breaded chicken, melted cheese, and pesto — it tasted awesome, but had WAY more calories than if I’d gone with a simple, and probably equaly tasty, smoked turkey.

SO! Making a plan. Checking it twice. Getting wasted with my work buddies.

Well, two out of three ain’t bad.

Choices

There’s an interesting interview with money guru Suzie Orman on the Weight Watchers website (of all places) about the connection between poor money choices and poor food choices.

From the article:

But you’ve got to decide: Are you going to have potato chips or the orange, apple or carrot? Are you going to put the money in the savings account or are you going to spend it? They’re identical. So when you don’t have money in your life, you’re the reason why. When you have weight on your body—in most cases, not always if there’s medical reasons—you are not a victim of circumstances, you have chosen to do that to yourself. They are absolutely identical in nature. Identical.

It took me a long time to figure that out, and a lot of days, I’m still figuring it out. I never consciously realized that I was blaming my weight –– or anything else –– on anyone but me, but I was. I used to think up all the reasons I was fat, and a lot had to do with the way my family ate when I was a kid. But that was still my choice. I could have chosen to eat differently, even as a kid. It wasn’t that we didn’t have healthy options at my house, or that my parents wouldn’t have bought me just about anything I asked for; it was that I liked eating the high-fat, high-calorie foods and I chose to eat them.

I really think the parallels between being in debt and being overweight –– two major problems in American society –– are fascinating and teribly apt. We live in a society where taking responsibility (not blame) for our own actions is frequently the last thing on someone’s mind, and if we want to change the size of our waist lines and our wallets (hopefully in opposite directions), we have to learn to take personal responsibility for the problems we have created.

DtDO First Box

Just got an email from Door to Door Organics that our first box will be here on Wednesday! Another benefit of this service? They tell you what’s going to be in the box so you can plan ahead (which we all know I love to do).

Mangos! Strawberries! PURPLE ASPARAGUS! Arugala and collard greens and carrots with tops! (It says “with tops.”)

I am SO EXCITED!

And, AND! We had two bunches of collard greens on the list (?) so I substituted one for yams because YOU CAN DO THAT! I can also order grass-fed buffalo meat, wild salmon, and fair trade coffee.

Did I mention SO EXCITED???

Door to Door Organics

We’ve been trying to find a good CSA to join in our area, but we’ve been put off by a couple of factors. First, it’s a large sum of money for us to cough up (between $400–$600 for the season) all at once. In addition, we would have to drive to pick up the boxes every week, which wouldn’t be so terrible, but for the ones we were considering, the pick-up points are rather far away and at inconvenient times.

So, imagine my glee when, while reading 5280, I discovered a service called Door to Door Organics! It’s a similar sort of service, where you pay a weekly subscription fee and receive a box of organic produce. But the pros are numerous: you can receive mixed boxes of fruits and veggies (most CSAs we’ve found are entirely, or majority vegetables), you pay by the week, with no obligation to continue (so no large up-front cost), the service is year-round (CSAs only tend to run from mid-May through October), and the box is DELIVERED to your door!

While the food is seasonal and MOSTLY local, the only real drawback (if you can even call it that) we could find is that some of the produce is from other states. For example, this week, the boxes contain bananas — definitely not a Colorado crop. But when we thought about it, we decided that we were pretty likely to buy bananas (or apples, or whatever) anyway.

Deliveries in our area are on Wednesdays. Since we’ve already done our weekly shopping, we will probably try out this service next week. Stay tuned for a review!

Boulder Farmer’s Market

What a great weekend we had! The weather was gorgeous (sorry to anyone in the Northeast!), and on Saturday we went to the Boulder Farmer’s Market. Apparently, that is like the hot spot of the world up here, because I saw one co-worker and his wife and found out today that another co-worker was there as well! (Note to self: remember not to look like crap when going to the farmer’s market!)

It was really fun, with all kinds of cool booths. Not a whole lot of produce yet, but we did end up buying some salad greens, carrots, a parsnip, some fresh mushrooms, some goat cheese, and some peanut butter! Lurrrrrvely.

After stowing our purchases, we took a nice walk along Boulder Creek, which runs right through the middle of town. We were hungry when we got back, so we went to the prepared foods area and got lunch! Such cool stuff. Brandon had an ENORMOUS gyro very drippy with yoghurt sauce, and I had chicken and veggie dumplings in a soy ginger sauce that were AMAZING. We shared a fresh lemonaide and sat on the grass in the sun to eat. That’s when we saw the “Step It Up” National Climate Action Day parade go by, complete with a polar bear in water wings! 😦 There were people from the Sierra Club and lots of other eco-action groups set up to talk to you about changes you can make. (We felt smug, knowing all our power now comes from the wind!)

I thought the other very cool thing about the Market is that it’s designated a “trash-free zone” — instead of trash cans, they have recepticals for compostibles and recyclables. No trash! Very cool.

Take the Challenge!

Sarah-Louise, a third-year journalism student Chester University in England, writes:

I am currently writing articles for a campaign, to encourage people to eat locally produced food and as such I am looking for anyone, living in or around Chester, who would like to take up the challenge of eating only local food for at least two weeks. If anyone would be interested in helping with this feature, I would really like to hear from them.

If you fit the criteria and are interested in taking on Sarah-Louise’s challenge, you can email her at 04163038 (at) chester (dot) ac (dot) uk –– replacing the parantheticals with the correct punctuation, of course.

Cheers, Sarah-Louise! And good luck!