Why NOT to Eat a Twinkie: Reason No. 32

From Twinkie, Deconstructed by Steve Ettlinger (via body+soul magazine):

Ethylene oxide [part of Polysorbate 60, a Twinkie ingredient] is an excellent but entirely unlikely food chemical, seeing as it is highly explosive (it was used in tunnel-busting shells during the Vietnam War), a known human carcinogen, and a respiratory, skin, and eye irritant.

~*~

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I’m apalled and astounded at how little I know about the food that’s been going into my body for the last 25 years.  Do you know what goes into a chicken McNugget? A plethora of ingredients, most of which are NOT chicken.

And do you know that they spray butane (or a form of butane, anyway) on the nuggets and/or box for freshness?  As little as a gram of this stuff can kill you, but they spray it on the faux chicken bits so they don’t go off.

I think E. coli is the least of our worries when eating at fast food restaurants.

Green Hearts

The Green Life blog has some great ideas for having a green Valentine’s day.

I especially like number five:

Double Your Pleasure:
Shared experiences bring lovers closer together, and a rustic weekend getaway, cooking or dancing classes, or tickets to a concert or play is a gift for you too.

Shared experiences are also waste-free!

The Grocery Game

So, over the weekend, the Husband and I made a trip to Wild Oats for our weekly groceries.  Our goal was two-fold.  First, as I’ve mentioned, we are operating on limited funds, so we’ve switched over to the envelope method of budgeting for things like groceries; we pulled out $300 at the beginning of the month for groceries, and we’ll only be using that cash to pay for our groceries.

Second, we wanted to shop at Wild Oats because, after both reading Pollan’s article, we were ready to take the plunge into buying more healthful, organic foods.

It was an interesting experience to say the least.  My husband had a piece of paper and a pen and kept a running tally of everything we put in the cart.  The hardest part was figuring out fractions of a pound in the produce section — next time we’re bringing a calculator!  (Oh, rusty math skills!  How you haunt me!)  We made it through the store and realized we’d forgotten the turkey for a stew we were planning to make — but we were already at our weekly budget.  It was a really interesting exercise, going through the cart and putting back some of the things we’d picked up that weren’t on the list, like ranch dressing, ready-made soup, sour cream.

It was also really challenging to only pick out foods that had only five ingredients or fewer.  I found an organic raspberry jam with only five ingredients, and though the ranch dressing (that we eventually put back) had more than five ingredients, they were mostly spices.  But that rule definitely ruled out a lot of things for us.

Overall, we spent just over $60 for a week’s worth of food for two people, and I would estimate that 90% of it was organic whole foods: fruits, vegetables, meat, and milk.

This is actually a food revolution for me in and of itself.  As soon as I start thinking about being frugal and keeping to a budget, my mind immediately turns to coupons and cheaper foodstuffs, but the whole idea of our new ethical eating is to eat better foods, and in this society, better means more expensive.   It seems counterintuitive that we should be trying this now, at face value.

On the other hand, how long can we afford to eat the way we have been eating?  Maybe the costs of that won’t catch up to us for ten or even twenty years, but they will catch up.

We managed just fine on our self-imposed budget, and we got much better quality for our money.  Better food, better health, better life.  On a budget!

You Say You Want A Revolution

I’ve undergone several food revolutions in my life — periods that completely changed the way I look at, think about, and consume food. Food Revolution Number One: Slim Fast.  When I moved into my first apartment in college, I realized that I finally had complete control over the food I ate.  I knew I needed to lose weight, and so I went with Slim Fast as my diet plan.  It worked — boy, did it work!  I lost 35 pounds in about six months between the Slim Fast and taking up swimming several times a week.  For the first time in my life, I was happy with the way I looked.

But I wasn’t happy with the way I was eating.  Those Slim Fast shakes were driving me up the wall.  I convinced myself that I was ready for real food.  I went off the shakes and, lo and behold, the weight started to come back.  Thankfully, I didn’t let it get too far before I underwent Food Revolution Number Two: Weight Watchers.

Weight Watchers appealed to me because they claim to be all about real food, and after six months of chocolate milk, real food was all I craved.  Nothing is off limits, they proclaim!  And to a certain extent, that’s true.  The ideas behind WW are sound: good nutrition, moderate exercise, and keeping track of what you eat.

But counting points got to be a major drag for me after a while.  I lost ten of the pounds I had gained back after the Slim Fast and hit a wall.  No matter how hard I tried, my weight never seemed to dip much lower, and when it did manage to go down, it came right back up again.  I was beating myself (emotionally) black and blue over each little point, each bite of food, analyzing and re-analyzing and then binging when I got too depressed to care any more.  I had hit a plateau.

And I’m still there — more or less.  The more is that I’ve finally realized that I won’t lose any more weight without a) seriously starving myself or b) seriously increasing my workouts.  The less is that I find myself feeling less and less negative about the woman I see in the mirror; sure, she has a few extra pounds, but she is so much fitter and healthier than she has ever been.  I’m ready to celebrate that victory instead of bemoaning those last 5-10 pounds.

So, I think it was kismet that Michael Pollan’s article came out when it did, because I think I am finally ready for Food Revolution Number Three: Ethical Eating.

I mean two things by Ethical Eating.  First, in the more traditional sense; just in reading the first chapter of Pollan’s book, I am appalled by the condition of the American industrial food chain, and I find I’m not willing to support it any more than I have to.  I’m ready to change the kinds of foods — and thereby the policies — I support by changing what I purchase.  I may not be ready to become a complete vegetarian, but I am ready to start insisting that the chickens and eggs I consume be vegetarian fed and free range, and that the beef I consume live out its life in an open pasture, rather than a crowded feed lot.

In the second sense, I am ready to treat my body more ethically.  It is shameful how little I know and understand about the food I’m putting into my body, the food I’m asking my Husband to consume.  Is it any wonder that our bodies are rebelling with weight gain and disease when we nourish ourselves with nothing but synthetic chemicals and artificial flavors?  I thought we were eating fairly healthfully — until I started looking at the labels on the foods in our cupboards.

For me, being healthy is an important part of living a whole life.  Treating my body with respect and care is a whole new challenge for me.  I only get one body, and if I intend for my best life to be a long one, I need to start taking better care post haste.

Next: The Grocery Game

14 Valentines

A community over on Live Journal is hosting an event called 14 Valentines.

The idea is to highlight 14 women’s issues over the first 14 days of February with art and information of every kind.  Some of the submissions are fanfiction, as the main constituents of the community are from various online fandoms, but there are also links to real resources for various women’s issues, personal essays, original stories and poetry, art, book and music reviews, and much, much more.

Subjects so far have covered domestic violence, body image, women in the arts, and women in academia.  The art is amazing, the voices are real, and the topics are devestatingly important.

Li-bary

The Husband and I made a trip to the library yesterday afternoon. Because of our aforementioned financial status, we’ve stopped buying books and magazines. In all honesty, I almost never buy new books any more anyway. My author friends would tell me that used bookstores steal revenue from authors, but at the same time, I don’t have the funds to commit $25 every time a new book I want to read comes out, so I compromise.

Interestingly, the library is even a better deal than used bookstores; you get to read new books much sooner after they come out than if you had to wait for them to show up at the used bookstore, and you get to read them for FREE!

Now, books are my crack, and not actually owning the book with which I’ve just fallen in love is something of an adjustment for me, but it’s not as bad as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, after picking up the next installment in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials sequence, I moseyed over to the periodicals section and sat down with the latest Martha Stewart Living magazine. I like Martha. She’s a little odd, and more than a little OCD, I think, but I love the photography and design of her magazines, and I aspire to be crafty and a homemaking diva, so I like to look at her magazines. I almost never pay the cover price for them, though.

As I was flipping through the beautifully designed pages of cookie recipes and Valentine’s Day ideas, it occurred to me that she has an equally beautifully designed website, and nearly all of the information in the magazine is available for free on said website — or will be, as soon as next months’ magazine hits newsstands. So, I took out the little notebook I carry in my purse and made a note of all the articles that were interesting to me, that I might want to look up later.

Voila! Instant savings. Instead of buying the magazine, I now have a reminder to myself of the knowledge I might want to retain from it, and a way of obtaining said knowledge for free.

You always learn something at the library.

To Work, Or Not To Work…

…Isn’t a question I have the luxury of asking any more. Two months ago, my husband and I picked up our lives and moved from the O.C. to the Denver metro area in Colorado. We love it here — despite all the snow — except for one thing: we’re both having more trouble than we expected finding jobs. It’s not for lack of trying, let me assure you, but whether it be because of the time of year or some other factor, we haven’t been wholly successful.

The good news is that we planned for this eventuality; we moved with several months’ expenses saved. The bad news is that we are rapidly coming to the end of those savings.

As of last week, however, I went from being woefully unemployed to having a contract position with a publisher in town. The job will last at least a few more weeks and will provide us with enough income that we can both keep looking for the right job without having to freak out about things like paying rent and feeding the cat.

Unfortunately, my first week back at work completely threw me off! All my best intentions about exercising, eating healthfully, and keeping the house neat and organized flew out the window as soon as I was back in the cube life, doing the daily grind.

It was a huge shift for me, going from having unlimited free time back into the working world, and it reminded me why all of these things are a challenge in the first place.

I’m just rounding out week two of being back at work, and I’m happy to report that I’m beginning to get back into the swing of things. It’s all about choices, and I’m proud to say that I’ve been choosing wisely this week: I’ve been eating a lot more fruits and vegetables after reading “Unhappy Meals” last weekend, and the Husband and I plan to go to Wild Oats this weekend to stock up on healthy whole foods; I finished the book I checked out from the library — BEFORE the due date! — by choosing to read in the evenings instead of watching TV shows I don’t care about (you’ll never get me to give up Heroes, but that’s another story…); my dear Husband has been taking on a lot of the household chores during the day, but I’ve made a point of cleaning up the kitchen and doing my before bed routine — at least an hour before I’m ready for bed, so that I’m not too sleepy to do it!

And that’s really all it is, isn’t it? The steps to becoming beautiful are just baby steps, the steps to whole living building blocks that gradually grow into something monumental. So, for now, I’ll take what I can get and celebrate the little victories every day.

Time to send out some more resumés!

Eat Food

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Sounds pretty easy, right? Wrong.

I’m still trying to digest all the information presented in Michael Pollan’s fascinating article Unhappy Meals from Sunday’s NY Times Magazine. The article is hard to summarize, because there’s so much pertinent information contained therein, but Pollan’s main recommendation is to stop fixating on nutrients and focus our diets more on whole foods.

But that’s a lot easier said than done, at least for me.

Some people are super conscious of their appearance, always influenced by the latest fashion magazines and celebrities; I’m hyper-conscious of food, influenced by lifestyle magazines and celebrity chefs. I’m always thinking about food, reading about it, worrying about it, or eating it.

When I started this obsession, it was to facilitate a much-needed weight loss. I still struggle with those 10-15 pounds that I never seem to be able to get rid of, but I am much healthier than I was at the start of my journey, and a lot of that is because of my dedication to the cult of food.

What to do, then, when Mr. Pollan tells me to stop worrying about getting enough protein with my carbs? To stop multiplying calories by grams of fiber? To toss my multi-vitamins?

Frankly, I would love to give up all these silly food affectations and obsessions that I’ve acquired over the years and return to a simpler lifestyle eating more healthful, whole foods. I tell myself this, and yet, I keep coming up against mental blocks when trying to implement it.  (Am I really supposed to go back to full-fat butter instead of margerine???  It contradicts everything I’ve ever known!)  Old habits die hard.
I’m not at a point in my life where I can go through my kitchen and throw away anything with more than five ingredients, but even thinking about some of Pollan’s assertions has me changing the way I’m thinking about food.

It may be a long row to hoe, getting to a place where I am truly living his mantra to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” but I think it’s an important step in my life. Maybe I’m past the point when I need to analyze every single calorie that goes into my mouth. Maybe I’m coming to a place where the whole should be more important than the sum of its parts; rather than allowing it to be my whole life, maybe it’s time to let food in general become just another part of the whole.

~*~

My dear friend Cate is sending me Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which we both plan to read, so expect more musings to come.