The power of simple food

I went out for a Thai dinner last week and I was blown away by the entree. It was iceberg lettuce leaves on a plate, some tamarind sauce and then an arrangement of raw apple, raw ginger, coconut, raw chillies and some nuts. It was great!! It wasn’t 100% raw, but it was the closest to raw that I had seen at a Thai restaurant. I loved it so much, the combination was delicious, yet it was so simple.

So this week I have been eating iceberg lettuce rolled up with avocado, capsicum and dill. Yummy yummy. Using iceberg lettuce as a wrap is so simple, but because it is sweet and rolls easily it works well with sweet or savoury fillings.

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  2. Search for an apartment continues
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  4. Vitamix
No Comments by Petra Smirnoff on August 27, 2010
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Goals are just a direction of focus – if we don’t succeed the first time, try again!

Well something came up only one day after my last post about breaking through obstacles, and it was a big enough issue that I had to stop everything I was doing and focus all my attention onto fixing the problem. It was such an intense pressure that afterwards I needed a few days of complete rest and recuperation. As a result, the momentum has been lost from the focus points and it doesn’t feel right to start these ones exactly where I left off. I could kick myself for lack of discipline, or I could celebrate flexibility. I think the latter is the better approach :) I’ll come up with some new focus points soon.

As a final report on my previous focus points, I learned a new way to make water wicking planter-boxes for the balcony so that is great news. I’m going to put it into practise once I have the equipment ready. I shared my desire to support my endocrine system with my naturopath who has suggested some herbs that will work well to restore adrenal balance and can be used alongside the maca (which I am now using faithfully in a daily tomato-based savoury smoothie, which I have decided is the tastiest way to consume maca). I have definitely lost some weight, and I have also benefited from cutting out the higher glycemic foods like dried fruit from my diet. Finally I did get to W3D2 of the C25K running program, and I am confident that I can get back into it this weekend.

I am looking forward to a new set of focus points, and in the meantime writing about some of the books I have been reading lately!

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  1. My points of strength and weakness – the direction of this blog
  2. Goal achievement: recognising and breaking through obstacles that are standing in my way
  3. General updates, maca recipes
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  6. Buying and eating organic and chemical-free food in order to improve health
  7. Balancing the endocrine system including the use of maca
No Comments by Petra Smirnoff on August 26, 2010
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Goal achievement: recognising and breaking through obstacles that are standing in my way

  • Looking after my endocrine system
  • Reducing my weight back to normal after gaining 3kg
  • Completing four weeks of C25K
  • Creating a balcony garden

This is the first time in a while where I’ve set goals to focus for a full 30 days. I have been allowing myself to be scattered and start a lot of things, and so for me this has been a test in discipline. Yesterday was Day 18 of 30 and I did find that in the past few days I had lost my focus a little and so I need to get back on track. Yesterday I decided that spending a day away from the computer would be a good idea as I tend to get sidetracked by reading so many different ideas and opinions. So the computer stayed off the whole day and I thought that was quite good. I did end up watching TV to get the election results in the evening, but I still felt that the computer-free day was worthwhile.

Today I’m going to the Eat Your Balcony event in St Kilda and I’ve been reading the book Chi Running, so today when I go for a run I’m going to practice some of the body focus techniques.

The area in which I feel I need to improve most is my diet, I have slipped back into a couple of bad habits in the last few days, out of convenience rather than out of desire. The other area in which I need to improve the most is to relax and not push too hard against what is. I think the reason I have been drawn to a little more convenience in my food is because Wednesday I felt burnt out and exhausted and ended up staying at home to sleep for much of the day. Then Friday at work I had a migraine and yesterday I suddenly got tired and fell asleep for 3-4 hours in the middle of the day. I’m not sure what’s up, but I suspect that some past tension has been catching up with me and it needs to be released.

Where did the tension come from?

I’ve been fighting against my career – I’m only six weeks into working for a new employer but my intuition is telling me that I need to work towards a different career because its not who I want to be anymore. At the same time, I like the fact that my current employment gives me the ability to afford good quality food, a nice home, stability in my life and a high calibre employer who provides many additional benefits to their staff that other employers do not offer. So instead of fighting with where I am now and feeling negative, I need to work with what I have in order to design the life I want and move forward to that destination. Part of that requires me to release any tension and go with the flow yet at the same time looking for opportunities that will propel me into the direction that I want to go.

I’ve also been fighting against significant relationships. I tend to hold a belief that my existing close relationships ‘should’ provide me with support for moving forward into becoming the new person that I am moving towards. But everyone moves towards their own goals and desires, and so if I am moving in one direction and someone else is moving in another direction I have no right to expect them to provide interest or support in what I want to do. The best thing would be to make new friends and new support groups for each interest, and then enjoy that interest with another person who is passionate in that area. That way there should be less tension in my relationships with family and friends where the relationship is based around the length of time rather than being interested in the same things. Its important to have a balance between having some relationships such as family and marriage and close friends where you have known each other for a very long time, and some relationships where you are interested in the same things. They don’t have to be the same!

It sounds as though these obstacles don’t have much to do with my four focus points for these 30 days, but when we’re holding onto negativity and tension in some area, it does spill over to other areas due to stealing focus. By being aware of these two areas in which I keep fighting against ‘what is’, I hope to stop fighting and instead, to relax and go with the flow, enabling me to achieve my goals with success.

I think that with any worthwhile goals in life we tend to follow a certain pattern which allows us to move forward:

  1. Excitement about the new goal – doing everything we can to achieve the goal, everything is going wonderful!
  2. We hit a stumbling block in the form of an external problem (the juicer breaking during a juice feast for example) or an internal tension coming to the surface (this is what I have been experiencing)
  3. We consider giving up on the goal and look inward to decide if we have the strength and personal character (often we decide we don’t and we just give up here)
  4. If we get past step 3, we formulate a new plan to get past the obstacle and push hard to get to the finish line
  5. We achieve the goal and the memory of breaking past the obstacle is imprinted into our unconscious memory to build up our strength and personal character for next time

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  3. Focusing on health for the next 30 days
No Comments by Petra Smirnoff on August 22, 2010
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Balcony garden, lost 1.6kg of my extra 3kg so far, completed two weeks of C25K and had some self-discoveries about anxiety

  • Looking after my endocrine system
  • Reducing my weight back to normal after gaining 3kg
  • Completing four weeks of C25K
  • Creating a balcony garden

Well I haven’t been posting the last few days because I’ve had some other priorities come up, but now I can play catch up and share how I’m going with my 30 day goals. Its about half-way through my 30 days and I am starting to see some real progress. Lets start from the bottom:

Creating a balcony garden

Even though I have not put much into this in the last 30 days, the law of attraction kicked in and this weekend I am going to attend a workshop about growing food from a balcony garden. I just found out about it today – I can’t wait!

My bokashi bucket has finally filled up and I am ready to put in a second container in series with my wetpots system. I’m going to mix the bokashi with soil and put in an acid-loving plant like raspberry canes since it might take a couple of months for the bokashi to break down. Last year I had a couple of raspberry plants bear fruit all summer and it was wonderful because I normally baulk at the high prices you pay for fresh berries at the market.

The wetpots system is working – I can count about 30 little pea shoots popping up through the soil, including in the corner where it looked a little drier as it was further away from the ceramic pot. I hope the peas grow happily despite the windy weather we’ve been having lately.

Working on C25K

I completed week 2 of C25K, and additionally I have still been jogging to work and back which is 2.5 km each way. Some days when the weather is bad I just walk or catch the tram, but the majority of days I have been out jogging. In the C25K I have been doing intervals so I have been walking and running, whereas when I jog to work I try to keep up a slow jog for the entire 2.5km. Other than a few stiff muscles I feel great!

Reducing my body weight by 3kg

To be honest with my increased fitness body weight probably isn’t the best way to measure my body fat, but I don’t need to be too scientific. I am making progress with this goal finally after what felt like a slow start. I have been focusing on eating less calories than I expend, and I am using www.nutridiary.com to tell me how much difference in calories I should have each day in order to meet my goal. This is what it looks like so far:

calorie difference

calorie difference in the last couple of weeks

weight loss

steady weight loss in the last couple of weeks

I haven’t been feeling hungry on the number of calories I eat because I eat so much of my calories from a large volume of nutrition rich, healthy greens, fruits and grains and almost no cooked or trans fat (although my overall fat consumption is about 12% of my daily calories – but it is healthy non-cholesterol producing raw plant-based fats). In fact, some days I have been feeling overfull with the amount of food I have been eating. With the addition of maca into my daily diet I have been consuming as much as 28.7mg of iron in a day (My RDI is 18mg per day) and as much as 63 grams of protein in a day (My RDI is 43 grams in a day) despite eating a 100% vegan diet. The difference between this and my ‘normal’ diet is only that I am watching my consumption of extra sweet and dried fruits such as dates and dried figs, as when I am not recording my calories I tend to overeat on these.

Looking after my endocrine system

Anxiety

This is where I have still been placing the majority of my attention as it is such a complicated system. Saturday I experienced a day of severe anxiety and even though I have been working on reducing my anxiety overall, I do occasionally have these meltdown days where I feel highly stressed and worried about everything. I do believe my adrenals took a beating over the weekend, because I was very anxious over a 24 hour period, even through the night I was sweating and having nightmares and it took much of Sunday to recover.

Yesterday afternoon I suddenly felt really exhausted corresponding with premenstrual hormone changes and so I think my adrenals are a little overworked. It hasn’t been helping that I have been feeling a progressing desire to change my career to something where I focus more on educating and helping people in a field that I care about. Currently I am a Java software engineer which is a more task-based detail-oriented career, with minimal people contact but frequent high stress emergency incidents.

One thing I observed was that a certain sequence of events took place before I had my very bad day on Saturday. On Friday I was feeling increasingly tense at work and as a result I called my husband on the way home from work and started complaining about my day. When I got home the conversation escalated as I shared all of my frustrations about work which transpired into a negative spiral about life the universe and everything. I went to bed feeling tense and woke up at 3am with extreme anxiety which got worse and worse as the day continued.

I wondered to myself, could it be that if I had not complained the night before, I would not have set myself up for anxiety the next day? The level of anxiety I experienced would have certainly affected my hormones and left me feeling so exhausted. When I think back to other times when I have experienced high levels of emotional stress, those times have usually been preceded by a large complaining session which starts off OK, but as it continues the listener gets annoyed and my observation of the change in response from the listener often triggers an anxiety attack.

The solution?

I have been thinking for a little while about starting the Complaint-Free World challenge, which challenges you to 21 days of consecutive days where not a single complaint has been uttered. The idea of the challenge is to first observe our behaviours, then to recognise them and then finally to change them. By changing what we say we will slowly affect how we think.

In order to keep yourself honest doing the Complaint-Free challenge, you wear a purple wrist band and each time you complain you move the bracelet from one wrist to the other. If you complain you start again at Day 1, no matter which day you are up to. If you can keep the bracelet on the same wrist for 21 days consecutively then you have achieved the challenge and can then take off the band! It typically takes people about 8 months to complete the challenge and so I had been unsure as to whether I could take on such a large challenge at this time, but I am thinking it would make a big difference if I could become complaint free.

I have ordered the bracelets and book from http://www.acomplaintfreeworld.org and for now I have started with a ‘make poverty history’ wristband I picked up from Oxfam. I hope it works well :)

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2 Comments by Petra Smirnoff on August 18, 2010
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The Ladycomp fertility monitor and BBT charting

  • Looking after my endocrine system
  • Reducing my weight back to normal after gaining 3kg
  • Completing four weeks of C25K
  • Creating a balcony garden

I’ve been enjoying learning all about the endocrine/ hormones system in the last couple of weeks, I’ve always been fascinated by biology, but these days with our modern technologies we are quite out of touch with nature. I changed my goal in this area just to ‘looking after my endocrine system’ which is much more vague, but biology knows best and all I can do is live in a way which best supports my entire body-system. I’d love it if there was some way you could go to a doctor or naturopath and take a quick test and then the next day you get a print-out of how healthy you are in all the different systems of the body. It would be great! You could take the test every few weeks and have the data plotted on a chart so you could see if any specific system was out of balance.

ladycomp fertility monitor

Ladycomp

I’ve been using Basal Body Temperature (BBT) charting for two and a half months now, so I’m only new at it, but it is very interesting to see how your body reacts to different circumstances. Originally I bought my Ladycomp thermometer/fertility computer to be used as a natural contraception method, but I was curious as to what a cycle really looks like so I’ve been plotting it as a chart in excel.

Basically the way the Ladycomp works is that when your body is in its estrogen phase your temperatures will be lower than when you are in your progesterone phase. When your body goes from estrogen phase to progesterone phase that is when you have ovulated. In a perfect menstrual cycle aligned with the lunar cycle a woman should have 14 days in estrogen phase including menstruation and 14 days in progesterone phase with an ovulation occurring right in the middle. These days due to work and life stress, xenoestrogens in the environment, synthetic hormone medication (such as the birth control pill and HRT) and being out of touch with our bodies our cycles are not usually perfect. The Ladycomp learns your cycles so that you don’t need to plot them manually, but I’ve found it fun to plot it manually anyway so that I can see if my body is in good health or if there is something not quite right.

One thing I noticed that was quite dramatic is that one evening I ate some raw chocolate (only about 30-40g, but it still contains caffeine) and that night I was sleeping very restlessly. When I took my temperature upon waking my temperature was up very high. The next day something happened that made the whole day very stressful and I spent quite a bit of the day feeling upset. When I took my temperature the following morning my temperature had plummeted to lower than it had been before the rise, so I had a crazy-looking spike in the middle of my chart. So my current theory is that having a fair bit of ups and downs in the chart means the adrenals are being overworked.

Given its not good to overwork the adrenals my plan at the moment is to try to give my adrenal system a rest and see if the temperatures balance out without any spikes. Maca is an endocrine system adaptogen and so by consuming it every day with my food (as I have been doing) I expect that it will take some burden off the adrenals. I am still wondering about measurement – maybe I can measure adrenal activity by getting excel to plot the average square of the difference from the mean temperature and comparing the 30 days with maca to 30 days without maca. I’m sure its not that simple though :)

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  1. Balancing the endocrine system including the use of maca
  2. Supporting the adrenals with wise food choices, avoiding sugar and caffeine
  3. Reducing xenoestrogens from plastic in contact with food
  4. General updates, maca recipes
  5. Balcony garden, lost 1.6kg of my extra 3kg so far, completed two weeks of C25K and had some self-discoveries about anxiety
  6. Buying and eating organic and chemical-free food in order to improve health
  7. Focusing on health for the next 30 days
  8. Goals are just a direction of focus – if we don’t succeed the first time, try again!
by Petra Smirnoff on August 12, 2010
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Moving along on my C25K running program

view from the treadmill

view from the treadmill

I’ve never been much on an exercise fan because I’m such a book worm and find that in the past I would more often ‘run out of time’ than actually run! But my idea of health is congruent with fitness, not just eating a healthy diet, and so inevitably internal pressures get me started again. I have been putting some focus on starting a running program over the past week, specifically I have started working on C25K wearing my vibram fivefingers shoes.

C25K stands for ‘Couch to 5 kilometers’ and it is an interval training program that introduces you to progressively longer runs so that you can start off slowly but then quickly build up to being able to run 5km without stopping for breath.

Last week I completed all of week one and I found it quite straight forward and easy. The week one program was a 5 minute warm-up followed by 8 intervals of 1 minute runs and 7 x 1.5 minute fast walks. At the end there is a 5 minute cool down.

This week I have started week two which is a 5 minute warm up followed by 6 intervals of 1.5 minute walks and 5 x 2 minute fast walks, followed by a cool down. All up I do about 3.5 km in these workouts, which is a good start for me. I have also been walking to and from work every day which is 2.5km each way. I was jogging to work, but its been quite rainy lately.

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by Petra Smirnoff on August 10, 2010
filed in Fitness, Petra's health goals

General updates, maca recipes

Today is my seventh day concentrating on the following goals:

  • Looking after my endocrine system
  • Reducing my weight back to normal after gaining 3kg
  • Completing four weeks of C25K
  • Creating a balcony garden

I have found that focusing on particular goals is definitely helping to accomplish more. Otherwise with my scanner personality I can get caught up in a whirlwind of different activities and then wonder where all my time went. Also if you focus on what you want to achieve you are more likely to move forward rather than getting stuck on all the obstacles.

So here are a few notes about progress in general:

Balancing the endocrine system

As you would expect, 7 days is way to early to see any proof of improvement so I have to assume that if I am moving towards best practice in my lifestyle then it will be having a positive effect. Here are some of the things I’ve been doing:

Consuming maca every day

OK, I admit it… I really don’t like the taste of maca. I didn’t like the taste when I was having only 1 tsp a day, then when I tried upping it to 2 tablespoons a day I liked it even less. But I found some ways to hide the taste and now I’m consuming quite a bit of maca. I found a nutritional profile here which I plugged into a new entry in nutridiary.com and I have been happy to discover that since increasing my maca levels I am also getting quite a bit more nutrition every day because maca is surprisingly high in iron.

Basically I have realised that (for me anyway) the flavour of maca does not go well with anything sweet. Recipies on the web all suggest consuming it with sweet food and that it tastes like butterscotch, but I think that’s a load of hogswallop. To me maca powder tastes like radishes, and increasing to 1+ Tbs makes the food taste very radishy indeed. And I am sorry, but I would never eat radishes with bananas.

Instead, I have been combining with tomatoes and this is making a huge difference. Maca also has the same kind of spiciness as radishes so I find that it combines quite nicely with a hint of cayenne.

This has been my daily smoothie of late:

  • 5-6 strongly flavoured tomatoes
  • handful of basil or some other herb that goes with tomato
  • 1 red capsicum/bell pepper
  • Handful of dark green kale
  • 1 Tbsp maca powder
  • cayenne to taste

I decided to also see how maca combined with a cracker recipe, and my attempt at making maca crackers was very successful. I don’t have a recipe yet because I threw everything in the food processor without measuring, but the ingredients were raw soaked buckwheat, soaked chia seeds, tomato, basil and lots of maca. It came out really yum and not overly maca flavoured even though I used quite a lot. Next time I’ll add some zucchini or extra vegetable to give it some stretch because the mixture cracked at its thinner points when it dried.

Avoiding my food coming in contact with hormone mimicking plastics

I bought some more BPA-free containers and set up all my raw vegetables in containers in the fridge. Everything is keeping very crisp so far, and I like knowing that there is no BPA on my food. As a bonus, my fridge is now really tidy because its so easy to stack hard containers! I also have some foods in paper bags instead of plastic, but not green leafy veg.

I emailed the company that makes the yeast-free mountain bread that I enjoy eating, and asked them what kind of plastic their packing is made from, does it contain BPA? Their response: “Our packaging material is made from a combination of PVDC and LLDPE. Hence no BPA.” Well that is good to know.

Eating only organic or chemical-free

I have started buying more organic food, but I have realised how difficult it is (both logistically and with regards to affordability) to try to eat 100% organic. I eat a substantial part of my diet as raw leafy greens and fruits and so it is much much more expensive for me to eat a few kilograms of fresh food a day at $20 a kilo than it would be for someone who eats organic rice, bread and pasta as the predominant source of their calories. Also, because fresh raw food weighs so much I need to buy food very frequently, but I don’t have access to organic food every day. What I am going to work towards for now is about 50% of my food coming from organic sources.

I did buy a salad spinner for work, so now I can buy a greater array of foods and prepare a fresh salad at work and feel confident that it has been properly washed if I can’t get all organic.

Supporting my adrenals by staying stress-free

I think I am a bit of an anxious go-go-go kind of person by nature, so for me trying to stay stress-free can feel like an exercise in remembering after I’ve already made a mistake. I do know that having it as a conscious choice has been beneficial though. I have certainly been trying to slow down and ensure that I am methodical and diligent and trust that things work out for the best. Working in IT, dramas can happen, but after a difficult Friday night I was able to wind down on the weekend and fix all the problems at my own pace on Monday. I made sure that my weekend was pretty relaxed and easy-going.

When some issues have arisen at work over the week I have slowed down and instead of panicking and trying to solve the problem immediately, I have shared the responsibility with others on my team so that we can get it done together.

Going to bed by 10pm

Its 10pm so I’m going to go to bed!

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  1. Balancing the endocrine system including the use of maca
  2. Reducing xenoestrogens from plastic in contact with food
  3. Buying and eating organic and chemical-free food in order to improve health
  4. The Ladycomp fertility monitor and BBT charting
  5. Supporting the adrenals with wise food choices, avoiding sugar and caffeine
  6. Balcony garden, lost 1.6kg of my extra 3kg so far, completed two weeks of C25K and had some self-discoveries about anxiety
  7. Tasty raw greens and kale chips
  8. It’s not that easy eating greens; spending each day munching on leaves…
  9. Supporting the adrenals by going to bed before 10pm
by Petra Smirnoff on August 10, 2010
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Supporting the adrenals by going to bed before 10pm

Well I must say I have not been doing too well with this one. This is from my notebook:

  • day 1 – 10pm – woke up full of energy at 4am!
  • day 2 – 10:30pm – woke up at 4am again, but this time I decided to have a sleep in until 7am. Was previously going to bed at midnight so it’s a bit of a change for me.
  • day 3 – 10:30pm – found it hard to get to sleep
  • day 4 – 10:45pm… I need to work on this!
  • day 5 – 11:00 argh!

LOL. I guess I’m not doing it right :)

Probably what I need to work on is getting out of bed by 6am, and then that might spill to getting to sleep by 10?

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  2. General updates, maca recipes
  3. Balancing the endocrine system including the use of maca
  4. The Ladycomp fertility monitor and BBT charting
  5. Balcony garden, lost 1.6kg of my extra 3kg so far, completed two weeks of C25K and had some self-discoveries about anxiety
by Petra Smirnoff on August 9, 2010
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Supporting the adrenals with wise food choices, avoiding sugar and caffeine

Today is my fourth day concentrating on the following goals:

  • Looking after my endocrine system
  • Reducing my weight back to normal after gaining 3kg
  • Completing four weeks of C25K
  • Creating a balcony garden

chocolate

Over the last week I’ve been taking notes about sugar and caffeine consumption and how that affects the endocrine system and body weight. Interestingly I have also learned that there is a direct correlation between estrogen levels and body weight. Having the endocrine system out of balance (high estrogen) leads to fat gain because estrogen causes food calories to be stored as fat and also inhibits thyroid hormone, which would normally turn fat into usable energy. Having high estrogen is one cause of hypothyroidism which is associated with sluggish metabolism and weight gain.

I am not new to weight management. Over ten years I gained 17kg of body fat and tried so hard to lose it, but without success. I then lost 15kg within three months when I simultaneously came off the pill and cut my sugar intake. I have maintained this lower weight for some time, but have recently and unexpectedly gained 3kg, which puts me on alert.

It’s no secret that two keys to losing weight are to reduce sugar and fat in the diet. Both sugar and fat are high in calories and the theory is that consuming calories in excess of the number of calories that are being burned through daily activity and exercise will lead to consistent weight gain. I already eat a very low fat diet as I found it made a big difference to dietary control of candida but I have historically had a sweet tooth which has caused troubles for me in the past. So my assumption was that I would just reduce the sugar in my diet and because I am exercising every day the weight should just go away. It just might happen like that, but if my weight gain is intrinsically tried up with a bigger metabolic system then it might take a little longer. In either case, reducing sugar is the first step for reducing weight.

The part that I didn’t know was how sugar consumption has anything to do with hormones. Well consuming foods high in sugar leads to adrenal fatigue because sugar fluctuations will cause the adrenals to kick into gear to produce cortisol which (along with insulin, a pancreatic hormone) regulates blood sugar. When the body runs out of the cortisol produced by the adrenals it will resort to converting progesterone into cortisol in order to keep up the supply. When progesterone is lowered, the ratio of estrogen to progesterone in the body is increased, further bringing the body out of hormonal balance. Once the body goes so far out of balance that an anovulatory cycle occurs (a menstrual cycle in which there is no ovulation), the ovaries will not produce progesterone the next month and the ratio of estrogen to progesterone becomes critically altered.

A diet in which there is more stable blood sugar levels will give the body a chance to both balance the endocrine system and enable weight loss.

I also mentioned caffeine in the title of this post, well I don’t really consume caffeine (it affects me tremendously) but caffeine has the same affect as sugar because it causes the adrenals to switch on immediately and produce adrenalin and cortisol, resulting in the same downward slide of progesterone and increase in estrogen.

The other big one affecting the adrenals is stress, but I’ll cover that another time.

So, what am I going to do personally to reduce sugar consumption?

  • I cut out lollies and icecreams some time ago when I chose to eat a mostly raw diet, but I still eat a few sources of quick sugar – sweet fruits such as ripe bananas and fresh dates, dried fruits such as dried figs and sultanas, yeast-free flat bread and raw chocolate.
  • On the calories side of things, I was surprised by how many calories there are in a packet of fresh organic dates or dried fruit such as figs or sultanas. A 250g bag of sultanas has 95% of its calories derived from sugar and contains a whopping 755 calories, more than the number found in three cheeseburgers. On a weight loss diet where there is some level of calorie restriction that is a significant part of the daily allowable calories.
  • I am going to cut dried fruits out of my diet because I tend to get addicted to sugar and once I open a packet of dried fruit I do not stop eating until I have eaten the whole packet. :(
  • Fresh ripe bananas I am thinking that I will choose to keep in my diet because they are good with smoothies, but I will balance them out with greens such as in a green smoothie and/or include lower sugar fruits such as berries.
  • Flat bread I am currently keeping in my diet, although I am getting frustrated by the fact that it is not organic and it comes sealed in plastic. I am eating rye, barley and oat varieties to lower their glycemic index.
  • Raw chocolate needs to be cut out of my diet because the caffeine increases my heart-rate and temperature noticeably after only a few squares, but since it is so yummy I usually end up eating quite a bit more than just a few squares! Plus as I discussed earlier, caffeine stimulates the adrenals, furthering any hormone imbalances. I do not consume caffeine in any other form. Its a shame because raw cacao/chocolate is a great source of magnesium, but for me I am just too sensitive to the caffeine.
  • I will also plot my daily food consumption into nutridiary.com to make sure that I am reducing my sugar consumption overall.
  • I will ensure that I am better prepared with food in my fridge at work. The only shop within very close range to my work is a little corner deli that sells no fruit or veg other than sultanas in cardboard boxes and some apples wrapped up in clingwrap. I had a hunger attack one day during the week and ended up buying some sultanas, but it was a big mistake because I did not feel well for the remainder of the day.

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by Petra Smirnoff on August 8, 2010
filed in Endocrine System, Petra's health goals
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