Ah, the weekend. Finally I get a chance to relax. 
Today is my third 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’m making good progress on my goals this week, although I am experiencing a few obstacles and interesting challenges. Here are some details from my notebook:
Balancing the endocrine system
Eating only organic or chemical-free
Alongside synthetic hormones from plastics (which I covered yesterday), another significant source of xenoestrogens in the environment are in pesticides and herbicides. Rather than try to find out which ones, it is better to assume that all pesticides and herbicides contain xenoestrogens, and therefore make an attempt to avoid chemical-contaminated foods. I don’t believe we should be completely dogmatic about it, because there comes a point where the additional effort to eliminate every single possible chemical becomes so high that other areas of our life can suffer. I know that some people do only eat 100% organic food and live in an environment where they experience very minimal airborne chemical exposure, and I think that’s great, but I do believe that some balance is OK, and that if I can eliminate 80% of all the pesticides and herbicides then I’m doing well.
I have not made any dramatic changes yet, but I am increasing my awareness. Here are some key points that need to be changed.
Washing my food:
- Because I eat my fruit and vegetables raw, and eat a large volume of fruit and vegetables and also I abhor the sensation of eating food that is still damp from washing, I probably take in more pesticides than I should because I don’t always remember or desire to wash my food before I eat.
- I could pre-wash all my food when I buy it, but I’m more of a spontaneous person rather than being very carefully planned, and so I am better with a system that involves me not having to remember to do that preparation step.
- I never wash my food when making a salad at work, instead I buy pre-packaged greens and hope they have been well washed already. I suspect that this is probably a little naive!
- If I eat almost entirely organic or chemical-free food, particularly fruit and vegetables then I will do myself a big favour because they should not contain as much pesticide residue as conventional food, and therefore the need for washing should be less.
- Also, I have been looking into purchasing a good quality salad spinner and I have seen some great ones for sale in the same kitchenware shop where I purchased my hormone-free food container. I am thinking that I can have one salad spinner at work and one at home and then wash and spin my salad when needed.
Buying organic versions of daily staples:
- Salad vegetables – I bought some lettuce mix for $22 a kilo, which is cheaper than I can buy conventional from coles. Because it is not stored in a sealed plastic bag at the shop it will remain fresh for a shorter period of time. I need to buy salad greens more frequently and eat them sooner, with less storage time. I tend to eat large quantities of salad greens anyway so this should not be a problem.
- I’m not sure about bread. The bread that I like (flat yeast-free mountain bread) is quite specific because I only use it for wrapping salad. If I buy a thicker bread then I would be eating more bread than I want in my diet. In this variety of bread I never buy the organic version because the organic version is white flour, whereas the rye and barley versions that I like are not organic. I think I’ll stick with the rye variety for now, and just not eat too much. Bread is calorie dense anyway and so a small amount goes a long way.
- Organic is about 50-100% more expensive than conventional, but I will be saving money buy not buying conventional salad pre-packaged in plastic bags as these are very expensive.
- There is plenty of variety of organic fruit and veg available from the markets which is great. In some cases the organic food stores have more variety as they sell produce like coloured silverbeet, heirloom purple carrots, and purple curly kale instead of green.
- Hommous is not available pre-prepared as organic unless I want to buy one variety which is very high in fat from organic canola oil and I do not agree that this is healthy even if it is organic. I like the taste of my own home-made hommous and then I can also store it in glass jars instead of plastic, so I will make my own version from organic chickpeas.
So my basic plan in this area is to start buying all of my fruit and veg as organic or chemical-free, minimise my consumption of non-organic breads and restaurant food, buy a good quality salad spinner (preferably one for home and one for work, but the good quality ones are a little pricey so I might do that later), wash my food before I eat it and prepare my own dips, salad dressings and other side-dishes so that I know that my food has come from an organic source. Stop buying salads in plastic bags, and instead prepare my own salads from a variety of organic produce!
I’m sure I’ll run into some obstacles with all this change on my plate, so I’ll make notes as I go along.
Daily maca
I’m going to increase the amount of maca I consume after reading the entire chapter on maca from David Wolfe’s Superfoods: The Food and Medicine of the Future
Avoid synthetic hormones from plastic leaching into my food
Not much to add since yesterday‘s post, since I went into so much detail about this then, but I went out at lunch and found a shop specialising in high-quality kitchen equipment. I found a series of hard plastic containers called ‘clip fresh’.
- They claim to be completely hormone-free, and they come in good sizes for storing all sorts of foods.
- The 3.4 and 6.8L rectangular containers come with a shallow drip spacer at the bottom so that the food does not come into contact with water, causing salad vegetables to rot.
- They have a food-grade silicon seal to keep the contents completely airtight
- I looked up the plastic (plastic #5) on the internet when I got back to work and this is polypropylene which at food-grade quality is regarded as safe and reusable
- It was only $13 for the 3.4L size, which I thought was quite reasonable as the quality is good
- I have given it a good wash and taken my salads in the work fridge out of plastic bags and into this container. Now I just need to do the same at home.
- NOTE: I don’t care if it is widely considered safe, I am not going to heat any food in plastic containers, end of story. This container is to be used in the fridge for salad.
Tomorrow I’ll look into sugar consumption and weight loss.
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