Food matters

I now weigh 30-40 pounds more than when I left the Army. And I live in America. It's impossible that I should not know this is an issue. For years I've said I would never diet, but in all those years my weight was never an issue. My words were empty. Well, now the rubber hits the road, and I have to decide what to do. And now I'm a few decades better informed. The science has advanced.

Nothing's going to change.

I have friends who battle anorexia, friends who've given up trying to eat better, friends who never realized there was anything to learn about food. Frankly, though, there are several ways eating well is part of living better, so I'm going to try to capture a few thoughts about it in a post. From the perspective of living better, where living better means trying to make the relationships in my life more alive, here's why I care.

• Dying of an eating-related disease wouldn't make my relationships any more alive
• Making myself weak and sick to look stunningly thin wouldn't make my relationships more alive
• Being weak and overweight wouldn't make my relationships more alive, either
• Refusing to eat what everyone else at dinner is eating, without a real reason, strains relationships
• Being strong empowers me to do all the other things I need to do in those relationships

It matters to me to eat relationally.

Here's my diet. I've kept this up for twenty years, and I've enjoyed it.

• Every meal I eat is pleasurable to me
• If mankind's been eating a food for the last 6000 years, I'll eat it every time no matter what the FDA says
• Salt, milk, wheat, butter, eggs, beef - I'm in
• High carb and low carb have both been part of mankind's diet, and I eat both
• If mankind invented it in the Industrial Age, I'll avoid it when I can
• White anything (sugar, bread, rice, caffeine) provides energy, but none of the fiber, enzymes, and vitamins needed to repair the normal damage of life
• !!! Any sugar substitute !!!
• I'd eat a meal of white sugar with a spoon before I'd drink a diet soda
• Except dessert. I think humans were made to enjoy dessert, and several times a week I enjoy me some industrial age dessert.
• I try to get as much real food into me as I can
• I don't go for the whole raw thing, but I eat a little raw food
• Real food, not stripped, shaped, flavored, and repackaged, contains all that stuff I mentioned above.
• That's the stuff that enables our bodies (when mixed with adequate sleep) to self-heal so many of the leading causes of untimely death
• Seriously. Given only empty nutrition, our bodies lack the resources they need to heal
• I try to eat/drink something fermented three times a day
• The intestinal biome is critically important and enables us to digest milk, wheat, and other good stuff
• Kombucha, kefir, buttermilk, sauerkraut
• I take supplements
• They're of debatable value, but when I quit taking each I suffer symptoms
• I buy the expensive, food-based supplements - very few grocery vitamins do anything
• I never count calories

Diet is critical, but in America it's about body shape - thinness - and thinness is about diet. When people talk about food, they're talking about calories. Low fat and low carb are both all about body fat. That's a deception. Diet should be about life, and life is many-dimensional.

You need to know heavy dieting combined with heavy exercise, the formula recommended by all and followed to extremes by some, is a leading cause of hypothyroidism - which is a leading cause of weight gain. Yes, you read that right. Weight loss is a leading cause of weight gain and heavy exercise is a leading cause of low energy.

I'm suffering with hypothyroidism (in my case, not due to dieting but to poor stress management.) I'm advised to eat less and take thyroid meds, but I'm resisting that advice. So far I'm six months into my resistance, and I'm happy with my progress. My plan does not include intentionally reducing my caloric intake. Time will tell which set of experts is right, but I'm currently going with the ones who say some thyroid deficiencies can be addressed with diet, proper exercise, and rest.

I'm never going to have the ripped beach physique, but that doesn't mean food doesn't matter to me. I just care about it differently than most of the books I read. I care about eating food rich in nutrition, and even at my current weight I'm enjoying good food and good strength. I have the energy to spend time and energy with friends, and worrying about the food that might be served doesn't interfere with our plans (except for that tree-nut allergy in our family.)

I live better when I enjoy food and to profit from it.

Digestion and Aging: Enzymes to the Rescue

Yep, this is a post about old bowels. Sorry, but someone might find it useful, and that's my criterion for "post-worthiness."

I've been under a small freight train of stress these days, and it's been starting to show in a number of ways. One of them has been failing digestion. For the last couple months, I've been having a hard time digesting normal meals. I've actually been tempted to eat less, which makes no sense given the workload I'm under. And when I've given in to that temptation, I've had to cut back on the things I'm doing.

I'm getting older, right?

Then I was hammered with an allergy to wheat. Every time I'd eat wheat, my mouth and throat would begin to swell, and I'd have indigestion all day. I carefully eliminated all other changes to my diet, and yep, the staple of my life was suddenly poison to me.

So I cut out wheat. My problem did not go away. The swelling was gone, of course, but the weakness and indigestion were still there. The wheat thing appeared to be more a symptom than a cause.

I researched. I had an idea what I was looking for, so when I found it I was not surprised. As we age, our ability to make/use/whatever enzymes weakens. This is significant because enzymes are the doodads that break proteins up into usable thingamajigs. My body was running out of thingamajigs, even though I was eating plenty of good stuff.

Long story short, I went to my local health food store and bought the best enzymes I could find. 4 days into the new routine, I'm on the tennis court again and feeling pretty solid all around. I'm going to give it another week or two before I man up to trying wheat again, but the turn-around for my health was dramatic. Everything I eat feels well digested soon after I've finished.

Give it a try if you find you're experiencing age-related digestive problems.

Real men eat quiche?

It seems I've run most of the men off from the site. Now let's see if I can run off the women. :-)

I know some of you are squeamish, so just move on from this post. And no, I never kid.

It's just that, you know, it's dinner! And it makes me happy!

One of the ladies at work buys her eggs from another of the ladies at work, just like I do. Well, she forgot and left her eggs in her computer bag all weekend, and found them just this morning. Fortunately, I was there or a dozen fruits of the hen would have been lost. I did not know exactly what to do with them, but they WOULD be eaten.

On the way home, I knew. It would be a quiche.

So, I busted up a dozen eggs, added a half cup or so of milk (I quit measuring a while ago) and hit the fridge. There were a couple bags of half-finished frozen veggies - in they went. There were the pinto beans my boy cooked last week - Perfect. There was that last pound of xtra-xtra sharp cheddar - I scraped the fuzz off all 6 sides of it, and in it went. A little fresh spinach, just because I have too much laying around and have to get it eaten. And the coup de pork - the last pound and a half of the easter ham along with all those good juices. Blend in a couple good shakes of salt, and half a doohicky of herbes de provence and stir.

Then, to grease the pan, coat it with a liberal couple fingers full of bacon drippings - yep just like your grandma used to keep under the kitchen sink in a coffee can. These days it's a yogurt tub, but I'll never quit a habit that kept so many generations of Knox's hale and hearty through the centuries. And finally, scrape the fuzz off a half pound of marble porter cheese to top it all off.

Bake.

How long? Well, until you're ready to eat it, obviously. :-)

When you can smell it real good, it's not quite done. Let it go a bit more.

When I pulled it out, my son asked me what it was. I reminded him that it was quiche (it had been almost two hours since I had announced my intentions) and snickered. His first guess had been meatloaf (porter is a very dark cheese), so he promptly corrected me that I was NOT eating quiche. This was "eggloaf."

Tru' dat.

I've got a post coming soon on depression, but nothing puts a smile on a man's face like a couple pounds of eggloaf.