Doing great...

Doing great! 

Yep, life is going well with my lenten observances... unfortunately, that doesn't mean I'm any better at blogging more often!  Oops.  Best intentions...

Ready to ski first day!!  That's me on the right!

Have gone skiing since lent began, and YES, I cheated with rice while away!!  Really, I had to... there was about 3 small chunks of beef in the beef curry the one day and I was so hungry from skiing!!  The next day, there was NOTHING on the menu for this Primal gluten-free girl except "seafood pilaf"... so I got that, hoping for more seafood than rice.  Um.  Good try, but nope.  There were about 10 small, I mean small scallops, about 4 small shrimp and perhaps 5 peas in a yellow rice concoction.  Ate it all.  Of course, both meals were eaten with lots of prayers (you know how the guilt works in us Catholics...).  

Well, other than having rice for those two meals, the others went well as the hotel staff understood quickly my gluten intolerance (called "allergy" here as they truly understand those!!) and prepared special meals for me.  I had tomato sauce over a non-breadcrumbed meatloaf for one dinner (many other people wanted what I had instead of their dark sauce with mushrooms), and for breakfast a typical Japanese one complete with Nato.  I opened it, forced the hubby to try it, took one small bite myself, then promptly shut the little box it came in... smelled it all day.  Ugh.  Definitely one of those dishes one MUST be raised on to enjoy!!  That breakfast also contained miso soup with tofu (drank the soup, ate the mushrooms, but left the soy pieces behind) and tamago (think scrambled eggs in a form, but lightly sweetened... not my favorite as I  like my eggs with SALT, but edible).  

My biggest problem that first week was the coffee.  Yes, I must be a little 'mad' as that is my ONE thing I've never allowed the docs to take away from me in my years of being sick and migrainey.  Yep, told the neurologist to get a life when he suggested going decaf, same thing to the cardiologist when he suggested decaf would help slow down my fast heartbeat.  However, 12 days later and I'm still getting caffeine  just through the green tea.  It's all good.  No headaches, no withdrawal... hopefully, when I start drinking it again, I'll be content to be sugarfree!!  

My son and me, at top second day!  

So, after 12 days, have I lost weight?  Yep.  5 lbs or 2 kg.  Yeah, me!!  What's better is the tummy bloating and retaining water in my legs is gone (except a little right legged swelling after the two lunches of rice).  AND... my clothes are already fitting better.  Niiiiice. 

Its been 2 days

So... it's Friday and I've been practicing these promises for the past 2 days now.  How hard?  VERY when it comes to my morning coffee!!!  Remember, #5 was to only drink green tea and water, so that means no coffee.  WHAT??  Why would I give up coffee???  I'm such a proponent of this brew... so, why?  

Well, for me, coffee is not drunk black, but full of cream and flavor.  I know, I know... NOT Paleo or even Primal.  Well, kinda primal with the cream, but not with the flavor as it's from a bottle.  I developed quite the addiction to the new Coffeemate creamers that are "natural".  They sucked me in with their ingredient listing of NONFAT MILK, HEAVY CREAM, SUGAR, NATURAL FLAVOR CONTAINS MILK.  So, what's the problem with those?  NOT grass-fed cow milk #1, and #2 the sugar is probably GMO sugar beets... and what the heck is "natural flavor"???  Read this from Health Basics and you'll see that "natural flavorings" can be really yucky stuff. 

So, I figured to reset my coffee drinking habits, time to give it up for a bit.  I was, however, drinking a tablespoon or more of coconut oil in it every morning.  THAT, I'm looking forward to restarting!!  

Yes, I've had mild headaches the past 2 days.  But, remember, I'm drinking Green Tea, so I didn't go "cold turkey" from caffeine.  I know better than that!!

I have noticed, though, that the tea... yes, even green tea purchased in Japan, has some kind of aftertaste.  So, I'm planning on making it without the bag and see if perhaps that's the cause of the aftertaste.  

I DO have more energy.  Whereas I was just sitting my bum on the couch watching TV during the day or evenings, I'm up doing things and getting more done!  A slight flare-up of fibromyalgia and joint aches though, not sure why... will see if that goes away as my system detoxifies.  

Oh, dinners and lunches!  What HAVE I been eating?  

Salmon and stir fry with avocado. YUM!

Ash Wednesday adhered to the Holy Day rule of eating dinner only, so that was pan seared salmon, stir fried zucchini, diakon, and onions with a wheat-free soy sauce, ginger, garlic, salt and cracked pepper seasoning.  All that numminess with a 1/2 avocado on the side with red wine vinegar and cracked papper.  Boy that avocado was PERFECT!!  






Thursday, I had the Peppered beef salad without the tortilla strips at Chili's for lunch and broiled Kobe steak (salt and pepper) while I stir fried zucchini, carrots and onions with ginger in basil-macadamia nut oil.  Water for drink, followed by lovely warm green tea afterwards and a blood orange for desert.


Now, what fun things have I been doing?  Had a tour of AFN Tokyo (Armed Forces Network) with my culture group and got the chance to sit at the anchor desk!  Thrilling to be in a dark studio with all the lights on me.      

The newest Anchor of the Pacific Update:  Your very own, Debi... BabyPT!! 

Lent 2013

No, this isn't me!!  Just liked her getting ashes outside Starbucks!! 

Yep.  I observe Lent.  For us Catholics, and some other Christian religions, it all begins on Ash Wednesday.  I typically go early in the day for ashes because I just don't hide them... others, go in the evening and take their shower right afterwards.  Believe it or not, wearing the ash cross reminds some to go get their ashes, and others it sparks conversations.  Typically, not conversations that are anti-Catholic (thank goodness!!).

I had a friend about 20-some years ago who also observed lent and she would "take on" something instead of "give up" something.  She had a great point in taking on something new... they say it takes 20 - 22 days to create a habit.  Well, lent is 40 days, so that's truly long enough to create a good habit.  So, what would she do?  Typically, something healthy for herself such as drinking 2 or 3 liters of water a day, exercising each day, or only saying positive things to herself.

Fast forward to now, and it's my turn.  Why?  Well, I promised myself and my readers that I'd go "Strict Paleo" at the start of 2013 as I'm on a plateau.  Happened for a few days, then the chocolates would call to me, or I'd go and eat out.  In Japan.  Yep.  Rice comes with EVERYTHING.  Since I'm severely gluten intolerant, I "allowed" myself the delicious, non-GMO rice they grow in this country.  How do I spell plateau??  R-I-C-E and CHOCOLATE!!  Yeah, I know... when I ate chocolate, it was dark and as dark as I could find (yes!  I found a 99% cacoa bar here!!  It was bitter, but only a bite or two and I was good!).

Clearly NOT 100% as they would be brown/grey in color

 I then started allowing myself some buckwheat, called soba in Japan.  These noodles are everywhere and some noodle shops carry the 100% soba (most are 80% soba and 20% wheat).  Well, a Japanese friend of mine purchased these 100% noodles for me and I ate them with great aplomb... with spaghetti sauce, in soup, or just cold (yep, that's Japanese in the summertime).







So, my Lenten Observances are set to get myself back on track.  Why?  I figured that if I couldn't get back on track for myself, then this little Catholic Primal girl would get back on track for her faith!  It's MUCH harder to let someone else down than yourself, and the Big Guy?  He's the hardest to let down!!  So... here goes, from 13 Feb to 29 March, these are my promises:

1) Holy days and Fridays will fast until dinner, then meatless (seafood OK)

2) Only consume meats, veggies, nuts/seeds, and limited fruits

3) NO GRAINS (corn and rice, too), NO beans/legumes, NO dairy (yogurt OK)

4) any food eaten out will be subject to these rules…

5) Drink only unsweetened green tea and water.

6) exercise every day... Do something active! Now, as my hubby pointed out, #4 is a "given".  But, for me, it's not.  Even when I was "strict Paleo", I still would eat the rice while out on culture group events or just eating out. I felt that if I didn't eat the rice, I'd starve.  OK. Fine.  Great for "not lent" time, but this IS a time of sacrifice.  So, what that means is that I'll have to get into the habit of bringing beef jerky and my nut/fruit mixes with me when we go out.  THAT WILL BE CHALLENGING!!  I have a LOT of culture group outings this month and next, plue two ski trips.  Ski trips are even MORE challenging as typically, one feels the need for a carb like rice while skiing for more energy.  I can't even think of what I might find as we embark on this first ski trip this weekend that doesn't contain rice.  I'll post on it and let you know!

Pumpkin Beef Stew

So... I took down all the Christmas decorations after "Little Christmas" (Epiphany, 6 Jan) and noticed my little pile of golden squash, kobucha squash, sweet pumpkins and my large, uncarved pumpkin from Thanksgiving time!!  So... what to do with all this bounty without it going bad??  Well, I came up with two delicious things for these items.  My favorite?  BOTH!!  :)

Kobucha squash... THAT gem was cooked last night by cutting into squares and lavishing a bunch of olive oil goodness all over it, then sprinkling with sea salt and cracked pepper.  Cooked at 450 deg F for 25 mins and VOILA!  Lusciousness to my taste buds.

Pumpkin Beef Stew:

Ingredients:
1 lb beef stew meat - cut into small bite-sized pieces
1 large Japanese sweet potato
1 small sweet pumpkin
1 yellow onion, cut into small squares
3/4 cup brewed coffee
3 garlic cloves, minced
2 large carrots (I used julienned carrots from salad earlier in the week!)
salt, cracked pepper, and red pepper flakes to taste

Directions:
1. Put coffee into crock pot and turn on high.
2. In the meantime, saute onions then add beef pieces, sprinkle salt and cracked pepper while sautéing   Cook beef pieces just long enough to brown each side, then place all beef and onions into crockpot.
3. Brown garlic in saucepan then add to items in crockpot.
4. Slice pumpkin in half, seed and place in a glass casserole dish with 1/4 cup water.  Cook in 350 deg F oven for 20 minutes.  Remove and cut off skin and cube the pumpkin.  Pumpkin pieces should still be soft, but not mushy or firm.  Add to crockpot.
5. Skin and cube sweet potato, add to crockpot.
6. Skin and slice or julienne carrots and add to crockpot.
7.  Continue cooking all in crockpot for 4-5 hours, or until sweet potatoes are soft.

Serve while hot.  Left overs are delicious, too!!


Enjoy the recipe!!  You probably could substitute beef broth in place of the coffee, but I feel the coffee flavor really pulled out the darker hints of beef.  YUM!!

Thought for the day:  When willpower seems lacking, get with your supportive people.  Sometimes, BEING the supportive person for another fills that hole!!

Christmas!

Me and my bells

Where have I been???  Well, for those who know me, know that I've been around... but not doing too much with myself.  I've been busy with culture groups, singing Christmas music and learning to play the handbells!  Though not typically a Catholic thing, our Japanese choir director loves handbells and formed an ecumenical Handbell Choir.  What fun it was!!  Hard work, too, as she put me on the bass bells... larger and heavier.  I had a great time, but must admit my wrists will love not playing anymore!

I'd like to share an email to my sister:

Being home in the states again after being away for a year (and losing over 30 pounds since most of my family saw me last summer), has brought up many questions from relatives wanting to know what I've done and how I've done it.  I strongly suspect many in my family suffer gluten-related illnesses, too... come-on, we hear how celiac is genetic, so it makes sense that any intolerance would be, too!

So, my sister wrote to me about the Chex cereal that is now spouting "gluten-free' labels and boasting this claim via the television... Here's how our conversation went:  

Sister to Me:  

I just saw a commercial for Gluten free chex...what do you think of them??   I love my a.m. cereal, vs no breakfast....

Me to Sister:

Gluten-free just means they've used something that isn't wheat.  If that's your goal, probably OK.  However, I've stopped eating all grain (genetically modified and bad for the gut... even corn and rice), so I won't eat it.  Most likely it's just rice or corn chex.  :)  If you like it, try it.  I only eat eggs, steak or yogurt for breakfast now... oh, bacon too!!  :)  

Sister to Me:

Thanks for the info...trying I guess.  no corn??  Don't you miss corn on the cob??  lol..  that's basically the only corn I eat.  Most diets are too expensive..they need to make veggie's n fruit less expensive!!  :)

Me to Sister:

I only miss it if it's here... however, I've gotten into reading a LOT online and to see what/how HUGE companies like Monsanto are genetically altering our corn, wheat, soy, rice and canola, I'd rather not eat it.  I fear that they truly are poisoning us from the inside out.  Now, there are a LOT of low carb dieters who use corn and rice.  IF I 'cheat' on my diet, those are the two I 'cheat' with... rice first and foremost as I live in Japan.  However, looking at it for what it is:  a filler, I realize I don't eat it for nutritional content.  We've known corn is non-digestible since we were little and first spotted a kernel in our poo.  lol!  So, if I eat something these days, it's not mindless eating, I want to enjoy it and have my body benefit somehow/someway from eating it.  Far cry from the Debi who got so sick that she stopped eating anything (well, except for maybe 2 apples a day and some rice at the end nearing my gallbladder surgery).  It's only a hard lifestyle IF I dwell on the changes and what I cannot eat.  Instead, so I don't feel like I'm missing something, I dwell on what I CAN eat.  I CAN eat all the freakin' bacon I want!!  Whoo hoo!!  I can have 2-3 eggs every morning for breakfast (and still have LOW cholesterol)!!!!  I CAN eat dark chocolate!!!  I CAN eat all the meat (fish, bird, seafood, cow, pig, etc) I want without worrying about serving size!!  I CAN eat veggies... more than one serving and more than one type at any meal, AND I can put butter on them!! 

So, as you see... it's not just changing WHAT I eat, but how I think about what I eat.  It must be healthy and healthfully grown.  It must be non-GMO (genetically modified organism)... or as close to a non-GMO as I can get (in Japan, they don't allow GMO, so it's easier over there except for all the prepackaged American foods in the commissary...).  I also stay away from prepackaged foods.  I have gotten back to making supper from scratch.  I also don't succumb to cravings, except chocolate when I have my period... but, hey, that's OK... full of antioxidents!!  I also do drink wine and vodka/tequilla.  I don't drink bottled juices, alcoholic drinks (nope, no more ICE or others), etc.  Just water for me. Yeah, I do break that rule for 100% cranberry juice, lemonade (as long as it's natural and not high fructose corn syrup (HFCS)), limeade (I make a mean margarita with "Simply Lime" limeade!!), and tonic water.  Why tonic water?  Well, I do love a vodka tonic, but the truth is that I get BAD muscle cramps.  Always have and they are, at times, worse.  So, I find that if I have tonic water on hand to drink about once a week, and eat something with yellow mustard (the tumeric supposedly helps cramps) about 2 to 3 times a week, I'm fine. 

Well, this letter went on WAY longer than I anticipated, but I get wordy when I explain how and what I eat.  I get the "WHAT??!!  NO bread?  NO pasta?  NO corn/rice? NO tortillas?  NO chips?" a LOT... amazing how people focus on what they cannot eat, and forget all that I DO eat.  As a matter of fact, a family member is now trying to make me 'see' that people 'need' fillers like potatoes (I do eat sweet potatoes, but only about once a week)... whereas she, like our mother and their generation, always have some kind of 'filler' (my word) each meal.... bread on the sandwich (I eat the meat and cheese rolled and dip in the mustard), dinner must have bread or pasta or rice or potato as a side (remember?  Mom brought us up to have one 'starch' at dinner... meat, veggie, starch, drink and desert)... or, as she says, I'm too expensive to feed.  Possibly.  I get a LOT of frozen veggies every two weeks.  I usually just have double veggies for dinner and make my hubby and teen the rice/pasta/corn-on-the-cob(COTC).  Now, with that being said... I will 'cheat' and have COTC once in a blue moom, not daily, weekly or even monthly.  Rice when I go out to Japanese restaurants or have sushi... not daily.  So, I'm not missing anything :)

 

**********************************************

I'm sure some of what I've written just brings more questions or advice from many readers, but remember, I'm not trying to scare people off of Primal/Paleo, but to give a little groundwork to entice someone, especially someone who I love very much (my sister) to eat 'better'.  Yes, I could have talked more about corn being a grain and GMO'd, or the benefits of sat fat and MUFAs, or the evils of trans fats, PUFAs/omega 6s.... the list goes on.  This is just a quick groundwork email chain and I'm sure this isn't where it stops, just a point at which I'd like to share with readers.  :)  

 

Whatever your reasons for being primal... stick to your system, especially if it works.  By and large my family and friends have been supportive while here in the states for these few weeks, but I really have to use self-control.  At home, there are NO chips to tempt me... NO fresh bread just out of the over... NO potatoes... NO corn on the cob.  I can control what's in MY house, not someone else's.  Hey, perhaps that's a blog for later!!  

 

 

Being "Good" while traveling

*sigh*  For those of you who know and follow BabyPT on FaceBook, you know the last few days have been spent trying to catch a military "hop", or space-available, plane out of Japan so that my son and I can go home for a visit.  We've wait listed for WAY too many planes at this point and been disappointed.  So a wonderful friend, who is an airline pilot, offered us two of his Buddy passes so that we can have an alternate way to get home.  We have no deadline as to when to be there, but we do for coming back, so we took him up on the offer (thank you! thank you!!).  Unfortunately, the first plane was at an airport 1 hour and 15 mins from our house in southeast Tokyo… all of us, my hubby drove us, got up at 2:30am to leave the house by 3:30am and arrive no later than 5am for a 6:55am flight.  Hubby dropped us off and left, we stayed and got immediately turned away.  So, over an hour and a half to get back home had us miss the first military flight on our agenda… however, this friend would NOT give up!  He ended up finding a "wide open" flight that routes through Hawaii (OK, a few hours in the sun would be GREAT!!) and we're currently awaiting that flight.  Let's pray we get on… though our chances look good, there are NO guarantees.

Anyhow, my teen and I were dorks and took silly "touristy" style photos as we were heading down the escalator from security toward immigrations… thank God there was no one watching us running UP the escalator to switch places and get back in place for the second round of photos!!  GREAT primal exercise, by the way!!

"Are we going to make it on THIS flight??"

"OK, I'm being more positive!!"

Me after darting back up the escalator… I think I'm still walking up the down side!!"

So, the question to other Primal and Paleo friends is:  "What do you eat while traveling?"

I just had my first snack.  2 hard boiled eggs, a handful of carrots, cauliflower and orange bell pepper strips.  Prior to pulling out my stash, I had walked around and the smells of all the breaded and fried foods was smelling WAY too good (that still happens, even after almost a year!), so I quickly sat down and got out my stash.  Now, somehow this stash is going to have to last for the next full day as we're leaving at night Japan-time, getting into Hawaii in the morning (of the SAME day!!) then traveling through that day and night into the next morning.  So, the 5 hard boiled eggs are now down to 1 left (hey!  My son needs to eat, too!!).  I still have a good amount of the veggies, but made two lovely bags of nuts/dried fruits/dark chic chips and have those in my bag, too!  I also grabbed two, off the shelf beef jerkys.  Nope, can't get all the wondrous grass-fed beef and au naturale jerky you all can in the states, and I have not yet started to make my own… so, I found Oberto! brand's "natural" and it does not have soy sauce (read "gluten") in it, so it's in my bag.  Some additives as it has "flavoring" in it, but I'll sacrifice those preservative/flavorings in favor of soy sauce laden Japanese "fast food" which is sure to make me visit the restroom a LOT.

So, what do YOU eat when you travel?  Do you try to 'make do' with what's served by picking and choosing?  Or do you bring your stuff like I did?  (let's see how long it lasts… might end up picking and choosing by tomorrow!!)