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Day 3: gluten, sugar, dairy freeSubmitted by briefcandle on Wed, 06/04/2008 - 3:02am.
I seem to be hitting a wall with the sugar. Cookies are looking mighty good to me. Unfortunately I just fine-read the label on the cranberry juice I've been drinking and it turns out to have sugar. I could have sworn it said 100% juice Today's breakfast: one coffee, cantelope & honeydew. Lunch was a smorgasbord at the co-op preschool: dinner leftovers (punjabi potatoes & cauliflower, chicken), veggie chips, tofu/seaweed dip, tomatoes, apple, rice cake, soy yogurt, blueberries Dinner: polish sausage shish kabobs with zuchini, yellow squash, potatoes, onion, mushrooms marinated in oregano & rosemary from my garden and garlic & olive oil. I feel like with a nursling I constantly have to keep the snacks going so I don't ever feel hungry. I can't take more than like 5 minutes of hunger or I go nuts. I wonder how much of this is my relationship with sugar, and if my experience of hunger between meals will change as I take sugar out of the diet. briefcandle's blog | login or register to post comments | email this page | printer friendly version
i'm a huge fan of fruit, and of snacking. the breastfeeding makes me feel like a snack vacuum. but at least now I'm not grabbing a cookie at every other craving... it's more likely to be a small piece of sausage, a carrot, or some nuts. I will have to get a sweet potato, yum. I have some frozen pureed for the baby, I can hit it up if needed.
I swear, raw lacto-fermented veges (like sauerkraut, gingered carrots, pickles and kombucha tea) really cut the sugar cravings. They add good bacteria and lactic acid to your gi tract, and those good bugs eat the sugar-craving bugs (like the bad yeasties). I have tried to not eat sugar many times before and it has always been soo hard I've never made it more than a week. So we'll see, this is only day four, but I'm feeling pretty good! OK, also, I have a super stuffed up nose so I can't taste or smell anything and that helps too. The other thing I think that is helping is eating enough protein. Eggs, meat right now. Once my nose is cleared up I'll start with my raw milk kefir again. And the crispy almonds dh made this week are a great snack to replace all those cookies I ususally eat. OK gotta go. Just had a yummy lunch salad with artichoke hearts and roasted red peppers. Now my 15 mins. is up! I'm so done with my stuffy nose, it's been weeks. same virus that gave ds the first ear infection of my parenting experience. I got some pickles based on what you said
Lacto fermented vegetables are different than the average vinegar pickles. They are preserved in salt brine and they are usually raw (un-pasteurized). The reason they are so great is that as they ferment they host zillions of organisms that eat ferment waste. When you eat the raw veggies you also eat all these friendly bacteria and yeast and these in turn go on to eat all the fermenting waste in your own gi tract. This is a good thing. Really. A lot of gut disbiosis (or in a lot of cases non-biosis!) is due to the lack of friendly yeast and bacteria in our gut. These important co-inhabitants make many enzymes and digest a lot of waste for us. Without them we can't absorb all the nutrients we need from our food and food waste sits in our gut putrefying and in some cases, making us sick. Poorly digested food weakens our naturally healthy gut-mucous, and this also weakens our immune response (most of our "cold-fighting" immune cells are produced in our intestines). The problem is most of us lose our symbiotic gut-buddies by taking antibiotics. There are other ways to kill them off too (for example, they don't take binge drinking too well, or preservatives, or nicotine . . .) Many people try to repopulate their gut by eating yogurt after taking antibiotics and it may help a little bit, but yogurt only provides one or two of the bacteria that you need, and the bacteria are short lived. Really, for optimal health, all of us need to be recolonizing our guts every day with a diverse array of what I’ll lovingly refer to as “gut-buddies”. The funny thing is, we used to know this. Virtually all traditional cultures included (or still include) fermented foods in their diet to continually repopulate their gut with the biota we require for good digestion (and thus good health.) Historically we omnivores knew that we needed to live in relationship, not just with each other (hence our fancy language skills) but also with a whole group of symbiotic gut flora and fauna. Modern American diets are pretty much devoid of these good bacteria. So not only are we killing them off with our record use of antibiotics, but we are also not replacing them. This brings us back to lacto-fermented vegetables - which are an excellent, palatable source of friendly bacteria. Other good sources include yogurts, kefir (even better), tempeh, miso, sourdoughs, kombucha, raw beer, mead and ciders. There are many more options but since most of us weren’t raised on the taste of fermented food, they can be pretty unappetizing. It can take some time to get used to the old idea that fermented, sour, bacteria-laden food is good for you. But it really is! I started to write an entire book here about this topic and I wrote even more about my own experience and journey healing my gut, but I cut it out. Maybe I'll repost it as a separate blog after I've worked out some of my ideas. . . oh yes, so the natural dill pickles and fermented beets and stuff that my mom is always telling me to eat/make would be in this category. I see. Yes, I think the natural fermened dill pickles are so good I would drink the leftover juice. NOT something you'd ever do with commercial vinegar water that is regular pickle juice. Also the natural barrel-cured sour kraut sold in Polish stores, omg I could eat that by the plateful. And I also love kefir; we used to eat it with mashed potatoes. Maybe when I bring dairy back I'll start with kefir for all the good stuff. |
I did however go grocery shopping today and got some gluten and dairy free products, unsweetened or lowest sugar available: frozen gf waffles, the Perky's O's cereal and another brown rice cereal, some almond and soy milks, soy yogurt, gf bread machine mix, rice cakes, gf rice pasta. Continuing on a feeling I started to have last night, I don't know if it's mental or not, but this feeling inside of being lighter... like being a little more hollow in my chest and bowels; in the trunk of my body. Hmmm. I've also been getting over a respiratory thing, so less coughing and phlegm also contributes to this feeling. 
good snack. I don't know what 'lacto-fermented' means, are those special ones that you buy or are they all that by default?
for me, this was the key to kicking sugar (ok I am back to it, but I did kick it for a while and have made some really lasting changes). Also, some things will make you feel more satisfied than others. I've said this before, but there was one day where I really hit a wall (got to that primal, anxious, tweaky, must get food state) and a sweet potato really saved me. It was like manna from the gods, I swear.
apples and peanut butter also.
Hang in there...you're inspiring me to clean up my act.
My challenge: just eating 3 meals a day and not snacking (I am no longer breastfeeding, which is a huge difference -- I was hanging out with a bfing mama friend yesterday and remembered how much *more* and more often I needed to eat when I was bfing -- remember that you are needing something like 800 more calories per day than a non-bfing woman).