Elimination Diet Wrap-Up

I neglected to do a timely overview of the results of my elimination diet experience when I finished it, mainly because life got in the way. But overall I loved doing it because it gave my diet a much-needed injection of clean living with vegetables and protein sources. I only ended up losing a few pounds as a side effect, but I'll take it! :-)

About the results. I was expecting a gluten sensitivity. But I could not detect one. My naturopath thinks that if I still have thyroid antibodies, I might try to go gluten-free again for a while. But that's going to require time and testing. I'm up to the challenge though!

I am not surprised that I have a little sensitivity to chili peppers. I think we all probably do to some extent. It's kind of like a necessary evil living in Mexico. It's one that will have to be consumed in moderation though.

The big surprise from this diet was that I discovered that I have a sensitivity to eggs and potatoes. Both give me gastrointestinal symptoms, but I'll spare you the details. I even tried challenging them a few times afterwards, but it's really true. No more french fries, mashed potatoes, and omelets. I almost feel like I should be crying as a type this, because these were two totally cherished components of my regular diet (I even raise egg-laying chickens!) and I was NOT expecting to be sensitive to them. But I was also not expecting to feel as indifferent as I do about letting those two foods go. I still have small amounts from time to time as they are often ingredients in commonly-served meals (pancakes, for example...). But gone will be the days of having these as my main course. Oh well!

I was also happy that as a result of having done this, I have more empathy for folks who are gluten-free, and I have something to contribute when people talk to me about food issues they have or if they too are considering trying the diet. The coolest thing perhaps was being able to examine my own self without having to go to a lab for tests.

To that end, here is the wrap-up of several go-to recipes I made while I was on the total elimination diet, as well as a few from when I started to challenge. This is by no means a comprehensive list, and I hope to keep coming back and adding to it as time permits. Happy Food Trails!

During the total elimination phase

• Black bean soup
• Raw food chocolate pudding (can be adapted as a superfood smoothie)
• SPRING ROLLS
• Baked figs with cinnamon 
• Red Quinoa and Lentil Pilaf
• Homemade Sesame Rice Crackers
• Homemade Hummus

During initial Challenge Phase (these recipes are not all 100% elimination diet, because they include one or more challenged ingredients):

• Coconut Tapioca Pudding (maple syrup)
• Crunchy Cumin-Chicken-Celery Tacos with Tahini Dressing (corn), a Nicole original ;-)
• Spinach-Walnut Pesto (vinegar or lime) also by yours truly.

A Closer Look at My Nutrition | My First Few Weeks with "The Diet Cure" by Julia Ross)

It's been an interesting "food month." Last month I read a compelling book called "The Diet Cure" by Julia Ross, MA. director of Recovery Systems in Northern California. It was so compelling that I decided to test if I had a gluten insensitivity and went off gluten for a week. Today I'm reintroducing it to "see what happens." It just happens to coincide with a visit we're getting from our very own private chef—yes, you read right: I won a raffle at a local supermarket and a private chef is coming to our home tonight to prepare food using their special cooking equipment (which they'll of course try to sell us and I'll politely decline...but it'll be fun in any case :-)

About the wheat-free week, as I said on my Facebook page when I first decided to put this book into practice, "I'm not really a "diet" person—I buck the fads in favor of common sense & nutrition. That being said, I do have some "issues" I'd love to improve: extra pounds, joint pain, and occasional depression. The book I'm currently reading has me convinced that there's more than meets the eye to 'everything in moderation.' As a result, yours truly is now investigating her body's relationship with refined sugar & wheat (among a number of other substances)."

And it's true: I'm not really a diet person. But I have struggled with being anywhere from slightly to moderately overweight for a good part of my life. And many of my relatives have suffered from obesity and obesity-related illnesses such as diabetes or low thyroid on both sides of my family. So although I'm not attracted to fad diets, or crash dieting, I am very aware of what I put into my body and am a big health advocate. Most of my friends know that I'm an amateur herbalist and swear by my Nutritional Healing book for being able to get rid of ailments, like nixing colds with Vitamin C and garlic.

So it wasn't too much of a stretch for me to be convinced by Ross that there are eight basic nutritional imbalances that individuals can have which can affect their health—both physical and mental.  She asserts that by answering a series of questionnaires you can start to detemine which imbalances might be affecting you.

What were most interesting to me were arguments that sugar and refined grain products like white flour can be addictive. Ross discusses the brain's chemical reactions to certain food substances and why we can become "addicted" to foods that are actually adverse to our health—in a very similar way as we do to substances like drugs or alcohol. The chapter about re-regulating naturally mood enhancing brain chemicals through healthy eating (NOT undereating the right foods or overeating the wrong foods) was most fascinating to me. She also went on to talk about other imbalances that often go undetected, such as thyroid imbalances or systemic yeast overgrowth, which are harder to diagnose but that plague people all the same until they undergo comprehensive testing.

In my case, I decided to first cut out extra sugar—it seemed the easiest, fastest, and most important thing to try. It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be, and I think it'll still be okay to consume it in moderation, just with more awareness. Toward the end of the first week, I cut out refined grains products—white flour and white rice—also, not as hard as I expected. The reason why it wasn't so hard was because I was making sure to consume a lot of protein, vegetables, fruit, and healthy fats. Ross believes that undereating/malnutrition is more common than we think and leads to a depressed metabolism. This is a tactic I never quite understood, or at least couldn't get to work for me, but I think it's because I wasn't eating enough nutrient rich foods.

I wasn't doing this for the weight loss effect, just for the health-enhancing effect—Ross believes that gastrointestinal upset and joint pain, two things I often complain of, can be caused by certain foods. But I didn't mind when, two weeks later, I checked the scale and saw that I'd lost 5 pounds.

This next week, I go off dairy, again, "to see what happens." I've gotten a skin allergy test before for hayfever allergens, and it came up negative for most major food groups, except a slight allergy to soy. But Ross explains that some internal adverse reactions to foods go undetected by the skin tests, which is why they promote the elimination diet approach. I like this approach in that it's learning a little more about my body, and I'm only doing one food at a time, not all at once. I especially like the unexpected effect it's had on my cooking—having to go a week without bread, pasta, or crackers meant I had to obtain a few more interesting grains for my kitchen like amaranth flour and make garbanzo flour patties. I made my own mayonnaise with a fresh egg from our chickens and olive oil, great because regular mayo is made out of soybean oil (and even better for how delicious homemade mayo is!). I also made Thai food for the first time in years to go over brown rice. Any excuse to spice up the action in my kitchen is welcome around here, and if it has the pleasant side effect of losing a few kilos in the process, all the better!

I'm a little nervous about the upcoming week without cow's milk because I am quite beholden to my dairy products—yogurt, cheese, kefir, etc—I love probiotics. But I got some goat cheeses to hold me over, and if the wheat-free week was any indication that depriving yourself of one food can lead to embracing several others, then I should be excited about what the week ahead has in store.

We Are the Earth

The mantra "Earth Day Everyday" has rung clear as a bell in my head ever since I first started celebrating the holiday as a youth, probably in high school, possibly earlier. I've been an environmentalist so long that when my art therapist asked me to picture an image of "my authentic self" for a self-reflective assignment, I couldn't come up with anything other than visual images of nature. One, two, three, four days later, and I still can't come up with anything other than rainbow colors, rivers, forests, a crescent moon, silhouetted mountains.

But is it because I am an environmentalist (which term I once loathed to admit publicly for all the negative press the term has gotten over the years, but now embrace wholeheartedly with pride) or is it because, at heart, we really are inseparable from the Earth that sustains us? This is not a philosophical question I'm asking. I really do think that the reason why "Earth Day Everyday" is so hard for some folks to adopt is because little by little, our human community has grown further and further from awareness of its roots as utterly, inextricably, and incredibly dependent on the Earth's ecosystems that sustain it.

Granted, not every society or individual has that same level of detachment from Pachamama. Thank goodness, otherwise we would not have so much indigenous wisdom to drawn on as we try to right our often erroneous path with regard to how to best tread on this planet. Thank Goddess for invisibly steering the hand of passionate scientists who decode the inherent wisdom of Earth systems and sustainable technologies that may allow us humans to inhabit the third rock from the sun for a more peaceful and prolonged period of time.

Even though it's Earth Day everyday at our house, I'm not bragging because I know I could always do more. I know I have way too big of an ecological footprint than I could have (we obviously don't have 2.19 Earths, my score), and that I make way too many excuses for not doing things as ecologically as I could. That might be an intimidating statement for someone who doesn't do the type of things that we do here on a daily basis, like buy organic, use cloth diapers, irrigate our fruit trees with greywater (used washwater), collect rainwater, feed kitchen scraps to our chickens and collect our own eggs, plant native cacti, make my own herbal remedies, and recycle practically all our solid waste.

Despite doing all of the above things, we're still "on the grid" in that we use gas, electricity, city water, buy produce that probably was farmed with sludge or sprayed with pesticides. We drive an old truck that burns good old-fashioned gasoline, and don't ever walk or bike to the grocery store (I claim only partial responsibility for that—the local roads are way too dangerous for us to currently consider it an option). Okay, so I need to get more involved in local Queretaro politics...umm, sure. I'll get right on that tomorrow.

But this guilt is not stemming from a desire to want to "keep up with the Joneses." Rather, it's a frustration that there's aspects of our lifestyle that I'd green over in a heartbeat. If only the government would do their part and put in bike lanes. If only organic food and solar panels were less expensive. If only biodiesel was more popular here. If only, if only, if only. So I do what I can, and change the things I have control over. I'm working on it, and I assuage my guilt by knowing that's better than many.  I also avail myself of inspiring ideas on how to do what we're doing better, like those being carried out at my former coworkers and good friends at Ampersand Sustainable Learning Center in New Mexico (hi Amanda & Andy! You're my EDED heroes!).

One thing I decide I can do in addition to greening my own lifestyle is help inform others how they too can tread more lightly on the planet. That's how I became an educator actually. I think people would be surprised to find out, especially now compared to 20 or even 10 years ago (shocked I can say that with authority), that greening their daily lifestyle is a lot easier than they might think. It isn't actually that much more expensive, especially if you're into D-I-Y. And even when small things are a little more pricey, like food, just think of the words of Birke Baehr "Either pay the farmer, or pay the hospital." I love that an 11-year old could re-inspire curmudgeonly old me.

Which is why today, on "Earth Day," I permitted myself to feel proud of the little things we do every day. Sometimes they're annoying (dealing with chickens), inconvenient (turning a subterranean valve covered with cobwebs to direct our greywater to the right fruit trees), expensive (organic dairy products), or just plain gross (rinsing cloth diapers). I don't do these things to feel good about myself—I do them for the rest of the Earth's inhabitants, like wildlife, and also, for our children, and their children, to be a model for those who might also decide it's time to start giving the Earth the due respect she deserves.

p.s. I forgot to mention that I actually did do something special just for Earth Day, which was plant a pine tree outside our house, who along with a banana tree and a few other ornamentals, will soon receive rinsewater from the kitchen sink. Even though digging the hole wore me out, I just think of how beautiful that tree will be 10 years from now. But wait a second, does that mean I could see myself here in ten years? Hmmm....

Henhouse update

One of my goals as a blogger is to master the art of the short post. It's very difficult for me since I'm very long-winded. My first foray into the short blog arena was literally 5 minutes ago—to celebrate this blog's 5000th pageview. This post is not exactly short but neither is it one of my characteristic super-long posts.

What I want to say is that my experiment with the nesting chickens worked. In my last post, I described how I put up a removable door to protect the 2 nesting hens from their marauding sisters who don't watch where they step when laying their own eggs (although the other two are laying, they're not "broody," i.e. not interested in sitting on the eggs. I must be a shabby bird biologist because I couldn't tell you off the top of my head what makes a bird broody in the first place). The day after I tied a shield with custom air holes, fabricated out of a scrap piece of corrugated plastic, and affixed to the front of the next box with my crappy knots (no wonder my husband gave me a little guide to knots a few years ago...if only I'd studied it), I was pleasantly surprised to find 1) no more broken eggs up top in the occupied nesting box and 2) a fresh egg laid by one of the unbroody hens in the box below. Success. Since the 2 broody hens are sort of blocked in, even though they hardly ever get off the nest (I've never actually observed them do it—they kind of semi-fast for 2 weeks), I feel obligated to make sure they get out and stretch their legs, eat, drink, and take care of their business at least once a day. So that's a tad bit labor intensive, but if it results in cute little chickies pretty soon, I think it'll be worth it. Crossing my fingers!

My next post will be quite long because it will tell the dramatic story of something that happened here last night—a terrifying night of a huge fire on the property started by a lightning strike. But since we were up all night and are exhausted, it'll have to wait. Hasta pronto.

The Real Easter Basket

Two months have passed since I began working part-time at an English school. It's been nice to get out of the house, I enjoy the personal interactions, and I can now breathe a little easier on the economic side of things, but it's had its expected flip-side results as well. I'm quite tired every day, I worry I'm not giving enough undivided attention to my family (some correspondences are suffering), my hip pain has returned, and my amount of free time to dedicate to creative pursuits such as writing, art, and gardening has taken a hit.

But there're also some undeniably wonderful things happening at the same time—the growth of our daughter, the flourishing of our orchard and flock of chickens, even the growth of some friendships and personal strength. I tend to believe as is in nature, also is with people, and vice versa. Even when it seems like I have little extra time for anything, the above things are both a blessing and a natural result of small, diligent, patient efforts toward progress, combined with the wonderfully powerful and cyclic elements of nature.

I'm the kind of person who likes to answer every personal email I receive, but it hasn't always been possible with my new schedule. But one of the side effects of not always being the most responsive, or first to reach out, has been to find out which friendships have perservered despite my low levels of maintenance. It reveals a connection that can stand the test of time.

I never would have guessed that something as simple as, when we built our house, placing a window facing a mesquite tree, would bring so much enjoyment from the center of our home—seeing its vibrant, almost flourescent green leaved branches waving gently in the breeze and filled with songbirds coming to take a drink from a dish of water on the ground below it. It took years of gently inviting wildlife to our yard and runoff from our roof directed to the mesquite's roots for this whole scene to develop.

There's a weedy grass that got out of control in our yard while we were otherwise occupied with parenting duties, and when I finally decided to reclaim my garden and started letting my daughter come outside and explore while we worked, we'd get covered with its sticky seeds. Even the regular feeling of desperation of just walking outside for a few minutes to pick greens or feed the animals, only to spend almost half an hour just picking the spines out of our pantlegs (and weeks afterward trying to eradicate it), managed to turn into a unexpected moment of repose, albeit a month or two later. Just today, my daughter and I were standing in the kitchen after coming in from outside and I noticed she was prostrate on the floor behind me. At first, since she has a frustrating puppy-like characteristic of chewing shoes, I impatiently said, no touch! But when I looked down, I realized she was picking seeds off the bottom of my pantleg and couldn't help but smile. This is a 17-month old, who picks kale leaves and feeds them to our chickens—why had I assumed she was just getting into trouble instead of doing something constructive? I took a deep breath, stooped down, and hugged and thanked her, acknowledging to myself that I'd judged the moment too quickly.

The living things in our garden have been in a relative state of neglect, with the exception of our flock of chickens. They didn't lay a single egg for almost 4 months this past winter, and we were starting to wonder if our efforts to keep them fed and safe were in vain. Our older chickens almost got passed over for new chicks to replace them. But then miraculously, almost a month ago, they began laying again, and right now, not one but two of them are sitting on eggs in the nest, in the hopes that they will become first time moms to some fuzzy little chicks in less than a couple weeks. In checking up on them last night I observed that one of the 7 eggs they'd laid and were brooding was crushed and smeared over the others. I couldn't figure out if it was them or the other chickens coming in and stepping on them. So I decided to try and experiment with a swinging door so they could get out and eat and drink water once or twice a day but that would block the other two hens from coming in, who'd have to lay their eggs in a lower nest box. As I was snipping and collecting grass from around the yard, and placing it in the coop, rearranging the eggs carefully, I couldn't help but think of an Easter basket. Then I thought, duh, these *were* the original Easter egg hunts! Even though I probably won't have time or money to do up a fancy colorful gift basket like the kind we used to get as kids, we'll have the satisfaction of having the real thing.

Not to be trite, but cliches describe these situations well—finding the silver lining of every cloud, or asking yourself what you can learn from a situation. My own personal list goes on, but I hope I've made my point. In these particular moments, I made a mental note that sometimes even the most disdainful situations can have surprisingly sweet results—especially if you take the time to look for them.