The Post-Thanksgiving Stomach Sweep-Out

OR

A Long Weekend Cleanse For The Poor and Bloated

First and foremost, I must apologize for skipping out of posting these last three times. Between GF being in the hospital (she's okay) and cramming for a heavy-duty Anatomy and Physiology test in school, I was a little pressed for time. Also, last Monday was Canadian Thanksgiving (which we like to refer to as "Thanksgiving" in the same way one would refer to "gay marriage" as "marriage" when they're used to it), and although I watched no tediously long football games and had no turkey to put me to sleep, I knowingly neglected my blog to dedicate my time to the love of my life and her cooking. So basically, I'm lazy. The lucky thing about having a new blog is that no one really notices when you skip out.

Like every other Canuck from here to Alberta - because I'm convinced everybody in BC is athletic and shapely and would never gorge themselves on mashed potatoes and gravy the way Maritimers do - I suffered the after-effects of a delicious, uncombined, heavy-on-the-starch Thanksgiving dinner with rounds of hiccups, water retention, gas, and my personal favourite, bloating (Revenge of The Baloonha Belly!). While I can accept the consequences of my speed-eating gracefully, I can't help but want them to go away just as easily as they come on. It took twenty minutes of eating to make me uncomfortable for three days, and this is just the beginning of the holiday season, packed with identical meals. Ah, the North American lifestyle.

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Being as I'm in a classroom with a bunch of health freaks two days out of the week, a lot of conversation comes up about green - or for that matter, any colour - juices or smoothies. On any given day at least a third of my classmates have mason jars full of substances as green as cartoon toxic slime, slightly runnier than paste, and they slowly chug through it, somehow, without gagging. As appetizing as that sounds, fresh smoothies and juices are making an impact in the holistic world as widespread as the yoga movement. Movies like Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead have accentuated the reasoning behind consuming liquid leaves: plants are full of nutrients and it's hard to eat a lot of plants at once, but if you juice your plants you can eat a shit-ton in one go, thereby flooding your insides with nutrients without experiencing digestive stress. Bam, instant health! This is endearing and a great idea if you can afford tiny $5.00 bags of fruit thrice a week or more, but for those of us in the Magic Bullet boat, blending anything well is a far-off dream and affording a juicer - and the veggies to go in it - is a laughable goal. Certainly I can plan for the future, where GF's the family breadwinner and I can lounge around doing martial arts and drinking greens all day, but in the meantime I have to accept that these lovely alkalizing beverages are way out of my price range. There is a limit on how well I can take care of my body, and it's called rent.

This is a similar situation, I imagine, for many other folks fresh out of their parents' houses or struggling to make ends meet. Minimum wage is definitely the minimum one can live off of, and some folks are working with less than that. As much as vegan and locavorian books preach how affordable healthy food is, there are days when a loud, "Eff you," is the only appropriate response to the pages and their writers. This said, during my stint of über-hydration back in my first blog post, I discovered the only-slightly-splurgy poor man's way to clean and soothe one's digestive tract without living off lemon water and tea alone. I call it: The "Gerard, Is This A Grapefruit?" Weekend Cleanse*.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with all this fasting and juicing stuff, here's your 101 summery: A fast is when you go for a period of time, be it hours or days, without food. Many religions practice fasting. Persons on a fast can choose to eschew solid food and eat only liquids like soup and juice, or neglect anything beyond water for their fasting period. Fasts come in varying intensities and time periods, but the basic idea is that you don't eat food, so your digestive system gets a break. Cleansing, on the other hand, is less drastic and can still involve solid sustenance. It generally excludes anything hard to digest and focuses on simple foods to ease up on the tummy without starving the body of anything it might want. Anyone who's spent multiple lazy days in the summer eating nothing but fruit knows what a cleanse can feel like. If you're under a lot of stress day-to-day, or are working on upping a certain nutrient you're deficient in, doing either might be a bad idea. Talk to a nutritionist or naturopath. If you're pregnant, just don't.

So removed are most folks from what food is that upon asking my cousin if I could dig around for breakfast in their kitchen while visiting a few months ago, she apologized  for the "lack of groceries" in their fridge, full to bursting with fresh fruit. To me, my godparents' kitchen stock was food nirvana. To them, it was embarrassingly empty of quick-to-make meals. There's a really interesting point-of-view analysis to make there, but it's not the point of my story. Excited by the abundance, I had starting making humongous salads with gusto, savoring the feeling and taste of fresh vegetables and fruit, lounging around and taking long walks at leisure (because that's what you do in tiny Cape Breton towns), and drinking, I'm sure, vat-loads of tea. I noticed, on my last day before returning home, that I felt amazing. Light, bloat-free, awake and hydrated. I felt like every movement was a drink of sunlight, if that makes any sense. I hadn't had a single juice or smoothie, and I'm happy to report that I ate cooked food too, so there, raw foodies.

As much as I'd like to duplicate exactly what I'd done those few months back, I don't have three free days of nothing to do, I live in a loud, non-relaxing city, and fruit is expensive. But I have leftover vegetables from my parents, discount mushrooms and melons from a shop down the street, and enough time in the morning to whip up some basic salads. That, my friends, is enough. To be honest, it's a lot easier than doing a juice fast, too; there's no loud machinery, no supremely different tastes or textures, more fibre, and overall, it's way less expensive and time-consuming. True, you probably aren't getting as much of a nutrient dump as a juice fast would provide, but for those of us who have never done a cleanse or have habits and cravings they're trying to break free of, this little cleanse can be a massive help without all the mental and digestive stress. If you're overweight or currently living on Mickey D's, an intense fast can actually make you really ill, as it kicks up all the toxins and fats stored in your body, and can give you crazy diarrhea, since your guts probably haven't seen carrot paste since you were an infant (or maybe not at all) . A basic vegetable cleanse gives your tummy a break from hard-to-digest food, and the huge influx of liquids and fibre will help you poop and clear out anything that's been stuck in your intestines or bothering your liver without the associated nausea. Simple, but effective.

To do The "Gerard, Is This A Grapefruit?" Weekend Cleanse, you'll need three not-too-busy days, as many green foods as you can get your hands on, a bunch of apples ('tis the season!), and, if you fancy it, tea. Herbal tea, please. A cup of green mid-day won't hurt, but try to keep the caffeine to a minimum and avoid it in the morning. To make things easier if you've got, say, kids to take care of or very little time to yourself, wash up everything the day before you start your cleanse so you don't have to worry about it later. When you hit day one, start your morning with a mug of hot leaf juice. If you want more, have more. The whole idea of this "fast" is to eat as much as you want, which sounds backwards, I know. But when you do it, you're going to be having water and herbal tea, very little heavy proteins or starches, vegetables up the yin-yang, a good dollop of sweet fruit, and very little salt and sugar. When you're eating good food, you can have as much as you feel like shoving in your face. To cover my bases for those of you worried about how safe a cleanse is, consider:

1) People have been doing fasts for thousands of years. While living off just water (or air, because there are people that crazy) for a week isn't great for you, short periods of easy-to-digest food give your poor overworked digestive system time to rest. You sleep to rest your mind; why not fast to rest your body?

2) All vegetables have protein. Per 100g, a leafy green like chard or a floret like broccoli has 10g or so of protein, where 100g of steak would have about 8g. Honestly, you'll be fine. Almost everybody in North America and the developed world are actually over-sufficient in protein. It's hard to digest and acidic to the body, and being as we want to be alkaline inside, it'd do you good to give yourself a break from meats and dairy and whatever else is pushed to get your daily dose of the macronutrient. The only way you'll ever become deficient is if you eat only fruit (and no avocado) for years. Chill.

3) Doing a vegetable cleanse is the farthest thing from starving, if you're wondering. On a daily basis so many of us are eating tons and still suffering the munchies at the end of the day, because our bodies are going, "Hellooooooooooo, I didn't get my potassium! I need that! Go eat something!" When you chock yourself full of water (which cells love) and the vitamins and minerals vegetables are full of, your body gets its daily doses and keeps quiet, even if you're consuming fewer calories. You'll feel less hungry, suffer fewer or no hunger pains, and feel wicked good, because you're not weighed down with the task of digestion. Plant foods, especially when you're not including grains or beans, are pretty calorie-thin, though, which is why you can and will want to eat shit-tons of them. I'm serious about the "as much as you want" thing. There are no dainty salad-bowl-size salads in my house. There are mixing bowls for one. Pack enough food for an army everywhere you go. You will need it.

So, the basics of this cleanse are thus: Eat vegetables whenever you want, water in between, and an apple or two a day, and aim for as much raw as possible. The greener everything is the better. Salads are going to be your number one BFF, but feel free to have some cooked up veggies too; avoid white potatoes for the three days, because they're basically all starch and sugar, but carrots, squash, turnip, and anything like them are all fine.

Apples, cantaloupe, oranges, onion, shallots, garlic, broccoli, cauliflower, pomegranate seeds, rutabaga,
kale, enoki mushrooms, asparagus, carrots, tomatoes, radishes.

Water is your best friend. If you're bored, watching TV, or otherwise generally chilling out, try to make sure you've got a glass of either water (unflavoured, please, unless you're just dropping orange chunks in it) or a mug of tea in your hand. Think of your digestive tract as a blocked pipe; you're pumping Draino (fibre) into it like crazy, so you're going to need to flush everything out with a bunch of water, too. You won't feel half as good on this cleanse if you're not drinking. That said, and this should be common sense, but you shouldn't be having any pop, juice, or otherwise non-water drinks. Coffee is out, caffeinated tea is out (this includes decaf, because it's a chemical mess), and alcohol is absolutely a no-go.

As much as it can be super hard for folks who have sugar addictions, avoiding large amounts of fruit is kind of a part of this cleanse. Even though the fibre in whole fruit does generally stop it from spiking your blood sugar levels, fructose is still fructose, and you'll want to haul back on it a lot. Feel free to spice the crap out of your meals - if you're feelin' an autumn-y breakfast, throw some pumpkin together with cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves, but hold the maple syrup. Keep a weary eye out for pre-combined spice mixes à la "pumpkin pie spice" that could have included sugar - anything doesn't sound like food or ends in "-ose" should be avoided.

Pepper is totally free game. Go nuts. Spices are all great. They'll actually help things along. If you don't eat a whole lot of processed food day to day, and you don't have blood pressure issues, allow yourself a little bit of sea salt on the odd meal during your fast, if you must. But by little I mean, like, a pinch. Not a hefty dousing. Do the same as you would for the sugar and check mixed spice bottles for added salt or sodium anything.

As I said before, you're going to need to go easy on the fruit, but they're not under a total ban. If you want to throw some blueberries on your salad to make it taste better, you go, Glen Coco. Just keep in mind that you want the majority of your food to be from the vegetable side of the ring. On a related note, I know it's hard to make salads taste good without dressing if you're used to it. There are still some kinds of greens I can't eat without some sort of sauce on top. But in general, try to stick to spices, olive oil (just a spoonful!), and a sprinkle of salt. Lemon juice is tasty to some people. Maybe vinegar, if that's your thing. If you need more flavor, try blending up some berries into a sauce. If you really must use store-bought dressing, try to use little, and avoid anything "free". If it's fat/salt/sugar/whatever free, it's probably a chemical shitstorm of things you shouldn't ingest. Take responsibility for consuming "unhealthy" food and eat it in its natural state or not at all.

In closing, go easy on yourself. Too many people get hung up on what they're supposed to eat or not eat and in what portion sizes and lose the whole point of a cleanse - to clean. You're aiming to soothe your body by making everything easy to digest and wholesome. Don't worry if you want to throw chicken in your salad, or if you sneak a scoop of mac and cheese from your kid's plate. It's not all or nothing.

A couple of tips that you don't need to follow but that will make your cleanse that much better:

1) Try to leave 20 minutes between each meal and drinks. Most of us are used to having a glass of something with food, but it actually messes up your saliva production and waters down your digestive juices. If you really need to, take a couple of sips of water while you're eating, but have as little as possible.

2) Chew your food! Seriously, pay stupid close attention to how much you chew each bite. Consider: there're no teeth below your mouth, so the less you chew the harder the rest of your digestive tract has to work. Food should be a paste before you swallow it.

3) When you reach the last day of your cleanse, try to ease yourself back into heavier foods. Suddenly dumping five cups of pasta into a freshly-cleaned digestive tract is just going to give you cramps and instantly take away the light, floaty feeling you get after three days of veggies. Instead, have a bit of chicken at lunch, or a cup of lentils with dinner.

4) Do yourself a favour and don't do this cleanse if your climate is now very chilly. There aren't enough fats and proteins in vegetables for the calorie boost you need in the winter to keep warm. Everyone's perception of cold is different, sure, but spring and early autumn are actually the best times to fast/cleanse. Trust your body - I've got too cold a temperament for cleansing in the colder months, so I don't.

So, because we all love point form and this is certainly long enough to give anyone attention deficiency problems, I'm going to summarize:

- Stock your house with vegetables and fruit. More of the latter than former. Discount racks are the best. Buy in bulk. Apples are like natural multivitamins, so have one or two a day. Try anything leafy and green. Eat like candy. Vary what you're eating - living off rutabaga is impressive, but not healthy.

- Drink water and herbal tea like it's going out of style. Try not to drink and eat at the same time. 

- Carry around enough food to feed six people and eat as much as you want whenever you want. Seriously, eat vegetables until you're going to burst. You can't have too many.

- Feel awesome!

With love,
- Leah

*The name of this game stems from my finding a grapefruit in my godparents' refrigerator with "Gerard, is this a grapefruit?" written on the rind with permanent market. My uncle can't eat this citrus fruit because it messes with his blood pressure meds, but had for some reason bought one. There, I'm not sounding crazy anymore - it's a phrase of association with my three days of awesome cleansing. This also brings up a point that anyone on prescription medication should remember: don't eat any weird spices or take any unfamiliar supplements until you're sure they're not going to react badly with your drugs. If you're on blood pressure meds, avoid citrus fruit like the plague.

DISCLAIMER TIME. I'm not a physician. If at any point you feel like shit or faint or are starving, nevermind what I've told you and go eat a sandwich or something. You know your body better than anyone; if it says something's wrong, SOMETHING'S WRONG. Please consider your state of health before you do any cleanse or fast - if you have blood sugar issues, are taking medications, have gaping nutrient deficiencies, don't know an orange from a grapefruit, or are feeling overwhelmed, USE YOUR BETTER JUDGEMENT. Talk to your doctor, a nutritionist, a friend who's done a million cleanses before, or consult Google. Take nothing at face value. Be inquisitive. Do what's best for you.

Breaking Bad (Habits, That Is)

OR

Making Promises To Yourself: A How-To Guide

There was a summer in my teenage days where I dedicated hours to playing video games. Certainly I'd spent a while trudging my way through Final Fantasy VII and Chrono Cross (finishing neither) in traditional gamer style, with my body half buried in a beanbag chair, getting up every few hours only for food or bathroom breaks, but in particular I'm thinking of the one summer I spent playing Dance Dance Revolution.

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Anyone aware of pop culture in the mid-2000's probably recognizes the misleading name of this game. As one of the first in "healthy" video games (AKA games that make you move more than your thumbs), DDR had a huge surge of popularity when I was entering high school and a reputation for making fat kids thin. Our now defunct local arcade showcased its DDR machine at its entrance, and the employees were quick to interest curious onlookers with stories of overweight teenagers who had played the game for months and shrunk down to fraction of their former sizes. It was mind boggling how fast those kids could move their feet. The arcade versions ran at about $2.00 for three songs, which you'd "dance" to by stomping on four directional pads at your feet. When the game became available on home consoles, my family quickly acquired the Xbox version, to which I spent an entire two months dedicating my time. Every day I would follow the same routine: get up, eat breakfast, "dance", eat lunch, relax.

Perhaps it was because accomplishing a song on any other level than Easy was a challenge for me, and sparked some kind of competitive-against-myself spirit. Perhaps it was just something to do during my long, mostly solitary summer. Whatever the reason, I playing that game with almost religious fervor. I missed out on a full summer of sunshine. I lost the twenty extra pounds I'd been carrying from gorging myself on peanut butter sandwiches and cereal. I had wicked stamina, suddenly. I'd picked up a healthy habit and was sticking to it.

Often when folks are told to change their diets, they're given the one-choice-or-none approach. Either they're handed supplements by the wheelbarrow and continue to eat the same as always, relying on the magic silver bullet of herbs, or they're told, "You need to stop eating red meat and have it never again and be a vegan forever no exceptions." While this is responsible in some cases (namely allergies), generally most people can't do the all-or-nothing. They have to start slow and be reinforced often. There's a reason kids given stickers in school learn to spell quickly.

My very first blog post was about drinking water. I discovered the magic of hydration, and swore I'd be chugging that sweet nectar of life until every cell inside me was sick of wearing its bathing suit. But like every other human being out there who's promised to stick to something, I have very quickly found myself with cracked lips and a mouth like a desert (especially in the morning - hello Sahara). The fact is, winter is upon us, and as the cold weather moves in, my desire to do anything, including walk, eat, and drink, becomes extremely limited. To add insult to injury and enjoy a double idioms, it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks. I'm used to eating lots of simple carbs and drinking little water, and though I'd promised I'd rectify both habits, they're habits, and are severely ingrained into my life as stubbornly as a tick in the foot would be (Mom always warned us about going without shoes in the woods).

There will always be those persons who decide to do something and do it, cold turkey. Quitting smoking, abolishing fast food from their lives, or becoming immediately talented, like the boys my sister hung out with in school who just decided to learn to back-flip one day, and did (how?!). But for the rest of us, picking up a habit and adhering to it for the full twenty-one days they say it takes to make it automatic is often super stupid hard. For a few days we're golden, then we get lazy, or some event throws us off our schedule, and suddenly we're a week without following our own promises. Oops.

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If the old Berenstain Bears books taught me anything, it was that nail polish is the best prize for taking care of your nails. I'm one of those people (and believe it or not, this is entirely unrelated to me preferring chicks to dudes) who cannot stand having long nails. Talons that click on tables and keyboards, hinder my ability to pick things up, and grow all kinds of little pointy bits drive me up the wall. I cut my fingernails down as far as I can and habitually pick at the sides and skin around them. Gross, I know. As of lately, though, I've been suffering the clickity-click and nasty feeling of enamel out of pure love - and compliance. GF's taking an aesthetics college course, and had me swear on fear of her murdering me that I would not pick at my nails so that she could do a proper manicure on them during her upcoming first night in the clinic. I promised I would, but only if they were kept painted. I like pretty colours on my hands and am less likely to destroy my nails if I can't see the whites of them.

In this story lies two examples of ways to enforce a new habit:

1) Make yourself accountable to someone else

2) Reward yourself for sticking to it

My third suggestion is to make your habit something measurable. If you're taking up running, decide, for example, that you'll run at least to the stop sign at the bottom of your street before you turn back. If you go farther, great! But you must make it to that point. When you do, give yourself a reward. Food isn't always the best option, unless you're giving yourself one big night-out-for-nachos reward instead of a bunch of Cheetos-for-dinner treats, but something as simple as stickers on a chart or allowing yourself to buy a new pair of earrings (or nail polish!) can be awesome for enforcement. On that same vein, either convince someone to do the run to the stop sign together with you every day, or enlist someone in your house to force you to do it - if I told GF to not let me in the house until I'd gone for a walk, she would most adamantly stand in the doorway and threaten me in the way that only a hobbit-sized nerd girl can until I had finished my stroll. Positive-in-the-guise-of-negative enforcement can be wonderful for making you feel guilty and obligated, especially if the other person does the, "It doesn't matter to me, but you promised yourself," thing. Be mindful of whom you're asking to threaten you, however - they'll need to know when to back down. If I were sick or having a severe bout of depression or anxiety, I would trust GF to recognize this and let the nagging go, or at least take me seriously when I said, "Not today."


When it comes to drinking water, I've decided to stick to one big blue bottle and drink two full loads of it daily. If I drink more, excellent! But two is my goal. That's 1.6 litres. Granted, I haven't yet found someone
to share the challenge with, which is probably the best way to hold myself accountable, but two days out of the week I'm in a classroom full of quasi-hippies who have water-drinking superiority complexes, and there is no stronger peer pressure to drink up than a judgmental eye (or twenty).

Finally, remember to give yourself some slack. Everybody forgets to take their vitamins, fill in their daily journal, and brush their teeth a particular way sometimes. Anyone telling you otherwise is lying. Habits take a long time to enforce, and nine out of ten people are going to fall off the bandwagon a couple times before new goals stick. Making yourself swear that you're going to do something is great, but the most important thing to promise - shut up, Yoda - is that you'll keep trying. I've been on and off promising myself I'll stick to vegetarianism for years, and sometimes I feel bad about having a nibble of Christmas turkey, but I've learned to listen to what my body wants, and sometimes it wants a piece of poultry. Some days you really don't want to run, because everything sucks and the outside world just seems too big. Sometimes you pick up a cigarette and puff halfway through it before you remember you were trying to quit. Some potlucks just have damn good food with crap-tons of fat in it. Remember that one time isn't every time, and you're strong enough to try again.

In the end:

1) Everybody makes goals and promises that they have trouble sticking to. Habits take forever to build. Make your new habit something you can measure, and practice it at the same times each day to make it really stick. Enforce it, reward yourself, and cut yourself some slack when you need to. At the risk of exasperated eye-rolling for using another idiom: Rome wasn't built in a day.

2) Drink your water.

Habitually,
- Leah

The Salty Lesser of Two Evils

OR

Why Quality Salt Is Healthier Than Shitty Sugar

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Iodine is - brace yourselves, I consulted my textbook for this - a poisonous gas that we need to ingest. A halogen mineral, it sits comfortably in the 53rd spot of the Periodic Table, and is apparently purple, not that we ever get to see it. It's most commonly found in vegetables and mixed in with table salt, or salt in general, which is why folks who live in places like Halifax don't have problems with goiter; the sea breezes blow enough iodine into our systems that our thyroid gland doesn't have to expand to try to catch more. (For those of you wondering what goiter is, think of the guy in Disney's Tangled with the winged helmet.) While Iodine in its natural gaseous form is terrible for us, iodine in food is a natural substance that we need to function correctly. This is also true of the salt in which it's found. As much as it's not super great for your blood pressure, without it you would absolutely die. Salt is so necessary that in ancient civilizations it could be traded as currency and people would get arrested for boiling saltwater at home instead of buying it. It's a big deal.

My Daddy recently read and recommended a book called Wheat Belly by William Davis, and has been following the author's guidelines for getting rid of his persistent "beer belly", which I'm very proud of him for. Mr Davis believes that because wheat grown today is so far removed from the wheat that folks in the fifties and earlier had that our bodies have no idea what to do with it. Genetically engineered and cross-bred to be uniform heights, grow at specific times, and taste a specific way, as well as survive frost and pests, the wheat plants we eat in pretty much everything are not only a threat to those with gluten intolerance and Celiac Disease, but everyone else, too. I've been mostly following in my father's footsteps as of the last week or so after finishing a school project and realizing maybe wheat wasn't the best for me, either - albeit for a different reason.

This past Thursday I'd asked my teacher which was worse: salt or sugar. We'd been talking about atherosclerosis, the hardening and thickening of arteries in the body, and how the amount of salt someone eats can alter how bad their situation is. The class before, we'd talked about how sugar in high amounts, especially high fructose corn syrup, was causing ridiculous quantities of children in the United States to develop or be born with type two diabetes. Obviously neither salt nor sugar are great for you in large amounts, but it seemed, to me, that sugar was the baddest baddie of the two. It makes us fat, attention-deficit and hyper, lethargic, blocks absorption of vitamins we need to live (like vitamin C; those with compromised immune systems should really avoid it), inflames the body, is addictive, severely screws with our insulin levels, and tastes so damn good we can't stop eating it. Salt, on the other hand, keeps us balanced in more ways than one. It helps our bodies build hydrochloric acid in our stomachs to break down food, aids in blood sugar controls, and supports our thyroid gland. This being said, the thousands of grams of cheap, white, refined salt that live in prepackaged meals and your cute bottle of table salt aren't helping you at all. On the contrary, they're making you sick.

Anytime I've ever heard the term "food diary" I've gotten annoyed. Those two words ring out at me from every television show, healthily living book, and style magazine available, all aimed at women trying to lose weight - keep a food diary, they say, and you'll eat better! Or less! Or you'll just feel ridiculously guilty and
ashamed and stressed out, says I. Tedious and over-analyzed, the whole concept seemed pointless to me. But despite my loathing for the practice, I was assigned a project for school that told me to do just what I'd never wanted to: keep a food log. For five days I had to plug in exactly what I was eating and at what time (although thankfully without note of calories), how much water I drank, how I felt, and how many times the toilet and I made conversation. Afterwards, it was my responsibility to look over the information from an outsider's point of view and make recommendations to the "client" on how to eat healthier.

One of the most frustrating questions vegetarians of any kind get asked is, "Where do you get your protein?" Although this macro-nutrient comprises 20% of our body and is needed for everything from muscle building to brain power, it's considered the most important thing we ingest beyond calories by most people. Never mind that your body needs good carbohydrates and fats to function well too, no, the question is always, "How much protein are you eating? Are you pregnant? Are you trying to build muscle? Are you old? More protein! Eat your lean chicken!" Becoming a vegetarian at age fourteen opened me up to years of this question and insists that I eat more beans. Confirmations that yes, a person can get plenty of protein from plant foods were always met with hesitant, "Okay..."s and disbelieving looks. If you know a vegetarian or vegan, please refrain from asking this question, as well as the, "But if you were trapped on a desert island with only a cow to eat...?" one. Just stop.

It was, therefore, the most grueling self-acceptance of mine that I realized, upon finishing my food diary report, that I was severely lacking in protein. In the span of a week I'd eaten nothing but sunflower seeds that were specifically, predominantly protein. Suddenly the suspicious muscle loss and slower cognitive function I'd been experiencing made perfect sense, especially when paired up with the realization that I live almost entirely off of sugar and simple carbohydrates, and had been following this pattern for years. No wonder I'm hungry all the time.

Most anybody can recognize plain white sugar. Hand someone a chocolate bar and they'll easily confirm that it's loaded with the stuff. Fruit, most people can tell, has its own natural sweeteners. But when handed a box of pasta, nobody looks beyond the nutrition facts on the side that say how many carbohydrates are inside and wonders what that pasta will become once they ingest it. When we eat the three main macro-nutrients, carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, our body takes them apart like Lego and then build them into things our
bodies need to function. Fats... well, they stay as fat, and lubricate our cells, move fat-soluble vitamins around, and pad up our internal organs so we don't die of cold or shock. Protein is deconstructed into amino acids when we eat it, little building blocks that construct everything from stretchy muscles to serotonin. Anything solid besides bones in these meat sacks we call bodies is made of protein. Carbs, on the other hand, are our main source of energy. Our bodies run on glucose, a form of sugar. Carbohydrates, both complex like buckwheat and simple like pasta, turn into glucose. Carbohydrates are sugar.

These are all sugar. Simple sugar.

The reason low-carb diets "work" is because our bodies, when they can't find sugars in our diet, will pull stored sugar, sitting in fatty deposits (your favourite love handles) out of our bodies to burn for fuel. Once those are gone, your brain instructs your digestive tract to start eating protein, our emergency rations. This is called ketosis, and although Mr Atkins thinks it's a great idea, it's dangerous and ensures that when you do reintroduce carbohydrates, your body's going to hold on to those sugars, in the form of fat, like a starving man would a banquet. The fact is, we all need carbohydrates to function right. It's the cheap firewood that keeps us running. Cutting out carbs is like throwing electronics in the fire to avoid burning up wood. Electronics don't burn well, aren't good to be breathing in, and cost a lot more than a chunk of dead tree. Plus the fire'll be pretty weak by the time you decide maybe it's okay to use firewood again. Let's just do ourselves all a big favour and not avoid carbs, alright?

Carbs come in a couple forms. Simple sugars are pasta, white rice, bread, basically anything that makes you feel good eating when you're stressed out. Complex carbs are buckwheat, quinoa, brown rice, beans, things that make it too hard for you to have dessert because you're so full. At the risk of getting too technical, simple sugars are little chains, and complex are long chains. If you had a couple jelly beans in one hand and a foot-long Fruit Roll-up in the other, which would take longer to eat? These long-chain "Fruit Roll-up" complex carbs are a slow form of sugar that your body can still use well but that don't cause blood sugar spikes or contain so many simple "jelly beans" that they get out of hand and your stomach has to time-out them in fatty deposit corners. Basically, if you've got problems - like me - with eating too much sugar, opting out of the Halloween candy isn't good enough. You've got to get rid of the simple carbohydrates and replace them - to avoid ketosis - with complex. The bonus of complex carbs, especially for those of you worried about their vegan family members, is that they contain protein. I've been opting out of eating wheat - which is generally a simple carbohydrate, unless you're eating wheat berries - and these "jelly beans" in general both to stabilize my blood sugar, increase my protein intake, and help satisfy my unending hunger.

Here we arrive at the point of this post. Salt. Once you cut that delicious sugar out of your diet, and being as everyone and their mom's telling you you need to stop eating salt, food's probably going to look pretty bland. I have bad news for you: you should probably cut down on the salt intake, and you have to stop buying regular old table salt. The good news is, you don't have to get rid of salt completely.

Dextrose is a chemical term for glucose. Sugar.

Consider where salt comes from. The sea, the earth, the human body. The table salt we're all used to eating comes from one of these sources (hopefully not the last one, haha), gets sent to a factory, and then is bleached, depleted, de-ionized, sprayed with chemicals, sprinkled with iodine, rolled in sugar, and packaged in pretty white bags. You read that right. Go grab the salt from your baking cupboard right now - there's sugar in it.

Obviously when your salt has sugar, your body's more than a little confused and you're eating something very unnatural. The general goal of someone who wants to be healthy should be to eat as close to a food's traditional form as possible, meaning they'd opt for a steak, which is just a hunk of muscle, instead of a hot dog made of mysterious beef parts mixed with chemicals and wrapped in plastic. Seasonings should be looked at the same way. If you went down to the beach, grabbed a cup of seawater, and waited for the liquid to evaporate, you'd be left with a cup of probably grey and black chunky salt. Believe it or not, this stuff is totally edible (although it's not a great idea, since our oceans have pollution problems). This is natural salt, the way it's been mined for centuries. It's infused, like a good tea, with minerals like magnesium, potassium, and calcium. A good natural salt can have as many as 85 different trace minerals in it. The chemical table salt we're all used to, by contrast, is bleached white, has all the minerals sucked out of it, has to have iodine put back in to protect midwesterners from goiter, and it's so over-purified that it bypasses every toll booth in our bodies and therefore screws us right up.

If you're going to eat salt - and we all should, in small doses - I highly, highly suggest you invest in a lovely sea or rock salt. Be mindful - if it's pure white, it's probably just a variation of the sodium chloride table salt we're all used to, labeled as "sea salt" to get in on the health craze because technically speaking, all salt came from the sea at some point. Aim to find yourself a nice off-colour salt, fine ground or chunky. My cupboard personally has some adorable fine pink Himalayan sea salt (said to be the richest in minerals), a rich grey Celtic sea salt, and oak-smoked rock salt from South Africa, which smells like a campfire in November. The added bonus of natural salts is that they've got stronger, deeper tastes, and you therefore need less, and this is coming from someone who salts the crap out of her food. It's important to point out that if you're eating a lot of sugar, whether with your sodium chloride, in candy, or as simple carbohydrates, you're probably going to crave salt like a boss to counteract all the sweetness. Cutting down on sugar means you'll need less salt, and if you're eating a healthy, un-stripped salt, you'll be getting essential minerals along with your meal instead of heart problems. Win-win-win.

In summery:

1) Simple carbohydrates are sugar. While our bodies do need sugars to function, they run best on complex carbohydrates that digest slower and give us a little boost of protein. If you're like me and eat bread and pasta all the time, consider switching up for more brown rice and buckwheat to balance yourself out. For the record, granola and oatmeal are simple carbs doused in sugar. Avoid them.

2) Your table salt has sugar in it. It's completely devoid of nutrients and you need shit-tons to make anything taste good. Spoil yourself with a colourful, mineral-rich sea or rock salt and experience both amazing new tastes and health benefits that will protect (in reasonable amounts) instead of harm your heart.

3) Although we all hate to hear it, vegetarians and vegans need to be mindful of their protein intake. It's very possible to be totally healthy on a plant-based diet, but us lazy meat-avoiders have to be careful. If you're like me and don't particularly care to eat beans every day, make sure you're eating lots of whole grains and nuts. If you're also like me and can't really afford/keep forgetting to buy nuts, or are getting really deficient in this important macro-nutrient, consider getting a hemp or plant-based protein powder.

4) Mr Atkins' program is dangerous and dumb. Your body needs fat, carbs, and protein. Give it good quality and reasonable amounts of all three, exercise a little, and stress less, and you won't have to worry about your weight.

5) Food journalism isn't a good long-term habit, I personally think, but it's not a bad idea to log your eating habits for a week or so and then critically look them over - do you eat a lot of sugar? Simple carbs? Salt? Are you stressed out? Do you poop? Are you eating late at night? Take responsibility for your own health. I'll be seeing a naturopath later this month who can help me out with the specifics of my protein deficiency and organize some better eating habits, but in the meantime, I know what I basically need to fix. It's no good waiting for someone else to take care of you; you're the best specialist you've got.

In health,
- Leah

The Autumn Squash Challenge Round #1

OR

Stripey Sweet Potato (Delicata) Squash

Source

When I set the book down, closed its back cover (after desperately checking the index pages for more), and resigned myself to its finish, I had to pause a moment to bask in the glow of a good read. I felt girlish and giddy, pink-cheeked and wanting to squeal to my empty apartment, "How romantic!" in tones usually reserved for fluffy animals and babies. I was thrilled and inspired, ready to jump up and start cooking, or grab GF and swing her around in those iconic ways Disney heroes do their princesses. (Unfortunately for me, she was at school.) Shauna James Ahern had written - in a way, I felt, for me, even though I have no food allergies - an entertaining, mouth-watering, touch-your-heart-like-no-chick-flick-could novel entitled Gluten-Free Girl, after her blog. In poetic iterations of her five senses, the author made carrot sound exotic and mushrooms as rich and delightful as candy. I felt warm and comforted while she described her friends at dinner, and I salivated at the mention of tastes that made her moan. I craved meals that made me writhe in delight as so many of hers did. 

Every once in a while I'll decide my life's purpose is to cook. I'll head to the kitchen and start whipping out pasta and vegetables, dousing pans in oil and spices and licking my lips in anticipation for my masterpiece. Folks using everything from artisan stone pits to Easy Bake Ovens for their bread can (and do) laugh at my dismal baking skills, but the cooks of the world will soon realize they're outmatched. I'll be the Iron Chef! I'll throw anything in a pan and make it a meal! GF will start asking me to make supper!

Oh, dreams. How quickly they crumble. Especially the unrealistic ones. I understand the ideas behind cooking, sure: take food, make it yummy. But the process of getting Jimmy the broccoli stalk from point A to point B eludes every neuron of my brain (population 500*), and poor Jimmy ends up in a severe identity crisis somewhere at point A-and-three-quarters. ("Am I a floret or a stem? Sauteéd or fried? Green or black?") GF's palate is too refined for my culinary mistakes, but my meals are okay enough for me to eat. They're just not... good.

Enter the Seaport Farmer's Market. It's a brand new building a couple blocks from here with windmills on the roof and extra large windows to give visitors a panoramic view of our mutilating harbour water and island full of snakes. Stalls filled with artists selling crafts and farmers with food crowd the walls, wares elevated on wooden stands. Endless lines of tourists stand right in the way of where everyone's trying to walk. There're usually fiddlers. It's very Nova Scotian. On the Saturday after payday I'd made my way down, hauling a little red wheelie cart, to get myself some groceries. I'd made a list and had more success than usual; scored inexpensive free-range eggs, a giant head of kale (which I've only just finished, two weeks later), local coloured peppers, and my favourite rainbow carrots. Much to my delight, most of the stalls had some form of pumpkin or gourd lining their shelves, too.

Being as I've got a cold constitution, I can't say I'm not partial to summer weather. I can broil myself in the hot sun for hours, then cool down in five minutes and suffer nothing more than a tan. But there's something about autumn weather that everybody and their mother adores. Be it the Pumpkin Spice Lattés at their favourite coffee shop, the colours of the dying leaves, or the thick-knit sweaters, there's something about this season that calls everyone together for cuddles and complaints about cold mornings. I love everything about the fall season. The air is wet and smells of rotting leaves. The ground is prime real estate for people who love crunching things underfoot. Every bite of food you're offered tastes of cinnamon and nutmeg.

As may be obvious by now, I love food. I especially love heavy, warm, squishy food. If it tastes like a walk in the woods, a pot on a fire, and a dollop of maple syrup, I am there. Before I'd realized what I was doing this Saturday at the market, my little red cart was heavy with squash. I'd grabbed two armfuls of the strange globes, admiring their colours and textures and reading their cooking directions curiously. I forked over six or so dollars for four medium-sized gourds, and decided in that moment that I would become a Squash Iron Chef. Food in general may not be my forté, but I am determined learn how to make delicious, squishy, autumn meals if it kills me. There are so many bajillions of variations of fall veggies, and more of the squash family. There is no reason why I shouldn't be able to learn to make cheap, filling food out of at least one of these buggers. It helps that GF doesn't generally bother with pumpkins and their cousins, so she can't backseat cook.

I come home with a pumpkin and one each of a sweet potato, spaghetti, and butternut squash. Since I'd tried recipes before of the other three, the sweet potato squash was my go-to for trial #1. 

The instructions said just to bake the little stripey guy, so that's what I did. Forty minutes in a casserole dish at three-hundred and something degrees. The only problem was, after it was cooked, I had no idea what to do with it. Such is the conundrum of being a... well, I wouldn't say gourmet, but a food-collector. I cannot resist buying spices on sale or discount vegetables. I've got lots of tastes to work with, but no idea how to use them. So I mixed the squash with lentils and put curry maple pepper (from Sugar Moon Farm) on top. That sounds decent, right?

  

...ta daa? I'd give round one a 2/10. It was edible, for sure, and I guess not bad, but... not good, either. Clearly this is a squash I'll have to revisit a couple of times to really get a good recipe out of. As I understand, delicata squash come in many different sizes and are generally used as ornaments; this guy just fit in the palm of my hand, so I had no leftover meat to work with.

Host Mom and Dad roasting seeds.

Also, I'd tried roasting the seeds. During the Halloween of 2010 my Orillia host family made the most delicious fresh-roasted pumpkin seeds from the Jack o' Lanterns I and their two girls had carved. I really wish I'd paid attention when Host Dad was cooking them, because I can't for the life of me remember the heat setting or amount of time he'd had them in there. We'd nibbled on those throughout the night, and then after Trick or Treating ate tea, fruit, and hot homemade soup while the girls gagged at the ingredient lists of their chocolate bars and chip bags - a far cry from the way my sister and I used to finish our night of costuming.

My attempt at roasting the squash seeds went much the same way as the squash itself. Maybe it's because I had less that a quarter cup of seeds, or had the oven too high, but in any case, four minutes was too long, and although they looked and smelled nice, the seeds were just too far gone to be pleasant to eat. Very chewy and hard to swallow.

Lessons learned:

1) Find a recipe to follow besides what's printed on the squash itself.

2) Cook more seeds at a lower temperature.

Ding, ding!

- Leah

(P.S: I'm sorry this post is a couple days late. I was ill and working on school project over the weekend.)

*This is a joke. The human brain has an estimated 100 million neurons or more.

A Lesbian Avoids Boob(tube)s and Carpal Tunnel

OR

Reasons To Toss The TV and Slow The High Speed Internet

It's not often that I make new friends. Clearly chick flicks lied to me and moving to a big city doesn't automatically convert you into a wealthy socialite. I have no ritzy magazine job writing scathing reviews of designer clothes (although I'm sure my convenience store uniform deserves one). I don't have huge parties with blaring music and hors d'oeuvres. I certainly don't go out pub-hopping on a regular basis, because neither my wallet nor liver can handle it. It's a mystery to me how a young woman is supposed to meet people outside work or school. If there's a Lifehack for that, I'd like to know.

We made a lot of cookies that night.

I remember a night in December a few years back where a friend from Montréal and I were baking shortbread cookies (she was baking; I was staying far away from the stove as possible for fear of somehow goofing up the food). We were just getting into the dark and dry cold of the 2010 Labrador winter, and the house was dead quiet save for the wind outside. The rest of our Katimafamily were out taking walks together; we'd all decided to get to know one another, and had partnered up and dedicated an hour to our pair, learning all about their lives outside our six month program. This may be just my brain pulling a hipster move and filtering the crap out of the picture in my mind, but the memory of that holiday season is one of the most rich and sweetest in my life. The house was lit with blinding, mismatched lamps. A plastic tree with paper decorations glimmered next to the couch with no legs. The walls were plastered with homemade posters talking about feelings and needs, held with green tape. Our kitchen always smelled like fresh bread, but tonight it was white with flour and the air was sweet with sugar. Kate was screaming.

My compliments for having the best reaction to my fourteen-year hobby ever. It definitely made me feel like I had something to be proud of. At the prompt of, "Tell me something about yourself," I had informed my now dear friend that I was a black belt in karate, casually, as was my personality at the time. She had complimented my nonchalance with an over the top, "OH MY GOD. NO WAY. YOU ARE? I TOTALLY DIDN'T EXPECT THAT," and told the seven other members of our group immediately after they returned from their walks, their faces flushed pink with cold and boots half off their feet.

Those rare few times I do meet new people, they often have a reaction similar to Kate's when GF or I inform them that we don't have a television - by which we actually mean we don't have a cable subscription. Our secondhand television, which is much newer at ten years old than our original thirdhand television, is used for movies and video games alone. We have no Netflix subscription. No satellite or cable connections. No gaming consoles newer than a Playstation 2. Most times it sits dark in our living room.

I once listened in on a conversation about trashy reality shows my aunts were having. That was one of the last times I was in "Grandma's house", a now-sold three-level treasure perched on a hill in the prickly grass of a quiet Cape Breton village. The building was buzzing with after-dinner conversation, and the TV blared from the room adjacent to us. All around me teaspoons clinked against glasses and women relayed their daily rituals. Far from serene stories of bubble baths and wine, these were re-tellings of long days at stressful jobs, finished with a late supper and terrible television shows "just for something to watch". The episodes were awful, they assured each other - overdramatic, scripted, and a waste of airtime, but they all watched these shows religiously, my mother included.

There's nothing wrong with a couple of guilty pleasure television shows. Sometimes you need a dumb video or two to distract yourself from a stressful day. I've been personally re-watching Cardcaptor Sakura through Youtube. My mom likes soap operas. Famous health bloggers like Jess Ainscough waste brain cells on shows like Keeping Up With The Kardashians. But with the way people react to my lack of screen-watching, you'd think avoiding a daily service to the boob tube was sacrilege.

"How do you go without a TV? I couldn't do it!"
"It's not that expensive! They have student discounts!"
"No television at all?"
"You should check if someone left the cable intact in your apartment!"

Neither GF nor I find our lives lacking anything because we can't watch TV. In fact, we're both glad it's stayed out of our budget. Student discounts or no, $100+ a month is a lot of hard-earned cash to be shelling out "just for something to watch". If we could specifically choose the two channels we have any interest in (Discovery and History, and maybe TLC because GF likes dumb shows about dramatic girls picking out wedding dresses), I'm sure a couple dollars would be worth the education. But to use precious daylight staring at a box that takes thirty minutes out of every hour to try and sell me things and the other thirty insulting my intelligence, and to pay huge sums of money for the privilege of letting it do so...?

We once had a month of free cable from our internet provider. I don't think I've ever talked to GF less, even when we were four provinces and six months apart.

Everywhere we go in this high-tech world we're exposed to screens of some sort. Whether you're one of those folks who can't tear their eyes away from your cell phones (what on earth are you looking at that's so interesting?) or someone like me, whose job involves a touchscreen computer all day, almost everyone in the developed world is constantly straining their eyes to stare at pixels in one way or another. As you can imagine, this is terrible for our eyesight. Ever notice how many more people have glasses now then when you were a kid? We're an entire generation suffering from nearsightedness and problems focusing. (Also, if you're cell phone addicted, you probably have hypertension in your neck.)

According to BBM Canada, Canadians spend up to thirty hours a week watching television. That's thirty hours of sitting around doing nothing except maybe eating. Eyes get strained, brains get fried, and nobody has anything interesting to say in a conversation that begins with, "So what have you been up to?" If you used those thirty hours a week to, say, go running, you'd be booking it five hours a day and be both ridiculously physically healthy and ridiculously mentally unhealthy at the same time. So that's a bad example. But if you could take those thirty hours and divvy them up - use them to read a good book, go somewhere fun, cook a healthy meal, hang out with a friend, play pretend with your kids, et cetera, et cetera, just pick up a women's magazine and they'll give you ideas. I'm sure we all realize that thirty hours a week is a huge waste of lifespan, and although I'm sure not everyone dedicates that much time to their TV, it's no stretch to say we all watch much too much of it. If you died today, would you feel like you'd really lived, when a fifth of your life was spent watching teenagers in too much makeup scream at each other?

The Katimavik program was completely, thankfully, free of a television, and I've been without one since I moved away from my parents in 2011. When you don't have total anytime access to the world of the telly, the times you do watch become that much more memorable. GF and I recall dates and events based on what movies we saw in theatres in what month. Playing video games I haven't since last December fill me with holiday fuzzy feelings of nostalgia. When I was in Labrador, watching Miracle On 34th Street in a little private room with my nine closest friends at the time was an event we looked forward to all month, and a chance to spend time together laughing, instead of mindlessly eating out of the same chip bowl and calling it a date.

When I want to watch a specific show, I look it up on the internet or rent it from the library. With a computer, I've found no need for television. This said, I know I spend too much time mindlessly surfing the web - some days, and I know I'm not alone in this, I'll realize that I've been scrolling my way through endless pages of GIFs for hours and learning nothing of interest. My relay of the day to GF when she comes home from school is a repetitive cycle of, "So I saw this thing on somebody's Tumblr..."

I've decided it has to stop. This is the 21st century, and of course I can't avoid technology, but a woman in her twenties should not have blood clots in her legs from sitting too much (which I'm sure I'm heading towards, being as there are days I can hardly remember standing). I've decided to lessen my use of the Web-connected boob tube with exceptions for homework and blogging, which I do rough drafts of on paper. I tend to start getting sleepy as soon as it gets dark outside, so I'm restricting my internet surfing until after eight at night, so that I can spend my daylight soaking up Vitamin D and enjoying our short fall season (and working on my self-inflicted Autumn Squash Challenge - more on that later).

True, we can't all pull away from the technology of necessity, but consider giving yourself a break from those screens around you. Find something creative to do. Bake. This is the season for it. Write. Do your homework. Draw. Nap. Walk. Phone. Hang out. Find something to do that fills your day with memorable things beyond a funny cat video. Make your days last. Remember when you were a kid, and the days felt like forever? Aim for that.

In closing,

1) Baby steps. Take them. You don't have to toss out your television or bar the family from their video games, but maybe tell the kids they have to play outside for the day on the promise that you'll all watch a movie or play a game together at night.

2)  Mom had a set of rules when my sister and I were kids that I've stuck to my entire life: when you have guests, you leave the computer alone. No video game unless they're two-player. No TV until you've been outside for a while (and absolutely, positively no television in the dining room or your bedrooms). Stick to this and you'll find your days become a lot longer and your conversations a lot more personal. Avoid tech when you've got a friend over. They came here for you, not your entertainment systems.

3) But seriously, what's so interesting about your cell phones?

With whirs and buzzing and a couple clicks,
- Leah

Recipe: Herbed Croutons

OR

Salad Toppings From Bread Heels: A Story of Seagull Deprivation

Have you ever been to one of those really ritzy home decor stores? You know, the kind that're usually privately-owned and tucked into some secluded corner of a city? They sell dishware and tablecloths, as well as beautiful, unique pieces like bronze chandeliers, abstract art, and tablecloths made of the Golden Fleece. The few times I've been in one of these places (wondering what it's like to drop a couple hundred dollars on an ugly horse sculpture without being intoxicated beyond intelligent thought), GF has pointed out objects so ridiculously silly and expensive that neither of us can wrap our heads around them. For example, one Christmastime we saw a silver bonsai tree in a store window downtown I would call "the minimalist style of today's high-class urbanite" in that it was all branches and sparkled something fierce. We were struck both by how pretty and how audacious it was to be asking $200 for something we could make with a walk in the woods and a can of glitter paint. A few months later GF saw spindly silver (it's the "in" colour) decorations that were equally pretty and equally expensive, and was so enraptured with them that she went to the Dollar Store, bought foam and paint, and made duplicates for a fraction of the price. We now have six sparkling silver carbon atoms hanging from our living room ceiling.

I love grocery shopping. I take to it like some girls do to shopping for clothes or makeup. Be it at the local supermarket, farm market, or convenience store, I get a huge thrill out of picking out food. I love trying to figure out what my most cost-efficient option is. I love filling up carts and baskets. I even love paying for it (gives me that accomplished feeling). I get the warm fuzzies from shopping for necessities. I am totally for hire if somebody wants me to grocery shop for them. Dream job, I'm telling you.

What I don't especially love when I'm shopping is finding pre-fab food I could make myself. I get that convenience is king for most people, but who doesn't have time to make mashed potatoes? It's just silly and a little bit frustrating, in a way. Why would I pay three dollars more for something that would take three minutes to do myself? (That would be an excellent job, too. A dollar a minute? Talk about rolling in the dough - pun intended.) There are some things I absolutely refuse to buy just because the Average Joe could make it in under ten minutes. Ready-for-baking tinfoil-wrapped potatoes, pre-layered salsa chip dips, pre-cut vegetables of any kind, salad kits, and pre-seasoned meats top the list.

Also, croutons.

Like with her ingenious crafting, GF has become a pro at mimicking recipes on cookbook pages, meal boxes, and sample tables. I'd like to say she's the art girl and I'm the inventive chef, but this is real life and I've long since accepted that the only things I'm especially good at cooking are pasta (which is bad for me in large quantities) and quiche (which I should really make more of, but responsible eggs are expensive). Still, I'm quick to learn, so when GF showed me how to make real croutons from scratch, well... I actually promptly forgot, and will probably get the finer details wrong the next eight or so times I make them. But I promise I got her to double-check this recipe before I posted it.

Croutons (and for that matter, stuffing, but I'll pick on Stove Top another day) are stupid easy to make. In the same way I can't fathom spending $400 on carbon atoms for my ceiling, I likewise can't reason why anyone would spend $3 on a salad topping. Croutons are entirely made of stale bread. Birds don't pay to eat your hot dog bun ends - why are you paying to eat overcooked bread heels? Croutons sit in the same boat soup stock does; they're made of scraps.

To make croutons, stop feeding birds. It's bad for them anyway. Hoard your bread heels, broken toast pieces, freezer-burnt slider buns, and the cheesebread logs your cousin brought for tea. Pop them in the freezer in a Ziploc bag next to your stock chunks. When you need them, yank'm out of the cold, preheat your over to 325F (so they can witness their impending doom), cube/rip them up, dump them in a bowl, add enough vegetable oil to coat them, douse them in spices (we usually use garlic powder and Italian seasoning), then sprawl the oily nibs on a cookie sheet ("Draw me like one of your French breads!") and cook them for about fifteen minutes, until they're toasty and brown.

Or, if you're me, put them in the oven, forget about them, cook them for too long, eat the black ones, and save the nice bits for your girlfriend.

Oops.

 Summing it up:

 1)
- Save up bread scraps and freeze until needed
- Preheat oven to 325F
- Rip or cut bread chunks into bite-sized pieces
- Place breadcrumbs in a bowl and coat with vegetable oil
- Add seasoning (garlic powder/Italian spices/whatever)
- Spread on cookie sheet
- Bake for 15 minutes, give or take, until they're golden brown
- Eat

 2) We have sparkley silver carbon atoms on our ceiling and GF is very proud.

 Cheaply crunching,
 - Leah

Red Light, Green Light, Abs of Steel

OR

How To Gain Muscle Mass By Sitting In Your Car

When I was younger, I used to do 100 crunches before bed every night. Why? Somewhere along the line of my maturing I got into the notion that I should try to be the most fit I could be (a good habit to get back into, really), so I made an effort to eat well and do at least a little bit of exercise each day. Doing crunches was absolutely a pain sometimes - if I'd had a workout earlier that day, or if I was already comfy in bed, the last thing I wanted to do was haul my ass off the mattress and try to brain myself with my knees. But 99% of the time I'd get up and do it. I had no one to answer to but myself, and I told Me that if I wasn't going to take up running (cardio is the bane of my physical existence), the least I could do it flail on the floor for a couple minutes per night.

Expectedly, I did build some strong abdominals. Along the way, I also discovered the lazy man's trick to building up lower tummy muscles without looking like a doofus. I sat up.

Somebody once told me a story about this really fat elementary school teacher. The lady sat pin-straight at her desk and had the funniest looking gut; her stomach was flat, but every other part of her body was flabby. It confused the heck out of the kids in her class, because she was completely nonathletic, but had abs of steel. You see where I'm going with this.

I was reminded of this trick while riding the bus not long ago. I wouldn't suggest it for anyone driving (because you should be focusing on the road, so put the damn cell phone away before you kill someone), but I used to do it all the time as a passenger. It works all the lower muscles of your abdomen, as well as your thighs and back muscles. You won't get short of breath or (probably) sweat. Best of all, instead of looking silly and having to wear gym clothes, you can do this in fancy or everyday clothes and you'll actually look classy.

Source

Sit down.

Doesn't matter where you put your feet or arms, so long as you're not leaning on anything. Now straighten your back - not to the point where you feel like a human two-by-four, but straight enough that you can imagine your vertebrae sitting on top of each other. If you feel like you're craning your shoulders or hips into some bird-like position, cut it out. Just relax.

You know how when a bus slides to a halt the people on it go round and round shift forwards? Or how you slide backwards when your car's going up a hill or around a wide turn? That force is what you're going to work against. It is your invisible set of dumbbells. Pick a neutral spot where you can sit comfortably. Generally I try to make sure my back is at least a few inches away from the back of the chair. Anytime you feel those invisible dumbbells pulling you backwards or to the side, resist them. Don't lean, but do your best to stay in that neutral spot. You'll feel everything from your calves to neck flex, but especially your lower tummy and crotch muscles.

I won't make any concrete promises - "You'll gain X amount of abs in X number of weeks!" - but  this is way less work than Kegal exercises and I know from experience that if you do this every time you're in a moving vehicle, plus mind your posture whenever you sit, you'll gain a pretty excellent gut from it.

Now about those crunches.

Remember:

1) Relax, but sit up straight. Pretend your spine is threaded through a string attached to the ceiling (eww). Fight vehicle momentum!

2) Kegals are good for you even though I pick on them.

Flexing impressively,
-Leah

I'm Gonna Drown You, Mister Fish!

OR
Keeping Your Body Hydrated To Fight A Bloated Belly

Something really cool happened.

Something amazing and astounding and really exciting happened.

I went a whole day without being bloated!

(Cue the cheers.)

Okay, so maybe my gastric achievements aren't that exciting to anyone else, but there's a good lesson included in the story. I'm a girl who habitually adds salt to my meals (to the point where they're completely unpalatable to anyone else) and I'll have maybe two glasses of water a day, which is way short of the generally recommended eight. Oops. Both of these are perfect habits to get into if you're fond of the ballon-meets-Happy-Buddha (let's call it Baloonha) body type, where everything below your belly button looks like its been violated by a tire pump. Your pants dig into your guts whenever you sit. You feel chubby, even if you're a really athletic person. Your insides gurgle in the decibel range of a lawn mower with sounds unheard of since the prehistoric era. It's just all bad. But as far back as I remember, my body's always been like this, so I figured it was just a result of where my fat stores sit (raise your hand if you're a pear! Genetics and stress hormones* for the win!)

Enter my tea cabinet. Well, don't actually, because it's not that big. Inside there's cute little antique cups and saucers from GF's grandma, supplements I should be taking, a stash of hot chocolate for our ten-month-long winters, and tea. Shit-tons of tea. Ye olde standard orange pekoe, herbal, black, white, green, and one that turns the water hot pink. Loose, bagged, in containers and not. We have a hoarder-level stockpile of tea. It's herbageddon. I don't even know why there's so much of it. GF doesn't drink it. I don't drink it. I think its single purpose in being there is for us to force on guests.

“Did you want anything? Tea? Water?”
“I'm good, thanks.”
“Tea it is.”

But here I stood, six-o'-stupid-o'-clock in the morning, eyeing the teas with a lust usually reserved for GF's curry casserole. I brewed myself a cup and sat on the couch reading hippie magazines and probably contemplated life or something equally overwhelming enough to make drinking said tea automatic. I finished my mug of tea within an hour. Then I brewed another cup (I must've been sleepwalking), and sometime later had more. I drank tea like it was going out of style. I think I went through about five cups that day. The next day I had more. We went to visit relatives and I stuffed my face with freeloaded veggies and fruit. Downed more tea. Sipped water. Et cetera. I'm not sure what compelled me to keep doing it – maybe I was thinking of all those “green tea is good for you” articles the hippie mags had shoved into my memory – but it was starting to feel really good. I've got a cold constitution (anything under 24C is uncomfortable to me), and downing a couple of hot leaf juices before brekkie was warming me up and making my tummy happy. My body was getting much more than two cups a day of liquid. The tea stocks were starting to diminish. It was win-win for everybody but the kettle (he worked so hard!).

Maybe this is just happens to me, but do you ever notice how trim you look in the morning? As soon as I dump fuel in the tank (cue prehistoric noises), all the taut tummy muscles I'd been admiring in the mirror just give up and surrender to the Gravity Demons I'm convinced live in my intestines, but before I drink or eat anything I am the (less athletic-looking) prime example of firm form. I am a goddess with bedhead. I am rocking the pear hips like no D'anjou ever could. I am getting way too personal. Sorry.

Flash-forward (or -back, at this point) to the fourth day of my incessant tea-chugging. I eat breakfast. I have lunch. I lounge around all day. I perfect bad posture.

The Baloonha belly doesn't appear.

Bless GF for putting up with my raving about it at every quiet moment. I was ecstatic. As it turns out, ingesting piles of salt and not hydrating yourself are a perfect combo for chronic dehydration, which produces a bloated belly. My cells were starving for water, and the Dead Sea treatment I was sticking to was only making what liquids my guts could get all that more precious. We do get a good portion of water from our food (and I eat a lot), but two cups of pure H2O is hardly enough to feed everything in a 5'7” body, especially in the summer. Once I started pumping liquid into my body, my guts realized that there'd be more coming than what they had right now, and they didn't have to hang on to the water I put there a week ago.

It's like Finding Nemo, only your cells are Marlin, and Dory is the tea, and the water you drink is a wave of Nemos that--

Y'know what, let's forget that analogy. The point is, your body needs water, because it's 98% made of the stuff, and you keep crying and breathing and pissing it out. How rude of you. The polite thing to do would be at least to put back what you take out.

So, in review:

1) Your body is a hoarder and it needs reassurance. Feeding it water is feeling it love.

2) Cut back on the salt (I recommend piling on the garlic and onion) and double the liquids you consume if you get Baloonha Belly. You're probably dehydrated or constipated. Water helps both!

3) If you're like me and can't handle the cold, opt for tea instead of ice water for your daily drink. Just make sure you're sticking to herbal teas, because black and green contain caffeine, which is a diuretic (makes you pee) and don't technically hydrate you at all. Feel free to have a cup or two daily for the perk-up or antioxidants, however.

4) Tea > flavoured water/water flavouring. There's no added sugar or weird sugar substitutes and no chemicals in the former. Just rehydrated plant guts. Mmm. Plant guts.

'Til later,
- Leah

*The hormone cortisol, which is produced when you're really stressed out, lowers your sensitivity to pain and helps give you a burst of energy, which are good things if you're being chased by a bear. If you're chronically stressed, cortisol can screw with your blood sugar and pressure and a host of other things. If you've got a persistent spare tire of fat at the top of your hips, cortisol is probably involved.