My "New" Diet

I am a type 1 diabetic & have been raw most of the last 4 1/2 years. I have had a lot of problems with insulin resistance (which isn't normally a type 1 issue) & other health challenges in those years (although some of the health issues existed before that, too). Not only have I had health problems, but in the last year and a half (since I was hospitalized for complications of diabetes), I have put on almost as much weight as I lost in the first three months of eating raw. Weird. Anyhow, I recently experimented with eating more cooked foods as I wasn't feeling great eating raw & thought maybe I was missing something. In August (while continuing to eat lots of cooked whole foods as they made me feel better than my raw diet had), I started using herbs, supplements and some amazing essential oils, which helped a lot in how I felt, and my insulin sensitivity has been gradually improving since then. I still hadn't lost weight, though. In fact, I was only three pounds away from my highest weight ever - which was pre-raw. I found Dave the Raw Food Trucker on Youtube, and watching him I felt like maybe I should get back to raw, but do a low-glycemic raw diet, since my body wasn't processing high-glycemic carbs well (I would eat a piece of fruit & get really irritable & crash & have to sleep for an hour). I recognized that I'd been drawn to low-glycemic cooked foods, so I wondered if maybe low-glycemic was the key I needed. I went to eating a low-glycemic raw diet, and I drank loads of fresh green vegetable juice for two or three days. I have never felt good/healthy being vegan long-term, but I felt that there was an element of truth/power for in Gabriel Cousens's eating plan, so I was planning to stick with the low-glycemic raw vegan diet for 6 months to see how I felt. Well, after six days, I felt a shift - that I didn't need to do it any more because I had reset the body-mind connection and now wanted to eat just what was best for my body, so I didn't need the rules any more. I added some grass-fed beef and a few more carbs into my diet & continued to feel better. At some point in this self-discovery process, I remembered a discussion about agave (months ago) in which I became aware that most of my crazy blood sugar issues started at the same time I started using agave. I dismissed it at the time, but it came back to me this past week. I use muscle-response testing (kinesiology) in my practice as a holistic health coach, so I decided to muscle-test myself to find out if there was/is a certain diet I need to follow, or if I can just eat intuitively, etc. I tested specifics of my ideal diet, based on the thoughts & intuition I'd had, and I discovered something amazing, which shouldn't have surprised me one bit! The diet my body wants is the exact diet I was following the first six months: when I lost weight, had more energy & experienced lots of health improvements (including better insulin sensitivity). One of the main things about this diet is NO AGAVE. I am eating plenty of carbs again, I have energy instead of crashing afterward, I get more energy every time I eat...in short, I feel better from my food than I have in the last four years since I started using agave. I have also finally started losing weight - seven pounds in the last two weeks since I got back to "my diet" - mainly raw but with no agave.

Another BLOG!

I just wanted you all to know that I have started yet another blog. www.dreamjoyfully.blogspot.com will be about any & all aspects of my life, growth & learning. Don't worry, though; I'll keep the kitchen open!

Yesterday, I made a raw pizza, spicy-cheesy dehydrated cauliflower snacks (no, I don't think they are really like "popcorn", but it's a tasty & nutritious snack all the same!), and dehydrated buckwheat "crunchies". I'm meeting the colder weather with dehydrated food. Salad is good (and I had a big one for breakfast today), but I tend to like some dry &/or salty food to keep me warm in the winter. Speaking of cold weather, I'm also mourning for the loss of my garden to the freezing temperatures. The cucumber & tomato plants are covered & haven't completely died off yet, but I'm not thinking they'll last much longer. I hope to get at least one more good harvest of cucumbers to juice - I'm loving my green juices!

Some Changes, and I'm Officially a Weirdo

I haven't fallen off the planet, but a few changes are here since I last blogged.

Ready?

1. I am a mom & now I'm also in school. These are my priorities, so no promises on how often I'll be blogging.

2. I'm not vegan. I never was, but for a time I aspired to be, and even with supplements my health got worse the longer I did it, and now I'm doing better since I've gone back to being non-vegan.

3. I'm changing the blog title because I'm not eating 100% raw these days, and I want to share stuff about other nutritious foods, too.

4. I want to talk about other facets of my life & health in addition to food.

Okay, so with all that said, here is my funny experience from this weekend: this is not RAW food related, but it has to do with my (happily geeky) interest in health & nutrition.

I was recently told that my son needs more vitamin B6. We have been struggling a bit with this since he hates the taste of the kids' multivitamin I bought him, and he hasn't learned to swallow capsules. One day he started reading the label of a health bar I had bought for him & told me it had vitamin B6, so I've been looking at food labels to see what else it's in. Vitamin B6 isn't a required listing on the standard nutrition label, but some "health food" products are proud of their extra nutrients & will list them for you. We were at the grocery store recently, and I was reading a label of some whole-grain cereal that my son wanted me to buy for him. I saw B6 on the label, so I said to my son, "Hey, it has vitamin B6!" A random stranger walking past said sort of mockingly, "You can't live without THAT!" Haha! I guess not everyone shares my enthusiasm for these sorts of things (not that I asked him to...).

The Food - As Requested

I received a request to post the food that gave me the nutrition I talked about in my last post. Since the tracking feature on www.nutritiondata.com keeps track of ingredients, I'm going to attempt to list the foods, reconstructed from that list of ingredients. Ya never know, I suppose, but I'll do my best. Here you go, Aimee!

Fresh peas (a lot - I estimated very conservatively at 1 1/4 cups of shelled green peas)
pizza (flax crust with garlic seed cheese)
brownies
key lime pudding
1 mango
3 bananas

I realize now that I forgot to add the cacao to the list (in the brownies), so I really got an additional boost of magnesium, iron, calcium, etc. and of course, I ate more food after that - a huge spring mix salad was the main thing I remember in the evening.

Nutrition

I just entered today's food into my "tracking" on www.nutritiondata.com

It's 4 pm. I've eaten 3,328 calories so far - all raw. I haven't eaten enough calcium or sodium yet (and I get B12 from a supplement or shots because I don't want to eat enough animal products to get my B12 from those), but on almost all the other nutrients, I've gotten 2 or 3 days' worth of each. I am above the recommended glycemic load (dates, agave & bananas), but then I'm way over the recommended calories for my height/age/activity level, too. :D Today's diet is "strongly anti-inflammatory" as well - Yay raw food!

Raw Fat & Health

Raw foodies AND non-raw people have either hinted or directly said that I eat way too much fat to be healthy. Before I went high-raw, I had high cholesterol that wouldn't come down even with medication. The last time I got my lipid panel (blood tests for cholesterol, triglycerides, etc.) done, my doc said that the results were excellent and showed that I don't eat much fat. If I thought he'd appreciate the irony, I'd have fallen off the chair with laughter. :)

Sorting through "health information"

Okay, if you're like most people, then all the "health information" out there can be confusing. Today I'm on a rant about things that make it even more confusing!

How do you sort though everything out there to find what's real & true? I read something today that reminds me why "health information" can be so confusing:

This is on a website promoting a raw diet partly by explaining what's "wrong" with the typically prescribed diabetic diet. While I can't say that the medically prescribed diet is healthier, I get frustrated with things like this:

"It is generally recommended that 5% of total calories of the diabetic be protein. In a 1,500-calorie diet that would mean 75 grams of protein. This amount of protein greatly exceeds the needs of even the most active man. The average person cannot utilize more than about 20 to 25 grams of protein daily." The article then goes on to talk about how too much protein is hard on the body and how raw foods have enough protein.

Makes perfect sense, right? Sure, except that whoever wrote this obviously didn't do the math. Five percent of a 1,500-calorie diet is 75, but that means 75 CALORIES from protein. There are 4 calories in one gram of protein (just look at any standard nutrition label), so 5% of 1,500 calories would be 19.25 grams of protein - just about the amount that the article says a person can assimilate.