Day one:
I went grocery shopping yesterday and I ended up going to Pogue's Run Market and then to Kroger as well. My grocery list this week consisted of:
Fruits: organic kiwis, strawberries, raspberries, organic lemons
Vegetables: red onion, white onion, organic mixed greens, organic asparagus, tomatoes, artichokes, green onions
Dairy: locally made full fat plain yogurt, goat cheese, heavy cream, organic cream cheese, swiss cheese
Protein: locally raised chicken breast, chicken wings, canned tuna in water, locally laid eggs, shrimp, scallops
Fats: walnut oil, mayo made with olive oil
Sweets: 70% dark chocolate, agave syrup
Carbs: 100% whole wheat bagels
Other: apple cidar vinegar, garlic chili sauce
All this totaled $180, not too bad for a lot of fresh, local and organic produce. I just hope this will last us the week. When my husband looks in the refrigerator he looks worried like I am going to starve him to death. The thing is there is no longer convenience to our food, I have to prepare it all the day before for the most part.
My food for the day:
Breakfast: plain yogurt and raspberries for breakfast
Lunch: Salad and garlic shrimp
Dinner: Seared apple cidar chicken and asparagus
Dessert: 4 strawberries dipped in dark chocolate (these were to die for!)
My husband ate:
Breakfast: 100% whole wheat bagel with butter
Lunch: tuna salad and salad topped with shredded swiss cheese
Dinner: Seared apple cidar chicken and asparagus
Dessert: 4 strawberries dipped in dark chocolate
9pm tonight my husband is rooting around in the fridge saying "What time do I have to stop eating?" Haha this is going to be a learning process....
Monday, January 31, 2011
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Time to Shop
Well today is the first day I will be grocery shopping for this new diet. I usually just head to Wal-mart, push through the crowds and grab all the usual low fat frozen meal for lunches, some vegetables and fruits, whole wheat bagels, soy milk and skim milk. I find I usually buy the same things over and over- I guess you just get into eating ruts and I am able to get out of the store faster...I mean have you ever been to Wal-mart? It's a whole different world in there...
Today I am planning on doing a little research on where to shop. Wal-mart's produce is standard at best and doesn't carry necessary local or organic produce. I recently heard about this little grocery store, Pogue's Run Grocer that just opened up on 10th street here on the East side of Indianapolis.
I found this information on Pogue's Run Grocer website, http://www.indyfoodcoop.org/
The mission of the Indy Food Cooperative, Inc. is to provide public education about health and nutrition, to create neighborhood economic opportunities through direct job creation and sourcing from local producers, and to provide access to healthy food choices for low to moderate income residents on the Near East side of Indy. The means to these ends is the operation of Pogue’s Run Grocer at 10th and Rural Streets, featuring budget cooking and nutrition classes, living wage jobs, and affordable, local, fresh, and healthy food options.
I'm interested on how expensive things are and how big the store is. I am going to go dig into The Perfect 10 Diet book to try to plan out our meals for the week. This is going to be tricky because the convenience of frozen meals, eating a bowl of cereal or grabbing quick processed foods is the fast approach to eating we are used to. We will be making all our food instead. I will also have to shop at more than one store because I will still need to get laundry detergent and toothpaste and those kinds of thinks.
I'm sitting here actually a bit anxious about starting this diet tomorrow. Eating is one the best part of the day. What if I dread eating this way and am always hungry? I guess we will find out.
To clarify I am not going on this diet to lose weight, I see this diet to be a processed food and chemical detox and I will probably just feel a lot better and hopefully stop craving sugar all the time. My husband is hoping to lose 15 pounds over the next 7-8 weeks and I think he will find he will have a lot more energy too. When I was reading this book it dawned on me that I may have single handedly helped my husband gain his 20 pounds when we got married and started living together. When I talk to Chad about his eating habits when he was a bachelor he monitored his fat intact but not by eating low fat he instead ate a lot of grilled chicken, pasta, some vegetables and protein shakes. I on the other hand don't eat a lot of meat and so my diet unfortunately is made up of a lot of carbohydrates. I think I was maintaining a consistent weight by eating in moderation but Chad is 80 pounds heavier that I am so the intake of carbohydrates he began to consume increased greatly when we moved in together, his protein intake decreased and our low fat diet never left him full or satisfied.
Here's some information that I thought was interesting in The Perfect 10 Diet book:
Do you have no control over your appetite? You may have a Leptin problem. Leptin is secreted by the fat cells, and not a endocrine gland. Leptin manages how much fat is stored around the organs and under the skin. When the fast cells are filled with an abundance of food, more leptin is secreted, and the leptin enters the brain to curb your appetite. As a result, you feel full and satisfied. Initially, scientists believed that if you gave leptin to overweight peole, it would stimulate fat burning. Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect. Overweight people were not leptin deficient; in fact, they produced too much leptin. It turns out that excessive levels of leptin often go hand in hand with high sugar and elevated insulin levels. You see, food without nutritional value, such as refine carbohydrates, low-fat products, foods containing high -fructose corn syrup and trans-fats, and other fake foods, sends erroneous signals to the brain. The body interprets those signals as starvation, which makes the body burn fewer calories and store fat even in the presence of high leptin levels. When Leptin is high because of all the fake food you eat, you satiety switch becomes broken. As a result, you gain weight, because you will be as hungry as a wolf and will have no control over your appetite (pg 63 The Perfect 10 Diet).
Foods that help balance leptin include: vegetables, fruits, whole grains, foods containing natural fats, and fish.
Interesting stuff, right? As I read this book I want to dive into other resources to see what other research supports Dr. Aziz's information I am reading.
I will post my grocery list once I make it! Signing off.
Today I am planning on doing a little research on where to shop. Wal-mart's produce is standard at best and doesn't carry necessary local or organic produce. I recently heard about this little grocery store, Pogue's Run Grocer that just opened up on 10th street here on the East side of Indianapolis.
I found this information on Pogue's Run Grocer website, http://www.indyfoodcoop.org/
The mission of the Indy Food Cooperative, Inc. is to provide public education about health and nutrition, to create neighborhood economic opportunities through direct job creation and sourcing from local producers, and to provide access to healthy food choices for low to moderate income residents on the Near East side of Indy. The means to these ends is the operation of Pogue’s Run Grocer at 10th and Rural Streets, featuring budget cooking and nutrition classes, living wage jobs, and affordable, local, fresh, and healthy food options.
I'm interested on how expensive things are and how big the store is. I am going to go dig into The Perfect 10 Diet book to try to plan out our meals for the week. This is going to be tricky because the convenience of frozen meals, eating a bowl of cereal or grabbing quick processed foods is the fast approach to eating we are used to. We will be making all our food instead. I will also have to shop at more than one store because I will still need to get laundry detergent and toothpaste and those kinds of thinks.
I'm sitting here actually a bit anxious about starting this diet tomorrow. Eating is one the best part of the day. What if I dread eating this way and am always hungry? I guess we will find out.
To clarify I am not going on this diet to lose weight, I see this diet to be a processed food and chemical detox and I will probably just feel a lot better and hopefully stop craving sugar all the time. My husband is hoping to lose 15 pounds over the next 7-8 weeks and I think he will find he will have a lot more energy too. When I was reading this book it dawned on me that I may have single handedly helped my husband gain his 20 pounds when we got married and started living together. When I talk to Chad about his eating habits when he was a bachelor he monitored his fat intact but not by eating low fat he instead ate a lot of grilled chicken, pasta, some vegetables and protein shakes. I on the other hand don't eat a lot of meat and so my diet unfortunately is made up of a lot of carbohydrates. I think I was maintaining a consistent weight by eating in moderation but Chad is 80 pounds heavier that I am so the intake of carbohydrates he began to consume increased greatly when we moved in together, his protein intake decreased and our low fat diet never left him full or satisfied.
Here's some information that I thought was interesting in The Perfect 10 Diet book:
Do you have no control over your appetite? You may have a Leptin problem. Leptin is secreted by the fat cells, and not a endocrine gland. Leptin manages how much fat is stored around the organs and under the skin. When the fast cells are filled with an abundance of food, more leptin is secreted, and the leptin enters the brain to curb your appetite. As a result, you feel full and satisfied. Initially, scientists believed that if you gave leptin to overweight peole, it would stimulate fat burning. Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect. Overweight people were not leptin deficient; in fact, they produced too much leptin. It turns out that excessive levels of leptin often go hand in hand with high sugar and elevated insulin levels. You see, food without nutritional value, such as refine carbohydrates, low-fat products, foods containing high -fructose corn syrup and trans-fats, and other fake foods, sends erroneous signals to the brain. The body interprets those signals as starvation, which makes the body burn fewer calories and store fat even in the presence of high leptin levels. When Leptin is high because of all the fake food you eat, you satiety switch becomes broken. As a result, you gain weight, because you will be as hungry as a wolf and will have no control over your appetite (pg 63 The Perfect 10 Diet).
Foods that help balance leptin include: vegetables, fruits, whole grains, foods containing natural fats, and fish.
Interesting stuff, right? As I read this book I want to dive into other resources to see what other research supports Dr. Aziz's information I am reading.
I will post my grocery list once I make it! Signing off.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
The jist of it
For the next seven weeks my husband, Chad and I will be pioneering a new way of eating. This blog will help us be accountable to it and also serve as a Health Promotion project I am doing for a college class.
The idea for the content of this blog came from a book I was recently gifted, The Perfect 10 diet by Dr. Aziz. The title pretty much put me off immediately. Who needs to be a 10? What kind of hoax diet is this that promises you the perfect body? This "diet" probably encourages drinking veggie shakes and starvation. No thanks! Well since it was my own mother who gave me the book I thought I would give this book a chance. So despite my doubts I picked it up to flip though and quickly found that the title may just be a marketing gimmick to reel in superficial fad dieters, desperate unhealthy people, book cover surfers and apparently even my mother. The attention getting title doesn't do this book justice because once I began reading it I found it really did support healthy living.
As I continued to read The Perfect 10 Diet, I was quickly drawn in because, as a nurse and relatively healthy person, this book was chock full of medical research and common sense. Random scary fact: The average American eats a pound of pesticides a year. That's a lot of chemicals, that certainly makes me rethink organic fruits and vegetables. Dr. Aziz also went into more detail about how these pesticides actually act as hormones when they enter our bodies. Pesticides are often termed "Gender Benders" as there is research to prove that have caused males in many species to become feminized (pg 20 The Perfect 10 diet). I will continue to post excerpts of great information I extract from this book and other personal research I plan to make.
For now, let me give you a little background on my husband Chad and I and what our eating habits are on a normal basis. Overall I feel we eat pretty healthy. Well at least I feel pretty good when we compare ourselves to the "typical American". These are the things I tell myself and others that we are in fact "healthier than thou": we don't frequent fast food joints, we pack our lunches most days for work, we rarely drink soda and if we do it's diet, we eat a low-fat diet and rarely eat red meat...I could make this list longer and longer as I try to convince myself, husband and everyone around that we LIVE healthy. I'm about half way through The Perfect 10 Diet book and these are now my thoughts now: we never eat organic, we probably only eat an average of 7 vegetables a WEEK, our low-fat diet has caused both me and my husband to gain weight due to the great increase of carbohydrates we eat, we are consuming innumerable amounts of chemicals through processed food and our meal planning for the week is poor at best.
This weekend this our last weekend to eat whatever we want and that is why I am at this very moment finishing my 3rd pack of fruit snacks...they are just so good. Who can have one pack?
The idea for the content of this blog came from a book I was recently gifted, The Perfect 10 diet by Dr. Aziz. The title pretty much put me off immediately. Who needs to be a 10? What kind of hoax diet is this that promises you the perfect body? This "diet" probably encourages drinking veggie shakes and starvation. No thanks! Well since it was my own mother who gave me the book I thought I would give this book a chance. So despite my doubts I picked it up to flip though and quickly found that the title may just be a marketing gimmick to reel in superficial fad dieters, desperate unhealthy people, book cover surfers and apparently even my mother. The attention getting title doesn't do this book justice because once I began reading it I found it really did support healthy living.
As I continued to read The Perfect 10 Diet, I was quickly drawn in because, as a nurse and relatively healthy person, this book was chock full of medical research and common sense. Random scary fact: The average American eats a pound of pesticides a year. That's a lot of chemicals, that certainly makes me rethink organic fruits and vegetables. Dr. Aziz also went into more detail about how these pesticides actually act as hormones when they enter our bodies. Pesticides are often termed "Gender Benders" as there is research to prove that have caused males in many species to become feminized (pg 20 The Perfect 10 diet). I will continue to post excerpts of great information I extract from this book and other personal research I plan to make.
For now, let me give you a little background on my husband Chad and I and what our eating habits are on a normal basis. Overall I feel we eat pretty healthy. Well at least I feel pretty good when we compare ourselves to the "typical American". These are the things I tell myself and others that we are in fact "healthier than thou": we don't frequent fast food joints, we pack our lunches most days for work, we rarely drink soda and if we do it's diet, we eat a low-fat diet and rarely eat red meat...I could make this list longer and longer as I try to convince myself, husband and everyone around that we LIVE healthy. I'm about half way through The Perfect 10 Diet book and these are now my thoughts now: we never eat organic, we probably only eat an average of 7 vegetables a WEEK, our low-fat diet has caused both me and my husband to gain weight due to the great increase of carbohydrates we eat, we are consuming innumerable amounts of chemicals through processed food and our meal planning for the week is poor at best.
This weekend this our last weekend to eat whatever we want and that is why I am at this very moment finishing my 3rd pack of fruit snacks...they are just so good. Who can have one pack?
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