She's lovin' her green juice, oh yeah

Boy is it late. Or is it early?

But I’m feeling good. I have recovered from my rant in the last post and am surrounded by the calm influence of green juice in my veins.

All week I have stuck to a high raw food diet and I feel wonderful. My mood has totally lifted and I have discovered that by drinking a freshly made glass of vegetable juice in the morning, my blood sugar stays stable and the only thing I need to eat before lunch is a piece of fruit. Even when I get hungry, it is like my body doesn’t really care. This mellow body feeling has been lasting all day. From one glass of juice! I can eat a light lunch and dinner and my body is totally at ease. No desperate feeling for salt or sugar - nothing.

It’s so strange because even though all that life stress is still there, it has somehow been removed from me and is instead skulking around an invisible barrier that sits about a foot or so away from my skin. What a difference this has made.

Along with the veggie juices (I generally use cucumber as a base, then add whatever else I have on hand, like an apple or two, a couple of carrots, a stick of celery, a handful of spinach, a nub of gingerroot and maybe a few radishes), I have been having a grapefruit everyday, and some avocado as well. I am aiming to get plenty of vitamin C in my diet as apparently this is a mood booster, and I want every kind of mood booster I can get.

Thanks for all your comments, which helped with my dilemma over what to buy/eat. I have downloaded a free seasonal food guide for Scotland and will be using it to try and get the most out of the local fresh veggie scene, but for some foods I will still be putting my nutritional needs first and eating what my body needs, even if it wasn’t grown here.

Hooray! To celebrate, if you would like to see some photos of some baby highland cows, click here.

Happy Easter weekend!

A rant about health care and the question: Local or raw/organic?

Oh my, is JP ever going to regret giving me Food Inc. to watch. Because since I watched that on Friday night, I’ve bounced over to Raw for 30 Days and other videos like the amazing FoodMatters and another called Healing Cancer from the Inside Out.

Nothing will make you want to become a vegan like sitting down and watching all of these films. And nothing will make you so frustrated when you think about people who you love who have died of cancer and other illnesses while under the “care” of conventional medicine.

Today is Renee’s birthday. Renee was a blogger who recently died of stage 4 inflammatory breast cancer that had spread to her stomach and other parts of her body. During her final weeks and days her daughter used her mom's blog to update people on Renee's condition. Renee was a kind and vibrant woman in the middle of her life and instead of health she died long, painful, suffering-filled death.

I remember a while back a post on her blog, sometime after “the bats” in her stomach (this is how she described the feeling) had kicked into high gear and this was making it difficult for her to keep food down. There was something about how she couldn’t even keep down yogurt. And now I think to myself: what on earth is a woman with cancer doing eating yogurt or milk products of any kind, when cancer loves nothing more than to eat up all those milk sugars and grow and grow and grow.

My grandmother, who suffers from COPD, is now on a host of medications that treat a list of ailments. I know that changing her diet to one high in raw vegetables and green juices, while also eliminating dairy, caffeine and wheat, would greatly improve her quality of life. Yet I also know that it will never happen. Because change is hard, and her habits are utterly ingrained in her mind.

Where the hell is the nutritional counselling in our western medical system? It’s terrible enough that someone you care about should suffer, but it is worse to know how that suffering could have been reduced or even alleviated with a change in diet.

Problem # 2: Local vs. organic or raw.

I am involved with both the local raw food club and the Edinburgh Slow Food group. The raw food movement includes lots of fresh fruits and veggies, nuts, seeds and freshly made green juices. The problem is that most of the foods that I need for this raw food diet are not grown locally, or even in the UK. If they are organic they are often shipped from even further away. The only time that I can get fresh, locally grown greens is in the summer (with the exception of Scottish kale) and fruit is certainly restricted to the high season. In the winter there are root vegetables, but those aren’t as good raw, and too many cooked potatoes make me feel unwell.

My body loves me when I eat a diet that is high in foods like lettuce, tomatoes, and spinach, however I can’t get those locally for most of the year.

What I can get locally all year round is a lot of meat, dairy products and bread, none of which my body likes in any quantity and all of which I know are bad for my hormone health and PCOS symptoms.

So what do I do? Eating lots of fresh, raw veggies and fruit is the way to good health, but if you live in a northern climate, it also means you are contributing to global warming because all your food is being flown in from abroad.

Sorry this is so long. I just needed to ramble and vent. Anyone have any thoughts on any of this?

March raw food potluck

Today was one of the best potlucks our group has had, with an amazing selection of goodies from savoury to desserts. I made my tropical fruit tart with mango puree, which I've made before but always goes down a storm. Also, I whipped up some brazil nut and sundried tomato "cheeze" and some pistachio pesto.

There was the most enormous, beautiful salad with fresh dill and veggies of all kinds, including beets and cucumber that had been done on a special mandolin to cut them out and make them extra pretty. There was a raw carrot cake and even raw falafel that had all the flavours of the cooked variety. As well, there was a slightly spicy sweet potato dish, a salad with avocado, tomato and basil, loads of sprouts, the most glorious mango salsa and tasty seed crackers.

It was the first time I got to try buckwheaties, which are sprouted buckwheat that have been dehydrated. They are just like a breakfast cereal and perfect with a bit of nut milk or cream, and some dried fruit on top.

My favourite thing of the day were these gorgeous little tomato and fennel tarts, which had a base that included some seeds and some nuts I think. They were just so flavourful and looked so posh. If I had a bigger kitchen and could fit in a dehydrater, this would be the kind of thing I would try to make, along with my own crackers.

Not to be forgetting the beautiful raw chocolate cake, which had pecans in the base and the best thing of all, a layer of raspberry cream (made with almonds). One of the wee foodies got his fist into the cake - my favourite photo of the day. With all the desserts there were a lot of nuts in the dishes, but none of us eat so many of them on a regular basis so as a special treat it was fine.

Next month I am hosting the potluck for the first time. I'm a bit nervous but it should be okay. I've never done another stint of completely raw since last year when I lasted two weeks. But now that spring is here I feel ready to increase the percentage of raw food I am eating.

For now I shall leave you staring at a few plates of deliciousness. Enjoy!

Sitting my ice pack, worrying about Omi

My grandfather was supposed to call me tonight. I keep looking at the clock, counting forward by four hours and backwards by twelve. My grandmother is in the hospital again. Her latest chest infection, a by-product of her advanced COPD (Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), has failed to improve.

COPD is a terrible thing. My grandmother can take a breath in but then can’t breathe out. Imagine a mucus-filled sponge that keeps you from being able to exhale. After seeing my grandmother’s condition continuing to worsen over the past few years, all the while knowing she was still smoking, I despise cigarettes with a new fury. What kind of monster keeps someone so tethered to it, even as it kills them?

Since I have been exercising my lung capacity has changed. Now when I take a deep breath, it feels like the breath goes all the way down below my navel, where it bulges pleasantly, kissing the shoreline of my pelvic floor before flowing back up and out again. So easy.

That said, this is the first time I have ever blogged while sitting on an ice pack. My gluteus medius are in spasm. Ie - some of my butt cheek muscles are freaking out. This is what is causing the majority of my lower back and hip pain. I am supposed to roll on a tennis ball to try to get them to ease off, but all I have is a golf ball and it hurts like hell.

I am frustrated because it affects everything I do - walking, bending, standing. It gets worse after I work out, and my hip flexors don’t feel like they have gotten any stronger with all this exercise. I am afraid it won’t get better, that this will continue to hold me up and I won’t be able to move forward. I need to feel like I am getting stronger, better.

John and I have spoken about the kinds of things we want to do in the coming year. I think of the things that I can’t do now that I am desperate to be fit enough to accomplish. I want to bag a Munro. Eventually I would like to climb Ben Nevis. And walk the Great Glen Way. I want to be able to have complete confidence in my body, to hike, flex, climb or hop.

Since our visit to Canada I have been determined to change my relationship with food. After seeing my grandmother’s decline I am equally determined to do my best for my body, to build its strength and stamina. To let my lungs celebrate breathing, because lately that is what it feels like they are doing. My chest feels wide open and clear and even my heart feels lighter.

Now if only my damn ass would cooperate, I could move on.

The clock says 20:53. Plus four hours is 7 minutes to 1 a.m., minus 12 hours is 12:53 p.m. B.C. time. He still hasn’t called.

Breasts: excellent. Hips: Not so good.

Despite the fact that she has no arms, a time-worn nose and various contusions, including what seem to be simultaneous attempts at garrotting and decapitation, I yearn to look like this woman.

Since my return to Scotland I have begun a journey to getting fit. This was triggered by being back in my parents’ house and my reaction to the overwhelming presence of food. It suddenly all became very clear to me just how my personal eating habits came to be formed.

Treating this realization as the exposed root of a life-long neuroses, and combining this with another family trait of supplying a good idea with as much enthusiasm as possible, I subsequently hurled myself into an intense fitness regime almost as soon as I landed.

I bought new shoes, a heart monitor, and the sports bra of all sports bras. It is red and is marked for “very high intensity.” This bra is so intimidating that I nearly dislocated my shoulder trying it on in the changing room at Marks and Spencer. In this bra my breasts look like huge alien sausages. I showed it to John at the first opportunity.

I wanted to sweat. I wanted to get strong. I wanted to shed all the fear I wear in layers over my skeleton. I wanted results. But Of course, I have hurt myself.

Within a week of jumping, squatting, lunging (**side note. In the editing of this post I realized that I had written “lunching” instead of lunging. Freud, is that you?) and heaving my way through the various motions of a home DVD nightmare called Insanity, the pain in my right hip, which is connected to a half-moon of tension that cups around my tailbone, became unbearable. I ended up at an Osteopath having my back snapped back into place and the knots massaged out of my muscles.

It has been a week off and I’m still in pain and am feeling deeply frustrated. My attempts to massage myself last night (I can’t afford to keep going to the Osteopath) has left me with a lovely low-slung belt of bruises around my tail bone and hips. I should also mention that in the week that I was walking to and from work (40 minutes each way) and working out for an hour in the evenings, I managed to gain a pound and lose not one inch.

So instead of feeling like the graceful (albeit in a crumbly sort of way) creature above, I feel rather like this:

FOD. How I wear this sentiment like a cloak made of meat.

Still, I am attempting to regroup. I am abandoning any hope of continuing with Insanity (really, the hint is in the name, woman!) and will shortly be starting another, more reserved 90-day programme.

I am trying. But it is hard and I feel a bit stupid.