Monday, April 29, 2013

Food Victories.

Everyone has that moment before the sun rises, where things just don't seem to be clicking into place, and then there's that golden moment where it finally does. That's where my diet is. It is finally having its shining, clean moment in the sun.

Food is commensurate with one's own personal physical goals, and the quest is to create some leanness in the body, so the lean muscle shows. I personally have never really seen my body super lean, but the truth is, I want to. In fact I need to, because I feel I've been in this business for a long time, but I never wanted to starve. I finally found a way to eat that works for me, based on bioindividual principles and intuitive eating...and wouldn't you know it, I'm on my way to lean.

Lately I've been getting my fill of salmon. Dinner consisted of a blackened piece of salmon with mixed veggies, salad and brown basmati rice that I decided against eating. If I didn't love it, I didn't want to spend those calories having zero fun. That sounded droll. Monday's lunch consists of carrots, tomatoes, avocado, smoked cold salmon, and a kale salad I made with pomegranate and black raspberries.





Sunday, April 7, 2013

Today's Sunday Deliciousness.

Ah, Sunday.

 This is truly one of my most favorite days of the week for many reasons. One is because I get so many sweet delights from it: spending time with family, making the choice to do something fun, having time to work, cook, clean and run errands, relax, read or just sleep the day away. While i usually choose to work and clean and blah blah blah, I know that this is a healthy choice offering a wonderful outcome.

Today I had Michael over for lunch and cooked him a double decker beef patty on whole wheat, lettuce, tomato, cheddar and nitrate-free bacon. (A 6'5" trainer male can utilize this food in about an hour without too many metabolic issues). As for myself, I had a beautiful bowl of seasoned kale, yams, avocado, grape tomatoes and pan seared tilapia, seasoned with smoked paprika, red chili pepper and cayenne, good metabolic thrusters. I was way pleased at the outcome of this dish and wanted to eat all day. It was my only big meal and the rest consisted of hydration, supplementation and meditation (lots of great words all at once using-ion!). I was ready to make dessert an apple with almond butter, but I didn't get that far (couldn't fit it in).

...Okay, so I caved and had two squares of bittersweet dark chocolate. My mind thought it was the weekend...and went with it. My darn mind has a mind of its own. All of this fine food accompanied both black and green cups of tea, my favorite drink to consume from sun up until its setting. I always feel so sattvic with a little bit of tea to soothe my senses. I'm also about to down a bottle of water infused with minerals and chlorophyll. I'm thinking that this is the way to go, is to continue to drench my body with wonderful sources of nutrients it loves to experience.

Later on I had a perfectly boiled brown egg. I've been marveling over my eggs and how I've gotten the times down on cooking. I heat the water and place the eggs in slowly. I cook for 13 minutes and immediately remove them from the water, allowing them to sit for about ten minutes in replacement water that I salt. Then I proceed to crack, roll, then peel under cool running water and they peel beautifully. I've heard tale of not boiling a fresh egg, but two fresh batches later, and I had the most perfect eggs I've ever seen myself peel!

The day rounded out perfectly with having been able to accomplish a huge number of tasks, including cleaning my room and putting away clothes, washing dishes, prep cooking for the week, totally planning my meals mentally at least, and throwing out bags of trash. I'm on a mission to not only get my diet right...I'm out to get this life right. Namaste.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

A Day of Successful Clean Eating

We talk about eating clean but I don't think most people actually have a grasp of what it means to eat clean. Eating clean contains all whole, unprocessed animals and vegetable and fruit calories (but not too much), the odd sweet potato and the occasional brown rice, keeping the amount of carb grams to a fat burning minimum (which according to some research, 100-150 carbs can still burn body fat and is just enough where fat loss can still happen). Protein totals and overall sugar intake matters, so that insulin is not compromised (which some say is good for muscle leanness and performance).

Here's a couple of articles on eating clean.

http://caloriecount.about.com/means-eat-clean-b583101

http://www.completenutrition.com/blog/posts/2013/march/what-it-means-to-eat-clean/

Eating clean is a discipline for me of major proportion, but I still attempt to produce. It's nothing easy but the results are so worth it. Every time I eat clean, I see a major difference in the way I look and feel. However I must say that it initially makes training harder, but at the same time easier, because ultimately you can see more muscle and striation by eating this way.
For muscle building competitors, they are even impressively organized on the timing of meals and what and how much they consume and when. When you are a week out from competing, it's a whole 'nother ball game. I considered competing for that reason alone, and I need to see if I can sustain the type of intake that is suggested, or I'd fail plus lose my entry money because it wouldn't be worth it to put on a swimsuit and be called fat by your peers. It's a different scale of measurement. The Gods and Goddesses of the muscle realm call it shop lingo, but I digress.

Last night I went to bed without any carbs, just a protein shake, sauteed shrimp and greens. I had a huge amount of protein for my dinner. In the morning I had my almonds and tea for breakfast. Here's an entire breakdown.

Morning: 40 almonds, plain black tea, coffee with some cream and sugar (I broke down), apple, orange, banana.
Noon: 20g of spicy Thai tuna, brown rice bowl, 20 baby carrots.
Dinner: 6 oz. BBQ salmon, 3 cups mixed greens (1/2 dino kale, 1/2 dandelion greens), sweet potato with butter.
Lemon water and green tea helps me to stave off weird sugar cravings.
Snacks: 50g total protein from 2 different protein shakes

Food Is Love.

Ever since I could remember, I connected food to a true sense of belonging. Every little bite and morsel that I ate, was contributed to some loving and supportive moment in my life. No wonder I fell in love with food. It was my greatest supporter and my biggest fan growing up! It was there for me in my lowest moments, when no one else was. It was a surrogate father, a replacement emotion for the man who wasn't there. Today I am back in that father relationship to heal it, and I realize that I make the same mistakes while being with a man who helps to recreate the reasons for my food choices.

My mom energies helped me to recreate the reasons I was supposed to find that same food disgusting. Now my mom never even seemed to enjoy the concept of being in a marriage, and wanted all of us daughters to get our careers and our skinny "on" before accepting a man (read: loser bum I have to take care of ) into my life. Mom projected a fear onto me that wreaked of a little bit of hatred for men, a hatred for choosing that man, and looking at fattening, sugary foods as the enemy. No wonder men left a bad taste in my mouth...

So then, was food really love? Yes it still was, if that food could give me the satisfaction that a man wasn't giving, food once again became the hero. Besides, mom would never approve of any of the men, but a hot baked pie, she might approve of that.

Holidays was a must to attend, and would be piled high with all the fun, exciting, crazy fattening foods one could find in one sitting. Everyone would gather in the kitchen at mealtimes to talk on a regular basis, and it was in fact what my mom wanted for us, was to have a community watering hole where everyone felt comfortable coming into and contributing our efforts to. It wasn't often after a certain point in all of our lives that we would sit to the table together to eat, so I immediately felt a void being the youngest one, to not have that table meal. It is no wonder that I had to cultivate a sense of need around serving Mike and Kai a meal at dinner, no matter how subservient I felt doing it. That's another topic in itself for another time.

When I didn't feel skinny, I ate a peanut butter cup. That put me backwards and almost drove me to seek counseling after a bulimic bout. No matter how mild, there was a part of me that wanted to go down that road, and another part of me that just knew how awful it was to take on bulimic habits. If food was love, throwing up was not the answer, even in my desperate state.
So since I eliminated that option, I headed over to another form of desperation, exercise buliminia. Don't even THINK about eating peanut butter. That sent me into an easy 5 miler and making me think it wasn't enough. That's when I started eating vegetarian. I guess now orthorexia was in my cards.

Is this still love? One thing I learned was, food may have signaled some form of love coming from an external force, but it definitely did not express self-love in my life. I wonder what other family members taught me that a lack of self-love was okay.