Making friends with Salad

Worker Emm has started on this diet, based on a site he's joined with all these inspirational stories of how people have shaped and toned their bodies using nutrition and exercise tips.

Its a site in another language, so I wouldn't get any benefit if I joined, though one thing that Worker Emm finds inspiring is there are photo galleries of before-and-after photos of people. He showed me one photo of a girl who was supposedly 'flabby' beforehand, and then her after - which really had me raising an eyebrow. For a start, the woman's body was tanned and ripped, like that of a female bodybuilder, but her face looked exactly the same as in the before photo. I was fairly certain that the woman's face had been photoshopped onto someone else's body.

While what is driving Worker Emm appears to be a bit dodgy, he's been very diligent in going about his exercise. I admit to finding it inspirational, seeing him go off for runs in the middle of the day, and it was with his help that I did my first 5km around the office.

Worker Emm's eating has been incredibly focused - very focused on nutrition for training, despite the fact that he hasn't entered in any sort of competitive event. While I've been eating pretty much low carb for most of the time that I've been practising intuitive eating (quite possibly the proof that a lower carb regime worked for me, the fact that it interweaves so nicely for me with regards to intuitive eating), Worker Emm ate what was right for his training - eating sweet potatoes before going out for a run, and returning and replenishing energy from protein.

Worker Emm and I both have different eating regimes - for a start, I think I eat a whole lot more. The reason being, I exercise a whole lot more. The only form of cardio Worker Emm does is running, whilst mine is mixed up with some circuit training, RPM, and Body Jam. We both do what's right for us, and that's been working pretty well.

Other people in the office have noticed this. Worker Emm and I bounce off each other in terms of achieving a healthy lifestyle. But one thing appears to be very different between the two of us. Worker Emm has said that he'll probably go back to his old ways come October-November, and put on those Christmas Kilos again. He's been wandering around, turning down foods that he would normally eat saying "I'm on a diet."

Me? I show no signs of stopping. Which is why I've still been indulging in cashew nuts, the odd chocolate biscuit, and putting feta cheese and avocado in my salads. I can see myself keeping up both the eating, and exercise regimes indefinitely.

Though at least Worker Emm is giving the healthy lifestyle thing a decent shot. I know the guy loves his food - he enjoys it, and is passionate about it.

One of the girls in the office has no idea how to be healthy. She doesn't eat vegetables, and I'm certain that if you were to cut her open, a whole flock of chickens would burst from within her. Chicken is pretty much all the girl eats.

It was only when a naturopath told her that eating vegetables would help her to have shiny hair and better looking skin, that she decided that she would eat vegetables.

...!?!?!!

And I thought Worker Emm's photoshopped body builders were a dodgy reason to start eating healthy.

She tagged along with me in a during-the-day trip to the supermarket to stock up on some veggies to make a salad with. Just as well I was with her, because she had no idea what she was doing. She selected a bag of salad greens, and then pondered about whether it was a good idea to mix coleslaw through the greens. In the end, I told her that I would show her how to make a salad, and I would pick the ingredients. I don't think I could stand by and let her just add cabbage to cabbage and pass it off as a salad.

I made her a spinach, sundried tomato, feta, corn and olive salad. She had never heard of sundried tomatoes before, and was blown away by the flavour. I swear, I was suddenly her favourite person - she suddenly realised, "holy crap, veggies taste AWESOME!"

When I asked about why she hadn't made 'the switch' to eating vegetables before, her justification was that life is too short to eat those things.

Right.

I say, life is too short to live WITHOUT those things. I'm no vegetarian, but fuck me, I think a life without meat would be much more tolerable than a life without veggies.

I've enjoyed having Worker Emm's company in the healthy living boat. Maybe NoVeggie girl can join us.

Lets hope there's more salads to come.

A bit nutty in the head

I started cleaning up my room a bit yesterday - great way to spend a long weekend, Long live the Queen! - and for some reason, started thinking about this particular chocolate that Worker Jay had given to me back in Easter.

According to Wikipedia:

Toffifee (known in the United States as Toffifay) is a brand of caramel candies, owned by the Berlin-based, German company August Storck KG. Sold in 12, 15, 24 and 48 piece boxes, Toffifee are caramel cups containing nougat and a hazelnut, topped with a chocolate button.

First sold in Germany in 1973, Toffifee were marketed as a product "for the whole family". In 2000, Toffifee were sold in over 60 countries.

I hadn't heard of them nor tried them before Worker Jay gave them to me, and initially, I wasn't interested in them. Simply because I didn't really have any sort of craving for them or desire to eat them.

Then, Worker Jay gave me a second box of them alongside my birthday present. I thought, "Oh heck. You've given me a second box when I haven't started on the first!" I took one of the boxes in to work, and slowly, I began eating them. And they were beautiful! No wonder Worker Jay gave me the second box, if I had known they were that good, they would've been long gone!

Time went past, and as I was cleaning my room, I thought, "Maaaaan, those Toffifee that Worker Jay gave me were absolutely delicious. I wonder where she bought them from, I could really go for one right now."

It's really awful when you're craving something that you can't get your hands on. You end up trying to replicate or substitute the craving with a million other things that Just. Don't. Taste The Same.

Which is why I was stunned when I opened a random box to find, whaddya know, a box of Toffifee in it! I couldn't believe my luck! Clearly, I had taken one of the boxes to work, and left the other one at home in a 'safe place'. I hadn't even thought about Toffifee at all for the last few months, and the one day I think about it, hey presto, it appears.

As you can see from the photo above, the tray contains a whole lot of small caramel cups with nougat and a single hazelnut topped with a chocolate button. One thing that I've had problems with in the past regarding boxed chocolates is that if there wasn't any wrapping on the chocolates, I would be tempted to eat the entire box full of them, popping chocolates into my mouth like it's nobody's business.

Today, is the day after I found the box. It's sitting behind me, on my shelf, in plain view. I ate three chocolates yesterday, and thought, "Mmmm yeah, that's good stuff." And after three, I stopped. They're right behind me, if I look over my shoulder right now, I'd see them.

In fact, I just did. They're still there. I didn't reach for them, since right now, I don't feel like eating any.

What do I feel like eating?

Nut butters.

I've been on a nut butter kick recently - having peanut butter on toast for breakfast, though now this has expanded beyond peanut butter. I bought a small jar each of cashew butter and almond butter and loved both of them. But those things are expensive.

And I could only find cashew butter and almond butter. Nothing in the way of hazelnut or macadamia butter anywhere, never mind things like pecan butter (for some reason, the idea of walnut butter doesn't appeal to me.)

I went off on a nut buying spree. I bought cashews, macadamias, hazelnuts and almonds. And I made butters with each of them, and all of them taste beautiful. Admittedly, I think both the macadamia and hazelnut butters would taste better slightly sweetened.

I'm looking forward to starting the day with these nut butters for weeks to come. And I mean weeks. Or really, months. Because it was much better value for money putting them in the food processor and letting it blitz than buying them little jars. I'm surrounded with the stuff, and damn happy about it.

Stop being so cheesy

I was driving to work after my weekly session with Adam, and all I could think about was cheese. Toasted sandwiches, stuffed with light cheddar cheese. I swear, I could feel the warm meltiness in my mouth, anyone sitting in the lane next to me would've thought I was a tad off my nut since I'm sure I was slobbering something awful.

I started telling myself, "Well, you can have toasted cheese sandwiches for lunch. For now, it's muesli with peaches."

Of course, still, all I could think about was toasted cheese sandwiches. I mean, the hell? Toasted cheese sandwiches at 7:15 in the morning? What the hell? What kind of crazy person am I?

Wait... 7:15 in the morning? Noone else would be in the office... who the hell cares what I'm eating!

As soon as I got into the office, I turned on the sandwich press, emptied the dishwasher, sliced off some of my cheese and got my bread out, put it in and waited for its delicious toastie magic to take place.

When it was done, I sat down with it, looked through my emails, and savoured every delicious, warm, soothing bite.

Muesli and peaches? Last thing on my mind.

Millions of Peaches

Worker Burns has been driving me nuts.

She lives a somewhat unhealthy - not insanely unhealthy, but more or less a typical unhealthy - lifestyle, whereby every weekend she drinks like a fish and eats oodles of takeaway, but is pretty reasonable with what she eats throughout the week. She doesn't exercise, though she has expressed a desire to get back into running (and she has told me that my running shenanigans was part of the reason.)

She recently discovered that she's gained 4 kilos, and wants to get it off promptly.

Okay. It's a fairly common thing when one has gained a bit of weight from eating unhealthily that they want to turn it around. Of course, Worker Burns is tiny, and since I have enough trouble trying to lose 4 kilos, I know how much more of an issue she will have with it.

But of course, the only reason why I struggled, is because I did The Weight Loss Thing PROPERLY. Sure, when I first began with it back when I was 8 (seriously), I dieting and yoyoed like mad. But I've kept off the weight I've lost since being at my highest weight and size (at a size 24, MASSIVE for anyone with Asian heritage) for quite some time, and I'm confident that while there'll be a bit of fluctuating, I won't ever get that big again. I may not get any smaller, but I definitely won't be that big, that unfit, and that unhealthy, ever again.

This is something that the girls at my office know about, since I'm always in the office early and leaving early so that I can be in the gym. I don't think any of them can quite comprehend me being 'that size', since heck, I'm pretty chubby even currently. Imagining me chubbier? Gasp!

Because of this, they sometimes ask me, 'is this good or bad?'. Them hearing me spiel on about no food being 'good or bad' and all foods being morally equal is not the advice they want to hear. They want to hear. "Yes, that's good." "No, that's bad."

Worker Burns, with her OMG 4 KILO GAIN has taken to obsessively reading labels, but she doesn't have a clue as to what she's reading. She'll say something like, "This has 606 kilojoules and 5.1 grams of fat. ... Is that good?", and because apparently I know about The Weight Loss Thing, I'm supposed to spit out an answer just like that. When I tell her, "I don't know", she gets exasperated and is all like, "Well how DO you know? How did you do it?" I tell her, but she doesn't like it, because it's not fast enough.

So she stops asking me for advice and starts looking in other places. Next thing I know, she's bringing in cans of peaches to work. Puzzled, I'm like, "What's with the peaches?" She excitedly tells me that a friend of hers was told by someone at the gym that the best food to eat to lose weight is food that has a ratio of something-to-something in terms of kilojoules and fat. And that the one food that she'd found that satisfied this criteria was... peaches! So what was she eating for breakfast, lunch, and dinner until the 4 kilo was gone? You guesed it... peaches! Oh joyous day!

I thought, 'Fuck me, is she serious?' But she was serious. At lunchtime, there she was, with her bowl of peaches, looking very proud of herself. Others in the office, meanwhile, would walk past her absolutely flummoxed by her lunch choice, to which she would exclaim, "They have no fat!"

After a few days of this, I bumped into her, in the kitchen - she grabbed the can opener before I did. I was waiting with my can of beetroot while she opened her can of peaches. And no, I wasn't just eating beetroot, I was going to make a beetroot, feta, avocado and spinach salad at the time.

I shook my head and said, "You're going to drive yourself mad with all of the sugar in those things." Again she came up with her justification, "But they have no fat!".

Begin miniature rant. Fat doesn't make you fat. Sugar doesn't make you fat. Carbs don't make you fat. Too much of one or more of the above, combined with a deficiency inother nutrients and vitamins, coupled with no heart-rate elevating cardiovascular activity? Perhaps. But aside from being fat or not fat, what about your mental health. I love me some canned peaches. But I could not, will not, eat nothing but them. I would go mad. While eating the sweet mushy peaches, I would be thinking about savoury cheese, crunchy crackers, peanut butter, tomato soup, broccoli, mushrooms - everything savoury, creamy, warm, and crunchy; everything that peaches aren't.

If you try to warn someone about this though, telling them that you'll start wanting other foods and then binge and gain all the weight back, they'll cut you off and say, "No *I* won't! *I* won't gain it back!"

I did give up.

And yesterday? I saw her sneak into the office with a steak and cheese pie.

Nine in the Afternoon

One thing about my discussion with Adam a while back was that I'm not eating enough. The fact that I come home from the gym absolutely famished and prepared to eat every carb in sight should've made me realise that I wasn't eating enough during the day. But, I was so destroyed by the notion of 'being good' whereby you eat as little as possible, that really, I was NOT being good at all. My body needed more food, and I hadn't been giving it that.

So that was one of my challenges. To eat more. It sounds like a very 'pleasant' challenge, especially after dieting notions tell everyone everywhere, STARVE URSELF, FATTIES LOLOLOLOLOL. But it hasn't been as easy as you might think.

The main challenges that I've found have been dealing with the prejudice of people around me, when they see me eating, they have some objection to me doing it.

They don't have objections of me eating at set times of the day, and they don't have an objection to me eating sweet things in the morning and savoury things in the afternoon, but anywhere outside those rules, I get hassled like anything.

Take today, for example.

I ate a delicious bowl of toasted muesli with peaches for breakfast at 7:30am. At 10:30am, I started to get hungry. I had been specifically thinking a mug of tomato soup with a piece of toasted garlic pita to dunk therein.

I toodled off to the kitchen to toast the pita and make the soup, though not long after, Worker Jay was in the kitchen, wanting to know what on earth I was doing. I explained, "I'm hungry."

She was utterly incensed by the fact that I was toasting a garlic pita at 10:30am. She quizzed me, incredulously, as to what would possess me to make such a thing at this time in the morning.

As she pressed me, I got more and more nervous about what I was doing. And I won't lie, while I was just making some food for myself and it was nobody else's problem, it atually uspet me a bit to see someone so up in arms about my food choices. Yet if I were eating a banana, a pottle of yoghurt, or heck, a DONUT, it wouldn't have mattered, because it was acceptable, not-savoury 'morning tea' food.

I mean, who came up with that rule? Who deemed it law that it's 'okay' to eat sweeter things in the morning (apart from bacon, eggs, sausages and baked beans for your breakfast), where it's 'okay' to eat a chelsea bun for morning tea but not a cup of tomato soup?

I did a really good job of listening to my body today and having the soup and the pita, but while my body was soothed and satisfied by the meal, my mind was anxious, concerned, and upset. It's the first time since I've gone full blown intuitive eating and I haven't felt good about making a fully intuitive choice. It's because of society's notions of normal encroaching on me, when I know, trying to fit into their 'normal' has been the reason why I've struggled so much.

I just wish I didn't have to make a big fucking political statement in order to have a morning snack. That part of it tires me out. It exhausts me, something awful.

While I truly want people to leave me alone and trust me on what I'm doing, I don't think that's ever going to be possible.

I'll have to resort to, "My trainer told me so." since everyone I care about seems to respect his judgement over mine.

Which is rather sad.

A bit of a Curly one

Those of you who follow DYHAXLIT will know that I ran a scavenger hunt competition to give away three copies of Dietgirl's book. One of the prize winners was my friend Andrew, and he was the last person to get his winnings - despite him being probably the closest winner in proximity to me, since he has committments with babies and weddings (by god, who on earth would want THOSE, I mean, really!)

We finally managed to get our act together and arranged to meet up a few days ago for curly fries at a cafe at the University of Auckland.

Now, I haven't actually eaten curly fries before. I have heard of them, and have heard them them mentioned in American sitcoms, but never before had I heard of somewhere in the southern hemisphere actually dispensing these remarkable delicacies.

But behold, here they be! In all their curly glory!

How good were they? SO GOOD.

They actually tasted more like seasoned potato wedges than your generic shoestring fry - that might have been down to the decision made by this cafe to season the curlies, and I think that make them taste a million times better than your standard fry.

Basically, they would've been tasty even if they weren't curly. But the fact that they were curly made them fun. [And the dip is aioli, by the way].

All the better to tempt babies with.

And, repeat!

That's a good Emma, you be learning fast.

Mark's Daily Apple: Saturated Fat

I love Mark's Daily Apple. One of the best nutritional blogs out there - a bit unrealistic to follow most times, but I love the posts. It's one of the nutrition blogs out there that hasn't bought into the frenzied dieting notions that almost every other nutrition site has become.

I had a conversation with Sarah-II about how we're uncomfortable with all of the hype about artery hardening saturated fats. Saturated fats have been around for years, are a natural substance - unlike partially hydrogenated oils and trans fats which exist in things like... Oh... Weight Watchers Chocolate Mousse? [And FYI, they sell the Australian Weight Watchers mousse in New Zealand, I can verify that yes, partially hydrogenated oils DO exist on the ingredients list. I saw it with my own eyes.]

Which is why articles like this one on Mark's Daily Apple are a breath of fresh air.

I’ve said before that the hype over saturated fat is overblown in many respects. Saturated fats are required for many crucial functions in the body. They make up 1/2 of cell membrane structure. They enhance calcium absorption and immune function. They aid in the body’s synthesis of the essential fatty acids and provide a rich source of fat soluble vitamins. My beef isn’t with the beef fat. It’s with the carbs – the grains that conventionally raised animals are fed as well as the buns, chips and other assorted carbs we modern humans eat with the side of beef.

So awesome.