healthy eating – lunch

Here’s part 3 of the healthy eating series (read up on part 1 – research and part 2- breakfast).

As a reminder, this was my resolution:

• drastically reduce sugar intake and sweets
• eat less empty carbohydrates (white flour products like bread rolls, pasta, etc.), switch to whole grain products where possible and find alternatives to wheat
• eat a more plant based diet, fruit and vegetables first, everything else second
• continue to buy local fresh produce
• grow my own salads and vegetables again on my balcony with a better plan on what I want to grow and actually need
• build up a collection of tried and trusted healthy recipes that we can return to again and again
• use less dairy products

LUNCH

What did I change?
I am eating lunch at the office where there is a variety of hot lunches to be had as well as salads, desserts and rolls. I’ve never been much of a meat eater so I usually stuck to pasta, potatoes, anything baked with cheese or fries. I also almost always got a dessert, most often pudding.
Since doing my research I felt I could now make some informed choices and plans for lunch. I especially liked the 5 a day campaign by the WHO (in the US it’s called fruits & veggies – more matters). It basically tells you to eat 5 hand fulls of fruits and veggies a day, ideally 3 helpings of veggies and 2 of fruits. One fruit portion can be substituted by a hand full of nuts.
True to my resolution I am now trying to stay away from the carbs and especially the fries and the foods drowned in cheese (saturated fats). Instead I pick whatever veggies are offered and fill my plate with them. Since I have no say on the menu this is easier on some days than others. I still eat pasta or potatoes when they come with a veggie side or sauce. I try to stay away from fatty sauces and I eat fish whenever it’s on the menu. Often I have a little bowl of salad with my hot meal.
With the salad I choose organic olive oil and balsamic vinegar as a dressing instead of heavier premade dressings. Instead of dessert I get a glass of freshly pressed orange juice with my lunch, which serves as one portion of fruit for my 5 a day plan.
I realize these choices are highly dependent on the environment and may not be possible for everyone but I think we all need to work with what’s there and make the best food choices available to us.

I also always take a 20-30 minute walk after lunch. I need to get out to breathe a bit of fresh air and stretch my legs before sitting down at the desk again. It’s refreshing and especially in spring gives your body a chance to soak up some sunshine and much needed vitamin D.

How did it work?
Man, staying away from fries and cheesy gratins was hard! When you get there hungry those hot, fatty foods look mouthwatering. The veggies and salads look much less appealing and filling.
But I promise once the withdrawal period is over it gets so much easier! It took about two or three weeks for me not to crave fatty foods any more and I now easily and happily choose the veggies. It helps to tell yourself how much better you’ll feel when you make the right choice and how proud you will be of yourself!
Sure I still have days when I crave a certain thing on the menu and sometimes I get weak and give in (it’s ok, we need to love ourselves).
When you switch from fatty foods and lots of carbs to a veggie based diet at first you feel like those still leave you hungry, like they are not as filling. I found that too subsides after a few weeks as your body adjusts to it. Instead I now feel pleasantly full after a meal whereas when I eat fries or heavy foods now they make me feel tired and bloated.
I used to have an afternoon low after lunch when I would get very tired and sleepy and concentration was impossible. Changing my eating habits has made this afternoon slump disappear almost completely!
Overall I feel much better with this diet and that’s enough encouragement to stick to it.

What’s planned?
Honestly I think lunch is fine for me like it is now. I could say I planned to do more home cooking to take to work but I know myself and it ain’t happening any time soon 😉
I’ve found what works for me and the challenge will be sticking with it. It’s a choice to make every single day and while it gets easier and easier with time the temptations are still there. I’m looking at you, chocolate pudding dessert with cherry compote.

Stay tuned for the next part which will be afternoon snacks!

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healthy eating – breakfast

Here’s part 2 of this series, ‘healthy eating’, View part 1 ‘the research’ here.

After doing all that research I and finding out how certain foods work within the body I was finally at a place where I knew enough to plan how I wanted to change my diet.

This was my resolution:

• drastically reduce sugar intake and sweets
• eat less empty carbohydrates (white flour products like bread rolls, pasta, etc.), switch to whole grain products where possible and find alternatives to wheat
• eat a more plant based diet, fruit and vegetables first, everything else second
• continue to buy local fresh produce
• grow my own salads and vegetables again on my balcony with a better plan on what I want to grow and actually need
• build up a collection of tried and trusted healthy recipes that we can return to again and again
• use less dairy products

All the changes are more easily explained by going through the day so I am going to split this series into morning, mid day, afternoon and evening eating.

MORNING

What did I change?
For breakfast I used to eat some form of cereal with milk or yogurt, then a bread roll with cheese at the office followed more often than not by some sort of pastry. In the last few years I had already gradually switched from sugary cereal to first chocolate muesli and then fruit muesli.

I started finetuning by switching to a muesli with no added sugar, but lots of seeds and nuts and some raisins for sweetness. This was a definite improvement but after a few weeks it was confirmed what I had long suspected – I am lactose intolerant, meaning I should cut out milk completely. I then tried a variety of milk substitutes – soy milk, almond milk, rice milk. None of them really appealed to me, so right now I’m skipping the muesli altogether.

Instead I buy a seed and grain bread at the market every weekend. I used to hate these multi-grain breads as a child but they are growing on me. Lots of fiber and they do keep you a lot fuller a lot longer. As a topping I switched from cow milk cheese to goat milk cheese (yum!).

I am notoriously the first person in the office to declare I’m hungry come mid day so until lunch instead of pastry I eat an apple every day. With apples we try to buy old varieties because the newer ones are all grown to contain lots of natural sugar. Old varieties are tarter but I find they taste a lot fresher and juicier.

I drink tea in the morning and have stopped putting sugar in it. It’s hard for a few days but once you get used to it it starts to taste completely normal without sugar. In fact, I once had a yogurt at work and it tasted overly and not at all pleasantly sweet to me after this sugar abstinence. When I do need to sweeten something I use agave nectar instead.

How did it work?

It’s going great! I like the grain bread, I love the goat cheese and I have come to crave my daily apple. It’s funny how the body adjusts to a changed diet, it gets used to getting certain foods. Just like I found when I started drinking lots of water every day that I started to be thirstier. It’s like the body saying ‘whoa, you get it! Now let’s start talking to each other again’.

I miss milk but I feel so much better without it, it makes a huge difference. I used to have some stomach trouble in the evenings and that is all gone. My big revelation was when I had not had milk for a week and then got a craving for a big mug of chocolate. A few hours later I got stomach cramps and spend the evening curled up on the couch with my hot water bottle. It really hit home then and I have decided to cut out milk completely.

What’s planned?

I want to get back into baking my own bread with spelt flour and some grains and seeds so we’ll see how that goes!

I also really want to try green smoothies. I’ve read so much about them and I think they would be a great addition to my breakfast.

Come summer I will incorporate fresh fruit and berries in my breakfast as well.

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So much for breaktfast! Lunch, snack time and dinner will each have their separate posts coming up. Let me know what you have for breakfast in the comments!

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*Am I shamelessly reusing old photos for these posts? Absolutely! When does the light come back again?

healthy eating – the research

We all strive to eat healthy, right? It’s good for us. The problem is that it is such a vague concept. You feel like you don’t really know where to start, what is healthy and what is not and why is healthy food good for us while pizza is not?
I’ve been planning to “eat better” for years without much success. So I decided to really tackle this as a project late last year and just get down to it and do my research.
I took a day off to cram as much research about food and eating in it as I possibly could and hopefully end up with a plan. The good news is, I did and it was not even that hard! I’m going to share with you what I found out and what I changed in my diet.
This is my personal experience. This isn’t going to be a book and I’m not an expert so I strongly encourage you to do your own research since I will try to keep this short and sweet 😉

The first thing I found out is that there literally is no general definition of healthy eating. What is good and healthy for a person is a very individual thing. There are government issued guidelines but they change and evolve over time.
There are so many different ideas and diets out there and they all tell us they are the one way to eat to be healthy. Vegan, paleo, Atkins…just to name a few and there are so many more. I got very confused.
Whenever I get confused I try to structure my information. I made a chart and jotted down which foods all (or almost all) sources agreed were healthy or not healthy and which foods seemed to be controversial. This is my list:
—————————————————————————-
GOOD:
Vegetables, fruit, water, herbs, roots, nuts, good fats and oils, fish, meat (if organic and consumed in moderation). Eating as much food raw as possible.

CONTROVERSIAL:
Grain, dairy products, legumes, eggs, coffein, alcohol. Cooking foods.

BAD:
Sugar in any form, additives, bad fats and oils
—————————————————————————-

That seems a lot more manageable, right?

I did want to know why some products were bad or highly controversial, such as grains and sugar and certain fats. Here’s where again I strongly encourage you to do your own research (share your sources in the comments!) since I did most of my research on german language sites and will be keeping this very short. If you would like my list of german language sources let me know.

SUGAR
Sugar is present naturally in lots of sources, especially as fructose (fruit sugar). When we eat an apple it contains sugar, but this sugar is attached to lots of fiber, vitamins and minerals. The body can really get to work breaking those down and using them, releasing the contained sugar slowly. Our blood sugar level rises slowly, inducing the gradual release of insulin to transport that sugar to our cells to be used as energy.
When we eat refined sugar (pure sugar which is not attached to anything valuable like fiber) we’re basically flooding our body with so much sugar that it can’t really deal with it all. Our blood sugar level soares way too quickly and lots of insulin is produced which results in a blood sugar level crash again. We are really throwing our body processes off balance continually.
Eating lots of refined sugar can thus lead to permanently confused insulin processes and in turn, diabetes. As I said, I’m keeping this veeerry simple.
What is more, tumor cells love sugar. Empirical research suggests that consuming sugar in the way we do in the western world dramatically incresases cancer rates. Animal research suggests that sugar is also responsible for a range of other negative effects.

GRAINS
Grains are controversial. Whole grain flours contain fiber, minerals, vitamins, micronutrients and unsaturated fats. White flour however has lost most of these nutrients, so what remains are empty carbohydrates which in turn are absorbed way too quickly by our bodies and make our blood sugar levels soar too quickly and unnaturally (see sugar). The starch and gluten get sticky and acidic when digested and can cause problems with the digestion for some people from bloating to serious bowel inflammation.
Some sources also mention that all the good stuff even in whole grain flours and products can be found in greater quantities in fruit and vegetables and advise to quit grains altogether.

FATS
I won’t go into this in great biological detail but fats and oils are not all bad. The right ones help us absorb vitamins, protect our organs and even help our blood flow better. Good for us are unsaturated fats and oils, such as walnut, rape seed, soy and linseed oil. Some are better used cold (like olive oil) because heat damages their good properties. Rape seed oil is recommended for cooking as it can stand the heat better.
Saturated fats are present in animal products like butter and cream. They are usually solid at room temperature and should only be consumed in moderation as they bump up our blood cholesterol levels. Industrial food products such as chips should be avoided completely because the hardened fats in them are much worse than other saturated fats like butter.

That doesn’t sound so hard at all does it? After my day of research the picture has grown a lot clearer and while I will probably never understand the biological intricacies in detail, the general direction is clear.
The boyfriend was impressed by this compilation as well and we have made an effort to incorporate these findings in our daily eating habits for the last few weeks. As this post is already very long, there’ll be another one one detailing what simple changes we have made and how it has affected us.
I hope to also share some recipes and tipps for healthy eating with you throughout the year. Please leave your thoughts in the comments section, I’d love to know what you think of this and if you struggle with eating better too!

hiking

I’ve taken up hiking with a few friends. Being outdoors and in motion feels cleansing after spending day after day, week after week in front of a computer screen.



We’re only taking little, easy trips right now, breaking in our boots and getting in the flow of walking regularly.



The more I work, the more I realize how important physical exercise is for my well-being. It’s always hard to balance my office job, my business (I guess you could call it two businesses now with the shop), my other hobbies and my need for rest. I could work all the time really, because I know my goals and am ambitious. If I didn’t force myself to listen to my body, rest frequently and get outside to exercise I’d get ill from exhaustion within a month. Hiking is a bit like yoga, it has its own rhythm and works wonders to calm and focus the mind.



On this trip we were in the woods for about three hours. We set out quite late and the air was cool and fresh, lovely golden evening light streaming through the trees. I got worried we wouldn’t be out of the woods until the sun set but we made it, happy and hungry. I did nearly fall asleep over my pizza in the restaurant we stopped in on the way home. Guess I have a way to go before I’m up to a full day or week trip!