Eastside Hippie

Here is a part of the entry I posted on Seattle Metblogs this evening:

Here is the current breakdown of food. We have just under $28 left for the week, which gives me some leeway to pick up a few more vegetables and some tofu for tomorrow’s stir fry. For lunch tomorrow, one of us will have leftover lentils from Monday and the other will have leftover red beans and rice. Thursday, I think we’ll have leftover Megadarra for lunch and I’m still thinking of ideas for Thursday’s dinner: maybe a simple winter squash soup with some of the Greek yogurt.

You can read the full entry here. I’m currently experiencing the dullness of mind that comes with taking a migraine pill (Imitrex), which was brought on I believe from carrying too much stuff in my backpack yesterday….anyway, I just don’t have it in me at the moment to really write a separate entry at the moment. I need to do my homework and head to bed, have a good night!

I just posted the breakdown of today’s cooking on Seattle Metblogs (direct link) but wanted to expand a bit more on the personal level here on my blog. On United Way’s blog, they quote Eric Rivera take on how he is conducting this challenge. It’s similar to what we are doing: eating similar to how we normally eat and how it’s not the point to go out and buy frozen pizzas, Top Ramen, and eat off the value menu at McDonald’s. The point, in which I am in agreement, is to eat a healthy and varied diet.

Today, we did fairly well, but definitely did not eat as many vegetables as we should/could have, and no fruit at all. I have spent just a smidge over half our food budget for the week (which is $60) and we can afford, at this stage, to add some fresh vegetables to our diet. Eric also points out that it really helps to know your way around the kitchen in order to create healthy meals. This morning’s example is perfect to demonstrate what I mean by this. I woke up early, panicking about how we didn’t have lunch to take to work/school. In about 30 minutes, I had cooked up a batch of simple lentil soup. If I haven’t had experience in trying out different types of lentil soups, I may not have been able to sleepily grab what was on hand (as allowed by the Hunger Challenge) and put this together. Healthy cooking is for those who have the time and enthusiasm to learn it, there is no doubt about this.

All in all, the hardest part has been not just grabbing any old thing out of the fridge to snack on when I got home from school. I have some leftover brioche (that may very well go bad before the week is up) that looked mighty tempting, but there is no way I could afford to spare enough money in the food budget to make this now. Brioche requires 2 sticks of butter, and I’d rather save our money to perhaps splurge on splitting 22oz beer on Friday instead. Tempted to make cookies? The ingredient list adds up. PB&J? Jam is fairly expensive, at least the jam that isn’t packed full of sugar and preservatives. Cream for our coffee? Forget it! While 1/2 and 1/2 is still cheaper than those liquid margarine knockoffs Coffee Mate and other non-dairy creamers, it’s still expensive. Chicken? The price of chicken on Capitol Hill runs almost $8lb at most of the nearby stores. It’s ridiculous. I can make it stretch for a long time by using it sparingly and for flavor, but still!

I better go make dinner now.

Carl and I are participating in United Way’s Hunger Challenge. The idea: to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner for $7 per day for 5 days (or $12 a day for two people). It starts on Monday and I will be blogging about it each day here and on Seattle Metblogs. My personal goal is to avoid eating Top Ramen and other similar foods, to eat a balanced and healthy (if not slightly limited) diet.

I’ve been writing down meal ideas w/ ingredient lists and today I scoped out prices at Madison Market. If we use leftovers for most lunches, we should be able to pull this off w/out resorting to Top Ramen.

Breakfast: rolled oats for oatmeal (less than $1.00 each), or an egg, slice of homemade bread, 1/2 an apple, and a slice of bacon (roughly $1.29 each).

Lunch/Dinner ideas include Megadarra (lentil, brown rice, and caramelized onions w/salt, pepper, and oil, red beans and rice (kidney beans, jalapenos, carrots, celery, onion, brown rice, cumin, salt, pepper, garlic), lentils w/kale or chard (green lentils, chard/kale, carrots, cumin, salt, pepper, onion, bacon), stir fry (broccoli, carrot, celery, onion, brown rice, oil, soy sauce**). I can also make a pretty cheap soup using onion, celery, carrot, potatoes, garlic, rice, beans, and a slice of bacon.

We’re trying to figure out if we can afford enough coffee for 5 days. The cheapest coffee at Madison Market runs at $7.99lb, so half a pound would likely last us that long, but that would cost us $4, plus the cost of sugar/cream if we used them. I am not a huge fan of black coffee.

I found some pork for $2.89lb, and could use 1/2 lb in one meal fairly easily.

Here’s a list of some of the prices:
**Soy sauce: $2.40lb (in bulk section)
Pork: $2.89b
Coffee: $7.99lb
Kale/Chard: $2.49-$3.99 a bunch (can likely split a bunch into two meals, w/stems)
Yellow onions: $0.59lb on sale (picked up 2.69lbs for the week already)
Eggs: $0.19 each (bulk section)
Flour: $1.39lb (need 14oz to make a loaf of bread)
Yeast: $4.29lb (need 0.25oz to make a loaf of bread=$0.07)
Olive oil: $6.29lb (in bulk section)
Safflower oil: $2.88lb (in bulk section, will likely skip olive oil and use this instead)
Rolled oats: $0.89lb
Wheat berries: $0.99lb
Fuji apples: $0.79lb
Broccoli: $1.99lb (can use stalks too)
Winter squash: $1.99lb)

Debating whether to buy sugar. We would only use it in the oatmeal, stir fry, and coffee. Also I would love some butter, and I can buy a single stick if I wanted to, but I didn’t grab the price of that.

Homemade no-knead artisan bread costs an entire $1.02 to make.

Copied from Get Fit Slowly. Modify the portions according to dietary preferences if you eat less dairy, prefer vegetarian, etc.

This is part two of several posts reviewing Lisa R. Young’s, The Portion Teller: Smartsize Your Way to Permanent Weight Loss. Part one explained how to “smartsize” your meals.

One of the most practical points that I’ve taken from this book so far is this: Americans eat too much of everything. There isn’t one food group responsible for our expanding waistlines. In order to avoid cravings and lose weight, we need to cut food from all of the food groups instead of cutting out entire groups. This book provides a simple plan to help us eat the right foods in the right amounts. The basis of the plan is the Portion Teller Food Pyramid as seen below:

What I like about this pyramid is that it doesn’t eliminate any foods whatsoever. There’s even a place in a balanced diet for things like dessert–however, moderation is key. But how do we know what a serving is? We’ve already been introduced to what a portion is (whatever you put on your plate) but if we’re over weight, then we’re putting too many servings into our portions. Throughout this chapter, Dr. Young provides us with concrete, visual aids to help us in determining the right serving size for all of the different food groups in her pyramid. Let’s take a look at each of the groups in the pyramid and get an idea of what a single serving from that group would be:

Fruit (2-4 servings daily):
We all know that fruits contain loads of vitamins and minerals, but they also contain a lot of sugar which is why we’re told to limit our fruit intake to 2-4 servings per day. Dr. Young tells us that the most helpful visual for determining the right serving size of fruit is a baseball. A baseball’s volume is approximately 1 cup. So 1 cup of berries and 1 baseball sized apple or orange would be good examples of a fruit serving. According to The Portion Teller, the best fruits, nutritionally, are berries, kiwi, melons and citrus, and we should avoid fruit juice, dried fruits, canned fruits in syrup due to their high sugar content.

Non-Starchy Vegetables (3+ servings daily)
Yippee! We can eat as many servings of vegetables as we want! Again, the visual of choice is the baseball. A serving size of raw vegetables is 1 cup, while a serving size of cooked vegetables is 1/2 cup. The best way to maximize your vegetable nutrient intake is to eat as colorful a plate as possible. Some of the most nutrient packed vegetables include spinach, red peppers, asparagus, broccoli and carrots. There’s no need to avoid any of the non-starchy vegetables because according to Dr. Young, “No one ever got fat from eating too many carrots.”

Grains and Starchy Vegetables (4-8 servings daily )
The Portion Teller Pyramid allows us to eat more servings of grains and starchy vegetables than any other food group. But it also provides us with a warning for the types of grains we’re supposed to eat. It tells us to choose healthy grains such as whole wheat, rye, and oats while avoiding white bread, muffins, bagels, and pasta. However, the most important thing to consider when eating our grain servings is the correct serving size. Remember, “white flour products, such as bagels and muffins, have increased in size over the past few decades, sometimes as much as 400%.” A computer mouse is the right size for a baked potato, a CD is the right size for a pancake or a pita bread. And a CD case is the correct size for a piece of bread. Be careful with your grains, the average American eats 17 Portion Teller sized servings of grains every day.

Fish, Poultry, and Meat (2-3 servings daily)
6-8 ounces of meat will provide us with all of the protein we need each day. Dr. Young recommends one serving of meat with every meal and she stresses that low fat, high protein meats such as poultry, fish, and the leaner cuts of red meat are the ones we should be eating. You may also want to include eggs and legumes into your balanced diet as these contain different types of fats that might not be found in the other types of protein. The visuals provided to help us size up our meat servings depend on the type of meat being eaten. More often than not, a deck of cards will be similar to a serving of meat. However, if you’re protein source is a flaky white fish, a standard check book is a good visual that approximates 3 ounces.

Dairy (2-3 servings daily)
There are many benefits to including several servings of low-fat dairy into your diet on a daily basis. Dairy products are wonderful sources of calcium and the B vitamin Riboflavin; some sources are even fortified with Vitamin D. Another huge benefit of consuming dairy products is that the protein in them fills you up so you don’t feel hungry. I like dairy products a lot and find it hard to keep within the recommended 2-3 servings per day for dairy–I guess there are worse things that I could be cheating with. Dr. Young provides several visuals to help find the right serving size when it comes to dairy products. My favorite one is the “4 dice visual.” Whenever I go to a party, often the thing that trips me up is the cheese tray–certainly one more of those little cubes couldn’t hurt? But how many have I already had? My new trick is to use a plate. Every five cubes basically equals about one ounce, or one serving of dairy. I put all my “dice” on my plate at the beginning and don’t go back to the buffet. I don’t have to limit myself to just one serving, but I make sure to budget those extra cubes in to my day.

Fat (1-3 servings daily)
1 to 3 servings of fat daily is not very much fat. The Portion Teller provides simple visuals for doling out your fats as well. A golf ball is about 1 oz, a shot glass is about 2 tablespoons and a walnut is about 2 tablespoons. The fat visuals are by far the smallest of the visuals provided in the book because gram for gram, fat has about 3 times as many calories as carbohydrate and protein. It’s recommended to steer clear of the “bad fats” such as butter, coconut oil, cream cheese and mayonnaise so that you can concentrate on consuming good fats such as olive oil, tahini, avocado, nuts, and nut butters.

Treats and Sweets (0-2 servings daily)
Everyone agrees that treats and sweets aren’t good for us. But they are part of life–I’d never give them up completely. Like fats, treats also have very small visuals to help you relate to serving size because they are calorie dense foods. You’re supposed to think in terms of 1/2 of a baseball or 1 tennis ball. The Portion Teller also gives us some tips to help us deal with the sweet tooth in all of us:

• Avoid your triggers–if you can’t stop with one serving of chips, then don’t eat any.
• Only splurge 1 day a week–avoid eating sweets on a daily basis and they’ll seem like more of a treat.
• Skip soft drinks–you’re better off chewing your calories than drinking them.
• Fat free still means calorie laden–be careful when eating those low fat cakes, cookies, and ice creams.
• Share–order one dessert for two people when at a restaurant.

• RDA sodium: less than 2,400 mg
  • One level U.S. teaspoonful of granulated evaporated salt contains approximately 2,400 mg sodium.
  • The average American consumes 2500 to 5000 milligrams per day
• Official US Guidelines advise a maximum of 40g refined sugar for every 2000 calories consumed.
  • 40g refined sugar is equal to 3.34 tablespoons or 10.02 teaspoons of sugar.
    • The yogurt that I sometimes eat, Brown Cow, contains 25g of sugar. This is 2 tablespoons of sugar. No wonder it tastes so good. We recently switched to plain Greek yogurt with a spoonful of jelly or a bit of frozen raspberries.
    • The types of sugars included in this: cane sugar, organic cane sugar, table sugar, high fructose corn syrup, anything with corn syrup (corn syrup solids, for example), fruit concentrate (to make “juiced” products, food chemists process fruit juice until it is basically fruit-flavored sugar, then reconstitute it.), honey, and anything ending in -ose, such as lactose, dextrose, and maltrose.
    • The USDA estimates that average daily intake of sugars per person is 31 teaspoons-17 from corn syrups and 14 from sucrose…more than 3x the RDA.

Carl and I have gone back to a mostly vegetarian diet. I stumbled onto an article that lays out ways to ensure proper nutrition with various forms of vegetarian diets and realized that we follow a Flexitarian (semivegetarian) diet. Flexitarians primarily follow a plant-based diet but occasionally eat small amounts of meat, poultry or fish.

We treat meat more as a flavor addition or as a side dish, trying to ensure that the bulk of our meals are vegetable or carbohydrate based. Anyway, here is the article for those who are interested.

According to the World Health Organization, no more than 10 percent of calories should come from added sweeteners. This advice is in line with the long-standing recommendations of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) food pyramid, which called for a maximum of 12 teaspoons of sugar (48 grams) in a 2,200-calorie diet — or roughly 9 percent of daily calories. Current USDA guidelines, revised in 2005, simply say to limit these calories. (Via How Much Sugar Is Too Much?)

For comparison:

• 12oz can of regular Coke: 39grams of sugar
• Brown Cow Raspberry Cream Top yogurt: 25grams of sugar
• Starbucks Grande Mocha: 33grams of sugar
• Starbucks Grande Mocha Frappuccino: 47grams of sugar
• Redbull sleek can: 39grams of sugar

12 teaspoons of sugar is equal to 1/4 cup of sugar. If a person consumes one soda each day for a year, that is equal to 65lbs of sugar.

= 12 teaspoons of sugar = total recommended sugar per day

Many people will make a New Year’s resolution to lose weight and/or eat better for 2008. Even though we think we eat pretty well, Carl and I plan to focus further on this in the coming months and I wanted to share some of the information sources that we will use.

There are ups and downs to each of these links. Use common sense.

My Pyramid: funded by the United States Department of Agriculture, this site recommends a bit more meat and dairy than I think is necessary, but has some good tips for varying the diet, what constitutes a portion size, and ways to include whole grains without turning into too much of a hippie.

What To Eat: Marion Nestle’s blog. A great source for breaking down what is in our food, where it comes from, who is funding the advertising, and how the government helps promote foods that are not that good for you.

Eating Well: Healthy recipes, healthy eating, healthy cooking. I use this site for wholesome, simple meals on an almost weekly basis.

What Does 200 Calories Look Like: photos of what 200 calories of a certain food looks like. Great visual representation.

Vegetarian Times: a great source for recipes. It’s easy enough to add in some meat if you can’t live without it.

I found a blog post on Wise Bread titled “The new face of poverty is fat“. Not much of the article was new to me, but one line in particular really summed up the entire theme nicely:

Ninety percent of what you bring home from the grocery store shouldn’t have an ingredients list–it should be ingredients.

American kids, dumber than dirt. Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history.

‘Stupid in America’ How Lack of Choice Cheats Our Kids Out of a Good Education. Article. Video.