How to: Choose good foods in the supermarket and clean out your diet

Easy. This is so so easy. When I started reading and learning about meal prepping for gym training I was pleasantly surprised by how much effort actually went into food, nutrition and learning about what athletes were putting into their body. I genuinely didn’t think people who were body-building were that food conscious – no, that comes across wrong – I guess I just never really thought about it much. I did have a bit of an assumption that they were all just in it to look at themselves in the mirror, truly, but as I learned more and more, I came to realise that their tenacity and dedication to being truly fit was something I’d never seen before, and food was a huge part of it.

One of the posts I’d read, and I can’t find it now across my favourite bookmarks unfortunately, but one of the posts I’d read was so simple in its explanation…only buy things from the outer aisles. I stopped for a moment and thought about it – so true! Think about it, all the outer aisles are fresh food and items requiring refrigeration – fresh meats, fresh fruit and vegies, fresh dairy, cold cuts, fresh bread and fresh seafood. That’s it. That is all you need. It makes such simple sense to shop that way that if you honestly try it out you’ll soon see how easy it is to clean up your diet.

Anything that has a shelf life, sugar, stabilisers, binders, sulphites, preservatives, artificial colours and other soy, wheat and palm oil derivatives is not going to be good for you. And granted, some items do have this stuff and in some industries like in cold cut meat, (because in Australia, all meat that is cured and/or smoked is required under legislation to have a sulphite or nitrate in it), unfortunately you can’t just get out of it.

When I started eating cleaner, I removed all the rubbish from my cupboards. Anything with a shelf life (in a packet or box), anything with refined sugar, soy, wheat and carbs and anything that had a best before (5 years away) end date on it.

If you have the option to choose organic and its within your price range, of course that is the better option. Being certified organic doesn’t just mean it isn’t just sprayed, it means as so far as the farmer’s soil is considered certified organic and the foodstuffs they feed their cattle is organic is as far as the organic label goes. I personally believe that organic foodstuffs should just be labelled normal food, and that foodstuffs filled with chemicals should have warning labels, but that’s a topic for discussion another time.

If you have the further option to choose Paleo/GAPS made items, then that is another brilliant way to make sure that the food you’re eating is the cleanest. You’ll now find farm to plate butchers and farmers on Facebook like Paleo Beef Direct (Hivesville, Queensland) selling to consumers direct. The advantage is you buy bulk (as in, a half a cow or pig), or you can go halvies (in a cow or pig) with a neighbour or friend. The meat is incredibly sweet and tender as the animals are not factory farmed and there are a variety of cuts available to you. One woman in my suburb was a regular purchaser and also acted as the drop off point so when our meat gets delivered every couple of months, we only need to go to her place to pick it up.

Alternately, find or develop your own local fruit and vegie co-op. My closest one is getting rave reviews. I haven’t purchased from them yet but I will and can do a review when it arrives.

I use Paleo Beef Direct for grass-fed bulk beef and bulk pork purchases. Find them here on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/paleobeefdirect/

Food, choices and everything in between.

What a week. I sit here writing to you from my freshly cleaned kitchen. I know, it’s totally a “housewife” thing, but there is nothing better than knowing everything is in top shape before the beginning of the week. I am also attempting to blog from my iPad using a little keyboard, so forgive me for the editing as I will attempt to fix this throughout the week.
I interviewed twice this week for a job but only one that I really really wanted, and I’ve been sitting here thinking about the second interview and replaying everything back in my head…did I sound insecure? I mentioned I was nervous, is that a negative trait? Was I too cocky when I gave 7 strategies instead of the 3 they asked for…did I seem desperate? Was I professional enough? It makes it harder that this job is exactly the one I want, and after several interviews these last 3 months I do hope this one comes through. Whilst this one won’t really be a promotion, it will be more like, “going home” so to speak, and I am comfortable with that.

So yesterday we managed to actually leave the neighborhood and made our way to Southbank for the Brisbane French Festival. I loved it. We ate everything we were not supposed to, but to be honest we paid for it later. It is amazing when you get used to eating a certain way and you interrupt that, how much of an issue it can really cause. Both of us had majorly sore tummies, but worked it off yesterday evening and today with a new workout we created ourselves.

And whilst I know both of us are still probably considered new to weightlifting, I loved these last 2 sessions. Both sessions were truly a ‘call to action’ so to speak and totally lit our muscles on fire. I also lost another kilo – yay for me!

So maybe to pay homage to the theme of food from yesterday, we will look at how to change your diet. And by this I don’t mean, how to eat the way I do, although if it suits you go ahead! I’m talking more about, making that transition to eat a different way for whatever reason you may have. Maybe your doctor has told you to cut certain foods out, or maybe you have allergies or inflammation, or maybe you just want to stop and make a change. Whatever the reason, when you’re at the point you are considering changing your diet, something else is going on. And I don’t mean anything sinister – in fact I think it’s more that something has triggered you to want to change, a catalyst has changed your mindset.

Personally I am fascinated by the concept of change – more so I am fascinated by choice, but choices usually accompany change in some format, before or during or after, and that is what I am intrigued by.

You see, I believe everything we do is a choice. Everything. For example, whether you choose to have or not have children, is entirely a choice. Wait, you may argue, no it isn’t, in my instance, I cannot physically have children because of an illness or some other misfortune. Right, that is true, but choice has guided how you deal with that. Did you go out an adopt a child instead, or try other options like surrogacy or IVF? Have you instead turned bitter and anti-child to compensate for the inability to have your own? It is true that sometimes we are dealt with a card, or set of cards, which doesn’t seem to always serve our personal interest, but how we chose to deal with that hand and what we do with our lives is entirely our choice.

This is important when making a major change to your diet. Our family comes from Eastern Europe. Food is not technical – it’s simply made, with basic ingredients. If you ask my parents and even my husband, it wasn’t uncommon to eat bread with potatoes in the same meal, and in fact it took a long time to wean my husband off that mentality that he needed to ‘carb load’ to feel full or feel as if he was satisfied from his meal.

So recently, probably over the last 6 months, we have been tweaking our diet. Initially, and this has probably been from about 3 or so years ago, I was made aware, through a series of almost unfortunate events, that I had an intolerance to soy. Any type of processed, refined, GMO soy in any format, as an emollient, as a binder, as an acidity regulator or whatever else they use soy in (which these days is almost everything with a shelf life) absolutely obliterated my stomach. I would have the most severe of cramps, quick onset nausea, explosive…well, you know what can be explosive and in some instances, I would even vomit. I quickly learnt about soy and its derivatives and uses and sought to eliminate it entirely from my diet.

It took a bit of getting used to. I literally could not have any thing that wasn’t fresh. It completely immobilized the way I was able to eat, and I thought my life was over. No sweets, no chips, no candies. It really isn’t that scary looking back on it now, however my first thoughts were that it was going to entirely hinder my social eating life!

Removing soy from my life has been a godsend. I have introduced raw and paleo desserts into my life and bake more… and to be honest I have never been much of a baker. Which leads me to the next part of the story. There’s been a lot of media attention of late about the effects of refined and excess sugar in our lives. Everywhere you look there’s a new book or documentary about the effects of aspartame or GMO sugar beets or some other such monstrosity. Yes, I refer to it as monstrosity because we can’t just simply refer to food as food anymore- it always seems to be something else…look at take away food for example. When did our ancestors ever need beer battered chips and deep fried fish smothered in flour and breadcrumbs to supplement their dietary habits?

But I digress. What caught my eye, or ear, specifically was a podcast I listened to in about October of 2015 where a Dr William DAVIS was talking about wheat. In fact, it was one of many as I endured a journey that began with the initial soy incident about attempting to eat cleaner and remove anything artificial, refined or genetically modified from my diet. I watched every documentary available about food (one even triggered me to become a vegetarian for 6 months because I was so distraught at what was happening to the animals) and listened to every podcast. I was on high alert for anything food related, but despite all this proactive watching and learning and education, I was still eating rubbish. I was promoting the lifestyle through my words and not my actions. I was bloated, heavy and inflamed and did nothing to better my prospects.

And then something changed. It wasn’t just something, it was one of the most important things of my life. I changed job. And whilst some of you may think, oh yeh, big deal, in my line of work it really is. And whilst I went in with the best intentions, it has so far, been the worst thing I could’ve ever done in my life, and I am not one that regrets much, if anything at all.

My new job (even though I have only been here almost 4 months) made me change. I went from having complete control, to no control. I went from knowing everything, to knowing nothing. I went from feeling comfortable, to feeling completely unsafe (despite being in a controlled environment) – this completely rocked my core. It wasn’t just a “oh I don’t like this” for 5 minutes type thing, it was literally, from day 3, “I fucking hate this”. It was shortly after I started this job that I started thinking about the gym, and about weightlifting. It was when I started thinking specifically in terms of my career, that if I want to take it a certain way, I may need to rethink the path I was initially trying to travel down. Maybe this new path would require more of me, demand more of my time, but pay off in much greater ways. This new path required my fitness to be much better than what it was.

So with this decision to join the gym came the decision to change my eating. Entirely. After reading about “Wheat Belly” by Dr DAVIS I started reducing the amount of wheat in our diets but we still had pasta and bread. It was a good start, but not good enough and I kept thinking of the analogy he used where he would say something akin to “you don’t quit smoking but have one for the road – when you quit smoking you quit it for good.” So, we couldn’t say we wanted to ‘quit wheat’ but still eat bread and pasta. And one of the things you will learn from this elimination of wheat is the argument that proteins in wheat can cause an effect in the body that replicates what could be considered like an opiate addiction. So, in simple words (if I have paraphrased that correctly), wheat is addictive.

I found myself being able to see these parallels in the examples given by other grain free advocates (one being Cindy O’MEARA from the “What’s with Wheat?” Documentary) to the notion that wheat was addictive. Recently at the Brisbane Premier of What’s with Wheat, Ms O’MEARA discussed this. She mentioned how, when she told people she didn’t eat wheat they looked at her as if she had sprouted an alien being on her head. “Well, what do you eat?” These nay Sayers asked, and she then would tell them, fruits, vegetables, fresh meat etc etc. She also discussed how the concept of not being able to eat a sandwich or have a bowl of pasta freaked people out. And it’s true, because it freaked me out. But slowly and surely, we were able to find alternatives. We don’t eat pasta all the time, but if we do decide to make a fresh ragu, there is wheat and soy free alternatives made from tapioca flour, rice flour and even corn flour and you couldn’t tell the difference. And almost every organic or bulk food store has gluten free, grain free alternatives.

Now another reason we decided to eliminate wheat from our diets was also to remove gluten and yeast. And as we did, my husbands sebhorraeic dermatitis completely vanished. You don’t understand, his face would flare so much because of inflammation and we never knew why. Sometimes he would bleed and get these large dry flaky patches on his face. We went to every specialist known to mankind. We tried every cream and medicine available. All would work briefly, but the flaky dry skin would quickly return. It wasn’t until we changed our diets and introduced more fresh foods that we saw a remarkable change.

And this includes processed and refined foods. We removed sugar, refined and processed carbohydrates, wheat, gluten and soy from our diets. And guess what? We are still alive. In fact, we are more alive now than we were before.

Changing our diets hasn’t been easy. It has been constant – it has been a constant effort of thinking about food and pre-planning food and meals. And as a result of us joining the gym and starting to weight train, we were able to follow through with that change with a better mindset.

So back when I mentioned about how much I hated my job – well I still do, but this is where the gym, and choice, and food and all this comes together. For someone who has never been very active, I dove into weight training like it was the newest thing to man kind. My friends laughed at me, one in particular I once told “I don’t sweat voluntarily’, (and she now loves throwing that in my face) thinks the change in me has been remarkable. Granted, I’ve been training as long as I have been at this wretched job, and I have only lost 3kgs (in weight), but I have lost 4cm off my thighs, hips and waist, 2cm off my arm, and 8cm off my chest. But I cannot do my day without gym. I get angry if something impedes on the time I am supposed to have for the gym. I would rather spend a Saturday evening at the gym than anywhere else.

Initially I couldn’t work out why, but being that I travel to and from work over a 2 hr period every single day and have been mulling over the facts of life as I endure this horrendousness that is this job, I finally came to a conclusion. At the moment, gym and eating and fitness and food is the only thing in my life that I have complete and utter control over. I choose, when I want to go to the gym, what clothes I will wear, what music I will listen to, the body part I’ll train, how long I will train for, the intensity of my training session and so on and so forth. This is why I have become entirely obsessed with it, (in a good way) because unfortunately I cannot control my employment circumstances, or my financial circumstances as a result or any other circumstances for that matter – all I can control is my gym training and my food schedule.

So see, for me, the catalyst was that I hate my job. The other catalysts include developing an intolerance to a certain type of food, and in the instance of my husband, attempting to reduce the inflammation of his dermatitis. The other additional driving force in this change has been knowledge and education. I don’t have the ability to do much to change the world – it’s not like I am a millionaire or have oodles of funds at my disposal to encourage or force major change. I do however, have the ability to make choices in my own life, from everything to what I eat to how I wear my hear or what clothes I put on. So despite dealing with the stress of hating a job you have to go to every single day, I have been able to work out how to deal with its stressors in a manner that helps me in other ways and by now, the change has been a recurrence for long enough that it is part of my lifestyle.

I’d like to discuss more about the types of foods we eat, recipes and sample menus in much further detail. I see how this may seem a little disjointed, but believe me it all fits in somewhere on the spectrum.

Unfortunately for me it’s getting late – the remainder of editing, hyper linking and image uploading I will get to tomorrow. For now, it is time for this iPad and keyboard to get a well deserved break from my ramblings.

Until then.