preventive surgery

I know and you know that Angelina Jolie has been all over the news this week because she tested positive for a gene that increases her risk of getting breast and ovarian cancer. She decided to have a double mastectomy and reconstruction….just in case. And I believe she is also planning to get her ovaries removed.

I seem to be in the minority among people close to me. My kids are saying, Hell, if you can afford it, why not? I have so many bad feelings about it, it hurts.

I just read an excellent article by Dr John McDougall which expresses so well the thoughts that have been going through my head that I thought I’d link to it, so if I express myself badly he can be my backup!

Here’s what I think, as briefly as possible…

• Angelina may still get cancer – there are no guarantees.
• If she doesn’t, there will be no way to prove whether the surgery was successful, or in fact she wouldn’t have had it anyway
• How confident can doctors be of the risk that they are willing to go out on a limb and say she has an 87% risk of contracting breast cancer?
• There are many factors in keeping oneself cancer-free that involve less drastic and invasive methods – a wholefood vegan diet, for one.
• How many body parts are sufficiently dispensable or able to be replaced with prostheses that a profit-driven medical system will start to offer replacement for those who have the means to pay?
• Wouldn’t it be better to leave the body alone, uncut, and simply monitor the situation? Seems to me that surgery carries its own risks, including breaching cancer cells and causing them to spread around the body. This again is a sticky area for me, because apparently our bodies are constantly creating and dissolving cancer cells/tumours without our even being aware of it, so constant checking often means that something is “caught” that would have naturally been dealt with by our bodies’ immune systems, easily and painlessly.
• There are many factors in why people get cancer and whilst genetics may be one factor, so can crappy diet, smoking, drinking, and, yes, bad karma (and I do believe that it is a real thing). Doctors don’t know it all.

Well, that’s probably enough said on that subject. Back to the knitting!

 

 

 

 

More health news

I am warming more to the doctor who wrote the Wheat Belly book as I work my way through the book. Yesterday I said that he seemed to think it ok to eat animal foods but in subsequent chapters he does talk about the ph of the body and how vegetables are alkalizing and animal foods are acidifying, and an acidic body encourages health problems. So I feel more confident that when he gives his patients the suggestion to try four weeks without wheat, he is also telling them to eat more vegetables. Except, of course, for those “healthy whole grains” which are apparently not so healthy.

I have enjoyed two more great smoothies today. This morning’s was a more classic smoothie with banana and almond butter and spinach and stuff, this evening’s was more of a thick juice with lettuce, cucumber, pear, mango, orange and frozen prune plums.

In between I was visiting with a friend today and took along some energy balls – once again, a new experiment which turned out well. They have a cup of almonds, blitzed in the food processor, to which I added a quarter cup of almond butter, half a cup of raisins, 8 medjool dates, 2 tblsp raw cacao powder, 1 tblsp maple syrup, 1 tblsp grated ginger root, and blitzed again. I rolled the small balls of mixture in more cacao powder. Mmmm, chocolate health food, and actually better than the Bliss Balls that I was inspired by.

My friend had made fresh juice which she shared and it was really good. Orange, apple and carrot juice, with which she blended kale and parsley.

So, a good day’s eating. Feeling great!

 

Smoothie week

I’m going in to my fourth week mostly eating raw. I said at the outset I’d allow myself to “cheat” on weekends and that has helped me to stay on the wagon during the week, except for one night last week when the family came together at the end of a busy day and I’d made a big pot of soup in the morning so that dinner wouldn’t be really late. It was really good soup and I had some and it was very satisfying.

However the past weekend has once again shown me that a little more self-discipline would be great. I had some more soup. A few tortilla chips. A small bar of chocolate. A couple of slices of toast with melted Daiya on top. Yes, they tasted good for a few minutes, but once in my body things were not so pleasant. I regretted choosing those foods afterwards and today I was committed to more smoothies/juices.

Breakfast was mid-morning and the smoothie contained

Frozen blueberries
Banana
Water
Spinach
An orange
A grapefruit
Scoop of Barleans Greens

Lunch was mid-afternoon and I had

Bananas
Almond butter
Water
Spinach
Frozen apricot and plums
Barleans

A little more calorific and satisfying with the nut butter in it.

Dinner

No frozen fruit – more of a Vitamix juice
Apples
Carrot
Celery
Lettuce
Spinach
Grapefruit
Plum

While I was cooking for the rest of the family, I had some cucumber and carrots.

My aim is to take the cleansing and weight loss to the next level.

I’m reading the Wheat Belly book right now and am not surprised about many of the conclusions that the author comes to. I’ve long known that eating bread makes me sleepy and heavy and bloated. He says that today’s wheat is nothing like the grain of old, and that it is an addictive substance that causes many health problems, including big bellies and man boobs (those are called Moobs around here)! I don’t agree with all of his recommendations to his patients, though, as he says they can eat plenty of animal products as long as they stay off the grains. It would serve them better to go over to a plant-based diet and avoid all the artery-clogging effects of eating meat and cheese. In my not-so-humble opinion

It’s been a beautiful sunny day today, though the air never completely lost its coolness. The sun is just peeking in my window, shining over the top of the mountain and through the neighbour’s tree branches. I love this time of day – if you watch the sun disappear you can almost feel the earth turning.

 

Quickie

A quickie while waiting for ds2 to brush his teeth. I have to get him to his art class by 9am.

Fiddlehead Fern – back is done down to armholes, stitches have been picked up at shoulders and neck shaping done, steek stitches in place at centre front.

Raw food diet – Day 11 – feeling great, jeans are looser. We did go out for lunch on Sunday for ds1′s 21st birthday, but apart from that I have been 99% raw. Feeling nice and clean, er, inside, if you know what I mean! That Sunday lunch (Vegan Asian food) transitioned exceedingly fast, ahem. Ovulation was less uncomfortable than usual – I have noticed that before – anyone with menstrual problems should definitely try eating raw for a couple of months and feel the difference.

Here’s a progress shot of the cardigan:

 

The lunch box diet

I found a library book recently called The Lunch Box Diet by Simon Lovell. A Brit, he writes about a nutritious way to lose weight without going hungry. The plan is that you eat a sensible breakfast and dinner (he has advice on that) and for those long hours in between, when you might be at work, or at least out and about, he recommends the lunchbox.

This is a large resealable container into which you put vegetables (at least 5 different ones, making up 60% of your volume), some lean protein food (by which he means meat, fish, beans, nuts, tofu etc) to about 30%, and 10% sauce/dressing. You pile all this stuff into your box, give it a shake, and graze from it throughout the day.

With that in mind, I filled a container with salad and pumpkin seeds and olive oil and lime juice and had half of it before we went hiking and the other half on our return. It worked well. I also had a few Medjool dates for dessert.

Dinner was more salad – I’m really loving mango in my salads at the moment, and fresh ginger too.

A friend and I hit our LYS tonight for Knit and Chat and I have invested in some yarn for a cardigan. More info to follow on that later. We watched a short demo on dyeing yarn with Easter Egg dyes – very fun – of course animal fibres dye easiest which is a pity as it would be great to experiment with dyeing my own yarn and seeing how it looks knitted up.

 

Successful first day

I was so busy with housework yesterday (including putting away the winter boots and sleds and getting out my summer clothes) that I was able to avoid boredom eating and only eat when I really needed to. That’s one of my main challenges – home a lot, close to the kitchen, too easy to grab food.

I had a raw smoothie at noon and a big salad at 5pm plus a few almonds, and I was satisfied. Felt so good and energetic. Went to bed early with a detox headache, which is normal, but slept fitfully. Up earlier than usual today and looking forward to a hike with friends in the sunshine.

Breakfast is Vitamix juice. In other words, all the fibre of the fruit is in there – grapefruit, orange, apple, pineapple – blitzed. It’s very good!

 

Spring cleaning

I’m posting from my iMac today so I can type way faster than on my iPad so I can say more!!!

And I can hit Command + and get a nice big font so I don’t need my reading glasses

As usual, Spring is here and is motivating me to do something about my body and the layers of fat underneath the layers of winter clothes. We have had beautiful weather here this week, officially 16 or 17 degrees but more like 20 in the sunshine. And of course one’s thoughts turn to beach weather and swimming in the lake and maybe fitting better into one’s clothes.

“They” say that after a certain age (and I DID turn 50 last year) one has to choose between one’s face and one’s body. What that means is that if you’re skinny, you may look older and wrinklier because there’s no fat underneath the skin to pad out the wrinkles. If you’re plumper, then in theory your face is less wrinkly. Hell, I don’t really care about wrinkles or a few extra pounds, and I’m totally embracing my numerous grey hairs these days. But I do like feeling energetic rather than sluggish and out of breath, and I dislike the feeling of the roll of fat around my midriff.

I need to keep myself accountable, and to that end I posted a status on Facebook the other day to say I was going 100% raw from Monday. Asked if any of my friends would like to join me so we could support each other. Two said Yes! Ten years ago, when I did the raw thing for about six months, I measured myself, weighed myself, and got quite obsessed with every quarter of an inch (I still remember a sarcastic comeback from an acquaintance). This time, I ain’t doing numbers. I put on a fairly presentable set of black underwear and asked Tai Chi Man to take photos with my iPad, full length front, back, sides and a close up of my face. Thought it would scare me into losing weight, though actually I don’t look as bad as I thought! If I could only change one thing physically, it would be the lumpy cellulite-y legs – cos really, curvy is fine, I just don’t like the way the cellulite casts shadows when in the sunlight, ha ha…sob.

I certainly won’t be posting the photos here, but I have dragged them on to my computer desktop so that if I falter I can refer to them and think…..raw food….raw food….cleanse, cleanse, cleanse.

I am going to allow myself to “cheat” on weekends, if I feel the need. Because sometimes all you need is the knowledge that you can have something “later” that keeps you on the straight and narrow.

Happy Easter, happy Springtime, and healthy eating to you all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Good morning

And welcome to the weekend. Isn’t it a wonderful Saturday morning! Can you tell I’m sitting here with my first cup of Yorkshire tea in three weeks?

The cleanse is over and I’m happy that I stuck with it with very few transgressions. Don’t know whether I lost any weight but my jeans feel more comfortable. I enjoyed a good hike with a friend and our boys yesterday afternoon – now that most of the snow has melted it’s time to up the activity level and get more calories burned for Spring.

Last night I thought I’d try out a new stitch, brioche. It looks so beautiful. If you take a look at projects on Ravelry that use two colour brioche, they are impressive, and I wanted to know how to do it. I found a tutorial online and gave it a go. I had worked four rows of it when I found a dropped stitch. Well, this is one pattern where picking up a stitch and rescuing it is seemingly impossible because brioche is made from lots of slipped stitches and yarn overs. Realising I wouldn’t be able to save it, and that I wouldn’t be making any large projects with this stitch that requires so much attention, I pulled it out and told myself that that was another lesson learned!

I still haven’t come up with a small project to knit to tide me over until the Knitpicks order arrives.

Well, I was gobsmacked just now, though I don’t know why. My 20 year old has always been a gold medal-winning messmaker and just now he shook a large salsa container, not realising that the lid wasn’t on properly. Salsa shot out all over the dining table. I saw him do something about it but knew I should put down the iPad and check the situation. It was not good. He used a pale blue dry towel to scrape up the salsa and had put it in the laundry basket including lumps. There were two bamboo placemats in the basket too, and we never machine wash those – they can easily be rinsed off under the tap. I also noticed he hadn’t wiped the dining table properly or checked the carpet under his chair. Why oh why does he have to be so slapdash? He had already sat down to continue eating so I know he thought his cleanup job was adequate. I’m glad I caught it all before it dried on and soaked in. I sometimes tell him that I’ll know when he’s “grown up” when he starts being more conscientious about things like this (I know from forums on Ravelry that some people never learn to be a Noticer Of Things That Need To Be Done – how frustrating for the people who live with them).

Rant over.

Time to make a meal plan and shopping list as it’s grocery day. Have a great weekend.

 

cleanse update

I’m glad this is the last week of the Quantum Wellness Cleanse. I am happy to to continue without wheat and sugar, but I am really missing my Yorkshire tea. Yesterday, the bottle of agave that I bought to use throughout the three weeks was finished, so this morning I am having Typhoo Decaf with unsweetened almond milk and maple syrup. The maple syrup has so much more flavour than the agave, not to mention that it is a considerably more local product, and I believe it’s better for me. So I won’t be buying any sugar, but it’s back to the maple.

Saturday morning I will be enjoying my Yorkshire tea and to heck with the consequences! (And I’ll be back to the Silk too.)

I have enjoyed a fair amount of exercise lately. Over three hours of snowshoeing Friday (my first time, it was awesome, definitely want to do it again). A walk on Sunday with Tai Chi Man. And another walk yesterday morning with my friend and her dog. Now that the weather’s warming up and the roads aren’t icy, there’s no excuse.

I think that this Spring will find me getting more active and dropping a few pounds, which is something I really need.

 

 

 

 

 

Gluten free bread

A bit of googling for vegan gluten free bread recipes led me to a simple recipe at Hopes Kitchen which I made last night with the aim of sending ds1 off with a loaf this morning. I doubled the recipe and used (sshhhh) maple syrup instead of sugar. I just had a couple of slices this morning and WOW does it exceed my expectations. I was anticipating something gritty that I’d have to force down, but it’s really good. It provides that bread look, smell and mouth feel without the wheat, and is very moist. I will definitely make it again (though the gf flour mix is pretty expensive – I may have to mix my own again).

I’d like to add that I used Namaste Foods Perfect Flour Blend from my local health food store. It has sweet brown rice flour, tapioca flour, arrowroot flour, sorghum flour and xanthan gum, so I didn’t need to add any extra xanthan gum when making this bread.