The Olympics of Eating

Lately I've hardly notice what I've been eating. And believe me, I have been eating. Stress does that to me. The more desk work I have to do, the more I crave something to chew on, crunch on, sip or savour. I drink more tea than the Royal Family. It has little to do with thirst or hunger and everything to do with distraction. What I'm craving when I'm sitting at my desk reading dense journal articles or cramming lists and acronyms into my brain, is some kind of physical stimulation. I would love to get up and go for a walk or run, hang out with some friends, laughing and interacting, or put my hands to work and make something, anything tangible - but this is not the time for that.

So instead, I try to cope with the sitting, by snacking. It's an easy solution - because unlike most things, eating does not take away from the mental work. I can do it while I sit. I can do it with just a sliver of my brain.

After finishing yet another dinner with my mind wandering to the next exam and where would I live this summer, my face in a Cuisine magazine, scanning recipes to slot into my mental collection, my hand on autopilot, rhythmically supplying my mouth with the next delivery to be processed, the thought - what's next? immediately jumped to my mind. I had barely even noticed that I'd just eaten dinner. I couldn't tell you if I was full, I had just eaten until the plate was empty. I was already thinking; What snacks could I eat later? What would I have for breakfast tomorrow? How much had I already eaten today? and various other food related questions.

I realized, I needed an intervention. Moving on to dessert or finding another study snack was not what I needed or even wanted. Doing so would only leave me feeling full and crappy on top of bored and annoyed with school. It's not very satisfying snacking while I study or reading while I eat and I'm eating more than I'm using up with all this sitting. In all honesty, I'd rather not have to buy new pants but more importantly, I'd much rather actually enjoy eating and feel nourished than do it halfheartedly.

What I needed was a Closing Ceremonies. I decided on a new approach this week - the Olympics of Eating. I'm sure that conjures up images of an eating competition - 20 fist sized matzo balls in 2.6 minutes... but that's not exactly the idea.

It means Eating as an Event. The Olympics has both an opening and closing ceremonies. The meal is the extravaganza in the middle. So for 2 out of 3 daily meals this week, I'm trying to eat with full attention - no magazines, no textbooks, no radio. Just me and my plate.

My opening ceremonies is basically just a moment of looking at, smelling and thinking about what I'm about to eat before I start. Switching from study mode to dinner mode. The sight, smell and thought of food actually serves an important purpose - called the "Cephalic Phase" this is when neural signals from sensory input get the juices (such as saliva, pepsin and hydrochloric acid from the stomach and bile from the liver) flowing so we can digest the meal.

Next comes the main event - the meal itself - the enjoyment of tasting and feeling every crunch and squish, salty or sour: really being focused. Stopping to take a breath and relax. Perhaps even putting my fork down.

The Closing Ceremonies is just a few thoughts on how good the meal was, and how it is now over. That I've had dinner, I'm satisfied and I'm done eating. Time to move onto something else. I don't jump right back to my desk. I take a few minutes to walk around the block or I sit down with a magazine (other than Cuisine!) and enjoy, really enjoy reading it, sometimes I call a friend for a chat, or I write an email.

This isn't the first time I've returned to mindfulness. I just get off track every once in a while, but the point is just to come back to it when I do. It really works for me and most of all, it's really enjoyable. It's also not just about eating less. It's about me acknowledging that I need much more than just food to keep me happy and finding ways to get those somethings rather than distracting myself from wanting them with snacks.

Babaganoodle...

Hanging out with my 4 year old godson Davis over spring break, I was quickly sucked into the vortex of silliness that is his life! His latest thing was making up new names for whatever food we ate each day --- for example – he invited me to have “twidges” for dinner (pasta and greens with chorizo) and “babaganoodle” (waffles with peanut butter) for breakfast with him. Babaganoodle sounds to me like a strange middle eastern/Chinese fusion dish of creamy eggplant topped noodles… however, I think I'm being too literal. The point is that he still approaches food with fun and finds fun in pretty much everything.

I'm trying to keep that in mind while I get through this next busy spell. A great work opportunity came up at a very inopportune time. Trudging in the door tonight after class, dinner was about the last thing I wanted to think about. Then I remembered that I had treated myself to some wild harvested fiddlehead ferns at the market yesterday. I imagined that eating a bowl of something called fiddleheads would have to lighten me up a bit.


Fiddlehead Saute

Olive oil
garlic cloves
1/2 lb of fiddlehead ferns, brown stems trimmed (leave them no longer than 2 inches)
white wine
lemon thyme
salt and pepper

I washed them well in a few changes of water, then blanched them by dunking them into a pot of boiling water for about 2 minutes, draining them and running them under the sink in cold water until they were cool. Next I heated the oil in a big cast iron frying pan over medium-high heat and added the garlic and fiddleheads together (garlic burns easily and I was not in the mood to be watching over garlic). I let them cook a while... I've only cooked them once before and haven't eaten them many more, so after a little internet perusing, I just kept tasting until there was no longer a bitter undertone and the texture was like a perfect green bean. Everything I've read about them says not to overcook them! At the end, I splashed in a little white wine and added salt and pepper, stirring while I let the wine cook off a bit. Then I lay some on a bowl of pasta with some leftover roasted yams and tucked in.

I am definitely feeling a little lighter about everything on the to-do list now... fiddle dee dee.

Bacon and the Neighbour

Oh bacon…. smoky, salty, crispy, greasy and delectable… but so bad?! I have a love/hate relationship with it. Growing up, bacon was neutral, something to slather maple syrup over on weekend mornings when my dad lovingly made me bunny-eared pancakes with juicy blueberry eyes. It was in my teens when I latched onto a new identity as a vegetarian and gave it up. Then it was gross, inhumane, unhealthy; a perfect symbol of cultural excess and environmental destruction. I craved it for more than 10 years without ever giving in. I was proud of my control, my morals, and my unwavering dedication to my values.

Then something happened to me. I entered what I like to call the “lightening up” stage of my life, where tightly-defined rules gave way to something more dynamic and ‘context’ relevant. I started to make exceptions. I began to occasionally eat “bad foods” when I didn’t want to miss out on something culturally significant or connecting to someone dear to me. I’d eat my grandma’s borscht made with beef stock, or have the chicken smothered in mole verde on that trip to Mexico City. It felt right in those moments, but was followed by a sense of guilt or “selling out” that I couldn’t quite rectify.

The summer before I began my education at Bastyr University, I started dating my next-door neighbour: a French-Canadian musician from Montreal. He just didn’t get the “English” approach to food and health. For him, food was food. You ate it because it was good. You didn’t eat too much and you enjoyed a lot of different things, but most of all you never felt guilty about it. There was so much pressure to be ‘healthy’ in Vancouver. Where was the pleasure? It was curious and refreshing to hear such a seemingly non-obsessive relationship to food.

It was with him that my relationship with bacon changed. Every weekend (and occasional weekday mornings when we skived off work for a few hours) we would walk to the store and buy bacon. It wasn’t free range, grass fed, hormone or nitrate free. It was generic Safeway brand or sometimes as an extra treat, “Lazy Maple” with the maple “flavour” built right in. I waited for the voices in my head to tell me this was wrong. “I can’t believe you are going to eat this! All that saturated fat and toxic nitrates! What about the environment!?” But they never came. After we ate I expected the queasiness of guilt and fatty meat to set in. I waited to feel disgusting and full. But I never did. I felt energetic and light. I felt nourished.

Bacon gained immense importance in our relationship. It was a common bond. It had Rock Star status. It represented precious shared moments of hedonistic pleasure when climate change and heart disease didn’t matter. We would even close text messages with “bacon,” like “hugs and kisses,” only much more delicious.

On a trip to Montreal with the neighbour, I set aside my judgments and was surprised at how amazing I felt eating the ridiculously rich local delicacy – Poutine: French fries with fresh cheese curds slathered in gravy. Not exactly ‘heart smart’ fare. It was everywhere, and came in countless varieties. Sometimes it was topped with mounds of Montreal-style smoked meat. Of course there was one with bacon. I ate more than my usual year’s share of meat and heavy foods on that trip but I felt great. Even my pants were looser than when I stepped off the plane.

But when I came to study at Bastyr amidst the vegans and the socially responsible, I worried that someone would find out about my bacon habit. I felt like a fraud as a nutrition student. On lonely mornings when I turned to bacon for a dose of home, I felt heavy and full, my stomach churning from the salty grease, my thighs expanding from the fat. Something was definitely missing.

We learned about that something in my Psychology of Nourishment class. Eating a meal is more than just eating food. It is the entire experience of the meal that nourishes us: the care and attention that went into making it, the social nourishment of being with friends and family, our emotional state when we eat and the meaning we ascribe to the food. It makes sense.

Times with the neighbour nourished me on a level beyond the nutritional value of bacon. There was nowhere to rush to. I was relaxed and where I wanted to be. I ate with incredible sensual awareness, noting every detail of the crisp ruffled edges of the bacon. I savored every bite. I felt completely satisfied. I ate the whole experience: my mood, the company, the atmosphere, and most importantly the connection the meal created between us.

Eating provides us with more than just nutrients. Eating with awareness and curiosity can give us a hint about how the entire eating experience affects us and what we need to feel nourished and fulfilled, such as a sexy French-Canadian neighbour at the table.

Although my pancakes are rarely bunny-eared these days, I have returned to positive eating experiences. The neighbour has since moved back to Montreal, but he and bacon will always have a special place in my heart.

Vitamin Burps

It seems like everything I had heard, read and watched about nutrition in the media before coming to Bastyr focused on the battle between carbs, fats and protein. It's all about the struggle to lose weight and diets are all about the big 3 (in fancy nutrition lingo the “macronutrients”). But food gives us much much more than just those 3 things. That is very apparent from the strange paradox we are seeing around the globe today: an epidemic of obese people with malnutrition.

What's going on? People are getting a lot of the big 3, but very little of the other nutrients… the ‘micro nutrients’. The water soluble (Vitamins B and C) and fat soluble vitamins (Vitamin A, D, E, & K) not to mention the plethora of phytonutrients (as in plant compounds) such as antioxidants and the insanely large number of beneficial plant compounds we have yet to name, or even identify.

We take foods that are naturally spilling over with these powerful, essential compounds. We strip them, refine them, bleach them, sanitize them and pretty them up. Then we take what we took out and pop it into pills to be sold back to us as supplements. I can’t remember where I read this but it really struck me… Kind of strange- no? Those vitamins were ours. They were in our food and we have to pay to get them back. We shoudln't have to think about how to mix and match and meet all our needs from pills. Well there's an easy way to fix that... and it's delicious. Eat real, whole food.

I’ll take my vitamins as a juicy, fresh pear please. Or how about some garlic marinated roasted chicken with rosemary yams, edges crispy from olive oil and good old time in the oven? Or a pie, golden and steaming, with pounds of crisp local apples cooked down into sweet little sugary buttery coated pillows of love... sound a little more appealing than washing down a handful of chalky or gelatinous pills? wondering if it's the right formulation or the right time to take it (with a meal? empty stomach?) hoping that you don't taste fish oil all day, or that a ghostly cloud of white powder doesn't whisp from your nose as you exhale, carrying up, on a little burp, the contents from the burst gel cap lodged in your esophagus? (yes that happened to me).

When you eat, whatever you eat, eat real food. Think about getting your money's worth. Aim for nutrient density (more nutrients for the calories). Even when you eat a chocolate chip cookie... think about how it can have a few more nutrients in it (get the extra delicious one from the bakery with the real butter, rolled oats and walnuts). Add a handful of something green or red or orange to your meal - throw a bit of spinach or mushrooms into your spaghetti sauce or soup - grate an apple into your instant oatmeal and use real maple syrup instead of Aunt Jemimah maple flavour high fructose corn syrup on your pancakes, drink sparkling, real juice drinks instead of pop once in a while. Food is more than just fat, protein and carbs. Do little things to add the vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals you need. Even if its just a trace because Small Acts Add Up.

It's my favourite saying and it's true. No matter what you do, it matters. Little changes make a difference over time.