What you and Bear Grylls already have in common

Quick, what is an all natural ingredient used to color yogurt, juice and other "health food"? Here's a hint: It's used to turn things red, or reddish purple. And it used to crawl around on cacti in the desert.
Carmine! A red dye made from dried and ground up beetles. Specifically, their abdomens that house the fertilized eggs of the cochineal beetle. Yummy! More Strawberry yogurt please!
How did we find out about this?
One of our new toys is an app Denise downloaded onto her iphone called Fooducate. You can use it to scan the bar code of items at the grocery and get food grades, reviews and hints about what the good folks at fooducate think would be a healthier product. Denise scanned one of her previously favorite yogurts and was informed that it contained bug abdomens. Needless to say, we tried a different brand.
At first, I was grossed out and not just a little bit upset. Food manufacturers go out of their way to make sure you have no clue as to what you are eating or where it comes from. The only reason the practically toothless FDA made manufacturers start listing carmine as an ingredient was the risk of allergen exposure and the rare anaphylactic reactions. The food manufacturers knew that "ground up beetle coloring" would hurt sales, so they settled on the term Carmine.
But here's the tricky part.
Which is grosser: An all natural food coloring that is made from dried, ground up insects, or the "normal" food coloring, Red#whatever, which is derived from coal tar?
Limiting your processed food intake makes more and more sense the more you know about the food like substance creation system.
Suddenly, the beetles are not nearly as icky as before, just an extra protein boost. Maybe a little bit of extra fiber.

The joys of live television

So Jack and I are quite alike in one respect, we both love dogs.
Real blog entry coming soon, promise. Denise has been having some more epiphanies. I'm going to twist her arm to write them down.

Another goal for this year

Last time I tried these I think I cracked a thoracic vertebra. The key is holding your core tight so you don't fold very painfully in half, which I did. I'll try them again sometime when my wife is not around to tell me it's a bad idea.

So what DO you eat?

I get asked this alot.  I was explaining (vaguely) what we were doing to Noah's pediatrician and I think I scared her.  I'm sure in the file somewhere she has written down "Make sure he's getting real milk", "make sure she's not feeding him nuts".  Yes, Noah is drinking cow's milk (organic of course) and he's not eating nuts or peanut butter :)  It is, however, a challenge to feed him when we are eating fish and spicy bean hummus.  But he does ok.  What are we eating?  Here's a list of some of the things:

• Breakfast - always a protein fruit smoothie (unsweetened vanilla almond milk, a little greek yogurt, frozen fruit, protein powder)
• Weekend breakfast - brown rice and eggs scrambled together with a slice of Ezekial bread that is topped with natural peanut butter and a drizzle of honey.  This lasted all through sunday school and church without getting hungry!  And we eat breakfast early!
• Snack options:  greek yogurt mixed with blueberries and 1/4 c Kashi go lean, Ezekial cinnamon raisin english muffin topped with 1 TB natural peanut butter and a drizzle of honey, banana with 23 almonds, apple with 1 TB natural peanut butter, any other fruit with nuts, Larabars (apple pie is my fav), carrots with hummus
• Lunch - typically we make a big pot of something so we can zap it in the microwave.  Some recipes we have tried are Black Bean and Beef Soup, White Chicken Chili, some other bean and rice combination.  When we use meat it's grass fed beef or free range chicken and we add more beans.  We throw in rice too so the beans and rice make a complete protein.  We also do salads with black bean salsa and lots of veggies.
• Dinner - pan seared tuna with grilled veggies (still my fav!), last night it was grilled veggies topped with Dill and lemon pepper tilapia.  Sometimes it's salad, one of the bean dishes, or shrimp and grits!  I thought I was going to get tired of fish.  Hasn't happened yet!  We are trying new veggies too:  maple glazed parsnips and carrots (WW recipe using maple syrup - it's a natural sweetner!), roasted brussel sprouts and cauliflower, carrots, onions, mushrooms, broccoli, sweet potatoes.  I'm not feeling deprived at all!  I feel like I'm eating gourmet every night :)

There are a few "processed" foods I have allowed back in but they have to be organic.  For the nights we don't have time to cook or I'm too hungry to think I have some of Amy's Organic burritos on hand.  And we did have organic pizza twice BUT it didn't have meat on it, just veggies.  I'm thinking if Jillian was starving and didn't have time to cook (well she would probably run up to the local tree hugging restaurant and grab something) but this is Jemison and there's no such place so I'm thinking she would go for this.  One day I might ask her :)

So there you have it.  This is what we DO eat.  I have tried so many new things and I'm loving it!  The weekends are still sometimes tough but we just treat them as a week day and eat the same things.  When we are out and there are tough choices to make we both agree that it's nice that we don't really have to debate about whether we are going to allow ourselves this or that.  Instead we can blame it on Jack and Jill!  They are the crazies not us ;o)

Unhappy People

`Nuff said,
Cliff

When do you want to stop this thing? (or How unhealthy do you want to get?)

Since finding out that I can't live off of mush for brunch and a salad for dinner, Denise and I have been kicking around the idea of stopping our experiment. We had even thought about calling it quits after the two month mark.
But then we started talking about what we would let back into our diet. Cheese? Milk? Reasonable choices. Chocolate cake? Mama Dathie's Apple Dumplins? Tasty choices, but not really healthy choices. Pigs feet? That was a straight no. I've had barbecued pigs feet, and I can honestly say that is one portion of pig anatomy that holds no attraction for me.
When is it a treat, and when is it a sugary fat filled bomb that will give me a migraine and make me feel like crap? How unhealthy are we OK with being? Is being healthy 80% of the time acceptable? 90%? 99.5%? And how would you even gauge the acceptable level of crap to eat?
Hard questions, especially since I am finally starting to feel good. My energy level is great most of the time. I'm drinking coffee now more to avoid the withdrawal headache than to pep me up. I'm not nearly as constipated as I was before either. (We're all friends here, and when we're in our 80's that will be a normal topic of conversation.)
So I am less inclined to stop now that I am finally seeing some payback for all of my hard work. Also, I'm not so sure that we wouldn't revert back to old "sin and repent" eating habits. I think I need the extra discipline right now.
Thus I will continue with Jack Lalanne's words of wisdom:
"If man makes it, don't eat it."