Gluten-free June: a post at last

I have been eating a gluten free diet since 2 June and I can safely say that one of the side effects is that you become a less diligent blogger.   Finally posting some initial thoughts on this diet which I was particularly interested in as I have two Coeliac friends (Mark and Pete) and I wanted to see what it was like to live with their forced dietary requirements.  In case you do not know, my Coeliac friends are not from Coelia: they have Coeliac's disease which gives them an intolerance of gluten.  

Check out some more yummy facts on gluten here.  It is a combination of two proteins and I was fascinated to read that gluten was first discovered by vegetarian Buddhist monks who were looking for something to give their food some more elasticity like meat.   This knowledge has come back to haunt me: as you will hear, the lack of gluten can lead to some pretty dry, flaky, nay, friable food items which is not appetising.   However, generally, I am loving the diet: as ever it is not about deprivation but about exploration and I have made friends with loads more grains - more of this anon.   

The key thing for me though is that I have discovered that gluten is in almost everything we eat and snacks are almost all wheat-based so I have not been able to eat biscuits etc during breaks (I have been in training sessions for a week).  This gives me high hopes of weight loss: I am working on getting in great shape for next triathon season.  Mark and Pete are both skinny so that also encourages me that I will be able to get to fighting weight on this diet (OK they run 60km a week too...).

More gluten-free stuff soon...

Vegan Expo

Hey check it out, the Vegan Expo is in Sydney this Sunday!

I'm totally going down there:
http://www.vegansocietynsw.com/vs/html/index.html

The other thing is I've been listening to a podcast lately called Vegan Freak Radio which is really funny and ranty but also self-deprecating and has some interesting philosphical insights, definitely worth checking out:
http://veganfreak.net/

June, the month of...?

I haven't got a dietary focus for this month, partly because I was so into the vegan thing I never got around to shifting my attention to making a plan for June.

I have kept (largely) to the vegan thing. I tried salmon once, a previous favourite, and was actually pretty turned off and won't be buying it again. Ditto for cheese, although we have some in the house now because Sarah bought some, but I'm not including it in meals - oh except for some haloumi we had to finish off... No yoghurt or milk or butter at all. And I'm still trying to avoid baked goods (muffins, cakes etc) with the egg and the milk ingredients.

I loved the vegan diet, I liked the way it made me feel and I liked the new ideas it brought to my cooking. It was occasionally inconvenient, but never really difficult and I think would get a lot easier as your lifestyle adapts to it.

I would like to join Dan with the gluten-free thing, but I need to spend more time reading about it and planning what I would eat, then stocking the house with the right foods. Which I will do. The second issue is that I've just started ramping up my training for the Sydney Marathon and added some more bike kms as well, so my body will be working very hard for the next few months and will need some serious carbs. I'm sure it's possible to get enough carbs in a gluten-free manner, but I would need to give it some research before I launch into it.

Dan be warned, I'll be living vicariously through your experience this month and gathering lessons for myself!

Choosing a bread

I just saw this article on the Sydney Morning Herald website.

It's no good for you at the moment Dan, since you're off the gluten this month. However when (or if) you get back into it, then I figure if you're going to eat wheat, you might as well do it properly! There's a very interesting point about wholemeal which I hadn't realised before.

"When it comes to bread, Davie, and co-author, nutritionist Dr Joanna Mcmillan Price, have given five star ratings to pumpernickel, sourdough breads made with whole grain or rye and the heavier wholegrain breads made from wholewheat flour and added grain. Wholemeal, however, doesn't rate so highly - neither does multigrain bread, which Davie and McMillan Price say is made with white flour with a few grains added.

What's wrong with wholemeal? Strictly speaking, a bread made with wholemeal flour can be labelled whole grain because it does contain the whole grain - ie the wheat's bran and germ, the nutritious bits that are removed to make white flour - in the same proportion as found in whole grain bread. But because the fibre in wholemeal flour is ground so finely, it has a higher Glycemic Index than denser whole grain breads.

"Wholemeal bread might have more fibre than 100% white flour and more nutrients but, like white flour, it has a high GI and doesn't keep you feeling full for very long," says Davie. "Any bread made with wholewheat flour is more nutritious than white as it's the outer husk surrounding the wheat - stripped away to make white flour - that contains the majority of nutrients." This makes it nutritionally better than white bread, but not as a nutritious as a good whole grain bread - one that's brown in colour, heavy in weight and with the most visible grain kernels, say Davie and McMillan Price.

What's so good about pumpernickel, according to Star Foods , is that it's made from whole grain rye, is very high in fibre, and packed with nutrients including B vitamins and iron, is low GI - and again, hard to overeat, says Judy Davie.

Wholegrain sourdough and rye sourdough get a five star rating for combining both the nutrients and fibre from a whole grain with the GI lowering benefit that comes with making bread with an acidic sourdough starter (made from fermenting flour and water) rather than yeast.

My pick of the best breads? If I'm supermarket shopping it's Burgen rye or soy and linseed, but if I'm at the deli or health food shop or market I'll get breads from smaller bakeries like Common Ground, Sonoma, Bowen Island or La Tartine. I also love Pure Life's Sprouted Essene bread - a very moist heavy bread made with sprouted wheat or rye that's almost like cake. Lower in salt, but higher in protein than most breads, a single slice keeps you going for hours.

For more information about food and nutrition, check out Davie's website http://www.thefoodcoach.com.au/- as well as healthy recipes, it includes a database which lets you key in the name of just about any food you can think of to find out its nutrient value and tips for using it."

Link to the full article here.

1st June - Breaking of the fast

Nice work Dan! A very interesting month of variety you've had, I can't wait to hear more detail andhopefully try it myself soon.

As for me, well I successfully negotiated VEGAN AND ALCOHOL FREE MAY and tonight it was all about pizza and wine (this is a stock photo - it's actually been chardonnay). Tamburlaine Hunter Valley Chardy that we've been saving a case of for special occasions, and tonight certainly is one.



I'm feeling happy as a clam right now! Too drunk to type sensibly now (that's on a mere 2 glasses), but we got takeaway gourmet vegetarian pizza and linguine pesto from a great local Italian resaurant (pesto we have missed terribly because of it's parmesan cheese content). Absolutely delicious but extremely oiley which I think I'll be paying for tomorrow. We'll see.

Now I have to decide the diet for June! Maybe gluten free? Hmmmm, requires more (sober) reflection.

Variety May: doing 30 in a bulked up area

I have to say, sharing a blog with Mike who obviously missed his calling as a monk in a silent order when it comes to depriving himself of things is looking tougher by the minute, but anyway...

Two things to do here: share my learnings and give you my top tips for food variety.

How did I go?
Here are my food variety counts for the 16 straight days I tracked and some notes where useful: 18 (just starting), 20(on a plane), 36 (in harness!), 31, 31, 26, 28, 14 (followed my dad's diet - see below), 30, 30, NA, 18 (missed a meal), 21 (no snacks), 19 (missed a meal), 30 (thai meal), 30 (salad lunch and curry), 18 (traveling). (These scores are 'raw' scores, not using the Food Variety Checklist. I will post about that in the next couple of days).

Not bad, hitting the magic 30 about 50% of the time. I am feeling well, I have energy for training and I have found that a focus on variety has no downsides and a surprising side-benefit: one of the great things I learnt is that if you aim for variety, you never eat huge calorie loads of pasta etc so this is compatible with calorie control if that's what you are after.

A big challenge this month has been that I have been in the UK looking after my dad who is on chemo. My main job there is to feed him up with hi-cal (fatty) foods and while this was problematic as I am trying to lose some weight it also presented challenges with variety. I deliberately followed his diet one day and it gave me my lowest food variety. The worrying thing is that our diet that day was pretty typical: fish, chips, steak etc. Without adding the fruit that I did my food variety would have been in single digits. I realised that loads of people eat this diet evry day and without varying it over the weeks and months: high calorie, high salt, few micronutrients - a time bomb...

Top tips
Here's what I learnt this month.
- Eat well! Sounds obvious but when you choose health you choose variety (see note on my dad's diet). Striving for food variety should be part of every lifestyle.
- Put nuts, fruit and live yog on your cereals
- Eat muesli! With yog, milk and banana on top you can be over 10 on variety before you get up from breakfast.
- A smoothie could also be good: add wheat germ , spirulina etc and you could be into variety heaven.
- Don't skip meals - we know that, right?
- Snack healthily: a great chance to get different fruit, veg, nuts and seeds into you. We know that too, right?
- Eat Thai and other foods that focus on variety and the abundance of veggies.
- Have a meal where you eat from the fridge: huge variety and delicious!
- Beware of repeating days - I think it's worthwhile trying to eat different stuff through the week rather than repeating the same 30 day after day.
- Eat with the seasons: for real variety through the year, eat what's in season. This is also cheaper and you can eat from local suppliers thus saving the planet as you tuck in!
- Travelling makes things tough so pack some varied snacks and seek variety.

Final tip is: live a varied life. Eat with vegans, visit the ocean and buy fish, go into an area of the supermarket you don't normally visit, when you see odd foods - buy them, go to some ethnic areas of your city and get into the local nosh. It has been great to see Mike also discovering this on the Vegan diet. If we are what we eat, then let's be varied, different and exciting!

The Omnivore's Dilemma

Speaking of food and being mindful of the way you eat, we saw a great interview on The 7:30 Report last week with Michael Pollan, author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma".

You can view the transcript and watch the interview here. These were my favourite quotes from the interview:

You know, if the whole world tries to eat meat the way the Americans and the Aussies do, we'll need 2.3 more worlds to feed them.

You've got to distinguish the real foods from the edible food like substances.

We also can look to other cultures that have learned how to navigate a culture of abundance. The Japanese, for example, they have a rule called hara hachi bu, eat until your four-fifths full. What a radical idea to not eat until your full. But many cultures have that rule.