Tip of the Week - Pizza

When I was first diagnosed, I thought pizza was out. But pizza has come back to my life. The key is portion control. And as a diabetic, starch is never the center of my meal. I will have a SIDE of rice pilaf or a SIDE of mac 'n cheese (often in a tiny cast iron skillet) but no, there will not be a plate of pasta in front of me. I still eat things like polenta and grits but I make sure my plate is divided into quarters - one quarter protein, one quarter starch, two quarters veggies. No deprivation at all.

Here's the tip: Don't order delivery pizza. Go to a restaurant with friends. The more expensive the better. There's an awesome place that serves wood oven pizzas. I split one as an appetizer with three other people and I get one slice, two slices max. Pizza is never the center of my meal. And believe me, pizza with proscuitto, shaved Parmesan and asparagus -HEAVEN!

New Segment - Tip of the Week

You know, living the lifestyle, you can take a lot of the changes for granted. That's the point isn't it? What used to be a huge effort is now a natural part of your routine. So to capture some of the ongoing things that are becoming almost subconscious, I am instituting the Tip of the Week. We're all learning something, so if you have something you've incorporated into your routine, feel free to share in the comments.

Here's my tip of the week - Restaurant Eating

When you've eaten your portion of food, put a napkin on top of your plate. I am finding my meal is DONE. Like I would totally be embarrassed if I had to unearth my food from a napkin. It also indicates to a server you are done so that the food is outta there.

What are things you all do to keep on track in restaurants?

Health-ifying Restaurant Food

I know a lot of people are against the idea of a "mommy state" politically, but I am all in favor of this kind of government reform. I know just how hard it is to battle obesity and lifestyle diseases. I'll take all the help anyone wants to offer. Here's a NYT article about a new NYC voluntary plan to make restaurant food hold the salt:

Business
New York Seeks National Effort to Curtail Salt Use
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
Published: January 11, 2010
The broad new health initiative sets a goal of reducing the salt in packaged and restaurant food by 25 percent over the next five years.

Easy and Elegant weeknight dinner

So B, our favorite restaurant serves these awesome California style pizzas. V, our favorite server always makes a recommendation to add arugula and a fried egg on top of their mushroom pizza and truly it's sheer heaven. Being diabetic, I can only have one slice, although I totally poach more than my share of yolky arugula.

Color be delighted when J found an Alsatian tart with bacon and caramelized onions at Trader Joes. For some magical happenstance, there's only 11 grams of carbs for 1/4 of a decent size tart (bigger than a personal pan pizza). That means I can eat the whole damn things and only ingest 44 grams of carbs. Now with bacon and cheese and onions the fat content is off the charts but that's why I run 18 miles a week.

As an experiment this weekend, I decided to top the tart with arugula and a fried egg. My twist was to toss the arugula in a meyer lemon vinaigrette. And OH MY GOD. Arugula salad and Alsatian tart is a better flavor combination of chocolate and peanut butter. The sharp pepperiness of the arugula and the tang of the vinaigrette are in perfect harmony with the salty sweetness of the tart. I've had this twice this week and could have it every night if I had my druthers. This is a total cheap eat because the tart is like $3.99 and the arugula is like $2.99.

And the Meyer lemons come from my tree.

crossposted at: bayareafoodblog.wordpress.com

Giving Thanks for Running

The theme for this Thanksgiving should be the Olympian - stronger! higher! faster! because I ran my ass off that weekend. Along with eating a truckload of food.

Eating
On the eating side of things, I did a sorta stupid/sorta smart thing - I barely ate anything leading up to Thanksgiving dinner. You see, I would be having real food professionals over for Thanksgiving. We picked up a maple and rosemary-brined turkey from Cheffie Mark. We would be having a cheese plate selected by the cheesemonger at the wine bar where Bellisima works. And a trio of soup shooters. And that's before we even sit down for dinner. So leading up to the big meal (and I mean BIG meal), I ate a grand total of 30 grams of carbs. 15 grams from a roasted pepper frittata and 15 from an apple. I also had a salad during the day. While I am sure it was playing havoc with my body and my metabolism, I wanted to eat my Thanksgiving meal with abandon. And I did. It was spread out over the course of six hours and all of it was delicious. The great thing about this meal (where we had a summit to plan the menu!) was that we all floated in an out of the kitchen. Noone was slaving over anything because we all contributed.

So yes, we started with the cheese and pate (homemade!) platter with onion jam, fig and raison compete and a red currant gelee. That was followed by soup shooters of tomato soup with a quark dollop, beet and carrot soup with a coriander sour cream, and a cauliflower soup with a bagna cauda drizzle. And then everything settled in our stomachs and we were already full. But we plowed on to eat mashed potatoes, mashed acorn squash, the aforementioned turkey, green beans, homemade rolls, and a kale and sweet potato casserole. We sent everyone home with dessert bags because noone could touch the pumpkin tarts or the apple cobblers. We spent the post dinner part of Thanksgiving nibbling on J's homemade truffles and cheese and pears.

The great thing about this was the bounty of vegetable dishes and the fact that J made truffles with dark chocolate which are intrinsically low-carb (although high fat). by the next morning my glucose level was a surprisingly low 97.

Running

Thanksgiving weekend also entail a good amount of running. On Thanksgiving day, Muffin and June actually found out about a 5K that was within walking distance of our house. It was a great way to start the day. This was a totally informal race set up my a neighborhood gym. No big clock or starting gun. To keep my ankles and knees ok, I run on a gym treadmill. It was definitely different (and more exhausting run on cold, hard concrete. And definitely exhausting to run uphill for a quarter of the race. But all in all, I ran strong and had a good time.

The Sunday after Thanksgiving, I ran the Run Wild for a Child race in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. It was very interesting to run because I thought there were part where I was running pretty slowly. But in the end I ran the entire 6.2 miles in 51:41 minutes which is an 8:19 minute pace. This is well ahead of the 9:11 pace I ran for the Presidio 10K in March. Yay me! It's interesting to see how much I hate running up hills and how badly I am about gauging my pace.

I'm very Thankful I have this disease under control and am I very thankful I am in a position to get stronger, higher and faster. And, of course, thanks to all of you out there, especialyl stef, who's been an invaluable sounding board.

The Challenge

I work at an organization that promotes healthy living and I get to interview someone on their project to get members of their community to eat 5-10 servings of fruits and vegetables a day. It's really fascinating because they are working with a low-literacy, limited English proficient, immigrant population. The learning is very experiential and visual. What I find to be a great success story was the person running the program felt like she had to actually eat 5-10 servings of fruits and vegetables a day so she wasn't spewing hypocriticial bs. And after six months on the program she lost 30 pounds. She didn't do anything else. In fact she was telling me about how she's also be eating nachos and steak. But she was eating a heck of a lot less nachoes and steak because she had to get her 10 servings in. So here's my challenge - eating 10 servings of fruits and vegetables a day.

Here's a handy guide for those of you who are unfamiliar with serving sizes for fruits and vegetables.

In this challenge I have amended the rules:

1. Canned fruits and veggies don't count (although frozen does as long as it's not packed in syrup)

2. Beans and legumes don't count. They are the great superfood but they are like loaded with carbs. Great if you are a hunter who hunts and forages all day. Bad if you are diabetic.

3. Hell to the no with juice. It's not a fruit, it's sugar.

So here goes. I'll check in weekly about this but I am curious to see how realistic 10 servings is.

Frank Bruni Interview in Salon - Thoughts?

So I'm reading the Frank Bruni interview in Salon. He gave this little piece of insight to his own challenges with eating.

I think people with eating issues can't imagine the constant temptation of being a restaurant critic. You work out a fair amount. But really, what was the trick in keeping off weight?

Being a restaurant critic helped me maintain weight and not gain weight, because I think my problem is the same as that of a lot of many people whose eating gets out of control in that I really kind of rode a sort of binge-purge roller coaster, and that roller coaster was facilitated by my ability to tell myself the lie that I was going to be really bad today and tomorrow and maybe even the next day because the next week I was going to do a cleanse or a fast. As a restaurant critic, I had to keep eating at a certain pace. By never being able to tell myself with any degree of convincing honesty that I was going to be great and do an ultra-ultra-extreme deprivation next week, I never allowed myself to binge the way I had in the past, because I couldn't tell myself with any convincing honesty or authority that sort of purge was coming up on the far end of it.

I think it does affirm a piece of what we try and say here - it's about the eating and deprivation isn't a great way to approach living healthy. It's a fascinating interview and really makes me want to go out and buy his book.

What are your thoughts?

The Spa Staycation

I'm nothing if not a trend followerer and in this economy the staycation makes a lot of sense. Stef, in her other blog asked her readers about what they would do for a staycation in DC. The idea of a weeklong staycation sounds awesome. So I am giving stef my idea of a spa staycation in DC.

Here's some guidelines. That money you were going to spend on hotel and travel, use a tiny chunk of it and get someone to clean your apartment. No, seriously. The first time I had Shirley, my cleaning woman, clean my apartment with J, I giggled at the sight of a spotless apartment that I had no hand in cleaning. One assumption I am making is that you will have an easy morning and nothign really will be happening until 11:00 am at the earliest.

Here's the schedule:

Friday - Get the house cleaned!

Saturday - Get provisions: fruit from the farmer's market. Some good fresh bread from Marvelous Market. Hummus, tzatziki, carrots, and grape tomatoes. A small bottle of good olive oil.

Sunday - The fun begins
Sleep in and informal breakfast
Lunch at Teaism
Walk from Teaism to Dunbarton Oaks and look at the most beautiful garden in DC
Dinner at Dino (they have a great prix fixe for $25)

Monday - Spa day. Take advantage of the fact you'll get an appointment because everyone else will be working
Sleep in and brunch at home
Half day at Serenity Day Spa in Tenleytown (since it's affiliated with Sport and Health Club, you all get a one day pass there)
1 hour of exercise at Sport and Health
Dinner at Lebanese Taverna

Tuesday - Veg out day
Grocery run for snacks
Stay in during the day and watch one season of Buffy
Beginning modern dance improv class at Joy of Motion Dance studio
Take out sushi from Spices (also the Wafu salad is to die for!)
More Buffy

Wednesday - Feeding your mind
Lunch at the Museum of the American Indian Food court (avoid the Fry Bread!)
Look up at http://www.si.edu/events/onetime.htm the Smithsonian one time events. they have tons of stuff going on every day
Dinner in - perhaps broiled tilapia and roasted asparagus?
After dinner: Take the bus up to Politics and Prose and go browsing

Thursday - back to Nature
Morning walk into Rock Creek park (there's a trailhead right in between Van Ness and Cleveland Park)
Lunch at home
The National Zoo
Dinner at home - Salad with a lemon vinaigrette and sauteed shrimp. With bread on the side.

Friday - Day of Beauty
Lunch at home
Spa day at Elizabeth Arden in Friendship Heights
Dinner at Central

Saturday - Yum!
Ok Stef. It's time to step up to the plate and do some entertaining! But I'll make sure you are well supplied and give you a menu where the only cooking is slicing some tomatoes and cooking a steak!

A visit to the Cheverly Farmer's market in the morning to get provisions for a dinner for four
- bread
- salad greens
- grape tomatoes
- cucumbers
- sugar snap peas
- red onions
- fresh fruit in season
- cheese for a cheese plate
Stop by Eastern Market to get a nice flank steak (1 1/2 pounds)
Lunch at Cafe Atlantico where you will get their Latin Dim Sum
Chill out for the afternoon and recover form the enormous lunch
Dinner at home
- cheese plate with bread, grape tomatoes and cheeses (I'd suggest a nice aged gouda, stilton, and a goat cheese
- steak salad (salt and pepper the flank steak, grill in a super hot pan for 4 minutes on either side, let rest under foil and slice as thinly as possible agaisnt the grain). Salad with a balsamic vinaigrette, salad greens, cucumber and sugar snap peas.
- sliced fruit over ice cream for dessert.

Sunday - Feel refreshed yet?

You CAN Go Home Again

I know I've shared with you before that going to visit my family is always a big "eating danger zone" for me. All the old factors are there -- the emotional side of family dinners, huge portion sizes, different kinds of food -- but I'm happy to report that this was a very successful visit, eating-wise! I've shared with my family what I'm trying to do with the nutritionist, and they all got very into the idea.

I stayed with my brother for 2 days, and he really made the effort to try and pick good eating-out places (sushi, a cute locally-sourced cafe for brunch) and even cooked me a meal. He was very eager to show off his kitchen skillz (he's been cooking a lot longer than me) and made marinated tilapia filets with his own seasoned couscous with peas. Plus he showed me how he makes plain oatmeal with sugar-free maple syrup to give it some flavor. He also bought me special snacks and we were good all weekend.

Then it was 2 days with Mom and Dad. They also bought some special snacks just for me, and had good breakfast items. Sunday night dinner was tricky, as Dad made a big lamb roast, but we'd talked about the menu beforehand and he traded out his original plan of homemade mac & cheese for his saffron rice with peas & tomatoes (yum). Plus he did 2 different sides of cooked veggies - the usual carrots, celery, and potatoes in with the roast (I skipped the potatoes) and roasted mushrooms and artichoke hearts. I skipped bread, and tried to have sensible portion sizes of the lamb and all the sides. It was delish!

We ate out twice in Bloomington, and both times were ripe with potential temptations.... first up, my promised birthday dinner for Dad (a month late) at his choice of restaurants. He chose a steak place, well-known for huge portions of meat. I perused the menu beforehand and made my choice, knowing it was a treat. I got a 7 oz petit filet (instead of the 10 oz or any of the monster-sized steaks), allowing myself a steak since I never cook that at home. I make chicken, and pork chops, and fish, so the steak was a real treat. It came with a baked potato, which I had with some sour cream, a nice side salad which I ate completely with vinaigrette and a little crumbly bleu (treat!), and one roll with a little butter. I was hungry enough I could've eaten more, but I didn't fill up on bread and instead really enjoyed my dinner.

Then, today, Mom and I visited my favorite place in B'ton, an Afghan restaurant. I had my heart set on my favorite dish, another lamb dish, and I was a little annoyed when I was peer-pressured into having the lunch buffet. (Yes, I was tired, and didn't mean to be a snit but sometimes it just happens. Sorry Mom.) I love that lamb dish and had planned for what was in it -- the buffet was good, absolutely, but it was totally different stuff for me to think about what I was eating. I did fill my plate, with mostly veggie dishes, some brown rice with carrots & raisins, 3 little beef meatballs, and a small piece of chicken. But -- I skipped the bread and the hummus, and I skipped the "included" baklava-style dessert.

So -- even though I was worried about this trip being bad for my overall dieting efforts, I think I did fairly well and still indulged a little since it was a vacation after all. :-)

I stepped on Mom and Dad's scale this morning and really liked what I saw... I'm going to wait to see what my own scale says tomorrow just to see if they're calibrated differently, but it seems like week 2 of this plan is working.

Eating Habits

When I first got diagnosed, I totally changed how I ate. Taking that crazy ass diabetes class, I took a hard line those first two months about eating. As I have taken control of my health, I've gained some mad skillz in the eating department, especially in restaurants. The obvious things like sugar, white flour, and things made with those two ingredients were off the table. Other things like Vietnamese food, Thai food and sushi were also off the table. The scary thing about that was seeing stuff as gateway drugs. If I had a taste of something I would want lots and lots of it. Somehow, my stomach adjusted to where I self regulate automatically. I make sure I order a large serving of vegetables and lean protein that I eat first. With my stomach sated, I can eat ONE piece of bread or a single serving of rice, or a few pieces of sushi.

Case in point, I've been traveling to Minnesota and ordered a nice piece of walleye fish with a corn and sweet potato hash. I had a huge salad with it and ate the whole salad and all of the fish. Stomach filled with protein and vegetables, I really couldn't eat more than a serving of the hash.

So Vietnamese, Thai, sushi, and even bread are back in the list. Desserts made with sugar are still of the list. It's great to know I've developed some diabetic friendly eating habits because it is as much about the inside as the outside.

And speaking of inside, Stef, you are totally kicking my ass when it comes to the cholesterol. My HDL is 40 and my total cholesterol is 199. I am totally jealous of your numbers.

What I've Learned from My Co-Blogger

Well, a lot of things, cuz he's pretty great. :-) But one of the biggest things T has said that has stuck with me is the idea that you need to set yourself up for success. If you have temptations in front of you, it's going to be hard to resist them. If you're only surrounded by bad things, you're going to eat bad things. But if you create an environment or a routine where you can easily make good choices, you will. That's a really important lesson.

Here's one way I'm learning to apply that lesson in real life.

I *hate* bringing my lunch to work. Even though every couple of weeks I go on a kick of thinking I'll do it and buying a bunch of entrees or soups or snack-packs to bring in, I really don't like doing it and almost never actually pack that lunch bag. The "lunch food" in my pantry often becomes a weekend lunch instead.

So -- I love to go out in the neighborhood for lunch, either to grab something quick to take back to my desk or to make it a social outing with coworkers. I work in a neighborhood with LOTS of options, from takeout delis to full-on white linen dining. When I'm *not* being particularly mindful about my eating, I have plenty of opportunities to get greasy sandwiches, chips, big burritos, burgers and fries and pizza, oh my!

BUT, there are also places with really healthy and interesting and tasty lunch options. And this week I've made it a point to go to one of those really great places -- Teaism -- and explore the variety of their menu. In 3 different visits, I had 3 totally different things and they were all delicious and fresh and - though they may not all be considered "light" - I know everything was pretty good for me nutritionally. Best of all, these meals were satisfying and because there's so much variety I didn't get bored. I had: grilled beef and veggie kebabs with brown rice with fresh mint and coriander; chicken udon soup; and Vietnamese shrimp spring rolls with miso soup.

Knowing that I have such a great restaurant with so much tasty variety nearby makes it very easy for me to make good choices at lunchtime, and to feel good about supporting a local business at the same time. Sounds like success to me!

Dining Out

For us diabetics dining out can be a minefield. Cooking at home means you can measure everything and calculate the carbs and know you're safe. My problem eating out is actually that I totally overestimate everything and end up having a low blood sugar moment. That's a train to Shelbyville (Steel Magnolias reference!). For example, I went to a great restaurant near our house and ordered the lamb sliders (Mmmmm!) and I estimated the carb content of the mini buns to be around 15 g of carbs per bun. It turns out they were much less than that because my blood sugar level went down to 65 (it should go below 80) and I was all shaking and bitchy.

But dining out has been a joy when I realize there are things I CAN eat and things I can enjoy. Here's the cuisines I've been partaking as well as the ones I'm avoiding:

The Good:
The Classy High-End places - These are awesome because the portioning is usually a decent sized piece of protein (roast chicken, steak), a great vegetable, and a starch that is fairly well defined portion wise.

Chinese - There are many things on a Chinese menu that fills my tummy and are low carb. Mu Shu! Hot and Sour Soup! Things to avoid are those General Tso's type of of batter fried. But most of the menu is a cavalcade of fun for this diabetic.

Indian - Naan may not be your friend but the basmati rice is easy to portion out and the curries and tandooris can be eaten to your heart's content.

The many organic diners in the Bay Area - tasty omelets and salads along with toast is killer(in the good way)! I'm blessed to be fairly indifferent about french fries so the salad substitution is great.

In and Out - a double double has 30 grams of carbs. I can have 45-60 per meal. If I do take out and make myself a salad I am SOOOOOOO set.

The Not So Good:
Vietnamese - sugar is a pretty integral part of of the sauces and marinades so I have been hesitant to try. I have made a splenda nuoc cham at home and that is some tasty eating.

Thai - Do you know what the carb content is for 1/2 a cup of pad thai? 98 grams. At most you should have 60 grams per meal. What the hell? Are they dousing it in sugar and deep frying? A Kripsy Kreme donut is less than that!

Mexican - Beans have carbs. Rice has carbs. Tortillas have carbs. Avocados are teeming with fat.