Gut Feelings--No More Eating To Please

Just at the four week mark in England, heading to Israel tomorrow; I finished translating Alpha this morning! And sent in the final portion of my second packet of this year's MFA work (i.e. thesis and critical paper work). Doesn't it always feel good to have some closure before a trip?
For a little more closure, since I'm burning the candle hard at both ends anyway, the promised post on some food stuff that isn't going away (yet?)
You'd think--I keep thinking--that a light bulb will go off and I'll have it all figured out and have created a sustainable, simple, failsafe way to fuel my physical existence in this world and perhaps even understand that this is necessary as a prerequisite to other things.

But just as I failed to find one single "bottom", the light bulb moment is elusive too, and I keep bobbing around the same old gyre. That said, my current problem is a result of having tried something "new" but finding it led back to "same old." Since getting out of the hospital--two months now, yay!--I'd been trying to eat a variety of foods rather than living mostly on coconut milk. This meant experimenting with legumes and gluten free grains, and even, via an ill-advised purchase of a marked-down-gluten-free boxed brownie mix, with some refined flour and sugar in the dynamite medium of chocolate. Oh, my proclivity for marked down goods! Always gets me in trouble. And then I allowed my mum to get me similar gluten free packaged goods to sample over here. I learned that my body, like most bodies, is susceptible to addiction to the chocolate/sugar combination, and suffered much guilt and painful cravings even while being able to taste the essential emptiness of that food.. 
I continued with the illusion that my body could cope with these foods...
And even relaxed my ban on sucralose so I could have good old English ginger beer in the zero calorie version.

This ginger beer is from Sainsbury's; the "diet" versions from two other supermarkets I looked at had barley malt in the ingredients! Diet soda that isn't gluten free?! Aside from the sucralose, the above picture has two other issues. The enormous amount of liquid recalls a flagging of massive liquid consumption as ominous in a post of about 18 months ago. And, well, the diet product. Um, of course it's reasonable for me to try the products over here and see what they're like, right? It's quite good, incidentally.
I got sick. Not from the sucralose--so far that seems okay. From the food, from expanding my palette and kidding myself that I could handle a broader range of foods. There were two days in the past week that I basically couldn't do anything, except some translating, and was just in abject pain all through the inside of my body. I've had to scale the variety way back and to accept that I have to be super careful. Even relying heavily on charcoal and silica gel and enzymes, if I have one bite too many I am in agony. I already mentioned using tons of charcoal a little while back, but I wasn't yet ready then to face that the things I was choosing to eat were simply making me sick.
So, no I can't just eat anything gluten free and be okay. And I can't just go out to eat and trust I won't get sick if I order something I know will work. And no I can't just eat more of something because it tastes good. I was doing quite a bit of "eating to please" also, and can't do that anymore. Whether my gut issues are a result of having celiac or are created/exacerbated by the history of self starvation is a moot point at this stage, and saying a person can go gung ho on all kinds of foods in the interests of "recovery" or of fitting in with other people is misguided if there are genuine problems, even if getting sick doesn't happen immediately.
If you have gut permeability issues, they can preclude good digestion even if you're not getting symptoms of indigestion. Inflammation will build up, until you're confronted with it harshly as I was last week, and as I could have avoided being by laying off grains, legumes, and refined sugar also. Since sucralose is sucrose with the hydrogen bonds replaced with chlorine, it's pretty likely it could penetrate a leaky gut in a not-so-nice way, so I should probably reconsider the ginger beer and (unpictured) energy drinks.
Duh, right?! A light bulb turning off and on like a fireworks display--can't I just keep it on and act on the realization?
The best part is that my mum has undertaken to remind me not to eat "too much", which will be a welcome contrast from her expressing concern over whether I've eaten "enough".
Ugh, I don't love talking about food! Do you hate me talking about food? It's good to have this under awareness before we go to Israel, since the food is so fantastic and tempting there. I'm relieved to be back on the straight and narrow, and to have overridden the "eat to please" imperative, to have headed back to more bearable ways to deal with the problem that generally, eating tends to beget eating.

Encountering Strange Fruit--Medlars!

Time, high time for a post. I've had the delight of encountering weird and wonderful fruit in various far flung places of the world, and in one of my lifetimes was nicknamed "the fruit fairy". Who knew that I'd find an unfamiliar fruit right here in London? Show and tell must ensue, but after I put up this post I also need to talk about food in a more serious way, as the time has come to face up to some issues I've been trying to ignore.

The apples are russet apples, which I mentioned before, crisp, sour-sweet, special texture, never had them outside of England. The little fruits that look like tan-colored rosehips?

These are called MEDLARS. I said they look like rosehips, and the juxtaposition with the russet apple insinuates the relatedness to apples and yes, they are in the rosaceae family, as apples and roses are too. They are mespilus germanica. I had read about them in classical texts--the Greeks and Romans ate them. But what to do with them? In the above picture, they look pretty green. and they were firm. I bit into one, knowing I would probably get woody and astringent, and that's what I got (probably not an example of manifesting your reality).
I let them get really dark brown, soft, mushy, which they have been doing serially, not all at once (as you can see in the picture below). I peeled off the husks and removed this brown, mushy pulp with five sizable seeds in a loose star shape at the center (just like an original, ungrafted apple).

 Mushy, mealy--a texture not appealing to everybody but obviously very rich in pectin, which is good for many people's gut. Mild in flavor, not strong or outstandingly delicious. It's usually boiled up with a bunch of sugar for jam.
I mixed it up with another product I haven't been able to find back home. The Turkish and other ethnic shops here are a treasure trove for my Israeli palate--whole shelves of houmous and tahini and halva and pickles and unusual herbal teas... And in the jar below is carob syrup! 

The only ingredient is carob pods, but obviously they've been boiled down into a sort of molasses. Full of carob's natural sweetness, with its complex dark and bright notes prominent also.

I then stirred in some tahini (carob syrup and tahini is a very normal dip, as are tahini/honey and tahini/date syrup). And thus, I created a dip slightly less dense than straight up carob syrup and tahini, with the gentle, soothing texture of the medlars.
Fun fun! I love getting to know new fruits, especially when they're actually old, heritage fruits, and I love getting to be in the abundance of carob and tahini and all things Middle East palate oriented.

I don't want to make this post too long, so I'll post another very shortly addressing the too-long-ignored food situation.
Love from London!

Keep Following the Curve...

Hello again from London! It's evident from the lapse of time between the previous post and this one that I still haven't quite gotten my act together on the resolution to do more creative and communicative writing. There are many things I've wanted to do that I haven't done, and there are many ways I've wanted to be that I haven't been. 
Of course, there are many things that have been right, too, and I'm learning the value of acknowledging what is going well and recognizing what huge learning opportunities I'm being offered as I spend so much time in the company of beings out of whom, (in some ways at least) literally, I'm made.
As my wise and wonderful mentor reminded me, any ardent commitment requires our rededication every single day (for which this image is particularly appropriate as I've been working on a poem about driving the curve for almost a year now). 

"I write today, I write today, I write today." Every day is only "today," but the more "I write" becomes part of "today," the more "I write today" comes to imply "and tomorrow, and yesterday, and next week, and always." If writing is really what I want to do, if literature is really what I want to produce, then the process and the product must reflect that desire.
Or:
I choose not to eat what I know will not serve me--the wrong food, at the wrong time, for the wrong reason, for others, so that I end up feeling bad about myself  and in myself and having to chase every meal with charcoal...and I choose not to excuse myself that in every case it's innocuous food I'm not allergic to: if I know it won't create the "me" through whom I wish to experience the world, I should decline. 

And oh, the devil in the doubt--do I really want to write or should I just edit and translate or go work in a cafe; would I really rather feel safely and comfortably austere in my body, or do I want to be someone who gratefully humors a person offering me gluten free treats or tickling my dark chocolate buds...?

The lesson I keep returning to is that my behaviors and actions reflect my goals. Which means I need to be crystal clear about what those goals are, in a way that I've never been in my life so far. I can choose what goals my actions reflect, rather than having my actions represent goals I might not wish to claim.
After my close brushes with death this summer, this should be even more urgent--but is it? I translate words over and over again, matching meanings, but my own matching to life and self remains unwhole. Unholy? 
Every day is an opportunity, and the opportunity is an honor.
Every moment is a choice, and every choice can be a lean into the curve or a deviation from it.

Please share your thoughts, dear reader. How do you find the resolve to recommit to your desire daily, to form process into practice, to enjoy the product of the process?

Forgive me for being obtuse. I've been burning the candle at both ends. Keep following that curve. Keep learning...

Our Visitors--Me a Gramma?--Rocking Summer

As most people who read this know, I'm married to a man almost twice my age. One of the funny quirks about this relationship is that he has two children who are older than me. Stepmom? I don't think so! More like little sister. (You hear about Phil's gorgeous daughter fairly often, since she's awesome and she lives right here in Homer.) Even funnier (in terms of imponderable relationship titles), Phil's son has kids! So, our first set of visitors are Phil's son (on the left), his wife (on the far right) and their four kids!

 The center of activities is up at their mom/'real' grandma's (much bigger) house: most people who read this also know that Phil's first wife also lives in town and is one of our very favorite people, and that her house is the center for many activities in our life.

This is about the most fun, good natured, positive, cheerful crowd of visitors one could wish for. They've gone fishing, and maintained interest and engagement all the way through the process. We've hiked the beach picking up rocks, collecting the most beautiful ones and practicing skipping the rest, or throwing them down hard to try and break out geodes. We've hiked around in woods and meadows gathering wild flowers, bird egg shells, and even a road-killed baby snipe, flattened in the dust like a pressed flower.

 She wasn't really going to eat that jellyfish we found on the beach! But she's such a good sport, she posed as if she would.

I'm finding ways to take a few hours out of the melee here and there in order to get some work done and have some quiet time and space, which allows me to be fully present the rest of the time. It feels good. Some of those 'time outs' have gotten engulfed by food-prep and garden projects rather than reading/writing/working, however.

And what that chocolate-orange raw not-cheesecake has to do with all that beautiful freshly harvested kale will have to wait for my next check-in!

I hope you're having a beautiful weekend.
What's growing in your garden?

Restaurant Review - Blossoming Lotus in Portland; Gourmet Foods and Sensitive Tummies: What's the Culprit?

We went to visit Phil's brother and sister-in-law in Portland this weekend. They are vegetarian. I mentioned that I wanted to visit Blossoming Lotus and they were happy to try something new.

Before we left, we played with their adorable labradoodle dog

- hard to get a good picture of her, because she's always in motion. She has the most winsome, huge eyes.

...And after we finally got home, their big bruiser of a cat showed us how to relax

On to the food porn in just a moment!

Restaurant Review

We showed up to the restaurant at around 6.15 and immediately saw that it was packed. We were told it would be about a 25 minute wait, but we finally sat down after 7! I kept watching the list, and was frustrated because many parties of two who came in long after us were seated ahead of us: our in-laws just said 'welcome to Portland!' Of course, we took it as a good sign that it was so busy. I was excited that a vegan restaurant with raw options should be doing so well. We people-watched while we waited, and my cohorts insisted that I got something so that I didn't keel over from low blood sugar! I got an apple-lemon-ginger-kale juice, which was delicious. It was a very good idea.

Once we were seated, we didn't have to wait too long for our food, which was a relief! The servers were friendly, enthusiastic and knowledgeable, even on an evening when they were so very busy (and it was a Saturday night, after all).

Food photos courtesy of my sister-in-law's iPhone - I couldn't get the flash to work on my camera for some reason, and her iPhone took some gorgeous pics.

After all that mushroom hunting, I had to order the live wild mushroom pizza, which was the day's special:

- three kinds of mushrooms, marinaded with bell peppers and onions, with a tahini pesto, on a dried tomato-walnut crust, with a side salad.

I really can't do bell peppers, so I picked them out. I was a little concerned about the dried tomatoes in the crust given recent experience, but didn't seem to have any immediate trouble.

This was delicious - the marinaded mushrooms were delectable, and even though the peppers themselves make me sick, I enjoyed the slight taste infusion from their presence alongside. The crust was delicious and I'm impressed that they use a lot of walnuts rather than any other nut (that's what it seems like): walnuts have the best omega-3 to 6 ratio and one of the highest antioxidant levels of all nuts. (Is this bad of me to be thinking in those terms in a gourmet dining experience?)

My sister-in-law had the seasonal stir-fry - we'd watched another diner eating this while we were waiting and it was immediately obvious to my s-i-l that that was what she wanted, no matter what else might be available!

She had it with soba noodles and extra broccoli. She said that the tofu was so meaty, it almost worried her, and then she realized that it had been rolled in nutritional yeast, for extra yumminess. Considering that it was love at first sight for her, she didn't seem disappointed!

Phil had the lasagna, which had semolina noodle layers, lots of veggies, a tofu ricotta and sesame parmesan, with cashew sour cream on top -

- sumptuously beautiful presentation, and he said it was pretty good. Considering that he's not generally very impressed by 'alternative versions' or substitutions, this was pretty high praise. He also had the house-made chai with coconut milk, served over ice. It was an eclectic spice blend - strong ginger note, cinnamon, cardamom and clove more subtle, but the nutmeg really pronounced. I liked it a lot - but I am just a chai fiend!

Our brother-in-law had the salud salad (cool name)!

- salad with tomatoes, avocado, cashew sour cream, black beans and quinoa. He has recently quit eating dairy and felt so much better as a result, so they were intrigued by the cashew sour cream, especially when I told them how easy it is to make.

And of course, we had to try dessert! I was excited to eat a raw dessert (and just make an exception with the sugar and cacao) and to see what everyone else thought of them too. The main raw choices were the german chocolate cake and the cheesecake of the day, which was a chocolate turtle swirl. We got one of each between the four of us.

The german chocolate cake was a cacao-walnut-date crust, a creamy layer that tasted like walnuts, almonds (or maybe almond extract), agave, shredded coconut, maybe some coconut oil, a fudgy cacao-nut-coconut layer, another walnut/almond layer and a fudgy cacao-agave topping.

The cheesecake had a cacao-walnut-date crust, and the filling was a typical cashew-coconut oil-agave-type cheesecake mix with a cacao swirl. Cacao nibs and dried pecans on top - yummy crumbles.

I was glad that I'd only eaten just over half my pizza and left room: these were just delectable. A chorus of 'yums' from around the table. It was weird to me to be eating 'regular' gourmet raw desserts after over a year of only making non-sugar treats (these are way richer even than the couple of lara bars I tried last week). Especially the cheesecake, with the smooth, creamy, dense middle - it tasted almost alcoholic!  Even with four of us working on them, we had leftovers of both of them that I had for lunch with my leftover pizza yesterday. But I definitely ate more than I needed of them that night. In a way, I preferred the german chocolate cake with its dense nutty layers: it was more up-front about what it was, so it was easier to stop eating it. Somehow, the cheesecake was more deceptive and beguiling - 'eat more of me!' More on that in a moment.

Overall verdict: our brother and sister-in-law were excited to be introduced to this place and the whole concept, and plan to go back with their daughter (who was at a sleepover that night) as soon as possible. Phil was a little taken aback by how pricey it was, but was glad to be shown some of what juices me. I was excited to go to a restaurant with so much more of the menu accessible to me, although I've long learned that even at raw restaurants I can't just stick a pin in the menu - there are so many things like bell peppers, and now maybe tomatoes, that are a problem. And the rest of my response to the experience is much more complicated - that's what I'll turn to now.

Gourmet Foods and Sensitive Tummies - What's the Culprit?


That 'almost alcoholic' comment above should have been a clue. Although I didn't eat my whole pizza or a whole serving of the dessert, I felt kind of hungover first thing yesterday. I had a green drink in the morning and then, at brunch with lots of family - brother and sister-in-law, sister and brother-in-law and her sons - I ate kelp noodles and sauerkraut that I'd picked up at the co-op, and some apple slices, so super-light.

Early afternoon, on the way home, I ate my leftovers - bit of live pizza and bits of the two desserts. And I should have remembered from earlier raw restaurant experiences that eating any of that kind of food on consecutive days doesn't work well for me. It threw me right back into a strong nauseous-hangover feeling that lasted the rest of the day! This was partly because I accidentally ate a bell pepper piece on the pizza - in the car and not being careful enough picking through, and it's really a bad idea for me. We ended up going out to town for dinner with Phil's mom and her sister (eating out three nights in a row? I don't think I've ever done that in my life before!) to a beautiful riverside restaurant recently reopened as a Vietnamese and sushi place. I ate super-light there too - a bit of lettuce from inside a summer roll, a little cup of miso soup (picking around the tofu) and a veggie roll -

I picked all the rice off, so it was just a bit of asparagus, cucumber and avocado with a bit of nori. And I actually ate that entire leaf of wasabi, with a little help from Phil, just about straight up! Had a few eye-watering moments that contributed to a hilarious evening, which began with the waiter spilling ice-water all over Phil's mom! We laughed all evening - it was sweet.

Now today, the food hangover is gone, I'm back to work, and I'm ravenous! I've been hungry all day! And this is the phenomenon that I've noticed before with gourmet raw food - I feel hungover the next day and can't eat, and then the day after, I'm starving! If the 'hungover' feeling was due to sheer excessive calories, you'd think that by the third day I'd be back to normal, not ravenous.

So, What is the Culprit?


Back in the days when I lived in the Bay Area and went to Cafe Gratitude occasionally, I was firmly in the 'high fruit/fat-phobic' camp, so of course I was sure that the feeling came from having eaten more fat than I'd eaten in a month. Nowadays, I eat almost no sugar and quite a lot of fat, so must I conclude that the hungover feeling comes from all the sugar? After all, alcohol, that causes hangovers, is a sugary thing...

I'm actually going to have to say that I think it's the combination. I also think that I was on to something when I mentioned that the chocolate cake, with the ground nuts, was more forthcoming with the 'you've had enough' signal than the creamy coconut oil/cashew creme cheesecake, which was more beguiling and 'eat more of me.' The ground nuts are closer to whole foods, I guess. I'd also add that back when I was fat-phobic, yes I ate a lot of high glycemic food, but it was all fruit - bananas and dates, not bottles of agave. I think it's the combination of rarefied, refined sweeteners, and a very lot of fat put together, that makes it borderline intoxicating to my system.

Well, shucks! Look in any honest book about treat-making and it'll tell you that lots of sweet, lots of fat, and a little salt to bring out the flavor, is the key to a wonderful dessert. Am I just going to have to accept that I'll need to keep it to a tiny taste of these treats, or not eat them at all? Actually, there's a part of me that has my gander up and really wants to pursue the making of delectable no-sugar treats. I've never had a problem with the fat by itself: without the sugar to stimulate the appetite, I simply can't eat enough of it to bother me. With all the sweet-tooths I live among, I'll have some exacting taste-testers - who will probably also not see the point, since this kind of food doesn't make them feel bad even if they eat the whole pie!

Should I pursue my no-sugar treat endeavors? Will anybody care? How do you feel after super-gourmet food?

with love...

Reflections on Self-Love (in Oregon!): The Deeper Issues; Visit to Phil's Timberland

Greetings from Oregon! I'm online courtesy of Fred Meyer supermarket, and am experiencing reverse sticker-shock. Not just produce, but everything  is so much cheaper than in Alaska! Ok, I knew that. Get over it.

Not having gotten online yesterday, my inbox was overflowing and I was behind on work, so this will have to be somewhat brief.

In today's reflection on self-love, Tina talks about using negative self-talk or behavior as a shield or smoke-screen to avoid dealing with the real, deeper issues. Even with only three days left to go (yes, really!) we're not even getting close to running out of important areas to explore.

I'll come back to that in a moment, first want to talk about what we did earlier today and how it brought up some 'real stuff' emotions, for Phil in particular.

Phil has a twenty-some acre piece of timberland, consisting basically of a north-facing and a south-facing hill-slope about 40 miles away from the family farm. He bought it before I was born, planted it in Douglas Fir and logged it a few years ago, just before we got together. That means that I was involved in the replanting over the last few years - planting baby trees into the ground still treacherous with fallen branches, in snow and sleet and horizontal rain. Because he adores them, and because he adores a challenge, he planted in Western Red Cedar instead of Douglas Fir, with an admixture of alders for nitrogen fixation, oregon grape and vine maple (natives) and some native hardwoods (madrone and chinquapin) that volunteer there. He left some of the old trees up when he had it logged, for diversity. Here's sort of what it looks like today:

Close in shot with ferns and deadfalls:

Madrone clump in the foreground and a great view into the distance:

Unfortunately, the deer love Western Red Cedar above all else. They think it's candy! It's so frustrating: if we could get them to leave the baby trees alone for two more years, the whole area would be a wondrous habitat for the deer! Phil had heard from family members that stopped by in the early spring that the deer predation had been bad this past winter. Last fall, everything was in great shape. Today, a lot of those plastic tubes had been pulled off the baby trees and the deer had eaten back all the year's new growth. (Phil and I spent so much time replacing and straightening those tubes that I took to calling them 'deer candy-bar wrappers'!) It takes just one smart deer to figure out how to do it, and the jig is up. But, if that smart deer can be eliminated or sidetracked, it might set back the predation. Deer aren't ordinarily considered predators, are they? They're our biggest problem here!

Other problems are poison oak, certain invasive blackberries, and thistles. With all the dead branches that haven't yet rotten down overgrown with blackberry vines, it can be very treacherous hiking.

Here I had a blackberry wrapped around my legs and a thistle in between my legs! Ouch!

And it's pretty steep too.

Theoretically, a forest land is the ideal kind of land for an absentee owner - once the trees are up, it takes far less maintenance than any other kind. And Phil has loved just knowing it's there.

But today he was really down about how it looked, how poorly so many of the trees had done, thanks to the deer and thanks to the fact that he lives so far away and hasn't been able to take care of it. This was an emotional response to a very real situation - no smokescreen at all. It's especially challenging when Phil gets down, because ordinarily he's so positive. I just did my best to give him space, offer my ear when he wanted to talk possible solutions, and be as loving as I possibly could be.

And what of the reflection on self-love? Tina asks why we do this cover-up activity, and asks for any tips to avoid it. I think her own tip is especially excellent: she says, "I liked simply to ask, "Why?" about everything. Whenever I feel myself getting emotional or negative, I ask, "Why?" I don't deny my feelings, but when I realize the source, often I realize their insignificance and move on naturally."

I am going to remember that one and try it! Negative self-talk and behavior can definitely be a kind of self-indulgence - I retreat into the familiar ground of "I'm too fat," or "I suck," rather than looking squarely at why I can't stand it when I make a small mistake, or why I feel so uncomfortable when I am out of my comfort zone. At the moment, having a certain cushion of 'comfort zone' is important to my healing, so I'm recognizing that part of my self love at the moment is maintaining that. Asking 'why'? instead of indulging in self-flagellation will be a helpful way for me to gauge how well I'm doing at a given time, and to make sure that my body is getting all she needs in order that I can be my most loving and gracious self during our visit.

Phil's family is awesome and varied and challenging, like all families. I'm starting to feel that it's especially important to be our best in the family setting, because it's precisely the setting in which it's easiest not to be! What I hope for is eventually to be able to be at my best without having to be tense with it.

Thank you to Tina for this great topic - with love.