21-Day Sugar Detox -- My First Ever Restricted Diet Done For "The Right Reasons"

My friends tend to freak out at the idea of me doing any sort of restricted diet, since my normal diet tends to involve much restriction and I'm not, let's say, in a condition of excess. But I believe this is the first time I've undertaken a diet for self-care reasons rather than straight deprivation. Why??
Try this on for size: If I'm (1) attached to the familiarity of an old pattern and (2) eating inappropriate foods, I get cut off from my body's innate wisdom. And therefore: My body does have innate wisdom, she knows what is good for her. (Oh how amazing if that could be true!)

I have so many positive associations around fruit. Eating lots of it helped me out of the very lowest point of my anorexia--eating it, but also getting involved in growing, harvesting, and sharing it. I was so much the fruit girl, that's how everyone knew me. And despite all that I came to know and understand about how unnatural fruit is today, I still find myself harboring a Garden of Eden fantasy; I still hold a belief somewhere within me that it's the "perfect"/"highest"/"most righteous/correct" food. And so even after I ate no fruit for a year as I cleansed the worst case of candida my naturopath had ever seen, I gravitated back toward it. And again last year, despite a year of mostly coconut cream which was one of my best years digestion-wise. What's more, the years of fruitarianism mean that my estimation of a serving size for fruit is still potentially inflated.

Back on the fruit this year, I was in trouble. Intense sugar cravings, blood sugar swings. I never used to think of food as a comfort source, and how that evolved in me is for another post, but fruit+sugar cravings was sending me into even sweeter foods; foods that I knew were terrible for me, that made me feel terrible. It's no secret that part of my m.o. is pretty serious calorie restriction. But eating so much sugar when I did eat, I was hungry all the time. So I relied on chewable vitamin C, drink mixes, fasting every other day, and the fasting+lots of fruit sent me into the horrifying unfamiliar territory of binge-purge.
Meanwhile, I couldn't digest anything, couldn't sleep for the stomach pains and nausea, and had such severe bloating, the gas often wouldn't even come out in a colonic session! I was walking around 80-some pounds with a balloon belly. I would read/hear about people who'd gone gluten free, cut out dairy, and were feeling like a million bucks, and I felt like such a victim! Here I was, no gluten or dairy ever, absolutely wretched in my body. And yet at the same time there was a dive into gluten-free cookies here, an energy bar (aka sugary soy) there; even brightly colored sucralose candy one time, to my own disbelief--things I knew made me feel worse and yet somehow felt either entitled to or compelled to. Yes, straight-up sugar, as well as some white grains. In some twisted way I was able to give the cane sugar portion a pass because I haven't historically had a problem with sugar, but cookies made of rice flour? Sometimes with omega-6 oils like sunflower and canola??? My system can barely handle any kind of whole grain, so what's a bunch of finely starchified poison-powder going to do in there?
Even as I felt sorry for myself, part of me had the "sucker" lights lit up. Part of me was calling bullshit. At the MFA program residency, where I had a little less control over food availability and timings, I brought protein powder and gave myself the informal limit of two servings of fruit per day. Two things: I felt much better, and I had godawful sugar cravings, resolving into a couple breakouts into the fruit.
Perfect, then! I knew what I needed to do, and I knew for myself that in order to circumvent self-sabotage, I needed a framework where I'd committed to doing it. Even though I felt completely like myself with the crave and intermittent binge/purge , I knew myself well enough to know that if I laid down a framework, I would comply.

And so, when I heard an interview with Diane Sanfilippo about her 21-Day Sugar Detox a day or two after returning from the MFA residency, I decided it was time.

Stay tuned for my reflections on the twenty-one days!

Starting to Talk Diet Again: Fruit

 http://ulteriorharmony.org/?p=715

When I started this blog, it was pretty much a food blog, and pretty much a raw-vegan-oriented, gut-restoring/low sugar-oriented, permaculture/grow-your-own-food-oriented blog at that. I posted recipes more than once a week, I talked plants and herbs, I reviewed other bloggers' recipes.

That all stopped a couple years ago, and since then I've been almost afraid to talk about food because it's such a tricky topic tied in with my general health and wellbeing. It's true, I am somewhat of a freak around food, but through recent self experimentation I've come to realize that--in certain respects--my body isn't that different from anyone else's. And, since I do have a near-freakish amount of knowledge about diet and nutrition, it's time to share some of this experience.

Why else should you listen to me? My perversity and paradoxical nature, which leaves me tripping along both sides of any line in clay or sand (or macronutrient balance) and thus able to channel both sides. Consider this:

(1) When put under strong pressure to go inpatient this last winter, I drove across the country instead--and am loving my new environment!

(2) Having gotten myself out of an unprecedented and horrendous binge-purge cycle, I am now fasting (sundown to sundown) every other day (even though I know that fasting can drive eating if you're not careful)!

And that's enough for about five blog posts right there... 

Doorful of tinctures and potions--can't we just live on those?--but as you can see (bottom left) I still love carrots

...and I'll likely go on for at least five blog posts, as there is so much to talk about, so much to which many will relate, who wouldn't have expected me to be able to relate to them/you!

Today, though, I'm going to kick off with a renunciation of my ultimate redoubt of denial: fruit.
It's a funny cyclical serendipity that I was pretty much off fruit when I first started the blog, as it's the one food I've gravitated toward for much of my life and about which I've had almost magical beliefs. Renunciation doesn't always happen all at once. Fruit and its sugars have been controversial for as long as I've been studying nutrition, and as the voices grow ever more unanimous about the deleterious effects of sugar, fruit continues controversial. I've always so wanted it to be good and perfect...
I have believed:
(1) Fruit is humankind's most natural and ideal and perfect source of sustenance (cue Garden of Eden and fig leaves and happy bonobos).
(2) Fruit is easier to digest than anything else.
(3) (In my body at least): the sugar in fruit doesn't have the negative impact that other kinds of sugar have.

Myth (1) I really had to let go of this as soon as I studied any anthropology, but, more importantly, as soon as I became an arborist and tree carer. The truth:

Most fruit today is no more or less natural than any other man-made item, even as alive as it is. The peach tree whose fallen, bruised fruit were calling me and the clamoring craving colonies in my belly--none of its seeds could grow a fruit. The tree itself couldn't stand up by itself. Its fruit is so much sweeter than even drosophila can handle! It's analogous to those superbred turkeys that can't mate naturally anymore.

Note, by the way, "no more or less natural": two possibilities here: either (1) man-made = unnatural by definition or (2) anything man made is part of nature, as is man him/herself, so this peach is natural in the same way that a good quality home made bread might be.

Note, too--and this was the myth that I had to explode for myself: "natural" is not necessarily synonymous with "beneficial in your body" (am I really going to step on the "natural" rattlesnake?)

(2) Fruit seems to be easier to digest than anything else for me, and for the most part. I've gotten plenty sick from eating fruit too. How much of the ease is simply lifelong habit? And how much of the ease is because of the prevalence of simple sugar, in which case, is it feeding me or is it feeding a yeast colony? Some of the cravings I've dealt with recently suggest the latter, although I know that losing a lot of (non excess) weight last winter, moving across the country, and then doing a job that involved a lot of heavy lifting may have had something to do with that too. 

It's a great question to keep asking, literally, metaphorically, with every turn of the attention, every absorption: Who am I feeding? What part of me? Symbiote? Commensal? Parasite? (And the etymologies of those three words deserve a post of their own.)

(3) Dovetailing nicely with the "who am I feeding" question is the belief that fruit's sugar is somehow different (at least for me), that its packaging with vitamins and fiber meant it didn't impact blood sugar. I was a fruitarian for about six years, and it probably saved my life at the time, bringing me back from an almost fatal low. It's true that in practice, when I moved to Hawaii--fruit heaven--I found myself much better off with more avocados, coconuts, and greens... but fruit remained the ideal. I have fruitarian-oriented friends, and I sense a righteousness to their choice; it seems almost like a religion.

Especially with all the hard physical work, and all the fasting, I've had the opportunity to feel really hungry at times. And I started to notice that when I ate a whole bunch of fruit, I didn't feel any less hungry than when I started--sometimes more hungry.

So that's when I got a blood glucose meter and started obsessively tracking my blood sugar. And that's for the next post. I'll close with an openended question: which data are more useful: "how you feel after eating something" or "a readout on a meter (which has some margin of error)" (Obviously, the answer is "both," but how do you weight the two kinds of data?)

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!

Letter from London--Gathering, Harvesting, First Haircut in Five Years...

Greetings again from London. I've been here a week now, and realize I need to come through on my promise, to myself and to you, to write here more. So far all aspects of my creative writing form the big missing piece in my being here.

As my dear friend Leslie pointed out, I've now been out of the home as long as I was in it--I left for college half my life ago! So, of course, it's a time for revisiting, and for noticing how much has changed while so much else has stayed the same. Same house, but as time wears it down, of course it's not the same house. Analogously for my parents, and for me.

But some delightful new additions, also. Just as my mom bloomed when she became a homeopath and started really helping people, the garden is blooming like it never was when I lived here. Aided by an English summer as unprecedentedly warm as ours was in Alaska, the vines are producing grapes...

 ...and the pear tree, young as it is, had lots of pears.

 Pears in pairs...something so peaceful and companionable about that image.

 Here's a sunny day's harvest of both. (It's mostly been raining while I've been here.)

 And they're really good! There are so many varieties of apple and pear one doesn't find over in the US. It's a delight to have Russet apples and Cox's orange pippin apples, and William pears, and Conference pears, which are what my mom's are. They're kind of like a bosc pear, although they're smaller--similar sweetness and bite.

There was another harvest that had to happen as well. Before I left for England, I mentioned to my mum over the phone that I'd be willing to go to her hairdresser's with her. My hair hadn't been cut since five years ago, when I shaved it completely. It had gotten pretty long--for me. Apparently everyone's hair has a certain length beyond which it won't grow; that's been my life experience. My hair wasn't super long up until last week, but it was about as long as I've ever been able to get it.

When I arrived, my mum was pretty horrified by the tangled mess of split ends that was my hair. It was like one big dreamcatcher, I confess. So my appointment at her hairdresser's was made urgently, and much hair was removed. 
She straightened and styled my hair as well, so I came away looking quite different.

I don't know if the above shot seems kind of contrived, but to bring it back down to earth, the top right is my mom's finger, and the bottom left was a desk lamp on the floor. Accidentally looked kind of neat.
It's been almost a week now, and of course my hair is back to its curly, unruly self.

I'm not willing to start a daily habit of straightening it as my mum does, and as she would like me to. Is that wrong of me? What I will undertake to do is brush it somewhat more regularly, to guard against the dreamcatcher tendency. If I let my dreams move freely from my head, perhaps they will travel where they need to go and plant themselves in some fertile ground or ether.

More soon! Lots of love.

Poetry Reading at Bunnell Tonight; Figs and Cream

Where I'll be tonight: at the Bunnell St Gallery, to hear my friends and much-admired fellow-poets Erin Coughlin Hollowell and Linda Martin. See Erin's post for full details. Phil is coming too, and so are his nephew and his girlfriend. Any of you Homerites reading this, I urge you to go too.

Both Erin and Linda are graduates of the same MFA program on which I'm about to embark: the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. Together with Mercedes Harness and Debi Poore, they are wonderful teachers and fellow-travelers for me. We are just starting to meet up as a group and critique each other's work, and discuss other books, and I am bottomlessly grateful for it. By undertaking a low-residency MFA, I'm missing out on the intense peer-to-peer interaction of being in school full-time. Getting to interact with these wonderful poets right in the place where I happen to live is more than compensation.

 Between guests, work, the garden, the approaching wedding and preparing for the MFA residency, I feel like I am being stretched on a rapidly moving wheel, each extremity pulled away from the other, like the skin of a drum. I pray to become more like that drum-skin, with a taut and definite center: at this point, my center is ill-defined and discombobulated. The ever-present subtext of trying to figure out how I fit with my surroundings, and how to incorporate my surroundings, specifically food, into my body, also continues to distract and puzzle me.

On the other hand, the sun has been shining for three days straight now and I feel my spirit rising to it. And when I stayed home to write while the rest of the gang went off on one of my favorite hikes, I realized that the sense of gladness that I felt over staying home to write was greater than my chagrin at missing out.

Last week, one of the markets here in town had fresh figs for the first time this year! When I saw them, I almost teared up from all the memories of harvesting my own in the California days. I ate one as soon as I'd paid for my basket, and it was just perfect.

We had a dinner gathering that night, so I made a cream from cashews, young coconut meat, irish moss gel, xylitol and lots of vanilla powder, and bathed the figs in it.

I love their expansive secrecy, their sweet fecundity.

When you miss out on an activity in order to do something more important to you, do you feel sad or glad?

Ending the Tetra Diet and Cardamom Rice Pudding Recipe

Happy Sunday, everyone! It's mid-afternoon here and the sun is making a belated appearance. We've only had about three sunny days so far this spring but I'm holding the intention that we're due a good summer, after last year's washout. I love how all colors are enhanced when the sun shines--when it's not shining, it's as though a whole dimension is lost from the spectrum.

Well, I did my yeast retest a week ahead of when I'd thought I would, but I still stuck out my 'Tetra Diet' for a full three weeks. I enjoyed the zen simplicity of it, but had definitely had enough. I confirmed that last night by having yams, nettles and carrots for dinner: carrots still taste great as ever, but the nettles are coming close to flowering and don't taste as good, and neither do the plain yams. My taste buds are telling me something. Part of me craves a routine so that I can eat on autopilot, and another part would love to get more in touch with my body and always be in tune with exactly what I want. I do think that this experiment helped me to consider and search myself on 'what I like' in more depth, especially with the "Treat Day."

Released from the yeast, this has been my breakfast the last five mornings:

So yummy, and feels so good! Sometimes it's lasted me all morning! My problems with blood sugar that I lamented on here last year are a thing of the past: I'll devote a post to that issue soon.

Otherwise, I've been enjoying green smoothies, salads, veggies, and a few more tastes of that cardamom rice pudding before putting the rest in the freezer.

I'm glad that rice doesn't seem to be bothering me anymore either. This is such a good 'comfort food,' and I'm happy to share how I made it today. I didn't actually use that much 'fat' (coconut cream) for the entire amount--long, slow cooking makes the rice itself pretty creamy--and it was interesting to observe that I could feel so 'treated' by eating this but with no feeling of heaviness afterwards.

Cardamom Rice Pudding (sometimes called Kheer, or Payasam)
Note: I used the crockpot that I was given for my birthday, which has a sealing gasket on the lid and is thus way more efficient than my thriftstore crockpot with a loose lid. Depending on your crockpot, timings might vary.
2 cups long grain white basmati rice, soaked overnight and rinsed
8-12 cups water
1 generous teaspoon cardamom seeds (if I'd had pods, I'd have put four or five whole pods: I think the husks have some flavor too). *Make sure you're using green cardamom: black cardamom has a very different taste.
About a cup of neutral-tasting sweetener (I used just under a cup of xylitol/erythritol combined and 2 tablespoons sugar).
2 cups coconut cream (or make thick coconut milk) (or one can)

Rinse the soaked rice and put in crockpot with 6 cups water and the cardamom seeds. Cook on High for two hours--your space will be filled with the divine aroma.
After those two hours, check that the rice is cooked and add two more cups of water. Stir everything around well so that the rice doesn't form hard clumps. If the rice is cooked but the grains are still discrete, turn the heat to Low. If it's not yet cooked, leave it on High for a bit.
Check back regularly and stir every 40-60 minutes for the next two hours (or more, depending on your crockpot), adding water if necessary. I added the coconut cream and sweetener on my first 'check' after turning it down to Low, so about three hours in.
The stirring helps to break down the rice grains and make the 'pudding' texture, without clumping or sticking to the sides. You may need to keep adding water to encourage this breakdown process. You'll know when it's 'done!'

I hope you enjoy this!
Is the sun adding colors to your world?
Have you entered my giveaway yet?

Although this might sound like a lot of 'minding' for a crockpot recipe, it was actually very easy. I was busy with other things and just waltzed through and checked up on it every so often.