Vacation March 31, 2008

We are going away for a few days tomorrow. Just to Palm Springs. Seth is staying here. Kate and I are going with my mother, sister, and my two nieces (they are all flying in). We’re going to swim in the pool and relax.

We are celebrating Kate’s first birthday (a little early — her birthday is April 13th).

We’ll come back on the weekend — and hang out here a few more days, go to Venice Beach.

I still have a lot of packing/preparation to do. Not so easy when you have to make homemade formula, deal with cloth diapers, etc. I’ll get it done by tomorrow.

If I have time, I will blog — but I doubt I will be online.

See you next week!

Daily Photo: Farmer’s Market Day March 30, 2008

Kate in her brand new Radio Flyer wagon. She got it from her grandparents for her first birthday (we opened it early). She loves it! Smiles the whole time she’s riding in it.

Daily Photo: Naked Lunch March 28, 2008

Kate’s been such a messy eater lately, I figured it was just easier to feed her naked. She had duck liver pate and avocado — and yes, it ended up in her hair.

Super Fast Breakfast March 28, 2008

Sometimes I’m so busy, I don’t even have time to fry eggs or make a smoothie.

Here’s an extremely fast, very healthy breakfast you can make when you are on the run:

1 cup raw milk, kefir or a combination
2 egg yolks

Just mix the egg yolks in with a fork. If it is not sweet enough for you, add 1 tsp of honey (preferably raw honey) or maple syrup.

Serendipitious Vegetables March 27, 2008

OK this is crazy. About six weeks ago, I buried a bunch of vegetable scraps in the garden. I didn’t have a compost bin set up yet, so I was just burying my scraps directly into my beds.

Look what happened!

I accidentally grew beets and what looks like some kind of onion.

I always joke about how easy it is to grow things in Southern California. I always say, “Just throw it in the ground and it will grow.” Interesting how your belief becomes your reality, eh?

Still, it’s amazing to me!

Tonight’s Dinner March 27, 2008

Here’s the soup:

Sprouted lentils (soaked overnight in warm water, whey and sea salt), a whole lot of homemade chicken stock, a little water, about a pound of ham, plus onion, carrots, turnips, celery and a bouquet garni of thyme, oregano, and Italian parsley from the garden.

The marrow bones are defrosting. I’ll roast them when we get home from the park. This is going to go great with a nice zinfandel.

Clearly, there will be leftovers, which I will freeze.

Daily Photo: Funny Lady March 27, 2008

Kate clowning around on our morning walk:

Sprouted Lentil Soup and Bone Marrow March 27, 2008

Kate’s watching Charlie & Lola. When I finish my cup of coffee, I am going to take her for a walk this morning (before breakfast even!) — to enjoy the sunshine and fresh air. I’m not even going to change her out her jammies. Who’ll know?

I decided to make lentil soup for dinner. Last night around 9 pm, I emptied a bag of dried lentils into a bowl and covered them with warm filtered water, a couple of tablespoons of whey, and a teaspoon of sea salt. I covered the bowl with a dish towel and stuck it in the microwave.

The microwave is unplugged. I only use it for my ferments, since it’s a nice warm place. I also put a bowl of soaking oatmeal in there (which we will have for breakfast today).

This morning the lentils had actually sprouted! It makes sense to me that when the bean or seed sprouts, it releases all the nutrition. By soaking, you increase your absorption of the minerals in the beans — from 50-100%!

Here’s a good article on why it’s so important to soak your beans.

I’m going to add a bunch of chicken stock, some ham that I found in the freezer, some onion, garlic, carrots, turnips, and celery. Tonight we’ll have lentil soup with warm sprouted bread (not homemade, unfortunately) and I’m going to roast some marrow bones to spread on the bread with butter.

It only takes about an hour to cook this soup. If you are really busy, a great way to do it is in the crockpot. This way you can do your bone broths every week — and make soups and beans and all kinds of things. You just dump everything into the crockpot in the morning and when you come home from work, dinner is ready!

A crockpot is one of the best investments a busy person can make (just make sure you get one with an enamel bowl — not aluminum or anything like that). I think I got mine for about $35 on sale at Macy’s.

Here’s a crockpot recipe for homemade lentil soup. Just soak and sprout your beans the night before.

We’re watching Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. It’s such a good show.

“It’s a neighborlly day in this beauty wood. A neighborly day for a beauty. Would you be mine? Could you be mine? Won’t you be my neighbor?”

We’re going to go enjoy a walk in our neighborhood now.

Easy Homemade Chicken Soup March 26, 2008

Seth and I are both under the weather. Sore throats, tired. Not full-blown colds, but just feeling kind of bleh.

Not sure where we picked it up. We have both been working very long hours. Any time you work too much, you are more susceptible to getting sick.

Kate’s fine — although she has had diarrhea for the past two days. So I guess that is how it is manifesting for her.

I was listening to Dr. Phillip Incao, MD from the Weston A. Price Foundation mp3s from the 2007 conference. I haven’t listened to the whole thing yet but it was very interesting. He was saying that if you get a cold, or your child gets a cold, that’s a good thing. It means that his or her body is fighting the illness. It means that toxins are being ejected from the body. Anyway I shouldn’t quote him because I can’t do it justice — I need to listen to the whole lecture first.

Since we’re not feeling well, tonight I made homemade chicken noodle soup for dinner. It is so easy to do when you have chicken stock on hand in the freezer. And there is nothing more restorative than real chicken soup.

You just put a little butter or chicken fat in a stock pot, add chopped onion, carrot, and celery and add them to the pot and cook until softened. Then add your frozen chicken stock. Let that come to a boil. If you have leftover chicken from roasting a chicken (we roast one almost every week), throw it in as well. Add pasta (I added rice pasta because it has the least phytates and is the healthiest choice if you’re not making your own pasta. Cook for 5-8 minutes. Add sea salt and freshly ground pepper. And if you have some, add fresh parsley or cilantro. You can use dried parsley if you don’t have fresh.

That’s it! So easy! I think it took me all of 15 — maybe 20 minutes. And so good!

OK, signing off now. Must get some rest. But first, I’m going to pour a glass of kefir and pop some Congaplex.

Coffee and Raw Honey Sweetened Lemonade March 26, 2008

I’ve been trying to cut back on coffee. No, not trying. I have been cutting back. I’m pretty proud of myself!

Sally Fallon said that cutting out coffee was the hardest thing she ever did. I’m not trying to cut it out completely (yet) but I am trying to cut back. For the sake of my adrenal gland. Drinking a lot of coffee and eating a lot of sugar is really bad for your adrenal gland. Most people have adrenal exhaustion due to constant stress, and too much coffee and sugar.

You can heal your adrenal gland. I just listened to a lecture about it from the WAPF 2007 seminar. The guy said that it can take anywhere from a few months to a few years. He said to take a multiglandular (like the ones Standard Process sells), vitamin B complex (I’m taking nutritional yeast, blackstrap molasses, and lots of fermented foods for my Bs), and a few others… I’ll have to look at the list I wrote down. He said it can take anywhere from a few months to a couple of years to heal your adrenal exhaustion — depending on how severe it is.

Adrenal exhuastion is part of the thyroid puzzle. You can’t really heal your thyroid unless you fix the adrenal too.

So anyway, I used to drink 2-3 cups per day. Now I’m drinking just 1 cup a day. With raw milk and blackstrap molasses. I have heard that blackstrap molasses helps with grey hair. (I’m starting to get some — and I’ve stopped highlighting my hair.) This was from Donna Wild of Standard Process, the nutritional supplements company (not just something I read on the internet!).

It hasn’t been that hard, cutting back on the coffee. I think, instead of cutting it out all the way, I’ll just keep cutting back to less and less. Go to half a cup a day, then a quarter cup.

It will be nice not to have to drink coffee. Drinking it here and there is one thing — but when you have to drink it that is an addiction, and that’s something I’d like not to have.

Meanwhile, Yensi has been making homemade lemonade for us. It’s delicious! And you would never know that it does not have any sugar!

Here’s her recipe for homemade lemonade:

Juice of one lemon
Raw honey to taste (she said she only uses about a tablespoon)
Pinch of sea salt
Fill pitcher with filtered water

It’s so wonderful to be able to drink homemade lemonade with nutritious raw honey — instead of Diet Coke or other soft drinks like we used to do. The lemons come from our tree in the backyard!

Happy Ishtar! March 24, 2008

Yesterday morning Kate and I got dressed and headed over to the local farmer’s market early. We got a big flat of strawberries from our local organic farm so I could make strawberry ice cream.

She tasted feta cheese and then we got to visit the petting zoo. They don’t always have a petting zoo — it is a special thing they do for Easter.

We saw an Easter mama sheep and her lambs:

An Easter bunny:

And some chickens. A perfect way to spend Easter! What better way than to see baby animals and visit the farmers at the farmer’s market?

As many of you know, Easter is not just a Christian holiday. It is actually a pagan holiday that goes all the way back to the Babylonians. The eggs and bunnies are symbolic of fertility. (Think about it — Playboy bunnies.)

“The egg was a sacred symbol among the Babylonians. They believed an old fable about an egg of wondrous size which was supposed to have fallen from heaven into the Euphrates River. From this marvelous egg - according to the ancient story - the Goddess Astarte (Easter) [Semiramis], was hatched. And so the egg came to symbolize the Goddess Easter.”

Source

This thing goes all the way back to the Babylonians with the goddess Ishtar (which was pronounced “Easter”).

Ishtar is a goddess of fertility, love, and war. In the Babylonian pantheon, she “was the divine personification of the planet Venus”.

Ishtar was above all associated with sexuality: her cult involved sacred prostitution; her holy city Erech was called the “town of the sacred courtesans”; and she herself was the “courtesan of the gods”. Source

Joseph Campbell, a more recent popularizer of mythology, equates Ishtar, Inanna, and Aphrodite, and he draws a parallel between the violent yet loving Hindu goddess Kali, the Egyptian goddess Isis who nurses Horus, and the Babylonian goddess Ishtar who nurses the god Tammuz. Source

I don’t personally worship the goddess Ishtar. Or any of the others. But I do like to celebrate the arrival of spring.

We bought eggs and onions and potatoes and asparagus and green beans. I really wanted to buy a blood orange tree at Guadalupe’s stall (she sold me my avocado tree two weeks ago) but I ran out of cash. Next week!

We also saw our friends (and neighbors — funny, they are our neighbors but we never see them) Jada and Walter. The bizarre thing is that I never see Jada and Walter except for at these random places. Like at the raw milk store downtown. Haha!

Jada told me all about how she’s making her kombucha and how they’ve been drinking raw milk and eating grass-fed beef, and how much better her health is. She says she has kombucha SCOBYs if anyone needs them. Me, too — need a SCOBY, let me know in the comments. We can mail it to you for the cost of postage.

Anyway, it was a fun morning. When we came home, Kate napped.

After that she and Julianna went with Yensi and Luis (Julianna’s daddy) to the park and the grocery store while Seth and I stayed home and worked.

In the afternoon, Yensi and I cooked up a storm. I made dill pickles (they’re fermenting on the counter now) and coconut water kefir. And for Easter dinner we made:

Garlic Rosemary Lamb Chops
Asparagus with Lemon and Olive Oil
Potatoes au Gratin
Homemade Strawberry Ice Cream (made with raw cream from grass-fed Jersey cows, and sweetened with maple syrup, not sugar)

Santa Monica Treesavers March 22, 2008

I met these folks today on the street in front of my office. They are trying to save 50 trees in Santa Monica from being ripped out.

Certain people (a few local store owners, from what I gathered) want to rip out perfectly good trees and plant new trees. It’s crazy!

Anyhow, these good folks were out on the street today, collecting names on petitions to fight the destruction of these trees.

The City of Santa Monica plans to destroy or remove over 50 of the beautiful, large-canopy Ficus trees along Second and Fourth Streets

The city wants them replaced with small Ginkgos that though beautiful, actually cast very little shade (most of it after 20 years’ growth). Why? The city claims some of them are too damaged or decayed to be saved. But the majority of these trees are being removed to make those streets more attractive to the shopping public. This weird logic flies in the face of research, surveys and studies showing that dense, large-canopy trees attract shoppers. They make the place nicer, better and healthier for everyone.

Many Santa Monica residents and visitors want to preserve these magnificent stands of large, shade-giving trees in the heart of our town. This site is intended as a clearinghouse for information, and a rallying point for community support. Call your council members! Tell them: Save Our Trees!

Interestingly, one of the main people involved in this is Chris Paine, director of Who Killed the Electric Car?

Chris is also my former boss. Interestingly, my other former boss, at two different companies, Richard Titus, was the producer of that film.

Who Killed the Electric Car? is one of my favorite films of all time. If you haven’t seen it, do so immediately.

I think it’s awesome that they are fighting to save these trees. There is always something we can do to better our own neighborhood. Something small or something big.

And if we can’t think of something we can do — we can support someone else in doing something.

I want to thank you guys, Jerry and Carol and Chris and everyone else — for doing what you can to keep these trees alive.

Here’s your chance to do something good. Go and support them! Sign the petition or donate some cash:

http://treesavers.blogspot.com/

Or blog about them! Spread the word!

PS: This photo was taken with an iPhone. Not bad, eh?

Daily Photo: Beet Face March 21, 2008

Beets, avocados, and roasted chicken.

Daddy came home early and we all got to eat dinner together at the dining room table.

Michael Pollan on Butter March 21, 2008

Here’s an interesting 10 minute video with Michael Pollan defending real food:

Watch video

I agree with everything he is saying.

Except for when he says that you shouldn’t eat a lot of butter. Sally Fallon says butter is a health food. She said she eats half a stick of butter on her oatmeal every day — 4 full tablespoons. She actually said that she thinks vegetables are just a vehicle for good fats. I love that!

One thing Pollan says in this video is that we should look to history and tradition when making choices about food and nutrition.

Hence, the traditional foods movement — eat real foods that have not been contaminated, adulterated or processed: butter, raw milk, raw milk cheese, grass-fed beef, pastured poultry, naturally leavened breads, fermented foods, soaked and sprouted grains and nuts.

Traditonally, people have been eating butter. For centuries. LOTS of butter. Read any French cookbook from a hundred years ago and the amount of butter and heavy cream will blow your mind. Heck, just read Julia Child’s recipes!

So why does he say we should not eat very much of it? Why does he say it is not a health food? What is his evidence for that claim?

I also disagree with Pollan’s wacky assertion that we should, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

WTF?! Plants? Mostly plants?

Many radically healthy traditional populations lived on animal foods as the bulk of their diet. Traditional Swiss villagers lived almost exclusively on dairy — raw milk, butter, cream, and cheese — with naturally leavened bread and small amounts of meat and vegetables. Other cultures lived mainly on the meat from animals (the native American Indians and many African tribes) and still others lived mainly on fish (Polynesian tribes, Eskimos, Scottish fishermen). All of these people lived on a diet high in saturated animal fats — over 50%. The Eskimos ate about 80% saturated fats.

I can’t think of a single healthy traditional culture that lived on mostly plants. Can you? I challenge you to name one.

I wish Pollan would do his research on traditional diets and the health benefits of saturated animal fats. I agree with Sally Fallon — Pollan is in a position of power and he really should study more about nutrition so he can speak intelligently about it.

Here’s Sally Fallon’s Open Letter to Michael Pollan.

Take the Olive Oil Challenge! March 20, 2008

Last fall my sister told me that she had read an article in the New Yorker exposing the fact that most olive oils on the market are fake. I was shocked and horrified. I had been cooking with olive oil for years and using it to make my own salad dressing. I was trying to avoid trans fats.

When I first started eating a WAPF diet 6 months ago, one of the first things I did was buy real (WAPF approved) olive oil. One of the brands they recommend is Bariani. A little more expensive, but worth it considering it’s real! I also buy Adam’s Ranch at Rawesome, my local buying club.

And Sally Fallon says that, for making salad dressing, even if you use the finest, most expensive ingredients, it still comes out the same cost-wise as if you are buying ready-made salad dressings.

Yesterday I was listening to a lecture by Sally Fallon (an mp3 from the WAPF 2007 conference). She said that you can tell if your olive oil is real by putting it in the fridge. If it turns hard, it’s real. If not, it’s fake.

Last night I put 3 bottles of olive oil in the fridge. One was my bottle of Adam’s Ranch unrefined olive oil. I also put in a bottle of Santini from Trader Joe’s and a bottle of Fillippo Berio I bought at Albertson’s. Both of these are the olive oils I used to buy before I got into WAPF.

Guess what? The Adam’s Ranch is the real thing. And the other two — FAKE!

See how the Adam’s Ranch is hard and cream colored? You can turn it on its side and it is absolutely solid. The other two oils are totally liquid.

This really pisses me off! I cooked with that shit for years, thinking I was using a healthy oil. I was trying to avoid trans fats — and here I was ingesting them unknowingly.

And those douchebags at Filippo Berio have the nerve to put a page on their website about “Tradition”. It says:

When you buy Filippo Berio olive oils, you’re buying olive oil steeped in expert tradition — oils with the same flavor as those Filippo Berio produced over 150 years ago.

Today, these award-winning oils are made using the latest technology, but the traditional flavors remain — thanks to painstaking attention to detail and a deep commitment to excellence. Filippo Berio olive oils have been produced by our family-owned and operated business since the mid-1800s, with hands-on family direction and expertise to ensure unsurpassed quality and unequalled taste in every bottle.

Notice that it doesn’t say anywhere that this is 100% olive oil. It just says that the “flavors” are the same.

Which means they are adulterating the olive oil with cheap oils (vegetable and soy, most likely) and adding olive oil flavor.

Try it with your olive oil and post the results on your blog — comment if you do it. I want to compile a list of real and fake olive oils.

Hot Dogs: A Health Food! March 19, 2008

I worked all day today and don’t really feel like making dinner. But I can still make a healthy meal — quickly and easily.

We’re having:

US Wellness Meats Hot Dogs (all-beef, nitrate-free, from grass-fed cows) with Homemade Lacto-fermented Sauerkraut and Pickles on Alvarado St. Bakery Sprouted Bread
Organic Green Salad with Tomatoes (from CSA box), Raw Milk Blue Cheese and Homemade Vinaigrette
Organic Corn with Raw Butter (from the freezer)

Grass-fed beef is so good for you. According to the Eat Wild website:

… compared with feedlot meat, meat from grass-fed beef, bison, lamb and goats has less total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, and calories. It also has more vitamin E, beta-carotene, vitamin C, and a number of health-promoting fats, including omega-3 fatty acids and “conjugated linoleic acid,” or CLA.

I feel good, too, knowing that the cows who gave their lives for this meal lived good lives on pasture in the sunshine, eating green grass — not confined, standing on cement up to their knees in their own manure in a feedlot.

It will only take a few minutes to heat everything up and serve. And this is a meal any kid would love.

Add some reheated homemade chili and raw milk cheese and it’s even better! (I don’t happen to have any chili in the freezer so we are having them plain tonight.)

UPDATE: Seth said, “There must be a lot of fat in these hot dogs because they taste REALLY good!” Actually they have less of the bad fat and more of the good — and yeah, they do taste better.

Genetically Modified Masa Harina March 18, 2008

Yensi cooked us some Guatemalan food for dinner. It was SO GOOD!

We had:

Chicken sauteed in butter with grilled onions and red bell pepper (I added some salsa on top)
Brown rice cooked with chicken broth, chopped carrots and red bell pepper
Black beans with avocado slices and a dollop of yogurt “cream cheese” (yogurt curds without the whey — I used this in place of sour cream)
Salad with red leaf lettuce, strawberries and blood oranges (all from our CSA box) with vinaigrette

We are drinking a very yummy biodynamic (organic) wine I found at Whole Foods called Côtes du Lubéron Blanc Château La Canorgue.

I put the dry black beans in a saucepan (with a lid) last night. I covered them with filtered water and added a couple of TBS of whey (homemade, from yogurt). They soaked for about 17 or 18 hours before she cooked them. We also soaked the rice all day.

Yensi wanted to make homemade tortillas, but we couldn’t find organic (non-GMO) masa harina. I called six stores!

Masa harina is basically pre-soaked corn meal. They soak it in lime water. This is the traditional method Yensi said they use in Guatemala. They soak the cornmeal (which they grind fresh) in lime water for two weeks.

Sally Fallon says in “Nourishing Traditions” that it’s best to make masa harina from scratch, because the masa harina you buy in the store is usually rancid (like most flour — it goes rancid quickly after grinding). Maybe we will get to that one day. In the meantime, the organic masa harina will have to do.

Yensi said has been been buying the Maseca brand of masa harina that she gets at her local store. Problem is, we looked it up and it’s not only not organic, but it is also genetically modified. They publicly denied that their products used genetically modified ingredients a few years back, but I know that is bullshit because they are owned by Archer Daniels Midland, makers of that shitty inedible “GE (genetically engineered) corn”.

I’m sure Maseca was a good company at one time, and they probably made good products. But big agribusiness corporations ruin everything they touch.

In the movie “King Corn” (see it if you haven’t), they tried to eat some of the genetically engineered corn they grew — they spit it out it was so bad. This corn is designed to be used for high fructose corn syrup. They make it by soaking the inedible corn in battery acid.

Yep, here we go:

Longstanding Mexican government regulation of corn supply and prices, support for small corn growers, and price subsidies for corn tortillas for Mexican consumers have been eliminated, all at the behest of Cargill, ADM, and ADM’s powerful Mexican partner, Gruma/Maseca. The end result of this globalization process is that small and medium-sized farmers, both North and South of the border, can’t make a living, while ADM and Cargill (and their preferred customers such as McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, Tyson, Smithfield) make a killing. Meanwhile, consumers, who have been promised that Free Trade would result in lower prices, are paying more for food every year. Corn tortillas, the main staple of the Mexican diet, have risen in price 300% since NAFTA came into effect.

Source

I was trying to explain to Yensi why the Maseca masa harina is bad. Try to explain “genetically modified” to someone for whom English is their second language. I basically said that not only is it not organic, but that the pesticide is actually INSIDE the corn. Not exactly true, and a very simplistic way of explaining it. I tried.

Anyway, I think we’re going to order the masa harina from the Bob’s Red Mill website — then we can have tortillas next week!

That was one of the best meals I’ve had in a while. Yensi is a fabulous cook!

And it was really wonderful to be able to just make the salad and not have to scurry around putting a whole meal together after I worked all day. Whew!

Yensi said she is going to put the leftover beans in the blender and then she will fry them in a skillet. Another Guatemalan specialty. I think we’ll have that Friday night with some ground beef tacos (we’ll use sprouted tortillas from Whole Foods since we can’t have homemade). Sounds great to me!

What’s for Dinner? March 17, 2008

I’m making:

Lasagna (made with organic grass-fed beef, tomato sauce, rice pasta, and freshly grated ricotta, mozzarella and Parmesan cheese)
Garden Cress, Tomato, and Fennel Salad (with oil and vinegar dressing)
Chocolate Ice Cream (made with Organic Pastures chocolate colostrum milk and raw pastured egg yolks)

I’m fairly new to this traditional foods way of eating. It’s much more time-intensive than packaged foods. But I feel so much better knowing that I am feeding my family real foods without preservatives and sugar and other additives.

Pasta is a quandary with traditional eating. The thing is, the Weston A. Price Foundation recommends that you soak all your grains. This is the way it was done in traditional cultures. The reason the grains are soaked is twofold: (1) it aids digestion and (2) it removes the anti-nutrients (phytates).

A diet high in unsoaked grains will cause nutrients to be blocked. It will also make digestion difficult — which also produces less absorption of nutrients.

According to “Nourishing Tradtions”, it is not absolutely necessary to soak rice because it is lower in phytates. It is better to soak, but if you don’t, it is not as bad for you.

So, rice pasta is acceptable! Sure, it would be better to soak the flour and make your own pasta — but if you can’t get around to that, use rice pasta instead of wheat. It’s better for you.

If you need a quick meal and haven’t soaked beans or other grains overnight, and have nothing in the freezer, you can always do rice pasta.

Sadly, there is a little sugar in this meal. The Organic Pastures chocolate colostrum is sweetened with sugar unfortunately. And the organic tomato sauce I bought has sugar in it. Why they need to add sugar, I have no clue. I’ll have to make my own from now on (I don’t know why I didn’t — it’s not hard at all).

Thyroid Recovery March 15, 2008

I’ve been thinking about this hypothyroid situation. Seth asked me today, “Why are you having a problem with your thyroid if you’ve been eating so healthy the past few months?”

Good question. I have an answer.

It’s due to the fact that I carried a baby for 9 months, then nursed her for 9 months. That’s 18 months of intense stress on my body.

I only started eating well (traditional foods) 5 months ago. However, I didn’t eat too bad before I got into traditional foods.

Ever since I cured myself of candida almost 15 years ago, I haven’t eaten much sugar at all. And I rarely ate fast food.

And I’ve been eating sprouted bread (Alvarado St. Bakery) most of the time since I was like 20 years old. I always liked the taste better than white bread.

I’ve also never been big on the whole low-fat diet thing. I’ve always eaten real butter and lots of cheese and meat and eggs. No margarine or low-fat cheese. And I always ate the skin on my chicken and ate full-fat meats.

This is probably why I was in relatively good health when Kate was conceived. I think the people who have a harder time are the ones who either eat lots of junk food and/or low-fat and/or are vegetarians — especially vegans.

And when I was carrying Kate, I ate a lot. I didn’t know about WAPF, so I ate stuff like donuts and burritos and cheeseburgers. But I was also eating a lot of things like eggs and steak and butter and drinking a lot of whole organic milk.

I ate this way when I was nursing, too. In fact, I think I ate even better after she was born (since I wasn’t suffering from morning sickness or heartburn). Every day, I would drink lots of milk and eat ice cream and every night I’d make a big dinner consisting of chicken or beef or fish, often with brown rice and butter and a big salad with oil and vinegar.

My health was fine until after I stopped nursing — in December. That was when I stopped eating well. I wanted to lose weight so I cut out grains and ate very low-carb. Not only that, but I really cut down on calories. I have only been eating one meal a day for the past few months.

Which may be fine under normal circumstances (before I got pregnant, I used to only eat one meal a day) but I think my body is run down now. I still need to rebuild my nutritional stores. Even though I am longer breastfeeding, I still need to eat a very nutrient dense diet — to rebuild what was depleted during pregnancy and breastfeeding.

Pregnancy and nursing take a huge toll on our bodies. It’s no wonder that we are nutritionally deficient after pregnancy and childbirth and extended breastfeeding.

So… here’s what I think… in addition to the supplements I’m taking (the ones Dr. Cowan recommends, which I started on yesterday), I need to eat more, and more nutrient dense foods. I’m going to try to go back to 2-3 meals a day.

The problem is — maybe it’s the thyroid thing — but I’m just not very hungry. I will have to eat smaller meals and eat more often during the day.

Today I actually felt a lot better. I had two meals. For breakfast, we went to Dinah’s Fried Chicken. I know, restaurant food. Not optimal. But at least I was eating!

I ordered 3 eggs over easy and hash browns and I asked them to cook them in butter, not oil. With that I had 1.5 pieces of fried chicken (I know, not ideal — but it’s Dinah’s; I could not resist) and some fresh fruit. No white flour — so that was good.

I had a glass of kefir in the afternoon. For dinner, I made seared ahi tuna on a bed of steamed spinach with rice wine vinegar, with a salad of apples and pears with “crispy walnuts” dressed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. And brown rice that I made with chicken broth instead of water.

I’ll drink a big glass (10-12 ounces) of raw milk or kefir before bed.

I’m going to start eating something every morning — either toasted sprouted bread with butter and raw honey or eggs and cheese… or oatmeal with butter and raw whole milk.

I’m not a big lunch person but I’ll try to snack during the day with kefir or cheese or eggs. I’ll try to eat at least two eggs a day.

I’ll make a nice big dinner every night. Meat lasagna or steak or fish with salad or homemade soup. And potatoes or rice.

And I’m going to drink a lot more raw milk. I think I will make some raw milk ice cream tomorrow and try to eat that every night for dessert.

And I’m going to try to incorporate broth into as many soups and sauces as possible.

I’m going to hold off on doing the GAPS diet with Seth. Right now I need to focus on getting myself healthy. I don’t want to limit dairy or other foods for now.

And I’m going to be better about taking my cod liver oil. I’ve been lax lately. And incorporate more coconut oil.

Yeah, it may take me a while to lose the baby weight. But right now I need to focus on getting healthy. I don’t think my thyroid condition is going to improve until I build up my nutritional stores. And I need to be really healthy so before can even think about trying to conceive again.

My friend Marcia said she didn’t lose the baby weight until 4 years after she gave birth. I think sometimes your body hangs on to the weight because it needs to. And trying to diet too soon is risky.

The thing is, if your thyroid is screwed up due to nutritional deficiencies, you can’t lose weight anyway, not matter how much you try.

I didn’t realize how hard it is on your body to be pregnant and carry a child. Add nursing on top of that and it’s a huge undertaking. It’s like running a marathon — for over a year!

I’m Hypothyroid! March 14, 2008

It appears that I have an iodine deficiency and hence hypothyroid, which means I have a low-functioning thyroid gland.

This morning I woke up and the patch on the inside of my arm had faded about 80-90%. It’s almost completely gone now!

From all the reading I’ve been doing, this is very common after pregnancy. There are many other causes including chloride and fluoride in the water, depleted iodine in the soil, and excess consumption of soy. Think you are not eating soy? If you are eating out in restaurants (any restaurants — not just fast food) or eating processed foods, you are taking in a lot of soy. This is due to all the soy oil they add to everything and cook everything with. This also explains the diabetes and obesity epidemics in this country.

I also think the mercury crown I had put in last year is also part of the cause. I’ll be having all the metal in my mouth removed in the next few months by our WAPF dentist, Dr. Raymond Silkman.

Here is what Dr. Cowan recommends for people with hypothyroidism — iodine, Standard Process Cataplex F, and Standard Process Thyrotropin:

I use organic iodine (1 tablet, two times per day) to supply extra iodine to the thyroid gland. Along with this I use Cataplex F tablets (1-2, three times per day). Cataplex F contains extracts of the 2 essential fatty acids (linolenic and linoleic acids) plus arachidonic acid and other polyunsaturated fatty acids that are often low in people with hypothyroidism. The effect of these fats is to help transport the blood calcium (and probably other blood minerals) into the tissues, where it can be used to fuel metabolic and enzymatic processes. The source of these fats are flax seed oil, beef liver lipids and testicular extract. The third medicine I use is Standard Process Thyrotrophin, the thyroid protomorphogen. I recommend 1-2 tablets, three times per day. Protomorphogens are specially prepared extracts of the nuclear material of the source gland, in this case bovine thyroid gland. Protomorphogens bind with and neutralize antibodies that can destroy our tissues and organs. In the case of hypothyroidism, often Hashimoto’s thyroiditis is involved, which is an autoimmune disorder of the thyroid gland. Neutralizing these attacking antibodies gives the gland a chance to rebuild itself by sheltering it from the attacking antibodies.

With this treatment, most patients report increased energy and, within a few months, the loss of about ten pounds. In six months your TSH should be back under 5. The treatment should be continued for two years or more.

This treatment is less effective when the TSH reading is over 8.0, in which case thyroid hormone may be required. Most doctors use the synthetic hormone Synthroid, but natural thyroid hormone is available. Such treatment must be carried out under the supervision of a licensed health care professional.

Ask the Doctor About Hypothyroidism

I’m going to call Dr. Cowan and set up a phone consultation. And today I’m going over to the Apothecary to get the supplements he recommends. They also have a couple of good books on thyroid function and thyroid disease.

I’m very relieved actually. Now I know why I’m so exhausted all the time, so moody, and why my baby weight won’t come off. And this explains my recent anxiety attacks. I have never had those before in my life!

It’s very important for me to improve my thyroid before I get ready to conceive again in the next year. I want to replenish all the vitamins and minerals my body needs to function properly so the next baby gets everything he needs.

It’s interesting because from what have been reading, most blood tests the doctors give you will not show a problem with the thyroid. My friend Sarah has many of the symptoms of hypothyroidism, but she always gets “normal” thyroid results. From what I’m learning, those tests don’t really work.

And apparently synthetic thyroid drugs are not effective either. They work for a while, but then they don’t work.

This site explains why: Stop the Thyroid Madness