Well this is it, the final stretch! Hope everyone feels amazing for this last week. Here is an epic compilation of beautiful clean eating recipes. Hope you guys enjoy!
Wow, hey! It’s been a week already. The hardest part is over and I’m starting to feel like a functioning human again. There were definitely a few days of struggle, even with an abundance of healthy and damn delicious food. Once you get into the groove it feels really good. I’ve kicked my long term late night snacking habit which feel pretty awesome.
How’s everybody else doing? Hope you guys liked the meal plan from week 1 of the whole 30. I’m sure if you did the shopping for week one there will be a lot of things that you can ignore on this shopping list. But for clarities sake and to ensure you’ve got all the ingredients, I included them all. Hope it’s not too overwhelming. Happy week 2!
Yay for fall! It’s my favourite season and NOT because of pumpkin spice lattes and comfy sweaters. Though those things are nice. I like the way nature renews itself by shedding that which no longer serves a purpose. I love the smells of decay and the brisk air. The reflective feelings that naturally rise up when any season shifts, but particularly this one. The opportunity for renewal is ripe for the picking. Which I why I thought it was a great time to do a whole 30 full body reset.
After a summer of plenty with treats and hearty glasses of wine to last the winter long, it’s time. I’ve been starting to feel sluggish and dependent on treats for a little burst of energy. And you know what, I just hate that feeling. Call me a control freak but its nice not to rely on anything for energy and that get up and go we all strive for.
But you guys, I really hate doing this stuff alone. It’s the worst and it makes fighting those urges to reach for dark chocolate and a glass of red all the more difficult. SO I’ve created a little Facebook group and I’ll be posting weekly Whole 30 approved meal plans and shopping lists, because thats the hard part. So if you’ve been contemplating treating yourself to a detoxifying elimination diet, if you’ve been struggling with poor digestion, a few pounds that don’t want to vacate, lack of energy or hormonal imbalance then maybe now is the time to give your body a break.
Join the 30 day detox challenge Facebook group HERE or if you don’t do Facebook then just keep an eye out on the blog for the weekly meal plans and shopping lists.
Raising a healthy eater who is open to a variety of foods starts with us moms during pregnancy. Depending on what we eat during pregnancy we start to shape our childs palate.
Knowing this now, it makes sense that my son has never liked boring purees or flavourless cereals. Those foods certainly weren’t something my pregnancy diet primed him for. Instead, he’s interested in much of the same things I ate in abundance when pregnant. Fresh berries, intensely flavoured curries, plenty of fatty meats and fermented foods. Of course he hasn’t yet tasted those double fudge quinoa brownies that I love so much, but I’m sure once he does he’ll love those too.
My son is just starting to decide for himself which foods he likes and which he doesn’t. He shows me this by chucking chunks of raw apple across the room vs. devouring apple cooked in cinnamon butter in mere seconds. I adore watching him enjoy food, I can appreciate that all mothers experience this. It makes sense now why we try and accommodate our children however we can, even if all they’ll eat is french fries. We want to see them happy, full and content, so we do whatever it takes. Culturally it makes sense that our children love sweet and carbohydrate dense foods. Typical North American parenting practices involve an early diet of just that, grains, sweet cereals, sweet beverages and basically all things that babies don’t actually have the enzymes to digest.
What we feed our children from the womb throughout infancy establishes their taste buds for life. Why are pickles a comfort food for some and others completely nasty? Why is it that some people adore cilantro and others think it tastes like soap?
Taking a different approach to feeding babies looks more like what we would see in less affluent countries. No doubt, mothers all over the world want to see their babes enjoying food. The marked difference is the necessity inherent in a poorer (I hate this term but it gets the point across) nation’s food choices for their infants. So often children, even babies, just eat what their parents eat, and it makes sense. When did we start creating baby or toddler specific meals, separate from our own and how does that benefit us or our children?
This question really boggles my mind, I’ve always wondered about the practicality behind some of the things people do without question. Shitting in water for example, when we know that using a contained and sanitary composting toilet would then allow the cycle of life to complete itself. A little off topic but important nonetheless. Is it nutritionally necessary to feed babies baby specific boring ass foods? The answer is no. Cultivating a childs palate to be open to a variety of different flavours must start at a young age or we may never get the chance. Once that little mind decides what it likes and doesn’t, old habits die hard.
I started out practicing baby led weaning, which involves letting an infant age 6 months and up basically feed themselves. Standard wisdom suggests mashing and pureeing everything to spoon feed your baby. Up to a certain point this makes sense but babies, even as young as 4 or 5 months have a strong gag reflex, they have the mechanics to ensure they don’t choke because it’s in their very nature to put anything and everything in their curious little mouths. This method resonated with me, even though I’m a paranoid first time mom. I could see that my child was capable of feeding himself and frankly enjoyed exploring the foods I gave him more than even eating them. At this point his primary source of nourishment was still breast milk, food was merely an exploratory experience of tastes and textures. With baby led weaning, an infant first learns how to chew and then swallow, instead of the inverse.
“Babies who are weaned using solid finger food are more likely to develop healthier food preferences and are less likely to become overweight as children than those who are spoon-fed pureed food.”
One of the main reasons I chose to practice this style of nourishment is because it allows for the freedom to explore and learn in a more natural progression. It gives autonomy to the infant, whose capabilities often exceed our presumptions. And last but not least, it might be the key to raising a child whose open to different types of food.
Sally Fallon, leader of the Weston A. Price Foundation and author of various books on traditional diets recommends against baby led weaning in her book Nourishing Traditions Book of Baby and Child Care. Her points against this practice are valid, that by 6 months babies do have real nutritional needs beyond breast milk that need to be met, and we simply can’t just leave it up to them. It was for this reason that I did a combination practice of mostly baby led weaning with the occasional spoon fed meal of grated free range beef liver for iron and lightly cooked free range egg yolk for its abundance of b-vitamins. Other important nutrients for growing babies like omega-3 fatty acids were met through supplementation and it didn’t take long for Mav to decide he likes eating fish.
Let me be clear in saying I didn’t and continue to not cater specifically to what I think my child would like. I give him what I eat, even if there’s spices, bitter flavours, sour ferments and strange textures. Of course I’m not going to give him anything too insane that would burn his mouth, or load him up with diarrhea inducing amounts of fermented vegetables, there is balance. I disagree that we should be feeding our infants boring purees and cereals. It makes sense that this is setting them up to crave those types of food as they grow older. I’ve had to teach myself how to like healthy foods, literally, it wasn’t a natural thing to reach for that jar of sauerkraut or a big salad over a bowl of chips. I can’t help but think it would come more naturally if I’d been fed these foods as an infant.
I’ll be honest, when I first started baby-led weaning I wasn’t really convinced that my child would be interested in eating what I was eating and not just throwing it across the room. But I just continued to place an assortment of foods in front of him, he would pick and choose, play and explore. It took time for my brain to deprogram from the age old spoon fed puree style of feeding babies.
Fast forward 10 months since we started baby led weaning and my little man eats a wide variety of foods that I put in front of him. He enjoys an assortment of ferments like sauerkraut and kefir, curries and intense flavours like ginger and cinnamon, meats, including organ meats and especially fatty cuts and duck. I’m a lot less strict about sugar now that he’s a bit older but I still try and avoid it. On the rare occasion that baby gets something sweet at this point he’s really not that into it.
In the quest of establishing healthy eating habits, it’s possible to try too hard to be too anal. In a perfect world sugar wouldn’t engage the same brain centres as cocaine and we’d all live happily ever after. But we’ll never be able to keep our kids away from all unhealthy foods and its not worth stressing over. The point where we have control is where we need to utilize it. Right now, at a year and a half I get to choose for my baby what he eats and establish his taste buds to not turn up his nose at chicken livers when he’s older. I know it’s not always going to be that way. My house was the house kids would come to and gorge on pop, chips and pizza before returning home to kale and carrot sticks. And if your the PCP house, all hope is not lost either. Eventually I realized that eating junk made me feel like junk and started to train myself to actually enjoy healthy foods. It worked!
As a side note, what is more fun than watching your child experience a food for the very first time! It’s hilarious, the confused face which sometimes turns to a smile or a sour faced grimace. The bottom line is food should be enjoyable, and creating healthy food habits starts with us as parents.
I thought you had potential, your packaging made you look so healthy and natural. Your golden amber hue reminded me of honey, as did the title ‘nectar’. Nectar? This is a term reserved for rare purity, divine nectar, nectar of the Gods- call it what you will. You hijacked this term and used it miles out of context. You continue to trick people with your low-glycemic index and tasteless sweetness. I won’t stand for it anymore, and I’m telling the world, agave syrup is not your friend.
Processed food is processed food. You can call it what you will, you can dub it the ultimate alternative to sugar, you can sing its praises from the mountains high but when all is said and done, many health foods are just as processed as those weird cheese slices wrapped in plastic.
Ok well maybe it’s not that bad, but I kid you not, a lot of stuff being touted as healthy and natural, is far from it. This happens for a number of reasons, because health is an industry just like any other and people are out to make money. There’s not much stopping companies, aside from reputation, from putting whatever they want on a label. When agave nectar came on to the scene it sounded like such a precious and wonderful natural substance. I would use it instead of honey for a long time until I found out that it’s mostly fructose and difficult for our livers to assimilate. Really it just turns to fat, something that doesn’t happen quite as easily with an actual natural sweeteners.
I’m writing this series because I want to bring awareness to the gaping holes in the food labelling/marketing procedures. People can say whatever they want about their revolutionary new product, but the proof is in the pudding. Many of us are just trying to be health conscious, but we don’t necessarily have time to research every single ingredient we ingest and it’s natural to see something labelled ‘healthy’ and assume that must be the case.
In the first part of this series we talked about the dangers of soy, a long time pseudo health food. Today I want to go into more detail about some common sweeteners. I’m not even going to get into aspartame because I think by now most people know about the dangers associated with this rat poison in disguise. But lets talk about agave, because there’s still a lot of people under the impression that this is a good alternative to sugar.
Agave “Nectar”
Agave is far from being a whole food, it’s actually highly processed and unlike the name suggests, doesn’t fall into the category of a true ‘nectar’ whatsoever. The extraction of the sweet syrup comes from the starchy root of the plant. It’s a process similar to that of high fructose corn syrup and requires a transformation of the plant fibre inulin into sugar.
This is done by means of enzymatic or thermal hydrolisis. In the case of raw agave nectar, enzymatic hydrolosis technically ensures the agave syrup is still raw.
The process converts inulin into fructose and the finished product is anywhere from 70% fructose or higher. In contrast, high fructose corn syrup is 55% fructose and 45% glucose and even THAT causes problems with insulin response. (1) (2)
But…Agave has a low glycemic index, making it good for diabetics right? Wrong.
Just like research has proven high fructose corn syrup to be dangerous for diabetics, agave syrup could be even more so. The dangers of agave syrup lie in the fact that our bodies just weren’t designed to process such high levels of fructose. The main fuel used in humans is glucose, at least with glucose we can use it up as energy but fructose is pretty useless.
So what’s the problem with concentrated fructose? Well the common assumption is that fructose is a naturally occurring sugar present in fruit. In actuality, fructose is just one type of sugar present in fruit, there’s also levulose,sucrose and glucose. Accompanied by the whole fruit itself, complete with fibre, antioxidants and enzymes, it’s far less harmful to consume fruit than it is to consume their extracted sugar concentrate.
There are key differences between levulose, glucose and fructose, the most important being that levulose and glucose are digested in the intestine. Fructose is processed through the liver, which is why it doesn’t spike insulin levels. It’s for this reason that agave syrup is promoted as a low-glycemic sugar substitute for diabetics, but it is by no means safe.
Because fructose is processed through the liver it immediately turns into triglycerides or stored body fat. The effects of this are amplified as it inhibits leptin, the main hormone responsible for helping us feel satiated. This then causes us to eat more, perpetuating the problem that it’s supposed to be helping.
Studies show fructose sweetened beverages leads to increased insulin sensitivity (3). So while agave may have a low-glycemic index it’s still not appropriate for diabetics to consume. A better option would be whole fruit or natural sweeteners like honey and maple syrup that have a balanced ratio of fructose and glucose.
With diabetes and obesity on the rise, more and more evidence is coming out to show sugar being the culprit. The explosion of popular diets with the goal to balance blood sugar is a direct reaction to the worlds growing addiction. Yet we still want some sweetness in life. Dried fruit is great but we want our treats, and we are all guilty of this. I think it has a lot to do with how we were raised and many of us grew up eating a SAD diet high in sugar and refined carbs.
So the market started churning out these low glycemic sweeteners. First it was aspartame, well gosh it took us awhile to catch up to that one! I’m still horrified that diet sodas are even allowed on the shelves. If this is news to you please check out the documentary Sweet Misery: A Poisoned World. Then it was sucralose, stevia, and xylitol, which are far less devastating than aspartame but still a far cry from being healthy. For a lot of us, the taste of artificial sweeteners is a major turn off, there’s no denying they all have a strangely fake sweetness, one that provides no energy whatsoever.
But in an age where sugar is fast becoming the major health villain, we take what sweetness we can get. Then along came agave syrup in the 1990’s, before the 90’s we lacked the technology to even be able to produce the stuff. It caught on as a low GI, healthy alternative to sugar that didn’t spike insulin and that tasted sweet without the after taste of the artificial sweeteners.
Southwestern Indigenous peoples used agave in their traditional diets, but the processing was closer to how we make maple syrup. They would gather sap from the plant and boil it down to make a thick syrup. This is quite different from the often genetically modified enzymatic treatment commonly used to extract the sweet liquid today.
It sure is unfortunate that manufacturers put whatever they want on labels. It’s empowering to know the truth before we invest in something that lacks any real merit. There’s also something about the taste of agave syrup, it really is just pure sweetness, lacking any depth of flavour. It strikes me as being cheap to produce and is basically the organic industries version of high fructose corn syrup. Unfortunately, agave is probably even less healthy than regular old cane sugar. At least normal sugar has a ratio of glucose and fructose that our bodies understand.
I now try and stick to truly natural sweeteners of which there aren’t very many Coconut sugar (succanat), maple syrup and raw honey. Sweetness in life is nice don’t get me wrong, but lets save the agave for natural fibre production.
If you haven’t already, check out part I of the series all about the dangers of soy.
Is it safe to say that we all want to be the best version of ourselves?
We want to feel alive and vibrant, not stagnant and numb. But sometimes we lack the tools to get to that sweet place…
Welcome to biohacking, a fairly new health movement that does just that- propels us to be the best we can be. Finding flow and balance, utilizing technology to our human advantage, biohacking teaches the principals to stack the deck in our favour.
I want to be clear and say that biohacking isn’t about inserting chips into our bodies and embracing some sort of cyborg lifestyle (at least not to me anyways). It’s not about embracing technology to a point where we lose touch with nature, in fact I see it as quite the opposite. Biohacking can help us to grow a stronger connection to our nature so that we can live in more optimal ways. Its no secret that the path humanity walks along at present isn’t working too well. Collectively, people and the planet are sicker and more disconnected than ever. Bringing back that connection to ourselves and our environment is crucial to finding healing in a crazy world. Why not utilize what’s proven to propel ourselves forward on this journey of constant improvement?
Blending together ancient fundamentals with modern technology, we have access to a lot of information about our human nature. We can learn from the past and use the tools of the present to track our progress. Harnessing this knowledge enables us to quantify data and apply it to improve our lives. Through nutrition, fitness, sleep, meditation and our environments we can implement certain techniques to hack our way to wellness.
What works best is a question that can’t be answered unless we quantify and track our progress. For anyone who has a website or business, tracking key metrics is critical to growth and ultimately success. The same principles apply to many things, people often track calories for weight loss, profits and expenses for taxes, mileage for gas, the list goes on. When we apply tracking principles to our health and wellness we optimize our chances for success. We strive to move forward, to improve- if only by .1% every day, we’re still improving.
Since there’s no such thing as perfection, improvement is the name of the game. What would happen if we actually noted how many times a day we check our phones? Usually this is an unconscious activity and something we do without thinking, but is it necessary, is it helping us move forward or is it a waste of time? We can navigate everything from mundane energy wasting tasks that are best outsourced, to balancing our blood sugar levels for optimal energy and focus.
Often biohacking gets grouped into the categories of either body building or futurist theories. It’s a lot more than that, and I think its time the principles were explored a little deeper in order to apply to everyone.
Biohacking is cracking the code of body, mind and spirit. Dave Asprey calls it a state of high performance. I think it’s more than that, it’s understanding ourselves better so that we can achieve a state of high being. Finding out of the box solutions to our woes, working with technology yet still understanding its limits. Heck you don’t even have to use technology, really there are simple hacks like sleeping in pure darkness or cutting sugar from the diet that literally can change everything.
One must have the utmost respect for the human life-force, we’re pretty complex! But if we can get within our complexities and understand the root of our problems, then bam- we hack our biology and we attain something greater than we thought possible. Knowing is half the battle, which I why I like to spend my free time reading scientific studies, teehee.
So far what makes the most sense to me is coming to grips with certain manipulatable human tendencies that cause us undo suffering and fixing them. Like hormones, so many people have hormonal imbalance, but when we have the tools to fix that, life becomes more manageable. Biohacking is just another way of looking at a set of tools to help us be even more awesome.
Over the next few weeks I’m going to delve deeper into the topic of biohacking. Stay on the look out for detailed articles on biohacking the body, mind and spirit.
Hey I'm Chantelle, my alter ego would be a mermaid if I wasn't such a terrible swimmer. I love writing authentically and cooking in my pyjamas. My favourite pastimes include eating avocados, travelling the world and hanging out with a toddler.
(succanat), 
and 
. Sweetness in life is nice don’t get me wrong, but lets save the agave for natural fibre production.
