Saturday, February 16, 2008

New Eating Programme

Well, I'm 4 weeks into the new eating programme I blogged about in my last entry - inspired by the fantastic book "Potatoes Not Prozac" by Kathleen Desmaisons. Incidentally she also has a website which provides an overview of the programme and forums where people can send questions or just post their thoughts. I've found it really supportive to read about other people who have gone through similar stuff to me.

So, back to my progress. Well it started really well. The first step is to adjust your breakfast, or for those who skip this vital meal of the day, have one. As I have always eaten breakfast regularly, this was a fairly easy first step for me, although I know my friend has spent a bit more time on this stage. The second step, writing a food journal, also seemed fairly easy. So after 2 1/2 weeks, I was feeling fairly upbeat about moving onto step 3.

This is where by problems started. Step 3 requires you to eat 3 meals a day with protein at each meal (there's a bit more to it, but that's the basics, for the purpose of this blog). Well, I don't always eat 3 meals a day, so obviously I've been a bit up and down since then. It's amazing how such a simple adjustment can bring up so many "food issues". But unlike "wobbly moments" before, this time I feel I have the tools to recover and I have indeed rebalanced myself quicker than I would normally have done.

So while my initial naivety that it would all be easy and really quick has been scuppered again, I am still feeling really positive that this is the eating programme for me.

More later...

Friday, February 1, 2008

Are we getting enough nutrients?

An interesting question? I expect a lot of us who eat 3 home cooked meals a day consider that our diets are healthy and provide the right balance of nutrients for our needs.

I've recently been given a book by my friend Liz, called "Potatoes Not Prozac" by Kathleen Desmaisons, which addresses sugar sensitivity. What's this you may ask - I did. It's the name given for a certain body chemistry which leads us to crave sweet foods. Sugar sensitive people are the ones who have an emotional response to the idea of eating chocolate or cake - you'll have an idea if this is you or not.

Anyway, the idea of the book is to manage this through diet. I can't comment fully on this yet because I'm only halfway through the book, but it partially involves getting enough protein, which is what I would like to talk about.

Having had no real idea whether I was ever getting the "right" amount of nutrients in my diet, I decided to look into this by reading my labels and surfing the web. And to my surprise I noticed that a lot of foods had much lower protein amounts that I would have guessed. In fact so low, that I was confused as to how I was going to get enough protein into my diet to fulfil the requirements of the book's process.

This was until I was discussing the problem with Liz and she was quoting much higher protein values for eggs than I'd researched. On further discussion, I realised that Liz was quoting values for organic eggs and I was quoting values for standard eggs. Standard eggs were listed as 6g protein per egg and the organic eggs were listed as 12g protein per egg.

That's quite a difference when you think that a couple of eggs for breakfast seems fairly normal, but if you had to eat double that because you were only getting half the protein, you'd probably feel you were overeating.

I decided to look into this further on my weekly shop today. The normal Feta cheese is rated as 6g protein per 100g but organic Feta cheese as 16g protein per 100g; an even bigger difference.

This has made me wonder how many people who feel they cannot afford organic are deficient in nutrients and whether, in fact, buying the cheaper food is actually a false economy.