Day 20
Felt pretty good today. Planned ahead food wise as I was out for most of the day. Finished up with a nice bivvie out in the wilds of outer Bath with my partner. It was strangely relaxing to not really take much food or worry about emergency bathroom moments. Just loads of water. No yearnings for sweet stuff, although I do still yearn after fruit and look forward to its return. Friends who have done the paleo diet say that it tastes really sweet after being without for some time and it will hopefully be enough to satisfy me once the official thirty days of detoxing are over.
This time period has made me have a real re-think about the sweet treats that I eat and why I indulge in them. It certainly fills both an emotional and a physical gap. Its also pretty lazy. I plan to stay off them for longer than my official 30 day detox. I plan to gradually re-introduce fruit and then honey and then go from there. Its true that in the longer term avoiding all savoury foods with sugar in would be a real challenge and re-shape many things like eating out and dinners with friends. Eating just whatever savouries you normally do will probably provide enough sugar if it has had any kind of processing however healthy it looks. My friend Simona is vegan and has emailed about her difficulties with finding food on the hop when she is hungry that is actually healthy. She said motorway services are particularly useless. I have really wondered (for those of us who are either car drivers or lift sharers which is most of us) where the wisdom lies on this. Driver's pit stops are simply laden with overpriced junk, sugary food and coffee. Cars weigh about a tonne and people jump in them to spin round often half asleep. Why are the main places to stock up for a reviving travel snack just filled with rubbish? Its ridiculous. They are certainly one of the easiest places for people to grab junk, particularly people on the move for work from salesmen to musicians.You have to do what I have termed the "Walk of Will", where you avoid eye contact with all sorts of brightly coloured tempting packages. Everyone deserves to be able to access healthy foods without this plethora of kak or paying 7 quid for a full plate of hot food at a services that is probably a baked potato and salad and won't do much for you either. Incidentally my sister's husband you can now buy pre-baked potatoes with toppings for re-heat. What planet Janet?
Day 21
Started the day with a river swim. What a winner. Pretty chilly by the time we hoisted out and the sun broke through to turn our fingers back from white to pink. Bit hungry but able to decamp to Bath for a bite to eat. Ate quite light with a bit of meat. Yesterday and today I found I got the 4pm energy dip. It seems directly proportional to how much meat and nuts I eat. I don't ever really buy meat and have not been endeared when I recently bought fish and chicken from a well know retailer. The fish was not fresh (that was when my housemates commented) and the chicken was off on its sell by when I opened it. I had bought it as it was organic, so not impressed. The fish I later discovered was also caught EITHER by "line, net or trawl". For anyone interested in fish issues The End of the Line documentray makes depressing viewing. Line catching is perceived as a good option. However the lines are miles long and baited at intervals. Sea faring birds such as the endangered albatross dive for the baits and get caught and die. Net catch hauls in a variety of unfortunate marine life, no matter what they say about sizes of net hole to let smaller fish out. I have witnessed this at grass roots level when I went out on a small traditional Sri Lankan fishing bought. We accidentally caught several things that were dead by the time entangled, one of them a beautiful Dragon Fish. Trawling as if anyone needs to know, uses huge metal rakes to literally scrape the sea bed bringing up everything in its way and leaving the equivalent of desertification on the ocean floor. So the idea that actually fish is a "healthy" option over red meat is deeply questionable for me. Just because we don't see fish in fields and they are not cute or furry it is still a very thorny ecological issue. I am trying to re think it at the moment although I don't eat alot of fish.
Food purchasing it seems to me is a real minefield. We are turned into scholars at the supermarket reading endless labels to avoid certain nasties or additives. We are faced with "local or global" food issues. I love rice but it travels thousands of miles to me around the world and I don't know much about workers rights in these countries or conditions in the paddy fields. Or environmental impacts. I read that it takes 140 litres of water to produce one cup of coffee grown to the new "full sun" more intensive method of farming. Higher yields are produced but at what cost? Shade grown coffee (literally utilising the shade from surrounding forest trees) is more sustainable, yet produces a lower yield. It supports more biodiversity. The coffee flavour is supposedly better too. Guatemala can be a good area for this and also for coffee dried on tables in the traditional style. Try to fins out where your coffee comes from and support traitional growing methods. Something else I have learned recently is that the western world's ongoing interest in buying quinoa has driven up prices in the countries where it naturally grows and now local people can't afford it. I believe as far as possible local is always best but sometimes just not achievable without huge effort and commitment. I fall short of the grade I know. Do we have the time or the patience to unpick these issues? Can we use more of our "wasted" space in cities to grow food. Personally I think we should look at going up. There is plenty of available wall space and for me vertical gardens in cities may be the future. Check out this website where walls are no barrier to greening. Patrick Blanc has got some very cool ideas. http://www.verticalgardenpatrickblanc.com/
I have certainly gone off the point about sugar, but my point is that f we had more fresh fruit and veg available to us that we could freely harvest around towns and cities without waiting a week for a veg box to arrive we could eat healthily on the hop and start to re-shape our eating habits..........
Felt pretty good today. Planned ahead food wise as I was out for most of the day. Finished up with a nice bivvie out in the wilds of outer Bath with my partner. It was strangely relaxing to not really take much food or worry about emergency bathroom moments. Just loads of water. No yearnings for sweet stuff, although I do still yearn after fruit and look forward to its return. Friends who have done the paleo diet say that it tastes really sweet after being without for some time and it will hopefully be enough to satisfy me once the official thirty days of detoxing are over.
This time period has made me have a real re-think about the sweet treats that I eat and why I indulge in them. It certainly fills both an emotional and a physical gap. Its also pretty lazy. I plan to stay off them for longer than my official 30 day detox. I plan to gradually re-introduce fruit and then honey and then go from there. Its true that in the longer term avoiding all savoury foods with sugar in would be a real challenge and re-shape many things like eating out and dinners with friends. Eating just whatever savouries you normally do will probably provide enough sugar if it has had any kind of processing however healthy it looks. My friend Simona is vegan and has emailed about her difficulties with finding food on the hop when she is hungry that is actually healthy. She said motorway services are particularly useless. I have really wondered (for those of us who are either car drivers or lift sharers which is most of us) where the wisdom lies on this. Driver's pit stops are simply laden with overpriced junk, sugary food and coffee. Cars weigh about a tonne and people jump in them to spin round often half asleep. Why are the main places to stock up for a reviving travel snack just filled with rubbish? Its ridiculous. They are certainly one of the easiest places for people to grab junk, particularly people on the move for work from salesmen to musicians.You have to do what I have termed the "Walk of Will", where you avoid eye contact with all sorts of brightly coloured tempting packages. Everyone deserves to be able to access healthy foods without this plethora of kak or paying 7 quid for a full plate of hot food at a services that is probably a baked potato and salad and won't do much for you either. Incidentally my sister's husband you can now buy pre-baked potatoes with toppings for re-heat. What planet Janet?
Day 21
Started the day with a river swim. What a winner. Pretty chilly by the time we hoisted out and the sun broke through to turn our fingers back from white to pink. Bit hungry but able to decamp to Bath for a bite to eat. Ate quite light with a bit of meat. Yesterday and today I found I got the 4pm energy dip. It seems directly proportional to how much meat and nuts I eat. I don't ever really buy meat and have not been endeared when I recently bought fish and chicken from a well know retailer. The fish was not fresh (that was when my housemates commented) and the chicken was off on its sell by when I opened it. I had bought it as it was organic, so not impressed. The fish I later discovered was also caught EITHER by "line, net or trawl". For anyone interested in fish issues The End of the Line documentray makes depressing viewing. Line catching is perceived as a good option. However the lines are miles long and baited at intervals. Sea faring birds such as the endangered albatross dive for the baits and get caught and die. Net catch hauls in a variety of unfortunate marine life, no matter what they say about sizes of net hole to let smaller fish out. I have witnessed this at grass roots level when I went out on a small traditional Sri Lankan fishing bought. We accidentally caught several things that were dead by the time entangled, one of them a beautiful Dragon Fish. Trawling as if anyone needs to know, uses huge metal rakes to literally scrape the sea bed bringing up everything in its way and leaving the equivalent of desertification on the ocean floor. So the idea that actually fish is a "healthy" option over red meat is deeply questionable for me. Just because we don't see fish in fields and they are not cute or furry it is still a very thorny ecological issue. I am trying to re think it at the moment although I don't eat alot of fish.
Food purchasing it seems to me is a real minefield. We are turned into scholars at the supermarket reading endless labels to avoid certain nasties or additives. We are faced with "local or global" food issues. I love rice but it travels thousands of miles to me around the world and I don't know much about workers rights in these countries or conditions in the paddy fields. Or environmental impacts. I read that it takes 140 litres of water to produce one cup of coffee grown to the new "full sun" more intensive method of farming. Higher yields are produced but at what cost? Shade grown coffee (literally utilising the shade from surrounding forest trees) is more sustainable, yet produces a lower yield. It supports more biodiversity. The coffee flavour is supposedly better too. Guatemala can be a good area for this and also for coffee dried on tables in the traditional style. Try to fins out where your coffee comes from and support traitional growing methods. Something else I have learned recently is that the western world's ongoing interest in buying quinoa has driven up prices in the countries where it naturally grows and now local people can't afford it. I believe as far as possible local is always best but sometimes just not achievable without huge effort and commitment. I fall short of the grade I know. Do we have the time or the patience to unpick these issues? Can we use more of our "wasted" space in cities to grow food. Personally I think we should look at going up. There is plenty of available wall space and for me vertical gardens in cities may be the future. Check out this website where walls are no barrier to greening. Patrick Blanc has got some very cool ideas. http://www.verticalgardenpatrickblanc.com/
I have certainly gone off the point about sugar, but my point is that f we had more fresh fruit and veg available to us that we could freely harvest around towns and cities without waiting a week for a veg box to arrive we could eat healthily on the hop and start to re-shape our eating habits..........
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