Still going... and now trying to get in shape!

It's been almost 9 months since I received my LEAP results... and I still kind of follow the diet. I feel a lot better too, which may be a result of less stress, a change in seasons, or who knows what else. Or, it could be because I follow the diet. I may never know...

The way I follow the diet now is that I really just actively try to avoid my "red" and "yellow," and some of the "high green" foods everyday if I can. There are times when it is just not feasible, particularly when I eat out (e.g., I order a gluten free pizza about once a week and am a big fan of getting nachos). I haven't really been rotating foods in the diet all that much (especially corn, tomatoes, peppers, dairy, eggs, and rice -- which I eat pretty much every day), but I have been trying my best to eat a greater variety of foods than I used to. Oh, and I drink pretty much an unlimited amount of diet coke, even though cola is one of my "yellow" foods. Ultimately, I end up eating a lot less preservatives and sugar than I would otherwise, which I'm sure plays a big role in my IBS recovery. I try to avoid buying ANYTHING when I grocery shop that isn't organic or that includes any extra, unnecessary ingredients. For instance, I LOVE cottage cheese but haven't had it in months because it always seems to have added gums. I just found a cottage cheese that's actually locally made in Iowa and has minimal ingredients; and, I think I might try my hand at making my own (I have had luck making my own paneer cheese on multiple occasions). Finally, I currently have a big 'ol vegetable garden and I go to the farmer's market once a week, so I have been able to eat a lot of fresh foods this summer.

But now... I want to start getting in shape! I'm really not in bad shape. In fact, I won a triathlon with my sister this summer! We did it relay style, and among women's teams we took first. I only had to bike a 20k and she did the rest. But, my weight has crept up about five pounds over the past year. I actually think I look really good at this weight. In fact, it might be ideal for me as I am probably most often too thin. But I have this irrational anxiety about my weight creeping even higher, so I guess part of this plan might be to subdue that anxiety. I would like to say that this is probably not the best way to deal with that anxiety, I think working toward acceptance of my body at whatever shape it is will likely serve me better in the long run. I do really like being strong, however. I like the strength that training for the triathlon has given me, and the fact that I can now exercise without feeling like a wimp. I also want to sort of rehab my body because of some of the problems I have, including pre-arthritis in my feet and wrist pain. I want to do yoga at an Iyengar center to better support me doing correct postures and alignment. I also want to lift weights as strength training can help people with hyper-extensible joints such as myself. Finally, I want to try and do a spin class once a week and continue commuting by bike to keep up the cardiovascular health I was able to achieve when training for the triathlon. That is super overzealous. The fact is, I know will not have time for all of that. Not to mention it is probably not healthy for my social life or my mental and emotional health to spend so much time and mental effort on exercise. I tend to become overly obsessed with diet and exercise, so I really want to find a healthy yet feasible middle ground. I'm not sure what that will be -- mentally, I feel like everything on my list of I want... is crucial! It's not, but it feels that way to me right now. Did I say I don't like to half-ass things? Haha! I'll keep thinking about what to do, for now.

Part of why I'm writing about this here is that I also want to be a bit more mindful of and/or planful about my eating. I want to continue to search for more variety in my diet, and I want to pay better attention to how much protein I eat to complement my workout regimen. I have the idea of following a rotation diet splitting the week into two -- Monday breakfast to Friday lunch as the first part, and Friday afternoon to Sunday as the second. I figure I could make food ahead of time for the week on Sunday nights and then just reheat during the week.

Here's a dish I made this morning. Typically, I've been having eggs with cheese  and salsa for breakfast. That is super high protein (3 eggs + 1 oz swiss = 29g), which is great, but I want to find another alternative to switch it up from time to time. Last week I ate rice cakes with peanut butter for breakfast (2 organic cakes + 2 tbsp. peanut butter = 10g protein), and this morning I tried making a savory oatmeal. It was good! Here it is:

It's a serving of cooked steel cut oats with a serving of Eden Organic black eyed peas cooked with a tsp. peanut oil, scallions, and halved cherry tomatoes and chard from my garden. I topped it with an ounce of crumbled chevre goat cheese. Overall, this was more than 19g of protein. Not too shabby! And, after seasoning with salt, it was quite delicious.

MILKS!!!

My diet has changed a bit, but that's a whole different story.

What I'm sharing today is a link to a recipe for making your own oat milk! I found it so difficult to find non-dairy milks while on the first few phases of the diet because they would always have additives such as sunflower or safflower oil (now I just use goats milk or cows milk). So, if you're in that stage of the diet and need some milk for cooking or drinking, follow this link.

Also, my previous post mentioned the difficulty I had been having with finding a coconut milk that did not contain guar gum. I found one! The coconut milk at Trader Joe's is supposedly just coconut milk. I haven't gone there and picked any up myself yet, so when you go to get some make sure you double check the label first.

Flours, Coconut Milk, & Gums

I think I may be becoming an organic coconut milk and gluten-free flour hoarder. But, in all seriousness, this stuff is expensive! I buy in bulk when it's on sale. I can't buy the all-purpose flours and flour mixes, so I buy corn flour, cornmeal, millet flour, tapioca flour, oat flour, white and brown rice flour, and amaranth flour. I've also recently picked up some teff and sorghum flour. My stash makes more sense now, right?

Sad note about the coconut milk, though, it has guar gum and in it! I tried eating organic cottage cheese for breakfast today, but it too had guar gum and locust bean gum! So I didn't eat it. What's the deal with putting gums in everything organic?

Monday (Day 2 of rotation)

Breakfast
I don't have much of an appetite this morning, so I just had some pineapple and leftover amaranth cornbread with strawberry preserves. The cane sugar is supposed to be eaten only on Day 3, so next time I'll need to use a different sweetener when making cornbread. Also, the preserves have cane sugar. The rotation diet is a REAL CHALLENGE.

Amaranth Cornbread

Ingredients

• 1 tsp ghee to grease the skillet (more or less if needed)
• 2 cups gluten-free yellow cornmeal
• 1 1/2 cups mix of corn flour, amaranth flour, & corn starch (the bread ended up being somewhat dense, so I would try a different flour mix next time)
• 1 cup uncooked whole-grain amaranth
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup organic cow's milk buttermilk 
• 2/3 cup cane sugar syrup
• 2 tablespoons ghee
• 2 eggs
• 2 tablespoons chopped pecans (optional) 

Directions

Preheat oven to 400°.

Oil a 9-inch cast-iron skillet with 1 teaspoon ghee. Place in a 400° oven for 7 minutes.

Combine dry ingredients (cornmeal, flour mix, amaranth, baking powder, baking soda, and salt) in a large bowl. Whisk together wet ingredients (buttermilk, cane sugar syrup, 2 tbsp. ghee, and eggs) in a small bowl. Pour wet ingredients into the dry, stirring just until the dry ingredients are completely moistened.  Pour batter into the preheated skillet. Sprinkle the pecans over batter (if using). Bake at 400° for 25 minutes or until a wooden toothpick comes out clean.

Lunch & Dinner

Corn and Roasted Sweet Potato Chowder

I adapted my recipe from soupchick.com (link) using the following ingredients: 

Ingredients

1 pound cubed, peeled sweet potato
2 tsp ghee, divided
1/2 large red onion, diced
1-1/2 tsp brown sugar (or a smaller quantity of molasses)
1 bay leaf
10 oz frozen corn kernels (next time I would roast them first)
Salt and fresh black pepper

1 Tbsp thinly sliced scallions, for garnish

I also might add a small amount of shredded cheddar cheese, if I feel up for really starting to experiment with dairy. Thus far, I've really only used cow's milk-products in baking and eaten cottage cheese.
 

Sunday Meals (using Day 1 of the diet)

Breakfast
Green tea and Lundberg apple cinnamon rice cakes.

Lunch & Dinner
Today I'm making some recipes from my How to Cook Indian cookbook by Sanjeev Kapoor. I also included scallops seared in rice bran oil with dinner. 

I'm still struggling a bit to keep the food families together on the rotation schedule, especially in regards to citrus and onion/leek/garlic. Because those foods seem so essential to good cooking, I have split up the citrus fruits into different days and will do the same with the onion/leek/garlic family (Interestingly, asparagus is also in that family). 

I'm using a leek stock for my soup today because 1) I have it in my freezer and 2) I'm still thinking about what to do with this food group. The recipe also calls for garlic. I just used garlic yesterday, so I guess I will leave it out today and just use leeks instead. My Indian soup will have a French flair.

All of my recipes for today also call for cumin. Cumin is a 1.3 on my LEAP results, so I feel confident eating it (Anything under 1.0 is very low reactive, and it looks like anything under 2.0 is fairly low reactive as well. I'm trying to stick to foods under 1.5 right now). BUT... it's a member of the parsley family, which I eat on Day 3 (as mentioned above, I'm on Day 1 now). So, I'm splitting up the parsley family and hoping there is enough diversity between the seed of cumin and the root of carrot that it won't be a problem. Although, it would be nice to have cumin on the Mexican-inspired day as well... decisions, decisions!

Fodnicha Bhaat (Tempered Rice)
My adaptation of this rice dish was composed of peanut oil, black mustard seeds, cumin seeds, turmeric, peanuts, and cooked brown basmati rice (See photo with the soup below).
 
Matar Ka Shorba (Green Pea Soup)
I used green peas, leeks, ginger, cumin seeds, peanut oil, and leek stock to make this soup. It didn't look all that delicious, but it actually tasted quite nice.

The finished product:

Thanks, India, for the good food and great memories!

Snacks and Beverages
Lemon flavored sparkling water (the La Croix brand is great because they only use water and fruit essence), more green tea, and some citrus fruit (orange & grapefruit).

Saturday Meals (using Day 3 of the diet)

Breakfast
2 eggs fried in goat's milk butter with sauteed, julienned zucchini (also in goat's milk butter) and green tea. Feeling good.

Lunch & Dinner
I'm eating the leftovers from lunch for dinner. Still feeling good.

Roasted Sweet Potatoes and Carrots
I roasted 1/2 cubes of sweet potato and carrots (first I mixed in goat milk butter, brown sugar, salt and black pepper) at 400 degrees F. I think it's more traditional to do it at 450, but my millet bake needed to be cooked at 400.

Baked Millet & Squash
I adapted the recipe from autumnmakesanddoes.com (link). I used acorn squash instead of butternut, just because the butternut squash at my co-op was so huge I didn't think I could carry it home with the rest of my groceries. I also used goat milk and goat milk butter in place of the whole milk and olive oil. Instead of rosemary I used scallions.

Snacks and Beverages
I have been having sparkling water to help replace my soda habit. Today's water was berry flavored.

Other snacks include an apple, goat cheese, raspberries, and pecans. (Raspberries aren't really a part of my Day 3, so I'll just have to hold off on them a few days)

Ah, yes, and some New Grist gluten-free (rice & sorghum) beer (link).  

I had some symptoms throughout the night, so I'm thinking the garlic & shallots in the baked millet might have been a problem. 

Diet Rotation

Here's a draft of a new 3-day rotation schedule. You can see there are a lot more foods. I also have a bit more flexibility, so hopefully the diet will be a little less stressful.

Note: I haven't added all of these foods back into my diet yet, so in a way this is more aspirational than true for now. The list of foods I have eaten is on the right.

Day 1: Asia & Island Influenced

Day 2: Mexico & Latin-America Influenced

Day 3: Baking & Sweet Things

Resources for Ingredient Substitutions

I'm trying to build up a sort of library or catalog of things I find useful on this diet. Pretty much everything I make involves substituting one food for another. Here are some sites I've found helpful, and some others that I might look at some day.

Butter & Oil Substitutes
 The Kitchn: Did you know you can substitute avocado for butter? (link)

Baking Substitutes

The Joy of Baking Baking Ingredient Substitution Table (link)

Nightshade Substitutes
Good Substitutes for Tomato Products from followers of The Kitchn  (link)
How to Replace Nightshades: Tomato (link), Potato (link), Peppers (link), and Eggplant (link).

Everything Substitutes! 
The Cooks Thesaurus (link) is great for everything, but especially for learning about using the many non-wheat flours.
The Kitchn: Guide to Food Substitutions (link).

Other Creative, Healthful Subs
83 Healthy Recipe Substitutions (link).


Other sites I haven't looked at yet:
E-Cookbooks Ingredient Substitutions (link).
Recipietips.com Food Substitutions List (link).

By the way, The Kitchn is so great. I LOVE it! I can't eat almost anything on the site, but I learn so much that it's indispensable.

Groan...

I am getting so tired of the foods I have available to me. I haven't been adhering to the diet perfectly for the past week (I needed a break, so I had some minor indiscretions). I intend to be better, do more to de-stress, and add in more foods to make things easier.

Anyway, I'm going to post my new diet plan soon. I've noticed the diet I'm on very closely resembles Phase One of The Maker's Diet (link), which is interesting. The Maker's Diet, however, is a little less restrictive. :( I long for the day I can eat tomatoes and peppers. I don't know what to make of the similarities between the diets, but I hope I might find some associated recipes that fit my plan.

 I also think I need to go back to the doctor and have iron, B12, vitamin D, etc. checked because my diet has been so restricted for so long now (it's been 6 weeks!).

Update and Great Tips for Elimination Dieters

It's hard to even talk about how bad my symptoms have been lately - there have been really good days and really bad days. I think overall what has been happening is that I am under a tremendous amount of stress. So I'm taking a break from tracking what I've been eating at every single meal (which has sort of happened because I've been too busy to do it, but also because I don't really think the food is at fault right now), just sticking to the foods on my list right now and trying to eat them in a cycle like I outlined here.

Tips and Recipes
There are some important things I have found out through this process that I want to share for anyone else struggling to find foods to eat on an elimination diet.

Quick Breads
If you can have baking soda, oil/ghee/butter, and any kind of flour, any kind of starch, any kind of sweetener, and any kind of milk, you can probably make a quickbread (I list example ingredients below).

Tasty types of quickbreads you can make (and these are just a few):
fruit bread (apple, avocado, banana, cranberry, date, fig, grapefruit, lemon, mango, orange, pear, pineapple, plum, raspberry, rhubarb)
grain quickbread (corn, oat)
nut and seed bread (almond, hazelnut, peanut, pecan, poppyseed, sunflower, walnut)
vegetable (carrot, onion, sweet potato, pumpkin, winter squash, zucchini) 
soda bread

Any of those types can also be combined (and so you have the common banana nut bread, or cranberry orange bread).

"Risotto" or Pilaf
Another great food that can be made with almost any kind of grain or vegetable is "risotto". You can make a "risotto" like dish with an oil/butter/ghee, a broth, a grain and some kind of addition. (I'm vegetarian so I make a stock to fit the vegetables and spices I have for each day of my rotation).

I'm finding the basic start of a risotto is typically garlic, onions, arborio rice, and white wine. But those ingredients can easily modified. The most important parts for me are having a good vegetable or aromatic (to take the place of the onion) and a a good acid to improve the flavor palette. For instance, I made a broccoli risotto with just vegetable stock, arborio rice, broccoli, and chevre goat cheese yesterday. The stem of the broccoli was peeled and diced, so that sort of took the place of the onion and the acid in the goat cheese made for a really nice flavor. Risotto-like dishes can also be made with grains such as amaranth or steel-cut oats. Tonight I'm making an amaranth "risotto" with a stock of carrots and ginger, and then finishing with carrots and lemon juice.

What I'm describing here can probably be accurately described as a pilaf instead of a risotto, but those bring back memories of awful pilaf I had in school as a child.

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Examples of flours:
brown rice flour
buckwheat flour
corn flour/meal
mesquite flour
millet flour
oat flour
quinoa flour
sorghum flour
sweet potato flour
teff flour
wheat flour

Examples of starches:
arrowroot flour
cornstarch
potato flour
potato starch
sweet rice flour
tapioca flour
white rice flour

Examples of sweeteners:
agave nectar
beet sugar
rice syrup
cane sugar
coconut nectar
corn syrup
fruit juice concentrate
honey
maple syrup
molasses 
sorghum syrup

Examples of milks:
almond milk
coconut milk beverage (NOT coconut milk itself, more like this)
coconut milk (sometimes this works too)
diary milk (cow, goat, etc.)
oat milk
rice milk
soy milk
(I noticed that most of the commercial non-dairy milks don't work for my diet because of the additional ingredients)

(Follow this link for the source of the list of flours and starches, and how to combine them into an all-purpose flour.)