So far in this menu series we have laid out proteins, fruits and veggies using a simple system of color coding.  Color is tremendously important in the world of food because the more colorful the food, the nutrient packed the food is.  Keeping your plate looking like the Rainbow Coalition is a great way to stay on the healthy side of life. 

But unlike protein, fruits and vegetables, starchy carbohydrates are not easily broken down by color.  A perfect example of that would be potatoes.  You have red potatoes, sweet potatoes, white potatoes, Yukon gold potatoes—and I would recommend that you eat them all at the same frequency because none is more nutritious than the other (ok, sweet potatoes have a slight edge;).   

Starches are also *not necessary* to be in your diet the way that fruits and veggies are or any other food source for that matter.  Yes whole grains are healthy, but they are not necessary.  For one thing, we just started eating them as a species.  We never ate grains on a regular basis thousands of years ago.  We were more meat based and plant based.  Also, no matter what grain you choose, it will require some level of processing just to be palatable.  When’s the last time you went wheat berry picking? 

So going strictly by color might not be the most prudent methods of choosing a starch.  But what about a starch’s texture?  I would venture to say that a starch’s texture is far more important than any other aspect of its composition.  There are 3 types of texture:

Shards of fiberglass:  This starch is the mainstay of any person’s diet who honestly says they are serious about looking good naked.  Fully represented by cut up gums, acquired taste buds and hard core chewing, this starch is all about health.  Do not even THINK of giving this to any family member who has not been thoroughly sworn into the “I care how I look AND feel club” or you will never hear the end of it.

Barley, quinoa, couscous, shredded wheat, millet, brown rice, steel cut oats.

Pass me the water, please:  This starch is characterized by a thick, smooth feel on the palette.  Nowhere near as intense as the shards of fiberglass family, but not an easy sell either.  Family members may not hate you after these, but they are still not party favorites. 

Lentils, beans, oatmeal (slow cooked), Ezekiel bread, oat bran, whole grain, brown rice

Flashbacks of Sade:  That’s right, these are Smooth Operators.  Eating these guys makes you forget about the 3 molecules of water that you’ll be holding on your butt for every gram of starch in them.  To be honest, you don’t care.  If you could slap a stick of butter on these and hum while eating them—you would!  These guys make ya wanna holla every time you eat one.  Family members will eat most of these starches but typically they bathe and dress them in things that would make you do double cardio just knowing they were in the house.

Potatoes (sweet, red, white, gold), Squash (acorn, butternut, spaghetti), pumpkin, root veggies, bananas

There are some foods that are missing off of this list on purpose:  peas, corn, lima beans, tortillas, pasta etc.  They just are not worthy of any good press.  Try to limit them to one time per week or less if possible.

Here are the rules:

1)       VARY YOUR TEXTURES!  Because we are creatures of habits and eat oatmeal like it’s our jobs, we deny our palettes the fun of pumpkin!  Texture is AS important as color when it comes to variety and beating food boredom.

2)       Try to have at least one from each texture every week.  If you are not eating starches on a regular basis, try starting with the Flashbacks.  They are easier to get down and chock full of vitamins.

3)       Do not repeat a texture in a day.  Most people have 1 to 3 starch servings per day but may find themselves eating different variations of oatmeal all day long.  Do not do that.  Vary your starch as much as possible.  Although quinoa, millet and spelt are all very healthy for you, eating them all in the same day may preclude you from any long board meetings for a few days.  Easy on the fiber there quick shooter!  OY!

Ok…we’re getting closer to having all of our foods laid out on the counter.  We have fats next and then we ‘order’ them.  I hope you have been trying some of these suggestions as to how to put some variety in your menu.  Feel free to share some tips in the comment section below if you have any!  I really want to hear about them!:o)

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Menu Planning:  Living Life Beautifully

As we embark on this fun journey together (which will resume on Monday after I finish getting through all the emails that state, “I didn’t know you had a blog and now I need to get caught up on the reading!;) learning how to plan our menus, I feel the need to empty my soul as to why this needs to be so important to you. 

Do you have any fears?  I mean real “wake-you-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night” fears that almost take your breath away because they seem so real?  I do.  More than most of you will ever know.  Some of my fears are irrational just like most people’s fears.  But there is one that I have that is real…and big…and furry (ok, not furry, but I loved how that sounded). 

If you think it is the fear of dying you are wrong.  I do not fear death so much and as I age I am almost embracing it (I make myself sound so old yet I still feel like I am oh so young).  Somehow for me there is an unspoken serenity in a timely death.  No, I do not fear that.  What I fear is living with disease.  Not dying from disease—living with it. 

Now I know what you’re thinking: “Jodi, I already eat clean”.  Yes, I know.  If you are reading my blog, you care what you look like.  However, that’s why I am talking to you about living with disease.  Not dying from it.  I do not want to be 65 with beltway skin, shards of teeth, straw for hair with enough fire in my engine to make it from A to B, but otherwise so depleted that I literally hurt all over to get there.  I am not interested in being 70 but looking like I am 90.  Don’t you feel so bad when you meet that person?  Or how about being 75 with every known condition out there that requires oodles of medication to keep you going?  Not my desire.

That’s us, though.  That’s the path we are headed on.  We exercise daily so we are keeping our vessels healthy.  We do not eat processed food so our arteries are clean.  And we flush ourselves daily with loads of water to keep our cells teeming with life.  But we also secretly stuff ourselves with so many chemicals and artificial sweeteners that if we listen closely at night we can actually hear our livers sobbing quietly looking for relief from the toxins.  We work hard, play hard and pretty much live hard, too.  Don’t forget, we are type A.  And lastly, we eat the same nutrients day in and day out so that when we go to replenish what we rob of our body everyday in our killer workouts, we fall short.  Thereby creating what I call now, “the slow, painful life”—not death.

See we’re going to live.  And we’ll be somewhat vibrant.  Maybe vibrant is too pain free of a word.  We’ll be operational.  But for who we are used to being, we will not be happy.  More than even the processed food loving general public folks who do not value their health, we need to be diligent about food periodization.  That’s a $100,000 word for “not eating the same thing all the time”.  We need to cherish the gift of performance that we have been so blessed to possess. We take for granted things like weight loss, functioning joints, working organs (hysterectomy anybody?) and regeneration. 

Take it from someone with first hand knowledge, regeneration ends.  And when it does, will you be on the good side of that stick or on the bad side?  Don’t get caught out there on the bad side of the regeneration stick!  Hormonal hell, emotional distress and physical therapy will all be staring you in the face.  And they are not that good looking to be that close to you!

I bring all this up because I don’t want this series to be a fly by night thing for you.  You know, you throw a few amens out there and agree with all that is being said to you only to find yourself 2 weeks later eating the same thing you were eating 2 weeks before.  I don’t want that.  I want you to read this, get this, try this, live this.  For that to happen, we need to take it slow and develop some habits.  Food is habitual.  If you think you are going to just wake up and start balancing menus left and right—good luck to you.  Actually, if you find that you can I have a few food diaries for you to help me with when we’re done with this series.  Email me. J

So although the info will be coming faster than it has so far, it will not be coming so fast that we are on the next letter before you have fully taken advantage of the first.  Please try to incorporate as much as you can in between posts so that it is instilled in you in real time.  You learn by doing, not by reading.  Give me feedback as to how it is going and share any tips and tricks that you learn in the comments so that others may learn with you. 

The response from this series so far has been tremendous and it has just started.  I am so excited for the rest and from the looks of my Facebook page, you are too!.  Let’s put this to good use and truly set ourselves up for living beautifully…cool?:o)    

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Dieting for beauty sounds a bit odd for most people.  When you think of dieting, you think of weight loss but you really do not equate the end result to something like ageless beauty.  And when you think of beauty, you think of creams and treatments instead of fruits and vegetables.  But as you go through this series with me you will hear me refer to beauty over and over again.  Why?  Because you are wasting your time just dieting to lose weight, diet to look good at the end! 

Dry hair, brittle nails, wrinkled, leathery skin and a less than bright smile all take away from the weeks of effort you just put in to make your body hot.  So how can we control how we look at the end of all this dieting?  Menu planning. 

Adding variety to the diet allows the body to flourish.  Hitting it fresh from all angles makes you look fresh, young and beautiful.  Instead of walking around with a list of vitamins and minerals in foods, let’s work on easy ways to remember how to get it all in.

Most of us eat many of the same foods day in and day out.  Protein does not change too much throughout the week (here’s a conversation you hardly hear: “I wanted squid today but they didn’t have any on sale so I swung over to the meat department and picked up tripe instead) with us depending on chicken, chicken and chicken for every meal with an occasional ground turkey and shrimp tossed in the mix.  Starches are the same old starches and fruits and veggies are just an afterthought for the most part (Oh look, berries.  I’ve never seen that on a menu.)    If we do not actively have some way to stay on top of our variety, we are just not going to do it.  Instead, we rely on the usual suspects (however healthy they are, they are not the only fruits and veggies in the world) like berries, broccoli and salad (really lettuce) to populate our plates.  Unless, we color code it!

Color adds variety and not just in fruits and veggies.  Meats and starches can be characterized through color, too.  Texture is important as well but that’s how you liven up a menu so just hold your horses will ya?  Jeez! J Here is a different way to think about the colors of protein in your diet:

From light to dark:

Protein may be categorized from light in color (shellfish, white meat chicken, dairy, white fish for example) to various medium tone shades (salmon, lentils, ground chicken for example) to darker shades (skinless chicken thighs, steak, buffalo just to name a few).  An easy way to look at your day is to think 3, 2, 1.  Three sources of light, 2 sources of med tone and 1 source of dark per day.  Do you have to be exact with that?  No.  But it gives you a starting place instead of aimlessly milling around the store picking up numerous forms of chicken!

So what does this really look like?

Light: 

Chicken breast, scallops, shrimp, cottage cheese (1%), egg whites, turkey breast (non deli), extra lean ground turkey, white fish of all kinds, greek yogurt, albacore tuna, lobster

Medium:

Salmon, chunk light tuna, chicken livers, sardines, lentils (yes they are a starch but I am using them as a protein here), egg yolks, protein powder, tempeh

Dark:

Eye of round, buffalo,bison, venison, skinless chicken thighs and legs, flank stank, beef liver (you knew it was coming), lamb, duck

Here are the rules:

1)       Try not repeat items on the list more than twice in a day, but you certainly can within the week.

2)       The items are not listed solely by fat content so you will have to catch the post on how to track your macronutrients. They are listed by color.  Don’t forget that.

3)       Lastly, this is just a fun way to remember how to spice it up a bit.  There is not any major scientific basis for this—yet.  First we learn to crawl…wink, wink.

Using this format, you could have egg whites, chicken breast, white fish, protein powder, salmon and buffalo in one day.  Holy mother of variety, batman!  I think you have covered just about every avenue with that winning combo.  Much more to come on how to put this together, but at least you’re getting the idea.

Why does this matter?  Mainly because if you choose all the same protein sources all the time, you’ll miss out on choline in egg yolks which supports cardiovascular and brain functioning or selenium which is more abundant in dark meat than in light meat.  And since selenium is an antioxidant and staves off certain cancers, I like to think you’ll be adding a bit more dark meat to your diet.

I hope you realize how much you will be learning in this series and you get to stick around for more.  Next we will tackle carbohydrates and give you great ways to think about adding more color to your plate!

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What a one hit wonder they were!   And when it comes to menu planning for an effective diet, you do not want to be a one hit wonder!  But you do want to C.O.L.O.R. yourself bad! 

Menu planning may seem incredibly daunting task at first if you think you are just going to write one up without a “plan”.  You know how much simpler life seems when you have a step by step guide that shows you how to do something.  So let’s quickly break down the process of making a menu and it’s as simple as adding some C.O.L.O.R.:

C             Color code it           How many colors do you have in the week?  Can you add more?

O             Order it        Your goal decides your menu format.  There are a few and we’ll cover as many as we can.

L              Liven it up     Too much seriousness in your menu is no good.  Let’s dress this puppy up!

O             Optimize it      Step back and look at all you have.  Can we improve anything anywhere? 

R             Repeat it all over again      Create your own “bank” of menus.

If your menu has COLOR, it has everything!  When I receive food diaries to check out (and in season I probably view over 50/week), I see many of the same eating patterns that we as busy people like to perpetuate:

Eating the same thing everyday

Limited choices of fruits and veggies

Focusing on only the “super” foods (how much broccoli can you eat?)

No “fun” in the diet

No rhyme or reason for food placement

If you do not know why you do something or are not sure how to do something, you will never really do it well.  You are just going through the motions faking it while in reality you hope you are “making” it.  But you know you really are not making it yet you are not quite sure why.  You are falling short somewhere and it is getting old to you.

There are hundreds of books out there with recipes in them and now there are even people selling ebooks of menu plans.  You are more than welcome to find one of those and follow them if you want.  But what’s going to happen?  You are going to become bored with the food choices or feel limited by the way they put the menus together.  What happens if all of the recipes are not clean enough for your goal?  What if they give you plans and their lowest cal level is 1400 and you are 4’10” and 95lbs?  That’s like Thanksgiving for you!  And because you do not know why they did what they did, you cannot adapt it to be what you like it to be.  How about just creating your own menus, with your own fun added to them? 

Let’s begin the process of creating our own menus and take it step by step—from color coding it all the way to repetition—because face it, no one really knows what you like but you.  And success depends upon you planning an effective menu and adhering to it as much as possible.   Next post:  Adding some COLOR!

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You know I am all about inner beauty because it is what facilitates your outer beauty.  And you know that inner beauty comes from a balanced, healthy diet with fabulous training.  And I’m sure that by now you probably know that I shoot straight from the hip and will do whatever is necessary to get your attention.  You may have even picked up on the fact that I may know a thing or two about nutrition.  Well it is time to start putting all those traits together to make some learning magic. 

Welcome to the first of one of many series I will be hosting on my blog.  From time to time I will introduce a new topic that I will cover in bite size pieces so you can really learn something from it and then take something useful away with you.  I do not have any worries about giving you useful information and I hope you do not mind receiving it!  I also hope you don’t mind that I’m going to be pretty silly while giving you the info, too.  You know I’m a clown.;o)

No matter who I am speaking with, food is an issue.  Let me say that again b/c you may be in denial:  food. is. an. issue!   It could be planning it, controlling it, liking it, eating it, sharing it (that’s mine–back it down cuz forks hurt when they hit your hand!lol), who knows what *it* is, just know that “it” is many people’s source of stress.  Thus, success demands that you will to have to be a Jack of all trades and a master of none.  I say master of none simply because people tend to beat themselves up when they are not “perfect” at something and I honestly do not expect any one to be perfect at anything food related. 

Dieting (meaning the act of planning and controlling one’s nutrient intake) is hard.  No doubt about it.  Ask anyone, whether they are a seasoned athlete or a mom just wanting to be hot again, what they are doing that day for a workout and they will give you great detail (whether you wanted it or not).  They can tell you what time they are going, how long it should take, what weights they like to use…etc.  They can even tell you when they last made a change to their workout and what effects they got from the change.  Let me just quickly add that I am referring to those folks that really are interested in looking good–you know…you!  Anyway, they are like a walking workout journal.  But if you ask that same person what they are eating and when the last time they changed what they have been eating, they look at you like you just asked them if you can lick their spoon for them (what a nasty thought…ewww). 

Now don’t get me wrong, they will tell you they eat “healthy” or “clean” or whatever–and they most likely do.  But they also eat the same thing day in and day out because they don’t want to, or do not know how to:  menu plan.  That’s right, I just said it.  Menu Planning.  What are you going to do about it?  Hide under a chair and act like I just didn’t bring that topic up?  Menu Planning.  Said it again!  And I meant it too. Haha!

So let’s stop this awful practice of eating the same thing over and over again and just learn how to plan a menu, rotate some foods in and out, count some macros and etc.  We’ll take it step by step beginning with the layout.  How does that sound to you?  Let me know before I roll this Cadillac worth of information out on this blog and scare some of you into hibernation.  How about we do it over a 4 day period–maybe 3 if we’re feeling adventurous.  We can put a few days in between so you may have time to digest the info and try a few things.  You have one day to say yay or nay…so what you say?