Category: nutrition

Ironing Out Our Health

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In the YouTube video Dr. Ede talked about iron the missing helpful food in a lot of diets.

Interested in this I Googled foods with iron. The following food contains a good amount of iron:

Peas: a cup cooked with salt: 2.5 mg.

Pumpkin seeds: one cup nearly 3.7 mg.

Cashews: 2 ounces: almost 3.8 mg.

Sweet potato (a cup of boiled sweet potato without skin): 2.4 mg.

Spinach: 1/2 cup cooked: 3 mg.

Lentils: 1/2 cup cooked: 3.3 mg.

Swiss chard: one cup: 4 mg.

One large baked potato: just over 3 mg.

Tofu: 6 ounces: almost 3 mg.

On Not Liking Chocolate

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Dr. Ede the author of Change Your Diet Change Your Mind parts ways with other experts giving nutritional advice.

The Integrative Health Coach I employ told me that beans, grains, and fruits break down into sugar. Sugar can exacerbate depression and anxiety.

Dr. Lipman cut out the habit of consuming quantities of beans. Eating too much beans can cause a diabetes concern apparently.

The advice to have dark chocolate I haven’t taken to heart either. As I really don’t like eating chocolate. My Health Coach told me that in her practice they’ve turned away from recommending that people eat dark chocolate.

I have eaten dark chocolate too long ago to remember when the last time was that I ate it. In fact I stopped buying dark chocolate years ago.

The strange thing is that I don’t often do what experts who hang out a shingle tell you to do. I trust my Health Coach because of my intuition that she knows what she’s talking about.

Also: I trust what friends tell me that makes sense. Years ago a friend told me he became a vegan. It was likely for ethical reasons. His mood worsened. When he returned to eating red meat his depression lifted.

Armchair advice to be certain. Yet intriguing insight that could very well be true.

In this blog I would like then to touch on how exactly to get happy and get more energy. What specific action can we take to lift ourselves up?

I’ve begun doing these things and will report back on the effects.

Who and What to Believe

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I’ve come to take what John C. Norcross wrote in his book Changeology with a grain of salt. He said that his wife wrote down every day how many calories she consumed.

Why she did this is what I would like to find out. Separating fact from fiction isn’t easy. As in believing that the calories in versus calories burned approach is how to lose weight.

It’s the kinds of food we eat not the amount that counts. It was a Big Food Marketing Myth that it’s OK to buy those “100-Calorie Packs” as a snack.

I think a better option is to fuel yourself for afternoon energy with a 170-calorie serving of cashews. Then go outside your office building to take a 15-minute walk on your break. Anyone who works at a job should take a morning and afternoon break by the way.

One M.D. who published a book titled Hype claimed that standard nutrition advice was wrong. She said it’s not healthy to eat too much broccoli (this could be true yet who would eat too much broccoli to begin with).

In fact what I a simple blogger thinks is that if you’re having broccoli for dinner every day 5 days a week you should question that. I think you should “eat a rainbow” like the British M.D. wrote in his book How to Make Disease Disappear years ago.

The author of Hype claimed everyone (everyone not just most people) gets enough daily water in the food they eat. What if you’re on a low income and buy Lean Cuisine frozen dinners? Chomp on Frosted Flakes for breakfast. Have a Big Mac for lunch with French fries.

Ignoring the socioeconomic reality of how and what people eat reinforces the industry norm of using well-off persons as the standard when talking about eating habits.

This M.D.’s advice was shot for me when she wrote that she drinks Naked Juice nonstop every day. She was not a health coach. She was a children’s ENT doctor in a hospital. Right.

There’s a path we can follow along the lines of nutrition:

  1. Credible scientific advice.
  2. Well-meaning advice that is repeated in the health field.
  3. Industry-sponsored research that gets the result the food marketer uses to sell a product.
  4. Questionable claims about how taking a certain supplement leads to better health.
  5. Giving a food “product” a name that suggests it’s healthful like Skinny Pop or Kind bars.
  6. Quackery.

In all my adult life I haven’t consumed the total RDAs of vitamins and nutrients that were recommended. I think the reason I don’t have osteoporosis–even though I don’t drink milk and likely don’t get 1,500 milligrams of calcium per day–is because I’ve been lifting weights that is strength training for 14 years.

It comes down to common sense. Like I said in a months-ago blog entry we need to Act as Our Own Healers along with working with our treatment providers.

How to heal using adjunct approaches not just food and pills is coming up in here.

The MMD (Modified Mediterranean Diet)

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This week I checked out of the library the book Change Your Diet Change Your Mind. In fact, Dr. Ede in her guide states that some of her patients choose to stay on medication while adopting the Keto Diet.

Dr. Ede is against using the Keto Diet for new or worsening psychosis.

I wanted to read her book to see exactly what she wrote and whether the hype in the YouTube interview was credible. As regards to the content it feels to me like she cobbled together evidence to make her case about the Keto Diet. She also refers to the Paleo Diet being an option.

I’ve created and coined the term MMD for Modified Mediterranean Diet as the kind of eating plan I’ve been adhering to.

My approach is what I’ve written here before: what I call my “little bites” philosophy. The strategy is to consume everything in moderation.

So that if you’re eating too much of a food Dr. Ede tells the reader is a no-no that could be a concern. Having adequate not excessive RDAs of food makes sense to me.

The issue is whether the standard RDAs recommended are valid. One M.D. in another book stated that these guidelines were set by food industry staff.

In fact, over the last 15 years, I can’t say I’ve consumed the RDAs of fiber and calcium at all. Not from drinking milk do I get enough calcium. I think lifting weights that is weight training has kept my bones intact.

What I have every day is around 60 grams of protein which is the RDA for my weight.

Only sometimes and not often always do I have the recommended “5 a Day” servings of fruits and vegetables. More likely I have 2 to 3 servings of a vegetable daily and a serving of fruit 3 or 4 times a week.

On page 281. Dr. Ede lists the fruits and vegetables acceptable in the Quiet Paleo Diet she goes into along with the Keto Diet.

These are food items I’ve been having all long with the eggs chicken and dairy in my weekly diet.

Think of choosing what to eat from these “diets” as assembling a tray in a cafeteria from the options on display. My Health Coach thinks it’s pretty hard to adhere to solely a strict high-fat diet like Keto.

My stance is that it comes down to what your intuition tells you to do as regards to what food and how much you should eat. Just like our intuition can guide us to make decisions in other areas of our lives.

Dr. Ede lists nuts and seeds as a no-no. I regularly have a serving of cashews when I need to maintain my energy in the afternoon. Dr. Ramsey the other psychiatrist who wrote a book about food and mood recommends cashews.

Dr. Ede gives mixed advice about what foods to eat and what foods to avoid. It appears she lists certain food items to avoid that are also listed in the category of foods to eat.

Choosing the eating plan that will benefit us I think comes down to researching and hooking up with a reputable Integrative Health Coach. Not deciding on our own like one woman I knew who limited her “diet” to 700 calories per day so she could lose weight.

The obsession with losing weight and being thin must stop. Dr. Ede in her guide states the often-parroted ideal weight scheme that I’ve been against for decades: If you’re 5’0″ you should weigh 100 pounds plus 5 pounds more for each inch over 5’0″.

No I don’t think so. I’m 5’0″ and today I weigh 107 pounds.

This ideal weight guideline I don’t think is realistic.

Coming up in July after this blog carnival about food and mental health I’m going to review a couple of recent cookbooks I’m using to create recipes with.

Health Coach $100 Dollar Holler

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On Sunday morning I reported on the YouTube video I watched because I think it’s worth exploring a food-based option when all other treatment fails. For those of us who have a better life because we take pills I say not so fast to discontinue this treatment.

However I know that the food we eat plays a big role in how healthy we are. Mangia Bene Vivere Bene Eat Well To Live Well is a truism.

I won’t tell others: “This is my 2 cents.” I think the information I give is worth way more than 2 cents. That’s how I created the term $100 Dollar Holler.

Today’s advice comes from a reputable Health Coach I’ve talked with after viewing the YouTube video. In fact I think in the interview Dr. Ede said not everyone is helped with the ketogenic diet. I will have to watch the video again to verify this.

What I agree with Dr. Ede about is that so-called experts are giving advice that is not credible. I think what she is saying about the erroneous information is right.

Like the idea of having smoothies. I don’t drink smoothies at all. In the era of anti-science government leaders I think we need to educate ourselves more than ever.

The profit-driven Big Food marketers will claim anything to get us to buy their processed food. Maybe it’s because I have come to question the authority of elected leaders that I’m wary of believing the claims about health and nutrition that the current regime is passing off. In the form of essays that no reputable M.D. has published and that are not peer-reviewed but written by lackeys parroting the president.

Who can we trust to give us the right information?

Per the Health Coach:

“Doing a keto diet is not great for everyone, but incorporating healthy fats is an important part of diet for mental health, hormone health, and so much more. A high fat diet is pretty hard to execute.”

This is why I’m no fan of outright discontinuing psych meds if those pills enable a person to have a full and robust life they wouldn’t be able to live otherwise.

The idea that anyone can hang out a shingle as a nutrition expert is what alarms me. In the early 2000s I contacted a woman. She charged $1,000 per month for her advice. Where did she get her training?

The keto foods I eat that are “animal” fat are eggs and chicken every week. The other fat I get is from a handful of cashews every day and a tablespoon or 2 of organic peanut butter. Plus the healthy omega-3 fatty acids in seafood.

The Health Coach thinks a whole foods, low carb, healthy fat diet (like the Mediterranean diet yes!) is a great balanced diet for most.

Her eating plan is exactly the one I’ve used for over 10 years. Minus the smoothies. Minus grains. Minus meat.

In fact the Director of the USDA is often a person chosen who used to be a Big Food industry person. As early as 1993 I bought and read the original Mediterranean Diet paperback guide.

Decades ago on the government food website the recommendation was to have 6 servings of grains per day. This was obviously because the government subsidized farmers who grew wheat.

There’s a book I think it’s called Grain Brain that talks about eating grains. For 20 years I haven’t eaten grains. Only every so often.

I’ll end here with this: it’s worth exploring other options for achieving optimal mental health when everything else has failed.

My take on this is that I think some people have what I call “beautiful brains” and this is why the medication works. What a person eats can be a factor in why treatment works too.

More than the food we eat our lifestyle choices can buoy our mood and mindset.

Coming up after this blog carnival I will talk about the simple effective changes I’ve made in the last 2 months that have transformed my health.

Food and Mood: The Final Foray

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I’m going to top myself in this blog entry. I make no pie-in-the-sky promises. I don’t sell a product. I don’t guarantee that you’ll lose 30 pounds in 30 days by following my rules.

However what I’ve been writing in here for years about the food we eat improving our mood has been verified by two M.D.s

Drew Ramsey, M.D. the author of Eat to Beat Depression and Anxiety I found out is a psychiatrist in private practice. Long before I read his book I was eating the food he recommends: eggs, cod, cashews, bell peppers, salmon, shrimp, fermented dairy (yogurt) and mussels. (Italians love our mussels!)

The connection between food and mental health has been taken up by Georgia Ede, M.D. in her 2024 book Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind.

After watching a YouTube interview with this nutritional and metabolic psychiatrist I was astonished to find out I’d been doing what she recommended as well long before hearing her talk.

She recommended a ketogenic diet. Though I don’t eat meat I was surprised that all along I’d been eating the other foods in a ketogenic diet for years.

I have three eggs for breakfast. Seafood like shrimp, mussels, salmon, red snapper, flounder, and scallops for dinner. Organic chicken.

No grains at all. (I stopped eating grains 20 years ago before an expert like Ede told people not to.)

Dr. Edie told viewers to cut out refined sugars and refined fats. Like Dr. Lipman she’s no fan of vegetable oils or canola oil or seed oils. She rails against the modern-day scourge of eating processed food.

On this note the Mediterranean Diet is toast. Even the Nutritarian Diet doesn’t hold a candle to eating animal fat.

Watching the video unsettled me. It shocked me to find out that I’d been eating all the food you’re supposed to be eating.

Even smoothies got creamed by Dr. Ede. She is against this standard advice experts give people when they tell us what to eat.

Dr. Ede has had success using the ketogenic diet to treat patients not helped by traditional psychiatric medication. Some had been ill for years or even decades. After Dr. Ede prescribed a ketogenic diet in coordination with slowly lowering the doses of the traditional pills they had a miraculous recovery.

I’m no fan of taking Big Pharma pills for medical conditions that are caused by lifestyle choices. I say Take the Pill! if you need to take a pill to be well mentally physically or emotionally. By all means take the pill if it’s helping you be well.

The friend I watched the YouTube video with clarified that the psychiatric medication hasn’t been effective for a lot of people. Things got better when they went on the ketogenic diet. This is one of the few instances where I think alternative treatment should be considered. I think this because in my own life I’ve benefitted by eating ketogenic food.

I turned 60. I look and feel decades younger. The proof is in the fact that I exercise consistently and eat well. I hope by reading this blog entry you followers are energized and empowered to consider what you swallow: the lies being told as well as the Coca-Cola.

Now: I will always take the pill I’m taking. It strikes me that maybe this pill works precisely because my diet aids and abets the pill to be effective. You can’t outrun chowing down on candy bars and expect to be healthy.

The best thing is we don’t have to be rich or go broke to eat food that can improve our mood.

”t

Protein Sources and Grams

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I Googled the grams of protein in serving sizes for a few food items. If you ask me a one cup serving is OK to have as vegetables are low in calories and high in benefits.

You can calculate your RDA of protein linked to your weight in kilograms. It will likely be lower than what some people think is acceptable. I tell followers to decide for yourself in consultation with a reputable integrative health coach.

I’ve read that a person should have 30 grams of protein by noon. Having 3 large eggs for breakfast (18 gm) with a container of Fage plain Greek yogurt (16 gm) would satisfy the requirement.

1 cup asparagus has 3 gm protein

1 cup Brussels sprouts has 3 gm protein

1 cup broccoli has 2.5 gm protein

1 cup cooked zucchini has 2 gm protein

1 cup cauliflower has 2 gm protein

1 medium-sized sweet potato has 2 gm protein

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3 oz chicken cutlet has around 26 gm protein

4 oz salmon has 20 gm protein

5 to 6 medium shrimp have 20 gm protein

20 mussels have 20 gm protein

6 large scallops have about 20 gm protein

1 crab cake has 11 gm protein

1 large egg has 6 gm protein

My Fitness Plan Revisited

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I’m sorry to report that in using the search bar I found a blog entry recommending eating a Kind bar in a pinch. A Kind bar as I found out after I posted that has chemical additives called natural flavor. Even the Bulletproof power bars that I used to get now have natural flavor. They didn’t used to.

In the blog entry I’m giving the link to here I list what I’ve been doing to be well as an older woman. One update is that today I have Fage 0 fat plain yogurt nearly every day not just 2 or 3 days a week.

Soon I will be talking with my Health Coach. After I do I will post here the answers to questions I’m going to ask her then.

This is the link to the original blog entry about the habits I adopted courtesy of reading the Dr. Frank Lipman, MD book How to Age Well his companion to How to Be Well:

Using My Experience to Empower Readers

The Healthy Difference

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I’m not opposed to an occasional “treat” in terms of food or drink. What I think is that eating healthful food consistently enables a person to have that treat.

Who can resist a chocolate bar waiting in line to buy groceries when you’re hungry? Right.

Having a treat every so often is what I recommend. Not consistently reaching for the processed food or chemical-laden or unhealthy-fat loaded food. Making this an infrequent choice.

What I’m in favor of when it comes down to it is making educated informed choices. Not relying on science-deniers or others to tell us what to think and believe about what’s right.

In the extreme this comes down to the 1990s when “Ketchup is a vegetable” was the prevailing wisdom. We haven’t gotten much farther than this with the new leaders of the Old Guard.

Using our brains to figure out what to think and what to do and how to eat won’t get old. I realize that AI is here to stay for better and worse at the same time. We should not be outsourcing our intelligence when it comes to choosing how we live our lives.

It comes down to common sense too. Knowing that “straitjacketing” our mouths and expecting total goodness in terms of how we eat is unrealistic and an unlivable lifestyle.

My motto is “Everything in moderation.”

More to come on my current eating plan.

Seductive Food Claims

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Kind bars aren’t kind. They contain natural flavor. So does Honey Nut Cheerios. And Snapple. It can seem unhinged that I’ve taken up a crusade against this food and drink ingredient.

Other food products to steer clear of are the ones with unhealthy fats according to Dr. Lipman. Unhealthy fats are corn and canola oil, cottonseed and vegetable oil, safflower and sunflower oil.

Skinny Pop popcorn has sunflower oil. Amy’s Organic soup has safflower or sunflower oil. So–I buy only the Amy’s soups that are free of these ingredients.

Other Amy’s boxed frozen products have safflower or sunflower oil too. Admit to you I can that for a spell 8 or 9 years ago I relied on Amy’s boxed products for dinners in heavy rotation.

I for one think cooking real food is the way to go when you have the time, energy, and money to do so. Following the guidelines in How to Be Well I think can lower a person’s costs for food in the end.

I would say think twice about the claims that a food product is kind or skinny or all natural. Even just buying regular produce not organic produce is better than loading up on these kinds of snacks.

It’s not as simple as the calories in versus calories out equation. It’s what you eat not the number of calories that counts. Food and drink companies can make all sorts of claims. I would say that at least 80 to 85 percent of the claims aren’t true.

Each of us should enjoy finding buying cooking and eating the food we do. I say if you want to eat and drink whatever you do that’s your choice and it should be accepted.

In here I simply want to talk about what I’m doing to live my life well and whole. I hope what I write resonates with followers. Take what you think will help you. Leave the rest of the information on the side.