Tag Archives: diet

Gym Tales

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Last week I documented my first steps in the Land of the Dairy-free and described the differences I’d noticed in my own health after what was a very short space of time.

Since then there have been more developments, surprising and welcome, such as less joint pain and an increase in energy. So far so good. I’ve continued to become accustomed to dairy-free milk and yoghurt, [opting for unsweetened almond milk and soya yoghurt] but I admit to failure on the cheese front.

In a parallel improvement I’ve returned to the gym, partly due to less painful joints. [I am now able to bend my right foot] and partly due to winter weather [walking in a deluge is not always a pleasant activity].

In my absence of about 18 months there are changes at the gym. Julia, the previous Friday morning yoga teacher has left and in her place is Michelle, a kind, enthusiastic mentor but one whose moves and poses are beyond me, both in difficulty and in pace. After one session of attempting to keep up with the downward facing dogs and sun salutations I spend the following few days crippled and feeling advanced in years by around 20 [taking me to 85, reader-not an uplifting experience]. The second session, while no easier, rendered me less incapacitated.

Encouraged, I reserved myself a place at ‘Easy Aero’ [in other words, aerobics for the ancient, the crippled and exercise virgins]. Ten years ago I was still leaping about in the exercise studio with gay abandon. Surely ‘Easy Aero’ wasn’t about to trouble me?

How wrong can you be? In the pre-class throng of the changing room there was a crush of greying, primped, powdered and blue-rinsed ladies clad in pastel lycra, chattering animatedly in front of the lockers. I stood back to wait for a space. They continued to chit-chat as they queued for the water machine and filtered into the exercise studio and I headed for the back in a bid to lurk unnoticed. In came Carla, a wisp of a girl with a broad smile, whose classes I’ve attended in the past.

Music on [a heady mix of 70s disco classics], Carla proceeded with the warm-up, when I realised this was not to be the gentle easing back into gym activity I’d expected. Ten minutes later, having undertaken a couple of routines I was not just warm, but perspiring. Hmm…

The dance routines were followed by some step-aerobic work and some core exercises, culminating in a ‘plank’ to finish off. I felt a glimmer of hope in still being able to hold a plank position for one minute, but overall this was a hefty enough workout for now.

Here’s a thing though; aerobics, like bike-riding is an activity that lingers in the mind. With the instruction ‘grape-vine’ I went instantly into that step side, step behind step. With ‘box-step’ I knew what to do. It’s heartening that even when you’re out of condition and struggling the brain cells can cope.

And the ladies? They are amazing! All power to them…

The Dairy Discovery

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During November, while Fiction Month trundled along collecting some new readers of ‘Anecdotage’ I made an interesting discovery.

Of course we should have been pootling merrily along the Rhine on a swish, indulgent river cruise boat swigging German beer, scoffing wurst and carousing. We should have been exploring hitherto unvisited [by us] cities, wandering cobbled streets, photographing, sampling, learning. We should have been undertaking what was to have been our very first cruise-type holiday. But this was not to be.

After the long, hot, dry summer of 2018, the mighty Rhine has not sufficient water to float the cruise boats down it’s length. We could have continued the trip using coaches but what would have been the point? We have a perfectly beautiful road vehicle of our own.

At the beginning I was stunned. This was to have been Husband’s celebratory birthday treat and felt I’d failed him. We booked a short break to Vienna, missed on our spring jaunt [detailed in a previous Anecdotage post]. Then the evening before our departure Husband became ill with a virus. We cancelled. Ho hum…

Now I’m on a different journey, exploring, having made a discovery. In an idle moment, whilst reading an article about raising infants as vegans I learned that I may have become allergic to dairy products.

Now for a number of years, [since having been diagnosed with UC-another story] I’d come to assume that the skin disturbances I’ve battled were associated with the disease. But the article suggested that dairy products could be the cause.

Hmm… I consume a lot of dairy items. I’m a fan of natural yoghurt, take milk in tea and coffee, love cream and am pretty much a cheese-aholic. I cook with cheese, milk and yoghurt and I am inclined to whip a chunk off the Cheddar for a quick snack. Becoming dairy-free was going to be a major undertaking!

I started with milk. I began that same day by trying ‘Koko’, a coconut based milk on the vegan shelf in the supermarket. In coffee it was palatable. In tea it was overwhelming, rendering the tea most un-tea-like. As an addition to soup it was fine.

I moved on to soya milk. In coffee it was creamy and delicious, adding a chocolatey taste. That it also added a chocolatey taste to tea was less encouraging. Soya yoghurt, however was a triumph and  possibly more delicious than dairy yoghurt. The next test of almond milk proved the best solution for tea [although it can’t match soya milk for creamy coffee].

I turned my attention to cheese. Tesco provided a small range of vegan cheesy options and I went first for a cheddar-like block [Violife]. It was bland and rubbery-a little like processed cheese; neither disgusting not delicious. A lump of ‘stilton’ tasted quite nasty and smelled like dung, pervading the fridge with it’s noxious aroma. It had to go. But it is early days and I am continuing my quest.

…and the results? Startling. Within 48 hours my skin looked and felt drier and clearer, and continues to improve. My hair, which was oily enough to need washing every day has become drier and my digestive system [sparing details] is altogether calmer. It’s enough to keep me on the dairy-free path, but I’m in mourning for crisp, nutty, tangy, roof-of-the-mouth-tingling Cheddar. Any suggestions?

-Oh-and just think-if we’d been on the river cruise I may not have been idly reading the news and found that item on raising vegan children and still not have known about dairy allergy-so there you go…

What not to Eat [clue: anything]

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OK. New government health advice. We eat too much [we know this]. We must restrict our intake to 1,800 calories per day. The recommendation is 400 at breakfast, 600 at lunch and 600 at dinner. Great.
I watched the ‘experts’ on a daytime news programme showing us how this looks in terms of meals. Breakfast was a child’s bowl with porridge and a few blueberries. Lunch was two miniscule ‘spinach’ muffins and some tiny, doll’s house dishes with miniature tomatoes and a strawberry. Dinner was another child’s bowl with some chicken risotto. The expert generously suggested that the risotto could be accompanied by a small side salad. There, readers. Don’t eat it all at once.
Here at Lessageing Manor we don’t actually do breakfast, which leaves us a whole 400 extra calories to have at lunch! Whoopee!
It is certainly true that Husband and I have consumed too much during the winter and have been attempting to correct the ensuing spare flesh by cutting down on carbs and so on. But I can’t help feeling that these suggestions of tiny, dolly-sized helpings are not going to convert the mountainous, British obese into svelte, MacDonald and KFC refuseniks.
In other, dangerous-food-related news there was a long, detailed item on the subject of that most lethal of breakfast staples: BACON.
Some time ago the demon bacon was heralded as the greatest poison known to man and the consumption of it foremost in the list of behaviours most likely to cause bowel cancer. Like many such revelations this is not a happy discovery for those who’ve based a lifetime of breakfast experiences upon it. This bacon scare, having frightened devotees of the ‘Full English’ enough to prompt a boycott of the sausage/ham/cured meats aisle then appeared to die away and bacon consumers resumed their perilous habit, returning to Greggs for their bacon rolls and Burger King for their additive rashers.
Now however the bacon threat is re-awakened. This is not due to bacon itself, or any other treated meats, but the mass-production technique of adding nitrates to them.                Following advice, I prowled the aisles of Waitrose in pursuit of nitrate-free bacon and ham, with limited results.
Every day, it seems another food aisle is closed off. Don’t go near biscuits! Keep away from crisps! Touch fizzy drinks at your peril! Don’t touch fruit juice with a barge pole!
It’s no to alcohol, bacon, carbohydrates [especially evil sugar], processed foods, red meat and fruit! Fruit, apparently will not only make you fat but will simultaneously rot all of your teeth. This is the single most depressing news amongst all of it.
Perhaps the simplest approach would be for our health gurus to suggest what would be acceptable for us to eat and drink. What would they say was alright? I’m guessing kale, lettuce, lentils and beans washed down with water would be the answer. Am I right?

 

Grace’s Guide to Scones, for the Uninitiated.

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scone

            You know you’re advancing in years when you begin to frequent coffee shops on a regular basis. You begin to have favourites. You get to know what’s on offer besides the coffee, too. For me this is likely to be a scone. For overseas readers here is an explanation of ‘scone’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scone
I consider myself to be something of an expert on scones and it is this, besides the quality of the tea or coffee that determines whether a coffee shop makes it onto the favourites list or if it is cast into the venues that are forever shunned. I have fond memories of scones in New Zealand, where the ubiquitous dairies produced substantial offerings boasting dried fruit in abundance, or made from wholemeal flour, often warmed and with ample butter on the side. Ireland also serves up generous, delicious scones in their many forms.
And yes, for the uninitiated there are several forms of scone, the most common being the fruit variety. This is best enjoyed with butter only but is too often used as part of a cream tea [that is to say, with jam and clotted cream: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clotted_cream]. The most suitable scone for a cream tea is a plain or ‘Devon’ scone, since fruit detracts from the whole jam/cream experience. The best establishments may also offer cheese scones, which are a nod towards the less unhealthy option, being free of sugar, although it has to be said that dietary health is not a feature of this post.
Sometimes, having established that a café has scones before we select a table there is a prolonged wait for the scones to arrive. This is because the scones are already plated up and part of the [aforementioned] cream tea. Please note, café proprietors, that if we, the customers request a scone, this is not the same as a cream tea and while we are unlikely to turn it down we are not in the habit of devouring cream teas [treats that should be enjoyed on an infrequent basis].
Scones that do not pass muster tend to be dry, with a consistency akin to sawdust [such as those from a prestigious castle tea room in our locale] and too flat, with the appearance of an inflated biscuit. Mass produced scones may also have a slightly bitter taste, from having had too much raising agent added or with a leaden texture that sticks to the roof of the mouth and are sometimes available in the cafés of large department stores. Best are the offerings of small, independent coffee shops with their ranges of homemade cakes.
I am of course perfectly capable of baking scones at home and have done so in the past, but these days baking at home is an activity best avoided due to Husband and my propensity for eating the results.
For the foreseeable future, scone research has been put on hold. This, reader is due to the fact that overconsumption of scones has lead the researcher to begin to look like one. So having imparted what I know I leave you to pursue your own investigations. Enjoy!

Ten? We are all Doomed-

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Smug about your diet? Getting your five-a-day in? Well don’t be, because now you are advised that this is not, has never been enough and you should be cramming ten…yes ten helpings of fruit and/or vegetables down your gullet each and every day.

Great. Actually I’ve been quite smug myself. We’ve never been ones to load the trolley with ready meals and have tended [especially since the heady, time-rich days of retirement] towards cooking from scratch-not going as far as making our own pasta or blending our own garam masala, but we don’t buy sauce mixes or shop soup and we’re fond of vegetable-rich meals and salads and we’ll snack on fruit rather than cakes or biscuits.

Now, however it transpires that we haven’t done enough on the vegetable front. What sort of time though, is this to tell us, when we’re never going to see the front of sixty again and all the damage, the degeneration and the eroding of protection has been wrought throughout our only five portioned/meat-and-two-veg/subsistence diet? Presuming that it is now too late to undo the shocking abuse of more than sixty years that neglecting to have ten veg and fruit things has done, should we continue to follow the subsistence, ‘five-a-day’ regime? Or can we mitigate the ominous, brewing health catastrophes by swallowing fifteen or twenty helpings of cabbage, kale and tomatoes each day?

And take care, reader not to simply gollup piles of fruit down or swig ten smoothies every day, because fruit, my friends is sugary and calorific, leading to an expanding girth before you can say ‘Jabotacaba’. We are advised to ration our fruit intake and turn instead to sober lettuce and sprouts.

Wait, though. A glut of helpful news columns has emerged, explaining how to insert the extra portions into our daily trough. We can add spinach to our spaghetti, have another veg on our plate [we’ll need bigger plates] and snack on fruit. It all begins to seem exhausting.

On a more serious note, all these fresh fruit and vegetables do not come cheap. Here is yet another few miles plugged into the rich-poor divide. How many fresh items are there in the food bank basket at the supermarket? For those whose main issue is how to prevent their children from going to bed hungry, plying them with ten fruits and veggies must come a long way down the list of worries. Keeping healthy, then is a preserve of the comfortably-off, as are most things.

What on earth will happen to fast food outlets? The kebab houses will be alright-there is always a lettuce leaf and some shredded cabbage in the pitta pocket; but fish and chip shops will need to double up their mushy pea portions and MacDonalds will have to sneak mustard and cress into the Big Macs-or whatever it is they serve.

Watch the space. In a few months’ time we’ll either be told that eating too much cabbage is killing us [well the noxious gases produced may well do] or that ten portions are not enough. In the meantime, I’m off to the greengrocers…

Boomers’ Bloomers [again]

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Baby boomer:    a person born during a baby boom, especially the one in the US or UK between approximately 1945 and 1965: Ageing baby boomers are creating a greater need for healthcare. baby-boomer. adjective [before noun] › The baby-boomer generation is now hitting retirement age.18 May 2016

We ‘boomers’ are in trouble again. Not content with having had free university education, ‘good’ pensions, having the gall to buy properties and now living long enough to be using up all the healthcare budget we have transgressed further. The offence? We have failed to teach our progeny horticultural skills. There! How appalling! We should have been outside in the garden with our new-borns teaching them the difference between bindweed and broccoli instead of idly dandling them on our knees. We should have set our toddlers to weeding, hoeing and tying in the runner beans rather than reading them stories and letting them splash around in paddling pools.

Having been born and raised in the countryside I did actually learn a great deal about gardening at an early age; though not grand or modernised the properties we inhabited were always surrounded by large pieces of garden which my father tended with gusto-perhaps because he came from a family of market gardeners. The fruit and vegetables he grew were more than a supplement to our diet; together with the hens we kept they almost were our diet. Yet we were not coerced into digging and weeding and were left to our own devices, excavating our own plot behind the shed to find buried treasure and taking stray worms down to the hens’ enclosure or trawling the small stream with jam jars on strings. I do remember being interrogated as to why I’d pulled up a cabbage and explaining that it was to see if it was growing, a reply not received with indulgent approval-nevertheless it had been growing.

But I knew about gardening. I knew that you could graft one type of apple tree on to another, that potatoes needed to be earthed up, that you could make compost from garden and vegetable waste. I knew the names of things-vegetables, fruits, flowers and weeds. I also knew the names of trees and wild flowers. At school, with no danger of a ‘national curriculum’ we went on nature walks-a long crocodile of hand-holding pairs strolling the lanes and scrutinising the banks and hedgerows so that we knew which tree conkers grew on [not a conker tree!] and bringing back specimens for the ‘nature table’. I grew up able to identify common birds from plumage and song and to know a number of wild flowers, plants and trees.

Just as a garden itself cannot be made instantly you can’t ‘teach’ gardening. The skills and knowledge develop over time with trial and error and a little research now and again. The best gardens evolve-like the twenty year old patch I’ve grappled with and am about to leave. How will the next garden grow? I look forward to finding out…

 

 

How to Stay Healthy, or How not to?

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If you read a recent article on the subject of the elderly being too wealthy you would be tempted to believe that most of the under 50s population would like us all to be euthanised. How dare we have pensions? How dare we own our properties? How dare we have holidays? Problem is though-will they be so enthusiastic regarding geriatricide when their own turn comes?

As an attempting-to-stay-fit 60 something it is my own intention to get the most out of however many years there are left whilst trying hard not to lean too heavily on either the state or my own offspring when bodily malfunctions occur.

So-health advice then; what should I do or not do to keep out of the doctor’s surgery? Since I became an adult there has never been a shortage of advice on how to stay healthy. Here, in no particular order, is a selection of warnings and recommendations:

  • Wear a seat belt
  • Don’t eat eggs
  • Eat eggs
  • Eat curly kale
  • Run
  • Drink a glass of wine every day
  • Don’t drink alcohol every day
  • Stay out the sun
  • Wear sunscreen
  • Sunshine gives you cancer
  • Lack of sunshine is bad for you
  • Smoke menthol cigarettes
  • Don’t smoke
  • Coffee is bad for you
  • Coffee is good for you
  • Walk 10,000 steps
  • Don’t eat fat, eat carbs
  • Don’t eat carbs, eat fat
  • Don’t eat processed meat
  • Don’t eat butter, eat margarine
  • Don’t eat margarine, eat butter
  • Exercise your brain
  • Get enough sleep
  • Don’t have too much sleep
  • Fruit is good for you
  • Don’t eat fruit

There is a lot more advice. There is so much advice you can waste several years of your life sitting down to read it.

If you’ve been diligent enough to have read the list you’ll have noticed the conflicting pieces. Take the butter/margarine snippet. Twenty years ago we were all bludgeoned into shunning butter in favour of healthy, heart-loving margarine. The manufacturers of brands such as ‘Flora’ rubbed their hands in glee as we made faithful inroads into their stocks. And now? Now margarine is the dastardly enemy and must be ostracised for the manufactured upstart it always was.

The problem, for those of us of a certain age is that if we have striven to follow guidelines and warnings we have done all sorts of things wrong. We ate eggs, we didn’t eat eggs, we drank wine [with an enthusiasm that contradicts current thinking], we gave up coffee, we eschewed fat in favour of carbs. Presumably then, we’ve done untold damage to ourselves by following the advice? What are we to do?

Perhaps we should pursue the authorities, the powers that be for compensation. ‘You told us to eat margarine!’ we should say. ‘Look what it’s done to us!’

I wonder what their response would be?

What’s Cooking on the TV?

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In its wisdom, the BBC has opted to schedule on Channel 2 a big, blockbuster ‘food season’. This is much heralded and promises to inform in ways we have never before been informed about-food. Yawn. Really? How many more programmes about food can we take? And how many more times must we be told that refined foods, salt, fat, fast food, takeaways, sweets, chocolate and the demon sugar will be the undoing of us?

Let me see. ‘Masterchef’, ‘Hairy Bikers’, ‘Nigella’, ‘Saturday Kitchen’ and on and on-the programmes exhort us to produce more, varied and extravagant meals using more, varied and exotic, unheard-of ingredients. We sit and watch, munching our takeaways or our toasted cheese sandwiches and nodding-‘mm, yes, that looks nice’. How many viewers rush out to the supermarket next day for Tahini paste, syrup of nasturtium seed or essence of wild boars’ scrotum? How many search online for a high temperature vacuum bath or a freeze-drying machine? Heston Blumenthal has much to answer for.

It was all vastly simple decades ago. My childhood diet followed a weekly timetable that varied little beyond which meat to cook for a Sunday roast or what was available in the back garden vegetable plot. Mondays would yield up something with the remains of Sunday’s roast, the remaining days repasts would revolve around Spam-with mashed potatoes, with chips, with beetroot or eggs from the hens at the end of the garden-omelettes, fried eggs and mash or chips. We children never questioned or grumbled. We had no dislikes and would clamour only for an orange or a banana since these were prized items [rationing was not yet a distant memory], although as I’ve mentioned before we were only permitted a banana if it was accompanied by a slice of bread.

If the first course was a little sparse there would be a vast rice pudding or a suet sponge for the purposes of filling us up. Meals always consisted of two courses. Not only did we survive on this regime, but we were relatively healthy and never became in the slightest bit overweight, still less obese, even though the occasional day out to the seaside would conclude with fish and chips wrapped in newspaper.

How ironic that the more elaborate and fiddly TV chef meals become, the more the population capitulates to fast food and fry-ups, snacks and sweet treats.

Here in Portugal, where we have fled to escape the UK’s wintery temperatures we de-camped on our first evening-after five days of driving- to the village restaurant where we were shown a box containing assorted, gargantuan fresh fish, from which we selected our favourites. They were taken away and grilled with a little salt and served with a salad, crusty rolls and a plate of fried potatoes. No sauces, ‘beds’ of anything, snotty-looking foam or those stupid drips and smears dotted around the plates. The result? Completely delicious.

Out Damn Sugar! Out I Say!

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Sugar is the new evil. What a revelation! Every day there is a press article revealing some new disease, some new side-effect or some new and sinister ill that sugar has wrought. Yet who in the world could not, by now, know that sugar is not good for you, makes you fat, rots your teeth, gives you diabetes etc?

Just as everyone is aware that burgers, chips and pizza should be consumed in moderation, so we know it is the same for sugary products. Strangely, though, knowing these things is not enough. You have to care that sugar and fat are unhealthy to do anything about them, too.

Eradicating sugary and fatty foods from your life is tedious beyond belief. You have to watch others consuming slabs of cake, portions of chips, ice creams or creamy desserts whilst sipping black coffees or nibbling on a lettuce leaf. You have to sustain this regime for what seems years. You may not ever slip from a religious observance of ‘no sugar, no fat’.

It is never enough to undertake vast amounts of exercise; to run miles each day, leap around aerobically, swim, dance and lift weights. Sugar will still be bad. It will, at best, rot your teeth.

As a child I was not denied sugar, neither was I obese, although during my teens I did have so many teeth filled [with lethal amalgam consisting of, amongst other substances, mercury] I was like a walking barometer and you could almost tell when a storm was coming by staring into my open mouth. The fillings were not a result of decay. No, they were the outcome of a rush of enthusiasm by my national health dentist who was, at that time, paid handsomely for each filling he could complete, regardless of need. That this is now needing to be expensively addressed has been described in a previous post.

My mother’s problem with her very young children was not how to keep them on the straight and narrow of dietary goodness. It was how to feed us enough of anything. We were like a small clutch of baby birds reaching our beaks to the sky and squawking, ‘feed us!’

My father grew a lot of vegetables in our sprawling garden. There were hens at the end of it, obligingly providing eggs; [unlucky ones, on occasions would also provide the Sunday roast]. The odds and ends of discarded fruit from my uncle’s market greengrocer stall provided us with treats, although we were never allowed to consume a banana without an accompanying slice of bread and butter. We were always given a ‘pudding’-usually something carb-laden such as rice pudding [we fought over the toffee-like skin that clung to the sides of the dish], suet apple pudding or jam roly-poly. These starch fests were to fill us up. We were not chubby children.

So what went wrong? I can only guess at the answer, but I’d say affluence is the culprit, along with too many options, but you can’t turn the clock back, nor would you want to; so it’s back to coffee and lettuce leaves…

Part 2…Grace’s Guide to Happy Old Age

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                …So much for the experts’ guide to ageing. I am no expert, but I may be moving towards knowing what makes for a happy, healthy old age. For the majority it must be a desirable state. Who would plump for the alternative? You would have to be in a miserable condition to choose to be either unhealthy or the ultimate in ill health.

Exercise

                Some of the experts’ ideas are on the right track, but to me they seem too narrow, too prescriptive. For instance, why weight lifting, particularly? There can be few people left on the planet who don’t realise by now that exercise is good for you, but any kind of activity will surely suffice? I’d opt for something you enjoy-swimming, walking, dancing, gardening, cycling-even housework [perhaps not so enjoyable]. Experience has demonstrated to me that activities which are not fun or enjoyable will not be sustained. I never got any fun from weight machines. On the other hand I love Zumba.

Eating

                Again, you would have to have lived on a desert island not to know that overweight is bad [in which case-you would be unlikely to have become fat, due to having to hunt for food]. Food intake is closely linked to the above [exercise]. It’s not difficult. Fuel in-expend fuel. Too much fuel without enough expenditure=surplus. I can’t see the need to fast, and in any case it is unpleasant.

Brain

                I agree it is best to keep the grey matter in good order. If learning a language is what you enjoy, go ahead and learn one. Learn lots of languages! But I’d say there are plenty of ways to maintain the cells. Reading, discussing, learning, writing [of course!], observing, crosswords [if difficult enough], those number things with a Japanese name. In the future I’d guess more old people will be accustomed to computer game playing. I confess ignorance as to the value of these.

Others

                This is a tricky one. According to the ‘expert’ marriage and/or a strong social network were crucial to staying healthy. But I’d place the emphasis on the ‘happy’ part where marriage is concerned. For some, once the world of work and bringing up children comes to an end there is little left in a marriage and it could be more stressful to continue as a couple than as individuals. In retirement you spend much more time together as a couple. Similarly, the company of friends can sometimes provide more problems than it solves. But I do agree that loneliness can be a stressful emotion.

                The experts were all agreed that stress should be avoided in order to live into advanced years. I’m with them on that. This is not to say a little excitement should be avoided however. But how you do it, I reckon is not rocket science at all. Enjoy life and live it to the full!