Dismissal, Introduction, Reinstatement and Substitution

While implementing changes into our diet we have developed a few supporting approaches: dismissal, introduction, reinstatement and substitution.

Coming to a conclusion that a certain product or habit is undoubtedly harmful for us we try to dismiss it from our life. This way we stopped reheating leftovers, avoid irregular snacking and eating late. For the same reason we now skip heavily processed products like flavored pop-corn, candies, sausages or hams.

Sweets and cured meats had never been staples in my parents’ household. And even in United States, as our American friends confirm, traditionally such things were mostly eaten on holidays.

Not too much processed food on this table

Freedom from Want

Norman Rockwell

The history of food industrialization and introduction of chemicals went hand in hand with increasing affordability of processed products naturally leading to their more widespread, casual consumption.

So, comparing with our parents and grandparents we challenge our genetics in two new ways: consume too much of inflammation triggers (like saturated fats and sugar) and stuff our bodies with chemicals.  

Scientists already figured out that each chemical alone is not good for us, but how these jolly fellows collaborate inside us is still a subject of future studies. We shouldn’t be surprised though, if their mutual impact turned out to be deadlier.  

With this picture in mind I now easily pass certain counters in the supermarket, and the sight or smell of former tempting foods does not trigger my cravings anymore. Instead I immediately imagine itchy acne all over my face. 

We gradually incorporate new products, habits and activities that promise making our lives healthier. 

Inspired by Victoria Boutenko, the matriarch of the Raw Family and relentless promoter of green smoothies, who also happened to be my husband’s former classmate (both of them, left), we started drinking these smoothies just in addition to our usual diet.

My husband makes them in our old noisy mixer which he moved to the garage to spare my ears. He puts there a generous bunch of leafy vegetables, occasional dandelion from our lawn and few bananas for taste.

For those who might be interested: the effect was felt almost immediately in more energy, faster reached feeling of pleasant (but light!) satiety and in visibly stronger nails.

Sometimes we reinstate old things or habits giddily given up during our first years in America for the sake of convenience. A good example of that would be the old-fashioned cooking from scratch versus packaged and precooked easy dinners.

Honestly, I am not Martha Stewart! I just use my “six ingredients” rule and make simple things, like salads, stir fries, or one-pot meals.  

My favorite approach to life improvement is substitution. Learning that a certain food is not particularly healthy, but still having strong attachment to it, we start looking for better alternatives. This is actually fun!

For many years my breakfast included conventional farmer or cottage cheese, with all the milk hormones and antibiotics in it, plus inevitable additives and preservatives. When I ate my chocolate cake and learned my lesson, I started using avocado instead.

We both enjoy crunchy snacks like chips and crackers. In search of healthier option, I once tried radishes and became totally addicted. I guess, they fed some serious nutrient deficiency, because for almost three years I ate them two bunches a day, all year round. My radish munching made me a butt of jokes for the entire family and my radish-stuffed plastic bags not once startled supermarket cashiers.

Sometimes they asked:

- What do you do with all of them? 

- Nothing much – I smiled - just eat.

They had all reasons to think I was crazy.

One thing I am still struggling with is bread. Shatalova is a fierce opponent of yeast-based bread, especially black rye. She is convinced it is the major contributor to many types of cancer. Her arguments pressed me to reduce bread consumption to a morning toast, but once a week I still have my sunny-side-ups with black rye – the bread of my college youth in Leningrad, Russia.

My husband needs no sacrifices here – he never cared much for bread or pasta. 

After reading books of Victoria Boutenko, I tried to replace bread with raw organic crackers. Unfortunately, this I failed to do. All raw crackers I could find were either sweet as snacks or openly nutty. None of them even remotely resembled real bread.    

The major element of any healthy diet today is organic. I was really excited when such products became available in Michigan. For financial reasons we did not dare to buy them for quite a while. But every time I was passing an organic apple and buying a conventional instead, I told myself “Some day, when my budget allows, I will go completely organic”.

We delayed it for years, until we realized that organic produce was not a luxury but the only hope to survive in the modern, chemical-contaminated environment. 

Many people think that organic fruits and vegetables are simply free from pesticides and herbicides. In fact they are also not treated by radiation (as conventional potato) and genetic-engineering-free.

Victoria once told us that she preferred eating organic produce unwashed: “I am more afraid of chemicals than of parasites.”

I share her point wholeheartedly. (In fact, when I was younger I often did the same, but was hiding this habit as untidy). Benefits of earthy bacteria aside, we have been adjusted to parasites throughout the human history, while chemicals are our very new enemies. Our bodies not prepared by evolution are defenseless against them.

Today many sources still try to convince us that in terms of nutrition organic and conventional produce are equal, but I think we just need to wait a little until enough scientific evidence is accumulated in favor of uncontaminated food.

With great interest I have read in the Green for Life by Boutenko the following:

…dead plants get consumed only by particular bacteria and fungi. Plants “know” how to attract to their own rotting only those microorganisms and earthworms, that will produce beneficial minerals for the soil where the plants’ siblings will grow.

Again, this amazingly sophisticated mechanism is only true for natural, not chemically treated soils and plants. Where chemicals are involved all the precious intricate relations between the plant and its soil are broken.

Still I often hear people saying: “organic is too pricy, I can not afford it” or “an organic label is not a 100% guarantee of a clean product, so why wasting money?”

And some stay away from organic for political reasons, because they associate it with rich folk’s liberal-socialistic fancy (?!)

Paul Bragg and Other Gurus

The Miracle of Fasting by Paul Bragg was recommended to my husband by a fascinated friend.

My husband immediately started sprouting wheat in a large untidy-looking bowl and declared a week fast. To me it seemed slightly extreme. Reluctantly I read the book myself in hope of bringing him back to sanity.

Although it did not ease my caution regarding week-long fasts, some ideas of the book clicked with me. The concept of getting all the nutrients from no other sources but wholesome produce looked very reasonable and I made thorough lists of “power foods” encircling those that were not yet in our diet.

 We stopped adding salt to cooking and while our taste buds cleared up, started re-discovering unique flavors of various grains, fruits and vegetables.

This experience reminded me of my childhood discoveries, when together with my best buddy Vitka (nickname for Victor) we tried every fruit and nut growing around: soft young walnuts that had to be shelled out from bitter iodine-saturated skins; sweet flowers of white acacia and early apricots straight from our neighbor’s tree. Those small pinky fruits were deliciously sweet-and-sour.

The unhappy owner of the tree begged us to stop it or at least wait until apricots ripened up, but we did not care for oversweet and mushy things: our unspoiled little bodies knew better where vitamins were…  

Together with my husband we decided that it was the time for us to substantially reduce meat consumption.  A number of reasons were taken into consideration. One of them was that in no traditional culture people over 50 consumed meat regularly (except for the few very powerful and rich).

Feast of warriors with Russian prince Vladimir,

A. Riabushkin

Anyway, what is perfectly justifiable in the phase of growth and ultimate physical activity - i.e., in childhood and youth, becomes unreasonable in the later phase of life with its changed dynamics.

The idea of including more raw foods in our diet also felt natural. We always preferred raw apples to baked ones. In season I would make ambitious plans for apple pie or baked apples with honey, only to be discouraged by my husband.

- Why spoiling, - he would say, - let’s have them as they are. 

Not all of our life changing attempts had been successful or long-standing. For example, we tried to fast but this did not work for us.

I personally disliked constant cravings and dehydration that came along no matter how much water I had drunk. Maybe we did not do it the right way, but recommendations of drastic cleansing before fasting alarmed me even more - I am not a big fan of extremes.

Galina Shatalova was another author who made a great impression on us. She is a Russian neurosurgeon, clinical researcher, nutritionist and simply an extraordinary woman. In the fifties and early sixties she was the head of medical selection-committee in charge of screening Soviet astronauts and became a passionate promoter of physical challenges and food restrictions. All her research and experiments pointed to the fact that in order to stay healthy people should eat much less.

Being in her nineties with a group of much younger patients she undertook a 311 mile (500 km) hike through the Karakum desert described in her book Choosing the Way (Выбор пути). According to various internet sources I recently checked  Shatalova is still alive (she was born in 1916!), and is full of energy.

Apparently she lives exactly what she preaches.

She strongly speaks against food reheating. In her opinion heating (boiling, frying or microwaving) the same food twice makes it carcinogenic. While not dismissing cooking process entirely, she recommends reducing it to a minimum and applying in mildest and shortest forms. At the same time she admits superior value of raw food and considers it a staple of healthy diet.

These concepts gave us a different prospective on “smart utilization of leftovers”. They also helped us re-evaluate all the precooked (then frozen) and canned products that made cooking so easy.

After reading her book it became difficult for me to find a really healthy recipe even in the most health-devoted magazines: practically all of them included canned beans, broth or sauces. 

Another strong conviction of Dr. Shatalova is meal simplicity and limited number of cooking ingredients. In her opinion fewer ingredients naturally allow for better food combining, they also simplify cooking from scratch and thus promote freshness.

At that point my perception of “good food” made the full circle: from regretting culinary scarcities of my childhood, through enjoyment of immense variety of ready-to-eat foods in the near-by store; to realization, that a tomato picked in my backyard garden and eaten while still fragrant and warm from sun - is the best way of having it, a paradise lost for most of us in the modern world.

Based on this idea I formulated my own “six ingredients” rule, meaning that if a recipe requires more than that, forget it! With different feelings I now watch TV cooking shows where famous chefs even of my beloved Asian cuisine easily mix together soy and Worcestershire sauces, add butter to olive oil and pour chicken broth from cardboard boxes…

We also stopped peeling potatoes, apples and cucumbers. According to Shatalova there are skins that should be eaten and those that should be not. The last are easy to figure out, because Mother Nature makes them hard or bitter. Others – are the best part of the produce, usually with highest nutritional content and additional properties particularly good for digestion. (By the way, all of this is true  for organic produce only. Conventional skins specifically accumulate pesticides, herbicides, etc.)

For example, potato - the epitome of starchy vegetable avoided by many sensitive eaters due to bloating it might cause, when consumed with its skins, makes no trouble at all. Skins take care of it.

We verbalized this prospective on healthy eating as:

-         Max eats a mouse with its skin.

And believe me, he is doing just fine!

As I already mentioned, Shatalova came to the conclusion that in developed countries people eat much more than they physically need. In clinical trials with athletes and astronauts she reduced portions more than twice comparing to standards of the day and her control group constantly showed better physical performance and higher energy levels.

I checked the concept against my own teenage sport and mountain hiking experience.  I remember that on the morning of gymnastic competition we hardly ate at all, otherwise you felt weak, heavy and perspired excessively. The same strategy was instinctively chosen on a mountain trail:

- Let’s first get there; then we will rest and eat.

The appetite after such exertions was also notably subdued. And yet, from those trips I always returned home stronger and healthier.   

It might look like each and every impressive book on nutrition made us join another philosophy and become its devoted followers. In fact we gradually build our own approach to healthy living by trying different ideas, accepting some and dismissing others.

I see it as an endless process, where mistakes may be made, but also corrected; influences may be experienced, but also - overcome.

Diet Transformations

Every new wave of immigration brings to America its ethnic food and introduces it to the general public. In exchange, within a generation or two, newcomers are expected to switch from their humus and kielbasas to pizza and diet coke. 

As so many before us, our family started here by happily embracing everything American.  We were totally enjoying supermarkets, where no food was expensive for a working person; strawberry could be bought in February; canned and frozen section made dinner preparation a no-time and no-brainer (still could not comprehend, why so many people preferred to go out and take carry-outs). 

Abundance, variety and freshness – these undeniable achievements of American food industry made the experience truly democratic.  Please, remember: we came from the country, where canned peas were bought on a lucky occasion, and thereafter - strategically stored for months in view of holiday salad.

Yes, that’s the salad!

No holiday meal could be without it

But the first encounter with amazing chicken made us realize that we faced a more complicated phenomenon than just new cuisine.

Gradually we started noticing troublesome signs. Many of our friends, regardless their age and physique, were gaining weight with astonishing ease. Giggling timidly they tried to convince us it was inevitable part of aging.

To my unaccustomed eye people around us represented two polar extremes: very skinny and very heavy. Skinny, mostly celebrities, often looked skin and bones. Overweight people were not only of unusual size but also seemed lacking gender. It felt as if healthy build had no chance to survive: you either starve yourself, or gain a lot.

Something much more destructive than extra pounds was going on.

Next, we noticed rapid change of heart to almost every new food we tried: after a month or so of enjoying Sam’s Club hot chicken wings, we suddenly could not look at them anymore. We thought we were spoiled by variety.

My allergic reactions I already mentioned.

It was the end of the nineties in Michigan, the concept of organic food was not yet around. In search of cleaner and more wholesome products we turned to ethnic groceries of less developed countries with supposedly more traditional practices. Eventually we found ourselves in the process of intense diet transformation.

The first on our list was naturally the Russian food market, where we hunted products of authentic origin with obscure Soviet-era labels and thick old-fashion, sometimes rusty lids.

Surprised saleslady tried to offer us a Brooklyn-made counterpart:

-         It tastes much better!

This was true, but it also contained my personal enemies - “artificial flavors and colors”.

In comparison Russian-made products of that post-Soviet period not only had ridiculously small number of ingredients (for example, a cherry preserve included only cherry and sugar). But even this list could be excessive comparing to the real content.

Anyone who was born and raised in the former USSR understands what I am talking about, but for others this needs to be explained.

Well, according to a long-standing Soviet tradition all nutritionally valuable components were chronically stolen from manufacturing facilities by those who worked there. So, the final product was usually stripped of salt, sugar, cream… you name it.

But thanks to this peculiar practice, for no extra cost we were in fact consuming dietary products.   

Next, we explored Indian and Middle – Eastern groceries with their dry fruits, nuts, flat breads and spices.

Unfortunately for us the Japanese food industry turned up to be too advanced. Any product in the store that provided English explanations presented a long list of chemicals.

To reduce consumption of antibiotics and hormones in meat we switched to Amish poultry.

It was the time of wide interest to Dr. Atkins diet that according to Wikipedia “entails close control of carbohydrate consumption, emphasizing protein and fat intake, including saturated fat in addition to leaf vegetables and dietary supplements”.

The interpretation given to us by the diet’s enthusiasts was slightly different. Many were particularly allured by the idea of loosing weight while eating liberal amounts of fatty meat.

- You see, it is very smart – they would explain to us, - Human body craves carbohydrates. They satisfy hanger fast but also are easily digested. We, instead, consume meat that needs much more calories to digest, and by burning these calories body actually loses weight! At the same time we can enjoy tasty stuff…

For me such an approach looked questionable.

- What about long-term consequences of outsmarting your body? - I asked Atkins’s followers.

I was assured that, according to the diet’s author, none had been found.  This was not good enough for me. I tried to indicate similar patterns among traditional ethnic cuisines: if a certain nation practices such a diet for centuries staying strong and healthy, it might have merit.

For example, Mongolian and Middle-Eastern nomadic tribes were always renowned meat eaters. Sheep herders in Caucuses Mountains have many similar traditions and are also famous for living long. Maybe this is the evidence of meat eating health benefits? 

But according to historians cattle herders never ate of their livestock freely: meat was saved for a rare feast, while daily food was limited to byproducts like fermented milk and cheeses; grains and legumes.

I once read a novel by Fazil Iskander, a well-known Abkhaz writer, about a sheep herder getting ready to move his flock to high mountain pastures. He packed a pile of home-made flat breads, onions, cheese and salt.

Breakfast or lunch in Armenian mountain village

This fare with addition of wild herbs and water from pristine mountain lakes was going to be his menu for months. He would have meat only in case of the outmost disaster - that is if a sheep was killed by wolves.

Maybe because healthy living, not weight loss was our priority, we were not tempted by “magic potions” that slim our waists while we are eating burgers. Maybe early involvement in sports made us more aware of uncompromised relations between good efforts and good shape.

Anyway, we were not looking for shortcuts but rather for a wholesome lifestyle that would be better adjusted to the modern American reality.

At one point the Miracle of Fasting by Paul Bragg caught our attention.

Smooth Riding

In 2007 my yearly mammogram came out not good. They took another and later I received a call from my doctor.

He was short and assertive. “Here is the name of the surgeon, I send you to. He will tell you what to do”. He also said “Do not worry yet, 80% of the cases usually are not cancer”. 

For some reasons his last phrase caught my particular attention: “Let us go through this as smoothly as possible”. That naturally resonated with my intentions: to go through the ordeal as smoothly and dignified as I only could.

Well, first of all, there is no such thing as 80% assurance.

You can cheer yourself up for a moment, but your next thought will be “What if I fall in the other statistic category?” You start preparing yourself for the worst-case scenario. You are not anymore the person you’ve been before the call. Now you are in a different world, the paranoid world, where everything bad can happen and nothing makes sense.

Of course, I made a research.

The information coming my way was not too encouraging. The articles I read day after day suggested becoming educated on cancer risks. And according to risk criteria I was doomed: a petite Caucasian of unfortunate ethnic and age group, late to menopause (very bad!), who’s mother died of different (does not matter!) cancer.

Something like this

I was desperately searching for approval of my comparatively healthy lifestyle. I thought it might compensate somehow for my hopeless statistic profile. On this subject the sources in 2007 were unanimous: according to multiple scientific studies, lifestyle efforts did not count.

“There is no evidence” they said.

By the way, only two years later, relevant reports started sounding totally different. Here is a quote from the article Smarter Living Could Cut World's Cancer Cases, Report Says February 27, 2009 (Health Day News):

A simpler diet, more exercise and better weight control could prevent more than 40 percent of breast and bowel cancers in developed countries, a World Cancer Research Fund report released Wednesday says.

According to the report, almost a third of the 12 most common cancers in the United States, including throat and lung cancers, could be prevented by adopting lifestyle changes. It estimated that 45 percent of colon cancer cases and 38 percent of breast cancer cases were preventable by adopting the small changes.

http://yourtotalhealth.ivillage.com/smarter-living-could-cut-worlds-cancer-cases-report-says.html?nlcid=ca|03-09-2009|

Back then this information was not available to me, so I had to make conclusions myself. This is what I came to:

§         Lifestyle is the major factor deviated simultaneously with increasing statistics on debilitating diseases

§         It is also the ONLY THING I can control

Therefore I decided not to believe that it did not count.

This decision was important because as soon as I came to the surgeon’s appointment, I found myself sucked up by a powerful medical machine. It felt pretty much like moving through a tube: as soon as you are there, your traveling skills are not really important - no matter what you do, eventually you reach the opposite end.

I was first sent to the needle biopsy, then, due to inconclusive results, – to the more invasive core biopsy. Then I was told I did not have cancer. Not that time.

All these events took a while. Each phase of the process required a week or two, with major holidays and personal vocations interfering. In all it turned into months of limbo.

Spring glided into summer; between biopsies I tried to do my usual things, go to the pool, dance etc. Unfortunately, these were mere mechanical simulations of once meaningful activities. Related joy was gone.

It looked like nobody’s fault, just the way things were. I was hoping that my feelings would somehow be taken into consideration by all these impeccably professional people around me. Feelings, however, were never discussed. 

At times I wondered, what if I had not agreed to all these procedures and countless X-rays. It felt like fear already shortened my life by a year or two. This very unscientific point of view I dared not to express to any member of the medical profession.

Eventually, though, I came across the following information:

Waiting is the Hardest Part in Biopsies

Women who are waiting for results after a breast biopsy experience abnormalities in the levels of a stress hormone known as cortisol, a fact that might not only be damaging to overall health but might compromise future treatment if, in fact, the results come back positive.

The findings, appearing in the March issue of Radiology, argue for faster relaying of results to patients.

For a long time, there has been the recognition that women should find out sooner what they have, but there was just not much effort put into it," said Dr. Elvira V. Lang, an associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School in Boston and an author of the study. "When women just say they're stressed, there's a tendency to put it aside as psychological. But once you can show there can be adverse effects on the immune system and on what the next steps are, particularly in women who may be diagnosed and women who have future interactions with the health-care system, then this gets a completely different light on it.

http://yourtotalhealth.ivillage.com/waiting-hardest-part-in-biopsies.html?nlcid=br|03-03-2009|

It made me realize that general perception of our bodies by medical science still gravitates toward quite simplistic mechanistic models. It also confirmed my gut feeling that stress was much more powerful and damaging than it was customary to admit.

Luckily, this is visibly changing nowadays and we might live to see patient’s emotions evaluated in the doctor’s office along with blood or urine tests.

Following my doctor’s advice on going through this as smoothly as possible, I figured out some tricks that helped me along the way. I hope they are worth sharing.

Cozy space:

In challenging times I stick to a habit of creating cozy and peaceful environment around me. For example, I prefer not to skip my usual housekeeping chores even if in pain. Anyway, you can not rest much when it hurts, so why not have something done?

On a day of a major procedure I like to get up as early as needed to sweep the floors, feed our cats and tidy-up everything.

This way, when I return from hospital with my head still spinning from anesthesia, my neat bedroom will give me an extra hug.

No medications around:

Another trick of mine, a slightly crazy one: I hate keeping medications on my bed table - they always create havoc and hospital-like atmosphere in the room. I rather crawl to the bathroom and do whatever is necessary behind closed doors, then crawl back to my bed, to my lamp shade and gift edition of Jane Austen’s novels at my side. 

Keeping it cool:

In bad times I also like to limit bothering my husband to a minimum. The underlying logic here is the following: God knows how many favors I might need from him, if things go worse. So, I’d rather not tire him with requests and emotions now, while I still can. 

In good times, I assure you, I am as demanding and self-indulgent as any other good man’s wife.   

Three-days rule:

I also made one mini-discovery. I call it the three-day rule: no matter how bad the news is, in three days you find yourself less upset. How does it work I do not know. Logic does not apply here: all the facts are the same, you are the same, but emotional pain somehow subdues.

So, when it strikes, I whisper to myself “I need to wait, just to wait two days more…”

And as I mentioned before, we have two major stress busters.