Tag: healthy food

diets · fitness · nutrition

Catching Up with Maintenance Phase

Diane HarperLeave a comment

Last weekend I had to go to an event across the province and decided to listen to podcasts as I drove. It had been a while since I listened to Maintenance Phase, which is all about debunking wellness and weight loss fads.

What a delightful way couple of days that turned out to be. I got caught up on trying to define ultra-processed food, the statistics behind blue dot communities (where lots of people live past 100), the wacky claims around seed oils and so much more.

Some of the influencer nonsense is spreading to Canada, as I discovered at a trendy shop in Toronto. I spotted a large display of tortilla chips made of organic Canadian corn, containing no seed oils, but fried (handcrafted) instead in grain-fed beef tallow. And as a bonus, it uses sea salt instead of salt containing iodine (iodine deficiency is the main cause of goitre).

A bag of tortilla chips that is clearly working to be perceived as Canadian and healthy.

I can’t be all smug though. My way of coping on long drives is to ingest caffeine and snack on something crunchy. By the end of the weekend, I had consumed many cups of coffee, two bags of potato chips and a Diet Coke. I had the worst case of heartburn in years, and was still feeling dodgy two days later.

fitness

Just cook! (And help me out…)

Sam B6 Comments

I’ve written before about my aspirational cook book problem.

I love the idea of cooking healthy food but I find it all a bit overwhelming.

And now Yoni Freedhoff comes along and validates my feelings. He suggests that maybe we should separate out “cooking” from “healthy.” Certainly for me I tend to bundle cooking in there as part of the complete life change we all dream about. I know, details differ, person to person. In mine my room is always clean, I’m vegan, I only have dessert on special occasions, I’m never behind on writing projects, and I cook a lot of high quality, healthy, delicious food. (Nat’s cooking posts on Facebook make me jealous.)

Here’s Freedhof’s piece, For Beginners, Maybe Cooking Shouldn’t Be “Healthy”

I can also tell you that many of the folks who don’t cook regularly believe that if they were to start doing so, they’d need to be cooking “healthy” foods.

Why sure, cooking especially healthy meals is a nice aspiration, but if you’re a beginner in the kitchen, why not instead focus on cooking meals that while perhaps not incredibly healthy, are meals that you’re confident that you or your family will enjoy?

The goal really is to gain comfort in the kitchen and/or to gain the trust of your family members that you can cook yummy things.

So if you’re a beginner in the kitchen, maybe cutting your cooking teeth on less healthy meals will encourage you to gain the skills and comfort you’ll need to slowly improve your repertoire, and in so doing make the kitchen a room in which you actually enjoy spending time.

Okay. Okay. Maybe I’ll back off from the healthy bit of my cooking aspirations. Scale back a bit and focus on food that I enjoy.

The last new recipe I followed was this: RAS EL HANOUT ROASTED WHOLE CAULIFLOWER. Yummy!

A spiced, whole roasted head of cauliflower

 

Share your recipes with me. What’s something yummy, vegetarian and easy to make that you recommend to this beginning cook?