Daily 5 - Year 2, Day 31

Today's Daily 5:

1. Two safe flights
2. clearing airport security and US customs without any of the customary adventures I tend to collect while doing those things
3. vacation
4. hugging a friend in person for the first time
5. being someplace with warm weather (and not the snow predicted for home this week!)

Vacation

Early this morning, probably before this post ever goes live, I left for vacation.

I'm spending the next week in California, visiting with a dear friend who became a friend thanks to this blog.

And I can't wait to finally "meet" at the airport.  We decided (though we know things about each other that some family members probably don't know, and have been corresponding at least several times a week for a couple of years now) that the most fun thing when people ask how we met would be to use some version of "we met at the airport, yesterday..."

I'm looking forward to all the conversations that will be so much better over tea, held face to face, than they would ever be by email or an online chat.  And I'm looking forward to checking out her favorite places to escape, too!

The blog will be quieter this week while I'm enjoying my chance to get away.  I'll see you on the other end!

Daily 5 - Year 2, Day 30

Today's Daily 5:

1. A relatively peaceful day
2. rain - the day was dreary and cold, but the rain reminded me of fresh things coming
3. eating three full meals the day before traveling - most of my last trips have been so stressfully anticipated that I haven't eaten at all, so three meals is a huge thing!
4. time with just my mom
5. a treatment to get me all set to go
6. a very long and good phone conversation with a dear friend
7. leaving (bright and early! like 4:30 am early) for California to spend a week with another good friend

Food Rules

I've talked before about my love of Jamie Oliver and cooking.  About the healthy changes in eating, cooking, and supplement taking I've been making over the last few years.  However, if you had told me two years ago that I would be the kind of person who would read an entire book (even if it was a smallish book) on the topic of simple ways to have a healthier diet, I'd have laughed at you.  Long and hard.  And then I was converted to healthier ways because of necessity when my own health failed me, and last week I actually read a whole book on the topic of healthier eating.  I read Michael Pollan's "Food Rules: An Eater's Manual"

I borrowed this one from the public library, but it's one I'll be ordering and adding to my own library.  I'm also, having whet my appetite on one of his shorter works, planning to read at least one more of Pollan's books on the topic of food - where our food comes from, and how to eat in a way that will make us healthier.  Pollan sums up his healthy eating philosophy in seven words.  "Eat food.  Not too much. Mostly Plants."  You can't get much simpler than that.  More than that, though, this particular book was funny in preventing it's wisdom.  It was broken into three sections of rules, 64 total, one for each sentence in Pollan's seven word philosophy of eating.  I'm including some of my favorite rules from each section below:

Eat Food:

• Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food
• Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce
• Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle
• Eat only foods that will eventually rot
• If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't.
• It's not food if it arrived through the window of your car.
• It's not food if it's called by the same name in every language.  (Think Big Mac, Cheetos, or Pringles.)

Mostly Plants:

• Eat your colors
• Eat animals that have themselves eaten well
• Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk
• "The whiter the bread, the sooner you'll be dead."
• Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

Not too much:

• ...Eat less
• Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored.
• Spend as much time enjoying the meal as it took to prepare it
• Don't get your fuel from the same place you car does.
• Treat treats as treats
• Cook
• Break the rules once in a while

Realistically, this was one of the most practical, doable, and basic books I've ever read on this topic.  (Well, it's the only book I've ever read on the topic, but I've read a whole lot of magazine articles and this is still the most basic compilation I've come across.)  More than that, though, what I appreciated was Pollan's sense of moderation.  He doesn't suggest that you make all 64 rules hard and fast - his advice is to pick some from each section and make those changes.  The explanations that go with each of the rules were simple, yet convincing, filling in the gaps of some of the less obvious things, and I actually felt like I walked away from this book with some new ideas for healthy eating, and knowing things about food that I didn't realize before.  Like I said at the beginning, though I initially borrowed this one from the public library, I'll be purchasing a copy ASAP for my own library.

My question is this - which of these rules do you like the best, or what "rules" of your own do you live by for healthy eating?

Daily 5 - Year 2, Day 29

Sometimes making these lists feels like a lame exercise.  Especially when it's been the kind of week where I feel like every evening I sit down and list the same things over and over.  That said, lately the same things have offered glimmers of hope and encouragement over and over amidst some long, tough days.  And so I list them.  Over and over.

Today was a pretty rough day in a lot of ways.  And some of those same things helped.  And now, I'm staring at a screen, feeling like it lacks originality to list them again.  And yet, they helped.  They were bright spots in a painful day.  So I'm listing some of the same things, and a few newer ones too.

Today's Daily 5:

1. lighting candles
2. curling up in my own bed
3. fuzzy slippers
4. chocolate
5. packing for my holiday (2 days!)
6. twirling skirts and scarves
7. trading emails with a few dear friends
8. cathartic tears
9. watching church online from California
10. clean water