Everyday Bliss

(scroll down for the apocryphal picture of me at close to max weight…and today’s version…)

I am fortunate enough to have a very good friend in social media expert Andy Wibbels (@andymatic on Twitter). We’ve masterminded and built our businesses side by side for years and he has been such a help and such a darling friend to me. Color me very grateful for this high class, high value friendship.

We met when Andy still lived in Chicago. When he and Ron and kitties Astroboy & Downy moved out here in 2008, Andy stayed with us while interviewing at SixApart, where he worked until recently on their TypePad, Vox and other products. Now he’s graduating to the bigtime and toddling off to North Carolina to work for sales shark Jeffrey Gitomer. I’m so proud of Andy I could bust. Love him like a sister. k

We’re getting in a lot of celebrating, dinners and theater, ballet and shows before they leave. Tonight we went to Swan Lake, which was great, though missing the iconic dying swan scene at the end. In Helgi Tomasson’s production of the San Francisco Ballet, Odette simply jumps off a cliff – offstage.

WHERE WAS MY DYING SWAN SCENE?! I waited the whole doggone ballet to see it. Ron was similarly taken aback. You just don’t cut the dying swan. It isn’t done.

At any rate, for afters we went back to the boys’ apartment and shot the breeze as long as eyes stayed open. Followed by a picture taking session (which followed the food pics at Santorini earlier in the evening). The below right picture is tonight’s. The one on the left is of me two years ago almost to the day. That chin is pretty much a straight line from under-lip to collarbone, and was a triple roll at my high weight.

BTW, I got that wrong in the caption below. (hey, it was late at night)  I went back to my records and found I weighed more like 265 in the lefthand picture, not 280. But once I got that large, I stopped counting as many do, so the lapse is understandable. 

All the cutting & sculpting done on this body happened pretty much in eight months. Close to 70 pounds, 5 dress sizes, 1 shoe size, 3 bra sizes and 2 chins down, plus over 6″ off my abdomen so far.

I didn’t effort, I just had fun.

I didn’t restrict my eating, I had what my body wanted. How I did it will be the stuff of a future workshop. Something to look forward to! For now though, photos unretouched, just captioned…

ILLUSTRATED RECIPES INCLUDED BELOW!

Ok! Celiacs and those with irritable bowel syndrome and those of us who are gluten-free by choice and like it, take heart.  There’s more value you can wring out of a pumpkin than just scaring the kids at Halloween. We’re using our Halloween Jack o’ Lantern for toothsome Christmas goodies now. Talk about your Frugal Gourmet!

If you were beaten into frugality by parents who went through the Depression and were determined “never to be hungry again, no not me nor any of my people”,  you probably know all this stuff already. But if not, listen up. It’s now cool again to be frugal. In our house, that means no vegetable end goes wasted but gets put into a container labeled “Future Soup” and used in weekly stock-making.

Even the Halloween jack ‘o lantern does not suffer the ignominy of the compost heap. We paint ours with its festive face, placing a tealight on top of the pumpkin (well glued-down with hot wax) for Halloween night, then remove the tealight, turn the pumpkin around and use it as a Thanksgiving centerpiece with other seasonal fruits and flowers. After Thanksgiving, the pumpkin is scraped of paint, baked, and both filets and chunks carved from it to use in cooking.

One of our favorite dishes is an Afghani entree of sauteed pumpkin filets covered with a delightfully savory sloppy-joe type ragu and finally a yogurt sauce gently scented with garlic and a touch of brown sugar. The dish is called Kadu Borani and is served over fluffy, long-grained jasmine rice. One gluten-free recipe for Kadu Borani is here and here is its graphical representation:

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Awesome-sauce! Right?

Just a handful of ingredients you probably already have on hand and this dish is practically cost-free.

Other less intensive dishes can be made with pumpkin or other squashes, which are highly beneficial for those with celiac disease, irritable bowel syndrome and other conditions that require greater amounts of natural fiber added to the diet. One of my favorites is a recent innovation with this year’s jack o’ lantern cutlets:

5 Minute Breakfast Pumpkin Cheesecake

Now could you “diet” on your busy schedule if you had Pumpkin Cheesecake plus a mouthwateringly luscious cup (real, thanks to the Bear for an early Christmas present!) of Kona coffee for a quick out-the-door breakfast? You can prep all the ingredients the night before. Putting the Pumpkin Cheesecake in your serving bowl and making your tea or coffee is what takes the five minutes in the A.M.  Here’s how:

1. Assemble the ingredients (coffee optional and used as an accompaniment for this dish in the A.M.)

2. For one serving, place a cup of pumpkin cubes in glass bowl and pour half-n-half to cover halfway. Microwave uncovered for 2 minutes on high, or simmer on stovetop until half-n-half is boiling.

3.  Remove pumpkin mix from heat, add yogurt, spices and sweetener to taste, mash with fork or puree with hand blender. I favor Blue Agave syrup or Truvia sweetener made from stevia, as both of these are low to no-gycemic and don’t metabolize in the body as sugar, which makes all the dishes I cook great for diabetics as well.

Additions: If you’re super-bulking your fiber, you can also add a tablespoon of ground flaxseed. If you’d like more high-quality protein, add the same amount of soaked crumbled walnuts or hempseed.

4. Though I have this “crustless”, you can line a bowl with gluten-free cracker crumbs – I use Glutino’s “wholemeal” crackers, with a teaspoon or two of agave syrup or honey and a drop or two of lemon juice just to hold the crumb together.  Press into bottom of bowl.

5. Spoon the rich pumpkin mixture over the crust, or place in bowl just as it is.

Jack o’ Lantern Pumpkin Cheesecake

This is a breakfast yogurt that you can amp up the nutritional complexity of as described above if you wish. It’s also something you might find at a swanky spa or gourmet restaurant. You can serve this for an after-dinner dessert. If so, spoon mix over crust in a glass pie plate and make enough to cover the crust. Freeze until 1o minutes before serving. Thaw very slightly on the countertop, slice and serve. This dish is better scooped out though, a la cobbler.

Enjoy!

Answered a post at Alltop and thought I’d put my leftover veggie heaven tips here….

Try striped red & cream chiogga beets that look like peppermint sticks, and the mellow chocolatey flavoring of golden beets if you dislike the darker, semisweet chocolate of traditional red beets. Whiz them up with any juice you like for a cocoa-goodness backbeat and infusion of vitamins. It’s literally like getting an infusion of red blood cells but instead of a needle, you use a straw.  <grin>

I just included the leftover Brussels sprouts from Thanksgiving dinner in an adventure in High Cheesery I call “Potato Rarebit” that is to die for. To leftover mashers add sauteed garlic, worcestershire sauce, greek seasoning (or black pepper, oregano, parsley, chives, thyme + dried onion), curry powder, shredded cheddar, milk and chopped tarragon, cilantro and arugula (or your combination of favorite herbs).

How:
Cook the garlic to light brown and add milk, cheese and spices to taste. Simmmer together into a thin sauce stirring frequently and add the mash and herbs. Keep stirring until everything incorporates and begins to look glossy.

It literally spins into a richly decadent dip that looks and feels like spinach sour cream type tip (but is so way better), and is delicious picked up on any kind of bready substance. Being gluten-free, I used my mom and grandma’s no-sugar cornbread which was also left over from Thanksgiving.

Throw in the brussels sprouts as I did for dinner, and it’s reminiscent of broccoli in cheese sauce.

What’s not to like?

From my favorite Good News Site, www.gimundo.com:

…the premium Swiss chocolate company Callebaut claims to have solved both of these chocolate conundrums with the invention of a brand new confection known as the Voulcano.

Read the inventor’s article on this here.

What’s so special about the product? According to founder Barry Callebaut, the new bar is completely melt-resistant to hot weather: it’s able to withstand temperatures up to 131 degrees Fahrenheit without getting sloppy. Even better, the new chocolate, which will be available in both bar and cookie form, will contain up to 90 percent less calories than a typical piece of chocolate.

It sounds revolutionary, but the question, of course, is the taste. Is there any possibility that a Vulcano chocolate could compare to the luscious flavor of your favorite Lindt bar? Callebaut claims that it can—and, if the company’s right, they may have struck (black) gold.

“It’s nice and chocolatey, with a strong aroma, and crispy rather than creamy,” a Callebaut spokesperson, Gaby Tschofen, told The Guardian. “It does melt in the mouth, but it is the enzymes in saliva rather than the heat of the tongue that causes it to dissolve.”

Read the rest of this article here.

My mother, God rest her, used to save up pickle juice to baste fish in  – a particularly horrible tip she got from her Weight Watchers sponsor in the 1970’s. Now I’m not talking about the kind of pickled fish you find in a jar like that on the right. I’m talking about regular old Vlasic or Heinz cucumber pickle juice. The stuff that’s left over with all the floaty bits, when you’ve eaten all the pickles.

Throw it away? Mom would rather have bitten off her own hand than to throw “good food” away, so even old, clapped-out pickle juice got used up – to Dad’s and my chagrin. For Mom, that was being a good steward of the environment, being frugal (which was next to Godliness in her book), allowing her to be creative and seasoning a hated food item “interestingly”.

Interesting was one word for it. Once she actually put the whole sodden mess up in lime jello. That was one of the worst nights of my life. Dad rescued me with a McCheeseburger (hey, I was seven, ok?) and knowing Dad, probably fries and a rootbeer. We were great drinkers of Frosty Rootbeer in my household. Can’t get more white bread vanilla than that. 

Because Mom was the only one doing the cooking, PickleFish unaccountably became a Friday night standard with the cheery quip: (you know you’ve heard this before folks)

“You don’t have to LIKE it, you just have to EAT it!”

Just as unaccountably, Dad instituted the “alternate Friday pizza night” tradition.

We can all thank God that Mom didn’t meet Picklepop Bob before she passed into the great mystery. Or we’d have had the horrors of PickleSickles to deal with as well.

This is apparently…for real. Pucker now or forever after hold your peace. Click to check it out:

Now say: “Pickle pop packing plant prime pickle puree!” eighteen times real fast. The most worrying aspect of this is that they’re pushing it as an alternative to soda in elementary schools. Is there enough psychotherapy in the world to undo the damage this item will inflict? Worried experts are unsure…

Yes, as Mom used to say, “there’s all kinds of people in this world honey, and half of ‘em are as crazy as loons.” This, from the woman who innovated on PickleFish, which never should have been invented in the first place.

Dad rolls his eyes and makes the index-finger-twirling universal glyph for “fruitloop”.

Don’t even start telling me about your Grandma Yetta’s lutefisk or hakarl.

Picklefish was worse.

I just created my first couple of HubPages. The second one I did was on Practical Sustainable Living which means, Sustainability without Stress. Simple stuff we can all do. It’s here:

http://hubpages.com/hub/Practical-Sustainable-Living

The first post I made to this hub was so good I wanted to share it with you, because sustainability is dear to my heart and one of the shifts we need to make as a culture. In answer to someone else’s question about whether or not to go organic to avoid hormones in meat and milk, I answered:

Real simple: ORGANIC = YES.

Anything that is an animal product, always, always go organic. This means there are no pesticides, hormones or additives to the animal’s life, and that they were kept in a humane manner, allowed sufficient pasturage to roam in the case of cows, goats, sheep etc., and in the case of chickens, turkeys and other fowl, that they were not cooped, were allowed to scratch freely and have room to stretch their wings. Also, that they were killed humanely and treated with dignity throughout their life and in their final hours. It makes a difference in the taste and nutritional value of meat, milk and eggs of domestic food animals, plus which it’s just the right thing to do for all the reasons above.

Put it this way: Would you eat a piece of chicken pumped not only full of artificial hormones and antibiotics, but the extreme stress hormones from being cooped beak to beak with other birds all its life, who suffered before dying and was killed inhumanely while terrified? I know I wouldn’t. My conscience won’t let me, my tongue detests the taste of non-organic meat, and my body, fed for over a decade now on organics, knows the difference and begs me never again to feed it chemical-laced protiens. Organics are also one of the best ways, animal or vegetable, to cleanse your body of all the poisons you’ve ingested over the years. The benefits of going organic and taking a full body cleanse with time to integrate into new eating patterns, are manyfold and thoroughly blissful.

Some speak of organic farms not producing what pesticided farms do. That may be true or it may not be true…or we may have yet to find out what new organic-friendly technologies can produce. But simply put, would you rather eat poison or quality nutrition? It’s also over 100 years of using pesticides and other chemicals in North America at least, that have leached the core nutrients from our soils such that we have to supplement them by taking vitamins – even with organics. Those farms that have been organic 20 or more years have put back the nutrients into the soil by adding their organic livestock manure or vegetable matter compost and even seaweed top dressings to the tilth.

Food from organic farms is vastly more nutritious, and if you feed on it, your body needs less food to live better. Part of the overeating we’re seeing as pandemic right now is caused by the very poor nutrition available even in plain meat and vegetables that are produced on chemically saturated lands. The body is just trying to get its RDA of nutrition, so the person eats and eats. It’s a shame the available calories in such food haven’t gone down too, or we might be able to break even. But that’s not the case… *wry smile* Also, our bodies have become miniature pharmacies of hormones, antibiotics and a host of other chemicals we have picked up from the chemically treated foods we eat. That makes us more susceptible to influenza and other diseases, and is one of the suspected major causes of some cancers.

Organic food makes us healthier and more able to cope with illness or physical injury.

Also, in turning our lifestyles around from the endless consumption that factory farming is part of, we can leverage other options for food production. Rooftop and back yard gardens – in the 1940’s during WWII, everyone had them and everyone fed their families nearly 100% with them. Farming the seas as well is technology we are only starting to leverage, like seafaring nations such as Sweden, Norway and other Scandinavian countries have done for centuries to create their hearty and disease-resistant populace. We can also learn from Asian teachings and use meats sparingly as flavoring like they do in Japan, another nation whose bulk of protein comes from the sea. Hydroponics, terraced city agriculture and community farms are also extremely viable options, even for city dwellers. There are vast tracts of land in America that is currently being used to house feeder cattle that if turned over to organic farming would feed hundreds more people. And across the pond in England, each family without back yard space for a garden may request an allotment of land from the city for the purpose of growing their own vegetables and keeping small livestock. There are many options to boost farm production other than sticking with chemicals that will continue to damage the earth, even if we stop using them tomorrow, well into the 22nd century.

We might well take advantage of these options no matter what city, state, nation or principality we live in. It’s no longer an east /west issue, or a north / south divide. Food and water are becoming scarcer, but that doesn’t mean the trend has to continue. If we all pitch in towards sustainable longterm solutions, we can still turn back the tide of damage a century of chemicalized living has done.

Go Green! It’s not just for posters anymore…

For those with food-related weightloss issues, there is a new helping tool that bears mention: Lighten UP!.

If you haven’t yet encountered the juicy wisdom of Loretta LaRoche, polish up your funny bone, you’re in for a rare treat.  And if you have problems with food and excess weight, Loretta’s latest work, just published TODAY entitled “Lighten Up” will be of special interest.

Not a day goes by without an article appearing in the media that reveals how certain foods could be harmful or helpful to our health.

Our meals have become either demonic or divine.

We’ve forgotten how to be in a “right relationship” with one of the greatest pleasures we have in life: eating.

As a result, we’re fatter than ever and more stressed out about being fat. And to the rescue comes PBS maven and one of my personal heroines of “laugh while you work on it”, Loretta LaRoche.

Loretta LaRoche is sick to death of diets and diet books . . . so why is she writing a book about losing weight?

“One of the reasons why I feel compelled to write this book is simple: I can’t stand it anymore! The other is the desire to encourage you to develop a more pragmatic and optimistic approach in relation to food, movement, and life’s inevitable ups and downs.

I’ve struggled with this problem, I’ve watched countless friends suffer because of it, and I’ve helped tens of thousands of people deal with the stresses that bear down on their lives, often because of weight and health issues.

There are a variety of solutions in : Lighten UP! that you might not have explored up to this point. They require taking action. These answers aren’t simple, but they’re much easier to incorporate into your life than expending your time and energy on useless diets, gadgets, and faux scientific cures. They take commitment, common sense, and the ability to learn emotional self-regulation.”

Learn to eat well, move with joy, and live a more balanced life. Click here to oder Lighten UP! and watch yourself have more fun than should be legal….or that you thought possible…while growing into the look, feel and deliciousness of the real you.

In this humorous and informative book, Loretta shares her expertise as an international stress consultant, former aerobics instructor, and owner of a wellness center.

Lighten UP! offers a unique perspective and help you set healthy, realistic goals with its numerous tools and techniques. You’ll learn to:

• Develop a sane relationship with food
• Stay committed to your goals
• Be passionate about eating nutritious meals
• Develop tools to reduce stress
• Focus on your successes
• Experience more mindfulness in the way you approach food
• Create health AND well-being

Weight loss is a physical, mental, and spiritual process. Learning how to work on these aspects together will help you maintain a relationship with food that will nurture you, fuel you, and give you joy.

Lighten up, slow down the pace, and make mealtimes a vital part of your day. Click here to learn more about Lighten UP!

Ladies, check out Loretta’s NEW PBS special:

If you haven’t seen Loretta LaRoche in action, you’re in for a rare treat.

Loretta’s seventh public television special, Juicy Living, Juicy Aging, begins airing this month.

Armed with her amazing wit and refreshing candor, Loretta challenges us to embrace our lives by being wiser, healthier, happier, more enthusiastic, and juicier. (Who couldn’t use a little extra juice?)

Check your local listings to find out what times Juicy Living, Juicy Aging will be broadcast in your area. This is one to pop some corn for, break out the antioxidant-rich hot chocolate and view with a passel of your best pals.

How can you support each other to live juicier?

Health, skinny jeans and long life!

Because you Just. Have. To. See. This. Anyone who ever thought office work was dull or who didn’t realize the amazing things you can do with humble office supplies, here’s some joy for ya from those wild and crazy guys at Eepy Bird, who last brought us the sordid tale of what happens when you mix Diet Coke and Mentos roll candy (don’t ask). Slinky company, watch your profit margin.  Enjoy the pretty colors!

I eat healthy because I want to. Some may say I don’t have a choice, but I prefer to embody the reality of my physical container as a temple, and to keep the temple clean and sacred, I only put the best fuel in it. If I eat bread or glutinous grains of any kind, I blow up like a toad and look like I’m carrying triplets. Discomfort doesn’t begin to cover it.

And when I eat animal products (increasingly rare) they’re organic – meat, eggs and cheese, because even those with their heads still far down in the sand have pretty much acknoweledged the contamination of world food supplies with pesticides, hormones and the like. Ditto veggies, which must be organic.

Above is a picture of my kitchen counter with a few staples on it and my award-winning (with family at least) recipe for Pumpkin Apple Crumblebutter. So healthy it counts as a beefy serving of veggies AND fruit, and I lived on it as a treat and dessert while I was writing the book. Click the link to go to the recipe. It’s gluten free and you won’t even miss Pumpkin Pie at holidays with this stashed in your pantry. 

But if I’m back in my home state visiting friends or in suburban areas, organic is hard to come by, so I’m okay making do with the best I can get. Lots of filtered water, lots of farmer’s market fare. At home, we keep healthy foods on hand and eat more out of the cupboard than outside the house. I pretty much figure out dinner a few hours before we eat.

But I was very suprised to learn that on the other end of the scale from anorexia and bulimia, is a zone where healthy eating becomes unhealthy obsession. Complete with a quiz of course, to see if "this is you".

Check this out, from an article from the NBC11 local television station:

Is there a dark side to such healthy living?  Bay Area doctor Steven Bratman coined the term "orthorexia" from the Greek word ortho, which means correct. The disorder is not in the obsession to be thin, but with being pure.

El Camino Hospital Dietician Kim Bandelier said orthorexia is not a medically-recognized diagnosis, but it’s real and can be very dangerous.

"We normally see it associated with OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). It’s a symptom of a mental disorder. They definitely have an unhealthy preoccupation with food," Bandelier said.

Dieticians say the vast majority of healthy eaters are nowhere near orthorexic. But like any eating disorder, there are red flags to watch out for. One of the signs is when someone no longer enjoys food.

Alexis Perlmutter said she and many of her friends have some orthorexic tendencies.  "I used to love Big Macs. Now I look at Big Mac and I think, ‘Poison, poison, poison’ and I won’t eat one," Perlmutter said.

There are some questions you can ask yourself to see if you are obsessed with health foods and may be at risk of developing orthorexia. This quiz is from Dr. Bratman’s book "Health Food Junkies." Give yourself a point for each question you answer with "yes."

• Do you spend more than three hours a day thinking about healthy food? (For four hours, give yourself two points).
  
• Do you plan tomorrow’s food today?
  
• Do you care more about the virtue of what you eat than the pleasure you receive from eating it?
  
• Have you found that as the quality of your diet has increased, the quality of your life has correspondingly diminished?
  
• Do you keep getting stricter with yourself?
  
• Do you sacrifice experiences you once enjoyed to eat the food you believe is right?
  
• Do you feel an increased sense of self-esteem when you are eating healthy food? Do you look down on others who do not?
  
• Do you feel guilt or self-loathing when you stray from your diet?
  
• Does your diet socially isolate you from others?
  
• When you are eating the way you are supposed to, do you feel a peaceful sense of total control?

Light said she’s aware of her hyper-healthy attitude and she believes it that keeps her in balance. So, as the phrase goes, too much of a good thing can be bad for you, even when it comes to health food.

The original article is here: at the NBC11 website

When I see disinformation, even very well-meaning disinformation, I’m passionate about correcting it if I can to spare someone some grief. Recently at LifeHacker, the very excellent blog edited by Gina Trapani, there was an article on "Combatting the Common Cold" that contained the advice to eat pasta with garlicky red sauce. Yes’m to the garlicky ragu, not so to the pasta. (about which read more, below)

Inflamed with all the passion of the recently converted, I wrote an off-the-cuff sermon on the evils of gluten which I also give you here. Please take heed. You cannot imagine how very much more healthy you will feel without the "glue" of wheat-based products gumming up your insides!

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Exclude Pasta, make sure it’s gluten-free pasta or better – strands of spaghetti squash – over which you ladle that garlicky ragu. Pasta and other items made of glutinous grains such as wheat, rye, barley, spelt, kamut and millet all form mucus in the body. If your system is clogged with mucus to begin with, and a virus piles more mucus on, it takes you twice to three times as long to recover from ANY illness, no matter what enhancements you use. (Image courtesy of http://www.kidsaware.co.uk/ where you can get gluten allergy stickers and other gluten-free goods)

Researchers also posit mucus-filled intestines clogged with undigested food, (which can barely extract adequate nutrients from the food we take in) to be the primary source of most of the diseases we face as human beings. Where there is excess mucus present, digestion – and health – is a dicey proposition.

The 7-10 days doctors suggest is the "normal recovery time" for a cold is for the average American body clogged with mucus and fighting for health on several different fronts. Most Westerners are mucus filled due to the fact that the average American and European diet contains a disproportionately large amount of milk and glutinous grains. By "mucus filled", I don’t necessarily mean you have drippy sinuses (though this is certainly a symptom) – this kind of mucus is in the body’s cells and tissues inside organs, muscle and particularly, the intestines. When mucus fills the intestines, food is allowed to ferment, bacteria and parastic infestations can gain hold and low-grade inflamation moves over the body without our even being aware of it.

If you’re gassy after a meal including grain or dairy, this is why. If you have freakish amounts of gas and are wondering how to get rid of it – go gluten-free. Ditto infections that keep coming back and that you just can’t seem to cure. It’s no accident that the primary component of the cold cure above is garlic. Garlic wipes out intestinal parasites in large enough quantities, and is both a virucide and bactericide. Large enough quantities I should note, are quantities big enough to make you severely antisocial, and cause gas and loose bowels of their own. Don’t worry though, you’re excreting the toxins that were making you sick in the first place.

I would also add to the above 10 – 15 mg of zinc every three hours and Vitamin C to bowel tolerance (again, until it makes you gassy) every four hours and sambucus nigra – elderberry – extract, tablets or syrup which has been proven in European studies to fight even the flu virus. On a tertiary level, what a cold is trying to tell you is to slow down. We have cold and other viruses in our environment all the time. We become susceptible when we are stressed, hurried, not eating well or taking care of ourselves.

Ask yourself: "what is my body trying to tell me?"

More On Why You Should Consider Going Gluten-Free:
My pre and post-gluten-free recovery times for an average upper respiratory ailment are night and day different, as most who are gluten and dairy-free find. Unlike the most common of gluten ailments, celiac disease, I do not have serious physical problems – my body is simply allergic to gluten like most Westerners,  and produces gas and liquid in response to it. I had no idea until a naturopathic doctor pointed this out to me by looking at my abdomen girth and measuring it against the rest of my body. When I stopped eating gluten (which was easier than I thought it would be), I lost 3.5" off my abdomen in two weeks, from elimination of the gas and edema (excess liquids) that the allergy caused.

What a great benefit!

Like my "GF" (gluten-free) kindred, I also have by my own reckoning, about forty percent more available energy than I did when eating grains and dairy. I don’t miss grains at all. GF folks can eat rice, nuts, seeds and some of us can also eat corn. Ancient grains are also available to us, such as amaranth and quinoa and grass seed products that are used like grains, such as Ethiopian teff. None of these place the mucus burden on our bodies that wheat, rye, barley and the like do.

And on the virus front….most of the gluten-free find we either just don’t have colds anymore, or it’s a matter of a 48 hour recovery at most. I used to take two weeks to recover from a cold on average, when I was eating gluten. The American Academy of Family Physicians also links gluten with viral issues. (Source: http://www.aafp.org/afp/980301ap/pruessn.html)

YMMV, but when "conquering" a cold, at least for the time it takes you to get over it, consider going gluten and dairy free and taking more water than you think you need. Most Westerners are also chronically dehydrated as we tend to drink coffee, tea and soda over plain, pure water. You’ll get over your cold faster, and your body will appreciate the vacation!

Some sites you might like to visit for more info:

Shauna James Ahern’s awesome blog: http://glutenfreegirl.com
Wikipedia’s Explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten-free_diet
GF Diet Helps Autism (Aspergers, ADD and more): http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001526.htm
Karina’s Kitchen: Gluten-Free Goddess: http://glutenfreegoddess.blogspot.com/

Or, simply Google "gluten-free" to get more information about this healthy and health-inducing lifestyle. Enjoy!