Once Upon a (Christmas) Time...

Do you remember the stories you loved as a child? If you close your eyes, maybe you can see the text, or your favorite pictures on the page. Maybe you can still recite "Peter Rabbit" from memory?

"The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived."
~Howard Pyle

Now Christmas is, itself, a story within a story. (And, of course, this is true of whichever winter holiday you celebrate.) Whether you celebrate a secular or a religious Christmas, stories go before, behind, and utterly envelop the day, the traditions, and the decorations.

"And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled 'till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more."
~Dr Seuss

How lucky the child who is given the gift of Christmas stories! Stories of mother and father's Christmases past, of why-we-do-this, and why-we-eat-that.

When my first child was born, I thought about the traditions and the memories I wanted to make a part of his "Christmases past."

"When we recall Christmas past, we usually find that the simplest things - not the great occasions - give off the greatest glow of happiness."
~Bob Hope

I noticed that lots of the traditions I saw in families around me weren't all necessarily conducive to peace and joy... but many seemed conducive to temper-tantrums and the production of good "future consumers."

"He who has not Christmas in his heart will never find it under a tree." ~Roy L. Smith

My husband and I wanted something different for our children. We wanted to infuse our family with traditions that would keep the wonder in their eyes and the joy in their hearts. We wanted a credit-card-free kind of celebration. And that's when we started telling stories.

Tomorrow I'd like to share our familiy's favorite stories with you. Do come back and "see us."

"You may have tangible wealth untold;
Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold.
Richer than I you can never be -
I had a mother who read to me.
~Strickland Gillilan

Baby Step #10: To Supplement or Not To Supplement: That is the Question

Everyone has an opinion. Of course, the ideal is to get all the vitamins and minerals one needs from one’s food, every day.

But the argument is that our food isn’t as nutrient-dense as it was even a hundred years ago. Our produce and grains are grown in depleted soil; our animals are full of synthetic hormones and antibiotics and who-knows-what-else. No one really knows if, even on a 100% organic diet, it is even possible to get the necessary nutrients for good health from food alone.

Then again, just like pharmaceuticals, vitamins are Big Business. Someone stands to gain by convincing you that popping pills (‘natural’ pills, this time…) is the solution to a poor modern food supply.

So- to supplement or not to supplement, that is the question.

Do you have plenty of energy for the things you want to do? Do you sleep well and feel fine once you drag yourself out of bed? Do you bounce back quickly from a bad day? Do you rarely experience cravings for junk food, candy, or coffee? Do you eat a wide variety of foods in as close to their natural state as possible? Do you get sick once a year or less and recover easily? Do your bowels move easily and regularly?

If you said yes to all of the above, then you may not need supplements. The main reason people supplement, and stick with it, is that they feel better with the supplements, and worse when they stop taking them. I, personally, will not go without my high-potency multi-vitamin. I have a (medically confirmed) chronic zinc deficiency, and I could never eat enough green peas to provide the zinc my body needs. So I have no qualms taking it in pill form. If you are against vitamins, and you feel good, that’s wonderful. I hope you are extremely careful to eat a balanced diet high in fruits and vegetables, and that you studiously avoid foods that rob your body of vitamins and minerals- caffeine, white sugar, and white flour.

If you answered ‘no’ to several of those questions and suspect that you could be helped by supplements, I suggest that you gather lots of information before buying a single bottle of anything. My most trusted source for supplement facts, what to take, and safe ceilings (maximum amounts) for all different vitamins and minerals, is Fertility, Cycles & Nutrition 4th Editionby Marilyn Shannon. The newest edition also contains safety data on many herbs and other ‘natural’ supplements. It is also the best source for safe supplementation during pregnancy and lactation.

Other resources I have used in designing my own safe, energy and health-promoting supplement regime are:

Rosemary Gladstar's Herbal Recipes for Vibrant Health, this book is especially useful for people who are against all synthetic vitamins and want to enhance their health or overcome health issues using only nutrition and herbs. Rosemary Gladstar, depite being one of the most famous herbalists of our time, is very balanced in her approach, never an extremist, and has a lot to say about combining natural and allopathic (mainstream medical) therapies. And her teas and other recipes will give you whole-foods, all-natural solutions at a FRACTION of the price of the “alive” vitamins and supplements on the shelves at the health food store!

Another source I use is Let's Have Healthy Children -please note that a portion of the information in this book is quite out of date. However, there are so many useful suggestions in this book for pregnancy and more, that I hate not to mention it. ****************Just be sure, as with any self-help book, that you cross-reference any nutritional, herbal, or other type of treatment in at least 3 published (i.e. NOT internet-only) sources. (This is, in fact, the herbalist’s rule of thumb- never use a remedy with finding it in at least 3 trustworthy places!)******************

Marilyn Shannon does suggest that supplementing the adult(s) in a household is far more important than supplementing children, provided the children’s diet is high-quality whole foods. I agree. It is very hard to find an all-natural, sugar-free, iron-free vitamin for kids. And if sugar and white flour are mostly avoided, children’s systems tend to absorb nutrition from their food far better than adults’ systems do.

One more note: regular grocery stores and drug stores are no place to buy supplements. The iron in drug-store variety vitamins, and ESPECIALLY in prescription pre-natals, is particularly damaging to the body’s intestinal flora. Most drug store-type vitamins are difficult or impossible to digest. One chiropractor I know suggests that people who feel they can’t afford good-quality health food store vitamins should buy an iron-free multi-vitamin and ***chew the tablets.*** This, at least, helps with their digestion. It’s really gross, though.


"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door," he used to say. "You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to."
~J.R.R. Tolkien, "Three Is Company," The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954

Baby Step #9: Sugar Season Strategies

My husband thinks Baby Step #9 should be "Listen to Your Husband 100% of the Time"; at least, listen to him, my husband, because he's always telling me not to worry about anything. Ever. And relaxing, in his opinion, is just as important as nutrition for good health. I told him he's right. And if God would just transplant our personalities for a single day....

Sugar Season is that season that comes this time of year. Starting shortly before Halloween and lasting until, say, January 15. Have you noticed that flu season revvvvs up just as Sugar Season (thank goodness) fizzles to a close? Hmmm. And that everyone in sneezing distance has a cold in January and February? Hmmmmmm. And Seasonal Affective Disorder starts to bother people late in January? Hmmmmmmmmm.

I realize that there are many factors involved in these winter plagues. But who can argue that the sugar orgy of late fall and early winter is certainly not helping your body fend them off?

Nobody ever mentions these things- doctors, the media, pharmeceutical companies... but your body is exposed to germs all the time. You would die without germs. Your body's immune system constantly fights off unfriendly germs. Doing so keeps your immune system strong, in fact. You get sick when your body's defenses get overwhelmed. That's why when 2 people who get exposed to the same germ, one might be unaffected and the other might be in bed for 9 days. It's why some kids catch everything that goes around, while other kids run a fever for an afternoon then hit the ground running.

Genes affect your body's defenses, too. But good nutrition will keep your immunities functioning your personal best.

Avoiding sugar and junk food is my #1 strategy for surviving Sugar Season without contracting the plague. Excercising regularly despite the bad weather is good, too. This is easier said than done, of course, with dozens of invitations to parties, which means lots of party food and late hours. Present wrapping, celebrations to plan, cards to write, songs to sing, books to read, decorations to make, lights to hang, not to mention the usual 3 meals a day to cook, noses to wipe, baths to give-

Ya, sure, plus excercise and eat properly, too! What's the big deal? You're super-woman, right?

Sigh. No. At least, I'm not. So what's a mom to do?

Christians have a good excuse to give up sugar for Advent (the 4 weeks before Christmas), since it is traditionally a penitential season. That's what I do. I explain to the children, every year, why we are doing it. I've found that it is easier on all of us if there are no exceptions to this rule, otherwise every day seems to be the occasion for an exception.

Halloween just ended. My 2 older kids each ate 1 piece of candy after lunch knowing that we'll have no sweets (no white sugar) till Thanksgiving. They know that on Thanksgiving they can eat as much of their grandmother's famous apple pie and pumpkin cheesecake as they want (after a big plate of turkey and green beans and salad, of course). The holiday seems very special that way. Then it's a fast again till Christmas Mass. After which I pretty much drop the reins till New Year's.

I always take a big sugarless apple crisp to holiday parties so my children have something yummy to enjoy, and to prevent them from resenting our no-sugar fast. I also feed my kids before parties. It sucks.

Parties used to mean "Woo-hoo, I don't have to cook dinner!" but it always ends up badly. Half the time the food will be covered in cheese (Isaiah gets much more messed up by dairy in the winter than in the summer), or else there will be no protein in sight. So I've learned: if I want to enjoy the party, feed the brood beforehand.

On the days I know we'll be eating unhealthier-than-usual fare, I try to give the kids acidophilus- the friendly bacteria your intestines need to keep candida- yeast- at bay, and to keep things, uh, moving smoothly. We also take our elderberry syrup and echinacea tincture sporadically (that is, whenever I remember) during Sugar Season.

The other thing we do regularly when the temperature drops is to bring out the neti pot. This: is the neti pot I gave several people for Christmas last year. We have one that I sterilize between uses. (Everybody is supposed to have their own, but I thought 3 neti pots was just too much in my cabinet!) My 7 year old does his own nose himself with it. My 4 year old uses an eye dropper on her own nose because she won't let me use the neti pot on her. John Paul, our baby, gets his nose washes with saline in an eye dropper, too. And I use a teeny pinch of baking soda and a teeny pinch of Himalayan Pink Sea Salt in warm water. It's a winter ritual, really, and we usually giggle a lot watching each other's funny faces while 'neti-potting.'

What's the point? Well, the saltwater washes the "bad germs" off your mucus membranes, where they lodge and multiply. Plus, the salt hydrates your mucus membranes. Winter weather tends to dry them out and leave them even more susceptible to germ invasion. Drinking hot tea and gargling salt water also help keep your mucus membranes clean and happy.

Is there something you do to survive Sugar Season healthily? I'd love to hear about it!


"Things sweet the taste prove in digestion sour."
~William Shakespeare, King Richard the Second, 1595

Baby Steps #7 & #8: EAT ME! DRINK ME!

I’m getting sick of these baby steps! I have so many other things to tell you.

So tonight I’m condensing 7 and 8, EAT ME! And DRINK ME! (I just got a copy of Alice in Wonderland (full of vintage illustrations!) for 50 cents so I’m feeling very Wonderlandish. I’ll just assume you caught the allusion.)

Even if you couldn’t do any of the other steps, these 2 would cover a multitude of evils. And they are so simple.

EAT more fruits and veggies and DRINK more water.

Wow- do they pay me to come up with this brilliant stuff?

Well, no. They don’t.

But we all need to hear it more often than we do.

What if you decided you’d eat a fruit and a vegetable at every meal and every snack for the next week? Or that after breakfast you were going to eat nothing else till you’d eaten 10 (Ok, maybe 5) servings of fruits and veggies? For starters, if you’re trying to lose weight, you’d add a lot of fiber to your diet and that would help you feel less hungry all day. You’d also be less likely to feel those sugar-coffe-pop cravings in the afternoon and evening.

I don’t have much advice for people who think vegetables are gross. Except maybe, wake up and smell the cancer, and, for heaven’s sake get creative!!! And if you need help eating fruit then you may, in fact, be beyond hope in the nutrition department….

And what if you decided that after breakfast you’d drink only water for the rest of the day? Did you know that even mild dehydration can contribute to headaches, fuzzy brain, cravings, and overeating? Did you know that studies have shown that an apple and a glass of water decrease afternoon sleepiness better than a cup of coffee? Did you know that lots of people don’t drink water till they feel thirsty, when they are already quite dehydrated? There’s a great book called Water: For Health, for Healing, for Life: You're Not Sick, You're Thirsty!. I highly recommend it if you think I’m being silly on this water thing.

If you don’t like to drink water, then I’ll give you a big AMEN! I think tap water, in the dozens of cities and farms where I’ve drunk it, is super-yuck. Water should taste sweet and smooth. Most tap water is so riddled with impurities that it hardly goes down without a lot of doctoring up. There are lots of ways to doctor up plain water- lemon, cucumber, even cantaloupe chunks, frozen, for ice cubes (really good in the summertime). But you could also just drink water that tastes good. Many folks think a home-purification system is a luxury. But if you buy soda pop, juice, milk, coffee, tea, and whatever else people drink these days, you’re mistaken. A good-quality reverse-osmosis or steam distillation system costs between $300 and $1,500. And over the years, you will spend that much and more on drinks. Shoot, I have a friend who buys 2 Tropicana jugs a week at $6. In 1 to 3 years she could have a very nice drinking water system paid for, save her body a ton of empty calories, and prevent a lot of waste in the landfill.

The other reason to filter your water is for you (if you’re a woman) and your daughters. LOTS of people flush birth control down the toilet. Some on purpose, others because they don’t fully digest it and out it comes. Your municipality DOES NOT filter out pharmaceutical agents. You get antibiotics, hormones, and anything else people flush or don’t fully digest. Yum. And studies point to these agents as potent factors in many cases of infertility and hormone imbalance.

So, again, even though these Baby Steps are pretty simple, sometimes just hearing common sense for the zillionth time is refreshing and inspiring. It’s refreshing to me just to write it down.

And yes, we had a sugared Halloween, for those of you dying to know. We went to Halloween story time and trick-or-treated (two different times, in fact!). We survived and today there is NO CANDY in my house. Because otherwise I would eat it. All of it. Even the stuff I don’t ‘like’.


"Do not condemn the judgment of another because it differs from your own. You may both be wrong."
~Dandemis


Please note that since this is my blog, and I am the editor, and no one really cares, I’m not footnoting these posts. If you want to find the studies to which I refer, Google is your friend. If you still can’t find them, you can email me, and, eventually, I will reply with the info that I will have to go find. I read constantly and sometimes I forget where I found something. I am an abysmal note-taker. Cheers!

We have a winner!

These glass straws are from www.glassstraws.com and-

JP Barnham is the winner! Drawn fair and square by John Paul.

Send me an email with your address and I'll send them out asap!

Thanks to everyone for your comments. I'm already working on the next giveaway, so stay tuned for that.

Hope you all have a BOO-tiful day!


"In the hopes of reaching the moon men fail to see the flowers that blossom at their feet."
~Albert Schweitzer

Baby Step #6: Read Yourself Healthy

I find that anything I'm interested in gets old. Eventually. Nutrition and cooking not excepted.

So I like to find ways to stay motivated in the areas of my life that I don't want to fizzle.

I've read The Secret of the Rosary about 10 times, because it keeps refreshing me. Same with my old house-keeping standby, Sink Reflections.

In the kitchen, I've found lots of interesting books that I use and pass on to friends. The Wonderful World Within You is one I keep around. I like it because it is full of graphs of the nutritional density of foods. The visual difference between pizza and peanut-butter-and-jelly-on whole-wheat is pretty cool, and looking at the charts is helpful to keep me on track, nutritionally speaking. This book also made me fall in love with mushrooms; they are the most dense food, nutrition-for-calorie. You also get to see which vitamins and minerals are highest in what foods, which I find very helpful.

Recently, I came across a dumb-sounding book and started reading it out of curiosity. The Thin Commandments : The Ten No-Fail Strategies for Permanent Weight Loss. I don't really need to lose weight, but I'm sometimes asked what diet I think is the best, and I never have an answer. "Just eat real food and you'll get full before you get fat," isn't really that helpful, is it now?

I was very pleasantly surprised by this book. The 10 Commandments are actually not about what to eat and what not to eat to lose weight. The book is all about strategy, structuring your environment, and re-learning how to think about food. Now, the goal of the book is weightloss, but ANYONE who has food allergies or who wants better nutrition can benefit from this book.

One of his good points: no one gets fat (or ruins their immune system) from Christmas dinner.

No. You get fat (or sick) from the 2 weeks before Christmas and the 3 weeks after Christmas. The junk snacking, the leftovers you can't stop picking at, the endless parties. We stretch out the feast so much that there are no fasts in between!

We KNOW what to do to be thin (or be healthy). But we don't do it. Even when we want to.

One cookie isn't going to make you fat (or ruin your health). But so many of us eat the cookie. Then 5 more. Then tomorrow we eat the rest of the batch. Then we decide to make some more 2 days later.

Cravings. You can't reason with cravings!

But this book is full of strategies to help you deal with foods you are addicted to, are allergic to, foods you love, foods you hate, and emotional eating. I've intuitively developed my own strategies to deal with junk food cravings, and many of them are in this book!

My personal weakness is vacation. It's very hard and very expensive to eat healthy when I'm not in my kitchen. And if I only went on one vacation for a few days every year it wouldn't be a big deal. But my last vacation was 2 weeks, my next one will be 2 weeks. That's a lot of meals and snacks to deal with! So I'm taking notes furiously and trying to make a smart plan for our trip to Kansas for Thanksgiving.

My main beef with this book is that the author makes no distinction between whole foods and chemical food. At the end of the book, he suggests a lot of 'lite' foods riddled with artificial sweeteners and additives. I think some of them might be ok as occasional indulgenges, but I hope no one would eat them regularly! Especially when trying to restrict your food intake, 97% of your food needs to pack a lot of nutritional punch in every bite.

In any case, I'm glas I finally have a book I can refer readers and friends to when they ask about weightloss and dealiong with cravings.


"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you're the easiest person to fool."
~Richard Feynman

Baby Step #5: Choose Your Poison Wisely

Honey, raw honey, Really Raw Honey, agave nectar, maple syrup grade A, maple syrup grade B, Yacon syrup, xylitol, stevia, evaporated cane juice, raw sugar, natural beet sugar, coconut sugar, organic pure cane sugar, demarara, rapadura, brown rice syrup, barley malt syrup, organic corn syrup, old-fashioned molasses, black-strap molasses:

Ummmmmm- where am I?

If you guessed the "sweetener" aisle at any given health food store, you've got it!

Confusing. To put it mildly, eh?

Now, let me say it: I'm biased. Yup, me. Biased. Not shocking, I know, as I do enjoy shoving things down people's throats (more than I usually allow myself to do). But hey, the great thing about a blog is you can just click 'x' if it makes you mad.

But I hope no one will get mad over a little bit of sugar, and for the record, I hope I'm not shoving anything down your throat. Although if you were here, I'd shove a whole wheat cinammon roll down your throat because I just made some- and MAN are they good.

But I digress.

Sugars. They all have one thing in common, on every diet, ever- they are NOT free foods. Carrots and celery= free foods. Sugars? No.

Sugar makes you fat.

Sugar messes with your mood.

Sugar is delicious.

That's the crux of the matter, right?

The question is, when you are going to indulge, how are you going to do it?

I'm not going to go into WHY I think you should ditch the white sugar, even the organic stuff. It's a highly refined, often genetically modified, chemicalized food which you can read about a zillion places. (Try Sugar Blues or Suicide By Sugar.)

I have a bias towards the more natural sweeteners: raw honey, agave nectar, maple syrup, brown rice syrup, and stevia. Barley malt is a good choice, but I'm going to leave it out because it is outside my area of expertise. I'd love comments from someone who cooks regularly with barley malt!

Honey is great because the good stuff is raw. Unfortunately, once honey is cooked, it's main benefit- enzymes- are destroyed, and as such, I try to only drizzle honey on top of things, or add it to teas that have cooled. The main thing to look for in honey is raw and unfiltered. (Raw honey shouldn't be fed to babies under 12 months old.) It does make a great, safe cough suppressant. Even real doctors grudgingly admit this.

Maple syrup is definitely a whole food. Just tree sap, cooked down. Formaldehyde is NO LONGER USED to produce Grade A maple syrup. But Grade B is still much yummier. This was the 'cheap sweet' of America before white sugar production became a chemical, cheap, industrial process (read Farmer Boy- mmmm). Back before America got fat, we ate maple sugar. (Maple sugar is crystalized/ evaporated maple syrup.)

Agave is pretty new to the American health scene. It is produced just the same way maple syrup is, but is much cheaper. I will say that RAW agave nectar is sorta a fuzzy thing, because it is made by fermenting agave juice with mold spores, and the process is proprietary (i.e. they don't have to tell us jack about how it's really made). I'm not big into mold spores. And raw agave gives me a splitting headache, while regular agave does not. Regular agave nectar/ syrup is my sweetener of choice for special occasion baked goods.

Brown rice syrup is made by cooking brown rice with enzymes. It is a traditional food in Asian countries. But it's not very tasty. My kids love it on toast, but I keep it on hand for sweet emergency use only. It is good for baking, since it is already cooked, but produces a dense texture.

And now, my baby, my favorite, my sweetener of choice:
Stevia.

Stevia leaves are green and they come off a plant. They are like a bazillion times sweeter than sugar. They are amazingly good added to loose-leaf tea or to ground coffe, right in the filter. They can be dried and powdered and added directly to foods. BUT stevia doesn not contribute bulk or texture to foods which makes it quite tricky to bake with.

Stevia extract can be obtained by a chemical or a natural process. That white powder stuff is not a whole food. It is a purified, isolated element from the stevia plant. It is sold as 'stevia extract', and in brands like TruVia and Rebiana, it may be called Rebaudioside A. Whole food extracts are available, too, and are my sweetener of choice. A natural stevia extract is liquid, either with grain alcohol as the extractive, or else water and vegetable glycerine.

These are produced by soaking the leaves in the liquid medium- a tincture! Yep! And you know how to make tinctures now, right?

Unlike honey, agave, or any other sweetener (including most artificial sweeteners), stevia has been proven to have a negligible effect on blood sugar. Also, unlike other natural sweeteners, it is calorie-free. Add all you want to your tea or coffee or quick bread, but beware! Too much stevia gets very, very bitter. I think many people who don't like stevia simply tried too much and found it bitter.

So remember, this Baby Step means don't indulge too often, and when you sweet, sweet responsibly!

Tomorrow: Baby Step #6: Read Yourself Healthy


"In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest."
~Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

Baby Step #4: DON'T BUY ME EITHER!!!

Artificial sweeteners.

Yuck.

Worse than sugar hardly seems possible, but it is. Worse than HFCS? No one's sure. But they're on, about, equal footing.

I'm not a big fan of coffee drinking, but every time I see a soda pop in someone's hand, I just want to beg- please, please have a cup of coffee! All the caffeine, none of the man-made chemicals.

Now, as I repeatedly say, I am not a healthcare professional, a chemist, a nutritionist, or an herbalist. And I encourage everyone to do their own reading up on subjects that interest- or incense- them.

But let's face it- if diet pop, diet cookies, and artificially sweetened ice cream really worked, we'd be a skinny nation.

Right?

The bottom line is that NO artificial sweetener is a whole food. Period. And if Mother Nature didn't invent it, it doesn't belong in a "natural kitchen."

Unfortunately, saccharin, sucralose, acesulfame potassium, and some new, seductive combos of these hide in lots of places. Accidentally grab the wrong bag of no-sugar-added frozen fruit, and it's drenched in the stuff. No-sugar-added jam? You thought that was good, right? But if you don't read labels, you're bringing home gram upon gram of Splenda. Ditto fruit juice, popsicles, sunflower seeds, and even bread. Ya, because those 3 teaspoons of honey in that loaf of 100% whole wheat bread are what's making America fat.

Right.

What about my little darling, stevia extract? Hmmmmm? How can that be a whole food?

Well, because you can make it in your own kitchen. From real foods.

But not all stevia extracts, or even honeys and maple syrups and agave nectars, are created equal.

And that's what we're talking about tomorrow in-
Baby Step #5: Choose Your Poison


"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."
~Theodore Roosevelt

THAT DARNED GIVEAWAY!

Hey, remember these?

For new readers- these are glass straws from www.glassstraws.com!

Well, they are taking up space in my cupboard. And it doesn't look like I'll be reaching 50 followers till 2012- LOL- so I'm going to give these away on Monday! A guiltless Halloween treat.

You have till then to become a follower and leave a comment. Every comment is an entry!


"If you don't like how things are, change it! You're not a tree."
~Jim Rohn

Baby Step #3: DON'T BUY ME!!!

OK, I'm not a doctor, a chemist, or a nutritionist. But it's finally common knowledge: high-fructose corn syrup IS BAD FOR YOU. Sure it comes from corn. (So does the ethanol that you put in your gas tank.) But the process it passes through turns it into a chemical.

In a nutshell, in laymen's terms, as I understand it: Your body doesn't biologically, physiologically recognize HFCS as a food, though it tastes sweet and contains calories. So unlike that slightly lesser evil, common table sugar or sucrose, HFCS doesn't trigger your brain's satiation response. One of the MANY reasons a person can drink three soda pops in an hour, but could never down 47 teaspoons of sugar in an hour!

So, in short, this baby step to a healthier family invovles throwing out any box, jar, or bag in your home that lists HFCS, high-fructose corn syrup, corn sweetener, or anything similar. When in doubt, google. You can find good lists of how this chemical is creatively named to hide in your food.

Even many health-food store foods contain HFCS. Notorious for HFCS:

-Jelly, jam, preserves and the like. Look for one made with only fruit juice concentrate as the sweetener. Or make my Rose-Hip Jam!

-Yogurt, especially the single-serve cups. Most folks don't binge on entire cartons of yogurt, so why pay extra for the portion-controlled cups? Buy a nice, big plain organic tub of it. (I noticed recently that at our grocery store, you can get organic for about the same price as regular now!) Add your own fruit, vanilla, honey, or whatever.

-Cereal bars, granola bars, and other pre-packaged junk. The problem with these snacks, in addition to the possibility of tons of HFCS in the cheaper brands, is that they take the place of the healthier snacks you and your kids should be eating when you're hungry throughout the day.

By simply saying "no" to HFCS, you'll save a lot of money and a lot of health. You'll make losing weight and keeping it off easier. And you'll be forced to expand your diet to fill in the gaps.

A winning strategy all around!

Baby Step #4: DON'T BUY ME EITHER!!!


"What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it."
~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939, translated from French by Lewis Galantière