This is why it is amazing to own a pet care business in Los Angeles. Impossible to keep one’s heart closed to Nature with these backdrops.  Aaaaahhh…

While walking I chanced upon this lovely flower garden & had to share. I love spring

Bond Brill has really put together a good self-help book. The first half explores what heart attack is and how our systems work.  The second half sets us on track to change our eating habits to healthier choices.  There have been a zillion diet/self-help books thrown at us over the years, some sound, some not so much … Atkins, the Zone, South Beach, Cookie, Mediterranean and more.  So it takes a bit to convince me to read on when it comes to food and nutrition.  A couple of things that made me read through her pages:

1. She gives an excellent education on how our anatomy, organs and body systems react to food and why…and why the bad foods are really bad…and why the good foods are really good.
2. She delivers a very good assortment of recipes (most were very appealing to me). Based on the Mediterranean Diet concept (fish, olive oil, figs, dark greens), she gives enough of a recipe base plus meal plans to get anyone started on eating right.
3. Just as with a diabetic meal plan, you need mid-meal snacks, she sets those up for you as well (those could have been a bit more inspired, but everything else is quite appealing.)
4. Because the cooking is fresh and simple, prep time for any meal is very little — about the same I currently spend on my meal prep at home — I can prep and bake a fish dinner with full-on veggies, quinoa/rice/couscous/pasta, etc in less than 30 min.  I realize most people nowadays prefer to pick up something pre-prepared and pop it in the microwave for 10 minutes, but adding just another 20 can make a radical difference in your life.

My own food choices approach a more vegetarian/pescatarian diet every day.  Ever since watching the movie “Food, Inc.” my eating habits have changed radically.  My choices are mostly organic and locally grown produce, very little chicken and beef (and then, only free-range), and virtually no processed food.  It’s been almost a year and not only have I lost fat (and weight), but I feel great and I’m convinced that this was the right lifestyle choice for my family.  After months and months of persuasion, my daughter is finally starting to take a shine to a broader array of veggies, and defines some of the best smells in the world, as those emanating from my kitchen.

I’m including the Q&A sent by the publisher, because it is worth the read and may convince you to make some healthier eating choices, even if you aren’t a “self-help” book type.

Onto the muddled state I find myself in…all thoughts, comments, yeahs or nays welcome.

Thought #1: Health care.  I am one of the self-employed corralled into an individual health plan and therefore subject to limits based on what I’ve been able to afford to buy into.  You’ve heard me complain about the cost of my premium, but what I forgot to mention (some of you emailed that your own plans were more costly) is that I’m on what is called a 40/60 plan with no limit on the deductible and no preventive coverage, and a $40/visit co-pay.  So if I go to the doctor 10 times in the year (let’s say I had been injured, or got whooping cough), that is $400 for my co-pays, plus 40% of each visit.  If I were hospitalized and the bill is a mere $10k, I’m on the hook for $4k, etc.  So here is where I’m a bit confounded right now.  We are all aware that there is a pertussis (whooping cough) epidemic in California.  I’ve received emails and voicemails from LAUSD reminding me to innoculate my daughter with the tDAP vaccine.  Because the vaccine is considered preventive care, it is not covered by my plan.  It will cost me $85 – $90 each for my child and I to be innoculated. 

I’m on a search for the free vaccine, however most free or low cost clinics listed through LA city insist on a full medical exam for each of us prior to the exam, even though we both have regular doctors.  The cost for the exams will be the same, if not more, than the cost of shot.  So, it will cost me about $170 for the shots, which I plan on paying for.  Money is tight for everyone…so let’s say that I didn’t get the innoculations.  If I caught whooping cough, aside from potentially dying, wouldn’t the costs for my health care be a whole lot higher than $170?  I’m just saying….

Thought #2: Oh my gawd!  Watching the lead up to the Nov. 2nd elections is PAINFUL.  Painful.  Worse than listening to fingernails scratching against blackboard (those days are long gone…only whiteboards and dry erase markers now…) is watching the sound byte lies permeating the ads on both sides of the aisle.  However, since the GOP is spending a bit more on their ads, they seem to be even more out there in the “let me lie, but call it marketing” campaigns. 

One of my faves is the Christine O’Donnell “I am not a witch” ad.  Dressed in somber colors, lit up like a ghoul against a dark blue backdrop, with a bizarrely haunting piano track, I swear I can see ghosts floating around behind her. 

Another fave for sheer idiocy is the anti-Meg Pinnocchio nose-growing ad.  I can’t stand Whitman, but seriously…this ad is laughable. 

But my absolute favorite ad (this time for sheer brilliance) is again, a Jerry Brown sponsored anti-Meg Whitman ad, juxtaposing her sound bytes against Arnold’s bytes from his first campaign.  Yup…same words.  I’m sure she’s had a conversation or two with her campaign manager and speech writers about it.  Enjoy.

Thought #3:  Self-esteem.  Have you noticed everyone is suffering a bit at the self-esteem front?  Could it be because 41% (or just about) of the employable workforce is unemployed?  Do you keep hearing people say “well…with 10% of America unemployed 90% are working”.  False.  Untrue.  Bad math.   There are about 300 million Americans.  You have to take out the retired (forceably or otherwise) and children and other non-working family members as well as those in “institutional” roles…i.e. non general population workforce.  Then there are also those who have given up looking for work (about 2 million). Then look at the numbers in the perspective of the American non-institutional workforce.  You get a true employment to population ratio is 58.5%.  How many of those in America who CAN work are in fact, working.   Here is the report…if you head down to the bar graph at the bottom of the report it is easier to figure out.  (Look for 58.5% and you’ll see how the labor metrics work.)  So 14.8 million are unemployed out of a potential pool of 150M civilian laborers.  That’s how it shakes out.

The letter from Anthem talks in circles about health care reform and how these changes may or may not have affected my policy and that my age and that of my daughter (10) may have something to do with the increase (a basic bunch of crap to tell us that any excuse is allowable for raising rates) and again in circles about how they realize how tough the economy is:

At Anthem, we understand that raising premiums creates many challenges and is hard on individuals and families, especially in these tough economic times.  We know that we can do better — and we will — but we can’t do it alone.  We’re all in this together.  We’re working with doctors, insurers, regulators and you to improve the health care enviornment. And we are investing in many initiatives to reduce the cost of care, including:

• pushing harder for higher quality health care from our partners
• negotiating for the best rates for health care products and services on your behalf
• making more tools available to help you better manage your health and out-of-pocket costs
• continuing to provide significant discounts through access to our large nationwide provider networks

…blah…blah…blah…

This past year I turned 50, which meant it was time for me to have a preventative colonoscopy.  Considered an out-patient surgery by my plan, my cost, plus co-pay would have meant close to $1000 for me.  I was not able to take care of it last year and it is unlikely I’ll be able to afford $1000 for that procedure this year.  Interestingly, the new health care reform bill will be phasing in the cost of colonoscopy to be part of the included wellness health program that insurance companies will have to cover.  I guess I’m being charged that amount anyway.  Not only am I furious, I’m disgusted.  The spirit of health insurance reform is to help Americans have affordable health care coverage and actually be able to take preventative steps to stay healthy.

As of Monday, I’m exploring my options with Kaiser (an HMO organization) and we’ll see if I can do better there.  Disgusting.  Shame on Anthem, the state of California’s LARGEST health benefits company.  They say they are

“committed to help transform health care in California and make sure we meet your needs.”

If anyone from Anthem leadership is a Gen Plus reader, let me assure you…you are definitely NOT meeting my needs.  Where is a 17% increase warranted in ANY company right now? Auggghhh!

Well, I may be spending $4-6/week on my eggs, but I’m not one of those who is going to get sick from one of the FIVE HUNDRED MILLION (yes – 500,000,000 ….500M) eggs that have been recalled.  Talk about food conglomerates owning the food chain.  How is it possible that we have left ourselves in the hands of such huge monopolies, whose bottom line is only about bottom line?  Having worked in corporate environments for so many years, I understand adhering to minimum requirements, but I have also seen what minimum requirements are…and I can guarantee you, they are to minimize the exposure of a company, NOT to guarantee the safety of the North American consumer.  Here’s a CNN article on the mess.

If there is any more “in-your-face” example of how the food chain has been corrupted, I’m not sure what it would be.  the salmonella is not on the shells of the chicken eggs.  It is in the eggs.  The laying hens are contaminated from eating tainted feed, or ingesting fecal matter from other chickens, or from myriad reasons.  So either the chickens will be destroyed, or they’ll be treated with massive antibiotics to get rid of their infections.  Which will pass, again, through to the eggs.  We are what we eat and as a society we are far too reliant on major industry.  When something like this egg disaster happens, you can see how fragile our food-chain system has become.  That is why it is SO important to support your local farmers.  At the very least, I can get local supply of free-range chicken eggs if I need to.  At the very least, I can get seasonal produce from the farmer around the corner. 

It doesn’t matter that it is more expensive — my pocketbook is very tight, yet I’d rather eat food that I know will not make me sick…if we stop supporting local growers and they shut down, what happens when we really have a contamination crisis and can’t count on quality of the product from most of the mega-growers?

Here’s another thing to think about.  When is the last time you found a bug in your salad, a worm in your tomato, or  in your lettuce?  I’m sure you’ll be hard-pressed to remember a time.  When I switched over to locally grown and organic produce, I started finding a few bugs here or there.  A ladybug in my salad.  A worm in one tomato and an ear of corn.  A bit of rot on a lemon.  The last time I remember finding a worm in a tomato was probably about 15 years ago (and I launched it across the table at my sister…not on purpose…which was what I had done all through our childhood, whenever I found a worm in my veggies or fruit).  This summer when I found a worm in my corn I was actually amazed and delighted.  It meant that the corn had been grown in an environment where a bug might actually wander into the crop.  If none of you remembers the last time you found a bug in your produce, what does that mean about the environment in which they are grown?  All I’m saying is think about it.

In order to avoid the massive amounts of hormones and antibiotics in beef and chicken from most of the major growers, I switched over to organic meat — meaning the cattle and fowl are free range.  Cows are grass-fed in pastures, chickens in natural sunlight. If they are being fed corn it is not genetically modified…basically they are living a life closer to what nature intended than in the cattle and chicken farms that show very little respect for the lives that they raise and slaughter.  I’m not a vegetarian and I have nothing against raising cattle or fowl for human consumption.  But to see cows standing knee deep in their excrement in vast, acres of excrement and mud…no.  That doesn’t sit well with me.

On the fruit and vegetable end of things, after much deliberation, I’m buying a combination of organic and locally-grown produce.  I’m shopping for most of my food at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, which both offer me a good range of meats and produce and they fit my food choice preferences. I get most of my local produce at the Tapia Brothers market (if you are in LA, at the corner of Havenhurst and Burbank) where much of their product is from their farm across the street or brought in from a range of less than 50 miles.  So it is farm-ripened rather than truck/transit-ripened.

Because I’m lactose intolerant, I have to ingest soy milk if I want to have a semblance of milk in my diet or cooking, so I purchase organic and limit my intake to about 8 oz a day max.  (The isoflavins in the soy milk are good for you in small amounts, but not in the large amounts that we are ingesting by virtue of all the soy fillers in most prepared foods.)

AND, the biggest change is that I’m ONLY buying fresh food and making all cookies, cakes and avoiding any packaged goods.  Once I started reading labels and discovering just how much soy and corn is added to just about every packaged food, I couldn’t, in good conscience, continue to keep ingesting it.  My own theory is this:  soy and corn fatten up the cows and chickens, and if we have such huge amounts of soy and corn fillers in OUR foods, then we will fatten up as well.  In addition to this, the changes to our food supply really started within the past 10-15 years — coincidentally the same period of time as I’ve had trouble losing belly fat.  You could say it was my age.  You could say that I wasn’t getting enough exercise. 

In my case, I radically changed the foods  I put into my body and those of my family.  I’m NOT dieting.  In fact, I’m eating whatever I want, whenever I want…however ALL the food is chock full of goodness and not an artificial filler in sight.  I’ve now officially lost about 8 pounds over the past three months.  No diet.  No change in my level of activity.  Just no preserved/packaged foods (i.e. no soy/corn fillers), fresh local or organic produce, and free-range organic beef and chicken.  The fish is often farm-raised, but then I’m making sure it is organic (so even though corn-fed, it is not genetically modified corn) or wild-caught.  I have my own continuing battle over farmed fish vs. wild-caught because of the wild fishing methods being harmful to other sea creatures…so I’ll keep having a think on that one.  I don’t see a clear answer yet on the fish front.

But 8 pounds?  Just from avoiding the fillers?  Does it take me more time to prepare all my foods?  Yes.  Definitely.  From soup stocks to baked goods…a lot more time.  Is this higher quality of food more expensive?  Yes.  Definitely.  However, I’m no longer spending a cent on packaged anything, so it seems to even out.  Am I wasting food?  Very little.  Most leftover bones, and vegetable scraps go into my freezer for soup stock.  It took me a few weeks to realize that such fresh food goes bad more quickly, so I’m heading to the store and local farmer more often, but other than that, it is becoming a fairly easy and enjoyable way of life.   I really feel that I’ll lose another 5 – 10 pounds over the next 6 months to a year as the belly fat continues to dissolve without fillers and excess estrogen (from pesticides and preservatives) to keep it there.

I don’t worry about when I eat out or if my daughter desperately wants something that is filled with corn syrup and fillers, because it is the rare occasion and not the rule. 

I feel incredibly healthy.  So, there is the update.