Alphabetical List Of Foods On My Weight-Loss Diet

These are the foods that I am allowing on my diet for the next 6 weeks (until April 1, 2013) and also for the next 18 months (until August 14, 2014) — provided they are available in season:

Whole Grains, Organic:
• Amaranth (Gold Mine Natural Foods)
• Barley, Bronze (Gold Mine Natural Foods)
• Barley, Ethiopian (Gold Mine Natural Foods)
• Barley, Golden Waxy (Gold Mine Natural Foods)
• Barley, Purple Prairie (Timeless Foods)
• Brown rice, basmati (Lundberg Family Farms)
• Brown rice, jasmine (Lundberg Family Farms)
• Brown rice, long (Lundberg Family Farms) 
• Brown rice, medium (Golden Rose, available in bulk, Lundberg Family Farms)
• Brown rice, short (Lundberg Family Farms)
• Brown rice, sweet (available in bulk, Lundberg Family Farms)
• Buckwheat groats
• Corn on the Cob
• Millet
• Oat groats
• Quinoa, traditional
• Quinoa, Inca red
• Rye berries
• Teff
• Wild rice (Lundberg Family Farms)

(NOTE: no ground flour, rolled flakes, or polenta until after 4/1/2013)

Vegetables:
• Bok choy
• Broccoli 
• Broccolini (baby broccoli)
• Brussels sprouts
• Burdock root
• Cabbage, Chinese 
• Cabbage, green
• Cabbage, purple 
• Carrots
• Cauliflower
• Celery
• Corn on the cob
• Cucumber 
• Daikon white radish
• Dandelion greens
• Edamame  
• Fennel
• Garlic
• Ginger root
• Green beans (fresh from the garden)
• Green onions (scallions)
• Kale, curly
• Kale, dinosaur
• Kale, green
• Kale, red
• Leeks
• Lettuce (including bib, butter, iceberg, leaf, romaine, etc.) 
• Onions
• Parsnip
• Peas, green split, dried
• Peas, snow
• Peas, yellow split, dried
• Pumpkins (see squash, winter) 
• Red radishes
• Shallots
• Squash, summer (yellow, yellow crookneck, pattypan, button, zucchini, etc.)
• Squash, winter (including acorn, butternut, buttercup, delicata, blue hokkaido, kabocha, sugar pie pumpkin, red kuri, turban, etc.)  
• Sunchokes (Jerusalem artichokes) (fresh from the garden) 
• Sweet potato, Japanese
• Sweet potato, Hannah
• Turnip
• Yam, Garnet
• Yam, Jewel 
• Zucchini (see also squash, summer) 

Beans and legumes:
• Aduki beans (azuki, adzuki, aduki)
• Chickpeas (garbanzo beans)
• Lentils, black beluga (Timeless)
• Lentils, brown
• Lentils, green
• Lentils, orange/yellow
• Peanuts (on special occasions) 

Nuts and Seeds:
• Almonds
• Cashews
• Hazelnuts (filberts)
• Pecans
• Pumpkin seeds 
• Sesame seeds
• Sunflower seeds
• Walnuts

Sea Vegetables:
• Arame
• Dulse 
• Kombu (Rising Tide Sea Vegetables)
• Nori (Rising Tide Sea Vegetables)
• Wakame (Rising Tide Sea Vegetables)

Condiments and Seasonings:
Ohsawa Nama Shoyu, Organic Unpasteurized Soy Sauce, Gold Mine Natural Foods
Seaweed Gomasio, Eden Foods
Ume plum vinegar, Eden Foods
Umeboshi salt plums, Eden Foods
Celtic Sea Salt, light gray unrefined, Selina Naturally 

Special Occasion Spices and Extracts:
Almond extract
Anise extract
Cardamom
Cayenne pepper
Chili pepper
Cinnamon
Cloves 
Cream of tartar
Cumin
Nutmeg
Pepper, black
Pepper, white
Vanilla bean

Dried or Fresh Herbs and Teas:
bancha tea
basil
bay leaves
green tea
kukicha twig tea
lemon balm
oregano
parsley
rosemary
sage
saffron
thyme

Peels, rinds, and juice for flavoring:
lemon
orange

Related blog articles:
The First Six Weeks Of My Weight-Loss Diet
My Own Fat Camp
Lemon Balm, A Friendly Cheerful Herb
Vegetables For Centering
My Notes On The Macrobiotic Centering Diet

My Special Weight-Loss Diet Plan For 18 Months Started on Valentine's Day, 2-14-2013

My goal is to lose 22 pounds as I follow a self-customized diet for 18 months based on macrobiotics. I'll be keeping a daily record of my diet here in two blogs (Food Santa Cruz and My Daily Diet Report) and weighing in once a week to watch my progress.

Here are the key points in my plan:
• Drink a hot cup of water when I get up in the morning.
• Eat 3 meals per day.
• Chew each bite at least 100 times, 200 times would be better.
• Eat until I'm satisfied (with no worries about quantity).
• Eat whole grains and fresh, seasonal vegetables that are organic and the best quality as possible, as listed here: Alphabetical List Of Foods On My Weight-Loss Diet.
• Once or twice a day, have miso (probiotic) in a soup or broth.
• Eat wakame or kombu sea vegetables on a regular basis.
• Supplement my meals as desired with nuts, seeds, lentils, chickpeas, split peas, aduki beans, and Bio-K+ probiotics.
• Drink when thirsty and after a meal — water, tea (kukicha, bancha, or herbal), or occasionally water with lemon juice.
• Cook with sesame, olive, and coconut oils (organic, unrefined)
• Season with unrefined sea salt, natural soy sauce, miso, gomasio, and ume plum vinegar, and occasionally season with lemon, orange, cinnamon, ginger, garlic, black pepper, and other spices. 
• Exercise as much as possible, especially after meals.

After six weeks, on April 1st, 2013, I will gradually introduce foods made with whole-grain flours (especially organic flours in my homemade products) as I desire. I will also be adapting a more flexible travel-plan to allow for the foods available in the places I visit, so that I won't "tweak out" if I'm traveling and can't find the "perfect" foods to eat — I'll simply increase the amount of chewing and enjoy! 

About Exercise:
• Walking is my preferred mode of exercise — fast enough to work up a sweat but not so fast that it forces me to breathe through my mouth for air. I love to walk!
• Gardening is my other preferred mode of exercise — I love to garden so much that I'll often lose all track of time and can be out there for hours!
• Housecleaning, especially cleaning floors and windows, is another mode of exercise that I enjoy doing.
• As a backup plan, whenever the weather is interfering, the indoor stationary bike is another one of my preferred modes of exercise.

About Foods And Beverages Not On My Diet:
• Alcohol, such as wine and beer, is not on my diet and I'm okay with that. I'm such a lightweight anyway when it comes to drinking my favorite stout or pinot noir — I can only handle 1 or 2 ounces at a time without getting too tipsy, dizzy, or a zillion hot flashes. So, I won't miss it in the next year and a half!
• Coffee is not on the diet. 
• White flour, simple sugars, syrups, fruit juices (except the occasional lemon), and all fruits are not on the diet. No fruit!
• Chocolate and cocoa, unsweetened, no longer offer any appeal to me, so they're off the list too.

About Traveling:
• When we're on the road, I will attempt to bring my own food as much as possible.
• If my food choices in a restaurant aren't perfect, I'll either eat it or not, and if I do eat it, I'll chew it very very well.

About Keeping A Daily Report:
• Already I've discovered how much fun this is! I love to take pictures and document everything that I'm seeing — and photographing my meals is already something I've been doing during our travels. Now, I get to do it at home too! and the challenge is to come up with more picture-perfect meals — I'm learning how to "plate" my food in more artistic and creative ways. I fully expect to see a big improvement by the end of these 18 months!

Related Blog Articles:
MY DAILY DIET REPORT
MY OWN FAT CAMP

Day #8 — Leftovers Again?

The Purple Prairie barley that I reheated for my dinner today doesn't really count as "leftovers," I don't think, since I had only eaten a little of it yesterday when it was still undercooked. But whether I call it leftovers, or pre-cooked, or something else, it really doesn't matter to me, because it was delicious! 

I warmed it up with a little of the leftover rice and wild rice from this morning's breakfast in a small frying pan coated lightly with sesame oil. I drizzled a little water (not too much!) over the grains, turned the flame down to low, and covered it with a lid, allowing it to warm up while I boiled some water for my tea and heated up a few pieces of the Japanese sweet potatoes in the small toaster oven.

The flavors of the onions and celery with the barley came through, adding a delicate sweetness to the dish. And the sweet potatoes with their faint coconut flavor contributed a more robust, deeper sweetness to the meal. This time, the barley was well-cooked, soft, and tender, and yet it still had a unique texture to it that was fun to chew. In the end, I must say that leftovers can be a wonderful life-saver when you get home late and hungry for dinner!

Julia Ferre gives some excellent tips and recipes for re-using leftovers in her book, Food and Intuition 101, Part 1, on page 218. For example, she suggests using a reheating process that is complementary to how the dish was originally prepared, such as the oven for my roasted sweet potatoes!

As I ate my excellent dinner this evening, I reflected on the other meals that I had today — including a nice meal at P.F. Chang's where I had a small bowl of brown rice, a few pieces of undercooked broccoli, and a delicious side dish of Lemon Scented Brussels Sprouts that had been "shaved" into very tiny slices (that was something new!) — and then I suddenly remembered the great news I received this morning when I stepped on the scales to do my very first weekly weigh-in.

I've lost 2.6 pounds — and now I feel even more enthusiastic about this plan!

Related Blog Articles:
MY DAILY DIET REPORT — Day #8 Of My Weight-Loss Diet
Lunch At P. F. Chang's (1-4-2011)
Searching For Brown Rice In Restaurants
Green Vegetables (2-8-2011)
 

Quinoa, Millet, Sweet Potatoes, and Purple Prairie Barley — All On Day #7

This turned out to be a great day for food, here on Day #7 of my special weight-loss diet!

It started with a simple bowl of miso broth and a freshly cooked blend of quinoa and millet. (I'd say the ratio was about two parts quinoa to 1 part millet.)

I had more of the quinoa-millet mix for lunch along with two kinds of sweet potatoes that I oven-roasted in coconut oil. So easy to make and so extraordinarily delicious to eat!

Then, for dinner I cooked up a pot of organic Purple Prairie Barley, which according to Timeless Natural Food, originated from Tibet.

I started with two onions and two stalks of celery, chopped and sauteed in sesame oil, and then added the barley and its overnight-soaking water, and 3 big pieces of kombu from Rising Tide Sea Vegetables. Having cooked barley a lot before, I figured the kombu would help to tenderize it. And for the same reason, I omitted adding any salt, which could make the barley tough.  Nevertheless, it still wasn't cooked enough by the time I was wanting to eat my dinner, so I made a small soup with some of it and some mellow white miso, which has a lovely sweet and sour taste, and had that with some more of the leftover quinoa and millet mix.

It took more than two hours to cook the barley to a soft, tender stage and it tasted delicious. I put it away in the refrigerator, thinking of possible ways to fix it for tomorrow's meals. And that got me to thinking once again about the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk's annual Clam Chowder Cookoff!

Related Blog Articles:
MY DAILY DIET REPORT — Day #7 Of My Weight-Loss Diet
The Annual Clam Chowder Cookoff (2-25-2011)
Boston Non-Clam Chowder (2-25-2011)
Manhattan Non-Clam Chowder (2-25-2011)
Santa Cruz Non-Clam Chowder (2-6-2012)

Carrots Fresh From The Garden On Day #6

We dug up the last of the carrots this morning before the gophers could finish them off. This was the best crop that Michael has grown so far. Fat, juicy, and delicious, and loads of them too! Plenty to share with those pesky gophers? I don't think so! I'd rather if they'd concentrate on eating other things, like poison oak for example! And blackberry roots!

I love carrots. Always have. Except that when I was a kid, they had to be raw. That makes sense, considering how much more yang I was then. Today, carrots are one of my most favorite vegetables, cooked, raw, or baked in a cake!

The carrot is one of the most yang of all vegetables, because it grows slowly, vertically under the ground, and it's orange. What else? It's one of the most yang of all the root vegetables too, because of its color, its shape, and its size, and probably for other reasons too. The carrot's yang qualities are especially great during the cold winter months. Carrots are also "generally alkaline-forming," which is good for balancing with acid-forming grains. (See The Acid And Alkaline Dimension Of Food, Part 1.)

I love cooking and eating carrots "nitsuke" style, as described by George Ohsawa in his book, Zen Macrobiotics. For my lunch today, I grated the carrots into tiny pieces, sauteed them in sesame oil for a few minutes, added pink Utah sea salt, covered the pan, and let them cook in their own juices for about 9 minutes more. I didn't cook them the whole-nitsuke way to juicelessness, because I wanted that bit of juicy yin today. The flavor was incredibly delicious.

Carrots are included in the basic macrobiotic diet and they're also in the more restrictive macrobiotic centering diet. Come to think of it, these first six weeks of my special weight-loss diet is very close to the macrobiotic centering diet (with the exception of Bio-K Plus, for strengthening my digestive system).


Related Blog Articles:
MY DAILY DIET REPORT — Day #6 Of My Weight-Loss Diet
What Is The Macrobiotic Centering Diet?
My Notes About The Macrobiotic Centering Diet

Dharma's Organic Vegetarian Restaurant — A Delicious Dinner On Day #5

I like this new diet that I'm on! I get to eat lots of delicious food. Today I had dinner at one of my most favorite restaurants, Dharma's Restaurant, in Capitola, California.

Dharma's serves all-natural, organic, vegetarian food that's wholesome and delicious, and they've been serving it since 1982. The restaurant has a cafeteria-style arrangement with a counter where you order and pay for your food first, then pick it up when they call out your name and carry it to the table of your choice.

Michael ordered a Brahma Burger, which is served on really good whole-wheat buns, and I asked for a small bowl of organic brown rice, and could I have a sweet potato? and a mug of Bancha tea (Choice Organic Teas). Michael's grain-and-protein burger came with a small salad and he let me have some of his delicious lemon-tahini dressing to drizzle over my rice. 

I was surprised by the sweet potato; it was so big and served on its own special plate. It was very sweet and it made my meal most satisfying.

One time, not so long ago, we came here for an early morning breakfast on a week-day. (They're open 7 days a week from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.) We got there just as they opened and it had a really nice, quiet, sleepy kind of atmosphere. I almost expected to see people still wearing their pajamas! I ordered their multi-grain blueberry pancakes and wow, were they ever good. I'm looking forward to having them again, only a little later on when I reintroduce whole-grain flour products again to my diet plan. (I'll skip the blueberries, though, until my diet is over, 18 months from now.)

They have a two-page menu that you can download from their web site, Dharma's Main Menu, which is the same one they hand out at the restaurant.

I love Dharma's!

Related Blog Articles:
MY DAILY DIET REPORT — Day #5 Of My Weight-Loss Diet
My Favorite Local Restaurants Today
Whole Grains In Restaurants (March 3rd, 2011)

Sunday Road Trip And Picnic Lunch on Day #4

What a wonderful day! It turned out that all those leftovers came in very handy today, first for a quick breakfast and then for a quick lunch to go in a thermos.

I hadn't put much thought into how my new diet was going to work if we were to spontaneously decide to go on a short trip somewhere and today I got my chance to find out. It works out just fine! Having leftover grains in the refrigerator helped a lot, but I could've taken a little more time to cook up some millet if I had to (about a half hour). And if I had happened to have quinoa soaking in the refrigerator, I could've cooked that up even quicker. Oh yes, and I also have teff in the cupboard, which cooks up pretty fast too. Anyway, it took very little time to warm up the leftovers, cook some fresh broccoli, and put them steaming hot into a wide-mouth thermos jug.

We drove down the coast a little, visited the famous Corralitos Market and Sausage Company near Watsonville (Michael likes their sausages!), went for a walk in Moss Landing, and then drove on to San Juan Bautista. After a nice walk around town and the California Mission San Juan Bautista, we walked over to a nice picnic area and ate our lunch. 

My thermos jug of leftover soup (wakame seaweed and Miso Master's Brown Rice Miso), leftover rice cooked with sunflower seeds, and freshly steamed broccoli really hit the spot! And the white picnic table, green grass, and tall trees provided a wonderful fresh backdrop. I found that by chewing everything well and breathing in the scenery around me, I was very satisfied and eager to continue on with our travels.

I found some plates and bowls in an antique store to start my new collection. I'll be showing them off tomorrow, I'm sure, in My Daily Diet Report!

Later on, we drove to Morgan Hill and stopped for a coffee/tea break at Peet's Coffee & Tea company. (I just learned on wikipedia that Peet's was founded in 1966 in Berkeley.) I bought their small serving of Tazo Calm Chamomile Tea and asked them to keep the tea bag separate from the very hot water, so I could save it for later and use two of my own bags of organic Kukicha tea instead. 

It turned out to be a beautiful Sunday Drive and we were back home in time for me to cook up a pot of quinoa/wild rice and a pan of baby broccoli. I just learned that baby broccoli (also called broccolini) is not a young broccoli plant as I had assumed. It is actually a hybrid of regular broccoli and Chinese broccoli, and it is more tender than regular broccoli.

The baby broccoli turned out especially nice this time because of the way I cooked it. I cut the stems into one-inch pieces while the pan was heating up, then after the pan was hot, I added a couple of teaspoons of organic, unrefined sesame oil and, immediately after that, the broccoli stems. They sizzled and crackled for a few moments and then calmed down to simmer for a few minutes under a lid. Then I added the broccoli flower pieces, some pink, unrefined Utah sea salt (Redmond Trading Co.), and some water, and simmered it on a slow boil, uncovered, for another 7 minutes or so. Delicious!

Incidentally, I found an interesting web site about feeding the pink sea salt to animals, which includes a detailed breakdown of the minerals and nutrients for their livestock-grade pink sea salt.  The web site is called Wolf Creek Ranch, Home of Whispering Winds Wholistic Animal Sanctuary.

Related Blog Articles:
MY DAILY DIET REPORT — Day #4
Eating On The Road
Adapting To The Road