Author: steve

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RECIPE: Roasted Sweet Potatoes, Beets, Apples, and Carrots

I hang out in The Ultimate Reset post-Reset Facebook group, because a lot of the participants are like-minded people, who care about health and fitness, and many of whom also choose to eat little to no animal protein.

Often they will post recipes, or links to them, and this recipe is one I saw — originally posted  in that Facebook group by my friend Suzanne Winkler of GoneVegan.US — that I thought I’d put my own spin on. I almost didn’t try it, because of the apples, which seemed weird to me in a savory dish. And then there’s the cinnamon, which I like, but, again, in a savory dish?

But that is why I like to try things I don’t think I’ll like, because you know what? Sometimes it’s delicious, and that is the case here. Not too sweet and it paired well with some rice and beans.

INGREDIENTS

  • 1 lb sweet potatoes or yams
  • 1 lb beets, any variety
  • 3 medium-sized carrots
  • 3 small gala (or your favorite) apples
  • 1 Tbsp coconut oil
  • 1 Tbsp ground cinammon
  • 1 tsp cumin
  • 1 tsp cayenne
  • salt to taste

INSTRUCTIONS

  1. Preheat oven to 425°.
  2. You can peel the produce if you like. I don’t peel.
  3. Wash and dry all produce, then cut it into good size chunks, about an inch cubed (or larger). They need to be big, because we’re roasting them, so we need them to be large enough to withstand the heat. Don’t obsess about the size, though, because the little crispy bits can be very tasty.
  4. Place all produce into a 1 gallon plastic bag or a large bowl with the oil, and mix well to coat.
  5. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix well to coat completely and evenly.
  6. Place everything in a single layer on a large sheet pan and put it into the preheated oven.
  7. Cook for 15 minutes. Flip everything with a spatula, if you care to.
  8. Cook for another 10 minutes.

Makes 2 large servings.

You can experiment with this by using olive oil, green chile powder, or other spices, but I think the cinnamon is the key. I say a tablespoon of it in the directions, but you should really have enough to coat everything thoroughly, so make sure that happens. The aroma while this is cooking is heavenly.

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Conscious Eating

“Conscious eating” — it’s a term that is picking up steam, and it encapsulates a very simple concept: thinking — actually thinking — about what we are putting into our mouths.

Do you think about it, or do you just habitually go to [insert your favorite fast food place here] for lunch every third day? Do you think about it, or do you just buy the [insert your favorite breakfast cereal here]?

“Conscious eating” means knowing what you are eating, thinking about it, and making an informed decision. How many grams of fat are in this? How many grams of sugar are in that? What are the ingredients? Once you know, you can eat consciously.

Eating consciously goes beyond that, though. It also involves taking in what we are told about nutrition and saying, “Hmmmmmm…. Maybe I should explore that further before I accept it.”

For example:

  • All my life I’ve been told that milk is good for me. Now I am not so sure, so I don’t drink it.
  • All my life I’ve been told that the best form of protein for my body is animal protein. Now I am not so sure, so I don’t eat it.
  • All my life I’ve been told that vegetables are good for me. Okay, I think that’s still valid.

I’ve been fed so many lines of crap over the years, from the government and diet gurus alike. Hell, we are all exposed to this stuff, and so many of us buy into the latest diet crazes, whether they involve eating a lot of oatmeal, not eating wheat, avoiding carbs, whatever. Problem is that we need to choose a path and stick to it for a bit in order to see if it works for us.

Nothing drives me crazier than when someone has, for example, high blood sugar. So, they, wanting to take control of their own health — a behavior I loudly and publicly applaud  — start eating a particular way. They give it a shot for 6 months, have a blood panel run, and, oops, their blood sugar is still high.

“I don’t know what else to do,” they say. “My doctor told me to eat this way, but my blood sugar is not improving. I guess I’ll need to take the meds.”

Hmmmm…. I dunno. Maybe, well, just maybe your doctor doesn’t know what she’s talking about? How about that?

“What?” they shout. “My doctor went to med school, which is more than I can say for you!”

Hey, now, come on, think about it. Your doctor went to med school. She learned about diseases and which drugs or procedures to use to treat them. How much did your doctor learn about nutrition in med school?

According to a 2006 study by the NIH (available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2430660/)

Ninety-nine of the 106 schools responding required some form of nutrition education; however, only 32 schools (30%) required a separate nutrition course. On average, students received 23.9 contact hours of nutrition instruction during medical school (with a range of 2 to 70 hours). Only 40 schools required the minimum 25 hours recommended by the National Academy of Sciences. Most instructors (88%) expressed the need for additional nutrition instruction at their institutions.

Wow, in that case, I have a lot more nutritional training than your doctor probably has, and I am certainly no expert.

Anyway, the point is that even your chosen authority figure doesn’t have all the answers, so when he gives you advice, think about it. Read and get yourself educated. Try things out on yourself. That is how you figure out what works and what doesn’t work for you.

That’s called “critical thinking” and, getting back to the title of this article, you can apply that same principle to the way you eat. Conscious eating applies critical thinking to how we consume food. Start doing that and your body will love you for it.

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Is soy dangerous?

I have still not looked that deeply into soy, but public opinion seems to be split on it, so I keep my intake rather low to hedge my bets until I can figure it out. Being the cynic that I am, it’s hard for me to believe anything, and, in fact, I really don’t put my faith 100% anywhere, so it takes me a while to get a handle on some concepts, especially one with such a diversity of opinions, all with, of course, scientific evidence to back them up.

I used to drink a lot of soymilk, but a few years ago my friend Hans told me how much better almond milk was for me — he was buying into anti-soy rhetoric, which, as I said, may indeed be valid, but I just don’t know. Anyway, I tried almond milk and immediately switched, primarily because almond milk just tastes a lot better than soy milk.

Outside soy milk, which I used in my breakfast cereal and protein shakes, I didn’t really eat soy, except for soy sauce sometimes, and a little tofu here and there from Pei Wei, which has the best tasting tofu, I think, although I cannot to speak to its nutritional value ;=)

Well, that was then, and this is now. Then I was consuming a lot of animal protein. Now I am eating mostly vegan, so I need my plant-based protein, and soy products like tempeh, tofu, and edamame are really good sources of it. I mean, soy is eaten by a large percentage of the world’s population, so my cynicism tells me that most of the anti-soy rap has been generated by the meat industry, which sees soy as stiff competition.

Soy or no soy, well, life doesn’t really boil down to that, now does it? I mean, how can we possibly know what one particular ingredient does to our bodies? There is simply too much going on inside for one ingredient to be “the one thing” that will either kill or cure us, right?

I fact, I am at the point where I cannot even continue to demonize sugar, because there is a lot of sugar in the good fruits we should eat. Okay, maybe refined sugars and flours are bad for us, but perhaps that is simply a problem of volume, and if we only ate a little of that stuff, we’d be fine, right?

Ultimately, it’s virtually impossible to know the answers. The body interacts with the nutrients we ingest in so many ways, there are too many factors to determine what a particular ingredient does inside us. We have a hard time knowing whether it ever makes it to where it needs to be, or whether it has the opportunity to do the damage or uplift the health the way researchers claim it can do.

So what I currently do is strive to eat a lot of plants, and even, on rare occasions, some fish or eggs, and that should be me as close to “okay” as I can get. That’s my take on it for today, anyway. As you may have noticed, I am always open to change, if the right evidence comes along.

But I’ll tell you, I’ve been through a lot up to now, and a whole foods plant-based diet, including soy, seems right.

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Is muscle soreness reduced by a vegan diet?

When I switched from paleo to vegan a few months ago, I did so because in the 21 days of a vegan detoxification program I (1) lost weight that I thought I had no chance of losing, (2) my lower leg and foot cramps were gone, and (3) my eyes were not burning all the time like they used to. Given those results, I figured I’d try a vegan diet for a year or so, then re-assess at that time.

I have discovered an unexpected side effect of my plant-based diet, though: I am not nearly as sore the day after a workout as I used to be.

At first, I thought this lack of delayed onset muscle soreness — abbreviated as “DOMS”, that’s the soreness I would always feel the day after a workout and beyond — was because I was not fully recovered from The Reset, so I just wasn’t pushing it that hard. As the weeks passed, though, and the DOMS remained severely diminished, I decided to put it to the test.

One sure way for me to feel sore the next day is to do my Steve’s Chest & Back routine. I do all the exercises to exhaustion, so there is no way to dog it, and I have felt so sore from this in the past that I could barely move my arms the next day, because of all the DOMS in my chest and lats.

I did it, gave it all I had, and the next day … nothing. Well, not completely nothing, but not nearly close to any kind of soreness I’d felt in the past.

“Okay,” I thought. “Maybe there is some connection between a plant-based diet and a lack of muscle soreness.” But I was not convinced. So I waited 6 weeks and tried it again.

Again, I was barely sore the next day. Hmmmmm….

I started looking around a bit, once again, at DOMS, and there is still not a lot of consensus as to what makes us feel DOMS. Some say lactic acid. Some say lack of stretching. Some say muscle spasms. No one seems to know for sure.

I did discover, though, that Brendan Brazier, the guy who wrote the book Thrive: The Vegan Nutrition Guide to Optimal Performance in Sports and Life, also noticed his DOMS was much less severe when he went vegan.

Again, hmmmmm….

I will continue to test this hypothesis on myself, but I would say that my soreness is at least 65% to 70% less as a vegan than it was when I was eating a high-animal-protein diet.

And that’s a good thing.

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Is P90X2 better than P90X? (Part 2)

I’m going into my 10th week of P90X2. I’m in Phase 2.

“10 weeks?” you ask. “It’s a 90-day program. Shouldn’t you be in Phase 3, home stretch?”

Well, if I were doing P90X, which is a pretty strictly scheduled 90-day program, then, yeah, I’d be about done, but P90X2 is different. You see, there is a lot of balancing in X2 — standing on one leg, hands and feet on medicine and stability balls — and I really wanted to get a better handle on that stuff before I moved on, you know, build up my core.

Consequently, I spent 9 weeks in Phase 1, which included 3 recovery weeks that were just yoga and stretching. I put in a recovery week every third week, because I could.

The program allows for that. Phases 1 and 2 are, by the book, 3 to 6 weeks of workouts, and Phase 3 is 3 to 4 weeks. Up to you. Oh, and you can toss a recovery week in wherever you like. Or not. Up to you.

While Phase 1 was mostly about building the core, Phase 2 is working toward building overall strength. Plyocide and X2 Yoga are carried over from Phase 1, along with the Recovery & Mobility and X2 Ab Ripper routines, but now we are getting into training more targeted at the major muscle groups.

The schedule for Phase 2 is:

  • Chest, Back & Balance + X2 Ab Ripper
  • Plyocide
  • Rest or X2 Recovery & Mobility
  • X2 Shoulders & Arms + X2 Ab Ripper
  • X2 Yoga
  • Base & Back + X2 Ab Ripper
  • Rest or X2 Recovery & Mobility

There are other optional DVDs that can be swapped into some of the spots, but I did not buy them.

The workouts are still applying balancing techniques for added core strength, so there is a lot of on-one-leg stuff, particularly in the Shoulders & Arms routine, and plenty of work with medicine and stability balls.

At this point, unlike when I published my first impressions, I am prepared to say that, for me, P90x2 is better than P90X. Why do I say that? Simple — I feel stronger and more athletic during this program than I have during any other program I’ve tried, including P90X.

But, wait. Couldn’t that be because I’ve been building up over the past few years, so, really, this feeling of athleticism is a result of years of hard work toward a fitter me?

Okay, you got me, could be. But you can’t stop me from finishing this piece, so here’s the rest.

The techniques employed by P90X2 are much more unorthodox than those used in P90X, at least as far as weightlifting goes. Don’t get me wrong, P90X kicks ass, but the focus is more on simple resistance training. That will get you into shape, no doubt — it worked for me — but P90X2 goes beyond that, providing strength and balance training.

Have you tried doing curls while standing on one leg in a Warrior 3 stance? How about pushups with your hands on medicine balls and your feet on a stability ball? Let me tell you — it’s tough!

Is balance that important? Yes. Especially as we age, balance is so important, because falls can be much more destructive to our aging bodies.

I feel ready to tackle life with P90X2, because it seems to provide me with practical strength and balance that I need in my day-to-day activities. P90X made me feel “in shape”, but X2 makes me feel “ready for whatever life throws at me”.

I think a lot of the feeling of wellness I get is from the great core work. I really cannot describe how good my abs and lower back feel. Sure, I spent 9 weeks — 6 of them doing the actual P90X routines — in Phase 1, the Core phase. But it was worth it.

If you have not done either X or X2, it’s really up to you which one to select. Both are tough, but X2 may prove daunting for a newbie, because of all the balancing. If you are a seasoned athlete, though, and you want a challenging program to get you into better shape, either X or X2 will do that for you, but you may be ready to just jump into X2.

As Tony Horton says during X2 Shoulders & Arms: “Before we were working parts and getting fit. Now we’re connecting parts and getting athletic.”

Remember, no matter which you choose, there’s always a 30-day money back guarantee, so try one out. Don’t like it? Send it back. But do yourself a favor and try one of those programs. They truly are life changers.