Bondi Junction Wholefoods Tour

I caught up with a friend over the weekend and on hearing I'm about to start studying nutrition she suggested we meet at Earth To Table vegan cafe in Bondi Junction followed by a tour of some of the other interesting whole food grocers and eateries in the area. I'm a upper Northshore girl and visit the Eastern suburbs rarely so I had no idea what to expect.

I'll admit I was a bit concerned about the idea of lunch at a vegan cafe. All the vegetarian/vegan eateries I've been to don't have much to offer the person who's trying to avoid eating grains. Even the Nature Care College and Australasian College of Natural Therapies cafes that I visited during their open days featured predominantly grain based meals, and salads, too much of which I also seem to be having trouble with lately.

Well! I'm glad to say I was most pleasantly surprised and impressed perusing Earth To Table's delicious sounding menu and finding very little grain at all!! Woohoo!! And no sugar, no dairy, no gluten. Instead there's dishes featuring kelp noodles, spiralised vegetables (veggies shaved into spaghetti-like spirals), nut and seed meal based recipes, coconut this and that, and more superfoods than I thought a business could afford to have on a reasonably priced menu!

I was going to go with a dish light on the raw veg but then someone nearby ordered what I think was called something like Rainbow Noodles (I didn't know I was going to write a blog post about it, otherwise I would've paid more attention, and I can't find a menu online, sorry) and decided "I want that one". It looked like a pile of multi-coloured noodles but was in fact raw spiralised carrot, beetroot and zucchini with baby spinach, avocado and pesto (pictured above). It looked and tasted amazing! Although, like I said, I haven't been handling too much salad all that well lately and within an hour or so I had a mild tummy ache. Lol! Ah well. I don't regret it. I'll put it down as a learning experience and trust that the changes I'm making to my diet will soon make me more able to properly digest spectacular salads like this.

My friend had a chocolate brownie (I'm presuming almond meal or similar and sweetened with maybe coconut nectar, dates or honey) and chocolate coconut milk ice-cream (see photo on right). Oh my! How's the presentation?! I didn't taste it but man it looked good! If I hadn't already been treated to a gluten/dairy/sugar free cake that day I so would've had one as well.

From Earth To Table we wandered over past one of the local Crossfit gyms (they have more than one!) to BU Organics. Goodness! They appear to stock everything your health conscious person could possibly wish to buy, from specialised supplements that are normally only available to purchase online from the US, to water filters, to fresh organic fruits, veg and meats, to a great array of fermented foods and some delicious looking sweets and savouries. A rather ripped young woman (a Crossfitter me thinks) spoke to us enthusiastically about the benefits of combining fossil shell flour and MSM. She was a bit scary. Lol! My friend purchased us some sprouted, toasted buckwheat spread with cashew nut butter. More serious yum!

Then we headed over to aboutlife natural marketplace. I haven't visited an aboutlife since the early days of the original store in Rozelle. They've come a long way since then! What a great selection of fresh organic food and products! I picked up a dozen organic eggs at a great price as I've been eating 2 or 3 a day just lately!

We then crossed the road and popped into the controversial Pete Melov's The Suveran cafe and his adjoining whole foods shop next door. Wow, again. This Northshore girl was blown away by how Bondi has very much embraced the newer 'trends' in nutrition. It was nice to see all the things that I try to incorporate into my diet and feel a bit weird about (lots of fermented foods and grain free alternatives), totally embraced and normalised. My friend bought a fermented coconut and spirulina smoothie and me a 'carob...something' sorry! Again, if I knew I was going to blog about this I would've paid more attention!

Next was a butcher specialising in free range meats where I picked up a very interesting GAPS friendly sounding leaflet for True Foods Nutrition. I'm tempted to try some of their great sounding workshops.

Finally we had a peak through the window at the Paleo Cafe which I'll have to visit another time.

Wow. Well. I am impressed! I tip my hat to you Bondi. I think it will be some years indeed before someone in my humble northshore suburb is brave enough to open a raw vegan whole food or paleo cafe. But who knows!

High Tea...High Time For Change

I am currently in what I refer to as a bit of a 'f@#k it' period in relation to food. It doesn't look like anything extreme, it just means I'm not restricting food groups and will pretty much have a go at anything if it's offered to me. Although at home I have the last few weeks been experimenting with implementing aspects of the GAPS (Gut and Psychology Syndrome) protocol as I have a feel that's kind of where I'm headed, unfortunately.

I say unfortunately because it's a grain-free diet and as much as I try to ignore it I seem to be having trouble with grains, and I love grains! Still it will be an experience! And implementing the GAPS protocol into my own life, I believe, will help me in assisting others to do the same thing should they wish/need to which is something I would very much like to do as a practitioner. More about GAPS in a later post. However if you're curious check out the GAPS website. The creator of the GAPS protocol (fancy word for diet) Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride is my new hero. This interview and this presentation  sum up her work exceptionally well. She has completely changed my perspective of food as medicine and was my inspiration to study nutritional medicine.

But I wanted to talk about high tea! I love a high tea! Especially the half price ones you can get on the various coupon sites! Up until recently I've been able to handle the occasional high tea indulgence with relative ease. However I thought to post about how I have reacted to the one I shared today with my mum.

It was your average high tea; wheat based savouries with meat and dairy, scones with jam and cream, and numerous, delectable little cakes and pastries. Now, 6 hours later, I'm in a fair bit of discomfort. My stomach is mildly crampy, the glands around my jaw are swollen, my ear pressure feels different, probably from the swollen glands, and my throat is a little sore.

Over the past couple of months these symptoms and a few others have become increasingly regular after eating. I was roughly 85% raw vegan for some time there and I put the symptoms down to possible 'detox', however when I started to regularly experience uncomfortable bloating after a seemingly very simple meal of raw veggies, cooked (and pre-soaked) grains and avocado, I was stumped. I started to incorporate animal products back into my diet and many of the symptoms stopped, until I ate grains, unfermented dairy, or too much sugar.

So my guess (and I'm very open to being wrong) is that my gut flora is pretty seriously out of whack (for reasons I'll probably discuss in a later post), my gut lining is quite possibly damaged, I'm not digesting properly, and my body's not coping. The solution, I believe, is to start really looking after my gut flora and heal my gut-lining. So I'm thinking no grains or legumes, because apparently they damage the gut-lining. No refined sweeteners because they feed the opportunistic ('bad') bacteria. No unfermented dairy, cause...something about casein that I can't remember. No starchy vegetables, cause they're hard to digest and so also feed the opportunistic bacteria. Go easy on the raw veggies other than juices (because they're hard to digest and my tummy needs a break). And hello animal products! Bone broths (apparently awesome for healing the gut-lining, organic gelatin is also meant to be good), soups (easy to digest) and organ meats (concentrated nutrients) here I come! And hello fermented foods! Just as well I already love you! What I've described is pretty much the GAPS protocol in a nutshell. The Specific Carbohydrate Diet, I believe is similar but I haven't looked into it. It could be that simply going paleo might be enough. I will be curious to see what helps.

Next step. Seek some professional advice.

I share all this not to be boring and self-centred, I generally avoid talking about my food reactions from fear of it getting tedious, but because I hope to be able to share at a later stage how all these symptoms have disappeared and what led to that result. I'll be my first case study!

To be continued...

It Begins Here

It begins here. I enrolled to study nutritional medicine yesterday. And I ate more than one banana. I don't eat bananas as a rule. It felt like the fabric of the universe was coming undone. Then I found a home-made swing under a huge tree overlooking a train-line. My bottom fit, I took that as a sign it could hold me. I sat, swung, and drank in this new beginning. And my banana smoothie. It felt a little bit amazing.

But really it began years ago.

Food and I have had your not uncommon full gamut of love, hate and neutrality in our relationship over the years. It's my sincere hope that all my various personal experiences with food and health (food intolerances, food aggravated hormone imbalances, weight gain, weight loss, eating disorders and food obsession, recovering from eating disorders and food obsession, experiments with being vegetarian, pescetarian, ovo-lacto, vegan, high protein, dairy free, soy-free, gluten free, grain free, macrobiotics, food combining, metabolic typing, candida diets, paleo, juicing, smoothieing, supplements, Chinese herbs, acupuncture, chiropractic, counselling, cooked food, raw food, fermented foods etc etc etc) combined now with studying nutritional medicine, might actually be of real help to people.

What have I learnt from my personal experience? Two main things. One, that I think that everyone's body is different at different times in their life. What works for one person won't necessarily work for the next person, and what worked for one person at one time in their life might not work now. And two, that some people can implement food changes easily but some, like me for many years, need more support, maybe a lot more support. And if that support can come from a combination of  food choices that help the body/brain to function at it's best, and a supportive network of people who are similarly sincerely trying to finding their path to healthy eating, I think that might be the ticket. In my future practice I hope to be able to provide both for people who need and want it.

But, I might be wrong. I've also learnt that in the area of food and nutrition, well in life really, that I've always got to be ready to let go of what I think is 'right' or 'best' if I want to stay healthy. Even if it is 'right' or 'best' at that point in time. It seems that that kind of  black-and-white thinking, while at first often beneficial, if held onto for too long can lead to closed-mindedness and cut one off from further learning and from intuition, both of which I think are vitally important when it comes to making continued healthy food and life choices.

So let's get started! :D

Hello To You Human Microbiome!

Hello to you, my nothing short of remarkable human microbiome!

I've been doing some reading lately into the importance and complexities of gut health and I feel like I've walked into an amazing and beautiful jungle. It's as though my eyes have finally been opened to the wonder of the incredibly diverse ecosystem that is my own body. In fact it truly feels like I’m understanding who I am for the first time. I've always understood that I am part of nature but now, having a more informed and vivid sense of the microorganisms that comprise my gut ‘flora’ (not technically flora, the more correct term is ‘microbiota’[i]), not to mention the bacteria and other organisms in and on other parts of my body, the connection between my body and my mind and the world around me now feels utterly seamless. I am nature.

Below are some excellent articles and websites if you are interested in learning more about the human microbiome:

http://www.nih.gov/news/health/jun2012/nhgri-13.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/health/human-microbiome-project-decodes-our-100-trillion-good-bacteria.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/magazine/say-hello-to-the-100-trillion-bacteria-that-make-up-your-microbiome.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

http://humanfoodproject.com/americangut/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2945190/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiome

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Microbiome_Project

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[i] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23159341