More Vegetables, Please! ~ Vegetable Soup ~

It’s a snow day! It’s a snow weekend! So far we have about 3 inches of snow; with 20+ more expected. I love it! We are hoping the power stays on, but while we have it, we hammered out some cooking. Simmering on the stove right now is a HUGE pot of vegetable soup. I’ve been making it a lot lately. It’s easy, it uses whatever you have on hand, and it’s good! It also is a good dish to eat in the winter, as eating warm soups in cold weather allows us to live in accordance with the seasons.

Always start with mirapoix (onion, celery, and carrot – these 3 ingredients should always be on hand, in my opinion).

Another Diet, Another Lesson

So often I hear, “I tried every diet, and nothing has worked.”

For this discussion, it is first necessary to define what a “successful diet” is.  Is the goal of your diet to lose weight?  Gain muscle?  Correct a leaky gut?  Achieve pregnancy?  Reduce anxiety?  Gain energy?

Most of my efforts in experimenting with different diets have been centered around weight loss and management.  But since reaping other health benefits with dietary changes, I have expanded my personal definition of a “successful diet.”  If you learn something that leads to better health, is that not success?

Ode to the Traveling Pantry

Often I remind my patients that it is much easier to make a poor food choice in this country than a healthy one.  Our brains are bombarded by marketing that evokes all senses and arouses all emotions.  Unfortunately, the majority of what is offered is of poor quality (and that’s putting it lightly, in my opinion).

How often have you had a ‘sour stomach,’ felt overwhelmingly tired, or wondered guiltily how many calories were in that meal or snack that you got at a (fill in the blank):  cafeteria, restaurant, county fair, bar, or sporting event?  Washington, D.C. has made great strides in providing nutritional information at restaurant chains so we can be aware of what we ingest, yet I still find the options limiting and unacceptable.  I can make hamburgers, chicken sandwiches, and salads that taste amazing, have more nutritional value, and have a fraction of the fat and calories of some public vendors.  It’s sad to see what could be a healthy meal messed up by poor ingredients and improper cooking techniques.

A Good Place to Start

If you follow my updates and news articles I post (or are one of my patients), you will notice that although I am not a vegetarian, I promote vegetables.  A lot.  I really do think that if we eat the full spectrum of  variety from mother nature, we will have little desire – and little appetite – to overeat other foods.   Not to mention our body tissues will be exposed to all of the different colors, textures, and flavors that exist naturally, and which many studies suggest ward off disease, promote immunity, and make us look healthy.

I have learned several ways to get more vegetables into my diet.  Although they seem obvious and simple to me now, there was a time when vegetable meant the lettuce and tomato on top of a (fried) chicken sandwich.  With fries.  And a Diet Coke.  Multiple times a week.  My entire diet was beige.  I didn’t even eat ketchup. 

Why Asian Pears?

As we continue into autumn, many of my patients have been reporting what are known in Chinese Medicine as lung dryness symptoms.

According to Traditional Chinese Medicine theory, each season has a corresponding organ system.   The organ system corresponding to autumn is the lung, and the lung system is particularly vulnerable and sensitive to dryness.  Therefore it is very common to express lung dryness symptoms such as a dry cough, dry skin, dry throat, and dry nasal passages during autumn’s dry days.

In additional to applying topical moisturizing agents and taking medicinals to suppress cough, we can choose to eat foods that moisten and protect our lung system internally.  Eating foods that are in season are mother nature’s medicines that help to both prevent and ease symptoms.

One food to moisten lung dryness is an Asian Pear. 

Ginger Crinkle Cookies

Many recipes for cookies are full of refined ingredients with very little nutritional value.  While these cookies still contain fat and calories, they use several natural and nutritionally beneficial ingredients such as black strap molasses, turbinado sugar, ginger, cinnamon, and whole wheat pastry flour.  Foods that contain real food, fat, and fiber tend to be more satiating (and satisfying!) than their fat-free/sugar-free alternatives.   Try them – they make the whole house smell amazing.  Personally they are one of my favorites, and I’ve made dozens of batches.  Let me know what you think!

Ginger Crinkle Cookies

In terms of Chinese Medicine, these cookies are warm in nature and are suitable for those with cold and deficient conditions.  Ginger and cinnamon are two foods that are used in Chinese herbal medicine.  They are warm, harmonizing, and moving in nature.  Those who experience nausea or stomach pain due to cold should eat foods with such characteristics.  People with excess heat or dampness should avoid or minimize consumption of these cookies as too many could aggravate their symptoms.  Not sure what your pattern is?  Ask your Chinese Medicine practitioner 🙂

In good health,

Molly

It All Adds Up

What would happen if you took the stairs all of the time?

In your apartment building?

In the building you work in?

In the building your friend/boyfriend/sister lives in?

To the 5^th floor of your acupuncturist’s building?

Up the escalator from every metro ride you take?  (Bethesda’s is scary long!)

One of the main reasons that people cite for not exercising is lack of time.  But if you added up all the stairs you COULD take in a week, you’d be surprised at how many steps you could get in.  These short bursts of exercise help elevate the heart rate, strengthen the muscles in your legs, and burn calories.

In terms of Chinese Medicine, taking the stairs would regulate qi, move blood, and calm the shen.

If you make the effort to locate the stairs and stop making excuses for taking the elevator/standing on the escalator, good things will happen!

It all adds up.

In good health,

Molly

Vegetable and Chickpea Curry Recipe

This recipe is delicious, very healthy, and makes your home smell great!  I made it last week for the first time and it got rave reviews.   You might try making it on a Sunday morning, eating it for Sunday dinner, and then having leftovers for Monday (and Tuesday and Wednesday!) lunch.

Instead of curry powder, I used 1 TBS of coriander and 1 TBS of tumeric.  I didn’t peel my potatoes or seed my serrano chile.   If you’ve never worked with fresh ginger before, you can peel the skin off easily by scraping it with a spoon.  For this recipe, I chopped the ginger into lots of small pieces, but you can grate it as the recipe lists as well.   It’s not an exact kind of recipe – do what feels right!

Check out the nutrition information too – low in calories, high in fiber.  There are lots of colors of the rainbow represented in this dish – a sign of a healthy meal.  

You are what you eat…And you eat what you are?

Do we make healthy choices because we feel well?  Or do we feel well because we make healthy choices?  It seems that making healthy choices and feeling well have at least a correlative relationship, so is it even necessary to determine cause and effect?

Let’s consider some scenarios and possibilities.

If you were to take the time to cook a fabulous and healthy dinner, from researching the recipe, to going to the grocery store and hand selecting the finest and freshest ingredients, to listening to your favorite Pandora station while chopping, dicing, simmering, and steaming, to smelling the aromas and hearing the sizzles, to sitting down at an actual table with actual dishes, perhaps with other actual human beings, to eating something that tastes better than many things you’ve eaten out at a restaurant (with fewer calories and better quality ingredients), do you think you’re more likely to have a couple of squares of dark chocolate and berries for dessert or sit with a tub of ice cream and Entenmann’s cake and aimlessly feed your mouth as you watch Comedy Central?