Thursday, November 18, 2010
A Motivational Weight Loss Story Video
Someone had told him he could change a habit in 21 days. Within 21 days he had lost 18 pounds. This motivated him to keep going. Within five months he lost 100 pounds. He gets up at 4:45am each morning to exercise. See his very motivational video here.
Check out his story at his website Ryan in Boise.
Ricotta Cheesecakes with Berries & Pecans
- 2 cups fat-free ricotta cheese
- 1 cup (8 oz) light cream cheese
- ½ cup fat-free plain Greek yogurt
- ½ cup maple syrup
- 1 large whole egg
- 2 large egg whites
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- 1½ cups fresh barriers
- 2 tbsp chopped toasted pecans
- Fresh mint sprigs
- Preheat oven to 325 F. Lightly coat 3 mini-muffin pans (12 muffins each pan) with olive oil cooking spray and set aside.
- Combine ricotta, cream cheese, yogurt, syrup, egg, egg white, and vanilla extract in blender or food processor. Blend or process just until smooth. Divide batter among prepared pans. Batter will come to tops of cups.
- Bake 20 minutes. Cool completely, then chill. It is normal for the cheesecakes to fall.
- Place 3 cakes on each plate. Sprinkle each serving with berries and nuts, and garnish with springs of mint.
Weight Loss Recipes Amount per Serving: 140 Calories, 8 g Protein, 16 g carbohydrates, 3 g Fiber, 5 g fat, 3 g saturated fat, 35 mg cholesterol, 125 mg sodium
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
A walk down memory lane
Since I can't live without a computer with a big monitor (for work stuff), I thought I'd turn on my old faithful 12-year old Dell. I hadn't really used it since my first laptop in 2004. Amazingly it booted up, connected to the internet and works with the new monitor. The grinding sound the hard drive keeps making is annoying me, but it works. Gotta love old technology.
I was looking at all the old files that I never bothered to transfer over to my laptops. Apparently I was much more career-driven in 2004. There are tons of work files, work goal setting documents and very few pictures. I found two pictures of myself sitting on the desktop.
2004 - 240 pounds
June 28, 2009 - 156 pounds (I think I added this one when my old laptop was dying last year).
Jogging to Lose Weight
My name is Ben Davis. On December 25th, 2008, I decided to get my life together. I weighed 360 pounds and was a miserable person.
Then I started jogging.
Then did a 5K.
The pounds started falling off.
I ran a 10K.
And a sprint triathlon.
Then I did a half-marathon.
I kept losing weight.
And kept running.
Then I did a full marathon.
I decided to keep going.
Then I did an Ironman.
If you want to do something with your life, if you really want to do it, just do it. I promise that you can. You just have to do it. And when you do, you’ll be happier for it.
Mini Apple Gingerbread Cupcakes
- 2 cups stone-ground whole wheat flour
- 1 tsp baking soda
- ¼ tsp salt
- 2 tsp ground ginger
- 1 tsp ground cinnamon
- ¼ tsp ground cloves
- ¼ tsp ground nutmeg
- ⅔ cup low-fat buttermilk
- ½ cup molasses
- ⅓ cup canola oil
- 1 large egg
- 1 large egg white
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 cup finely chopped apple (sweet apple such as Fuji or Delicious, not Granny Smith)
- Preheat oven to 350 F. Lightly coat 30 mini-muffin cups with olive oil cooking spray. Set aside.
- Combine flour. Baking soda, salt, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg in medium mixing bowl. Set aside.
- Whisk buttermilk, molasses, oil, egg, egg white, and vanilla extract in another bowl. Make a well in dry ingredients and pour in liquid mixture. Stir until just combined.
- Divide batter between prepared muffin pans (there will be about 3 cups of batter).
- Bake on center rack 15 minutes, or until wooden pick inserted in muffin comes out clean. Cool 10 minutes before removing from pans.
Weight Loss Recipes Amount per Serving: 70 Calories, 1 g Protein, 10 g carbohydrates, 1 g Fiber, 2 g fat, 0 g saturated fat, 0 mg cholesterol, 90 mg sodium
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Polenta Cornbread
One evening for dinner, I went to the fridge to grab the corn meal. I didn't have enough for the recipe so I announced that we wouldn't be having it. My oldest daughter asked if we could use polenta instead since it was dried corn. At first I thought that was a crazy idea. They are two totally different ingredients, right? Nope. Both are corn meal, poleta is just ground less, it's courser. If you want to see what I mean, compare the two meals.
Due to the courser corn meal, the bread has a little chew to it. I'll never go back to regular corn meal for our bread.
Impressions from the Wise Traditions Conference
I spent last weekend at the Weston A. Price Foundation Wise Traditions conference in King of Prussia, PA. Here are some highlights:
Spending time with several people in the diet-health community who I’ve been wanting to meet in person, including Chris Masterjohn, Melissa McEwen and John Durant. John and Melissa are the public face of the New York city paleo movement. The four of us spent most of the weekend together tossing around ideas and making merry. I’ve been corresponding with Chris quite a bit lately and we’ve been thinking through some important diet-health questions together. He is brimming with good ideas. I also got to meet Sally Fallon Morell, the founder and president of the WAPF.
Attending talks. The highlight was Chris Masterjohn’s talk “Heart Disease and Molecular Degeneration: the New Paradigm”, in which he described his compelling theory on oxidative damage and cardiovascular disease, among other things. You can read some of his earlier ideas on the subject here. Another talk I really enjoyed was by Anore Jones, who lived with an isolated Inuit group in Alaska for 23 years and ate a mostly traditional hunter-gatherer diet. The food and preparation techniques they used were really interesting, including various techniques for extracting fats and preserving meats, berries and greens by fermentation. Jones has published books on the subject that I suspect would be very interesting, including Nauriat Niginaqtuat, Plants that We Eat, and Iqaluich Niginaqtuat, Fish that We Eat. The latter is freely available on the web here.
I attended a speech by Joel Salatin, the prolific Virginia farmer, writer and agricultural innovator, which was fun. I enjoyed Sally Fallon Morell’s talk on US school lunches and the politics surrounding them. I also attended a talk on food politics by Judith McGeary, a farmer, attorney and and activist, in which she described the reasons to oppose or modify senate bill 510. The gist is that it will be disproportionately hard on small farmers who are already disfavored by current regulations, making high quality food more difficult to obtain, more expensive or even illegal. It’s designed to improve food safety by targeting sources of food-borne pathogens, but how much are we going to have to cripple national food quality and farmer livelihood to achieve this, and will it even be effective? I don’t remember which speaker said this quote, and I’m paraphrasing, but it stuck with me: “I just want to be able to eat the same food my grandmother ate.” In 2010, that’s already difficult to achieve. Will it be impossible in 2030?
Giving my own talk. I thought it went well, although attendance was not as high as I had hoped. The talk was titled “Kakana Dina: Diet and Health in the Pacific Islands”, and in it I examined the relationship between diet and health in Pacific island cultures with different diets and at various stages of modernization. I’ve covered some of this material on my blog, in my posts on Kitava, Tokelau and sweet potato eating cultures in New Guinea, but other material was new and I went into greater detail on food habits and preparation methods. I also dug up a number of historical photos dating back as far as the 1870s.
The food. All the meat was pasture-raised, organic and locally sourced if possible. There was raw pasture-raised cheese, milk and butter. There was wild-caught fish. There were many fermented foods, including sauerkraut, kombucha and sourdough bread. I was really impressed that they were able to put this together for an entire conference.
The vendors. There was an assortment of wholesome and traditional foods, particularly fermented foods, quality dairy and pastured meats. There was an entire farmer’s market on-site on Saturday, with a number of Mennonite vendors selling traditional foods. I bought a bottle of beet kvass, a traditional Russian drink used for flavor and medicine, which was much better than the beet kvass I’ve made myself in the past. Beets are a remarkable food, in part due to their high nitrate content—beet juice has been shown to reduce high blood pressure substantially, possibly by increasing the important signaling molecule nitric oxide. I got to meet Sandeep Agarwal and his family, owners of the company Pure Indian Foods, which domestically produces top-quality pasture-fed ghee (Indian-style clarified butter). They now make tasty spiced ghee in addition to the plain flavor. Sandeep and family donated ghee for the big dinner on Saturday, which was used to cook delicious wild-caught salmon steaks donated by Vital Choice.
There were some elements of the conference that were not to my taste. But overall I’m glad I was able to go, meet some interesting people, give my talk and learn a thing or two.