Just Lie Back & Think of England...

Mmmm Marmite, Mmmm Pubs, Mmmm Curry, Hmmm Coping with our Wheat-Fructose-Free way of eating in a holiday environment & company of well-meaning relatives.  I'm fearing to even think about the newly ventured additive awareness or possibility of the Failsafe Elimination diet.  Its so exciting to be heading back to the homeland & taking the little ones to meet friends & family but it does open us up to food choice "struggles" & criticism.

I've finished reading Fed Up... & am now perusing the Failsafe Cookbook, also by Sue Dengate.  I have booked a consultation with a recommended paediatric dietician & am open to what this may bring. I have no illusion that Failsafe will be an easy way of eating, but if we can use it to determine if there are food intolerances or causes behind certain behaviours then I'm willing to give it a shot.  Afterall if I can personally give up Wheat & Fructose & mostly manage the kids foods this way then I have a head-start.  The exceptions in the vision will be parties, I just have to be stronger on playdates, kinder & day trips when its become the norm that other kids get "party" food & "treats" are food-linked as opposed to the actual trip being the treat.  The trip to England will be a good test.  Though maybe harder with people that know me well, where I don't want to offend their life choices or my own upbringing, than with strangers or people that I'm not particularly phased if they think I'm being extremist.  At the end of the day though, my kids health & my wellbeing are paramount.

.....  So we had the dietician appointment today & she has recommended that my son follows the RPAH / Failsafe Elimination Diet STRICTLY as there are so many potential causes in his current diet that could point to certain behaviours he's exhibiting.  And that was said taking into account what we currently eat is pretty healthy, with the infrequent takeaway or occasional convenience meal.  This will mean eliminating even healthy foods (inc. fruit & veg) at first to determine whether he is affected by salicylates, amines, glutamates, preservatives, colours, flavours, gluten or dairy...

The dietician realised the difficulty of starting this immediately so we plan to do it the day we get back when I'm in full control of their intake.  The aim will be to do this as a whole family, not just my son.  I certainly glean to gain some insight from it for myself & am hoping that maybe it might pinpoint things to avoid for my daughter too.  It would be unfair to expect him to be limited so much & the rest of us still feast on his favourite foods.  Also its so full-on it will be wasted time if we don't do it right, to only have to repeat later if issues persist.

Meantime I will RELAX, "Read Labels" & pack!!!  With all this buzzing in my head it will be hard to switch off but necessary I think to deal with the flight, kids & emotions of seeing everyone we've missed for so long.

Its 4 years since I've been to England & I expect much has changed, it had the previous time.  I know I will be blown away by the choices in supermarkets & convenience options.  That said last time I found just GF hard to come by, I'm hoping they are more readily available now & that I will be able to find some sugar-free options too.  I just hope Mum is ready for me to make a mess of her kitchen as I expect I will need to be cooking & baking to limit a complete month of eating out & takeaways "just because we are on holiday".  To me a week, or two, is a holiday, a month is living, you can't sustain the gluttony for that long, without the sloth-like feeling kick-in.  I've undone good work at both Christmas & Easter & its taken me until now to get back to the pre-xmas weight.  Before when I've been back, there were sweets, crisps & chocolates bars I had craved & then indulged upon.  This time I will just fill my boots on marmite stocks (hmmmm maybe not for Failsafe homecoming) & proper English Indian Curries... if thats not a confusing concept to non-Poms.  One dish I'm salivating over is a Shaslik.... I have not been able to get one similar here in Australia.  Also some good Rogan Josh, Jalfrezi, Chat & poppadums the size of dinner plates.  I understand many English curries are uniquely created for Brits, they do not even exist in India or migrate to other parts of the world.  One restaurant visit per week should satiate that desire (who said you can't sustain gluttony when on holiday??!)

So before I head off to pack, here's a few good things I've discovered on my journey this week:
> Additive Alert - free app which is great for checking ingredients whilst at the shops
> Bakers Delight will happily print out ingredients of their bread... & even better do not contain nasty preservative 281/282.  The baker was very helpful & explained they don't add any sugar/oil either
> My son happily ate celery sticks I packed for kinder (an option for the Failsafe eating)

Fed Up & Fearing Forty

I'm having some OMG moments of late... firstly with increasingly hard to cope with behaviours from my 4yo, secondly discovering "Fed Up" books by Sue Dengate & potential correlation to former.... & lastly friends OMG fears of becoming 40... For me I have no fear but essentially aspirations - to be the fittest & healthiest I can, to be happy, looking onwards & upwards to the rest of my life & continued adventures with family in tow.

Prior to having kids I thought my health was generally ok, with the exception of effects of eating wheat which I discovered 6 years ago.  So with that avoided & the arrival of kids I was all set or so I thought, but boy do they take it out of you!  My energy levels often flagged but since going fructose free I'm on an even keel.  As I approach the big 40 I want to be as healthy as I can to keep up with them & give them the best I can.  Somewhere along the way in my food investigations (& behavioural strategies) I came across Fed Up & it triggered that there maybe some answers in there to help my little one & potentially me along the way.  I'm devouring the book right now, so will get back to some bigger blogs & recipe trials later.  The opening chapters are hitting home & I've made contact with recommended dieticians in hopes I'm barking up the right tree regards potential food intolerances.  To me it makes sense, the additives & chemicals in our post 1960's world must be having effects on all of us.  I feel there will be some correlation between the Failsafe Eliminations & Toxic Oil/Sweet Poison avoidances.  I hope so else this will be one hell of a change in eating habits!!

This will be hard, I have no illusions, however as I'm never one to resort to medicine before determining cause & prefer healthy alternatives where possible, I'd rather extremely change our food first.  In my recent discoveries I'm looking at food now as fuel whilst still trying to have fun with & enjoy it.  If its fuel then we want the right fuel in our tank to get optimum performance from it.  I liken wrong fuel to putting Petrol into a Diesel Engine where it causes internal damage & sluggish performance.

So although I've been a little 'fed up' of late I'm hoping that this is the beginning of an enlightening journey for us.  I'll take the steering wheel & try to pacify the backseat driver. 

PS. In case you are wondering I have 6 months to determine what ingredients will be in my birthday cake!



Fed Up: Understanding How Food Affects Your Child and What You Can Do About it

Ff...

F... My all time favourite letter.  I used to love writing it as a kid using calligraphy, now I have an affinity to it in many aspects of my life, especially in duplicate:
 - Fructose-Free
 - Full-Fat
 - Foo Fighters (favourite band)
 - F* F* (pet name for one of my family)
 - Furry Friend (what I often call my dog)
If I was a tattoo kind of person I guess this would be something I would consider tagging myself with but as I hate needles, its hardly a concern.  So maybe just some kind of logo for this page...

For now I leave you with the fabulous Foo Fighters :)  ...... Do you have Times Like These when  people don't get the Best of You???

Chocolate Pick Me Up

Had my first chocolate yesterday for a while, not really by choice, but necessity... the kids kindly brought home something from kinder which meant we needed to 'treat' the whole family...

You can pick up some great things at kinder other than just your kids, like colourful artwork (lots of), funny anecdotes of their conversations which brighten your day, new friendships & even gossip.  But your kids pick up far more... knowledge, independence, bad behaviours, swear words, appauling table manners & dislikes to food they've never even tried because little johnny doesn't like it, but even better than those - gastroenteritis, headlice & now pinworms. Oh what a fun year its been!  So yes our 'reward' for making it this far were worming tablets - which come in the form of chocolate squares... Now if I wasn't already adverse enough to chocolate due to its fructose content the reminder of this now helps me more!!

Also yesterday Dextrose sold out in my local Big W, so when the helpful assistant asked if I wanted it because of the sugar-free books, I said hell yeah!  She then got a 10min reasoning to why they are so good, my successful weight-loss & improved health due to them.

It seems changes are afoot, people are showing this feet first with their shopping habits.  Not only has dextrose been running out of the door, but the sugar-free books are among the bestsellers & I was unable to renew Toxic Oil at the library as there's a queue for it... & I had been the first to order it in.  I'm now hooked on it anyway so I've bought my own copy, along with the new Sweet Poison Quit Plan Cookbook.  So much for saving my money until I get back from holiday... ahh well at least I can just tell more people the otherside of the world about all of them now & test out some recipes before I go to bake there too. 

Given the taste for chocolate, I fancied baking something chocolatey today (with cocoa), but with limited dextrose left I chose a recipe that used very little & halved it to make a small batch of Choc-Nana Muffins from Hungry Tums recipe book.  The kids were in heaven as I rarely make icing, but these cute mini muffins deserved the added extra.  The recipe was quick & easy, even making the icing sugar (dextrose).  As I was using mini cases I also reduced the cooking time (a lesson learned from previous downsizing of recipes!)

My Kinda Knowledge

My reading up on sugar, namely from Sweet Poison, enabled me to know the answer to a trivia question last night at the pub!  "What gland produces insulin?" - the Pancreas was my answer, my team mates however disagreed so I was overruled 2:1 & I was damn right. Thankfully they didn't have views on the Queens of the Stone Age, as that was my other correct contribution to the evening.  Next time I shall have to be more persuasive about my knowledge on bodily functions...

I do feel I've been doing a lot of reading lately & quite overwhelmed by the newfound knowledge, Toxic Oil in particular.  I do, however, remember feeling this way a year ago when I read Sweet Poison, but now most of that comes as second nature.

As ever a little knowledge raises more questions & a thirst for answers.  So I'm keen to find more sources & explanations:  mostly about sugar, more about oil, what they do to us & definitely more about homemade GF bread.  Good books, good blogs, good recipes & good breadmaker reviews!  Suggestions welcome.

Just be mindful my reading platter is pretty full already with Toxic Oil, Fat Chance, Fed Up plus The Failsafe Cookbook... & for desert Keith Richards biography!

And as I type, I'm proving out some of that newly read material, there's a trial dinner experiment going on the oven right now... cooking chips with Supafry, yes animal fat... I have never done this in my life!  I'm sure its what I grew up on, before vegetable oil became the norm, but have never used it myself.  Sure I've eaten both lard & dripping at my Nans house way back, but this is a whole new adventure.  Although I've been partial to buying oven chips from the freezer section & just whacking them in the oven at times, mostly the last few years I like to make wedges or chip shapes cut myself & have just used olive oil, occasionally seasoned with herbs & salt.  So to go the whole hog of a deep fat fryer, the smell & danger that brings to my house is off limits right now.  My normal method is to pre-nuke spuds anyway once chipped before sticking in oven, so this is what I'm trying hoping that will soften them enough to soak up the fat & give the desired flavour.  I'll venture into limiting microwave use another time... too many new things on the go right now, its hard to quit every convenience factor of the 21st century.

The Verdict:  Exterior crunch & interior softness perfect, taste...ok, but for the grown-ups in the house a little greasy.  I think akin to adjusting back to full-fat milk at first.  Maybe I just used too much fat or perhaps I could combine with olive oil to be nearer the taste we are used to.  They certainly crisped up better than with straight olive oil.  The kids took to them fine. Chips are just chips to the non-decerning palette!  The roasting pan was easy to clean & the oven didn't smoke as I feared it might, so all-in-all a successful attempt.

The Process:  Peel & slice spuds.  Rinse & microwave for 8mins.  Add 5mm slither of Supafry to roasting pan, heat in oven.  Drain spuds & add to roasting pan, turn to coat in oil.  Cook for approx 30mins at 200C or until golden (turning halfway).