Nuts, glorious nuts…Chock full of satisfying fat, protein, and minerals, these inexpensive snacks are crucial to keep around the house. Buy them in bulk: it’s cheaper.
Here’s a little story I actually told a client yesterday. It’s a personal tale. I call it “The Evolution of Nut Consciousness”.
For many years I avoided nuts. This is because I heard they had a lot of fat in them. I believed that eating fat would make me fat.
Then I started to get interested in nutrition. I learned that nuts had “good fat” in them, aka unsaturated fat. I started to buy some nice honey roasted Planter’s in a can, and feeling virtuous, snacked on those occasionally.
Then I enrolled in holistic nutrition school. I learned the following:
1. The only “bad” fat is “trans” fat (saturated fat is crucial). And nuts in a can are sometimes covered with trans fats to preserve them for longer.
2. Roasting nuts impacts their micronutrients. It’s best to eat them raw.
3. Eating fat doesn’t make you fat.
So I began my raw organic nut crusade. I tried Brazil nuts for the first time and couldn’t get enough (perhaps I was deficient in a mineral they had in abundance). I made cookies using a blend of ground oats and nuts. I ate lots of them. Then I made more and ate more.
Then I decided to use my nut cookie recipe as a snack demo at holistic nutrition school. This involved a nutrition analysis of the cookie recipe. Well…one cookie turned out to be about 350 calories.
Whoops.
Let me point out that this is a common scenario. Person has a pattern of bingeing. Person learns about nutrition. Person gets excited. Person thinks “as long as it’s healthy, I can eat as much as I want”. That’s not quite true. While I’m not an advocate of counting calories, anyone can see that eating four nut cookies at 350 calories apiece is…well…not the greatest idea. It is, of course, preferable to eating four Hostess Snowballs. Which I used to do.
So I’ve reined in my nut obsession. I still keep a box of almond milk in the fridge, as I’m not great with dairy. And I always have some kind of raw, organic nut in my cupboard. It truly is an ideal snack to tide you over between meals. Just a handful will sufiice. I like to mix up the kinds I get, as eating the same thing over and over can create an allergy. Besides, eating a wider bandwidth of foods means you’re getting a wider bandwidth of nutrients. I still make the nut cookies sometimes, but I limit myself to one. Ok, maybe two. And I eat some of the batter. You know, to make sure it tastes ok.
I’ve been reading a lot of weight loss / diet / health blogs lately, and I’m trying to figure out where mine falls.
I’m in the position of advice-giving expert. I have my Master’s in Clinical Social Work, and my certificate in Holistic Nutrition. I work with people (mostly women) to create a positive relationship with food. I really love what I do.
But sometimes it’s boring to read a blog that’s just telling you “do this” and “do that”. Sometimes you want to know more about the actual person behind the blog. And I’ve arrived in this position precisely because of my own journey with food. So I’ve decided to share a little more about me.
I grew up eating pretty horribly. The earliest meals I remember were Cocoa Krispies and pb&j sandwiches. In high school, a typical day consisted of a granola bar at breakfast, a brownie for lunch, chips and salsa after school, and some random concoction for dinner – leftovers, takeout, white pasta with sauce from a can. If a vegetable happened to make its way into my mouth it was probably on a slice of pizza, or had been microwaved within an inch of its life. Oh, and I was a vegetarian…who, I recently discovered, was allergic to both soy and milk. So any protein I was ingesting was wreaking havoc on my digestive system.
I was obsessed with sugar. I ate it every day, multiple times per day. I also had numerous health problems. For instance, the summer I was fourteen, I went to Switzerland. You can probably imagine my favorite activity there: pounding chocolate. I came back with severe acne that remained with me for years. All the dermatologists told me “diet has nothing to do with it” and wrote me prescription upon prescription. At one point I was applying 4 different lotions topically and taking a low dose of antibiotic. Now I know antibiotic is one of the worst things you can do to your gut. I was also on birth control, another gut wrecker. My sugar cravings got worse and worse. I had excema, brutal PMS, really unstable moods, and other issues that are a little too personal to go into. And of all the medical practitioners I visited, no one ever questioned my diet.
By my mid-twenties, I was a practicing psychotherapist living in San Francisco. I didn’t know how to cook, and I ate things like apples for breakfast and protein bars for lunch. No wonder I binged on sugar two or three times per week – I was starving. I really had no desire to change my eating habits either. As far as I was concerned, eating healthy meant half a grapefruit and salads with fat free dressing and cottage cheese. And NO SUGAR. When I ate that way I was hungry, and I didn’t enjoy myself!
Eventually a friend connected me with her holistic nutrition counselor. I started to see her when I was 26, and I began to get a bit of a handle on how to eat. I learned what a meal should look like, and I learned how to cook really basic things that also tasted good (hint: it’s all about the seasoning). Before long I was assisting cooking classes. As I improved my food choices, many of my symptoms began to lessen. And within two years I had decided to embark on my own course of study of nutrition.
Now I work with people on their relationship to food because I think food is a wonderful, simple metaphor for how you live the rest of your life. If you’re willing to learn to cook, that means you’re ready to start taking care of yourself – at least a little bit. If you’re ready to explore your food addictions, it means you’re ready to look at some difficult dynamics and face some potentially unpleasant emotions. By supporting people both nutritionally and emotionally, I feel I can support the whole person.
And so often, we’ve bought into myths about food! Healthy diets do NOT consist of grapefruit and salad…well, not ONLY grapefruit and salad. There’s room for butter and meat and cream and maple syrup and all kinds of whole, satiating foods. Very often, I see people who are eating too little, then go off the rails, as I used to do. They think it’s an issue of willpower. That always makes me sad. In reality, they just don’t know how to eat supportively day to day in order to feel satisfied.
So that’s a little about my own journey. I believe in what I do because I saw it work for me, and I’ve seen it work for many others. Food is endlessly fascinating precisely because it’s so powerful. We’re only made up of what we eat – nothing else.
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