Oh, dear, it's been awhile!

Yikes, it's been awhile.

So meanwhile, vacation ended and I had to go back to work and already a week and a weekend has passed since being back!

I feel a bit unraveling at the seams -- overwhelmed by tons of things right now.

So also during the break, I visited Thailand. Not literally, alas, but through cooking. I found a really excellent pad Thai recipe on the jar of a pad thai sauce jar, and I just added a bit to it. I will go into more detail later perhaps. I am too lazy to hunt down the jar of pad thai sauce and write down the recipe at the moment. Let's just say it was divine and just as good as restaurant pad thai! I have also visited the Philippines via a recipe from my good friend Katie (she has lived there before). That also came out very yummy, but I forgot to take a picture of it. No, really, I WILL make a post that involves travel food again with pictures and recipes and everything, but this evening is not that day.

Healthamateur asked about fasting in a comment. To tell you the truth, I haven't done fasting much since coming back from vacation. It's hard because there's a big social element to our lunch hour at school. Everyone gets together and if anyone does anything weird (like not eating) there is instant attention on you and questions. So I haven't done it, as I get weary of talking about whatever I'm doing on any given day. I would rather not be the center of attention. I will probably go back to experimenting with fasting more in the summer or possibly on occasional Saturdays. Anyway, the question was about hypoglycemia. As far as I know, I have a tendency toward hypoglycemia. As a result, I have trouble if I eat anything high carb for breakfast (like bread or fruit or cereal). Here's what I think. I think that if you are having normal hunger pangs while fasting and just feeling mildly light-headed and uncomfortable, that that's normal. If you have such bad dizziness and shakiness that you can't function? Then probably fasting isn't for you. Also someone else mentioned (can't remember who right now) migraines, and since Healthamateur tends toward migraines, it might be a risk not worth taking because migraines suck.

Writing. Yeah. How's that going for everyone? For me, it's going ok. Not great, not horrible. The writing itself is great. It's me actually sitting down and doing it that's the problem. Once again, I will need to back off from the internet for a bit to allow more time.

Oh. And as for running? I signed up for the half marathon. Am I insane????

Cooking around the world -- Myanmar (Burma)

So one of the things I thought I would do during my break is to pick a few random countries and cook a dish from them. This is not as formal as the blog that I think Pink Audrey talked about where someone cooked around the world on a regular basis. This is just sort of random and obviously I can't do this super regularly because of time factors.

So yesterday I made a dry shrimp curry from Myanmar (Burma).

I used this recipe:

Dry Shrimp Curry

I did add a few things. I added about a half can of straw mushrooms and a handful of bean sprouts, just to have some veggies in there. Also, when it said to blend the onion, garlic, and ginger, I knew my blender wouldn't be having any of that without some liquid, so I added a bit of chicken broth to the blender. I only had brown rice to serve it on, and as healthy as brown rice is, I don't really like it that much and it takes forever to cook. Eh. But whatever.

Here was the result:



It was not fantastic and I probably would tweak a few things (less broth, maybe add some coconut milk even though it's supposed to be a dry curry). But it was pretty good. I enjoyed eating it. It is all I have in memory since today is a fasting day for me, haha.

On what we put in our mouths

So I tried this experiment this week in which I cut out all flour, starches, and sugar from my diet (exception being lower sugar fruit like berries).

I allowed myself protein, vegetables, and dairy, some berries, and nuts.

For a few days I felt yucky. I couldn't tell if that was a "low carb flu" that people who cut out a lot of carbs get or whether it was my job (which was very stressful this week). I felt headachy, lethargic, and tired.

I had this weird upper stomach bloating that I was able to pinpoint exactly to extra dairy intake. I cut out the dairy for about two days and voila, it was gone. (I had SOME dairy, just not the big amounts I was having before).

However, come Friday morning, I woke up and felt wonderful. I had lost 4 pounds and felt full of energy and ready to take on what I knew would be a long and frantic day of meetings, more meetings, data, and hardly any actual teaching. By the end of the day, my stomach hurt in a throbbing way, but that was stress from a particular meeting that ended up being upsetting emotionally (long story, but there's a child that I work with who ended up witnessing something really bad in his home and I got to hear about it in detail). The stomach hurting ended when I left school.

Anyway, I promptly ruined all progress by eating a mini bag of m&ms (I NEEDED CHOCOLATE, K???) and then I went out to eat with some friends and had french fries and wine.

How do I feel this morning? My stomach rebelled. There was much tmi. I'm feeling off.

So game on again today. No sugar, no flour, no starches. Just basic, basic food. How can that be wrong? I've been reading up on the Paleo way of eating a lot. I'm not a trend follower, except when the trend follows along how I'm feeling. My main obstacle is myself. My main obstacle is inconsistency and laziness. That's what I have to remember.

I have thought about maybe adding chicken back into my diet. I've been a fish-only vegetarian for a few years now. The idea of red meat and pork still make me gag, but chicken is, well, chicken. And if I buy locally where I won't feel I'm contributing to cruel chicken farms, then I feel I can do that ethically (in the summer when my chicken-eating husband was here, I bought chicken from the farmer's market from a local farm).

So in conclusion, our body is amazing. It's amazing how what we put in our mouth affects our moods, our aches and pains, and energy levels.

Next? How to get my writing focused, how to get my writing focused...