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Feed and Eat Digest, Issue #014 -- Put together a Personalised Plan
September 05, 2008

A monthly ezine brought to you by Petro Janse van Vuuren, changing your life with healthier eating choices

In this edition:

Personal update: Flu Busting
Monthly Maxim: Fats
Feature article: Put together a Personalised Plan
Recipes: Energy Seed Bars
Business Bite
Extracts from Ingrid's Latte Letter

1. Personal update: Flu Busting

I have very little news this month. Perhaps most interesting healthwise is that I am working with two great girls, Bronwyn and Elzette, on starting up regular health chats here in Stellenbosch. I know the regular meetings in PMB have been a great addition to the local social calender and I am hoping to make the STB events equally popular.

In the meantime we are all well and thriving with no flu and vile viruses to challenge our health thanks to a rigourous supplementation plan and plenty of fresh green vegetable juice. Sure we get sniffles now and then, but it has been ages since any of us had been bed ridden – this in spite of everyone around us dropping like flies. What a difference health can make to one's state of mind and productivity!

2. Monthly Maxim: Fats

Choose cold raw oils rather than cooked, butter rather than margarine.

Heat damages the essential fatty acids in oils turning them into trans fats that are harmful for the body. Margarine and other low fat options contain hydrogenated veg oil which contributes greatly to heart disease and other illnesses.

Drizzle olive oil over steamed or baked veggies, rather than frying veg in oil,
Pick Original Black Cat peanut butter rather than Skippy - organic is even better of course,
Make homemade biscuits with butter, rather than with marge,
For frying use coconut oil or palm fruit oil. They can withstand the heat and are extremely nutritious and fall under the category of super food. Coconut oil contains a growth factor great for littlee kids and palm fruit oil is loaded with carrotenoids that protect your cells against disease.

The most important fatty acid you need from cold oils is omega 3 and unless you eat lots of fresh oily fish, it is hard to get all you need so I recommend supplementing.

3. Feature article: Put together a Personalised Plan

Slowly by surely I am working on a series on how you can achieve personal success in your health. My first article in this regard was on Manifesting your Main Motivation

I later wrote to you about Getting a Great Goal

Now I want to help you with the next step: Putting together a Personalised Plan.

There are so many step by step plans out there and so many products that is sold as part of such plans to help you shape up and get healthwise. All of the plans have been proven and tested, but many, in fact, most of them will not work for you. Reason: you have your own particular context and personality with its own unique specifications. Unless you find a plan that slides into your life with ease, you will not be able to follow it. The sad thing is that no one but you can personalize that plan for you. This takes time thought and focus. Unless you apply these things, you are doomed to fail. There are no quick fixes because nobody's life is simple and straight forward. The most important factor in putting together a plan just for you, is that you need to know yourself, your real needs your deepest feelings and how you operate.

If you were able to set a great goal and find your main motivation for wanting to achieve it, you are well on your way and putting together the plan will be far less complicated. Let us stick to my original example of losing my mommy tummy. I set the goal of losing 6 kgs in 6 weeks so that I can be trustworthy (main motivation) when I tell other people about losing weight and being healthy.

What was the plan?

At first I had no plan. I would just start by doing little things like not finishing my children's food and not keeping any biscuits in the house. However, these small changes was not going to help me reach my goal. It had to be more drastic. So step one of the plan is finding one.

I started by setting up the criteria according to what I already knew about myself and according to what I was finding out. The new self knowledge came from reflecting on my failed efforts up to now. I knew myself well enough to know it would not be a straightforward weight loss plan because I am always more interested in health than in weight loss. So no diet shakes and fat free sugar free junk for me. Also, I love cooking and playing with food too much so I could not replace meals with quick no interaction food like shakes or pills or apetite reducers. I had to find a way to retain my interaction with food, without making me eat stuff that packed on pounds. I did not have time to do much research or read too many new recipes. Also, I am partially sighted, remember, so no new books and reading material full stop.

Finally, I hate exercise especially exercise for the sake of exercise like going to a gym. If I had to get moving I had to do it in a way that fits in with my everyday life. Here are some of the things I did to track down the perfect plan for me:

I started poking around on the internet beginning with sites that I already know and trust.
I called up a few friends who had lost weight recently and asked them how they did it.
I pulled out my favourite health books and looked through them for inspiration.

Based on the above criteria of being healthy, allowing me to play with food and making exercise fit into my daily routine, here is how my plan took shape:

I followed a friends advice to cut out all carbs after two in the afternoon.

I joined a belly dancing class. In this way I got both exercise and 'me' time.

Since I was already taking my son to play school on my bicycle, I started by doing it in half the time and then I added an extra km or two before returning home. I gradually extended the distance and reduced the time over the 6 weeks. (It was still hard work and took perseverance, but it was easier because it flowed from something that was already part of my day).

I tried all sorts of different things with my food, but none of it stuck. I needed something more drastic. In came the invitation to a raw food cooking course...

It was my introduction to raw food quisine that did the trick. I was introduced to a whole new food game and I could play with my food and enjoy wonderful new tastes without packing on the pounds. It was a perfect match! The plan was not complicated either: eat raw only food. The course took up a weekend of intense training including demonstrations. With the course came a weekly email that sent recipes and reminders and support so no reading and studying required. The 6 kgs simply melted away and I was enjoying every moment of it. Reflecting on my story as I was writing this article, I noticed 3 important things. Firstly, although I set the original goal in January, it took me until the middle of March to get the whole plan together. I tried and failed many things before I could get the plan to fit my personality and my life style. Secondly all these attempts taught me about myself and about how I work. Every time I failed at something, I found another way in which the plan had to be adapted to make it work for me. Finally, the clearer I was about what I needed the quicker and easier the answers and solutions came to me. Give yourself some time and grace to figure out exactly what it is you need and what sort of plan would work for you. Keep adapting the plan until it fits into your life and you are able to make it work.

Now I know some of you are thinking that you can not keep adapting the plan or discarding plans that don’t work always looking for the one that will suit you. You think of someone you know, or you think of yourself perhaps, who have tried every single diet on the planet and was unable to make any of them work. Of course that is why people come up with new diets all the time promising you that this is the one that will work. The trick here is not to look for your salvation in the plan itself, but rather in how well the plan matches you. You have to be able to adapt the plan whichever it is to who you are and what you know about yourself. The journey is not about learning more and more about diets and food, but about yourself in relation to diet and foods. Food is just food, but when it comes into a relationship with you it becomes comfort food, or fast food, or healthy food or toxic food.

If you want to know more about your own relationship to food start by plotting your position on the food-slide

You may also find my 5 steps to change helpful

For an example of how one person made a plan to fit her needs look at Chereen's article on GI Lean

Finally, Another easy to follow 5 step plan that has worked for me in the past was Mary-Ann Shearer's 'The Natural way'

Finally, if you want to keep it simple, you can read through my 12 Principles

Pick one two or three that resonate with you and begin to implement them. What ever you do, plan the work and then work the plan adapting it as you get to know yourself.

Of course even if you have manifested your main motivation, got a great goal and have put together a personalized plan, you can still fail. Like me after moving into the freezing Cape winter and into my mom’s house where rusks and bread are always readily available... Suffice it to say, I have gained back about half of what I lost and all because this one thing was not in place. I will tell you all about it in November when I give you the fourth step in generating more personal success concerning your health.

4. Recipes: Energy Seed Bars

This seed bar recipe is full of undamaged cold oils. Lauren Weiss from Raw4Healing writes: "They last for a long time, my husband loves them in his lunchbox, and my grandson loves them for a snack."

All ingredients are raw and organic.

1-2 cups Pumpkin seeds
1-2 cups Sunflower seeds
2-3 cups Sesame seeds
1-2 cups Cashews
1-2 cups Almonds
1 cup Flax seeds
1 cup Cranberries, dried blueberries, raisins, chopped dates
½ to 1 cup Raw coconut
½ to 1 cup Raw honey (to taste)
1-2 tsp Celtic sea salt
1-2 tsp Pure Vanilla extract, or raw vanilla seed pods

Soak the nuts (except cashews - never soak oily nuts) and seeds, and coconut in a large bowl with filtered water overnight.

Drain, and divide out about 75% of the soaked nuts and seeds. Blend them in batches on high speed in your blender.

Chop the remaining 25% coarsely with a knife or chopper. Don’t chop too much. Can be left whole, if preferred.

Combine both the blended and the chopped nuts and seeds. Add the dried fruit, like raisins, cranberries, etc., honey, salt, and vanilla extract.

Spread on a large flat oven pan lined with wax paper. Dehydrate at 45 degrees Celsius for 2 hours and then flip onto a dish cloth. Finish dehydrating overnight, or until crunchy/crispy.

Measurements are approximate. Don’t fuss if you can’t make a full cup of nuts, etc. This recipe is very forgiving when it comes to measurements. If you don’t have one of the nuts just skip it. You can use any nuts and seeds you like, this is just a combination that I personally liked. You can add cacao or carob chips too for extra sweetness.

Do you have your own favourite and healthy family recipe? The one recipe you cannot do without? I would like to hear about your recipe. Share your recipe with me and if I like it I will add it to my site. I wil try your recipe out of course and add my own comments on what I like.

Share your recipe with the form here

5. Business Bite

We find the 7 Great Lies of Network Marketing very interesting. Here's a link if you want to take a look yourself:

Free ebook - the 7 Great Lies of Network Marketing

It exposes all the myths and bad practices that cause the majority of mlmers to fail in their business. But we think it would be insightful reading for anybody in any businesss.

6. Extracts from Ingrid's Latte Letter

Health habit for the week:

Breathe with your diaphragm - not your chest! Try to take 10 DEEP breaths during each day from beneath your rib cage (holding to the count of 4 and releasing through the mouth, for the count of 4) and see how much better you feel!

Tummy Aerobics: Kids were asked

Q: Who they should marry one day?
A:No person really decides before they grow up who they're going to marry. God decides it all way before, and you get to find out later who you're stuck with.
- Kristen, age 10

Q: What is the right age to get married?
A: Twenty-three is the best age because you know the person FOREVER by then.
- Camilla, age 10

Q: What do you think your mom and dad have in common?
A: Both don't want any more kids.
- Lorianne, age 8

Subscribe to the Latte Letter

Greetings,

Petro Janse van Vuuren

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