How I Eat

Video Transcript:

Hello, it's Saturday and this is "Saturday with Cindy." Welcome to all those who are here for the first time. Last week I gave a little house tour and then I asked for you to vote and let me know if you want to see more of the house and gardens or if you wanted me to offer you some vegan recipes. And it was 50/50 all the way down. So, today I was gonna try to do both and I realized I have bit off way more than I could chew because I'm packing for Italy and I'm taking off tomorrow. So, I hate to make promises and not follow through. So, I am gonna to speak a little bit about food and I am gonna show you more of the gardens. So, instead of sharing an entire week's worth of meals, I'm gonna tell you approximately what I would eat in one day. So, breakfast, if I'm feeling like I want a hearty breakfast and I want something I can burn for a while, if I get up and go straight to yoga, then I would probably just have some water and maybe a little bit of orange juice.

I will make rolled oats. I like rolled oats better than steel cut oats because they take too long, rolled oats take about five minutes. But I won't use the instant because I think they're too processed. So, I go to Whole Foods or go to a health food store and buy them in bulk and just get a good thick, hearty, organic rolled oat. And I cook that according to the directions and I usually put in fresh berries or fresh sliced peaches and bananas, always have some kind of fruit with it. And if I want even more, I will add soy milk or coconut milk. Now, I've noticed that everything I show you is backwards. So, I'm gonna hold this up and I'm gonna hold it still so you can really get the brand and everything on there. It's organic, it's unsweetened, it's by WESTSOY. I don't know who else makes a soy milk this pure. Very important to read the ingredients. All it is is purified water and soy.

Most soy milk, almond milk, hemp milk, it is an encyclopedia full of stuff. They put oil, they put salts, they put a lot of really obnoxious things. I just like a little liquid on my cereal in the morning. So, this is what I use or I will open up a baby coconut, which is particularly succulent, the meat, and it's really, really thin, but I don't put the meat in, I just put the milk in. But I've discovered they are capable of getting the milk out of those coconuts and putting it in this, any kind of a container, and it stays fresh until you open it, then you have to put it in the refrigerator. And I just didn't believe it, I didn't think it was possible. This is what I used to do, just open up a...I used to take an ax and whack it open. You can get them at a lot of Asian stores. That's where I get my fresh baby coconuts. But anyway, it's delicious and it replaces milk, if you want to do a plant-based vegan diet.

All right, so that's basically it for breakfast. Then if Bruce is downstairs, he almost always makes orange juice, so then I'll have a glass of orange juice, too. For lunch, if I'm home and I have time, I will take any leafy green vegetable. Rainbow Swiss chard, green Swiss chard, kale is one of my favorites. And I just cut it up and steam it and maybe put a little lemon juice on it and that's it. I am doing everything I can completely stay away from salt, oil and sugar, any oil even though we're told oil is healthy, oil is good for you, you need your fatty acids. You get your fatty acids from other things, other types of fruits and vegetables.

If you have to use a little teeny bit of oil, I think it's okay. The doctors at TrueNorth would not agree with me. If you tend to get addicted to things like that and you add a teaspoon today, but by next week, you're adding three tablespoons, then you have to be careful. I am a salt addict, so I have to stay away from it completely. One grain of salt and it's all over, I'm salting everything.

So, I love dressings, I love sauces and almost all sauces are made definitely with oils and salts and sometimes sugars. So, when I make a salad, I'll put in maybe three different types of lettuce, romaine, mixed spring, spring mix, they call it. I love the one called mache or mache, everybody pronounces it different, very hard to find but they're little, succulent, beautiful leaves. Sometimes you can get them by Earthbound in those plastic boxes or if you're near a farmers' market, you can get that. Oh, it's so delicious. But I tend to either like hard lettuces or soft lettuces, I don't like to mix them so much. So, I could throw in some sliced cucumber, I'll take a carrot and I'll either grate it or I'll use a potato peeler to make it really thin so it's the same texture as the lettuce. I do that with the celery and cucumber as well. I might throw in some stronger greens like fresh collard greens or Swiss chard, just a little teeny bit. 

If I ever put kale in a salad, I chop it super, super, super, super fine, almost like powder because it's very leathery when it's not cooked. So, I really go by what I'm craving and what's in season at the time. But then what? Do I just eat it like that? Well, almost all salad dressings are made with fat and acid, so I get away from the oil and I use avocado as my fat or I will use a nut butter and tahini is one of my favorites. But you have to get tahini that has nothing in it except for ground sesame seeds and you can find it out there. So, I dribble the tahini and that's my oil, and then I will either squeeze lemon juice as my acid, or grapefruit juice, or orange juice. You can use vinegar. The doctors at TrueNorth do use brown rice vinegar with nothing added, just brown rice and that's it, and it's really good but sometimes I get a little bored of that flavor over and over. 

So, I trade between that and lemon juice, but I will use a little balsamic. Now they told me that all balsamic vinegar has lead in it. So, I did a ton of research and it is so minute, there's so little that personally, I'm willing to take the chance. So, I mix, you know, those different things, one acid and one fat together, and then you can certainly put in herbs and things if you want to. But I find that the vegetables themselves are really flavorful. So, that will be my lunch. A big old salad with dressing. I love it and I can eat a lot. And when I say a lot, I'm talking huge piles. And it will fill you up initially but there's not a whole lot there to burn, so by dinnertime, I'm hungry. So, I will either make quinoa, brown rice, potatoes of some kind and I always start with steamed greens. It could be asparagus, broccoli, or one of the green leafies, the collard greens, the kale, and I put that on the plate first. 

So that's the main part of the dish, and then I'll add the quinoa or the brown rice, or a mixture of those things. Sometimes, I'll saute onions and mushrooms and mix it into that. So, it's like a real casserole-y kind of a dish. I may or may have a salad with that, maybe just some sliced tomatoes. Tomatoes and celery are very high in salt, so that's how I get my salt. So, the question is, "Well, if you have salt in those things, or you have your fats in your avocado and your tahini, why can't you have oil and salt?" Because they are extracted from the whole food. So, this is the deal. We're always coming up with recipes as humans. Can anybody recreate this recipe? This is a recipe. There are a multitude of ingredients in this packaged food. This is the perfect packaged food. You cut it open, you taste it, it's magnificent. 

Now if we could make this, we might go, "Oh, this is so delicious. This is a Gala apple? Give me the recipe," but we will never know the recipe. It's mother nature's recipe and it's already created, packaged, sterile and ready to eat. So, you can just eat an apple and it's a perfect meal. 

And how about this recipe? Easy to open package, you don't have to read the label, you can trust the ingredients 100%. There are over 300 varieties of fruit. Oh, look, a label. Well, it doesn't tell me what's in it, it just says "Ripe Now!" And then there's a number. Apricots. This is a fruit. Anything with a seed inside is a fruit. Tomato is a fruit, and funny enough, pineapple is considered a berry and so is a banana. But that's, you know, getting into the horticulture and botany of the whole thing. But when it comes to eating, you have sweet fruit and non-sweet fruit.

Bell peppers are non-sweet fruits, avocados are non-sweet fruits. So that's basically a day worth of food that I eat, and quite often, I won't prepare my own recipe, I will just go ahead and eat a couple of these, eat the meals made by Mother Nature. But what I wanted to tell you about is a book called "The Pleasure Trap" and it has to do with why we crave what we crave. Our brains are identical to what they were when we were cavemen, our brains have not evolved. So, we are hardwired to go after as many calories as possible, expending the least amount of calories doing so. It took us so much energy to go follow the animal until it dropped or dig for roots and find fruits and vegetables to eat that we were using up more calories than we were actually finding. So, it is absolutely critical to our survival that we get enough calories and we are hardwired to do so. 

So fast forward to modern times, we can dial a phone, pick it up and order a billion calories using up about 20 doing it, and so we do. "I'll take five pizzas. Yeah. Why don't you throw in a couple of those garlic twists? Oh, dessert? Hey, yeah, you want some dessert? Okay. Throw in a couple of ice cream and la, la, la." We all love it, we all want it. No matter what our intellect tells us about what's healthy and what's not, our animal instincts on the most primitive gut level say, "Go for the fries, go for the pizza, go for the ice cream, get it and get it now." So, every single day, we are fighting our instincts. Now, not only that, but we were designed to feel really good while we ate massive amounts of fat and calories. Feel good, pleasure, it brings us pleasure. The dopamine, the endorphins, the serotonin, all those chemicals in our body that make us feel really, really good and really happy and feel a lot of pleasure, they all get activated by those very foods.

So, we are doomed. No, we're not doomed. We do have these really big brains and we can make a choice, a conscious choice. I could say, "You know what? I'm partying, I'm having a good time and I really, really want to eat french fries tonight and so I'm going to." And that will change my diet over the next three days. Maybe I will eat less avocado, fewer nuts, put more fresh greens into my diet and make up the difference. If there is anything actually damaging in the food that I would eat, if it's gonna clog my arteries or put a toxin in my body, then I probably wouldn't choose to do that. I think personally, and this is entirely my own personal opinion, I think it's fine to indulge once in a while. And some of you may have heard my "Birthday Cake Theory." Most of us go to a birthday a few times a year and we'll have a slice of cake even if it's not in our diet every day. 

As long as you're not eating it three times a day, every day, it's not really what you're living off of. If you have a piece of birthday cake five times a year, it's not gonna to kill you, it's not gonna shorten your life and I doubt it's gonna lower the quality of your life and your activity. So, that's my theory and I think it's fine to allow yourself...and I also think that food brings joy and pleasure and fun that has nothing to do with what's going on mechanically and organically, you know, just getting your body fueled. And I think that joy, and pleasure, and partaking in all that is a part of being healthy because it makes you happy and happiness is a huge, plays a huge part in how healthy we are. So, just thought you might want to know about that book, "The Pleasure Trap," it was really fascinating getting that information and it was written by Dr. Goldhamer and Dr. Lisle.

Goldhamer owns TrueNorth, Dr. Lisle...and he is a behavioral psychologist. So, the book is called "The Pleasure Trap" and it really explains in depth this whole thing about how we're hardwired, and that to eat a health-promoting diet, we really have to pay attention to those primitive instincts and try to work around them or work with them in a positive way for our health. All right. Just wanted to say that before we head out to the garden.

Okay. Well, so long, everybody, I'm heading off to Italy and California. Please join me at Union Square in San Francisco on July 27th. It's huge, it's huge for women, it's huge for America. The first public gathering for the Pro-Age Revolution. Thank you.