What I’m Not Eating

I am avoiding most carbs (although I get some in my wraps), most dairy (just some occasional goat cheese added to a pizza or taco salad) and most sugars (although I do have a spot of dark chocolate with real peanut butter for dessert most nights).

Lunches on the Food Combining Plan: Veg and Starch

 Romaine and cabbage salad with sweet potato fries and ranch dressing

Lunches have been, by far, the hardest part to figure out on the Food Combining Plan. Vegetables and a starch. Not what I normally ate together, without meat I guess I should say. So the first month and probably beyond I was eating a lot of salads with sweet potato fries. This was good, but I can only do a big serious salad only occasionally. I mean seriously, that’s a lot of chewing and thereby a lot of time to eat it. I have been working diligently to subtract the meat and protein from meals, my all-time favorite substitution is my cauliflower tacos!

Wrap with cucumber, matchstick carrots, purple cabbage and ranch dressing

I should also list other approved “starches” — corn (so I’m going with corn taco shells), potatoes, sweet potatoes, brown rice (and all it’s products, such as pasta and crackers), quinoa and other grains I don’t have in my cupboard. Today’s lunch is a vegetable soup with brown rice and a side salad (my preferred salad!) of romaine. I also have a brown rice and chia bread that I make and it’s delicious!

#megaveg stir fry served over quinoa

I happily found my way to a healthy choice at Subway also! I love the Veggie Delight wrap with lettuce, spinach, tomato, cucumber, black olives, pickles, pickled peppers and some ranch dressing. But it’s about 7 or 8 dollars, so I have been buying the ingredients and making my own so that I can afford to have them more often!

Vegetable soup, romaine salad with radish and Newman's dressing, slice of toasted quinoa brown rice bread with an itty bit of butter

I also have been eating soups, stir fries and a great Veggie Lo Mein. I’ll be sharing all of these recipes as I go along here.

Veggie stir fry over brown rice

Another favorite lunch is Spaghetti With 3 Tomatoes Sauce. I can have this over zoodles and add a starch such as brown rice crackers, but I prefer to have this over brown rice noodles with a side salad of romaine. This recipe is one that I tweaked years ago from Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food magazine. It hits the spot for this tomato lover!

Snacks

Neither of the Food Combining books talked about snacks. Like, literally nothing. I even found a Food Combining group on Facebook, but they are very inactive and no help. So I have been working to figure this out on my own. In the mornings I have been having nuts. Rotating between cashews, almonds and walnuts. Raw nuts are more nutritious than cooked. And you'll know if its raw because they'll tell you on the packaging. One ounce is a serving and I try to measure this amount up about once a week and put the nuts in containers so they are ready to go. You can do this easily with a kitchen scale, just remember to us the tare button once you place your container on the scale to get your total weight back to zero.

Afternoon snacks have been harder to perfect. One recipe that works is the Elimination Diets Chia Brown Rice Bread. And I'll be honest here and confess that I have a little bit of butter with this bread, toasted, but I do not react to it and keep it a small amount. 

Chia Rice Bread

From Elimination Diet

Dry ingredients

2½ to 3 cups brown rice flour

1 cup arrowroot powder 

1¼ teaspoon sea salt

Wet ingredients

2 cups warm water (105º to 110º)

1 tablespoon honey

1 tablespoon active dry yeast

½ cup ground chia seed

Grease an 8.5x4.5-inch glass bread pan with coconut oil.

In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients. Set aside.

Place the water into a 4-cup glass liquid measuring cup or small glass mixing bowl. Add the honey and yeast; whisk together. Let the yeast activate. It should get bubbly or foamy after a bout 5 minutes. Then vigorously whisk in the chia seeds.

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and mix together with a wooden spoon. Continue to need the dough with your hands until the ingredients are completely incorporated. It should feel a little moist and sticky. If it is so wet that it sticks to your hands, add more flour, a few tablespoons at a time, and knead until combined.

Place the dough into the bread pan and cover with a towel, plastic produce bag, or piece of waxed paper. Place the pan in a warm spot in your house and let the dough rise for about 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 350ºF. Bake the bread for about 50 minutes. Let cool in the pan for about 10 minutes, and then gently loosen the sides with a knife and transfer to a wire rack to cool.

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I also tried and tried to make their Zucchini Chocolate Muffins work (the book calls them cupcakes--I think they are too savory to be a cupcake). This recipe has some applesauce in it and I wonder if I am reacting to the fruit and the starch of the brown rice flour. They trigger reflux for me. I also adapted their Banana Muffin recipe to a Pumpkin Muffin. I still got reflux from these most times I have them, so not sure I'll keep them in the rotation. But it's a good recipe so sharing here.

Pumpkin Muffins

Adapted from Elimination Diet’s Banana Muffins

Wet ingredients

1½ cups brown rice flour

¼ cup coconut sugar

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice

1 teaspoon baking soda

¼ sea salt

Dry ingredients

One 15-ounce can pumpkin puree

½ cup melted coconut oil

2 teaspoons raw apple cider vinegar

Heat the oven to 350℉. Oil a 12-cup muffin pan with coconut oil or line it with unbleached paper liners.

Whisk together the dry ingredients in a medium mixing bowl. In a separate bowl, whisk together the wet ingredients. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and vigorously mix together. Fill each muffin cup about three quarters of the way full with the batter. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes. Cool on a wire rack.

To make banana muffins substitute 2 cups mashed banana for the pumpkin and eliminate pumpkin pie spice.

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This month I've been having these bars on Mondays and Fridays for my afternoon snack. 

Gluten Free Peanut Butter Bars

adapted from Against the Grain

1 c smooth or chunky peanut butter

1/2 cup honey

1 large egg

1/2 t baking soda

1/4 unsalted peanuts

Position an oven rack in the center of the oven and preheat to 350 degrees. Grease an 8x8 baking dish, then line it with parchment paper, allowing paper to overhang two sides of the dish.

In a bowl, with a hand mixer, blend the pb, honey, egg, baking soda, and sunflower seeds  until thick and creamy. Scoop the batter into the baking dish and use a rubber spatula to spread the batter until it is even.

Bake the bars for 18 to 20 minutes, or until set and the edges just barely starting to brown (the center will be slightly lower than the edges when set). This batter has a tendency to overbake very quickly, so be sure to check for doneness at around 18 minutes. Remove the bars from the oven and allow to cool fully in the pan before cutting.

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Other good afternoon snacks are tortilla chips and popcorn. If you're buying tortilla chips  and popcorn packaged in the store please read the ingredients label and find ones with very minimal ingredients. If you can pop your own popcorn, please do so. If you need to purchase a bag read the ingredients! Angie's Boom Chick A Pop is a great option! I like their white cheddar flavor the best! 

Keeping my snacks as simple as I can seems to work the best for me!

Liquids

Food Combining also stresses "not drowning your food", which means limiting water intake while you are eating and keeping it to a minimum. First thing every morning you should drink room temperature water with real lemon. About an hour to an hour and half after breakfast I have about two cups of tea. Gillian McKeith recommended Nettle Tea to someone on her television show. I tried it and like its earthy flavor. And I keep this up all day. After my morning snack I wait a half hour to an hour before more water. Then again drinking water after lunch and after afternoon snack and dinner.

I drink a lot of water! Either water with lemon or water infused with lemon, ginger or fruit. My "treat" water is Pellegrino sparkling water.

I'm am pretty much off coffee but have found an oat substitute works when I need some. Coconut cream is a delicious non-dairy cream alternative. I turn to this hot chocolate or mocha now when I need a hot drink. I have adapted this recipe for a healthy hot chocolate or mocha and included the recipe below. Give it a try! Working on adapting as an ice coffee. Need to eliminate the coconut oil as it solidifies when chilled so not working so well for me yet!

Coconut Mocha or Hot Chocolate

adapted from a recipe in Clean Plate by Gwyneth Paltrow 

2 cups boiling water

1 tablespoon coconut oil

2 teaspoons instant oat coffee (coffee substitute)

2 teaspoons raw cacao powder

2 teaspoons coconut sugar

Pinch of sea salt

2 teaspoons coconut cream

I use my coffee pot to heat the water. Pour enough water over coconut oil to melt. Add the other cacao and sugar, stir to mix. Add coconut cream and additional water to desired level. Enjoy!

Breakfast On The Food Combining Plan: Fruit

Before I started this plan I thought that breakfast was going to be the hard part. I wasn't convinced that I would feel full and satisfied. 

Fruit, they say, digests the faster than other foods and should be eaten on its own with an empty stomach. So breaking your sleeping fast with fruit is what it calls for. 

I didn't think it would be enough to sustain me. But I was wrong. It's been fine. I generally have two large pieces of fruit and add some blueberries or raspberries. I use Corelle dishes and fill up a cereal bowl. 

Melons supposedly digest even faster than the other fruits, so if you have melons you need to only have melons for the entire meal. I feel like a kid in a candy store on a watermelon day! Delish!

Apple, kiwi, raspberries

Banana, kiwi, blueberries

Apple, pineapple, blueberries

Watermelon

Pineapple, mango, cherries

Apple, mango, kiwi, blueberries

My Adventures In Food Combining

I first heard about Food Combining in a book my health coach advised. It was mentioned only briefly but in short it sounded like it focused on healthy digestion and also as a happy bi-product that someone on this plan could see significant weight loss as their body heads back towards its natural set point. 

It sounded too good to be true. I was dealing with everything from acid reflux, burping, gas and diarrhea. Not to mention weight gain and migraines. Two years earlier I had tried doing the Elimination Diet. In this plan you clean up what you're eating until your system has calmed down, then you slowly and deliberately re-introduce foods to determine if they are a trigger food for you. I retested a couple of things, but ultimately I got all the way through the program with no real triggers discovered. But one happy bi-product of the Elimination Diet was that I saw a great drop in the number of migraines I was having. 

I approached my health coach for help because my migraines were becoming crippling. In the fall before I started Food Combining every month I kept worrying about running out of my prescription to take a migraine down once it had started. Insurance allows only 8 pills a month. After a multi-day migraine my neurologist had me drive to Willmar for an infusion of the liquid version of this drug and some pain meds. It was getting pretty bad, and I kept remembering my migraine results from the Elimination Diet. But since I didn't feel like I found answers on that plan I was on the hunt for something else, which is when I found the mention of Food Combining in Gillian McKeith's You Are What You Eat. 

I checked the library card catalog and couldn't find anything, so I went to Amazon and found a book by Kathryn Marsden and ordered it. Soon after I also ordered the classic book from the 50s by Herbert Shelton called Food Combining Made Easy. Between the two of these books I clambered together enough information about Food Combining to give it a start for the new year. Essentially your focus is on what foods you eat with other foods. Fruit digests faster than any other food, so you eat it by itself for breakfast. If you're having melon have it alone as it goes through super fast. Then lunch is starch and vegetables. While dinner is protein and vegetables. I will elaborate more on what I've learned about each of these meals as well as snacks and liquids as we go along in other posts. I will also go in depth on how I am transforming recipes and making them #healthyaf and full of vegetables (#megaveg). I want to end this introduction with the fact that I feel amazing and have seen significant weight loss. And I don't feel like I'm missing out or being denied anything. Well, maybe in a restaurant! But not when I'm cooking for myself, which is most of the time!