Yes, you can definitely freeze your spinach for later use!

First, I recommend that you clean your spinach well. Wash off the grit and remove any unhealthy leaves or sections of leaves.

Second, I suggest that you blanch the spinach for two minutes, no more or no less. What I mean by blanching is simply placing your cleaned spinach leaves in a covered steamer basket on top of a saucepan that contains boiling water. If you blanch your spinach for only a minute, you won't succeed in deactivating the enzymes in the spinach. Deactivation of these enzymes is helpful to prevent further ripening of the spinach in your freezer. Color changes, taste changes, and nutrient loss can still take place in your frozen spinach unless these enzymes are first deactivated. If you blanch your spinach for more than two minutes, you will not only deactivate the enzymes but also cause a significant amount of unnecessary nutrient loss.

Third, I recommend that you chill the spinach in ice water immediately after blanching in order to stop the cooking process. After that, thoroughly drain the cooled spinach leaves. Only after completing this last step should you go ahead and place the spinach leaves in freezer bags or other containers for storage in your freezer.

The above three steps should provide you with a supply of homegrown, frozen spinach that can last you all the way up until your next year's harvest!

whfoods.org

Garlic in oil? No-no-no....

Extreme care must be taken when preparing flavored oils with garlic or when storing garlic in oil. I agree with the following statement made by the Cooperative Extension Program at the University of California, Calaveras County:

"Garlic-in-oil mixtures stored at room temperature provide perfect conditions for producing botulism toxin (low acidity, no free oxygen in the oil, and warm temperatures). The same hazard exists for roasted garlic stored in oil. At least three outbreaks of botulism associated with garlic-in-oil mixtures have been reported in North America."

According to the National Center for Home Food Preservation (http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/), peeled garlic cloves may be submerged in oil and stored in the freezer for several months. Definitely, do not store garlic in oil at room temperature. By law in the United States, commercially prepared garlic-in-oil has been prepared using strict guidelines and must contain citric or phosphoric acid to increase the acidity. Unfortunately, there is no easy or reliable method to acidify garlic in the home. Acidifying garlic in vinegar is a lengthy and highly variable process and therefore carries risks with it; a whole clove of garlic covered with vinegar can take from three days to more than one week to sufficiently acidify. As an alternative, properly dried garlic cloves may be safely added to flavor oils.

Given all of this, I think that you should be safe rather than sorry...not only would I not eat the green garlic, but I'd also discard the entire garlic-in-oil mixture.

whfoods.org

Cauliflower

Did you know that along with its wealth of vitamins and minerals, cauliflower, like the other cruciferous vegetables, contains powerful sulfur compounds that have repeatedly been found to help prevent cancer? Since 1993, the National Cancer Institute has been demonstrating that prevention, rather than cure, is the way to decrease deaths related to cancer. And they have found the way to prevention is eating the proper foods! Research on the prevention of cancer, as well as diabetes, heart disease, and obesity, all points strongly to the food we eat as a key factor that has the potential to cut back dramatically on the rates of these chronic diseases. And some of the best foods for disease prevention are the sulfur-containing cruciferous vegetables, such as cauliflower. These vegetables contain compounds, including sulforaphane and isothyiocyanates, which help the liver to neutralize potentially harmful cancer-causing compounds and to suppress tumor cell growth and the movement of cancer to other parts of the body (metastasis).

whfoods.org

I Will Rise

Sang this in choir this morning.

Something very interesting happened.

For a couple of days I didn't eat very much. I tried eating only if I was very hungry. Problem is, I don't experience strong hunger since my hypothalamus has been reset. So I didn't eat very much. Each day I gained weight. I had read about this happening when I was on the hcg diet. I think what it is is, your body goes into that infamous 'starvation mode' and holds onto the weight. This could screw with my hypothalamus, and possibly un-reset it. That's something I don't what to happen.

So I changed my eating to make sure I partook in small quantities throughout the day. [I try not to eat late in the evening, but that is hard to do for me due to my schedule.] I lost 3/4 lb the first day and .5 lb the second day. That's 1.25 lbs in two days!

So I starve myself and gain weight, and eat more - but balanced - and loose weight.

Amazing!

Simple: 1 grapefruit, pink, plus 2 oranges...um...orange. :P Add some hemp protein powder [not the whole amount shown, but maybe half for my taste], and juice it all up.

Can you see how the skin on the grapefruit is scored? [It might be hard to see that the 'north and south poles' are scored.] I also do this to oranges that I pack in my lunch. Very easy to peal this way. Sections just pop right off.

Breakfast of..um..artillery specialists? heh

Check this out:
almond milk - BAM!, cacao powder - BAM!, frozen banana - BAM!, frozen blueberries - BAM!, agave - BAM!

How I kept from sipping this before I took the pic, well, I just dunno.......

How do foods affect my sleep?

There's no doubt that there are many of us that have trouble getting a good night's sleep. The statistics here are striking. For example, 42% of all healthy, middle-aged women in the United States report some kind of sleep trouble, including difficulty falling asleep, waking up during the night, or not feeling refreshed in the morning.

Sleep is a "mind-body" experience

There's no doubt that from a physiological standpoint that sleep is a complicated event and one that's related to many factors that cut across the "mind-body" spectrum. When we can't get to sleep because we're worried and feeling anxious, or depressed and feeling down, or confused and can't figure something out, we obviously aren't going to get to the root of our sleep trouble until we're able to work through the parts of our lives that we're feeling anxious or depressed about. At the same time, however, our nutritional status and the food we eat always influence our sleep. While we can't afford to overlook the psychological aspects, we also need to pay attention to the way we eat.

Patterns and timing make a difference

We've all heard the advice, "don't eat a big meal too close to bedtime." Although this advice sounds simple, it's actually very important and not that easy to follow. On our World's Healthiest Foods website, we've tried to emphasize the sheer joy of eating healthy food. Getting to savor the aroma, taste, and visual beauty of food is a part of what it means to be healthy. Many of us eat a meal late at night-within two hours of bedtime-precisely because we haven't made time during the day to enjoy food.

In fact, we let ourselves get so hungry that we don't really care any more about the joy of eating. We just want something in our stomach! Research shows that the timing and size of our evening meal is closely related to the timing and size of our other meals throughout the day. When we have a cup of coffee in the car on the way to work, grab a sandwich for lunch, or take care of all the household chores before getting around to dinner, we are setting ourselves up for a bad night's sleep.

Sometimes we rationalize and think that a big meal will actually help us get to sleep by exhausting our body as it tries to digest the large meal. It's tempting logic, but research evidence points in the opposite direction. A large meal does the opposite of slowing our body down. It asks our circulatory system to move more blood to our digestive tract. It asks our stomach to secrete more gastric acid. It asks our pancreas to become more active and produce digestive enzymes. It asks the smooth muscles around our intestines to become active. In short, when it comes to our physiology, a large meal does anything but relax us.

In addition, our digestive tracts are set up to work best when we are standing; lying down results in gravity pulling the "wrong way" to help foods digest. Even though the practice of napping after a meal is common, it isn't ideal from the standpoint of digestion. Sitting and resting are fine. For example, enjoying each other's company around the table after a delicious meal is a good idea. But lying down to sleep just doesn't help digestion.

It's also worth thinking about the physiological purpose of eating in regard to late-night meals. Nutrients and energy get released from food after we eat, not before. They help increase our vitality hours after the meal has been eaten; they cannot go back and compensate for a prior day's worth of activity that received no nutritional support. The time to have our largest meal is always before we need the most nutritional support, i.e., before we have the most physically demanding part of our day. Sleep is the least physically demanding part of the day, and the least logical target for release of food energy and nutrients. We tell ourselves we've had a hard day, and we're starved, but at this point, it's too late to repair any nutritional damage done. We need the nourishment before the hard day (and hopefully it will make the day less difficult). I should also mention how important it is not to go to bed actually hungry; this can interfere with sleep, usually by failing to keep the brain supplied with enough glucose (sugar).

whfoods.org

Back from Mom's....

This trip to mom's is the reason I made sure that I had achieved phase 4 by then. I've never eaten so much meat. And - get this - all the while reading The China Study! Uber blech! I felt like I gained a ton. So on the flight back I fasted until 5 pm. I weighed in this morning and had gained 1.25 lbs. I'm actually quite pleased with that. I would not have been surprised if I had gained over 5 lbs! I'm sure, had I not fasted yesterday, that the weigh-in would have been higher. Seriously; ice cream, cake, whipped cream desserts, meat, meat, meat, sugared cereal, bread, bread, bread, etc. It's a miracle! LOL

Now I start back to working out. My next goal: loose 5 more lbs.

Oh, and I froze some mung sprouts before I left. I'll let you know how successful that was soon. :D

Ooo, I almost forgot. Of all days, today I tried on some shorts I had in a drawer for a few years that I could not fit in anymore. And they fit! I think what's more amazing about loosing the weight on this diet, is loosing the inches!