HAGGIS & SWEETS

Before our trip I had lost about 12 pounds following the Weight Watchers points system. It's easy!  It works!  I also took some dance classes at the Y, a strength training class, and my usual yoga practice.  I was in a groove of healthfulness and felt great.

Then we left town, and our routines, behind.  The only thing that saved me from gaining more than the three pounds I gained on the 5-week trip was the amount of daily walking we did -- over 200 miles in total; about 6 miles/day.

Breakfast was provided every morning on the tours.   I didn't want to fill up on pancakes, and the eggs, I'm sorry Britain, were always too runny for my taste.  "Traditional" Scottish and English breakfasts include lots of meat, which I don't eat except for the occasional chicken dish and Thanksgiving turkey, so that was out.

But let me say a word here about haggis.  In Scotland, haggis is always on the menu, and it is part of the traditional breakfast.  I swore I would not go anywhere near it; would NOT put even the smallest taste into my mouth.  But....I did.   Our first night in Edinburgh we found a local pub and Hub dove right in and ordered the Haggis, Neeps and Tatties (mashed turnips and mashed potatoes).  I ordered the lentil cottage pie -- a lentil mixture with mashed sweet potato topping. So good!

Here is the Wikipedia definition of haggis, if you are unfamiliar:  Haggis is a savoury pudding containing sheep's pluck (heart, liver, and lungs); minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock, and cooked while traditionally encased in the animal's stomach though now often in an artificial casing instead.

On the plate it didn't look too gross, so I took a small forkful and found it savory and flavorful and not at all disgusting.  Still, being full of organ meat was a bit of a turn off for this 95% non-meat eater, so that was my one and only foray into the Scottish delicacy.  Hub enjoyed it with most of his breakfasts.

I hit up the Continental breakfast buffets instead and found so many favorites!  Danish!  Croissants!  Pain au chocolat!  Toasts and jams!  Bran flakes (which for some reason are a binge food for me, and binge I did!)  I also ate oatmeal, yogurt, fruit, and nuts, which sounds healthy in normal qualities.  We won't talk about my quantities.

Lunches were on-the-go affairs, rushed in restaurants, so we took to stealing breads and cheeses (and another croissant and a few mini-pastries) from the breakfast buffet to build our own take-along sandwiches and treats, along with an apple (healthy!), and copious numbers of Shortbread cookies -- which became a bit of an obsession.  Also, our nicer hotels provided "snacks" mainly consisting of chocolates that we hoarded in our "treat bag" in my daypack.

Dinners were plentiful, delicious, and unconcerned with caloric intake, but with rarely a salad in sight!  Our English tour guide said salads were traditionally considered "poor man's food" and if you were rich and/or wanted to impress guests, you served meat! Greens were an insult. I'm not sure why this tradition continues in most restaurants.  Salad is healthy!  Still, I was grateful for the variety of vegetarian main dish options, even if no salads.

Most deadly for me, however, was that every single dinner came with a delectable dessert.  Two local favorites became my faves too:  Eton Mess and Sticky Toffee Pudding.  OMG!

Eton mess is a traditional English dessert consisting of a mixture of strawberries, broken meringue, and whipped double cream.

Sticky toffee pudding is a British dessert consisting of a very moist sponge cake, made with finely chopped dates, covered in a toffee sauce and often served with a vanilla custard or vanilla ice-cream.

But even if those weren't on the menu, there were brownies, ice cream, cakes, pies....let me just say I fell off the low-sugar wagon big time.  BIG TIME!

So I swore to get back on Weight Watchers when I returned and get back on my yoga and YMCA schedule.  Good intentions have been thwarted by jet-lag, illness, conflicting commitments, sloth, and sort of an "I don't want to" near-depression blues that has been winning the battle between good and evil.

Now I tell myself that November 7 is my start-over date.  I will have been home for a month, plenty of time to recover, and the mid-term election will be over.  Win or lose I will have to be in good shape for what comes next.  2020 is just around the corner -- the year my younger son will be married and the presidential election is held.  Let the goal-setting commence; a year should be long enough.

At least, that's the view from here...©

Photo Credit: Alamay and  BBC.com

FOOD ISSUES

Oh geez...I've become a full-fledged "one of them".  Have I written about this before?  Well, maybe, but now I'm way over the edge.

I have "food issues".  Oh, how I ridiculed people who complained of "too rich", "too spicy", dairy and gluten sensitivities (undiagnosed, so not "real" in my mind), too sweet, or not vegetarian, etc etc.  I'd roll my eyes and dig into anything put in front of me.

Then a dozen years ago or so I started to get a very dramatic reaction to rich foods and gone were the cream sauces. No more Fettucini Alfredo.  Not long after that I noticed a similar reaction to spicy fare.  Thai food, among my favorites, became a one-star affair instead of three.

I read two brilliant books a year or so ago, "Salt, Sugar, Fat" and "Grain Brain".  The first put me off any processed foods, the second was an indictment of gluten and most grains and carbohydrates.  I started to clean up my diet and let my eating choices be not only health-related, but also a statement about my opposition to being sold a lie by corporations that wanted me to be addicted to unhealthy processed foods for profit.

Four years ago (today!!!)  I quit drinking alcohol.  Two years ago I mostly gave up caffeine (now only a cup of half-caf in the morning and decaf any other time.)  For several weeks last fall, including over Halloween (a real test of my commitment!), I went sugar-free.

Then I fell off the wagon.  Grains and gluten snuck back in.  I started to have a nightly helping (or two or three) of dark chocolate with nuts and sea salt.  I reached for the pastries instead of the veggies at church coffee hour.

And then the headaches and gut issues this summer had my anxiety rearing its ugly head, trying to convince me I had something dreaded happening inside me.  Hub more rationally suggested a couple of weeks ago these symptoms could be diet-related.

Well, I don't eat hardly any meat -- no beef, just a little pork (oh, delicious pig!), some chicken and lots of salmon and seafood.  Pretty healthy.  I do love mozzarella cheese sticks and Greek yogurt.  Ice cream is a trigger food which I limit due to its addicting qualities.  I watch the carbs.  But the grains and gluten had snuck back in with the sugar and the ongoing dairy.  My weight started to creep up too, beginning to negate the 25 pounds I'd lost a few years ago.

So, here we go....elimination diet.  NO dairy.  NO gluten.  It's been 2 weeks and my headaches have subsided and some days are gone completely.  My GI system seems to be on the mend.  I've lost 2-1/2 pounds.

I'd feel happy and self-righteous if I wasn't so annoyed that this is working.  I know that makes no sense.  Of course I want to eat clean and be healthy.  I just don't want to be "one of them".  I want to eat any damn thing I please! But that is wishful thinking.  No one can do that and not pay the price in weight gain and disease or be party to the profit motive of Big Agra and its less than stellar track record with farm animals, pesticides, and creating addicting combinations of tastes and textures in fake processed "food".

So, I'll keep on, slowly and moderately re-introducing a bit of dairy in a couple of weeks to see how I respond.  I sorely miss my nightly Greek Yogurt and blueberries with a sprinkling of walnuts and cinnamon.  Oh....my....I miss it.  And a smidgen of dark chocolate can't possibly be deadly can it?  I'd like to reintroduce that soonish too.  The other stuff I find I don't really miss.

Except, well, for the occasional "special treat", like the teeny tiny slice of the Key Lime Pie my son and daughter-in-law made for Family Dinner this week...it would have been rude to refuse.  See?  I'm not perfect, but I do confess my sins of ingestion.

Bon Appetit!©

At least that's the view from here....