Body Conscious Ramblings

I knew this show was coming for quite a while, but never really felt very strongly about wanting to watch it, especially now that my interest and fascination with Tosca Reno is starting to wane. However, thanks to promotional nature of Tosca Reno I heard about the exact date it was going to air and decided to set my PVR to record it for me. I finished watching it about 5 mins ago, left a message on Tosca's blog since she asked about people's feelings about it and here I am to say more. And I should add that it's going to be a 100% honest review, no sugar coting. [caption id="attachment_1315" align="alignleft" width="448" caption="Photo source: www.myviva.ca"][/caption] Now, before I let my tongue loose, I should mention that I have a lot of respect for Tosca and what she did to her body. I think that many of us watching her could use some of that motivation and strength. But is it always so easy and breezy? As for the show..... I had mixed feelings about it from the start and when I sat down to watch it I was very skeptical about liking it, simply because I find the industry of bodybuilding a little sickening. On top of that I am not a huge fan of certain reality shows where the only purpose of getting on the show seems to be to get attention and exposure. The principle behind the Eat Clean diet is fantastic, but that's where my approval and fascination with Tosca begins and ends. It's great to teach people how to cut out all the junk from their diets and to show them how to cook without poisoning themselves. She has published several books on this issue, even though in my opinion one would be perfectly sufficient, since hearing or in this case reading the same information 3-4 times makes you feel like a child who needs things repeated to him before he gets them. OK, so what is my beef with her then in the show? First of about eating..... She advocates eating clean foods and eating them in small portions 5-6 times a day. Again, this is a great idea that has been scientifically proven to give you excellent results if you want to boost up your metabolism. Now she has probably heard it before from other critics, but I am going to say it again: Most of us average Joes can't do it because we have real 9-5 jobs. We get an hour off (or not) for lunch and we simply can't eat at work every 3 hours. So we eat breakfast before work, lunch at noon and then supper and snack when we come home. Now, we still can eat clean, but boosting our metabolisms by eating more frequently just won't happen. How about Tosca? Does she do it according to what she preaches? By listening to the conversation in the show one can conclude that she doesn't as far as the volume is concerned. One of her daughters has a very emotional exchange with her in which she accuses her of using anorexic practices to get to where she wants to be. She apparently doesn't eat adequate, healthy portions in a pre-contest stage. Well, whatever happened to "You can eat to your heart's content if you eat clean"? And how about "Clean eating is not about depriving yourself"? Not eating enough carbs will make you irritable and moody, which is exactly the outcome for Tosca. So why does she preach this and doesn't following it herself? Now about the beginnings.... This was the part of the show that got my attention and sympathy. I have to admit, she has a likable personality. She appears normal like any one of us, well, except for her body of course. Seeing her on camera wasn't like seeing any big celebrity, she is much more approachable and normal. She says that the whole thing started with the end of a bad marriage in which she felt unloved and unattractive, so she left and started to do some cardio. Then she met Kennedy who started training her. The impressive thing about it is that at the age of 42 she found enough strength to come out of a bad place and turn her life around. She showed pictures and bits of video from her old life that proved how different her life was from what it is now. And this is great. How about body image..... I think it is definitely skewed in more than one way. In the video you see the real Tosca, so you can actually really tell that this woman is reaching a point at which it is no longer OK to do certain things. It's not the Tosca covered with make-up you see in a bodybuilding competition or the one airbrushed from the cover of a magazine, it's the real thing. Even though she looks absolutely amazing for her age, she doesn't seem happy with her body image. There is a scene that I wish wasn't there and that any self respecting woman wouldn't want displayed nationally on TV, where she puts on a bodybuilding costume to parade in in front of her family. The costume looks like any swimsuit, I suppose, except for the thong like appearance on her derriere. It would have been OKish had she NOT turned around, grabbed her butt cheeks and jiggled them saying with disapproval "Look at that flab" This part was unnecessary and made me want to run to the bathroom. Why? Well mostly because it lacked taste and viva edited it in a way that made it even more ridiculous. The woman looks amazing for her age and yet she is not happy with herself. To conclude I will say that there is too much self-promotion going on in the show and off, which makes it look and feel like big money making machine. And, yes, I realize that that's what this business is and that's why I don't like it, because this drive for exposure takes away from the real thing, which is supposed to be educating the public about food.

Even though I love watching movies it has proven extra difficult in recent months. I used to watch a lot of movies, all sorts of movies, comedies, dramas, thrillers, documentaries, you name it. But things have changed. I can't expect to pick up a movie and be able to watch it, because I have a significant other and like all women, every friday night, I stand before the centuries old dilemma: "How to pick a movie as a couple" He likes old and I mean very old movies, I'm more into "the fresh meat". I like drama and movies based on true events, he finds those highly depressing. We don't subscribe to the same kind of comedy, I usually don't understand the humor in his favorite comedies or find it highly repulsive and stupid. He wants to watch only things that educate and while I will gladly watch a documentary, I recognize that movies also have another quality and that's called: entertainment. So last night we went searching for a movie. We tried something different this time and decided to each pick a couple of movies that we would be willing to watch and then show them to the other and decide which one out of the bunch would be appropriate for both of us. While we were investigating the pile, he glanced at the shelf and pull out another one and said "Hey look what they have here" He was showing me Our daily bread. I quickly glanced at it and since it was a documentary about food I quickly decided that this is the one I want to watch. So we brought it home along with Smart People. Here is a trailer of the first one for you: And this is exactly what you get from this movie for about 95 minutes! When it started playing we were struck right away by the lack of any commentary. There was noise, so we knew the volume wasn't down. Randy proceeded by asking "Did you read the jacket description?" and not waiting for the answer he grabbed the box to read it, after which I heard him read something out loud about the lack of comments in this movie. So that was it. We were going to watch how food is made without anybody telling us "Oh look what they're doing here is really really bad for the environment!" Strange, considering the fact that this movie won several festival awards. We never watched it in one sitting. Instead we decided to show parts of it to the little one once he arrived. He seemed to enjoy seeing where the food we eat came from and we'd hear him say on several occasions that he is never eating this or that ever again. So what's the point of this movie? I'm not sure, because it certainly didn't shock or inform me.... I realized that you need to first kill a chicken for me to be able to purchase and grill my chicken breast. The fact that big factories spray stuff on my tomatoes isn't exactly a novelty either, that's why I scrub them clean before I put them on my sandwich. Did the killing of animals happened in inhumane circumstances? As a matter of fact I did say "Oh that's inhumane" couple of times during the movie, but now that I think of the movie as a whole, I don't think it was any more or less inhumane than killing a bug that's crawling on your dinning room table. The factory workers were just executing their tasks and after doing it for so long it became very mechanical. Of course they didn't pet the chickens before stamping them with a number, but not petting doesn't mean being inhumane, does it? So in the end the movie showed the processes through which a pig must go before you enjoy your bacon. And I'll have you know that they even showed the factory being washed at the end of the day, something that you probably wouldn't see that often at Maple Leaf Foods Inc. Now, there was one part which I did not enjoy at all and I will leave it to your imagination as to how they managed to artificially inseminate cows :D It was an OK-ish documentary, but I wouldn't say it's a major piece on food industry , because it only illustrates that food oriented activities in developed countries happen on a very large scale (humongous green houses and fields for produce, big factories to process meat etc.)

We went out to my favorite restaurant in town last night, namely The Sprout. It's a tiny, bohemian style restaurant that is very popular among the young crowd. They serve meals with a strong asian undertones, like the miso based soups or asian style noodles in Pad Thai. They also serve burgers and sandwiches but they are definitely not your typical oversized, full of grease type burgers that you'd get at Wendy's or Mac Donald's. I like this place for its health and freshness aspect. Randy on the other hand doesn't enjoy the size of the meals they serve, because it never seems to satisfy him and he ends up coming home and fixing himself a little something. Here are some iphone pics from our last outing. We both had the Miso hungry soup and Thai one on.

Drinking our delicious and very spicy miso soup served with some rice crackers.

And this is our equally spicy and delicious Pad Thai. Now, don't get fooled by the neatly arranged pair of chopsticks on Randy's empty plate ;)

Generally speaking I don't believe in diets as such, and every time I hear about a new one coming out I just want to turn the other way screaming: "Do not buy into it!" at the top of my lungs. But people do buy into all sorts of things anyway, because everybody wants to look good, slim and sleek. And they usually want to achieve it the easiest, fastest and cheapest way possible. Which is why "diets" that claim to provide just that tend to do very well on the market. This doesn't mean that I won't read books about food. Quite the contrary, I enjoy reading such books and every so often I'll reach for a new one, but on that another time. I did say that generally I don't believe in diets, which means that there was a point in my life during which I was desperate enough to try out one of those magic diets. It is called the Montignac Method and as such isn't really referred to as a diet by the author, Michel Montignac. The basis for this method is very simple and logical and its explanation can be found in his most popular book called "Slim Forever the French Way". First of all get rid of all processed and refined foods such as white sugar, flour and rice and replace them with their wholegrain unrefined versions aka good carbs. Same applies to fats such as fat from meat, butter and dairy that are all to be replaced with their good equivalents from olive oil and fish aka good fats. And proteins should come from lean sources (vegetable or animal). Montignac doesn't believe in counting calories, but portions should be reasonable and overeating is discouraged. So far it makes perfect sense. But then on top of that Montignac adds on what's called Glycemic Index (GI for short) which can get pretty complicated and difficult to keep track of. So what is this GI anyway? First of all, each food is assigned a numerical value and the lower the number the better it is for you. The foods are then categorized into 3 groups: Low GI, Medium GI and High GI. How is it decided what food gets what number? The foods that have the least effect on your blood sugar get a low number and therefore get a green light and the ones that affect your blood sugar and spike up your insulin levels get a red light. The foods that are somewhere in between the two are OK-ish and get an orange light, but you should try to avoid them. So how does GI affect your weight? Montignac says that if we eat the wrong foods that are high in GI our pancreas will secrete more insulin than is required to take sugar present in blood down to its normal level. This is commonly known as a hyperinsulism disorder, which gears your body's metabolism toward production and storage of fat. This, of course, is a very simplistic explanation of the GI and for a more in depth, scientific approach I would have to ask you to google it. So we have eliminated bad carbs and bad fats and we are only eating lean protein. We are also constantly consulting a list of foods to verify whether or not we get a green light with the GI police. Doesn't seem that difficult so far, but then there is more. You also have to make sure that you don't mix certain foods! You either eat carbs with protein or protein with fat or just high-fiber carbs alone. You can't eat carbs with saturated fat from meat, because that will stimulate the pancreas to produce insulin which will trap the meal's fat in the body as stored fat. So, for example, your breakfast can be either carbs such as rye bread, wholewheat bread/cereal with protein such as fat-free cheese/cottage cheese/natural yogurt, skim milk OR protein such as eggs, fish, meat, poultry with fat such as bacon, cheese, sausage. Same for lunch and dinner: if you put some meat on your plate, don't accompany it by rice, eat it together with veggies and if you have high-fiber carbs don't add meat to it, have it with veggies. That's not all... Bread can only be eaten in the moring, forget about bread for lunch. Certain foods can't be cooked, because cooking them will raise their GI and we don't want that to happen : raw carrots are ok to eat, because they have a low GI due to their fiber, but the moment we cook them the fiber is no longer present and the carrot turns into a useless high GI starch. Pasta should also always be cooked al dente. And the list of things to keep in mind goes on.... Now, the most important part of this method is the fact that you can't really get off it. Most people treat diets as if though they were a temporary thing. They get on them and then they get off them. They not only get off them, but they also go back to their old eating habits.  Montignac or not, if one is overweight or obese and they change their eating habits to loose weight, it is only natural and logical that the moment they get off their diet and go back to their normal style of eating that their weight is going to crawl back! One doesn't have to have a PhD in nutrition or biology to understand that if we come back to the wrong way of eating our bodies are going to respond to it in the same way they did the first time around. Unfortunately, most people use diets only for a period of time, after which they sit back and relax with their plateful of steak and fries, which according to Montignac is heresy! So, I did try this Method. Am I still on it? Not to the full extent, but I didn't go back to my evil ways either. I do keep the principles in mind when I eat. For example, I learned to recognize the GI of foods and now avoid the high ones. I'm also not consuming any bad carbs or fats, which is referred to by some as Clean-eating. But as far as the combination of foods is concerned, I ditched it. Instead, I keep my portions reasonable. Did the Method work for me? Yes, it certainly did. It was a pain in the derriere for 7 months or so, but it did help me shed all the unnecessary weight. I should point out though that I used it along with daily pilates sessions. Like anything that makes it to the media, this Method received both negative and positive criticism so please use your own common sense in learning about it.

• 1 head romaine lettuce or celery
• 5-6 stalks of kale
• 1-2 apples
• 1 lemon
• 1-2 Tbsp fresh ginger (optional)