A Question From a Friend

Late last week I received the following statement and question from an ex-pat friend of mine in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine.

"I came to the realization the other day that I need to lose some serious weight. Except for cutting out bread and beer, I'm not sure what to do. You know what resources / foods we have here. Is there any approach you'd recommend?"

The first steps

The first thing I want to address is what my friend calls resources/foods in his question to me. While he may not realize it, much of the food in Ukraine that is available is probably available to him is closer to real food than many of us have in the West have had as we have been subjugated to a great deal of processed foods over the last forty years. In fact the idea of processed foods and what was provided to the average population, in my speculation, is that many of the companies providing rations for the troops in Europe provided a great deal of food stuffs and food like products during the war effort against the Nazis. The money they were making must have been a pretty penny and when the war was concluded they needed a new market for these food stuffs. Yes, I am using the world food stuffs here on purpose because they were no longer real food.

While I never did military duty in Canada, I can't recall one of my friends in either Canada or the United States of America who did, who ever actually peeled potatoes during that part of their stint in the army. On the other hand, I had plenty of friends who served in the Soviet Army before Ukraine's Independence who understood what it was to clean potatoes for their fellow servicemen. I am not saying that serving in the Soviet Army was better, but the fact that their society was not solely motivated by profit of big conglomerates, did clearly have an effect on the quality of their food supply; and at this point in my life I would say that it was for the better.

While, I spent nearly ten years living in Ukraine and understand what is available in the stores, at its markets and in general, the decisions of selecting real food will truly depend on my friend. He will have to learn to make healthy eating choices. We have all heard that more is not necessarily better, it's the quality that counts.

If he realizes that he really does have to lose some weight as I did a year ago, I think he will have to make some sacrifices. Some of those sacrifices, unfortunately for him will be those that I also made! Bread and beer! For the most part the bread that my friend has been eating is closer to real food than most of all the foods combined that North Americans eat. It is bread which is is produced from whole wheat that has had minimal processing, and this is much better than eating “Wonder bread”! Nonetheless, while I am not a nutritionist or dietician, research does seem to suggest that bread and something that some are calling “Wheat Belly” is caused by an intake of bread and wheat based products.

Last year, I had to travel to Germany for business. It was during that period that I basically took a close to a three month vacation from a North American lifestyle, I knew that I couldn't simply diet, but needed a complete lifestyle change. When you have a hard time bending down to tie your shoe laces sitting on the edge of your bed, you realize that you really do need to change. That trip was an ideal opportunity to make a change in my life. We all have to realize that change doesn't come without some sacrifice!

Ukraine's cornucopia of options

Wherever you live has a cornucopia of options when it comes to making healthy food choices. How you make those choices does of course depend on your budget, though nonetheless, if my friend wants to loose weight then he will have to make some sacrifices for about six weeks or so. I understand his love of beer; however, in order for him to pull his system into one that recognizes what he is feeding it he will have to give up beer, and bread for some time. I did it, it didn't kill me and I know for a fact that if he is fifty pounds lighter he will be much better off if the lift/elevator decides it is on strike for a few days due to the lack of service in the country. 

I would like to tell my friend that it is worth taking a break form beer and any alcohol, I did this while living in Ukraine and I lost about 10 kg during that period. I did so for about three weeks, and in the end it made it easier for me to walk everywhere in the city, and get to my fifth-floor flat when the lift was not working. There were a few other things I abstained from, added new things to my diet that I had not been eating before. The first of these was Oatmeal in the morning, on occasion with with some dried raisins, chopped up figs, or other fruits that I had available – and never adding any type of processed sugar to it. Last year when I was in Germany I would often prepare some polenta and supplement it with some bio-yogurt and fruits.

While in Ukraine some of the other things that I ate or didn't eat were very carefully selected. These were selected by a friend of mine who practices non-traditional medicine, though I full trusted him and still do. He is a gifted individual, and if you take the time to listen to him you can gain a great deal of knowledge. 

One of the most important things I learnt from my friend was to understand the health of my stomach. What what microbes were living in there and how it effected my health. There were things I could and should not eat. One of the should not's were wheat products, though buckwheat or hrechka as we all know it in Ukraine is not related and is fine.

When it comes down to the number of different factors, the most important one that few talk about in diet or lifestyle change regimes is the most normal and one that can make sense to everyone. In order to loose weight, not only do you have to have a healthy diet that doesn't screw up your natural body functions; you must also find a way to be more active – burn more calories than you consume and the only real way doing this is to become aware of both your caloric expenditure as well as your caloric intake. It is only when the later is lesser than your expenditure of calories will you see a loss in weight. In the long run, the only way to loose weight and keep it off is a lifestyle change. That change for me came in the form of making better food choices and becoming more active.

A different mode of commitment

Clearly my friend is willing to cut out beer and bread, though it is more than that. It comes down to making selection of different foods. I am far from an expert in this realm but I do know from experience that when I am more active physically, I don't crave, what we can call -”bad foods”. Those are the ones that we prepare in bad ways, and not so much in the way they are in their raw form. My friend is on the right track, but unless you don't get out and move, things aren't going to go well for you in the long run.

He asked me for an approach that I would recommend, and this will vary from every individual though I believe that he is more or less in control of what we call our working day – very much like I am – so I will recommend the following and what I have found works for me. He will have to do a little bit of research to determine his BMR or Basal Metabolic Rate though I have sent him in the right direction with that link for understanding, but you won't have to do the calculations that is what you have a BMR calculator for. In addition to his BMR he should also know what his ideal BMI or Body Mass Index number is currently and what he should be aiming for. I still have a long way to go to reach my ideal BMI, and my goal is for that to happen sometime next spring to early summer.

Based on a great deal of reading, and self examination, I became to understand that the most important fact was caloric expenditure versus caloric in take. There is no other way for this to work in a metabolic process. After all our bodies are nothing but big chemical plants that try to process what we put into them! If we consume a great deal of empty calories that do not contribute to your body's operation, then we are clearly not heading in the right direction. In short you have to maintain the proper balance between what you are consuming, making sure that you are getting the protein, vitamins and nutrients your body needs as well as the carbohydrates needed.

Since I have practically eliminated all processed foods from my diet, there is seldom a time that I have a craving for something. I treat myself to things I like on occasion, but I make sure I don't over do it. There are plenty of tools online that can help you understand your caloric intake, when my friend or anyone else starts to understand that and really how much you really need to eat, and how much exercise you need to do in order to slowly but steadily loose weight that is when the real changes start to happen. It was my understanding of these two elements that lead me to experimenting more in the kitchen, because I realized that eating healthy food didn't mean that it couldn’t or shouldn't taste good.

Helping out a friend... and Grandma's everywhere!

As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts I made a decision on a life style change a year ago from the day I started this blog. It wasn't easy, but it was a choice I had to make. Along the way I have found a number of ways of staying motivated, but there is one friend whom I have probably known since I was in my early teens and he was friends with my younger brother. Over the years we have managed to stay in touch. I have helped him with language training for roles he has auditioned for and he has always found the time to be encouraging and motivating during this change in my life, at times much more so the family members that you would expect to hear something positive from.

About a week ago my friend Jasson Finney, who is an actor, personal trainer and motivational speaker sent me an e-mail about a new project he is working on. It didn't at all surprise me as he has shared segments of video on this project in the past, while I would send him recipes of healthy eating options I would whip up in whatever kitchen I was close to.

There have been more than a few times that Jasson and I have sat at the same table, and most of those times were at his mother's place for either for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. Some of the most memorable times were when his grandmother was still with us. In fact I understand just how much Jasson's grandmother meant to him. Ukrainian grandmother's, like most grandmothers are not simply a grandmother; they are really an institution within each family, and also within a larger subset of the communities they live in. I never knew either of my grandmothers. My maternal grandmother passed at a very young age in her early thirties, when my mother was but eleven years old. My paternal grandmother was behind the Iron Curtain, she died when I was about eleven years old. To this day I remember that day when my father learned of the passing of his mother, the letter, the black and white photographs from the funeral. I never knew a grandmother! Though I very well understand their value in our families and communities.

However, those dinners happened many years ago, but a more recent brunch last year on Mother's Day was quite a nice change from the standard day out with Mom. Jasson gave me a call and invited me to go over to his place with my Mom for brunch, it was there were I met two new faces to add to the vast array of many people I know scattered around the globe.

New faces then travels

To this little fest of celebrating our mothers, Jasson had also invited a friend of his Tammy and her mother Elaine. Elaine, like my mother and Jasson's grandmother is also someone's grandmother, and thus with this she brings to her family and community many traditions, particularly in the area of culinary expertise. While that Mother's Day was the first time I met Elaine, it wasn't the last time that I would meet Tammy, but that wouldn't come for some time.

Before the third week of October started in 2012, I was off to Germany for nearly three months where my lifestyle changes started to slowly materialize. I had my own small flat for that period of time and I started going to the gym regularly, and walking practically everywhere, within the small town were I was locate. I completely abstained from any alcohol for nearly that entire three month period. I started regain my desire to prepare healthy and tasty meals. I made very attempt to eliminate any processed foods from my diet. This together with a regular regime of exercise, helped me a great deal, one step at a time, to losing fifty pounds over the first six months. I never craved anything during that period, I began to eat smaller portions of healthy food, and maybe four to five times a day. I felt great and I felt energized!

During most of my stay in Germany, I would be in touch with Jasson. I started sharing with him some of the dietary changes I had made I my life, as well some of the work I was doing on my own in the gym. While I had known him for a long time this was the first time I had ever received such encouragement and support because of a decision I had made to take back my life. We had many different Skype conversations, and I have always appreciated his supportive role in helping me change.

When I returned to Canada, it was Jasson who helped me find an affordable gym with great staff and equipment. This allowed me to continue on my path to further self development, during one of the nastiest winters we have had in Montreal in many years.

At some point in the spring Jasson told me he would be back in Montreal for a little while and that he would be having a pot luck dinner/get together for some friends. He added, “I want you to bring one of those bean soups you whipped up when you were in Germany, it sounded so great!”

Well that dinner party came along and this is where I would once again run into Tammy, her new boyfriend, and some of Jasson's other friends and family. It was a great evening! All kinds of great food.

Some foodie memories

That pot luck that Jasson had organized brought back a few memories of dinner parties my room mates and I would organized, or would simply materialize, almost organically. One of these started out as a birthday dinner for a friend of mine who's birthday happened to fall on Valentine's Day. Originally, it was just supposed to be two of us, then one of my roommates, Chris, said his girlfriend Lori was going to be down and asked if he could join me in the kitchen. That little party ended up with fourteen people around our small kitchen table, including our other two room mates and the four girls who lived upstairs.

Though that wasn't the only dinner party, in 1989 my room mate John and I invited two young ladies we had met playing volley ball in the Ukrainian community in Ottawa. We planned that menu for a few days, when shopping for the ingredients the morning of the day before the planned event. Most of the prep work was done on Saturday, the day Nathalie and Christine, were supposed to come over for dinner. That Saturday night John and I attended a going away party for an acquaintance of ours in Ottawa who worked as a journalist for the Globe & Mail – he was getting posted to Hong Kong. It turned out to be quite an affair, the amount inebriating fluids my room mate and I had consumed clearly created a picture to the young women who we had invited, that there was no way would be in any shape to be preparing them dinner, and at about 2:30 in the morning one of them broke it to me. “We aren't coming for dinner tomorrow!” Neither John, nor I, were pleased with this, but I know our neighbour, whose name now escapes me, together with her significant other, were extremely happy to be invited for Duck a l'orange wild rice and mixed vegetables. She even at one point during dinner, stated: “May more women stand you guys up – as long as you invite me!”

And now back to the shtick

I am a story teller, so I do stray off the path well trodden at times, but that is what makes life interesting. Now that you know about Jasson, and my connection to him, I want to share this video with you all.



It is in this video that I met the culinary side of Tammy's mom and saw her again. It was in part that in watching his video, that I could see my personal need to start getting back into my passion for food. I know Jasson is passionate about everything he does. I have a passion for food and more particularly healthy food, particularity in the last year. I want to share this passion with you, and I hope to at some point introduce you all to Jasson, but in the mean time, for those of you who would like to see a different twist on the Grandmothers who are foodie institutions for their families and communities, I would love you guys to support Jasson with his project.

This support can come in many different ways, you can provide him with your Grandma as an inspiration for a programme, or you can simply donate to get his indiegogo campaign off the ground. In any way you folks can help it would be appreciated! Right now, I 'm just returning the support a friend gave me during a period where changing my lifestyle meant a great deal to me. In time, I know that I will find a different way to support this project, but at the moment, this is the best way I know how to support this particular friend!

A morning breakfast...

Breakfast, an important meal of the the day, and more than many will imagine. However, I for the last year have always tried to get some fluids in me and some movement in my body before having a true North American type of breakfast. I do this for a few different reasons. The first is to get my system lubricated. Sure it sounds simple, but usually the first thing we want to do in the morning is to urinate and defecate; that is if our systems are working normally. So the first thing i do is gets some fluids into my body.

This morning, I chose some freshly steeped ginger tea from fresh ginger root. The benefits of ginger are numerous, and I am not going to be relating them to you here. I want people who read my blog to think about their choices, and eventually learn as I have how to change their dietary habits. I travelled my journey, and if you are ready travel yours I would appreciate it. We are all very different, but me telling you what my readers need to do is just not mys style!

Yes, this morning was my fifty-first birthday... A year after I had made a decision to change my lifestyle.

Before I went for my nearly 3km walk, I was contemplating on what I could do with oatmeal, and rather than turning to the WWW I went out and looked at what I had in the garden. I thought to myself about what I had and thought how I could incorporate it into a breakfast!

There really wasn't much left in the garden, some beets, and Red Swiss Chard. It was not unusual for me to use the stems and greens of beets during the summer in omlettes; however, this was a bit of a different situation.

I went for my walk through the community I grew up in, and very much aware of the changes that had transpired from my adolesence! When I arrived home, it was certain that I wanted something tasty and out of the ordinary, though at the same time healthy in a number of aspects. Eureka Somehow, I didn't want to simply have oatmeal this morning. I recalled having a baked egg dish when I was visiting with family in Ukraine, so I thought. What kind of baked egg dishes could I have with oatmeal. Though I really did have a hankering for something with a bit of bite on my birthday.

After prancing around the WWW for a bit, I got a few ideas, though what I had in mind was a little more natural in content than what I had seen.

Oatmeal! Spinach! Egg! That wasn't making my consensus of ingredients I had on hand!

So why is it a nice bite?

Because it bites you back to some degree, however, it also provides you with a lot of energy and great things for your body!

While there are only six ingredients and I can guarantee you will get a great boost from such a breakfast.

How to do it!
It's not Rocket Science!

The primary focus is:

• Oatmeal - this can be of either format - quick preparation or slow cook!
• Red Swiss Chard - this can be replaced with either Beet Greens or Spinach.
• Garlic - One big clove - cleaned and chopped up nice and fine. The finer the better - but all is according to taste! :)
• Medium Egg - The healthier the egg, the healthier you are!
  

Cooking mediums: Water for Oatmeal, butter for garlic and egg.

The other things like cinnamon are child's play. The silly stuff - And a parallel world!

Chop your Red Swiss Chard so you have about half a cup... this comes to about two big leaves with their stems.. Don't forget to wash them when you take them from your garden!

Take your one clove of garlic. Clean it in whatever way you know how and chop the clove up into little pieces. If you like bigger pieces that is great. You do want to some degree infuse the butter that you will be frying that egg in in that garlic. However, the best is to make sure that you lay down your egg on those lovely little pieces of garlic that you have browned in the pan. (Personally, I use a small three inch cast iron pan, it works so well!)

When your Oatmeal is nearly half cooked, throw in our Red Swiss Chard. Stir it aound so that it gets in touch with the other food in the bowl. When all is mixed, return it to cooking for its required time.

I hope you have cooked your oatmeal in a bowl you can live with?

During this period you are watching your egg frying with your selected chunks of garlic. You have the choice to turn it or not. It's up to you! Just like it was up to you how important is was to cut those pieces of garlic!

When your Oatmeal is ready, with the other things you have thrown in there;placed yor fried egg with that wonderful garlic on top of your Oatmeal...

Yes, I don't have a picture of my first attempt, but I think I will love to see such attempts. You will love the food and I hope you share the pictures.

A lifetime of upheaval and a year of positive change!

For many years I have had to re-invent myself, as markets changed, life changed, and the world changed and continues to change all around us. A year ago today I probably made a very consciencious decision to change something else, but because I had to adapt to the change all around us but because I wanted to get back my life.

Putting things in perspective

During my high school years I swam competitively at a provincial and national level. Demands were high and training extremely rigorous though I was never quite good enough to get a full ride scholarship south of the border like some of my friends had. When I returned from National Short Course Swimming Championships in Victoria, British Columbia in February of 1981, I had one of the most difficult decisions any young athlete would have to make - to stick with what I had dedicated so many long hours and years to or stop in order to get an education?

I gave the sport up because I knew that without great marks I wouldn't get into university, though the guiding force of my life, which was an extremely active lifestyle just wasn't there any more, and that is when the battle of the bulge started. Though, there were a few interruptions before it conquered my life.

After an abysmal first year at univeristy, and basically being thrown out, I took what I told many what was my first academic sabbatical, to return what had given discipline and focus to my life. In the summer of 1982 I decided I would go back and and swim with my old Club, the Pointe Claire Swim Club. It was challenging, I had to get back to my ideal body weight and had I known then what I know know, it would have probably been a lot easier to do. I never got down to that weight but I did have to drop a significant amount of weight, and managed to get within about 6% of my ideal competitive weight, but it was a struggle.


During that, what I call my sabbatical year from academia of any type, helped me refocus somewhat on my life, and then returning to study at the Univesity of Waterloo. I intended to graduate from where I had started, for a very personal reason. During that first year of hell I had run into an academic adviser who had told me that I should probably not be in university, and that I wasn't good enough. I wanted to prove him wrong, and prove to myself that giving a sport that was my life and that I lived for was not in vain.

So in the autumn of 1982 I returned to what some have dubbed the MIT of the north, to noot study in a very technical area, but to pursue languages, literature and political science. While for my first year back I swam and played water-polo it was not at the same level as I had previously, and eventually campus life's unhealthy lifestyle got the better of me and it started again. However I had a reprieve for a few years, because some time during my undergrad years I had planned a crazy trip with a long-time friend which forced me to get back into shape. I didn't have a choice! You don't get on a bicycle and intend to ride from Vancouver to Montreal unless you are some semblance of shape. It became a trip of a life-time after I had completed my B.A. There was one little sweet moment after I had graduated and was at a reception and actually was able to look that adviser in the eye and say to him, "I guess you didn't expect to see me here! Well here, I am!" While pointing to the diploma which represented the degree which had been confered upon me in the graduation ceremony an hour or so earlier.

I was still keen on academia for a bit, but after a while, I just wanted to get on with my life so took a more practical approach after my first Master's degree. It wasn't long before after my second Master's degree that I became gainfully employed thanks to some of the newly acquired knowledge of my third academic acheivement, and a whole lot of perseverance of trying to wrap my noodle around computers, database design as well as business, science and technical information.

Gainfully employed, but also gaining

Throughout the 1990s I was trying a number of things to keep the weight off, from changing my eating habits, reducing my beer intake and even getting regular exercise, but nothing seemed to be in the right combination.

Over the seven years of sitting at a desk and thinking about ways to work smarter and provide better service to our clients, which ranged from Desktop delivery of news services to a whole new way of library operations, and moving from mainframe to a Unix based client/server model, knowledge management and competitive intelligence initiatives the day came where, I like most other human bipeds, are just to to much weight for the shareholders of the company and decisions are made and they can be extremely drastic. Though, I have long forgotten to think about shareholders, and the stock market that is a primarily manipulated insititution.

It was a decision to appease shareholders regardless of the human cost as far as I am concerned. However, now I am extremely thankful it happened.

While I had been gainfully employed and even getting above average salary increases, a change in grade and benefits, and even informed by my suprvisor "that she would be retiring in the next six to eight months and was putting my name in for the coroporate management training program". After all of the positive growth and contribution, one can never be truly prepared for the day when you get called to the Human Resouces office and are shown your conditions of termination. That happened to me at the end of January of 1999, and that same day there were close to 800 others who were terminated by my employer. It was not a fun feeling, they even had security around to make sure that I and many others "didn't go postal"!

Changing continents

In March of 1999 I had made a decision that I would be leaving for Ukraine, my paternal homeland, for up to three months to spend time with family and friends and see what other opportunities I could find with my variety of skills in addition to my language skills.

The food and drink there were extremely different to Canada, though I had travelled for visits to the newly independent nation two times before its independence and four times afterward! I was in for a completely new way of life and not necessary a heathy one in many aspects, though it was life, and the foods I was introduced to, the ways of preparation, and the age old traditions will always stay with me.

I saw food culture in Ukraine changed quickly during the close to a decade that I called Kyiv, the nation's capital, my home. During the first year or two I would go to, thanks to recommendations of friends I was working with, to the Stolova or Soviet style cafeteria, where one could get a relatively healthy meal, with real food, and cooked in a traditional manner for an extremely reasonable price. If I can recall properly, I could have soup, salad, and main course for all of about USD $1.85.

It was regular for the NGO community I was providing consulting services for to go to the Stolova of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine. I got to know the "golden toothed" ladies by name, they knew what I liked and I know they were the mothers of someone, who cared about what they were feeding those who visited them. Some of those women in the serving line even got to know some of us by name! While they were industrially prepared meals, the ingredients were natural. Ukraine was a totally different world in 1999 to about 2001 or 2002.

Then came the more affordable Ukrainian style fast food joints, to which to this day are still a great deal healthier, than most North American establishment called fast food.

At some point my time for food, drinks and discourse with friends became more important than really thinking about what I was eating. The bulge continued... and at times I was really actually not in a frame of mind to deal with a change that I understood that was necessary, but couldn't tackle it alone. There were many factors.

At some point I did make inroads to abstaining from toxins that would effect the way my body processed its intake, and managed to loose not a great deal of weight, but I was appreciative of it Because in Kyiv, Ukraine's capital you walk a lot if you live in the city's core; and, if my elevator went out, I found it much easier to climb the stairs to the fifth floor, where my flat was located. This is what I would call the first epiphany, regarding my food lifestyle change.

Return to Canada

My return to Canada was for a mulititude of reasons, though primarily due to a condition of my mother's health, and the rapidly deterioating businesses and political climate of the nation.

While I as growing up I faced some challenges. We were what could be considered a lower-middle class family. Though there was a twist, my father died of an aneurysm, when I was sixteen years old. We had our own home, and while my father was alive, he in fact did most of the cooking. He taught me to make my first pancakces and crepes when I was about ten years old. He and I would go mushroom picking together and fishing. We would make use of everything we ever gathered... However, then when he was no longer with us our life changed. We had to cope. My mother, as I anylyse in retrospect had become used to her very simple Irish heritage diet, but using additional canned ingredients - which had made her life simpler. Or had it?

I personally feel, due to my personal experience, that the loss of my father, and someone who would rather cook stuff from scratch, to my mother's post war brainwashing by marketers - had an effect on my personal health. It wasn't just my personal health but that of an entire generation.

My mother is now eighty-four years old. She gets all kinds of publications about good health, senior living, and best eating, but she will still buy her cans and prepackaged food-like stuffs. She likes her bread that has little or no nutritive value, whatsoever, and asks why I pay $3.00 for a one pound loaf of dark non-processed bread? And then adds, "I'm still alive and I'm not as fat as you are?" Though there are many factors that my mother won't and will not understand, because of a number of factors: from not truly listening, to simply not really caring and being thankful that she has lived as long as she has!

My mother's understanding of health is incredibly different than mine. Genetically it is not irregular that she will live a long life. She had ancestors who lived into their late ninties, and her father lived to eighty six. She seems to not figure that into her calculation. She clearly has her own model of life and her age, I am not going to change it, though, for most of her life and even adult life she ate "whole foods" it was only in the 1970s, when my father was not around to cook because of his shift work that we ate a combination of what could be had. In 1979 when I lost my father, that all changed. It became a lot of things that were purchased based on price, not on value of what was being offered. Please, understand, I am not judging my mother but judging the society we had become. It is only after many years of evaluating what I personally went through that I could even consider starting this blog.

I know of many different former atheletes who have gone through similar transformations. We are not alone, and nor are others that want to somehow change their lifestyle.

I will not just chat about food here and what it does for us, but I will also try to engage, in the future some other authors I know for their expertise to collaborate with me.

This will be done through personal contact, knowledge of nutrition health and fitness as well as the creative aspect of matters.

In short, this is an introduction to the side of life that has changed in the last year, not only because of food but because of regular exercise!

Welcome to : Scrumptious and Health Food Alchemy!

William (Vasyl) Pawlowsky