And then there’s all the food.

I like to bake for Christmas – in quantity, as if I had 20 people to bake for.  I also  like to eat what I bake, sometimes while I bake it.  Yeah, ok. Sometimes raw dough is appealing. The other night I baked poppyseed rolls and started asking myself how many pieces of raw dough could I eat if I gave up dinner?  Who even asks themselves such a question?

So what’s a person to do when you’re trying to lose that last 6 pounds while baking for the imaginary army of people you have in your head?

I’ve always believed that God is good and wants us to be happy.  But I also believe He wants us to think about what we’re doing.  So I’m coping with the onslaught of holiday food with “mindfulness.”

Mindful eating is just the moment-to-moment of awareness of what  you’re eating and why.  I think that during the holidays, it’s important to indulge ourselves in what makes us feel good, brings back wonderful, warm memories, or what just tastes good.  Just make sure you’re thinking about it and that you’re aware.  This awareness will allow you to make substitutions, limit yourself perhaps to the 2-3 things you like the best, and create in yourself an overall sense of well-being.  You CAN eat Christmas cookies  just like the rest of the family, but eating them calmly and deliberately probably will make you eat less and savor them more.

Our heads are full of voices, aren’t they.  All the voices in our lives telling us what they want, what they don’t want and what we should do.  In the midst of all that chatter, we can lose our own voice, our true “self”, and we can certainly lose track of God’s messages when we make Him compete with everything else.

Your head tells you that you need to eat a healthy breakfast.  Your other “voices” tell you that (1) there’s no time; (2) ME first – whoever “me” is – child, spouse, job; (3) quick is better, after all there’s no time; (4) I want to eat what all my friends are eating;’ (4) who cares? It’s not really that important.

There are a lot of references to body image in The Bible, so there is actually a Christian basis for taking care of yourself, including eating that healthy breakfast I was just talking about. Perhaps the most well-known is from Corinthians:

“Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”

1 Corinthians 6:19-20

We are all intelligent beings and most of us know what we need to do in order to eat healthy. It’s listening to that inner voice and making the changes we need to make. Awareness of our inner voice helps us to eat mindfully, rather than emotionally.  We can control what goes in our mouth; we own those decisions.

I still like a “cheat” sometimes.  Most often, it’s pizza.  I love pizza.  Sometimes it’s rice pudding or Starbucks ice cream. But it’s a thoughtful process for me now.  I enjoy my “cheat”, then I’m a little more careful the next day.  And I won’t cheat if I’m (1) angry, (2) sad, (3) or stressed in any way. Eating for comfort is something I had to leave behind.

Speaking of rice pudding, below is a vegan version that’s fantastic.

When it comes to choosing healthy eating, the going can get tough, especially at first.  The first month, in particular, is difficult.  And if, like me, you are the only person in your house trying to make this work, it can be really, really hard. The temptation is to either (1) be stoic and so into your own “thing” that you don’t involve anyone; or  (2) when you slip up, you give up – after all, there is that implied pressure from the rest of the house to eat french fries!!

But God doesn’t want us to give up.  Nor does he want us to go it alone.  I have to believe that God wants interaction and relationship with us, and for us to have interaction and relationships with each other.  When change seems overwhelming, or just when things seem overswhelming, God does not want us to abdicate, but to delegate.

Sharing the burden of a new lifestyle or a new problem is an easy choice.  Asking for help from God, from your family, and from your friends is much better than giving up. Asking for strength and support to make healthy choices for yourself isn’t a sign of weakness – it’s a sign we’re human.  I also believe it’s a sign that we’re doing what God wants us to do - to form a ‘community’ with others, and to be in full ‘communion’ with Him. These healthy choices can be about food – or not.  Asking God for help to have healthy conversations, or healthy attitudes is definitely not off the table!

And speaking of the table – the Thanksgiving table – below is  recipe for easy and healthy cranberry sauce.  We always bought cranberry sauce in a can, but homemade is a lot better for you and a lot easier to make than I thought. So enjoy!

Fresh and Healthy Holiday Cranberry Cherry Sauce

Ingredients:

• One package of fresh cranberries (approximately 1 pound bag)
• 1 cup agave nectar (or 1 cup raw cane sugar)
• 1 cup cold water
• 1 cup dried cherries
• Zest of one orange

Directions:

1. Place dried cherries in a bowl and cover in orange juice.  Let stand for 20 minutes so that the cherries get plump
2. Heat water to Boiling
3. Cook uncovered berries over medium high heat
4. Cook until berries pop open
5. Add dried cherries and orange zest
6. Cook until sauce slightly thickens (about 7 to 10 minutes minutes).
7. Cool and serve or refrigerate.

Makes about 4 cups.

Denial is your best friend.  A transformation of any  kind is major.  It’s daunting.  It’s overwhelming.  This is why most people don’t make the transformations they need to. That hill is JUST-SO HIGH.

So how about a little denial?

Look at your transformation in chunks.  Don’t  climb the whole  hill in one day – take it a little at a time.  At one time, I had 80 lbs. to lose – an unthinkable amount for me.  So, I just looked at it in 20 lb “chunks”.  Much more manageable!

The issue of spiritual transformation is not new to Christians. It has been a primary issue, though perhaps given different labels, throughout church history. From the time the Spirit of God descended upon the believers in Jerusalem, God has been transforming the souls of individual believers in the context of local Christian communities. But even to these early Christians, most of the time, transformation was gradual.  Even for the Apostles, transformation was gradual.  They didn’t believe right away, and Jesus didn’t force the issue.  He let His followers transform in their own good time.

It’s not so different with our own personal transformations – spiritual or otherwise.  If you feel the change you must make is huge, then look at it differently.  Take it in bite-size pieces. If you can’t picture yourself doing something for a lifetime, do it for one day.  Just a day.  Pray more. Be aware more. Make that change. Answer the call. See what happens.  Then start over the next day.

When we make changes we are often told of the things we need to give up and do without in order to make our transformation real, but in terms of food, denial really is your best friend.  We don’t have to give up anything – just TRANSFORM it into something healthy and workable. 

With the multitude of pumpkins available this time of year, I’m always looking for healthy and tasty ways to use them. A little research into transformations (AKA substitutions) netted this very nice cheesecake recipe.  Enjoy!

Pumpkin Cheesecake:
 

Ingredients:

•  
  • 3 8oz blocks of fat free cream cheese
  • 2 eggs/2 egg whites(or just use three eggs)
  • 1 cup Agave nectar (or sugar if you must)
  • 2 tsp. Vanilla extract
  • 1 small can of pumpkin
  • Pumpkin pie spice

Crust: 

• 2 cups oatmeal
• 3 chopped apples (Granny Smith or Honey Crisp)
• cinnamon

Directions:

Take the apples, chop them up and cook them down on the stove. Add cinnamon during the process – gradually they will break down and soften, that’s when you mash them to make applesauce. Add the oats into the pan with your applesauce and mix together.

After that put the mixture into a non-stick cheesecake pan. bake in a 350-degree oven and for 10-15 minutes (depends on the texture you like for your crust, and how wet the oats are).

Bring your cream cheese to room temp and blend it with the eggs, vanilla, and half of your agave nectar. Try to get this to be as smooth and creamy as you possibly can so you don’t have a crumbly cheesecake. Once the mixture is smooth add your pumpkin, the remainder of the agave nectar, and other spices. Continue to blend until smooth again.

Take your pan and add the filling. Shake it on your table for a minute or so just to get all the air bubbles out. Place in a 350 degree oven for 45 minutes or until you can place a tooth pick in the center and pull it out without anything on it. Let it cool to room temp before you place it in the fridge.

Nutrional Info:

• 275 cals per slice(if sliced into 1/8)
• 3g fat
• 42g carbs
• 18g protein

Transformation – of any kind – is scary.  It’s scary for you – the transformee – because you are thinking about changing something about yourself.  I am convinced that people just innately hate change.  Better the devil we know.  Comfort in sameness.  Pick your own cliche. Even when change is good for us, we typically dig in our heels.

Transformation is scary for those who love you.  What if you’re transformed into someone…different? Again, those who love us love the sameness, even if that’s not healthy.  What if you’re making a transformation and your partner isn’t?  What if they just don’t understand? What if?  What if? What if? Where will it all lead and will it lead you away?

It doesn’t matter what your personal transformation is: a life change? a physical change, a spiritual change.

Join me on the journey!

On Sundays, I  typically make a nice dinner.  It’s the only day of the week I make what I would consider a large dinner, thoughtfully and lovingly put together. To be honest, and blogging is about honesty you know,  I don’t have time for love during the week when it comes to meals.  Meals are whatever I can come up with that can be ready in 30 minutes that is  at least somewhat good for us.

But Sundays are different.  Sundays I have energy, and mostly I have time.  I consider it part of my personal stewardship of my household to provide one lovely meal per week.  I love giving my family a nice meal.  I love serving it. I don’t need people to “ooh” and “ahhh” over the meal.  I just love the feeling I get from providing the physical nourishment, as well as the emotional nourishment we receive from all sitting down together. Isn’t this how Joan Cleaver and Carol Brady felt?

Today I am serving a turkey breast with butternut squash, corn on the cob, and fresh green beans.  Mmmm.  You can feel the love, no?

During Stewardship Month, we talk about Serving and Giving.  Serving our church and serving God.  Giving to the church and giving for God’s purpose and glory. The fact is, when people serve from their hearts expecting nothing in return, their faith life blossoms.  When we serve, we feel closer to God and our love for God grows.  And when our love for God grows, it just makes sense that our love for others will grow as well.  All of that happens when we give of ourselves to serve.

I figure there are three ways to serve:

• Putting our self (our time, energy and talents) at the disposal of God so that he might use us.
• Putting our income at the disposal of God so he might leverage it.
• Putting our influence and power at the disposal of God so he might access it.

Service is not sitting in church once a week singing songs. Service is action-oriented! Service is not self-centered and about what’s convenient.  Service is other- centered! Service is not always glamorous, but it’s always grace-filled.

So, how are you serving God, your church and others today?  Is there someone in need of your service?

It wasn’t all that simple though. I was in a hurry and a little careless.  I dropped the first egg on the floor.  And then I got to thinking about eggs.

What do eggs and faith have in common? (These meandering thoughts are one of the reasons I have a hard time getting out of the house on time in the morning!)
 
Imagine an egg in its natural state.  It’s fragile, delicate, and can easily be cracked or broken.  This egg is susceptible to outside forces (such as you).  You can do many things with it: fry it, scramble it, make an omelet, poach it. Or drop in on the floor, much to the delight of your canine breakfast companion.
 
Your faith is not so different than the egg.  Often, it’s fragile and delicate. It can easily be broken by a poor self-image, tragic events, disappointments or the influence of others around us. Our faith can become hard and cold.  It can become scrambled when you pretend you know what you’re doing without asking God for guidance, but in fact, have NO idea what you are doing  – or fried in the face of tragic events.  Like the egg, our faith is too often susceptible to outside forces such as family, society and events.
 
Faith is a basic tenet in our lives as Christans, but I don’t think we take good care of it most of the time.  We are careless rather than nuturing; we assume our faith will be strong and make no effort to nuture it or to grow in faith.  If we don’t take care to nuture our faith, it gets easier to fry it or break it.  If you’re too busy feeling hurt, angry, or put down, if you’re too much in a hurry and you dial up the multitasking - it’s easy to lose sight of the need to nurture, to activate your faith.  We should all be sure to take the time for God and for activities that will help us grow in a relationship with Him.  In other words, be sure to guard your faith!

Scrambled Egg with Tofu

By stretching an egg with a little tofu, you reduce the cholesterol and saturated fat.

Ingredients

• 1 large egg
• 2 T salsa
• 1 teaspoon extra-virgin olive oil, or canola oil
• 6 cubes tofu, crumbled 
• 1 whole wheat pita pocket

Blend egg and salsa in a small bowl with a fork. Set aside.

Heat oil in a small nonstick skillet over medium-low heat. Add tofu and cook, stirring, until warmed through, 20 to 30 seconds.

Add egg mixture and stir until the egg is set, but still creamy, 20 to 30 seconds.

Spoon egg mixture into pita pocket and serve immediately

Sylvia is one of us. She and I have a lot in common, Sylvia having lost 80 pounds in the last two years and me at 73 pounds this morning.  We hate getting up in the dark, but we love how we feel after we work out.  We love the results of all our hard work, and we also love carrot cake.  In fact, we talk about it all the time.

Carrot cake is #2 on the list of foods that are really, really bad for you.  (Cream cheese is #1, if you’re interested, so you can imagine what carrot cake with cream cheese frosting will do…). So we started talking about ways to make carrot cake work for us.  Surely, there were substitutions that could be made so that a piece or two (or three) of carrot cake wouldn’t kill us.

The conversations on this topic took place mostly on a LifeCycle and as time went on, others in our little “sisterhood” chimed in: Amaranth flour instead of white flour; agave nectar instead of sugar; buttermilk instead of oil; flax meal instead of eggs. After a  couple of weeks, we started writing it all down into a coherent recipe.  All while on LifeCycles and treadmills and elliptical machines.  For our group, coming to the gym religiously every morning got EXCITING.  There was always chatter, there was action, and finally, the resulting recipe that we posted in the women’s locker room.  And then in the men’s when there were protests from the guys who arrived later in the middle of our conversation. Well, Nick the desk guy posted it for us – just to be clear.

So, what’s the point?

You can come to the gym every day, slap on  your headphones and never talk to anyone. Your workout gets done, sure enough. You’ve done what you came to do. But in developing relationships and working through problems with others, you form a community. You are not one girl on the LifeCycle peddling away to achieve 17 miles. You are a community – peddling, walking, running together – united in a purpose, even if it is to create a legacy of the perfect, healthy carrot cake.

And what does THAT have to do with, well, anything?

I grew up in  a church where you came in and put in your time.  45 minutes in a pew magically sent you to heaven.  It didn’t matter what you did once you got there, whether you had relationships with anyone, whether you helped someone in need, or what you did when you left. I remember it as being rather unfulfilling. Surely, you did what you came to do. But you left as you came. Nothing wrong with that on some level I suppose, but my gut tells me there’s a whole lot not right about it.

Church is a faith community. You can come and go and never be involved, never speak. You did what you came to do. But are you doing what God wants you to do?  What is your legacy?

A faith community is that – a community.  A community  pulls together, helps each other, furthers its causes. Does faith form a community, or is the community faith-forming in and of itself? Your thoughts welcome!

Oh, and here’s that carrot cake! 

“You always are eating,” my friend commented as she stopped by my desk one day.  And she’s right.  I probably eat 6-8 times a day, with a handful of something every 2 hours or so.

The downside to this is I stop what I’m doing to grab food; the upside is that I never really am hungry.  And at Edelman, this is beneficial because we always have doughnuts or cookies or cake or something in the kitchens. There are leftovers from client meetings, brainstorms, or gifts from people who feel their practice will benefit from a Tres Leches cake.

There was a time in my life where I would go for all this stuff; after all, by 2:00 in the afternoon I was hungry!  I had worked hard and I deserved a piece of Tres Leches cake, right?  You know the John Mellencamp song where he says “You gotta stand for something, or you’re fall for anything?” Desperate people make desperate choices.  Hungry people make desperate choices as well. Like that Tres Leches cake.

My eating day looks like this:

7:00 a.m. – breakfast

9:30 a.m. yogurt

11:00 a.m. fruit

1:00 p.m. lunch

3:00 p.m. almonds and fruit

5:00 p.m. raisins or carrots

7:00 p.m. dinner

I am full all the time, and I’ve decided that when I’m full I don’t feel that “desperate for food” feeling anymore, and I like that better. And I am much more likely to think before I eat.

There was a time in my life, not that long ago, when I had a deeper desperation. Desperate for a relationship with God, desperate to belong to a faith community, and desperate that I wasn’t ready for either, or that neither God not a faith community was ready for me. I went to church twice a year and I didn’t understand why I wasn’t fulFILLED. Get it? I was hungry all the time, and hungry people grasp for doughnuts, not almonds.

I’ve found in my church a satisfaction for my hunger, and by making a commitment to myself that I will attend regularly, if not weekly, I’ve been able to feel a relationship with God growing.  I don’t believe this is possible by going to church twice a year. By the time I walked through the doors of Faith Lutheran Church, I really needed to be fed early and often.

So, whether you are struggling with your relationship with food, or in your relationship with God, I encourage to dine – often. You will be filled more than you can imagine.

• I will plan a healthy meal
• I will pass on the salt
• I will get a good night’s sleep

There is an opportunity to join the Kashi Community, and section calling community members to “spread the word” and “share your accomplishments.”  The Day of Change pages are full of healthy-looking, smiling people – the implication being, the more healthful choices you make (i.e., the more Kashi you eat), the happier you’ll be. There was a section on “being more receptive”, and even a section where a reader mentioned her “leap of faith” towards a healthier lifestyle.

Now, I like Kashi products and they’re really good for you. I enjoy the spiritual undertones of the Kashi Community and the Day of Change.  I wondered though how awesome it would be if we put that much effort into enticing people to go to church or grow in their relationship with God? What if we all took Kashi’s challenge one step further to a “Day of Change” in our faith? Would this “Day of Change” lead to the same smile that broke across my face at the first taste of Kashi Caribbean Carnival Pizza?

Here are some ideas for my spiritual “Day of Change”:  All the above, because healthy food and adequate sleep DO make you feel better and, I believe, better able to discern God’s meaning and messages; PLUS

• I will take time to pray each day
• I will be aware and receptive to God’s messages
• I will support my church with my time, talent and treasure as much as possible
• I will become a member of my faith community, rather than just “attend” once a week
• I will spread The Word
• I will share my spiritual accomplishments as a means of encouraging others

Change takes conscious effort and implementing a laundry list of changes all at one time can be overwhelming.  This why when, changing to a healthier diet, I believe it’s best to go one step at a time.  This is why, when deepening your relationship with God, it’s also probably best to go one step at  a time.

I was told once that if you have a hard time envisioning yourself  doing something for the rest of your life, just try it for one day.  So my challenge to you is to pick a bullet point and consciously try it for one day, and let the community know how you feel.