Tag Archives: PH

Books, Diet, Food

The Starving Artist Cookbook – Get it While it’s Free!

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Click Image to see on Amazon
Click Image to see on Amazon

On August 22, Self-Publishing Guru Joe Konrath reported that he got drunk and wrote, edited, formatted, designed a cover for and published a short on Amazon in an hour. On four different occasions. He found this exercise tremendously freeing and challenged his readers to try it, giving them 8 hours to accomplish what he did in one.

On August 26, he promised to feature anyone who met the challenge in his August 30 blog: 8 Hour Contest Winners. He gave us until August 29th to complete this and send him the info (click the link to see the books, many of them are free tonight and tomorrow).

I’m not a huge Konrath fan, but I was outside of Chicago at the time visiting my stepmother. Her only computer is an ancient Dell that can surf for exactly five minutes before the browser locks up. There’s only so much I can do on my Kindle Fire. Like watch my on-line writing group buds whooping it up over the silly books they were writing under groaner pen-names. The more fun they were having, the more I felt like I was missing out.

Then I remembered. Back before Lia Anderson was a gleam in my eye, I was researching publishing options. Not because I thought I had a novel in me. Because I wanted to write a cookbook. I abandoned this project for two reasons: 1. I upgraded my word processing app and it ate my MS and 2. I thought eating right was going to cure my TBI (fool, I) and when I realized I didn’t have all the food answers, I dropped the project until such time that I did.

I never did find my answers, but I realized I had a lot of recipes I’d collected along the way. I got back into Cincinnati at 11 p.m. on August 27. Twelve hours later I sat down at my computer (lovely, lovely Mac! How I missed you!) and tossed together The Starving Artist Cookbook, skimming just under Konrath’s 8 hour deadline.

It’s not perfect. I didn’t get to include everything I wanted. The cover is, admittedly, ‘Meh.’ I didn’t have time to create a table of contents. But it’s out there. And tonight and tomorrow, it’s FREE! After that it’s $.99.

I will be adding to this book (and raising the price to a lofty $2.99) sometime this fall. Then I will contact the ‘Zon and tell them I have improved my book, and would they please let all the nice people who already bought it, download the improved version.

It’s written from Lia’s perspective, since she and I share the same quirky attitude about food. It has a large section featuring vegan smoothies, including Lia’s famous ‘pond scum’ smoothies. There’s info about making yogurt (which you can do with almond milk, if you like) and cultured veggies (yum!) and many raw food recipes. There are only a few recipes with include fish and chicken, and none with red meat. It includes several chocolate recipes, including raw fudge and my own crazy cake. One of the first things I’m going to add when I update the book will be Jim McDonald’s crazy cake recipe (which gets a mention in soon-to-be-released Maximum Security).

So, get your copy of The Starving Artist Cookbook now, while it’s free. I guarantee you’ll find at least one keeper recipe in it. And if you don’t, I’ll give you back every penny you didn’t spend on it.

Aztec Diet, Diet, Food

Aztec Diet: Coffee, Tea or ?

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Stats: -1 pound. Net Loss: 6 pounds

Breakfast: Papaya Yum; Lunch: Dr. Bob’s Kale Blueberry Smoothie with ginger and cacao; Snack: freeze dried veggie chips; Dinner: Spinach Portobella Smoothie with 1 clove garlic, made with hot water; Snack: nothing

Now that I’m refreshing my memory about PH, it occurred to me to look at my morning cup of coffee. When I first decided to tackle my weight problem last fall, I was drinking a morning cup of hot chocolate from the convenience store on my way to the dog park. The first dietary change I made was swapping this for a cup of coffee with almond milk. I knew eliminating the chemicals and sugars in the hot chocolate mix would be beneficial. It did not occur to me to ask myself how the PH factored in. I wondered if I would do better with green tea, instead.

Your typical cup of coffee has a PH between 5 – 6. Darker roasted blends are at the top of the scale. You can also reduce the acidity of coffee by steeping coffee grounds in cold water for more than 12 hours. Use this concentrate to make your coffee. Caffeinated teas also run between 5 – 6, with green tea at the high end of the spectrum. So tea and coffee are comparable, and are not a problem if limited to a morning cuppa.

In contrast, soda pop varies between a PH of 2 – 3, except root bear, which is 4. These drinks are loaded with chemicals and calories along with the acid. My personal choice is to never drink them.

For the rest of the day, I drink water. Even better is water with lemon. This is a widely accepted practice for alkalizing your body. I have a friend who is doing a great job of outliving her life expectancy while fighting stage 4 cancer. One of her habits is to start her day by squeezing a lemon into her morning glass of water. Today I pulled out my grandmother’s old pitcher. I added the juice from one lemon to a quart of water. I plan to add this to my daily routine from here on out.

Another healthful beverage option is 1TSP – 1 TBSP raw apple cider vinegar, with or without raw honey, in a glass of water. This tonic is reputed to have many health benefits. Bragg’s has been promoting it for decades. Now they have bottled the tonic and you can buy it at your natural food store for many times the cost of making it yourself at home.

It has occurred to me that eating popcorn is not the best option for a snack, even if it is on the approved list. I do love the smell of popping popcorn, and I really enjoy the crunch. If I need a snack tonight, I’m going to try celery instead.

Papaya Yum

    1 Cup papaya
    1/8 Cup cashews
    1/2 Cup Tropical Blend (pineapple, mango, strawberry)
    1 large handful baby spinach
    1 thumb ginger
    2 TBSP ground chia seed
    Water, to desired consistency

Carol’s Kale Blueberry Variation

    1 young coconut, meat and water
    1 Cup blueberries
    3 kale leaves, chopped or torn
    2 TBSP ground chia seed
    1 TBSP raw cacao
Aztec Diet, Diet, Food

Aztec Diet Day 9: Phantastic PH

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Stats: -1 pound; Net Loss: 5 pounds

Breakfast: Carol’s Blueberry Kale Variation; Lunch: Papaya Yum; Snack: 9 Triscuits; Dinner: miso broth with a red bell pepper and a glass of water with 1 TBSP Chia; Snack: air-popped popcorn

This morning it was raining steadily. I’d decided I was not going to go to the dog park. Then the phone rang. It was Tom, my dog-park buddy who has an Amazon Prime account. “Your scale is here. It must have come yesterday. It was between the screen door and the door when I went out this morning. Are you coming up?”

I got wet.

I’m so happy to have a new scale. The old one bobbled around and was unreliable. I would weigh myself a second time after my morning coffee and it would read a pound less. On this scale, it reads .8 pound more. It’s futuristic looking. A slab of tempered glass on top of 4 stubby legs and a huge digital read out. Doesn’t go with my grandmother’s furniture, but then, neither does my Kindle or my iMac.

Yesterday, I was talking about the cleansing properties of greens. This is largely due to the high PH of all green foods. PH is a number which represents how acid or alkaline something is. The scale goes from 1 – 14, with 7 being neutral. You’ll find controversy between experts regarding which foods are acid and which are alkaline because the net effect on the body is different than the PH of the food itself. Lemon is one example of a food that is acid but has a high alkalizing effect on the body. The lists vary a bit, but you’ll notice certain things remain constant.

Why is PH important?

Remember the Andromeda Strain? The killer space virus could only function in a certain range of PH. The human body’s optimal PH is 7.365, slightly alkaline. The Standard American Diet (SAD) is highly acidic.

What happens when the blood is too acid?

1. It starts robbing the body of needed minerals to operate properly. This promotes a variety of degenerative diseases.

2. The body naturally becomes acidic when you die. At which time the body becomes host to a variety of organisms that function well in an acidic environment (corpse) and whose purpose is to promote the decomposition of the body. When your diet is too acidic, you wind up emulating a corpse and inviting all manner of nasties to take up residence.

In 1931, Otto Heinrich Warburg won the Nobel prize for discovering that cancer cells do not use oxygen. This work, unfortunately was largely ignored by mainstream medicine. It did spawn alternative treatments for cancer, such as treatment with hydrogen peroxide. In his later years, he connected PH to this theory, noting that cancer cells maintain a lower PH, as low as 6.0. They go dormant at a PH of about 7.5, and they die after maintaining a PH of 8.5 for a specified period.

Remember those toxins I wrote about yesterday? The toxins that your body hides in fat stores it creates specifically for that purpose? The fat your body won’t let go of until it is able to process the toxins? These are largely acids. Raise your PH and you will be better able to process those acids. Then weight loss becomes easier.

Phase I of the Aztec Diet focuses heavily on high PH greens, which makes it ideal for creating a diet that balances your PH. Focus on maintaining a high PH. Test the PH of your urine in the morning, using PH test strips designed for this purpose (PH strips for other purposes do not have the correct range). Empty your bladder when you get up. Wait about 20 minutes, then urinate again. Test this urine, it does not contain all the acids you dumped overnight.

Some highly nutritious foods are also acidic. Don’t dump them. Accommodate them by eating more alkaline foods. For a list of Acid/Alkaline foods, go here: http://alkaline-alkaline.com/ph_food_chart.html

Look for today’s recipes tomorrow.