The other day Thing 2 ran up to me in Wegmans and handed me a packaged cookie. “It’s dairy-free, egg-free, soy-free and gluten-free, Mommy!” he beamed. “Can we get some?” It felt like a hockey puck in a plastic sack. “I think this one might be fun-free, Buddy,” I said as I put it back on a shelf filled with other “everything-free” treats.

I have given up a lot in pursuit of good health. Meat went first, more than 15 years ago. More recently I gave up eggs and dairy (and blue cheese, heaven help me) as I transitioned to an almost completely vegan diet (I cheat with marshmallows and the rare egg and dairy when traveling). I drew the line at gluten, however.

I did try. So many health gurus have been spouting off the benefits of gluten free living that I decided to see what it does for me. Perhaps I was one of those unfortunate souls with a hidden gluten sensitivity! Perhaps it would came me to miraculously drop those last 10 pounds!

I found instead that it made me miserable with no benefit to my health. I did not feel better, but I did feel deprived. It’s not that you can’t have wonderful vegan, gluten-free food, but it takes soooooooooooooo much work for so little reward for someone who doesn’t have a gluten allergy.

It would seem that Doctor Furhman agrees that while gluten is a problem for some, avoiding gluten is not worth the effort for most of us:

Does Going Gluten-Free Equal Fabulously Healthy or Fabulously Foolish? : Disease Proof.

So if you’ve been thinking about giving up gluten, there’s two things you should know:

1. It’s going to be really tough. Gluten hides everywhere. It’s not just in bread and cookies, but also in beer, soups, spices mixtures, and even in envelope glue.

2. If you buy gluten free substitutes for traditional wheat products, it won’t help you lose weight. Often the gluten free version has more calories, as the manufacturer ups the fat and sugar to compensate for the tougher texture.

Despite this, I do include some gluten-free items in my pantry, in part because I came to like them, and in part because I have a friend who cannot eat gluten for genuine medical reasons. I love brown rice pasta. I will make “oatmeal” with quinoa instead of oats. My gluten free-chocolate cupcakes are as good as the wheat version.

But my seitan is all gluten, and my pizza crusts are whole wheat. That’s fine for my system, because I am in the 90% that has no problem with gluten.

Happy New Year’s! I am just barely squeaking across the finish line of 2011 intact.  This past month has been intense, leaving me feeling like I am sprinting the last mile of a long race tired, winded, injured and looking forward to the finish line. Today I get to sit back, tend my wounds, and look forward to a fresh start in the new year.

As is my usual habit, I am not so much making Resolutions and Setting Goals. There are a few things I want to work on and accomplish in the coming year. They are:

• Learn Spanish. I plan to spend at least one hour a week studying Spanish through Rosetta Stone.
• Improve my photography skills. To do this, I will choose a theme each month to focus on, and then post the best results here.
• Get back to my green schemes. I have drifted away from my ideals the past few months, and it’s time to course correct.
• Train to run my first marathon. This one will take some dedication, as right now I cannot run even 2 miles pain-free. My plan is to spend January and February healing my knee problem, which may be due to IT Band syndrome, and then start training in earnest in March.
• Set up a keg system. I haven’t brewed a batch of beer in months, mainly because I have been too busy for bottling, which can take several hours. Kegging would spare me the need to rinse and sterilize all those bottles, saving tons of time. My plan is to replace the win fridge in the kitchen with an undercounted kegerator to hold two kegs, with taps up on the counter.
• Blog more regularly. I should be able to do one post a week. I’ll aim for Fridays.

What are your goals for the new year?

This past weekend, a friend and I attended Dr. Fuhrman’s Weekend Health Immersion in Princeton, New Jersey. From Friday night through Sunday afternoon, we attended lectures about the role of nutrition in health and disease prevention, workout sessions, and buffets offering a wide variety of highly nutritious and often delicious foods. I came back armed with a deeper understanding of what makes for good long-term health, and I hope to put it all into practice immediately.

The main thrust is to eat a diet low in calories but high in nutrients. The focus is on eating greens, onions, mushrooms, berries, beans, and seeds/nuts. Animal products, if consumed at all, should be extremely limited. The basic daily  eating plan looks like this:

• eat 1 pound of raw veggies daily, with a lot of that being green
• eat 1 pound of cooked veggies daily, including some mushrooms and greens
• eat 1 cup of beans daily
• eat some seeds and/or nuts daily (1/2 ounce to 4 ounces, depending on your activity level)
• eat 3-5 fruits daily
• avoid salt, sugar, caffeine, alcohol, and refined grains

There’s a whole bunch of research and science backing up the plan, and you can read more about that on Dr. Furhman’s website or in one of his many books. I’m not going to discuss it all here, but the information is out there if you care to learn more. What I’m going to talk about here is implementing the diet, and how it impacts my life.

I already know that this way of eating is powerful because I used this eating plan to drop 30 pounds and get my energy and health back. In the past few months, though, I’ve gone from the occasional compromise to the daily compromise, which lead to gaining back a few pounds and losing the spring in my step. Attending the immersion helped me refocus on my goal of staying healthy and vibrant.

I also already know that this way of eating is not easy. I will compromise, of that I have no doubt. I know that am not going to eliminate my daily cup(s) of coffee–I just brought back several pounds of super-awesome Costa Rican coffee beans, and those are going to be honored and properly consumed! I also have concerns about cutting my salt too low since I have borderline low blood pressure–just two days of salt-free eating caused me to have chest pains, which I take as a warning sign.

That said, I can do a huge daily salad, lots of cooked greens, and a cup of beans. I can avoid the white flour and rice, and I can cut way back on the sugars. I came back from the immersion with a brand new masticating juicer, so I can now also add fresh juiced greens to my day. I can eat those daily nuts and seeds, adding them to my smoothie in place of the isolated protein powders I had been using.

And of course, I can blog about it, sharing my recipes, triumphs, and moments of weakness here with you. I just hope you like reading about kale! If you want to join in the fun, Dr. Fuhrman is running a Holiday Challenge, complete with a free 6-week trial membership to his website, and I encourage you to check it out!

I was handed a guitar at a cub scout campfire this weekend and given a chance to play. It terrified me, and I just about froze. I felt that two years of lessons and sporadic practicing at home did not make me skilled enough to attempt to play anything, especially in the company of so many more accomplished players.

Really, I was afraid of screwing up and looking like a complete ass. My fear of failing in a public performance comes from being such a bloody perfectionist. I don’t handle my failures well even when I’m alone, and I certainly don’t like to let others see me fail. This is especially bad with making music, where I feel so insecure about my skills and I feel failure is the inevitable outcome of any public effort.

Then today I read this piece on MSNBC about self-compassion, which indicates that I should learn to let myself fail:

Want to be successful? Be kind to yourself – Health – Behavior – msnbc.com.

If the researchers featured in this article have it right, I need to work on accepting my shortcomings rather than pushing myself to meet impossible standards and beating myself up mercilessly over my failures. Yeah, I fail at failing with grace, though I have working on just that, in fact, in my meditation sessions for the past year when I practice Loving Kindness meditation, or metta bhavana.

Traditionally this meditation starts with sending love and kindness towards yourself, then towards a loved one, then towards a stranger, then towards an enemy, and finally towards all of mankind. Personally, I find sending kindness and acceptance towards myself to be the biggest challenge–next to that, accepting other people’s shortcomings is a walk in the park. After all, I am not responsible for their mistakes the way I am for my own. If I could only excuse and forgive myself the way I do other people, I would be in great shape. Maybe someday.

I did eventually pick the guitar up and belt out a song at the campfire despite the stage fright. I played the only one I know by heart, which was Nora Jones’ Don’t Know Why. I didn’t play or sing as well as I do when I’m without an audience, but that’s OK. My voice didn’t crack, I wasn’t accused of caterwauling, and no one took the guitar away mid-song. Hopefully next time I will feel a little more confident and let myself take the risk with a bit less fear in my heart.