Staying Healthy: Eating & Exercise (7/18 – 7/24)

I am a label reader. I want to know what’s in the food we buy. We try to buy food using four of Michael Pollan’s rules:

1. Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. “When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can’t pronounce, ask yourself, “What are those things doing there?”
2. Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can’t pronounce.
3. Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be on the outer edge of the store near the loading docks, where it can be replaced with fresh foods when it goes bad.
4. Don’t eat anything that won’t eventually rot. “There are exceptions — honey — but as a rule, things like Twinkies that never go bad aren’t food.”

While we often miss on the five ingredient rule, we do look for ingredients we can pronounce and know, for whole grains, and for natural sugar or sweetness (anything with high-fructose corn syrup will be immediately rejected). We do buy processed foods that meet these rules. Locally-produced will almost always win over national brands if the price isn’t too outrageous, and almost all the produce we eat is grown on Kaua’i or in Hawaii, with exceptions mainly things like apples, stone fruit, and berries. About 20% of what we buy is organic, but we don’t go out of our way to shop at natural food or health food stores for organics. Costco carries many organic products at good prices, and other organic items we often find at Big Save or Safeway. I don’t think organic is healthier or more nutritious, but it is cleaner in my opinion.

As we get ready to enter August we have very little meat left in the freezer: two 12-ounce packages of ground beef, two pork chops, two quart bags of meat sauce for pasta, one package of chicken thighs, and a half-pound package of roasted chicken breast. We’re now down to just one meal with meat per week going forward. This week it will be grilled teriyaki chicken thighs along with zaru soba, and we’ll continue this way until it’s all gone, hopefully by the end of September.

We had some very good and tasty meals last week. Vegetarian lasagna was not to be found, and the ingredients to make our own were costly, but we found organic sweet corn ravioli at Costco and it made a surprisingly good substitution along with a little bit of pesto.

Sunday: Spaghetti with meat sauce; roasted zucchini

Monday: Plant-based chick’n sandwiches; watermelon

Tuesday: Sweet corn ravioli with pesto; roasted asparagus

Wednesday: Sweet & sour pork with steamed rice

Thursday: Spicy black bean bake with Fritos; sliced cucumber

Friday: Cheese board

Saturday: Mini Margherita pizzas

Our dessert this past week has been an olive oil lemon cake. Very yummy, and a small piece is more than enough. We have a couple more days of it left and then I’m going to make a cherry baked oatmeal.

On the menu for next week’s dinner meals are:

• Spaghetti pasta salad

• Guadalajara quesadillas

• Cheesy white bean-tomato bake

• Panzanella with beans and feta

• Mini pizzas

• Cheese board

• Grilled teriyaki chicken with zaru soba

Getting up to the park to walk this week was very hit or miss because of the weather. We took Sunday off, but walked the perimeter on Monday. Tuesday was our Big Shop and we put in nearly two hours of shopping (including pushing a heavy cart) – it was exhausting. Wednesday it rained most of the day and I decided not to risk getting wet but Brett went up to the park and walked the paths. He did get a little wet and had to take cover a couple of times, so I was glad I stayed home. We got in a full perimeter walk on Thursday although it started to pour again just as we got to the car so we timed that perfectly. Friday was a total washout, but Saturday the rain cleared in the afternoon and we got in a full perimeter walk, or at least until the last eight minutes or so when the rain started falling again (and we got soaked). We still found a total of 17 lost balls last week, something of a miracle since we thought we had cleaned them out last week.

One of the things we have enjoyed most about our walks are the other walkers we have met and become friends with over time. Sadly, many do not not come to the park any more for a variety of reasons, although we keep in touch through Instagram and Facebook. We sadly said goodby this past week to a walker we have become very fond of, an 80-year-old retired judge (we know his name, but always called him The Judge or Your Honor). He was recently diagnosed with a rapidly progressing neurological condition, and will be moving back to the mainland to be closer to family and better medical facilities. He will be as greatly missed as much as the others have been. We continue to meet new people, but the ones we met during the pandemic when we were new to the park will always be special to us.