The Eat-Clean Diet: You Don't Have To Be Fat and Forty-something

Pumpkin seeds are a little like viagra. They’re loaded with zinc which kicks starts the libido. I found that nutritional nugget in Tosca Reno’s book, “The Eat-Clean Diet.”

Pumpkin seeds are just one of “12 Superfoods” Reno discusses toward the end of her book – after she’s finished explaining the basics of how to Eat-Clean and escape being fat. Her slogan is, “Eat more food, not less.”

Eating Clean is not a diet. It’s a lifestyle that has worked for Reno who practiced it for 7 years before publishing her book this year. After the mother of three with a BSc. saw her weight yo yo for years from it’s peak of 200 pounds, she adopted the clean eating lifestyle and became a swimsuit model – after the age of 40. She now has a regular column, “Raise the Bar”, in Oxygen, a women’s fitness magazine. She lives in Toronto but, according to her blog, is often in much warmer places in the U.S. and Mexico attending fitness events.

Reno believes that how your body looks is 80% about the food you put into it. Only 10% of how your body looks is in her view – and this will be a relief for anybody who hates exercising -- about the exercise you do. The other 10% is largely out of your control: genetics.

A key to the Eat-Clean lifestyle, Reno insists, is to eat every 2 or 3 hours. Eat five or six small meals a day. Couple lean protein and complex carbohydrates at every meal. These foods digest slowly and prevent you from getting hungry. And they prevent swings in your blood sugar that leave you with that lethargic feeling – one reason I am now following her advice. Following are a couple of small meals suggested in “A Typical Day” Meal Plan:

2:30 pm – 5 oz. lean cooked chicken breast, ½ cup raw veggies, 500 ml water

5:00 pm ½ baked sweet potato, 1 cup steamed vegetables, 5 oz. grilled salmon, tea and 500 ml water.

Although Reno insists early in her book that you pair up lean protein and complex carbohydrates as “a steady date” at every meal, she gets off to a slow start in explaining exactly what complex carbohydrates are. In Chapter 1, she leaves the reader to infer from the Meal Plan what complex carbs are. The last sentence in the chapter is the closest she comes to explaining what they are: “A serving of complex carbohydrates from fruit or vegetables is a heaping handful, while a serving of complex carbohydrates from whole grains or starches is the size of a tennis ball.”

I mention this because the difference between complex carbs and simple carbs is a source of confusion for many people. I heard the singer, Janet Jackson, tell an interviewer that she ate “no carbs”. No carbs? Surely she eats salads.

It’s not until well into Chapter 2 of Eat-Clean that the difference between complex and simple carbs becomes more clear. When it comes to simple carbs, Reno offers a rule of thumb, “In short, avoid the white stuff!” Reno further tackles this confusion in a section called “Carbohydrate Confusion” in Chapter 5.

That’s a strength of the book, redundancy. But not boring redundancy: every chapter is chuck full of colorful 'shout out' boxes and photographs reminding you of the basics: Eat lean protein and fresh vegetables and fruit. Avoid “white poison”. Drink lots of water. Learn to tell the difference between the good, the bad, and the really bad fats and you’ll notice a difference in your hair and skin.

Tops on Reno’s bad fat list are trans fats (the ones now banned in New York restaurants), which she says could be moving your body in the direction of heart disease and cancer. When it comes to good fats, throwing a few seeds on your morning cereal is a good way to get them. Remember those pumpkin seeds?

But Reno doesn’t gloss over the work involved in eating clean. To eat clean, you have to get organized and make packing your own food a daily habit. That may seem time-consuming, she says, but look at how bad habits that have packed on the pounds have eaten into your time. “Hey, if you made Starbucks your morning habit, didn’t that take some doing? You had to get yourself there, stand in line, order your drink, pay for it, pick it up at the other end once the barista had made it and then get on with your day.”

Reno’s not a fanatic though who will deprive you of a cup of coffee. “I will give up many things to eat clean but I refuse to give up coffee” she says. She allows herself a couple of cups of coffee first thing in the morning, but she’s avoids the fat by no longer putting cream in it. The problem with coffee, she says, is that it drains vitamins and minerals out of your body. In a sample meal plan, she recommends drinking a cup of green tea at both breakfast and lunch.

Reno is not a fanatic with children either. “Choose your battles,” with kids, she says in the “Eat- Clean – Kids” chapter. “Say yes occasionally to unhealthy treats.” Set regular meal times and stick to them “within reason” over the long term.

One way to engage your children in healthy eating, Reno advises in this chapter is to “Take your children grocery shopping.” But in an earlier section called, “Clean Eating – Shopping Clean”, she advises: “Shop solo. You can get in and get out quickly and no one will bug you for a candy bar at the checkout.” Ooops!

Toward the end of the book, Reno includes an “Eat-Clean Recipes” section with entertaining full page color photographs. Most of the recipes are refreshingly simple. Only occasionally did Rosca use ingredients that I knew I would have difficulty tracking down in my local market. One recipe calls for "wild rocket, arugula, or mesculun salad greens”.

This book is not geared to vegetarians – the word vegetarian is not even in the index – but Reno does encourage people to use meatless sources of protein such as beans, lentils, and the ancient grain, quinoa. One thing that appealed to me about her meatless recipes is that they do not rely heavily on cheese.

One of the most fun recipes in her book is the “Ziploc Omelet”.

Ingredients:
Use a Ziploc freezer bag
4 egg whites per bag
½ cup vegetables of choice

Instructions: Separate 4 eggs (large or extra large) and pour egg whites into a Ziploc bag. Shake to combine. Add a variety of ingredients, such as onion, green pepper, tomato or salsa to the egg whites. Make sure to squeeze all the air out of the bag, and zip it up. Place bag in rolling, boiling water for exactly 13 minutes. You can usually cook 6 to 8 omelets in a large pot. For more, make another pot of boiling water. Open the bag and the omelet will roll out easily. Be prepared for everyone being amazed.

Reno’s book is not all about eating though. She hones in on that 10% of her formula for a better body -- exercise. Reno believes that doing a little weight lifting three or four times a week is a must. Her book is published by Robert Kennedy who also publishes “Oxygen: Robert Kennedy’s Women’s Fitness”, a fitness magazine with an emphasis on weight training. That made me immediately suspicious: Was Reno’s book going to be a forum for hawking body building products? It wasn’t.

Whey powder though, a protein supplement widely used by body builders is included in the “Top Supplements” section near the end of Eat-Clean. Reno defers to Kennedy in endorsing whey: “It has virtually no fat but all the nutritional goodness of milk….,” states Robert Kennedy, publisher of Oxygen magazine. “It is the supplement most widely used by all those seeking to trim and define their physique.” I wince at any one-size-fits-all promotion of a dairy product. People who aren’t from Northern European backgrounds – “I’m Dutch,” Reno says in her book – commonly have difficulty digesting dairy products.

It’s Reno’s weight lifting that could buffer her from criticism that she is setting unrealistic Barbie doll standards for female beauty -- although the photo on the back cover of her in a red two piece bathing suit made me wonder how many women could actually look like that. At closer inspection, you can see that Reno has a layer of muscle that it wouldn’t hurt most women her age to strive for, since weight lifting combats thinning bones. Reno is 48 years old and beating path to the gym, while many women her age are on a path to osteoporosis.

Reno actually sounds an alarm in her book about the unrealistic Barbie doll standard of beauty that women are constantly exposed to. She provides a chart which compares the weight of the average American woman to Barbie. Barbie is much thinner in every part of her body, except the bust where she is bigger than the average woman.

Reno cautions that you are at least partially stuck with the body type that is your genetic inheritance from mom and dad. “To some extent you must live with these physical attributes.” But you can make improvements, she says. “A thick waist can be trimmed down to a slimmer version; a saggy backside can benefit from uplifting resistance training and cardiovascular exercise; skinny legs [which she says she had as a girl] can be enhanced by doing specific weight-training exercises to build them up.”

That’s the theme that runs through the entire book: what you can do. This is an upbeat book in the tradition of body builders such as Arnold Schwarzenegger who says he puts his mind not to what he can’t do, but always to what he can do. By the end of the book, Reno has made a convincing case that, to quote the blurb on the back cover, “it’s never too late to get in the best shape of your life.”

The Eat-Clean Diet is available at Amazon and other major bookstores.

BCTF Member Stands in Soup Line

It was the night before welfare day. Last Tuesday night, the Salvation Army Soup truck pulled up as usual to Main St. & Cordova at 9:45 to hand out piping hot soup and peanut butter and jam sandwiches to the poor.

A well-dressed BCTF member who teaches at the Vancouver School Board Eastside Learning Center for adults a block away, lined up for a bowl of soup. Several people saw her; in fact she said hello to a couple of people. She has been a VSB teacher in the neighborhood for years. She is middle-aged, a little on the heavy side, with short blond wavy hair.

"Those people make a fortune," exclaimed Serg, a Downtown Eastside resident, "and she's taking food from the hungry."

A couple of years ago, the media reported discussions in London, England of shutting down food lines for the poor due to widespread abuse. Working people were using them as a convenience, instead of cooking for themselves.

Truth is, virtually everybody you see at the Sally Ann soup truck on Tuesday and Sunday nights in Vancouver looks poor.

Other teacher-related articles on this blog:
Vancouver Teachers Demand Recycling in Schools
International Boycott of High School Diplomas Issued by the Vancouver School Board

Divorced from Reality

A man in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, divorced his wife because he caught her alone in the same room as an unrelated male. The male was on television, hosting a show that she was watching.

In Saudia Arabia, under the heavily patriarchal Sharia law, a man can divorce his wife without going through the courts.

Efforts to introduce Sharia law to Ontario were defeated on Dec. 9, 2005. "I am so happy,” Ms. Homa Arjomand, one of the primary organizers against Sharia in Canada, said at the time.

I came across this story on Covenant Zone.

Vancouver Teachers Demand Recycling in Schools

It was a back flip worthy of the Olympics.

Yesterday, Vancouver School Board Chair Ken Denike said no to teachers insisting that a standard recycling program be set up in all schools. It would be too expensive, he told CBC news on Tuesday, Sept. 25. He said recycling in schools was a volunteer effort, although he admitted that it at times deserved a failing grade. "We have attempted in a number of schools to put in a recycling program," Denike said. "But unless you have a diligent teacher there, or someone really pushing it, it doesn't continue."

But here’s what Denike told the CBC the next day: "It's time to do it." On Wednesday, Sept. 26, he said, "I think it's important to do it fairly soon while we've got motivation and interest in schools. Students have also been pushing for the change.” Denike promised a review by the School Board of the possibility of a district-wide recycling program.


One teacher who put pressure on the School Board to organize a standard blue box program is Michelle Tayler (photo above), a Grade 4 and 5 teacher at Queen Mary Elementary. Tayler told the CBC on Tuesday that while the curriculum emphasizes environmental education, the School Board sets a poor example by discouraging students from actually practicing what they've learned. "Just after lunch you'll see a lot of juice boxes — they're thrown into the garbage cans", Tayler said. "I would have thought by now something would be in place."

Last spring, students from Lord Tennyson Elementary and Lord Byng Secondary made a presentation to Vancouver School Board committees on the topic of recycling and overall sustainability in schools.

Sharon Gregson, the trustee who oversees Lord Byng Secondary School and who last year appeared in the National Firearms Association Journal sporting a gun on the front cover and a tattoo on an inside page, told the CBC that she is keen on recycling. [In fact, after she recycled her husband, Ian Gregson, he accused her in The Tyee news in April 2005 of taking off on vacation to the Dominican Republic with her new boyfriend and saddling him with their joint-custody kids, sabotaging his ability to campaign as a Green Party candidate.]

Gregson told the CBC that it will take time for a standard recycling program to be voted on by the School Board. First funding will have to be found and then the issue will have to be discussed at appropriate committees.

Gregson says the issue of recycling got backgrounded as trustees have been focused on other issues lately, such as “a lack of adequate funding from Victoria, the problem of last year’s lower than expected enrollment, the problem of facilities that need to be seismically upgraded.” She avoided any mention of the international boycott of Grade 12 diplomas that the VSB was accused in the media last week of concealing from parents. The boycott has some parents looking to next year's election, when even a new recycling program may not be enough to save this School Board from ending up in electoral landfill.

Live Trolley Bus Wire Snaps in Chinatown Trapping Man in Car

A live trolley bus wire snapped and trapped a man in his car on Tuesday at about 3:30 p.m. in Chinatown. This was the second day in a row that an electrical trolley wire had fallen in the same spot, Main & Pender in Chinatown, during rush hour.

The man trapped on Tuesday in his small brown Sedan risked electrocution if he had stepped out of his car. "It had just started raining again to make it worse; the street was wet," a witness said. It had been raining in that morning and during the night too. The witness was convinced that if the man had gotten out of his car, "He would have been a goner, ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ."
The wire snapped "like a clothesline breaking", the witness said. If the live wire had hit the man's windshield when it came down, he added, it could have broken his windshield and killed him.

The witness believes it may have been the strain of the bus turning from Main St. on to Pender at that moment that caused the wire to snap.

"There was an Asian guy in the car; he didn't look like he was worried," the witness said. "The Transit supervisor was talking to him."

Police were telling people not to step off the curb. "No cars could get by; you couldn't turn left or right on Pender."

The witness had seen the same scene the day before during afternoon rush hour. "They had the cones out, they had transit supervisors, pretty well in the same spot. Police were putting the barricades up."

Int'l Boycott of Vancouver High School Diplomas Concealed By School Board

(photo: Ken Denike, Chair, Vancouver School Board)

While the Vancouver School Board is exporting schools and diplomas to the children of the elite in China's Communist Party, Vancouver residents say it is importing tactics of political repression used by China's Communist Party.

The result is an international boycott of Vancouver School Board secondary school diplomas. The boycott was launched in 2004 by individuals who have since formed the ad hoc group, Canadians Opposing Political Psychiatry. The DTES Enquirer has learned that Vancouver School Board trustees and administrators, including Principals and Vice Principals, were sent written notification of the boycott but concealed it from the public.

Organizations around the world "are being asked not to recognize these diplomas", according to a Feb. 13, 2004 notice entitled, "International Boycott of Diplomas Issued by the Vancouver School Board", received by the VSB.

The boycott stemmed from evidence that the VSB was using police intimidation and political psychiatry to deter legitimate citizen complaints. Pursuing a complaint against the Vancouver School Board can earn the complainant a visit from Vancouver's notorious "Car 87", a police car in which an armed constable and psychiatric nurse ride. They arrive at a complainant's home, according to official forms that they complete during the visit, to perform an assessment for "apprehension" to a mental hospital.

A psychiatric notation appears for life adjacent to that individual's name on the police computer system -- even if they are cleared. But here's the catch: even when you're cleared, you're never really cleared. The wording on the form reveals that an individual is simply not a candidate for apprehension "at this time".

In the fall of 2002, outgoing President of the BC Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils mentioned intimidation of individuals pursuing complaints with school administrators in an interview with the Vancouver Sun. Reggi Balabanov stated that complainants were discovering police on their doorsteps. This has put a "chill" on the willingness of people to pursue complaints, Balabanov said. [Balabanov was not involved in organizing the boycott.]

The boycott was ultimately triggered by a case involving police intimidation and classic political psychiatry in October 2002.

The woman targeted for political psychiatry was the last (last known) of several individuals, both female and male, who had lodged complaints --with no knowledge of one another's complaints at the time -- with the School Board about a verbally and physically abusive teacher. The VSB instructed her to submit her complaint in writing to Violence Prevention Co-ordinator Lisa Pedrina, but when she did, she got no response. Months later, she wrote a letter to the VSB criticizing this lack of response. She quickly received a letter dated Sept. 12, 2000 from the VSB in-house lawyer, Richard Hall, threatening her with legal action for "liable and slander" -- this lawyer could not spell "libel" -- if she dared criticize Pedrini again. The woman asked trustees to ensure that the VSB stopped issuing threats to prevent the raising of legitimate concerns with staff.

Hall had told the woman in the threatening letter, that if she wanted her complaint processed, she would have to re-submit it. This is a typical "obstructionist tactic" she says. She asked trustee to investigate why this in-house lawyer could not simply pull her original submission out of a VSB filing cabinet? Hall later left his job at the VSB.

With Hall's departure, the VSB hired an external lawyer, Wendy Harris, to send the woman a letter stating that "no substantiation was found" to support her claims that previous individuals -- who had by now heard of her case and contacted her -- had lodged complaints about this teacher. "There are no records which could be located to indicate that either of these individuals had made complaints against [the teacher]...." Complainants were stunned by this response. The VSB ignored written notification that a previous complainant, a male, was willing to provide them with letters on VSB letterhead brushing off his complaint against this teacher, as well as a postcard he had received from the teacher apologizing for 'attacking' him. The VSB also ignored written notification that an earlier female complainant was willing to speak to them, a complainant who had been telephoned at home by a VSB supervisor when she suddenly stopped all school volunteer work after being physically assaulted by this teacher; the supervisor told her that the teacher would be sent on "sensitivity training." The VSB had been given contact information, in writing, for both these complainants. They had also been provided, in writing, the names of two VSB supervisors who had received complaints about the teacher.

The above example was one of several outlined in an Oct. 12, 2002 letter to the Vancouver Board to illustrate that they were paying hundreds of dollars an hour in taxpayers' dollars to evade a genuine investigation into this case. The woman stated in the letter that she intended to campaign in the election, just two months away, about VSB "duplicity" in the handling of bullying complaints, specifically their practice of assuring the public that such complaints were being taken seriously when in fact letters complainants were receiving told a different story. The ruling party, the Non-Partisan Association, was poised to lose the election; any campaigning by the woman could have been damaging to incumbents.

The VSB called police "Car 87".

In the morning of Nov. 5, 2002, the woman responded to pounding on her door by opening it and discovering an armed constable, Michelle Sevigny, standing with psychiatric nurse, Don Getz. Getz was flapping her Oct. 12, 2002 letter to the VSB in his hand. It is noteworthy that her Oct. 12, 2002 intent-to-campaign letter was the sole evidence submitted to police and the psychiatric nurse to justify the visit.

The woman felt sufficiently terrorized by the Car 87 visit that she dropped plans to campaign in the School Board election.

At the beginning of the visit, Getz told the woman, "You seem fine to me." As he was leaving at the end of the visit, she claims -- this is something she reported in writing to the Health Authority and the VSB at the time -- Getz told her that he shared her view that the upcoming tight School Board election had motivated the VSB to arrange this visit.

In his official psychiatric report, though, the sole reason Getz provided for going to the woman's home to assess her for "apprehension" was that she had made "freedom of information requests" to the VSB. Indeed, at the end of the Oct. 12/02 letter, the woman had requested that documents from the file be released to her under the Freedom of Information Act. The woman had made two routine freedom of information requests over the previous year. Getz revealed in his report that the only person the VSB made available to meet with him was Georgina Kosich, the Labour Relations and Freedom of Information Assistant at the VSB. (When he arrived, he had chatted with the VSB's new lawyer, Michael Hancock, who had directed him to Kosich.) The woman has in her possession letters from Kosich responding to her Freedom of Information requests and inviting her to feel free to contact her again.

The revelation in Getz' report that the VSB had diverted him to a freedom of information clerk reinforced the fact that they did not feel at any risk. Yet Car 87 is, according to Health Authority policy, to be reserved for cases where the targeted individual poses an "imminent" risk of killing themselves or others. That policy was confirmed in a taped telephone call with Jan Fisher, Head of Client Relations at the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority. Fisher told the woman that she "might get an apology" as a mistake had obviously been made. It wasn't a mistake, says the woman. "It was a pre-meditated attempt to intimidate me and discredit me with the electorate."

The fact that the Car 87 visit was no mistake tends to be supported by comments made by Police-School Liaison, Sergeant Garry Lester, whom the woman telephoned for answers on the afternoon of Nov. 5th, just hours after the visit. He told her during a taped telephone conversation (advocates routinely advise DTES residents to tape conversations in cases of police intimidation and political psychiatry) that he had stressed to the VSB that there was "nothing untoward" about her Oct. 12/02 letter. But the VSB pressured him, he revealed, so he approved the visit. (Such soliciting by bureaucrats of a favor from the VPD in order to have a critic visited has turned up in documentation pertaining to four cases of political psychiatry and/or politically-motivated police intimidation brought to the attention of DTES Enquirer bloggers.) Lester confirmed, when asked by the woman during their telephone conversation, that the Oct. 12, 2002 letter was the sole evidence considered in the decision to send Car 87 to her home.

Despite the lack of evidence that the woman posed a risk, approval of the Car 87 visit allowed instant access by Car 87 staff to her medical records. "They had no evidence against me," she says, "so they went on a fishing expedition to see if they could find anything to use against me." [She can prove that content of her medical records was altered when transferred into the Car 87 report. She has copies of both the original record and the Car 87 report. But this will be covered in another post.] She has no history of mental illness.

During the year and a half between the Oct./02 Car 87 visit and the organizing of the boycott of diplomas issued by the Vancouver School Board, records confirm that efforts were made to have VSB trustees take responsibility for their alleged instigation of police intimidation and political psychiatry. In 2003, trustees held an in-camera review of the case of the woman targeted by Car 87. She was not invited. But a staff person implicated in wrongdoing in the case was invited to brief the Board. The woman learned from meeting notes obtained through Freedom of Information that evidence in the case had been consistently misrepresented at the meeting. "He said the teacher wasn't working for the Vancouver School Board at the time we lodged our complaints, like we were all too stupid to know what school she worked at." All they had to do was check the payroll records, she points out, to confirm that she had definitely been a VSB teacher when the complaints were lodged.

Jane Bouey, elected in Nov. 2002, was a Vancouver School Board member during the term in which the in-camera review was held and the VSB persistently evaded addressing allegations that they had restricted freedom of expression via Ca 87. No hint of Bouey's record was provided to the public as she appeared in the media to sell a draft of "Safe Schools" legislation. This "Safe Schools" draft was criticized for imposing excessive and heavy-handed limitations on informal, day-to-day speech of students. Critics who believe the VSB is comfortable with tactics typical of the Communist Party in China and the former Soviet Union are hardly dissuaded by the fact that Bouey is Assistant Manager of the Communist Party's People's Co-op Bookstore in Vancouver and uses the internet domain address of the Communist Party's People's Voice newspaper as her personal e-mail address. While on the School Board, her partner in her personal life was (and may continue to be) Kimball Cariou, editor of the People's Voice.

There is no doubt that the Vancouver School Board was aware of the boycott ultimately triggered by this case. A Freedom of Information request to the VSB by the woman visited by Car 87 resulted in the release of a copy of the notice entitled "International Boycott of Diplomas Issued by the Vancouver School Board" bearing the stamp, "RECEIVED Feb. 23, 2004 HUMAN RESOURCES". The VSB also released other documents pertaining to the boycott bearing "RECEIVED" stamps with dates in 2004. Further, a copy of the notice of the boycott was hand-delivered to the Vancouver School Board headquarters at Broadway and Granville in March 2004, at which time proof of receipt was provided by a receptionist who signed a photocopy of the notice and signed her name on it.

The VSB has never formally responded to the boycott. An internal memo, though, does reveal a somewhat flippant response from a VSB administrator, "Wendy", in a handwritten memo to another VSB administrator, Sue Arthur, dated Feb. 27, 2004:

"Sue – put your "Legal Counsel" hat on for this . . . . Take care & happy Friday!"