Green Leafies and Bright Colors

The first level of the Wahls Protocol focuses on increasing your nutrition, while removing some items that aren’t doing you any good.  For me, the first step will be adding lots of greens and brightly colored fruits and vegetables.  I do take a multivitamin every day, but Dr. Wahls points out that this only provides the compounds that are known and included in my vitamin.  She says “the vitamins and antioxidants that naturally occur in food are more effective at supporting your cells when the whole family of related compounds is present.”   Most supplements in pill form are synthetic, are not  shaped identically to natural nutrients and may not act the same in your body.*

To get 3 cups of greens and 3 cups of bright colors, I’ll need to eat some veggies and/or fruit at every meal and some snacks as well.  Lunch is easy, since I usually eat a salad for lunch already.  (I still miss a nice sandwich, like the tuna, ham or (yikes) bologna ones my mom used to send in my school lunch, but I know those two slices of bread are not good for me, even if whole wheat.)  I usually have lettuce or spinach or a boxed mixture called Power Greens.  I know I'll have to get into the more hard core stuff like kale, chard and collard greens.  In the meantime, here are the salads I ate yesterday and today.  I realized I like vinegar and oil better than most salad dressings, so it's easy to have a variety by just changing the vinegar.

Dr. Rosedale says to add nuts or avocado for some good omega 3's. This has pecans.

This one has chicken left over from Stan's good dinner last night

It’s actually not too hard to get some greens and colors for breakfast.  I have learned that a large handful of spinach cooks down to almost nothing, so if you measure first, three cups is easy.  Here’s the breakfast I had this morning: 2 eggs scrambled into spinach, onion, yellow pepper and tomatoes with a bit of parsley.

Stan remembered when he was working at Boeing he often bought an extra salad from the cafeteria salad bar at lunchtime and ate it for dinner.  So we did that when we were in Whole Foods earlier this week.  (Unfortunately not very near to our house – we have to fight traffic to get there, even midday.)  Anyway, here’s what I got, and with the turkey and egg, it made a very satisfying dinner.

A word about eggs:  The Wahls Protocol says no eggs.  The reason is that Dr. Wahls is allergic to eggs so she didn’t eat them during her recovery.  When she got a grant for a clinical trial, the terms were that the study would exactly replicate what she herself had eaten.  So, no eggs.  She suggests that we go without eggs for a month, then eat several over the next few days.  If you have any symptoms, you may react to the protein in eggs and would be better off without them.  If no symptoms, eggs are fine, but do choose eggs from happy chickens that roam outside and eat grass and insects.  I may do that test in the future, but for now I’m pretty sure I have no problem and I’ll continue eating eggs.

*This info is from The Wahls Protocol, by Dr. TerryWahls.  My post of 12/28/2014 has more details.