Quinoa confusion - Paleo or not? Healthy or not?

What an exciting week it has been! In case you missed it, I had the amazing honour of sharing my journey with hypothalamic amenorrhea and body image on The Huffington Post! Seriously a dream come true! 

OK back to quinoa. It’s the high-protein darling of the vegan and vegetarian world. It’s the hip new pseudo-grain (it’s actually a fruit). And it seems to be somewhat of a grey area for Paleo folks – some love it (using said “fruit” defense, because God-forbid they eat a grain), and some are downright against it (if it walks and talks like a duck, (or grain), then…).

So who is right? Is quinoa the super-food it’s made out to be, or is it just another dodgy grain-like cereal?

Apparently Quinoa is a girl on pinterest who is well
 into her fashion…and hates pleather.
Just a little weird.

About 4 years ago, I was diagnosed with coeliac disease. My symptoms were not pretty – fat and protein malabsorption (which translates to chronic diarrhea, that kind of also feels like constipation – fun, right?), nutrient deficiencies, low energy and a rash that was spreading all over my body. The treatment for coeliac disease is simple – follow a gluten free diet.

So I switched my beloved oat-based porridge to quinoa porridge. It was a simple switch, and tasted pretty good, too. Unfortunately, just going gluten free didn’t cut it. I still had my symptoms some 6-9 months later. That’s when I decided to try this crazy “Paleo” thing that my hubby was doing (despite my dietitian brain being completely against it). Lo and behold my symptoms disappeared…..quite rapidly, in fact, with the high fat, low carb diet I had adopted.

Fast-forward to last year when I was diagnosed with hypothalamic amenorrhea and hypothyroidism, which my low carb diet probably played a large role in. I was tasked with adding in more carbs, and there is only so much sweet potato a girl can eat, especially with the exorbitant prices in NZ! Cue quinoa. I thought – why not throw it back in the mixer and see what happens?

This time, however, I made sure that I soaked my quinoa seeds overnight, rinsed and rubbed them in the morning, THEN cooked them (more on why I did this later). Success! No adverse reaction, no tummy upset. I felt great. Hurrah! Quinoa porridge is now a regular breakfast for me, and I love it!

I tell this story to highlight the fact that there is no one diet for everyone, and what might be right for you now, might not have been OK a while ago, or in the future. It’s all about experiementation!

So why does quinoa get such a bad wrap? Well, the quinoa seed contains a few “anti-nutrients”:

Check out those soapy saponins after soaking quinoa overnight

• Saponins – as the name suggests, these are soap-like substances, which can cause problems with digestion and potentially increase intestinal permeability (AKA “leaky gut”)
• Phytates – or “phytic acid” can bind up minerals, such as iron, zinc and magnesium, preventing their absorption and utilization by the body
• Protease inhibitors – “proteases” are enzymes that break down proteins into their smaller constituents, amino acids, which can then be absorbed through the intestinal wall and used by the body to build new proteins. The body is clever, right? Protease inhibitors, as you might have guess, can inhibit the action of these enzymes, thus disrupting the ability to digest proteins 

Well crap. That all sounds pretty unhealthy. Why would I even consider eating such a food?

Here’s the thing – soaking, rubbing, rinsing and cooking reduces the content of these anti-nutrients by 50-100%, making them less problematic, and the vitamns and minerals contained within (think calcium, magnesium, folate, iron, phosphorus, vitamin Bs and vitamin E), more bioavailable. Brilliant!

All that said, if someone is suffering from a health condition, especially if it is digestion-related, I would suggest cutting out quinoa and going quite strict Paleo for a period of 30 days. Then you can start to reintroduce foods and see how you go. That sounds fair, right?

Now just because I love you, I have decided to share my yummy brekkie recipe. Enjoy!

Warming Quinoa Porridge

• ¼ cup quinoa
• ½ cup water (plus extra for after cooking)
• ¼ cup coconut milk (plus extra for after cooking)
• 1 ripe banana, mashed
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp maca powder (optional, but is great for hormonal balancing)
• 1 small handful of nuts (chopped) and/or seeds
• 1 small handful of coconut flakes (optional)
• Sometimes I also add a sprinkle of Great Lakes Beef Gelatin (flavourless) for extra gut-healing goodness

Method

1. Soak the quinoa overnight and rinse thoroughly in the morning, massaging the seeds as you rinse. This removes “saponins” and improves the digestibility of the quinoa
2. Add quinoa, water and coconut milk to a small saucepan over med-high heat until just boiling
3. Turn the heat down to low and put a lid on the saucepan for around 10 minutes or until most liquid is absorbed
4. Meanwhile, mash the banana and chop the nuts
5. Add everything together (quinoa, banana, nuts, maca, coconut flakes, cinnamon) and add extra water and/or coconut milk until it reaches your desired consistency
6. Enjoy slowly!

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Are you eating enough?

It is rare that I will get a client who is eating too much food. Often, it’s the other way around. Which makes sense, given what we have been taught about weight loss. It’s simple, really: 

“Eat less. Exercise more”.

Hmm. OK. My job (in terms of weight loss clients) really should be obsolete then, right? If it really were as simple as eating less and exercising more, most of my clients would be Kate-Moss-thin. But they aren’t. Some have just a little bit of stubborn fat that they would like to lose (for aesthetic reasons), others have more that they need to lose (for health reasons). All are exercising their butts off. Too much, in my opinion. All are not eating enough.

So simple, yet so easily forgotten. 

I was taught at university that if an overweight person comes to me and their food record shows they are consuming fewer calories than they are burning, then they must have been lying, because they should be losing weight. How f-ing arrogant of us to assume this. It truly breaks my heart to see people who are literally broken from trying so hard to lose weight using the traditional “eat less, exercise more” dogma”.

I agree. Ridiculous indeed.

So why is fat loss so hard?

Well, it is complicated, and I am the first person to admit that I do not have all the answers. As I mentioned, if weight loss were easy, we would not have an obesity epidemic that is running out of control.

What I do know is that when you consume too few calories, shit is going to hit the fan. Let’s back up a little for some weekly science….

Your resting metabolic rate (RMR) is an estimate for how many calories you would burn if you lay in bed all day (sans hanky panky). Your RMR represents the minimum amount of energy required to keep your body functioning – your heart beating, your lungs breathing, your reproductive system functioning, your thyroid gland humming along nicely, controlling your metabolism and body temperature. Let’s put this into practice and see what some numbers look like:

To calculate your RMR, you can use something called the “Schofield Equation”. While this equation does have some flaws, it provides a pretty decent estimate.

For me (and any other female in the 18-30 age group), the following equation would be used to get my RMR:

{(0.062 x weight (kgs)) + 2.036} x 1000 = 5,942kJ per day (divide by 4.28 to convert to calories)

So my minimum calories that I should consume, based on me staying in bed all day is 1388. MINIMUM! This is not taking into account any sort of exercise, folks.

Let’s say I decide that I am going to walk a little each day. My estimated energy requirements then go up to 2,082kcals per day! Just to do a little wandering here and there.

What is really concerning to me is that I have clients consuming around 1300-1500 kcals per day who are training at high intensity, for long durations, every day of the week. A rest day for them would involve a slow run, rather than a fast one. And this is not just females, it’s the fellas too.

What’s the problem with eating too few calories?

Image by Sara Thurley via Pinterest

When you have insufficient calories on board to fuel basic bodily functions, those functions will slow down. Your brain will recognise this lack of fuel and signal to the thyroid gland (in your neck) that energy needs to be conserved and to slow everything down.

Your thyroid gland controls all of your metabolic processes and your body temperature. If it slows down production of thyroid hormones, your metabolism will slow down, your heart rate will drop and you may struggle to keep warm. What happens when your metabolism slows down, people? You guessed it! Weight loss resistance!  If you are, essentially, starving, do you really think your body is going to give up its fat stores easily? Or do you think it is going to hold on to every last morsel to feed your vital organs (and to keep you warm). (PS have you checked out the Thyroid Sessions yet? They are awesome!)

If this wasn’t bad enough, your adrenals are probably going to kick into gear to help you survive (especially if you are doing high intensity exercise and don’t have enough carbs in your diet). This means cortisol is going to ramp up and give you a nice little pooch around your tummy that you can’t shift, no matter how many crunches you do (as a side note, crunches are not the best exercise for a lean mid-section, so just stop it).

In my opinion, troubles with weight loss are the least of your worries if you are chronically under-eating and over-exercising. I have spoken (at length) about how this can lead to Hypothalamic Amenorrhea (click the labels below this post to read more about this topic), but what about the other consequences, not just impacting the ladies:

• Compromised bone density
• Brain fog and inability to focus
• Decreased performance (in all forms of exercise, including the bedroom)
• Vitamin and mineral deficiency
• Low energy
• Increased risk of heart problems
• Poor memory
• Skin breakouts
• Hair loss
• Cracked and brittle nails 

Not pretty, right? Moral to the story – eat more and eat well! Or, exercise less. You choose. But don’t do nothing, or you could end up in some ugly (literally and figuratively) places. It might be useful to track your daily food and exercise, using something like “My Fitness Pal” to get a better picture of whether you need a slap in the face with a juicy steak.

Thanks, Ryan. Much appreciated. 

Are your hands and feet cold? (non-wedding-related)

Mine were. Constantly. My husband would always complain about me “stealing” his heat (he used slightly more obscene language) as I rubbed my feet up against his warm legs, or as I stuck my ice-block hands up his top. Naturally, I thought it was funny. That’s because I didn’t really see it as a problem. Everyone has freezing extremities, right? Wrong. Little did I know, all of those years, I actually had a thyroid gland that was coughing and spluttering…..trying its absolute best to drive up my body temperature. Unfortunately, there were a number of factors in my life that were saying “F&@k you, thyroid!”, including:

• Under-eating 
• Over-exercising
• Eating gluten (for breakfast, lunch and dinner – not smart when you have undiagnosed celiac disease)
• Stressing like a mo-fo! Stress was my middle name! I wore it like a badge of honour! Fool!
• Not allowing enough time for R&R

So it’s not surprising that I am now on dessicated thyroid extract (a natural thyroid supplement) to try and get this baby up and running again. If you’re thinking you can live with cold hands and feet, that isn’t all that low thyroid causes. Your thyroid impacts pretty much every cell in your body, with an underactive thyroid looking something like this:

• Dry skin
• Brain fog
• Inability to focus
• Poor memory
• Infertility
• Menstrual irregularities (which I have spoken about at length HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE….just in case you were after some light reading on the topic of periods)
• Weight gain (and inability to lose weight)

Sexy, right?

That’s just a short list, and we haven’t even gotten to the subject of hyperthyroid (over-active) and Hashimoto’s thyroiditis!! And I’m not going to. Not here. Not yet, anyway. That’s because there is a FREE online Thyroid Summit coming up, starting May 4th with a bunch of AMAZING, incredibly knowledgeable, health practitioners (nutritionists, doctors, naturopaths and more) that are going to show you how you can NATURALLY heal your thyroid and restore optimal health through real food and lifestyle changes, as opposed to burying your head in the (warm) sand until it’s too late, like I did.

I’m particularly excited about these ones:

• Chris Kresser – Thyroid Myths and Truths (because I love all things Chris Kresser)
• Reed Davis - Stop Chasing Symptoms: An Illustrated Guide to Finding the Root Cause of Thyroid Disorders
• Dan Kalish – Home Thyroid Testing (because sometime needles just suck)
• Kim Schuette - The Thyroid’s Effect on Conception and Pregnancy
• BenGreenfield – How exercise destroys your thryroid…and what you can do about it

So if you are interested in your own health, or perhaps you’re a practitioner caring for the health of others. Check this out while it is still free, because it won’t be free after the sessions have aired, but there will be an opportunity to purchase them and keep them for life. Then you can watch thyroid videos OVER and OVER. Doesn’t that excite you? No? Oh well, I always knew I was different!

Checkout the Thyroid Summit and let me know what you think!

Hypothalamic Amenorrhoea - these things take time

Image by MONICA Reyes via Pinterest

To say I am impatient is a bit of an understatement. When I want to do something, I want to do it yesterday. My dad used to say to me:

“Lou Lou*, there’s no doubt about it – you’re a doer!”

*My middle name is Louise. Although, he often now calls me Luci. Pretty sure it has nothing to do with my middle name. Should I be offended that Luci is the name of our dog?

My amazing husband is also very cognizant of my “need-to-do-this-right-now-or-else” attitude. Although he often takes the approach of:

“Patience, my love. Patience”

Whatever. I’m a doer! My daddy told me so! And so when it came to baby-making, I applied the same amount of “OK, let’s do this” attitude, thinking if we start trying now (June 2013), then the baby will arrive around March next year, so I will be well and truly clear of university responsibilities. I apologized to my best friend – there was a high chance that I would either be pregnant or with child on her 30^th birthday (9^th March 2014). How lovely it is to dream….

Now, as you may know (if you have read my previous posts on the matter HERE, HERE and HERE), there was one minor glitch in this lady’s plan – a menstrual cycle that had been M.I.A for quite some time.

“That’s OK”, my friends would say, “I know a girl who had a cousin who dated a girl whose mother conceived when she didn’t have a period”**. Sweet. Back on track.

**May or may not be an accurate recollection of the conversation. Admittedly, quite a few friends mentioned that you could indeed ovulate without menstruating. I have since done the research and they were correct! Yay!

However, I knew it wasn’t ideal. I knew the best plan of attack would be to get my menstrual cycle regular – then I would truly back on fertile grounds.

Image by Erin Karolchyk via Pinterest

As I mentioned in my previous post on the matter, my first period in 2 years returned in September last year while I was in Broome. Then I returned home to Sydney apparently leaving my monthlies back in Western Australia. It was a little disappointing, but part of me expected it, for some reason.

We moved to New Zealand on Christmas Eve. Over the new year period, I partied like it was 1999 (only this time I was legally old enough to drink) – I was fed up with being “good” all the time, getting no evident results on the lady-time front. Early January this year it returned – I was pretty excited! So was my husband. And my family. Yep – everyone heard about it! It probably sounds odd to hear someone say they are excited about getting their monthlies –a time when your skin breaks out, you become a bit of an irrational, short-tempered bitch, your tummy cramps and bloats and you can’t don’t want to have sex. Sounds pretty shit, right? Any guys reading this are probably squirming up their face right now. Have you ever noticed that most males freak out when you say “period”. Try it – it’s fun! Anyway, the whole thing is exciting if you’re in my boat – it signals that things are starting to work again. And when you want a baby, there is nothing more important than the baby-maker. That’s not rocket science.

Image by Joanna Rodarte via Pinterest

OK let’s back-track a little.combination of factors: low carb diet, high intensity exercise, high stress life….. It’s really not surprising that my thyroid shut up shop! When you have low thyroid, you can experience a number of symptoms:

• Low energy (tick – always loved my coffee to get me going)
• Cold hands and feet (my husband can vouch for this one)
• Dry skin (like a crocodile. Sexy, right?)
• Weight gain (well, I had been trying to gain weight, but it did seem to happen at a pretty rapid rate)
• Low basal body temperature (mine was frequently dipping into "hypothermia")
• Menstrual cycle problems – BOOM!

 There are others, but I’m sure you know how to use Dr Google.

So I had a thyroid problem. The solution? Medication. I don’t like pharmaceutical drugs. I think they mess with our system and are too often handed out like lollies. However, if I wanted my body to start functioning properly, something had to be done. Luckily, I could be put on thyroid extract – dessicated pig thyroid! Yummy! Thyroid extract has the advantage of providing everything your thyroid requires, rather than just T4 (thyroxine), the inactive form of thyroid hormone which needs to be converted to the active form, T3 (triiodothyronine – try saying that 10 times fast!).

Anywho, a few weeks ago I had to go to a local NZ doctor to get a new script for my pig pills. She sent me for some blood tests to get a baseline of where my thyroid hormones are at. For shits and giggles, I thought:

 “While you’re getting some blood, let’s find out if I’m ovulating”….

The results came back –

Dr: “Your progesterone is very low, which means you aren’t ovulating, which I guess you already knew….”

Me: “Mmm hmmm. Yes, I guessed that was the case” – I lied, smiling on the outside, but dying a little on the inside. (For some reason, if you work as a health practitioner and you know about biochemistry, you somehow don't require the usual bedside manner) 

I’m not great with emotions, so I didn’t cry then and there. Or on the 40 minute drive home. It wasn’t until my mother-in-law’s dog chewed my sports bra that everything came unstuck and I threw a massive tanty. Why, when I have done everything right, was this happening to me? For more than 2 years I have tried pretty much everything to make myself fertile. What have I tried, you ask?

• Acupuncture
• Acuenergetics
• Ayurvedic massage
• Chiropractic
• Kinesiology
• Reflexology
• Chinese Medicine
• Raw food
• Cooked food
• More carbs
• More fat
• More protein
• More food in general
• Weight gain
• Less exercise
• Different exercise
• Herbal teas
• Naturopathy
• Herbal medicine
• Vitamin and mineral supplements
• Desiccated adrenal gland
• Desiccated testicle – yep, you read right – bull’s balls. Check them out below
• Abstaining from caffeine
• Abstaining from alcohol
• Sleeping in a pitch black room – I card-boarded up my windows to block out the light
• Crystal healing
• Ayahuasca
• Shamanism

 That’s just what I can remember off the top of my head. I am sure there’s more. Long list, right? Sometimes it is tempting to just give up and go down the medical route. But that’s not what I am about. I am determined to fix this the natural way – not just for me, but for all of the other females in my position. If I can fix myself, then I am in a much better position to be able to help others, right? I am slowly working through a truck-load of scientific literature. I say slowly because the studies I am reading are pretty technical and full of “science-ese” (as Denise Minger would call the language of science). But I will get there. And when I do, I will be sure to share what I have learnt. I've got your back, ladies! 

As we speak, I have my period. That’s two in two months! The last was a 38 day cycle – verging on regularity (ideally they should be 28-35 days long). It has taken me this long to get my period back. I’m guessing it will just take a little longer for ovulation to kick back in.

Image by Tina B via Pinterest

So stay tuned, friends – these things take time, but we are making progress! Thank you all for your continued support – it means a lot! xx