Macrobiotic Life

I am resolved to stop overeating and especially to stop eating all the junk foods I was stuffing into myself the last 3 weeks. I had eaten the worst foods yesterday night, like sausages, cheese, eggs, lard, lot of salt, lot of the cheepest chocolate, ton of honey, all mixed with white bread. I was eating till 23:00.
No I want to eat really strict again. Today I want to eat very small portion of MB meals. Chew very well and not to take anything else than MB foods. Control the yin side (barley malt).
But I have nothing else sweety than barley malt at home now. It would be good to go shoping and have some fruits (raisins, apples), dried soya milk, 100% fruit concentrates etc.
I start to dislike the barley malt more and more. And it’s not satisfiing me enought with the sweet cravings. I crave for honey, but when I start to eat honey, I crave for something stronger, chocolate.. it’s really vicious cycle, that’s not clever to start/open at the first place at all!! And I am really stupid to leting myself to eat honey the last days.
Also I crave for baked products. I should prepare sourdough leaven and do my bread instead of eating the salty graham bread.

Day progress:
It’s 21:00 when I am writing this. The day progressed very very well since far. The first meal I had at 14:00 and only small portion. It was even not salty at all, bland and very watery barley grains. I was whole day consciously observing everything, every thought and watching my hunger like it wasn’t happening to me, but to somebody else. I was trying to observe without the “me, myself” thoughts and tried to enjoy the hungry state. I would like to learn what real hunger really is. Because I am afraid I wasn’t really hungry for a long time. The feeling I consider hunger, is just little voice of my stomach. Another problem I have is to know, when I am full, not even to find out when I am full from 80% only. I am not sure what full (satisfied) for me does mean.
Anyway, I found out perfect, but very simple thing, important for my “home working” life. I don’t understand why it took me so long to connect all the puzzle pieces and realize this. I need movement/exercise/be active to stop the lazy, tired, unconcentrated vicious cycle! Yeah, sounds simple. But I needed to connect it all with the food and yin/yang theories. The physical action is making whole body more yang. It seems in another way than salt/shoyu, because I have no sweet cravings after finished running. Quite the opposite. The digestive system start to assimilate more nutrients into the blood and even when I felt hungry, I feel satisfied after a short intensive physical exercise. So I can prolong my eating and I have even more energy. I can start to concentrate and my brain is freed from the lazy/tired cage.
The perfect concentration and active lifestyle I had around the New Year seems to be not only because of the good quality macrobiotic I was eating, but mainly because I was going to weight-lift to gym (3 times a week) and run (3 times a week). It made my body/thinking active.
I need to incorporate any physical activity as my daily habit. Otherwise I will get stuck in the very bad, lazy state and doing nothing important. Only dreaming and wishing to do something, but without real power to launch things.
For today I was biking quickly for 15 minutes uphill. It started me to feel perfect. And for the dinner I ate small portion of spagheti, with leek+broccoli fried on oil, chickpea paste with little shoyu.

I have new simple quick spagheti recipe also:
- pressure cook chick pea with lot more water (I will use the water as a broth but it’s very tasty for drinking
also)
- saute vegetable for few minutes, add prepared spagheti and saute for few minutes, add broth and boil for a while, add shoyu to taste
- I have crushed hot chick peas to a paste before and I put this paste on top of the spagheti
- something green for a perfect look on top of that

I finished the dinner at 19:30 and because I was having small thoughts about what to eat now, even when I wasn’t hungry at all, I took a walk into the forest. I started to run there and in the end I pushed myself very well and was running really intensive. When came home, no taste other than thirsty. Well done.

5:50 get up
8:30 – 9:10 yesterday grains (rice + millet) with water deep-fried broccoli + roasted flax seeds (50x chewing)
12:20 – 12:40 small portion of fresh cooked kuskus with carrot and daikon + 2 plates of seitan; going out to school and taking 2 jars of this food
15:00 – 15:20 eating 1st jar at school, being very hungry, not chewing at all
18:10 – 18:40 chewing well 2nd jar, still at school

I am feeling very warm and very fine, happy minded. Outside temp is 0 *C. I have bought another camping tools for my traveling future plans. I have new gas cooker (var2 – czech made), new camping cooking set (2 pots – 1.5 liter and 1 liter) – but they have very thin bottom, i am not sure how well will these serve for macrobiotic foods cooking, because they need longer time preparation and lower flame. These camping cookers are prepared for maximum effect – high flames, rapid boil, but not for the low simmering. Anyway, for the longer trips to the foreign countries (Asia, Russia, Mongolia etc.), I imagine taking small 3.5 liter WMF pressure cooker. Yes, it sounds crazy, but I was inspired by Nelissen, who pictures I saw, when he was traveling China and taking not only one but two of these WMF pressure cookers in the backpack – their handles were sticking out of his bag like a two samurai swords But you need a lot of gas bombs for long time cooking too. Hope I will get more experiences. And what better could I do, than going to sleep in the nearby woods tonight. I was really feeling very warm, even hot. I have also bought new professional all-season groundcloth (14mm strong). It was veeery adventurous to go outside in the night for me, it was first time sleeping without tent, under the beautiful sky and trees. I packed my stuff and also some food to enjoy the morning breakfast in the nature and to test my cooker. I had head-light already boughten.
I went out at 22:30 and was preparing my sleep place at 23:30. Although I have slept no more than 3 hours, the enjoyment was VERY VERY cool. I felt like I can really go and sleep anywhere. I fall asleep fast, because I was heated from the trip and I was even sweating. But then I woke up and being cold. I couldn’t slept at all, I was feeling completely awake and was thinking about many thinks where I will travel. But while being still chilled, I went out and do a quick muscle training set (crunches and quick nunchaku set – yeah, I took my nunchaku also). And then went fast to the sleeping back and was ok and fall asleep again for a 1 hour. Woke up at 5:30. All birds were singing and I started to hear something very similar to barking, it was quite close to me. I looked around and I realised that even roebucks are barking I fall in love with sleeping outside. I fall in love with Nature. I want to spend more time outside than in the house. And with today’s achievement, I feel very powerful. It was my first trip in the quite cold weather, sleeping without tent. I forgot to say, that it was -3 *C through the night.
At the morning I made a lot of streching, some fast runs, Bates eye stretching method for my shortsightedness (I have very strong – minus 6 dioptres and I consider this as a biggest goal in my life, to corect this shortsightedness problem and to enjoy the World without glass crunches, it limits me in many adventurous dreams and sports, I need to wear contact lenses, but I am ok with them only for 12 hours, sometimes I would need more hours without glasses, especially if I would like to hike in the mountains).
Then I warmed my leftover grains (kuskus + rice with millet) in the bancha tea. All went ok with the VAR cooker. And chewed 50-150 times in the meditative morning forest atmosphere. I eat that from 6:50 – 7:40.
I come home at 8:30.
But now, while writing (10:00), I feel like I have small higher temperature. But I am happy for this, because the yin overeating in the previous days needs to be eliminated. I am very thankful it goes out in the natural manner – higher temperature and sweating. I will definitely support my body in this process with small food portions and perfect chewing today.

I have also finished the school. Actually, I call it school, but it was course in the “Www administration” that belongs under the Labour Office, because I am unemployed at this time. From today I have all my time for my future plans. I have some money stream coming from my internet website projects. But it’s not much and I will need to live frugal life, if I wouldn’t want to go to work.

Thank you Nature for this beautiful World.

5:45 get up
9:00 – 9:40 freshly pressure cooked 80% short rice + 20% millet with salt; water deep fried leek; chewed very well (50-150x), small portion; i was chewing my saliva 500x before the meal
11:40 – 12:15 the same
13:10 – 14:00 walking outside
14:30 – 15:15 miso soup – carrot, daikon, wakame, sunflower oil (1 spoon); today’s grains
16:15 – 18:10 little of grains; finished miso soup; Racio “breads” – it’s a local product, i call them styrofoams, very dry whole grain slices, I eat them with a half of raw chinese cabbage pressed with salt; I can say that I have overeaten by this, but I feel somehow satisfied, not craving for anything; it seems like the raw vegetable aspect (yin) does work for my craving (at least now); it concurs with my reading at the fruitarian forums, where people say, they have no need for overating on the raw food diet, they say they are completely satisfied with the raw vegies and fruits and seeds/nuts
and have no cravings and binges; maybe I should switch my barley malt overeating with raw salads overeating; i will prepare pickled raw cabbage today for tommorow consumption

19:30 – 20:15 grains fried on oil with shoyu + the chinese cabbage salad + small piece of seitan; well chewed
21:00 – 21:20 meditation
21:50 sleep

Not the worst day from the macrobiotic eating view, because I haven’t eaten any simple sugars like barley malt or my favorite oat milk (sweetened). Just lot of raw pressed salad and 3 tablespoons of oil, which is better than malts or fruits I think. But I haven’t adhered to the pause of at least 3 hours after the dinner.

6:00 get up
6:50 shoyu + kuzu drink; my lower lip is swollen (classic reaction to the extreme yin state of my large intestine)
9:55 – 10:25 porridge – rice+barley (yesterday) with water; 15 minute stewed cabbage
11:45 – 12:00 the same
12:20 – 12:45 seitan fried on sunflower oil + shoyu + rice with barley; roasted seeds
18:00 – 18:40 rice + barley + onion + sunflower oil (1 spoon)
23:00 sleep

I would say, perfect day from the eating regime point of view. But the reason I haven’t overeaten is pretty visible. I was out from 16 am to 22 am and I couldn’t sit at home while eating unconsciously while watching some movie or reading internet. It’s a big change when I am occupied by something interesting. But because I am working from home and many times not going out at night, I have problems not to think about food, when my energy slows down and I have no idea what really interesting to do. I am single also, and this adds up a lot. When having gf I would have plenty ideas to conduct with her I need to build my discipline more, it was not such a big problem in the history. But now I am trying not to be so hard on me and rather watch consciously what my body needs/craves and not to restrict anything, but be more in the yin/yang flow of energies. If I see I do crave for sweets, I am trying to find the real reason now. I hope this overeating experiment, with no push to be disciplined, will show me some new path to my problems.

I was doing a lot of stretches through the day – the “Sun greeting” set many times and many other stretching styles.
I also met a girl by accident that is going to Iceland for 5 month and we were chatting in the Shopping store for 3 hours about her and my life.

And I bought my first new rucksack – Deuter Aircontact Pro 60 + 15. The price is in the highest range of the rucksacks prices, but I decided not to spare on two things – rucksack and boots. Because I don’t see no logic in saving $125-$200 bucks on rucksack if my backs will hurt on a long trip, the same with boots. I am slowly getting more ready for my planned future trip. I want to live in a nature for a while. I see a healthy/spiritual aspect in this trip. I want to eat and cook and chew and exercise and meditate for few days/weeks in the mountains. One of the reasons is, that I hope I will be occupied by many interesting things and the food will be no more my top daily priority. Also the food reserves will be low, so I won’t be able to eat and eat and eat.. I will need to think and spread my foods over the whole trip. That’s what I call real life discipline, not the artificial part that I would achieve at home.

7:15 get up
9:30 – 10:00 fresh pressure cooked 60% rice + 40% barley (soaked overnight); small portion very well chewed (100-200x)
- trying to meditate (watch, observe) the chewing process and thinking of my mouth as an energetic oven, where the food
is charged by the chi of Earth and Cosmos
11:15 – 11:30 the same
12:15 – 13:00 the same; watching TV
15:30 – 16:30 the same; watching TV
17:15 – 19:20 complete overeating with macrobiotic sweets; oat milk stired with hot water + pastas; roasted seeds;
seitan + sunflower oil + onion + shoyu; 1/4 jar of barley malt; oat milk dry; watching internet videos
22:00 sleep

Again totally overeaten with sweets. Idiotic behaviour, that the reason of this, is mainly the lack of an interesting
activity to pursue at midnight. My energy is low after reading, studying whole day and I am eating because of being
bored. What a bad reason. But still I have to praise myself too, because the head start to the day (well, up until the
midnight) was very good. I was chewing perfectly, eating low portions, doing things that interested me (mainly
macrobiotic/taoism study).. only the hours past 17 were totally off.

I would like to try to log my daily eating habits and some personal observations from my days.
These logs will be maybe a little chaotic for you. For this I am very sorry, but I will risk it, maybe somebody will still find some value in them. At least I would like to read some eating logs of other macrobiotic friends, so I could see, how is their eating regime structured and to see that I am not the only one, who has a lot of cravings (sweet for me) and is overeating and not eating straight macrobiotic diet at all (which is nearly impossible – we are just humans).
I am also for the grammar/typing mistakes, English is really not my native language. I am also using my food version names, if you become really interested what did I really mean, just ask in the comments. Well, I start with the day log now.

7:10 getting up
10:15 – 10:50 pressure cooked rice with red lentils (from yesterday); deep-fry broccoli+carrot (in water)

12:30 – 13:00 rice+lentils again; fresh miso porridge – turnip cabbage (with green leafs), onion, wakame, miso, wheat
flakes, sunflower oil = dense porridge

14:30 – 16:00 dense miso porridge again; freshly cooked adzuki with barley malt and mixed
18:15 – 20:30 overeating, at the end lot of yin (barley malt, oat milk dry); i began with fresh pastas + water deep fried
broccoli + ume vinegar with water; continued with pastas + oat milk (dry) – overeaten a lot; then finished the adzuki +
barley malt (so it means I have eaten 500 ml of the adzuki today); then eaten simple barley malt (1/4 of the jar); then
drinked kuzu + shoyu drink

I was watching samurai movie – Sword of Doom (highly recommend, one of the best samurai movies ever) – while eating
Today I have learned/watched some chi kung videos – I have learned and practiced Wuji Swimming Dragon
Also watched the Wudang Kungu 5 part document at youtube. It’s a beautiful document full of taoist inspiration, 103 year old women that practice taichi 3 hours a day and have really long nails, 10 year old girl with a bear and a sword in their hands and masters that are going for immortality it left me with a strong fascination to learn more of the tai chi, chi kung, kungfu, for the chi energy reasons, not for the physical fighting; if I would know any temple where I can stay for free and eat macrobioticaly and train, I would pack my things and rush there Please let me know if any exist.

I am not posting my daily eating recipes with photos as I planned. It’s mainly because I feel like my meals are very similar to each other and I have nothing new to show and share, except of the little bit different grain and vegetable combinations. But I am still making pictures very often, because I really like the look of the macrobiotic foods on the plate. It encourages me to care for a plate design a little bit more than if I wouldn’t be making pictures for this web. In privacy, when eating alone and preparing my quick dish from the leftover grains, I am very often mixing all foods into one pot – starting with a little of oil or water, frying some vegetables and then adding the grain + ginger or shoyu or miso. And then very often eat right from the pot.. yeah, I am just a simple man, pardon me But in the last month, I really do care about the aesthetic aspect of my meals too.

Back to my typical morning breakfasts. I am usually cooking new batch of grains every morning. I get up at 6-7 am. I have usually prepared soaked grains already in the pot with the right amount of water. So I just bring them to the boil, pick the foam, add kombu or sea salt and pressure cook them for 50 minutes. Then wait until they are little colder and I am starting with the breakfast time around 9-10 am. It’s ok for me, because at the morning it’s the only time I am really satisfied with being hungry and I have no taste cravings. So I enjoy the empty stomach at morning, sometimes as long as I can, and it is no rarity to start eating at 11-12 for me – it very depends on the richness of my last evening meal.

When the grains are prepared, I am used to add only water prepared vegetables on my breakfast plate. In the last Spring days I really like veggies like broccoli, leek and carrot. I water-boil them very fast, with no salt, like 3-6 minutes, so they are nicely crispy, have perfect enticing color and are very sweet (broccoli not so much, but the leek and carrots very much). I switch between boiling in too much water (3/4 of the pot) and simmering in 2 cm water in the pot – to have always different cooking styles. I am changing the cutting styles also. Remember to always change something in your daily cooking. It enhances creativity also.
Every other day, I am roasting pumpkin, sunflower or sesame seeds for my breakfast too.
And that’s it.

I have to add, that my breakfasts are not entirely ideal macrobiotic ones. The suggested morning meal should consists of a grain gruel, it means more watery version of your usual grains. You will achieve this by cooking grain left-overs for 5-10 minutes in a 1-2 cups of water. The consistency will change to gruel and it’s more recommended for the daily healthy breakfast. You should go more yang (less water) as the day progress. The miso soup is also recommended for the ideal macrobiotic breakfast (again the water effect). So in the end, you can see, that my breakfasts are not ideal at all

You can see the final results on the following – macrobiotic breakfast – pictures:

Barley + adzuki + kombu, kale

Short rice + oat + kombu, leek

Short brown rice + emmer grain, leek + broccoli

Short brown rice, leek

Breakfast

I have whole grains leftover from the previous day. It was 70% rice + 30% millet cooked with piece of kombu and 2x of natural spring water in the pressure cooker for 50 minutes.
I simply modeled balls from the grains by hand (wet your hands), just for the decorative reason.
And the vegetable is very simply boiled too. I have choose to quick boil it in the big amount of water (can’t remember the cooking style of this). It’s just different than steaming the vegetable in a pot with little water in the bottom. Because you need to pick narrow smaller pot and fill it 1/2 or 3/4 with water, let the water boil and bubble and put one type of vegetable in it. Cook the vegetable types separately. The cooking time is short, to let the veggies be crunchy and nicely coloured with strong flavour. For the green veggies, 1-3 minutes is enough. For the root vegetables let them boil a little longer. You will learn by practice, just experiment. Pick the veggies out with a strainer. I usually put my grain balls at the end to the hot water too, to get them warm, because I usually use leftovers from fridge for breakfast.

Lunch

For the lunch I have spent a little longer time today. It was about 40 minutes for preparation.

Whole grains
I prepared these whole grains today: 70% rice and %30 emmer grain (it’s one of the oldest grains used for cooking on this planet – Paleolithic Age 17,000 BC), kombu, 2 times of water, cooked in pressure cooker for 50 minutes.

Vegetables
I have used the water from the morning breakfast and for the veggies choose mostly full pot of kale and 1 piece of onion. I am repeating again, these are not hardstone written recipes. I am thinking them up daily, according to my tastes, but very often my tastes are out of range of my stores, so I cook whatever is eatable at my house at that moment Let your intuition guide you and mix any sorts of vegetables together as long as they are macrobiotic sorts of veggies (you know the prohibited ones are night shades – capsicum, tomato, potatoes, eggplant etc. and use only the ones from your climatic zone). I have sidetracked a little…
I also add to the kale+onion+water these other things: red lentils (like 3-4 tsp), wakame (3-4 cm), pumpkin+sunflower seeds (1-2 tsp).
Let it boil for 12 minutes and put 1 tesp of barley miso and squeezed 1 tesp of ginger. Rest for 2 minutes and ready to serve. But I had to postpone my lunch a little because I wanted delicious, crunchy, fatty tempura with a lot of protein.

Tempura
I have decided to deep-fry small pieces of seitan, tempeh and nori. I use white flour for deep-frying, something that I have learned at Kushi Institute in Holland. They teach us, that white flour absorbs very little of fat in comparison to whole grain flour. And it’s really true from my experience. We have very good electrical grain-mill at home. It was bought at Vienna, but I don’t know where exactly, it was a gift. But it’s really superb grinder, all the others I have seen here are very small and very costly. This one is big and precisely made and according to the man who bought it, it was cheap, but I am not sure about the exact price. Just let me know in comments if you want to get more info or to see a picture, I will gladly help. So if you have your own grinder it’s very good, because you can always prepare the very fresh flour, that’s not in the rancid process. I made white flour by milling the white rice. Then I just mix with a little of water and make thin paste. In the small narrow pot pour enough oil so your tempuras can be deep-fried easily and be covered by oil from all sides. I am using sunflower oil, but I am not sure if it’s the best one for frying. I have read about big advantages of rice bran oil for the deep-frying. The Ilanit Tof article about oils – Reflections on oil consumption – is very good reading in general. Back to the tempura making. Simply cover the seitan, tempeh, nori pieces in the white flour paste and let it deep-fry for 2-4 minutes in the hot oil from both sides. Place on a plate with spongy napkins to absorb the excess of oil. And you can see my Wednesday result at the pictures.

I would like to start posting and logging and blogging about my daily eating habits. I will try to make descriptions of the ingredients and make a nice pictures of my daily foods. Sometimes I will post only my lunch recipe, sometimes breakfast or dinner too. It will depend on my time, mood and if the meals would be interesting to blog about. It’s all one big experiment what I am going to do. I always wanted to log what I eat daily and it seems that if I will blog about it here, I will even give other people new ideas and maybe encourage them to start cooking macrobiotic too. It’s not hard at all. I am single man, living alone, cooking for myself only and I am preparing 3 meals a day. I won’t lie to you, it’s taking quite much time, because I am trying to cook as best as I can just now. But any time invested in your health, is not lost time. You will gain a massive amount of energy, happiness, well-being from your orderly cooked macrobiotic foods and if you eat them in relaxed manner and chewing them well. Don’t exchange your time for money, by working hard in a lousy job and neglecting your health. Stop and try to think a little. Anything in this world is more important than your health. If you are healthy, you can build on top of that. But no model can work opposite. You can’t do anything well if you are not healthy. Be patient and start cooking macrobioticly, because it’s the only food system, that is in harmony with nature and leads to natural well-being and happiness. Ok, from now, you will see more pictures and recipes at this blog. Enjoy and post comments if you want