It seems like a lot of things to think about but all you have to think is a balanced diet of REAL FOOD.

I am not a mother of humans and I’m not a medical professional so please read the disclaimer at the end of this blog. I checked my opinions with a registered nurse who worked for over a decade in pediatrics and pediatric ICU, who is also a mother and a grandmother.

Your very first consideration in our sugar-crazed world is to seriously consider never giving your baby sugar. If your baby doesn’t get sugar in the first 3 years of life he/she will likely never develop a taste for it. Unless you give your baby sugar, he/she isn’t going to be in the kitchen at 3 a.m. making a hot fudge sundae at 8 months old. You are in the driver’s seat when it comes to sugar—at least now. And children’s tastes for food are set in stone by age 3. So it’s up to you.

Another issue if factory food. It’s poison for adults and extreme poison for babies. I may come off as a total lunatic but I’m going to come right out and say my true opinion that feeding babies and children factory food is child abuse. A reasonable person wouldn’t feed say, chocolate to a dog, as chocolate is poison to dogs. So why would you feed McDonalds, Trix, Coke, or any of the other thousands of poisonous substances to your children? When I read “kids menus” in hotels and restaurants I really feel sad. I also feel infuriated. So that is all I’m going to say for now on this subject.

But I do want you to relax. Babies all over the world eat hot curries, insects, and all sorts of weird stuff. If you’re relaxed and casual about feeding your baby a diet of real whole food, he or she is going to accept that diet, and you’ll be setting your baby up for a lifetime of good eating habits (desires).

Food makers were able to put MSG in baby food until 1969 and now the medical community is wondering why there is so many neurological problems in the boomer generation. Even though MSG is not in baby food anymore, don’t feed your baby jarred food. It’s dead.

Just as you would eat yourself, feed your baby historically eaten foods—foods that were consumed 150 years ago.

For baby’s brain, immune, and endocrine development, you want to make sure that your baby eats nothing but real food, and especially real, healthy fats (butter, coconut milk, olive oil, cod liver oil, butter fat from whole milk, whole plain yogurt, eggs, meat, small fish). The brain is 60 percent fat and will be made up of any fats you put into it. So if you feed your baby crackers, then his/her brain will be made up of the hydrogenated or even in the very best case, the damaged vegetable (usually soy) omega 6 oils in those crackers.

Wouldn’t it be neat to make a baby and then develop that baby’s brain on nothing but real, healthy fats? I think it would.

Brain development explodes in the first 3 months of life. It’s crucial for breastfeeding mothers to eat healthy, organic fats during this time so that baby’s brain gets the fats it needs for development.

Raw whole milk (that is milk that isn’t pasteurized) contains abundant omega 3 fatty acids, which is going to contribute to a healthy, happy, optimal brain. Butterfat is also the richest known source of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), which fights toxins, and regulates metabolic rate. (Unenlightened doctors will flip out at the idea of mother’s or infants drinking raw milk. Of course you should only buy raw milk from a reputable raw milk producer. They are all highly regulated by the government and their milk has fewer bacteria raw than commercial milk has pasteurized).

Never ever give your baby any type of soy. A bottle of soy formula has the same amount of estrogen as a birth control pill. Soy has many problems that you’ll read about in Death by Supermarket and Survival Guide. Suffice it to say here, that it is extremely toxic to babies causing everything from cognitive problems to reproductive problems (public hair and breasts on 2 year old babies, for example).

It’s a good idea to wait until your baby is 6 months old before giving her or solid food as well as her usual milk. After 6 months breast-milk on its own doesn’t give your baby everything she/he needs, in particular iron.

Start with simple puréed or well-mashed foods. Give baby a balanced diet of real, whole food and a variety from the four main food groups:

Proteins
Fats
Nonstarchy vegetables
Carbohydrate

Baby’s shouldn’t eat commercial grain products because they are made with GMO grains. Instead make your own baby cereal, using short grain brown rice, amaranth, grits, millet, maize, or steel cut oatmeal. Put dry grains into a food processor and pulse until powder, then follow this basic recipe:

1/4 cup powder
1 cup water

Bring water to boil in saucepan. Add the powder. Simmer for 10 minutes, whisking constantly. Allow to cool before mixing in breast milk. You never want to heat breast milk as it destroys the enzymes.

With cereal, try offering baby 1 or 2 spoonfuls of the following:

Mashed or puréed vegetables, such as cooked carrot, parsnip, potato or sweet potato, with organic butter for brain, immune and endocrine development.

Mashed or puréed fruit, such as banana, cooked apple, pear or mango. Easy on the fruit as it will develop your baby’s taste for sugar. Always mix with veggies. Just think, if ripe banana is your baby’s first food then SUGAR is going to be the first food he/she tastes.

You can offer food to your baby before or after a milk feed, or in the middle of a feed if this works better.

It may take your baby a while to get used to these new flavors. Don’t be surprised if she/he rejects the food or spits it out. Just try again later, or the next day. You can make the food a little blander by mixing it with a few teaspoons of your milk or organic cow or goat milk.

As your baby becomes used to fruits, vegetables and cereal, add a variety of other foods. Then gradually increase the number of times a day that she/he has solids. By the time your baby is about 7 months old, she/he should be eating solids 3 times a day. A typical day’s intake could include:

Breastmilk

Cereal.

Vegetables: potatoes, parsnips, broccoli, cauliflower, sweet potato, spinach and butternut squash.

Small amounts of pureed grass fed, organically raised meat, poultry, fish, whole plain yogurt, hard boiled egg, well-cooked lentils, and organic cheese.

Don’t give your baby brie, stilton and other mold-ripened or soft cheeses.

Fruit

Use a tiny pinch of sea salt in cooking for natural minerals.

At about 7 to 9 months, most babies are ready for finger foods cut into bite-sized bits. Ideal finger foods for this stage are:

Tender cooked carrots and sweet potatoes
Ripe bananas
Melon
Apples
For teething you can make your own teething biscuits.

1 cup steel cut oats pulsed to coarse oat flour
1/4 tsp sea salt
1/4 tsp cinnamon or ginger or cardamom
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 overripe bananas, mashed
2 organic egg yokes
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 tbs butter or coconut oil

Mix dry ingredients, add bananas, eggs, vanilla and melted butter or melted coconut oil. Drop by the spoonful onto a baking sheet greased with coconut oil. Bake 12 to 15 min at 350

To avoid brain damage, never give your baby city water or commercial juices as they are made with city water. City water is contaminated with arsenic, mercury, cadmium, fluoride, lead, aluminum, pharmaceutical compounds, herbicides, fungicides, industrial solvents such as vinyl chloride, dioxin, benzene, acrylamide, and polychlorinated biphenyls.

You should also not give your baby (even home squeezed) fruit juices in a bottle as this can lead to “bottle mouth,” a condition wherein your baby’s incoming teeth rot and can jeopardize his/her adult teeth. If your baby wants to suck on a bottle have him/her get accustomed to drinking distilled water, which is the cleanest water. I am researching water filtration systems for distilling for my book Survival Guide.

Also never give a baby or child rice or nut milks as they are also made with city water. Nut milks are particularly dangerous for children as nuts contain natural toxins (inherent in the plants to keep predators from destroying the entire plant).

Keep all toxins (especially chewable plastic and vinyl toys) away from your baby. Use organic detergents and soaps. Use your head. If it’s got chemical gobbledygook words in the ingredients, it’s poison to your baby’s brain. Keep your cell phone away from your baby’s head. Get rid of that stupid microwave!

Enjoy your beautiful baby and watching your baby grow into a healthy child. Om Shanti.

Om Shanti, Nancy

Grandma Gone Granola Blog
Simple, Inexpensive Tips for Healthy Living from Becky Lyles

How to Grocery Shop
June 23, 2010

For years, health experts have suggested we shop the outer rim of supermarket shelves—where unprocessed food items are usually located—and avoid the inner aisles as much as possible. The counters and coolers along the perimeter of most grocery stores include fresh fruits and vegetables, seafood, meat, eggs, dairy products, and sometimes raw grains, nuts and seeds.

“Elizabeth Ward, RD, author of The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to the New Food Pyramids, says we should fill our shopping carts with fruits, vegetables, whole grains, dairy, lean meat, fish, poultry, beans and nuts. “Be adventurous; aim to try a new fruit or vegetable each week.” http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/guide/10-tips-for-healthy-grocery-shopping

“When buying or eating food, always remember that the more processes a food has to go through before it gets to you, the quicker you should decide against buying and eating it. The more devitalized and processed foods you eliminate from your diet, the healthier you will be.” (Stormie Omartian, Greater Health God’s Way)

“…factory food is designed to make you want to eat more. And wanting to eat more is the polar opposite of being satisfied. How does the factory food industry get you to want to eat more? The primary addicting ingredient is sugar, but the deal clincher is the flavor enhancer monosodium glutamate (MSG).” (Death by Supermarket by Nancy Deville)

Avoid factory food addiction. Eat real food. Happy shopping! Becky

Wednesday, June 30 at 5 p.m. PST, 8 p.m. EST
Blog talk radio interview with Jon Hansen

Wednesday, July 28 at 11 a.m. PST, 1 p.m. EST
Interview with Cheryl Benton and Debbie Zip
I will discuss Death by Supermarket and my upcoming book Survival Guide.

Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 1:30 p.m. PST, 4:30 p.m. EST
Radio interview with David Steinman
David is an environmentalist, consumer advocate, and author. I will discuss Death by Supermarket and my upcoming book Survival Guide.

If you haven’t read Death by Supermarket: The Fattening, Dumbing Down, and Poisoning of America, it lays the ground work of education for Survival Guide. Then Survival Guide is the program of diet, sleep, supplements, HRT, meditation, much more.

If you’re curious about what people are saying about Death by Supermarket, you can read Amazon comments here.  I also received this Google Alert this morning from a Gastric Bypass site with even more reviews.

Death by Supermarket is great summer reading. I hope you have a fabulous summer!

Om Shanti!
Nancy

READ AN EXCERPT OF DEATH BY SUPERMARKET

Get your copy now of the first edition of Death by Supermarket: The Fattening, Dumbing Down, and Poisoning of America [Paperback] at the crazy discounted price. TOTAL WITH SHIPPING ONLY $10. Buy now they are going fast!

My primary goal every day is to begin the day with meditation. I find if I don’t meditate immediately then fires take control of my schedule. If I do meditate then I’m better able to extinguish fires during the workday. I don’t need coffee to wake up so I meditate before I leave the bedroom.

I schedule exercise (usually yoga) on my calendar. If it’s not on my calendar then when something comes up it might bump yoga off my day, and I don’t want that to happen. Because I’m a health and wellness writer I factor yoga into my work day with impunity!

I work every day, even on the weekends. I rarely skip a day. I may not work the entire day, but I get something done. I frequently work the entire weekend. Fortunately I’m in love with what I do. But I don’t always write. I would like to write every day, but I’m an industry of one so I have to do everything, including grocery shopping, bills, cooking. In the spirit of disclosure, I do have a housekeeper who comes once a week, an assistant who runs errands for me once a week, and now that one of our dogs is too old to give me a workout, a dog walker comes 5 days a week.

When I have time alone on the weekends I don’t “work,” I write. That is pleasure and those are wonderful stolen hours.

Every week begins with a To Do list. This list runs the gamut from personal to business. It’s all mixed up. The To Do list would take over my writing schedule if I didn’t create artificial deadlines. I know exactly what trajectory any given project is on and what state it needs to be in by a certain date. Then I set another deadline. This works well for airline travel because I have edited all of my manuscripts on airplanes. But you have to plan ahead and have the manuscript in a prepared state.

Because I create deadlines there are days when I simply have to devote the entire day to writing just to make progress. I have to read a manuscript through in total quiet without interruptions so that I can gauge its flow and continuity. That takes scheduling. On those days bathroom breaks and food runs to the kitchen are the only interruptions allowed. But it’s so much fun.

I only make business calls during the day. I’m not a phone talker by nature and don’t enjoy talking on the phone so I generally keep calls to the point and move it along. The phone can chew up a lot of a writer’s day. The same is true with the Internet. It’s very easy to get caught up in emails and Facebook.

Because I’m doing FB videos now, that takes a lot of my time. It requires “stage” makeup or I’m washed out. So just getting myself organized, and the camera set up with acceptable lighting takes a lot of time and then it takes time to upload the videos to YouTube. So I generally turn back to whatever I’m writing while the video is uploading. This sounds a lot like mult-tasking though it’s not. I’ve come to the conclusion that multi-tasking doesn’t really result in the optimal completion of tasks. You get stuff done but not in the spirit of excellence.

Right now I’m working on my proposal for Survival Guide. I’m thinking about it all the time, when I wake up and when I go to bed. I take the last draft with me to bed and read and edit it before I go to sleep. After I meditate, I take my laptop to the kitchen for breakfast and download emails and FB messages. I blow through them as fast as I can. Then I eat breakfast and I’ll work for several hours on my writing. I attend to emails and FB messages in between writing when I want to clear my mind of what I’m working on so I can have a fresh look at it.

I don’t go out very often at night. That would probably not appeal to a lot of people, but I like to go to bed early so I can be fresh the next day. I’m dedicated to my lifestyle of work and accomplishments. I haven’t been much of a vacation taker since I started my writing career. That needed to change for my health, sanity, and productivity, so the last few summers we’ve spent 4-6 weeks on Martha’s Vineyard. Last summer was a near total bust. I started working on my memoir Hippie Chick but mostly I goofed off the entire time. It was OK and it didn’t make me paranoid because I knew that I would crank in September. And since that time I have not stopped. But if that kind of slacking derails you, then I wouldn’t recommend it.

Because of my dedication to my work, I’m not a crazy social animal. I love entertaining, but I keep it to a reasonable amount of time. Socializing is a reward for work done, but at the same time there are times when I can’t stand the sight of my laptop.  So socializing purges me of any pent up discontent.

Every single social, travel, or extracurricular event, book, magazine, newspaper, TV, movie, play, or opera is fodder for my writing. I never stop making mental or actual notes. Keeping my mind active saves me time because I never have to think, now what? I have so much creative stuff at my disposal that sometimes it builds up to a toxic level and that’s when I can’t sleep. So I have to monitor my drive a little.

One detail that I have always given priority to is making connections. I spend time networking regularly. I spend a lot of time sending review books out, scheduling radio interviews, preparing for interviews and talks and rehearsing. And in the beginning I always wrote thank you notes (on real stationary not emails) to agents who rejected a manuscript. They took time out of their busy schedules to read my work and I felt an acknowledgement is only polite. Now I don’t really get much information on who reads what because my agent does it for me. But if there is an instance where I have direct contact with a person who gives me any amount of time, I thank that person with a real note.

As I write I’m getting a pedicure. It’s taken me 45 minutes to write this. I planned it that way. I plan my entire work schedule. So I guess in a nutshell my time management strategy is all about planning.

Om Shanti.

When I was 40 in 1990 I bought my first computer and announced that I was now a writer. I thought that you wrote a book from the beginning to the end and then wrote THE END and you were finished. It’s not at all the way it works.

I wanted to be a novelist so set out to write my first manuscript. To begin I wrote in ball point pen on a Post-It “Do not disturb for any reason,” and I put that Post-It up on my office door. It has a lot of power because when I was in my office with the door shut no one disturbed me. It took me two years to write my first manuscript, the novel that is now Karma. (That is too long of a story to get into now.)

A lot of people go to writer’s conferences. I signed up for one in Santa Barbara but it all seemed like a bunch of schmoozing and listening to amateurs (including me) read their works in progress out loud. I only went to a few classes and then felt like I should be home writing. So that’s where I ended up—though I did take a semester of Adult Ed night classes on how to write fiction that was very buttoned up and no reading allowed. So I learned from those classes.

I’m not discounting writing conferences, or discouraging you from attending. It was just not my thing.

My MO has been to write a draft, and then find an editor to copy edit whatever manuscript I was working on. I pay for these services—you can’t get professional feedback from friends. (FYI copy editing is when an editor does a massive sweep of your work looking for continuity, flow, characterization, plot, etc.) And then I take about 90 percent of what that editor tells me. Not all comments are created equal.

Rewriting is the majority of the work. I’m fortunate because I’m not very picky about my first drafts. I will write anything just to have words down on the page. I am not fond of writing first drafts. But when I have the first words down, no matter how dumb and unorganized, I then start to have fun.

Over the years I’ve developed techniques that have made my writing so much better. One important skill to hone is ruthless deletion. Shorter, terser is always better. Keep the pace moving.

The most difficult but the most important and productive technique is retyping rather than cutting and pasting. I used to “rewrite” by cutting and pasting. But then with Karma I forced myself to finally do what I’ve heard about from the masters of writing, and that’s to retype the manuscript. Retyping allows you to rewrite sentences and to embellish and cut in ways that you really can’t do when cutting and pasting. It’s much more creative. But it also separates the men from the boys. It’s brutal and takes a ton of discipline to do it because imaging retyping 90-120,000 words with all the punctuation. I don’t retype final drafts however because line editing would be crazy.

I don’t believe that writers have to write a certain number of words per day. I have a lot of interests (yoga, Charlotte and India, piano, reading, cooking, and of course developing my cult following for my health pursuits, ha) so I don’t have the time or desire to write every single day. But when I do write I am a machine. I get into the flow very easily. As drafts mature and my characters become fully developed I begin to live through them, thinking their thoughts and feeling their emotions. That’s when I tend to finish huge chunks. I’m not very much fun to live with then, as I’m pretty much glued to my laptop and carry it around with me from room to room.

Deadlines are crucial. I impose artificial deadlines on myself. I wanted the manuscript Love Children (my second novel) to be off to an editor this summer because I have a lot of traveling to do and I wanted not to feel disappointed in myself. So I made that happen and the manuscript is with an editor, Ron Kenner—who I am sharing a booth with at BEA this week in NY!

This summer I will work on my two next writing projects, my memoir Hippie Chick of my trip to India in 1968-69 and the book I’m developing to share with you what I’ve learned on how not to fall apart. I haven’t settled on a title. It will be a HOW TO on my entire personal program, with guest chapters on hormone replacement, etc. written by experts.

So even though I said I would take my 60th birthday summer off, I won’t, cause I love what I do!

Please feel free to ask me any other questions about the writing process. Om Shanti!

The roll appears after years of stress and carbohydrates. As I’ve explained in videos:

When you are stressed your adrenals secrete cortisol, which breaks down your lean body mass (muscle and bones) to provide sugar as fuel to use during this time of stress (not trekking across the desert looking for food, but staying up till midnight Xeroxing something for your boss). But still. Now you have too much sugar in your bloodstream and sugar is damaging to cells so your body doesn’t like that situation.

Another way is by using stimulants (tobacco, caffeine, drugs (prescription, OTC, or recreational)—all of which result in the release of cortisol.

The third way you get too much sugar in your bloodstream is by eating too many carbs.

When you have too much sugar in your bloodstream insulin is secreted to store that sugar away into cells. After years of stress, eating too many carbs, using stimulants, your cells are filled to capacity with sugar and your body has not other choice but to convert any incoming (nonused) sugar into fat and it stores that fat, guess where? Around your waist first. I do not know why. I agree it’s unfair, but it’s just the way it is.

The way to achieve your optimal body weight and empty those cells of fat and sugar is to focus on overall health.

Stop eating factory food
Eat a balanced diet of real food
Reduce stress (remove yourself from stress if possible, practice meditation)
Cut down on or quit all stimulants (caffeine, tobacco, alcohol, prescription, OTC and recreational drugs)
Avoid toxic exposure
Drinking plenty of water to flush poisons from your system
Indulging in mind-clearing playtime
Go to bed as early as possible (preferably by ten) and get eight hours of rest
Exercise

In Karma, my character Dr. Meredith Fitzgerald uses survival breathing to keep a clear head. Inhale for 4, exhale for 4. But would you be surprised to know that slow, even, modulated breathing can actually lower your blood pressure? There is a device you can buy that will help you keep track of your breathing. It’s called “Respirate,” and it really works. But if you don’t want to drop $150 on that little gadget, you can do it yourself but you have to be disciplined. Just sit quietly and watch the second hand on a clock. It doesn’t matter how long your breaths are as long as they are even. So if you breath in for 7 seconds, then breath out for 7 seconds. Do this for 10-15 minutes a day every day for 2 weeks and your blood pressure will drop.

I understood that it was a “Young Adult” book that had taken off in adult readers so that seemed interesting in itself. The story takes place in a city that is the seat of Nazi Germany and showcases the plight of Jews, the suffocation of those who did not blindly fall into lock step with Hitler, and of course the heinous individuals who hypnotically followed him.
This book is 560 pages long, so you can imagine my chagrin when I realized very quickly that it was going to be a laborious read. It was one of those books that seems as if the pages are soaked in molasses, turning very slowly.

It just goes to show that everyone has different tastes in reading. I loved the initial narration by “Death” a fresh voice in literature for sure. Death is sardonic, dark, witty, and even self-effacing. But after a few pages, with the introduction of the characters that I didn’t find very dimensional or original, and a plot in which very little happened, it bogged down.

Nancy’s Fiction Book Ratings
•    Gripped from first page, an absolute must read
•    Took over 50 pages to get into but then it was a very good read
•    Was moderately entertaining but didn’t really care about the main character
•    Read it cover to cover but didn’t resonate with the author’s voice
•    Left on my nightstand forever but never reached for it like I don’t want to reach for the Manolo Blahnik boots that hurt. There are two categories: a.) the author is too brilliant for me, and b.) boring/bad writing

Nancy’s Book rating for The Book Thief: Read it cover to cover but didn’t resonate with the author’s voice.