Rebuild from Depression Blog

I finally came to my sense on the big brush-clearing project I began about a year ago: I hired help in the form of two teenage cowboys. They can get a whole lot more done than an out-of-shape 39-year-old who spends her weeks exercising her fingers in front of the computer.

They have helped two Saturdays in a row and having them outside with my mom and me reminds me of a story of two dogs we had here when I was a teenager. “Ladybear” was the mama dog who had “Arsha” when she was about five years old. Ladybear’s maternal age for a dog was probably on-par with a human 40+ year old mom. When I took Ladybear and Arsha on mountain walks (unleashed), Ladybear walked from shade spot to shade spot. She also knew how far I usually walked and would stop short of our end point (in a shade spot) and wait for Arsha and I to climb back up the hill to meet her.

Arsha always looked like a puppy compared to Ladybear until my mom brought home “Rugby,” a stray she found in town. I took the three dogs on a walk and Rugby ran circles around me while Arsha joined Ladybear walking from shade spot to shade spot. Arsha never looked “old” until Rugby came along.

For the past two weeks we have brought in the proverbial “Rugbys,” and I have joined my mom walking from shade spot to shade spot. We worked on a mountain slope Saturday that was probably at least 60 degrees. You couldn’t find a slope much steeper and still be able to work on it. When these guys wanted a cup of coffee, they just bounded back up and got it. They thought it was odd that I tossed bags of pine needles down to the burn area rather than carry them down. Of course, carrying the down wasn’t the problem. It was the return trip that I tried not to do too often.

Monday was Mercury’s birthday. I apologize for not publicizing the birthday in advance but its birthday was only determined Monday morning.

My son Frederick loves birthdays and is into astronomy lately. We were learning about the sun’s age – when it was born, when it will blow up and turn into a nebula, and all of those details that inspire little boys. I made a big push for celebrating the sun’s birthday.

“No one ever remembers the sun’s birthday,” I pronounced (all the while thinking that pagans are likely a major exception in some way or other). “We should have a birthday party for the sun!”

Frederick paused and said, “Mama, we need to have a birthday party for Mercury.”

I looked at him for just a moment wondering what crazy idea he had. His line of thinking dawned on me and I laughed in big belly laughs.

The emails are increasing as this book moves further from its launch date. I am sorry for the delays. We have had hiccups and are working in absolutely the final stages of production of the book Rebuild from Depression. I still cannot say exactly when it will be available in stores, but what I am going to do is make a limited number available as soon as possible on this website given the fact that this book is already late.

In the next week or two, you will have the opportunity to buy a combination of an e-book version and a print version for the price of the print version. For those of you overseas who just want an electronic copy, you will have that opportunity. For those who want just the print version, you can buy the combo for the price of the print version or wait and buy the print version for the price of the print version.

In the meantime, what I am going to do every single day until we start selling the book is posting something about a depression buster food. That commitment alone may inspire me to get the book done faster. :)

Keeping my promise to write about a depression buster food every single day until the book is available, I wanted to point out that lamb is a depression buster food. Lamb comes from sheep and sheep have been a topic of amusement between my mom and I. :)

We were traveling to Bakersfield together for my six month dental check-up and I announced to her that I was giving up my E. coli obsession ways. I did my best to recount to her the “health building” list I posted.

1) Sleep a lot more. If I count sheep, I will try not to think about the bacteria colonies in their rumen.

2) Cut the coffee. A friend of mine recommends Tylenol for this task. I usually put myself through some sort of obsessive weaning program.

3) Move around a little bit. For numb shoulders and for general health, a wise person once told me that exercise can be healthy. Finger movement at the keyboard is not the best source of exercise.

4) Eat real food. Coffee is not a food group. Salads are a nutritious and easy option. I will keep my fingers crossed that the lettuce was not watered with dairy run-off. (See, there I go again.)

5) Consume foods with beneficial bacteria. When I became ill in a norovirus outbreak I wrote about consuming raw milk in my recovery. I do have some raw milk around and I think I’ll get some ferments lined up on the kitchen countertop.

In recounting the list, I did manage to remember the bit about counting sheep.

“Good for you. Admitting that you have a problem is the first step to recovery.”

Not minutes later she exclaimed, “There are the sheep! Get a picture so you can count them!”

for all of you fellow sheep-counters out there, if they help you sleep, they will help you fight depression. Cooked up as a lamb roast is a pretty good idea too.

Update: I've done well on my health recovery list, I am happy to report. However, the extra sleep and lack of coffee could be affecting the lack of a book.

For those of you who found this website because you are desperately seeking to avoid medication and for those of you who take it to stay stable, it looks like we all may be getting a far bigger dosage of just about all medications from municipal well water.

Trace levels of anti-anxiety medication were found in Los Angeles water. Apparently it is a popular drug to help commuters get through their schlep to work.

Rural areas may have issues too, particularly due to medications escaping the leach fields of a septic system and making their way into the ground water. Our own well is 102 feet from our leach field. The requirement is a distance of 100 feet. Of course, we take our own medication more directly. It’s the medication of the neighbors upstream in the underground river that serves our well that is more of a concern to me.

So what to do? Worrying in any active way about your water is probably worse than your water. What you need to do is make sure you are taking in adequate nutrients so that your body will be able to filter out toxins. The B vitamin family is critical. The minerals in our depression list are critical. Basically, rebuild from depression and help your body filter ground water medications at the same time.

In my daily penance-like obligation to post about depression buster foods in the run-up to actually having the book available, I would like to take a moment to reflect on one of my favorites: beef.

Apparently you shouldn’t buy it from Chino and you probably want to make sure any surface area is cooked real good, but those issues aside, there is nothing like a good serving of beef. ;)

It is a good source of B vitamins and minerals. If it has been grass finished it even has a bit of Omega 3 as well. It still doesn’t come anywhere near salmon in the Omega-3 department but, last I checked, there is no such thing as a salmon hamburger. (I’ve had salmon burgers mind you and they just aren’t the same.) Mom's Moroccan beef recipe is also a winner around here.

But the real reason for posting about beef in addition to meeting my daily obligation, is to post this picture. I have tried to get a picture of this bad boy for four years but have never had the camera at the right moment. Last year, he was right near the fence as I drove by with my camera. I stopped the car, found a great position for the photo, and the camera failed. For the last year I have talked about him as my “nemesis.” It should always be this easy to win against your adversaries. In this case it just took a working camera and some new grass.

And just as an aside, maybe it’s because I am not really into showy types, but seeing a bull like this makes me wonder how this particular herd manages to reproduce itself year after year. For me, those horns would be enough to inspire chastity.

At long last, the second generation of “mom cooking videos” are here. We got great encouragement after the string of videos last summer and fall that we bought a decent camera and then proceeded to act like we knew what we were doing with it (much like we pretended with the first). Of course, mom is great in all of them, but apparently not everyone can hear her in the first generation of videos. The second generation may have some sound problems as well, but with a mondo kitchen and sound bouncing all over the place, the sound issue is a work-in-progress that our friend Keith is helping us tackle. Keith is editing the videos as well.

In the video below, mom shares tips on staying organized on kitchen tasks in busy times. You can click the "play button" below or watch Cooking Tips for Busy People at YouTube.

I do try to bring you the most burning questions here on this blog, particularly as I do penance for a very late book and post about depression buster foods each and every day until the book is available to you.

Frederick made a snail out of Play-Doh the other day and it does beg the question: is snail a depression buster? Is a Play-Doh snail a depression buster?

I looked up Play-Doh in the USDA nutrient database and found no nutrient profile whatsoever. I looked up “clay” as well. My thinking was that Play-Doh may very well be clay and some people do eat clay (of course, when those people eat clay it is in response to a deficiency state and not seen as a particularly healthy sign). In any case, people eat clay and yet, “clay” did not make the nutrient database either. The status of the Play-Doh snail may remain a mystery.

However, should you decide to eat an actual snail (in fact a pile of them totaling about 3.5 ounces), those snails would be a pretty good source of iron at 3.5 mg and a very good source of magnesium at 250 mg. You cannot get that much of iron out of a steak or that much magnesium out of a chocolate bar, so snails may very well be our answer.

My mom and I are at the Expo West right now, a natural products trade show with upwards of 5,000 vendors and 70,000 people in attendance. Our feet are sore and we have bags under our eyes. The good news is that we can return to Expo this morning and probably find orthodics for our shoes or, minimally, get a foot massage. We have our choice in eye cream to help treat the bags or in mineral makeup to cover them up. Though we have not actually had a formal meal since sometime Thursday, we are easily meeting our intake requirement with the truckloads of fortified nut bars, oatmeal cookies, peanut butter, orange juice, animal crackers, and soybeans dressed up like chicken nuggets.

The real hunt, of course, is for interesting depression buster foods (not to mention that I am writing about them every day as penance). We have seen some fascinating food items here making various mood claims, but we have seen only a few products that got my attention as “different.” It strikes me that here at this alternative health trade show that the products are fairly typical for places like Whole Foods. I did find a great beef jerky that damage my gums and that tasted great too. You can also find salmon and tuna jerkified here, both on the list of depression buster foods. A California-based producer has developed a tasty pumpkin seed snack. Vendors from the mountain states have gotten our attention with some buffalo products. We may sell one of them right here very soon. If no one buys it, I suppose we will be forced to eat it ourselves.

We head back in this morning to do some follow-ups. I may grab some more eye cream samples if I see them.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day everyone! This post is an oldie but goodie from the archives of last year's St. Patrick's Day. Conveniently, it helps me in my penance to post every day about a depression-fighting food until the book is available to you. Read on to see that you may very well be able to fight depression by eating caterpillars.

****From the archives****

We have a special entry in the depression buster contest "Pest or Dinner?" We are looking for foods high in depression-fighting nutrients that also may be considered pests. Entries must be edible or at least digestible. They also must be pests or pesky in some way.

Husbands do not count. Someone has already attempted to enter her husband. And while nearly nothing is sacred on this blog with a dead steer hanging from a truck in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and some poor souls finding this blog via a search for "halibut in white sauce" and probably not finding what they expect, I draw the line at cannibalism. No husbands, wives, or mother-in-laws.

St Patty's Day Entry

My very own mother submits the caterpillar in honor of Saint Patrick's Day. Her primary rationale is that some caterpillars are green. She writes:

Dear Mandy,

I nominate the caterpillar for the contest "Pest or Dinner." I have held back my nomination because I thought it would be a perfect dinner for St. Patrick's Day. So while you were taking Frederick to preschool, I collected caterpillars from the garden, flash boiled them, and then fried them in a tempura batter. I ate them with scalloped potatoes and green beans as you can see in the picture below.

Most insects have a high nutrient content. My guess is that caterpillar is full of depression-fighting nutrients. And some of them are actually green and make a good St Patty's Day meal. Cook them with scalloped potatoes to feel a little more Irish.

So do I win a book?

Mom

I am writing a ditty every day about depression-fighting foods until the book is available here but I have to admit that since Friday, I have been living on supplements.

My mom and I attended to Expo West, a huge natural products trade show and were faced with supplement samples on every isle. Most of the food samples were basically supplements as well since they all tended to be fortified with something healthful so that the cookie, brownie, or soda could claim to be healthy as well. We drank green drink samples, liquid vitamin samples, B vitamin samples, mineral samples, and fish oil samples. We ate tiny bites of pizza and I was even bold enough to taste a piece of soy that some talented food scientist made look like shrimp. (Note to food scientist: it still tastes like cardboard.)

We were so sampled out after the first hour or so each day that we turned down samples for most of the show. There are only so many energy bars you can sample in a day when you are used to eating things like meatloaf or a green salad. As we drove home bemoaning the cookie and energy bar overdose, we also noted that we had a whole lot of energy.

We got our seventeen bags of samples out of the car and organized the bounty yesterday. (Yes, they gave us samples to take home too.) We decided we should be a little more consistent in our supplement intake because it sure is nice to have some energy at the end of a long weekend.

Somehow Easter snuck up on us this year and I am still trying to face the fact that I have given no thought whatsoever to holiday celebrations, nor am I even really ready for spring to be here. Luckily for me, I have on hand the key ingredient for Easter excitement: Easter egg dye.

We have spent the last two days dying every egg in our house. We had given my dad a dozen eggs last week and asked him to swap that dozen for a fresh batch. Eggs that are too fresh do not peel well. Use older eggs in the Easter basket.

Now we have another entire dozen to boil and dye. There is nothing more wonderful to an almost-six-year-old who is into color mixing. Luckily we all like egg salad.

Eggs are a great food. If you can find eggs from hens who are wandering eating bugs, those eggs will be far higher in beneficial fats than the regular eggs at the market. The high-fat yolks will, in fact, help you fight depression. To think that I used to eat egg white omelets.

Read more here about eggs:

• Omega 3 Eggs
  
• Deviled eggs (with boiling tips)
  
• Egg salad (stuffed in a bell pepper)
  
• Sweet Omelet
  

Thour we don't have a strong Easter tradition in this household, we do attempt to do something a bit special on Easter Sunday. This is a special food item that would work well for a brunch and fight depression at the same time. Eggs are a great source of protein and the yolks are a great source of Omega 3 fatty acids (Omega 3 eggs), particularly if the eggs come from hens eating bugs and weeds or on a diet of flax or fish meal.

Mom writes:

If you are in the New York area and into eating one of nature's most powerful depression-fighting foods, check out the chopped liver taste-off at The Fork in the Road blog at the Village Voice (via Marisa at Slash Foods)

We should have a liver taste-off right here on this blog or perhaps a liver blog carnival. I wonder if such a carnival already exists. I wonder if anyone would join the carnival besides my mother and I.

More on liver:

• Mom's flash-cooked liver recipe
  
• Liver and essential fatty acids
  
• Vitamins and minerals in liver

The talk around the brunch table today was about inflammation and, specifically, the finding that the cholesterol-lowering drugs may actually work to reduce heart disease because they reduce inflammation in the body. There are ways to reduce inflammation without the use of pharmaceuticals and certainly without the use of expensive pharmaceuticals. After all, aspirin reduces inflammation.

It reminds me a bit of my discussions with a vendor last week at Expo West about an anti-inflammatory product they carry. I am always interested in learning about anti-inflammatory foods or supplements because of the role of inflammation and depression. The woman was selling a high-priced supplement and I asked her a question that shocked her just a bit: is your product more effective than aspirin at reducing inflammation? Walking outside my front door and taking in some deep breaths on a spring day reduces inflammation too.

I posted a list a couple of times in the last month about things I was going to do to stay healthy in the midst of work stress. What strikes me is that these activities (particularly the first four), will reduce inflammation in my body. I could take drugs to reduce inflammation, but unless the drugs are sleeping pills, they will not give me the sleep I am lacking. They will not help me get sunlight and exercise.

Today for Easter I sat on a hammock with my friend Galina and said, “This is the way to reduce inflammation.”

“The List”
1) Sleep a lot more. If I count sheep, I will try not to think about the bacteria colonies in their rumen.
2) Cut the coffee. A friend of mine recommends Tylenol for this task. I usually put myself through some sort of obsessive weaning program.
3) Move around a little bit. For numb shoulders and for general health, a wise person once told me that exercise can be healthy. Finger movement at the keyboard is not the best source of exercise.
4) Eat real food. Coffee is not a food group. Salads are a nutritious and easy option. I will keep my fingers crossed that the lettuce was not watered with dairy run-off. (See, there I go again.)

I have already broken my rule of posting every single day about depression fighting foods until the book is available. There was Easter, but the bigger talk of the household is that right here *in this house* in August, a friend of ours will be getting married. A few weeks ago I commented that we surely cannot get a milk goat until we clean up the leaf piles. Being behind on moving leaves is one of about seven hundred and ninety tasks that haven’t been done for a while. The fact is that had anyone else called to ask if we would have a wedding in our house, the answer would have been pretty definitive in the other direction. But there are some things you just cannot say “no” to and this is one of them. I also know that the father of the bride is our secret weapon in getting things in shape around here.

One of the first comments out of my mouth was “How in the world are we going to clean the place up in the next five months?” After my mom’s first response of “Absolutely,” she asked “How in the world are we going to clean the place up in the next five months?”

Geez, I just realized that it's actually four months.

As if this blog is not evidence enough, I really must be crazy because not only are we going to move the leaf piles, we are doing some major cleaning and repair projects on the landscape and we are actually going to paint the exterior of the house. The house is a giant craftsman. It is so spacious that it once served as a bordello. It also spent many years as a religious retreat house, but that’s not nearly as colorful as a bordello. The spaciousness of the house is great when you’ve got a big party, but it can bite when it needs to be painted and otherwise maintained.

This is probably all reason to revive my house blog. I just do not have enough opportunity to blog these days. I should also try to figure out how to turn this blog post into a post about depression-fighting foods so that it will meet my daily commitment. I do expect the wedding will serve something like tri-tip, a cut of beef. Beef is high in depression-fighting vitamins and minerals.

Mmm. Tri-tip.

This weekend’s cleaning party will involve Costco pizza. That’s not a depression-fighter, though I’ve posted about a depression buster pizza here before. It probably tastes very good. We’ll see. I’ll do my part and give it a try.

For friends and family, this will be the wedding of Chris and Cathy's daughter Jessica. Also for freinds and family: "No, we don't do events here because *that* would be crazy." :)

“Frederick, would you like to play another game of Parcheesi or are you ready for a movie?”

“Another game, Bea. It’s not as much electricity,” Frederick said to my mother.

“Oh really?”

“Yes, I don’t want it to global warm. Bea, do you know that spring is getting warmer and I don’t want it to be that warm.”

~~~

“Bea” recounted the story and wondered if Al Gore had dropped by Frederick's charter school today.

“I don’t know, but if stories are true about Al Gore’s electric bill, he hasn’t missed many movies.”

~~~

Hey, we don't just yap about it, from the amount of electricity we've cut out of our lives, we could probably watch movies until the Earth burns up.

A big part of my depression story was lack of food nutrients. The memoir portion of the book (which is coming very, very soon) make that fairly clear. As I move past those very bad years and have friends and family conduct their own professional and amateur analyses of my psyche fairly regularly, I start to realize that the long game for me is about a lot more than the right foods. I have had moments in the last six months where I have wondered if I had some major degenerative disease and then when I take a break, I go through a miracle cure.

I have been seeing a chiropractor and my adjustment needs are directly related to the stress in my life. I wonder how many really bad mental health episodes I need in my life to learn my lesson at last and take it easy now and then. The crazy thing about it all is that much of the stress comes from “extra-curricular” activities such as food politics work. Leave it to a crazy person to discover the importance of food by having nutrient deficiencies and then to go bananas over food advocacy work. Just for the record, I am not going bananas, not just yet. I do realize, however, that many of the circumstances that led to depression and psychotic episodes back in the day are things I did to myself. I need to make changes for the long game.

We got in this discussion Easter Sunday as we were discussing inflammation and depression. Inflammation may be an underlying cause of depression. Nutrients such as fish oil and B vitamins reduce inflammation, but so does yoga and sleep.

Someone asked over Easter dinner, “Which one is more effective at fighting depression, fish oil or yoga?”

“Are you in more desperate need of Omega-3 fatty acids or relaxation?” I responded.

At this point in my life, relaxation would be much more effective since that is apparently what I am now deficient in.

Most of us know what our biggest problem is. Fixing it just is not always all that easy.

We are on the road at a trade show and working on keeping our energy up without the use of coffee and donuts. ;) One of my favorite items for these busy days is actually a dried liver supplement, a tool I have written about to help with holiday craziness. You can find desiccated liver products in any health food store and I have actually found a favorite for quality and price that I may offer on this website soon. I take a dozen or so a day when things are hectic and it gives me an energy boost to make it through. Now if only I could find a good Internet connection I'd really be set.

More on liver:
Liver and essential fatty acids
Vitamins and minerals in liver

This wins the "Bumper Stick of the Day" award on our return trip home down California's Highway 99.

I don't know if "monkey" is a depression buster food. It did not make the USDA's database on the nutrient content of food. Without an independent lab test, we may never know the answer to this burning question. Apparently, however, people do eat money. I found a recipe that requires monkey meat online which informed me that people in the Philippines eat monkey. I will have to ask some of my friends if they have ever tried it. Have you ever tried it?

In the meantime, I must get one of those bumper stickers.

The long march is coming to an end. I have a final copy to approve and some index changes. My daily penance of posting about depression busting foods on this blog every single day until the book is available is becoming a long march in itself. It looks like I missed my obligation entirely yesterday and today I can hardly hold my arms at the computer because they have been dragging brush and decaying wood to a burn pile. We're cleaning the place up for a wedding in early August that will be right here on our property. The amount of trash around here is unbelievable. This was my parents' house for many years and my father saved every piece of scrap wood from his projects. You shouldn't have to haul 18" 2x4s to a burn pile that should have been disposed of twenty years ago.

I said to the guys who were here helping, "If you are wood recyclers and if it's going to make you cry to see me burn this stuff, this isn't the job for you."

"That pile of junk?"

We fueled ourselves on egg salad sandwiches, a great depression-fighting food. I am trying to keep up the dried liver regimen as well.