The health habit for May is to eat salmon a minimum of once per week.

On top of this goal, we will be continuing the habits from January (yoga three times per week), February (eliminate added sugar), March (meditate three times per week) and April (drink tea three times per week).

Quick Change of Plans

This was not our original goal for May.

I had an entire blog post written about a different goal, set to publish yesterday. That plan was to do a full gut reset, to change the internal makeup of our gastrointestinal tract. 

While it feels like the “gut” has become a buzz word of sorts just in the past ten years or so, Greek physician Hippocrates is quoted as saying, “All disease begins in the gut,” roughly 2,000 years ago.

And, some more recent science has shown an interesting link between the microbes existing in the human gastrointestinal tract (called the gut microbiome) and other functions of the body, like the immune system or even the brain.

A gut reset is a meal plan you embark on for a set period of time, with the goal of reviving the healthy balance of good vs bad bacteria in the microbiome of your gut. You remove certain foods from your daily intake that could feed the “bad” bacteria in your gut and cause inflammation. Meanwhile, you also up your consumption of foods that feed the “good” bacteria in your gut.

I researched the many gut reset plans on the market, and there are a lot. I decided a plan laid out by Dr. Aviva Romm, an MD, midwife and herbalist I follow on Instagram. She has a very logical insight I appreciate, pulling from modern medical science and also incorporating ancient medicine into her practice. I find most people draw a hard line on Eastern vs Western when it comes to medical philosophy, which I find puzzling because WHY would you deny yourself the benefits of BOTH?

She wrote a book called Hormone Intelligence that I had considered ordering, and then I noticed she had a free 28-day gut reset plan that came with the pre-order of the book. So that’s the plan I decided to use.

It’s a great plan, with weekly menus and a full arsenal of science to back up why this is good for your body. So the planning, at least, was done for me.

As you might recall from when I cut out sugar, I like to get the kitchen ready before I start any new venture like this. So I pulled everything out of the pantry, gave it a good scrub, then categorized the food into what we COULD have on this meal plan vs what we COULDN’T have.

This is when I started to run into trouble. As you know, there’s that rebel chick inside of me. When you tell her she CAN’T have something, or do something, she narrows her eyes at you and then puts all her efforts into PROVING YOU WRONG.

Little red flags were going up the whole time I was doing this pantry organization. We already cut out sugar, and we already try to only buy things with REAL ingredients, the way Lisa Leake from 100 Days of Real Food and Bobby from Flav City have advised. So, as I was sorting things out, I thought, wait. Can I have nuts? Can I have fruit? Can I have quinoa?

The rebel chick inside me rolled her eyes.

These are healthy foods. If I’m on a meal plan that cuts them out, is that a good thing?

But I ignored those thoughts, excited to embark on something new. I had made my decision and I was forging ahead.

I spent all morning yesterday cleaning the pantry, using the meal plan to find out what I needed, then placed a grocery order. But then another problem cropped up. The meal plan was so specialized, our normal grocery store didn’t have a few of the things we needed for it.

Another red flag. But, again, I ignored it and placed an order for Whole Foods as well. It’s not like I’m going IN the grocery store, I told myself. I can just pick up two orders of groceries.

Then, the Whole Foods order was delayed. By 45 minutes. Which threw off the plan. Because I had the schedule perfectly lined up, so that I had plenty of time to pick up Whole Foods and then H-E-B, my local grocer.

As I was driving to Whole Foods, worrying about not getting to H-E-B in time, my stomach growling because the breakfast I’d had that morning had been less filling than my usual breakfast, I started to become bitter. The rebel chick was reaching out, telling me I’d screwed this whole thing up.

It’s okay, I told myself. I’ll run this set of groceries home, grab some nuts – the ones I CAN have – and then run to the next store to pick up the next order. I did just that, and as the omega-3 fatty acids made their way to my brain, I started thinking more clearly.

In the first four months of this experiment, I’d taken it easy, adding small habits to my life that have added up to solid benefits over time. That was the WHOLE POINT of this blog. I had this idea that small lifestyle changes could help me, as long as I stuck to them for a long period of time. And this thing I was doing, that was already screwing with my head, was NOT a small change.

I was cutting out dairy AND gluten and other things, so that contrasted the independent variable idea of this experiment. And there were some strange things we were cutting out, like bananas, which are a potassium-rich food that reduces the effects of sodium and alleviates tension in the walls of the blood vessels. AND COFFEE, which is LIFE.

The Pleasure Principle

(TRY to get that song out of your head for the rest of the day, I dare you.)

I already wanted to quit, and this was DAY 1. This is the whole problem with diet culture, in general. It makes you FEEL BAD. It makes you feel like even if it makes you unhappy, you have to power through it anyway. Because it’s worth it.

So far with this experiment, the things I’m doing have made me happy. Cutting out sugar was the one thing that seemed like it was going to be hard, but it forced me to discover other foods that could make me happy in the same way. And I already knew about the sugar substitutes I was going to employ. I didn’t have to deprive myself to also be good to myself.

And being good to yourself, in my mind, includes eating cheese and bananas.

This may be different for you. If you are good and happy and love not eating dairy or gluten, then you do that. You follow that bliss. What you SHOULD NOT do is make yourself miserable in the pursuit of health. Because misery is not healthy, folks. It just isn’t. The mental and the physical are linked. And being under stress increases blood pressure.

PLEASURE is what you need to incorporate into your daily lifestyle, NOT DEPRIVATION.

So, when I got home from getting all the groceries, as my husband I were putting them away, I suggested we change the plan. To something more simple. We should write this off as a mistake, I said, and try something else instead.

Thank you for the ride to nowhere, gut reset.

KISS

KISS is an acronym for Keep It Simple Stupid. Or Keep It Simple Sailor. It’s a design principle crated by a U.S. Navy engineer in the 60’s. The idea is that systems work best if they are not overly complicated. The simplest, most straightforward design is often the best route. In fact, I was reminded of this principle by Dr. Romm, the herbalist and doctor who wrote the gut reset, who changed it to Keep It Simple Sister.

We decided to do just that.

Instead of making this more complicated, we were going to forge ahead with the same principles we’d been engaging in for months now.

No reason to complicate things. Because these small steps are working. My blood pressure is gradually going down. And if I continue to incorporate things that make me happy, things I can stick to without rousing the rebel chick within, I can continue for a longer period of time. And that’s the plan here. To do this for LIFE. Because once my blood pressure gets to the point I want it to, I have to then maintain it for the rest of my life. And if it’s not simple, I won’t do it.

Why Salmon?

So, now that you know the route we’ve taken to get here in the past two days, allow me to forge ahead.

Salmon contains long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, which can lower blood pressure, strengthen the immune system and to have a positive impact on the nervous and cardiovascular systems, according to a 2019 study by one of the oldest medical schools in Germany.

An article by Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health says that omega-3’s can lower your blood pressure and heart rate and improve blood vessel function. However. “About one-third of Americans eat seafood once a week, while nearly half eat fish only occasionally or not at all.”

We are some of those Americans. We do eat salmon, but it’s rare. Almost like a special occasion. I also have some worries about making sure it’s cooked properly, and not being exactly confident of my skills in that department.

I have maybe three recipes I’ve used in the past. So I’ll need to go through our recipe book and pick out what I have, and perhaps expand my repertoire a bit.

While everything else has been implemented in the rule of three, the salmon addition is only going to be feasible once a week. I don’t want to burn out too soon. And I fear salmon three times a week would turn us all off of it, which would do more harm than good.

Now, I’m going to go have some coffee. And bask in my decision to deem myself wrong and start anew. In a simpler, more reasonable way.

See the results of this month’s experiment.