Nutritious & Delicious!

I'm starting to wake up really early (about 6 a.m.), and getting a lot done. Almost every morning I make a delicious breakfast for my family, before I get off to work. Here are some of my healthy breakfast recipes, which me and Luda and Anne Sophie enjoy very much:

Blueberry Smoothie

This is my favorite breakfast. Ingredients vary slightly depending on what is available. This week's ingredients include:

- 2 bananas
- an orange
- half a mango
- 1 cup (frozen) wild blueberries
- 1 table spoon ground flax seeds
- a celery stick
- some organic (frozen) spinach and kale
- half a cup of pomegranate juice

Mix all of this in a high powered blender. Takes 15 minutes to make. Nutritious and delicious! I make this for my whole family 2 times a week. My daughter loves it and calls it "daddy's cocktail"!

Quick Banana Breakfast to Go

We love this, and it only takes 8 minutes to make! So if you're in a hurry, try this:

- 1 cup of frozen wild blueberries
- 1/2 cup of rolled oats (havermout, овсяные хлопья)
- 2 table spoons of ground walnuts
- 1 table spoon of raw sunflower seeds
- 1/3 cup of pomegranate juice
- 2 sliced bananas

Combine everything in a cereal bowl and microwave for 3 minutes. It's really delicious and very healthy. All three of us love it!




Fruit & Berry Smoothie

- 1/2 cup frozen raspberries
- 1/2 cup frozen blueberries
- 1/2 cup strawberries
- 1/2 cup pomegranate juice
- 1/2 cup soy milk
- 2 bananas
- 1 tablespoon ground flax seed

 Blend all this in a high powered blender until creamy and smooth! M-m-m ... A real feast for your palate! I was hesitating whether to add a celery stick, but decided not to.


Enjoy these recipes and let me know what kind of delicious and healthy food you make!

30-Day Meditation Challenge

I've been on and off meditating and wanting to meditate for years. There are many benefits to mediation, which I will not discuss here. Suffice it to say that it can be good for both your physical and mental health and for learning more about yourself.

In order to develop my meditation into a lasting, daily habit, I am embarking on a 30-day meditation challenge and I invite you to join me! The rules are quite simple: meditate at least a few minutes every single day for the coming 30 days. In fact I already did this once last year, and I really enjoyed the challenge, but the habit didn't take root at the time.

Because different people understand different things under meditation, it's up to you to choose your meditation technique. I'll be using non-religious, but Zen-Buddhism-inspired meditation techniques developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn as part of his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program. In essence, it's about sitting mindfully, following your breath and taking mental note of what's going within your mind and body.

So if you wish, please join me in this endeavor and share your experiences!

To help you start, I've shared a number of guided meditations by Jon Kabat-Zinn:  https://docs.google.com/#folders/folder.0.0B2tp0bSwDZS4ZWM2Y2VkMTItMGRmNy00OTEyLWI3OTAtYWYxNTkxOGE1YjI5
These meditations explain what it's about and guide you in how you can meditate in various ways. Good luck!

Eat for Health

A few posts back I wrote about bicycling as a way to keep fit, be healthy and contribute to the environment. Well, from April 1st I started biking to and from work again, and has been doing this for 2 months now with great enjoyment, pleasure and enthusiasm. In these 2 months I biked 293 km / some 14 hours in April, and 262 km / also some 14 hours in May. In May I also walked a total of some 50 km with Anne Sophie in a stroller or in a baby carrier on my back (actually all of those walks were done during our holiday in Portugal).

Another important aspect of well-being is healthy food. In our affluent Western society, the biggest killers of people are cardio-vascular diseases and cancer. According to many, the principal cause of these ailments is our unhealthy nutrition.


I've been trying to improve my diet for years. I eat a lot of fruit and vegetables, etc. But still I was gaining weight. Recently, I came across the book called Eat for Health by the American nutritionist Joel Fuhrman. The biggest conclusion I made when reading this book was that I needed to review my whole diet: eat much more foods rich in nutrients, and much less nutrient-poor foods. Dr Fuhrman provides a lot of advice and lots of great recipes for gradual transition from SAD (Standard American Diet) to healthy diet.

Two weeks ago I started experimenting with his diet. And I must say - it's just great! I started by making healthy breakfast for all three of us (and now four with my mother visiting), which includes freshly pressed orange or mandarin juice, and some kind of oatmeal with berries and nuts or a fruit salad. Also I make a smoothie for myself and for them to eat at lunch. For lunch I also take a bunch of green leafy vegetables, tomatoes, cucumbers, crisp bread and humus (my colleagues find it very funny). In the evening I'd make a healthy desert, such as poached pears with raspberry souse or some blueberries and bananas mixed with nuts and seeds.

This past long weekend I cooked most of the meals myself. Today for dinner I made broiled fish (tilapia) with braised bak soy, and a delicious raisin/apple/cinnamon/nut desert. I must say that I really enjoy this healthy cooking, which I thought I never would. The downside is that it still costs me a lot of time to cook. I am not yet experienced in doing many things at the same time. But I am getting there!

So if you wish to improve your diet, try this book:
Eat For Health: Lose Weight, Keep It Off, Look Younger, Live Longer

Bon appetit!

Winter Blues

This blog has been silent throughout the winter. Why? Well, do you know what winter blues is? That’s what happened to me this winter. Basically that comes down to a lot of sleep, little energy, no desire to go anywhere or do anything. It turns out that as much as 10% of the population in the Netherlands suffers from this form of mood disorder. The winters here can be really depressing: no sun, no snow, gray sky, cold wind, drizzle.

So, how do you cope with that? Essentially, I just accepted the situation as it was. I was telling myself: just keep surviving the winter and hoping for the spring to come soon. I cut back on many commitments and projects, did virtually nothing outside work, read several books, watched lots of movies, and spent time with my daughter.

I also went to see my medical doctor, who recommended light therapy, which is about sitting 30 minutes in front of a special lamp every morning for one or two weeks. I had to wait a few weeks before I could sign up for that, so in the end I did my therapy in the end of March, when I already started to feel better. I still don’t know whether it really helped, or whether I was recovering anyway due to longer days and more sunshine. At least it had a disciplining effect on me: I had to get up early every morning to be in down town by 8:30, which was actually one of the biggest problems. But I emerged from those two weeks refreshed and again full of zest for life.

So if you ever get into a winter blues, try light therapy. They say it really helps!

7 Day Detoxification

In my previous post, I talked about how I gained weight and started to lose it again. Recently, my weight stabilized around 81kg, still 6kg short of my target of 75 kg.

So what is a good way to start getting rid of excessive weight again? I thought I'd start with detoxification, which is another, more difficult word for cleansing the body of all the rubbish that has accumulated there for the past days, months and years.

So on 31/10 I started following the free 7 days raw vegan detox program from http://www.therawdivas.com/7daydetox/index.php. Well, the site is actually for women and has quite a lot of ads and commercial stuff. But I thought, what the heck, I just follow the free program and buy nothing :)

The program is basically about eating only raw fruit and vegetables and drinking a lot of water. Inspired by Steve Pavlina of http://www.stevepavlina.com/, I decided to just do this experiment and see how it will work out for me!

In this post I am going to update you on my experiences during these 7 days:

Day 1 (31/10): Weight 81.5 kg. The detox started with a day of fasting: from Thursday evening to Friday evening. I am quite used to fasting, because I observe the Baha’i 19-day-long fast every March, but this fast turned out a lot easier because you can drink as much as you want! I finished the day with a whole melon and a pineapple. Indeed, after a day of fasting, the food is not just delicious, I felt I could taste it with every fiber of my body :)

Day 2 (1/11): Weight 80 kg. The idea is that you don’t eat early in the morning, but wait until you get really hungry. And so I did, helped by the fact that I had to feed Anne Sophie and that she and I went to the market in Leiden to get the fruit and the green stuff :). After coming home I ate some fruit and went to fix the lamps in our hall (something I had been postponing for months), and got really hungry by the end of the afternoon. Luda made a huge green salad, and we ate it for dinner, except that she ate it with bread and cheese and ham, while I just had some olives. By the end of the evening I got an enormous craving for some substance, and I confess I eventually got myself some bread with cheese and ham :)

Day 3 (2/11): Weight 79.2 kg. I got up at 6:00 in the morning and drank a lot of water and ate some fruit. At about 11:00, Anne Sophie and I went for a 15-km walk, whereby I carried her in a baby-carrier. It was a beautiful cold sunny day, and I used my Nordic walking poles for the first time! We went to the De Horsten estate, and the autumn colors were amazing. I drank water and some freshly pressed orange juice and ate a banana, while Anne Sophie was devouring her rice cookies. My calorie meter showed that I spent 900 kcal in 3,5 hours, which was quite good. At home, there was again a feast of fruit and green staff, but still I craved for some solid food, so eventually I ate a couple of spoons of Anne Sophie’s potatos. So, again I failed a little, but I was still quite satisfied with my progress!

Day 4 (3/11): Weight 79.3 kg. It is a Monday, and I biked to work as usual. I brought with me lots of veggies (paprikas, carrots, tomato and half a cucumber) and fruit (apple, mandarins, kiwi, two pears and even a melon). Well, I ate the vegetables, but I only ate half the fruit. So, I had to carry the melon back home, on my back :) By the end of the workday, I developed some headache, but it surprisingly disappeared as I was biking back home! At home there was a usual combination of salad and fruit and raisins to still my craving for sugar. It seems that evenings are a lot more difficult to endure than the mornings and the afternoons. Also I get much more tired in the evening, and fall asleep early, even earlier than Anne Sophie!

Day 5 (4/11): Weight 78.3 kg. Today is my 35th birthday! What a great thing to be able to spend your birthday without cakes and sweets and overeating, just feeding on natural green and fruit staff! I took a day off to spend my birthday with my family. The three of us went for a bike ride, and in the evening we went to Roberta to celebrate the Baha'i 19-Day Feast! This day went surprisingly well! I didn't have any cravings for solid food and was even able to withstand the delicious cake at Roberta's! Today I also did my first experiment with green smoothies. The first one (apple, cucumber, coriander, ginger, and lemon juice), which I made for lunch, was really great! Luda enjoyed it too! The second one (cucumber, dill, parsley, paprika, lettuce) was disappointing, I guess because it was vegetagle-only and I still need to get used to it. Because we gave up our TV-subscription, I didn't have to hear or watch any news on the US presidential elections! All in all, it was a great day!

Day 6 (5/11): Weight 78.2 kg. I woke up at about 6am and felt really great, light and clear! Am I past the withdrawal syndrome stage? Let's hope so. My weight seems to be going down steadily, which is great! The important thing is not to kick back to overeating after the detox ends tomorrow. I didn't eat much during the day, just two paprika's and three banana's, which was a mistake. Even though I ate two delicious salads at home in the evening, lovingly prepared by Luda, I still felt quite feeble and low energy. Also I couldn't resist the temptation of eating a couple of spoons of Anne Sophie's mushrooms with potatos.

Day 7 (6/11): Weight 78.1 kg. I had some wild dreams tonight that people started giving baha'i Ruhi courses about environment and healthy way of life in large numbers :) I woke up at quarter to 6, but didn't feel quite well. The shower and the bike ride through the mist and drizzle to work, however, made me feel a lot better! I gave a fruit party at work in the morning to celebrate my birthday of 2 days ago. It was mostly fruit, but also carrots, and some fresh organic juices. This was quite different from the usual birthday cakes in our office. Today is the last day of this detox. I am really happy about this experience, even though I did make a couple of minor slips here and there. I lost quite a lot of weight (between 2 and 3 kg), and it feels like my taste and other senses and even feelings have sharpened. The big question now is how to proceed further tomorrow, when I can eat whatever I want. I still need to think about it, and I'll keep you posted about that!

This is my weight chart from the Hacker's Diet website for these 7 days:

Gaining and Losing Weight

When at the age of 25 I moved to Holland in August 1999, I weighed about 72 kilo. It was a perfect weight for my height of 178 cm, and I was quite fit and healthy!

8.5 years later, at the start of 2008, my weight was over 86 kilo :( , and I didn't feel good about it at all. So what happened in those years that made me gain almost 15 kilo, almost 2 kilo per year? I guess it was the usual combination of much less movement than before, too much car driving, too much tasty food, work stress, etc.

Think about it this way: According to John Walker in his most entertaining and insightful free book The Hacker's Diet, there are about 3500 kcal in a pound of fat. For the sake of simplicity, let's say that 1 pound = 1/2 kilo. Then we can say that to gain 1 kilo of extra weight we need an excess of 7000 kcal, and for 2 kilo's this amounts to 14000 kcal. Now let's divide this amount by the number of days in a year (365 days), and we can conclude that to gain 2 kilo of extra weight in one year, we just need 40 extra kcal per day. And what's 40 kcal? It's almost nothing. Even an apple contains more energy than that, not to mention cola, meat, cookies, sweets, etc.

Well the good news is that to lose 2 kilo of fat in one year, we just need a deficit of 40 kcal a day! Well, first off course you need to reach the ballance between your intake of energy and expenditure thereof. If you consume exactly the same amount of calories as you spend, your weight will be stable. This point is often hard to reach, but if you do, then to lose weight you just need to lessen your intake of food by a relatively small amount of calories.

Well, that was the theory and you can read about it in the above mentioned book. So did I in the spring of this year. I found it a great read, full of insight and inspiration. My first step after reading the book was to start monitor my daily weight. I log my weight every morning, using this online tool from the same author: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/online/hdo.html. The tool calculates weighed average of my weight over the last 20 days or so and presents many useful graphs. This is my weight history graph over the last few month, starting from the end of july when I just returned from my trip to India:


The red curve is my average weight. (The sharp fall at the beginning of this curve is due to the fact that I lost some 3 kilo during my trip to India.) The little diamonds are my actual daily weight measurements, and the green vertical lines show the difference between the actual and the average. As long as your actual is under the average (red curve), you will be loosing weight. You can see that the actuals can fluctuate a lot. This can be due to all kinds of things: how much you ate the day before, the amount of water in your body at that moment, etc. The important thing is the red curve, because it averages out all those fluctuations and tell you the real truth about your weight.

Now, this tool is really easy to use: you just log your weight daily and the tool does the rest!

As you can see, I've been losing weight for a couple of months, but in the last couple of weeks I've gained some weight and gone from the average of 80.5 kilo to 80.9 kilo.

By the way, you can always see my latest average weith in the right side bar of this blog, under my profile.

So, how did I lose more than 5 kilo since the start of the year? Well, firstly just monitoring your weight as above makes you aware of your weight and of how it is affected by the things you eat and exercise you do. And because I watch my progress daily, I am inspired and encouraged to manage my weight so that that red curve goes down.

Secondly, I lost 3 kilo in India, mostly due to the very streneous mountain hikes we did in the Himalaya. And even though we ate quite a lot of food, if you walk up and down in the mountains for 6 hours a day, you will lose weight I assure you!

Thirdly, I decided to bike to work and back every day, unless I have a meeting with a customer. I wrote about this in more detail in this post: http://lublenok.blogspot.com/2008/09/keeping-fit-and-alpe-dhuez.html. This gives me 20 km (some 50 minutes) of biking hard almost every weekday, which is a great exercise. I log my bike times at http://www.logyourrun.com/. This is for example the graph of my daily bike distances for the last 3 months:



Also I do a daily 10-15 minutes exercise program from the same book by John Walker: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/exercise.html. It is a program of five simple exercises: bends, sit ups, leg lifts, push ups, run & jump. You can start at a level you are comfortable with and work your way up the ladder. The blue marks on the graph above indicate what level I did that day. I am currently at level 26 out of 48.

Additionally, I walk and bike regularly together with Anne Sophie, which is also a good and very pleasurable exercise!

But lately I've again gained some weight, so I decided to try out something new! Read about it in my next post!

Keeping fit and Alpe d'Huez

One of the important aspects of our lives is our health and physical condition. Many people almost totally neglect their health by consuming unhealthy foods and indulging in unhealthy habits like drinking, smoking, watching too much TV, etc. Others seem to go into another extreme and are often (almost) obsessed with low-calorie foods, exercise, body shape, beauty products, etc. It is not always easy to find your own middle way of keeping a healthy body, without sliding away into one of those extremes.



After having tried the gym and jogging, I concluded that those are not for me. To be frank, I found both to be extremely boring and uninspiring. At a certain point I realized that what I need are some functional health activities which I can weave into my daily life and which I can use to support my other goals and priorities. I’ve chosen 2 activities that I enjoy very much: biking and walking. I’ll talk about walking in a separate post, but now let’s talk about biking.

Instead of driving, I bike some 10 km to work and back. I do this 4 to 5 times a week resulting in 80 to 100 km of quite strenuous biking per week. I reason that by biking to work I not only contribute to my personal health and enjoyment but also help reduce air pollution and traffic jams. Although in the beginning I had to force myself to get on the bike early in the morning each day, now it feels absolutely natural. Biking early in the morning through beautiful tree-lined alleys of Leidschendam and then a few kilometers along the Vliet (channel) is a most enjoyable experience. But being ambitious as I am, I try to bike as hard as I can. I now cover the distance from home to work in 20 to 23 minutes depending on the wind. Even on the pretty cold autumn mornings, I am sweating a lot as I arrive at work, but for me this is a small inconvenience compared to all the joys of bicycling.

A couple of times a week I also go for a bike ride with my now 1-year-old daughter Anne Sophie, and my wife Luda also sometimes joins us. Anne Sophie enjoys biking in her front seat (attached to my bicycle) immensely! She watches all the objects with intense interest: the trees, the cows, horses and sheep, the road lights, the passing vehicles, and even the stars! I often sing to her as we bike, and she is starting to "sing" along! This is a great way of spending time with your child!

To grow in any area of our life, we need challenges. So is it with biking as well. Fortunately, every year my employer, Delta-N, organizes a biking challenge in the French Alps. This year, at the end of August, we went to bike up Alpe d’Huez, one of the most famous climbs from Tour de France. While for some of my colleagues this was the second or even third time to climb Alpe d’Huez, this was my first time.

The long weekend in the Alps was fantastic: wonderful, sunny weather, majestic mountains, fine accommodation, great food. On Saturday morning we put on our gear to concur the climb of 14 km with an average gradient of 8% and 21 excruciating hairpin bends. It took me 2 hours 12 minutes to get there. It was hard, very hard indeed. The sweat was flooding and irritating my eyes, and I had to stop twice to get some rest. Yet the feeling of achievement on the top was overwhelming!

The descent down to the village was fantastic, with high speeds and magnificent views! After some energy drinks and energy-full food, some of us went to play in the small open-air swimming pool, and then on to a trampoline, ping pong, and some deep philosophical conversations.

This was a great, unforgettable experience of physical exertion, overcoming and achievement! I’d recommend it to anyone!