Mediterranean Women Stay Slim, Too: Eating to Be Sexy, Fit, and Fabulous! (28 page)

Italians are never punctual; the cafe, the conve-

nient place to wait, absolves them from that.

There is no question of hanging about, no looking

lost and unwanted or even disreputable, as there

is in hotel lobbies or the foyers of restaurants.

One just sits and enjoys the scene, and waits.

—Shirley Hazzard, writer

√ Move It or Lose It

About that walking I keep mentioning—this is another distinct difference between the lifestyles of the typical American woman and the typical woman living along the Mediterranean Sea: exercise. Life in the Mediterranean, particularly a few decades ago, was full of physical labor. Women spent a lot of time outside, working, moving, lifting, walking. They had gardens to tend, animals to feed, food to harvest. When they went to the market or to visit a friend, they walked or bicycled. Children played outside, never inside in front of a television with a video game controller in hand.

In the United States, city dwellers often walk a lot. But rural and suburban dwellers usually drive everywhere—to the store, to the neighbor’s house, even to their own mailboxes! Getting outside and walking or bicycling to the places you need to go is quintessentially Mediterranean. When you walk, you get full access to the sunshine, fresh air, and direct experience of your
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own community. This is a natural and integral part of Mediterranean life, and it can be a natural part of your life, too. Just put down your car keys and get out there.

Think of all the ways you could rely less on technology and more on your own steam. Make bread by hand. Walk to work.

Dig up that garden plot with a shovel instead of a tiller. Hand wash your dishes. Walk to the store and carry your groceries home—if you go every day, you won’t have to fill up the whole grocery cart, and your food will be fresher. The next time you want to watch television, go on a bicycle ride and watch the scenery instead. Turn the compost with a pitchfork. Walk your dog. Play kickball with your kids. Go swimming. Walk home from work.

LUCY’S LIFE

Primo head grower Lucy Funkhouser Yanz may be seven months pregnant, but that doesn’t keep her from working in Primo’s organic gardens.

Every bit a twenty-first-century American woman, Lucy nevertheless leads a very traditional Mediterranean life. Her exercise plan these days consists of weeding, composting, digging, transplanting, harvesting, and contemplating in the gardens.

Lucy grew up in the Mediterranean way thanks to her mother, who always cooked in that tradition, although she was not from the Mediterranean. “Being pregnant has made me even more committed to eating healthy food,” Lucy says. “I’ve been trying to eat a lot of protein, and I’ve been making a lot of frittatas using the vegetables we get from CSA [the Community-Supported Agriculture program]. My healthy habits have stuck with me, but I think it really helps how active I am.” Lucy is outside most of the day gardening. “I think gardening is a really good way of keeping your body in balance. I don’t feel like eating a lot because I’m working so much,” explains Lucy.

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Lucy came to gardening when she was eighteen. “That’s when I became interested in more sustainable ways of living,” says Lucy. She and her husband try to eat locally produced, seasonal food whenever possible. “We want what we eat to reflect what’s going on around us. We don’t buy watermelons and cucumbers out of season. It makes the different foods that much more exciting when they come into season. I’ve been trying to eat more and more that way, to not get impatient and buy things out of season but to wait until they come into season here.”

When food does come into season, Lucy preserves it or freezes it to extend the growing season while still supporting local producers. “Eating like this is better, more frugal, and to me, it just makes more sense,” says Lucy.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with exercising in more formal (and more American) settings such as the gym, or in less utilitarian ways such as jogging without a destination. If that is the way you like to exercise, great! The end result is the same: you get healthier, your heart stays strong, and you feel better about yourself and your body.

A recent study showed that regular aerobic exercise was just as effective as antidepressant medication in relieving symptoms of depression. We spend so much time sitting inside at a desk, in front of a computer, on a couch in front of the television, or in our cars with the radio blaring that we lose touch with our bodies and the way they move. Find your body again and let it move. And at least every now and then, let your body move outside. You don’t have to live in the Mediterranean to get back in touch with the natural world—just go outside and walk. Or just step outside for a few moments and breathe.

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√ Nature Girl

Give your body a break from stale indoor air. Open your windows in your home for at least an hour each day. Long, full, deep breathing suffuses your body with oxygen. Step outside on your breaks at work and breathe. Let Nature in.

You can also get your few minutes with Nature each day by standing barefoot in a patch of grass, letting the sun shine on your skin, even for just five or ten minutes each day, and looking at wildlife. Contemplate the way the wind moves through the tree branches. Consider how you are part of the natural world, too—not just living with it but being of it.

Nature is powerful enough to reset your internal rhythms and help you slow down, relax, breathe. This is how stress drains away, and you know what chronic stress does to you: it makes you tense, uncomfortable, and probably makes you eat more without enjoying your food.

My heart is like a singing bird.

—Christina Rossetti, poet

Here are some more ideas for how you can get outside, move, breathe, and let Nature into your life:

• Take a walk to new places. Discover nearby parks you’ve never visited. Walk slow, walk fast, but engage with the world around you as you go. Look for signs of the natural world.

Birds? Clouds? Trees? Flowers?

• Get out that old bicycle and ride around your neighborhood.

Explore areas you wouldn’t normally have time to explore if you were walking.

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• Put a basket on your bicycle and ride to the grocery store for the food you need for tonight’s dinner. Think how French you’ll feel, riding your bike home with a long, skinny baguette in your bicycle basket!

• Plant a garden in your yard, in containers on your deck or front porch, even in window boxes. Try tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, peas, beans, carrots, radishes, and fresh greens. What else might grow in your area? One clue is to try growing what you normally see offered at the farmers’ market.

• Grow herbs. Tending a small herb garden or tea garden is an exercise in aesthetics, and the aromas you will experience every time you weed the garden or harvest the plants will help you tune in to the natural world and give your mind a break from all your other responsibilities.

• Drag your children outside. Tell them, “Step away from the video games!” Take them on day trips, such as to nearby national forests, parks, lakes, beaches, and hiking trails. If they complain, that’s a sign that they are not doing this kind of thing nearly enough. In their natural environments, children are supposed to love this kind of thing! Jane Austen wrote, “They are to be pitied, who have not been . . . given a taste for nature in early life.” Mediterranean children get that taste. Don’t your kids deserve it, too?

• If you don’t have children, take a friend who also needs to get away from her computer. Or take your dog. Or your friend and your dog! Or just go yourself if you need a break from people.

Let Nature be your companion.

• Mow the lawn. Trim the bushes. Prune the trees. Weed the roses along the driveway. Tend your yard as if it were your
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very own country estate. Why hire a neighbor kid to have all the fun?

• The next time a friend suggests meeting for coffee, counter with a suggestion that you get your coffee to go and take a walk in the fresh air.

• On a rainy day, put on your boots and grab an umbrella. Go for a walk in the rain. Splash in the puddles. (Not sure about that? Let a kid show you how.) Or just stand outside under the cover of an eave and watch how the rain changes the world.

• Go swimming in a natural body of water—100 percent chlorine-free. Whether an ocean, a local lake, or a reservoir, feel how different it is to soak in water that is part of the earth’s natural cycle. You don’t have to put your head under—just let the water rock you, and let go of everything else.

• Once a week, get up, go outside, and watch the sunrise. Once a week, stop what you are doing and go outside to watch the sun set. Once a week, notice what stage the moon is in. Is it full, a tiny sliver, or halfway between the two? Look at the stars and see what the sky promises for tomorrow.

We are nature. We are nature seeing nature. We

are nature with a concept of nature. Nature

weeping. Nature speaking of nature to nature.

—Susan Griffin, poet

• Cultivate an interest in your local wildlife. Discover what birds are native to your area, and look for them. Or become an expert on the local wildflowers, or the food crops that grow best in your area, or wild foods. Go foraging for mushrooms, wild onions, and greens. (Be sure about what you eat—some wild mushrooms, greens, and berries are not edible.)

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• Get off the asphalt. Most cities and towns have hiking trails and off-road bicycle trails you can explore through parks or other wildlife areas.

• Just once, when the weather is lovely, sleep outside in a tent, on a deck, even within a screened-in porch. In her book
A Country Year,
Sue Hubbell wrote, “I have stopped sleeping inside. A house is too small, too confining. I want the whole world, and the stars too.” Take them!

• On your next vacation, choose a place where you can really get into Nature. You don’t have to make this quest the entire sum of your vacation, but let it be one important part. Hike up a mountain, swim in the ocean, get totally surrounded by trees, explore a glacier. What
can’t
you do at home?

These are the keys to enjoying a more Mediterranean way of life: Make a commitment to stay in touch with your family.

Spend more time with your friends. Let them unburden you.

Talk to them. Stay in touch. Move more. Exercise every day.

Spend time each day in Nature, breathing the air, feeling the sun, working in your garden, playing with your kids in a park, going for walks. Slow down and let a little of every day be made of leisure.

And when you eat? Taste. Savor. Let your meal become the whole of your experience. That’s the Mediterranean way.

Let the Mediterranean lifestyle lull you into a more stress-free, relaxed way of living. You can still get your work done, but you’ll enjoy it more. You might even do a better job. This spirit can make your life more vivid and more worth living. I really believe that. Why don’t you join me?

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z

14

Artigiano

Putting all the pieces of the Mediterranean way together to create a unified vision and method for living is much like producing a work of art. Become a Mediterranean food artist and you may find yourself smiling the knowing smile of the
Mona Lisa
!

Soul, heart, family, love, friendship, the earth, are all inextricably linked through food and make up the elements of the artist’s palette. And the artist is you. Think of a mosaic. Each piece of brightly colored tile fits into the whole picture to create something beautiful, memorable, lasting.

But it can be hard to grasp how to put all these pieces together, especially when the Mediterranean way isn’t ingrained in you from childhood the way it is for so many women who actually live there or whose parents came to America from there.

How do you eat day to day? How do you know how much to put on your plate, what to choose, when to make which recipes?

This chapter is here for you!

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For those of you who like more exacting rules than just “eat better, eat less,” the following seven-day meal planner uses the recipes in this book to give you guidance on what and how much to eat in traditional Mediterranean fashion. Each day includes breakfast, lunch, an afternoon taste, dinner, and an evening taste. Each is portion controlled and contains wholesome plant foods with just a little meat here and there for excitement.

Take a little time to cook with care each day, to prepare your food lovingly, and to eat slowly, savoring every bite, and I think you’ll find this week of eating very pleasurable. Use this meal planner as a guide for creating more and more weeks of Mediterranean eating in the same style and spirit. If you enjoy having your meals mapped out for you, check out ediets.com.

This service helps you track your weight loss, hook up with support groups, and custom-designs menus and shopping lists for you, all online. Their newest meal-plan option: The Mediterranean Diet!

Sunday

Sunday is a good day to have a nice family meal together for dinner. You may also have more time to cook on Sunday, so some of these meals take a little more preparation time than meals during the week.

Breakfast

2 eggs, scrambled, topped with 1⁄4 cup Salsa Verde (page 45)

1 slice rye bread, toasted, drizzled with 1 teaspoon olive oil

1 small orange

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Lunch