#Whole Foods Is Closing All of Their Budget 365 Stores

[drkimjean-blog]

4 RIDICULOUSLY EASY WAYS TO BUY & EAT ORGANIC FOOD ON A BUDGET A very loyal patient of mine once asked, "Doctors are always advising me to eat healthy, eat organic, and exercise. Do they not know eating healthy is more expensive than eating fast food?" Unfortunately, that is a sad truth. This disturbing fact motivated me to research and share several ways to mitigate the initial money pains of buying organic foods. 1. BUY IN BULK Many stores sell products at a discounted rate when they are purchased in bulk. Growing up in a decent size family, my mother always use to always buy the whole animal, cut it into pieces, and freeze the portions she did not use. I did not understand the point back then, but now I share that exact practice. Buy in bulk and save! 2. PRIORITIZE AND MAKE A SHOPPING LIST Baby steps if you are just starting out with the conversion to a healthy, organic lifestyle. Limit yourself to impulse purchases at the grocery store. Set a budget, create a list (with your must haves at the top), and stick to it. You can use the "Clean 15" and "Dirty Dozen" lists on the ewg.org as a guide if you like. 3. BUY IN-STORE ORGANIC BRANDS It seems like every grocery chain have their own in-house organic brand. Some examples are below: Safeway: O Organics Kroger: Simple Truth Organic Target: Simply Balanced Whole Foods: 365 Everyday Value Aldi: Simply Natural Stop & Shop/Giant: A Nature's Promise Check out your nearest grocery to see if they carry an organic chain. 4. LOCAL FARMERS MARKET When I eat the food from my local farmers market, you can definitely taste the difference from non-organic. The flavors explode in my mouth. Fresh with a capital F. Amazing tip: farmers do not like to lug all the produce back to farm at the end of the day so 1-2 hours prior to closing, they cut their prices dramatically. Find this tip and others like this on my blog! Find this tip and others like this on my blog! Dr. Kimberly Jean M.D. (See link in bio) #revitajuve #womanempowerment #femaleentrepreneur #ladyboss #womensupportingwomen #womeninbusiness #entrepreneurship #manifest #leadership #womenwhohustle #buildinganempire

[allaboutfoodgwu]

SAY CHEESE: Whole Foods ed.

Welcome to the world of cheese! This is my first post for my field research project for Anth 4008. I will be studying cheese, specifically block cheese, in five different grocery stores.

Take 1. I start at the good old Foggy Bottom Whole Foods, also known as my second home. If you’re a GW student, you’re probably also a slave to Whole Foods. I mean, it’s a grocery store in the heart of our campus with a whole floor’s worth of prepared foods. Who isn’t going to go? Dare we ask for it to be affordable, though?

As a senior, I’m very familiar with the layout of Whole Foods. But I’ve never evaluated the store as closely as I will now. I walk in at 10 p.m. on a Monday night. The store is not nearly as crowded as it usually is during lunch or dinner hours. I go downstairs for the block cheese, because the upstairs area only has grab-and-go items and prepared foods. I know that the main cheese display is all the way at the back, so I head there.

While walking toward the back, I notice a large cheese display in the middle of the store (top left). What is this? It’s almost like a shrine for cheese! And it’s not just for any kind of cheese- it’s for the 24-month aged Parmigiano Reggiano that’s “hand-cracked in house.” Wow. I also notice that a huge cheese wheel sits at the center of this display. How authentic. The actual block slices of cheese for sale sit on top of this wheel, and the display also contains an array of seasoned crackers. Now that’s convenient. The placement of this display is a bit strange, because the middle of the store mainly has fresh fruits and vegetables. The closest display next to the cheese here was actually bananas. What do bananas have to do with cheese? Nothing, I hope.

As I continue towards the back of the store, I finally come across the entire array of block cheeses in an open, glass rim display. That’s it, exactly what I was looking for. You name a cheese, and I can probably find it for you here. For each type of cheese, the sliced blocks sit on top of the wheel. This section has a series of cheeses from many different areas of the world. For each type of cheese, the blocks are sitting on a wheel of the cheese itself, giving it a bougie, gourmet-like appearance.

Each type of cheese also has a black card label that states the origin and a brief description of the cheese. For the “Asiago Fresca,” the card says “Cleveland, Wisconsin” and its description is “soft and chewy with an outspoken tang.”

I try to find the Manchego, my favorite cheese.  This display has three different types of Manchego, each with a different age: 3-month, 6-month, and 12-month (bottom left). I pick up the 6-month Manchego, and remember how expensive it is. One narrowly sliced block is over $7. What! Well, I put it in my cart anyways. Who’s going to resist? Not me.

Above the display of cheeses is an exhaustive display of different types of crackers and jams (top right). Suggested pairings, I guess? Overall, this display is so large that it took me around 10 steps to walk from one end of the display to the other. There was no one around me while I was at the display, probably because it was so late at night. It could also have been because this cheese display is slightly out of the average student’s budget, and students are usually the only ones still out at this hour in Foggy Bottom.

Eventually, I come across even more cheese in another refrigerated area. At about eye level, I notice blocks of 365 or Whole Foods brand Cheddar cheese (bottom right). I also see Monterey Jack and Mozzarella. Below eye-level, I also find more blocks of Cheddar cheese, but they are not the Whole Foods brand and their selection is much smaller. Strategic placement.

Finally, I see a sampling display of “Blazing Buffalo Cheddar” cheese that’s on sale for $10.99. I wonder what the original price was. Of course, this is when I finally see someone. Free cheese? Everyone’s there. He seems like a student because he is wearing a backpack, but he looks relatively young to be a college student. I sample the cheese while I’m there as well. It was good, but then I remembered it was $11. I noticed the person who was sampling did not buy the cheese either. Great minds think alike, I guess. Hold in your smiles and don’t Say Cheese again until I take on Trader Joe’s next week!

[allomammal]

Resolutions for 2K18

1. Flexitarianism

Last year, one of my resolutions was decreed: Thou shall not consume mammals. The rationale behind this goal was inspired by the rabbits I’ve been raising for the past few years. Rabbits are far more socially intelligent than you might think. Especially if you’ve only had dogs or cats as pets, you might not realize that rabbits will present themselves to be groomed by curiously running up to you, nuzzling their heads beneath your hands as if to invite you to gently stroke their heads and ears, and licking you when you stop petting them as if to say, “Come on! Pet me some more.” And when you do engage them in a petting session, their eyes have this sweet expression that I like to believe is analogous to what humans might describe as companionate love. While it is not my field of research, I think about Frans de Waal’s ideas on heuristic (or critical) anthropomorphism - that is, the idea that it may be evolutionarily parsimonious to regard the cognitive faculties of closely related species as similar since these faculties are derived from a common ancestor. Now, by no means do I intend to project onto rabbits a very human and very romanticized ability to perceive or experience love. Rabbits are very different from humans. Rabbits are very different from primates and other mammals. Still, we share ancestors with primates, lagomorphs (rabbits and hares), rodents, canids, felids, ungulates, cetaceans… So, our own endocrine and nervous systems - which give rise to our psychological and emotional repertoires - are derived from some ancestral, mammalian endocrine and nervous systems. That is, while humans and other mammals may have their own distinct Umwelt or cognition adapted to different sets of ecological circumstances over millions of years, allomammals have, at least, some basal mental faculties homologous to the socio-emotional intelligence we, humans, understand. And there are numerous other reasons why a person might choose to stop eating either red-meat or meat all together (environmentalism, animal rights, etc.) but this was the primary reason I decided to take a break from eating my mammalian cousins. However, by the end of the year, my life-partner, Azaneth, (who had also been practicing a no-mammal diet) tried to donate blood but was turned away due to low iron. I realize that we could remedy this deficiency with legumes and dark, leafy greens, but this year, I wanted to give room to consume the double, bacon cheeseburger -- in part to compartmentalizing my simultaneously-held, contradictory urges but also because I don’t hold strong moral judgements against people who do consume meat. But, appealing to some vague sense of balance, I decided a good compromise would be this resolution: Meat may be consumed 1 week out of each month; of the 12 ‘meat-weeks’ in the year, only 3 may be mammal-meat. This scheme should work fairly well with our meal-prep schedule; that is, we usually prepare one major dish on Sundays to be eaten for either lunch or dinner throughout the week. And the balance is struck by allowing for the occasional red-meat meal (carne con papas, beef fajita quesadillas, double, bacon cheeseburgers), while significantly reducing my overall meat consumption (mammal or otherwise). I imagine these dietary projects will, at some future equilibrium, yield a more nutrition-conscientious, vegetarian me.

2. Run 400 Miles

For 2017, I was most proud of the modest exercising goal I set for myself to run at least 20 miles per month (a total of 240 miles by year’s end). That goal was surpassed sometime in July - a fact for which I was extremely proud. As I wrote in my previous post, I decided to up the ante by trying for at least 365 miles by the end of the year (a mile for each day). Again, I was able to surpass that goal with a final mileage of nearly 383 miles. I was not an avid runner until around the age of 19 when I was in college. A close friend of mine was about to begin training for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon in San Antonio and asked me if I’d like to run with him regularly. Our college campus was small, essentially bounded by a street we affectionately called “the loop” - it was an ellipse with a roughly 1 mile circumference. In the evenings, we’d run a couple to a few miles, but eventually we worked our way up to 11 miles. We had friends that often ran upwards of 20 miles - they had been cross-country runners at least as early as high school. Still, this was a major accomplishment for both of us. Eventually our schedules diverged and my friend transferred to another school, but since then I’ve been running a my primary form of exercise. I’ve befriended runners who routinely run as far as 50 miles in one go. That’s pretty fucking amazing. It’s the kind of thing that might discourage some from even trying to become a runner. I doubt I’ll ever complete a 50 mile run, but what these friends demonstrate to me is (1) human bodies are keenly (evolutionarily) adapted to running incredible distances, and (2) human bodies are extremely plastic and it is not impossible for the average person to become an ultra-marathon runner. I get a lot more out of running than an increased heart rate. Most times, I’m able to work through and process many of my feelings, thoughts, and ideas while on a long run. In my view, whether becomes an avid runner (or an ultra-marathon runner) has a lot to with the circumstances of your birth. It seems pretty clear to me that if you’re born in a high-SES household, you’re more likely to pick up running as a hobby because you’re more likely to have access to a wealth of good health-related information. If you’re born in a high-SES neighborhood, you’re more likely to have sidewalks, access to well-developed parks, access to upscale grocery stores, and exposure to people of a health-conscious culture that make regular use of this kind of health-infrastructure. I’ve briefly explored the data on parks in San Antonio, and while low-income areas of town have more parks, they are often very small and poorly maintained.

3. 100 Push-Ups a Day

Towards the end of 2017, I had begun doing push-ups sporadically (50 here, 100 there), but nothing particularly consistent. It wasn’t a codified resolution or anything. I’ve always been insecure about my body, and push-ups just seem like a simple way I can achieve a lean upper body and sculpted chest. For context, I grew up in what some have described as a ‘pus pocket’ suburb in Northeast San Antonio where my parents were reluctant to let my brother (10-months my senior) and me roam outside of our relatively safe and stable cul-de-sac. By the time were were old enough to venture around, we really didn’t have many places to go so, often times, we’d walk a mile up the road to the local Diamond Shamrock to spend our hard-earned allowance on junk food - Starburst, Airheads, Sour Punch, Sour Parch, Sour Skittles, Hot Cheetos, etc. As I’ve gotten older and become more educated with respect to biology, nutrition, and public health, I’ve realized that we were very much playing out instantiations of an individual-based-model of the epidemiology of metabolic-disease for low-SES children living in a food desert. In other words, I was a chubby kid who enjoyed candy. So, the insecurities I developed as a child regarding my physical form as well as the inclinations to consume goodies high in fats and sugars are still very much a part of my adult psychology. Only through continued metacognitive awareness and effort am I able to stave off temptation. And that’s not always a fight I win. But I hope that if I can commit myself to at least 100 push-ups a day, that I will have just one more tool to help control my weight and form.

4. No Lattés

Nowadays, I think about how sociological and cultural systems maintain negative health outcomes for low-SES minority communities. The last few years of my life, I’ve lived in 4 different locations in San Antonio, each with stark differences in the structure and configuration of the built environment. Some places had more, direct access to fast food or gas stations (junk food purveyors that, luckily, “NOW ACCEPT EBT!”). I noticed the most extreme fluctuations in my weight at these spots. More recently, I’ve had quicker access to the nice HEB, Sprouts, and Whole Foods. Here, I’ve enjoyed a much less fluctuation in my weight. However, the newest problem I face is an increase in my sugar-consumption due to upper-class, obseogenic enterprises - Starbucks - which leads me to my next resolution: No Lattés. By no means is Starbucks the only perpetrator peddling coffee with inordinate amounts of sugar (and, thus, calories). Often I entertain jokes about “coffee” drinkers who only drink the beverage if it contains lots of milk, cream, or sugar (The joke is that these people like milk, not coffee), but - I confess - I also enjoy a good latté. However, this year, in addition to abstaining from latté consumption, I’ve also barred myself from consuming highly sweetened creamers like the Coffee Mate French Vanilla that I enjoy so much because I suspect that the sugar functionally overpowers the caffeine making my morning pick-me-up and morning let-down. In addition, I really do need to be limiting my sugar intake. I’d like to have a significant draw-down in the amount of added sugar I consume this year in hopes that, with my previous exercise and diet themed resolutions, I can gain better control of my weight and overall health.

5. Limited Take-Out Finally, knowing that eating out - whether to-go or in a sit-down restaurant - can be very expensive (on your monetary and dietary budget), I’ve decided to limit eating out to at most once a week. That is I can order food either 0 times per week or 1 time per week. To be honest, this still seems like I’ve allowed myself a lot of wiggle room. Perhaps too much wiggle room. However, I think the flexibility is providing for those unforeseeable, stress-filled where meal-prep schedules get thrown off by a day or so. So, on a good week, I imagine that I will actually not be eating out at all.  Hopefully, most weeks will be good weeks. But, those weeks where I do order out will still need to abide by the resolution on Flexitarianism and, usually, I tend to consciously run more miles immediately following eating out. So these are my explicit resolutions for 2018. They are an interconnected framework of health goals that I hope will support one another and make for another disciplined and accomplished year.

[cassieminus-blog]

8/27/2017

1. Yesterday I still created a caloric deficit, but I went over my calorie limit on MFP by 100-200 calories. That’s not insignificant (ie. I went 20 calories over so I could have another cup of coffee or I reallllly wanted some grapes so I went 50 cals over) but it’s also not enough to really slow me down (I still burned more than I consumed and still lost a teeny bit of weight today). But what I’m more concerned about than the calories is the way that I used food. I felt sick, tired and just out of it and wasn’t in the best mood and so I was gonna have like one piece of chocolate and just go over my calories a little, but then I ended up having two pieces. I know that sounds insignificant, but they were kinda calorie dense truffles and it was just food that my body didn’t need and I knew that I didn’t need it and I ate it anyways. And yeah, for a hot second I felt better, but then I just went back to feeling sick and tired and out of it and probably even more so than before. So like, using food to try and feel better isn’t good, and neither is turning my brain off for half a second to convince myself to eat. 

2. I’m having every craving I possibly could. Sometimes I’m super 100% excited about healthy eating and all the great new recipes I can try and all the yummy, reasonable options at restaurants and then other days, like today, I want to eat everything and get annoyed at how many calories are in certain foods. I think the cravings are at least partially because I’m adjusting to school and work and apartment life and I’m stressed but also weirdly bored and I know the feelings will pass and in a couple weeks living here will feel completely normal to me, but it’s also pretty annoying rn.

3. I’m prob overdoing it on artificial sweeteners. Between all the halo top, light coffee drinks and diet soda I’m drinking (I drink a LOT of diet soda) I’m probably consuming too much. I think I’m going to not buy any more diet soda except for when I need mixers/chasers and when I’m out to eat. I’ll definitely drink more coffee to compensate but I feel like a packet of Stevia is better than the stuff that’s in diet soda. Also, I adore halo top and similar low-cal ice creams but I literally eat a pint a day when I have it in the apartment. but it’s not convenient or practical to run out and grab a pint bc my apartment is like kind of a drive from places that sell it so like...I just need to practice more self control. I might go to a couple specialty grocery stores tomorrow and stock up and then force myself to only have one every couple days? but then I feel like, if I make the room in my calorie budget to have a fucking pint of ice cream every day, why should I not let myself do that? there are for sure worse vices in the world. Ugh. I don’t know how bad the sweetener really is for me and I also don’t know how many pints a week I’ll be able to afford :-) we’ll see. This is SUCH a 1st world problem. Also I almost bought a pack of 6 skinny syrups but held back, I’m going to try and find them at TJ Maxx or maybe I should just get fun creamers? I’m just trying to make bomb coffee at home. I got a milk frother today too so like fun lattes and shit can happen soon.

4. got a weight loss compliment from a dude I’m friends with but not close friends with and it felt really good!!! I didn’t see him daily last year like I saw all my friends so it felt nice that he noticed.

5. I worked out 5 times this week! My roommate and I have a goal to workout 60 times this semester and we’re off to a strong start. Getting into shape feels gooooood. between walking around on campus and working out at the rec I have high hopes for how many calories I’ll be burning in a typical week.

6. I’m going to make myself go to Walmart to grocery shop. And ALDI. that will help me save money especially bc I get a lot of organic/cage free/grass fed shit when it comes to produce, dairy and meat and bc I like my frozen Amy’s entrees and Halo Top. I’m also going to try to use coupons.

7. This is so rambly but it is really helping me organize my thoughts!!!!! Anyways, having my own kitchen (that I share with one person but still) is nice and we’ve been good influences on each other. not only with the gym but with cooking. We both make veggies and chicken a lot and idk I think we’re helping each other out. My roommate is counting calories but not accurately and like, I see how she eats and she’s definitely not doing what she should be if she wants to lose weight but it’s not my role to say anything. I think she may also be overestimating the role that working out plays but it’s just not my place to tell her that. If she wants advice I’ve got it but I’m not going to be overbearing or annoying with it. Just the fact that she’s trying to buy and cook healthy foods and go to the gym is a great start and hey, maybe I’m wrong. it’s just some of the things she says/does (she didn’t wanna make pasta slow-cooker meals bc of carbs but then said immediately afterward that she wanted to make rice and chicken ones. does she not get that rice and pasta are pretty much the same thing, just differently shaped?) that tell me she doesn’t have a clear idea on how to lose weight. and she wants to try whole 30 again which I just think is dumb. she isn’t going to go a full month without drinking, she isn’t going to go a full month without half the shit on that list...like I said the first time she attempted it (but not to her face) I’d much rather just half-ass whole 30 and do it forever (I called it half 365 cuz I’m a fuckin nerd). and so far I have, and it’s been good. But despite the fact that I dont think she’s totally on track for weight loss success, we do motivate each other and I think we are helping each other be healthy. and having my own space is nice. 

8. Packing food/being on campus all day is annoying. And today I committed myself to this mentoring thing where I’ll volunteer at an elementary school on Mondays so now my only free afternoon is Friday. Mondays I’ll be busy/on campus from 7:30 until 5:30, Tuesdays from 7:30 until 8:30, Wednesdays from 9:30 until 6:00, Thursdays from 7:30 until 5:30 and Fridays from 7:30 to 1 or 1:30. And it’ll be later when I go to the library/Starbucks/the gym after class, which will be super often. I have friends who will share their microwave access with me but that’ll be inconvenient a lot of the time and I’m just...not prepared for all the stale sandwiches and mushy salads I’m about to have to eat for lunch this semester.

9. I am stressed but it’ll all be ok!!! Just need to be prepared to work hard. If I play my cards right I will go home 3.5 months from now with great grades, another 15 pounds lost, money in the bank, shit to put on my resume and some great memories.