How to make the most of your Macro-Mediterranean Experience

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1 How to make the most of your Macro-Mediterranean Experience When transitioning your eating habits, we feel it is counterproductive to restrict foods or beverages. While there are foods that can be more and less beneficial to your body, the most important piece to long-lasting, enjoyable change is that you set the intention to eat better. With the help of the food that is provided to you, you will already be doing a lot for your body. Below you will find some general recommendations about foods you can choose to eat or habits you might choose to cultivate, if you feel ready and want to maximize your experience. With all the food and drink you partake of in life, including the food we provide to you, the main things for you to do are to not be judgmental of yourself for choosing any foods and also to focus your awareness on how you feel during and after eating whatever food you are eating. Our main goal is to ensure you enjoy the process of learning to eat in a new way and that you learn that taking care of your body can come easily and be paired with enjoyment. Please make cultivating this approach your overall goal as well and make changes as you become ready, through improving your choices and being mindful, and without being overly forceful or restrictive. Beverages: When eating our food you may find it natural to drink less fluids during the day. When choosing beverages water is always a good choice. You may also find it natural to drink less during your meals. Not drinking large amounts of liquid during or after meals can help improve digestion. We do not recommend consuming ice cold beverages, especially with meals. Iced beverages can numb the organs and glands that are charged with digesting your food. The job of these organs is to produce digestive juices and they operate best at body temperature. Kukicha tea is a non-stimulating tea that is also a digestive aid but you shouldn't drink more than ½ cup as your beverage along with or after a meal. It is probably a new name, but is readily available in health stores. When eating our food it is common to experience greater energy and so have less of a need for caffeine. It is not necessary to avoid coffee, but green tea is an option that can be less disruptive to body function. If you are looking for the taste of coffee without the kick, there are some excellent grain coffees available. Other beverages that are recommended are mu tea, amasake and unsweetened apple cider. Alcohol in moderation can be part of a healthy diet. Overconsumption, we all know can be detrimental. Also keep in mind that if you have specific weight goals, it will be harder to achieve them while including alcohol in your diet Reducing or eliminating dairy products from the diet is linked to many beneficial health improvements. Choosing a grain (rice, oat, etc.) or nut milk can be a delicious alternative. We do not recommend eating non-dairy cheese, but if you feel inclined to try one, that is fine.

2 Storing your meals: All the way at the bottom of the Our menu page on our website you will find a menu worksheet for each season that indicates what dishes freeze best (the dishes that freeze best have their names underlined). Upon receiving your meals you should freeze the underlined entrees if you don't eat all of them by Monday. The ones you eat for the next few days after receiving your order can be stored in your refrigerator. Our breakfasts Chi-noa smoothies can all be stored in the freezer and each day you can transfer the one you are planning on having the morning after to the fridge so that it thaws. Portioning: We provide standard portions that might be too large for a single meal for some of you. You should not try to finish all the food if it is too much for you. If a meal contains too much food for you, we strongly recommend to make the leftovers a snack. Relying only on the food we are providing between meals is one way to ensure you get the most out of your experience. Snacks: As we just mentioned, you may always have any food that is left from your main meals as a snack. If you want other ideas, included you will find a snack list with snacks that will help you continue to eat in-line with your Macro-Mediterranean experience. Salt: Our meals may be less salty than what you are used to. We have done this both because getting used to moderately salted foods has some proven benefits, and because it is easier to add salt than to remove it and so doing this accommodates those who already eat a low-salt diet for health reasons or preference. If you do wish to add some salt to your food, ways to do it that are both considered more healthful from a macrobiotic standpoint and can be more varied and delicious are: shoyu or tamari (both true-quality soy sauces), gomashio (toasted, ground sesame seeds and sea salt), unpasteurized pickles, umeboshi vinegar and miso (which is already in some of our recipes like in miso soup). You may also add regular salt if you wish. If you do, we recommend using unrefined sea salt in moderation and adding it before heating your meals if possible. Spicing and other condiments: Our meals are intentionally spiced lightly since there are some people who prefer less spicing and it is always possible to add but not remove spices. Please feel free to add any spicing to your meals to make them taste the way you want. The most important piece of all of this is that you enjoy what you are eating. This also goes for other condiments, like hot sauces, ketchups, mustards, barbecue sauces, etc. While some of these might be less beneficial to your body than not using them, if you choose to forgo transitioning to a healthier diet because a condiment you love is not the healthiest choice for you body, that choice would obviously be less beneficial than making healthier food choices but continuing to include the condiment that you would otherwise miss. To the extent you can choose versions of sauces that are higher quality and include less -healthful additives (like high-fructose corn syrup), this can be a strategy to strike a balance between health and enjoyment as well. Seeds: Both sunflower and pumpkin seeds are very potent sources of many vitamins and minerals including iron and zinc and are a good source of high-quality vegetable protein. Macrobiotic principles suggest to consume them toasted and together they make a complementary mix. We recommend a goal of working 1 tablespoon of each into into your diet over the course of each day's meals. Easy examples of ways to do this are, mixed into breakfasts, as a topping for salads, or making a mix with nuts and dried fruit for healthful snacking.

3 Sea Vegetables: Certain seaweeds and other sea vegetables are often prominently featured in macrobiotic cooking. In macrobiotics there are clear guidelines on how much of these ingredients to use regularly to get the optimal amounts of nutrients from these unique mineral-rich foods. Since sea vegetables can be ingredients that are not universally accepted because of their limited use in more common cuisines, we have chosen not to include them in our meals. For anyone who wishes to work in some of these ingredients, they can be easily added when reheating many of your meals or added to salads. The recommended amounts are: Toasted Nori sheet: ½ -1 a day. Wakame: 1 teaspoon a day (in miso soup, salads, etc.). Kombu: a stamp-sized piece a day (we include it in our meal delivery service). Arame : 2/3 cup cooked serving 2-3x week ( cook for 25 minutes in rice or add to salads). Agar agar, Dulse, Sea Palm, Mekabu and Irish Moss: optional (occasional weekly use, we use Dulse because its iron content is very high). Another common variety of seaweed you will find is called Hijiki or Hiziki. Hijiki seaweed is traditionally consumed by the Japanese, among other populations, but due to recent findings that show it can contain arsenic, we do not recommend its use. Reheating: All our meals are delivered fully cooked and only require warming to your desired temperature before eating them. Our plastic containers are microwave-save but are not oven-save. If you choose to microwave your meals, reheating them on high-power for 1-3 minutes or to your desired temperature is fine. We recommend using an oven or toaster-oven when possible to reheat everything except for soups and stews that will come out best on a stove top. Our containers cannot be used in the oven, so transfer the food to an oven-safe container before heating. We especially recommend using an oven to reheat dishes with breads and doughs like pizzas, pot-pies, etc.. A 300 degree oven for minutes is usually sufficient for most dishes. When reheating soups and stews on a stove, we recommend 10 minutes on medium-high heat. If you prefer a thinner consistency than the meal as it is provided, for best results heat a small amount of water and dissolve a teaspoon of miso in it and then add it to the soup. Doing this makes the miso easier to dissolve as opposed to trying to dissolve it directly in the soup and will not water down the flavor in the soup. When reheating rice dishes, sometimes the rice can become hard from being in the refrigerator. You can reconstitute the rice by adding water and optionally 1 teaspoon to ½ tablespoon of olive oil before or while heating. Usually the oven will give the best results when reheating rice, but a pan or a microwave can also be used. You may also optionally reheat plain rice in a pan with a small amount of olive oil, water and shoyu to create a slightly saltier rice dish. Miso: Miso loses a lot of its beneficial qualities if it is exposed to boiling temperatures. We recommend when cooking miso or reheating your miso soup that you warm it but try not to make it boiling-hot, it still may be simmered gently for a couple of minutes as long as it is not brought to a boil while doing so. Feel free to add more miso to the soup that we deliver to customize it to your taste.

4 When purchasing miso, it is recommended that you use barley miso or black soybean miso more often than the other varieties since these are the ones traditionally used in daily cooking. All the varieties have the same exceptional health-promoting qualities, however, and so while keeping this recommendation in mind, it is perfectly alright to occasionally substitute one of the other varieties of miso into the meals if you so choose. Fermented foods: It is recommended to eat some sort of fermented food with main meals. Fermented foods produce lactic acid in the intestine when digested, helping greatly to re balance intestinal flora and lower rates of colon and intestinal cancers, among other benefits. We include miso in many of our meals since it is a fermented food that has been linked to many health benefits. Fermented foods recommended to work into a healthy diet can include: sauerkraut, all varieties of unpasteurized pickles (including olives and just about any vegetable), umeboshi plums or paste, tamari (traditional, gluten-free soy sauce), shoyu (traditional non-gluten-free soy sauce)*, miso, natto, amasake and tempeh. When purchasing fermented foods (especially pickles), it is very important to make sure that they are unpasteurized as pasteurization removes many, if not all of their beneficial qualities. *We do not recommend using the modern condiment labeled soy sauce found in conventional supermarkets. We highly recommend you to buy Tamari or Shoyu from health stores (even though they are more expensive) because you use very little of them but they do a good deal for you health. Sweeteners: Reducing simple sugars not only can help with weight-loss but can provide other health benefits as well. When eating the food we provide, it would be natural for cravings for sweets to become less intense or go away completely. For others cravings can initially get more intense and this is usually a tell-tale sign of a common condition called hypoglycemia that is a precursor to diabetes. With hypoglycemia the body over secretes insulin and takes too much glucose out of the bloodstream causing intense sugar cravings and poor energy management. When removing refined, processed sugars from your diet, these cravings can become more noticeable. This condition can be corrected over time simply by eating the foods we recommend. Initially it will be important to try to satisfy any cravings for sweets by choosing higherquality sweeteners that can help correct the imbalance and break the craving cycle. Gradually reducing the amounts of sweets to satisfy your cravings as time goes on will then reset your tolerance for sweets, and will reduce and eventually eliminate cravings as you give your body the chance to heal. There is a dessert available in each menu which you may add to your order that can be of help in choosing healthier sweets. Saving the dessert to satisfy the typical 2 pm crash or another moment when your cravings are strongest can be helpful, as would be eating the dessert portion in small amounts across various days, limiting the amount you eat to just enough to satisfy each craving. Our desserts are lightly sweetened. If you initially feel you need a sweeter flavor in your desserts, we recommend adding one of the recommended sweeteners listed below to add sweetness until your body and palate adjust. If you look for other sweets, non-sugared, dried fruit is always a good option and recommended sweeteners are: Brown rice syrup, barley malt and agave syrup (mix into teas, put on bread, look for prepared sweets that use only these, etc.). It is still recommended to use small amounts of these sweeteners, but they are much better choices than cane sugar or artificial sweeteners (make sure to read labels for gum, sugar-free treats, etc. so you never consume Aspartame as even small amounts of it can be a great danger to healt (we

5 recommend searching the internet for information on this ingredient). Remember that sugar cravings are cumulative, the more sweets you have the more you will want and the less you have, the less strong your cravings will become. Breakfasts: Included in the Sarter Package materials you will find 2 miso soup recipes, an oatmeal recipe and a breakfast burrito recipe that we have found many enjoy for breakfast. Oatmeal is by far the most widely accepted of the three and so feel free to use only oatmeal if that is what works for you. If you choose to make oatmeal, we recommend using dried fruit to sweeten it. When choosing dried fruit, try to choose varieties that do not contain added sugar or sulfur. Our breakfast recipes are only suggestions and there are many other ideas that could work for you. When choosing breakfasts it is best to select dishes that do not include sugar or refined flour as these will not give you lasting energy until lunch and can induce midmorning cravings for sugar. We also offer our Chi-Noa super-food breakfast smoothies that can be added to any order if you would like us to provide you with a breakfast option. We offer 7 different flavors so you can have a different one each day of the week. We strongly recommend adding 1 cup of nut/grain or other vegetable-based milk to the more-concentrated Chi-Noa we provide, placing it in a travel mug and sipping it throughout the morning. Some clients prefer blending in the milk and others like to add some fresh fruit to the base we provide to further customize it to their liking. Chewing: In macrobiotics, chewing slowly is recommended. We have found this to be generally good advice that aids greatly with improving digestion. By improving digestion, you help your body to perform at its full potential, which in turn helps to maximize weight loss and improve health. Eating before bed: In macrobiotics it is generally recommended to try to finish dinner 3 hours before you go to bed. If this seems doable with your schedule, it helps ensure digestion has ample time to complete before going to sleep. Taking a walk after eating can also aid digestion. In macrobiotics this principle is considered quite important. Traditional hazards: We use whole-grains and beans in many of our dishes. These are ingredients that occasionally can have small particles like small stones that are a natural byproduct of the mechanics of harvesting. We sort all these items by hand before cooking to remove these items but occasionally something can slip through. We do not generally have any problem but we just want to make you aware of this fact so you may do your part by chewing carefully.