In Which I Accomplish the Miracle of the One Thing

"Orange-Teal Creamsicle, Now With More Calcium"--Saturday, 7/9/16

Today's Reverse Inspiration is a 4 year old Polyvore image incorporating teal and coral.

From polyvore.com

Orange and teal are a delightful color combination.  In color wheel terms, they are "complementary" colors that sit opposite each other on the color wheel.  In this example, we're talking about "red-orange" and "blue-green."

From gardening.cornell.edu

I have a teal/cream cardigan that I like but that I find rather difficult to wear.  Probably the hardest part is that it doesn't look right like a white shirt underneath it, and when I wear a different color, I feel very limited in the colors that work on the bottom--navy or denim seem to be the obvious choices.

Coming into this summer with new-to-me orange skort and a very new coral scarf made it easy for me to wear this cardigan a different way.  I wore my (too dark to look right with the stripes) beige t-shirt underneath the cardigan and put the scarf on top of it, so you can't really see the shirt at all.  Win.

Then I repeated the teal and orange color scheme on my bottom half.  Let us all remember the esoteric principle: "As above, so below."  And voila!  A cool, refreshing summer outfit with no denim or navy to be found!

(The "calcium" in the outfit title is the cream stripes in the cardigan...but also a foreshadowing of the kidney stone diet information described below.)

Teal/cream striped cardigan (Coldwater Creek), $4.50/wear
Beige t-shirt (thrifted, Target), $1.33/wear
Orange skort (thrifted, Walmart), $0.44/wear
*Coral lace infinity scarf (Walmart), $4.13/wear
Bright teal flats (Payless), $0.87/wear

Outfit total: $11.27/wear

In other news...Today Robert and I did some research on food oxalate values and went to the grocery store.  My kidney stones consisted of calcium oxalate, so the idea is to lower your dietary oxalate intake to 100 mg/day or preferably 50 mg/day, if possible.  Interestingly, I do NOT want to limit my calcium intake!  Calcium binds oxalate in the intestines so it is not absorbed by the body and and thus is not eventually brought into the kidneys where stones might form.  (Remember, the digestive system and the renal system are separate.)

Oxalate does not exist in animal products, so I can eat meat and dairy products freely.  It's kind of difficult to predict which plant-based foods will be high in oxalate.

First, some baseline information about my recent diet.  In contrast to the 50-100 mg/day recommended for people with a history of kidney stones, my typical day is over 800 mg.  Yikes!  The biggest offenders were iced tea (about 100 mg), almonds (122 mg/ounce), dark chocolate (100 mg/serving), almond butter (130 mg/2 T.), cashews (65 mg/serving on my lunch), and sweet potato (28 mg/cup).

But it could be worse.  I could be eating a lot of spinach...at 775 mg/cup!

So part of our time was spent figuring out a strategy for replacing these foods in my diet.  Here's what we came up with.

A breakfast of eggs and sausage is fine.  I haven't seen specific guidance on flaxseed oil, but from what I can tell, all oils are either low (1-5 mg) or very low (under 1 mg) per tablespoon, so it's not a big deal.

For lunch, I am going to revert to my old stand-by of ground beef (0 mg), onion (0 mg), and shredded cheese (0 mg).  Recently I had been eating beef with onion, celery (19 g/half cup), and cashews (65 g/use).  My even older stand-by of ground beef with onion and avocado is out for the moment because many sources say it is a high oxalate food while other sources say it's low in oxalate.  Whatever...for now, I will not have it as a routine part of my diet.  I will often have a roasted red pepper as part of my lunch, and that is OK at 4 mg each.

I typically supplement my lunch with some combination of dark chocolate and almonds, which are among the worst possible foods for me to eat.  But I've come up with some good substitutes, drawing hard on the dairy category that I haven't been eating much of lately.  Cottage cheese with canned peaches (0 mg) or a carton of fruit yogurt (3-4 mg/carton) would work nicely. 

For dinner, I can continue to rely on fish as my go-to option (my lightly breaded type has 4 mg and plain has 0 mg).  I will need to eat things other than sweet potatoes to supplement it, however.  A butter lettuce salad with a bit of cheese, mixed seeds, and salad dressing is another popular choice, and as long as I leave out the seeds, I can do that for about 1 mg.  Other very low to low oxalate veggies I haven't yet mentioned include cauliflower, cucumbers, mushrooms, broccoli, cabbage, and squash.  I can also have white rice for 4 mg per cup.

I typically have a snack in the evening, but chocolate and nuts or almond butter (sigh) isn't happening.  But a Pink Lady apple (with cheese if I want) is 1 mg, and there are other fruits that are low oxalate as well, such as strawberries, cherries, green grapes, melons, and blueberries. A serving of oatmeal and raisins is 3 mg.  I can make a lot of different kinds of muffins in the 1 mg to 6 mg range (mostly depending on how much wheat or rye flour is in it because they have more oxalate than oats/oat flour/oat bran).  If I wanted to go crazy, I could have two pieces of whole wheat toast with butter for 12 mg.  Vanilla ice cream has 0 oxalate, and if I ever want to have a little bit of chocolate as a treat, they recommend eating it with ice cream because the calcium in the ice cream will bind some of the oxalate in the chocolate, taking it out of the kidney stone formation equation.

And as for the all-important iced tea question:  I am going to substitute iced tea for iced tea.  That is, substitute iced green tea (2 mg per cup) for iced black tea (14 mg per cup).  And I have already started bringing ice water instead of iced tea in my giant thermos some days at work.  I am already in the habit of drinking a lot, but I will continue to push myself to maintain this high intake because it is a very important factor in kidney stone formation.

Robert and I calculated that on my new standby diet plan outlined above, even if I had 2 of the higher oxalate muffins or 2 slices of toast, I would come in under 50 mg of oxalate.  If I had 2 squares of dark chocolate as a treat, that would put me up to just under 100 mg of oxalate--not something to do every day, but a level that is reasonable on occasion.

I have read that most people are not able to stick to a low-oxalate diet, but I am feeling pretty confident given that I've spent the last 20 years on one kind of restricted diet or another, and this one is not the hardest.  And as we know, a high level of self-efficacy (i.e., having high expectations about one's ability to engage in a behavior) is predictive of the adoption and maintenance of healthy behaviors.

Drinking lots of liquids?  I ALREADY DO IT!  Eating a low oxalate diet?  I CAN DO IT!

Now the other piece of this puzzle--lowering sodium intake--that's another struggle, for another day.