A Beginning of Sorts

My food journey began years ago, after giving birth to my third daughter.  I had watched the scale steadily increase as I moved to another state far from home, dipped my feet into graduate school in my secondary field, got married, and started having children.  What a journey it has been, and, boy, what I have learned along the way.

In the beginning, I read a lot about whole grains and how much better they were for us than our processed, white-flour-and-chemicals starches.  So, I switched our family of four over to whole grain everything.  That was when it became abundantly clear that my husband was having some sort of a reaction to something in our diet.  After some painful skin outbreaks and severe gastric issues, a simple blood test revealed that he had Celiac Disease.

My reaction was, "What the heck is that?"  When the doctor explained that it was an intolerance to wheat gluten that included wheat, oats, barely, and rye (mostly due to wheat contamination in the case of the three latter grains), I thought she was kidding.  One can actually be allergic to wheat?  How on earth would we be able to function without gluten?  After investing in a few well-reviewed books and a generous gift of several different kinds of flour from one of my students (I'm a private music lesson teacher), we began to understand just how different things were going to be in our house.

Over the course of the next five years or so, we began to implement healthier eating habits: more fresh vegetables, more fresh fruit, cooking from scratch even more so than before, sticking to only whole grains, limiting sweets and other junk foods.  While shopping for gluten-free (GF) foods and flours at our local co-op, I decided to grab some organic fruits for my girls' lunches one day, and that was one of the best decisions I have made, to date.  Our ride toward an organic, earth-friendly family was gaining steam!

After the birth of my fourth daughter, three years ago, I was determined to get my body and lifestyle healthier.  That's when I met one of the most amazing and influential women I have ever had the pleasure of knowing.  Her name is Val, and she was my personal trainer for 1.5 years at my gym in Minnesota.  Thanks to her tutelage, I gained some muscle tone and lost a lot of inches.  Something was still missing, though, as I was only able to lose twenty pounds in that 1.5-year period.  I was frustrated, but I was not going to let it stop me.  In fact, I worked out that much more; yet, my weight stayed the same.

"What gives?" I thought.

That was when Val began really asking about my diet.  She told me that weight loss is more like 75% diet and 25% activity/exercise.  I began paying more attention to my diet, counted calories, cut out diet soda and candy, and tried to limit eating out.  That seemed to help a bit, but it just was not enough to kick-start my weight loss again.  Enter the ever-present Murphy: my husband lost his job, got a new one, and we were going to move back to the East Coast.  While I was excited, I was also steeling myself for the coming months of living as a single parent to four young girls without much of a support network, far away from my family.

The stress of our situation and the reality of doing absolutely everything for myself, the girls, the cat, and the house we had on the market hit me in unexpected ways on a weekly basis.  I was not able to go to the gym the entire summer last year, because I just could not manage to get enough sleep, dress and feed all the girls, eat a healthy breakfast, clean the whole house until it was showing-ready, and get to the gym before the kids room closed.  Once our showings slowed and school was back in session, I was back in the gym as often as possible.  I am still quite proud of the fact that I managed to lose another ten pounds while under a tremendous amount of pressure.

After I coordinated with parents of students, friends, and my husband's family, I was able to schedule a moving date for just before Christmas in 2010.  Once the girls, the cat, and I arrived and settled into our new home in Mayland, I think the full brunt of my year alone finally sank into my body and mind.  I was exhausted and had nearly-constant migraines for the first three months of living here.  The only other time I can remember feeling so awful was just after giving birth to my youngest daughter, thanks to the sciatica I suffered with both of my last pregnancies combined with migraines with the last pregnancy.  I knew my emotions and pain were driving me to eat more, but I did not have the fortitude to fight it at that time.

Desperate to be rid of my head pain, I scheduled an appointment with a family practitioner.  I could barely function when I met my new doctor, and she quickly jumped to the task of getting me pain-free.  While I was frustrated that she was not looking for the source of my pain, at that time, I was so very grateful to be pain-free again.  At this point, I had gone back up fifteen pounds in the three months since we moved.  To say that I was down would be a massive understatement; I was devastated.  All that work down the drain in three short months.  Sigh.

Once the devastation passed, I got angry at myself for allowing the weight gain to happen again, and I began to research a diet (in the eat-it-every-day-of-your-life way and not the I-just-want-a-quick-fix-for-now way) rich in earth-friendly, easy-to-recognize, available ingredients.  I was done with being fat and sick, and I wanted to make some changes for the health and well-being of my entire family.  That was when I just stopped shopping at local grocery stores completely.  My stores of choice had become Trader Joe's and Moms Organic Market.  After my dear friend Kelly turned me onto Whole Foods, being an organic mom herself, we had even more options.  Without her help and guidance, I would have been a bit lost.  Thanks, Kelly!

In the beginning, I blew our weekly budget for groceries every week, but as I replaced the old, processed food with new, organic, all-natural food, our budget returned to normal.  We have been eating all-natural and organic for several months now, and I am finally getting the hang of keeping our grocery spending in line with our targeted budget amount.  I still blow it on occasion but not by much.

My family and I have seen such wonderful changes from changing our diet that we continue to seek out new opportunities to improve our health even more.  The more research I do, the more I am convinced that becoming a vegetarian or vegan is the healthiest choice.  I just do not know if I can ever completely give up meat. Dairy was easy, because I have been getting increasingly lactose-intolerant over the past five years.  One of the most delightful surprises in my new diet came from organic soy milk and almond milk.  For years, I thought the taste of  Silk was the norm.  Then, I met the Whole Foods organic soy milk.  Wow, what a difference!  Oh, the love I have gained for organic vanilla almond milk, too.  I have to ration myself to one glass per day, or I would gladly down the entire half-gallon carton in one day.

As of today, I have lost twenty pounds since late June.  Not too shabby, I would say.  In addition, my doctor was able to cut out my migraine medicine and prescribe an asthma preventative.  Now that I am breathing well, eating well, and exercising three to five days per week, I am feeling fantastic!  I am entirely too excited for the months to come and the additional changes we will see in our whole family.  I may even have a go at a vegan diet for a few weeks to see how it makes me feel. We have already committed to becoming more flexitarian, so I am hoping it will not be too difficult to finish the transition to completely meat-free.