On Diet

Diet.  

As a noun, this is a subject of utmost importance, and one which is way too often overlooked.  As a verb, I consider it a dirty word, one which is far too often overused.  

While diet is important, dieting is a ridiculous idea that does more harm than good—even more ridiculous than New Year’s resolutions, if you ask me.  Why would I say that?  Because I believe in making good choices ALL the time, I don’t believe in waiting until you’re overweight to lose weight, just as I don’t believe in waiting ‘til New Years to make positive changes to one’s life.  The moment you realize that something should change, you should begin to accommodate the necessary changes in your life--no, I don’t think anyone can change overnight and that’s exactly why diets do not work.

Let me explain my theory about the body and weight gain.  I view my body like a balloon—one of those really itty bitty ones, you know, those little suckers that are ridiculously hard to inflate?   You can blow and blow until your ears ache and get little expansion.  You give yourself a little break then go back to it and notice that it inflated fairly easily to the level you’d already achieved, but beyond that takes some more doing.  Again, you take a break.  Noticing that the previously stretched balloon fills out more easily each time to the point already reached and a then stretches just a little more.  Once it’s been blown to its max, it’s no longer a problem to blow it up again and again, but by then it’s definitely lost its original shape and there’s little hope of it looking new again. 

Yep.  

I see evidence of this in people who regularly diet.  They gain and lose repeatedly, year after year, and they always seem to find that each time they gain their weight back they gain just a little bit more and always more quickly than expected.  It’s just like those darn balloons.  

That is why my practice from adolescence has been NEVER to expand that darn balloon.  I focus on diet not dieting.  The key is a healthy diet and exercise.  I believe that exercise is should happen naturally in the context of living…however, our culture is such that we hardly exert any energy to live any more.  Cars get us from A to B regardless of proximity.  We don’t need to work for our food, or draw water from a well, heck, even cooking is easy compared to the days when bread was kneaded by hand daily, pasta rolled by hand, and grains milled without the use of handy dandy electric mills like I have.  Very few of us split wood during the cold winter days to heat our houses or even shovel snow for a decent path during the winter months.  Convenience has made us lazy.  And now to get exercise we need to set aside time and buy expensive equipment like treadmills and ellipticals. 

Getting back to the point, the key to not inflating that balloon is balance.  Food and exercise. 

As a busy mom who loves good food, I will admit that I do not habitually hop on the treadmill and I do indulge epicurean fancies.  But what I do hop on daily is the scale.  I’m not obsessed or anything, but this is key.  My body, as everyone else’s, has a comfort weight.  It likes to be at a certain number and it likes being there a lot.  It takes some doing to get below that magic number and it takes some doing to get above it.  Sadly it’s easier to go up than down, especially when you like baked goods as much as I do…but nonetheless, the scale keep me on track.  My goal is always to be five pounds below my ‘comfort weight’ and NEVER, EVER more than two pounds above it—with, of course, the exception of pregnancy and a few months postpartum.  Essentially, I eat what I want and exercise when I can, but when I see that I’m encroaching upon that magic number, I practice a little more self-control—which means that if I have a treat I make sure that I get on the treadmill.  Or if I know that I will be too busy to find time for exercise, I do without the extra calories.  Balance.  

Now to address “what I want to eat”.  You may be shocked when I say that I eat whatever I want, but let me explain. What we put in our bodies is so incredibly important, and too many people understand too little about the food that they are eating.  Admittedly, I LOVE good food and I probably eat plenty more than I need to, but I don’t settle for junk.  For instance, I can easily refuse a typical cookie, made with processed white flour and far too much sugar, but don’t set a plate full of my homemade cookies in front of me and expect there to be survivors.  Anything I make is made with freshly ground organic whole wheat flour and I cut the sugar by at least half, in every recipe.  Sometimes I even sneak veggies like carrots, pumpkin, or zucchini and fruits like dried blueberries and dates into them!   Thus my cookies end up being nutrient rich, with the nutty flavor of fresh flour, and just sweet enough. 

That is my kind of food.  But for years my diet (and appetite) has been evolving.  As a kid I hated food.  I hated eating.  I distinctly remember seeing a commercial once, clearly for some weight loss product, and it posed the question, “Do you love to eat?” my immediate response as a seven year old was “Ew, no!”    Thank goodness.  Because the diet I grew up on consisted mostly of meat and highly processed grain products like cereal and white bread, and the vegetables that we did have consisted of canned green beans cooked with bacon and onion, corn, and potatoes!  I hated milk and wasn’t a huge fan of cheese or greasy, overly sweet or salty food, so in essence, being picky saved me!

In high school, I began taking control of my own diet simply by asking my mom to trade out my PBJs for salads.  Now, let me express the fact that I didn’t exactly enjoy salad, but I knew that it would be good for me, so I chose to eat them, and I learned that one’s taste buds can, in fact, be trained to enjoy foods that are good for you!

When I got married and began cooking for myself I did a lot of what my mom did, but I experimented quite a bit too and found that I really enjoyed cooking.  Trying to save money as most young newlyweds must do, I reluctantly purchased boxed foods like hamburger helper, assuming that the only reason anyone would eat the junk is because it is economical.  Woops.  Curious, I priced out what it would cost to make my own version of these familiar foods using real products (instead of the mystery powders from a box!) and, of course, learned quickly that it was much cheaper to make my own everything, not to mention healthier.  Puzzled as I was about how things like Kraft mac and cheese and hamburger helper sold if not because they’re cheap, I began making everything that I conceivably could.  Out went Hamburger Helper with cheering and shouts of joy, out went Rice-a-Roni, out went Bisquick, canned biscuits, and crescent shaped rolls.  Later, out went store bought bread and every other baked good, including croissant!  Out went store bought pasta.  Eventually, out went all store bought canned fruits and veggies with the exception of tomatoes (because my garden still doesn’t yield enough for canning  L) and in came the chest freezers to store frozen fruits and veggies.  Out went the store bought flour and in came the organic wheat berries, oats, and other grains.  Out went the store bought boxes of cereal in exchange for delicious, homemade granola, oatmeal, and farina.  Most recently, out has gone the yogurt and ricotta cheese, replaced with ridiculously simple-to-make homemade versions!   (Mozzarella is the next item to be crossed off my grocery list).  

Years ago, I became convinced that milk is a detriment to health and so I strictly limited our intake of dairy products, much to the dismay of our milk drinking families.  I’m sure everyone has heard all the points that I could make about hormones and antibiotics being fed to cows, and how potentially dangerous both can be, so I will simply mention the topic for now with the purpose of shining light on why it has been our goal to raise our own dairy goats.  I could explain the reasoning behind raising goats in lieu of cows, but that would require a lot of scientific talk about molecular structure, proteins, blah blah blah…so I won’t   ;)

As I have learned more and more about the way animals and plants are raised for food in this country, how they’re treated and processed, the more disgusted I have become, and again our goals evolved to include raising our own cows for beef and chickens for eggs and meat.  Have you ever seen the conditions that these animals are raised in?  or read about the diseases that they need to be inoculated against because of those horrible conditions?    ::shudder::   Have you ever heard that the produce grown by “industrial farmers” (i.e. what you buy at the grocery store) is 40% LESS rich in nutrients now than it was 50 years ago?  That means that we would have to eat 40% more veggies than our grandparents ate just to get the same amount of nutrients!     This begs the question: how has the overall health of our populace changed over the last 50 years?  My bet is on a very strong link to nutritional deficiencies and…well…everything.

So, over the years I have done a little gardening, some seasons more successfully than others, but I have long dreamed of setting up a heated green house in which to grow our favorite veggies throughout the year.  Yes, I suppose we could just buy local organic and stock up for the winter, however, self-sufficiency is something that we always strive for!  And wouldn’t it be fun to “shop” in your own yard all year long?

You might be wondering why am I writing about all of this right now.  

and WELL…

I’m writing this because all of those goals are in the process of becoming reality for us this year, at long last, and I am beyond excited! 

Out front, at this very moment, is a small barn, which hubz built with wood he cut on our property (quaint, no?), housing two pygmy goats!  By the end of this month our field will be ranged by Rhode Island Reds and Plymouth Barred Rock layin’ hens, and a dozen Cornish Crosses that will be raised for meat!  We’re wavering back and forth, at present, as to whether we want to invest in yearling calves, bottle feeders, or a bred cow, and whether or not we’ll give in to our daughter’s pleas for a piggy that she wants to name Pork Chop. 

Soon, you will be reading posts about me, the Lazy Farmer   :)