I've been thinking about it since then, though, trying to figure out why I was so angry. I think the thing is that I feel like I have been lied to all my life about what nutrition is and why it really matters for health.
Growing up, I ate a ton of toxic stuff. McDonalds was a treat for us. Every birthday and holiday was celebrated with gobs of unnecessary candy and sickening sweet grocery store cakes with their toxic colored frosting. Vegetables came from cans. Breakfast was large bowls of sugary cereal. Everything was cheap and fast.
Obviously, my parents did the best they could. My anger isn't with them, but with the culture that allowed rice cereal as an infant and processed foods (I had an MSG addiction) to happen.
It really wasn't until I was an adult and in midwifery school that I started to learn that not everybody ate that way. I realized it just took some basic education to see that how we treat our bodies affects our health or lack of, and good nutrition is the foundation of a healthy lifestyle.
Now that I've joined the holistic moms network (and become a mom myself), my learning and understanding of nutrition has been kicked up a notch. What I realized, though, is that no one would be able to take my advice seriously unless I walked the talk myself. It makes me want to scream when I see crisco or fat-free milk or processed soy in my family's kitchen, but I try not to say anything, for fear of coming across as judgmental. Why would they listen to me? Really, they don't anyway. All I can do is live for myself and my own little family and give Olivia the healthiest childhood I possibly can.
My first step toward healing the damage of my own unhealthy childhood was making a vow to eat real food. Real meaning nothing with added chemicals, no overly processed stuff, no low-fat or sugar-free anything, which meant lots of things from the typical American diet. I'm trying to eat as much organic, local food as possible. Basically, I'm not eating most of the stuff for sale at Safeways.
I heard one of my midwife mentors once say that eating fat doesn't make you fat, eating processed food makes you fat. She explained that our bodies know how to handle fat, which is burned for energy, but our bodies don't know how to handle the junk of processed foods because they're so foreign and so our bodies fight against them and we end up with inflammation, pain, metabolic disorders, skin and digestive issues, and diabetes and heart disease. I thought she was a little crazy because, after all, everyone knows that a low-fat diet is the way to go.
As it turns out, she wasn't crazy! She walked her talk and is one of the healthiest people I know. I also started paying attention to the healthy (and unhealthy) people around me and tried to pick up on the differences. Real food is the biggest deal! Those who are knowledgeable about where food comes from, how it's prepared, and why it costs more than the cheap stuff (and who eat mostly home cooked food) are among the healthiest, happiest, most fit people I have ever met. And they eat tons of butter! When I have a question about a food to eat, I ask if my great-grandmother would recognize it as food. If not, I don't eat it.
I've been giving this real food "diet" a try for a few weeks now and I've already lost five pounds and a roll of fluff. All I'm doing is eating honest to goodness authentic food. This includes grass-fed beef, hormone and antibiotic free chicken and eggs, organic fruits and vegetables, and organic full-fat yogurt and cheese. I'm still eating lots of carbs, so I know I need to cut down. Finding non-GMO stuff is sometimes really hard. For fats, I'm only cooking with butter, coconut oil, and high quality olive oil. It's nowhere near as expensive as people think it might be. I'm loving this new life change.
I'm gonna experiment with making my own broths this month and cooking lots of new recipes shared by my (healthier than me) friends.
No more junk. I'm so done. Life is too short to be unhealthy.
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