3/7 post: food for thought

Hi Pals:

Happy Monday! Hope your week is getting off to a good start. I'm swimming along, in the way that I do.

For those of you who have been reading along/coming to class (ahem!), Saturday was the official last day of our elimination/discernment diet. Now, we slowly reintroduce the foods that we have taken out. Yesterday we reintroduced chocolate/coffee, and to be honest, I feel really junk. My head aches and I feel very jumpy. Yuck! So maybe I have to think about a chocolate-free future. : (

Here are a few things I learned on this diet:
7. Good eating takes planning. I had to read labels and cook just about everything from scratch. Which means I had to learn how make everything from scratch. It's, like, hours of cooking every night. So you really have to plan ahead, or you're eating dinner at 9:30p.m.

6. You CAN live without coffee, chocolate, and cookies--but at first, you may not want to.

5. If you cut out gluten, meat, eggs, soy, peanuts, eggs, and dairy, everything else  is pretty much high in fiber. Again, you need to plan ahead.

4. You should be honest about your eating habits. The chocolate in the freezer didn't run away from home. "One or two" pieces of candy=half the bag, which is bad, but not as bad as lying to yourself.

3. No matter what the packaging or the cookbooks say, there is no way something that is not cheese or meat will taste exactly like cheese or meat, and anyone who says they do clearly has not had meat or cheese in so long that they are delusional. So, instead of trying (and failing) to recreate meat taste, you should:

2. Appreciate food in its own right. A carrot may be a failed substitute for bacon, but it is a perfectly good carrot. Let it be what it is... After all, we like to be accepted for ourselves, instead rejected for not being something else.

1. Finally, I learned more about humility. It's all fine and dandy for me to be all philosophical about cooking from scratch and loving veggies, but when we went to a bbq that had, fresh from the oven, homemade mac and cheese with BACON, I had to eat my words--and that's all I could eat while everyone else dug into that cheesy dish of goodness.

Have a good week,
meredith