I thought I'd probably start with an introduction, and try to lay out what I want this blog to be about. First of all, I'm surprised that I'm even considering writing about food and nutrition. I was a notoriously picky eater growing up, I don't think I ordered anything besides chicken fingers and fries in a restaurant until college at least. Also, I have never been a particularly science minded person. I studied history in college and grad school, and currently work as an archivist.
So how did I get from history and fried food to where I am now? I guess it started in college, I began to get over my pickyness and try new foods. I also watched a lot of Food Network and taught myself how to cook. I began working out in college too, although I never really ventured beyond the elliptical machine.
In grad school I put pretty much any kind of healthy habits I might have acquired on the back burner. I simply didn't have the time or energy to work out or spend much time cooking. After I began working full time I also felt pressed for time. We'll my body certainly noticed the change and I gained about 20 pounds in two years. I would intermittently try to get back into working out or watching what I ate, but I wasn't very successful. Turns out, all I needed to get in gear was for my boyfriend to propose. With the prospect of wedding pictures that would last FOREVER I began to count calories using My Fitness Pal and began going to the gym more. I got bored with cardio so I began following the New Rules of Lifting for Women program. I lost some weight, but not much. I felt like I was fighting an uphill battle. I thought I was doing everything right, eating the right amount of calories and a balanced diet of complex carbohydrates, lean protein, and healthy fats. There were definitely more calories going in than calories going out, yet I just wasn't really losing weight. I wasn't really losing inches either.
After lots of digging around online I came across Mark Sisson's blog Mark's Daily Apple which outlines the primal lifestyle. The whole concept is based on the idea that we are really not very different than our paleolithic, hunter-gatherer ancestors when it comes to our genes and how our bodies work. Our ancestors did not eat processed foods, grains, vegetable oils, legumes, refined sugar, or any other number of things that are staples in our modern diet. Modern hunter-gatherer populations, and likely our paleolithic ancestors, are healthier than us, and free of the "diseases of civilization" such as most cancers, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, gout, ulcers, osteoperosis, arthritis, and a number of other chronic conditions that plague people today. Overall this whole philosophy just made sense to me intuitively in a way a lot of other stuff I'd read about diet and nutrition did not, so I decided to give it a try and began to cut out grains, legumes, vegetable oils, and sugar and began to eat more meat and fat. I lost weight easily and effortlessly and looked and felt great for my wedding last August.
While I got into this purely for vanity reasons, mainly because I just wanted to be thin, I quickly became very interested in the health side as well. In the last few months I've spent a lot of time reading about diet, nutrition, agriculture, sustainability, and the environment. I'm trying to make a commitment to eat as healthfully as possible, and to try to lessen my impact on the environment by eating as much local and sustainable food as I can get my hands on. I want to be able to buy the vast majority of my groceries at the farmer's market, small independent food shops, or straight from the farm. I plan on ordering some grass-fed meat in bulk as soon as I can convince my husband that it's reasonable to put a chest freezer in our living room. My biggest project is turning my apartment balcony into an organic vegetable garden so I can eat my own veggies next summer. I also hope to be able to save some money and support the local economy by doing this.
So basically, that's why I wanted to start a blog. I'd like to record and share my efforts to eat better, live better and maybe help save the Earth and save some money while doing so.
No comments:
Post a Comment