Anyway, my extremeness (according to others) definitely plays out in the way our family lives and eats. But I have some really good reasons for this, and I will share some of those reasons as I write my personal story of my journey into health.
I grew up with healthy values when it came to eating and lifestyle. My parents did a great job of feeding us healthy food and teaching us what was healthy and what was not, to the best of their knowledge. However, I also grew up during the era of margarine being healthier than butter, low-fat being healthier than full fat, whole wheat bread being the healthy option as opposed to white bread, and the list goes on. As long as you have your veggies on your plate, it doesn't matter if they come from a can, and organic was not a word in almost anyone's vocabulary. However, despite a lack of accessibility to truly healthy food and the information we really needed to implement true healthy eating, the values were instilled and I have benefited my whole life from those values.
Fast forward a few years, and I am now a teenager often making my own decisions about what I eat. I did not have a picky palette at all, and was not very educated on food and its health value, so I ate what some now refer to as the Standard American Diet. Pretty much whatever was available was what I ate. And I also had stomach problems, but of course I didn't know enough to connect the two!
In college my stomach problems only got worse. My diet coupled with strong antibiotics after a surgery, then exacerbated by food poisoning on a Mexico mission trip, caused me to have really painful episodes of stomach cramps, bloating, and diarrhea.
But it wasn't until several years later when I had my first baby and moved into a community living house that I started to finally learn a few things about healthy eating. In our community living home I met my now good friend Camille Macres. She had grown up with a mom that was very into holistic health and healthy eating, so knew a ton about this. She was also in the middle of starting her own business as a personal chef with a bent towards healthy cooking that was also delicious. She was reading tons of books on health and different types of diets, and would teach me what she was learning. She introduced me to a diet focused on vegetables, eating things like sprouted bread, and higher quality food. We began venturing into the local food co-op and got a membership there. (I have found that simply walking around stores like these can help you learn a TON about healthy eating).
I also began to think about food in a new way. As I was feeding my baby his first foods, I began to grapple with the reality that this child who had been born with this perfect digestive system and been fed the perfect food for him (breastmilk) for the first months of his life, was going to now go from eating pureed green beans (homemade of course) to somehow eating pizza and cookies one day. I couldn't fathom the idea of putting those things into his body and wanted so badly to protect him from anything impure going into his precious unadulterated system. This idea made me really start to look at the purpose of what we eat. If I want to protect my baby so badly, why aren't I paying more attention to what I am putting in MY body? If I can so clearly see the purpose of feeding my baby was to promote health and growth, why do I not see it the same way with what I am feeding myself?TO BE CONTINUED...
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