The Story of this Blog

This story actually started more than 10 years ago, but let me get you up to the present.

My name is Julie, I'm a 30-something mom living the suburbian dream. A cozy house, a new minivan, a husband with a great job, and two amazing kids. Oh, and the requisite dog and cat too. But before I had all this, I had the dream to have all this. Around the time these dreams were coalescing into something tangible I was spending more time with my brother's family. 12 years my senior, my big brother was a grown up before I was. His smart and beautiful wife was raising their 3 girls in a way that made me pause and evaluate my own life. The foods she fed them blew me away. Sure, we all have some idea of what 'healthy eating' is supposed to be like, but she was putting it into practice to nourish her kids. I knew I needed to make some changes to how we ate BEFORE we had kids, to both nourish them as they were depending on my body for nutrition, but also so they were raised thinking that healthy eating was just what we ate. That it was normal. That other eating was not normal.

I started to do some reading and found I especially liked the ideas of a Whole Food diet. Dr. Andrew Weil, Dr. Dean Ornish and even Frances Lappe Moore were all telling me the same thing: animal products are bad for our health, whole grains, beans and vegetables are good. Dairy is bad, any fat of animal origin is bad bad bad. This was 2001 and in a radical sweep I did a 14 day "detox diet" then moved into the new diet. Out with cow's milk, in with soy milk. Out with processed pre-packaged sides of rice and noodle mixes, in with brown rice and bulgur. Out with meat, in with beans. I completely re-learned how to cook, although I'll admit I wasn't much of a cook prior, more of a re-heater. Everything was to be made from scratch, nothing was to be prepackaged. I made my own salad dressings. I made my own granola. At some point years down the line I even swapped the dairy we still ate (yogurt, cheese, ice cream) for the no fat or low fat versions. I relied on canola and soy for my fats, on beans for my protein and on grains for their promises of better digestion and lowered cancer risks.

Here I should pause and say that this journey was not without hopes of making me feel better. I had been suffering from daily diarrhea for years and after having a colonoscopy diagnosed with IBS. Part of my goal with a new way of eating was to eliminate the symptoms I had been suffering. And at first, I did get relief. A lot of relief. Getting rid of all the processed foods I was eating everyday probably helped me feel better.

Over the next decade I got pregnant three times. I gave birth twice. I nursed two children for over 24 months each. Each major hormonal change seemed to go haywire with increasing escalation. After kid number one was born my cycles were a little off. After the miscarriage I had to use progesterone to approximate a normal cycle and get pregnant again. After kid number two came along I got worse and worse: hot flashes, migraines, moodiness, nausea. I saw several doctors to try and figure out the root cause of the hormonal symptoms. Additionally, with digestive symptoms through the roof I had to see an additional doctor for problems related to that.  I, myself, tried to find relief on my own--more soy, less soy, more exercise, herbs, hormone replacement, I even tried Prozac. Nothing helped. Finally, with a diagnosis of PMDD making me feel like these symptoms weren't killing me (not literally anyway), that they weren't due to a tumor or something life threatening, I resigned to just feel that way until menopause.

And that's sort of where I was a week ago.

Now, for the part where everything changes. My brother in law had been trying to get us interested in a different way of looking at food and nutrition. He gave me some information about Weston Price, his works, his findings, what is done in his name today. I read it, I agreed with some of it, but my previous ideas were too entrenched to even consider the opposite. Then he gave us a book called The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith. I'll admit I was not very interested. In regards to vegetarianism, it was a philosophy I never bought into. I never felt morally wrong to kill animals to eat them. I never felt that it was necessarily the right thing nutritionally to not eat any meat ever. BUT, I didn't have a strong opposition to vegetarianism. My brother has been veg since the 90's and I respected that as his choice. And we mostly ate vegetarian at home because while I didn't think it was bad nutritionally to eat meat occasionally, I didn't think it was healthy to eat the factory farm produced meat available to us every day. Besides, how would we eat all those super healthy beans and whole grains if we were bogged down with the meat? So, husband read the book. Husband encouraged me strongly to read the book. Looking at it further, it was full of info I was interested in. So I read it.

The book, in a word, is genius. Honestly, there was not a whole lot in there that was new information to me. However, it tied it all together, linked things I already knew, in a totally novel way. A revolutionary way. A way that, in actuality, is so simple, I'm a bit embarrassed I didn't make these connections myself. In my own defense, if I had wanted to advocate vegetarianism passionately, I don't see how I wouldn't have arrived at some of the same conclusions she did, it was the fact that I didn't really care about all that that let me easily believe the accepted rhetoric without question. The few kernels of new information to me, though, are the cornerstone of this food revolution that is occurring right now in our home and the subject of this blog.

Knowing that you, reader, probably have not read this book (yet!) , I'd like to fill you in on a few key points so you can figure out what the heck I'm talking about between now and you getting your hands on it!

In The Vegetarian Myth, Lierre Keith sets out to dispel the myth that by choosing grains and beans over animal meat or products, you are being less cruel, being responsible for less death, and being more "green". I'll let you read the book if those topics interest you. Her argument is air tight. You can continue to be a vegetarian, of course, but you can't use these arguments to justify it.

Second, she talks about how grains are, in a word, poisonous to humans. It was information I had researched in regards to Celiac Disease, but didnt' realize that Celiac or not, this applies to all of us. The evidence is clear across the centuries, everywhere agriculture began to provide humans with the new food of grains, 'modern' diseases follow. Humans ate ZERO grains before agriculture turned some wild grasses into the grains we eat today. The human body has lots of requirements, including for fat and protein, but needs ZERO carbohydrates. No whole grains, no beans, no sugar. Don't need any of them. None of them provide anything healthful to our bodies. Worse, grains break down in to lectins that mimic your body's own chemicals and lead to a cascade of autoimmune issues. Keith references mostly the Drs. Eades' book "Protein Power Lifeplan" for this section and I recommend their book too. If you are interested in the nutrition aspect of Keith's book and especially how grains are poisoning us, read their book or at least the chapter about "The Leaky Gut". This information, much like all the studies that smoking was bad, has been suppressed for decades.

At this point I was convinced a change was necessary. I could, in hindsight, clearly see how my health had slowly been deteriorating as the years went by since I adopted my whole food diet.

Additionally, I read Julia Ross' The Mood Cure since my hormonal issues are often manifested in moods. She has some really good information on how protein and diet affect the chemicals that control your mood or how you feel. It's clear that the combination of not enough protein and too many toxic grains has completely sabotaged my body's ability to function normally.

So, this is where I'll leave you for the first entry. This is where I was about two days ago, my head SWIMMING with information, everything I once thought was up was now down. I had to sleep on it a few days and talk about it with the husband and my mom over and over again. Once some of it was internalized, I knew I was ready to start putting this plan into action. My goal here is blog about this, what we are doing, why and how we are making the changes and how they are playing out. We really had nothing to lose, but trying to implement this over Christmas will lead to a staggered start, lol.

More tomorrow! Welcome to our journey!!!