I LOVE good food! For a lot of my life, you could have taken one look at me and figured that out. As an adult I have weighed 110 pounds and 190 pounds and everything in between. I have been on hundreds of diets, can count calories, carbs and points with the best of them. I can tell you from hard experience that vegetarianism does not equal skinny or healthy!
Let’s be clear – I am a lifelong vegetarian because my parents were vegetarians. I like to tell people that I am a vegetarian because I lack imagination. But truthfully, it is because the three or four times I actually ate meat, I got really sick! There isn’t much virtue in foregoing something that makes you sick.
Thirty years ago, I discovered that sugar made my joints hurt. I eventually quit eating sugar. Besides there was the whole weight thing and sugar which was an added incentive.
Twenty five years ago, I figured out that MSG gave me killer headaches. That was actually pretty easy to give up! Keeping it out of our diet has been a whole other story. . .
Twenty years ago I figured out that diet drinks, contrary to the name, made me fat and cranky. In fact, any sugar substitute seemed to have the same effect. I gave them up.
Fifteen years ago, I could no longer deny that I had big digestive problems with dairy products. That was just too damn bad, I wasn’t giving that up, too! Seemed like drinking gallons of aloe a month was a small price to pay as long as you didn’t really bother to do the math.
For the last 20 years,I have been a champion label reader who tried to minimized food additives, buy organic and eat whole foods. I considered myself one of the most nutritionally conscious people I knew.
Then David (my other half), the carnivore in the family, finally developed his very own dietary restriction; a gluten allergy. So, guess what we eliminated from our diet. . .
The final straw was seeing Forks Over Knives. David was so intrigued that he ordered a copy of The China Study. He actually read every page. Twice. He was a believer.
That was it! We decided to give the whole vegan thing a try. I figured if he was willing to make that drastic of a change in his eating patterns, the least I could do was give up eggs and dairy!
The result has been, and continues to be, a series of experiments and adventures in shopping, cooking, gardening and eating.
This is the story of our journey.