Morning and night I consider myself somewhat of a fitness junky :) but by day I fall into the category of REAL FOODIE.
Here's how it started...
I grew up with a very health conscious mother who after years of research and schooling decided that a vegan lifestyle was fit for her and her family. I grew up being scared of milk, pork, red meat and eggs (to name a few). I enjoyed drinking rice milk in my Kashi cereal or homemade granola and suffered through many nut loafs (think meat loaf, only made out of nuts) before learning to enjoy it. I'm not going to lie, I really just wanted to be normal and take Jiffy peanut butter and sugar filled jelly sandwiches on white bread with the crust cut off in my sack lunches but instead it was homemade peanut butter with hard raw honey on sprouted or homemade bread. Let's just say none of my friends wanted to trade food with me at lunch and that sucked. We were normal sometimes during holidays. I remember being so excited for root beer floats every New Years Eve because that meant for the week following we would have leftover soda in our fridge like all my normal friends.
It wasn't all bad though. My mom is a great chef and now I look back and appreciate all her work in preparing us (my dad and 6 other brothers and sisters) healthy food and being so concerned for our health and success. She is great! During the school year she made us breakfast EVERY morning which included something like fresh juice, fruit, homemade cereals, waffles or pancakes and during the summer each morning she would leave some kind of fruit cut up on a plate or fresh juice already in cups on the counter ready for us to grab during our busy morning. We were rarely at the doctor and I look back with such gratitude that she has given me a great foundation. For the most part, however, I was really disrespectful and did not hold my opinion in that I thought my mom was weird and I hated the idea of "healthy food." It wasn't until I moved out did I change my attitude.
My freshman year of college I moved out with some friends and I enjoyed my freedom to eat and buy whatever groceries I wanted until I looked at the scale and saw I had gained a couple pounds after only a couple months. I decided to take my health into my own hands and ate everything low fat or fat free.
It didn't help. I gained more weight.Not that I was ever really big at all but I was a ballet major at the time too so naturally my weight was just something I looked at a lot more back then.
I decided to take on my skinny mother's vegan lifestyle and I started to feel better physically but I never was quite satisfied with eating that way. After six months of that lifestyle I started working at your not so typical health food store and was immersed into philosophies of health food that were similar but almost opposite to what I grew up with. Suddenly I was learning that meat, raised properly, could actually be healthy for you and eggs, when fresh and from a pasture raised source, provide an abundant amount of nutrition. The craziest idea took me a year to even try and that was that raw milk, from healthy, grass-fed cows not given hormones and antibiotics, could be one of the greatest whole foods available to me. I became so curious about all these philosophies I had to learn more.
To be continued.....
Happy Fitnessing!
I love it. I remember feeling totally tortured by mom as well. But now I am so grateful!
ReplyDelete