Rethinking Food

One of the things that having a baby has brought home to me with startling reality is that I need to change the way I eat.  I lost my baby weight, initially, fairly easily: and then I began to pack on the pounds.  Because my baby is sedentary [for the time being] I have often been sedentary.  And my diet has wreaked havoc on my body.  I admit, I've never liked to exercise and I'm only good at it intermittently, and it would likely help if I did exercise more regularly.  But I think it wouldn't solve "the problem."

The Problem is that I don't eat enough fruits and vegetables.  Fruits I love and could gorge on them until I experience crises with my gastrointestinal system.  Vegetables... not so much.  But I'm a firm believer that they are the best food out there for you.  I just don't like them.  So I don't eat them.  Instead, I love junk food almost to an addiction, and I rarely have excellent self-control around them.  This is bad.  Very, very bad.  And my weight is fluctuating at a degree that brings me dangerously close to diet-related health problems.  This is uber bad.  What to do?

Well, the obvious answer is to start eating more fruits and vegetables.  The only problem is, I don't know what to do with them.  A friend of mine blogged about some of her culinary inspirations, which tout the goodness of eating more plants and less animal product (meat, dairy, eggs, etc.  Oh, sigh!  Cheese...)  I decided to check them out and the first tome I picked up was Mark Bittman's Food Matters.  I admit, I'm not as into the "Save the Planet" message of the book as he might hope I'd be, though I do believe in being a good steward of what the Lord has given us.  (I confess, I actually worried about all the jobs that would be lost if the food industry went defunct, but that's another story and likely a useless worry.  Would the food industry really go defunct?)  But I could get behind his message of "Sane Eating".  The bomb didn't start ticking with Bittman, though.  Jaime Oliver's Food Revolution got me to thinking, too.  The way I'm eating now isn't working for me, even if it is easy, convenient, and admit it, tasty in many respects.  Something's gotta change.  I really want to lose weight and eat healthy.  I want to teach my children to eat healthy.  I would really like to do this on a decent budget (and this is where I'm not convinced of Bittman's argument.  Maybe there in New York bulgur and wheat berries are inexpensive, but here they're specialty items.  The only thing I'd save on is beans and not buying so much meat.  And we'd have to grow a garden to supplement the high volume of veggies.)

So I'm rethinking the way we eat and the way I cook.  More grains, more veggies, less dairy (oh, sigh!), less meat, cutting out junk food...  It's kind of scary.  Mark Bittman makes it sound so easy, but it's a lifestyle change.  And what if I don't like the food?