Food is a beautiful thing. We shouldn't let it negatively affect our bodies. And it should never feel like a burden. From development to production to transportation to consumption, there's a lot we're all doing wrong. All of these things fall under the category I call "fooding" and I hope that through this blog, we can start to understand fooding better, and learn how to food correctly (trust me, you'll get used to the term eventually). Before I get started, I thought some background information would be helpful. Here are a few questions and answers that hopefully give us all an idea of what to expect from this blog.
When and why did I start caring about food?
A few things have happened to me recently that have really influenced my perspective about my body and what I put into it. Their significance varies, but they have all contributed to what I hope is a large and necessary lifestyle change:
- Moved away from my home in San Diego, California, to go to college in Long Island, New York. How did that affect my diet? Lots of ways:
- The “fresh” produce here is just a joke to my little Californian brain. Where I come from, lemons are free because they fall on the ground in our yard. Everyone I know knows what an avocado is. Not to mention, in California, Oranges tend to be, um, orange.
- In my second year here, I got off the meal plan and began cooking for myself. This gave me the opportunity to choose what I ate. I like to shop at Whole Foods and make recipes by Ina Garten and Giada De Laurentiis. It was much healthier than the campus food. However, this also meant the responsibility of purchasing, preparing, storing, and consuming this food at appropriate times. Difficult. I have to eat every day. Yikes.
- College is hard. Stress eating. No eating. Wendy’s is the closest and most convenient dining hall to my building. You get the idea.
- Winter. What the heck is this business about. The Wendy’s convenience becomes soooo much more significant.
- My athleticism has significantly slowed down. I started dancing when I was eleven, and by the time I was in high school, I danced enough to consider myself a pretty intense athlete. It was always very easy for me to get the proper amount of exercise because I just didn’t think of it that way. It wasn’t working out, it was dancing. And I usually liked it. Now that I’m in college, I don’t have the desire, time, or resources to exercise as much as I used to. All the sudden I looked in the mirror and realized I might someday have to start thinking about maintaining my weight. To be honest, it hasn’t happened yet.
- Here’s the big one: This summer, I started getting migraines. Loss of vision, nausea, vomiting, chills, the whole nine. After the first migraine, we waited to see if it was an isolated incident. If only. After the third migraine, I went to a neurologist, who gave me a list of foods that I should avoid to prevent migraines. In a future blog, I will go over the specifics, but for now just trust me: it was ridiculous. When every time you eat you think, this could make me feel great, but it might make me vomit and temporarily lose my vision and make me miss my classes tomorrow and force me to wear sunglasses inside even when it’s dark out and look like a big douche-bag, you really start to think about the significance of food.
- I started hanging out with this vegan boy. I know… DUMB. Stick with me here, though, please. The more I got to know him, the more I realized he is sooo vegany. Like, the I-walk-around-with-a-head-of-romaine-lettuce-in-my-back-pocket kind of vegan. Yeah. He feels very strongly about food, and definitely lives a much healthier lifestyle than many of the people I know. Conveniently, he came into my life while I was a walking diet experiment and has therefore been a big contributor to my research and implementation of diet changes.
Why the blog?
I am a privileged middle class Caucasian female living between California and New York who willingly gets a surplus of exercise and consistently had all the resources necessary to living what many would call an ideal lifestyle. My mother is a fantastic cook who has always taken pride in providing our family and others with delicious and healthy meals. Our family income allowed her to be a stay at home mom, which gave her the opportunity to do so. If you compare me to the rest of the world, I really should be the picture of health. But I’m not. This really freaks me out. The food that I eat is definitely on the healthier side, and it is causing me severe physical pain.
If it happened to me, it can happen to anyone. The food we eat can shape the way we live, but making changes to something so routine, so inherent, is extremely difficult. I know, because I have every resource I need, and I still have trouble understanding and implementing the necessary changes. So in writing this blog, I hope to be a resource to people who don’t want to get heart disease but also aren’t quite ready to join lettuce boy on the slackline (no disrespect to lettuce, boy, or slackline… I enjoy all three). The middle grounders who want to make changes to their lives, but just don’t know how.
What is a “healthy diet?”
Gosh, I don’t know. Don’t expect the answer to that in this blog, because I really can’t give it to you directly. I’ll keep everyone updated on my food experiments and let you know what I find out. A huge frustration for me in my research has been the fact that I do not understand my body or my food on a chemical level, and so the research that I do is often another person’s interpretation of something I can’t validate because I simply don’t have the base knowledge. But chances are, neither do you. So rather than a regurgitation of my research, I am your willing example. Because honestly, the proof doesn’t come from a chemical understanding. It comes from how the food makes you feel. So I’ll find out, and let you know.
What’s the plan?
First, in the next few weeks I plan to record my experiences with a vegan diet. I’ve done the research. I know that it is better for the environment as a whole and better for the animals. Many experts suggest that it is also the most beneficial diet to our bodies. But of course, I have been influenced by previous generations enough to be skeptical about this one element of it (my dad’s favorite argument is that “meat keeps you warm in the winter”). So this is an experiment, and nothing more. I’ll let you know how I feel and we can all make our decisions when the time comes.
After that, I plan to implement elements of a mediterranean diet. This is a budding fad diet that seems to be pretty nutritious and also extremely appetizing. Also, starting in February I’ll be studying abroad in Florence, Italy. I’m taking an Italian Vegetarian Cooking class, and I plan to utilize this opportunity to absorb more knowledge and gain perspective about food. Food was one of the main reasons I chose Italy. Granted, that was before I wasn’t eating cheese… it’s okay though! I will make it work!
I will document each of my subsequent adventures and let you know how my lifestyle changes affect my diet, how my dietary changes affect my physical health, and how my physical health affects my lifestyle. Full circle dude. With each blog, I hope to be a resource myself and also give you the resources I find helpful, informative, and interesting. Additionally, even if no one reads this blog except my mom, I plan to use this to keep myself motivated to continue my fooding journey. With that said, please let me know if you have any questions or specific topics you'd like to see covered.
