Physical Sanity (aka Birthday goals, day 2)

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food)

One of the precepts Michael Pollan sets forth in the book In Defense of Food is that we shouldn't eat anything our grandmothers wouldn't recognize as food. Michael Pollan may be a few years older than I am, or maybe his grandmothers did more cooking. But the principle makes sense to me.

Over the past several months, I've severely stripped down my diet to a pretty simple one. Just call me the queen of veggies and fish. I rarely eat red meat of any kind, any more, so when I was going through loose pages of recipes downloaded from the internet or torn from magazines or photocopied from library books, I started ditching the ones that had any mammals involved. I figured if I just HAD to make shephard's pie again, I could find the recipe somewhere else. I'll probably switch TVP for the ground beef anyway. Finding out you're about an inch away from doing permanent damage to your body is nothing if not motivating. Forget the adage that "nothing tastes as good as thin feels" and try "nothing is worth going to the hospital for."

It's not like I didn't already know everything I needed to know about how to treat this physical form. I let other people's priorities get in my way, though. I let being busy be an excuse to eat crappy food in the fastest possible way. Does that mean I don't do convenience food anymore? No--sometimes I really am too busy to cook. But McDonald's drive-thru is definitely out. Instead, it's a bundled salad from Publix in an emergency, or (twice in the last six months) chicken tenders and fruit from a chicken place. And I try to make it ONLY an emergency thing--like I'm out all day with no time to heat something up. Used to be I did better at eating fruit than vegetables. Now I feel it if I get fewer than seven veggies a day--usually I get about nine, and one to two servings of orchard fruit or berries. Almost no sugar.

But I do try to keep my head about it. Extremes are so much easier than moderation. So if the urge is overwhelming to have a friend's homemade chocolate chip cookies, I do. Have one. In public. None of it comes home. And I pass it up when it doesn't count. Lunch yesterday was a meeting/catered deal. I ate the chicken and veggies and told the server to not even bring me the dessert. Yes, it looked good (judging from other people's plates) but really, nothing is that good.

I'm trying more and more to embrace Pollan's suggestion. I doubt I'll ever again be a strict vegetarian (I've done it a few times), but I like the feeling of not being driven by cravings, and I find that the more veggies I eat, the more likely it is that I'll be dying for chocolate only about one week out of the month...works for me.

Fresh foods, healthy exercise (walking, yoga, core strengthening) = treating my body sanely instead of insanely. And it makes the outside life match the inside life a little more.