Daily Archive

Over the course of my life, I’ve been on a multitude of diets and plans. As a teen, I went years never consuming more than 800 calories a day to stay fashionably thin. When I became pregnant with my first child, I said no more to those dangerous diets, knowing I was nourishing someone more important than I. Sure, I gained 20 pounds during the pregnancy, but I also grew two inches taller and two shoe sizes. My body finally caught up and finished growing after years of starvation.

In the ten years between the birth of my first and my second, I confess, I went back on the dieting rampage. I maintained a perfect size 7 for eight of those years, mostly by eating only bananas and nonfat milk one week, then brown rice and fruit juice the next. When it was time to think about having that second child, my first step was back onto a healthy diet. I won’t discuss what happened to my weight, but suffice to say a decade after my second was born, my final child was born and I was considered a “high risk” delivery because of obesity. I just figured that’s what happens to me when I eat more than 800 calories a day. I was eating what I was told was healthily, too, for the sake of my unborn and nursing babies. Lots and lots of soy protein, raw veggies, non-fat milk fortified with additional milk powder, and whole grains made up my daily diet. I’d never heard that grains needed to be soaked or sprouted. Of course I was eating non-fat, I was obese and that was bad and eating fat makes you fat, right?

Never once did I stop and think about the five thousand years of humans wandering the earth before me. The first time I read “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration,” I thought it was a cute idea, but kind of wild and unreasonable to expect a modern, enlightened homemaker to feed her family that way. I mean cooking? Really? Standing over a stove? Me?

Little by little, news reports and medical “research” started making me wonder. Why is heart disease on the rise so fast if we know fats are bad and have such easy access to a dizzying array of non-fat foods? Why are all the (supposedly) nutritionally superior “enhanced” foods available to us not keeping us from becoming the most obese population the world has ever known? If non-fat is really what the body needs, why is there not a rule in the Bible about it? I mean, there are lots of rules in there for proper preparation of food, and I couldn’t find a single mention about not drinking the cream of the milk.

Ding.

The lightbulb went on, I slapped my forehead and uttered a loud “DUH!” People have walked the planet for thousands of years eating fermented foods, animal fats and whole, raw milk. Obviously they were healthy enough to reproduce because we’re here talking about it. Until the industrial age, they walked to travel, tended farms and animals, wove their cloth by hand, built homes for themselves and had enough strength and energy daily to accomplish whatever was required. Only recently have we become, as a race, fat, tired and unhealthy. What changed?

Ding.

Today marks the end of my first month on this journey. I know I’ll have many more “Duh” moments. I look forward to them. Because, like “K” said in “Men in Black,”

Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.

I can’t wait!