Veggies

For Mom's birthday, I got her a book called In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. With her permission, I read the book before I gave her the present, and it changed my life. Not in the dorky grad student "it changed my life" kind of way, but it just made me more aware of what I am eating and what I need to be eating. The basic thesis of the books is "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." It says to not eat anything that your grandmother wouldn't have eaten. Basically, only get stuff from the edges of the grocery store, not the stuff in the middle that is all processed and has a bunch of ingredients that you don't recognize, etc.

It makes the case that there are certain "western diseases" such as heart disease, diabetes, etc., that have come about from all the processed foods that we eat. Places in the world without all of our processed foods don't have the same rates of these diseases, and there is a reason. In order to prevent these diseases, we need to eat "whole foods". Not foods from Whole Foods per se, but actual fruits, vegetables, meats, dairy, etc., that exist the way that they did in nature. They have some balance of antioxidants and nutrients and vitamins that you can't get in foods that you buy frozen and precooked in the frozen food section.

Long story short (really, just read the book), we have decided to eat better. Make meals with real ingredients, not just eat frozen foods. This is important because we have been on Weight Watchers for so long, and have been eating a lot of frozen foods that are Smart Ones, or Boca. Now, I am not saying that those are the worst thing in the world (we did lose some weight), but now on I want to know what the things I put in my body are (that's what she said). So, per the rules in the book, we are reading labels: no foods with ingredients I can't pronounce, I have never heard of, or ones with high fructose corn syrup.

We are buying most of our groceries now at the farmer's market and at specialty stores, and it is really nice. We are cooking together, and having really awesome meals. Included in the awesome meals was this at Zingerman's the other night. Heirloom tomatoes all day! Fancy Zingerman's food! The most Ann Arbor crowd I have been around in a while! There was even a Chip-guy there who was photographing all the food, but wasn't like the official guy or anything. It was fancy and awesome. So many strappy sandals with jeans and such little makeup!

Last night we cut some corn off the cob and roasted it with onions and peppers and whatnot, and it was really fantastic. A very worthy meal for us to eat while we watched BSG. I don't know if the new diet will make us lose as much weight as the WW diet did, but I feel a little bit more piece of mind about what is going in my body (twss). Plus, we get to drink red wine every night!