Live Free, Dine Hard

I had to evaluate my diet recently. For three days, I had to write down and record everything I ate, in specific amounts and items, and then put it into a program that broke it down in nutrients, vitamins and minerals. It compared it to my recommended requirements and gave me a general overview of how I ate.

The results could have just said: “You eat like garbage and we worry about you.”

I know I eat like trash. I am a forager at work. I don’t sit down or stop for regular meals during the day and my only meal tends to be dinner, which I don’t make well-rounded at ALL. Example? A queso burrito from Qdoba.

Let me break down this beautiful piece of work for you, if you’ve never had one. Take a bowl, fill it with white rice. Dump black beans all over it, then pico de gallo, then a bunch of shredded cheese, followed by melted cheese and sour cream.

This bit of gold? I could eat it all day long. But aside from the black beans and the tomatoes, it seems to have the nutritional value of a sponge. 

It also makes me feel guilty when I eat it and that, my friends, is the crappiest side dish of them all. It ruins your choices, your enjoyment. You cut yourself off or eat too much. You read too much into labels, kick yourself for eating it later or feel awful for eating a REAL meal. 

There’s a saying, “Eat to live, not live to eat” and I understand that. Your life shouldn’t revolve around what you put in your mouth, but what happens when it does? I don’t count down the hours until I can have food, but my life has started revolving around what I put in my mouth and when. 

Should I eat this late? Should I eat this early? Do I really need to eat lunch since I’ve snacked here and there all morning? Does a huge thing of vegetables with rice really count as food? Was that cookie really necessary?

It makes me hate food and I don’t want to hate food. I love food. But how do you get over the screwball guilt?

So you’re stuck with this part of my journey, too, friends. Eating well, eating balanced and eating without guilt. It’s going to be a lonnnng journey.

Girl meets meat.

Girl falls in love with meat.

Girl falls out of love with meat.

It’s that simple.

People go flexetarian, vegetarian or vegan for all sorts of reasons, but mine isn’t deep. I just didn’t like it anymore. It wasn’t a health issue (although I do feel better), it wasn’t for animal rights reasons or moral obligation. I just had no desire to eat meat anymore. I will admit, my job working at a grocery store deli hasn’t helped the meat cause any. Between slicing meat and skewering whole chickens to be roasted, it was grossing me out. (Really, once you hear little chicken bones snap while shoving a metal spike up their hollowed-out carcasses, you really get grossed out. Try it. It isn’t pleasant.)

So I stopped cold turkey (har har) and have been stumbling through this new way of eating. My husband has been supportive, agreeing to embark on meatless adventures that he deems safe (spaghetti without meat sauce, etc) but had no intentions to stop eating meat completely.

Corey is a meat and potatoes guy to almost neanderthal levels. Double meat subs at Subway, the biggest chicken breast in the bunch, a steak AND a burger - typical Corey choices. To completely cut him off? He’d probably go into withdrawl.

But out of the blue today, I received this text: “I want to go vegan for a month.”

Bzuh? Who was this man and what had he done with my husband?

It excited me, though, and felt like a challenge. We agreed to ease him into a vegetarian lifestyle first and then go from there. Grocery shopping would be easier, I wouldn’t be required to cook two separate meals, I could put my new-found love of my nutrition class to use!

So that’s where this blog comes in. I’m new to this and Corey is brand-spanking new to this. He’s a little picky, I’m looking to expand my horizons and Corey…well, he’s cheap. Watch as we try to navigate through a new plant-based diet while being thrifty, one of us a couch potato and one of us an athlete. It’s going to be an interesting experiment and I, for one, am beyond excited to use my new knowledge for this.

It won’t always be pretty and it’s going to be a lot of trial and error, but stick with me. I’ll post recipes, product reviews and photos of our culinary adventures. If you get something out of it, great. If not? You can laugh at our misguided attempts at cooking tofu.

Don’t worry. I’ll be right there with you on the laughing.

-Meg