The Food Connection

Note: This week, I will be sharing stories of my physical  journey. All of these are intended to tell what happened to me, not to tell you what to do. They are anecdotes NOT advice. You have your own journey and have to do your own research. Feel free to share your stories in the comments or in an email. I would love to read them! 

We all know that we should eat healthy. We even have a vague or sometimes pretty accurate picture of what that looks like. The doing is the hard part. Here is a bit of my journey so far and how our food is evolving:

I went to a women’s meeting to get a little time away from the rigors of caring for a small baby. At the front of the room was a table with all kinds of unfamiliar food on it. At first, I thought maybe a missionary had come to speak. However, as the speaker began to tell us about healthy eating, I realized that all of the foods were American foods. They were just foods I hadn’t been buying.

I learned that night that sugar is unhealthy and invites disease to our bodies. I heard how most flours have been stripped of the essential nutrients God created them to contain. She told us about the processes that our commercial oils go through and how they are mostly rancid and damaging our health.

I began to ask questions and research on my own after that. With a new baby, I knew that I was responsible for her health. She would depend on me and my husband to provide her food for the next 18 years.

In the meantime, a friend of mine from another country began to talk to me about green smoothies. Not being a vegetable lover, I thought the idea sounded gross. She assured me that adding fruit to them made them delicious, and referred me to an American website that has been promoting green smoothies and other healthy plant foods for years. I decided it was worth a try.

Surprisingly, we loved green smoothies. We made them often. When I inherited my grandmother’s Vitamix, we found the sky was the limit. We could put just about anything into a smoothie. Some attempts were delicious and some ended up in the trash, but I began to enjoy experimenting.

My Vitamix also ground flours, so I ground my own wheat berries to make whole wheat flour, and experimented with other flours when my youngest could not eat wheat.

I began to hear and read the horrors of the commercial meat industry. Another friend referred to me a farmer who could sell me beef directly from his farm. We loved the taste and price of the grass-fed beef and his pastured chickens, and we have bought from him ever since. He has helped us by providing or sourcing our eggs, cheese and flours as well.

As we have moved toward less processed foods, we have seen behavioral and health changes in our children and ourselves. We still eat plenty of processed foods, and we don’t have green smoothies often. However, we are slowly building health habits that are paying us back in many ways.

Plus, real food is just delicious!