Getting back to Real Food

A long time ago, approximately 8 years ago, I and my family were suffering from several health issues. I had been into more natural health and eating years before and I knew the connection between food and health. I discovered a book called Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon. Wow! It was chock full of info that I had never heard before. It took me several months to read it, and I slowly began changing not only what we ate, but also the way it was prepared. I was pretty nervous about some of it, but I desperately needed help.

I was dealing with Irritable bowel syndrome, among other things. At the time, I felt like if I didn't get this fixed my life would be over. I first began having symptoms when I was 21, after the birth of my second child. I went to see a gastroenterologist, a past colleague actually, and his diagnosis was that I need to take an antidepressant and exercise. Thanks.

How that was supposed to help really bad diarrhea at inopportune times I don't know. So I came home, cried, and also prayed for God to show me what to do. Immediately I did an online search and found a doctor who used herbs for everything, ordered his stuff, and things were on their way to getting better. One of the things that learned about was probiotics, and I began taking supplements. However, they were really powerful and sometimes exacerbated the intestinal issue. When reading Nourishing Traditions, I learned about living probiotic foods, or lacto-fermented foods that people used to make hundreds of years ago. They didn't have refrigeration, so there had to be some way to preserve things right? They ate naturally fermented sauerkraut, yogurt, even meats like corned beef and Asian fish sauce. Since then I've noticed that I do so much better when I eat the living bacteria rather than supplementing with probiotic capsules.

Of course that's only part of it. The other big part was saturated fat! The big no no---turns out our bodies need the fat in dairy products, meats, eggs and things like coconut oil. The things that taste really good :) Also,in the book it describes properly preparing whole grains, which means predigesting or soaking  to make them more digestible. So, I started all this years ago, fell in love with it and all was good. I didn't really lose weight, but my body looked leaner and more proportioned, not to mention things like IBS disappeared. (One thing to note, I was also standing on the healing scriptures God promised us in the Bible. The diet changes helped a LOT, but ultimately, Jesus did it)

When I became pregnant with our fourth baby girl, I kinda lost steam. I could barely function at all, much less do all that food prep. I did get back into it later and ate as well as I could while pregnant. Even with all that saturated fat I didn't gain any weight until the last few weeks, and was very lean. After she was born, it became a huge burden. All I could manage was the homemade formula in the book for her, and a few other things. It was so stressful I had to just let it go. This turned out to be a good thing. I needed to focus on the Lord, and let Him be our Source. I needed to learn to eat healthy not out of fear, which is what I was doing. I've tried here and there to 'pick it back up', but could never find a good rhythm. I still cooked from scratch, but that's it, no culturing or anything-and we have been healthy! I learned what He wanted me to see.

But lately I've felt a calling come back to this lifestyle. I've slowly, slowly began getting back into it. The cool thing is that this has become so popular, that now I'm nearly surrounded by grassfed meat farms, raw milk dairy farms and local vegetable farms. There's a brand new huge health food store nearby, there's all kinds of stuff available on amazon, and now I don't sound so weird. We also have our own chickens, although egg production came to a halt when something broke in and ate them, the chickens that is....anyways.

I'm doing this in a certain way though; if at any point I get stressed out about food, I will just stop and not focus on it for awhile, and allow God to lead me. There's no point in getting wore out from food preparations. I've been on a low carb diet that stressed me out so much, that after 3 months, I had lost zero weight and had no health improvements! Stress negates any of the good things you are doing.

This time, I am also going grain free. I am not a fan of low carb diets, but the only reason I am doing it, is because I think I have candida overgrowth in my body. I am taking a supplement (diatomaceous earth, more about that later) that kills the candida, but reducing their food supply should help too. They eat sugar, so anything that converts to sugar is out as well. I only plan to do it for a short time, because I believe whole grains are good for us. But it's kinda fun to experiment, and I really feel relieved and at peace about it. And, if I am really wanting something starchy then I'll eat some.

So, all that to say, that I've had a lot going on in the kitchen today! Since it's summer I have the luxury of spending a lot of time going around picking up food and spending lots of time in the kitchen, which I did. It was fun, the girls were great, and it was adventurous driving around getting food. The whole time we're driving, I'm talking to them about what we're doing and why, so they're getting an education too.

Wow, this is a long post! I guess I'll continue in another post...