About
Posted by Heather Lackey
April 2009 and late September 2009
1/1/2010
I’d been meaning to start a food-related blog for a few months—since not too long after I began changing the way I thought about food—but I couldn’t get a handle on where I wanted to go with it. Now it’s the first day of a new year—a new decade, even. What better time to push myself to get going on this?
For most of my life, I’ve eaten the standard American diet (SAD), with a few exceptions: for six months in 1999/2000, I ate vegan. For a year and a half after that, I ate vegetarian. Between then and late 2006, I ate a mix of SAD and vegetarian. In 2007 & 2008, I followed, more or less, a low fat, high grain diet. Then I went back to my SAD ways.
My weight was exceptionally stable from ages 15 to 29—even after pregnancy it dropped effortlessly back down to my then-normal weight. After I turned 29, though, it began to go up. The gain averaged out to only 3.5 lbs per year, but 3.5 lbs year after year starts to pile up, and it was snowballing. In 2007 and 2008, I was gaining about 5 pounds a year. Who knows where I’d have ended 2009 if I hadn’t decided I needed to do something about it.
This wasn’t the first time I’d made that decision, but I was optimistic anyway as I dusted off my SparkPeople account, cleaned up my diet (in large part by stocking up on Lean Cuisines, fat-free salads and fiber-enriched yogurts), put myself on an exercise regimen, and resigned myself to the hard work and misery that would be the rest of my life—if I managed to stick to it.
After two weeks, my weight was down two-tenths of a pound.
I would have been absolutely miserable if I wasn’t also reading a book by Gary Taubes at that time: Good Calories, Bad Calories. It’s 640 pages of dense reading geared more toward doctors than laypeople, and I read the whole thing in a week on my iPhone, riveted. From there, I found more: Dr. Harris’s PāNu blog, Richard Nikoley’s Free the Animal, Mark Sisson’s Mark’s Daily Apple and The Primal Blueprint, the films Food Inc, Fat Head and My Big Fat Diet, Lierre Keith’s The Vegetarian Myth, and on and on…. My Google Reader has 40 or so very active nutrition-related blogs in it. My Kindle is jammed full of books on my “to read” list. I have King Corn in my Netflix queue, and I’m eager to see FRESH at some point.
Thanks to all of this, between September 1, 2009, and today, January 1st, 2010, I’ve lost more than 12 pounds of fat and gained a pound or so of muscle, and I’ve done it while eating the most DELICIOUS foods. Lean Cuisine? Peh. That’s not food.
In addition to slimming down, I’ve shaken off some chronic gastrointestinal problems that I’d thought were part and parcel of getting older—heartburn, excessive gas, constipation.
And most exciting (to me): I was able to get off my anxiety medication. I developed major anxiety issues not long after going vegan, though I didn’t make any connection between the two at the time (wasn’t I eating the absolutely healthiest diet a person could possibly eat?!). Even after bringing meat back into my diet, the anxiety remained—because I hadn’t gotten the trigger OUT of my diet. Until now.
So, this is what I do. It’s simple, it’s easy, and it’s sustainable (in a number of senses of the word):
I eat grass-fed meat, game, fish, fowl, eggs, butter, cheese and heavy cream, all of the nonstarchy vegetables (often cooked in butter—yum!) and berries I want, and, less frequently, nuts, fruits and starchy veggies. I also do wine, liquor, coffee, dark chocolate, honey as a rare treat, and my big guilty pleasure: xylitol. (Shush. Everyone gets a guilty pleasure.) (February 5, 2010 update: In doing the 28-Day Real Food Challenge over at Nourished Kitchen, I’ve dropped the xylitol. I’ll let you know if that sticks.)
I do not eat anything with grains in it—no bread, pasta, cereals, corn, rice, crackers, etc. Get these out of my diet is what solved both my anxiety and my gastrointestinal problems.
I’ve also banished industrial “vegetable” oils (though they are hard to avoid when you eat out—so we just don’t eat out very often). I cook with butter, tallow or lard from grass-fed animals, or coconut oil. If I can’t get it from the store with “approved” ingredients, I make it myself—mayonnaise, for instance. It only takes a minute to make, the taste of home-made vs. store bought is incomparable, and all the jars at the store have soy or canola oil in them. Yuck.
Since I don’t eat corn, soy, wheat, vegetable oils or, except in the case of dark chocolate, added sugar, I end up eating only a very small percentage of what the grocery store has to offer…yet I feel soooo far from deprived. I can eat whole, real foods, well prepared, for the rest of my (hopefully) long life, with no complaints.
I mentioned some of the sources of nutrition information that I’ve been devouring since I started changing my relationship with food. More recently I’ve been immersing myself in learning about the enjoyment of food, both preparing it and eating it. At the moment, I have both Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s The River Cottage Meat Book (a Christmas gift from my brother) going, with Greene, Hertzberg and Vaughan’s Putting Food By and Mel Bartholomew’s All New Square Foot Gardening lying in wait.
I feel I’ve been neglecting food most of my life—only half paying attention when I purchase it, prepare it and eat it. From now on, though, I will be present. I will live “in the food moment.” And that’s what this blog is about.
8 Responses to “About”
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I’d been meaning to start a food-related blog for a few months—since not too long after I began changing the way I thought about food—but I couldn’t get a handle on where I wanted to go with it. Now, on January 1, 2010, it’s the first day of a new year—a new decade, even. What better time to get going on this? 
January 18th, 2010 at 8:04 pm
Hi Heather!
I love your blog. We have a similar nutritional history, from vegan to low carb. Thank you for leaving the first comment on my bacon article.
I will definitely be checking out more of your articles tomorrow.
TTYS
erika
January 18th, 2010 at 8:12 pm
Hi Erika! I’ve added yours to my Google Reader, ’cause bacon IS a superfood. :)
February 27th, 2010 at 11:08 am
I have the Taubes book but I have given it rather short shrift so far. Something about “being busy” and the density of the writing and …. Excuses. Thanks for your story and I will now move the book to the top of the pile and, more importantly, have it read in the next two weeks.
February 28th, 2010 at 8:16 am
If it weren’t for blogs like yours I would still be eating foods more suited for use as livestock feed than human nutrition. This type of education changes countless lives for the better.
February 28th, 2010 at 3:12 pm
Heather,
Wanted to drop by again to say that you really are quite an inspiration for me to get in the kitchen and mix it up a bit more. I eat good food, but once a week minimum I need to try something from your site! Thanks for all of your efforts, see you around In The Food Moment.
Best Regards,
Zach
February 28th, 2010 at 3:43 pm
Hi BlogDog – GBCB is pretty dense. I’m looking forward to his average-person-friendly version, so I can recommend it more widely. (I’m also curious to see if any of his thinking has changed between GCBC and this next book.)
February 28th, 2010 at 3:52 pm
Dave, thanks for visiting. I agree–blogs are invaluable. I don’t know where I’d be without all the ones stuffed in my feed reader, though my guess is I’d either be miserably trying to stick to a low-fat, hearthealthywholegrain diet or living on cupcakes and fettucini alfredo in the face of the futility of trying to stick to a low-fat, hearthealthywholegrain diet. Thank goodness for the dispersal of knowledge and experience!
February 28th, 2010 at 3:54 pm
Hi Zach! I’ve been reading thepaleogarden.com for months–it’s great. Let me know how the recipes you try turn out!