Orange Island – Healing Journey Day 16

Journal:
What a day. I’m exhausted. After staying up so late getting things ready last night, I had to get up early and get going again. We had to pack up the vehicles and transport everything to the playing fields to set up and sell from the canteen all day. I didn’t get a chance to eat anything until noon, and even so, I did not eat much today. What drove me crazy all day was the smell of the burgers on the bbq. Oh my goodness. I had to smell them all day. They weren’t vegan, so that helped me not to cave. They were vegetarian as we didn’t sell anything with meat.

Thankfully, the weather was nice. That in itself helped. What I also find helps is the accountability that I have. I have accountability to you guys on here, and also to my housemates because they know what I’m doing. When people are watching, you are able to be so much more careful with what you do. So I stuck it out with clementines. Only one more day of oranges after this.

A note about the oranges: They are terrible right now. I totally picked the wrong fruit to eat for 4 days. Oranges are a winter fruit and we have not yet hit winter so the quality is terrible. But, because I’m determined to do this journey, I’m sticking it out. So here we go.

Review of Symptoms:
-Really not liking the state of my acne. I really want it to go away.
-I’m hungry and I know I’m not even enough.
-Exhausted. Doing way too much.

Weight at the end of the day = 174.4 lbs (down a total of 14.4 lbs)

Total Calories = 616 (99% carbs, 0% fat, 1% protein)

My New Experiment: Fruit

I think it’s time for a little background:

I grew up a hunter’s daughter. My father grew up a lumberjack’s son. He learned quickly in life that there was not a ton of money, and so my grandmother grew a vegetable garden, and whatever my grandfather was able to hunt was the meat they served (rabbits, deer, moose, partridge, etc…).

Thus, I grew up a heavy meat eater. In fact, stews or beans with biscuits, and the typical “meat and potatoes” were quite frequently a supper meal. Of course with the younger generations and slightly more money, pizzas and junk foods made their way in the diet as well. But it would not be uncommon for me as a child to sit down and eat a pound of bacon myself. That’s just the way it was.

I remember when I met my first vegetarians. They were like celebrities to me because the only people I ever knew of that would even think of not eating meat were celebrities. Nobody in the “real world” would ever think to live without eating meat. It must surely be a way to die!

However, seeing these people live, and healthily, gave me a spark that continued to grow. One morning, in my teenage years, I simply woke up, and told my mother never to make meat for me again.

Did I exactly know what I was getting into? Absolutely not. In fact, eating some vegetarian junk food without learning the proper way to eat healthily vegetarian landed me with intensive stomach pains and a visit to the hospital where the doctor informed me of some key staples I should be eating to be healthy. Oops. Learned that lesson the hard way.

And so it began. A somewhat healthier 10-11 years of being a vegetarian. Cold turkey. No going back.

It wasn’t until I met my husband, and found out he had grown up vegetarian that I went back to eating meat. Sounds weird, I know. But he met my family at my university graduation weekend, and my stepfather is notoriously known for his bbqing skills. My brother convinced him to try a “real” burger, and he was hooked. Of course, eventually it got to me, and I began eating meat again.

Of course, since I had been studying the Bible more and learning about healthier ways of eating, I still did not eat pork or animals considered “unclean”. I stuck with the basics of chicken, turkey, beef, and some fish. I am an Atlantic girl, and fish (specifically Atlantic Salmon) has always been a favourite.

Now recently, I’ve been reading and studying more into health. I’ve been looking at vegan diets, raw vegan diets, the details of what is going on with the meat that is served to us these days, the packaging, the handling, the processing, all of these things that are completely vital for us to know truly what we are putting in our bodies. And I’ve come to a conclusion: I need to get rid of the meat and animal products.

I could go on forever and ever about the toxins, poisons, and everything that is being put into animal products. I could tell you all about the fact that the majority of the meat we buy in stores has already gone bad and we don’t even know it. I could go on and on about how safety inspections are unrealistic, and how really, at the end of it all, we can only do the best we can with what we’re given. A hot topic, especially for someone who works out is of course how you get in enough protein.

But I’ve decided, the only true way to convince people is not a lecture, but to simply be a living example. And that is what I’m going to do.

Now, my husband is not quite on board with me on this, and I have promised to never ask him to change. If my life leads a perfect example, I figure that should be proof in and of itself. But little by little, he seems to be a little more supportive, though maintaining zero interest in it for himself, which is totally fine.

My plan is to still workout, to still continue researching how to eat properly, and to still continue on with everything else the same, except for how I eat. One difference. I’m getting the junk out of my system!

If you’re interested in this topic and wanting to know more yourself, the following are some of the links that I refer to frequently:

1. http://thebananagirl.com (she has other links from this site as well)

2. http://veganbodybuilding.com (some athletes even provide examples of their daily meals in their profiles)

3. http://www.thefrankmedrano.com (a man who chose to become vegan)

There are many more, but those are just a few to get started. I will keep you posted on how this goes!

#onajourneybacktoEden

He Doesn’t Cook Often, But When He Does…

Two things have changed when it comes to food and my husband since we’ve met:
1. He was a vegetarian and he now eats beef and chicken.
2. He hardly cooked anything, and now he can cook quite a bit!

As was I when we met, we were both vegetarians but had quite different backgrounds. His family had been vegetarian their whole life. My family regularly ate meat and I had made the choice to become vegetarian myself in my early teen years. 

When my family had come to visit during my university graduation, my father, who is known for bbqing, had a large bbq. This is where my husband had his first real burger and his first real bite of steak. He’s been hooked every since!

Then came the issue that I cooked the majority of our meals because aside from toast, nachos, and maybe a couple other things, my husband did not know how. Now I look over the time, and I hardly ever cook for him anymore. Because of our dietary needs (basically our food plans for our weight/strength goals), we completely make our own meals and thus hardly eat or cook together. Most people look at this as strange, but even when one person is eating and the other isn’t, we still sit together and watch movies or talk, so it is totally normal for us. In fact, quite often we’ll “check-in” on each other to make sure our diets/macros for the day are being taken care of. It’s really nice that way!

Even though we eat separately, we both know it is crucial to get in the amount of protein that we need to keep muscle growth. So every once in a while, my husband will use our large Crock Pot and cook a large batch of chicken overnight. I never expect to eat any of it, but my husband is always so kind and knows that I’m in a rush to make my bus stop every morning. So he’ll always make sure that I know if I run out of cooking time in the mornings, I can take some of his chicken that he’s prepared. I know it’s a small gesture, but it’s incredibly sweet. I completely ran out of time this morning (where does the time go?) and so that piece of chicken that I took was a lifesaver. It’s definitely more difficult when you don’t have a vehicle to get food or, because you’re taking the bus system in a large city, you’re waking up almost 2 hours earlier than you would have if you could drive yourself.

There have been a lot of changes, but it has been a growing experience. If my husband ever decides to start reading my blog, I just want to tell him, “Thank you! I love you!”