I faithfully followed a low-fat diet throughout my college years and into my twenties. I clearly remember mashed potatoes, pretzels, plain salads and steamed veggies being the angel foods and things like fried eggs and chicken with skin being demons. As an avowed vegetable-hater, I frequently fell off the wagon; no surprise given the fact that I never felt satisfied. For an entire decade, I see-sawed between feeling deprived and guilty, deprived and guilty, all the while carrying the “twenty too many” I’d tried so hard to drop. I was exhausted. So exhausted and achy, in fact, that my doctors became concerned. I went from specialist to specialist to find out what was wrong with me and was given various painkillers and shots, but nothing seemed to help.
Then in 1997 I got married and moved to San Francisco. Six months later, I was diagnosed with lupus.
Suddenly, talk about living a “healthier lifestyle” wasn’t just a nice-to-have; it was literally a matter of life and death. I finally realized: if the guilt-deprivation see-saw I’d been on wasn’t the picture of health, then I had no idea what was.
So I set out to learn.
I began seeking nutrition-focused assignments in my writing while at the same time exploring the San Francisco farmers’ market with my husband on weekends. Armed with Janet Fletcher’s Fresh From the Farmers’ Market, we’d roam the rows and pick up things that looked familiar (lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber) while challenging ourselves to try new things (fennel, fava beans, asparagus). Little by little, a whole new world opened up to me. As an avowed vegetable-hater well into my twenties, it was an absolute revelation to taste the sweet pop of a spring pea fresh out of the pod, or the meatiness of grilled asparagus. As I experimented, often several times with the same vegetable, I discovered that there were some ways I liked it prepared (roasted carrots) and some ways I didn’t (steamed carrots); it wasn’t the all-or-nothing proposition I’d always thought it to be.
At the same time, I was learning from the experts at Harvard and Penn State and Brigham and Womens about the science behind healthy eating. I was learning about the structure of healthy fats and unhealthy fats and their impact on our bodies; about different types of carbohydrates and glycemic load; about the impact of whole grains versus refined sugars and starches. It was an eye-popping, paradigm-shifting education that, when distilled down, showed me that the fresh fruits, vegetables and whole grains I was growing so enamored with were exactly the foods that I should be eating for my health.
But there was still more to the puzzle.
As the millennium drew to a close, Christopher and I decided to pack everything into storage, climb into our Ford Explorer and take a seven month drive to Costa Rica and back. Both of us desired to simplify; to, as Henry David Thoreau says in Walden, “live deliberately . . . live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”
And we did. Throughout our drive, we feasted on the regional foods and fresh, seasonal produce of Mexico and Guatemala. But when we got to Costa Rica, we found a beautiful country and a culinary wasteland. Although we’d dabbled with organic food before, we had never given it much thought until we saw field workers spraying chemicals that were banned in the US, then loading that produce onto trucks bound for our border.
In the time since I’d been diagnosed with lupus, I had become more aware of my body and protective of my health, and it didn’t feel right to me to put unwanted chemicals into it. So when we found out about an organic co-op—the kind we actually had to go work in the fields to get produce from—we signed on, and once or twice a week Christopher and I (when I was feeling strong enough) would go till fields or weed for a morning so we could have fresh, organic produce throughout the week.
Our fledgling “organic” experience in Costa Rica turned into a more active investigation into the food chain once we returned to America and settled in wine country. We deliberately committed to buy only organic produce and I began learning and writing about issues of sustainability. I found that the more conscious I became about the food I was putting into my body and how it was making me feel, the more curious and concerned I became about where it was coming from.
And the better and better I felt all around. I was feeling so great, in fact, that I went to my doctor and questioned the lupus diagnosis, believing it may instead be fibromyalgia (still a debilitating condition, but not a life-threatening one like lupus). My doctor agreed that he thought it was, but was hesitant to take me off the medication I’d been on for four years. I insisted, however, not wanting to stay on a medication for a disease that neither of us thought I had.
So I stopped.
And I continued to improve. It was during those years of the early 2000s that everything began to come together. I was putting my learnings into practice with the food I was eating and found myself enjoying meals to a much deeper level than I ever had; much as I’d witnessed the French and Greeks do when I’d lived in Europe in the early 1990s. At that point, those pesky pounds finally came off for me and the decades-long struggle I’d had with food turned into fulfillment that nourished me body and soul.
I look forward to sharing what I’ve learned with you and guiding you on your own journey through My Nourish Mentor.
