I got sick shortly after Christmas. Probably bronchitis. We spent a couple days with a family, friends we have from out of town. She had been sick with bronchitis. Me, being the bold being that I am, told myself "I trust my body to fend off illness." Then was totally uncareful about germs, drinking from whatever water glass happened to be closest at the time.
It was miserable. The coughing, the aching in my lungs. Totally congested, trouble breathing. Fatigue, lethargy. I got to feeling pretty sorry for myself. Of course, when you're sick, and tired, and have so much to do, you don't feel like spending extra energy in the kitchen.
So we were eating the bare minimum, quick and easy meals, plenty of carbs, with sugar and chocolate boosting my moods.
Carbs and sugar act the same way in our bodies, filling our minds with dopamine, making us feel temporarily happy, but ultimately more sad and feeling the need to eat more sugar and carbs. Doesn't help that our days are still quite short, and I get a lot less sunlight in winter.
After two weeks of being miserably sick, I had enough. I knew I had to change some things and get better before I had a real breakdown. A full trip to the grocery store this week was a real treat, since funds have been tight lately, and I've really been too sick to shop much. Before I went, I made a meal plan for the week. I pulled out one of my old cookbooks and went through it, looking for recipes to change things up, get some healthy food into us, provide some kitchen inspiration.
I should probably mention that meal planning in my house is a little more complicated than most. The baby and both parents are omnivores, one kid is a vegetarian, the other is a vegan. Cooking vegan or vegetarian is actually easier for me than the alternative. I was a vegan for 8 years. At the time, I was fully satisfied with my vegan diet. I ate mostly whole foods, very little foods with preservatives or additives, and plenty of raw fruit and veggies.
Then a miscarriage turned my life upside down. In searching for answers, I came across the Weston Price Foundation and the book Nourishing Traditions. The ideas, though actually quite ancient, are revolutionary in today's modern world. They advocate whole foods, presoaking grains and legumes, raw milk, grass fed meat and free range eggs. They claim that most of what we've been told about cholesterol and saturated fat are a result of propaganda from agri-business, trying to convince us to exchange our traditional fats for processed vegetable fats. It turns out, our bodies need cholesterol and saturated fat, just as we need salt, another ancient food that has been stigmatized in modern times. Raw milk, and especially cream, from small farms where animals are grass fed and raised on pasture has many health benefits, but the milk we are sold in stores is corrupted, the enzymes we need to digest it have been killed in the heating process, as well as many of the nutrients. Homogenization, a process that divides the fat cells into smaller cells so that they stay suspended in the milk rather than floating to the top as natural cream does, creates milk that isn't easily digested by our bodies and can create scarring of the arteries and heart disease. Sugar, it turns out is one of the most toxic substances to our bodies, and causes all manner of illnesses. If you are interested in learning more about these ideas, I highly recommend the book Nourishing Traditions. It is a cookbook with half historical and nutritional information and half recipes, and is a very interesting read.
This was a hard road for me to take, because I didn't become a vegan with the thought that animal products were unhealthy, or that veganism was the healthier option. Nevertheless, I had been far healthier as a vegan than I was before. I learned to cook because of veganism, fed my children because of veganism, learned about nutrition because of veganism. We ate grains and legumes, fruit and vegetables, nuts and seeds. A world of variety opened up to us when we became vegans, Indian curries, Mexican burritos, South American, Asian, Indonesian, African. Learning about food from around the world and how to make it was thoroughly exciting and tasty.
But I had become a vegan to reduce the suffering in the world, if even just by one person or one family. The industrial model of farming is so full of cruelty and total disregard for the life of the animal, it's comfort or it's natural state. I didn't want to be causing death or suffering by the foods I choose to eat.
So, in a sense it was an ethical decision, but it was also intricately tied to my spirituality. For eight years, as most of my religious indoctrination faded, I held on to two verses, Genesis 1:29-30. " Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” This was the description of the Garden of Eden, a perfect place with no death. It was later part of the covenant of the Nazarene, a tribe of Israel dedicated to be priests, that they should not touch any dead thing. I made a point of touching no dead thing, as much as was possible. For a long time I even boycotted leather shoes. The final decision came after a dream I had in which I encountered a horse in the forest who conveyed his feelings to me about man hunting his brothers (the cow, elk, deer and moose).
But a little over two years ago, I decided to again change what I ate. I wanted to increase my fertility, my strength and preserve my health through food, but more importantly, I wanted to contribute to my children's heath and that of my grandchildren and great grandchildren, to reverse the trend of chronic illnesses that humanity seems to be sliding towards (coincidentally, cultures that did not have access to modern processed foods were proven to have almost no tooth decay, no cancer, no diabetes, no heart disease).
That brings me to now. Having been sick for two weeks, struggling to keep my work done and everybody fed. I decided to make a meal plan. Basically, I went back to veganism (almost). I am eating two meals with meat, one with wild Pacific salmon and the other with local organic ground beef. Some free range farm eggs will get used in my baking, pancakes, etc. And of course we use butter now instead of margarine. Other than that, it bears a great resemblance to how we ate when we were vegans, with an emphasis on veggies and fruit, including some raw every day. I also bought some medicinal tea, an echinacea blend, which I am taking at least twice a day with honey and fresh lemon.
The day after I started changing my food, I started feeling better. Now I'm almost completely better and so glad about it! I should mention that I added positive thinking to the mix, since feeling sorry for one's self doesn't exactly aid in healing. So every time I coughed, I told myself "I'd rather be healthy that sick." That was the best mantra I could come up with at the time, since telling myself "My body is perfectly healthy" would just seem like a lie. I think mantras have to be believable to work.
Needless to say, my kids are happier, too. I guess they were getting bored with the same old, same old. Most of the meals have been a big hit, things like the rice pudding breakfast, the spinach scrambled tofu lunch (yes, we eat tofu sometimes), and the curried squash soup dinner. I took a lot of recipes this week from a cookbook called How it All Vegan, which is an excellent vegan cookbook with lots of variety and many simple recipes with simple ingredients.
The meal plan has revolutionized my week, and I think I'm going to try it again next week. For those of you with hard to please kids, or those with the winter blues that have started to think "I'm so bored I don't even want to eat", I encourage you to try it. If you have any questions about nutrition, wonder where to get started, or want some healthy advice or kid friendly recipes, please comment below. I'd love to help out in whatever way I can. If you have anything to add about food or meal planning, please contribute or share your experience. I'm interested to hear how you're all doing with it.
