Why Grain-Free?

I've had a lifelong love affair with food. I began cooking on my own at age 6. My first dish was scrambled eggs, not too scary for a 6 year old, but boy did I make them good. I made eggs for everyone who would eat them. And then I began venturing out into the world of spices and herbs, homemade soups, varieties of baked tofu, on to Italian food, French cuisine and even made my own sushi at age 9. All on my own.

My mother cooked, sometimes, but mostly for her it was a Crock Pot or a pressure cooker, and her idea of flavor was black pepper. No salt; just a truckload of pepper in each bite. Since I was fed-up with pepper at the time, I decided I needed to take control of the kitchen, and dinner became my thing. I cooked. And by the time I was 12 I was running the show.

My grandmother was my major inspiration for food. That woman could cook. The entire block smelled delicious when she was in the kitchen. Being 2nd generation of purely Czech-Slovak-Austrian-Hungarian descent, her food was seriously flavorful and rich with history. And then she died. I was 7. So I had just begun to cook and she had nothing written down. All her recipes were in her head, and all of that knowledge and deliciousness was lost. Forever. But the inspiration she left behind was not. And so I set off on my own journey of discovery and flavor in the kitchen.

Italian was always my favorite food-type both to eat, and to cook. Pasta. Pasta. Pasta. Seriously, if it had pasta, I was all over it. I never quite liked, and therefore didn't venture, into anything that wasn't pasta... Except maybe a few solo eggplant or chicken dishes.

And you might think, that being so in love with so much pasta, that I'd have been a round, pudgy, tumbly looking kid. But I wasn't. I was a stick figure with hair.... or at least so I was called throughout gradeschool and junior high. I was still a stick figure with hair in high school, but the kids didn't tease me anymore. And continued to be a stick figure with hair, eating whatever was in my path (as long as it tasted good), throughout my life. At 24 I had a baby, and continued to eat everything. I ate larger portions than the athletes I dated and outsiders were always snobbing me as anorexic. Granted, I ate by the truckload, but I also worked out at the gym 6 days a week 1-2 hours a day on top of keeping an active lifestyle.

But in the year I had my second child, my health began to dwindle. I reached 206 while pregnant - that's a gain of 80+ lbs since my first child, and began having difficulty shedding it. I no longer worked out. Period. Like at all. And the active lifestyle I once had became chasing a toddler around the house and feeling pooped out at the end of the day.

My picky-eater husband who hardly ate much outside the realm of chicken, steak and some Mexican food dishes, also reached his high point around this time. But then he came across Mark Sisson and the Primal Blueprint. He read this guy's book and Mr. Picky decided he wanted me to cook even more pickily for him. He was going 100% GRAIN FREE!

"Do what?" I asked him, worried about how I was going to handle this request. And he told me all about glycogen, insulin, carbohydrates, conventional wisdom about what's considered healthy, and how it's all faulty thinking and the FDA has been in bed with big-Pharma and is perpetuating disease. He began talking about some dude named Grok and someone else named Korg (fictional characters created by Mark Sisson to illustrate a point) and I began wondering why on Earth I agreed to do this for my husband, and I was seriously wondering what kind of cult he had joined!

Some of this stuff made perfect sense, and some of it was just too out there for me to even want to understand. My understanding of food and it's delicious relationship to our heath was being crushed. And I became resistant.

But then my husband began shedding weight left and right, and within a year of eating grain-free, he lost around 75 pounds, and was thinner than he was when I met him more than 10 years before. And I was noticing. That noticing turned into my own curiosity and naturally, since I was already cooking it, I began paying attention to how my new dinner choices were relating to me. But I still ate grain at breakfast and lunch; just nowhere near as much as before. I still had pasta. I still had crackers and cheese, cereal, and big fat deli sandwiches. I still ate Na'an with my Curry and still ate homemade cookies from time to time. But I was becoming less resistant to the idea of this grain-freeness and even more curious.

Skip to 2011. We moved from hot and deadly Southern Arizona, to temperate and green Southern California - and I felt good! I was able to be outside more and actually DO stuff. Seriously, those last few years in AZ, I hibernated mostly year round and did nothing. Just doing nothing in AZ but eating a LOT less grain, I had aready seen improvement in my health and my weight. And once we moved here, I was able to be active again and I lost even more. Add to that some physical activity, and I was almost where I was post-first-baby weighing in at 136. And then, bam. I wasn't. Something major shifted and I was gaining weight. So after my first year of living here, I was ranging anywhere from 167-177 depending on what I had been eating, and how much of it. That's a major gain, but of nothing good, except maybe some decently sized boobs for the first time in my life without being pregnant.

So I broke down, turned to my husband, and asked him for support and advice. He suggested I start with logging everything I ate for a couple of weeks. And Miss Life Coach here (me), thought that was a brilliant idea and wondered why I hadn't already done so. Sometimes, we're just blind to what's most obvious, what's already known, and what's logical. So like, Duh! I started a food journal. And I started weighing myself daily. And noticed a change.

In just a week I lost 3 lbs and hadn't DONE anything... except pay attention. But that second week, even though I was eating a little less in quantity of any food type, I was gaining again.

So, on November 26, 2012, just 15 days after beginning my food journal, I made the commitment to go 100% Grain-Free.

Even though I've been playing around at grainless recipes, this is my own new food adventure, because here we are barely a month later, and I've lost just over 7 pounds (corrected; previously written 12), and I'm really excited about it!!