photo credit: ellievanhoutte

In our house vitamins and minerals were something that came in pill form and were kept in a bottle on the kitchen counter, which incidentally we rarely opened.

These mysterious elements were never directly associated with the food we ate.  This lack of association was I am sure unintentional but probably very accurate in reality for my mother came from a generation that first off overcooked every vegetable in the house and second was the first generation to serve her family packaged, preprocessed foods like hamburger helper and TV dinners.

I was an adult living away from home before I ever tasted fresh picked peas.  We ate canned peas, green beans and corn.  I never saw anything but iceberg lettuce in our house.  On the rare occasions that fresh vegetables did grace our tables they were boiled until they had no color or nutritional value left in them.

So like I said, I was told “take your vitamins” not eat them.

DailyBread365 not only explains the micro-components at work in our meals but also provides menus and recipe suggestions to help us make the transition to a more wholesome lifestyle.

• Balanced meals
• Avoid carbohydrates
• Avoid large meals
• Exercise before breakfast
• Resistance training (my wording)
• I added a sixth item…a reminder to SLOW down and enjoy my food

Photos are courtesy of Freefoto.com

For the last two decades I have been fighting with nature, arguing with myself and wondering why is it I seem to eat so much less than when I was younger and yet in that 20 years I have crept up over 50 pounds, in spite of trying numerous diets and exercise regimens.  I’d whine about the injustice and beat myself up mentally that I was such a failure. Today when I read Lucy’s explanation a light went on.  For the first two decades of my life my body was growing and thus needed fuel to support that growth.  The third decade I was caring for a small child so I needed the energy to keep up with her and her friends.  I was eating to fuel the life style of a child in my adult body.  Suddenly, in my forth decade, my life slowed down.  I settled into an office job, no longer waiting tables, running Keno or caring for the sick.  I sat for at least 8 hours a day.  My recreation became less active too.  I now had time to read books and watch a movie all the way through in one sitting. So why is it such a mystery to me that I need less fuel to do so much less? The challenge now to is pay more attention to my body’s needs and the signals it is sending.  Why did it never occur to me that maybe acid reflux or GERD, as the TV ads call  it, is really my body saying I am overfilling the tank?  It’s kind of like the excess gas bouncing out of the gas tank when I try to top off the tank and put just a WEE bit more than the automatic shut off suggests. Since reading and listening to Paul McKenna’s NLP program I have learned to recognize that “automatic shut off” signal when my body gives it.  It was pretty quiet at first.  Even now I can blow past it if I’m chatting with the family or friends when I’m eating a meal.  If I let myself get distracted, I find I am no longer taking time to chew slowly and taste my food.  I am again just gobbing it down and by the time I “hear” myself say “enough” I am more than full, I am stuffed and uncomfortable.  Later, the indigestion is back. So once again I pick up the MP3 player and go back to Paul’s recording to remind myself of the basics and my goal to be a healthier thinner senior citizen in my last decades.  I do want my “golden years’ to be a little more Blanche and a little less Dorothy, although all my adventurous enthusiasm will certainly be focused on my darlin’ husband, Chuck.