Once upon a time, just a single year ago, I was living at home with my family. I love them to pieces, but we could hardly have been considered healthy eaters. My sister is fussy and I am a Vegetarian so a family that hates cooking ends up eating very repetitive and not very colourful meals. Oven baked french fries were frequently featured on the plate, perhaps a little too frequently. Now don’t get me wrong, we aren’t about to be seen on The Biggest Loser, but our diet was less than optimal.
by ~SChallisx on deviantArt
Now, we’ve all seen the news and the research about how sugar and highly processed carbohydrates can be highly addictive and bad for our health, so I don’t need to fill you in there. But do we actually do anything about it? No. We look at the news, we worry about the problem briefly, then we continue on as if we had never heard it. This is an age of ignorance in a world of information, and I was part of it. I figured, I’m not the main cook in the house so I can’t do anything about it – I don’t even know how to cook! Wrong! This is the worst approach I could have taken. Don’t know how to cook? Learn. Not the main cook in the house? Take over some of the work. It was only when preparing for university that I learnt to cook, and I am so very glad I did.
Moving out and having to live on my own for university was a very different experience to living at home. Having to do everything for myself meant I made all of my own choices about what to do, when to do it, and what I was going to eat. My apartment had no oven, so those snap-frozen ready-in-a-box oven baked options were out and my diet got healthier. I lost a fair bit of weight in those first few weeks of university because a) I walked everywhere, and b) my food was healthier. I can hear you – “Yeah, yeah, diet and exercise, I’ve heard it all before” but hold on a sec and look at it from my point of view. As a frugal penny-pincher I absolutely refused to catch a bus to anywhere I could easily walk, and living in the CBD meant I didn’t have a car (not that I can drive anyway). So over the entire year I think I caught the bus about 4 times excluding trips to the airport. Think about it, every time you get in the car, every time you get on a bus, it costs you money. What does it cost you to walk? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Sure, it might take a little longer but in a city of traffic you can just about beat the traffic on foot anyway.
As for food, most people say to me “But fruit and vegetables are so expensive,” well trust me when I say that they really aren’t. Big chain supermarkets put large markups on everything, so think twice and go to that Asian supermarket around the corner, or your weekend Farmer’s market. Leave the chain stores and you will find the same food for half the price. That’s your grocery bill cut down by a significant chunk. For me, the cash aspect was a really big motivator, but my health is important to me too and as the year went on I started to discover these cheaper supermarkets around town and I stumbled on something called a Raw Diet. Essentially, the entire diet (or as much as you can manage) is composed of Raw Food. This is a diet that keeps you young and healthy because by leaving the food raw, none of the enzymes are destroyed and you get the full benefit of the foods.
by ~crzee4art on deviantArt
So I gave it a go, and that meant giving up the biscuits I so love to eat. It wasn’t until I started trying to cut them out that I realised how attached to them I really was, I always had a few (or more than a few..) late at night after dinner and sometimes during the day as well, so giving them up was really hard. I thought I was a woman of strong will, but I was not quite as strong as I thought. Now, you can’t take something away without replacing it, habits don’t just go away – they get replaced. I was replacing my biscuits with fruit. I’m not gonna lie, it was pretty tedious for awhile as I longed for the crunch of my beloved biscuits, but after awhile it got easier and now I’m not bothered if I don’t have them at all. Sugar is an addictive substance, and I think it had its claws in me without me even realising. It took me a few weeks to completely get over the yearning for biscuits but I got there, and it was worth it. You have to really commit to making a change, sometimes you will falter, sometimes you will fail, but that doesn’t mean you should give up – it means you are human, so get back on the horse and keep going, you WILL get there.
Although I decided the Raw Diet wasn’t the one for me, it did help me develop much healthier habits. Foods I used to enjoy I now find somewhat repulsing when I consider the lack of actually nutritional content, and this is truly something I am happy about. I’m back home again with my family, and while my sister’s eating habits may never change and the average menu in the house also didn’t change while I was away, I did. I looked at the average food in our house and decided to change it. I went to the farmer’s market, bought some excellent vegetables for fantastic prices (Tomatoes for 1.50 a kilo?! I think so!), and started cooking some of our dinner meals. My meals are healthy, colourful, and delicious, and you can imagine how pleased my mum was to get quality food without cooking. Healthy food doesn’t have to be boring, you know.
I love eating healthy, and you will too.There is a light at the end of the tunnel, just keep going!
For Love and Change 