Diary of a Slacker, Day Whatever

So of course I've fallen off the wagon with blogging. My good excuses are numerous: mainly I got strep throat for a week right as Joel was going through his first end of quarter at his new job (same company). Also, cooking all your own food at home is so very time consuming. And since it's new to us I am going to one store or another almost every day. Target for the frozen fruit Husband likes in his smoothie, the farmer's market for the good milk, HEB for Henry's drinkable yogurt, Central Market for maple almond butter, Whole Foods for the pita without sketchy ingredients. It is exhausting and I feel so scattered. This really bothers me because I have spent most of the past 20 months slowly getting my act together.

So the big question is, where are we on diet? We lasted about six days as super strict vegans. Husband is now what he likes to call vaguean - good quality eggs and butter, occasionally cheese, no milk, and rarely some meat when it calls his name. I am less interested in the vegan thing, which is not surprising since it wasn't my idea in the first place. I was busting my butt and I just couldn't do it. I think it is absolutely possible to eat a full, balanced, healthy vegan diet. However, it takes A LOT of work. I found that I was not eating enough leafy greens for calcium or enough beans for protein. I was adding things like Boca Burgers in but I have a real problem with consuming processed food-like substances in the name of healthy eating. It just doesn't gel with me. I didn't feel remarkably better on the diet and I didn't lose much weight. I was tired and had headaches, either from the massive amount of work it took to prepare all that food or from a lack of protein I'll never know. It has been a good experience though, if only because it forced us to add a lot more veggies to our diets.

I know I'm done with the vegan thing but I'm not sure where to go next. At first I found myself engrossed with what I call real foods. Nina Planck and Michael Pollan are two authors I've read that offer good primers in this philosophy. Kitchen Stewardship is a great blog that digs into what it means to eat real food if you are curious. I also have been thinking back to an Oprah I saw in the spring with Geneen Roth, who wrote a book called Women, Food, and God (among many others). This is an oversimplification, but I am intrigued by her idea that you should listen to your body and eat whatever you want. I would like to work on letting my body tell me what it needs to eat, with the eventual goal of eating primarily "real food." The problem with that approach is that it is a more intuitive, gradual process than just counting Weight Watchers points. I obviously still have some thinking to do, but my gut is telling me that I am tired of obsessing about what to eat and would like to put my energies elsewhere. Especially since I've been doing it on and off for about 10 years and I am no better off. You know, the definition of insanity and all.

In other family news, Henry is almost two and boy does it show. "Uh-oh" and "no no" are the phrases this week. His name is now both a noun and an adjective. As in, he's very Henry today. His last rough patch was a couple of months ago, so I wonder if I should just expect the even months to be trying. This time around it's a bit easier because he is understanding explanations much more than he did during his last fussy spell. For example, this morning he had a screaming fit to be let into the kitchen. Once I explained WHY he couldn't come in (it had to do with our incontinent dog) he was totally fine. He's really not my baby anymore and I am trying to remember to treat him like the big little person that he is.

Okay, that's all for now. I will blog again in approximately 1-37 days.