The Journey to Normal

It used to strike me as weird when someone would refer to their food journey.  Or their health journey.  But, when I reflect on this delicious homemade pepperoni pizza, I realize that I could say Brandon and I have been on a journey for our health.  This seems true to me because there is no universally understood route to get to health, and there are so many different directions given for a healthy lifestyle and diet, that it's a journey just to try them all and find one that works.  

This is a pizza crust made with cauliflower!  It's Dr. Berg's recipe, which is two cups of shredded cauliflower, two cups of shredded cheese, and two eggs.  It's pretty good, too!  

Brandon and I have journeyed from the standard american diet and various attempts at weight loss diets, to vegetable smoothies, then to juice fasting, super foods, an elimination diet, gluten and sugar free, low carbohydrate, and now we've stumbled into the realm of the ketogenic diet.  

This pizza turns out even better when cooked on parchment paper on a pizza stone, although we enjoyed scraping it out of a cast iron skillet and eating it with a fork several times before we invested in the right tools for the job.  

I think some of the pathways we took on this journey were not the right destination, ultimately, but they were important steps for us to take.  For instance, I think juice fasting was the thing that made us both realize that we could feel noticeably better by changing how we ate.  Sounds obvious, right?  But until you experience it, it's hard to understand.  It was probably the first time that I stopped eating my old favorites, and didn't have cravings and weakness.  I felt flush with life, and it helped me understand that my body has the potential to feel much better when crammed with vegetable nutrition.  Of course, you can't live on juice forever.  What to eat, then?   

The elimination diet was also a big step in this journey for us.  Not just because we systematically tested different foods, and eliminated foods that triggered uncomfortable feelings in our bodies, but because for two entire months we had to cook all of our own meals from scratch.  If you had asked me before the elimination diet, I would have said we cooked most of our own food, and we weren't eating convenience food very often.  Ha.  We get busy or in a hurry, just like everyone, but during the elimination diet we forced ourselves to plan ahead, and to turn down temptations.  It was good practice, and it's been easier ever since.  

So here we are now, making our own pizza crust with vegetables, scarfing salad by the box, and loading up on saturated fats.  This ketogenic diet approach has us eating unlimited vegetables plus lots of eggs, meat, cheese, avocados, olives, butter, and healthy oils.  We're trying to eat six to ten cups of greens a day!  We're avoiding most carbohydrates, including fruit and alcohol.  

Even though so many people tell me that eating saturated fat is good for me, it's still makes me wonder when I see so many government approved diet plans that say to avoid saturated fat.  But look at the results from my recent physical - I'm normal!  No one ever tells me I'm normal!  Actually, my triglycerides have never been lower, and my good HDL cholesterol has never been higher.  I've also lost nearly twenty pounds since I was at the doctor for my physical last year.  

When I went for an appointment for some new glasses last week (Brandon sat on mine!), they said my blood pressure was text book - 120 over 62.  The doctor bragged about how healthy my eyes were, and when I told him that years ago an eye doctor said there were little bubbles in my eyes that people who get diabetes have, this new doctor scoffed.  He said, "your eyes are perfectly healthy inside and out."  

It's much more fun to visit a doctor and be told I'm normal, text book, and perfectly healthy.  It's encouraging, and it makes me want to continue this journey.