Eating for Life

Posted by Kelly on March 3, 2011 in Life | 2 comments

A friend of mine called me just an hour before a nutrition talk at the local library. I had forgotten about the talk and was going to stay home, but she wanted to know if we could ride together. She is really good at getting me out the door!! And I’m glad that she did.

I didn’t know what to expect from the talk, but it ended up turning my thoughts (and life) upside down.

“Nutrition Series: The Importance of Dietary Fat”

Ask ten people what they believe is the healthiest type of diet and eight of them will say that a “low-fat diet” is the healthiest. This dietary myth has been perpetuated by the government, the food industry, and conventional medicine since the 1950′s. But this entrenched idea is based on incomplete observational evidence and bad science. This presentation will explain how fats work in the body (yes, just a teeny bit of biochemistry) so you can see for yourself how important dietary fat is to your health.  Ms. Westover will help you determine which healthy fats you should be including in your diet and which fats you should be avoiding.

Low-fat is a dietary myth? It appears to be so. I have been reading (googling, podcast listening, lecture watching) like crazy ever since, starting with Why We Get Fat, and What to Do About It by Gary Taubes as well as his Good Calories, Bad Calories. I’ve read Eat Fat, Lose Fat by Mary Enig and Sally Fallon and Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats. I have become familiar with the Weston A. Price Foundation.

Things are finally making sense to me. I have been a dieter since the age of 12, repeatedly and ultimately unsuccessfully. Losing and then gaining more and more weight. Feeling like a failure. Probably messing up my metabolism and insulin resistance in the process. Several years ago, tired of dieting and gaining weight, I stepped off the diet train…and stopped gaining. What I’ve learned recently is that it wasn’t me, I wasn’t the failure.

I have made some big changes in my diet (but I still refuse to be “on a diet” ever again!), including adding virgin coconut oil as a supplement (in the nutrition talk Ms. Westover mentioned the connection between coconut oil and the reversing and/or halting the progression of Alzheimer’s. Which caught my attention and since then I’ve read many good things about it, so I’ve decided to make it a part of my life for now.), and plan to make more changes in the future. I’ve lost some weight, I am not feeling deprived. My blog reader is bulging at the seams with all the new blogs that I’m reading.

It’s been an interesting journey.

I don’t know where I will be in a month or in a year, but I thought that I would share a bit of what’s up with me NOW….today.

Also, on another subject: It was brought to my attention this afternoon that there was a glitch in my blog. I think I have it fixed, but my apologies for not noticing sooner!