Healthy Living

I am giving in to living a healthier life.

I would say that I fall in the category of the hardheads when it comes to watching what I eat and aside from an athletic stint that lasted through my university days, I have been living a relatively sedentary lifestyle. I think it may be partly because weight has not been a problem for me and also because I grew up in an environment where eating healthy is not much of a big and conscious focus.

But a lot of things have happened recently that had created a crack in this hard skull of mine. My mom had been diagnosed with abdominal cancer early this year (and since it is hereditary, I have been imagining my occasional stomach pains as those beastly cancer cells starting to invade mine too), my husband’s mom had been diagnosed with diabetes two weeks ago, and then Julia and I got sick from something she got at her daycare. It is just too much sickness at one time that I’m saying enough. I need to start getting healthier.
 My uncle who is 83 years old (and very conscious of what he eats), recommended us the GI diet book by Rick Gallop, which my husband bought and which I read. It is a nice place for me to start with since I like things to be simple and easy. So my goal now is just to stick to the diagram below (taken from the book), where I’d decrease my consumption of rice/pasta/carbohydrates (which is the big chunk of my diet) and putting the vegetables in its place and making them the main dish. My intention is not to loose weight as I don't need to but to eat more healthy foods and not fill myself up with too much carbohydrates. It is just one thing, one change and seems like a simple thing but then I realized, once you start on this path, it opens up a whole new bag of other things which basically messes up my entire life’s worth of bad habits and then other things need to change as well (and this may be a good thing). It is similar to the feeling after one has cleaned the kitchen, then we begin to want to clean the living room and the bathroom and the bedroom etc. For one cannot live on a clean kitchen alone, that's what I would now say.

I watched a late night show last night and saw Jamie Oliver’s Eat to save your life (or maybe it was eating yourself to death) show which I never watched but this time I did. And I was impressed at his passion for cooking healthy foods, horrified at how bad eating habits could accumulate all those gunk in our bodies and at how easy it looked to cooked delicious vegetable dishes. And so this is another place I’d start, trying on his recipes in the days to come. (I may be tempted to grow my own food someday as this seems to be the focus nowadays here in Victoria - the land of beautiful flowers, and maybe vegetables in the future, with a lot of free seminars on this topic and people advocating it, but I am not that evolved yet.)

I consider myself lucky for having had this realization while I’m still a bit young, before I totally become immersed with unhealthy eating in my new adopted country and before I could irreversibly ruin my daughter’s eating habits. Lately, in my exploration of North American foods, I have found myself exploring the microwaveable and ready to eat sections of the groceries which I see people buy and finding the convenience quite addictive. I’m so glad I had caught myself just in time. The convenience is not worth it. For me, with my eternal “why would I ever do it” questions, it boils down to my family and myself living longer, sickness free and happier lives. Those are good enough reasons for making the change.