Be Careful Who You Live With

My roommate Elizabeth is possibly too well read for our sanity. This year, she's passed over books like Finding Ultra, The Oh She Glows Cookbook, The Omnivore's Dilemma, What to Eat, and Year of No Sugar; and movies like Forks Over Knives and Fed Up. She also inspired my reading of Salt Sugar Fat, Thrive, and Food Rules, and the watching of too many food documentaries to name.

The results have been:

a 6-ish month vegan experiment, followed by a month-ish long break and then a mostly vegan but with sometimes holiday flavored milk chocolate is too delicious and why is this gross pizza so good right now moments.

more label reading than I'd ever imagined possible

an awareness of sugar and doing psychotic things like spending $3 more on pasta sauce without added sugar

training for a 50k, followed by going days and even weeks without running

trying ballet classes

group fitness

walking and biking to work

losing too much weight and being told to gain some of it back

growing a half inch (I doubt this had anything to do with anything but it happened this year so it's being included).

ridiculous cravings for avocados

learning to swap out refined sugars for maple syrup or honey

eating plain salt when I had a vitamin/mineral deficiency (I now take a multi vitamin)

green tea. lots of it.

sometimes making gluten free food just for the challenge and fun of it

bread obsessions

super healing muffins (courtesy of Oh She Glows). and several different experimental versions thereof

elderberry syrup and lozenges with zinc

sparkling water


And probably some other weird things I'm forgetting. As you can see, there were some positives and some negatives, and that's what I want to tell you: it's been a learning process and I am not an expert. You have no reason to take my advice. I'm just figuring out how to do me in the best way possible.

And so, tonight, here's one more crazy thing we've decided to try, together:

Tackle sugar.

January will be refined sugar free. Things like honey, maple syrup and coconut sugar will be allowed.

February will be no sugar at all. Except, you know, actual fruit. because fruit. Also, Elizabeth has been doing this vegan cleanse and I weirdly accepted the invitation to join her in February.

Stay tuned, folks. It's going to get interesting.