Day 26 of 365 - Delicious Food As Medicine - Part One

I've been on my share of diets over the course of my lifetime.  In my teens, I can remember doing one I probably read about in a magazine.  I think it was mainly grapefruit, cottage cheese and tuna from what I recall.  Of course, I lost weight, but it was not sustainable nutritionally.

Probably until my mid-forties, dietary strategies were for the primary purpose of losing weight, and mainly the weight I had gained during my pregnancies.  The high protein ones, like The Scarsdale Diet, for example, seemed to be what would give me the fastest results but still maintain the energy I needed for my busy life.

I don't remember exactly when my annual bloodwork started showing elevated cholesterol, but it was certainly in the years when the low fat diets became very popular, and along with them, a spate of related cookbooks came into existence.  The tasty but fun books, Looney Spoons and Crazy Plates, became a staple for family cooking which would satisfy everyone.  I did actually lose weight eating this way, for awhile, and my lab results may have improved a little.

Things shifted again when the hormonal fluctuations of perimenopause created annoying symptoms like hot flashes and increased abdominal fat.  This was when I became interested in learning more about how what I eat could be affecting those things. That was a phase of several years to be honest. And, of course, I still wanted to avoid becoming diabetic, as my mother had been later in life.  I always hoped I was going to find just the right combination to fix everything, but it was not like that.

I'm pretty faithful about giving an approach a good try, while also staying on the lookout for new information to assist me.  So, while eating more carefully to try to manage insulin and blood sugar, which I had learned is key to improving metabolism and decreasing inflammation, I'd wanted to keep learning about what else might help.

So, in the past several years came the advent of online summits where I could listen to multiple interviews with various practitioners who have a lot of experience with the big field of food as medicine.  There has been so much more research in recent years about how the body works,  how we digest and metabolize food at a cellular level, and the impact that has on how we may actually feel in our day to day life.  It can be very complex, but it's fascinating too.

Based on what I learned, I began eating in a much cleaner way.  This refers to cutting way back on eating processed foods and eating natural or whole foods as much as possible.  I used to think that eating like that would be boring and tasteless.  However, with the advent of so many different cookbooks related to health and wellness, I have learned to make delicious but healthy meals.

Even though I was eating in a much healthier way, until the last year or so, my extra weight, and in particular abdominal fat remained stubbornly in place.  I am a follower of Dr. Joseph Mercola, a U.S. doctor who is a 'health nut' and avid researcher of all things health.  I get his online newsletters and read articles of interest.  I became interested in the dietary approach he developed around what he calls mitochondrial metabolic therapy.  You can't get to much more of a cellular level than that, at least for me.

Before I made any more dietary changes, I really studied his book, Fat For Fuel, to learn a lot more about metabolic biochemistry.  It changed the way I think about the root causes of chronic illness.  To learn about what I decided to do in the six months following that and beyond, stay tuned for tomorrow's post.  It may not be exactly what you are thinking...