Thoughts

It's late at night, and as usual the quiet leads to a lot of internal conversations with myself. Right now I'm thinking about our fast and how it's changing my life. After over 11 years of wanting to go vegetarian and going back and forth about it, I think it may be time to make a commitment to making a life change. I've been talking it over with Matt and he likes the lifestyle changes we've been making during the fast, but he's not quite convinced about making this long term. I think we may have a compromise - one day a week of allowing seafood into our diet. The biggest challenge to committing to changing to a vegetarian lifestyle is not so much will power (though that is A challenge). The bigger challenge is our schedule. Traveling and long wedding days mean that we eat whatever is accessible. So at least for now, having one day a week where we can allow ourselves some flexibility may be just what we need to get started.

Right now I'm getting a lot of inspiration from Elena Wilkins of Vegalicious.com. I found her site as I was searching for recipes for the Daniel Fast, and I just feel I connect so much with her personal journey with nutrition and health and also her beliefs about natural healing over medicine. For most of my life I have believed in the body's natural ability to heal itself over relying on pills - ESPECIALLY when it comes to pain. So I don't take aspirin when I have a headache (unless I am to the point of wanting to cry). Even when I had my tonsils removed I stopped taking my pain meds after a day or two. We rely so much on pills to cure everything, when the side effects of them are usually worse than the symptoms that they cure. And medicine to relieve pain is the worst, because that pain is there to tell you that something is wrong.

So I'm against the idea of putting toxic things into my body - like tobacco, drugs, medicine - but I have put so much toxic food into my body. My body has been telling me for most of my life that it doesn't like dairy, and while I've removed some dairy from my diet I still include some things. Really, I need to commit to letting it ALL go.

But my reasons for wanting to change my lifestyle are more than physical. After working in food sales and marketing, I just learned entirely too much about what we eat. Every time I have tried to go vegetarian, I've been challenged by people - as if they are personally offended by my decision. But if they knew what they were eating - really knew - I bet some of them would change also. They are offended that I'm eating things that God put on Earth for us to eat (things that they also eat) but yet they think it's perfectly okay to eat a dead carcass?

I feel like God is speaking to me right now, and saying that it's time to make a change. I'm not going to try to convince other people that they should do the same (except for maybe my hubby, because he and I both need a healthier lifestyle). But if this change makes my life better, then I hope someone else will learn from it. Every time I fast, I feel a huge difference in my life - physically, mentally, and spiritually. I have more energy and I'm just generally happy and more at peace with myself. And what's crazy is that during the fast, eating this way is so easy for me. But once the fast is over, I go back to my bad habits. That's why this time we're fasting for almost two months! Two months of creative, healthy recipes should prove that we can change our lives. And I can tell you, we have loved the food we've been eating. In fact, I am MORE satisfied with the food we are eating now than what we were eating before. I can't count the number of times we've regretted eating unhealthy food (and too much of it).

It's just about bedtime. My thoughts are all over the place and what better way to process them than to write about it on my blog? : )