Category Archives: Learning to Like Veggies

Eat to Live update

Written on September 21, 2008 by hollie in Learning to Like Veggies, Sugar Addiction

Greg is out taking his walk. He goes for a two mile walk every morning now. He’s stuck to the diet flawlessly, and it shows. He’s lost weight that I can see (although he says it’s only about 4 pounds), and his blood pressure has gone down, from 150/100 to 130/80. I am stunned, and so impressed with him, and amazed at his ability to do this.

So how am I doing? Not so great. I’ve tried, but I haven’t stuck to it, and instead of giving up I’ve decided to just take what’s happening and try to learn from it. It’s not as simple as “I don’t like vegetables”, although that’s certainly a big problem. Yesterday he said, “Want to have some of my stir-fry?”, and I said, “Sure,” without really understanding what I was agreeing to. A few minutes later he handed me a bowl containing mushrooms, bamboo, celery, and broccoli.

“Yeah, uh, no.”

“You aren’t even going to try it?”

“No.”

“Just take a bite!”

I take another look into his bowl. “Yeah….still no.”

This is what vegans eat. And I’m not eating it. He can eat it. He says it’s not his favorite thing in the world, but he doesn’t mind eating it. Whereas for me to eat that, it feels like I’d need to be on Fear Factor with Joe Rogan cheering me on, a basket of hundred dollar bills sitting nearby to even consider putting a spoonful of that celery and broccoli concoction into my mouth.

So if I were to go vegan, what would I eat? The answer is apparently bread, and bread products. This is what I’m learning about myself. I’m a grains addict. I hear the voice of Hank Hill from King of the Hill; “I sell propane, and propane accessories.”

I eat bread, and bread accessories.

I’ve eaten plates of vegetables before, enough to fill me up, and yet fifteen minutes later I’m rummaging around for toast, because I don’t feel full, or, just…..right, until I’ve had some bread too. I put croutons in my salad and my soup. I eat crackers on road trips, I eat muffins for treats, I bake cookies when I’ve had a hard week, I make my own whole wheat bread in the Vita-Mix, and I bake my own white sandwich bread by hand. I don’t touch the crap in grocery stores; that white rubbery gunk isn’t bread, it’s padding for packages.

The Eat to Live Plan says to have a serving of grains a day. A serving.

So basically, I spent the first three days of this week starving, until the end of the day, when I’d collapse into a ravenous, exhausted heap, and eat whatever I could find. Then I got a head cold, and now I’ve abandoned the plan for a couple of days why I drink juice (you’re not supposed to have juice on the plan) and toast made out of my homemade oatmeal bread (it’s fortifying, I tell ya).

I need to find out why I’m such a bread addict. Maybe I can try going a day without it, just to see what would happen, just to see if my head would explode from the shock. Maybe if I can do that, I can start to see my way toward eating more veggies.

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Hee hee

Written on September 4, 2008 by hollie in Hahaha, Kids, Learning to Like Veggies

At dinner tonight, the kids didn’t want to eat their green beans. Admittedly they weren’t the best beans, they were from one of those microwave steam packs that seem to work great with corn but not so great with other vegetables. Still, it was either that or having nothing with our Orange Chicken (Trader Joes!) and rice, and I couldn’t abide the idea of Meat and Starch for dinner. Let’s have some real nutrition.

Miles tried his, and rejected them. Beth tore a bean in half and munched, eyes upward, thinking carefully. After a few moments I said, “What do you think?”

“It doesn’t taste good,” she replied.

Greg looked at her seriously, and said, “Does it taste like dirt, or grass?”

Beth was perplexed at the question, and I imagine my laughter as well.

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“Are you eating meat?”

Written on August 28, 2008 by hollie in Learning to Like Veggies

I asked friends and family to look over the blog and give me feedback, and the most common question was, “So are you eating meat, or what?”

At the moment, yes, I’m eating meat. Eventually I’d like to reach a place where I don’t, but making that big of a change right now doesn’t feel realistic for me, because I don’t know how to cook that well, and the few times I’ve tried to go totally vegan I’ve ended up starving. Remember the whole, “doesn’t like vegetables” thing? Yeah, well, being a vegan is difficult when the idea of something as un-sinister as eating a raw carrot makes your skin crawl.

But life is all about change, and this blog is about change, and I’m hoping that over time, through a lot of cooking lessons and taste-bud therapy, eventually I can make the slow but permanent switch to a diet that’s mostly vegan. But if I don’t? If something changes? That’s okay too. The goal here is figuring out how to stop eating junk, and how to get my body nourished, really nourished, on a regular basis. And of course, to see if it’s possible for a grown, vegetable-hating woman to twist her taste buds around enough so that she can look a vegetable stir-fry in the eye and not back down.

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And so it begins…

Written on August 28, 2008 by hollie in Learning to Like Veggies

I’ve wanted to start a food blog for a long time, but I was never sure quite how to begin. Until tonight, when I was sitting at the computer and I suddenly remembered the conversation I used to have as a kid, over and over, with well-meaning relatives and waitresses and cafeteria lunch ladies:

“Why aren’t you eating any vegetables?”

“Because I don’t like them. All vegetables taste like either grass or dirt or corn. Lettuce tastes like grass, cauliflower tastes like dirt, etc. They’re all gross.”

“What tastes like corn, besides corn?”

“Just corn. It’s its own category.”

“Well, you can’t not eat vegetables. Man cannot live on bread alone.”

“Just watch me.”

That childhood disdain of vegetables, despite my Mom and extended family trying valiantly to make vegetables I’d like and encouraging me to try new dishes, defined my eating habits for years.

In my twenties I ignored The Vegetable Issue, somehow convincing myself that a diet of carbs, cheese, and the occasional slab of meat was a well rounded nutritional profile for an adult. In my thirties, it became clear that eating like this wasn’t going to carry me into old age, in fact it would likely carry me into an early grave. It was already carrying me into pants that were a few sizes bigger than I preferred, and while my health markers (blood pressure, blood sugar, etc.) were all good, I knew that as my body aged, it would become a lot less forgiving

So here I am. Aged thirty-four years, with a husband (who, incidentally, has high blood pressure), and two kids (one of whom eats like me as a child, the other who mysteriously loves healthy food), and I want to be around for a long time, spending my elder years making valuable smart-assed remarks at the people I love.

To do that I have to stop eating crap. The issue of eating dairy has been taken care of for me: in my twenties it became clear that I was mildly lactose intolerant. In my thirties, that intolerance has gotten a lot worse, and I’m forced to avoid dairy completely now. But I still love sugar, oh my love, sweet, sweet nectar of life (and I eat way, way too much of it). And while I like a lot more fruits, I still don’t know what to do with most vegetables that pass through my kitchen. I have a ridiculously huge collection of vegan (non-dairy! featuring vegetables!) cookbooks that sits on a big shelf in my kitchen. I’ve read them all, but out the several hundred recipes in those pages, I’ve tried maybe nine or ten.

This just won’t do. Thing are going to change. From now on, I’m going to be seek it out: The Vegetable, the Final Frontier. I’m going try new recipes every week, I’m going to taste everything I make, at least once. I’m going to seek out new vegetables, and new dishes. I’m going to boldly eat what I’ve never eaten before.

And I’m going to write it all down.

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