Food Journey - Where Did You Start?

Remember the first time in your late thirties, or maybe your early forties, when you looked in the mirror and thought, "Dear God, is that really me?"

You may have noticed another wrinkle.

Or a new patch of gray hair.

Or, like me, you shaved your beard only to realize that —for some time—the same beard had obscured the skin beneath your chin, which had begun to droop like a rooster's wattle.

Then, upon closer inspection, you found more evidence of your impending demise.

Damn, is that another wrinkle?

Where'd that crease around my mouth come from?

Are those white hairs in my eyebrows????

Then comes the startling realization.

"Holy Shit. I'm old!"

When did this happen?

HOW did this happen?

I was in high school YESTERDAY; how did I get here?

On Tuesday, after I posted a photo of my first meal, someone DM'd to say, "I would love to know how you started your food journey. I do not know where to start."

Truth is - I don't know, exactly.

It has been like getting old. I ate this way and that way, then one day, I found myself eating the way I eat now.

Like getting old, it just sort of happened.

For most of my life, I've paid little attention to the nature of my food.

Growing up, I ate what my parents fed me. Being a child of the 80's, it was primarily low-fat fare, with low-fat being a code word for high sugar.

In my teens and early twenties, I knew I would live forever, and nutrition didn't matter, so I ate whatever pleased me. I mostly pleased McDonald's, Wendy's, and Burger King.

In my twenties and early thirties, I was an Obnoxious Vegan - you can read about that here (https://www.rwprice.com/.../the-30-second-fart-part-ii...).

By my late thirties to mid-forties, many regarded me as a health nut.

Across that span, there is a singular commonality.

I ate massive amounts of ultra-processed food, whether Entenmann's Low-Fat Chocolate Brownies in the 80s, McDonald's in the 90s, Garden Burgers in the 00s, or Granola & Soy Milk in the 10s.

Along the way, particularly in the vegan and health-nut years, I heard rumblings and murmurs of processed food being less-than-ideal for humans.

But the packages looked healthy, so I forged ahead on the same path.

The epiphany came around 2021 when I began eating fruit after having avoided it for nearly a decade.

Not because I didn't like it.

But because I was terrified of the sugar in it.

I believed it was making me fat.

Around that time, Instagram began to show me content from diet and health influencers telling me that fruit wasn't bad. The sugar was different, they said, and because the fruit contained fiber, it wouldn't make me fat.

So I experimented.

For six months, I ate enormous amounts of fruit. A typical day included two or three bananas, a couple of mangos, some apples, several oranges, some pineapples, and whatever dried fruit (dates, figs, etc.) I cared to snack on in between.

2-3 times the amount that could be considered normal.

I expected my waistline to expand.

It did not.

That's when I fell into the rabbit hole. If I had to answer briefly how I got started, that would be it. I started by eating a lot of fruit.

But that doesn't tell the whole story.

Around this time, my wife was coming to terms with a sugar addiction that had taken hold. That's a whole other story, but suffice it to say she was 40 lbs and five sizes overweight and getting up in the middle of the night to drink soda.

In other words, she was miserable.

For both of us, enough was enough.

To hear our kids tell the story, we turned the entire house upside down by "buying all this healthy food."

We started by eliminating anything that had added sugar, which took about a year, at which point we thought we were good to go.

But we still had cereals, seed oils, processed nut milks, boxed dinners, and packaged "health foods" like protein bars.

So we cut those out.

As we moved towards more whole, natural foods that are less processed, we both began to look and feel better.

A defining moment in this journey was my diagnosis of Lymphocytic Colitis last summer, a condition for which the prescribed treatment was a lifetime of pills.

I balked.

I researched.

That research led me to raw milk. Within five days of my first sip, my symptoms were 80% improved.

Two weeks later, my symptoms were gone.

I'm now five months into drinking raw milk every day, and I remain symptom-free. It's important to note I did not stop drinking regular milk - in other words, the colitis was not an allergy to pasteurized milk.

Holy shit!

Is food medicine?

You're damn right it is.

More importantly, processed food is poison.

And that's a hard pill to swallow because, for most folks my age, we'd eaten it our entire lives and bought into the marketing that taught us it was healthy.

It's not, and some folks get mighty defensive and take it as a personal attack when I say, for example, that Cheerios are junk food.

I understand.

I had 80/20 ground beef for supper last night. In my obnoxious vegan days, there wasn't a soul on the planet who could have convinced me that beef wasn't killing humans and the earth.

That viewpoint was the result of my buying into the vegan marketing machine.

Just like my mother's viewpoint on low-fat came from General Mill's marketing machine.

But here, a couple of years into eating primarily whole, natural foods (and three months into near exclusivity), I can tell you from personal experience that I feel better.

I sleep better.

I perform better.

My whole life is better when I eat natural, whole foods.

I've learned that it doesn't take much longer than pre-made, processed crap to prepare, and it can be cheaper than processed food, too.

If you want to give it a try, my advice is twofold:

1 - Stop eating processed sugar. Like, right now. Throw away what you've got, and do not buy anything else with added sugar on the nutrition label.

2—Cook your own food as much as possible and eat only fresh and unpackaged food, such as unprocessed meat, fruit, vegetables, nuts, and dairy. Stick to the grocery store's perimeter and be judicious when you're in the inner aisles.

It's hard at first!

Especially the sugar. Lord knows, there were days when Julia was getting off the sugar when I questioned whether I could make it through the worst of the for better or worse.

Give it time.

Stick with it for a month, and you'll be over the worst part of the withdrawal.

Two or three months later, you'll notice you feel a lot better.

By the time you reach a year, if it's the same for you as it was for me, you'll wonder how on earth you used to eat the way you did.