Hi. I’m Mel, and I am a happy wife and mom to the cutest baby girl on the planet.
I have never had a healthy relationship with food. Growing up, my mother was anorexic and spent a lot of time in the hospital for treatment. My father? Well, he worked in the fast food industry (still does). By the time I became an adult, my basic idea of food was that body image was more important than nutrition and I felt inclinced to literally forgo function over form–my form. Over the last 12 years, I have bounced up and down between a size 2 and a size 12, depending on my life circumstances at any given time. I have spent far too much time obsessed with counting calories and eating the “non-fat” or “sugar free” version of everything I could find. Ultimately in this process, I’ve ended up eating more processed foods than real foods, simply because I felt they were equally nutritious and joyfully easy. After having my daughter and struggling at family mealtimes and realizing that I still generally felt like garbage most of the time no matter how many calories I ate or burned everyday, I decided it was time for change.
I opened up my pantry one day and for the first time, really looked at what was in there. Boxed meals and cereals, jarred sauces, canned fruits and vegetables, canned meals like ravioli, endless bags of “healthy” baked chips and snacks and a lot of very confusing “wheat” bread products. I paused but still felt overwhelmed. Then I read Michael Pollan’s ”In Defense of Food” and I felt as though my world and relationship to food and the food industry was completely shaken to the core. I started googling things like “enriched wheat flour,” “margarine,” organic,” and “grass fed,” so that instead of just assuming I knew what those things were or meant, I actually knew. And what I discovered was that all these years, what I’ve been filling my body with is really “fake” food. Imitations of the real deal made with flavored powders and painful amounts of sugar, salt and an endless sea of chemical preservatives and byproducts designed to give these products an incredibly long shelf life. Chemical as made in a lab by chemists… not from or of the earth…
After some thoughtful discussion with my husband, we realized it was time to change our ways. To eat for the reason God intended: to nourish and fuel our bodies healthfully. In the words of Michael Pollan himself, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
This is the story of our journey.
