Challenges

If you’re single, changing the way you eat can be easy.

If you’re married with kids, changing the way you eat can be much harder. A supportive spouse is essential.

Let me just say, my husband is awesome. I am blessed to have a job I love, made possible by my house spouse, who handles things on the domestic frontier so that I can focus on the professional one. He cleans, changes diapers, and even shops and cooks.

His standard menu selection isn’t fancy, but he works hard to make meals that are tasty, nutritious, and economical.



A few months ago, tired of endless requests from our children for cheese roll-ups and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches instead of whatever he had made for dinner, we enacted a new law at our dinner table: we all eat the same thing. “You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.” Eat what’s on the plate, or you don’t eat.

So there’s the dilemma. The rest of my family isn’t really that interested (at least not yet) in overhauling their diets. My husband wants to accommodate me, but he also wants to preserve our table law.

It’s sometimes stressful for him to plan meals already. I’m adding an extra layer of complication.

But like I said, my husband is awesome—you should all be so lucky! He’s been making an effort to make more modular meals, meals where it’s easy to leave out the undesirable elements without changing the whole recipe. Example: he and the kids might eat chicken, broccoli, cheese and rice. I’ll eat the broccoli and rice with some pinto beans and maybe another veggie.

Here’s a picture of our lunch from a few days ago: whole wheat tortilla pizzas, his with veggies, turkey pepperoni and mozzarella, mine with broccoli, asparagus, onion, and spinach (hey, it’s what was handy). He was skeptical as to how mine would taste, but after I sprinkled on some garlic and red pepper, plus a dash of sea salt and olive oil, it was delicious!

Three cheers for my darling love!

Day 6? Feeling really good. More clear headed and energized than I have felt in a long time. I feel an overall sense of wellness I had been lacking.

What I ate today: Nothing fantastic to include here because, true confession time…I’m having trouble keeping it strictly vegan. For the record, being a vegetarian was WAY easier. I keep finding hidden ingredients in items that I would assume to be animal-product free. For example, barbeque potato chips. That should be vegan, right?

While waiting in line at Subway for my oh-so-virtuous Veggie Delite on Italian bread (did my homework…Italian is the one vegan friendly bread option there), I grabbed a bag of chips to munch. Didn’t read the nutrition facts until they were mostly gone. Why did they put buttermilk in barbeque potato chips?

Tonight for dinner I opened up a can of my favorite Ranch Style Beans. Read the label while they were heating up. Sadness. They contain beef fat. (Doesn’t that sound appetizing?)

I ate them anyway. (Hangs head in shame.)

This confession could continue, but I’ll stop here. It’s enough for me that I am moving in the right direction, consuming far more plant-based nutrition than I was previously and taking baby steps toward a totally animal-free diet.

One final warning on this label reading business—note, not all Boca burgers are vegan. Some are, some aren’t.

The tastier ones aren’t.