Drooling Over Food And 6 Valuable Life Lessons

Hi! Yes, I’m talking to you! Thanks for reading my blog today and if you visit often, thanks for taking a moment out of your busy life to share a few minutes of my thoughts and photos. I really enjoy your comments whether they are on my blog, in my email, on Facebook or Twitter. Oh! I also appreciate you for sharing my blog with your family and friends. {{{Big hugggsss}}} for you all!

So if you look at the side bar on most of my blog’s pages, you will see food. Not just food, but delicious and lovingly prepared dishes that are photographed in a way to encourage drooling. Obviously, I love to cook. Not only do I enjoy cooking, but I gain great pleasure in the adventure of putting ingredients together and producing a dish that I would be proud to serve to anyone.

For several years, I have shared my food with you in a manner that you could produce the same delicious dish at home by simply following the directions in my tutorials which are easy to follow and understand. It brings me pleasure to teach you, but I also know that I am giving my daughter a priceless gift by teaching her our family recipes. These dishes are filled with tempting food to tantalize the taste buds with each precious morsel.

Have you noticed, however, that for the past couple months there have only been a few food posts? Do you know why this is the case?

In September when I was diagnosed with an allergy to grain, I was in quite a shock that going forward I would have to eliminate an entire food group. It went against everything I had been taught since birth. In order to be healthy, I was taught to consume several servings of whole grain foods each day and yet my doctor was telling me to stop my grain intake. I didn’t know if I felt like a banished leper or if I was living in the Twilight Zone.

Initially after avoiding grains, I lost a bunch of weight that the allergy had loaded onto my body in a very short time period. My immune system, without the grains messing it up, started to work quite a bit better and all the symptoms of the health conditions I’ve had for many years almost dissipated completely. Even with all the positives of my new grain free living, I vacillated between euphoria for my improved health and the depths of depression because of my loss of a food group.

3 Truths Of Eating Grain Free

There are some days when I barely eat anything because:

1. I am too sad that I can’t have Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, corn on the cob, wheat bread, oatmeal or candy.
2. I don’t want to go through the effort of preparing a meal that doesn’t excite my eyes, nose, tastebuds and emotions.
3. I am not that hungry because I just don’t get as hungry as I used to when I ate grains. I have learned that grains make you crave grains and it is very obvious by my lack of hunger pains.

As the months have passed and I’ve purchased numerous “weird” ingredients like grain free flours, read a zillion ingredient labels, researched foods, searched for alternatives, studied scientific properties of foods and product ingredients, and put my new found knowledge to the test, I’m still pretty sad about the grain free living thing.

The non-grain ingredients are a bit more expensive than the grain inclusive foods. However, since I’m not as hungry and eat less, I think the price of my grocery bill is about the same. It might even be less since I NEVER eat out anymore since I’m too afraid that I will accidentally ingest a food that has grain in it. Suffocating because I made a wrong choice and ate a grain product isn’t really something I’m willing to take a chance with right now.

So while the lunch crowd ate slices of beautiful cake this week, I ate a crisp organic apple. When they put bite after bite of grain products in their mouths, I ate my organic vegetables, organic fruit and grass fed meat. When they eat whatever appealed to them, I carefully read the labels to determine if I could safely eat the food. So yeah, it is a bummer and I’m disappointed with my body for turning against me when I have really been quite good to it.

Aaaaaanyway, I have played around a bit and created a bread that is yummy. The bread photos in this post are of the yummy grain free bread that I have baked. I use the term “bread” loosely because it is not a yeasty, fluffy, melt in your mouth bread. It is dense, but serves the purpose of satisfying my emotional need for BREAD. You see, I’m sure that I can’t go much longer without a variation of my Moist, Best Banana Bread Ever, so I had to start learning this new method of grain free cooking.

6 Valuable Life Lessons

This whole grain free experience has taught me several valuable life lessons:

1. I’m extremely obedient even when I don’t like the rules.
2. I have been VERY kind to my body. I’ve never smoked, tried any drugs, drank any alcoholic beverages, had any eating disorders or participated in any event that put my body in harms way. That has to count for something.
3. This life experience is very much an individual experience. We are born alone. We die alone. We also live alone even if we are surrounded by a big family.
4. Life presents one lesson after the next for us to learn. If we don’t learn it the first time, it appears again in another set of circumstances. The sooner we learn it, the sooner we move on to the next lesson.
5. Learning to control the desires of our physical body makes our spirit or the light within us stronger.
6. I REALLY appreciate feeling healthy with a body that functions pretty good in spite of my physical limitations.

Although my heart still aches and I am still in the middle of a war with numerous undesirable PTSD symptoms, I’m not giving up. I still want to leave behind a good “life shoe” that looks something like the Gucci Crystal Embellished Platform Pump. I may not be able to eat grain, but my life is not over yet.

So it won’t be long before I am sharing new grain free, vegan, paleo and gluten free recipe tutorials which is the food that I will be eating. I will also continue to share my other recipes which my family and friends will have the pleasure of consuming. No matter which recipes you choose to try, I’m still going to make sure you drool over the food because that’s really half the fun of eating!

“I totally believe you should feast with your eyes too and I’m not just talking about food,” says The Redhead Riter as she clicks the link to look at the chocolate man for the 34,678th time this year.