Ellie Mae

Ellie Mae
Beautiful Ellie Mae

Freddie, the French Bulldog

Freddie, the French Bulldog
Lazing on a sunny afternoon

The artist

The artist
Ollie Mac

Ollie and Annie

Ollie and Annie
Azorean grandmother

Acrylics and watercolors

Acrylics and watercolors
Cannabis and sunflowers

Papa and Ollie Mac

Papa and Ollie Mac
Priorities, Baby

Acrylics and watercolors

Acrylics and watercolors
Hollyhocks

Mahlon Masling Blue

Mahlon Masling Blue
My friend and brother.

Mark's E-mail address

bellspringsmark@gmail.com

Friday, June 6, 2014

Happyday Farms- Lost: One Spare Tire


This is the fourteenth in a series of posts on Happyday Farms, the CSA (Community Sponsored Agriculture) located up here on Bell Springs Road, run by Casey, Amber, Lito and Courtney.

Happyday Farms-
Lost: One Spare Tire


Eating what is produced on Happyday Farms is not only a healthy alternative to the average ‘Merican diet, it is a serious avenue to natural weight loss, if you happen to be a person who currently feels as though you are lugging around a spare tire on your mid-section.

I am not a person who diets.  The idea of trying to lose weight, or inches, by limiting my intake of conventional amounts of food is unthinkable.  From what I have observed, for most people, the issue of weight is either huge or irrelevant.  There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground.

I never had to be worried about weight gain until I had been teaching for several years.  Even though I was generally up for eighteen hours or so a day, and always on the go, the sedentary lifestyle of a teacher still eventually caught up to me, and I had to start being careful of what I ate.

That is, until stress knocked me for a loop, and I dropped from about 190 pounds down to 155 pounds, the same amount of weight I was carrying the day I strolled into the Armed Forces Examination/Entry Station, or AFEES, Los Angeles, in 1972.

Of course, I didn’t know it was stress; I just knew that I could not digest meat or dairy products and that I was living on salad and veggies, and people thought I was dying.  I never did get back to normal until after I left the teaching field, but then “normal” didn’t stop until I bottomed out (or more appropriately, maxed out) at 212 pounds, with a paunch hanging out over my belt that made me look as though I were carrying around a thirty pound watermelon under my shirt.

A little over a year ago, in May, Casey and the crew at Happyday Farms were functioning at such an elevated level, that it was deemed appropriate that Annie and I would not only start getting a weekly share from the farm, but that when it came right down to it, the garden was virtually ours for the picking.

I say “ours” loosely, because it is Annie who does the grocery “shopping.”  However, in the past thirteen months, I have become so enamored with the ability to subsist off of vast, unlimited quantities, of fresh, organic produce, that it has gradually become a mainstay.

Now here comes the kicker.  Last summer at some unspecific point in time, I saw a post on facebook by a long-time friend, who made a very simple statement to the effect that since she had stopped eating bread, about eight months earlier, she had lost twenty pounds.

Bread makes you gain weight?  Duh.  What would I eat instead, asked a guy who used to be able to live off of sour dough bread-easily. Not only did I stop eating bread, but I cut out flour tortillas, a staple almost as prevalent in my diet as bread.

And as to what I would eat, it’s no different, except that if I want a sandwich at lunch, instead of wrapping lunchmeat, or cheese, or tuna fish, or egg salad in bread, I wrap it in lettuce, or kale leaves, or some other form of greenery, which allows me to enjoy the same things I always have (except grains) with no restrictions on how much I can eat at any given meal.

All this came about last fall, about eight months ago, and having weighed myself this morning, I am happy to announce that I have lost twenty pounds.  I have not lost my watermelon completely, but it now looks more like a cantaloupe. 

Amazing.  At least to me.  I miss my poached eggs on sour dough toast in the morning, but not as much as I miss my spare tire.  

Seriously,  it was as easy as that. 

1 comment:

  1. I know-that was a hard one for me too! Sour dough bread!

    ReplyDelete