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.