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March 02, 2004
i eat fruit now.
i've had some interesting things happen as a result of giving up vegetarianism and sugar, and spending the better part of the last year or so on a low-carb diet.
the first is that i really like fruit now. i just never did before. i'd eat it sometimes, but never understood why other people liked it so much. i mainly liked it in combination with sugar-- apple or cherry pie; strawberry shortcake; apple dumplings. this was a preference that i held basically from birth-- i was infamous in my family for not eating fruit. my mom spent a lot of energy trying to get me to eat some fruit, any fruit, on a regular basis. i never did unless forced.
i'm not sure why i like it now. i think part of it is because of the elimination of sugar. i eat plenty of artificially sweetened stuff, but i think the sweetness of fruit, in combination with its wholesomeness, has an appeal that artificial sweeteners don't compete with the way sugar did.
i also never drink fruit juice now-- for me, that would be almost as bad as drinking a coke. so i probably crave the nutrients.
the second is the phases i've gone through with meat-eating. around this time last year, i could not get enough red meat. i craved it, all the time. the cravings lasted for months, and then went away. i know the vegetarians out there may not like to hear this, but i think my body needed something that it had not been getting for a very long time. it wasn't iron; the planned parenthood technicians always told me that my iron levels were very good back when i was a veg. my guess would be some amino acid. i'll grant that i wasn't the healthiest eater as a vegetarian; i ate a lot of junk and processed food; had many meals where i'd substitute starch and fat for protien; and of course consumed tons of sugar and never enough vegetables. i still believe that a vegetarian diet can give the body everything it needs, but there's a lot less room for error-- you've really got to fill up on high quality foods and skip the junk.
over the last year or so, i've definitely come to see a lot of food that i once considered staples as filler and junk. pasta, rice, potatoes, bread. really good bread and really good french fries certainly have their place in the world of Foods Worth Eating, but mostly that stuff is so unnecessary. there's just no reason to eat it.
finally, sometime in the last few months i lost my ability to taste the chemical aftertaste in most artificially sweetened foods. this is disturbing, but also convenient. i can tell a difference between natural sugar and artificial stuff, but that aftertastey-ness is gone for me.
it's been interesting to find that this is really a progression, not a state that i will reach and stay at. that's helpful to me, too, if i get really caught up in eating something that i think is bad for me-- like oh, say, bacon? :) now i have every reason to believe that it's a phase and i'll pass through it and on to a healthier habit later.
Posted by lisa at March 02, 2004 04:07 PM | TrackBack
Comments
there's no reason to eat potatoes?!??!
i think i just had a heart attack to hear you say that.
Posted by: christa on March 2, 2004 04:49 PM
grow or die, baby. grow. or. die!!
Posted by: lisa on March 2, 2004 05:24 PM
My high school biology teacher thought food cravings really were your body attempting to get something it needed. If that's the case, then maybe you were missing B12. People have gone back and forth over whether vegetarians get any B12; the latest I've read is that they don't. But you don't need much B12, so I think you can go for a while without having a problem. I thought there was a gut bacterium that makes it out of something else in your gut, but I guess that something else comes out of meat.
By the way, gut problems can also cause a B12 deficiency.
Harold McGee, in On Food and Cooking, claims eating eggs and cheese will get you the B12 you need if you're vegetarian.
And B12 has cobalt in it, which I think is really cool. :)
Posted by: Joseph H Vilas on March 2, 2004 06:32 PM
ok, so a) your comment won't post right away because i have to approve it first and b) you might get a server error but your comment probably posted anyway and c) previewing doesn't work so i've removed the preview button.