Just in Time

For more than a year, friends have been asking me what I am going to do once I settle into our new home in Grass Valley. I’m nearly 69, retired, and still full of energy and ideas! However, my answer was always a bit vague: something about food … or dogs … or chickens. During the year of living in a construction zone in Berkeley and then the waiting months in Fish Camp, I was just being patient. I didn’t feel empty, just expectant. I was a little bored, but I could always entertain myself by thinking about, buying, and preparing meals. That’s the way it’s always been with me. However, once settled in, it was time to act!

When we’d been here for 2 weeks, I got an interesting email from an acquaintance. The subject was: “I've bent your ear about my nutrition reading, so now I'm giving you the references in writing.” This was a little surprising because she hadn’t bent my ear at all. In fact, I hadn’t heard from her in several years, although she was the person who started my daily routine of ground flax seeds!  I had heard about her though, and I think a mutual friend must have mentioned that I would be interested in her reading list. Boy, was I!

It came just in time. We were well on our way to being unpacked and I was definitely ready for the next interesting thing – I’d been calling for adventures for months! I had already scoped out the local coop where I could buy organic food and I had even ordered a quarter of pasture-raised beef for that empty freezer in the garage. Since I hadn’t investigated fostering dogs or raising chickens, it did look like my interest was leaning toward healthy food.

The first book on the list was Deep Nutrition by Catherine Shanahan, MD. What an eye-opener! She writes about how we can influence our genes with nutrition! Even though I’ve been interested in nutrition and have a degree in biochemistry, I had never heard of such a thing. For years, I’ve been working under the assumption that if my parents had Type 2 Diabetes (thanks Mom and Grandma) and coronary artery disease (thanks Dad), I would just have to be careful that I didn’t go down the same paths they did. Still, it was very likely I would, just later than they did. I didn’t think I could actually change the possibilities. Here came an MD who espoused the same things I have been saying for years.

Over the past few months, I think Jim and I were eating our way to calmness. There were some really stressful days, weeks, months. But finally we had arrived at our new digs. The house is better than I imagined I’d ever have. We are more-or-less debt free! The weather is glorious (but much too dry for the farmers and ranchers). And we both were starting to tip the scales at our all-time highs. All that nibbling things that weren’t good for us – “just this once” happened a thousand times!

What to do? Think of something different. What we needed was a healthier, more nutritious, more gene-changing diet! And along comes Deep Nutrition! I know you’ve heard this before: we each have lost around 10 pounds in three weeks.

There will be more about this on my blog. Bon appétit!