The Madly Healthy Story

Julia Child advised one to never apologize, but I must. It feels very self-centered to write about how I came to be sitting here. But I suppose if I'm going to offer myself as any sort of advice-giver, you deserve to know from whence I came.

My interest in health and nutrition started when I was in high school, in Flushing, NY in the late 70's. I read Adelle Davis and Carlton Fredericks ("Who?," you may ask. They were big names back in the day.) I still have a journal with notes I carefully took from my readings (daily nutrients and where to get them included one quart of dairy, obtained from whole milk products, 2T dessicated liver concentrates). Oddly enough, as I just opened my notebook from back then, on the first page is the recommended daily allowance for women. I see the ideal weight on the chart I copied is 128 pounds. Odd because that's my exact weight now (and, believe me, it hasn't always been that). I still have my first vegetarian cookbook, "Cookbook for the New Age: Earth Water Fire Air" by Barbara Friedlander. I haven't cooked out of it in decades - I'm too afraid it will fall apart if I do. Ditto for Nikki and David Goldbeck's "The Supermarket Handbook." It lives on a high shelf where no one is likely to find it and cause its aged pages to break from the binding. I love few things, but I love these books because they remind me of who I was, who I lost, and now that I've found myself again, who I am.

Why the interest in healthy food when I was at an age when most kids are drinking soda (yes, I did, too) and eating cookies by the box? I have no idea. Perhaps it was yet another way to rebel against my mother. Her idea of a great cold remedy was hot jello. This infuriated me when I got to the age (13) where her mere breath infuriated me (poor Mom, I was such a surly teenager). I remember my righteous indignation when I learned that sugar was not only not a health remedy but was detrimental. Mom's calm response was, "What? You liked it! It made you feel better." I can admit now that Mom was right, I did like it and it did make me feel better (and the reason for this will probably come out in later posts).

Fast forward from high school about fifteen years. After I married and started a family, I found myself living with four food allergic people - my husband and three kids. Four people + four different sets of allergies = one wife and mother who shopped for and cooked a dizzying array of dishes each day. No wonder there are parts of my past that are a bit fuzzy.

Time kept marching on, I kept shopping, cooking, and miraculously and wonderfully the kids became able to eat anything and everything. My husband can now eat most of the foods he previously couldn't (which was a list so long that friends who'd invite us over for dinner would just throw their hands in the air as I went through it and beg me to just tell them what they could cook, not what they couldn't. It was a much shorter list indeed. Through it all, unbelievably perhaps, I still love to cook (although, admittedly, not every day) and as I looked for "what I'd be when I grew up" I realized that through the years, there have always been books and magazines about health, food, and nutrition close at hand. I've watched eggs fall in and out and in of favor. I've read about carbs and fats being good and bad (as have you, no doubt), and even recently read an article extolling the virtues of whitish bread (which just goes to show you can't believe everything you read).

So now I'm studying at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. It's where I've always meant to end up. I never knew where I was going, exactly, but when I found IIN and read about their program, I knew that this was the nutrition program of my dreams. Their philosophy is mine to a "T". But, as I've vowed to myself that my posts would not drag on too long, and this one probably has, more on IIN in the future.