Something that has been swirling around in my thoughts a lot since switching to the mostly paleo diet and especially in the past few weeks since attempting my Whole30 is how radically my eating habits have changed and how I really felt about that. Obviously anyone starting to eat this way is going to have some shocks to the system given the state of our collective “grains are good and the base of a balanced meal” mentality. And I will be the first to admit that I loved pasta, and ate it often, I’m Italian after all so that affinity has gotta be in my blood, right? However that wasn’t the biggest thing for me. What I’ve struggled with the most is an identity issue and the Whole9 blog recently posted a very timely article about some of the thoughts and feelings I’ve had to sort out as I embarked on this food journey.
I’m 27 now but for majority of my life I identified myself as vegetarian and still have some trouble letting go of that identity. My parents initially raised me and my siblings as vegetarians. By the time I hit my teens my mom had introduced chicken and we also occasionally ate seafood because unlike me who would eat just about anything you put in front of me as a child (except mushrooms…blech) my younger brother and sister were very picky eaters and didn’t really like the whole eating vegetables thing. Even then though we probably only ate chicken or seafood once, maybe twice a week so I still semi-identified as vegetarian because I didn’t eat red meat (or pork) at all. Frankly though I wasn’t a big fan of it either, eating meat off a bone totally skeeved me out and I wasn’t wild about the taste either but I also didn’t really like to cook so I made do with eating whatever my mom made for dinner that night.
When I was headed off to college I told my mom that I planned to go back to eating vegetarian again and that’s what I did. Maybe it’s just where I grew up and went to college but by the end of high school and into college becoming vegetarian was very much so the thing to do. For a lot of my college friends though that meant lots of pasta, pizza and beer (seriously I will never understand the vegetarians who don’t eat vegetables…). Thankfully, I had a better idea of what it meant to eat a more balanced vegetarian diet from eating my mom’s cooking growing up and my college had excellent vegetarian options available at all times. That being said I know that I eat way better nowadays than I ever did back then and I also know I look and feel better as well.
Post-college I was dating and living with a guy who was born and raised in the heart of barbeque culture in the South and not eating meat kind of became a lost cause. Partially I got tired of limiting myself when I really had no moral or nutritional reasoning behind it. I never thought that the vegetarian diet was healthier than any other diet I just hadn’t grown up with the taste for meat and therefore never felt a need to seek it out. However at this point in my life I still wasn’t much of a cook and really didn’t enjoy doing it whereas the guy I was living with did enjoy cooking and was pretty good at it. So began the introduction of a variety of meats to my palate that I had never really tried before. At this point I was about 22 and really couldn’t call myself a vegetarian any longer because I was eating meat fairly regularly but it was mostly a matter of convenience. If I went out to eat I still never ordered meat entrees.
Beginning the paleo diet last summer was the first time in my life that I really consciously began to make choices to eat meat for myself and it hasn’t been the easiest. As the Whole9 article discusses I generally choose boneless cuts of meat because they gross me out less and I usually choose to mix my meat into something else rather than just have a slab of steak sitting on my plate. Which brings me to the fact that I still don’t really eat red meat. I don’t cook steaks or pork chops or ground beef or any of those other exotic meats that I’m sure are very nutrient dense and wonderful for me but still create an ick factor somewhere deep inside of me. I never understood the vegetarians in college who would freak out about how sick they were going to get because their food was cooked in a pan that had also cooked meat and they had been vegetarian for 6 whole months. I never got physically sick from introducing meat to my system after being vegetarian for years at a time. However, the mental hurdle is much harder to get past. The smell of beef cooking still kinda turns my stomach, I know it won’t kill me to eat it or actually make me sick but nevertheless the smell creates a certain queasiness for me that I can’t deny.
At this point I’ve accepted that after 5 solid years of eating a variety of meats I really can’t call myself a vegetarian anymore and especially recently I’ve really embraced the caveman/paleo diet nametag and I’m good with that. It helps that I genuinely feel better. Even that guy I was living with post-college remarked after I had first started eating meat for a while that I looked better, healthier, in general than when he had first met me as a vegetarian. I couldn’t really see the difference then but at this point I definitely agree and that helps a lot with my identity issues. I know I’m doing the right things for my body and that makes it easier for me to change my shopping and eating habits even if it is still very much a process in flux.
In other news the doctor cleared me to go back to work today! They’re going to kick me out when I get there though due to bureaucratic government red-tape though so more on that later!
