Change

Change is good.

For the past year and a bit it has been apparent that my life is stuck.  Admittedly, I’m stuck in a pretty good spot.  I’m in my mid-30s with a rock star husband (to me), and two great kids who are constantly amusing and amazing me. Great friends, a good job, a house, a car, blah blah blah.  And that’s where the problem comes in.  There’s a little too much blah blah blah. Same same same.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could uproot the family and move somewhere exotic and interesting like Brazil or Spain?  Lord knows I’ve looked into it, usually when the freezing temperatures of January and February kick in.

Sadly it doesn’t look like I’ll be moving to Brazil any time soon. So how do I go about peeling myself away from this stuck feeling?  Since I can’t afford to move, renovate my house or even redecorate for that matter, I’ve been looking to inward change.  And since I’ve gained weight recently… again, changing my eating habits… again, was a sure way to go. 

But as you may have noticed, I’ve been here before.  Weight Watchers has been great for my past forays into weight loss.  I’ve come away 70 pounds lighter on a few different occasions (How does it keep coming back???  Rhetorical question.  Sadly I know the answer).  However, the thought of counting calories (points) and journaling what I eat every day makes me want to shove a pen in my eye.  So I thought I’d try the South Beach diet, which is why I was in the bookstore when I happened upon the book Skinny Bitch by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin.

The cover of this book makes it look like it could be any other piece of chicklit on the shelves these days. BUT it’s in the diet and health section.  It looked fresh and fun, and since I obviously have no problem judging a book by its cover, I picked it up. 

Reading this book is not for you if you have low self-esteem and have something against being called every nasty name in the book.  Their writing style was a bit objectionable, too aggressive and induced a great deal of eye rolling, but it was definitely food for thought.  By the time I got to the sentence “you’re a vegan now” I felt a physical jolt go through my body. 

I always thought that vegans were totally hard-core, hemp-wearing, protesting, anti-establishment types with chips firmly attached to their shoulders. But this book was merely pushing the diet part, not the lifestyle. The eating regime described in the book didn’t seem so difficult and for the most part made sense. And the whole cruelty-free diet thing definitely resonates with me.

I gave up eating beef about 15 years ago while I was in university.  I never liked the taste or the texture of it and so it basically just meant giving up cheeseburgers, which was actually kind of hard.  But I did it and I haven’t looked back since.  Basically I mostly eat chicken, and guess what, I’m getting really bored with it. The hard part for me is going to be giving up dairy.  The book also recommends giving up sugar, caffeine and alcohol, but that’s more of a Skinny Bitch thing rather than a vegan thing.

So here I go!