Our lives are ever changing, that is normal but it seems that we have been over the top with changes this year. It is a good thing I have no signs of dementia or I would never know where anything is.
Our healthy eating that we have been doing requires a lot of thinking each day. I have been thinking of how we are going to tie together our new old vintage way of living with the new healthy way we are eating.
As some of you know we went on a drastic change of the way we eat so we can find if we can cure an non curable disease called psoriasis. Charles has had problems with this for many years now and it had gotten better then worse again.
Also we have been downsizing and organizing for awhile. Recently I decided to part with a china hutch. I don't know if you remember we found a very old cabinet we reworked and named it Walton. Our daughter-in-law was looking for a china cabinet recently to hold her Pyrex so we asked her if she wanted our other cabinet and she did so I cleaned it out and went through our oversupply of dishes and glassware to take to donations.
When you get to my age there seems to be an over abundance of dishes and kitchen gadgets. We have accumulated dishes over the years and then there was my mothers and fathers dishes after their passing.
I decided that it was time to part with things as I am trying to make life simple.
We donated many of our extra household and kitchen items last week and I kept what would fit in Walton and a cupboard in the kitchen.
I kept enough to still change things up and I finally let go of the fragile china. We don't need it anymore so I wanted someone else to enjoy it. It has been an emotional journey for me because of the memories of family gatherings which often have involved meals and familiar dinnerware. But this is a good thing to declutter our home.
We are eating for our health now and I wish we had done this all along. Pictured above is a very large salad and a bowl of Great Northern Beans with fresh cilantro over the top. The salad is mixed lettuce with sauteed mushrooms and onions, a small amount of dressing which is olive oil and vinegar.
We grow what we can and that helps with food costs and then we buy organic when we can find it and afford it.
There is a list of what they call the dirty dozen foods and the least contaminated foods. Onions is not on the dirty dozen but we wanted to try this organic purple onion. If you look on the internet for the dirty dozen foods just remember these foods have the most toxic pesticides in them. Celery is certainly one that we buy organic as it is on the dirty dozen list.
This is another meal of a large salad, fresh asparagus sauteed with garlic and baked salmon.
We are eating very little meat and only boiled chicken and salmon and only eating this a few times a week. We are mostly eating vegetables and fruits. The idea here is fill our body with good nutritious food.
There is more prep work when eating healthy. Washing, peeling, chopping, shredding and such but that is what they did in the past. They did not have shortcuts back then and still today if we eat non processed.
In the past the food was from scratch or something that they dried, salted or canned depending on what era they lived. Today we have food available that has already been peeled or chopped and wrapped up in styrofoam and plastic. Much of our food is processed. People say that it has made life easier but it has made us a bit lazy and our food more toxic.
But where does juicing for health fit in with our old way of living and our electric juicer and blender? Above is a healthy juice drink made with beet root and celery and other vegetables.
It makes me feel a bit off because I feel it is a modern thing to do but it is necessary and then.....
The above juice was today's juice made with carrots, celery (equal parts) and ginger. I was out of beets so no beets in there today.
and then....when I sat down to drink the juice I thought about when I was a child my mother would always serve juice and insisted that we drank our juice.
She had a juice press and I had forgotten all about this. It was heavy metal with a long press handle. So I did some research and discovered and reminded myself of many things. One was how one of our family members grew sugar cane and pressed and boiled the juice to make cane syrup.
I also remember a hand crank juice press and a wooden tub. You turned the top and it would screw down a weighted flat piece that would squeeze the juice. So making juice was done quite often during the proper season to harvest fruits. It was also done on a larger scale and canned and also turned into jams and jelly.
When you look at the meals we are eating we are simply eating vegetables, beans and fruits just like they did in the past. This meal today was Garbanzo beans, turnip roots, mustard greens, chopped mushrooms and onions that have been sauteed. We had chicken yesterday so no meat today.
We have lost more weight since I last posted and I have now gone down a size in clothing and we are going this weekend to purchase some smaller pants for Charles. The weight loss is the side effect of eating healthy since we were both overweight. Some of the food we "were" eating was causing inflammation in our body.
We picked our first Satsumas for this fall season and the lemons will be ready very soon.
We moved a small table from our camper, the Shabby Cabby, to the end of the kitchen cabinet until we finish working on the floor of the Shabby Cabby.
These are lotions I made for Charles and even used an old stick tube I had so he could take it with him when he leaves home. This I made using organic coconut oil, beeswax, lavender and tea tree essential oil. We have gotten him away from all store bought lotion because he was using so much of it and we cannot be sure what is in it and it was only giving him temporary relief.
So that is what we have been up to this week. Staying on our elimination diet, adding back a few things weekly and watching his skin closely.
I am still trying to organize and keep the house clean,the laundry washed and dried and put away, cook healthy meals and keep the dishes washed.
I still love our fruit smoothies at the end of the day. We are still not eating any gluten, dairy, nightshades and also we stopped corn.
I am doing this side by side with Charles. I need the healthier nutrition as well and have my own medical issues that I am hoping this will help. If I check out anytime soon it will not be from this diet but from accumulated health issues over the last many years.
If I knew when I was younger what I know now we would have continued to live more like the past instead of changing every time a new style or appliance came on the market and we would not have bought into the new processed foods marketing scheme. We would have saved a lot of money and most likely been much healthier. But saying that, food has changed, the soil has changed and we really can no longer eat the same foods we did in the past without toxic effects unless it is grown organic and has not been modified. We all must be careful with our food choices and better yet grow whatever we can in our yards or gardens.
Grandma Donna
