Friday, June 25, 2010

Farmer's Market Diet: Here's the premise

Mags: I woke up one morning and my pants wouldn't button. Oh, I also had a flabby belly and muffin top, too. It probably happened more gradually than that, but I was so busy chasing after my toddler, that I didn't notice. In the 20 months that my little girl has been in the world I lost all 52 lbs of pregnancy weight and then dropped below my normal weight. I chalk that up to breastfeeding one very hungry, very chunky baby. And then... Somehow, in the last few months all that extra weight popped back on and then some. I'm still going to go ahead and call these extra few pounds "baby weight", because I have a baby, so I feel entitled to use that excuse.

I need to drop these pounds. I'm thinking about baby number two soon, but there is no way I am going to have this weight be my "
pre-pregnancy" weight. If I start out here, I will end up over 200 pounds, and, pregnant or not, that's not a place I want to be.

And at the same time, I need to be more healthy, for myself and as the culinary leader of my family. Being a busy work-from-home mom of a toddler does not leave me with tons of time. In order to feed myself and my family I have been resorting to take out and fast food (gulp!) way too often.

That's about to change. I live in Los Angeles, where there are Farmer's Markets throughout the city every day of the week. A variety of fresh, local, organic food is right around the corner and I should take advantage of it, right? right!

...

Sheesh: I went to grad school and in the rush of stress in trying to complete my program I miraculously gained 18 lbs. The culprits of that miracle were multiple repeat dinners of Chinese takeout and an almost unbelievable amount of candy. Since I pride myself on being vegetarian and a pretty health conscious person and I do love to cook, I was a bit dumbfounded on how this could have happened over about 3 months, then I remembered the culprits.

About 10 years ago this had happened to me as well and I had just eaten better and exercised a bit more and the weight pretty much just fell off. Only this time I am over 30 and even after a year of simply “trying to eat better” I realized pounds no longer just fall off. I am getting married in the fall and while I am content not getting my teenage body back, I would like to get rid of the last 10 painful lbs. that just won’t seem to disappear.

Being currently unemployed, I am opposite of busy working mom Mags. I have lots of time but not so much money, and we don’t get to eat out so much anymore. I have gotten very bored with my regular cooking and would really like to be more adventurous. The Farmer’s Market in Los Angeles has an unbelievable variety of produce and I want to try it all! In order to eat healthy and fresh (and affordable) I will push myself to make meals from things I’ve never seen or heard of before.

...

So here we go! We are setting out to start a Farmer's Market Diet. We will cook and eat food from our local Farmer's Markets as a healthy way to lose these extra pounds and improve our health and the health of our families. We plan to post about our trials and tribulations, successes and failures along the way. And we'll post our tips and recipes too.