Besides my continued recovery from last weekend’s festivities and an unplanned two hour commute on Thursday evening that forced an “on the fly” workout change, it was a pretty uneventful week. This left an opening for me to obsess about something new, which has turned out to be my eating.

People always ask me what my diet consists of like there is some secret, and my answer is usually, I eat a mix of meat, vegetables, and grain, and try to stay away from sugar (some weeks are more successful here than others). But a couple weeks ago, I started reading a new book that got me thinking a little more about food. The book is called “Animal Vegetable Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver. I love her fiction, which is the only reason I started reading this book because it’s definitely not my normal trashy murder mystery. The premise of the book is Barbara’s family takes a year and tries to eat only local food. I’m not even half way through, but it’s very interesting. She takes a non-pretentious/logical look at the health and economic benefits of local eating, not to mention the psychological. Something I struggle with in particular, is eating the same things over and over, but she points out if you are forced to eat what’s grown locally, you have to follow the seasons, which means you can’t eat asparagus 12 months out of the year.

So I decided to give this a try.  My husband was appalled that he had to give up bananas…we’ll see how long he lasts on this. Apparently we have to give up avocados as well, errr. I’ve started only buying from the local section of the grocery store and I even went to the farmer’s market on Saturday. The biggest change is replacing the meat, eggs, cheese, yogurt, and milk. So I haven’t gone full on here, we’ve done the meat and eggs, but I’m still hanging on to my grocery store milk/yogurt and Costco cheese. I’ll see about switching these over next week as we can get all of it at the farmers market. So far it hasn’t been too hard to find local products, it’s just been breaking the habit of buying the same brands we normally buy.

I have no clue how long this is going to last. I suspect a couple busy weeks and we’ll fall back into our old habits. But I’m optimistic and at the very least, I hope I can learn to cook a couple more vegetables, especially when broccoli goes out of season (asparagus is already gone!). The biggest change so far is how much better the local beef and chicken tastes! I’ll eventually have to assess how much extra money this is costing us too, we’ve already cut back on meat because this is clearly more expensive, but that isn’t a bad thing either. So standby.