A few weeks ago I blogged about Trim Healthy Mama, My Heart, and Me. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my health and my food choices over the past 15+ months… and this after decades of being health-and-nutrition conscious, actively gardening, farming, cooking from scratch, preserving food, and focusing on local foods where possible. If you’ve been around for a while (or read any of my novels) you know that about me.
And yet, the photo above, taken just a few months before the heart attack in 2017, clearly shows how out of shape and out of breath I was. There aren’t a lot of photos of me, since I’m usually behind the camera, but I remember how steep that scramble was up the hillside and how much it took out of me. Obviously, I needed to “do something,” but I didn’t know what, and I had no energy to do “it” anyway. To be fair, I don’t believe finding the mysterious something a few months earlier would have prevented the attack.
Back to the eating thing. Have my focus areas in the area of diet changed? Not much, but having a heart attack does cause re-evaluation. It has to. It wasn’t the local food that tried to kill me so much as hereditary high cholesterol combined with some other aspects I had no control over… and a sedentary life as a writer, though the health problems began (in retrospect) long before I began writing full-time. All that to say I haven’t changed my mind about most food aspects in principle, but adjustments were required to lose weight and help my body heal. Principles can’t do that. Only changes can.
So I turned to Trim Healthy Mama. I’ve learned a lot of new techniques and tweaks in the kitchen since beginning my THM journey. Some build on my previous experience while others are quite new.
With that in mind, I decided to add a Trim Healthy Mama section to this website, as you’ll see if you look up to the MENU bar. I am not an authorized coach or vetted recipe blogger and don’t know that I plan to pursue that as a calling. I keep plenty busy already with a family, a farm and garden, and a writing career! But I seem unable to leave recipes alone that I come across, but tweak them further to my liking or simplify them or choose easier to find ingredients, or… whatever.
You’ll be seeing some THM recipes come across this feed. I don’t know how often, as I’m not setting a schedule for it, but I have a (relatively) short list of recipes I’d like to share. If you’ve been around for a while, you know that I’ve blogged recipes from time to time over the years, so this will only be slightly different. I also expect that the items in the MENU bar will get rearranged as recipes come on board! It’s a bit of a work in progress.
Anyway, that’s it for today. Just wanted to give you a heads-up in case the topic is of interest to you. Welcome to the journey!
PS: If you haven’t checked out Raindrops on Radishes, you might find it a fun and enlightening read. It’s the first time I’ve written an obese heroine who is struggling with, well, everything.
One reviewer says: “Valerie Comer’s books don’t usually make me cry—but Raindrops on Radishes did. Valerie paints a vivid portrait of a curvy heroine who is loveable but far from perfect in the way she processes stress and sees relationships. Throughout the easy-to-read romance, Valerie deals gently but honestly with issues of diet, weight, and body image.”