Trying Quinoa and Buying a Scale

February has been a month of thinking and trying new things.  There were several catalysts for this:
1. Losing weight???? what??? these words have pretty much always been a foreign language for me. So get ready for some personal weight history.  I grew up in a home where we weren't starving, but there weren't bounteous amounts of food.  We never had store-bought (high calorie) snacks- our snacks were things like frozen grapes and "cucumber donuts" and apples; things from our own backyard.  That plus running 25-30 miles a week in high school made me pretty skinny. I graduated weighing 115 pounds- very thin for my 5-foot 6-and-a-half inches.  My freshman year at BYU I gained 15 pounds, thanks to Little Debbie, Jamba Juice, and BYU Mint Brownies. The beginning of my sophomore year I did a semester in Nauvoo, living off of (very delicious) cafeteria food cooked by the awesome senior missionaries, and as I hit 135 lbs and was still climbing, I took action for the first time.  My roommate and I made a pact to eat no candy or treats of any kind from Halloween to Thanksgiving, and we did it!  At that point I was only running about twice a week (running in Nauvoo was SO AWESOME.  My favorite place I've ever run!) but my weight stabilized thanks to our no-sugar rule.
The next year and a half I was so busy with school and working that I ate a little healthier, and ran a little more thanks to coaching track for a season in Springville and deciding to train for a marathon.  Then I entered my 3 years of coaching and running marathons, and I ate plenty of sweets, but my weight stayed fairly constant at 132. (I've discovered that this is the weight I maintain with my exercise/eating habits when I"m being fairly healthy.)
And then I started having kids. :)  With Katelyn and Whitney I lost the pregnancy weight easily with the combination of breastfeeding for at least a year/running and training for a half marathon around the time of their first birthdays.
When Whitney was 2.5, I did this cool fruits and vegetables diet for a month with Katrina, Allison and my mom, and I got down to 128 lbs, unintentionally.  I was just trying to eat healthier, not lose weight, and I did learn a lot about how good I feel when I eat healthily, and how to do it.  Then I was back to 132 by the time I got pregnant with Owen 6 months later.
Fast forward to Owen's one-year-old checkup.  I weighed myself on the doctor's scale, (I didn't own one and so had not weighed myself in several months) and was dismayed to find that I was still 10 pounds over my pre-pregnancy weight!  The combo of not training for a race (because it's winter) and some alarming new eating habits (we have the money to buy high-calorie snacks, candy and ice cream all the time!) and probably my age (the big 3-0) have led me to a place I am not comfortable with!  I know it's just 10 pounds, but that's where it starts!  And so... my goal is to lose 10 pounds.  Crazy but true.
2. Quinoa???? what??? So I've been really trying to eat more whole grain.  It started when I started feeding Owen real food and realized I want him to be a whole grain kid.  He only ate homemade baby food, and I didn't want to start feeding him empty-calorie foods just because he had enough teeth to handle them.  I hated feeling like he was going from breastmilk (perfect food) to white bread and white rice (welcome to my picky daughters' food world!).  And so, the last couple of months I have been cooking separate whole wheat pasta and brown rice for Owen and I, and white stuff for the girls and Eric.  Because I'm not about to risk nightly tantrums at dinner time, and Eric flat-out dislikes whole-grain stuff, therefore he refuses to be healthy. :)  One thing I'd heard a lot about was Quinoa, and so I finally tracked some down (by going to a store other than walmart!) and get brave enough to look up recipes.  Surprisingly, Eric was okay with trying it, so that encouraged me.  And.... it has been a huge success!!  Meaning: the girls ate it just as well as they eat anything (lots of complaining and "ew, gross!" followed by eventual "thanks, mom, you're the best ever!") Owen liked it just fine mixed with cheese, and Eric was the biggest shock, he said he's happy to have it in the place of rice all the time! (!!!) So, we're all about Quinoa over here.
3. The Omnivore's Dilemma.  (the what???) I picked up a book at the library a few weeks ago that our good friends Kristi and Taylor Harvey read a few years ago, called The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.  I've been making my way through it (it's very readable, I've just been reading several other books at the same time so it hasn't gotten all my attention) and it has changed me.  Totally changed the way I think about food.  I'm not sure how many of the truths I've gleaned will affect me enough to change my behavior, but I am at least stopping to look at labels and think about where my food has come from and what's really in it.  So in the book, the author says that as omnivores, and particularly as humans in today's America, we have so many choices of what to eat, so much is available, that we have a dilemma unknown to most humans and animals in history--what should we eat?  Also, in the absence of a strong national food culture (ours is such a blend of everything), our country is susceptible to diet fads and fast food marketing.  SO, he goes through and investigates 4 meals- one industrial agriculture (corn farms and giant feedlots of animals, which leads to McDonald's), one organic (from ingredients grown on organic farms and bought at Whole Foods), one from local, sustainable farms with grass-fed animals, and one that he hunted and gathered himself. it was such an interesting book, and one of the big things I've taken away from it is that I want to eat animals that have eaten grass, on a pasture- not corn and animal by-products in a feedlot.  I'm still investigating ways to do this!  We'll see if we can handle the cost.  I believe it's much healthier to eat that way, since meat from a grass-fed cow is leaner and contains 5 times the healthy amino acids  and Omega-3 of a feedlot cow.  But to Eric taste is more of a deciding factor than health.  We had vegetarian-fed, cage-free chicken last night for the first time, and maybe it was partly in our heads, but it was SO good, WAY better than the bag of huge frozen chicken breasts from Costco that we usually buy! (and only $1 per pound more!) Also I tried to go to a butcher yesterday to buy some grass-fed beef to try, but it was closed.  So we'll see how that goes.  I'm very interested in buying a quarter of a cow or something, and I'm going to start buying local cage-free eggs as soon as hens around here start laying again.  I'm excited about cooking again, since I realize how much healthier it is for my family to eat meals, and even treats, that I cook myself than buying some package of cookies at the store or picking up a pizza at the end of a crazy afternoon.  I'm definitely not opposed to doing this occasionally, but at least now I know what I will be putting into my body!  Or at least I know more than I used to. :)
4. Flabby stomach.  Yes, the curse of post pregnancy has also been a catalyst for change for me.  I did abdominal exercises for 2 weeks straight back in January, and I swear it made my stomach look bigger!  So now I'm trying a different tactic(losing weight), but I'm afraid that even when I lose 10 pounds it will make no difference to my stomach and I will still have a little pooch that sticks out. :(  Anyway, I bought my first scale ever, and weight myself about every day, and it is exciting to see results already, however small!
5. And last but not least, I blame this ridiculously frigid winter for part of my unhealthy habits!  So as part of my weight loss plan I am up-ing my exercise to six days a week, and increasing my mileage from a sad 10-12 miles a week to at least 15.
And so, that's what I've been thinking about this month!  We'll see how it goes, but I am pretty happy to have a plan and be living it!