The jist of it

For the next seven weeks my husband, Chad and I will be pioneering a new way of eating. This blog will help us be accountable to it and also serve as a Health Promotion project I am doing for a college class.

The idea for the content of this blog came from a book I was recently gifted, The Perfect 10 diet by Dr. Aziz. The title pretty much put me off immediately. Who needs to be a 10? What kind of hoax diet is this that promises you the perfect body? This "diet" probably encourages drinking veggie shakes and starvation. No thanks! Well since it was my own mother who gave me the book I thought I would give this book a chance. So despite my doubts I picked it up to flip though and quickly found that the title may just be a marketing gimmick to reel in superficial fad dieters, desperate unhealthy people, book cover surfers and apparently even my mother. The attention getting title doesn't do this book justice because once I began reading it I found it really did support healthy living.

As I continued to read The Perfect 10 Diet, I was quickly drawn in because, as a nurse and relatively healthy person, this book was chock full of medical research and common sense.  Random scary fact: The average American eats a pound of pesticides a year. That's a lot of chemicals, that certainly makes me rethink organic fruits and vegetables. Dr. Aziz also went into more detail about how these pesticides actually act as hormones when they enter our bodies. Pesticides are often termed "Gender Benders" as there is research to prove that have caused males in many species to become feminized (pg 20 The Perfect 10 diet). I will continue to post excerpts of great information I extract from this book and other personal research I plan to make.

For now, let me give you a little background on my husband Chad and I and what our eating habits are on a normal basis. Overall I feel we eat pretty healthy. Well at least I feel pretty good when we compare ourselves to the "typical American". These are the things I tell myself and others that we are in fact "healthier than thou": we don't frequent fast food joints, we pack our lunches most days for work, we rarely drink soda and if we do it's diet, we eat a low-fat diet and rarely eat red meat...I could make this list longer and longer as I try to convince myself, husband and everyone around that we LIVE healthy. I'm about half way through The Perfect 10 Diet book and these are now my thoughts now: we never eat organic, we probably only eat an average of 7 vegetables a WEEK, our low-fat diet has caused both me and my husband to gain weight due to the great increase of carbohydrates we eat, we are consuming innumerable amounts of chemicals through processed food and our meal planning for the week is poor at best.

This weekend this our last weekend to eat whatever we want and that is why I am at this very moment finishing my 3rd pack of fruit snacks...they are just so good. Who can have one pack?