Food... Food... Food...

Just when I have it all figured out... Somehow our needs change again.  


Despite eating the same types of meals we have been eating for awhile and eating our normal assortment of snacks (homemade granola bars, crackers, quick breads along with peanuts, sunflower seeds, raisins...), suddenly we're both starving.  I've lost another five pounds since coming here despite eating more than I was in Corvallis, and Matthew is just hungry all the time.  His poor skinny body is probably too little to allow him to lose five pounds.  *sighs*

I think that part of it is that we are up earlier, and I think I'm a bit more active than I was.  I also have been playing a smidgen with what we eat.  I watched the documentary Forks over Knives, and I was impressed by what scientists found out about the relationship between animal products and human diseases (primarily cancer).  After learning about dairy and how it's not necessarily as amazing as we're taught that it is (I think that the large dairy farming businesses manage to find a way to influence our government's food recommendations...).  Add to that the fact that organic milk is expensive compared to plant foods, and I hate using milk cartons... and I suddenly felt motivated to not eat as much dairy.  We've been using homemade oat milk instead of cow milk, we traded cream cheese for a homemade bean spread, and I started making fewer recipes with cheese.

The verdict?  I think we can drink less milk, although I don't think we will give it up completely.  Bean spread is actually more delicious and substantial than cream cheese, so it's totally a winner.  (Yay!  One less plastic container!)  We both miss cheese a lot.  Thinking back, I'm realizing that most of my dinners in the past had some cheese involved, so now I will just consciously throw in some cheese in our diet to keep up morale.

It's funny how much milk products mean to us!  When we pretty much gave up meat (and I honestly can't remember the last time I bought any... I think it was last winter or spring), it happened really naturally, and we pretty quickly settled into a mostly-vegetarian cuisine.  Fortunately, dairy products aren't nearly as destructive to the environment as meat products.  I was mostly interested in optimizing our health (and our budget), and I think that what will work best for us right now is to limit our dairy intake but not remove it completely.  On the plus side, there really are also studies (not done by the dairy industry) showing that milk also does some good things for the body.  For us, it's time to not fret about it and just eat it in moderation.

I also have been mostly giving up cookies.  I still make them for Matthew, but I realized that I felt addicted to them, and I don't like feeling that way.  I use organic unrefined sugar which is a step up from the refined sugars, and I use about 3/4 to 1 cup per batch (we used to eat one batch a week), so it's really not a horrible amount of added sugar.  However, for now I'm just eating a couple of cookies when they come out of the oven, and the rest of the week I satiate my sweet tooth by eating a little bowl of oatmeal with some peanut butter and dark chocolate chips on top.  Yes, I measure out a portion of chocolate chips each week so that I know how much I'm eating. :)

That all being said... The next change I need to make is to keep us from feeling hungry most of the day.  We're just kind of hungry people these days.  I think what might work best for us is having four meals each day.  Breakfast at 7:30am, elevensies (!!) at 11am, lunch around 2pm, and dinner around 6pm.  I think that 7:30 to noon and noon to 5:30 is just too long for us to go without filling our bellies.  Instead, we both go through periods where we are really hungry but we've already eaten our snacks for the day.  I'm thinking that veggie and/or bean quesadillas will be my first attempt at solving this problem.  Since it's winter veggie season, perhaps sweet potato quesadillas are in order?  Once a week I can make tortillas and then immediately turn them into quesadillas and then we can just reheat them as we go.

As a final comment, I just want to say that it is totally true that if junk food isn't in the house, than you can't eat it.  I'm not trying to lose weight, but I can't imagine having done so if I had unlimited calorie-filled prepared food lying around the house.  The reason that this post exists is because none of our food has preservatives in them, so I have to make only as much as we are going to eat each week.  The current problem is that what was enough in the past just isn't right now.  What a weird problem in our country, no?