This is a long over due post. I received my Food Rules book on Saturday and read it right away that night. Loved it and it was so interesting. I did feel like I had watch enough Oprah and learned enough in some of my classes to know most of those rules and I feel like it pretty common knowledge, but following some of them are hard! I have been doing some of my own weird food rules over the year. Since 2005, right around my birthday in the fall, I do about 7 or 19 weeks of no meat, including no fish. Since summer of 2006, I stopped eating pork and beef altogether (love rule 24). So when I do eat meat, it's chicken, turkey, and seafood. I'm from Vietnam and my parents we used to grow a lot of plants back in Vietnam and that has carried over here. We garden at lot at my house and grow 80% of the herbs we eat. We grow about 40% of the vegetables we eat like leafy greens and a lot of bittermelon, squash, and gourd. So rules about eating healthy, eating a lot of plants, growing and cooking your own food have been easy to follow. We mainly eat Vietnamese food so Rule 41 was an easy one to follow. We usually base our communal meals around a lot of veggies which some meat and yes we are guilty of eating white rice. I don't really eat much rice nowadays, but in my cultural defense, in Vietnam we mainly eat vegetables with small portions of meat and most people don't have a lot to eat so we are able to eat white rice and still be healthy.
With all that said, for us being college students living in a major US city with so many amazing food, it's hard to always be healthy, especially on a budget that can't afford it. You can buy a lot of food for not much, but most of it has a lot of preservatives, sugar, and white flour. On the other hand you can buy healthy things, but they cost more and you don't get as much. It's hard to try to find a balance, plus sometimes I just want to snack or eat a big piece of cake!
I went out on Sunday and spent $35 on mainly fruits and vegetables and the cashier looked at me like I was crazy. I didn't buy anything process. I brought mushrooms, sweet potatoes, strawberries, mix greens, kiwis, bananas, whole wheat/grain pasta, and a few other really great stuff! I guess I'm lucky that I live at home and have access to a kitchen to cook so it's easy for me to make meals instead of having to buy it sometimes. The only thing about healthy foods like fruits and vegetables is that they are eaten fast! I had to go back to the store on Wednesday to buy another $25 worth of food because I ran out of fruits and needed more vegetables to eat. I have really been thinking about what to buy that I know I can eat for a while that's healthy and cheap. So you have to be creative with your meals and balance it out well.
So this week I've been eating a lot of fruits like strawberries, kiwis, bananas, grapes, and apples. I ate salad, sweet potatoes, stir-fry mushrooms, tomatoes, and tofu! I know a lot of people don't like tofu, but I feel like it's a must if you're not eating a lot of meat and need the protein. I have so much more to talk about, but I'll save it for a later post. If anyone wants recipes for vegetarian dishes, let me know!
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