The Food I Eat

I needed a couple more credit hours this semester so I decided to enroll in an online nutrition class. Today I finished a 6 page paper that was a nutritional analysis of what I eat. In doing so, I realized how dramatically my eating habits changed since going off of gluten in April. Before, I was like the rest of America, eating a lot of processed foods. I would eat meals on the run, and therefore had a lot of items on hand that I could just throw into the microwave and it would be ready. Yet now I can't eat most processed foods, because most contain gluten. I've been forced to make my meals from scratch. It was an adjustment at first, because it takes a lot more time, but I consider the almost necessity to eat healthier a blessing of celiac disease. It is really good to know every ingredient that goes into my food and have it all be fresh rather than eating a mess of processed ingredients, however tasty they might be. I also find myself feeling more satisfied and snacking a lot less.

Because of this change, when recording what I eat, I noticed that I am consistently under the recommended calorie intake, and usually come in at about 1500. Because of this, I am also lower than the guidelines of every category on the MyPyramid. Yet I feel so much better about the food that I put into myself than I ever have. Some of the things I used to eat don't even look good anymore. (Some of them, I'm still eying the Totino's pizza rolls in the freezer and those do look pretty good...). But really, I realized writing that paper that I'm very happy with my eating habits and what I put into my body, and I am proud to be able to say that.