On March 19th of this year, I began eating a new way. It took almost 3 months for me to make the final guilt-ridden decision, after receiving three beautiful cookbooks as Christmas gifts, written by three of my favorite TV chefs and filled with recipes which didn’t come close to embracing the changes I wanted to make. All was well though, and as so commonly is my experience, my fears were for naught when the grocery bags arriving home from our local Wegmans included many items ‘almond’, including what would soon become my favorite go-to replacement for peanut butter – almond butter, as my kind and unassumingly generous sister-in-law advised me was so good, spread on a crisp, ripe Empire apple…she was right. 

It was through this same sister-in-law that God introduced me to this new way of eating. I love the way He moves. We, myself included, of course, like to put God in a box with our religious notions that He only works in ways that we can put our stamp of approval on. He is so much bigger than who we understand Him to be with every thing He made at His disposal and everyone on earth to use as He sees fit. He’s so good…He knows the desires of our hearts and generously pours out His best for us. For us to know Him and make Him known is His delight and His mysterious ways just makes Him nearer and dearer to me everyday. 

Not that He just waved a magic wand and ‘poof’, every step was easy.  Sacrifice, counted in time and food prep, was a challenge for me. Only one of us here at Camp Caselli had chosen this new pathway of eating, so creatively subtracting from one plate and adding to another was a necessary adjustment I had to make. And when I was tired of the same old ‘same old’, as God would have it, Pinterest entered my life. Not being a quick study in the technological, or patient with it, the app was a challenge for me to maneuver, but thank God, in the last 6 months, I’ve mastered it by now. It was there where I found a plethora of recipes, some horrible failures only suited for the garbage and some surprisingly pretty tasty – you know, the kind I might be brave enough to actually serve to someone else or post the links thereof on Facebook. Today I am a faithful follower of several of the recommended websites now and I enjoy perusing them daily. 

And though my diet has changed, happily, nothing else needed changing in regards to my calorie intake or the intensity of my exercise regime, which consists of walking only 8-10 miles a week. Will I ever jog again? My answer to that question is that right now, I am wholly content to be walking – especially with some minor back issues and the stairway debacle which laid me up for nearly 6 weeks this past winter. When considering the alternative, it feels so good to be content to walk the lake road…thanking God for every painless step I can take.

I haven’t exactly been a poster girl/woman/60-year-old for this diet and if you’re looking for one, please look elsewhere.  That said, I will say that I’ve seen the quality of my days improve in sustained energy levels, and far less of the brain fog that hampered my thoughts already prone to a contemplative way of life. I find I am sleeping much better, more soundly, too. What I’m hoping for, too, is the continued easing of chronic pain associated with my fibromyalgia symptoms which have not disappeared, and may not ever, but have markedly been less burdensome for me.

Today, I begin the 7th month of this new way of life, and I’m glad to do so. I’ll trust you to believe that the number on the scale marks a significant victory, but it’s not all about losing weight. It’s about gaining a better quality of life and learning some lessons along the way. Putting aside my wildly delusional beliefs that everything needs to be celebrated with food, I’ll celebrate events daily, weekly, and annually in a more carefully measured and purposeful way.  Will I stray from this diet like I did the day we celebrated my grandson’s first birthday in July and I ‘helped’ by eating a honkin’ big piece of delicious chocolate cake? No doubt about it…. I’ll eat cake on my 61st birthday, too, and leave it at that….