Epic Fall: The Bandwagon Edition

epic fallSo, journeys. They start with a single step, proceed with additional single steps, and sometimes wind around to a road one’s already travelled.

My journey with Call Me Old Fashioned paused at such a road. During the holidays, bad eating habits took over, and I felt hypocritical posting anything to this blog. It didn’t feel right to publish my opinion about eating whole foods and the empowerment of gardening – I wasn’t living that life, so how could I talk about it?

I admire the premise supporting Oh, Honestly, Lauren Cormier’s BDN blog that refuses to sugarcoat the details of everyday life. In honor of that admiration, I must admit: I fell, epically, off the whole-food bandwagon. For months, I kept farm and garden off my table. My trash-bags filled up with frozen pizza boxes and torn-wide candy wrappers.

Late last month, my good friend Ryan and I resolved to complete a 21-day detox that required us to eliminate sugar, artificial sweeteners, gluten, soy, and dairy from our diet.

I lasted 14 days; she lasted longer. During those two weeks, I ate a record-number of clementines, pistachios, and almond butter. All delicious. I must have cleansed my palate of intense flavor profiles, like Kids from a Sour Patch and Curvy Chips in a Can. I thought for sure that, even when the detox was over, I’d continue eating real foods, and would slowly introduce dairy, gluten, soy, and minimal sugar back into my diet.

Oh, me. Wrong again.

I binged. Frozen pizzas. Candy. Tacos, tacos, tacos. None of it made with healthy produce. (I haven’t spoken to a farmer in months.)

What the heck. Even though the real food was delicious, I was reaching for colorful junk.

Call it cabin fever? That’d be easy. Call it laziness? That’d be true.

Sometimes I wish I were still a kid so someone bigger than me would just take all the unhealthy stuff away.

And other times I wish I didn’t know certain facts about our food system, or that I’d forgotten how good it feels to pull produce from my own garden. I pretend that the convenience of prepared foods is worth it, and there are just as many vitamins and nutrients in gelatinous fruits as there are in real ones.

Such feats of rationalization! That’s one way to think about it.

Enough is enough. That’s another.

If, down the road, I consult with a physician, and he/she informs me I have some bad-diet disease, there will be no one else to blame. Responsibility? All mine. I’ll have to revise my eating habits then, to save my own life. I might have to take medication for it, or require frequent testing.

I don’t want that, yet I make decisions that beg to differ. (Dear adulthood: You’re frustrating.)

So, journeys.

Here’s to epically falling off my bandwagon. Here’s to clambering back on.

Jenna Beaulieu

About Jenna Beaulieu

Jenna is a writer and fine art photographer who recently moved from the Saint John Valley region to the quiet side of Mount Desert Island. She’s a fan of excellent music, homemade gravy, and colored pencils (also, short books and long books, good pens, flannel, and when the June bugs don’t really come out much that year). For more about Jenna and her work, visit her website at www.jennabeaulieu.com