Intro + eating less

Hello out there! My name is Rachael and I'm excited to be a contributor to this blog. I'm a happily married mother of two young girls, with another one (yes, another girl) expected to arrive in the late summer. My family and I have a lot in common with Mr. W and Sarah, share the same faith, and have similar goals in the realm of food.

In the first entry in this blog, Mr. W outlined these goals, and mentioned a bit about the Orthodox practice of fasting. We do "a lot" of it, as he said!

One of the ways that Orthodox Christians fast--or at least try to--is by eating reduced quantities of foods. A lot can be said about this aspect of fasting, I am sure, but I'll leave that to wiser and more experienced souls. The reason I make the remark is because I want to share something I have noticed since implementing this in my life is that I tend to eat a lot more than I really need. When I am fasting, I eat less (partly because that's how fasting is done, but mostly--Lord, have mercy!--because there aren't as many tasty foods to be had)--and yet I don't feel hungry all the time. I often find that when a lengthy fast is over, I don't want to return to my normal way of eating. Not that I don't want meat and milk, because I do! But I don't need as much of it. Of course, I have always been a lighter eater than many people, so perhaps that's part of it. But my husband has noticed the same thing. Americans are accustomed to eating a lot more than they need. Every time I go to a restaurant I feel like it's Thanksgiving dinner, and I am amazed that so many people eat like this on a regular basis.

So this has carried over into the way we eat even during fast-free periods. At home we usually have small, simple meals, and we don't snack all day long. I suppose this has been true for me for a long time, because I naturally don't want to eat big portions at once (unless it's cookies or something; I can definitely pack those away), but even so it's a change for me, and definitely for my husband.

I think this is a big reason why we spend very little on groceries in comparison to the average American family (at least, according to what I have read), and we don't feel deprived at all.

Another thing that has probably contributed to this is the fact that we're slowly improving our diet in terms of the quality of foods we eat. When we first got married we ate a lot of pizza, spaghetti, and other processed, bad-carb things...lots of chips, ice cream, etc. I say "lots" but it may not have been as much as I think--just in comparison to what we do now. Stuff like that is now a treat, and I try to make most meals out of lots of vegetables and some meat, and sometimes grains prepared in the traditional way (soaked). We have a lot of smoothies for meals.

There is still a lot of room for improvement; we both have a definite weakness for sugar and we love to eat out. But it's much better than it has been in the past--and we find the food we eat the most of now to be more satisfying than processed junk tends to be. I am learning that for a lot of reasons, it's very often good to say no.