Eeee, produce!

We have organic produce! We do, we do! We even have a vague idea of what to do with the dandelion greens! Hooray, hooray!

I do like this place. It's the Newleaf Natural Grocery, a tiny little storefront place the size of our living room, but happily stocked with a lot of neat organic groceries. I restrained myself to merely eyeing the place, making notes for later, purchasing a shitload of organic rolled oats (sold in bulk, $0.89/pound, thank you) and paying for our produce box for next week. They have you purchase each week's produce box the week beforehand, so that before they order the produce they know how much to order. Zero waste, unlike regular selling styles where you have to factor in the cost of the unsold rotting stuff.

I'm still tickled by the fact that I can save money and support small business at the same time. Yay! Also thrilled by the fact that most of my grocery budget is now being spent at Trader Joe's, Newleaf, and (for select items) Whole Foods. My Hub has dubbed me The Stealth Hippie, since when we started going out I wasn't even dieting, and organic food, yoga, an aversion to processed foods, and now vegetarianism are all things that crept in over the past two years. He's still shaking his head over the whole vegetarian idea, but he has to admit that it's not that far off from what I was eating in the first place, and that as long as I'm still eating fish (he loves fish), he doesn't foresee much of a problem. And, he says, he's proud of me.

My Hub had requested pancakes, and so when I ended up getting up earlier than he did this morning, I made some with some built-in nutrition: banana-nut pancakes, with no oil (since the banana made it moist enough, no problem) and whole-wheat flour. The banana was one that had gone pretty brown before I thought to toss it into the freezer, and so I plucked it out of the freezer this morning, peeled it, nuked it, mashed it up-- what was left to mash, that is; the fun thing about freezing fruit is that the cell walls get slashed to bits by the ice crystals, so it ends up as mush-- and mixed in some stevia (for extra sweetening), fresh-grated nutmeg, cinnamon, salt, and vanilla. Added that mush to the near-regular pancake batter, folded in chopped walnuts, and voila! banana-nut pancakes! My Hub, who is a big fan of banana-nut muffins, was thrilled. The damn things didn't really need syrup, either; I ended up just folding one in half and eating it dry.

I'm not counting calories, or fat grams, or even tracking my food. Then again, I'm not driven to eat too much, and not only have we had a pint of Ben & Jerry's ice cream sitting lonely in the freezer for days and days, but-- this is even more extraordinary-- we've had a 2-liter of diet soda, half-gone, sitting in the kitchen for more than a week. I say it's more extraordinary because I have a tendency to go through diet soda like a house afire; I buy a 2-liter and go through it in a single evening. It's a "safe binge". Haven't done that this time. Hell of a thing.

It's been a long slow crawl back from my crash & burn in September, just adding in things piece by piece, but I think it's working. It's extraordinary, but I think I'm finally getting what I've always wanted but that seemed impossible to get: a desire to eat healthy and to exercise that isn't linked to weight loss. I want to eat well because I want to eat well, not because I want to lose weight; I want to exercise because I want to exercise, not because I want to lose weight. And, yeah, I'd still very much like these damned extra 15 lbs to go away, and the inches that came with 'em, but that's sort of incidental; more importantly, I want to be able to run a 5K again, and maybe a half-marathon at some point in the next five years, I want to eat healthy and simply and stay this comfortable with it. If the pounds go away, that's good, and I'll appreciate having access to the just-reached-goal-weight section of my closet again, but if not, if I stay this size but manage to keep up the healthy eating and the exercise, that's fine.

Happy happy happy. I think I'm going to have meat tomorrow, since we're going out for our anniversary, but hey, today will have been the second day this week of complete meatlessness. Cool. Very cool.

My poor parents. They were puzzled enough when my sister became a vegetarian; when they find out about me they're going to wonder what the hell they did that made us turn out like this. Heh.