How-we-doing Humpday

Sustaining and foraging. 

Growing up, I spent four years living in Central Florida in a yard landscaped with exotic plants; supposedly, the previous owners landscaped for Disneyworld.  Looking back, we could have eaten much more from our yard - our internet connection was fairly slow in 1990...we couldn't just Google "edible plants".  We ate the young bamboo shoots.  We ate the ripe loquats from the tree in the backyard.  At one point we even tore apart a fruit from one of our palm trees (Queen Palm perhaps) to get to the seed just to smash it open and eat the edible nut inside. 

Now, in my own yard, I eat the hibiscus blooms and leaves.  We have a small herb garden on the back porch with rosemary, basil, mint and cilantro.  Strawberries come back every year.  We grow gardens in the summer.  And every other year, our two pecan trees provide a harvest, if you can compete with the critters.  Next spring I hope to use our copious amounts of wild onion in place of chives (one less thing to grow).  And I look forward to dandelion greens next year - must continue research on dandelion's detoxifying effects on the liver.

My father has a spectacular garden every year.  He's been growing these amazing, long "Chinese Beans" since I was in elementary school.  Squash, tomatoes, cucumbers (he's been pickling!). His jalapeno peppers are an amazing gift each summer. He can be so generous!  I remember, just a few years ago, watching him snack on pine nuts from his yard.  I'm glad those tall, scary pine trees have something to offer.  There is yucca and wild passion fruit in their yard, which they are less exited about than I am.  I'll try anything.

Fessing up

I'll admit I eat like an American.  I've had too much fast food, red meat, soda, and processed food-like product.  I am quite disturbed by the American "white is better" theory.  White flour, white sugar, white rice.  Food racism.  What a curse!

Let's not forget that our public schools implemented these bleached out products just as often as our poor families; at a private school I attended we were given Subway, McDonald's, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut every week.  They bought the hype.  Convenience won over health. 

I was a fairly healthy person through my first pregnancies.  In between pregnancies I would progressively get back into my soda addiction.  My worst soda habit is Red Bull.  They are my equivalent to cigarettes (thank goodness I don't smoke).  I usually plateau at a gallon of red bull a day.  Not water.  No water.  Sugar, caffeine and majorly too much B-complex. 

My last pregnancy I was diagnosed with a heart murmur and mitral valve prolapse.  I got to wear a heart monitor all day and night (except in the shower) for a month of that pregnancy.  I have no way to prove it was the red bull.  I have no reason to believe it was anything else.  That pregnancy ended almost three weeks early when I showed up at the hospital vomiting uncontrollably.  I was in labor and my liver was failing.  I had an emergency C-section.  We all came out alive.  If I hadn't gone the hospital that morning, I wouldn't be typing the same (or any) story. 

After I finished breastfeeding, I hopped back on the red bull train.  My youngest will be 17 months soon.  Most days I drink 48-64 ounces of that vial concoction.  I'm not sure why I drink something that makes me hot and angry.  I'm not sure why I drink something that depletes my appetite and causes major diarrhea.  I honestly think it is a subconscious desire to have something.  Something I thought I could control.  

I'll never have a perfect heart again.  I've done irreversible damage.  My liver is always going to be slightly wonky due to a genetic condition I carry; also my lungs are less durable from that condition.  I still expect to live a long enough life to meet my grandchildren.  I want to be at my great-grandkids births.  I want to have enough time on this planet to spread positive energy to others.  I must change my lifestyle.