The Beginning: A Lifestyle Experiment

I commute two days each week for school. During those days I spend many hours in classrooms and libraries with access to nothing more than vending machines and food courts. I run out of time in the early morning hours to fix anything for breakfast so I pick up McDonalds on my way in. I drink a gigantic coke most mornings to begin my day. Later, starving, I tear into bags of chips with the change I've scraped up, or I throw down a wasteful $5-$7 on something gross from a fast food joint.

On the days I'm not in class I normally skip breakfast anyway and scrounge up various unhealthy items for something that barely resembles a lunch. Dinners are a family thing and I do pretty good with those. We eat out just once or twice each week. And when we're not eating out I like to buy local meats, organic chicken and good ingredients. I'm happy with that part of my day.

But dinner is not enough to make up for my bad habits. Bad habits like unhealthy lunches and breakfasts, chronic soda drinking, and an addiction to unhealthy snacks like potato chips and candies.

I'm not under any false pretense that I will make the changes I need to overnight. Or that making better choices for myself will be easy. If it were easy I'd have succeeded at ignoring these food temptations years ago. Instead I keep drinking, keep munching and keep finding myself on the path to heart disease, or diabetes, or premature death.

Tomorrow my Dad goes for an echocardiogram. His heart problems are numerous, his sister has them as well. Their parents both had strokes. On my mother's side there are the same issues. The point is I'm not batting good numbers on the hereditary front. The least I can do is not fill my body with this junk.

So my current plan of action involves the following:

• eating a healthy breakfast every single day of the week.
• no more Coca-Colas.
  
• making fruits and veggies a part of my day before dinner.
• cutting out the bad snacks; no more chips.
• more whole ingredients, organic when possible.
• pack my lunches on Tuesday and Thursday.

This isn't a diet which means I won't go buy fat free hotdogs and 100 calorie packs and expect to lose weight. This is a lifestyle change. This is about making better food choices at the grocery store. This is about learning to love vegetables. This is about cutting out the fake processed crap that is going to kill me. This is about learning moderation.

This is the first day.

Welcome to my journey.