I am loving the Eat to Live diet (by Dr. Fuhrman).

I had the book for a few weeks and I hadn't really been looking at it, because it just seemed so Spartan and to require so much time and effort (that was my impression anyway). So I was spending more time reading Michael Pollan's book, In Defense of Food, which has the tagline: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.

Then luckily, (ha ha) Steve and I got hit with the flu and I have hardly left the house since Friday, and with all that time lying around feeling like crap, I didn't have anything I could do but read in bed, and even that was too much at times and I would fall asleep for hours on end. At one point I picked up a Tony Robbins book, and it said, "Let's take action now." And you do a little exercise where you write down what you would gain by taking some action, and so I went through that and decided I would start to get healthy on account of this cholesterol business, and so I put down Tony and I picked up Dr. Fuhrman.

As it turns out, ‘Eat to Live’ and ‘In Defense of Food’ have exactly the same philosophy, and they are a wonderful compliment to each other, so I recommend reading both to really hammer it home.

What they tell you in a nutshell is that all that processed crap in the grocery store (even if – especially if) it has health claims, is really, really freaking bad for you. Your basic foods, like many of your breads and cereals and some harmless looking crackers should really just be left in the grocery store to rot. Did you realize they put high fructose corn syrup in most breads? For real. Go look. I’ll wait.

‘In Defense of Food’ explains why you don’t want to be eating high fructose corn syrup at every turn (*cough*diabetes), and why food manufacturers do such insidious things to something you’re supposed to put in your body(*cough*$$) but I won’t get into that here.

What I did manage to do on Sunday before I got really, really sick (I thought I would just be Steve's nursemaid and I had opted out of having the flu. But the flu told me otherwise by Sunday night) and so Sunday afternoon before I was struck down, I went shopping for a ton of vegetables, which is another lucky thing, because our appetites were totally shot, and so when we felt anything resembling hunger, which wasn't often, we would eat an orange or a grapefruit or a banana and then faint from the exertion. And other times, when I felt less like death, I'd have a bowl of oatmeal, some bean soup, or a giant-ass salad with some nuts and strawberries. For having the flu, I definitely ate way, way way more food than I would have were I attempting to subsist on meat and cheese, because there's no way I could have eaten any of that formerly-delicious-sounding garbage.

So of course this is totally the flu's fault, but since Saturday, I've dropped four pounds. But I'm excited today, because while I'm still at home suffering from Imminent Death Syndrome (IDS) I will look through my giant vegetarian cookbook and formulate a doable 2-week meal plan while I have nothing else to do but die.

So I want to thank my awesome buddies Christy and Bloggergirl for suggesting the Eat to Live book; I can feel my cholesterol being lowered already. And I think it will be easy(ish) to follow, and I think it will become a lot easier for me to maintain my weight now. It was such a freakin' struggle before, but I can tell it will be a lot simpler now that I've been blessed with some wholesome nutritional wisdom and I feel like I finally know what I'm doing.

Amen. Now go eat your veggies.