How my childhood fits in to where I am at today?

I am the youngest of four and my siblings are over 10 years older than I. Their early childhood was different than my own. When they were little my mom was a stay at home mom and prepared all meals. My mom is pretty simple so I’m assuming these meals were the average meals found on many American tables in the late 60’s/early 70’s – a piece of meat, a piece of bread and a veggie.

When I was about 3 years old my parents separated changing our family landscape forever. My mom went to work ushering in the quick meal. As I grew older and my siblings went out into the world, the inconsistent nutrition remained. When I was a teenager it was not uncommon to have not had breakfast and to have no money for lunch or no self made lunch. For dinner it was fast food or a box of macaroni and cheese. I didn’t realize I was hungry. Being about 90 pounds my senior year was chalked up to genetics (my mom married in her early 20’s in a size 0).

In my senior year I met a boy and his mom believed in dinner at the table every night. I will never forget my first dinner time visit when his little sister presented me with two pieces of uncooked meat asking which I would prefer. I had no idea what to pick because they were unfamiliar to me. I should mention that on the rare occasions when my mom cooked it equated to boiling noodles or browning some meat which would be paired w a premixed box of seasoning. Back to the boyfriend’s family. Their meals consisted of equal size protein and carb with no veggies.

Usher in marriage (not the high school boyfriend J) where my husband was also fed regular meals but this time of fat laden Mexican cuisine (think lard, lard, lard!!!). Hubs and I were able to get by nutritionally by a hybrid of what we learned growing up – fast food, box food, restaurant (when we wanted Mexican), etc. No veggies. Not much fruit.

So time to hit the books & blogs, reach out to smart people, circle outside aisles of the grocery store to get this figured out (well talk about all my diets later).

Enter in lesson number one: