"It" being dieting/weight-loss/healthy eating plans/whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-it. I am 59 years old and thoughts of needing to lose weight have been rattling around in my head for over 40 of those years. I've been on countless weight-loss regimes since my very early twenties, none of which I have stuck with for any length of time and consequently, of course, none of which have had lasting effects. And looking at photographs taken of me in those early days, I wasn't particularly overweight anyway! All I've managed to achieve over the years is to make myself feel pretty miserable around food for much of the time...and when I am unhappy I comfort-eat. My head has been stuffed full of guilt with feelings of being a failure and hot on the heels of that comes the feeling of worthlessness ~ which leads to the comfort-eating cycle yet again. I am tired of the whole thing.....so I don't think I'm going to try another "weight-loss" regime for the foreseeable future. I've got far fewer years ahead of me than behind and I think I've spent more than enough time fretting about "dieting".
All this hasn't come out of nowhere, it's something that has been on my mind a lot over recent months. I hold up my hands and admit that I've gone through periods when my diet ~ using the true definition of the word as opposed to a slimming campaign ~ has been pretty dire. To be fair to my parents, we ate well at home. I think the rot set in when I married my first husband who was a very fussy and unadventurous eater. It was easier for me to just fall in with his eating habits and I suppose I was too lazy to cook separate meals. When Adrian and I got together I discovered that although he likes a broader range of foods than the ex, he still isn't keen on much in the vegetable line and really prefers a meat/fish-and-potato diet, with a little portion of a select few veggies thrown in to show willing! So, as I did with the ex, over the years we've been together I have mostly fallen in with his likes.
I was thinking about all this again as I was re-setting the old clock I have that belonged to my Grandma. The hands have to be moved manually all the way round the clock to get to the correct time, which is of course 11 circuits, and since it chimes on all the quarters it's a bit of a long-winded process in the autumn when BST ends! So there I was, sitting there just twiddling those clock hands, and thinking about meals at Grandma's house when my sister and I had holidays with her during the 1960s/early 1970s.....
She made virtually everything from scratch and ate wholesome meals with lots of local ingredients from the shops in the village. She ate breakfast, dinner, tea and supper, but none of her meals were the mega-portions we have a tendency to snaffle today. She ate cakes and pastries but they were homemade, small and she only ate one at tea-time ~ no snacking on them throughout the day! Grandma was a very active lady; she walked or cycled most of her life (she never had a car), worked in her garden and kept her house spotless. She wasn't just physically active, she kept her brain busy too with all the sewing, knitting, reading, etc, that she liked to occupy herself with.
I really believe that food was different then ~ I'm sure it's not just "rose-tinted spectacles syndrome". I don't remember eating ready meals of any description until I was in my early teens; my Mum, like Grandma, mostly cooked from scratch other than the occasional fish-and-chip supper. Grandma didn't even have a fridge when I was a child; I remember how cool her pantry always was. She kept bottles of milk in a bucket of cold water and walked up to the village shops most days to buy fresh food. Meat came from the butcher, wet fish from the fish and chip shop, bread from the village baker, vegetables and fruit from the greengrocer.
At home we had "proper" dinners each day too, quite often with a pudding, and a traditional roast on Sundays (actually, that's something that Adrian and I still usually have on Sundays). Breakfast would be cereals and toast or perhaps a boiled egg with toast soldiers, and sometimes a traditional English fried breakfast on Saturday or Sunday.
For tea (or at lunchtime if we were having our main meal in the evening) we would have sandwiches ~ cheese, ham, tuna or egg mashed up with salad cream. Or perhaps it would be baked beans, tinned sardines or scrambled eggs on toast ~ plus a piece of homemade cake.
I didn't grow up in a village, we lived on the outskirts of Norwich for most of my childhood, so I guess there was access to a wider variety of shops in the city although there was still a group of local shops at the bottom of our road. There was a little supermarket of sorts in Grandma's village where she bought packet and tinned goods (I remember one of our tea-time treats was tinned peach slices with evaporated milk and a slice of bread and butter!), and household sundries.
The main thing I remember, though, is really what I don't remember: being served large portions. And yet I can say hand on heart that I don't recall ever leaving the table still feeling hungry. We didn't eat until we were stuffed, we simply ate enough to satisfy our hunger. I can hear to this day Grandma saying "I've had quite sufficient, thank you" 😉
There wasn't much eating between meals, either; if we did want something we would have been offered a piece of fruit. That's not to say that we never had any sweets, chocolate, shop-bought biscuits or an ice-cream ~ things like that were regarded as treats.
I should imagine that most folk of my generation grew up eating in a similar fashion; our parents and grandparents would almost certainly have eaten those kind of meals, too. What went wrong then? Back then, it was "real" food; no one would have even heard of low fat this/low carbohydrate that/full of fibre the other. People just ate food! What so many of us eat nowadays seems so far removed from good, basic, wholesome food, it's more like something concocted in a laboratory. How can it possibly sustain and nourish our bodies ~ and our minds too, for that matter?
I guess the only logical step is to cook from scratch, using good old-fashioned basic ingredients, as often as possible. I have enough cookery books to open my own flippin' library, some of which belonged to Grandma including her battered old notebook with her own handwritten recipes 😊 Unlike Grandma, I have the convenience of a freezer which makes it so much easier to buy meat and fish on a weekly (or longer) basis. I can also do batch-cooking ~ after all it's no more bother to make, say, a big pan of stew instead of enough for just one meal, and freeze half for those days when we are going to be busy and won't want to be spending ages in the kitchen.
I'm not suggesting for one minute that if I start cooking from scratch my excess weight will just magically melt away. For the first time in many years that's not my primary objective. I just feel that it's time to feed my body, mind ~ and yes, my soul too ~ some good wholesome, nourishing food.
Grandma with my little sister and I sometime in the mid 1960s
I'm rather looking forward to falling back in love with cooking and baking again, and trying out some new-to-me "old" recipes. Be warned, though, I may feel the need to share my upcoming kitchen adventures 😃
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