You Are What You Eat

Well… here we go again.

I’ve been thinking a lot about food. I’ve been thinking a lot about food because it’s the one area of my life that I’ve always struggled with. I keep thinking that if I simply ate better during the past few months, particularly during my non-workout weeks, I wouldn’t have gained much, if any, weight. If I also ate better during my workout months, I’ve been thinking, I probably wouldn’t have stopped working out since I would’ve felt and looked better than I did. Food is the most important force in the universe, at least to me. My whole life revolves around it, for better or worse.

So I’ve been thinking about my kitchen. During my shopping sprees, I’ve been focusing on my living room/bedroom. I’ve been neglecting my kitchen. I’ve been cooking on a degrading and very frustrating to cook on frying pan for almost three years now. I need a new frying pan, and I want a high quality one, and that’s going to set me back over $100. I’ve been yearning to start grinding my own coffee beans and making different types of coffee, but a good grinder will set me back over $200, and purchasing whole coffee beans will probably cost more than the cheap stuff I buy at Safeway. New gear, new reusables and perishables, more money. I’ve also, for the longest time, wanted to buy a food processor, but again, a good one is expensive, over $100 in this case.

I’ve read a lot of diet and exercise books, and in them, many people keep saying that gear does not matter. Don’t not run because you don’t have the right running shoes and running shorts and you don’t have the right size and color headband or the best route to run in or whatever. Excuses. Just run. The same argument can be made here with me: just cook. I have been just cooking, and I’ve been doing okay, but I want to do more. I want to build up, and that costs money. For the past three years, I’ve cooked, I’m guessing, 95-98% of all of my meals. Now I want a frying pan and a food processor and a better potato peeler and can opener and a handful of other utensils and tools because I want to be more comfortable in the kitchen and not fighting myself.

I want to cook through entire cookbooks, like Julie from that Julie & Julia movie. I want to make sauces and entrées and salads and breakfasts I’ve never made before. I want to know that when I get hurt or I’m just not feeling a workout on any particular day, I can always fall back on my diet and ensure I’m not hurting my health or myself in any way. I don’t want what has happened to me these past few months to happen again, and the best way to do that is to build a foundation that is rock-solid and unimpeachable.

But, again, it all comes down to money. Everything does. I shouldn’t let money impede me from living a healthy and happy life. I simply can’t. So once fire season starts and ends, I’m upgrading my kitchen. It’s a done deal.