And so are my kids. They are pretty psyched about it. There is nothing better for a kid than farting at a quiet dinner table or sitting on a couch next to your parents. Lola even goes as far as to try and waft the smell from her butt to my nose by cupping her hand, and moving it violently from her butt to my nose, while laughing uncontrollably. I seriously love my daughter so much.
This new phenomenon appears to be coinciding with my wife’s new Lenten mission – to go 40 days with no processed food… the explanation and inspiration can be found here. She didn’t ask me to do it, she just said she was doing it, and that she would be cooking food that supports it. I am still trying to figure out if her indifference to my participation was a reverse psychology stroke of genius, or if she really didn’t give a crap. But for me, it seemed like a cool challenge. Plus I am doing this Crossfit Open thing starting today so I want to be healthy so I can finish 5,239,694th in the world (Did I mention I did CrossFit? I do CrossFit. CROSSFIT!!! BWRAAAH!!!) After one day of eating as much bread and fried food as possible, I told her I’d like to join her.
OK, back to the farting… I googled it. NPR had a nice explanation (click here). The wind is one of the 5 immediate side effects of a “Real Food Diet” I’ve already noticed.
Here they are (I’m sure the list will change as the days go on)
Farting (see above)
Dishes – Holy crap. Processed food is bad for you, I get that now. Ingredients with 16 syllables are straining on your body. But that means we end up doing a lot of the processing ourselves, with blenders, impossible-to-clean dicers, cutting boards of all sizes, about 5 different knives, and lots of big dishes that dont fit in the dishwasher. Here’s a pic Kim took of Saturday’s one course dinner:
Holy moly we make a huge mess!
3. You start tasting the difference immediately – this is nuts – we took the kids to a movie, Kim insisting on popping, and smuggling, our own popcorn in, because otherwise, ya know, game over. She popped organic corn with coconut oil and Sea Salt. Kim is a rule follower so we bought their bag of popcorn — dumped it out and replaced it with ours — We decided to order their popcorn then dump it out in ours, so we were at least paying for something and not feeling like criminals. I ate a lot of our popcorn, then I accidentally took a bite of the movie popcorn leftover. It was unreal. The top of my mouth started itching, immediately. I tasted something really weird, not butter, not salt, almost… METAL. The taste stuck in my mouth until I had two glasses of water. Amazing how you don’t realize how gross something processed is until you try it right after eating its natural counterpart. I don’t know if I will ever eat movie popcorn again.
OK… That’s a lie. I totally will.
4. My Acid Reflux is getting better – Combine stress, long work hours, beer, midnight snacks, and eating whatever is in front of you, and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I take a Zantac pretty much every day. But here’s the thing – I am still doing all of the above, except no more beer (unless it’s craft with all natural ingredients), and cutting the processed food out. More than a week later and no pill. Could that be the reason for the Reflux? Stay tuned.
5. It’s still a lot of the food I like!! – out of the gate, first two nights – Meatballs and Pasta. Pork Tacos. Boom. Granted, the “pasta” was string zucchini and the Taco Shells were Cabbage bowls – but it was still delicious.
I will end with this – my wife is awesome for doing this and sharing it with our family. It’s a huge time undertaking, and she is shouldering a huge percentage of that. Some day soon we will write about the effect it is having on our kids, which is already pretty incredible.
But for now we will all just keep farting. And Giggling. And wafting.
