The Dinner Project

I am a foodie. I love to eat. I love good food, fancy and simple. I love to cook even though my skills are pretty down-home.

However, I also have a problem with food. Years of out of control Binge Eating Disorder added with a typical American diet/lifestyle made me morbidly obese. I was lucky enough to hit my mid-thirties with no sign of obesity related diseases but I knew it was only a matter of time before my luck would run out. Thankfully, I've managed to get what I needed to deal with my eating disorder and get my weight down before I lose my health. Last January I started both a cognitive behavioral therapy program and Weight Watchers Online. To date I have lost 51lb.

The other night I was sitting down for dinner, looking at this amazing taco salad that I had fixed my family, and thought "Why didn't I realize I could be healthy and still eat this good!" I grew up going on diet after bland diet, wishing I could just eat something that had some kind of taste. In the end, I always broke my diet because I missed the joy in eating good food. I still see images in the media of people on diets eating plain celery sticks and looking longingly at some one else's plate. Or, even worse, dieters chowing down daily on prepared meals filled with salt and chemicals. (Not to say I don't pop in a frozen lunch every once in awhile but it is pretty rare.) We are told that dieting is either suffering or replacing real food with some synthetic food alternative.

The truth is eating healthy and eating well really go hand in hand. Even when you are living this truth it can be easy to forget. I eat better now than I ever have in my life! I still get shocked at the dinner table sometimes when I realize how much I've already lost while still eating great. To remind myself and share it with the interwebs, I have decided to start The Dinner Project on my blog. I will post a picture and the recipe for my favorite meal of the week. (I'd love to do it almost daily but that would be a lot of work!) Mostly I am doing this to remind myself but I hope some one out there stumbles upon one of my dinner posts, gives the recipe a try and enjoys a healthy, tasty meal.

Let's eat!