Sustainable Food Shopping

Just a quick post this time, but I've been sitting staring at the avocados I always feel bad about buying and thinking about why it is so difficult to buy things that are sustainable and ethical.  It seems so easy to just fall back into the old habits of buying things that don't really align with how we are trying to live at the moment. 

Picture taken from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46459714

After re-researching about the emissions, water usage, and general sustainability of the food we eat I felt a lot better about the food choices we're making, especially as greatly reducing your consumption of meat is still the best way of reducing your emissions.  I also felt a lot less guilty about eating avocados (their emissions and water usage isn't great, but is still no where near that produced and used by meat, especially beef) and about eating a plant based diet that has gone a little bit of travelling.  However, whilst we have been picking the best options I would like us to build on that further.

The hardest one is going to be packaging.  I do try and reduce the amount of plastic that comes into our homes, but it seems to be getting harder to find vegetables that aren't all wrapped up.  Not only does that mean bringing home more plastic than I want to, but it also makes it harder to reduce your food waste as you can't just buy only what you need.  Even when I've gone to a greengrocers some of the vegetables are still pre-bagged, but it is definitely much less than in supermarkets which has reminded me that when it comes to buying vegetables it would be better for me to go to the grocers instead.  It's something that I've gotten out of the habit of doing, but could easily pick up again.  On the plus side, and despite not being able to choice the quantity of vegetables that we buy, we are pretty good when it comes to not having a lot of food waste.

Got these from this Etsy shop https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/askingfortrouble

There are also specific styles of food that we like to eat and the recipes we follow don't necessarily have vegetables that are seasonal for us here in the UK.  Whilst the latest research has shown that the distance the food travels isn't the main issue when it comes to carbon emissions, now that we've worked on the other impacts our food could have I'd like to work on the distance it travels as well.  We're pretty lucky in the UK in the fact that there is quite a lot of food that is grown here now and I have a list of what food is in season throughout the year.  Before I had decided I would work out what food was available that month and then work out what we were going to eat from that, but actually I kept finding that a little bit overwhelming.  Now I'm going to do it the other way around.  Once we've decided what meals we want to eat I'm going to look at what vegetables are available then and tweak the recipes to fit that instead.  That should work out a lot better.

So, just a couple of changes that I want to make to how we eat.  Once we've made those into habits than I'll start looking at the way in which we cook our food as that has an impact too, it's just a very small percentage and therefore not the biggest thing to worry about.  Hopefully these little changes are ones that I can make relatively easily.  It should also help us save money as well.

Sustainable Diet

To cut right to the chase, I've put on weight.  Quite a bit of weight in fact, over the last two months.  It's not really much of a surprise to me as I have been unemployed for the last couple of months which means I haven't been doing the hard physical work I have to do on a daily basis to keep the fat off and I've been eating crap.  My diet hasn't been terrible, it's still mostly healthy, but I have been eating more processed food and sugar then I normally do and really I should have known better.  I have PCOS after all and I know how quickly I can pile on the pounds compared to a 'normal' person.

However, when I was thinking about my unhealthy food habits it occurred to me that it also meant I wasn't exactly doing my part for the environment either.  Now there is a bit of a debate about whether highly processed food is actually good or bad for the environment and I can understand the arguments for the good (seen as a way to reduce food waste, less energy used as the food is cooked together in a massive vate instead of separately by each person), but there are a few things that I find difficult to be okay with.  The first is the amount of packaging that comes with processed food a large proportion of which we can't reuse in any way, the use of palm oil in so many of the products most of which isn't taken from a sustainable source (it wouldn't be possible to supply for the demand that way anyway), and the fact that many of the companies just want very specific ingredients which means that farmers are forced to move away from crops that are more suited to their local area to grow other crops that usually need a lot of work and support (usually in the form of chemicals) to grow.  So basically my diet is not very good for me and not particularly great for the environment.

Back to my old PCOS diet it is then.  I'm still doing a big part of it, such as eating lots of vegetables, having only lean proteins (basically all vegetarian and vegan proteins are classed as lean), eating healthy fats, and having Omega 3 in my diet (plant based).  However, where I've slipped is eating a fair bit of processed sugar in the form of chocolates and cakes even if it's not daily, having fizzy juice (I might as well just have been eating a sugar cube), and having processed food with all that sugar, salt, and bad fats.  Some products that I've had that are processed can be perfectly healthy for most people, like bread, but unfortunately that's not the case when you have PCOS.

That means I need to either completely remove or greatly reduce a number of these not great food items from my day to day diet and keep them as just a treat now and then (at most once a week).  I also need to go back to replacing a number of my carbohydrates with low GI forms, like oats and quinoa.   I do feel like I need to do some in depth research into diet and PCOS again though as I've noticed that some of the information seems to have changed a little or is still being debated, like should you have carbohydrates at all and should you be able to eat things like tofu.

And that's it.  It should be a little easier once I start working again as I'll be back to doing all day physical exercise (I might also add some more exercise to do when I get home if I feel like I haven't done enough during the day) and I'll only be able to eat what I bring with me.  Hopefully it won't take me ten years to loss this again now that I have a much better idea as to what I actually need to do.  It'll also be interesting to see if being in my 40s has any affect on this as hormones don't normally follow the usual route when you have PCOS.  Regardless, for myself and a little bit for the environment it's time for me to eat more healthily.