I promised in a previous post that I would write about how I lost weight avoiding GMO wheat and corn. Here is how I did it.  I’m calling this the Goddess Diet because it was the goddess Sif who wanted me to buy no GMO wheat or corn.

The god who was with me when I was first making the small decisions that eventually became the Goddess Diet was Loki. Loki skinrode me into a grocery store. When he realized what was in there and that I intended to eat it he turned very dark and angry—not at me, fortunately. He saw that I eat poison because I’m poor by the standards of the society I live in. He was with me as I read labels and asked for products no one carried.

There was not much available that was labeled non-GMO. I could reliably avoid all wheat by buying things labeled Gluten Free, which I did when I could afford it. Grain products were previously one of the cheapest things I could buy, but when I started avoiding GMO, grain products became a rarely affordable luxury. If there was no affordable grain product option that I could be certain contained no GMO wheat or corn, I just didn’t buy grain products. I ate less grain as a percentage of my total daily food. 

When I bought organic or GF or the few labeled non-GMO products, I paid more for the product than I would have paid for a similar conventional product, which left me with fewer dollars to spend overall on food. That meant I bought less total food. I was hungry a lot, and that made me moody. I would not have stuck to that diet if I had been doing it for weight loss, but because I was doing it for Sif, I kept going. 

I lost 20 lbs. over the course of a year and a half doing that. Since then, I had an injury, as I wrote about in the post about attending the last Ravenwood festival in a wheelchair. While I was unable to do some physcial activities, I gained most of the weight back. Now I’m back to most of my usual activities, including gardening. As I wrote about in previous posts, I grew heritage wheat for Sif.

The Goddess Diet has become my permanent grocery shopping habit, and no longer requires much thinking, or any help from the gods. Recently, a lot of products have hit the shelves that have the Non GMO Project label, which is like the old Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval in that it’s a voluntary program that’s not run by a government agency. When I’m contemplating buying something made of grain in the grocery store, I look for the butterfly label of the Non GMO Project. The label is distinctive enough so I can see it at a glance while the product is still on the shelf. Fresh bakery breads don’t have the label, so I don’t buy those. (Unless it’s for my mom; the taboo doesn’t apply to her. The gods want me to vote with my wallet for less poisoning of the earth, but they also understand my obligations to my human mother.)

So that’s the short version of the Goddess Diet story. (The long version includes side quests into diabetes land and through the allergy forest.) Although I did initially lose weight doing this, I’m not losing weight on it now, just maintaining my regular weight. That’s OK; it’s not really for weight loss, but for the sake of nature, and nature’s gods.  

 

Image: A photo I took of heritage wheat growing in my garden