Cutting bread out of my diet

I grew up on the James Bay coast where thinking about what I ate was not something I considered much. The only time anyone I knew thought about food had to do with where to find the cheapest sources of nutrition around. This meant an abundance of natural foods that were mostly centered around wild meat like Niska (goose), Atik (Caribou), Namess (fish), Sheesheep (duck) and Waboose (rabbit). Occasionally in the summer we Cree up the James Bay coast supplemented our diet with wild berries we picked from islands in the Bay. By the age of 10, my diet up until then mostly consisted of wild food from the land.
As our people became more attached to the North American lifestyle, our food intake also evolved. By the time I was a teenager, more often than not I regularly enjoyed hamburgers, hot dogs, pasta dishes and plenty of fried foods.
I don’t exactly have the greatest genes when it comes to following a typical North American diet. As an Aboriginal person, I have been aware for many years that I am more prone than the average North American to develop conditions such as heart disease or type 2 diabetes. After years of eating too many fried fast foods, way too much pasta, bread and lots of sugary deserts, I finally found myself overweight and out of shape. So, I decided to do something about my health this spring.
I have never liked the idea of dieting. I am not exactly the most disciplined person in the world and any attempt I have made at following a strict diet has never worked for me.
It wasn’t easy to figure out how to change my eating habits but thanks to information from the Timmins Diabetes Expo event I attend every fall I began to slowly change my diet. I ate less, added more fruit and fiber and exercised more.
I think I have been working up to making a major change for over a year without really knowing it. I had found one of the biggest culprits in my diet was bread and grain products.
At one point a few years ago, I could go through a loaf of bread a day, in the form of toast, sandwiches, buns or just a mere slice here and there with jam. I came by this bread habit honestly as it has always been a staple part of our diet. Everyone I knew loved bread and ate lots of it. I recall my family going to the store and buying white bread by the case.
You can imagine how surprised I was when I recently discovered that white bread has what is known as a high glycemic index, which actually causes blood sugars to rise quickly after consumption, which is not great if you are concerned about diabetes. The more you eat bread, the more often you are raising your blood sugar level on a regular basis. I was also shocked to find out that many cheap brown breads are actually white bread that has been coloured with added vitamins and minerals.
In recent years I began to realize that I was eating bread and bread products way too much and I just simply cut down on grain products. In the past few months I even managed to wean myself off of whole grain bread and turned to thin rye bread instead.
After much reading on healthy diets I thought about it more and more and I began to realize that bread and grain products were just downright bad. I looked back on my ancestors who lived on the land and realized that they were not farmers and they did not process their foods to create grain products of any sort. Although some of my people harvested wild rice it would not have been a huge part of our diet and would have only been consumed for part of the year.
The cold climate and very short growing season made sure that we Cree were primarily meat eaters.
My people have always consumed most of their major food sources from animal products. Even as recently as my parents and grandparents generations it was normal to gather every bit of an animal for consumption. The flesh would have supplied protein but it was the organs and other parts that would have offered up a source of much needed vitamins and minerals. This diet provided enough nutrition for survival and it would have been supplemented with dried herbs and plant products like pine needles, tree bark and roots.
At any rate with everything considered, I recently decided I was ready to cut out bread and bread products altogether to follow a sort of carb-free diet. So as not to set myself up for failure I took the advice of some reading I had done and reserved one day of the week on which I could eat anything I felt like having. As soon as I made the change, I found myself eating more vegetables, beans, eggs and meat. Also, one of the most important changes I had to make was to simply not eat so much. In a matter of a week, I immediately lost a couple of pounds.
Changing my diet was very much like changing part of my life. I had to settle into my change over many months. If you are interested in losing weight and following a more healthy diet I suggest you do your research first and if you have issues with your health, visit your doctor or a medical professional for guidance on what you can do about your health. Then think about cutting down on that bread.