April, my friend, you came along a lot sooner than I was expecting.

It only seems like yesterday that I had an idea – that I thought to be a pure stroke of genius at the time – to make a sort of visual journal, some kind of nutritional impact somewhere. Although I am armed with a sketchbook and Dave’s tin of Derwent Studio pencils, a plethora of inspirational pieces in the form of recipes and what I just know will be an interesting medical story once it finally eventuates and hopefully fizzles out into bubbles of happiness and good health, I AM STILL NOT READY FOR YOU, APRIL, DAMN YOU.

Okay, so there is actually a story behind this. To be honest, when it all began I have no recollection, but it has been so important in my life that I really don’t remember how I survived beforehand. I do remember however, deciding to conduct what I thought to be a small scale experiment. It was encouraged by both my GP, and the common sense of myself and my husband. After blood tests, elimination of iron, overdosing on fibre and whatever else we tried in vain to make me feel better, I stopped eating meat. Not just gradually decreasing my intake over a period of weeks or months, but 100 percent cold turkey.

It was not easy.

Imagine yourself as me in September last year. Only a week into this trial, your husband cooks himself up a succulent kangaroo fillet for dinner – which just happens to be your favourite meaty meal. TORTURE. But you survive on your vegetable whatever-it-was… barely. However, that weekend you venture out to dinner with friends. Still not used to being almost exclusively restricted to pasta and risotto whilst eating out at restaurants, the night ends in you throwing a childish tantrum and grumpily ordering the random fish meal they had on the menu.

Even now, I am being told by the professionals to eat more fish, more fish, MORE FISH.

So, as the weeks totter past and the cravings for meat gradually subside, I notice that I am beginning to willingly eat more Italian style foods, and more potatoes on the side, and actually getting sick of fish as it’s been on my plate almost every day since this whole affair started. Who’d have thought?

All of a sudden it is March of the following year, I am wearing my vegetarian cookbooks thin, branching out and experimenting with the likes of quinoa, lentils and rice pasta, and I only eat fish when I have to or when I am feeling particularly guilty for not being nutritious enough (thank you Doctor). I don’t even know when or why, but I have completely eliminated 95% of dairy from my diet. With the exception of a scattering of parmesan over my puttanesca, I have recently learnt that for some reason I can’t even enjoy a tub of yogurt anymore without suffering for days afterward.

What the….??

So, armed with my pretty purple sketchbook and a tin of coloured pencils, I endeavour to show whoever is vaguely interested a month of my life. This may include the aforementioned toddleresque scrawls of my eatings, ponderings and whatever inspiration I choose to ride; it may include recipes and heavily opinionated blogs posts of why I feel the way I do about food, ethics, vegetarianism and veganism, and it will most definitely touch on what happens when I embark on my long overdue visits to particular specialists to hopefully solve the mystery as to why food never seems to agree with me in the same ways that you take for granted, despite the huge changes to my diet over the last few months. If nothing else, it will at least make me more consciously aware of… something. Anything that may possibly matter someday.

Oh, dear. What have I just gotten myself into?

She slumps onto the couch; hot, hungry and exhausted from a hard day at work followed by a strenuous cardio session at the gym. Only two kilograms to go…then maybe she can fit into those size six jeans that call her name every time she walks into that iconic fashion store on the main street. Two hours of her day today was consumed by running, cycling and rowing, followed by a simple salad in a lame attempt to satiate her starvation. Let’s call her Madeline. She is thriving to be the image of perfection in a huge proportion of today’s world – slim, gorgeous and wanted.

Sarah, what the…? What are you ranting about this time? Well, as a matter of fact, I got sunburnt yesterday. I just couldn’t help it! The outside world was sunny and warm with the slightest breeze, it created the ultimate place to relax and recuperate between all the hard work I was doing… Who could pass the sunshine up?! My arms and face have been a little, well, stung today, which indeed has put a real downer on things. But then I thought “Wow, I really need to get a tan, I can’t possibly let my snow white limbs be seen by the public eye”. It has since occurred to me that there are just so many things wrong with that harmless thought that made its way down the path of my mind in the way that any rational thought would have done. That thought sent a massive proportion of my world into an even tighter downward thought spiral.

I know, it’s true. I have a very fair complexion, and being as ‘white’ as I am is just not seen as fashionable, or dare I say it, sexy, in the world we live in. So I genuinely need a tan. I would like to develop a nice, natural (as opposed to fake) sun-kissed glow. And this frustrates me to no end. As Summer approaches, tiny girls will wander around in little shorts and midriff tops – and this scene will become so abundant you simply stop noticing…but whether you pay attention or not, these tiny girls are still likely to have bleached blonde hair and solarium orange skin. This over-tanned, celebrity wannabe look is sought after by too many of the women that inhabit the generation I belong in. I do not find it attractive or glamorous at all.

But people do. They must! Otherwise WHY would they all continue to pursue this look after more than just one summer, so we can’t simply fob it off as another fashion mistake?

Why does this annoy me so much, I hear you quietly ponder? Well, let me explain to you. I’m annoyed that body image is so important to such a large percentage of the Western society – more important than say, one’s own health. Like our friend Madeline – she is not the only girl that puts herself through that torture. Look around you. Sure, there are as many average people as  there are gym goers, or health buffs, if not more. But being ‘average’ does not have the potential to consume you completely. It may be easier to live, but who wants to be just another person when there is the chance out there to rise above ‘average’, to become beauty in human form? How could you possibly be happy with yourself? Beauty envelopes all of us in the forms of things we actively consume – namely TV, music, and movies. There are superstars and models and just simply gorgeous people out there, living the red carpet life, and we all know it is far, far from the glamorous beautiful world they try to make us believe in.

There is a not so fine line between the amount you care about how you look and the lifestyle you live. I respect that everybody is different, but those of you that have overstepped the line just annoy me. It’s the human race in general that I’m at my wits end with. It’s not okay (healthy) to want to be like darling Madeline, and count every individual calorie you intake only to make sure you cycle off twice as many, because you need to lose just two more kilograms. Nor is it okay (healthy) to be 120kg and choose pizza with garlic bread and a can of coke for dinner because you don’t care about the way you look. Mate, seriously, what about your heart and your liver and your cholesterol levels? This is how people die every single day! The problem is, in my eyes, the not-so-fine line exists completely isolated and alone under the world’s bright lights in an over-crowded place, because so many people avoid it and make it invisible. As much as TV, magazines, and other forms of media advertise their beliefs that they are over rake thin women, and that bigger certainly is better, I find an alarming contradiction when I turn the page to see Mischa Barton “looking sexier than ever” – gaunt features, sharp angles and all. How can society be so obsessed with this look? It doesn’t matter as it’s basically the higher power these days.

I believe I have a fairly sound understanding of the way it all works, and of everything that eventuates out of everything else. I appear confident and comfortable enough with my image/weight to live my life with a bounce in my step and a smile on my face. But I’ve fought my own evil demons – that mentality that I’m not pretty enough, or I’m too fat, or my legs aren’t long enough for me to be beautiful since before I can remember. I have, for lack of a better term, ‘come of age’ in the last 4-5 years. In this period I have gained seven kilograms, lost about seventeen, and then gained about nine. If it wasn’t for my loved ones constantly instilling me with self confidence, combined with my almost anal eating habits, those demons would surely be red hot and most likely endeavouring to devour my entire persona. I’m just like everybody else out there that cares about the way they look more than they should. I’ll never stop. And there’s not a whole lot I can do about that and be happy simultaneously. Call it a religion, if you like, or just think of  it as teetering on the edge of the not-so-fine line. It’s ultimately my higher power. I have found the balance and realised that to abuse this power by either treating it or tormenting it is going to end badly…it’s all about compromise.

All in all, Somebody needs to flip the coin and have it land sideways, as this discussion has two very clear, very defined sides. And if you aren’t the sideways landed coin, you’re clearly, obviously heads or tails. Nobody wins. Nobody loses, either. Think about it, decide for yourself what side has the better argument. And let me know.

The first feeling we learn in life is love. Our mothers wrap our tiny bodies in warm, fresh waffle blankets. We are the sweetness inside. The honey? Whatever you prefer, inside your waffle treat. In essence, from the moment we enter this world, we are learning how to feel.

Somewhere between being held as a baby, being taught to live, and living, up until now, having had lived.  Wounds  have been woven through my soul. Delicate, intricate.  Imagine a cloud of a soul inside of me. Soft, fluffy, like a marshmallow.  Poured over with the sweetest thing, say toffee?  But toffee doesn’t stay soft and sweet forever. In no time, it hardens. As does life. Turning my soul into a contraption of soft and hard, sticky. A marshmallow that would never be the same again, incased in the sweetness of toffee, that it was now sheltered by. I was not learning to be stronger. I was unlearning everything I knew. Unlearning feeling. Feeling brought me into this world, it was the basis for everything. And it would be the end of me.

To me, happiness was not a feeling. It was a sense of insanity. The unfeeling feeling. Craziness always wore a smile. Underneath that smiling exterior was a time bomb of emotion, laying dormant. Waiting, collecting. I had reached a point of wisdom and could not go further, for where is wisdom created without feeling?

Is life even lived without being felt?

These are the questions I ask myself day to day. Now, being what I am, being that I am no longer melting my toffee and pouring it deep into my emotions, am I living? Will I still grow, without it?

I guess that even without that sweetness of emotion, I have still felt. Because I have still learnt. I’ve learnt to be a little more delicate with myself. Caramel goes well with fluffy souls, right? Or how about strawberries?

There’s a good mix in there right now. Although the wounds will never disappear, they can be complimented by what I choose to pour into my soul now.

Which only leaves the question, what DO I want in there? Now that is something best left for another blog. A non-food-related, less insane blog.

For most people a meal on a weeknight after a hard day of work is a necessity rather than a choice. Your stomach is growling and churning, your energy levels are low and your mood has been increasingly deteriorating since about 3:30. Hunger is the path to fast food. Hunger leads to tiredness, tiredness leads to grumpiness, grumpiness leads to suffering.

Enter fast food… You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy! The unworthy adversary of good nutrition! If you choose the quick and easy path, as others do, you will become an agent of evil food, not to mention the complaints from your ever increasing waist line and your clogging arteries. The best way around this is to be able to quickly create a meal that you look forward to eating so much, that the task of creating it is as enjoyable as the final result of eating it. You must unlearn what you have learned.

So here I’m going to lay out a few things that I do on a general weeknight to quickly feed myself and my partner. Whether you’re cooking just for yourself or for others, decide you must, how to serve them best.

The Initial Idea:

All great masterpieces (and horrible failures) usually start with a good idea! You can either profit by this or be destroyed. It’s your choice. I like to start with a flavour idea and move on from there. I’d start a list, but I’m not writing a cook book here.

Whatever you feel like you can usually lump it into a generalized category and then boil it down from there. Italian? Which kind of pasta do I feel like? Do I want something saucy? Chunky? Meaty? Alright, I’ll have ravioli with a chunky sauce, or spaghetti bolognese. Simple? Ok, I’ve got some chicken, so I’ll grill that, steam some veg and microwave a spud, throw together a nice gravy. Mmm. Delicious.

Throwing It Together:

Assemble the troops! Lay out everything you need, assemble your fresh veggies and salad, or your bag of frozen veg (ugghh…if you must) and acquire/defrost/kill your required meat. Less trips to the fridge for broccoli means more energy saved (how green is that!).

Everything that transpires should do so according to your design. I try and plan my preparation to utilize my time most effectively. I know how long I take to chop things and how long it takes to cook things, so I’ll chop some onion and throw it in to start browning (in about 18 tablespoons of garlic!) while I chop everything else up. If you can, do your veg first and throw it into a bowl, then chop your meat. It saves you a wash of the chopping board during cooking and saves everything for afterwards.

Adequate Cooking Time (and YOU time):

Always in motion is the meal. So once you’ve got your ingredients in the fry pan, grill, steamer, wok, whatever, these things take time to cook right? Right! So duck off to the computer and share some dick jokes over IRC, check your RSS reader, and read some comics! There’s no mystical energy field that controls your foods destiny so occasionally nip back to the kitchen for a stir and a checkup on dinner and to add your seasoning as you go.

A Little Something On The Side:

Dinner almost ready? A side. Quick smart. Throw on some rice, or some pasta, and get it simmering away. Alright! You’ve just bought yourself another 5-10 minutes, so I’d grab something else you need to prepare or go read Neil Gaiman’s blog. Make sure you’ve got yourself a glass of red or a beer by this time, because that can be easily overlooked when you’re busy serving…

Serve, Season and Enjoy:

Presentation is just as important as taste! If your meal looks like the back end of a bantha, you’re not going to want to jump right in and start shoveling it. Try to lay your different components out so that they visually compliment each other. If you add some salt, and definitely when you add some pepper, it can serve as a garnish on blank parts of your plate as much as it can season your food.

Eat. Yub Yub.