Homegrown Year Update: not dead yet, quite the opposite

Still doing the Homegrown Year

Well, Thanksgiving is upon us, and I have been doing the Homegrown Year Challenge for 115 days – not that I’m counting. Here’s a quick Homegrown Year update. The first several weeks were absolutely brutal. I was experiencing what can only be described as physical withdrawal. It manifested in almost constant headaches, punctuated by an inability to regulate my body temperature and waves of nausea. Delightful.

Although I had planned to use the summer months to slowly taper off garbage food, non-stop coffee, and evening wine and cocktails, my anxiety-mitigation habits were too strong during the start of the pandemic. So, I cold-turkeyed it. This was a mistake.

A rocky transition

After the first few weeks, I started to slowly regain normalcy – and now I feel great. The first month consisted of almost entirely of a vegetarian diet. I had lots of cheese and eggs for protein but almost no meat. Because I started the challenge in August, there were still fresh vegetables everywhere. Every preserved meal I pulled off the shelf or out of the freezer was one more thing I needed to preserve for the time where our garden wasn’t busting with food. Just preserving enough for myself for overwintering with two sons under three, a full-time job, and a working farm meant I needed to be strategic and smart about what I eat and when.

So, I abruptly went from a coffee-guzzling, preservative mainlining, wine-sipping, emotional overeater – to an exclusively fresh-veggie-straight-from-the-garden eater. It was a shock to the system indeed. Honestly, it’s probably exactly what I needed. I now sleep better, have more energy, and have lost 35 pounds and counting.

No perky motivation memes

That said, I hate the people who do some big life transformation and then talk about it incessantly online as they try to sell you on their crazy thing. You won’t see any perky “if I did it, YOU can do it too!” posts from me. Although we can all grow or make something to add to our own diet, I apparently embraced the most extreme way to accomplish it.

This challenge is very hard. So hard. But also, it’s now just my habit. I wake up and eat eggs, zucchini, cheese, veggies, etc. I milk the goats and feed the chickens. I walk outside every day, and I can tell you exactly where every single thing I eat came from – and it’s kind of amazing.

So, check out the Facebook group if you want to keep up on what’s going on or sign up for the newsletter of the same name, “Kelly hasn’t starved to death . . . yet.”