lindagraceonline.com

Linda Grace Online is a blog dedicated to showing you that you can enjoy your life, no matter what your external circumstances are.  This is a place where you can share with me your experiences, good and bad.  As you read my experiences, it will remind you of stories of your own.  Please share your personal growth opportunities and we can learn and grow together!

I was born in Michigan November 15, 1963, the second child of two wonderful baby boomers. My mom and dad were high school sweethearts, born and raised in Evart, Osceola County, Michigan. Mom & Dad moved my brother and me to the city of Clawson where we were part of the suburban craze of the 60′s and 70′s. I lived a fabulous childhood on a street with bunches of middle class families. We spent our school days walking to the local elementary school, then walking home again at lunch time, for a homemade lunch prepared by mom. In the summertime, we played with our neighborhood friends outside, riding our bikes everywhere, watching the high school marching band parade through the streets, tracking down the ice cream truck when we heard the music with rewards of a Drumstick and Eskimo Pies.
It was a wonderful life!

I spent my life blazing down the road never slowing down even around the curves~ As early as I can remember, (probably as a result of watching Bambi as a kid), I  wanted to save the animals. I didn’t want to cage them, wear them, or eat them. (OK, I did have a guinea pig  Duke – as a kid.) I just  couldn’t stand animal abuse on any level. I was involved in the National Anti Vivisection Society which focused on advancing science without harming animals. I have an activist tendency – I didn’t want to add to the abuse that I thought was being inflicted on the beef population in the American farms that provided the beef for our freezers.

I had always been interested in health and nutrition. As a high school student  I wanted to be a vegetarian. My mom finally relented, recognizing me as old enough to take responsibility for my eating. I spent my senior year as a Lacto-Ovo Vegetarian. I didn’t work with the Anti Vivisection Society for long, I moved across the country, and didn’t pick it up as I settled in Michigan, with my dad.

I was a young, high school graduate, enjoying the dating scene. I dated a young man, Tom, who shared the same attitudes about eating that I did. He gave me the book, Sugar Blues by William Dufty, which described the negative effects of sugar. I stopped eating cookies, cakes and candies. Tom and I were eating mostly fresh vegetables, whole grain breads and delicious pastas.

That lasted as long as our relationship did. I broke Tom’s heart and married Robby. Robby was a selective eater, eating the averge American diet, too much deep-fried foods and not enough vegetables – . Being the very young bride, wanting only to be a stay-at-home mom, I buckled. I learned to cook what my husband enjoyed. You need to know that he never insisted that I cook and eat what he enjoyed, I just wanted to please him!

I enjoyed the foods that Robby loved, so I ate them (realizing that I just enjoyed eating anything) Big Mac’s, Potato Chips, Soda, and candy bars! When the kids started coming, I became a milk and cookies mom. Almost everyday afterschool, I had fresh baked cookies or rice crispie treats or apples and peanut butter ready for them.

I have always been thin, it’s in my genes, so I never had to count calories. Of course I would limit my children’s cookie quantity, watching out for their health, but as for me…

As a grazer by nature, with the cookies were already made and convenient to eat, I ate too many! Over the years, I truly became a junk food junkie! But I never got sick! The kids would bring home sniffles from school, I didn’t catch it ~ I mean I never got sick! I can remember one time in my whole adult life that I actually caught the flu and threw up! I believed since my college years that all illness is created mentally/emotionally and that we have power to get over anything! You can imagine my surprise! In September, 1995…
The movie takes it from there….