…Joe puts up a post encouraging the merits of healthy eating.

Those of you who know me well have seen my waistline shrink and expand depending on the season of life in which I am at the time. When Sheila and I got together, I was at a decent weight. However, as is often the case when one finds the love of their life and feels comfortable in a relationship, I put the pounds back on over time. (While I’m not exactly proud of this, the fact that I have seen many other folks in relationships put on weight once they found “the one” makes me realize that I’m not the only one who can’t help asking for seconds…or thirds in some cases!) Fortunately, I was able to shed many of these pounds for our wedding. As you probably know, I gained much of that weight back again as the siren call of free law school pizza and work lunches steered me to shipwreck time and time again. In my defense, I’ll say that Cleveland’s great restaurant scene combined with Sheila’s stellar cooking night after night makes it hard to engage in restraint at the dinner table!

At the start of the summer, I was pretty nervous about my waistline. I was afraid that the stress of the impending bar exam combined with large periods of inactivity while studying would mean that I’d gain large amounts of weight and fall into a state of poor health.

Fortunately, though, this summer turned out to be quite the opposite! Nightly walks with Butters gave me regular exercise. Sheila’s busy schedule with her work and the law practice meant that I made my own lunches pretty regularly, which often translated into heating up a bean and cheese burrito. Believe it or not, they’re not *that* bad for you! Because I wasn’t working, we also needed to watch our money pretty closely, and while this was (and is) not fun in many respects, one major benefit of this is that we wound up eating at home a lot instead of eating out. I also started reading various healthy living blogs (more on this later) that showed me that one could eat healthy without being a gigantic killjoy. By the end of the summer, I had actually *lost* weight and was feeling good about the direction in which my health was going…

…until the bar exam itself in Columbus arrived. For various reasons, we have eaten out at night for almost a week straight, and by last night, my stomach felt like a cauldron. We ate very well–the meals deserve a post of their own–and had several great experiences, but by the end, I was pretty tired of driving home with a rumble in my stomach that was almost as loud as the engine of our car.

Now that life is slowly going back to normal, I’m excited about getting back to eating Sheila’s home-cooked meals. Also, I’m excited about resuming our nightly ritual of taking Mr. Butters on walks around our great neighborhood.

Earlier in this post, I mentioned how I’ve been slowly warming up to the idea of attempting more healthy eating ever since I’ve started reading some healthy living blogs. One of these blogs is peasandthankyou.com. The main blogger, Mama Pea, is actually an ardent vegan. However, I really started reading the blog avidly once I learned that she is a lawyer who transitioned into being a full-time blogger and writer once she began championing the merits of a vegan diet. In fact, she even scored a cookbook deal as a result of her blogging! Her cookbook was released this past week, and we enjoyed looking at it at a Barnes and Noble in Columbus after the bar exam was over. Her writing is exceptional.  I highly urge you to check out her blog and her cookbook!