From Vegetarian to Pescetarian.

My Best friend Sue called me Nemo.

My son giggled nervously, my boyfriend tripped out, and all my sisters almost fainted. Everyone had their own personal crisis regarding my food choice, and for the first time in my life, food began to once again feel fun and experimental.
I'm not completely sure what possessed me to decide to take the leap (or the swim?) over to the dark side and eat the flesh of a marine creature, but it has definitely made me think about the fact that I am ingesting (a) marine life (b) praying over something that was once living (c) wondering if Great Spirit was kind enough to force me into the ways of the ancestral call for health reasons. Sometime in December, I remember mentioning my thoughts of returning to fish to a holistic chiropractor who I feel began doing the work on me before I truly asked for the assistance. Prior to this moment and several bottles of high quality fish oil pills later, something wasn't changing, for example, my weight, and especially after all the successful lifts, classes, cardio and rockin' da bell. Something had to give.

12 years is a long time to talk one's self out of eating a vegetarian lifestyle, but it's also a long time to ingest genetically modified soy with the full knowledge that soy has been blacklisted. When it comes to fact checking however, and the intensity of missing nutrients that the vegetarian diet simply has a tougher time of obtaining through food, it to me, rang undeniable, that the best way to tackle the problem was to allow a fish safe passage to swim into my life and onto my plate.

It is quite strange to have bitten into the canned salmon as my first fish experience and to immediately feel watery, oceanic images of dancing fish and Atlantis underwater. It's almost as if my world of roots and berries disappeared for one short moment, as if to say, no, I am in the aquatic world now. At school, one of my students randomly posted a screen saver with turtles and fish. I don't think I had even broken the news to them before Waterworld occurred. Dances with Fish? I digress.

I had several ask me if this deficiency could be obtained in a pill when all I could really think of was, I need to do this. I need to do this. Have you ever been called to something without recourse, but you knew it was right, and something edifying came along to determine a positive outcome? Yeah, me too.

I found it interesting and highly intriguing that a health maverick, Alex Jamieson of Super Size Me, just recently stepped down from her vegan palate as well. She's the gal who wrote a book, The Great American Detox Diet. I may be seeing a wave of bio-individual change and/or trendiness, but I also may be seeing some real people with a real desire to consume real food, finally. That, or like Jamie, you may feel inclined to simply honor a craving and have a piece of fish.

On a metaphysical note, eating fish is definitely a slightly different experience in terms of how my senses are now feeling information. I was nervous as an empath about feeling the pain and death of the fish. There is no denying that an element of this takes a role in meal times, but it just sends me into a deeper, more prayerful mode, as the attention one has to pay to one's body when consuming something this potent, becomes all the more important.

What is this really about? Besides the plethora of iodine and zinc, I'm certifying as a health coach. Something sounded impossibly exciting about reinventing myself against the climate of experimentation in the backdrop of finding what works best bioindividually. I feel as if the program wrote me a meal ticket to really explore my options, that it was truly my life, and it was meant to be lived well. And even though this has been a mentally and emotionally uncomfortable,  albeit smooth physiological change, I realize that all things must change, if I want to change. That includes my diet.