How does my secret love affair tie in with my weight?  Good question.  For the longest time, I had no idea what I was missing.  Until I experienced it.  And how it would impact my life.  Here's my story.

In this episode, I talk about:

* My first time

* How this impacts my weight

* What happens when I leave my love behind

Transcript:

Hello everyone! Welcome to the path to 1 million. This is going to be episode 173. I want to share a little bit of a story with you for this particular Friday. So I remember way back in the day, it was probably, well it wasn't probably, it was the first time that I flew to Europe. I went to Paris, I'd always been wanting to go, always wanted to see Paris. I, you know, had read books on it. I had maps of Paris. I was like all excited about it. So I make it to Paris. And one of the things that I was completely unprepared for was the fact that the food was going to taste so good. All my life I had grown up thinking that fuel, that food was just nothing more than a fuel source, just something that you just eat when you got hungry.

But I was actually really surprised when I got over there and just, it just tasted so good. And I remember more than once during a meal that it actually felt like I was having a foodgaism in my mouth. And I just was like, Oh my God, this is like totally awesome. And I remember on my first trip to Europe, I was actually gone for three weeks. So I really got a chance to sample a bunch of different foods, different kinds of cuisines. I actually absolutely fell in love with sauces because growing up my only sauce that I ever had was gravy. But I absolutely fell in love with the different sauces that was offered. And so I remember when I came back to the States thinking to myself, I want to eat like this every day. That's what I thought.

Cause there was a lot of people in France that could actually cook just as well as what you can get inside of restaurants. And so what this did is it actually put me on this path. I, and I didn't understand it or really know it at the time, but it put me on a path to the point where I was buying all my ingredients fresh. I wasn't buying anything boxed anymore. Like a staple of my diet through my twenties was shaken bank. You know, and that to me was like a different meal cause I could go to the aisle and I would see all the 'Shake 'N Bake' that were up there. And they had like at that time they had like five or six different flavors or something and I would buy one of each pack because that was one for every day of the week.

And that's how I cook because you know, it's just fuel. Well when I didn't, I get until later on when this whole thing about processed foods became really popular was the fact that by default, by switching over and only cooking with ingredients that I could actually pronounce and say and, and actually cook with things that I know and keeping my, my cooking simple and focusing on, you know, whole ingredients versus processed and everything else. I managed to skip a lot of the foods out there that can actually make you gain weight. And what was interesting is that I was thinking back yesterday about all the times in my life where I had actually gained a lot of weight. And when I talk about a lot of weight, it's like maybe 25 pounds or something like that. And I know people have gained a lot more weight.

But for me it got a little bit freaky when I gained 25 pounds because number one I had been 180 pounds for as long as I can remember. But number two, getting up there to like to two Oh five approaching almost to 10 that's when the doctor was telling me that my cholesterol numbers were through the roof and I needed to go on medication and all these other problems were popping up and something happened with my liver and everything else like that. So I had to go through all these tests and,