Della Adams, Chief Foodie and Fitness Lover in my Sixties
About Me
Everyone who knows me knows that I LOVE food. It’s been a huge part of my life since forever. I grew up in my parent’s restaurant business and later went on to own several restaurants of my own. I’ve worked in other restaurants as a waitress, a cocktail waitress and a bartender. A total of 30 years being professionally involved with great food. My background gave me the foundation, the knowledge to cook restaurant quality meals at home. I love hosting dinner parties, brunches and cocktail parties where I could really use my cooking skills to make my friends and family happy. In my forties I had a career change to being an Information Technology Manager. Life got hectic and very busy. I had to adapt my cooking skills to what was needed for a busy professional with a desk job. All of this, plus my very sedentary lifestyle was also the foundation that took me down the road to obesity and chronic illnesses that got progressively worse as I got older. Just like so many people I tried to eat “right” and control my weight; I tried to exercise regularly. But somehow I just couldn’t seem to make it work. I just didn’t know really what to do to seriously change the path I was on.
My before picture, at 5 ft 1 inches tall weighing 215 pounds and out of control diabetes
Weight training is a big part of my regular workouts
Transformation
At the age of 52 I had a wake up call and came to the realization I was in a seriously dangerous situation with my health. After battling diabetes for more than 15 years, weighing over 215 pounds, also suffering with high cholesterol and arthritis I decided to make a drastic lifestyle change. First, starting an intense exercise program called CrossFit and then embarking on a nutrition change to adopt the Paleo diet along with being very low-carb. Together these changes helped me to completely transform not only my health but also my fitness level. After dropping a significant amount of weight and going from a size 18 plus dress size to a regular size 8, I have been able to live an active lifestyle and enjoy Olympic style weightlifting, power lifting, in addition to running both distance (finishing my first half marathon in 2018) and sprinting and continuing to do CrossFit style high intensity interval workouts. I cannot say that the past years have been smooth sailing. It has been full of ups and down. because I’m human and it’s not possible for humans to be perfect. Will power is never enough. What I’ve learned is that I have to forgive myself for failures and celebrate myself for the successes. I had to learn how to overcome and go around obstacles. Decide for myself what nutrition path or “diet” philosophies work best for me. But there has been one absolute constant. And that is to eat whole, nutritionally dense real food with minimal carbohydrates and minimal inflammatory grains. This is the part that is a lifestyle change for a lifetime. What has also been a constant for me is to do a variety of workouts that challenge and push my body to perform at the highest ability that I am able to do.
The Biggest Challenge
The big obstacle for me was how do I make grain free, low-carb food taste as good as the great tasting foods that I was accustomed to eating all my life? I did what everyone else did when first adopting the Paleo diet; I scoured the internet for recipes. If you’re on this page you are already very familiar with a lot of internet recipe sites and you have already discovered that most of the recipes simply do not cut it in terms of taste, texture, aroma or even in the way they look. So I put my many years of professional cooking experience together with my persistent experimentation in exploring the various properties of numerous grain free flours, gluten free ingredients and their nutrition values to develop my own recipes for everything from baked goods, desserts, main entrees, side dishes, salads, sauces and condiments that are so good that my friends cannot tell that they are grain free and low-carb. Since I am no longer in the restaurant business with all the tools and equipment of a professional kitchen I made sure that all of recipes are for cooking at home, that they are easy to make and use time saving techniques with readily available ingredients. Through the years I’ve had to tweak my nutrition along the way. I went from very strict Paleo to trying Whole30 to adopting Keto, intermittent fasting and the IIFYM (If It Fits Your Macros) nutrition paths. All of these paths work for some people some of the time but not all the people all of the time. I look at these nutrition concepts as tools in the toolbox and use them as needed because our bodies are not all the same; are bodies are not static. We are all constantly changing so I have learned to be flexible. However, there are some basic principals that hold true. Eating whole foods that are as natural, as unprocessed as possible. Eating a low enough amount of carbohydrates so as to not increase insulin resistance. Eat as little sugar as possible.
My hope is that I can share the knowledge about and the love for cooking and eating great tasting healthy food that’s going to give your body the fuel that it needs to live a healthy and active lifestyle. At the same time helping you to enjoy great tasting food that makes you happy.