Under my nose all the time

I often wander round the city centre and seethe inwardly at the amount of rubbish food on sale. Not just Leeds, everywhere, it seems like nutrition very definitely takes a back seat to convenience. I eat healthy stuff, but only because I plan everything in advance and take bags full of food to work.

It seems I just wasn't looking. Over the past week or so I've discovered a whole list of vegetarian restaurants, organic/veggie/wholefood shops, and places to get nice, relatively healthy food. Of course, you could live in an organic veggie way off chips made with organic potatoes and green and blacks chocolate and not be particularly healthy, but generally speaking I find that if I make the effort to eat vegetarian food (although currently it seems more of an effort to actually get some meat in), I tend to make better choices than I would have made not looking at the vegetarian options. I've found places that sell locally produced organic vegetables that I really want to try, I've found places that sell some of the food I've considered trying but not been able to find in Tesco, and I've found places where I can stock up on my weeks supply of food at lunchtime, thereby cutting the torture of trips to the supermarket to a minimum.

So where have I found these obscure places that I didn't know about before. Erm, I have been going past them every day for the past two months. One of them is opposite the place where I get off the bus in the morning. I then walk past it on the way to the gym. Another is opposite the bus stop where I sometimes wait for the bus home. And a third is very close to work (and I'll be popping in there tomorrow if at all possible to check out those "award winning salads"). It just goes to show that sometimes you really need to open your eyes and see what is around you. I'm so excited at the thought of not only being able to buy the food I like far more easily (I got some lovely flavoured tofu the other day that I'd never seen before from one of the shops), but being able to support smaller, more independent and ethical shops (and producers) without even putting myself out to do it.

I was pretty surprised when I discovered my inner vegetarian (and believe me, she's damn persisent and demands to be fed vegetarian food nearly all the time), but it seems that I'm getting greener by the day. I could see how this journey could lead to me losing weight, but it's become more than that. I'm really thinking about what I eat from a quality point of view as well as simply for its nutritional value. I never realised that losing weight would unleash a bus catching, organic food eating almost vegetarian, not through rules but by choice. I'm not complaining, but sometimes it seems like this whole process has taken on a life of its own to go in directions I never even dreamed of!