Changing the way we eat!

One of the reasons I garden, and learned to can was to eat and feed my family the healthiest food I could. Winter comes, and we are drawn into eating 'comfort food', things like homemade bread, stews and meats with rich gravy, and lots of carbs. With the cold comes lack of outdoor activity, lots of nights in front of the TV, and lots of snack food. While I have the best of intentions, all that home canned goodness really doesn't do much for us when were are mixing it with fatty foods, and burying it in buttery mashed potatoes!  By the end of winter, we have all gained weight and feel sluggish, with very little ambition to do anything other than sit around and eat more processed, fatty and sugary foods. Hubby started to blame ME for making HIM fat - he said all my good cooking and baking was just too much! That's when I decided we needed a change!

SO many wonderful documentaries out there about the food we eat, and what it is doing to us!

I started by watching "Sick, Fat and Nearly Dead" by Joe Cross. I wasn't about to put my family on a juice fast, but I did buy a juicer and trade fresh veggie/fruit juice for our morning coffee (which had cream and sugar) Little changes can make a big difference.

What a great way to begin the day! 

Finding that lunch sandwiches were still making us sluggish, I eliminated most breads from our diet - no more white breads! Whole grain bread is in our pantry now, and while the kids aren't happy about it, they will eat it or find something else to eat. I have eliminated all bread in MY diet. Next on the list was processed foods. While shopping, I was reading a LOT of labels. If something had more than 5 ingredients and had words I couldn't pronounce, I was NOT buying it.  This really doesn't make things as hard as it sounds.  If you are reading labels, you will start to notice that SUGAR is an additive to almost everything.  We don't NEED all this sugar, and all these additives ... it is making us SICK!  Those snacks I used to stock up on for evening snacking have changed. No more cookies, potato chips, salty or sweet foods. We now have fruit smoothies, almonds, grapes, berries, or a special treat of organic sweet potato chips.  School snacks are now Lara Bars instead of chewy granola bars, fruit, vegetables and fresh fruit juice.  We still eat meat and dairy, but less of it.

My shopping trips, while more frequent now, are starting to look more like THIS

 

I buy organic when I can, and that will become easier to do once my garden is producing and the local vegetable market opens for the season.

Eating real food isn't as hard as it sounds. There is a wonderful website called "100 days of real food" that has some wonderful meal ideas and great pointers. Go check it out!

I am already feeling the difference and have so much more energy.

The added bonus - I have already lost 6 pounds!!

:)