The path to ACTUALLY eating healthy.
I’ve probably mentioned before, but I have given our diet a complete overhaul. It’s not even close to what I consider perfect, but it’s so much better than it was before…which makes me wonder how we even made it day to day pre-paying-attention-to-what-we-eat. I stopped buying snack food, started actually reading ingredients, avoiding GMO as much as I am aware, light exercise and I (not the boys) went gluten free.
Snack food.
Aka, the easiest thing to feed your toddler ever. It’s delicious, it’s always colorfully wrapped and AWFULLY convenient. In January of this year I stopped going into the middle of the grocery store. I found myself only headed in for pasta, tortillas, rice, spaghetti sauce or cereal. I started buying a ton of fruit and vegetables. I would start in the produce section, head to the organic section, to the deli, onward to meats and end at yogurt.
This is what I do in the store still, but with more time spent in the organic section and even less time in the center of the store.
This is what helped with cutting out snack food. I just didn’t offer it to August as an option. There are a few things he does get from me (Not counting all the snacks that come from… grandparents.) Annie’s Bunnies, anything from Clif Bar Kids, and anytime we get the chance to purchase them… Grateful Grahams. Those are mostly on-the-go items..Or, “I JUST NEED TO GET THIS ONE THING DONE TAKE THIS DELICIOUS, DELICIOUS FOOD AND GO.” (honestly..) Let me be clear, we eat “snacks” all day..It’s just usually fresh fruit and veggies.
Then came actually paying attention to ingredients. This is a big topic that I don’t even feel 60% educated on…But, I DO feel like I’m probably more knowledgeable on this topic than 70% of Americans, just by actually recognizing that I need to pay attention and AVOID basically EVERYTHING that is packaged and processed. I’m not trying to sound pompous..But, I am trying to hope that you pay attention to this statement: You are PROBABLY eating crap most of the time. Genuine crap.
I LOVE science…But I don’t need too much science making my food. My ultimate goal would be to eat foods where I can picture its original state, and how it got to my plate.
Which brings me to this… Food Rules by Michael Pollan. I heard about it from a blog, of a girl I went to high school with- Lauryn. (she’s smart, read her blog.)
It’s a really, really simple book that has a very basic concept that is pretty important. Eat FOOD. REAL food.
I almost forgot a very important key to our path to eating well… A produce delivery service. Ours is called Green Bean Delivery. We would get things in our weekly bin that I had never heard of…Which turned out to be a good thing. (You have the option to customize your bin, too. They also have recipes on their website using some of those, to me, odd ingredients.) That way EVERY WEEK I was being handed a bin of fresh produce that I knew we would need to eat. I would love to go to the farmers market every week…but, I feel like I haven’t organized my time completely yet to fit that in perfectly. When the weekend hits it’s a race to get everything completed while Josiah isn’t working.
Hopefully we will manage things better going forward, and be able to let August get a better idea of where our food comes from.
If you’re like me and getting a bin of produce at your front door is worth the time saving convenience, I urge you to see if there is a service like this available near you.
I shall post more later about our quest to eat better. Don’t be scared off by the reality of how crappy your diet is… I don’t know why I didn’t realize how terribly I was eating pre-toddler. I do realize now how wrong I was, and how important it is for me and my family to eat truly healthy, fresh organic food
Knowledge IS power. It’s one thing to not know and do wrong…It’s another to be provided a chance to learn and choose to ignore the facts.