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Thursday, April 5, 2012

I love food.  Give me good food and I am a happy girl.  I love everything about food...cooking it, shopping for it, serving it to other people, and of course eating it.
It is within my nature to be inquisitive.  I want to know how things work, what they are made of and where they come from. Once, on an afternoon about 6 years ago, Dr. Oz was on Oprah doing a special about the Dr. Oz diet.  I forget the specifics of the segment and of the diet itself, but one thing left a mighty impression upon me.  He went into a woman's home and told her they were going to clean her pantry and fridge out and any item containing one of the following five ingredients had to go. 
The list included: saturated fat, trans fat, simple sugars (such as fructose, galactose, lactose and maltose), enriched bread or high-fructose corn syrup.  
Being the ever curious woman that I am, I decided to go check out my pantry.  I loved to cook but knew very little about nutrition.  I would buy products simply because they stated that they were full of vitamins or "natural". I think it is safe to assume I was very much like your average, underinformed, well-meaning american consumer.  The amount of garbage in my home, which we were regularly eating, was baffling.  I genuinely had no idea.  Thus began my journey to change the way I eat.
It has been a rocky road.  At one point, I found myself feeding my family primarily whole foods, organic and local whenever possible.  However, in true life fashion, stuff happened.  Things got hectic and frankly, I've come to a point that I've once again found my pantry full of convience foods and my trash bin full of take out wrappers. Now ignorance is an invalid excuse and I have the responsibility of shaping the habits of my children on my hands. Too bad knowledge is useless without the discipline to apply it.

It is time for a change.

Today I've started a personal 30 day diet challenge. The guidelines are no refined sugars, no fast food, nothing deep fried and only water and smoothies (made at home) to drink.  This is just a basis for resetting myself so that I can lead my family into healthful eating.  Additionally, I'm hoping to highly limit preservatives.  I felt it would be unrealistic with a newborn breastfeeding around the clock to try and start making 100% of my meals from scratch and eliminating refined sugar in itself will require a lot of whole food cooking considering sugar is in just about everything. This should be a good starting point to reset my own habits and in turn, those of my family.

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