Why We Try to Eat Real Food

Real Food week one complete!! I would love to say that it was a breeze and that we loved every dish we made, but honestly it was really hard. One of the hardest parts was how much cooking I had to do. And consequently, how many dishes we had to wash. Processed foods are easy easy easy. I used to be able to whip up a three course meal in thirty minutes with my canned rolls and boxed pasta mixes. Don’t get me wrong, I love all of those quick meals, but my eyes are truly opened since having to cook from scratch for everything we eat.

I’ve had some inquiries about why we try to eat real food and what exactly the rules are and what our whole pledge is about so I thought I’d take some time to explain it a little bit.

First of all, our family decided to do the pledge because we had a lot of holes in our diet and we ate way too much junk food. We needed a change. But not just a diet. We needed something I like to call a “Live It”.

What we’re hoping to get out of our pledge is an education of what we’re putting into our bodies, a cleanse of all processed foods including any form of sugar and refined grains, and pretty much a whole new eating lifestyle.

I thought 100 Days would be a good amount of time for me in particular, because I’m the kind of person who can make a short term goal like a week or a month, and then after completing it I happily go right back to the way things were as if no progress was made. After 100 days (14 weeks) of eating real foods I’m hoping that it will really be ingrained in my lifestyle and that I will be so used to it that I won’t want to go back to eating badly.

I guess we’ll find out in the end. Yikes!

So here are some of the rules/guidelines

What we can’t eat:

No refined grains such as white flour or white rice (items containing wheat must say WHOLE wheat…not just “wheat”)
No refined sweeteners such as sugar, any form of corn syrup, cane juice, or the artificial stuff like Splenda
Nothing out of a box, can, bag, bottle or package that has more than 5 ingredients listed on the label
No deep fried foods
No “fast foods”

What we CAN eat:

Whole foods that are more a product of nature than a product of industry
Lots of fruits and vegetables
Dairy products like milk, unsweetened yogurt, eggs, and cheese (we’ve noticed during our first week and a half that we lean a little to heavily towards dairy and we’re trying to cut back)
100% whole-wheat and whole-grains
Seafood (wild caught is the optimal choice over farm-raised)
Only locally raised meats such as pork, beef, and chicken (This is from the official 100 Days website but we’re not sticking too close to this rule because locally raised meats are suuuper expensive. We don’t eat a lot of meat anyway)
Beverages limited to water, milk, all natural juices
Snacks like dried fruit, seeds, nuts and popcorn
All natural sweeteners including honey, 100% maple syrup, and fruit juice concentrates are acceptable in moderation

So as you can see, the “CAN EAT” list is actually longer than the “CAN’T EAT” list. But if you go to the grocery store you’ll see there are waaaaay more things to buy that are on the no no list. Honestly, grocery shopping has gotten a lot easier since we’ve started.

Before we started I would go down all the main aisles and look at everything and have a hard time choosing which items to get based on superficial criteria like the packaging, or size, or even how yummy it looked based on the packaging design. Now I make my lists (which of course you can do always, not just during a food pledge), I get whats on my lists, and if something comes up that looks interesting I go straight to the ingredients.

It’s fun! We’re really having a great time with it. And we’ve discovered some new yummy food a long the way.

Like…

Homemade Granola

Whole Wheat Pizza! This was seriously not as bad as you would think haha. The crust is pretty thin and whole grainey you could say. But the fresh topping made up the difference. Fresh mozzarella? Yes please! So good.

We just got Porter his new floaties so he had to wear it all night.

Yummy Snacks

Crock Pot Pulled Pork and Whole Wheat Tortillas

All Natural Peanut Butter

Over Night Oats

Caprese in a pita! yummy lunch for Dad.

Omelets! We already loved omelets before our pledge and we’re happy they’re allowed!

One of my favorite things so far. We got this bottle off of amazon and it gives you the ingredients to make your own dressing. We tried the honey mustard and I seriously love it. Is it low calorie? I don’t know because I don’t count calories, but it is yummy and has all natural ingredients. I seriously look forward to a salad lunch because of this little guy. Genius. Can’t wait to try out the other dressings.