Real Foods! Finally!

If you came back for this second post, Thanks! It makes me feel like less of a loser.

This is the post where I will actually start sharing the start of my Real Foods journey. (Finally! I know, right??)

If you read my first post, you’ll know that a few weeks ago I was at my breaking point with feeling and looking like crap. Little did I know that God was answering my plea for help and leading me into a wonderful land full of milk and honey (literally!)!!

So here’s how it all began.

Via the ever wonderful and knowledge expanding Facebook (yes, God uses facebook. He’s cool like that), I came across a couple posts from friends that intrigued me. First was about the truth of margarine. DISGUSTING. If you like margarine, seriously, don’t look it up. I wouldn’t want to ruin it for you. I used to like it too. I know how it feels. The next was a blog about a woman’s own journey to health and happiness by eating real foods. The ideas started to click. I started reading labels, and not for calories, for ingredients. I started to realize that “light” and “low fat” are LIES. LIES, I tell you! They are foods with all the fat and calories sucked out and because they, then, taste like paste and raccoon poop, they fill them full of chemicals to make them taste good again. But those same chemicals make us crave more sweets and salt and junky food. Vicious cycle. No wonder I wasn’t ever full and satisfied. I was eating chemically altered raccoon poop and craving even more! (No, really, I wasn’t eating raccoon poop, but you get the idea.)

This new information was dizzying. The best way I can describe it is like seeing something horrible or disgusting and you can never go back to a time where you haven’t seen it. In order to try and describe it to my wonderfully patient husband when I came home with an entire car full of real, traditional foods, after promising “we would take it slow and replace our food one thing at a time,” was to equate it to about 6 weeks ago when I had Laser eye surgery and he watched my procedure on a tv screen all up close and personal. Two weeks before his own procedure. Bad idea. He could never un-see what he saw. (And I watched his procedure after having mine done because I thought it would be ‘safe’ since mine was over. WRONG. It was DISGUSTING. and I now have very intimate, very permanent knowledge of my husband’s eyeballs.)

I admittedly did try to start slow. After almost falling asleep (again) from an over-eating lunch on Friday, this past Saturday, March 1st, I simply tried to eat clean with whatever we had on hand. I managed really well actually. I was reading all I could get my hands on, in terms of understanding labels, products, food, how to shop for and cook real foods, but physically and financially, I was taking it slow. I swear! I stopped by our new, local Trader Joe’s after reading many recommendations for their products to grab some corn tortillas for our planned taco night for dinner. I admittedly also grabbed some organic sour cream (I just can’t give it up!), some whole wheat, clean breads to try out and some coconut oil. I also grabbed a Misto oil sprayer and some salad dressing containers (for homemade dressings) from Bed, Bath, and Beyond. And that was it. I was so proud of myself for taking it slow.

(And yet. Two days later I’ve already created an entire blog on the subject. Can you tell I get a little enthusiastic when excited about something??)

But like I said, it’s like seeing something you can’t un-see. I knew I needed to go to Aldi for some things for our dinner last night so I went out after church to pick up what we needed. As I was walking in the aisles, I kept looking at the shelves and people’s carts and seeing, what appeared to me, bottles and boxes and bags with that poison skull and cross bones on them. I couldn’t stop seeing everything as the processed, chemical laden toxins that were waiting to destroy us all! (okay just kidding, but I seriously couldn’t look at anything the same way again.) Everything, to me, looked like lab experiments rather than salad dressings and spice packets and cake mixes. Things I had eaten my entire life, up until the day before. Talk about a transformed mind. (Check out Romans 12:2 for God’s awesome word on the subject.)

So…this is what led to the eyeball discussion when I got home. Remember how I told you we were a dorky budgeting couple? Well, I definitely spent more than I thought and way more than my husband had been led to believe when I left to “get a few things for dinner” (but I really didn’t do so bad in the grand scheme of things – $120 for a whole lot of staples we didn’t have on hand and specific ingredients for our upcoming meals this week). I really didn’t mean for it to happen, but I really and truly couldn’t go back once I started. And from all the blogs I’ve obsessively read the last few days, it seems like most people have this same reaction, but they all advise readers to take it slow. I apparently didn’t read that part until later or I had one of my 28 year old memory lapses. Either way, I have yet to come across a real food, clean eating blog where the writer didn’t also run out and buy a bulldozer for their pantry, so maybe “take it slow” works great in theory but it impossible to practice when it comes to eye opening world of processed foods.

Needless to say, I also cleaned out my entire pantry and fridge (something else I said I wouldn’t do) as soon as I got home. Though, in my kindness and attempt to avoid my husband hating me forever, I left his favorite staples untouched.

Small tagent…All throughout my healthy journey I have never forced my husband to give up anything he wanted to eat and the same goes now. I know how many times my family tried to get me to eat all different kinds of ‘healthy’ when I was growing up and it was all pointless until I wanted it for myself. The same is true for everyone, husbands included. My husband is the most supportive and encouraging person in my healthy journey and he almost always adapts to my healthy eating in our home. He knows that he can eat whatever he wants and that whatever I cook will be healthy. Win, win. As a result he has lost weight himself and became inspired to start running. He is looking better than me and could already run faster than me on his first day out. (we ran together once while I was doing my 5k training and I swear he was galloping along like a lithe gazelle while I wheezed like a crippled elderly person with COPD after weeks of training. we never ran together again.) I’m so proud of him. (I mean, once the bitterness subsided from our failed running date.)

All in all, it was actually a really good thing to dig ruthlessly into our pantry yesterday, despite my bull in a china shop attitude. What I discovered, other than a million and 500 overly processed and chemically laden products, is that we had a LOT of stuff in there we NEVER used. Stuff I can’t even remember when I bought it. It was honestly really good to get rid of all the excess and only have things in our pantry that are real and clean, but will also be used! I always used to look at our pantry after grocery shopping and wonder, ‘what the heck did I just buy all this stuff for?’, because it always looked so overly full. But in reality it was full of junk that was never used. I don’t know about you, but I really don’t want to be so wasteful anymore. I divided up the items to go out into two bags (not including items that were expired or stale), one with opened, still usable items that I can see if friends or family could use (with proper disclaimers on their contents of course!!), and the other with unopened items that can be donated to a food pantry. I don’t love the idea of giving food away that I don’t feel comfortable consuming myself anymore, but I also don’t like the idea of throwing away food that would be served at a pantry or soup kitchen anyway, whether I donate it or not. I fully realize that buying and eating real, clean, organic foods is not something everyone can afford or wishes to do, so I would like to at least try to donate and give away foods that people would likely buy at the store anyways.

After I finished cleaning out the pantry, I had two giant, stuffed Aldi bags ready to be given away, in addition to a small amount of fresh items in our fridge.

The fruits of my labor.

The rest of my night consisted of making home made dressings and marinades for our dinner, making said dinner while watching a Disney movie marathon on TV, and then researching clean eating detox symptoms. (I will be happy to share more on that later as well as how cooking my first real foods dinner went. Spoiler alert. Somebody cries. I’ll let you think on that till next time).

❤
Molly