A Better Diet

My husband and I have been talking a lot lately about how we'd really like to change our overall family diet. Basically, we want to eat healthier, eat out less, and cut out most of the processed food in our diet. Go primarily with homemade, natural foods. That sounds fairly simple, doesn't it?

And yet, it feels totally overwhelming. It's funny; from years of dieting and trying to lose weight, I am probably an expert on healthy foods. I can walk through the grocery store and pretty much tell you good, bad, good, bad, good, bad. What I struggle with is the overall picture. Putting it all together every day, for every meal and every snack. I could bring home a cartful of healthy groceries and then find that I didn't get anything that will work for a fast breakfast for me and the kids when we're running late (which is pretty much every morning). I will go to find a snack to send with my son to school and see that I have nothing portable or easy. I will go to make lunch or dinner and be totally overwhelmed at how to put what I have together into a meal.

A large part of this is making the change itself, I believe, and purging the toxins from my body. It's HARD. Even the idea of it is hard. You're talking to a person who has made a lifetime of eating convenience boxed foods, sugary cereals, candy, more sugary goodies, fast foods, and so on. Which is not to say I don't appreciate delicious healthy meals, but when I'm at home it's so easy to turn to what I KNOW.

My daughter took this picture of me with my iPhone. That's my giant gut. It pretty much sums up everything I'm doing wrong, and everything I'm afraid of.

I struggle with cravings too. I struggle with cravings for bad foods, and resistance to good foods. I can look in my freezer and see that we have chicken breasts, and broccoli in the fridge, and a whole pantry of spices and rices and potatoes and pastas, PLENTY to throw together even a moderately healthy meal, and I will experience a sudden and extreme aversion to having that for dinner. And I will avoid it and avoid it until I can convince myself that it's now late enough to just order out. Wasting money AND not nourishing myself or my family.

And yet, I get more and more scared every day, every time I think about what I'm probably doing to my body, to my family. All the things we put into ourselves every day that are not nourishing us; all the things that might be making us sick over time. All the things making us obese. I am about 80 pounds overweight. I am an insulin-dependent diabetic. My husband is a bit overweight himself. My kids are healthy so far, but I worry about making them sick, or making them fat, teaching them a lifetime of unhealthy habits. I read articles about the things in our food that aren't good for us and I begin to sweat nervously. High fructose corn syrup. Dangers in soy. Trans fats. Ingredients I can't pronounce. Added sugars in everything, from bread to milk to yogurt. High sodium levels in packaged foods. The list goes on and on. What are we eating, and where is it coming from?

I want to do a better job of nourishing my family. I want my husband and I to lose weight. I want us all to be healthier. I want our food to be delicious, I want our food to be easy (most of the time; we're very busy over here!), and I want to save money on our overall food budget.

That feels like a tall order. But it's important. It's important to me, and it's important to my husband. So I'm going to try. I don't really even know where to start. But start I will, and I will chronicle it here.

I'm totally looking for help. Feel free to suggest things we might like to eat, or easy changes we can make!

posted with love from K-Pidge