A friend of mine recently emailed me a link about the "100 Days of Whole Food" project. Basically, a family decided to cut out all processed food from their diets for 100 days.
I have been slowly making changes to our diet over the past year or so. We used to eat a lot of ground beef, and while we will never become vegetarian I have introduced some non-meat meals that have gone over well, like black-bean burritos and Indian lentil soup.
Since my bout with gestational diabetes in 2003, I have been much more of a label reader, paying close attention to sugar count. But after reading about the "100 Days" family, I have been looking at the number of ingredients in foods....whether there are 5 or 6 ingredients or whether there are 30.
Another thing I've been trying to do is make my own foods from scratch when I can. Now that M is older and less needy, I find it easier to make my own biscuits for the kids. It is nice to know I am spending a lot less money in the dairy case and giving them food with far fewer preservatives.
I have cut out buying frozen "ready" meals, like pizzas and Bertolli meals because it is super easy to throw some chicken and frozen veggies in a skillet to make stir fry or mix frozen veggies, canned chicken and cream of chicken soup for chicken pot pie.
The truth, though, is that I don't ever see us going whole hog like the family who first did and wrote about the "100 Days" project. From what I've read, they wouldn't even allow their kids to eat cupcakes at another child's birthday party, and that is simply insane, as far as I'm concerned. Hard-core restricting (from my own experience) does nothing but make someone crave whatever it is they are not "supposed" to have. I mean, look what happened to Johnny Depp's Willy Wonka due to his dentist father's refusal to allow Halloween candy.
It is more important to me that I make small, sustainable dietary changes that we can all live with and still feel like we're not deprived.
Because, really, who wants to eat nothing but Wasa crackers and rutabagas and live to be 105?
2 comments:
I think your last sentence/question says it all. The only thing that would make me make a full-scale change for myself and/or a family member is if we were diagnosed with cancer. When I read the book "Anti-Cancer" several years ago, I was stunned at the research and anecdotal evidence that showed that certain healthy organic diets can completely stop the growth of tumors.
Very convincing, and as I said, probably the only thing that would cause me to make more than just small changes to our intake.
Re-reading my comment confused me - I meant to agree that it's not worth it to live to a ripe old age if you can't enjoy your food.
And then I went on to say that the exception to that would be if it was actually to save or prolong my life in a dire circumstance.
It's 10:41 now and it was a hellatious day with the little people. I should probably stop commenting until my brain is functioning higher than a second-grade level.
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