Real Food

So, I’ve done a lot of dieting in my life. No, really I have. You wouldn’t know it to look at me right now, as I’m rather, um, large. However, that is the truth. I didn’t say they were successful.

I tried a modified version of the Cambridge diet when I was around 9. Sadly, I now really don’t like milk shakes. I’ve tried Weight Watchers, Jillian Michaels, Overeaters Anonymous, some weird diet that my mom had where you eat certain foods in a certain order, things like that. They all have one thing in common: that’s not how my family and I live.

What I’m learning is that I can eat just about anything if I eat it in moderation and I exercise. Now I’m not saying I should eat runny eggs and bacon everyday, although I know a lot of people who have and died at the tragically early age of 80 something. I can’t eat the same thing everyday anyway, I get bored and honestly nauseous if I eat the same thing repeatedly.

So what am I doing and what do I mean by real food? Well, by real food I mean stuff that as much as possible isn’t processed. I’m making my own meals. I’m not using organic vegetables or super healthy, extra lean everything, just regular food. The only real freezer stuff I’m using is some frozen veggies. I’m even making waffle and pancake batter and cooking them myself. I feel better and fuller with less food. I’m not leaving anything out. I’m still eating foods I love, but I’m cooking them now.

Music Man and I discovered something important on our trip, once outside of California we found places that served sweet tea. We found that one it tasted better than tea we added sweetener to, and two that we weren’t hungry after drinking the sweet tea. The sugar in it helped satisfy our hungry. It was very enlightening to us. We had spent so long trying to eat really healthy food that was over processed and we were still hungry that we had forgotten how real food tastes.

We were still hungry because while all the “bad” stuff had been removed from the food, so had most of the nutrients and some of the “bad” stuff is necessary.

Music Man has been after me for years to buy some cook books and about two years ago I broke down and bought a Weight Watchers cook book. Not quite what he meant. Well, I few months ago, I found a Betty Crocker cookbook. I’ve been cooking almost exclusively from it since then. The food is very tasty. It’s fairly simple to make and we’re not gaining tons of weight. The only thing we haven’t been doing is exercising a lot. My thought and the experiment I plan to conduct is: I’m going to keep cooking from my Betty Crocker cookbook (along with a new Better Homes and Gardens and two from Reader’s Digest) and start doing some real exercise. We’ll see how I feel for the 4^th of July.