10 WEEK FOOD CHALLENGE

I want to begin by thanking you for taking this 10 Week Challenge to rid yourself and your family of processed foods!

This is a big challenge and hopefully I’ve broken it down enough into small steps that you will find it easier than going cold turkey.  I’ve always considered myself healthy, but looking back I really was fooling myself.  We were anything but.  I thought if I bought BAKED Lays instead of the fried ones we were doing well !!!   Yes, you can laugh.  We fell right into the marketing traps of those huge food corporations.  Everything we ate was low fat or reduced fat, only to discover upon our journey that those foods are the worst for you.

Just remember this:  if they take something out they have to put something back in.  So if they were taking out the ‘fat’ of a product to make it ‘less’ fattening then they had to add something back in for flavor.  And that ‘something’ was usually preservatives and chemicals.

I thought I was doing ok on the breads.  I was getting multi grain and stone ground… Wrong again!  I learned (and you will to) not to look at the FRONT of the package where all the money goes into the deceiving marketing but the back under the ingredients.  Don’t worry.  I’ll teach you what to look for 🙂

I was buying the wrong eggs, the wrong dairy, the wrong flours…. really just about everything was mass produced, full of preservatives and wreaking havoc on our bodies.  Our family is not 100% unprocessed by any means ~ I’d say we are about 85% of the way there.  Our hurdles are still the white flour and white sugar.

My daughter especially is my biggest hurdle.  She will eat ANYTHING white and if a vegetable didn’t enter her system for a month she’d probably never even notice.  But to our credit we have come a long way and these 10 steps are what got us here.

This transition wasn’t easy for us and it probably won’t be that easy for you and your family either.  But one thing I can assure you of is you will be learning this whole time.  And once you know it, you can’t UNknow it.  You may still reach for the white flour now and again, but your knowledge of how it became white will never go away.

I welcome your comments and feel free to use this forum to share with others how you and your family are doing along the way.

With that said, I would encourage you to read Week 1 and start your 10 Week Challenge on a Monday, food shopping on a Sunday.

Helpful tips:

• I create my shopping list for the week on Saturday and I shop on Sunday mornings.
• I make a quick month type calendar in my computer and type in what we will be having for each meal that week, including snacks
• I put my recipes in a those page protectors and in a 3 ring binder.  There are tabs in the front for recipes I want to try and the only ones that make it IN the binder have been tweaked to our families preference and are keepers!
• I attach all recipes from my recipe binder behind my weekly menu and attach it to my fridge.  If I don’t know why I bought the scallions that week, they will end up limp and in the garbage within a few days 🙂
• I chop, cut up dice veggies when I get home.

 

 

 

Good luck and let’s get started, shall we?