Diet Changes

I haven't blogged in weeks - busy holidays, being sick, yadda, yadda, yadda (that should sum it up).

Every year I make two or three dietary changes in my efforts to get my family to eat healthier. Sometimes we regress, but over time these changes work their way into our lives.

Part of my eating philosophy is never to make dietary changes that you can't or aren't willing to live with for the rest of your life. Otherwise whatever weight you lose or health you gain will be negated when you fall back on bad habits. Extreme diets never work in the long run. They are generally not healthy, for one, and impossible to maintain for years on end. Therefore I make changes a couple a year - healthy changes we can live with.

This year's diet resolutions:

Change #1: To add more whole grains to our mostly white flour life. Although I used unbleached flour, it's still white and without that whole grain, wheat germy goodness.

Change #2: Decrease the amount of sugar we consume. I cut out most corn syrup products over the last few years. Barely does corn syrup cross our threshold - barely a soda, less than a few packaged snacks, and fewer canned or boxed meals. But our sugar consumption - good grief. It's mostly from homemade lemonade and my cooking, but I'm going through 5 pounds of sugar a week!

Change #3: Canned tomatoes. But aren't tomatoes healthy? Yes, but canned tomatoes are not.

A few weeks ago I read an article: 7 Common Foods The Experts Avoid . Most of it I knew.

• We rarely eat red meat - maybe once a month or less.
  
• Haven't had microwave popcorn in years! (Okay, that's a lie. I bought a box last year when it was on sale, but that's it! I swear!) I used a big sauce pan and a bit of coconut oil on the stove-top like I did when I was a kid until a friend bought an "Atom Pop" off eBay for me.
  
• Non-organic potatoes - that one I hadn't heard before, and I admit I was shocked at what they put on potatoes. But changing from conventional to organic doesn't require anything more than buying my potatoes at Whole Foods rather than Albertsons.
• Farmed Salmon - I've know about the evils of farming salmon for years, and much to my husband's discontent, we don't eat it!!! If you want a shock at some of the disturbing things people do to our oceans that directly involve what you eat, read about salmon farming.
• Milk Produced with Artificial Hormones - that one is so easy to live without. You can even find generic milk without hormones. We only drink non-homogenized milk. Homogenizing milk is usually done by forcing the liquid through a very small orifice until the fat molecules are very tiny and disperse easily in the milk. The drawback to homogenized milk: the fat molecules enter the blood stream much more easily. Not good, not good at all.
  

Now to the tomatoes. I used canned tomatoes all of the time. Put in homemade chilli. Add it to pasta sauce. Put it on fresh pizza. Tomatoes are one of those wonder foods with so much goodness, you can't get enough. Even when my 5 y.o. eats 3 pounds in one day, which has interesting side-effects I'd rather not mention when talking about cooking, I encourage everyone to eat more tomatoes.

My change, I'll have to use fresh tomatoes and dice them myself. If I use pre-prepared sauce, buy jarred rather than canned. It's not such a big change, I admit. But I would never have thought of a tomato as bad for us.

Let's see how the year progresses with these changes! I'm excited.