Oh, hey there bandwagon...

I'm not usually a bandwagon person, but every once in a while, when I find a good one, I think its okay to hop on. I mean, I did change my mind about wearing leggings as a grown up (they are just so comfortable!) and got peer pressured into a gym membership which I now use an average 5 days a week. So when I picked up Michael Pollan's Food Rules--which I read in an afternoon--I felt pretty good about hopping on his real-food healthy-eating train. (Does it bother you that I just switched from wagons to trains? Don't get distracted.)

I've read about real food eating before ("real" means it has just actual food components in it, not unknown preservatives and sweeteners and stuff), and two of my sisters-in-law do varying degrees of whole food eating, but I never thought I had the patience to do it myself. I do NOT like spending more time than necessary in the kitchen! Thank you. But Pollan's book skipped over the science lessons (which make my brain hurt--I'm a lover, not a microbiologist) and broke down the whys and hows into easy, bite sized rules, like:

Don't buy anything with ingredients you wouldn't keep in your pantry.

Well. That makes sense, right? Why would I want to eat something if I didn't know what it was? And I can still buy pre-made pasta as long as it has only things that I would use if I made pasta fresh at home. (Which I won't. At least not this year.)

Or:

Shop the perimeter of the grocery store.

That's where all the fresh stuff is kept, so that keeps it simple.

There were lots of other great, simple thoughts, too, and then at the end:

Ignore the rules on special occasions.

So, like, if everyone is at a party eating ice cream with who-knows-what kind of crazy stuff in it and you want some, or you need to use some food coloring to make a birthday cake, then fine. Not a big deal. The point is to adjust your everyday eating to be more natural foods.

After reading his rules it all just made sense to me for the first time. So I decided to just give it a shot. I started reading labels, mostly focused on following that first rule I mentioned above. I was shocked how many weird things were listed on most of the labels I picked up. (Why so much Xantham gum, America?) Even my "healthy" wheat bread had tons of random junk and processed sugar and stuff in it!

So part of my goal to engage this year is going to focus on engaging more with my health from a nutrition standpoint. Last year was a lot about exercise (which was so good, and which I will continue) and calorie counting (which can be good or bad, depending), but not so much about making sure I was fueling our bodies with good stuff.

I don't think we'll ever go 100% real food (I just don't think I am going to want to make my own salad dressing or pay like $10 for an organic whole foods version, and if Steve just wants to eat Pop Tarts sometimes, I think the right to Pop-Tarts-whenever-you-want is inherent to adulthood), but I've already made some small steps this year, and I've got a few more things to work on. So far my mini-goals are:

1. Replace cereal with more healthy, fueling, filling breakfasts.
2. Eat more greens and veggies, and fruit
3. Get the kids snacking on more fruits/veggies and less low-nutrition carbs (crackers, pretzels, etc.)
4. Add more lean protein and fiber to our diets so we stay full longer.
5. Focus on eating a mostly-real-food based diet (within reason)