One of my rituals for each new year is to choose a word to influence me for the year. My word for 2011 is EXPERIMENT. To support my EXPERIMENTAL focus, I commit to post the results of a new experiment each Sunday of this year.
This week I ate no processed food. I know this isn’t revolutionary. It is a challenging adventure though. And it sure has made my body feel more healthy.
Lisa Leake helped me on this adventure through her 100 Days of Real Food blog.
I did my ‘perimeter shopping’. I ate fresh when possible. I combined ingredients myself rather than using mixes. In restaurants, I chose the most simple menu items I could find. I drank only water, tea or coffee. Thankfully, I didn’t need to fret over sweeteners.
My house smelled veryyyyyy good this week. It smelled like food. It didn’t smell like the containers of take out. I felt like a cook – not an assembly engineer. It was FUN.
I didn’t miss many things this week. I was surprised that the single thing I missed most was the diet limeade I buy from WalMart. I missed chocolate, too.
I’m going to continue with most of the shifts I made this week. Some shifts aren’t permanent though. As I write this, I’m sipping on some of that diet limeade. And ya know what? That artificial sweetener tastes AWFUL to me now. Bummer. At least I’ll miss it LESS now.
The chocolate is PERFECT though:).
Where are you with this whole Real Food thing?
Lisa’s Cheap Therapy blog 
What a great idea, Lisa, and very inspirational. I’m going to check out the blog. Thanks for sharing – as always.
since i am the house cook for all four of us – although two are often too busy to spend much time here – i cook pretty much the way you have experimented with – which sometimes leads to a whining melt down of “all I do is cook!” at which point i serve something easy and once-frozen. it restores balance to the household.
Janet, here’ to HEALth!
Carol, it’s all about balance, eh? keep healin’. dear woman!
thanks for joinin’ in, ya’ll…