Real food...ish

I came across a website not too long ago about real food. Its full of explanations, recipes and health benefits.  It made sense and sounded like something I'd like to try. While, we don't have the worst diet ever, we eat out more than we should and could probably eat more vegetables with dinner.  Then reality set in.  The thing about real food is its a complete overhaul of your thinking, kitchen, wallet and time management.

The basic rule seems to be not eating anything that has more than 5 ingredients.  I should rephrase.  You can still make something like pancakes, but each ingredient in the pancakes should have less than 5 ingredients.  This means lite bread, granola bars, yogurt and other things that I associated with being half way healthy are out.  You need to buy the special 1 ingredient flour, the greek yogurt and all the other things that I avoided because they were in the expensive sections that I skipped.

Another drawback is the kids.  While looking at the sample menus on the web site, I could count on one hand the number of things the kids would eat.  A lot of it didn't seem that appealing to me either to be honest.

Then we come to the time and convenience.  Eating out on a real food diet is a challenge.  And thats being nice. Whipping up a quick meal is also long gone.  These meals take planning and time to cook everything.  We all know I'm not the cook in this family and with Jon working long hours until fall, that spells disaster for me.

I put the real food idea on the back shelf for a bit.  Then I went to a party Saturday where that was one of the topics of conversation.  Then I heard people trading recipes on Sunday for something healthy.  Then we had lunch with Prasti on Monday who is a much healthier eater and she answered some questions.  So I took the hint and decided to start small.

The kids love pop tarts, bagels and cereal for breakfast.  I pulled up a few recipes, got some approved ingredients and made banana pancakes.  We've had them before and the kids liked them so I figured it would go well.  Sam was annoyed we weren't making waffles and Zach wasn't interested so it didn't go as smooth as I hoped, but we survived.  Lunch was pretty easy: cheese, triscuits and fruit was pretty close to a regular lunch.  I made hard boiled eggs and pulled out some vegetables for a snack. This was Wednesday, also our 9 year wedding anniversary, so we skipped the healthy and enjoyed Outback for dinner. Even with cheese fries and salad dressing, I lost just over a pound in one day.  Now we're on day 3.  Sam was completely annoyed he couldn't have a pop tart for breakfast and refused to eat.  I wont make them give up the junk all at once or maybe even completely, but on days where we have time to cook a good breakfast, we're going to do that.

We still have a lot of shopping to do to replace the bad ingredients, I haven't given up my diet pepsi yet and we need to research a ton of questions I have about some foods and recipes, but we're getting there...slowly.  You wont get anywhere if you don't take a step in the right direction.