I’ve talked about fake food at some length now.  Here, here, well….over here, and here…wait, and here.  A few friends over coffee or lunch have asked me how I got the fake food out of our diet.  And I wholeheartedly agree that at first, it seemed like an overwhelming proposition.  But now that we’ve changed our diet, I can lay it out for you, step by step.  My friend Lydia swears she’s starving, but I can promise you, you won’t starve.  After a while, the decision to put down the Doritoes gets easier to make.  That being said, we are going on vacation, and I did pack some mini-bags of Doritoes!  I’m a realist, not a purist. So at the request of my dear friend Ana Paula, here is the order in which I took out the fake.  This was our personal ordering of things, and it was complete happenstance.  If you are trying to clean up your pantry, do whatever order rings true for you.  This list has taken me 3 very full years, so patience is a virtue.  I didn’t get cancer and start feeling like crap overnight, and it has taken me the full 3 years to really start feeling great again (and I do feel great).

1. High Fructose Corn Syrup, not because it is evil (although I secretly harbor suspicions that it is), but because those foods tend to have a lot of sugar in them.  Log Cabin Syrup and Arnold bread are 2 brands that don’t have it.  It’s nearly impossible to find HFCS free syrup and bread!

2. No more canned fruit or vegetables.  We do eat frozen veggies on occasion.  Fresh is a commitment of time, but you get the reward of flavor and health.  My personal bend on it: if it looks mushy and gross, it probably isn’t all that good for you.

3. Out with the hormones in the milk and meat.  This choice was a no-brainer.  I don’t give a hooey what the FDA says about hormones.  They don’t add flavor.  They aren’t vitamins.  They make the animals sick, meaning a) that’s cruel, and b) I don’t eat sick animals.  Ew.  Not to mention, they are outlawed overseas, so someone agrees with me.

4. Free Range Eggs, again, a no-brainer.  I didn’t do a ton of research.  Stressed out chickens lay stressed out eggs.  Healthy chickens=healthy eggs.  I’ve heard the argument from some large farmers that free range chickens get eaten by foxes, and that’s true.  But if I were a chicken, I’d rather take my chances on the range, than spend my life in a tiny cage getting pooped on by the bird above me.

5. Sugar, ah, the perpetual struggle.  I shoot for no more than 6 or 7 grams per serving on snacks.  We have much less in our cereal, and I won’t tolerate it in oatmeal.  I absolutely never, under any circumstances, let my kids eat fake sugar.  Saccharin, aspartame, Splenda….that crap will kill you slowly.  You have to be careful when reading labels re: sugar because naturally occurring fructose and lactose will raise those levels, making it hard to read a yogurt label for example.  In that case, I pick up a bunch of them and go for the lowest number.  We still have probably too much sugar in our jam, but I make it myself, and am so partial to the flavor.  The girls love, love, love their PB&J’s (well, SB&J’s…we eat Sunbutter), and now I am emotionally attached to a food.  Ugh. Can’t win ’em all. Warning: when you shop at Whole Foods or Organic Markets, you have to still read the labels.  Sugar sneaks its way into “organic” foods like a thief in the night!

4. Nitrates.  No big reason other than I can no longer digest anything with a nitrate in it.  I mourned hot dogs for a long time until I realized that nitrate free hot dogs are readily available in grocery stores.  The girls and I can’t get over how much better they taste.  Sorry Lydia, this house hasn’t seen bologna in a year.  The kids never loved it anyway.

6. Out with the food dyes.  This effort has been my latest “kick”.  I started with some research, and it did not take me long to realize that while nothing has been proven, food dyes are vaguely linked to enough cancers and neurotoxicities to float a barge of death.  America’s kids are fat and sick.  I have friends calling me left and right about tics, sensory issues, Autism spectrum disorders, seizures…really?  Do you remember any of this when you were a kid?  I don’t.  I can’t tell you that food dyes cause these illnesses, but I can tell you they are outlawed in too many countries to list.  I’m not the only person who suspects “vaguely linked” is enough to decide it might be poison and why on earth would I take that chance?  Seriously FDA, why would I want to EAT something that may or may not be, a poison?! It’s like playing Russian Roulette with my life, every single meal. Edy’s has a great dye-free, preservative-free popsicle that the girls swear is 10x better than any popsicle they’ve ever eaten.  Tell me if you can find a pie crust or relish…those are 2 things I have yet to replace successfully.

So what do we eat outside of the whole foods dinners? Cereal, granola bars, nuts, cheese, fruit, bread with honey, yogurt and granola, popsicles, chicken nuggets, ravioli…we eat pretty normal stuff.  We just choose the brands by reading the labels first.  I put more back than I buy when I walk through a store (except Whole Foods who sells nothing with a nitrate or dye, making shopping expensive, but a lot easier), and that can be frustrating and time consuming.  Because we eat primarily fresh food, I don’t have a ton of food in the house at any one time.  I go to the grocery too much.  The only thing I can buy at Wal-Mart these days is Tide. BUT, I feel great.  My kids feel great and rarely get sick.  We’re a normal size.  Am I in perfect health?  I wish.  Life is process and a journey.  So I’m hopeful, and in the end, every year, I feel better and better.  Won’t you join me?