Real food!

So today, after parusig through some of my favorite healthy eating blogs, I decided to attempt to go back to clean eating again. About a year ago, after discovering 100 Days of Real Food,  I tried to go 10, and then 30, and then just plain "go" clean. I'm not exactly sure how long I did it for, but I guess was about 80% clean for awhile.

Lately, weight watchers has not only caused me to cook a lot more healthy and delicious meals, but unfortunately also caused me to start purchasing some "healthier" processed or diet foods. For example, the WW snacks, pretzels, diet soda, fat free string cheese, fat free cream cheese, Special K granola bars, etc. None of these things are unhealthy, in fact, they are all 0-2 WW points, but they are definitely not real food. To add, Marvin loves having some highly processed foods lying around the house that I try to hide, but eventually wind up sharing; ice cream, various candy like m&ms, snickers, twixs, blowpops, cheese puffs, white bread, ritz crackers, coke, higher sugar cereals, pudding, and more. Yikes, when I typed  it all out and look at it, it scares me a little how unhealthy he can eat! So I carefully approached the topic of going clean this afternoon, and he actually really liked the idea. We decided that for now, we're not going to buy any more non-real foods. We're not about to waste anything either, so once we eat the remaining processed foods, they will not be replaced! Some things that we ARE going to continue eating that are sort of controversial on the "real food" list are:

-100% whole grain bread & pasta (I rarely eat this anyway, but he has sandwiches pretty much every day)

-Gluten free (made from brown rice) pasta & brown rice

-Peanut butter (but all the all natural one with only 3 ingredients)

-Dairy, including and limited to:

---Organic whole milk and organic half & half for coffee

---Cheese, but only full fat cheese and going to try to stick to parmesan only

---Yogurt, but only Fage 2% or whole (I'm not sure I could stomach the full fat)

-Coffee (some real foodists eliminate caffeine completely, but we really love coffee and we only buy local fresh beans and grind them ourselves

-Beer and red wine (beer is techinically not allowed, but red wine is! We drink a lot of mixed drinks though so this might be tough).

Obviously these foods are in addition to meat, fruits, and veggies, which will dominate (and already do) our meals.

I was feeling really excited so when we got home from grocery shopping I "cleaned out" the pantry and the fridge - meaning- I didn't actually throw anything out, just sort of seperated everything and bagged up a bunch of things to bring to work and attempt to give away.

All of the processed foods that were {and still are) in my pantry. Crazy right! And I thought I was healthy :-(

Remaining "real" foods that were left

Fridge door (a magnet for processed foods). After rearranging, ONLY the top shelf  was left with real food! (organic unsalted butter, plain seltzer, homemade salad dressing, mustard, polaner all fruit jam, sesame oil & soy sauce).

 

And right now, in the crockpot is Honey Sesame chicken from Skinnytaste! Jul- weird that we both had this one on our list, I'll let you know how it is!