Most people wish they ate healthier meals. I am one of them. For various reasons our household needs to cut down on sugar and also things that cause cholesterol. Rather than get stuck on medication for life it seems that changing your diet may accomplish keeping you off the meds. But… There is so much conflicting information.
Eggs are good, eggs are bad, dairy is good, dairy is horrible for you, chicken causes cancer. OMG. It’s enough to make you give up everything. I research. That’s what I do. The more I research the worse it gets. I do not have enough of a medical or nutrition background to know what’s true and what isn’t and even documented medical studies have conflicting results.
What’s a person to do? I think you have to follow your gut feeling. I know two things. When you change what you eat, it can’t be a diet because you won’t follow it for the rest of your life. It has to be something that you are willing to make into a life change. The second thing is that it has to be easy because otherwise you won’t follow it. So, one, easy, life change…check!
What else do I know? I know at one point for about 5 years I did not eat red meat. I felt better at that time and I lost weight as well. Why did I go back? Friends and dates would take me to various steak houses and what is the saying “when in Rome”. I always enjoyed a good steak so it wasn’t hard to start eating red meat again. See, hard to follow so I stopped.
For the longest time I did not drink anything with caffeine in it. Not a big deal. I could have decaf coffee or tea and decaf soda or other drinks. Then when I got into my early 30’s, bam, migraines. They were frequent and lasted for days and nothing helped. I knew caffeine helped with them so I started drinking my coffee with caffeine. I usually only have a cup or two a day and at least natural caffeine is better, in my mind, than taking medication. I still get migraines but not as often, maybe I get one a month or every other month depending on my stress levels. And I still drink one or two or no more than three cups of coffee a day.
So, where do we go from here. For the last couple weeks, we hardly had any meat or processed food at all and everyone has commented that they feel better. I think I gained a few pounds and I am not sure how that happened LOL.
I never liked labels of any kind so I am not going to label the new way of eating. We are severely cutting back on meat, eating a lot more vegetables and legumes and cutting back on things that mess with your insulin levels. There are tons of great vegetarian recipes out there, just check my Pinterest boards. Lots of great blogs and cookbooks are available too. I am cooking things we like, using lots of lentils and chickpeas, spinach and other goodies. Yes, we are eating potatoes and rice but it has to be something we can keep up with. I am trying to find healthier carbs that work well with what we like to eat. If we feel like having meat once in a while then we will. We still cook with eggs and cheese. I use real sugar or monk fruit and that works well. I have an issue with the whole no sugar concept. I still drink a soda now and then but try to mostly keep with water or seltzer. And guess what, no one misses the meat. Other things are just as tasty and filling.
We started making homemade dough for pizza, biscuits, pretzels, pasta and bread. We need to cut back on those too but at least making it from scratch means that we know what’s in it. Next I am hoping to be able to make my own ice cream and maybe even try some of the keto ice cream recipes that seem to be a bit of a healthier option. I just find it hard to deal with all these odd ball ingredients that people come up with, it has to be easy to get and easy to use.
Now if only I could find a way to enjoy exercise. Guess you can’t have it all.
I’ll let you know how it effects our weight, A1C’s and cholesterol as time goes on. And most important, I will let you know if we can keep it up and it becomes a lifestyle change. When I find a great a recipe I may post it here as well.