Lifestyle Change



Real food. This has become our recent obsession.

A few weeks ago, I was browsing through Pinterest(that never-ending rabbit hole of ideas) and quite by accident stumbled across a blog called 100 Days of Real Food. This unintentional find has sparked an entire lifestyle change in the eating habits of Michael and me.

We have always been pretty health conscious. We watch what we eat, we exercise, we try to maintain a certain level of fitness. This shared interest was one of the things that attracted us to each other as far back as dating. Ever since The Wreck, however we have gotten a little lax on eating right and exercising. It started slowly when I wasn't physically able to do our own cooking or go to the gym, and as the months passed we just sort of forgot how we used to eat and work out. As I regained the use of my arm and hand, I realized that I had lost the passion to work out(was it because I wasn't as strong, couldn't endure as long, intimidated to get back to the gym after so long an absense? I don't know.) and I continued to cook the fatty, processed foods that were easiest and least expensive. After a few months of this, we began to slowly come to the realization that our energy levels were way below what they used to be and that the numbers on the scale were creeping upward while our pants sizes seemed to be increasing. We both knew we should make a change in our habits, but it was easier said on the couch in front of the tv than done.

This all proved to be fertile ground for the discovery of 100 Days of Real Food. The premise of this idea is that most of the food in the American food industry is so overloaded with preservatives, artificial additives, hormones, and chemically injected ingredients that most of what we are eating does not even qualify to be REAL food. Take a look at the ingredients list on the items in your pantry. We did. And were shocked. Shocked at the discovery that over three-quarters of what we were feeding our bodies we could not even pronounce. After a day of serious discussions with each other over our bodies and our health we decided to make the change and pledge to eat only REAL food. We went through our pantry and freezer and threw away, yes I did say threw away, everything that had more than 5 unpronouncable ingredients or ingredients that include refined, processed items(such as high fructose corn syrup). When we finished, I stared open mouthed at the barrenness of our larder and almost despaired. What on earth were we going to eat??

Thankfully Lisa Leake's treasure chest of a blog is a priceless resource of information, ideas, recipes, articles, resources, advice, and encouragement to people like us who are new to the lifestyle. She encourages you to take a 10 day or 100 day pledge to only eat real food, but we decided to just change our eating habits cold turkey, without any trial period. What a difference that alone has made in our life. We both have already lost several pounds and our energy levels have skyrocketed, not to mention our passion for fitness and exercising has returned full-throttle. We started P90X, which we completed in its entirety  before we got married, and have been doing strength, cardio, and flexiblity exercises daily. In addition to only eating whole food, we are also doing the P90X nutrition plan, which basically tells you how many servings of which food group to eat in a 24 hour period in order to shred fat and have enough energy to perform the workouts.Already I am seeing the muscle definition that we used to be proud of begin to return.

This will begin our fourth week of our lifestyle change. I honestly didn't know we would make it this far. It was so hard at first. We had questions like, "Can we eat out?" "What can we eat if we eat out?" "What do we buy from the supermarket?" "Oh my goodness, are all whole foods THIS expensive??" "What do you mean I can only  have 1 serving of carbs a day?? That's the equivalent to 2 slices of wheat bread!!" But the shopping for whole foods, the knowledge about how much of each food group we can eat a day, and the meal planning is getting easier. At the beginning of each week I type out a meal plan in a spread sheet that details our daily portions for each meal and exactly what we're going to eat. Then we prepare all meals for the upcoming day the night before and store them in individual portion size containers. I'm not going to lie, it is time-consuming, fixing our meals plus the hour and a half workouts leaves us with very little "down" time in the evenings. Honestly though, we've come to enjoy spending time together in the kitchen doing something productive and knowing that it is best for our health in the long term.

I feel that this post is getting rather long, so if you would like more information what real food is, how to get started, health benefits of eating whole food, or reasons to take the pledge, I beg you to visit http://www.100daysofrealfood.com/.  Also, for more information about P90X or to preorder P90X II like we did, go to www.beachbody.com/p90x.

I'll leave you with some examples of our favorite whole foods lately that we have been eating.

Breakfast:

Turkey Bacon

Egg scramble with bell peppers and onions

Protein shake (frozen fruit, skim milk, 1 scoop whey protien)

Lunch:

Tuna with carrots, bell peppers, and a tiny squirt of dijon mustard

Shredded chicken

Salad greens with homemade whole food dressing

Deli ham

Snack:

Cottage cheese

Organic plain yogurt

Fruit

Mozzarella cheese

Homemade trail mix

Peanut butter

Supper:

Roasted shrimp (one of our favorites)

Roasted broccoli

Whole chicken in a crock pot

Turkey burger (with or without a bun depending on whether we've already had our 1 serving of carb for the day)

Stir fry veggies

Homemade sweet potato fries

Beverages:

Skim milk

Unsweet tea

Coffee

Water with lemon