With all the talk about real food these days, I thought I would offer my version of making the switch. Of course, eating more eggs, raw cheese, grass-fed beef, nitrate-free bacon, and grass-fed butter is easy, right? Well, sure, eating the good stuff isn’t a problem; it’s eating the good stuff all the time and not eating the bad stuff is the more challenging part.

The basic idea

Generally speaking, I conceive of “the switch” as going in 7 steps, like this:

• STEP 1: Read labels and stop eating additives. These are things like MSG, high fructose corn syrup, artificial anything, preservatives, added color, lab-created soy ingredients. Essentially, ingredients that you couldn’t go out and hunt/pick for yourself. These are the things that can damage organs and have been shown to cause all manner of disruptions in proper body metabolism, digestion, and maintenance (see a list here). This means reading labels all the time…seems like a pain in the arse, and it will be, at first. But the more you do it, the more you’ll see just how much crap is in processed food, and you’ll get better at recognizing good food from bad. By reading labels you’ll also be able to find foods that don’t use additives, and you can eat them with confidence. As an example, if you love Oreos, try this. First, read the label. Then see if a store near you carries the brand “Back to Nature” (Publix carries it); pick up a box of their oreo-like cookies and read the label. Then buy ‘em and try ‘em. Delicious! Eliminating additives does not mean eliminating flavor.
• STEP 2: Eat more nutrient-dense foods. This is the easy part (unless you’re a vegetarian, but that’s a whole other ballgame). Eat more grass-fed butter, high-quality eggs, nitrite-free bacon, grass-fed meats, organic & local veggies, raw milk cheeses, raw milk if you can, coconut oil, etc. These are the foods that Weston Price identified in his work as the ones creating vibrant health, and subsequent research has confirmed that they give us the most bang for our nutritional buck (see a full list here).
• STEP 3: Learn to cook. Hopefully, the more good foods you eat and the less additives you eat will make you want to do more of both. This will mean learning to cook—it isn’t that hard, no matter how busy you are!—and learning to plan ahead a bit. But the payoff, in the form of darn good meals, will be worth it. The payoff in improved health is even more worth it! The more you cook, the more it becomes a habit. Stop eating fast food, and start getting into the habit of making your own food to have on the go (once you get used to eating real food, which is so incredibly full of flavor, you won’t want to eat the flat, tasteless garbage that is sold as “fast food”). You won’t even want “snack foods” anymore, or rarely, because once you add good fats into your diet via real food, you won’t want extra food in between your delicious meals!
• STEP 4: Eliminate most sugar. Sugar, even natural sweeteners, can wreck havoc with your blood sugar and the ripple effect in the body is toxic. Especially if you’ve been eating the “standard American diet” for a long time, you’ve been ingesting way too much sugar. It’ll take time to wean yourself off of it, but as you do, you’ll feel so good you won’t find it difficult. Happily, as you eat more good fat, you’ll find that the carbs you take in from natural sources (potatoes, yams, carrots, etc) will be filling enough. Just be sure that when you do eat natural carbs, you eat them with plenty of fat. Whenever you need a sweet fix, try something like a slice of homemade, long-fermented bread slathered in butter and with honey on top. One of my favorite ways to feed the craving!
• STEP 5: Eat seasonally & locally by supporting small farms. This requires getting to know your area and what grows when, meeting farmers and growers, and questioning food stores so that you know exactly where all of your food came from. Your local supermarket probably carries a few local fruits & veggies, but local farmer’s markets are better places to buy from. Support the family directly! Also, when you’re ready to switch to only grass-fed beef, you’ll have to get to know local farms, as that will probably be the only way to find grass-fed meat. Grass-fed isn’t a farming method that is used in mass-produced meat, so forget buying national brands. You might think there isn’t anyone near you offering grass-fed meat, but you’d be surprised. I recently discovered a farm in southern Georgia that delivers all the way down here to west central Florida! I do have closer options, but it’s good to know that there are more people than I’d thought doing it all the right way. Also, by patronizing local farmers and growers, I feel that I can be more assured of a quality product; big national companies can, and do, put out inferior products and/or sicken people with alarming regularity. A small local farm? If they do that just once, they’re out of business. Small operations are much more committed to giving you a quality product, earning your trust, and hopefully earning your repeat business.
• STEP 6: When eating out, learn what’s an acceptable compromise and what isn’t. At some point, you’ll need to (or want to) eat out. If you’re like me, you’ll do the “eating crap just this once won’t matter” routine, eat the crap, feel like crap for days after, and swear not to do it again. After I did that the first three times, I decided to figure out what I should & shouldn’t eat when I eat out, and now I can go out with friends and have a good time without being “that girl” who won’t eat & drinks only water. I’ll post more about this topic in the future, since I think it’s something people struggle with, as I did.
• STEP 7: All real food, all the time. This is the ideal to work toward, and obviously requires a complete commitment to your health and a shift in thinking about food and our relationship to it. It forces us to slow down and plan ahead, two things we’ve been trained out of doing. (Warning: this stage might start to alter your perspective on more than food.)

So that’s it in a nutshell. I’ll write next about a more detailed switch plan, but for now I hear some bacon & eggs calling my name.

Whoops…I’m a bit late posting my next month’s self-challenges…heh. *blush*

As for the January self-challenges, I “won” two out of three. I’d posted already that I decided to forego the no-TV challenge, since I just missed it too much. NOT the ads and NOT the news—I refuse to watch either (egads, I’ve become my father…I mute commercials!). But there are a handful of shows I just really enjoy watching, and since during the day I’m usually writing or doing chores or cooking or tending the gardens, I really do like sitting down to watch Bones or Chuck or Fringe or Lost (other favs include Extreme Makeover Home Edition, Big Bang Theory, Human Target, and Cougar Town). Sometimes I knit or crochet while watching, sometimes I’ll do pixel art on the computer. But I enjoy following along with those stories enough that I’m not yet ready to let them go (I wanna know how they end! ).

As for line-drying laundry…not only am I still doing it, but I really enjoy it. A lot. Ok, ok, I’m weird. I admit it. But I thought I’d made that clear already? (No? I haven’t? Well, here ya go: I’m an odd duck!) There is something soothing about hanging laundry and taking in dry, sun-warmed laundry that I enjoy. I actually had to use the dryer one time because a blanket I’d washed, one favored by Bast, still had lots of cat hair on it. So I used the dryer on a no-heat setting so as to remove the extra hair. But I resented having to use it; I need to figure out a way to remove cat hair without it (and without going through a lint roller a day). There has to be a way, surely…

And the January real food self-challenge was successful…hence this blog.

So for February, here are the three goals I’d like to make:

1. Learn to make real bread from scratch and make all the bread that I and my roommate eat. So far, so good on making the bread. Right now I’m learning how often I need to bake a loaf so that there is always bread. My roommate loves this goal of mine, lol. She loves the bread so much that she said she now refuses to buy store-made, so I better keep making more bread! lol! We’re splitting the cost of flour, too, so it works out really well. And the better I’m getting at the dutch oven method, the easier it is to keep loaves coming.
2. Make my own kombucha. I’d forgotten how much I love kombucha until I bough a couple of bottles this week. Ooooh man, that’s good stuff. But NOT cheap. Happily, it appears to be super duper easy to make your own, so I’m going to use that recipe and try it very soon. I’ve got everything I need (organic tea, bottle of raw kombucha, big jars), so next week I’m going to start growing my own SCOBY and then after that, brew my first batch. I’ll use organic fruit juice when I first make it, so that I get the hang of the process, but very soon I plan to collect tangerines from my neighbor’s tree (he’s got a huge tree full of fruit that he never eats, and has told me to take all I want), juice them, and make tangerine kombucha. Mmmm!
3. Make my own sauerkraut. I’ve had this on my to-do list forever! But now I’ve got cabbage in my fridge and I don’t want it to go bad…so it’s gonna be shredded and mashed and left to ferment very soon. I’ve been craving sauerkraut, but I refuse to buy any, since making it is so simple and I just won’t buy the pasteurized kind. There is no reason why I haven’t made it yet besides the fact that it just keeps getting pushed down the to-do list. Therefore, I make it a self-challenge so that I have to do it, and soon.

Whoops, I better go mix up more dough…bread’s getting low around here!