Au natural

In this ongoing education on how to view food differently, one of my priorities has been to keep it basic. Where I used to use the crutches of diet food - you know... food that was like the food I used to eat but altered to be "healthier" (i.e. sugar free cookies, etc), I've now tried to switch those foods for foods that are naturally healthy rather than filled with substitute ingredients.

I figure any natural source of sweetness in fruits and the like would be preferable to artificial sweeteners, and those should be the foods that I should want to eat. The problem with eating all those "cheat" foods is that I still want to eat those things that aren't particularly healthy for me, so it's just easier to reach for those foods that really should hold a very small place in my life as a crutch to get through the day to day.

So I decided, especially during this first month of "detox", to avoid these potential pitfalls. But the thing was, I didn't see it that way when I made that decision. Like I said at the onset, I was simply trying to find the healthier, more natural alternative.

Only now after about ten days of these new eating habits can I see the inherent wisdom of that choice. Not only am I breaking the dependence on those things, I'm developing a new taste and new desire for these other things like fresh fruit. Not only has this had an emotional payoff in the lack of "eaters remorse" for giving in and plowing through a bag of cookies or chips, but it has also had a physical payoff in the way my body functions. Even as sick as I've been, I feel better overall with more energy and more enthusiasm.

The sun has broken through the cloud, as it were. Instead of trudging through life feeling like I was stuck in three feet of mud, I have the energy (and desire) to actively participate in my life instead of watch it pass by from the sidelines.

As someone who has taken anti-depressants before I can tell you this is *exactly* the same feeling I got from a pill... only this time I'm not taking a pill, but choosing to fill my body and essentially my vessel with the right kinds of fuel.

It's really quite remarkable.

I'm feeling so good in fact, I'm kinda paranoid about the potential pitfalls coming up in the next few months with all the holiday triggers to fall back into sugar dependence.

Halloween - candy. Thanksgiving - pies. Christmas - cookies. New Year's - booze.

It makes me want to avoid all these things even though the argument could be made that I can enjoy some of these things in moderation if I can contain it to just those days. Because that's the heart of this healthier eating - I'm not doing it because I "can't" eat those things. I'm doing it because by choosing NOT to eat those things I feel better long after that momentary satisfaction of giving into those triggers.

As long as I keep it my choice, I'm not prey for those deprivation issues that always seem to be my undoing.

Therefore I'm thinking it might be more valuable to me to avoid those temptations altogether just once just to show that I can. If I do give in and indulge for these specific dates, I'm not only opening the door for future excuses to indulge, I'm also literally feeding into the dependence part in my brain that says I can't enjoy these holidays without these foods.

Which, I know intellectually, is complete and utter baloney.

So my challenge then is to find healthier alternatives for these holiday challenges. My requirements: make it more vegetable/fruit specific, and if I use sweeteners of any kind they're going to be natural ones. If I have any recipes that require sweeteners, instead of white granulated sugar, get as basic and raw as I can. I found a great article on natural alternatives that will give me new strategies on how to approach baking - which I love to do.

I'll keep you updated on what I discover. Hopefully the fam will be along for the ride as I make these exciting new changes. Fortunately for me my seventeen year old is a lot more open to embrace this new lifestyle and, like me, has adopted a more "flexitarian" approach. This is particularly exciting for me because he has my same propensity for obesity, and I feel like giving him these tools at this young age will help him avoid getting as far gone as I have done.

Because changing these destructive patterns after decades of poor choices is a lot harder. Undoing nearly forty years of damage is a lot of hard work and concentrated, focused effort.

Thankfully though... not impossible.

And I'm totally equipped for the challenge.