Our journey with food

The past year has been quite a food journey for our family. We began with out shopping cart (or "buggy" as I like to call it) filled like many other American families. Snacks with all sorts of favorite children's cartoons gracing the front of the box, Easy-Mac, canned fruits and veggies, frozen meals, and an assortment of meat, cheese, and fresh produce. It got to the point where we were eating a LOT of junk and the kids were snacking instead of eating healthy meals. Slowly and surely we ended up in this place and I saw it as a failure on my part. So, I overhauled our food and eating habits. I stumbled upon a "real food" way of eating and decided this was the best idea for us.
I was inspired by the blog "100daysofrealfood.com" and Michaels Pollan's book In Defense of Food. There are several guidelines for "real food" diets but in very simple terms you eat, well, FOOD. Not "food" containing things you wouldn't normally keep in the pantry, products containing more than 5 ingredients, and things that contain ingredients a child could not pronounce. There is a focus on eating locally grown products and living in Italy, this was easy enough to do. We can walk to a local markets and buy fresh, real food. There were some significant challenges. First of all, Greg needed to be on board. He eats whatever I make, so that part was easy, but it was a food lifestyle change and I needed support. He got on board, I think with the assumption this would only last a few days. :). I had to find snacks my picky 5 year old would eat, and raw carrots weren't going to cut it. All of the store bought snacks- cheese-its, goldfish, fruit snacks, animal crackers- were out. I was left with pretzels and Triscuits. This is where I took a deep breath and found recipes to make graham crackers, cheese crackers, popcorn balls, and anything else I could find that would please the kids and still stay true to what we were doing. It was a challenge to find ingredients for a recipe that were only made if 5 ingredients. Have you seen the ingredient lists on condiments? Have you made sure you could pronounce every ingredient on your canned beans? What about your bread? My time in the grocery store seemed to double, because I was having to read every food label. Finally, I had to cook EVERYTHING. We did give way to this occasionally, as we are living in Italy, the land of delicious food.
I honestly don't remember how long all of this lasted. It seemed like a lifetime, but it was probably only a few months. Eventually a loaf of white bread landed in our bread basket (it was magic, I certainly didn't buy it) followed by a comment something along the lines of... Our kids shouldn't have to eat grilled cheese on that nasty bread.
We slowly began drifting closer to a balanced way of eating. I was still making some snacks, but buying others. I was still reading labels and was at least making informed decisions on what we were eating. Things we were eating before our "real food" way of life now became occasional treats. This was much more realistic for us.
Once we had the balancing act figured out, Greg and I signed up for Weight Watchers. We each had 20 lbs we wanted to lose, and we have had past success with the program. All of this year has been up and downs with weight loss, healthy eating, and not so healthy eating- I don't even want to talk about how many points a Tablespoon of olive oil is. Greg met his goal a several months ago and I still have 2 lbs to lose.
It has been a learning experience for me, and I'm very grateful for it. I want to feed my family in the best way possible, and I feel like I am closer to that than ever before. Even though the "real food" didn't fully stick, I still use many of the guidelines and consider myself an informed shopper. For me, it was a good place to start and I have been able to make adjustments to what works best for our family.