Full Disclosure

This is a blog about our journey. And if you're reading this, you're part of it too.

Chick-Fil-A has half-price shakes every weekday.

Sonic has 2-for-1 floats after 8 p.m.

Dairy Queen has a Nutter Butter Blizzard this month.

I have a recipe for Peanut Butter Stuffed Hot Fudge Cupcakes burning a hole in my Recipes folder.

I've been a tad-bit angry today.

Why?

Because for the last four days, we've been on a restrictive fungus-eliminating diet.

The only sweet things we can have are green apples, lemons and berries.

Four days people.

With apples and berries.

We've had so many lemons.

In desperation, I even created a raspberry lemon concoction that we mixed with sparkling water. 

It actually wasn't that bad.

Don't get me wrong. 

Those fruits are good.

Just not as the only option for two weeks.

Supposedly, after two weeks, we'd either feel so good we wouldn't want to go back to eating the way we did or we probably weren't needing the diet that badly.

So today, at four days in, I was at the grocery store looking for fish for dinner tonight.

I was trying to source out the best option taking into account mercury, toxicity, etc.

I walked down the cookie aisle.

I almost cried.

Oreos.

Soft Batch.

I could eat a whole package on my way to the fish department.

People do that, right?

I wanted to grab a spoon and eat what looked like a container of whipped cream.

Then I left the grocery store and drove past a donut shop.

I thought about going in and buying a whole bag.

Just for me.

Of glazed.

And cake.

And chocolate.

Maybe some sprinkles.

I think I'm having an issue.

So, four days in, we're caving.

We don't do restrictive diets well.

To be fair to the diet, we have noticed some improvements with how our sinuses and skin feel, so it's not all bad.

But we figured we'd try going back to normal for a few days, see how we do and then get back on it if we start feeling badly again.

At least then we'll know we legitimately have to say no to the sugary goodness that we miss so much.

To top it off, I didn't get the fish thing figured out, so we're going out for dinner too.

Today is either a complete food fail or a complete food win, depending on how you look at it.

Berries vs. Blizzards. 

Maybe next time, berries. 

Recipes and Resources

I'm working toward stepping up the posting schedule since I've heard from several of you that it's too slow. I really appreciate all of the feedback and questions! Keep 'em coming!

I'll do a couple of posts answering some of the more common questions we've gotten.

For starters, recipes.

I'm the new kid on the block with this topic, so I rely on many other bloggers and what they've learned in the kitchen as starting points.

I hope to eventually have my own recipes on the blog, but for now, these links are my go-to's when I'm looking for inspiration.

As a bonus, not only do these links give you lots of recipes, but the blogs they're linked to are pretty great resources for techniques, research and practical tips. Consider it my gift to you.

http://www.passionatehomemaking.com/recipe-index

http://www.keeperofthehome.org/recipes

http://www.cheeseslave.com/recipes/

http://www.thenourishinggourmet.com/recipe-index

http://nourishedkitchen.com/recipe-index

http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/category/recipes/

http://www.organicspark.com/recipes/

http://thepurposedheart.com/in-the-kitchen/

http://girlinanapron.blogspot.com/p/recipes.html

Next up, resources.

Where do we get our food and how do we decide what to buy?

There are a few great websites that we did lots of research on when we first got started.

For milk and dairy:
http://www.realmilk.com/where1.html

For meat, eggs and dairy:
http://www.eatwild.com/products/index.html

For produce and other farm-related products:
http://www.localharvest.org/

There's also a little resource called the Weston A. Price Shopping Guide (description below from the Weston A. Price website):

Provides "best" and "good" recommendations for purchasing healthy foods (including brand and stores names) as well as foods to "avoid." Tucks easily into pocket or purse. Includes choices for those consumers whose only choice is supermarket food.

It's only $1 and can give lots of ideas on where to go for good food. (Just click on the "Order Materials" link on the right.)

Now if you live in the same city as we do and are interested in exactly where we buy what, here's how it breaks down (for specific farmer info, contact me and I'll hook you up):

Milk: We get whole, raw milk from a farm.

Chicken: We get whole pastured chickens from a couple different farms.

Beef: We made a big grassfed beef order from a farm that sells cuts as well as ground beef.

Eggs: They're from pastured chickens from the same farm where we get our milk.

Produce: It usually comes from the farmer's market, United, or Natural Grocers.

Coconut oil, herbs, spices, nuts and seeds, pantry items, etc.: We shop between HEB, Natural Grocers, Vitamins Plus (in Drug Emporium) or Mountain Rose Herbs.

That's a brief overview of the major food categories we shop from on a regular basis and where we usually end up making our purchases.

We're always learning and looking for new and better ways to shop, cook and incorporate more natural options without breaking the bank.

So, if y'all have any questions or suggestions on where to go for recipes and food sources, please share!

Dealing with a Few Myths

Before we get to the fat issue, there are a few things I need to clear up/confess.

Myth #1: Matt and I have this healthy eating thing down.

The reason this blog is title "Unnatural Journey to Natural Living" is because we are awkwardly working through what it looks like to put the knowledge we've discovered into practice.

This week alone, we've gotten fast food twice, had Cocoa Krispies for dinner one night and for breakfast the next morning.

Why were the Cocoa Krispies in the house, you ask?

Well, we needed them to make a little recipe called "Better-Than-Crack Brownies" which we polished off in a matter of days.

We have lettuce in the fridge that went uneaten, is past its prime and will be tossed.

We also have two half-gallons of Blue Bell in the freezer.

Do we have our act together? Not in the least.

So why are we putting this blog out there?

We want to share what we've learned and experienced because we've seen positive changes and results.

And as you can see from what's written above, if we can figure it out, surely anyone else can too.

Myth #2: If you can't stick with eating this way, just give up.

Oh how we fight this one.

I'm not going to lie.

It's hard to stick with eating things more traditionally.

It's more expensive.

It takes a lot more time/creativity/planning.

It's so much easier to just eat the brownies and the Cocoa Krispies and the ice cream and the fast food.

But here's the thing we've experienced when we do.

Do we feel great? Not really.

Are we struggling to stay trim. Yup.

When we go back to eating the way we're learning we should, we find our health and weight improve almost instantly.

When we fall off the wagon, we try to chase it down and jump back on.

Most of the time, we find it's not hard to get back after it and the rewards are worth it.

Myth #3: Eating more fat will raise your cholesterol and make you fat.

We actually have bloodwork proof on this.

It just so happens that every year at Matt's work, they do health screenings.

We got his numbers right before we switched to eating more traditionally and we got them again about a year later to compare.

After changing how we ate, he lost:
32 pounds
3 inches from his waist
4% body fat
3.6 BMI

Systolic blood pressure dropped 13 points
Diastolic blood pressure dropped 15 points

Total cholesterol stayed the same, but HDL (good kind) went up by 10 points, LDL dropped by 9 points and his triglycerides dropped by 8 points.

His cardiac risk ratio dropped from 4.1 to 3.2.

His glucose level dropped by 7 points.

So, in eating more fat, we found that we dropped weight and his blood pressure and cholesterol improved.

Below is a link to an article that explains how this phenomenon works much better than I could, along with advice on how to incorporate eating fat correctly.

Take the Fear Out of Eating Fat

Onto the Details

I'm one of those people who doesn't think to take "before" pictures of a project until I've already finished it and it's too late.

That's how this journey has been.

I didn't think to jot down what we did and when until we were so far along, it's hard to remember.

Before we launch into the details, I have a few disclaimers.

1. I'm no doctor. I don't have any nutrition training. I'm just a girl sharing our experience. Don't take my advice without doing your own research.

2. There are plenty of people out there who have done a lot more learning on this subject than I have. I'll link to some other blogs and sites from time to time when I feel like they have better facts than I do.

3. The title of this blog is "Unnatural Journey to Natural Living." Meaning, I may jump around. Because that's what this journey has looked like for us. We may get into some details and then I realize I need to fill y'all in on something I forgot. Bear with me.

Now that those are out of the way, here's how we got started.

When I last left you, I was baffled at how we were eating "healthy," yet not seeing stellar results.

So I began searching the internet.

I stumbled upon several blogs written by women just like me who were sharing their experience.

What's more, they were reporting that they had seen a reduction or elimination of symptoms similar to ours by just changing the way they ate.

I was intrigued.

What was more intriguing, they seemed to agree on the same eating plan.

That's unusual.

Normally, for every 10 people, there are 10 different ideas on how to improve.

The fact that they all seemed to agree struck a chord with me.

And then, we watched Food, Inc.

That documentary, along with several others, really opened our eyes.

The food industry is just that.

An industry.

They're out to make money.

Large profits.

They're not so concerned with the actual healthiness of what they're selling.

They just tell consumers what they want to hear to get them to hand over their cash.

Once we realized that, we began to question why we had placed so much trust in advertising.

We began to look at what food was intended to be.

Fuel.

Nourishment.

A way to grow and heal.

That's where the blogs and the documentaries collide.

The blogs I'd stumbled across were talking about a man named Weston A. Price.

He was a dentist who, in the 1930's, began to wonder why Americans' teeth and health were declining.

He went around the world and documented how other cultures that were less advanced than ours had better teeth and better health.

According to Wikipedia, "He argued that as non-Western groups abandoned indigenous diets and adopted Western patterns of living they also showed increases in typically Western diseases, and concluded that Western methods of commercially preparing and storing foods stripped away vitamins and minerals necessary to prevent these diseases."

Thus, he began documenting "traditional" foods.

Ways foods were prepared and eaten that provided the most nutrition.

Being a natural skeptic, I began to look into what he was saying.

What I was reading seemed to make a lot of sense.

I had three primary thoughts.

1. Somehow the world survived for centuries without things like margarine and low-fat, skim dairy. How did everyone not keel over from a heart attack? I don't know much about the old-fashioned ways of eating, but the little I do know seems to fly in the face of modern advice. Things like lard and bacon and butter and frying were pretty common, I believe.

2. People that are chiefly interested in profit are not as interested in helping people truly resolve their problems permanently. Kinda like the drug industry. They survive by selling pills to alleviate the symptoms of a problem rather than figuring out what causes the problem to begin with.

We saw an example of this recently on the show "Shark Tank."

There was a guy trying to get the panel to invest in some nasal filters that would prevent particles from getting into the body.

As part of their questions, one of the panel asked why he wouldn't just sell the idea to a drug company.

The guy responded by saying that he had "considered licensing the product to a major drug manufacturer, but he found out that they would rather buy his product and shelf it (not sell it) because they make more money by selling the drugs to cure the patient then (sic) to prevent the disease.*"

*(taken from http://inthesharktank.com/2011/03/shark-tank-premiers-biggest-offer/)

So it just makes sense that an industry isn't necessarily as interested in what would be the most beneficial as they are in what will make the most money.

3. What could it hurt to experiment with this way of eating? I had experimented with quite a few things over the years, so this would just be another one to check off the list.

If you're interested in getting started on some research, check out the Weston A. Price foundation's website.

There's all kinds of good info on his theories and eating recommendations.

http://www.westonaprice.org/

The biggest thing that changed for us was FAT.

As in, we ate MORE of it and found our bodies were carrying around LESS of it.

How could that be?

I'll do my best to answer that next time.

Every Journey Starts Somewhere Part 2

When we last left off, we had just been enlightened to the fact that maybe we couldn't just eat however we wanted and expect things to go well.

So we began changing our diet.

We cut out soda.

We cut out candy and almost all desserts.

We began checking labels.

Anything with trans fat or partially hydrogenated oil was out.

High fructose corn syrup was out.

We bought all whole-wheat everything.

Pasta.

Bread.

Tortillas.

Everything.

We began eating salads.

We bought some fruit.

We bought veggies.

Most of the stuff went bad before we ate it, but we were trying.

We tried juices that gave a serving of fruits and veggies in them.

Tomato sauce counted as a veggie most nights of the week.

We switched to low-fat.

Skim milk.

Low-fat/fat-free yogurt.

Cheese made with skim milk.

We ate more fiber.

The highest-fiber cereal we could find (that still had sugar in it...couldn't bring ourselves to eat the pellet kind with no taste).

High-fiber tortillas.

High-fiber snack bars.

We switched to ground turkey.

We didn't eat a lot of meat, but what we did eat was super lean.

We used canola oil and olive oil for all cooking.

The only things we didn't do were follow the low/no sugar craze (because we heard some scary things about the sugar substitutes) and ditch butter (couldn't bring ourselves to do margarine and butter just tasted better for baking, but we hardly used it in anything else).

Aside from those two things, we tried to be right in line with all the recommendations.

We bought products with the best ingredient lists we could find.

We waited to see our health improve and our weight drop.

It didn't.

We continued to see an ever-so-slight decline in how we felt and an ever-so-slight increase in what the scale read.

No big deal, right?

Maybe our metabolism was slowing down.

Maybe we're just not working out enough.

Maybe we're just coming in contact with more sick people.

If they sell over-the-counter medicine for the problems we're having, they have to be pretty common, right?

We were discouraged, but we figured we were just "normal" and couldn't do much about it.

Still, it bothered me. How could we be eating better than what was in most of the shopping carts we saw at Wal-Mart but still not be experiencing good health and effortless weight control?

My desire to know what was up led me to a whole new concept of eating.

I began looking at food for its nutrient value rather than for its convenience.

This became both exciting and challenging.

I’ve had to read, research and learn more than I imagined I would going into this. But the more I learn, the more I want to learn.

And I hope to share what I learn with you.

Every Journey Starts Somewhere Part 1

The idea for this blog started a few months ago, when Matt (my husband) lost quite a bit of weight and we were regularly answering the question "Is he sick?" followed by "What are y'all doing?"

This blog is intended to answer the question of what we're doing.

First though, I need to start by taking y'all back.

Back to the beginning.

So pull up a chair, get comfy and bear with me as I fill y'all in on where we've been.

It was a fairly easy transition.

Matt and I grew up loving vegetables.

We hardly ever ate sugar and hated all the processed junk that we hear so much about these days.

All we really had to do was just start cutting out a little more fat and we were good to go.

The weight dropped off.

Simple.

The end.

OR

Maybe not.

Maybe the story went a little more like this.

Matt and I hated vegetables growing up.

I remember many a meal, sitting at the table, not being allowed to leave until I cleaned my plate.

I remember one meal in particular being gumbo with okra in it.

I'm sure it was delicious.

My Dad's a great cook.

But I was having none of it.

One of my sisters (can't remember which one, but I have a hunch) and I were stuck at the table until we finished.

We were trying the strategy of eating a bite and downing it with Kool-Aid.

We drank so much Kool-Aid, I thought I was going to throw up. My sister might've.

To this day I still don't eat okra.

For one of my birthdays, I thought it would be awesome if each guest got their own roll of cookie dough along with their own personal pint of Blue Bell.

I may or may not have been slightly overweight in my preteen years.

According to Matt, he never ate vegetables. He threw them across the room instead.

Our hatred of veggies is one of the reasons we thought we were meant for each other.

We would live a veggie-less life and be happy.

When we got married, that's exactly what we did.

I also did the coupon thing.

I cut coupons every week and bought what was on sale and used the coupons to get stuff dirt cheap or free.

We loved our life on Hamburger Helper, Cocoa Puffs and Pizza Rolls.

And then the weight started creeping on.

No big deal, right?

That happens to everyone.

So we started hitting the gym.

We worked out pretty hard for a while which kept things under control but still slowly creeping up.

I became aware of how not eating veggies might make one happy, but not necessarily healthy.

We began to think about whether we wanted to make changes while we still had the option or wait until we had some health condition that made it mandatory.

I started paying attention to magazine articles and Today Show segments that informed me on how to eat healthy.

I took notes.

We also began having some health issues.

Nothing major.

Just a few infections here and there.

Headaches.

Allergies.

Acne.

Colds.

Just the normal stuff.

But because they were fairly persistent, I began looking at what we might be able to do to help ourselves without spending a lot of money on yet another doctor's visit and prescription, which would lead to more side effects and over-the-counter solutions.

I'm definitely no expert on anything, so I figured if I was hearing that there was another way to eat and live and be healthy, why not try it?

So how did we get started?

Where did we go from there?

More next time.