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you are what you eat part 6

you are what you eat part 6 – after a year and a half, what we’ve learned

this is part 6 (and the last installment) of a healthy eating series, to read the rest go here: Read part one hereread part two hereread part three here,read part four here and read part five here.

if you are reading this post for the first time, be sure to check out our whole journey above.

now that we’ve been a year all natural, here are a few things we’ve learned:

i get WAY less headaches. i’ve tried and tried to create food journals over the years to figure out why i get random headaches (i.e. i’m not tired, dehydrated, pmsing, stress or had one too many glasses of wine) and i could never put my finger on it. over this past year and a half, i pretty much only get one headache a month (you know, that time…), and sometimes i don’t even get that one! what’s nice is that going all natural has just fixed that problem for me. now i don’t even have to bother with figuring it out and avoiding that one thing because i just avoid all those things that were bad for me anyway!

we both lost weight. this may sound obvious, but that wasn’t our purpose for doing this. we lost weight as a side effect of eating healthy and it wasn’t because of doing a ‘diet’ for a short period of time, counting calories, or working out more. all we did was create new habits!

habits are easier to keep up when you meal plan. meal planning has always been a huge struggle for me. you would think that a two person family would be easy, but when my husband says he’s fine with oatmeal for dinner most nights, it’s hard to be motivated to cook ever. but i know that we need to get in good habits before children or else we’ll never get into good habits. another problem with meal planning for us is that i’ll have it all set up and then one of us will just not be hungry for a full meal or we’ll go out with friends and i have to push everything back and since i’m still learning to cook, it’s tough to rearrange things. but i’m learning to be flexible and just make sure to use everything i buy. so the meal planning is still a work in progress but we’re definitely getting there!

this leads me to the pantry challenge. i saw one of my friends was doing this on facebook and thought it was a great idea. you take inventory of everything in your cupboards (which was a shocking amount since i feel like we never have food!) and then you make sure to only buy fresh items to go with those things you already have. you have to get creative and it really forces you to pay attention to what you have. my favorite part about it is that it prevents food waste! i hate wasting food when there are so many people who don’t have any, it seriously kills me to throw away a bunch of expired food that i paid good money for. so i did this for a few weeks, and it was fun!

balance…one of the hardest things about changing your diet so dramatically (sad that going all natural kind of feels like a dramatic change, it’s not like i went vegan!) is finding a balance with others. what i mean is that you can completely control what you cook and buy for daily things, but if you go over to a friend’s house for dinner or go out to eat at a place that is likely to have ‘no’ list items, it makes it tough. on the one hand you really don’t want to go back to eating certain things or getting symptoms from troublesome foods, but you also don’t want to be rude. we’ve decided that we will do everything in our power to eat an all natural and organic diet, but at the same time, we don’t want anyone to bend over backwards to try to figure out meals they can make for us. we’re also not going to be ‘those people’ at a restaurant asking a million questions about ingredients (but that’s mostly because i’m afraid i’ll get an extra special ingredient if they don’t like me…)

this wraps up my series on healthy eating! i’m sure i’ll post some about my garden which has helped a lot this summer, and other projects related, but i’ll leave you with a very cool video from chipotle’s ad campaign. i haven’t researched anything about what they really use in their food, but i just love the commercial and the story they tell, enjoy!