What's on MY plate?

I haven't been the best blog writer these days. There's no excuse except to say, I'm busy! Who's not?! The last 6 months I've been training hard for my first triathlon (in June) and Duathlon (in Sept). While I've been a healthy eater for a long time- the training put a whole new spin on things for me. After losing 10 pounds in 4 weeks, I knew I needed to change things up in my diet. Sure, I was eating healthy, and constantly, but was I eating enough, and the right mix of food?

 My schedule revolved around eating to live, not living to eat, like usual.  I wasn't being creative with meals, just doing the basics. In this time I did a lot of reading... and now I want to share with you some of what I've learned. Sure, this blog is mostly about food, but it's also about living a healthy lifestyle.

In general, you could say that I'm moving towards Natural Eating. My thoughts about this started to change, when I had a flash back to an Essential Oils seminar that I went to this past winter. For over a year now, I've been using essential oils instead of lotions and perfume. Then a few months ago- I decided to spray some perfume on before I went out, within an hour I had red itchy bumps on my arms where I had sprayed. I thought back to my seminar, when the speaker talked about how absorbant your skin is, and why would you use perfume, it's just dumping chemicals into your bloodstream. Long story short- if I'm not willing to put chemicals on my skin, why am I eating them?!

This led me to really cutting back on low-fat and no-fat foods. Realizing that to replace the flavor that comes with fat, manufactures tend to use salt, sugar and  chemicals to make up the taste. Yuk! How is THAT healthy? I'll would rather work off the tablespoon of real cream in my coffee, than make my body process and detox a non-dairy creamer (um... what is it??)! Same goes with sugar. Give me the real stuff, plain and simple, most of the "natural" sugar substitutes are created by chemical processes anyway.

So then I started finding lots of info on the Real Food Movement. Some of my friends, and followers participated in the 10 day Real Food Challenge. To put it simply; you eat real food! :) Anything that comes out of a can, box, bottle or bag, should have less than 5 ingredients. This sounds simple, but take a look at the ingredients on your loaf of bread! Then, check out your jar of peanut butter. More than 5 ingredients, right? And what are some of those words even mean? It goes straight back to the old saying... if you can't pronounce it- you shouldn't eat it! I encourage you to spend more time reading labels and enjoying real food.

So that's where I am at today. Enjoying more real food. Stay tuned, and stay healthy!