If you're like me you're seeing a lot of platters that look like this and are oh, so good! For our family the goodie season is about to kick in for real and the baking has begun. I'm totally guilty of luring my children home for the holidays with promises of homemade lasagna, Swedish pecans, gingerbread and butter cookies... but I can do this now without feeling totally miserable about how I look. A friend of mine went shopping at one of my favorite stores for me and sent me a new Christmas dress and since I only wear one size these days, it fit! And no it wasn't made by Omar the Tentmaker like days of yore.
In my past I was guilty of a lot of nutrition mistakes even though I'm a nurse and took college coursework ( and got an A) in Nutrition. First of all, back then (yes, it was the stone age), there were 4 food groups and one of them was the bread cereal group. So my boys were raised on meals that featured meat, vegetables, fruit and almost every evening something from the Pillsbury Dough Boy was sitting on the table from crescent rolls to biscuits to breadsticks. When I was a single Mom, working and going to school full time, Tuesdays and Thursdays meant school from 8-4 PM, dash home, pick up the boys from extended day, throw them in the back seat, roar through the drive thru, throw the bags into the back seat with them and play parking lot highway games on the toll road back to campus where they were stabled in more day care and I went to class from 6-9 PM. I don't even want to think about the garbage in those bags I was feeding the kids... but not to worry, they're adults and they survived and have corrected a lot of my bad choices in their own lives. So I'm here to say that you can make the choice to change.
The problem with the picture above, aside from the gazillion calories it represents, is that there isn't a whole food anywhere in sight. By whole food, I mean something that looks like it did when it was grown or harvested. Something that hasn't been processed to death and had any variety of chemicals added to it. Here's a picture of what I'm talking about. I didn't used to like a table laden with things like this...I would be much more likely to gravitate to that plate above. I've come to love the stuff below and I'd like to help you get there too. The first part is taking a look at what you're putting on your table, plate and into your mouth for the next couple weeks. Is it fresh and whole or is it from a package and long beyond the recognition of the grower? The closer you are to fresh and whole the better off you'll feel and as a side benefit eating real food will help you control your weight. So take stock and think about it. Maybe this isn't the best two weeks to do so but give it a thought now and then and we'll talk. If you're really brave, you're writing down what you're eating and drinking (water!) and you're stretching right????
Till next time. HV 13
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