Shannon: Diet Revolution

Over the last year, I have been slowing altering my grocery shopping habits and consumption habits. Unfortunately, I am still not always consistent with my new guidelines, so I have not seen as many positive effects as I should have had I been consistent! :D But regardless of the inconsistency, I thought I would share how I went about it.

1) Drink water. This was the easiest place for me to start my diet revolution. I stopped drinking tea, coffee, soda and juice and started drinking more water. I didn't eliminate everything overnight, but just made an effort to drink the recommended 8 glasses each and every day.

2) Reduce/eliminate sugar. Not exactly good at this. But I stopped buying sugary treats with the exception of special occasions. Stevia is an excellent, natural replacement for sugar used in baking.

3) Reduce/eliminate fast food. Again, I wasn't exactly good at this, but our budget helped prompt me to be more consistent about avoiding fast food. Meal planning was a requirement for me and it made avoiding fast food much easier. Knowing that I had a short list of 4-5 meals I was making throughout the week left little question over "What's for Dinner?"

4) Eat more fruits and veggies. This was easy. I just simply started switching out old snack items with fresh fruits and veggies. Then I added a vegetable to each lunch and dinner.

Now, as we approach 2010, I am making some more drastic, more challenging changes to our family meal plan. This comes because of my son's dietary requirements. Overall, it's the most difficult change, but being that it's for my son, it's motivated me even more to be consistent and make the necessary changes.

We are making the following changes over the next 2-3 weeks:

1) Organic fruits and vegetables whenever possible.

2) Eliminate wheat (at least for a period of time).

3) Raw dairy only (raw milk, raw cheese only)

4) Eliminate all sugars (except natural ones found in fruits)

5) Free-range or organic meats (including free-range eggs)

Essentially, we are going God-natural. If it's god-made and not man-altered, we're eating it! :D

NOTE: We are using coconut and almond milks as raw milk substitutes until we figure out consistent acquisition of raw milk (which, by the way, is NOT illegal...just hard to find!)

Whatever changes you begin to make in your diet, my personal suggestion is to make changes slowly over a set period of time. Make changes one at a time. Set a week or multi-week period to make each change and when successfully incorporated into your diet, begin the next change. From experience, making drastic and numerous changes all at once can be overwhelming and discouraging.