New Years Hopes

As a rule I believe that resolutions are meant to be broken. They are very similar to diets for me. They usually don't work because when I feel restricted to not eat or do something that becomes exactly what I want to eat or do. Human nature I guess. But resolutions are good for one thing. They give hope. Hope to do one or many things that will make your life and the lives of those you love better. And even if you stick with it for 1 minute, 1 week, 1 month or forever that means you had hope and a plan for that precious amount of time. And hope feels good. And I have to say that these days I am all about hope.

One of my  New Years hope is very similar to the majority of Americans. I want to eat better. But really I just want to clean up my diet. Lately, I have been feeling bad because to be honest I eat a lot of crap. I have this internal struggle because although I have run 4 races this past year and trained for a half marathon I never changed the way I ate. I've heard so much about eating non processed REAL food lately but I was just not educated on it, but a better way to say it was that I didn't want to become educated. That would mean I would actually have to do something with the knowledge and I just wasn't ready yet. I stumbled across a blog called 100daysofrealfood.com . The blog started as a way to track the self imposed challenge of one family  who pledged to eat real food (non processed) for 100 days. It was eye opening and the more I read the more I felt like it was doable. Her first challenge is to just read the labels on foods. I confess that I have never looked past the calories and fat section of food labels. Her challenge is to look at the ingredients. It is unbelievable how many ingredients that are in everyday products that you can't even pronounce. I looked at 1 loaf of bread that was whole grain and looks healthy and it had 15 ingredients! Talk about eye opening. And I wondered if eating all of this processed food, even the kind that is supposed to be healthy was what was making me feel so terrible. The bottom line is that I am going to try to eat real food as much as I can. I just want to feel better. I don't want to do this to weigh less although that would be a nice by product. I just want to feel like I am treating myself better. The 100 days blog makes it seem like it would be doable. Her blog is full of recipes and even free sample meal plans for breakfast, lunch, dinner. She even has a section where her family took a pledge to eat real food on a budget which I always saw as a challenge. So far I have tried a couple of  recipes and they have all been amazing. The tomato bisque is way better than any bisque I have had at any restaurant (even La Madeline:) and I actually made whole wheat tortillas the other day. They were pretty easy to make and although I was skeptical I was surprised by how much better they were than the store bought kind.

My other hope has been trying green smoothies. I am probably the last person to get on this train but I am enjoying this one so far. At first I thought Spinach blended with fruit sounded like a big nasty mess but they are surprisingly good. And since I am not a big raw fruit person this is an excellent way for me to get fruits and vegetables. I found www.simplegreensmoothies.com that has amazing green smoothie recipes. They have a free 30 day challenge that you can sign up for that will email a shopping list and list of 5 smoothie recipes to try every week.

My really big hope with all of this is to get my kids interested and eating  in these kind of foods. Baby steps. Holding onto hope for these changes and a lot more this year. :)