My Children's Nightmare

Having a sugar addict for a mom is a pretty "sweet" life. How can she get on you for eating M&M's first thing in the morning if she herself is snitching a few? When your mom can't say no to treats, there's a reasonably good chance that treats are in the house, or that there will be soon. Often a sugar-addict mom makes really fabulous treats as well, always looking for new and creative ways to get the sugar. Such has been the life of my children. I have attempted "sugar rehab" a few month's at a time. During those times I have lost weight, felt great (after the initial withdrawal headache), and been happier overall. So why have  I not continued a sugar-free lifestyle? Well, because I'm an addict and I have been training four successors whose habits I didn't feel it was fair to curtail, after all they weren't fat or crazy. I know that logic is very skewed. But food has always equalled love in my world, and since I love them I wanted them to feel that in a way that I knew they would recognize. We need to redefine things, a little . . .

We have been talking for a long time about improving the way we all eat. We watched documentaries, read books and blogs, but every week I still bought hundreds of dollars of junk--"food like substances" in the words of Michael Pollan. So I finally bit the bullet. At first Chris and I thought we might try Whole 30-- but we realized there was no way to realistically include our children in that. And that we would be less successful if we had choices in the house.  I was intrigued by a blog of a woman who went 100 days with no processed food on $125 per week. This seemed pretty reasonable, except the $125/week business--only one thing at a time, the budget will have to come later.

So today we started our experiment to remove processed food from our diet. We are starting with sugar, and processed grains, and snack foods--cookies, crackers, chips, goldfish, pretzels, cold cereal, etc. Chris is pretty certain it might kill him not to eat cereal before bed every night. The one exception is the bread for lunches, but I went with a bakery bread that is truly whole grain, until I can find an acceptable recipe. The kids' lunches were turkey and cheese on whole grain hoagie roll, string cheese, small apple, cutie-orange, 2 strawberries, bag of veggies with carrots, celery, snap peas, and radishes. The kids were skeptical.

At lunch Em an I had  this text exchange
  "this bread is gross".
   "I just had some and I thought it was delicious. Get used to it."
     ":(  "
    "Or you could have no bread"
silence--she must not have wanted to waste her minutes on a futile argument.

Surprisingly, she was the only complainer. "I can't believe you would give me a RADISH". The horror. Then she asked my if she could have a bigger variety of fruit--three wasn't enough, apparently. Jo had no complaints, but of course he made cookies in home ec so he wasn't suffering too much. Kenn said it was fine, but she's always a good girl. KP didn't have much to say--she was happy to have star-berries! Chris says he needs something salty, I suggested he salt his veggies.

So day one survived--not as bad as it could've been. I did realize as I cooked breakfast and dinner that we use a TON of processed products; the Pam  and the turkey sausage for the omelet muffins, the cream of chicken soup and soy sauce in the Hawaiian haystacks, the deli meat. I guess we'll just start with one step at a time.