Juiced!

  I am a product of a modern American culture that equates happiness with convenience. Who were the cool kids in elementary school? They were the kids who had the white bread, the snack packs, the individual sized everything from chips to Oreos. And like most people I have a weird relationship with food. It’s not just to sustain, it’s for taste, it’s for comfort, it‘s for socializing. And carbohydrates are delicious.
  Despite this I have over the years made a  conscious effort to cook with fresh ingredients and try to stay away from processed food- not always - but at least make foods that would survive the apocalypse the exception, not the norm. I have successfully changed my brain to find fresh products sexy.
 But I still find I bribe myself with food. If you get all this work done, you can have a coke or a cookie. Won’t this ice cream make you feel better? Well this can’t be healthy. So I am ready to take my relationship with food to the next level.
  Again, like so many other aspects of my life, it has taken having a baby to put things in better perspective. I want Layla to eat unprocessed, fresh, foods. I want her relationship with food to be a healthy one. I want her to eat smart, for the right reasons, and thrive. It will always be an uphill battle in our fast food, carb craving society, but I can at least teach her what I am learning and hope some of it sticks.
Luckily so much information is at our fingertips if we want to find it. And buying stuff is as easy as a click of a button. My juicer arrived in mere days.
Court and I have successfully replaced a meal a day with a glass of juice consisting of kale, cucumber, apple, lemon and ginger. It’s actually not bad! The color is scary, the smell is powerful, the texture is new, but easy to get used to. We aren’t doing the whole juicing cleanse where it’s all you consume, but it is amazing how one change can change the rest of your eating habits in a day. So raise your pint of another color to our first week and so far it seems safe to say we’ll stick with it.
With that said, I will still make biscuits and gravy from time to time and we’ll still meet friends for pizza at Beau Jo’s occasionally. We’ll just do it less and when we eat for comfort, for socializing, we’ll know what we are doing and just being conscious of the fact will make us healthier people- so I’ve decided.