Back to blogging and healthy eating

Chou and I are generally really strict with the food we bring into our home. If it's not whole, fresh, and/or generally nutritious, it rarely makes it past the front door. We've gotten to the point that all of our produce and the majority of our groceries come from market or the Amish health food store and we supplement with whole grain pastas and sometimes cheese and meat from the grocery store. Our diet is far from perfect, but we've come a long way in the past year. When I was pregnant, we committed to giving E the best possible nutrition. (Unfortunately she got pretty terrible prenatal nutrition because she made me way too sick to eat anything.) For us, this meant that she was exclusively breastfed for a minimum of six months (we started letting her taste foods around eight or nine months and she started actually wanting to eat them around ten and a half months). We have gradually changed our diet to include only things that we are okay with E eating and we've successfully eliminated all white flour/rice/grains, white sugar, preservatives, chemical additives, and most processed foods. There are obviously the occasional exceptions to this (I generally have cheese tortellini in my freezer because Chou makes an amazing tortellini soup, and Chou's an amazing pastry chef so every once in awhile I indulge...) and we don't worry too much if we're not eating at home. Since we've started being intentional with our food, we've both felt so much better and have generally stayed healthy and energized. E didn't get sick once for the first year of her life, and although nutrition isn't the only factor that contributes to good health, I think it has helped. A lot.

Unfortunately our whole foods diet went out the window in December. I ate endless cookies and goodies with zero nutritional value and can honestly say I noticed a huge decrease in my energy level. Additionally, E got her first cold the week before Christmas.

And then on January 1st, she developed a fever and came down with a super nasty virus that completely took her out of commission for a week. She's still not back to her normal sleep schedule eleven days later. Can I just say I never knew how exhausting caring for a sick child was? It's quite possibly more tiring than being sick yourself.

E never ate the junk I was devouring, although she had a few whole grain cookies, but she didn't get her smoothies for breakfast or as many healthy and balanced meals as normal. I'll never know if she would have gotten so sick if we had stuck to our normal foods, but it's a great motivation to get us completely back to our real food diet. I'm really thankful that she didn't get sick once in the first year of her life and I'm hoping we got it all out of the way for her second year :)

So for 2013, I'd like to keep up with real foods. I'd love to replace all conventionally grown meat with grass fed, as that hasn't happened yet, and we're hoping to participate in a CSA for the first time.

Kitchen help at its best!

Helping herself

Daddy's helper