After my epiphany in France, I realised that my food was making me more sick. I have been careful to eliminate many, many things from my diet for the last 8 years but the improvements were often short lived. I still don't really understand why but suspect it's a side effect of my medication that I can't do without or part of my autoimmune disease.
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| Marmalade, the bear, shopping at the French market |
So 4 months ago, I took the decision to eliminate most processed foods from my diet. I didn't eat badly before but I did use some convenience foods, such as jars of sauces or instant gravy to help on the days when I felt too sick to cook.
You will notice that I said that I'm eliminating most, but not all, processed foods. I've found that some things don't make me sick. I guess these items don't contain whatever additives I am sensitive to. One of these foods that I've kept is Schaar gluten-free bread, as I have failed abysmally at making my own. Even Jaws would struggle to bite through these babies!
This wasn't such a big jump as it might sound as for years Missy and I have been restricted to gluten-free and pulses (including soy) free foods. More and more foods have become unsuitable to us as soy (or other pulses) are increasingly being added to foods in place of things like palm oil. Really, we just took out the few things left that we thought were ok.
We started by eliminating all processed foods. Hubby isn't 100% converted in this as he doesn't have to be and I'm sure he's really grateful to his cast iron gut!
After about 2-3 months, amazingly I was getting fewer attacks (autoimmune flares) and my depression has lifted. I feel like the 'real me' again. I can think clearly again and am a lot happier. My anxiety has really dropped. I've even stopped taking CBD oil daily as a result. Heck, the weight is falling off me without trying!
Furthermore, Missy (who has a milder form of the illness) has also commented on how much better she is feeling even though I've not been as strict with her diet (as it was already a strict difficult diet for a child to follow). She says that her pain is a lot better and she is also able to think more clearly. She's also feeling more creative, which is wonderful for an author in the making.
By clearing the foods toxins out of my body I've also learnt just how severe the environmental air bourne toxins are to me. It has been much easier to pin down my triggers as they are nearly always environmental now and in public places where I have no control over them.
So what do we eat now? Mainly, real food. In other words, food that looks like its name. An apple that looks like an apple. A chicken that looks like a chicken, and so on. I cook everything from scratch, including all sauces and gravy. My Crockpot is amazing for this.
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| The Crockpot I love, but mine is green! |
At the moment I have a limited list of meals to choose from but each month I'm adding another one or two to the list. Pinterest has been a great source of inspiration. I've learnt how to adapt recipes for our allergies and most things have worked out quite well. Missy is also getting more into nutrition and cooking with me. She has announced that there is no way she's going back to eating processed muck when she leaves home. Time will tell, I guess.
Apart from the obvious benefits of feeling so much better mentally and pain-wise, there is another huge silver lining. Our food costs have almost halved!! We are currently spending, on average, about £300 per month on groceries for three of us (plus a cat), while still eating meat and buying expensive gluten-free bread. This is our entire food bill as we never eat out any more and take lunches with us. I'm seriously impressed!
We do a lot of our grocery shopping at the market now as 80-90% of what we are eating now is fresh fruit, vegetables, meat and dairy, all of which we can get at the market for a much cheaper price than the supermarket. Twice as much for often half the price!
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| Baking a gluten-free cake for the school's bake-off. And there's my Crockpot hiding on the left! |
I think the biggest money saving thing here is no longer looking for gluten-free products. If you look at the ingredients list it's scary. It might be gluten-free (advertised or otherwise) but there are so many more nasty chemicals in them to try to improve taste and longevity that they have been making me ill. Not to mention that they all taste like crap anyway!
Missy ate a ready meal recently and said how awful it was. Her taste buds are no longer used to processed foods so she could actually taste the chemicals in it. Quite an eye-opener.
Another big change is that we are now cooking a lot more as a family. As everything is cooked from scratch, and I'm somewhat limited with the use of my hands, I have become head chef and I now have two sous chefs. It's been fun and a great way to teach Missy how to look after her health for when she leaves home. She starts cookery class in school next week!
Most weekends we batch cook and freeze as many extra portions as we can. This reduces food waste and costs, as well as meaning that I don't have to take on a big meal prep every day. On days when I'm not very good, I can dip into the freezer and we have our own healthy version of a frozen meal.
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| My sous chefs in action |
I'm looking into buying an economical half size chest freezer to go with my two drawer freezers. We freeze ingredients that are cheaper to buy in bulk as well as freezing batch cooked meals. It's far cheaper to do it this way. I really miss my third freezer that died a few years ago.
Last week we noticed another big change. Hubby couldn't work out if it was the week for bin collection or not, as we only have rubbish collected twice a month. Everyone else had put their bins out so it was the right week but we only had 1 black bag of rubbish in our bin... from 2 weeks! We were amazed that a simple change like making food from scratch would have such a huge knock-on effect environmentally. We knew it would help, but not this much!! Amazing! It just goes to show how much packaging we have with our foods. We are probably paying a lot more for processed foods simply to pay for the packaging that is covered in marketing designs.
So this lifestyle change has meant
- better health (our reason for doing this)
-less money spent
-less food waste
-less packaging to recycle (if it can be)
-more family time cooking together as well as eating together at the table.
This is one change that we won't be giving up.
