Food thoughts

I consider myself an average consumer when it comes to food. I don’t always go out of my way to buy organic, healthy, unprocessed food. I do make attempts to buy better food but for the most part everything I eat is more or less average. Leaving sugar behind is my first real attempt at a healthy lifestyle. I hope that by taking that first step forward I make more progress towards an overall healthier lifestyle and drift further and further away from processed foods. Once I start my adventures in cooking I will begin to post photos on this blog so there’s actually something to look at here.

One thing about going sugar-free when you don’t always cook is the not so surprising discovery that nearly all processed foods have sugar in them. The thing is that I’m not talking about frozen dinners and meals in a can here. I mean things like canned corn. A couple of nights ago I asked my husband for some corn. He thoughtfully read the labels on the two cans we had at home. One contained sugar and the other didn’t. If I was the one opening the cans I may not have even thought to look at the ingredients. How naïve. So dear readers (if there are some of you out there) try to start reading the labels on your food – even the things that might obviously not have sugar in them, like canned corn!

In that same spirit I am even afraid to go to a restaurant for fear of having sugar in sauces, rubs, and dressings among other things. In an indirect way this gives me motivation to cook at home and from scratch, hooray!

In another food related story, I returned to work a few days ago. I have decided not to inform anyone of my new sugar-free lifestyle yet unless the topic comes up. It’s too easy for co-workers to criticize your decisions and have you second-guessing about how difficult it might be to give up sugar and how they could never do it because of X, Y, Z.  We’ll see how long this will last. Work is probably the hardest part about this decision. There’s always food floating around the office and sitting on my butt in front of the computer certainly doesn’t deter my desire for sweets.