The Week Before

The week before I started this diet, I knew I needed to figure out what I could eat. It was quite a process to go from not worrying too much about what I ate, to scrutinizing everything. There is white flour and white sugar in most of the common food products we eat. Eating like this pretty much eliminates everything processed, which isn't a bad thing... just a different, more difficult (in our case) way of eating! I started cutting back that week and began to try new recipes and buy products that I could eat. In came the 100% whole wheat (more anyway), brown rice, brown pasta, agave syrup, brown rice syrup, etc. I already used honey a lot, so that wasn't anything new. In fact, I rarely had jam on anything. I prefer honey. I started exploring what the different sugars and natural sugar substitutes were all about. I found a website that had a list of them with their glycemic index, which shows how quickly or how slowly the sugar is absorbed. I found out how bad HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) is for you! It's in almost everything! I was determined but feeling a bit overwhelmed. I knew I would have turn my kitchen into a test kitchen. I don't really enjoy cooking, and I tend to stick to the same "tried-and-true" recipes we know & love. So... some big changes.