Feel better; Eat Real, Recognizable, Whole Food!

Eating food in the form it was created.  Enough can't be said about how important this is.  Your Chi can't be centered, your work/family life balanced, your stress leveled while you are eating Cheetos. Doritos are tasty and remain in my diet, but they are not a life-sustaining food.  You won't wake up feeling better the next day.  

To feel better, you need real, unprocessed, recognizable food.

An old farmer was having breakfast at our house when I young.  I looked at his plate and immediately grew concerned.  "That's an awful lot of cholesterol.  You shouldn't eat that."  He explained when he was a kid, doctors told pregnant women ...
to avoid calcium.  They said it would cause elephant-man disease.  And he assured me that before he died, the doctors would change their recommendations about cholesterol.  He was old in 1987, but just died in 2010.  Long before he died, the recommendations changed.

I keep that advice handy.  It is my litmus test when my friends start espousing vegetarian, vegan, no-fat, no salt, gluten-free, all-kinds-of-other diets.  There is a season and a time for everything.

One of those friends clued me into this Facebook page that I love:
Nutrition on a Budget
https://www.facebook.com/NutritionOnaBudget
Great recipes and practical money-saving, food-preserving ideas.

Another resource to get you rolling is 100 Days of Real Food:
http://www.100daysofrealfood.com/
Great links to meal planning and recipes to get more vegetables into your diet.

My idea of healthy food is primitive.  In my food world, wheat grows from the ground and is therefore allowed in my diet.  Dairy is naturally occurring and I use it.   
As a farmer, I believe in locally grown produce, grown by least-harmful practices (not necessarily organic) and processed minimally.  Since I am not interested in boiling jars AND cooking the contents, that produce is usually frozen.  A bumper crop of pumpkins led to a new food staple for our family! There are cheers when the pumpkin cookies or pumpkin pancakes are ready.  That never would have happened if I wasn't forced out of my grocery comfort zone by eating local, seasonal produce. 

When I was a nanny, I packed the girls' lunches.  We called out each food group to be sure we had them all.  Then we got to the Cheetos.  I thought maybe a cheese, but a look at the ingredients set me straight.  Cheetos are a bread.  Remember that old adage about price?  If you have to ask...
If you can't recognize what your food is...

Fast forward 20 years and my, how things have changed!  

Technology is creating a new world order.  I believe the computer models for economics will soon show a hot spot of unsustainability.  It will revolve around preventable diseases like anemia and diabetes.  It will show up in the economic models because as a country and a world, we can't afford these excesses.  The scientists will work on studies for years and come to the conclusion that the food we eat must be in the form it was intended.  No more egg replacers and fake sour cream. 

Just eat the eggs.  That is the form they were made in.  That is the way they should be eaten.