Eating Healthy: Food Challenge

Story by Kaynan Goldberg. Kaynan is CaryCitizen’s 13-year-old columnist on all things frugal, crunchy, healthy and green. She also blogs at VeggiesGoCrunch.

Cary, NC – Wow, it’s been a while!  We’ve started school again.  It’s great, but there is a lot more work than last year.

Back to the Blogosphere

So, a couple days ago, I decided it was high time to return to the blogosphere.

I sat down and started catching up on all the blogs I follow.  I was reading 100 Days of Real Food, which is a great website for real foodies.  It’s about a family in Charlotte, NC who decided to only eat unprocessed food for one hundred days. Lisa – the mom in this family of four – blogs about their experiences.  Even though their original pledge ended about a year ago, they have done two other “100 Day” promises:  real food on a budget, and a series of “mini-pledges,” week-long challenges that focus on one ingredient or type of food.  Not only that, but Lisa posts real food recipes that her family loves.

Challenge

A while back, when I first read the blog, I thought, “I should do something like that through my blog!”  Well, now I am.  For one week, I want you and your family to take one step toward a real food diet.  If you’re new to the healthy eatin’ scene, try cutting soda out of your diet.  If you’ve been leaning toward more natural food, try to buy only local veggies.

Baby Steps

One piece of advice:  Take baby steps.  Sometimes, jumping in all at once is good – for instance, when you’re at the pool, and the water’s kind of cold.  But with things like this – lifestyle changes – it’s better if you don’t try to be perfect right off the bat.  When we first started switching to real food, it was a slow process.

My mom and dad bought half the grocery store’s supply of sparkling water when they stopped drinking Diet Coke.  We bought the “all-natural” version of Cheerios for my baby brother, who was just beginning to eat solid food.  My sisters and I ate whole-wheat bagels and we stopped getting frozen pizzas.  But we still had processed non-food in our pantry.  It’s taken us three years to get to where we are: no packaged snacks, no flavored yogurt, no juice or soda in sight.  Admittedly, we’ll sometimes get ice cream, or we’ll make chocolate chip cookies, or my mom will make sweet tea when my friends come over.  You don’t have to drive yourself crazy trying to be perfect – it’s impossible.  Just try to be good, and then try to be a little better, then a little better…

Aaah, I’m going off topic!  Basically, I want you to take one step in the right direction.  Switch to sparkling water for a week, instead of soda.  Buy some local veggies, or maybe even go out to a local farm.  Make a completely locavore meal.  And then, write about your experiences in the comments, or email me.  I’d love to hear about your real food journey – and so would everyone who reads this blog!

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The Food column on CaryCitizen is sponsored, in part, by Thai Spices and Sushi in Cary.