Nutrition - Where to Start?

I've had a couple of friends ask me about healthy food and where to start. There are so many different ways to approach this topic, so I'm just going to share how I started and the resources that have helped our family the most.

I've always made the girls' baby food, so I suppose our journey to healthier eating started there. I had no problem spending hours working on pure, whole, organic food for Mary, but when it came time to make dinner for Stephen and me, it would be junk. When Anna came along, we started to get more serious about ALL of us eating better. But where to start? I was reading a book about preparing girls to be Godly wives, and the author was saying how young women need to learn how to cook nutritious meals and feed their family well before they get married. She listed some books she recommended, one of them being Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon. I read the reviews on Amazon, purchased the book, and read it like a textbook on nutrition.

This was the turning point and starting point for us. All of my recipes either come from this book or from blogs that are associated in some way with this book. If you were to ask me right now, "Where should I start?" I would tell you this:

1. Spend some time on the Weston A. Price Foundation's website. (The author of NT is the president of founder of this non-profit group dedicated to nutrition education.)

2. If you like what you see, order Nourishing Traditions or check it out from the library. The first part of the book really is like a textbook full of information about food that you probably don't know, and the second half is all recipes.

3. These are the blogs that I find most helpful; I would highly recommend checking them out after you look through the book. They're part of the Weston A. Price network, and they're always on the blogroll over to the side of the page.

• Kelly the Kitchen Kop
• Cheeseslave
• Living the Nourished Life
• The Nourishing Cook (this one is really handy because she posts pictures of the recipes in the book)
• The Healthy Home Economist (lots of videos on this one)

4. Once you're sold on traditional cooking and have some knowledge about food and how it affects your body, you can start making small changes towards a healthier lifestyle. The key words here are "small changes." There was so much that I didn't know that it was, and is, very easy to feel overwhelmed. Take it slowly. Find one thing new that you learned and latch on to it. Learn all you can about that one area (healthy fats, dairy, buying locally, legumes, etc.) and run with it. (I've discovered that this takes time. It's hard to carve out time to study and read, but I can tell you now that it's worth it. Like most things, you'll get out of it what you put into it.)

I was really fascinated with food additives and how harmful they are. Colorings, MSG, "flavors," all started to scare me - including and especially sugar. The first change we made was cutting out all sugar. I know that may not be considered a small change to some (and it took me two tries to really do it), but it has worked for us. Once I learned about the dangers of sugar, it was no big deal to turn down that doughnut at church or that piece of chocolate at a friend's house.

Then I started reading labels (to help me avoid sugar). Almost everything has sugar in it! So, I knew I'd have to make most of our food and snacks from scratch to avoid the bad stuff. Again, this takes time, but it's so worth it! Here's where the NT book comes in handy again.

This has led us to eat as organically and locally as we can. Huntsville has lots of places to buy healthy and local produce and dairy. We now get our meat, eggs, milk, and chicken from local farms. I love taking the girls to the farms to see where their food comes from, and trips to the farmers' markets are always a fun outing.

That's pretty much what we're doing, just trying to make as much as we can from scratch using organic and/or local fresh ingredients. I'm still ironing out lots of little kinks, but the more I learn and experiment (I'm going to try making butter tonight - so excited!!), the more enjoyable cooking for my family becomes (I originally had "easier it becomes" but I had to change it - it's not really easy to me yet, it's time-consuming. However, making healthy meals that actually nourish my family and build up their precious bodies is so satisfying to me that it's okay that it's not easy yet.)

I know that's a lot of information, and it's probably more than you cared to know, but hopefully I've answered some questions for my friends about what we do and why. You may do your own research and decide this is all bunk, and if that's your opinion, great. All I know is that this is working for our family; we're happy, and we've never felt better than we do now that we're eating whole, real foods.

Here's another neat post with some great tips for beginners. And if you're already a "real foodie" you'll get a good laugh at this post.

Have a very happy rest of the week!

UPDATE:

I just made my own butter!! No way!! It was soooo easy, too, and it's so good and fresh. I had trouble separating the cream from the milk, so I really only made like two tablespoons of butter, but I did it! I think I'll have to invest in one of these to really get the job done, because this is just too neat!