October Unprocessed Week 3

After three weeks of unprocessed foods, things are getting much easier. Here's what we learned last week:

1. Some of my coworkers brought in snacks one day last week. It was a little sad to see a table full of food and know all I could eat was the fruit and veggies. There was also a big bowl of fruit salad. I was a little excited about that, until I took a bite. It had preservatives in it! I was a little surprised that I was able to taste it in just one bite.

2. Weight loss wasn't a goal of this for me, but I finally stepped on a scale last Friday. I didn't weigh myself at the beginning of the month, so the last weight I knew was from a doctor's appointment in July. I figured that was probably close to my October 1 weight. I was down 6 lbs! And, I lost another 1/2 lb over the weekend! Yay me!

3. While most of our meals this month have required some alterations, there are others that I haven't had to change a thing-like stuffed peppers.

4. So my work is pushing this "Healthy Lifestyles" website on employees. I get the agenda behind it-by making people more aware of their health, they will (likely) make better choices, leading to healthier employees, leading to less expensive insurance rates. Ok, sounds good. Yesterday, I started digging deeper into some of the tools on the website, specifically those dealing with weight management and healthy eating. I was disappointed to read that the majority of their suggestions included 0 calorie sweeteners in place of sugar and "lite" versions of products. So not to be all conspiracy theorist, but it did occur to me that Anthem and Healthways (owner of Healthy Lifestyles) are partners and they are pushing artificial ingredients. Seems a bit counterproductive to me. And I tried to figure my calorie/fat/protein/sugar/etc intake for the day by entering foods I had eaten. Imagine my surprise when I tried to enter "baked potato" but the only item that came up was "Wendy's Baked Potato"! Really??? That's how most of the foods were-very few items could be found in whole food form. I know eating unprocessed foods has made me more aware, but I find it unacceptable that an insurance company is pushing these processed ingredients rather than whole, nutritious foods. Now I completely understand that not everyone is going to home cook every meal (see below!!), but whole foods should be available in these calculators. Rant complete.


Week three confessions:

I made us donuts for breakfast one day. And not the whole wheat pumpkin donuts made with sorghum syrup-the white flour, white sugar cake type donuts. At least they were baked? Yeah, I don't really have much justification here. I just wanted something different-and donuts sounded good.

We went out to dinner last Friday. We've done really good this month, but I forgot to start dinner in the crock pot that morning and we were all hungry. We picked a local farm to curb restaurant. Most of their products come from a farm owned by the same person and they don't use any fillers in their meats, so I figured that was a decent meal without completely compromising the last 17 days. I had a pork tenderloin and a root beer. These tenderloins are huge.

This was from the soft opening of the restaurant, but you get the idea of the size we're talking about here! 

I didn't even make it 1/3 of the way though the sandwich. In fact, I didn't even get to the bread. So 1/3 of a tenderloin and about half of my root beer later, I was stuffed. As we were heading home, I started having an allergic reaction. My gums and tongue were swelling! I knew I had an epi pen at home if it got too bad, so we continued on home. By the time we got home and I got some benedryl down, my entire mouth was swollen and I was starting to have a hard time breathing. This is the third time this month I've had an allergic reaction to food that has never happened before. I'm still not sure if it was the tenderloin or the root beer, but to be safe, I'll just avoid them both in the future. I guess I learned my lesson about cheating on the unprocessed challenge!