It All Started with Goetta

It all started with goetta. I just wanted to know the ingredients in goetta. If you're a Cincinnatian, you know how amazing this stuff is. Some people get weirded out by the fact that it's part sausage, part oats but I already knew that. I just needed to make sure that goetta doesn't contain nitrates. Good news- it doesn't contain nitrates! Bad news- it does contain "monosodium glutamate" and I didn't know what that was. So, I googled it.

Oh.

I already knew that MSG is bad. I didn't know that it could go by "monosodium glutamate." Makes me wonder what else is hiding in my food that I ought to know about...

Starting on Saturday Jan 21, 2017 Daniel & I are starting the Whole Life Challenge. It's a "friendly competition" that lasts for 2 months and challenges us to complete certain lifestyle tasks each day. Click here if you want more details. (I'd be remiss if I didn't plug it: it does cost money but if you want to join in, you can! When you register, join 'Team Parkside' and you get all the fun and perks of competing alongside us!)

Anyway, the challenge is made of 7 different habits and you get points for completing each habit every day. The challenges include Sleep, Hydrate, Lifestyle, Reflect, Mobilize, Exercise, and... (you guessed it) NUTRITION!

I've been saying for awhile now that I want to change my eating habits and I definitely want my kiddos to grow up with a better mindset toward food than I have, so I think this is going to great for me.

Except I also think it's going to be RIDICULOUSLY hard.

I've spent 3 hours (!!!) on Pinterest tonight, trying to create my menu for the next week, following the guidelines laid out by the Whole life Challenge. (The level Daniel & I chose does not allow for carbs, sugar, or cheese, plus lots of other things but those are the hardest.) It's not that we eat that poorly now, but eliminating carbs and sugar is REALLY cutting into my list of "go to" recipes. No BREAD! No pasta! No tortillas! No cinnamon rolls!

Another thing on the list of "non-compliant foods" is nitrites and nitrates, benzoates, and monosodium glutamates. Which leads us back to MSG. I also had no idea what benzoates were so I looked those up too. That one is found in soda so I'm not too surprised that that's a bad guy. (Nobody thinks Coke is healthy for them. It's just tastes so dang good!) But then I read about potassium bromate and I'm REALLY sorry about that one. Apparently benzoates are bad but potassium bromate is REAL bad. Every other country in the world has banned potassium bromate except Japan and the US. In California, if a food contains potassium bromate then they have to put a "may cause cancer" label on the food. You know which food potassium bromate gets added to?

Flour.

My beloved bread. The stuff that any good meal is made of. The sweet smell of fresh baked bread. It's sad, really. I'm CERTAIN there are flours and baked goods out there that DON'T contain potassium bromate (and doggone it, I WILL find them! After the WLC is finished...) but it makes me sad to realize that we really do have to be careful about what we put in our bodies. I wish the American food industry was doing a better job of helping us eat what's good for our bodies instead of being really good at making money but... I digress.

So the challenge starts on Saturday and I'm hoping to blog my way through it, if for no other reason than I'll have an account to look back on and see what really challenged me and what changes we'd like to keep after we've served our sentence
gotten through it
survived
finished.

Pray for me. I just read about something called the "low carb flu." Awesome.