Our diet

I have been receiving more questions about this than anything else....ever!

First of all, I should mention:
I spent many years of my life obsessed and preoccupied with my size, weight, body image and exercise. I had many rules for what I would eat and when I would eat it and for how long/often I needed to exercise. I would binge then starve, weigh myself constantly and all the other things people do when they are waaaaaay out of wack in the food area.
Thankfully, with *old* age and time, that has left me. Praise God.
Now, I am just glad to have a functional body that will get up out of bed every morning and do all that it needs to do! Good enough. I certainly do not want to pass along any unhealthy attitudes toward my beautiful daughters, so gratitude it is.

We are on the Joy Diet.
That means, we enJOY our food and eat plenty of it.

We try to eat foods mostly whole. We love to bake so we use freshly milled organic whole wheat flour, real salt (from the health food store, it's brownish not white), real butter, real cheese, whole eggs, organic cane sugar, etc. The real stuff is easier to digest and more satisfying. I add organic flax seed to any and everything I can. No margarine.
I make our bread with my handy dandy bread machine.
As much as possible, we avoid partially hydrogenated oils and high fructose corn syrup.
We always stay entirely away from aspartame, splenda and any other artificial sweetener.
I season my own meat (which we eat about 3x/week) with spices so we aren't taking in msg. We use lots of cayenne for the heath benefits.
Fruit for snacks every day and vegetables are always served with dinner.
We eat out once every other week or so and it's never fast food.

I drink coffee in the AM with real half and half or whipping cream, (no creamer) then switch to tea for the rest of the day, either green, black, or white. Adding a little lemon is tasty and great to relieve headaches.
The kids drink water, and some juice so diluted it barely resembles juice anymore, as well as soy or 2 % milk.
No sugar cereals.
Berry smoothies are enjoyed most days made with frozen berries (COSTCO has a great mix!) yogurt and milk (plus flaxseed, of course.) It's so yummy. Like berry ice cream.
We all take a pharmaceutical-grade lemon flavored fish oil supplement.

***My downfall is candy. Oh, I love myself some candy. I NEVER buy it, but if we happen to receive some, I can't let it go to waste ya know. We have a strict NO WASTE POLICY in this home. I will give it to the kids for a treat for doing something extra special.***

I don't schedule exercise into my day like I used to, but I move it move it a whole bunch around the house. And, of course we groove it groove it too.

The move to healthier foods came gradually, and is still in progress, basically born from the fact that I didn't feel very well on our previous, more "typical" American diet, coupled with a desire to teach our kids to care for themselves well.

That about covers it.
If you made it this far in reading this post, I congratulate you for your endurance.
If you stop me at COSTCO and ask me if all these kids are mine and why I am this size, I will simply smile at you and say I'm on the No Time To Eat Diet. But then again, you wouldn't do that because you know the real truth ;-)