My Thoughts on the "nasty foods"

Alicia mentions three foods that are "nasty" and that everyone should give up, or at least eat in extreme moderation.

1) meat
2) dairy
3) sugar

Here are my thoughts on that. The easiest of these three things for me to eliminate from my diet is meat. I didn't really eat much meat to begin with. People would often ask me if I was vegetarian. But nope, I wasn't. I would still add chicken to my salads sometimes, and eat my mom's homemade roast beef on occasion. Oh, and sometimes I would eat things like pepperoni pizza rolls. Yep, definately not a vegetarian. I have been for a week now though, and it feels great to eliminate this "nasty" food from my life.

Dairy is another story entirely. I eat dairy with almost every meal almost daily. Dairy and sugar kind of go hand in hand for me, too. When Alicia talks about sugar being a nasty food, she means processed and refined sugar. One of my favorite meals is a lean cuisine four-cheese pizza, with a bag of smartpop popcorn on the side. Delicious, low-cal, and seemingly harmless.

However, this meal couldn't be more processed. The pizza itself contains at least eleven ingredients that I can't pronounce, most of which end in "-ose", which definately puts it into the highly-refined, highly-processed, "nasty" sugar group. Same story with the popcorn. And both contain dairy, too. Very nasty meal, according to "The Kind Diet".

I need to replace the lean cuisines with home-cooked food. I ordered a cookbook called "Student's Go Vegan Cookbook: Over 135 Quick, Easy, Cheap, and Tasty Vegan Meals" by Carole Raymond. It has a couple of pizza recipes in there, so hopefully it lives up to its title... the title sounds too good to be true!

Sugar will be the last thing that I get rid of as I take these baby steps towards a healthier lifestyle. First I'm working on being a healthy vegetarian. Also I am eating less dairy and less processed foods, but have not cut them out entirely yet (actually am nowhere near to cutting them out entirely, but I will get there).

Looking forward to see how this new style of eating affects my weight.