Good Morning!
Happy Monday. Ugh, I always hate saying that because Mondays are never really happy, ya know? But I think this one is pretty happy because there is a break in the middle. (hopefully for you too!)
I just wanted to share a great post that I read this morning from Kelly. She talks about being ‘real,’ and how a lot of bloggers are not ‘real.’ They talk about eating a lot of ‘fake’ foods- such as sugar substitutes, foods made with artificial ingredients, etc.
I have to admit, I ALWAYS used sugar substitutes. Splenda was a staple in our household. I put it in my coffee everyday; I used it for baking in place of real sugar. I didn’t even keep real sugar in our house most of the time.
I always had margarine, yep, the stuff made from chemicals. Yum. Never butter. Margarine was always used in place of butter in recipes.
Diet soda. That was all I drank. We don’t drink much soda, but when we did it was diet. Always.
When I used syrup, it was sugar free too. Of course! I mean who would use REAL syrup?! Have you seen the calories in that stuff?!?!
And then I got pregnant. And everything changed.
I decided that I didn’t want to put ‘chemicals’ in my body. I didn’t want our child ingesting that stuff.
What’s funny to me is that it took me that long to realize that. And it took a HUGE event happening to change my mind.
Because I didn’t want our little girl to have that stuff, I decided to stop eating any kind of artificial sugar. (Well, to the best of my ability, sometimes you don’t realize there is ‘fake’ stuff in there…especially when eating out) Then I thought about it more….pretty much it was OK for me to eat chemicals, but NOT for our child. That sounds kind of crazy. I should want that for myself ALL of the time.
So out went the Splenda, margarine, sugar free foods, etc. IN with the REAL sugar, REAL butter, REAL syrup. OH MY GOSH…real maple syrup?! HOLY MOLY. You need to have some now. I forgot HOW GOOD it is! I know that sounds SO silly, but after years of eating sugar free food you forget how GOOD the real stuff is!
You know what else I noticed? That when you use the ‘real’ stuff you actually end up using less of it. Now when I put real sugar in my coffee, I use about half that I would use of Splenda. I use real cream in my coffee too..and I notice that again, I use about half of what I would of used for sugar free/fat free creamer. Real butter goes a LONG way, you really just need a fraction of that compared to margarine. And it gives food SO MUCH MORE flavor that using margarine.
One of the hardest ones was giving up diet soda. Like I said, Craig & I don’t really drink soda, but we would have it occassionally for a ‘treat.’ He actually asked me to buy the REAL Coke instead of diet Coke because he had some one day when he was out to lunch & forgot how good a REAL Coke is. He said for as little that we drink soda, having the real stuff around is so worth the extra 140 calories. The more I thought about it, the more I realized he is 100% right! What is 140 extra calories going to do every once in a while?! NOTHING.
Of course Coke isn’t the healthiest thing in the world, I’m not advocating drinks cans & cans of Coke a day, I’m just saying that if I do have a soda now & then it’s going to be the REAL stuff, with REAL sugar…not a diet soda filled with chemicals that my body doesn’t recognize.
Hope you didn’t mind reading my little rant. I just couldn’t help but comment after reading Kelly’s post this morning. It got me thinking 🙂
I hope that you all have a wonderful 4th of July! We are planning to spend the day by the pool…and then have some BBQ for dinner….and maybe a REAL Coke to go along with it 😉
Everyday's a 'Hollyday' 