The 10-Day Real Food Pledge

I've just recently discovered Lisa and Jason Leake's 100 Days of Real Food blog, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. They (and their two young daughters) have been eating nothing but Real Food for over two months now, and Lisa is blogging how it's all going for them. Great stuff!

They're encouraging people to take a pledge to eat Real Food (no processed foods) for 10 days. I think that's pretty cool. But I haven't signed on. Not yet. But it's definitely made me think that if I'm doing this slowly, that's fine, as long as I'm doing it. Not just thinking about it, reading about it, learning about it, planning it, and whatever else. Because while all that stuff is important, it's pretty pointless without the money shot.

But I'm encouraged to believe that I am doing it after looking at my grocery list this week. Checking the items that just arrived from Woolworth's, I've got only 2 items that don't qualify as Real Food (as defined by the Leake's rules). Those two items are some Campbell's chicken stock and some rice crackers. I made real chicken stock the last time I bought a whole chicken, but the thing is, I don't buy whole chickens all that often. So either I'll have to start making more of my own or use less of it.

I suppose I might find somebody producing a packaged stock that isn't full of crap I don't want to eat, but I'm not hopeful. The ingredients list of the Campbell's stock is: chicken stock (consisting of water, chicken and herb extracts), glucose, salt, yeast extract (which contains barley), and "natural flavour". Maybe I'll get lucky and not only find Belinda's Chickens tomorrow at the farmers market, but I'll also find out that she sells chicken frames (carcasses) for making stock. If so, I'll be happy to buy them and make my own.

Now looking at the list from Coles, and the only non-Real Food items that I see are beef stock, Coke, and my apple crumble cereal bars. That's 5 items out of a total of 39 (roughly 13%). I think that's pretty good, although I still definitely want to increase the amounts and variety of fruits and vegetables that we're eating.

So I'm not quite feeling ready to take the 10 Day Real Food Pledge, but I definitely feel like we're headed in the right direction, and that we've made a lot of progress.