Follow up to last week's fake food post

I just wanted to do a quick follow up to my last post to address some of your questions and some of the things I overlooked...

First of all, thank you to all of you who recommended "The End of Overeating". I already read and *loved* this book. I strongly encourage every one of you out there to read it.

Other books I have read in the last 2 years and highly recommend:

• "Shangrila Diet" (this book is the only 'gimicky' one of the bunch, but I credit it with my thoughts about taste-association connection and reframing my thoughts on why I was eating)
• "Women Food and God" (Many of you suggest this book to me, but one of my favorite bloggers on earth sent me it a few months ago and I already read it. I really enjoyed it and have been meaning to re-read it)
• "Skinny Bitch" (These gals tell it like it is. No real - or fake - sugar coating. A quick & easy read. "If you can't take one more day of self-loathing, you're ready to hear the truth: You cannot keep shoveling the same crap into your mouth every day and expect to lose weight.")
• "Mindless Eating" (I loved the scientific nature of this book - the labs and results - it was fascinating. And they illustrated how something as simple as a description or the shape of a glass can affect what we eat. Learning tricks that are used to make us eat MORE can actually teach us how to consume less.)
• "Fast Food Nation" (a pretty terrifying look at the fast food industry)

On a related note, I highly recommend watching the movie Food, Inc. And for what it's worth, I could not get through The Omnivore's Dilemma. I mentioned that here a few times - how I stopped at the corn section that felt like it would never end and I have been unable to pick it up since. Sorry, Pollan fans. I just don't think I can do it...

As for my own personal transition - As soon as I decided I was no longer going to ingest fake stuff, I threw out everything in my apartment that had fake ingredients - microwave popcorn, all my bread products, many packages of gum, Weight Watchers bars, frozen yogurt, light pancake syrup, Fiber One, Crystal Light, rainbow sprinkles - I'm sure there was plenty more. I don't even remember what else I had at the time. But I got rid of it all. It was no longer going to be put into my body.

Believe it or not, That was the easy part.

The harder part was then looking at every single thing I bought because I no longer knew which bread was "safe". Which tortillas were "safe". Which cereal was "safe". That part took a little longer.

I remember when I first started this huge change - I was in my Key Food supermarket - where, up until that time, I had done the majority of my shopping. I was now no longer mindlessly grabbing the Fiber One because I could have 1/2 cup for no points; I was suddenly checking every "healthy cereal" box - and my priority was no longer trying to get the most food for the least points. Now I was concerned with what I was eating. And for the first time, points weren't the leading factor in my choice - I was willing to spend 2 points to eat real food for the first time. But nearly every box I picked up had 12 lines of ingredients - many of which I didn't recognize and some of which were fake. I didn't buy any cereal.

I remember moving onto the bread aisle and this task was no easier. Surely my Arnold's sandwich thins, which I loved and were only 1 point each, were safe? Nope, they also had unnatural ingredients (sucralose was the ingredient that jumped out at me, but there were many I could not identify). And don't even get me started on tortillas - that should be easy, right? Nope. Take a look at what's in your Mission tortillas. I bet you don't know half the items in that list.

Shopping was suddenly a chore. But I quickly figured out how to make it easier: Stop shopping at regular supermarkets. I started doing all of my shopping at local organic healthy independent stores. And I also shop at Whole Foods.

Now, I know some people hate Whole Foods for whatever reason. I'm not here to discuss politics or try to get you to shop there. I will say that I like them because they have a great selection of local, organic, vegan & vegetarian items. And what I love about them is that they do a lot of the work - they don't sell items with ingredients they deem unacceptable.

So if you are thinking of phasing out some unnecessary artificial ingredients or foods, just know it can be done. And hopefully, some of what I wrote about will help you do it. Also, don't overwhelm yourself - Realize you don't need to do it all at once like I did. There is nothing wrong with making small changes at a time in a way that's realistic for you. But I'd suggest you start by looking at the ingredients of all the things you eat regularly and decide which ones you want to replace with an all-natural version. You can phase things out by replacing them with new versions as you run out or pick 1 or 2 items a week to swap - whatever you want to do and whatever works for you. But be patient, and keep in mind that you will likely be reading a lot of labels for a while and you may not like the first replacement item you buy. But you shouldn't give up - try another one. (For the record, Whole Foods takes back any food item - except beer - for a full refund if you do not like it)

Believe it or not, the only difficult thing for me to give up in this whole transition was gum. Yes, chewing gum. I used to eat about a half a pack of Orbit Sweet Mint gum a day. If I wasn't eating food, I was chewing gum. Sometimes I even fell asleep with it in my mouth. Obviously this had nothing to do with hunger - it was just a habit. And it was just a habit I had to break.

I also want to dispute something - I have heard people say that chewing gum helps prevent you from eating because you have gum in your mouth or that it curbs your appetite. Well, I disagree on both counts. For one thing, I sometimes *still* ate when I had gum in my mouth. I'd keep it tucked in my cheek (gross, I know); or if I was eating candy, I used to enjoy wrapping the gym around the candy, then eating the candy, having it dissolve and going back to enjoying the gym. As for it curbing appetite, I disagree with that as well because in my experience, I know that tasting artificial ingredients only made me want to taste MORE artificial ingredients. It often set off a chain reaction of eating. I saw that my gum habit was making me eat, or at least crave, more bad food. Chewing gum wasn't doing anything to help me.

When I went natural, I did try switching to a few different kinds of 'all natural' gums but they were terrible and I realized - you know what? I don't need gum. It was just an unnecessary habit. And I gave that up too.

In a nutshell, that's how I transitioned. If you're considering transitioning, hopefully some of that will help you. And if you do make a similar change, don't be surprised if you realize that it wasn't so difficult to give up something you previously thought you couldn't live without. It might be easier than you think.