It has been almost a year since we started our (semi) whole food journey. Basically, we are trying to focus on cutting out preservatives, dyes/colorings, and added sugar. In that year we have made some more changes. We are still buying organic bread and using a more natural peanut butter. I have in fact mastered the art of making iced tea. I use maple syrup to sweeten. Matt loves it!
The changes we have made
– I am buying plain yogurt and adding fruit and maple syrup to it. I buy strawberries and blueberries on sale and freeze them. I usually run out of blueberries and just buy those frozen. In the summer, we also use peaches and raspberries.
– We have switched from refined white sugar to pure cane sugar. The brand that I can find at our local Walmart is the same price or cheaper than the refined sugar! We are still buying regular brown sugar.
– One thing that we started doing recently is shredding our own cheese, cheddar and mozzarella. I had no idea the amount of preservatives and coloring in a bag of shredded cheese! We used to use a hand grater to shred our own cheese to save money but discovered that block cheese and shredded cheese ended up having the same unit price. So I stopped making extra work for myself. I now have a food processor with a shredding disk. That makes shredding cheese so much faster.
To make it even easier, after it is shredded, I split the 16 ounce block into two freezer bags. I add about a half to one teaspoon of cornstarch to each bag and shake them up. It keeps the cheese from freezing into a clump. It is just as easy to use this cheese as it is to use the pre-shredded cheese.
– I have been making our own trail mix with nuts and chocolate chips for snacks instead of granola bars. I also make our own chocolate syrup and pudding. No more boxed mixes or ready-made ice cream topping.
– We are planting more peas and probably more green beans than we normally do this summer. Our green beans usually last us until about March or April but we tend to eat our peas as soon as they are ready. We would like to freeze some this year. We are also thinking about planting some blueberry bushes as we eat a lot of blueberries. I would like to do strawberries eventually to, just not this year.
– We still buy Pepsi and ginger ale but we don’t drink it as much as we used to. I also buy the Pepsi Throwback that has real sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. Still not great but better. And this mama needs her Pepsi about twice a week.
Thoughts on our year
Because we are on a tight budget, I can’t always do the changes I would like. I also can’t do them as fast as I should because it would be too much of a shock on the budget. To help counteract spending more on real(er) foods, I have to work hard to save on other things, like toilet paper and shampoo. This is part of why we are growing more in the garden as well.
Hopefully in another year I’ll be giving you an even better update. Small changes seem to be the way to do it for us so I know it doesn’t seem to be much of an update. A lot of this, much like frugal living, is changing the way you think. Sometimes it is hard as my frugalista side is trying to find the cheapest way while my healthier living side is trying to find the healthiest option.
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