Hello everyone and how are you doing with eating Real Foods? This week, we focused on eating up quite a bit of the factory foods we had and planning for this next week. An interesting note is that while I was eating more regular factory food than normal, I gained 5 pounds. Getting back to normal and with eating more Real Food again, I have lost almost all of it. That shows you how the process used in making factory foods, along with the added sugar and salt can quickly affect your weight.

Real Food activities from the past week:

• Ate a good portion of our current foods made in factories.
• Had delivered about 6 weeks worth of grass-fed beef and pork from a local farm.
• Began researching sources of beans and grains from small farms.
• Researched Community Support Agriculture (CSA) farms in our area to participate in for this season. More about these in a future blog.
• Made homemade pizza with local sauce and local sausage instead of buying frozen pizza.
• Planned the meals for next week, including more Real Foods. Also included necessary prep each day for future days. This is discussed in this week’s video. You can watch that now:

Real Food activities for the coming week:

• Making our own mayonnaise and ranch dressing.
• Soaking and sprouting all of our beans for the week. Learn how here.
• Paying attention to the prep list you saw in the video so I don’t get stuck with meal unthawed or beans not soaked and sprouted.

Notice that I am not planning 10 things to do. I have 2 new activities and one thing to pay attention to. We all do better when we only attempt a couple of changes per week. We can easily feel overwhelmed if we take on too much!

Every week, I will answer the questions that I receive to help everyone:

1. Do I have to shop at a health food type store to eat Real Foods?  No. You can shop at whatever store works for you for where you live and for your budget. Focus on buying foods closest to the way they look in nature and are not packaged with a lot of extra ingredients.
2. Are all packaged foods bad?  No. You will likely need to continue to buy some things like canned tomatoes, frozen vegetables, grains, etc. If you did not can or freeze foods from last year, you will need to supplement and maybe these are things you will always buy. Just consider how pure they are and if they have added ingredients.
3. Do I have to really make everything I use?  No, of course not, and neither will I. But, I can begin to transition the easier things and then try to find local sources of as many things as possible. Local foods aren’t made in factories and are right from nature. One reader said, “Oh, good. I thought I was going to have to become Julia Child!” Ha!
4. It looks like that you are proposing to make a lot of changes to the food that your family currently eats. Are you getting any objections from the family members?  My family is pretty on-board. They are skeptical that we can change as much as ambitious me thinks we will, but they are open. My 17-year-old son now works in a kitchen, so he is excited to try some new things. My husband is used to my wild ideas. I am very lucky to have his constant support for all of my projects.

If you have questions, be sure to ask them below. I have also created a new Facebook group, Real Food with Jen Owen, N.P. just for all of us “Real Foodies”. Please ask to join asap so you won’t miss anything. I plan to post some live videos there, as well as a lot of extra tips, articles, and information.

One last thing: I consolidated my presence on Facebook and now only have one page, Jen Owen, N.P. Please be sure to Like this page to keep informed of everything I am doing and sharing.

Have a great week! Be sure to share this post widely and sign-up for my newsletter up and to your right.

Happy Real Food Eating….