Eating Extremists

I finished skimming through a book I found at the library - I must admit, I picked it up off the shelf because the title amused me. The book is called "God's Diet", which seemed so presumptuous as to be funny...so I threw it into my bag. Can't resist a good (or very bad) title. The book itself wasn't bad, very straightforward with one extremely simple precept: if you can't pull it out of the ground, pluck it off a plant or tree, or kill it to eat it, DON'T eat it. The author (an M.D., not that that counts for much these days) wanted to create a basic, follow-this-for-life sort of plan for her patients to follow. The four main enemies in her opinion are flour, sugar, corn syrup and corn starch. There are more details to it than that, but I'm not here to give a synopsis, it's just that the book started me thinking.

To get to my point in a very longwinded fashion, what I realized was that we really aren't that far from her eating plan already. I eliminated refined sugar from the house a while back; I try to use honey, maple syrup and stevia for sweetening, with rapadura as a backup for the few baked goods we eat. Processed foods really haven't been an option for a long time (try to find one that doesn't have some sort of dairy or gluten). I also decided about a year ago to choose organic as much as possible. Today at the grocery store the only two things I had to go in the aisles for were cat food and organic brown rice. The rest was all meat, dairy, produce, and baby stuff. It boggles my mind, really, because when we moved to Fort McMurray I could barely cook, and hardly ever made anything from scratch. Kraft Dinner, noodles and sauce mixes, pre-made frozen things and takeout were my foods of choice. Craziness.

Trev and I are considering following the plan from the book I mentioned above, simply because the rules are so clear-cut. It would eliminate the last bastions of junk food in our house, because we do occasionally get chips or ice cream as a snack. The one modification I would make to the author's rules is that with regards to flour, freshly ground and then soaked organic flour would be OK for the odd loaf of bread or dessert, as long as all of the other ingredients were natural as well. This would however mean eliminating all commercial baked goods. And pretty much all snack foods, while we're at it.

While it sounds like a practical way to stay on the straight and narrow for eating, I'm hesitating...it just feels like we'd be getting to the extremist end of the spectrum. Or perhaps we're already there. What's left of the glutton in me is loath to give up the last of my 'treats', regardless of how bad for me those treats are. I'm not saying we won't make exceptions for a piece of birthday cake at a party, or a dessert at a nice restaurant for a special occasion, but it won't be a weekly thing anymore, likely.

What to do, what to do.