The Hardest Thing...

...to give up has been cheese.

I'm not eating that healthily right now. But now that I have started reading food labels I am stunned to realize just how unhealthily I was eating before.

Looking for an edible low fat cheese has become a big part of my grocery shopping experience. Yesterday I started doing some mental math on one of our old regular menus. We would have homemade macaroni and cheese, turnip greens with tomatoes and peppers, black-eyed peas, and cornbread about once a week. The kids loved it. It was comfort food, easy to fix, the ingredients didn't have to be thawed and would keep in the fridge and pantry.

The macaroni and cheese alone had more than 100% of the recommended amount of fat and saturated fat that an adult should eat each day. When you add in the pork seasoning in the greens and peas, and the fat in the cornbread and all the butter we'd eat on it, I'm amazed we didn't all keel over with heart attacks years ago.

And that was just supper. We probably had MacDonalds for lunch.

So I'm not depriving myself these days but I try to limit my splurges to once a day. And I think about what I'm eating instead of eating whatever I want.

Yesterday I had an incredibly good cheeseburger for lunch I'm not wasting my splurges on anything that doesn't taste great. If I'm in a rush and need to grab something fast I'll take an apple over a dried out burger that's been in a assembly line for a couple of hours. And since I ate 'bad' at lunch, I had a salad for supper.

So far, so good.