No More Excuses!

    I've wanted to get rid of all of the junk in our diets for a long time now, but my number one excuse was, "But what about all the food in our pantry? I don't want to waste it!" I would tell myself that once we eat it all up, I'd start buying better food. But there was a flaw in my plan. I kept buying more junk because it was convenient. And it's true, packaged food is convenient. It's so much easier to throw a box into the oven or microwave, and BAM, dinner's done! But we are compromising our health!
  I had to come up with a real plan and a real deadline. I talked to Cory, my husband. By the way, I love my hubby so much! I think he thinks I'm crazy, I'm expecting too many results from all of this, and he's really grumpy about having to give up his combos, cliff bars and M&Ms. But he's going along with me, supportive as ever. Anyways, he suggested having a start date, so we picked May 1st, 2014. That gave us about 5 weeks to figure out how I was going to pull this off and how to get rid of all our crap.
    Some of you might literally be able to just throw everything out and start fresh, but I was raised and taught that we didn't waste food, and that was too hard for me. So I went in my kitchen and I took inventory of everything that I had. I made a list of stuff in the pantry, freezer, and fridge. Then I took my list and came up with meal plans to use the stuff up. Some of it was eating our favorite things one or two last times, some of it was, "Here's dinner. I call it 'slop' ". And I got very creative. Every one was such a good sport. As I used items, I would mark them off the list. When it was time to figure our dinner, I'd pull out my list, and figure out items that went reasonably well together. And on the plus side, we didn't buy groceries for over a month, so we were able to save a little there.

Here is a picture of my pantry. It was actually about a week or so after I got started, but you get the idea.

And here it is again just 4 days away from our start date. I tried to use everything, but there are several items that I will just be giving away. I mean, it's hard to come up with a meal using pancake syrup and sweet pickle cubes.

I know my fridge picture is so dark, but I just want you all to be aware that it is sparkly. Like, I spent 3 hours scrubbing every nook and cranny, and now it shines with the brilliance of 100 suns. I decided to keep some of the condiments. We wont be using them on our diet, but I couldn't bring myself to trash them. I mean, we might have company, and maybe they would want some ketchup and BBQ sauce, you know?