October Unprocessed

So this is going to sound kinda weird, but food's been on my mind a lot this week.

It's stemmed mostly wanting to be healthy, and after two weeks of tracking what I eat, realizing that I have significantly worse habits than I'd thought.

Full of determination, I headed to the grocery store to pick up lots of fruits and veggies and lean, healthy meat.... And cringed the entire time because living mostly off carbs has gotten me accustomed to having a very, very low grocery bill. Then, when my week got a little crazy, I ended up not even eating most of it yet. It hasn't gone bad or anything, but I feel a double guilt trip: a) I haven't eaten it yet, and I should, but also b) it's more expensive than I'm used to, so I also want to make it last longer (did you notice how those two are in direct opposition to each other?)

Since I'm also saving up to move in a few months, it started to feel like I need to make a choice between being healthy and feeling financially secure. After a bit of contemplation and some nice, deep breaths, I headed over to Poor Girl Eats Well and Budget Bytes to get some ideas for how to eat cheaply and still healthily.

That calmed me down a lot, since I realized that it's possible to both be healthy and not break the bank. Not too long after that, I found October Unprocessed, a challenge to go the entire month of October without processed foods and decided to go for it.

It was funny, my first thought was that it would be fairly easy since I make a lot of my food at home. Then I spent the last couple of days checking labels on things I use - Cheerios, ketchup, bread, etc - and found that they all have ingredients that I don't have access to, everything ranging from "natural flavors" to words I can't even sound out, which by the challenge's definition makes them out of bounds (the suggested rule is that if you couldn't recreate the item in your own kitchen with all of the ingredients listed, it counts as processed) and I've had the dawning realization that this is going to be harder than I thought.

Other than that, not too much has been going on. I started up my craft blog and have a whopping 1 post and 1 email subscriber. I'm working on a couple projects to put up in my spare time, including a paint chip mosaic table. This should be interesting :)