Loving Natural Living

John and I attempt to eat as natural as possible.  With all the preservatives and such on the market, there's always all of these ingredients that I can't even pronounce, let alone know what it is.  Eating things as close to nature insures you get the most nutrients and the least amount of man-made crap.  Have you heard that all of these low-fat products are actually making people fat?   It's because of all the extra stuff that they have to put in to make a product taste good because they've removed the delicious fat.  Typically, when fat is removed, sugar is added.  So just because something doesn't have a lot of fat, doesn't mean you won't get fat from eating it or that it's better for you. 

Here are some products that John and I enjoy..

Greek yogurt, Simply Orange OJ, Barilla Plus pasta, natural coffee creamer, Nutella, Whey Protein, natural sourdough bread from Strawberry Field's, Raw Honey, and some Kashi bars.

Amazing combos:
Greek yogurt and raw honey
Nutella and natural vanilla Breyer's ice cream
Chocolate whey protein, whole milk, a frozen banana, one raw egg, and ice
Simply Orange OJ and frozen strawberries
Breyer's natural vanilla, natural peanut butter, and Nutella

Let's honest.  Nutella with literally anything is amazing. 

Life without these two products wouldn't be the same..

I also started buying one stalk of romaine lettuce at a time.  We used to get bagged lettuce, but I've started buying one thing at a time and it's a lot cheaper and I'm not mad if it goes bad because it costs like $1.30.  Something that we're trying to get better at is eating more fish and better meat.  We've heard a lot about how much better free-range, organic meat is for you.  Still working on that one because we love to just get a bag of frozen chicken breasts, ground beef, etc.

I am pretty proud of myself though for making some parmesan-crusted tilapia the other night.  It was super easy.  I just coated my tilapia fillet in olive oil, sprinkled with salt and pepper, threw a bunch of garlic salt on and coated in parmesean cheese.  We put it on the grill in a little aluminum foil packet, but you could just bake it too.  I usually hate fish, but this was just scrumptious.  I'll be making that again. 

John's dad bought us some of that bread from Strawberry Fields.  It's so yummy and only has about 6 ingredients.  I'm sure literally all of you how anti-bread Doug is but this is one type of bread he approves of because it's so natural. 

You do have to be careful though with different brands claiming a product is "all natural."  Your best bet is to look at the ingredient list on the back.  If you can't pronounce them, don't know what they are, or there are more than 6-7 ... it's probably not natural.  Also, the FDA doesn't regulate the terms natural and organic, so people use the definitions loosely just to sell more of their product. 

Random fact:  did you know that one of the approved alternative names for MSG is natural flavoring?  So even if something says that it has natural flavoring, that doesn't mean it's natural.  Come on, FDA!