Eating Healthy

I never really new how hard it was to eat healthy until now. Everything is full of sugar or turns into sugar in your body. Now that my mom has been diagnosed with breast cancer, she is staying away from sugar and white flower and things like that. We have a gluten free mix that we use, it's by Pamela's. But even still it's full of sugar. So today I found some recipes using Almond flour or Almond meal and using alternative sweeteners. You can make your own flour by putting Almonds in the food processor and pulsing it. But make sure not to go to far or else you will have almond paste. There are a lot of benefits to eating almonds, they are heart healthy, they aid in weight loss, high source of protein, anti-inflammatory and I'm sure many more things!! Also you can use flax seed oil instead of regular oil, the benefits to that are endless!

So now lets talk about white flour. I took this from Answerbag.com:

"White flour is actually in a lot of high processed foods, it's in bagels, muffins, donuts. Donuts, bagels, muffins they're all the same thing. They all turn to paste in the body and what it does, it actually inhibits your villi. You have villi in the small intestines and what those do; they actually absorb nutrients and toxins into the body. So anything that goes into your bloodstream that goes into the body will go through your villi. So if you add water to flour, which is what all those are, bagels, donuts, English muffins, blueberry muffins you're in a hurry and you want to grab something like that. It would actually go in and it makes into a paste. Now those villi don't really have much to work with because they can't move so if they can't move they can't get nutrients into the body. Which is very, very important so white flour is actually not a very good thing."

Here is one from helium.com:

"White flour is created by removing the bran and germ from the wheat, which contains 76% of the products vitamins and minerals. In removing these parts, 97% of fiber is also lost. At this point, the product only holds less nutritional value, but it doesn't stop there. Once this has taken place, there are many things that are added such as chlorine dioxide, potassium bromated, emulsifiers, ammonium carbonate, alum, chalk, alloxen and sorbitan mono-saturate."

Eeek, that makes me not want to eat anything with flour again. Just to be balanced I looked up the good effects of white flour on the body and not one good thing came up.

It's to bad that eating healthy has to cost so much, most of the organic foods in the stores are twice as much as regular food.

I love baking and I have been wanting to make Christmas cookies!! So I am going to try the Almond flour with blue agave sweetener. I will post my recipe, but only if it turns out OK!!

Ahhh, Christmas time!!

I love this time of year, it's so festive and colorful! I love looking at all the lights and the decorations and feeling the chill in the air (even though I like the warmer weather). So now that I am living in my apartment I am so excited to decorate it. I put up lights around our patio and some green garland and felt flower garland around our fire place. Next on the list is our Christmas tree. I have been slowly collecting decorations and I can't wait to see them all again. I'm sure that I have forgotten about some! But one of my favorite things that I have is a glass Christmas Tree shaped candy dish. My grandma Betty gave it to me years and years ago. She always had one at her house filled with M & M's. So I can't wait to go to the store and buy some red and green M & M's to fill it up with.

This is my first Christmas being married, it will be so different not waking up at home. But it will also be exciting to be with my husband.