Finding Food that is Healthy, Tastes Good, and simple to prepare!

     After having my first very healthy, extremely attached and strong baby boy, my body had changed quite a bit.  His first year of life was one growth spurt after another, which meant I was nursing 24/7.  My baby left behind some baggage on me that had to go.  My body retained water like crazy, because of nursing and all my hormones were out of whack!  I didn't have much time to cook and quickly realized I had to find food that could satisfy my mommy cravings and be healthy at the same time.  My outlook on food was changing.
     I'm not one to jump on fad dieting, but I always look for pros and cons of all of the newest trend diets.  They always seem to be based on an ounce of truth.  I started with common sense.  The diet that appealed to me the most was clean eating.  It basically says you just eat food the way it comes out of the earth.  You should cook all of your food and every individual ingredient should be made of (something like) no more than three [natural] ingredients.  Ideally, everything is organic, fresh, etc.  You can check out Clean Eating Magazine at http://www.cleaneatingmag.com/ for more information and recipes!  In our modern world, sometimes this is difficult.  I can't always do it, but I try.  I would say on a good day 85% of what we eat is clean and we try to shoot for no less 75% of all days.  We have days we don't make it though.

     I've also had to figure out a balance for me.  One week I went gluten free and also incorporated some ideas from the paleo diet.  I didn't see much of a difference on the scale and I felt a little weaker, since those diets do take out some important nutrients.  After trials, the best balance incorporated a really good balance of everything: only drink water, have gluten in very moderate amounts, and up the veggies a lot!  I really hope to reflect some fun, tasty and SIMPLE tricks to eating great, while feeling great, too!
     It's hard.  Life moves pretty fast.  Through lots of perseverance and trials I have come up with several recipes and tricks to get some of our favorites to be some of the healthiest, most delicious meals you can imagine.  Now, if I can just blog before we eat them!