Day 17

It's day 17 and honestly, it's not hard. If I can stick with this for 30 days, anyone can.

Most days I'm not even hungry first thing in the morning. Today I didn't make anything to eat until after noon.

We are out of clarified butter (more being made right now), so I dumped the remaining frozen salad shrimp in a big skillet with half a bag of frozen, whole green beans, a big squeeze of minced garlic and a splash of coconut aminos. I forgot the mushrooms. *sigh* I always forget something.

One thing I have noticed, I have arthritis in my thumbs and a couple of fingers and typically when I eat a lot of seafood it flares up. I've been eating a lot of shrimp and have had zero pain in those joints. Interesting, no?

Dinner is at 5. We are meeting the family at Outback to celebrate my dad's birthday. So yeah - I'll be having a 9 oz sirloin, plain, with mixed vegetables, plain and you guessed it, a plain sweet potato.\

I just ran across this recipe for Ground Turkey & Sweet Potato Skillet meal that I think will make an appearance this week.

We got my dad an electric smoker from Masterbuilt. I don't really want to wrap it, as it weighs a ton, but I am trying to get rid of stuff, wrapping paper included, so I suppose I will figure out how to wrap the top and sides at least and get it loaded in the back of the Jeep. Clearly we will not be taking it IN to the restaurant.

My friends Meredith & Chris Facebook messaged me last night asking about Whole30. I gave them the Cliff's Notes version and a link to the Whole30 website. They're thinking about it.

One of my big take-aways thus far is avoiding processed food. All the FrankenFood that is available now is doing terrible things to our bodies. I read somewhere that when your body doesn't know what to do with something (like artificial sweeteners, chemical preservatives, etc) it turns to fat whatever it can't process and / or remove as waste. Aside from that I firmly believe that all the genetically modified food, all the chemicals (preservatives, additives, flavor enhancers, dyes, and pesticides) are to blame for many of the cancers, the increased food allergies in children, the huge rise in autism, ADHD, ADD, most of the behavior problems in children...none of that stuff is good for you - it can't be, and I can't believe that it doesn't eventually cause genetic issues and mutations that lead to more issues.

The second is avoiding High Fructose Corn Syrup and added Fructose in general. Seriously that stuff is in EVERYTHING!

I'm thinking ahead to when we start to reintroduce things to our diet and I miss cheese. Oh do I miss cheese. And cream. I can pretty much live without rice - it was one of those "no-nos" for so many years that it was no big deal to ditch it, however, I do love going to the Japanese Hibachi places once in awhile and you have to have the fried rice! And I used to make a killer chicken and wild rice soup (not often though) so honestly it would be a handful of times a year that any rice would come back into our diets. Pretty sure it wasn't a problem before.