A Grocery Trip I'm Proud Of. Finally.

Yesterday Hubby and I went grocery shopping.

I hate grocery shopping.

I have celiac disease so a majority of items for purchase are ones I can't eat.

I've been gluten free for 4 years now.  Doesn't mean I haven't eaten gluten in that time, but it does mean that 99% of the time I don't and that 1% applies mostly to accidents.  Accidentally getting contaminated by salad dressing that for some reason I didn't read the label carefully enough.  Accidentally getting contaminated at restaurants.
Every 18 months or so I will have a moment of weakness and consume something purposefully full of gluten.  But even those times are becoming rarer, especially since getting Z.  I can't afford to be sick or knock a few years off of my life or run the risk of intestinal cancers any more.

I am grateful for the 2 foot section on 3 shelves dedicated solely to gluten free people like me, don't get me wrong.  And more and more items are either gluten free and being labeled that way or are now made with gluten free ingredients.  My world of food IS expanding and I'm happy for that.

Still.  90% of the food in the average grocery store are items that are not me-friendly.  And the time it takes to read the labels to find out if they are me-friendly is...a lot.  Z is usually munching on some beans-for-sale sign by the time I get done with the cereal row.  Seriously, the child loves to eat paper.

And just because it's gluten free doesn't mean it's healthy.  In fact, it is rare to find items I can eat that aren't highly processed.

This shopping trip, though, I had a plan!

Summertime last year, I had tried The Raw Food Detox Diet by Natalia Rose.  It was too extreme for me. But for the two weeks I managed it, I felt AMAZING.  I also own her book, Detox for Women, which I got at the same time as the raw food one, and upon re-reading it, decided that it was much more manageable and I should try it.  Especially since I've been feeling kind of icky since my last surgery.  And eating more crap than usual.  And stuck at a certain weight plateau.  But mostly I want to feel healthy like I did last summer.

So this particular shopping trip was all about getting the proper foods for the detox*.

Vegetables: winter squashes like acorn and spaghetti and butternut; summer squash and zucchini, tomatoes, salad fixings, carrots, sweet potatoes.  Then I picked up frozen fish.  And lastly, I stocked up on frozen veggies like peas and broccoli and spinach.

And So Coconut milk since I'm off of dairy except for feta cheese.

That was it.  No processed foods for me!

Just a cart full of veggies with a couple of pizzas thrown in for hubby.  (He's not doing this detox with me, and the freezer and fridge are full of meals for him and Zoe; chili and ginger rice chicken, etc, although I plan on Zoe taking part in eating all of the veggies I make.)

You know what I found?  I had shopped the perimeter aisles of the entire commissary!  Something I had heard was a good goal for any supermarket experience if you're eating healthy.  And something I had never accomplished before.

I felt like an adult.  A healthy adult making smart decisions, no less.

And it wasn't even that expensive.

And I didn't spend ages reading stupid labels to find out if the preservatives in the items I was buying were gluten free, because there were no preservatives.

I was doing a jig all the way out to the car!



*Not all of the food I bought was organic.  Zoe drinks organic milk and we do buy a lot of veggies and such organic when it's available, but we also buy a good bit of non-organic food.  The detox calls for all organic stuff, but I modified it to be more practical for us since we don't shop at Whole Foods, we shop at the commissary.  Plus I find Whole Foods a bit pretentious (and has anyone else noticed that they have a lot of the same stuff  as a regular grocery store but just at inflated prices??).