Processed Free for 23

One day I was gearing up for a long training ride and I was trying to figure out what I was going to watch on Netflix when I saw this documentary I had been eyeing for a while. I always try and watch shows and movies that I know Brady will not want to watch when I train alone so then he won't yell at me when he sees that I binged watched Daredevil while I was training without him haha. Well anyway this documentary I decided to watch was called Fed Up and it was all about the obesity epidemic in children in the United States and in the world. Not only did it talk about obesity but it also talked about all the crazy things that the government will allow in our food and how many chemicals and additive junk are in our food these days also. I finished watching and was floored by all the things I saw and I decided that I needed to come up with a plan with Brady that would make us eat healthier. Now I'm not talking about eating healthier to lose weight, I mean eating healthier to be HEALTHY, by eliminating a ton of chemicals that we don't fully understand how they affect our bodies.

A big reason we want to make this change is because of Brady's health. He has been battling this really weird throat/mouth problem for a little over 2 years. He gets really bad irritation and it hurts to swallow, it definitely hasn't been fun for him and let me tell ya it hasn't been fun for me because I have to deal with angry Brady. It's been pretty debilitating for him because this pain/irritation comes and goes and when it comes the only thing he wants to do is sleep, so he has missed a lot of training and time to study for school. We have been to several doctors and the only thing they say is "try this medicine and we'll go from there" they didn't care to dig deeper they only wanted to give him medicine in hopes it would work. One doctor who is an oral surgeon actually gave him 4 rounds of an anti fungal which lasted for 40 days, he looked in his mouth for literally 2 seconds and thought it might be a yeast infection, then he did a throat culture and that came back negative for yeast and he STILL kept prescribing us medicine. Needless to say we needed to do something ourselves! After watching some of these documentaries we stumbled upon this great quote form Hippocrates "Let food be thy medicine" and it hit us, changing our diet could very well help Brady and his problems.

Just last week we finally met with some good doctors who were interested in helping, an ENT said that it was bad silent acid reflux and he said that Brady needs to limit the sugary foods he eats especially late in the day. We then went to an allergist who also said it was silent acid reflux but that is only part of the equation, he also has really bad allergies to A LOT of things and that has caused pretty severe post nasal drip. This combination of acid reflux and allergies has been the cause of his problems..... at least we are hoping so! The moral of the story is that Brady's diet if changed to a more healthy diet can really help his acid reflux problems, and that is a major reason we are going to be eating processed free for 23 days.

Taking Brady's problems out of the equation though, our eyes have really been opened about all the crap that is in our diets. We have been trying to eat healthy for a couple of months and we thought that we were, then we started looking at some of the ingredients and we were floored by the junk that was in there. For example we thought that if it said wheat on it then we were making a good choice, however we came to find out that unless it says WHOLE wheat, then we may just be eating white flour. It is just shocking what the food industry can get away with... This is when our research really started in to eating healthier. We watched countless documentaries, read every Michael Pollan book we could get our hands on, and searched the web where we found 100 days of real food which has a ton of great information regarding whole foods. This has really been an eye opener for us and it has really helped us get to a starting point in this journey. So after all of that here are the guidelines that we will be following for the next 23 days:

• Only eating foods with 5 ingredients or less. We got this guideline from 100 days of real food and it refers to prepackaged foods because we needed to set the line somewhere. 
• Grass fed beef and organic hormone free poultry, this one is important to us because we want to know what is going into our bodies and we want the meat to be free of hormones and antibiotics. 
•  Organic, unsweetened, pasture raised dairy and eggs. Once again we want to know that what we are putting in our body is completely natural. 
• Organic veggies and fruits. I used to think that people who bought organic were crazy but after finding out about GMO's and all the chemicals used in commercial farming, it is worth it to me to spend a bit more on organic products.
• 100% whole wheat and whole grains, just trying to be as close to nature as possible!
• If you can't understand the ingredient then you can't eat it. 
• No refined sugar or corn syrup including high fructose corn syrup (obviously haha) 
• No fast food or deep fried food 
• No refined, hydrogenated, or partially hydrogenated oils (we also found this on 100 days of real food, she is one smart lady)
• Juice at least once a day 
• No GMO's. This is the biggest guideline in my eyes because we just don't know enough about GMO's and if I don't know what it will do to my body I don't want to eat it. 

We are super excited to see how this will first improve our health and second see how it will improve our performance in triathlon.
Now we promise to not be the snooty people who think they are better than everyone else because we aren't eating processed food for 23 days. We also won't try to impose this challenge on everybody else and we won't constantly tell you how great it is to not eat processed foods. I don't think all processed food is terrible for you and will cause death, we just want to eat as natural as we can to see how Brady's health improves and to see how we feel overall compared to when we eat our normal diets. We're super excited to see what kind of results this will bring, feel free to follow along!

Thanks for reading
Brady and Kassia