Blog Beginnings

So a little history to begin with.  When I got married, I listed cooking as a hobby of mine, as I enjoyed finding new recipes and excitement of trying something different.  However, cooking quickly moved to the bottom of the list when it became a thing I had to do three times a day for a family of hungry people.  As a mother of six young children, it became daunting to try to find something that everybody would eat and I think a meal rarely goes by where everybody is happy with the food choices.  Although having a healthy diet has always been important to be, it became such a daunting and unrewarding task to try to cook healthy meals that everybody would eat, that it quickly moved to bottom of my priorities and the quicker convenient foods took charge.

To make things more challenging, one of my children was diagnosed with a gluten allergy when he was four years old. Our food world quickly turned upside down, and I spent the next three months trying to find something for us to eat, as all of our usual food choices and particular favorite foods such as pizza and macaroni and cheese were laden with gluten.  The store had some incredibly expensive substitutes, but not realistic when I was trying to feed a family of eight on a tight food budget.  The one thing I knew, was if I was to keep my son from extreme tantrums and behavior issues and keep him from breaking out into horrific week-long hives all over his entire body, I had to remove gluten...and with a four-year-old, it had to be completely out of the house, as he just didn't understand why he couldn't eat the same thing everybody else had.  

And so began our journey to becoming gluten free along with a search  for a healthy lifestyle.  I was appalled at how so many of the gluten free substitutes, even if I made it from scratch, had starches such as tapioca flour, corn starch, or rice flour, all things that are just one step above sugar in my book. Now, my son is older and understands why he can't eat gluten, so although we eat much less gluten than before, we have reverted to some of our old ways, with gluten-free substitutes just for him.

I spent lots of time searching for a new way of eating.  I had run across the alkaline eating chart in the past and found it interesting, but over Christmas I began talking with my mom about Alkaline and realized that this was the healthy eating style I was really looking for. To me, this made so much sense.  It was eating in a way that was healthy but not extreme.  It did not complete alleviate any food groups, but was balanced with a heavy emphasis on vegetables.  I realized that the typical American diet of macaroni and cheese, cereal, and hamburgers was exactly opposite of what our bodies were designed to digest.  As Americans, the vast majority of our foods we consume are acidic and we deeply neglect the alkaline foods that put our body in a healthy state to be able to fight disease and sickness.  I love how the Alkaline diet uses a 60% alkaline food and 40% acidic food ratio.  That means we can eat all of our old favorites on special occasions or in moderation, but as a general rule we focus on our vegetables.  To me, that is both realistic and healthy and I think it is exactly what my family needs.

So this is a blog about my family's journey to becoming an Alkaline family.  As I searched the internet, I found lots of information on Alkaline, but hardly any on how to change kids used to eating a typical American fare over to an Alkaline diet.  I knew if I fed my kids the straight out Alkaline recipes I found on the internet, they would push it away and rather starve than eat the food before them.  This blog is our step by step transition to a healthy alkaline diet along with the pitfalls and successes we will achieve as we strive to keep our bodies healthy.  I will admit right away, that if you are looking for some place that follows all of the rules, you are in the wrong place.  We are beginners and trying to move over to the healthy Alkaline style, so I am sure there will be some exceptions especially here at the beginning.