Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

H. L. Mencken

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/h/hlmencke161245.html#mIQEEp4Uw2zLPdr8.99

Love that quote. Religion is like that, you have a bunch of restrictions, but if it’s not specifically forbidden, then you can use your own best judgement. Your judgement is what you are using in either case. Lots of people though, feel free to do anything that is not spelled out to them as off-limits, but consider doing something that is off-limits as a sin. You can’t claim to be clean and sober for one hundred days if you took one drink yesterday. The counter goes back to zero for them.

Your diet might be like that. My diet is not. I don’t have a dietary religion. There are no taboos, and I don’t keep any kind of score. If I ate sugar yesterday, then I don’t today. I try very hard to not bring the temptations into my home, so that when I eat all of my choices are on the new list, not old bad habits off of the old list. I eat potato chips, the kind that list ‘potatoes and salt’ on the list of ingredients. I don’t eat bread or pasta because we don’t buy them at the supermarket. I do eat fresh fruits and vegetables without regard for their sweetness or their organicness. It is good enough for me that they are single ingredient foods for which no one ever places a health claim on their labels. I like no labels on my foods.

The journey that I am on is one of change. I have changed my morning routine to include no sugar in my coffee, and breakfast every single day. Those were small changes. They were significant changes. I have started bringing fresh fruit to eat as a snack before I drive home. It satisfies me until I get to eat my dinner. I won’t look for a snack at home if I had a good one at work. Changing when I think about tomorrow’s dinner from tomorrow to today has allowed me to always have an entree thawed out and this keeps me from just going out and getting food or ordering a pizza delivered.

We do still get pizza delivered from time to time. We do still decide to go eat at restaurants instead of cooking at home every day. Nice thing is that it’s no sin to do so. We might even share a desert. Likewise, no sin, but we aren’t going to make a habit of it. Day in and day out we eat smart, local, single ingredient foods. Three meals a day, on average, we are following the plans we made yesterday. We eat foods loaded with real probiotics, fermented in our own kitchen. We eat foods containing natural oils, natural sugars. Very little of what we eat contains any artificial ingredients. When I was a kid, before 1973, foods that were not ‘real’ natural foods were required to be labeled ‘Imitation’. I remember margarine labeled as imitation butter. When they changed the law, now they can label it as ‘low fat’. Low fat mayonnaise is really impossible, for instance. Low fat mayonnaise is imitation mayo. Way back when it would have been labeled as such. Now, they can fake just about any ingredient in your foods and you will never be the wiser. The only clue will be the health claim on the label. Don’t buy foods with health claims on the label.