You live in the United States, you work long hours and so does your spouse. Your kids eat breakfast at home, lunch at school and dinner on the way to or from one of their many extracurricular events. You eat a quick dinner on the road or out of the freezer and into the microwave. You’re busy.

We are all busy, but we are doing our best. Our whole lives we have heard that we need to eat low-fat foods, so as we make our choices in the store we look at the label to make sure that the one we are getting is the lowest fat one of the bunch. Lately we have been also picking up things that have fruit juice sweeteners in them, because we are trying to cut down on the sugar we eat. Fruit sweeteners are healthier than sugar, or at least they sound healthier.

If this sounds familiar, you are in the vast majority of Americans. We really want to buy the right things, to read the labels and pick the ones with the most health conscious labeling on them. The only problem is, the advice you were given about what is ‘healthy eating’ has been misguided for practically your entire life. It turns out that all along you should have been eating real foods. By real foods I mean you should have been eating things that are natural. Broccoli, cauliflower, beans, carrots, apples, oranges, cabbage and lettuce are all single ingredient foods. They come packaged in the container that nature expects when it hits your digestive system. They contain ingredients that are vital and have not yet been identified by food scientists. They feed bacteria in you that also have not been identified by biologists, and may never be. Nobody yet knows why eating an apple is so much better than eating a food that contains ‘apple’, like a McDonald’s Hot Apple Pie. In the processing of the apples by industry something essential is lost. No processed food comes as good for you as the real thing, and that is because your body has evolved to make the most of food in that condition.

It’s not your fault that you are gaining weight, that your kids are gaining weight. When you restrict the kids to low fat foods, when you deny them sweets, you think you are doing the right thing. Nobody told you that they replaced the fat in those foods with sweets. Nobody told you that when they took out the fat in that mayo they replaced it with something that causes heart problems. It sounds healthy reading the labels. Why wouldn’t they tell you?

You look at the label on that breakfast cereal and it tells you the percentage of daily recommended allowance contained in a serving for every ingredient in that food…except one. Sugar. If you looked at the daily recommended allowance of sugar in your kids morning yogurt…if they were required to tell you…it would say 125%. No more sugar of any kind right after that container of yogurt. Except that there is sugar in every processed food in your pantry.

It’s not your fault that all of the food you eat on the road contains artificial ingredients, extra sugars, fake fillers, trans fats. Nobody has to tell you what is in your restaurant foods. How are you going to eat on the road and be sure of what you are eating? You aren’t and they aren’t going to volunteer that info for you.

What are you going to do? Keep buying the artificial foods, loaded with artificial ingredients? Will you figure out how to make a quick breakfast for you kids that is made up of real ingredients like bacon, eggs, sausage, oatmeal, grits? Can you make a dinner at home as quick as you can eat at a restaurant?

You can do these things, and they don’t take as long as you think they do. They don’t cost as much as you think they cost. They don’t slowly kill you with diabetes, heart disease, obesity. It’s worth a try. See how I did it, go to dcarmack.com and look at the top menu. Click on the 21 Day Journal link, read the whole month’s entries to see what I had to do to quit eating like everyone else. It was hard and it was easy. I won’t be going back to the old way. Join me.