Welcome!

In case the blog title didn't give it away, I'm a Mama. And a Foodie.

I've got two little ones, an almost 5-year-old daughter, who I refer to as LO (read "little one") and a 2-1/2-year-old son, Chase. My husband and I live in the beautiful southern state of South Carolina, and we are embarking on a real food journey.

I decided to start writing this blog to chronicle the process of taking back my family's health by eliminating processed foods from our diet. I'm a stay at home mama (with a part-time job for brief escapes from the children -- haha!), so I'm responsible for all of the grocery shopping, all of the cooking and baking, and all of the snacking. Since hubs and I were married in 2005, we've maintained the typical "American" lifestyle: junk food, processed food, and zero exercise. When our daughter was born 2 years later, we continued our lifestyle. When our son was born almost 3 years ago, we continued our lifestyle. I would occasionally jump on a bandwagon every now and then to eliminate processed foods and eat only whole foods, but it would last only a week -- maybe two at most -- before I was back to baking daily treats (brownies, cupcakes, cookies, etc.), running through drive-thru's for lunch with the kids, and dining out for dinner, enjoying oversized portions and an occasional dessert to boot!

Fast-forward to last weekend. I had gorged myself on a variety of unhealthy foods, and my body was NOT happy about it. My stomach was miserable for a good three days straight. It wasn't necessarily digestive issues, so much as a dull, aching pain in my stomach. For three days straight. It was like my body was finally sending me the message: enough is enough!

I came to my senses and started focusing my diet (and thus my kids' and husband's as well) primarily on whole foods and the elimination of processed foods. As of this writing, I'm only 5 days into our journey, but it has been a HUGE success and I don't see us going back to our old ways.

I've been buying TONS of fresh fruits and veggies, and have been avoiding processed foods. I haven't baked anything in over a week, which is a BIG DEAL for me. I love to cook (hence the "Foodie" part of the blog), so I've been trying out new, healthy recipes, as well as new ingredients I previously assumed my family and I wouldn't like.

I started this journey on my other blog -- Just Another Day -- but I've decided to devote my real food journey on its very own blog as I feel it's THAT important. I hope you enjoy following along on our journey as I post healthy recipes and food photos from our journey. Feel free to share your thoughts, insights, recipes, ideas, etc. here as well. I'd love the support and community from other healthy food foodies!

To get the blog started off on the right foot, I've grabbed the posts I wrote concerning our first four days of this journey from my other blog and posted them here so you'll have the whole picture of where we came from and what inspired me to start this journey. :)