We're back...Interesting lessons

We are back from MIAMI! We seriously considered abandoning all responsibility and staying there forever. We had a great time and lots of sunshine.
We started out trying to eat healthy. We were off to a good start. At Paula's she fed us some amazing home cooked meals. Melody made us black bean and veggie burritos.
Most of the trip we ate what I would consider a "healthy American diet", the foods that the Americans who are health conscious would eat. We'd pick salads and meats and veggies at the restaurants, avoid fast food, and snack on fruits. We ate cereal for breakfast and a lot of seafood. The biggest "unhealthy" foods we ate were a lot of unclean meats. We ate shrimp, crab, pork, oysters, yum...
Toward the end we weren't as careful and as time ran out we ended up at Fast Food sometimes. We still naturally chose the better options.
Here are some of the lessons we learned: (On our trip I thought of this in terms of "research" and "experiments" and "lessons" instead of failing or cheating)

It is really super hard, if not impossible to eat ALL whole foods on vacation. While we ate fairly healthy as I said, some things you just can't avoid in those situations. Like at someones house, or in an unfamiliar place where you can't find fresh fruits, or when you have really hungry kids and no where else to eat or no where to prepare fresh foods.

2. Another little experiment we did was with the kids. Since we were out and about, the kids saw a lot more snacks and junk food so they begged for it. They quickly wore us out and we said fine, we don't care. We can't put up with the begging forever. Interestingly, it didn't help. They begged for more junk food the more we gave them. So we didn't save ourselves any grief by giving in. I realised this once after we had given them a treat of donuts for breakfast and an hour later they threw a royal fit because they wanted ice cream! HAHAHAHA! So if you ever feed your kids whole foods, and feel bad because you are "depriving them" of fun food and you can't keep saying no all the time, keep this in mind. It doesn't help.

3. The "healthy american diet" is still a long ways off from the whole foods diet. While it's great to eat as well as possible and any little bit helps, it's not the same. I've heard from a lot of people (including myself a few months ago) that "we eat PRETTY healthy!" But it's not. Let's look at it this way. Most "healthy" people eat lots of good food to compensate for bad food. Like if I eat 3 oranges, I can eat ice cream too. While this way of thinking isn't all bad, after all, it's better than not eating oranges at all, it doesn't equate. I am pretty sure that you end up barely making up for the crap. You are never getting ahead. So you eat lots of healthy food that doesn't benefit you as much as it can. So you kind of do the hard work without the benefit. But just think if your body didn't have to continually "catchup" or repair the damage constantly. It just got better and stronger, or had more fuel to fight toxins in the air or other problems. Instead, it has to use the good nutrients to only counteract the bad ones. It can't ever use the good stuff to fix the problems or to build immunity. So if you are eating bad along with the good, it would stand to reason that you might still have all the same problems you had if you werent eating anything good because its never getting ahead. You might not be getting a lot worse, but never gain ground.
Also, I would be willing to bet that we ALL tend to overestimate the good food amounts compared to the bad (like, if I eat 2 pieces of fruit, I can have a bowl of ice cream, a candy bar, and a soda). And we also don't know how many superfoods you really need to eat to compensate for that diet soda.
(BTW, if you ever think that diet soda is better for you than regular, think again! It's poison!)
The most interesting thing I learned on vacation is that while I ate a lot of food I shouldn't have, I never felt like overindulging. Even for the whole week, I never got any cravings or addictions to the bad stuff. It still didn't satiate me like it used to. I found myself reaching for that orange after McDonalds because it tasted good. In the past, I would have ate as much junk as I could, just because i was able to. I never did try any pop! Occasionally it would sound tempting, but I just never did. That was nice. And the best part? When we got home and I went shopping yesterday? I bought all whole foods. I don't think we are going back. We know too much now.
I don't think we can do it 100% of the time as there are always difficult situations, but probably 90%. It just finally got to the point that our knowledge is finally in sync with our bodies. Before we knew what we SHOULD do, but we couldn't get over that addiction. Now we can. It's really starting to sound a lot more appetizing to us.

So tonight we had organic, pastured chicken, sweet potatoes, salad, and homemade blueberry pie for Willa's 1st birthday.
And I couldn't wait to get home and eat deviled eggs again!
So if we are really creatures of habit, the trick is to change your habits to whole foods and get in a whole foods rut!!!