Need help with ingredients & grocery items

[boxerkate_04]

Help! My husband and I are on day 5 and we are majorly struggling when buying groceries and making diverse meals. We are both somewhat picky eaters as far as veggies are concerned and have had some form of onions, peppers and chicken or onions, peppers and beef all week.

Every time we go to the store I get completely overwhelmed with the ingredients on the back. The book and tools always refer to reading the ingredients, but there are so many that I am not able to identify whether it's okay or not. I get the concept of little to no ingredients, but need to know how/when to make exceptions. For example, last night at Trader Joe's he picked up some bacon and it had dextrose in there. So I looked it up on my phone and it's from grape sugar - that's not okay right? Also, we've been eating PERDUE® Hot Italian Chicken Sausage in the morning with eggs - it says it has less than 2% of a few things, one being sugar- is this acceptable? My main question is - what IS okay to be in sausage, bacon, beef broth, sauces, spices etc.? I wish I had a list of all these ingredients and if they're okay or not.

We want to follow this program we are getting burnt out fast because I seem to be eliminating almost everything I see in the stores.

We have a Trader Joe's and Kroger local here. We have a couple small farmer markets that sell select fruits and vegetables.

Any advice or tips would be greatly appreciated!

[kayell]

Easy way around the label reading problem = don't buy things with labels. The farmers markets are great for that. I'm able to buy almost everything there. Your'e looking for simple foods first - meat cuts, fish cuts, eggs, avocados, fresh vegetables, fresh fruits. Keep the packaged items to very basic one ingredient stuff - coconut oil, tea or coffee if you drink them, spices that are just an herb or spice. It's much easier to keep it simple than to hunt for acceptable versions of processed foods.

At least that's what I do to make life easier. Side benefits - relearning the flavors of real foods, not spending $$ on packaging and advertising.

[CaseyD]

Kayell is right, it is MUCH easier (and better) to buy foods with no labels as much as you can. I realize when it comes to thinks like canned tomatoes and coconut milk, you will have to read labels, but for the most part it is easier to just buy cuts of meat instead of processed meats.

As far as bacon, it is hard to find W30 approved bacon in a store. US Wellness Meats sells W30 approved bacon that you can order, or you may try looking up local farmers in your area that raise pastured animals (as I imagine these farmers are probably going to be the only ones that make clean bacon). And, if you love sausage, it is easy to take ground pork and add spice to make it sausage.

Sounds like what you need most is some new recipes. I think most people are picky about veggies because they haven't learned ways to cook them well (or in ways that they like). Try finding recipes that are a combination of meat and veggies you don't usually eat as a way to experiment. Some of the best cookbooks I have are: Well Fed, Everyday Paleo, and Eat Like a Dinosaur. Not all the recipes are W30, but the ones that aren't can usually easily be altered to be W30 (minus the desert recipes, those just aren't W30). Also, there are some great online recipe sites like nomnompaleo.com, theclothesmakethegirl.com, www.chowstalker.com/whole30, picketfencepaleo.com, and so forth. This is just the tip of the iceberg, really, when it comes to places to find new paleo recipes.

One last tip I have is to spend some time looking up/developing some spice combinations (Well Fed is fantastic for this). I think this is a big part of eating paleo - being able to throw some meat, whatever veggies you got and a great spice mix in a pan and 10 minutes later, having a great meal. Spices can make the same couple of ingredients taste different, giving you even more variety.

[befabdaily]

It really is true, you can almost not buy anything that you might have been used to, anymore. It's a mindset and you shift into it deeper over the course of the 30. Read my log -- there was a time a few days ago when I realized that I just did not need a lot of what was in my pantry ever again. We are pushed to buy so many products, and I think there's a certain cultural pressure that your food should be totally different every day, and adventurous -- or at least luxurious. But you can get in this mindset where you have a few things that you know taste good to you and will work, and just slot them into your lunchbox or your dinner every day and be done. What I figured out during this month is that I was previously setting the bar way too high for my cooking, and then mostly sneaking under the bar. It doesn't have to be Julia Child every time.

I go to Trader Joe's, all I buy is eggs, plain frozen seafood, olives, avocados, lemons and limes, and sometimes nuts. Fruit, vegies, and grassfed meat I get at the farmer's market. The only labels I had to look at all month were on my canned tomato sauces and coconut milk, and the curry pastes I bought to make dinners with.

Here's how I made it not overwhelming. First I came up with an acceptable breakfast. One that didn't force me to eat anything I didn't like wholeheartedly. I road tested that breakfast for a couple of weeks before I started Whole30. It is: 2 eggs (either scrambled with spinach and olives, or sunny side up), 1 small avocado or half of a large one, about 3/4 cup of roasted sweet potato, and either a fresh tomato or some fruit. I eat that same breakfast every day with minor variations, and I don't have to think about it. Just be sure there's always avocados, eggs, and pre-roasted sweet potatoes on hand. It's like always making sure you've got milk and cereal, only better. Similar processes for thinking through lunch and dinner, doing the "cook-up" on the weekend so I have meals, or just being sure to have meat thawed so I can scramble up a (totally respectable quality) 5-minute curry.

I don't know where I got weird ideas about my food needing to be super-various or fancy, but I think it comes from about the same place that having way too many pairs of shoes comes from.

Enjoy the paring down and let it change you.

[Gregory Wu]

It really is a challenge to find packaged foods without some kind of sugar in them. I thought I'd found some deli Roast Beef that was Whole30 compliant, and I just looked at it and saw Dextrose.

Costco sells bacon that has no sugar in it. The trade off is that it has nitrates, which is used in almost all bacon.

Also, if you have Trader Joe's, then they probably sell Aidell's sausage. Most of their sausages, as far as I can tell, are Whole 30. Their Chicken Apple is sweetened with apple juice, and some others have no sweeteners at all.

To answer your question about what's OK, my understanding is you should not be having any processed sugars at all.

[Becky Rynkiewicz Dodson]

so my trader joes bacon lists sugar as an ingredient but in the nutritional data has 0carbs...is the sugar that significant then?

[AmyS]

No sugar in any form or amount. At all.

This was my biggest shocker when I did my first Whole30 as well. I was astonished (and later, kinda horrified, I gotta say) about how many products have sugar. I'm especially troubled by how many products that have words like "natural" on the label have sugar in them.

Most recently I've been discovering soy in products like canned fish that say prominently on the label "packed in water."

But yeah, sugar is in so. much. stuff. It's insane. It's really really reeeeally insane. I've started to spend most of my time in the veggie/fruit section and the meat section of the grocery store. It kind of hit me about 2/3 way through my first Whole30 that on some level, 90% of what they sell at the grocery store doesn't even really count as actual food.

Note on looking at meats: I'm finding that I even have to read ingredient labels in meats in my grocery store. Not just the cured ones, but even like, say, ground pork. Why does ground pork have added non-compliant ingredients, you ask? I cannot tell you.

Eat much more simply, and try roasting veggies with some compliant oil and salt, and see what you think of them. Even my pickiest kid will eat kale like that! I think sometimes we THINK we're picky, when really we're just used to everything having sugar in it. I find that it helps to add fat. I like refined coconut oil (no smell or taste of coconut) and I adore avocadoes.

[Michele West]

No sugar in any form or amount. At all.

This was my biggest shocker when I did my first Whole30 as well. I was astonished (and later, kinda horrified, I gotta say) about how many products have sugar. I'm especially troubled by how many products that have words like "natural" on the label have sugar in them.

Most recently I've been discovering soy in products like canned fish that say prominently on the label "packed in water."

But yeah, sugar is in so. much. stuff. It's insane. It's really really reeeeally insane. I've started to spend most of my time in the veggie/fruit section and the meat section of the grocery store. It kind of hit me about 2/3 way through my first Whole30 that on some level, 90% of what they sell at the grocery store doesn't even really count as actual food.

Note on looking at meats: I'm finding that I even have to read ingredient labels in meats in my grocery store. Not just the cured ones, but even like, say, ground pork. Why does ground pork have added non-compliant ingredients, you ask? I cannot tell you.

Eat much more simply, and try roasting veggies with some compliant oil and salt, and see what you think of them. Even my pickiest kid will eat kale like that! I think sometimes we THINK we're picky, when really we're just used to everything having sugar in it. I find that it helps to add fat. I like refined coconut oil (no smell or taste of coconut) and I adore avocadoes.

I agree with being horrified at how much sugar is added to something, I assumed was healthy or at least sugar free. Take the Organic Free Range Chicken Broth I bought 4 cartons of! Why the heck do they need to add sugar to that?!?! Again I assumed because of what the label said that it would be OK.

And the soy in canned tuna shocked me too!

I think it can be overwhelming at first. Well Fed is a great resource as are many food blogs. I also took some of our regular meals and Whole 30'd them! That make things easier also.