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There are a multitude of reasons as to why people gain weight. Everyone is different, but here are the top five that apply to majority of people. Choosing five may be a gross oversimplification, but these are the five most common reasons I see for weight gain. Diets Wait, what? Aren’t diets the pinnacle of health? Isn’t that how people lose weight and keep it off? No. Diets are restrictive, counterproductive, and promote an unhealthy relationship with food. Food is amazing. It is meant to be enjoyed, it is meant to be cooked from scratch using good ingredients, it’s meant to be savored. Food is not meant to be processed low-calorie, low-carb, low-sugar junk. It is time consuming and unenjoyable to weigh food, to count food, to portion it out into a teeny tiny allowance that doesn’t negatively affect your caloric intake for the day. Diets are not something that…

Have you ever stopped and wondered whether olive oil is healthier than butter and which fat is better for cooking? There is so much wrong information out there when it comes to good and bad fats! Let me break it down for you:  Butter vs. Olive Oil  – which fat is healthier? Recently there was a debate on Homemade Mommy’s Facebook page over olive oil being healthier than butter. This is something I see a lot. People eschewing butter because they are still afraid of saturated fats and have been led to believe that vegetable oils are the healthier option. Don’t get me wrong, olive oil is great. I eat it on my salads just about every day. It is rich in antioxidants and I love the taste. But is it healthier than butter? Should we eat olive oil instead of butter? Should we cook with it? Nutrient Density of Olive…

People tout yogurt as a health food. It’s a perfect snack, a low-fat solution to your sugar cravings. Unfortunately, most are not healthy at all. Here are yogurt’s common ingredients: aspartame, sucralose (linked to tumors) GMOs cornstarch sugar from GM sugarbeets preservatives dyes fructose (toxic, causes fatty liver disease) Here are the ingredients in a few very popular yogurts. Light and Fit: Yoplait (Weight Watchers approved!): What about Activia? It’s supposed to balance your gut flora, right? Wrong. Dannon Oikos: Let’s not forget that low-fat and no-fat foods contain harmful fillers. The fat is where the good stuff is, like vitamins and minerals! Why would we want to remove such a beneficial part? Additionally, unless yogurt is organic or grass-fed, you can bet your boots that the dairy is from conventional cows. Farmers feed them genetically modified corn and soy, and pump them full of antibiotics and hormones. Don’t get me wrong,…

On Friday night Scott and I had our friends Nick and Tasha over for dinner. I made brushetta with grain-free bread, asparagus, stuffed mushrooms, mashed potatoes and salmon. I made sure to make extra salmon and mashed potatoes because I knew we would eat it throughout the next week (aka this week). On Saturday we went tubing with friends and had a cookout afterward. For the cookout I made potato salad and pasta salad (using rice pasta). I did the same thing, I made a ton of it so we’d have leftovers to eat throughout the week. Salad ingredients. Last week I saw three small heads of romaine for $4.99 versus the normal $3 I spend on one. I then realized that three small heads, while it may look like a deal, produced a lot less lettuce than my one giant head. I stuck with the giant head this week. Mashed…

I remember when I first decided I was going to make the change to become healthy and start cooking for myself. Not only did I have no idea how to cook, I didn’t know what to cook. I would go to the grocery store, and I would draw a blank. I would get so overwhelmed. I distinctly remember being at the local Giant by my house, just aimlessly wandering around, completely frustrated. I would walk out with a a bunch of random food and no plan. I could make maybe one or two really basic dinners out of the random food I bought, but the dinner weren’t healthy. I didn’t know about organic food, about the importance of grass-fed meat and wild seafood over farmed. And on a very basic level, I didn’t know about real food. I didn’t know about cooking from scratch using whole ingredients. I didn’t know…