Real Food: What to Eat, What to Avoid, & How to Compromise (Yes, all in one place)

What do you eat?

How do you remember it all?

Are there some things I can still buy in the store that are still ok to eat on a real food diet?

What do you compromise on so you don’t go totally insane?

When people start on the real food journey, it can be SO overwhelming to even fathom what the cupboards and fridge are going to look like without a bunch of processed foods. What dinner will feel like without ordering pizza or grabbing a frozen one once a week.

Shoot, even in the midst of my real food journey, I’m still overwhelmed sometimes!

The research is constantly changing, what works for my family and my time frame shifts as the years pass, and even the sources I trust ebb and flow.

What’s a gal to do when she just wants to eat healthy, real food?

I’ve often received reader requests for me to update an old post from 2010 in which I offered a printable guide to “What to Eat and Why.” People feared it might be outdated, and rightfully so!

It’s a pretty comprehensive document as it turns out <<<understatement

…and it’s taken me the better part of a week to update it. Phew!

Now I see why I put it off for so many years, even though people wanted it. (Sorry, friends)

It deserves the capital letters on

“The List”

But now it’s ready, fully updated, a dozen pages of a simple to read 3-column list:

1. No Way! for the foods I try hard to avoid completely (or at least fully understand I’m eating junk if I eat them)
2. Okay for the semi-compromise foods – mostly whole foods that are decent options.
3. Hey Hey! for the best and most optimal choice in a given category.

Here’s an example so you can get an idea of how it works:

Click here to print The List

And why did I finally make the time and space to recreate this document and offer it as a free printable again after all these years and reader requests?

You have Plan to Eat to thank. They offered to sponsor the post so I’d finally have a real deadline – even though my readers are always the most important for me to serve, my sponsors tend to have louder deadlines, so I’m grateful PTE was willing to help me serve my readers!

Why did a meal planning site sponsor a printable that doesn’t talk about meal planning?

You can’t accomplish a real food lifestyle, or even a semi-compromise-real-food lifestyle, without meal planning.

Meal planning may not fit on the 3-column list but it can’t be left out of any basic guide for healthy living – and Plan to Eat can help even the most rookie of rookies.

The software allows you to plan your own meals from recipes on the web, in your own cookbooks, or wherever – you drag and drop recipes into the recipes box, and then PTE can generate your grocery and pantry lists and put prep notes into your digital calendar for things you might need to do before the meal, like thaw meat, soak dry beans, or prep a component of the meal.

I like that it’s fully customizable and you don’t have to use someone else’s recipes for your meal plan. Try it out for 30 days free. Search for your favorite ingredient and you’ll be on your way to technological meal planning in minutes.

Need More Baby Steps?

Here at Kitchen Stewardship^®, we’ve always been all about the baby steps. But if you’re just starting your real food and natural living journey, sifting through all that we’ve shared here over the years can be totally overwhelming.

That’s why we took the best 10 rookie “Monday Missions” that used to post once a week and got them all spruced up to send to your inbox – once a week on Mondays, so you can learn to be a kitchen steward one baby step at a time, in a doable sequence.

Yes! ONE Change a Week, Please!

Sign up to get weekly challenges and teaching on key topics like meal planning, homemade foods that save the budget (and don’t take too much time), what to cut out of your pantry, and more.