Dirty food habits die hard

I agonized over whether to fess up to this or not.  And to be honest, I was leaning quite heavily to the not side.  I didn’t want to reveal to everyone that I’m a fraud.  Can you blame me?  But I’m going to do it.  I’m going to come clean.  Yup, right now.  On three: one, two, two and a half… THREE.

As I was scheduling my post about cleaning up my diet, I was also cooking a box of Kraft Dinner.

There it is.

As I said, I was loathe to uncover my dirty little secret to everyone.  That is, until it occurred to me that there is no ‘everyone’.  In fact, there’s precisely ‘no one’.  At the time of publishing this post, I have exactly one reader, who I strongly suspect is my Dad.  So I need to get over myself.

Then I remembered something else: like I said at the start of the other post, cleaning up after 30 years of dirty food is CHALLENGING.  I can’t switch it off in a day, even if it is for the sake of my baby but I’ve made some serious progress in the last 20-odd months.  Pretending there isn’t still work to be done would only cheapen my achievement.

So in the interest of being honest – with myself and any future readers – here’s a list of my worst dirty food habits and why it’s so hard for me to let them go.

Kraft Dinner. Obviously, since it’s the inspiration for this post.  What can I say – like any good Canadian kid I grew up with this stuff.  It was also a staple of my university years.  It’s the one and only food I want when I’m sick.  It’s my special treat when Mr. Fair is away on business.  I even had my family mail me a few boxes when I lived in England.  But oddly enough it’s also the vice that I’ve had the most success in beating.  I used to eat 4-6 boxes a week.  The last couple of years, I’ve pared that down to 4-6 per YEAR.  I’m seriously proud of that.

The fake peanut butter. Again, the peanut butter of my childhood was the corn syrup and icing sugar variety.  We’ve switched to the real stuff in our house, but neither of us loves it and frankly, it’s a bitch to spread.  On a recent trip to my Grandma’s, I relished a slice of Skippy-coated toast.

Ice cream, especially soft serve. This one is mostly pragmatic: as much as I love making things from scratch, I’m not willing to make ice cream.  Aside from the time, I just can’t devote precious kitchen storage to a one-trick machine like an ice cream maker.  And even if I did, I still couldn’t make soft serve.  This will probably be one of the few industrial foods that will continue to appear in my diet.

Chocolate bars. Giving up Nestle for ethical reasons has helped a lot, but there are still lots of non-Nestle chocolate bars.  And let’s be honest, they taste good.

Pizza. We’re about to start making our own pizza (dough included) so this should progress pretty quickly.  But the thing with pizza is that it’s the food I go for when I’m fed up with cooking.  Even if I’ve got frozen shells, I’ll still have to cut up toppings and grate cheese and all that other stuff so the Delissios are still going to be tempting.

There you have it, my food Kryptonite.  I hope I’ll someday kick these in their industrial butts, but for now I’m focusing on the easier targets and (trying to be) proud of it.