Moving to a more “primal” pantry

As my family finishes up our time here at Fort Campbell, KY, I’ve put a lot of thought into the changes I’m hoping to make as we pick up our lives and transplant to Fort Leonard Wood, MO.

The one advantage to having a big life change forced on you is the opportunity to make other changes at the same time. It offers the opportunity for reinvention.

About 9 months ago, the docs sent ArmyMan home with the advice to choose a lower acid diet and advocated something called the Paleo diet. While I was highly skeptical at first, hours and hours (and more hours and hours) of reading and research- personal blogs and scientific research- convinced me that it was worth a try.

And that try provided pretty good results.

Since then, we’ve consistently improved our eating. Fewer and fewer grain products, more and more home made, from scratch meals and ingredients. It’s made a real difference in how we all feel and how well Monkey sleeps.

I didn’t realize how much of a difference it had made until this last month. Between vacation, packing up all my kitchen equipment and a rather drawn out moving process, it’s been challenging to maintain those positive kitchen changes. And boy do I feel it. I haven’t been sleeping well, my stomach has been bothering me, and I just feel blaaaaah.

All this adds up to excellent motivation to use the move to make a complete change over to a primal pantry. It will still take research and more effort when it comes to meal planning. But it’s worth it. If we really are what we eat (and that really makes a lot of sense if you think about it), then isn’t it worth a little effort to make sure that what we eat is the best available to us?