Getting back to basics.

I have been thinking about my weight loss diet.  I want a diet plan that will be easy to maintain and that means I can cook one meal for everyone.  I am tired of cooking one diet meal for me and one non-diet meal for the rest of the family.  If I can come up with a healthy diet that is good for us in general than I can be teaching my family how to eat so that the girls don't grow up with the same eating issues that I have.  I have tried the raw food diet, the Atkins diet plan, a more general high protein diet, a vegan diet, a vegetarian diet, the South Beach Diet, calorie counting, and everything else I can think of.  I am tired of strict rules.  I am tired of diets that I wouldn't want my kids to eat.

So I am going to try just eating clean healthy whole foods.  I know the basic rules to eating healthy, so I will stick to that.  I am not interested in concentrating on a rapid weight loss diet, I want to learn to simply eat healthy and teach my girls to do that too.

Here are some things I know:

• I know that chemically laden boxed junk that is more a science experiment is not healthy. 
• I know that I don't want to teach my girls that diet pills, food obsessions, and crazy diet schemes are the way we think about food.
• While I don't have a big issue with diet drinks, I want to make the switch to lemon water (which I love) and a home made ginger lemon tea.  
• I know that it is better to have my fridge filled with fruits and veggies and lots of fresh foods instead of having cupboards filled with snack bars and cookies.
• Concentrate on nutrition, higher fibre foods, foods with healthy fats, vitamin rich foods. 
• Weight loss diet foods, foods with saccharin, aspartame and other fake foods are not good for me.
• If I concentrate on whole healthy foods, avoid junk that is white processed, sugar laden and full of chemicals I will not need to worry so much about counting calories.  I need to learn to listen to my body and it will tell me the proper amount I need to eat.
• Basically if someone's grandma would look at it (or the ingredient list) and not recognize it as food, I should not be eating it.