PaleoPlus New Year's Tip #5 - Pantry Purge

Okay, the time is getting closer...2016 is just days away!  And for those of you who have decided (or may be still deciding) to start eating the way our bodies were meant to eat, you need to get prepared for success.

That brings me to today's PaleoPlus New Year's Tip #5 - The Pantry Purge!

Paleo eating removes all the things that have been shown to cause inflammation in our bodies or create an intolerance or other negative symptoms.  A Paleo diet removes the foods that are at odds with your health and replaces them with nutrient-dense, whole, unprocessed foods designed to keep you healthy and lean.

If you are like me - your pantry, cupboards and fridge are full of processed, non-Paleo foods.  Hopefully, you've already adopted Tip #1 Phase It Out.  If you've already stopped buying non-Paleo foods, you're kitchen is purging itself. 

I'll be honest, once I'd decided to make the switch to PaleoPlus Eating, I went cold turkey.  I knew in my mind and heart that I needed to do this, so I just stopped with everything that might be keeping me from losing weight and feeling my best.  Which meant I had to manually Purge my Pantry!

I grabbed a big plastic container with a lid and packed away anything we had that was unopened, but full of preservatives, sugars, gluten, soy and artificial sweeteners.  I packed up cans of beans and boxes of granola bars and bags of rice and quinoa.   The most eye-opening part was label-reading to weed out the items with added sugars. 

Once I started removing sauces, dressings, spreads with sugars - it eliminated 95% of the items in the doors of my refrigerator and a good part of the jars and cans in my cupboards.  I found sugar in all of my salad dressings, the pasta sauce, the chicken broth, the barbecue sauce ...too many items to list here. 

But it was freeing! 

Removing the temptations from your home kitchen and office desk drawers will help you stay true to your clean eating commitment during the all-important first 30 days.  Remember, my unhealthy food cravings were totally in check by day 11, but it was really helpful to not have sugary snacks and processed convenience foods at my fingertips while I was breaking up with sugar and dairy and diet soda and all the other junk I needed to get out of my system.

My kiddos kept eating their regular diet right up to Day 1 of our Squeaky-Clean 30 Days, so they managed to use up the ketchup and pasta sauces and pickles and opened boxes of granolas and jars of peanut butter.  Which was nice, because it meant I didn't really have to throw away that much.

(FYI - after our first 30 days on PaleoPlus, we decided to make the switch permanently, but it still took us another 2 or 3 months to donate all the unopened foods that we had stashed away.  It was all perfectly good, but we just knew we were never going back to our old way of eating, so we took it to the food bank and have never looked back!)

First of all, you need to decide what day you will officially start eating Paleo - January 1st?  For some, that is a family feast day, so think it all the way through.  My family will be doing a Squeaky-Clean 30 Days beginning the first Monday of the New Year - January 4th.  It's not a calendar-perfect way to do it, but avoiding sugars is easier when they are in their normal routine.

If you are interested in a program to help you through your first 30 days - check out Clean Eating Kick Start - a 30-Day Program, complete with full-sized pantry staples, Paleo snacks and a few portions of less-common ingredients to try as you prepare Clean Eating meals.  It really helps to have a guide and a real person to answer your questions.