Growing up in the 1960’s
I grew up in the 1960’s when food primarily came in a box or can. Sure there were fruits and vegetables in the store, but I don’t honestly remember eating them. It wasn’t exactly the healthiest— vegetables in cans and cake mixes in boxes. Even baking chicken involved using a seasoning mix from a box. (In case you’re too young, we’d put the chicken and the seasoning in a plastic bag, shake until the chicken was coated, and then bake.) Honestly, I thought it was the only way to cook chicken until I was in my twenties.
Dip for potato chips was sour cream and a dry soup mix that, yes you guessed it, came in a box. The only ‘real’ soup reminiscent of my childhood was my mother’s homemade, green, split-pea soup. She even dumped canned vegetables into that soup. I recall making an occasional cake from scratch and Snickerdoodles at Christmastime. Graduating into adulthood, I continued to use those packaged products, because I honestly didn’t realize that I wasn’t eating food. It was all that I knew.
Chronic Lyme Disease
I led a sickly life as a child and became seriously ill later in life. I remember my doctor looking in his books, trying to find out why I was sick. When I became an adult, my doctors only seemed interested in prescribing pharmaceuticals instead of finding the cause of my sickness. I was thankful for the world wide web and knew if I wanted to get better, I’d have to do my own research–yes and employee Dr. Google! That research brought me to food, and I quickly learned how tainted our food supply had become. Eventually, I was lucky to find a wonderful Naturopath who found the cause of my sickness – Chronic Lyme Disease. (More about my experience with Chronic Lyme Disease later.)
I’m thankful my sickness put me on a path to eating healthily. Eating real foods has become a huge part of my recovery from Chronic Lyme. Learning about food turned me into a Recipe Renegade! I changed the ingredients in most of my favorite recipes to real food. I realized it was simple: we either eat food that is healthy or we eat food that is not healthy. I no longer fall for those ingenious marketing tactics that big companies used to trick me into purchasing Frankenfoods.
Changing My Ways
Preparing foods from scratch like our grandparents did isn’t as hard as you think. Onion dip without MSG is easy to make. My onion dip goes nicely with raw veggies! You’re probably thinking, “I don’t have time for that!” It only takes a few seconds longer to put three spices in a bowl along with the yogurt or sour cream instead of opening a box and dumping it in. (I learned that the “I don’t have time for that!” people really just don’t care enough to get healthy.)
Paying attention to wonderful health pioneers like Robyn O’Brien, Mike Adams (the Health Ranger), and Russ Bianchi (world-renowned food formulator), and caring doctors like Dr. Robert Thompson, Dr. Joseph Mercola, Dr. Mark Hyman, and Dr. Josh Axe, I’ve learned a lot about food and how it can negatively or positively affect our bodies. It took many years for me to learn what to eat and what not to eat.
Through the years, I’ve experimented with my recipes and successfully replaced bad ingredients with healthy, wholesome ingredients. I’ve even come up with many recipes on my own. Friends started asking for my recipes and I realized the easiest way to share them is to keep them on a website. That’s when Make Healthier Choices was born.
You too, can learn how easy it is to make recipes with wholesome, healthy ingredients instead of man-made, ‘food-like’ ingredients.
MY MISSION: to become the healthiest I’ve ever been and to help others, especially those with Chronic Lyme Disease, to do the same.
I hope my website will help you Make Healthier Choices for a healthier you!
Lynn McGovern, the Recipe Renegade
