You know, when I started musical theatre a bazillion years ago, I learned that the actor’s nearest and dearest friend is the “vamp”.  A vamp is a little piece of music, usually about four or eight bars in length, that can be repeated.  Forever, if need be.  A vamp is usually the underscoring that begins a song or hides a transition or .. anything, really.  Learning a vamp will save your hide on stage.

So the term “revamping”?  Is just finding a new four/four that’s going to cover your moves.  It’s just learning your new background music.  It’s not really changing course or starting over; it’s merely continuing on to a slightly different melody.

We’re revamping in our house.

We had begun this path in January, when I had watched Food, INC over Christmas holiday and had a major breakthrough that we didn’t know our food and we were eating things being processed a million times over.  I learned that high fructose corn syrup and soy products are BAD, really bad, and things I had been complaining about for YEARS .. memory loss, lack of quality sleep, difficulty losing weight .. are directly related to HFCS and artificial sweeteners.  We made a decision as a New Year’s Resolution: no more diet food.  No more HFCS.  No more “reduced fat”, “lite”, or “100 Calorie Packs”.

We were going to eat food, damnit.  That’s why we’re here.

It wasn’t an easy change to make.  Well, okay, the ideal of it was easy to adhere too, but you quickly learn that HFCS is hidden in a LOT of things.  For instance, I bought some Nabisco Nutter Butter type cookies BECAUSE it said “No High Fructose Corn Syrup!” on the front.  But on the individual wrappers that held a couple of cookies together?  High Fructose Corn Syrup was the first ingredient listed.  SAY WHAT?

So we’ve done that, for the most part.  And our children don’t really notice a difference.

But now I’m trying to shop more primal, and that?  That, they have noticed.

They miss bread.  They miss rice.  They miss couscous, quinoa, oatmeal, and crescent rolls.  And really, I do too.  So we’re struggling to find some middle ground there.  Can I just say, Okay, but ONLY whole grain? How do I know that whole grain is really any better?

And trying to buy local/organic?  Is costing a small fortune.  There are some things I won’t bend on – dairy, for example – but meats are piecemeal.  Produce is almost unattainable.  I’m trying to console myself with Hey, nonorganic veggies are still veggies! but I feel like a fraud.

Then there’s eating out.  We don’t eat out that often, but when we do, it’s typically a drive-thru situation.  It’s not because we like the food any more .. we really don’t, honestly .. but it’s cheap.  We actually ate a sit-down restaurant last week for the first time in probably a month and I felt like such a SELL-OUT because it was a chain restaurant.  AND THE FOOD WAS MEDIOCRE AT BEST.

Why is it so hard, in every way?  Mentally, to move forward?  Financially, to not break your budget?  Emotionally, to have patience with the resistance in your brood?  Why can’t being healthy be easy?

::sigh::

Play it again, Sam..

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