I have made peace with grocery shopping.

Since we have gone gluten and dairy free grocery shopping has taken many unexpected turns for me. 

 

It started out as gluten and dairy free on April 1^st 2012 (a day I will never forget).  I took a day off work to “go gluten and dairy free”. I went shopping by myself.  I went to 3 different stores and spent over $300 on gluten and dairy free specialty products.  It was the right thing to do at the time.  It was a very hard change for my children and all the wonderful foods helped the transition. 

 

A few months pass before I realized soy was a problem.  So shopping turned into gluten, dairy, and soy free.  There are very few commercial products available that are all three. The products that are gluten, dairy, and soy free are expensive.  I started baking lots.

 

A few more months pass before the realization that eggs are bad.  Baking took a right turn into no-where-ville.

 

I tried my best to find processed foods that were gluten, dairy, soy, and egg free.  I resisted my very best not to go to whole unprocessed foods.  I really didn’t want too.  My children didn’t want to.  Yet everything I tried made someone sick. 

 

Finally in November of 2013 I drew the line in the sand.  I had made my children sick too many times and watched their misery.  I made a list of all the “safe” foods and everything else had to be a whole food. 

 

A whole food diet has been the hardest for me to accept and enforce. It is so hard not to give into a reasonable child that argues rationally to buy something in the store when you really want it too.

 

Even worse are the solo shopping trips when no one is around to see what you buy.  The cake, chocolate, candy, etc is so easy to slip in the compartment of the van on the way home to be eaten in private later. The little voice inside my head that tells me I deserve it and one won’t hurt.  But it will.  It will make me sick.

 

The internal struggle is time consuming and draining.  It takes every bit of my will power not to give in to.  I hating shopping.  I hated the fact that I couldn’t buy what I wanted.  I hated having to choose not to buy something.  I was going to write a whole post about how much I hated it.

 

But then I realized that I hate having to choose not to buy food.  There are so many people in this world that don’t have enough food.  Here I am with an abundance of food around me and the means to obtain it.  And I have the audacity to hate being in this situation. 

 

I am so very blessed. My children are healthy now.  I prayed and prayed for my children to be healthy and now they are.  Yet here I hate what I must sacrifice for them to be healthy. 

 

No.  That is NOT me. 

 

Thank you God!  Thank you!  I will thank you every time I go grocery shopping.  I will buy healthy foods. I will think you for blessing me with knowing what to buy.  I will thank you for blessing me with the means to buy food.  Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!  I cannot thank you enough.