Life can be vicious at times.
For example I ate a muffin last week. It was glorious, dripping in chocolate, filled with white chunks and it simply melted in my mouth.
Man, I loved that muffin.
Then, I woke up a couple of days later and that very same muffin had found a new home on the waistband of my jeans. It doesn’t look as good there as it did in the bakery window.
My paleo lifestyle has been a little lacking of late, although what is on my plate can usually be classed as clean, the wine and chocolate that follow are probably a little dirty….
Hence why my tummy is expanding and my chins multiplying.
It is time to get clean…. again.
Interestingly, my nine-year old diabetic daughter has proven the motivation to get back on the healthy train. She has recently given up gluten in her diet, she has decided that it doesn’t benefit her in any way and she would be healthier without it. I panicked at first, knowing the cost of replacement foods that are gluten-free, I worried if I could afford this change. Turns out my daughter was one step ahead again, she is not interested in replacement foods, she wants to eat clean – just like her mum.
I felt a bit of a fraud at that statement…
Eating Paleo/clean is not about spending a fortune, but more about thinking about what you put on your plate and budgeting according. My family shop for four of us rarely comes to over £50 a week, and we can all eat a ridiculous amount.
Last year, my lovely clean eating goddess friend, Ruth sold me the benefits of eating clean and buying affordable food and got me shopping at Lidl on a regular basis. With a wide range of meats, salads and vegetables it is a great store to find all of your clean eating needs, without going overboard on budget.
Molly, with a new-found love of reading labels, launched into the supermarket with glee, determined to find some tasty clean treats that weren’t processed to remove gluten, but instead were simply grown without it. She began tossing meats and freshly delivered vegetables into our trolley with careless abandonment.
“Steak for tea mum,” she yelled with a smile, “let’s have sweet potatoes and salad with it?”. “Can you make your mayo? I’ll grab lemons,”
“Oh, mum, look at this it is Spanish, do I like Spanish ham? Lets get lots, we can have eggs and ham for breakfast.”
“And they have those olives things you like, I’ll get a tub.”
“Eggs, mum, lots of eggs…”
It was like shopping with a kid after they had consumed a bucketful of sugar. Ironic since the diet she lives on is pretty much sugar free.
But to watch your child dart around a supermarket grabbing apples and whooping does make your parental heart boom inside your chest.
You may notice I am not referencing my other two children….
I left them drooling at the sweets and chocolate aisle and kept returning their selections to the shelves.
I am working on converting one child at a time….
Molly was right, the Spanish and Iberian range in Lidl at the moment is pretty awesome. We have enjoyed some beautiful Spanish omelettes this week, poached eggs and Serrano ham for breakfast, and Paella for tea. Plus I have created some fab tuna and salad salads for lunch which have started off my waistline reduction beautifully.
The bonus of Lidl is they run campaigns like this all the time, so the offerings are always changing. So Molly can get excited every time we shop.
Thanks to Lidl for commissioning this post. it was both lovely to shop and to eat the results!
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