The other day I was talking to a lady I know who grows a lot of her own food and promotes gardening and natural healing. She eats a generally raw-food diet. She’s a inspiration, really. But I discovered that day that she also sometimes eats giant cookies made of white flour, sugar, and who knows what else. We all have our weaknesses, don’t we?

We can only change so much of our diets and our lives at one time. So what changes are urgent, and what can you put off for a while? How do you decide which “vices” you can hang on to? It’s a very individual choice, isn’t it? And the big question for me has been whether if I hang on to some “vices,” I will get gradually better, and be able to give them up, or whether I’m just fooling myself. My body used to tell me that the best possible food was either cookie dough, (butter and sugar, with a touch of refined flour for balance) or cinnamon rolls (butter and sugar, with a touch of refined flour for balance). I know that in the past, I’ve switched to artificial sweeteners (the epitome of industrial food) and later discovered my sweet-tooth was as strong as ever. Soon, I was back to the cookies and cakes I’d thought I was free of.

Now, I’ve given up almost all sweets, but hung on to a few crutches. Mainly choco-perfection chocolate which is sweetened with a natural fiber-based sweetner that doesn’t affect blood sugar or insulin. I’ve been diluting them, by melting a small chunk of the chocolate in some coconut oil, and then cooling it in the freezer. The other day, I was at the grocery store, and bought myself a bar, and ate a piece straight. And you know what? The sweetness of it was really unpleasant. I discovered that I’ve actually freed myself of the desire for super-sweet tastes. What good news!

The moral of this story is that if *I* can get to the point where the idea of eating cookie dough is *gross* — anybody can.

Over the next few weeks (now that I’m back) I want to talk more about the process of transitioning away from industrial food toward real food. How do you decide which sweeteners to give up first? What about convenience foods? Is organic more important, or local?

If you have tricks you use to wean yourself off industrial food, or vices you still cling to, leave a comment!