It's two bucks a bottle for [STRIKE]the Kraft crap[/STRIKE] KRAP'S craft
This works too, LOL - most of their "food" has all kinds of crud in it...
It isn't.
I'm shocked to find that poor Americans eat at McDonald's for breakfast every day, when they could just as easily have had a real cheese sandwich at home for less.
Or a bowl of cereal, cooking a couple eggs, making a couple pankcakes, drinking 60 cents worth of orange or cranberry juice. Of course, if somebody makes pancakes, it doesn't do much good if they heavily slather each pancake with 400 calories of butter and drown it all in the HFCS-laden crap that passes for syrup here. For syrup, I use nothing but pure maple syrup. And even though it's expensive, you don't use all that much of it in one meal.
I lost close to 20 pounds by avoiding HFCS. That's it. No counting calories, no additional exercise, no nothing.
Same here, when I decided to lose weight in 2005. If I didn't love dark chocolate SO much (and I mean a full bar per day - sometimes even two), I'd be on the perfect diet, and from my August 2005 weight [225 to 228] I'd probably now be down 70 pounds instead of the current 43 to 45. I've intensely avoided HFCS for the duration.
We haven't had canned soup or prepared foods for 12 years, no prepared dressings, no 'seasonings', no hfcs laced foods except when we totally fall off the wagon and have a coke.
We figure that where we spend more money on real ingredients, we save it ten times over on making and preserving our own soups and stews and breads etc. etc. etc.
I do eat some canned soups, but I look at ingredients carefully. Half the time I'm eating some of the Indian canned soups (often a lentil soup, or
dal), or New England clam chowder, etc. There are just SOME soups that I really enjoy, but that I'm not going to even try to make at home. I accept that the canned soup will usually be a sodium-heavy meal and I figure that indulgence is less harmful, because
I NEVER add salt/sodium to ANYTHING, even things I prepare from scratch or which are otherwise unsalted. It's probably actually a good idea to eat something with salt/sodium in it occasionally, because the body does need it for electrolytes balance, etc.
On soup-can ingredients lists, I don't usually see as much a potpourri of horrid stuff as I do in some other things, but I tend to get my soup from places like Whole Foods and I pay attention to the labels. Campbell simply doesn't make very much money off me.
The seasonings that I use are generally simple ones, rather than something like "Cajun seasoning" and their ilk - mostly I'll use black pepper, cilantro, cinnamon, powdered seaweed, dill, sesame seeds, curry powder, chili powder (when I make chili). I have pure cocoa powder on hand as well. I haven't used a salt shaker since sometime in the late 1970's or early 1980's.
I think I'm doing OK on breads by watching the ingredients carefully. I'm aware I get some sodium, etc. from that, but I'm still avoiding HFCS. [I ASSUME that, if the ingredients instead just say "corn syrup," it's more or less the same?] I'm not motivated enough to take the effort to make my own bread...forget it, LOL.
Sodapop isn't even on my radar. I have perhaps two per year AT THE VERY MOST - in many years it's ZERO. Almost always that rare choice will be cream soda or root beer. Of course the latter tends to be LOADED with HFCS, ingredients have to really be watched carefully.
So once I lost the 45 pounds, I've managed to continue to hover around that lower weight, now, for almost four years. My weight can sometimes spike after the year-end holidays, as well as heavily-socialized trips such as JUB meets and hobby conventions, but I usually get it back down fairly quickly.
Most of my grocery store buys consist entirely of fruits and vegetables and, when needed, staples such as milk, eggs or rice.
