Day 15: Purge Your Pantry of Harm

Scripture to Memorize:
She is like the merchant ships,
bringing her food from afar.
She gets up while it is still dark;
she provides food for her family
and portions for her servant girls.
Proverbs 31:14-15
Passage to Read: Same as the scripture to memorize.
Prayer:
Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for the blessing of the gift of food. Thank you for providing our daily physical bread as well as spiritual bread. Thank you for the blessings of each of the five senses you have endowed our bodies with. I admit/confess that at times I let my senses overrule common sense. Also that I allow the worldly views of things involving my senses to take precidence over what your law says. I look for things to please my eyes, listen to the words that tickle my ears, over indulge in food that does not benefit my body but overwhelms my taste buds, and I lay my hands on things I should not touch. I allow my wants to become more important than what I need. I often eat things that are not really healthy food and purchase things that are not healthy food. Help me Dear Lord to be more like the Proverbs 31 woman. Help me to want to go the extra mile to provide the very best for my family.
Holy Spirit help me to make wise food choices personally and when I am shopping so that there are only wholesome healthy food in my house. Help to not follow fad diets or to be mislead by the latest dietary fad but to follow healthy lifestyle changes. Help me to realize that these changes are life long and although the weight changes as a result of these change may be slower than the fads, in the long run they will be longer lasting.
God thank you for the abundance that we have in this country. Help me to allows be grateful for the blessings of this abundance and not take it for granted. Help me to give to those who are less fortunate. I pray, for people around the world, particulaly children, who do not have enough to eat and who do not have clean drinking water. Help me to be grateful without forgetting those in need and without becoming over-indulgent. Amen.
Personal:
This week Donna focuses on healthy eating to become the woman God wants me to be. Although I for various cannot follow all of the recommendations she has in today's personal section. There are some very good suggestions. In particular the segment on cleaning out or pantries (or what functions as our pantry). This is basically those staples and canned items on shelves somewhere in the vicinity of your kitchen. Plus you may want to do the same thing with your freezer if you are like my family and have a large freezer. Her instructions are a three step process for clean out unneeded unhealthy items.
(1) If it has been sitting here for more than a year and it is unlikely you'll use it in the next year, throw it out. Throw it out regardless of the shelf life.
(2) Now check labels for expiration dates. If it is expired, throw it out, unless you have some compelling reason to keep it.
(3) While checking labels, if it has a list of ingredients you can't pronounfce, then it is really not food at all and should be thrown out because it is a bundle of man-made chemicals which may have a tremendous potential to harm your family.
Number three is the one that I really can not comply with. I do limit the number of items that fall in this category, however I am not the cook in my family most of the time and there are certain convenience items that we prefer to fresh items plus we have limited storage space for fresh items or items that do not contain any preservatives, etc. An example would be that we do not have the space to use fresh potates and actually prefer to use dehydrated potates that have some preservatives. This is true of some other items such as hamburger helper, some pasta items. We also use a number of frozen food items because they are more convenient for us and we often have more freezer space than pantry space. However, we do attempt to limit fats, refined flour and sugar, use brown rice instead of white, use whole grain breads. We focus on having a low fat, complex carbohydrate, high fiber diet. Our goal is to keep fats to approximately 10-15 % of daily food intake, complex carbohydrates at 40%, and proteins at 45-50%. Sometimes the complex caqrbohydrates is higher than proteins but try to keep it close. We are not rigid in our diets but do also attempt to keep calories consume in a day to approximately 2000-2200. The goal is to ultimately work this down to 1800-2000.
Affirmation: I bring my family food, not harm.
Practical: Clean out pantry shelves.