Yes you read that correctly. I now declare PIZZA FRIDAYS are now obsolete. We need better virtual foods! I mean c'mon. We can have pizza literally any time, any day. So I'm declaring that we have different, better options for our #Offtopic dwelling community. So for the first iteration of new "Food Friday's" I am offering that today's food choice be [b]Fried Chicken[/b]. Ok, maybe not the best choice, but it is better for you than pizza.... The reasoning behind my anecdotal reasoning (kinda long); [spoiler]I've recently been on a "better eating" path the past month, and still am not doing it as well as I had wished. [not really a spoiler] I'm not actually on a diet, just trying to eat / live better [/not really a spoiler] For the past 22 years I have pretty much ate whatever I wanted without much forethought other than I "tried" to be somewhat careful about what I was eating, kind of. This consisted of mostly prepared, frozen, microwaveable food, with fast food intermixed maybe once a week. The frozen food was in my mind, not the worst, somewhat heathy-ish stuff, or so I had thought, or maybe convinced myself. I didn't like to take time to or spend extra on ingredients to make meals for me alone, nor my sons when they were with me. We all had our own frozen stuff we all picked out, with my regulating some of their items (not allowing just all blatant junk). The past couple of years I can tell I wasn't as well feeling as I want to be. So today I'm trying to phase in aspects of the carnivore diet, and just walking away from the prepared foods. This also entails; -eliminating all seed oil use or anything made with them in it -less grains -eliminating anything made with "enriched" or "fortified" flour or rice -reduce as much sugar as I can tolerate, or have the will to, and no artificial sweeteners -change in the type of salt used -trying to eliminate as much of the preservatives, hormones, and ingredients that you can not pronounce nor understand without a degree in chemistry If you need the reasons why, look up these items actual benefits. Well, I'll save you that one, for there are none. I have always been capable of cooking, and did a little for special occasions. It's actually been fun to learn to and create my own ideas of food. It takes time I normally quite honestly would have wasted watching tv, or starting into more droning into a video game, though none of that happens until all that needs done in or out of the house is completed. A couple weeks in, I am beginning to 'feel' a little less blah. I think it's a combination of the better foods, and the mental activity of focusing my thought and energy into the foods, and the ideas of what I want to try to make. It has been a bit of more cost to get started (ingredients and equipment [rice cooker, vacuum sealer, really good Damascus steel cutlery set]), but it is already evening out, for I can buy ingredients in bulk, and have been buying full cuts of meat that I cut down into the sizes I want them in, which drastically reduces the overall cost. Some cuts of beef alone equate to less than half of what they would have been pre cut. A small local-ish grocery store I found has a large fresh meat counter at prices the other normal stores don't even try to compete with. I never got into Costco before, but have recently found it to be a great resource for this switch as well. Especially that they offer a decent array of stuff that is essentially what I am looking for (food without the before mentioned "stuff" in it). What I've found is that I'm more or less getting back to the types of foods that my Grandma and my Mom use to make, before the over industrialization of food processing became chemical plants. I know many of you have no idea what that may mean, but when I grew up, most all the foods that we have today that were available then, tasted better. Even the stuff we all know we shouldn't really be eating, like sugar coated cereals or anything in the snack cake aisle actually tasted better back then. Coke and Mt. Dew were made with real sugar and tasted better. They weren't 'good' for you then, but they were less bad for you then. People were not en-mass as large as they are today, both in girth as well as height! Girls did not start developing *cough*maturing*cough* at 10-12.[/spoiler]