A sneak peek inside our family fridge after a weekly food shop

Just over a year ago I posted a blog post ‘What’s in my fridge?  A typical week’s food in our household'.  It still gets a few comments when I share on Twitter, especially about the broccoli! 

I always find it fascinating to see what other people are eating.  I love programmes such as Secret Eaters and there’s another one where they see what a typical family eats, then try to save them money and make them cook more from scratch.  The name escapes me.  Years ago I also read a magazine that showed the inside of a famous person’s fridge each month and analysed its healthiness!

If you’re like me and love having a nosey at what people eat, then read on!

 

I thought a one year update would be quite interesting to see how our eating habits have changed.  The fridge this year actually looks pretty identical!  Though my beloved broccoli is still in its wrapper near the bottom and not in glasses of water.  I took this photo around one month ago and I can only assume Ben put this food shop away.  Ahem.

I always take everything out of wrappers when I put it away and make things accessible and easy to grab.  So if I buy a pack of cans, I’ll remove the packaging and put the cans away so they’re ‘ready to go’.  Ben just puts everything away as it is.  Annoying!  I especially don’t like fruit/veg left in wrappers as it goes off a lot quicker and gets all condensation-ey.

In my last fridge blog post I said I was thinking of cutting out refined sugar and this year I have!  I was thinking about it a lot towards the end of last year and thought of stopping in 2017, but wasn’t entirely sure I’d commit so kept it as an idea in my head.  After Christmas and New Year I decided I was going to give it a go and I’ve stuck to it all year, as far as I know!  I’d already cut out all sweet food containing added sugar last year and stopped eating any adult crisps/junk food.  Cutting out refined sugar completely seemed the next logical step and it’s been a lot easier than I thought.  Now I’ve done it, I don’t want to go back.  I’ve watched and read a lot about refined sugar and I really believe it is a poison that builds up over time in our bodies causing serious detriment to our health.  It’s also responsible for a lot of illness and disease in later life and I want to avoid this if I can. 

To find out more about what inspires me to be healthy read my blog post Trying to be healthy? Read this

Our eating habits are pretty much the same as one year ago.  I do a weekly shop and the bulk of it is vegetables.  The one change is I now order a lot more online shops.  I started doing this to take advantage of all the cashback and offers at supermarkets on Top Cashback.  I worked my way through the list of supermarkets to get as much cashback as possible.  The new customer offers are really good and you can save a lot on your grocery shopping if you’re new to them online.  I saved loads with Waitrose as they gave me vouchers off my first five shops, up to £20 per shop.  Plus at that time they had a huge half-price sale on so we got more than usual for the same amount of money as our normal Tesco shop.  At the moment I’m shopping with Sainsbury’s.  They’re not on Top Cashback unfortunately, but they’ve sent me four vouchers for £10 off £40+ online food shops which is a great deal.

We still get Little Yeos yoghurts and I’ve not noticed any other brands jumping on the sugar-free train with yoghurts just yet  That jam you can see in the corner of the picture in the fridge door is only made from fruit and is just as delicious as sugar filled versions, if not more so.  It makes me realise companies must just bulk food up with sugar to make more profit as half the time they don’t need to add it. 

There’s a pizza in the fridge from Waitrose which has a wholemeal base and no sugar!  Wahoo!  It’s right up my street too as it’s a green vegetable pizza.  Ben doesn’t like this one (it’s not pizza enough for him), but I just love it.  I get seriously excited every time I find something new without added sugar!  There’s a green smoothie in there with parsnip which is quite an unique flavour shall we say.  A couple of pots of fresh soup and a cheese sauce.  Even many cheese sauces have sugar added, but fresh ones don’t.  I literally read the ingredients on everything now

If you’re wondering why I’m harping on so much about added refined sugar read my blog post Why you need to reduce your refined sugar intake

We’ve started eating loads of eggs.  Perhaps subconsciously because we are getting chickens this weekend so we could be preparing ourselves for an influx of eggs in our diets!  I love eggs though and so do the kids.  Bella’s favourite breakfast is a dippy egg.  She’ll polish off two no problem.  Eggs are so easy to whip up quick nutritious meals and we look forward to having fresh eggs from our garden very soon.  We’ve been ordering 36 eggs per week recently!  Bella can easily have two a day if we let her, so they disappear quickly in our house.

Our meal planning is pretty much the same.  I loosely think about a week’s food and sometimes plan a menu, but most of the time I look on the day to see which fresh produce needs using up first or is starting to turn and invent a meal on the spot dependant on this.

One of the things I was most upset about when giving up refined sugar was Heinz baked beans.  My favourite comfort meal has to be beans on toast with grated cheese and ketchup.  Luckily Heinz now has a No Added Sugar variety which is sweetened with stevia instead!  Hurrah!  I also visit Wholefoods to get some Real Good ketchup which is sweetened with xylitol instead.  There are two types of wholemeal bread at our local Tesco which doesn’t contain sugar, so I can still have my lovely beans on toast!

Ooh next to the Country Life (one of the least ingredient spreads I can find) is Tesco avocado spread – yum!  Great for those cutting down/avoiding dairy and with not too many ingredients either.  It’s really yummy and now my spread of choice.

I’m not sure if Ben was entirely convinced a year or so ago when I said I was cutting out the crap.  I’m sure he thought it would just be a phase, but I was deadly serious.  For me this is a lifestyle choice, not a fad diet.  I’ve watched too many things and read too much about how bad foods affect your body and health, especially in the long term (even if you feel fine now), so there’s no going back for me.  To be honest I don’t even miss the rubbish food and there are plenty of natural, raw, wholefood alternatives that are far more scrumptious in my opinion.