Whole30 Day 8

Today I actually did manage to get my butt out of bed bright and early to get to a 5:15am spin class. I would much prefer to actually ride my bike outside, but some days my schedule doesn't allow. I ate a Lara Bar on the way over to class and made my Chipotle Salsafied Breakfast when I returned home. This is a great, filling meal and I like that you can tailor the taste based on the type of salsa you use. I've been experimenting with different salsas from Trader Joe's lately - they have Habanero Lime, Garlic and even Smoky Peach (although the Peach is not Whole30 compliant so it will have to wait).

For lunch I brought leftover salad from the previous night's dinner and added some lunch meat and roasted sweet potatoes for carbs and protein. I also made Whole9's Cashew Hummus and brought a bit of that to eat with some carrots and celery. I was skeptical that you could turn cashews into hummus, but it tasted surprisingly good. I made the roasted red pepper version and topped it with sun dried tomatoes.

Tonight was family dinner night, which I love because 1) I get to see my family and 2) I show up after work and dinner is ready! My mom made a roast in the crock pot, salad and roasted sweet potato and jicama fries.

I try not to have an evening snack unless I am actually hungry (and not just because I like to sit on the couch and eat almond butter), but tonight I was just hungry enough and made a small bowl with banana, almond butter, raisins and coconut milk.

One of the big things I have noticed since starting my Whole30 is that there are a lot of sneaky ingredients out there! For example, I made a stir fry for lunch on Sunday and got out the coconut aminos, fish sauce and siracha to mix up my stir fry sauce. No sooner than I had tossed it all in the pan did Kevin start reading the labels and noticed that both fish sauce and siracha have sugar, and siracha has a bunch of preservatives in the form of Potassium Sorbate, Sodium Bisulfite, Xanthan Gum.

You would think that after doing this for an entire year I would be smarter about reading labels, but I think I learned my lesson. Last night at the grocery store I found there were a lot of sneaky little ingredients out there. When I buy tomato sauce I expect the ingredients to be tomatoes and spices, but that is not usually the case. I spent about 10 minutes carefully reading each label until I found a sauce that looked good and had ingredients I could pronounce. The sausage we normally buy has sugar added so I found a sun-dried tomato chicken sausage that seemed to make the cut. It was good to have a little wake up call to remind me to pay more attention to the foods I choose.

Are there any foods that you thought would be perfectly Paleo that had sneaky sugar, preservatives or other ingredients in them?