Ben Roy

Ok, so it was originally 1909, but it seemed catchier to latch onto the whole "99" thing. I've been wanting to try out a diet that cut out all of the processed and artificial junk that is in most of our food, but I always get caught up in the details. What exactly do I mean by 'processed', what's in and what's out, etc.

I realized just last week that a pretty simple litmus test would be whether it existed 100 years ago. I admit I pulled it out of nowhere and have recently realized that 100 years isn't quite long enough to cover all of the items I'd rather avoid, but it was still a great place to start.

I wanted to spend some time eating just the simple stuff - fruits, vegetables, meat - but not the things you see on a label and have no idea what they are. So we decided to take a trial run at it, mostly to see if it was feasible. So tonight marks the end of the 3rd day of our trial, and to my knowledge I haven't eaten anything in the last 72 hours that someone couldn't have gained access to in the year 1900.

It was definitely more work; dinner was always a minor production. We had to bake because I couldn't find simple breads made without 15+ ingredients, and breakfast and lunch needed actual planning (usually breakfast is on the go and lunch is something from the cafeteria).

The short term goal was to figure out if eating this way is feasible, and the answer is unequivocally yes. In the larger sense I don't know that I have a clear objective. I know that intuitively I feel that it has to be healthier to avoid over-processed food, and I believe my body won't miss all the additives and random ingredients that make it into so many packaged goods (do we really need high fructose corn syrup in EVERYTHING?).

While three days isn't long enough to notice any physical effects from the change in diet, I'm optimistic that a sustained trial will produce noticable results. We're going to take the weekend off and then hit it again on Monday. We'll shoot for the entire work week and see how things are going.