Going organic can be intimidating when starting from the typical processed American diet. Rethinking everything you eat takes, well, a lot of thought.  And it can get pretty expensive.  So I decided to break it down for you.

The main reason a person decides to go organic is to reduce the amount of chemicals they put into their bodies.  And you can do this without breaking the bank, because you can do this without actually going “certified organic”.

The first step in going organic is to know what you’re eating. So my first tip is to eat home more.  Nutritional labels and ingredient lists are rarely accessible at restaurants; it’s too easy to be completely ignorant of what you’re actually eating there.  Buy what looks good to you at the grocery store, take it home, and eat it.  But before throwing out the bags and boxes, check out what you’re eating.  Add up the sodium, calories, and trans fat. Compare those numbers to the dietary fiber and protein.  Check out the first few ingredients on the list.  Count them all.  Try to pronounce them all.

If you can’t pronounce it, odds are… it’s a chemical.

Now you know what you’re eating (or you know that you don’t know what you’re eating), and you’re used to preparing the food yourself.  Time to move on.

The second step is to buy less processed food. You know what you like, now try to find a healthier, more natural alternative.  You can really look at this two ways: buy food that is “less processed” and “buy less” processed food.  Can’t live without chips at lunch?  Skip the Doritos and pick up some plain Lays instead.  Go from twenty-something ingredients to just three.  You still get your grease and salt fill, but without the artificial flavors, colors, and MSG.  Need a snack in the mid-afternoon? Put back the crackers with their hydrogenated oils and pick up some fruit and vegetables instead.  Baby carrots and peanut butter, apples and peanut butter, grapes, strawberries dipped in yogurt, raw almonds dipped in honey… all yummy snacks without the artificial ingredients.

But what about dinner?

Have you been buying pre-made meals at the grocery store?  Frozen lasagnas?  Frozen pizzas?  Corn dogs?  Fish sticks?  I won’t argue; it doesn’t get much easier than that.  But eating a natural, almost-organic dinner doesn’t have to be complicated either.  In fact, the more simple the meal is, the fewer ingredients, the more healthy it can be for you.  In my eyes, all you really need is meat, vegetables, and dairy.  We get enough carbs earlier in our day with our fruit and grain intake during breakfast, lunch, and snack. If you don’t, then add bread and fruit to dinner as well.

Meat doesn’t have to be complicated.  It can be pan-fried, broiled, oven-baked, or grilled.  Although a seasoned rub does make things interesting, a dash of salt goes a long way, too.  Brush melted butter and lemon juice on your fish fillet, sprinkle some salt, and bake at 450 for 5 minutes per half an inch of thickness.  Put a beef roast in the crock pot, add peeled potatoes, carrots, a sliced onion, and 3-4 cups of water.  Cook on high for 4 hours or low for 8.  Sprinkle a chicken with lemon pepper, garlic salt, and seasoned salt (make sure it doesn’t have MSG!), cook in the crock pot – same times as the beef roast.  If you have the internet (and I know you do; you’re reading this), you can Google cooking times for steaks and pork chops as well.

Vegetables can be fresh from the produce section, or frozen from the freezer aisle.  I suppose you can also buy canned, but then you get the BPA and you don’t want that, do you? 🙂

Dairy is a glass of whole milk.  Yes, I said whole milk.  Get your healthy fat on.

And, of course, I won’t think poorly of you if you have spaghetti once a week, either.  Or scrambled eggs.  Or quesadillas.  All easy, quick, cheap meals.

If you’re still bothered by the thought of antibiotics, pesticides, and growth hormones, you can take the final step.

Step three is to go certified organic.

It can be expensive, so you may want to start with the foods that have more chemicals than others.  In produce, these would be the fruits and vegetables that have the thinnest skins and the juiciest innards, since bugs like these the most. Berries, tomatoes, peaches… things like these.  Bananas are pretty well protected and thus don’t need very many chemicals.

Unless you live in a big city with nice stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joes (I dont’!) you won’t be able to find everything organic.  If you can’t live with that, start a garden!  If you don’t have a yard, you can always hang tomato planters from your ceiling by a window that gets decent sun.  Some towns even have community gardens open to people just like you!

Grass-fed beef and free-range chickens are also hard to come by.  So you may want to check with a local co-op or just ask around if you live in rural Indiana (cough) and see if you can find a farm from which you can buy your meat directly.  Of course, this means you’ll also have to invest in a chest freezer, but it’s a worthy investment!

I hope this post was helpful and not intimidating.  If you have any ideas to add, that would be lovely!