As I get closer to being 40, my health has become much more of a focus for me. When I was younger, keeping my weight down was very easy. Regardless of how I ate, I always stayed a size six.
Then I turned 30 and a few years later had two little boys just 14 months apart. I seemed to gain a few pounds every year and slowly, my weight was much higher than it had ever been.
Despite my best efforts, nothing seemed to make the scale budge. Then I found clean eating.
Clean eating has transformed the way I look at food. Rather than depriving myself, I just make sure that the food I am putting into my body is whole and clean. I try to stay away from processed foods as much as I can. This was finally what I needed to shed those unwanted pounds.
When I first started eating clean, I was lucky enough to stumble upon some really great quinoa recipes.
I had never heard of quinoa before and when I read about how healthy it was, I knew I needed to give it a try. I will admit that I was a bit hesitant about how it would taste.
The first dish I ever tried was from Tosca Reno’s Eat Clean Diet Cookbook, and I am happy to report that not only did I love it, but so did my whole family. Since that time, I have tried many different ways of cooking quinoa. One of my favorite is a Greek quinoa salad!
If you have never tried quinoa before, you may not know just how versatile it is. In fact, there are days when I will eat quinoa at every meal. I like to toast it and have it over yogurt for breakfast. At lunch I will have a quinoa salad, and at night I will use quinoa in place of bread crumbs in a meatloaf.