There are so many options when it comes to making food, and I find myself loving sweet desserts. However, the problem is that sweets become your enemy when you find yourself wanting to lose weight or maintain yourself at a specific weight. I kept finding various TikTok recipes that pointed towards delicious desserts, but each of them ended with guilt of eating something with so much sugar or white bread. Don't get me wrong they are really good and you will find some of those guilty pleasure recipes here. But many times we don't realize the big effects sugar, white bread, or even too much butter have on our bodies. This is why I'm trying to take normal recipes and turn them into gluten free, guilt-free, less sugar recipes. I'm doing this by changing some ingredients little by little until I make the recipe work into a version of it that contains substitutes that make it the most gluten-free, guilt-free, sugar-free without changing the actual recipes taste and presentation.

The reason for this approach goes back to many years ago, around 2013, when my mom took a Holistic course that took a radical turn in our household. Not only did we give away our microwave because of the lack of productivity when heating food. Many might argue microwaves aren't harmful, but the truth is that heating food in a microwave can never compare to heating food on your stove, or airfryer. According to Healthline, this is because microwaves "may not be as effective as other cooking methods at killing bacteria and other pathogens that may lead to food poisoning"(Healhtline). Additioanly, we started our own garden in our backyard, because we wanted to make eveyrthing from scratch. Since, everything we bought made you question, "What ingredients is this made of?". Thankfully, with time we lost certain things like juicing, cause I hated those, but they do have great benefits, specially when seeking to detox. Now, whenever I seek to detox I drink tea at night before going to bed, or green tea in the mornings with an empty stomach.

However one of the best changes, that we keep till this day is avoiding white starches. From our bread to the tortillas we eat we go full out on buying everything whole-wheat. This not only helps my fellow friends out there with gluten problems, but also takes the calories down, and is guilt-free. A great substitte for flour tortillas are corn tortillas, obviously they taste different. But coming from a latin family I love corn tortillas and they are gluten-free and you can also make them at home. For making them at home all you need is Maseca and water, you can buy Maseca at the supermarket or on Amazon, check out more about it on the Recipe section.

Another change that we keep is to buy the less possilbe processed foods. Don't get me wrong I still love the freezed section at the supermarket or the cookie section. However, we try mostly to not buy commercial store cookies because they are refined foods. Refined foods are caracterized for being processed and often have little to no fibers and nutrients. So, instead of buying these processed packages of cookies, we opted to start baking healthy and delicious desserts from scratch. 

Overall, with time as we toned down the intensity of Holistic approaches, there are still many ways you can enhance your life without fully being a full-time Holistic enthusiast. That's what inspired this step by step, "little by little" journey, into finding a healthier way for all those delicious foods that leaves us guilt-free, but gives us the same joy.