Hurdle or stepping stone?

When my daughter was 1 year old, and I was just pregnant with our second child, she was diagnosed as being allergic to dairy. If we had any hope of having her outgrow her allergy, we had to remove ALL dairy from our diet. NO Dairy!?! NONE!?! I thought we would die of starvation without any dairy. Cheese was an entire food group to me! What was I going to do? I was battling early pregnancy nausea and could not even begin to imagine giving up my cheese fries and nachos. But I knew I had to. It wasn't a noble venture to be healthier which got me started, but a desire to protect and care for my child. So, we started researching - an activity we were becoming increasingly familiar with after nearly losing our daughter to complications from her two month vaccinations. What we soon discovered was that food tasted good not smothered in cream of mushroom soup and piles of melted cheese. The biggest hurdle I had to cross was my inability to use processed foods of almost any kind. When I started REALLY reading ingredient lists, searching carefully for every way in which milk protein can be disguised, I discovered how horrible most packaged and processed food really is. And, since most processed foods contain dairy, I started cooking most things from scratch. That is when we really rediscovered how wonderful food tastes and how dead and lifeless most processed foods are. Little did we know that this was the beginning of our journey to improved health and fitness. What we thought was a major hurdle became a stepping stone to vitality and life. (For a great summary of all of the names milk hides under in our foods and a list of wonderful substitutes, click here http://www.veg4health.com/Articles/Hiddendairy.html .)