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While I try to be inspirational most of the time to show you that eating a healthy diet and living a healthy lifestyle isn't as hard as it sounds, there are some things that just need to be shared. These things are not always pretty, but they are authentic and by showing them I hope to show you that I am a real person. And that if you have things that look similar, that it's OK.

My pantry is one example of this. I work full time, have 2 kids, blog, eat Paleo (hence cook a lot), and choose to enjoy my time not spent doing those by doing other things.

So without further ado… meet my pantry.

Not super organized, eh? Goodness knows how we find anything in there. When we get new things we just stack them up and hope they don't fall. And I do have 3 shelves down in our basement full of other things too. 

Would I rather it be all prettified and look like it was out of the pages of a Williams-Sonoma catalog? Heck yeah! And I am one of those kind of people that when I organize, I ORGANIZE. Like when I clean my closet (which happens on maybe a yearly basis), I have to arrange clothes by type (short sleeves, long sleeves, dresses, skirts, etc) and then by color so that they follow the ROYGBIV rainbow scheme. In other words, I am a type A nerd when time and energy allows. But when time and energy are scarce, I'm lucky if I can walk in my closet. As evidenced by our pantry…  

So the reason I share this with you is to show you that:

(a) bloggers like me are real people and we don't always have beautiful, organized, magazine-worthy houses or kitchens

(b) since Paleo/real food cooking requires a lot of ingredients, they don't always fit into a pantry nicely. It's OK to have mess and disorganization. You can also organize the heck out of it if you wish. It doesn't matter, it's solely up to you.

(c) you'll notice there are some not Paleo things in there. We try to eat Paleo as much as we can because we know it makes us feel our best, but sometimes we don't. Sometimes we just want a quick gluten-free pasta because it's been a freakin long, exhausting day.