What Motivates Me

The "food revolution" that I've been going through, and sometimes dragging a kicking and screaming family through, has been, and still is, in progress for a few years now. It really started the year I took up running again.  The spring of 2008 found me feeling horrible. I had spent a long, cold winter eating, a lot. I began to run again. After about 5 months of running, and only completing one 5k, I signed up for my 1st marathon. Besides raising kids, that was the single hardest thing I've ever done.

During my training I began to realize a couple of things.  First, I didn't eat well enough to fuel my body properly for the training. Second, our eating habits were a direct result of my shopping habits. I knew I couldn't make anyone in my house eat healthy but I could influence their food choices by what I bought and cooked each week. So began the slow change to buying healthier foods. It started with less junk food and baking on my part but I was still buying a lot of processed foods.

Over this last year, I've really been struggling to make healthier choices at the grocery store, while staying within our budget. Besides creating a weekly menu, one of the great tools to help me with this came from a local grocery store. You can browse the products you want, make a grocery list and print it out, by the isles. So when I go on Thursdays to get groceries, I only go in the isles that are listed and ONLY buy off my list. This not only saves me money but keeps me from impulse buying junk foods.

In April of this last year, my honey, spent a week in the hospital with a very serious colon issue. I needed to take the meal planning to a new level.  We incorporated in more greens, removed all but maybe 5% of sweets, and I started cooking more whole foods.  We tend to eat grilled chicken, steak and greens in the summer anyway so it was easy over the warm months. I grew our first large garden so we had plenty of fresh vegetables through the summer. But, winter was coming and with it is usually comfort foods.

This past fall I began to make even more foods from scratch: breads, pasta, soups (even condensed types of soups).  GMO's disgust me, don't worry I won't get on that soap box here. I'm also trying to buy more organic, non GMO foods, yet always trying to stay within budget.

The beginning of last month (December 2012) my husband took his blood pressure and it was in the highest stage of high blood pressure that you can have. We were shocked because we were trying to be healthy. The more we researched the sodium in foods, the more shocked I was at the amount of it in everything. For example, my Hubby and Tinker Bell love bean soup and she would eat a whole can herself if I let her. A 1/2 cup has 41% of the daily allowed amount of sodium. A 1/2 cup of soup doesn't even begin to fill her growing little belly.

Finally, after weeks of his diligence with food, reducing caffeine, taking ginseng and finding ways to reduce stress, my Hubby's blood pressure is in a safe, normal range now. Our goal is to continue to add healthy recipes and exercise to our daily lives.

I'm on a constant search, for tasty, healthy, whole foods for us. I've cleaned out my pantry of unhealthy, sodium riddled can goods, stopped buying processed foods (90% of the time), and try to save money and make my own meals from scratch.

What we learn, what recipes I try or create, are what I want to share with you here. With a whole lot of prayer and a little bit of my time, I am finding healthier ways to love on my family.



If you'd like to take a peek at the rest of our life, you can hop over to my other blog living life with faith