The challenge of my health journey

So I'm not perfect, not making all the best choices right now in my life health-wise, and furthermore I haven't been doing the best job with feeding my kids healthy foods.
All of that changes- NOW.

Change is not easy. Living a healthy lifestyle is definitely not an easy decision to come by in a society where most foods are mass produced and created for the comfort of being "quick" and "easy" to prepare.
But I want the best of both worlds-- quick and easy AND healthy. Oh, and yummy.

This journey, more than anything, will challenge me to find the best foods, menus, household products, and exercise regimes that works for my family. It's a journey that I have only merely contemplated but never really jumped into cold turkey. I have bits of pieces of a healthy life, but I want a complete one- for me and my family.

It will be worth it in ten years when my joints are not aching every morning when I wake up, or I can run up and down a flight of stairs without pain. It will be worth it to see my kids healthy, with cholesterol and higher energy levels, or when we find good eczema solutions for my youngest.

But this is the hardest part...getting started. Finding the right resources, trial and error, making menu plannings, purchasing the right products and foods...this is the work part of the whole process which is the reason I've procrastinated so long.
In my next post I'll post some pictures of products I've groceries I bought this week and some ideas I have for planning our upcoming menus.
Planning, planning, planning!!  Fun.  And I REALLY hope that I can help others along the way too.  Especially for us busy moms who need those quick recipes...yeah.  I hope to discover some tips along the way that help to make healthy living easy, quick, and fun even.
We shall see.  So stay tuned :-)

Healthier breakfast for my daughter

Okay, so these are baby steps- the fact that I'm removing the whites from the yolks in her eggs, but it's a first step nonetheless.

My Health Plans

My Food Choices
I've always been somewhat laterally conscious of my food choices, at least on a surface level.  And every time I made a poor food choice I allowed guilt to set in, but then I immediately stuffed it way deep down into a little pocket in my heart which I reserved for "I'll try again later".
It wasn't so much that eating these scrumptious, high-calorie, sugar-laden, nutrient-lacking foods didn't satisfy my palette.  On the contrair, I quite enjoyed my slices of pumpkin pies and chocolate cakes during the holiday season or my weekend pizza excursions at Papa Johns with my family.  I still do, in fact.  And I will continue to enjoy them!  (I don't plan on putting a halt to enjoying my life, you know).  
But this time around...in the latest and newest part of my journey of discovering better health...I want to make wiser choices the majority of the time.  And when I do make a choice to choose the sugar-laden, nutrient-lacking food, I would have at least made a deliberate and well-thought-out decision.  It won't be something I make a habit of, but it will be an option I have to enjoy the less nutritious foods in moderation and balance it with a majority of healthy foods. So maybe I'll shoot for a 90/10 proportion.  Something like that. (90 being the good foods, of course).
My Food Plan
So...for the most part I start my journey as a total meat consumer with plans to phase out the meat s-l-o-w-l-y.  I plan to start by cutting the red meats out of my diet completely and replacing it with white, lean meats and fish, and adding a heaping of veggies to my weekly menu. 
So, I guess you can say that I am working towards semi-vegetarianism.
As much as I would like to jump gung-ho into veganism (no, I really don't), I realize that too many changes too soon is not gonna be a wise choice for this mama!
I almost called this blog "Green Journey Mom" until I realized that I haven't been much of a "green" anything lately (except that since moving to California we recycle every week-yay).  So I couldn't truthfully call my blog that because I am only now discovering all the eco friendly toys that I wish I could buy for my kids.  Only the price tags on those adorable, wooden (not-made-in-China) toys don't actually match my budget.  Hmmmm...
Okay, so back to my food plan.
On this blog I hope to introduce new (and old) recipes that work for my family- quick and easy healthy snacks, tips and advice others have passed on to me about being healthier overall...and of course, I will be chronicling my journey as I clean up my family's diet.
My Soul Plan
That's called "me" time.  I honestly haven't had a lot of that, what with two moves in six months (one being cross-country), and a lot of to-do lists including keeping up with the kids' activities and re-arranging/reorganizing our home for the umpteenth time (not to mention the basic routines of cooking, cleaning, laundry, you get the picture).  So besides an occasional bubble bath, I really haven't been on my own list of to-do's.  I plan to change that this year.  I think as I settle more and respect my own body more, I can hear a little more clearly God's voice speaking to me in those quiet times.  Of course, when I'm not so quiet because I'm so super busy, it's really difficult to gain that spiritual nourishment I crave.
My Family Plan
I'm an at-home entrepreneur, so I used to have a "business plan" projected for each year.  This year I've decided not to let business be my focus.  Instead, I'm going to focus on the health and well-being of my family.  I believe that when I focus on what inspires me at the moment, everything I need in life will flow out of it.  So, family it is.  I hope to spend lots of meaningful time together making new memories in our brand new home.  This is a really exciting time in my life and I am so blessed to have a family.  Period.

Raising my health consciousness for my family!

I am absolutely excited about this journey.  It's not just a "green" journey, though that would be great.  It's not even just a "health" journey, although I definitely need to be healthier.  It's a journey of discovering how to take of myself, both physically and spiritually, so that I can be a greater influence on my family and others around me.
I absolutely, resolutely and without a doubt, need to be a healthier mama.  
(I say all of this at the moment when my knee joints are aching from having climbed the stairs one time too many and I feel...well..."clogged up", for lack of a better word. Keep reading and you'll find out why).
I have been toying with this idea for years- the idea of slowly evolving into a family unit who is extremely conscious about what we put into our bodies.  It hasn't happened yet, although I've dreamt of it since the day my 9 year old daughter was born.  I have always envisioned being a "knower"- the kind of wife and mom that knows how to prevent and treat physical ailments.  The kind of mama who discovers something is going wrong with a child and able to hop on the research before ever having to wait for the symptoms to occur and accrue medical bills.
It's a dream of mine-- but it is not a reality.
I like the idea of it.  I like the sound of it.  I like what it stands for and what it means.
But this is a journey, and I haven't arrived yet...so I'm not perfect.  I still love my Starbucks and enjoy a weekly chocolate fest whenever I can!  My kids still consume sugar -although not tons, and I still enjoy California Pizza Kitchen or a juicy hamburger from In-N-Out Burger. (This weekend's fieldtrip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium with the kids was an all-day outing and that meant lots of last-minute, unplanned junk food for us...hence, the "clogged-up"-ness).
I don't necessarily like where I am physically (I exercise off and on, I have all kinds of joint and lower back issues, and I get tired way too easily).  And I also don't care to think about the fact that one of my kids already has higher cholesterol than average for her age.  
What have I been doing-- or better yet, what have I NOT been doing?
This is where my journey into "Healthy Mama" begins.