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 :-)

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.