Honestly, we went to Weight Watchers from May 2010 until August of 2010. I loved the camaraderie of fellow weight watchers, but my husband hated the way their scale would show a 20 pound loss or gain each week when he knew better. Finally I gave in to his grumblings and cancelled our membership as I was not losing either. I would be so motivated at the meetings, then go home and life would overtake me. Each week I would promise myself to do better, every day I would allow life to win.
Sigh.
Over the past year and half my husband and I have had many health issues that have come up. Some of them directly linked to our weight and eating habits plus lack of exercise. Some of them the doctors cannot decide how and why we have been plagued with these issues. And a couple of issues for me are apparently inherited.
All I know is that it is time to fight for our lives, literally. After a year of reading everything I can get my hands on about each of our health issues and all the diets out there, and after much praying on which path is right, I feel the Lord has shown us what we should be doing. And honestly, it seems so simple, something we should've been doing all along with our lives.
Society and diet gurus today have dictated to us that we need to eat low fat, low carb, no red meat, skim dairy products, take tons of vitamins and herbal pills, and join a gym. This is how I ate most of my late 30s and early 40s when I was 'getting healthy'. I never joined a gym, but I bought tons of exercise videos and worked out at home.
But always in my heart I felt this wasn't the way I should be eating. It just seemed wrong to me, against nature somehow. I kept asking myself what my ancestors did to exercise... there were no gyms to go to. They did hard, physical labor every day to feed their families and keep their homes warm and clean, they didn't need gyms or exercise videos. Their days were full of physical activity.
How did they stay healthy with no vitamin or herbal pills and no freezers or grocery stores that carried produce shipped up unripe from South America. They ate what was in season, what they could preserve, and they ate the meat that God provided - and amazingly a lot of it was red meat. And they used the natural fat from the meats they ate to cook in. They consumed raw milk and whole fat dairy products.
Finally, after God repeatedly put what I needed to be reading in front of me for over a year.... I started reading the Weston A. Price website.
And it just clicked in my brain and heart. This was it. This is how we should be eating. Man was on this planet for thousands of years before freezers and low fat and all the other 'modern conveniences'. When God made man He provided the food for him to eat for the way He perfectly designed his body. If we were intended to eat as our government food industry tells us to eat nowadays, we would've been eating that way for thousands of years, not just the past one hundred years. But we weren't made to eat the way we eat today, because the way our government food industry has us believing we should be eating in these modern times is NOT the way God designed us to eat. In fact, how we eat today is literally killing us it is so unhealthy.
No wonder we have all these medical issues plaguing society since we accepted what was being pushed on us from the so-called experts. The majority of our modern ills were very rare before the twentieth century. We have only seen a huge jump in cancer, diabetes, fatty liver, heart attacks, strokes and thousands of other such diseases and diagnosis since we changed our eating habits to the modern ways. People who eat the traditional way, the way God made us to eat, do not have the diseases and health issues that modern society has.
So, I did a kitchen sweep and got rid of all the prepackaged, chemically laden, non-nutritious foods in our house. I threw out the transfat laden canola oil and refined sugar and flour. My husband and I found a farm that sells fresh, raw goat milk and free range eggs. Little by little we are changing our eating habits back to the way God intended them to be.
I am excited about this. In reading the different articles on the Weston A. Price site, I clearly see why I have NASH (non alcoholic steatohepatitis), diabetes, chronic fatigue, etc, etc. It is all the literally trashy foods I have been eating for the past 10 or so years thinking I was eating 'healthy' because it was the current fad/recommendation from our very own government food industry.
In future posts I will talk about what ails us (my husband and my health issues). Last night I decided it was time to start writing on my blogs again. I want to journal our way back to health. When I've tried to find other blogs about similar health issues as mine, I haven't been able to find what I was looking for, that being someone who was going through the same things I am, and who was following the Weston A. Price way of healthy eating. I found a few blogs, but still none that have the same health issues. So I decided that there might be others out there who have the same issues as me and are looking for a blog to motivate them. Hopefully I can inspire someone while holding myself publicly accountable every day to getting back to health.
Here is the Weston A. Price website for those who are not familiar with it.
http://www.westonaprice.org/
I also bought the book "Nourishing Traditions" by Sally Fallon at Barnes and Noble. It is a thick book, but very full of helpful information. I will share additional websites and blogs to my sidebar as I come across them.
This is a ‘before’ picture. Not of us skinny, but when we were dating. We were heavy then, but not as heavy as we are now. This is our first goal we want to reach – our dating weights. After that we will work our way down to what is healthy for us at our current ages. I have no desire to be Skinny Minny or the Hollywood latest (the truth be told, I have no respect for the Hollywood crowd).
I just want my health back.
My goal with this revamped blog is to share how we are handling our health issues; what we eat every day; what kind of physical activity we did for that day; various things I learn along the way concerning our eating habits; and our progress. It will be slow, but steady. A year from now my goal for myself is to have lost 50 of the 115 pounds I need to lose. My husband has quite a bit more weight to lose than me, he has about 265 pounds to lose. As he doesn’t have the same health issues as me, he is able to lose at a faster rate, so his goal is to lose approximately 150 pounds this year.
Our eating plan is to eat whole, natural foods. This includes whole, raw dairy products; red meats along with poultry, pork, seafoods, and lamb; the natural fats of coconut oil, olive oil, lard and other meat/poultry fats – not the canola or vegetable oil the food industry has misled us to believe as being the healthiest fats to consume; no refined sugars, using natural sweetners such as raw honey and raw sugar instead; whole grain flours and other grains; sea salt and other fresh/home dried herbs; and fresh vegetables and fruits in season and home frozen or home canned for those not in season.
Our goal is to cook from scratch at home for all our meals and snacks. We plan to freeze and can our own soups, sauces, condiments, vegetables, fruits, and other things we normally buy at the store that are full of chemicals and other unnatural and unhealthy ingredients. One of our very, very bad habits is to spend a lot of money in eating out. Old habits die hard and this is proving to be a stubborn diehard habit. And if all bad food habits must be confessed here, my goal is for my husband to surrender his Splenda habit – I cannot stand the stuff but he pours it on everything. All manufactured sugars are bad – they are manufactured not natural. Splenda has gotta go! Never fear, we will conquer these monsters in our lives.
The goal is to eat God-made foods in appropriate amounts to maintain a healthy weight and immune system.
Right now we are concentrating on getting rid of the modern convenience foods and government food industry lists of their so-called healthy foods and eating the raw, whole, natural foods God gave us for thousands of years. We are doing smaller portions also. But we have not been weighing and measuring each calorie of food up to this point. My goal is to start food journaling because when I do reality hits me in the face about how much I am really eating. Counting calories will be the means we use for losing weight now, but we won’t be starving ourselves and probably will be eating much more than the conventional diet gurus tell us we should be eating to lose weight. And we will be eating the foods we love – just made healthier by us.
Our exercise plan is to simply increase our physical activity every day. Slowly at first, but steady for the long haul. My husband has been a couch potato for many years. I have become one over the last few years. We will slowly begin walking in our house, then gradually go out to the street to walk, and after that to parks and other places. We will also have vegetable and flower gardens, and instead of paying someone to mow our yard we will begin doing it ourselves. We simply plan to incorporate everyday activities more and more into the very lazy, sit-on-our-behinds-all-day lifestyle we have now.
My beginning weight is 275 pounds. I am 5 foot 7 ½ inches tall. My husband is approximately 525 pounds and 6 foot 6 ½ inches tall.
Here are some current pictures of us. In the picture of me, I am on the far right, my daughter is next to me and my son next to her. This was at my son's wedding in November 2011. The picture of Jerry was taken on December 26th, he is sitting in his chair, sorry about the dining room chair sitting in front of him, we had a lot of family over that day.
Thank you for visiting and please check back from time to time to see how we are doing.
No comments:
Post a Comment