The Journey to Healthy – How We’re Finally Making It Work

Rachel kicked off this week’s Heart Month posts by sharing the story of her Mother’s heart attack, aged just 54. Today Kelly tells us how gentle changes to their lifestyle are helping her family become healthier.

Kelly is mom to 18-month-old “Bean” and blogs at Becoming Crunchy about her family’s changing landscape from mainstream to granola (her husband very occasionally joins her with a post of his own). She likes to talk about the challenges and rewards of making the world a safer, healthier place for her daughter, along with what she’s learning about natural parenting, pregnancy and birth, and more.

It’s a huge honour to be here today – I’m a big fan of Mrs. Green and her awesome, inspiring family! When she invited me to write a post for Heart Month, I responded that our family is always looking for new ways to get healthy, so it shouldn’t be hard to come up with a topic.

In retrospect, I thought that might make it sound like we are this uber healthy family…but the opposite is probably truer. I’m constantly trying to find new ways to get healthy because I find it very difficult to stay in that mindset – particularly when life/work/etc. becomes overwhelming and all I want is a frozen pizza!

But not being there doesn’t mean we stop trying. And lately, some of the healthy changes we’ve been making have been sticking – for a few good reasons that I’ve noticed.

Keeping It Simple

This February, we’re focusing on a few basic things:

• Going for a walk every day that the weather allows
• Trying to cook at home as much as possible

Motivation

There are millions of reasons for getting healthy, many of which are meaningful to me, but ultimately my main motivation is twofold: I want to give my daughter a love of being active and real food, and I want to be in that place myself for her sake.

We Forgive Ourselves

As simple as these goals are, there are many days we find them extremely difficult to do – and I already know we will not end up attaining perfection. In the past, I’ve let that kind of thing really get me down and keep me from moving forward, but I’ve started to learn that moving on is more important than wallowing.

We’re Doing It Together

I am someone who likes to do it all myself – in fact, some might say I’m just a little bit “controlling” or “perfectionist” or “impatient”. 😉

Well, those who say that would probably be right…but I’m learning – slowly – to let go, understanding that family health is something that needs to involve everyone in the family.

One major inspiration for this realization has been reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. It was awesome to see how involved their entire family was in every aspect of their year of eating locally grown food – from the planting to the cooking to even the writing of the book.

It made me realize how much I was working alone. And it’s not that my husband has been unwilling to get involved – I just haven’t really been asking him to.

So our plan for February is a whole-family venture. I’ve asked my husband to help me more with the cooking and meal planning, and have been grateful to see how helpful he really is.

Our plan to walk every day was undertaken by mutual agreement. Baby Bean is involved just by loving it so much – I already hate the idea of missing one because she is so incredibly thrilled every step of the way – it’s a total joy to see her marching along the path.

For all these reasons, I really feel it’s going to be a great month. After a long, difficult winter, we’re continuing to move towards being on track when it comes to our health – and though we’re far from perfect, we’ll always keep trying.

If healthy living doesn’t come easily to you, I hope you know you’re not alone – and that you’ll keep trying along with us anyway!

We’d like to thank Philips for sending us an Avance juicer and Abel and Cole for our delicious fruit and vegetable boxes so, just like Kelly and her family, we can get ourselves fitter and healthier too!