Heavenly Homemakers

I suppose if I’m going to tell you about our healthy eating journey…I should start from the beginning.

Matt was raised a “city boy” in California. He was a very adorable little boy, so blonde headed his hair was white. That piece of information is completely irrelavant to this post, but I just felt like saying it anyway. As far as he can remember, his family ate a very basic diet of meat, pasta or potatoes, bread and vegetables. His family almost never had desserts in the house and they hardly ever ate out.

Thousands of miles away…..

I was raised on a farm in Kansas. The first few years of my life, we drank raw milk…not neccessarily because of it’s health qualities…but because we had a milk cow available. I hardly remember drinking it…we probably only had the milk cow until I was eight (ish). After that, we bought our milk from the store. We ate beef and pork that my dad raised. I don’t remember eating a lot of chicken. 

My mom had a garden (which, ironically, I hated helping her with). She grew a million (bazillion) green beans, some tomatoes, onions and peppers for her salsa…and a few other vegetables that none of us liked but her.

Which leads me to the fact that I was pretty much raised on green beans, corn and the occasional pea, because those are the veggies my dad ate. Every once in a while we had salad…but I didn’t learn to like it until I was almost in college. Oh, and we ate carrots when they were cooked with a roast on Sundays.

We were a steak and potatoes kind of family. We always had desserts in the house and ate wheat bread from the store. 

My mom cooked and baked almost all of our meals from scratch. We baked cookies with white flour, white sugar and crisco. We almost always had Kool-aid and pop in the fridge during the summer.

As much as possible, we ate at home…but we went through phases of eating out more often depending on sporting events and crazy busy high school schedules. 

I don’t think my mom would mind me sharing that with the exception of  the last few years of her life, she struggled quite a bit with her weight. As a result, she was often trying different diet plans. 

I was thin, but took an interest in my mom’s diet plans during my high school years…mostly because I was very interested in staying thin. I never (thankfully) developed an eating disorder, but I did get somewhat obsessive about not wanting to eat foods that had any fat in them. I really felt like eating any fat at all would make me fat, therefore I was scared of fat. I made my sandwiches with fat free mayo (blech) and ate fat free chips (cardboard). I would treat myself to fat free candy (my favorites were candy corn and circus peanuts)…feeling like I was “doing well” by eating sweets that didn’t have any fat in them.

This low-fat/no fat way of thinking took me into college. While there, I would go in phases of over-eating higher fat foods (like pizza and mac and cheese and cookies), thinking that “well…I’ve already blown it, I might as well eat three more”. Therefore my weight started to fluctuate a little bit. I was very “on” or “off” with the dieting thing…and I thought about (and felt guilty about) food a lot. 

During all of this, I met a very adorble white headed California boy who had grown into a 6’2″ blonde headed soccer player. Wonder of wonders, he thought I was cute too and in 1994, we got married.

To be continued….

I hear from so many of you about where you are in your healthy eating journey and about how so many of you want to begin eating (and feeding your families) a healthier diet. 

Some of you are in the “Dorito…Hamburger Helper…Twinkie…Jelly Beans are the only vegetable I eat…Please help me I have no idea where to start”…phase.

Some of you are in the “Okay, I pitched all my processed foods in the trash…My pantry now holds a couple of shriveled potatoes and a half a peanut…What should I do now?”…phase.

Some of you are in the “I just came home from the store with a package of brown rice, some bananas, a bag of whole wheat flour and a pound of butter…What in the world am I supposed to do I do with it?”…phase.

Some of you are in the “We’re getting there…I’m just trying to convince my family that eating vegetables and whole wheat bread is cool”…phase.

Some of you are in the “I’ve been feeding my family healthy food forever and I just need new recipes”…phase.

Some of you have been working to eat healthy for years longer than I have and are in the “Here Laura, let me teach you a thing or two about fermenting your pickles”…phase.

We’re all on our own journey to healthy eating.  No two family situations are the same. 

Many of you may assume that our family has been eating a healthy diet forever. When I receive your emails or read your comments that say, “I have no idea where to start when it comes to eating healthy – I didn’t grow up eating healthy the way you did”….it makes me realize that I haven’t told you enough about our healthy eating journey.

We actually only started caring about eating healthy just a very few years ago. Before that time, my pantry was full of boxed cereal and spaghettios and whatever else I could get for cheap or free with coupons.

And oh my goodness…did you know that I am absolutely and very much a recovering Pepsi addict? 

Over the next few weeks, I plan to share our family’s healthy eating journey with you. I’ll tell you what my husband and I grew up eating and I’ll share how we ate when we were first married and as our children started coming along.

I’ll share what made us want to make changes in our diets…how we went about making the changes…how we could afford it…how we convinced our kids that eating healthy was delicious…I’ll even share about how I was able once and for all give up Pepsi.

Then, after I finish those posts, I’ll launch into a new series on the basics of Making Foods from Scratch…so that EVERYONE can see that it IS possible to eat a healthy diet without breaking the bank or breaking your back or breaking a nail. (Though I do sometimes have bread dough or garden soil under my nails.)

I would love for you to leave a comment to let us know where you are in your healthy eating journey. Knowing where you are will help me know exactly where I need to go with some of my future posts. Plus, I think it will be great for all of us to see that we are on this journey together, even if we’re in different places. I think we can all use encouragement, no matter where we are in the journey! Thanks!
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This post is linked to Frugal Fridays.