When trying to lose weight, it is often suggested to remove junk food from your home to remove temptation. Let’s face it, if we had strength in our willpower, then most of us wouldn’t be trying to lose weight, we’d be succeeding. I will not do a full elimination of junk foods in my house for two reasons…

1.  I’m a mom. Part of my responsibilities as a mother is to teach my child. Yes, you can eliminate all “bad” choices from your child’s options, but if you are always doing that, then how do they learn to make decisions on their own? How do they learn to moderate?

2. If you remove something from someone’s life, or tell them (either in words or by demonstration) that they can’t have something, what do they do? They want it. The child that is not allowed chips finds themselves with their own spending money and they want a snack. If they are unattended, what do you think they will get? You decide to start a diet that removes processed carbs, what do you suddenly crave all the time?

I was raised with the food issues of my parents. It is one of those things that inadvertently gets passed on. Feeling sad? Have some ice cream. Angry? Ice cream. Happy? Let’s celebrate with ice cream. Confused? Nachos. We can’t eat ice cream all the time after all. Did I mention that my mom worked at a creamery? On the other side, my father would rather buy me a new wardrobe than buy food for the house. It creates a horrible cycle of binging. I would stuff myself silly when I could. Then get depressed, because you have to crash sometime. And when depressed, what do we do? That’s right! Have a bowl of ice cream.

I am so very determined to not pass along my food issues to my daughter. I allow her a variety of foods, and yes, junk foods are in the mix. I teach her about nutrition and what our bodies require. When my darling sister let her eat as much candy as she liked on Halloween and her tummy hurt, I let her know why. When she ate almost an entire bag of grapes and got a tummy ache, I let her know why. As a result, at a tender age of 9 she has learned what a portion looks like. She will leave a slice of cake at a birthday party half eaten because she knows it will be too much. She will choose a peach for dessert. If she knows that she wants ice cream after dinner, she’ll skip out on a danish offered to her earlier in the day. She loves her crackers, but she knows that she needs something else with more substance to it to call it a meal.

Cravings are telling us that we’re missing something in our diet. You don’t ever want to remove an entire food group from your plates. We need all of them. We also need to learn how to moderate all of them. We even need fat. I’m not going out and eating a tub of lard, but eating all fat free items isn’t healthy either. A big step in my move to a healthy lifestyle includes preparing more fresh foods. I try more and more often to have my foods not come from a package. I am, hopefully, passing this along to my daughter as well. She loves helping in the kitchen and reading along with a recipe. I’m showing her how to pick out fruits and veggies. Which ones are ripe, which should definitely be purchased organic. Hopefully I’ll pass along some good nuggets of information that she’ll hear in the back of her head just when she needs it.

As promised, here are my turkey cups. I loop one slice of turkey bacon around a muffin cup. In a bowl I mix veggies (these are kale, zucchini, and tomato), a handful of shredded cheese, and 2 eggs. Mix and spoon into the cups. Bake at 350 for 20-25 minutes.

In preparation for my up and coming physical, I have decided to be strict with my tracking of my physical activity and food. I have a notebook at the ready and my arm band is charging as I type. I fell off with tracking when, well, I had nothing good to track. I always feel like I have needed to defend my health when I meet a new doctor. I had a doctor forever ago that had the same solution for all of my health issues… I just need to get a little exercise. Unfortunately, this was back when I was running 5 miles a day and weight training. She just never believed me. She also took over a year to diagnose my gall stones. While I kept requesting an ultrasound, she denied it again and again. It took me switching doctors to be fixed. Moral of the story, if your doctor doesn’t believe a thing you say, you just don’t mesh. You really need to be able to work with your doctor if you’re going to be a team in regards to your health.

My goal is to be able to paint as accurate a picture as I can about where I currently am. I know that I have the basic theory on how to eat healthy and lose weight, but there is also a chance that I am missing something that a professional could pinpoint for me.

I have to say, I’m feeling a lot better today. I’m still trying to pick up my pace, however. I even played Just Dance 4 tonight, not for long, but I played. I’m within a thousand steps of my daily goal as of now. I’m definitely not as tuckered out as I would have been last week. I’m not even napping. I had to shovel (again) and I’m still not taking a nap. My path to my car is almost up to my hips with snow on the sides. We’re really paying for our mild Winter last year.

That’s it for now. Moving more. Eating better. Drink buckets of water.