Since my blog is mostly just for myself and my family (hopefully my kids will be interested someday in what their parents were thinking back in the early 2000s), I thought I’d take a moment to record where we stand in the middle of the current health craze.
Todd and I grew up in the 70s and 80s. I remember leg warmers and seeing Jazzercise on tv. My mom occasionally went through a funny stint of me holding her feet while she’d do sit ups in her bedroom. Kind of amusing to think back on. We had p.e. every single day. We rode bikes, roller skated, jumped rope, walked on the beach, rode our boogie boards and ran. Todd swam every day during the summer weeks. Kids were naturally outside more it seemed; but it wasn’t trendy, it was just how we lived.
As far as food, the only person I remember eating anything sort of trendy was my friend’s mom. She used carob chips instead of real chocolate chips, which was interesting and a little weird to me. And she had these thick malted wafers loaded with what I can only assume were vitamins. I just liked to snack and so I was indulgent when I went to play even though her treats were a different than what we had at home. Other than that, I’m not really sure what other people ate. I knew what my grandma had (not much that was exciting, radishes from her garden I remember, gross), but we never really went to anyone else’s house, so I have no idea.
That same grandma, along with an aunt and a cousin, was always really careful with what she ate. They were tall and slender, whether because of their habits or genetics, I don’t know. I loved looking up various foods in my grandma’s little calorie counter book just for trivia’s sake. My grandma was always watching her cholesterol, and my aunt would make us delectable treats and have only a bite herself. They were full of self-discipline, and I must’ve always subconsciously admired that. Other than these family members and my friend’s mom, no one I ever knew talked about what they were eating or doing. Not like today.
And maybe the adults in my life were talking about it back then and it’s only because I’m an adult myself that I’m privy to these conversations now. Or maybe it’s that we’ve become alarmingly unhealthy as a nation (world?) that we need to make a major overhaul and people are becoming noticeably more health-conscious.
I’ve written it all before, I’m not an all or nothing kind of gal. I believe in slow, steady, consistent habits that are sustainable for an entire lifetime. I’m not into diets, fads, hard-core workouts, excluding certain (natural) foods, or obsessing about any of it. And so I’m the least qualified person to write about what’s healthy. We simply aren’t buying into the hype. And yet, we really do try to be mindful as we create a healthy environment for our kids, of course we do; everyone I know is trying to do the same. I love and admire so many friends for their steadfast ways, they inspire me to implement their ideas and to keep upping our game. But just in case our kids are curious about in where we fit in…
We believe in walking. As much as possible. Hiking, through the city streets, in parks, along lakes, around the neighborhood. I believe in going for walks with my girlfriends and with my family. I believe in cross-training. At least five days a week. And using weights. But I also believe our bodies are our best gyms and that we don’t need fancy exercise-wear or gym memberships to create a circuit-training environment of our own. We can wear cut-off sweats and use weights that are fifteen years old; it all works just fine. I don’t believe in working out for hours a day, I have a million other things to do; working out is a tiny sliver of my day—like taking a shower—not the main attraction.
I believe in going to sleep and waking up about the same time everyday. 10 p.m. to 5:30 or 6 a.m. is optimal for me. We cheat on the weekends a little, but I know we all feel better when we stick to a routine. And I believe in power naps.
One thing I’m horrible at and am always trying to do better with is drinking water. I see women (not ever men for whatever reason) with their bottles as guarded as their purses. The real reason I don’t is I hate wasting time going to the bathroom several times a day. My strength and weakness being efficiency. Plus I’m never really thirsty. Maybe a couple times a week I’ll feel a little like taking a big drink, but not very often at all. I definitely need to keep working on this developing this habit. Although I have to point out, growing up no one was tethered to a water bottle. We stopped at a drinking fountain when we got thirsty (which is something I do try to do). I’m not sure why we can’t still do that?
As far as eating, I don’t really scrutinize it all that much. Like working out, what I eat is only a tiny piece of what I think about during the day; I don’t want to stress about it or spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about it. I’m thinking along the lines of a college girl who is anxiously trying to find a husband. How does that usually work out? I believe good things happen as we naturally go along just living instead of obsessing. Mindful, doing our best, but then relaxing.
I remember what we ate growing up, and maybe your life was similar. We had tacos, tostados, roast, spaghetti, pizza, BLTs, canned peas and beets, frozen corn, Scotch broth and vegetable soups, cereal, oatmeal, toast, grapes, apples, just really, really average American food from the 70s and 80s. My mom cooked from scratch and made us treats. I never remember having broccoli (except when it was mixed with cream of mushroom soup and chicken) or squash or anything like that. But we also didn’t have sugared cereals (it was always boring brown ones like Cheerios or Grape Nuts). It wasn’t what we’d deem a healthy diet by today’s experts’ standards, but it wasn’t the worst. I think it was pretty standard for families back then.
Today most of us are lucky enough to have access to more nutritious foods and to know what’s healthy, and I’m even more fortunate than my mom was in that I don’t have a full-time job to run home from every night. I have ample time to cook, and I feel like I have access to an amazing assortment of fresh and healthy foods. She grew up in Scotland and simply wasn’t familiar with so many of the fresh fruits and vegetables we have access to here in America. She never even had many until she came here as a grown up.
I of course had no garden growing up (we lived in an apartment), and so everything I know about gardening I learned from Todd and his family. We’ve had one from the very first year we were married, wherever we rented an apartment and then in every home we’ve owned. It’s brilliant to me, watching food grow right outside: tomatoes and peppers, cilantro and green onions, carrots and corn, pumpkins and squash, berries and cherries, plums and grapes, potatoes and carrots. It’s magical, absolutely breath-taking, to harvest bags and bags of raspberries every week, to have rows and rows of dried onions that last us until the Spring. It’s a miracle every single season, and I feel blessed beyond measure to have such an abundance, to have access to such fresh and healthy food. And so, like many of you, this is what we eat. Most of our friends also hunt or have friends who raise cattle. We’re lucky to have access to good (what city-folk would call “organic” or “free-range”) meat.
Even so, we still eat pretty much like we did when we were growing up, chili, enchiladas, soups and breads, omelets, just regular, everyday food. But I do think most of us have stepped it up a little, adding more salads and fresh vegetables, smoothies, more whole grains.
I guess I just have a million other things that take up room in my head. I worry about the refugees and the kids who have lost parents. I wonder how to help my kids access God. I think about the people who are lonely and need a friend. I want to spend my time learning and mingling with people. I don’t want to use precious energy analyzing everything I eat too.
And yet, it’s important that once we know better, we do better. And so I’m like most everyone I know these days, we’re all eating a lot of salads. And plenty of vegetables. That’s just where most of us are right now, it’s the culture; it just makes good sense, everyone knows that. But I also don’t believe in excluding certain foods. I believe fruit is valuable (not juice, but real, whole fruit with lots of fiber). I’m ok with milk on my cereal and having cottage cheese with my grapes. I’m all about sandwiches and toast (I remember asking my sister if she still ate bread and she was incredulous, “What else would I eat?”). I still eat peanut butter with my apples and have a banana and blueberries on my cereal.
Although I’d like to say nutrition is my number one value when I’m making dinner for my family, if I’m honest, I just want us to be together. So yes, while I want to be healthy and I want our kids to love healthy food, we also consider our other values at play. And here’s where I get all mixed up. Our top priority as far as dinner is that we do it, that we sit down together. Ideally, I’d love it to be punched with nutrients. I try, but I’m simply not cooking everyone a separate meal to make that happen. It’s more important that we’re all eating the same thing together, so I do wiggle a little on our nutrition. For instance, even though I’d like minestrone soup on soup night, that doesn’t fly well with anyone in our family and so I’ll make wild rice or sausage or stew to mix it up. Even though I prefer brown rice, I mix it with Basmati every so often so they can’t tell. I like spinach salads, they like iceberg; we do a mix of Romaine and spinach and other mixed greens. I prefer meatless dinners and love lentils and beans; so I add beans to our taco meat and occasionally have spaghetti with tomatoes from the garden sans ground beef. I like nutty, seed-packed breads while the kids would prefer Great Harvest plain white—or worse yet, that soft squishy white stuff—hands down; I compromise here too, I buy medium-grainy types for them. I’m trying to teach them better choices, and yet we don’t believe in being too extreme, in letting this kind of stuff consume us. We still have soda with pizza and plenty (plenty) of treat options throughout the week. And when it comes to lunches, we’re really not that great. Avery is our top performer here, packing salads and yogurts and eggs and cucumbers, she amuses me to no end. But we’ve never made their lunches for them, even though I know we could send them with much better options. Here again, our desire for self sufficiency trumps healthy. Which may seem like madness, but here’s what happens. They throw it away or trade it. They refuse to take sandwiches most days. Today Callum had grapes, a banana, and pretzels. Ridiculous. But if I’d made a tuna sandwich with cucumbers and peppers, where would it have gone? Wouldn’t even have made a trade. So while we wish things were like the internet families who post their lunch boxes full of colorful, nutritious fare that the kids really eat, our life is nothing like that.
In our quest to be healthy, we’re like you in that we make our kids go outside to play, to go on a bike ride or a run, to shoot hoops, to work on the treehouse. But we also let them use the computer and encourage them to read. We want them to be healthy, obviously; we all do. But I also believe there’s a facet to health we tend to overlook. And maybe it’s a mix of a bunch of things, but something along the lines of mental/emotional/spiritual health. And so I don’t believe in making them stressed and crazy by zeroing in on any one dimension of “health” so intently that they become tormented if they skip a day of exercising or if they have a sundae with a friend. I’d rather have a family full of less-than-ideal body shapes (what is that anyway?) than with a misshapen view of who we really are. And I’m not saying it’s got to be one or the other. But if I had to choose a piece of the health pie, I’d pick the mental/emotional/spiritual one every time. Because that’s the one that will last. When our muscles deflate and sag, when we can’t run, when all we can eat is mush or liquid protein drinks, we can still have a super strong sense of who we are and what our purpose is. And so that’s why we’re ok if we fudge a little on the other stuff now and then. We can’t keep all the balls in the air all the time.
We’re intentional in what we strive for as a family, but we’re pretty realistic. We’re aiming for self-sufficiency, confidence, security, a well-balanced approach to life. So yes, we’ll continue to introduce new, healthy foods (quinoa, chia seeds and Greek yogurt were all there once); we’ll keep our Sunday walk tradition (27 years strong), and we’ll try to keep tabs on what they put in their brown lunch sacks. But we’re simply nothing more than moderately healthy.
