The Sensible Mom

Many of you know that I am on a journey to lose weight, and not only to lose weight but also to be healthy. I’ve been praying about this for quite some time, but recently I decided to fast for the Lord’s blessing on our new year and that He would help me to lose the weight that I’ve been carrying around for the last 10 years. I gained almost all of this weight during my FIRST pregnancy, and it’s never left me….well a little has, but not enough to get near where I was pre first child.

I literally gained about 10 pounds a month while I was pregnant with him. I know the reason why now. I was young, going to school, and working. I was effectively living for the most part off of fast food and things like chips and ice cream. Duh! How I wish I could go back, shake that girl, and tell her to order the salad and not the buy one get one free chicken sandwiches!

Every pregnancy since then, I’ve gain an acceptable amount of weight and lost most of it soon after the baby was born, but I’m still carrying the weight from baby number one who, by the way, was my biggest baby at 9 pounds and 2 ounces. Yes, he was definitely getting a few too many fried mushrooms as well.

All of my other children were more “normal” weights. Breanna was 7.14 pounds, and Isaac and David were both 8.1 pounds. Sweet Nathan was the big guy.

Everything is changing, though. Our diet will never be the same, at least I hope it won’t. You see, I few weeks ago, I came across a film called FoodMatters which was talking about how our bodies work and how it processes the food we put into it. Simply put, what I learned from this movie is that God created us to eat a certain diet and, for the most, we aren’t eating it. Also, the food we are eating that we think is “healthy” is terribly deficient because the soil it is grown in is deficient and filled with chemicals from all the pesticides being sprayed on it. Some of our food has even been genetically modified which has been proven to be dangerous and cause disease in lab animals! It’s almost criminal what these big corporations are doing to our food supply…the same food that we put into our bodies and feed our children.

After that we watched a film called Food, Inc. Another eye opening film on how our food is grown. This film also goes into great detail about where our chicken and beef comes from, how it is treated, and what these animals are being fed. The chickens are kept in unsanitary conditions and in the DARK all day. Maddening. I won’t name the companies who are doing this, but there’s a good chance you have some of their products in your freezer/fridge right now.

Our beef is kept in equally unsanitary conditions, probably worse, actually. Cows are also being fed an unnatural corn feed diet. For these reasons, we are constantly hearing of beef recalls due to the E. coli bacteria found the meat of these animals. I could go into further detail, but I’d encourage you to just watch these films.

Ruben and I have also been doing other research and have watched a bunch of other videos on the dangers of some of the other things in our foods like MSG (Monosodium Glutamate–commonly hidden in our food under other names) and Aspartame.

All of this has caused us to completely rethink our diet and make some drastic changes. These changes would not be possible without the help of the Lord. I know if we tried to do this on our own, we would completely fail. But the Lord is giving us grace and helping us to take steps to change the way our family eats.

to be continued….Next time, I’ll talk more specifically about the actual diet changes that we are making.