10 days of real food challenge.

I have been recently inspired by this blog called 100 Days of Real Food. The blog is by a woman who cut out processed foods completely out her family's diet for 100 days and then blogged about her experience. Movies like Fork over Knife and Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead have also opened my eyes to a lot of things about food. We are a world living off processed foods that are simply bad for us for many reasons to our health.

I am not the healthiest person, I know that. I don't eat well nor do I exercise. I drink a lot of soda and practically no water. I eat lots of fast food because its easy, quick and convenient. But do I want that for my kids? or even me? No, I want to have a healthy life style for my family and I. I know the path I am on is not good for me in the future. Especially with heart disease and cancer in my blood lines.

For many years, I have been telling myself "tomorrow ill start", "tomorrow ill quit drinking soda", "we are not going out to eat for a while." BUT I never fall through to any of my promises to myself.

The last couple of years I have watched a Youtube channel of a family that call themselves the Shaytards. If you have never heard of them, go watch some of their videos. They are so amazing and can brighten your day. The dad, Shay Butler, believes that most of the worlds problems can be solved by simply having happy families. And that is exactly how they live their lives. This time a year ago, Shay was overweight and sick. But, he woke up one day and said no more. He changed the way he ate and lived his life. He put himself on a strict plant based diet and followed it through. Now, he is less than 200 pounds, happy, thriving and running full marathons. He has never felt so great. You can literally go to Youtube and watch his transformation. He vlogs his family every single day and has never missed a day. Today, he inspires people all over the world to better their lifestyle. He inspires me every single time I watch one of his family's videos and is the main reason why I am so inspired to change my lifestyle for the good.

So, after coming across the blog 100 Days of Real Food, I am ready to say NO MORE! No more feeling down in the dumps about the how I eat. No more of feeling nasty after eating a burger at the fast food place because I was craving the salt. No more late night runs to the gas station for a cookie ice cream. NO MORE! Its not fair to me or my children. My kids eat fast food and processed foods because we give it to them. Its time for me and my husband to step up and better their futures by building a good foundation of healthy habits in their life. That is why my entire family is taking the 10 days of real food challenge, starting this morning! For 10 days, we are eating nothing but whole grains, vegetables, fruits and any thing locally grown (thankfully we just bought our selves a pig at the fair. We have meat to eat, ha!) Its going to be a challenge for us but I feel this is the only way we can change. Especially me.

My main goal out of all of this is to be more active and have more energy. I want to start doing outdoor things that evolve being active and healthy. My husband showed me some beautiful falls on the bottom of the Grand Canyon yesterday and asked if we can do it one day and the entire time all I thought was, "Ill probably faint or be too exhausted by the time I get down there. There will be no way I can physically do that at this point." But that is my goal. My goal is to be able to hike the Grand Canyon. Geez, I am out of breath and tired just from climbing a flight of stairs. Don't get me wrong, I am not fat and I know most of you are like, "she does not need to lose any weight." I get that, and that is not my goal. My goal is to be healthy. I am no where near that.

The next ten days are not going to be easy for my family and I (except for Joslyn, she goes "Mom, can I eat good for 50 days? I love fruits and vegetables! haha!). I am personally going to struggle with not being able to have soda or that daily caffeine to get me going as well as going to fast food for lunch. We are going back to basics and making everything from scratch. I have prepared all weekend, wrote out menus, grocery lists, made homemade jam for the kids sandwiches (Ill share my recipe on a later post), even made 100% whole wheat bread in the bread machine. I know we can do this, and I am going to blog my entire experience.

100 Days of Real Food suggests that when purchasing food that you do not get anything that has more than 5 ingredients and you can understand what each of them are. I spent about 2 1/2 hours in the store. One thing that I am struggling with is how expensive it is just to eat healthy. That doesn't make sense, right? There is something wrong with that in so many ways. For example, for 10 days of food I can spend anywhere around $100 at the grocery store but on our new challenge I spent $160!! That is a huge chunk of change difference. The sad reality to that is, I do not know if I can afford to feed my family this way all the time. I can picture my hands imitating a scale when saying, "Whats more important, financial health or physical health?" We need to be able to pay our bills but we also want to live a long time and be healthy. It is kind of sad to think how I can go get a hamburger at Mcdonalds for $1 but cant even get a couple apples for that price.