Welcome to Process This

Hello friends.  My name is Amy, I am a 38-year-old wife and mother of two insanely cool kids.  I’m doing the best I know how to make sure my kids are raised healthy and happy, while making sure my husband and I remain somewhat sane.  I am asked quite a bit how I do it – how I can work outside the home, manage my kids’ schedules, and prepare (almost) all of our meals from scratch with real, whole, healthy ingredients.  So I decided to start this blog to share my journey with anyone who is interested in following and hopefully learning a thing or two.  I’m constantly learning, and look forward to sharing with you.

Less than a year ago, I was the queen of takeout, shortcuts, and simplicity when it came to mealtime.  My then preschool-aged daughter would ask which drive through we were going to most days when I picked her up from school.  At the height of my mealtime-shortcut obsession, I was diagnosed with Gestational Diabetes.  I was a few months into my pregnancy with my son (who is now a handsome, healthy, one-year-old), a pregnancy that my husband and I had fought so hard for.  I had miscarried a couple of years earlier, and it took us a long time, a wonderful specialist, a lot of money, a surgery, and giving up on the hope of another child before we finally became pregnant again.  So here I was, being told that I was endangering the life of the unborn child I had already been fighting so hard for.  The day I tested positive, I made drastic changes.  By the time I went to the Diabetes Center the following week, I had my GD under control.  I dutifully recorded all my food, checked my blood sugar (have I mentioned how much I abhor needles?), and quit hitting the drive-through.  Now don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t super unhealthy – a tad (between five and ten pounds) overweight (who has time to work out when you work outside the home, run a home-based business, have a young child, another on the way, you get the picture) – and the shortcuts I was taking with meal prep were “healthy,” for the most part.  But, there was definitely A LOT of room for improvement. 

I kept my GD under control, made my doctor proud, and made sure my baby remained healthy.  Despite all of this, I was put on bed rest two months before my due date (due to pre-term labor).  So, I had a lot of extra time on my hands to watch soaps read.  I started reading more and more about the ill effects of processed food and the disgusting ingredients in them.  And when I say ill effects, I don’t just mean the issue of obesity, although that is an important one; but behavior, moods, energy levels, headaches – you name it, eating too much processed food negatively affects it.

The more I read, the more absolutely disgusted I became.  What was I putting in my body?  And more importantly, what was I putting in my daughter’s and unborn child’s bodies?  I started looking at the seemingly good food we were eating, and realizing that most of it was highly processed.  So I started making our meals from scratch, using real, whole ingredients.  When you start to really read about the ingredients in the foods you buy that you think are healthy, it’s hard not to take a good, long look at our country’s rules (or lack thereof) when it comes to our food supply.  I’m not going to go into all of that here, with this post, I’ve already gotten too long-winded, but I will go into it at some point; the FDA won’t get off that easily with me! 

Am I 100% where I want to be when it comes to the food I feed my family?  Absolutely not.  I told my husband just last week that I’d really like to move to a big farm in the middle of nowhere, raise all of our own food, homeschool the kids…  But that is just not practical, at least not for us.  So for now, I’ll continue to do the best I can, reading and learning more every day, and sharing with you what I hope you’ll find useful in your own journey to a healthier way of life.  Enjoy!