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Ideas for LDS Moms, Christian Moms, and Any Mom Wanting to Be Better Each Day

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Taking Care of Mom (post #3)

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Several weeks ago, I started a series on getting in shape.  I was supposed to post every Friday.  And I managed to post a whopping total of TWO times before life once again got in the way.  We had been battling illness around our house and it only got worse.  We went through one thing after another, including a bout with walking pneumonia and the stomach flu.  And just when things were calming down, my husband went out to play football on Thanksgiving morning and broke his ankle and foot! 

Of course, that new development kind of threw us for a loop!  He’s now in a cast for 6 weeks, but I’m happy to say that I’m handling it pretty well.  So, I wanted to finally update you on my progress. 

You’ll see that I changed the title to this series of posts.  I’ve been listening to some podcasts and attended a midweek activity at church and realized that what I’m really wanting to do isn’t so much about getting into shape or losing weight as it is about taking care of myself . . . taking care of the body and mind that I have so that they will function as well as possible and so I can take care of my family and do the things I love in life.  And despite all the struggles in the recent weeks, I am making progress!  I have felt more energy and enthusiasm for life and for motherhood and even for cleaning the house! 

Rather than aiming for a certain weight or shape, what its really about is taking care of the mom so she is happier can take care of everyone else.  There have been lots of road blocks along the way and there will continue to be, that’s just life.  The challenge becomes finding ways to work with my circumstances, whatever they currently are, to problem solve and find a way to make it work.

So, when I’m not able to get out and exercise as consistently as I’d like to, I can at least make sure I’m walking the kids to school and home from school a few times a week.  Or I can crank up the music and dance my way through the house cleaning that needs to be done.

I’ve also compiled a list of our family’s favorite healthy meals, and focused on those that also require very little time in the kitchen.  I try to pull most of our meals from that list each week so there are quick healthy meals available instead of resorting to the drive-thru.

I’ve also found two awesome resources to keep me on track!  I’ve been listening to a podcast called Thinner Peace by Dr. Deb Butler.  Now, what’s funny is that its for women going through and after menopause.  I’m not there quite yet, but I think most of what she has to say really relates to everyone, but especially those of us that are getting a little older and feel the effects of a slowing metabolism.  And its great stuff!!!  I’ve also joined a Facebook accountability group called Holiday Hustle by Liz Tennyson.  She’s a fitness trainer but her challenges haven’t been focused on food and rigorous exercise so far.  She posts some recipes, but what she’s challenging us to do is make lifestyle changes that will lead to a healthier and happier life.  It’s been fantastic and I am loving it!

 

Week 3: Getting in Shape — after 40

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(If you’re just finding this, you can click here to go back to week 1, the first of my getting in shape after 40 series.)

Well, its the end of week 2 and start of week 3.  This week was a little more challenging for me with super sick kids (I had kids home from school Monday – Wednesday) which meant I couldn’t stick to my normal schedule.  I only got out to walk/jog one time this week and some days I was just too worn out from all the extra work of sick kids that I couldn’t get myself to do much of anything.  It was a blah start to the week, for sure.  But, I haven’t added a Dove chocolate bar (or any extra treat, which had become standard for me) to my grocery pickup in the last 2 weeks.  And I bought a bag of Halloween candy earlier in the week and I haven’t even touched it.  So, I consider this week a success!

Some tips & recipes from this week:

Tip 1:  I really don’t want to be making a separate meal for me than what I do for the rest of the family and I want to make sure this is a lifestyle change not just a temporary diet.  So, I’ve been working on making many of my same recipes but making them healthier.  I like to make muffins for breakfast, so I’ve been substituting applesauce for oil and in this Chocolate Zucchini Muffin recipe, I also cut the amount of sugar it calls for in half, and reduce the amount of chocolate chips.  I want to try it with whole wheat flour or at least 1/2 whole wheat & 1/2 white flour next time.  We love this muffin recipe and it gets some veggies in our breakfast!

Tip 2:  I’ve really learned this week the value of having a backup workout plan.  On days when I have sick kids or the weather is bad, if I don’t have a plan ahead of time, I’ll just end up doing nothing.  When you’re a mom, flexibility is key!

Tip 3:  My favorite healthy snack/treat is apple slices with natural peanut butter.  I’m keeping lots of apples on hand and have eaten a lot of apples and peanut butter this week.  When I’m really needing a treat, I’ll go a little less healthy with a spoonful of natural peanut butter with a few chocolate chips sprinkled on top.  I should really get the chocolate chips out of my house but I figure this is a better option than eating a candy bar, bowl of ice cream, or bag of chips.

Applesauce Oatmeal Muffins:  A friend introduced me to these muffins this week.  They were great!  I went home and printed out the recipe immediately and made them to have for breakfast this week.  The kids loved them too, so you know this recipe is a winner!


Fruit Salad:  We like to use fruit salad as a side dish for meals.  It’s like having a treat with dinner and its healthy.  What’s not to love.  We don’t mix the fruit with anything, just chop it up and mix it together.  Our typical fruit salad is strawberries, grapes, and apples.  I made more than usual last night for dinner so today I get to eat leftovers with lunch!  (If you add bananas, leftovers aren’t the best, so I usually leave them out.)

 

Taco Salad:  This is about as simple as it gets!  We love taco salad!  Make it without chips to make it even healthier, but even if you indulge in just a couple chips, its still pretty healthy.  We just layer the ingredients on our plate:  tortilla chips, salad, black beans (I use 2 cans of seasoned black beans from Walmart mixed with half a pound of cooked ground turkey), little sprinkling of cheese, a couple slices of avocado, some olives or green onions or tomatoes.  So delicious!


 

Greek Tacos:  This is one of our favorite meals!  The first time I made it, I wasn’t sure how this “healthy” recipe would go over, but my whole family just devoured these amazing tacos. 

Alright!  It’s your turn to share!  Tell me about your favorite healthy recipes or tips that I need to put into place.  Your feedback will keep me going on this & I need that!

 

 

Week 2: Getting in Shape – after 40

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(If you’re just finding this, you can click here to go back to week 1, the first of my getting in shape after 40 series.)

It’s been a week, so it’s time to check in!  Usually what happens with me is that I start to work on getting back in shape and then I have an injury or get sick and it gets derailed.  I always wonder why that would happen when I’m trying to do something good.  After my Friday declaration of it being time to get back in shape, I started running a fever on Saturday afternoon and had a rough couple of days of a cold that kept my head feeling all foggy.  This time, though, I realized that maybe the little bit of adversity is a way of testing my resolve.  And I decided that a little sickness wasn’t going to stop me.  Luckily, it was just a little bit of sickness.  It held on for several days but I wouldn’t start feeling tired, run down, and foggy headed until after lunch time so at least I got my exercise done in the morning and plans for healthy meals.  It could’ve been much worse; my husband, who never takes sick days, has been in bed for 3 1/2 days this week.

For exercise, I kept with the walking I’ve been doing and added some jogging.  I was worried it would be too hard, but it felt so good!  I started out easy with 1 minute of jogging 3 times during the walk but by today I was able to increase it to 2 minutes of jogging 3 times during the walk.  I did that for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and a 20 minute beach body workout on Tuesday and Thursday for strength training.  I take Sunday off and need to come up with a plan for my Saturdays when the kids are home and we’re off our normal routine — I haven’t figured that out yet.  I actually started to get excited and feel like maybe I could work toward a 5k sometime in the spring.

And it paid off!  The numbers on the scale actually started moving down for the first time in a very long time and it feels so great!  So I have some great tips and recipes to share with you from my week!

Tip 1:  No eating after 8pm.  I heard this years and years ago and it’s something that is so hard for me to do.  My last child goes off to bed at 8:15 and then I want to pull out ice cream and chips and anything bad for me and sit in front of mindless tv. I am exhausted at the end of the day!  This week, though, I did pretty well at keeping to the no eating after 8pm rule.  I did have a small snack a couple of times but tried to keep it healthier.  Bonus Tip:  If you’re trying to do this, don’t scroll through Pinterest in the evenings — all the yummy food pins make it really hard to stay away from the snacks!!

Tip 2:  With me being sick last Saturday it became a pizza night.  But I learned a great tip from a friend a couple months back.  She cuts the pizza slices in half!  So, if you eat 3 slices, its really only 1 1/2 regular slices of pizza.  It really is a mental thing but it works with my kids and with me and the family, as a whole, ate less pizza than we usually do. 

Tip 3:  One thing I forgot to mention in my back story last week is that 3 years ago I was in a car accident.  I ended up with lots of back and neck pain.  I finally got over the back pain but ended up having neck surgery (disc replacement — I have titanium parts now!) back in March.  I feel like any type of chronic pain makes it hard to exercise and eat well.  So, I try to keep up with the stretching that I know makes me feel better.  I’ve found some great stretching routines on YouTube.  Brett Larkin has lots of short yoga routines for different ailments.  Right now, I use this neck routine every day (when I skip a day, I have terrible headaches).  And when I was dealing with my low back pain, I used this routine. 

Recipes!

Here’s a few of our favorite healthy recipes from this week:

Blackened Chicken with Cilantro Lime Quinoa — This is one of my favorite meals (healthy or not healthy!).  It really is amazing, especially with the cool avocado sauce on top!

Slow Cooker Apple Cinnamon Oatmeal — A friend went to the produce market yesterday and picked up a huge box of apples for me.  With the extra apples, I remembered this recipe that I haven’t made in a long time.  It has a little bit of sugar, but I still feel like its pretty healthy.  3 out of 5 kids loved it for breakfast which says a lot around here! Throw 2 sliced apples, 1/3 cup brown sugar, 1 tsp cinnamon in the bottom of the crock pot. Pour 2 cups of oatmeal and 4 cups of water on top. Do NOT stir. Cook overnight for 8 – 9 hours on low.

Parmesan Garlic Sweet Potatoes — My personal recipe!  These are a great side dish for a meal or sometimes I just eat a bowl of them for lunch.

Parmesan Garlic Sweet Potatoes

Parmesan Garlic Sweet Potatoes

If you’re following along with me, I’d love to hear your progress!  How did it go this week?  What will you improve next week?  What great tips or healthy recipes do you have to share?

 

 

Getting in shape — after 40

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TODAY IS THE DAY!  I’m in the worst shape of my life . . . okay, not the worst shape. But I’ve almost gotten back to my heaviest weight and although I have been exercising for a while now, I’m still tired a lot, would rather sit than be up taking care of things, and am exhausted at the end of every day.  I need all that to change & I’m starting today on a Friday — not waiting for Monday!  I’ll post each Friday with an update on how its going and any great tips or recipes I find along the way in case you want to do it with me too.

Here’s the long back story . . . not excuses, just how I got to where I am today:

I was never happy with my weight in high school.  Although, looking back, I sure wish I could go back to that weight again!  After high school, I started running . . . jogging, really.  And I felt really great!  Unfortunately, shortly after running my very first 10k I got a mosquito bite while jogging that we believe was the cause of a strep infection in my leg.  It was several days before I could walk without severe pain and jogging was not even an option for a long time.  Then, my young adult years got busy with school and work and I just didn’t get back to the great routine I had started out with.

After getting married, the first several years were very difficult.  We wanted to start a family right away and I had some medical issues in the way that caused a whole lot of emotional distress.  I was a major stress eater during this time and during the times when I was working full time we did a lot of eating out — bad, bad, bad!  Along with not having an exercise routine, that really took me to being in the worst shape of my life.  And feeling awful about the way I looked and being sluggish and tired didn’t really help with all the emotional stuff. 

But I had started my own business and was loving what I was doing.  And I also met some great women along the way who were very inspiring.  I managed to start eating better and get some pretty regular exercise to drop a few pounds. 

When we started fertility treatments, my forward progress stopped and it was very hard not to fall completely back to where I had been.  The medications were hard on my body and much of the time made me feel too miserable to exercise or do anything else.  Plus, that stress eating was there again because going through fertility treatments is about the most stress I’ve ever felt. 

When I finally got pregnant from InVitro (IVF) after 3 years of fertility treatments, it was a rough pregnancy.  But I was pretty proud of myself for keeping the pregnancy weight gain to a minimum.  When our first baby was just a few months old, my husband headed out of the country for work and was gone for 5 months.  I went to stay with my parents in another state and while I helped around the house and had a baby to take care of, my responsibilities weren’t nearly as much as running a house by myself.  Even though having my husband gone was certainly stressful, I kicked into gear and got myself moving.  I started running again (even in the horrible Arizona summer heat) and being careful with my eating and by the time Jeff got home I was a couple sizes smaller and really feeling great. 

That became a cycle.  Fertility treatments again, followed by a reasonable weight gain in pregnancy, and dropping the weight and a little bit more after pregnancy . . . two more times first with one baby and then with twins.  When the twins were born, our oldest was still 3 for another month and there was also a two year old.  But somehow, I did it again.  This time, I did a couch to 5k program and when the twins were just a few months old, I ran my first 5k in years.

The cycle started again for our last baby.  But when she was born, she was rushed to the hospital by ambulance at 6 days old.  She was put on oxygen and had to stay on oxygen for the next 11 months.  Because of an unrelated heart issue, we were told she couldn’t get sick for the first 6 months or it could be very dangerous.  So, we kept her secluded as much as possible and even after that 6 months.  Even after we came out of seclusion, keeping up with carting around an oxygen tank and all the extra doctor’s visits really kept me from focusing on myself at all.  It wasn’t long after she got off of oxygen and we all felt like we could breathe a little again that we started the next round of IVF.  Even though it didn’t work this time, it took months out of my life, prepping with medications and doctor visits. 

When we got past that, we had finally reached a good point in life.  I was going to the gym every week day after dropping the older kids off at school.  The younger kids loved the childcare and getting to spend an hour there every day while I worked out.  But even though I was working out, the weight wasn’t budging.  A good friend told me to remember that my body had been through a lot in the last few years and to give it time.  I also felt that some of it had to do with turning 40.  It just seemed like it was so much harder than it would’ve been at a younger age.

Now we’re getting closer to today.  Late last year, we started the process of moving to a new state.  We did a lot of eating out and convenience foods while getting our house ready to sell and having it on the market.  When we moved, we ended up in a hotel for about 6 weeks which meant lots more of the same kind of eating.  Only now, I didn’t have my gym and really no way to get out and exercise.  That was a 10 lb weight gain right there. 

About two months after finally moving in to our new house, we were stunned to find out I was pregnant.  I was exhausted all the time and eating a lot of convenience foods again since I was too tired to do anything more.  Unfortunately, just a couple weeks later, I started the process of miscarrying.  It took me five weeks before I lost the baby and it was a very hard 5 weeks, knowing what was happening and the physical tole that it was taking on my body as well.  I gained another 10 lbs during all that.

So, here we are today . . .

I have a lot of weight to lose to get where I can feel good again.  Life is just so hard carrying around all the extra weight and I’m ready to be rid of it.  I do finally feel like I am ready to focus on taking care of me.  Here’s how I’ve prepped:

  • sold my umbrella stroller and sit & stand stroller to buy a used jogging stroller – I plan to get out and walk/run every morning after walking the older kids to school
  • have a list of our family’s favorite healthy meals that I’ll be cooking from mostly
  • taking Plexus Slim – it hasn’t helped with energy levels, curbing sugar cravings, or weight loss yet, but I believe its the reason I got pregnant on my own for the very first time, so I think its helping my hormone levels
  • got my fitbit and a goal of 12,000 steps each day (I’ve had a few 16,000 step days in the last week)
  • Beachbody on demand for the days when I can’t get out of the house to exercise because of bad weather or sick kids

I’ll check in every Friday and share how the week went and any great, healthy recipes I’ve found or tips that are helping.  I’d love for you to share your favorite tips with me if you’re already doing great at keeping in shape or follow along and do it with me if you have a ways to go like I do.  So, please leave a comment if you have any thoughts you’d like to share — I could really use the support!

Daily To Do List to help stay on track with habits and goal setting

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Daily to do list to stay on track with your goals

Daily to do list to stay on track with your goals

 

I have to be honest that I have struggled with creating new habits that I want in my life and sticking with the goals I set because life gets in the way, especially with 5 young kids.  There are nights when I’m up all night with a sick child and I’m too tired in the morning or days that the twins are having melt downs and I spend my day trying to manage that.  I always have good intentions, but inevitably, something happens and I have to practice this thing called flexibility instead of sticking to my plan 😉  Enter my new DAILY TO DO LIST that has changed my life over the past month.  In fact, one week, I purposely didn’t use it and everything went back to the way it used to be until I started using it again the next week.  It is helping me keep my New Year’s Resolutions and keep up with habits that sometimes get forgotten in the busyness of a day.

I looked and looked for a calendar that would give me what I needed but nothing did and so my husband finally bought me a week at a glance calendar a couple of weeks into the new year.  Its what I had used in the past but it hadn’t been giving me what I fully needed.  So, I’m using it to write my appointments and things I need to do each day, but I’ve added my new “every day” or DAILY TO DO LIST to each week so I can mark items off throughout the day, feeling accomplished every time I check mark a square, and stick with my goals.  If you want to use it, here’s the Xcel spreadsheet so you can adapt it to your own needs and goals.    I’m not proud of some of them, so please don’t judge me!  Most of these were things I did either on a semi-regular or occasional basis anyway, but having the list helps me to get back on track if that pesky flexibility issue gets me — which pretty much happens to me every day 😉

So, honestly, it sounds like such a simple idea but if you’re having a hard time reaching your goals, remembering to help your 2nd grader study spelling each night, or just creating better habits, give it a try and I’d love to hear if it helps you.

Tips for Creating Your Own List:

  • Just print one copy and make notes on the back throughout the couple of weeks you use it.  The next time, edit it to add or remove items.  The list I’m using now went through a couple modifications and will probably change again as I see other needs in my life throughout the year. 
  • Tape it to your calendar — I tape it on the side so I can open it up like a page and still use the calendar that’s underneath it. 
  • Gray out any spaces that you don’t need.  For example:  I don’t exercise on Sundays, so I just grayed out those boxes so I don’t feel the need to fill them in with a check mark.