“The key to life is accepting challenges.

Once someone stops doing this, he's dead.” - Bette Davis

I've been reading a lot about eating real food. I posted a few links to it in my last post and I've been trying to make baby steps toward that end.  I find the biggest problem I have in my weight loss goals is myself. I'm lazy and I hate change. So whenever it comes time to do something different, I balk.  Either that or I get all gung-ho:

 and give up about 5 minutes later.  Lately that's the way I've been acting about weight loss. I'm cool for the first little bit of a diet. But then I get frustrated.  And honestly I'm just sick of counting calories.  One of my dear friends made a comment about it that really stuck in my mind.  "If you're counting calories, how does that help you in the long run?"  And she's right.  Sure I'm eating too many calories, but my problem is the type of foods that I eat.  I really need to change that, and if I change that, then I think I'll be healthier and better for it.  But it isn't just about me. I have a family of 5 that I feed and I really want to change their eating habits as well.  My husband has numerous bowel issues and we're just starting to realize that the foods that we eat have probably contributed to that or caused it altogether. So I want to do something that will not only help me lose weight and get healhty, but help him as well. And I want to do something that my kids (who are almost adults themselves) won't turn their nose up to.




To that end I've decided to accept one of the challenges laid out in the blog 100 Days of Real Food. I've been reading various real food blogs for several weeks now and I love all of them.  But I find this one to be the most interesting because she has small children, and because she seems normal. She isn't some health guru who is telling me what a horrible person I am for eating crap all of these years and teaching my kids to eat it. She's just a mom who wanted to do better for her children. I can so relate to that! She has several different challenges on her site, the 100-day pledge, the 10-day pledge, and 100 mini-pledges. I'm not much of a cold-turkey person so the 100- and 10-day pledges would be harder for me. I could probably do 10 days, but you never know.  So to that end, I've decided to take on the mini-pledges I figure if I make small changes, one week at a time, then maybe I can sort of "sneak" in this change and my family won't even realize.

Since I love vegetables I'm hoping this one will be pretty easy.  I plan to head out to our local farmers market this weekend and see what kind of deals I can pick up.  I'll make out a meal plan today to kind of guide me through the process as well.   I'm hoping that at the end of these 100 challenges our lifestyle will have completely changed. I would like to lose the weight. And I would love it if my husband could have a normal life. Or at least as normal as life is with kids.