Three Health Goals for 2009

I mentioned previously that my 3 goals for this new year are all health related. They are:

1. Walk 1 mile every day M-F. I have set exercise goals before where I intended to exercise 2 or 3 times per week, and what ended up happening is that when exercise didn't happen on Monday I'd think, "no problem, I'll do it tomorrow". And when it didn't happen on Tuesday I'd think, "well, if I do it on W, Th and F, I'll still meet my goal". And when it didn't happen on Wed I would get discouraged and just give up, knowing I wasn't going to meet my goal. I have realized that in order to make exercise a part of my daily routine, it needs to be part of my DAILY ROUTINE! I have a Leslie Sansone "walk away the pounds" video that has both a 1 and 2 mile walk on it. Basically marching in place in front of your tv, with a few additional steps to change it up a little. Does it get boring? Yes, eventually. Does it get the job done with a minimum of fuss, without having to leave the house? Yes. The 1 mile walk, from warmup to cooldown stretch, is 22 minutes. I can find time for 22 minutes. The week of New Year's I walked all 5 days. Last week was exceptionally busy and I only walked twice. But I decided not to beat myself up about it. Life happens. So far this week I have walked both Monday and today! And I have noticed already that it is really helping the arthritis in my knees.

2. Cook 1 vegetarian meal for my family each week. I have been poking around blogs and websites searching for good recipes. I really can't afford to have a "flop" right now - I need to make every food dollar count, so I want to choose recipes that have the greatest chance of success. Tonight we had Black Bean Quesadillas which were excellent! My husband raved about them!! (yay! I am always so happy when he loves the food I prepare!). They were very healthy, very cheap, and very delicious. Great combination. :-) And all the fresh cilantro made our house smell like a mexican restaurant! I got the recipe from my friend Susan's food blog. Thank you Susan! (Her name is a hyperlink - click on it and it will take you to her food blog). We got mixed reactions from the children. Two of the kids loved them. Two of the kids liked them okay. And one hated them. Any guesses on who was the hater?

I already have our vegetarian meal picked out for next week and I'm really excited to be starting this journey toward even healthier eating!

3. Eliminate white sugar from our diet. This will be the hardest one to do, but I am ready to bite the bullet. I have been convicted about this for a long time but just tried to ignore it. That ignoring thing only works so long. To accomplish this, I have set short term goals. First of all, we are limiting our consumption of breakfast cereal to 3 times a week. Pound for pound, breakfast cereal in bags is actually a very cheap way to eat breakfast. But it's also a sugary way to eat breakfast. I used to have a rule that I would not buy a breakfast cereal unless sugar was at least the third ingredient listed. Do you know how many cereals that eliminates? Most of them! So sometime last year I got lazy and just bought one of each kind of bagged cereal whenever we did our big shopping trip. Well, no more. We are eating oatmeal, muffins and yogurt, or french toast on the other days.

We already don't drink soda or any drink with added sugar. So the other big culprit is baking. I have used sucanat for baking off and on for a few years already, but I have not been totally happy with the results. The taste of the finished product was the same as if I'd used white sugar, but the texture was different. And since sucanat is brown (the word comes from SUgar CAne NAtural and is non-refined cane sugar. Since the molasses has not been processed out it is brown in color - it looks granular like white sugar, only brown) the color of my baked goods would be darker. A couple years ago I began just immediately halfing the sugar in all my baking recipes. Amazingly, the taste has not changed (at least not that we can tell!). So now the next step that I have taken is to mix white sugar and sucanat half and half. I am also experimenting with mixing sucanat and brown sugar in my baking. I am committed to slowly switching over in the process to eliminate white sugar.

The other big culprit is condiments. There is a LOT of sugar and/or high fructose corn syrup in every day things we eat. Ketchup. Mayo. Pickles. It is a little more work to find sugarless versions of these items, but I think it is worth it. I have begun reading labels more consistently again and changing my shopping habits accordingly.


So there you have it. These goals are all incremental steps that are easy to measure and relatively easy to follow. Once I have these little steps down, I will take bigger steps. Judging from the last 10 years or so, it is just never going to get any easier to make healthy changes than it is right now. So now's the time!! Pray for me if you think of it! And feel free to ask me how things are going. I need a little accountability now and then. :-)