Baby steps to healthier living

WARNING: this is a long post, I worked on it on and off for several hours. You may continue :-)

Notice I didn't say healthy living, I said healthier. We do pretty well, but we could still do A LOT better. I find this can be associated with homeschooling since homeschooling families tend towards being more environmentally conscious, thus more health conscious.

We aren't super environmentally aware, but we try to do what we can. With no recycling here that is kind of hard. We try to do little things though. I use homemade laundry soap (but I buy it online) the great majority of the time to reduce petroleum products in our water supply and to reduce the amount of petroleum we use in general. I try to use environmentally friendly cleaners or homemade cleaners using vinegar, tea tree oil and Dr. Bronner's castille soap. We keep our heat set to low (68 day, 60 or off at night) and our AC set a little warmer than most (75-76-ish). We don't leave lights on in the evenings if we aren't in the room and we use daylight during the day and avoid turning lights on. I only use our dryer on low and I hang dry the great majority of our clothes, I have no issue buying used when things are in good condition. Reduce, reuse, recycle and all that jazz.

We grow a few things in our tiny garden, as much as we can. We also buy local whenever possible. The benefits of this are two-fold. 1) In our garden and at the local farmer's market we know what has gone into growing the plants (well relatively, most of the things at the farmer's market are organic or might as well be, but they aren't organically certified). 2) The food is not traveling far to get to our table, it's coming either from our back yard, or within 100-150 miles inside the state of Oklahoma. The gas saved in buying local is immense. The statistics and research show that most conventional food travels on average 1500 miles to get to the kitchen table where it is consumed. Many of our fruits and vegetables we buy out of season and they come from California or further.

Another biggie is that we cloth diapered Molly. I started because I thought we could save money and I know that we could've saved money easily doing it, but I liked the plush, super adorable diapers too much. Disposable diaper manufacturers will try to argue that using cloth is equally as damaging to the environment as making and using disposable diapers, but when you break it down that is simply not the case. To begin with, the manufacturing of disposable diapers includes the use of petroleum products, wood pulp (lots of it) and a ton of water. Additionally disposable diapers contain dioxin, a know carcinogen. Don't you just love the idea of your babies most sensitive, delicate parts touching a cancer causing chemical 24 hours a day?? I don't. The main argument that disposable diaper manufacturers use again cloth is that it uses lots of water to wash. This really isn't a valid argument. Most who cloth diaper have enough diapers to last 2-3 days, meaning they only have to do 2-3 loads of diaper laundry/week, and those aren't typically large loads, they are more likely medium or small loads, diapers don't take up that much space. The impact of 2-3 additional small loads of laundry in the big scheme of how much laundry a family with a baby (or more children) does is pretty minuscule. Additionally, cloth diapers will decompose in a landfill unlike disposable diapers. Cloth diapers that remain in good shape can also be sold second hand (or third or four) after the child is done with them, or they can be saved for the next child, you sure can't do that with disposable diapers. If there is anyone who is interesting in more info about cloth diaper can leave a comment and I can tell you more about it. I'm responsible for quite a few converts, haha.

The healthy eating is a little harder to come by, but we are doing it in baby steps. When Cor and I got married a little over 5 years ago we ate pretty much like college kids...which is what we were. Not a ton of veggies or fruit, mostly processed food. We didn't eat TONS of fast food but we ate it pretty regularly. We basically had a lack of awareness of food, how it's made, and what's really good for us. Then I got pregnant with Molly and I started to think more about our behavior in regard to food, among other things. The changes we have made have happened slowly over the last five years, pretty naturally and after a lot of reading and educating myself.

One of the first things we did was to incorporate more fruits and vegetables into our diet. For Cor the vegetable part is easier than the fruit because there isn't a lot of fruit that he likes, but he'll eat most veggies. We don't buy nearly as many canned vegetables as we used to, though we do buy some like tomato sauce and canned green beans and occasionally corn. We buy lots of fresh and frozen veggies. Frozen is equally as good as fresh, sometimes better because of how quickly it is frozen after being picked, we just make sure that the only ingredient is the vegetable, nothing else. After that we slowly started phasing out the processed box food...for the most part. We ditched the hamburger helper and pretty much anything like it. We buy the noodles, rice, meat, spices etc, all the things we need to make what we want to eat and make it from scratch (well, except the bought noodles).

After ditching a lot of the processed food we started reading labels on the processed foods we still buy. I rarely buy anything with high fructose corn syrup, HFCS from here on out (er...except soda, but more on that later). HFCS does not function in the human body the same way other forms of sugar do. I am no scientist and I'm not going to try to explain it because I don't fully understand it, but we avoid it. I also almost never buy anything with MSG in it. MSG is NOT a preservative, it's an additive that is used as a flavor enhancer and can mess things up in your body. So now when we buy something ready made, it does not include either of those things.That's where organics come in because organic food, even ready made, does not contain most of the crummy stuff that conventional food does.

We believe in whole foods. I don't need a "big food" company to prepare my food for me and in the process take out the good things and put in a bunch of junk I don't need. You could summarize our eating with that. I make things at home that most people buy at the store, and if I don't make it myself I'm choosy about who does make it and what is in it. For example, I make our bread or I buy it from a local bakery that only uses the ingredients I would use in my kitchen so it's as good as homemade. In the past our freezer was full of pre-made lasagna, pizza, individual meals etc. Now our freezer is full of left overs I've made that Cor can take to work, frozen fruits and veggies and meat.

Which brings me to my next subject: meat. We like our meat, Cor more than me, but we both do, as does Molly. We are not vegetarians and we will never be. So with meat as a staple in our diet I want it to be as healthy as it can be. A logical thought is, we are only as healthy as our meat is. If the animals we are eating weren't healthy themselves, what makes us think we will be after eating them. This is a more recent change. I've felt this way for a while, but the cost makes it more difficult. Organic, free range chicken is about $5/lb for boneless, skinless breasts and a whole chicken usually runs in the $12-15 range whereas a conventional whole chicken costs about $4-5. When as a family we eat close to a lb of chicken in a given meal, that gets expensive. One thing I've done to help with the cost is to eat less meat :-) Cor isn't terribly fond of this but if I want to be committed to eating this way we can't eat as much of it as we did before. I make a few meat free meals, and in other meals I'll use the chicken in a way where it goes farther, like shredding it and mixing it with other things rather than just eating a whole chunk of chicken whole.

Beef is a bit more complex. You can buy "natural" beef, but it's still corn fed, or at least corn finished. Corn is not good for cows as they are made to eat grass. Cows fed grass are healthy, cows fed corn are not healthy, they are more susceptible to infection and illness, thus why cows are fed antibiotics IN their food. This means when we eat the cows, we are eating the antibiotics they have been fed...and we wonder why the bugs are becoming resistant to so many antibiotics. Corn fed cows are also fattier, and higher in omega-6's which are good, but if they aren't balanced out by healthy omega-3s they aren't good for you anymore. Grass fed beef is balanced between omega-3s and omega-6s. Is also has much less fat in it, comparable to buffalo, which funnily enough is grass fed, go figure. Grass fed ground beef is typically $5/lb so we buy less of that too and use it more sparingly, just like chicken. If we are having friends over and want to make burgers or something we'll typically buy conventional beef because it's just too costly to buy that much grass-fed beef.

We don't buy milk with rBGH, the growth hormone, ever. Added hormones do not do good things in people's bodies. We also buy most of our milk from Braum's. It's not organic, but it's rBGH free and it's produced in Oklahoma so it doesn't have far to go to get here. I also like that they only ship their products into the states that border Oklahoma which keeps fuel used low. We still have other areas to work on. In a perfect world I'd like to be soda free, but I'm a coke addict (haha, soda not illegal drug). Coke is full of HFCS, except around passover when Coke produces a limited about of Coke made with real sugar because HFCS is not kosher and they want to keep their Jewish customers during that time. I should stock up during that time. So my newest commitment is to not buy 2 liter Cokes at the store. If we are out and about I can get a Coke, but I'm not just going to keep it on hand at home.

We do still have Diet Dr. Pepper at home, but that will be next to go...eventually. I don't like it as much as Coke, but it's now Cor's soda of choice. Aspartame is no better than HFCS, probably worse. From what I've read it seems that aspartame, while calorie free still causes the body to produce insulin because the sweet taste and chemical composition (I think) make the body think it's getting sugar. All this insulin is spit out to deal with the sugar and then there isn't any there so the insulin levels in the blood stay high for a while, or something like that. In any case, it's not good. So after we are comfortable with no Coke in the house and it is second nature, then I'll attack the diet Dr. Pepper. That's how we've made the changes we've made. Little by little and slowly so each change has become natural and not full of stress and deprivation. I'm proud to say that nowadays Cor prefers homemade foods and none of the pre-made stuff is as good to him anymore.

We still eat fast food, probably more often than we should. Molly still drinks watered down juice occasionally rather than water all the time. We go out for treats about once a week and get ice cream or frozen yogurt or donuts. Sometimes I buy a frozen pizza or a Stouffer's lasagna for those nights where I just don't feel like cooking. We even eat hot dogs sometimes :-P

I also know people who do a better job at healthy eating than we do and that's okay. We'll keep moving that direction, little by little. I think what we've done so far is helping us be a healthier family and that's what counts, not how much better or worse we eat than another family. We all do what is best for our family :-)